Africa Blues

A gazelle in the field, alone. Not a living soul for miles. Nothing but the massive expanse of the savannah sliced at the horizon by three flat-topped acacias and an enormous cluster of boulders. They appear like black paper cuttings through the afternoon mist. A warm breeze sends ripples in the tall grass, and a foreign and distant rustle cuts through the silence.

The gazelle stands at attention, her delicate neck stretched and her nostrils trembling. Her ears prick up and back, her hesitating gaze wandering first toward the invisible herd grazing in the distance, then back to linger upon the large rectangular object moving slowly in her direction.

She is frozen on alert for another moment before the adrenaline rising and raging through her blood launches her muscular body into a mad, high gallop, her legs taut in a sublime, desperate, hopeless hover to find shelter among the trees.

A gunshot tears through the air.

Then another follows.

A flock of birds rattles in the treetop. The flapping of their wings through the air is unable to dull the echo from the explosion, which surges to the outskirts of the boulder mass. Gliding and circling, they watch as things unfold. As the first bullet misses, tossing up a spray of dirt, the second bullet rips and scorches through the neck artery, and all that can be seen from above at first is a slight, twitching limp, but immediately thereafter, the panicked body is overtaken by a wave of shuddering nausea, and bloody foam gushes out of the lungs and into the mouth. After thirty more meters in flight, the motion stops, and a wheezing rising from deep in the chest precedes the collapse as the bleeding, persistent, still-warm body slams into the stained grass.

Sixty meters behind the scene, three men break into a mad dash, charging the carcass in a clump. The sun is at a zenith and the three of them huff, sweating, competing in the field. They are wearing khaki uniforms never before seen in these parts, and dusty boots. They are Israeli military officers. They parked their Land Rover nearby ten minutes earlier and entered a quiet ambush, hoping to hunt down a large stag with branching horns, and now that they’ve rushed the trampled weeds, they realize they’ve killed nothing but a female.

The exact time and place are unknown and unlikely to become known now, fifty years later. But it no longer matters. Ethiopia, someplace between Jijiga and Harar. A training weekend. Hot. Green flies buzzing over scraps of food in the camp, and the group of Ethiopian officers lie on their backs under the mesh roof of the hut with defiant languidness.

Did something happen? Their eyes stare ahead. No, nothing happened. It is their daily habit to stretch under the tarp at this midday hour, in the same lazy position and with the same pretense. Why does it still drive the girl’s father mad? And why on the weekend, when he’s just an hour away from heading home? Probably because of his damn Israeli temper and because of his age—he is several years older than them. Africa hadn’t really softened him, not as his superiors had hoped.

He could resolve this with just a few words of English: “On your feet, you lazy fuckers!” Or he could bash them in Amharic—he’d learned quite a bit of it already. But no. Their English is just as strong as his, and they could use it to make a thousand and one excuses. But instead, they make do with an expressionless gaze, as if unaware of how irritated he is. The more he insisted, the more they’d defy him, rebelling like little children. It was impossible to fight with Mengistu and his pals. Besides, in less than two months, he and the other officers—Aviram and Jerry—and their families would be returning to Israel after three years, and whatever these bums did then was really none of his business. Even if they did everything Mengistu was dreaming of doing, it wouldn’t be anytime soon. For now, it was only talk, and talk has yet to kill anybody. Certainly not the emperor. You don’t need a goddamn war to figure that out. It lasted only six days and ended with a big victory, but as far as he was concerned it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Yalla. He was going to get out of there right now. End of story.

He passed them by, quickening his footsteps, crossed the shed, paused by the drinking fountain, bent down for a drink, splashed water on his flushed face and neck, then continued on to the officers’ barracks (Aviram and Jerry were already gone), plucked his cap from his cot, put it on, and then moved toward the Land Rover without looking back. The rear door was already open and Aviram and Jerry were waiting in the front seats, smoking.

“Everybody there is a lazy loser, I swear,” he muttered as he slipped into the backseat and leaned back. The rifle and the binoculars were already waiting there for him.

“You’re just figuring this out now?” Aviram smiled at him in the rearview mirror. He was in high spirits.

“There’s plenty he doesn’t get yet,” Jerry said, turning to face the girl’s father. He was wearing sunglasses and army coveralls that generously hugged his large belly.

“Go on, step on it,” her father muttered. “They can go to hell,” and Aviram nodded, started the car, and blew out smoke.

“Where to, sir?” he asked through the mirror, as if he were a taxi driver.

“You can take me to the middle of nowhere. As long as I can get out of here for a bit.”

Within minutes, the vista spread before them: Long notches and furrows stretching to the horizon in a repetitive yellow crossword puzzle dotted with thin foliage, and a bright blue screen of sky hovered over all.

“Keep your eyes peeled, boys,” Jerry commanded, leaning back as the car climbed up an incline, overtaking potholes, zigzagging between rocks and low bushes, advancing speedily over the gravelly dirt road and leaving a cloud of dust behind.

It’s hot outside and the rumble of the engine is soothingly familiar. Jerry starts to yawn, but her father keeps scanning the plains through his binoculars, then closes his strong hand around Aviram’s shoulder.

Not far from there, in the middle of the barrenness, is a gazelle. Behind her there is nothing but a large mass of rocks and three trees. A dry eastern wind blows, carrying their smell to her, and she stretches her noble neck and turns her pretty head toward them.

“Go on, take her out.” Jerry shakes awake, his eyes narrowed.

“The sun is too bright,” her father mutters. It sounds like an excuse.

“Take her out. She won’t hang around all day.”

“Shh…”

His right hand crawls toward his rifle as he silently wriggles out of the car. He’d have a better chance to hit his mark in the open field. Mengistu once killed an antelope from a hundred meters away, and now the distance is sixty meters at most.

“Now!” Jerry orders, pointing ahead, and her father cocks, aims, and holds his breath. And shoots and misses.

Then he shoots again.

With drunken elation, they stride ahead, closing the distance. Hardly noticing the weight of the rifle hanging off his shoulder, her father also jumps up, breaks into a run, and overtakes them both.

“We had no idea you were such a gifted sharpshooter,” Aviram cries out, his Nikon bag hanging diagonally across his chest and slamming against his body as he runs.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” the girl’s father barks back without turning his head. His military cap, slightly tilted to the left over his tan forehead, shades the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.

Twenty meters away from the gazelle, they begin to slow down, huffing, catching their breath, cheerfully flanking the dark trail of blood trickling along the trampled grass to the spot where she is lying on her side, eyes staring ahead, flies already clinging to her wet coat.

“So what is it, male or female?” Jerry straddles her, sweaty and out of breath. He unscrews the cap from his water bottle and drinks as his eyes scan the grass and the clump of trees.

“What’s the matter with you, Jerry?” Her father ducks down and points at the gazelle’s swollen stomach. He stares at it for a long time.

“If we’d left early in the morning rather than screw around the camp we would have caught a stag, horns and everything,” Jerry protests, reluctantly handing over the water. He seems preoccupied. His real name is Giora.

“But we didn’t. Need I remind you whose fault that is?”

“Even in the savannah he’s hunting for chicks,” Aviram chuckles from within the tall weeds as the girl’s father removes the rifle from his shoulder.

It’s quiet for a moment as the three of them exchange looks. It’s a highly confidential military secret: Jerry is crazy about gorgeous Ethiopian girls, especially the very young ones, who are offered for pennies in dirty holes in the wall. And for the past three years he’s become embroiled in an impossible web of forbidden desires. People try to warn him that he’ll end up catching a disease, but nada, nothing, the man is an addict. And for the past three years, the girl’s father and Aviram have become secret partners to this addiction that must be kept from his wife.

“So? Any good?” Aviram jumps up eagerly, circling the carcass with his Nikon, sizing it up, trying to catch a good angle and change the subject. Click.

“Of course it’s good! It’s a hell of a gazelle!” her father cries, examining the pretty head—no less pretty than that of the antelope Mengistu shot—the thin hair on the plump belly, and the blood trickling into the dry dirt, waiting in vain for another wave of that feeling he’d had earlier, when he aimed and shot.

Then, suddenly, a quandary is raised: Has any of them ever even tasted venison?

“Of course I have! It’s a delicacy,” Jerry declares, face beaming with anticipation. But before Ethiopia he was acquainted only with the deerskin he kept in his glove compartment to clean the windshield.

“The meat has to be cured well, otherwise it’s too tough,” Aviram points out. “The American colonel has a special fridge just for that.”

The flies start to swarm, and the men remember the heat and know they have to get the job done. Her father eggs them on while Jerry scratches his head for a moment longer. Jerry is the highest ranking of the three, and hunting was his idea, but he really isn’t in the mood to become covered in blood right now, even if it’s only animal blood. Still, he needs a photo to remember this by. So, he bends down, grabs the gazelle’s front hoofs, and pulls them over her drooped head. The photograph is a close-up of the foaming mouth and frozen eyes. But he looks straight ahead, focused on victory, his thick neck poking with effort from between his shoulders as he bares his teeth at Aviram the photographer. “Yalla, shoot!” Click.

Less than half a meter away, in silver-framed sunglasses, her father ducks down with concentration. His bent left knee is planted in the ground like a peg right next to the gazelle’s stomach. His rolled-up khaki sleeves reveal tan arms, and his hands look as if he is wearing red gloves.

What’s this? her mother would comment with hostility two weeks later, at the end of a festive Shabbat dinner that Almito slaved over for hours, as the colorful slides are projected against the wall of the living room in Harar. She wouldn’t look at him or the other guests when she asked this (she knew him, Aviram, and Jerry well enough—they talk a big game, but all they did was chase down a helpless gazelle in their Land Rover) and he wouldn’t really answer, only reach out in the dim living room and try to hold her hand, which she would wriggle away.

It’s his knife. His hunting knife painted with blood. The long knife he likes to carry with him on the road. He’d pulled it out of his belt moments earlier, and the slide projected on the wall shows him gripping it with immense concentration, as if a surgeon wielding a scalpel, ignoring the flies buzzing around and the vultures circling overhead, as well as the sweat darkening his armpits and shining on his forehead, and the dryness in his mouth, and the hollow sensation in his stomach. And mostly Aviram, that nag, who insists on tweaking the angle over and over again, just to commemorate the moment when the two hands are pulled out of the gaping belly. So, what if the girl finds out it’s his knife? It’s the truth, isn’t it?

“Great gazelle,” one of the guests remarks out loud.

“You had mad luck out there,” Aviram or Jerry’s wife comments with enthusiasm.

“Mad luck not to have come across a rhino or a lion,” Jerry quips, and everyone sighs with relief and toasts them.

On the edge of the slide, in the trampled grass, is a black diagonal line. It’s the rifle. Fifteen minutes earlier, it had been cocked and it had shot two bullets, and now it is tossed aside, superfluous.

Yes, everything is permitted in Africa, especially if you’re wearing the right uniform—that of the Army of the Ethiopian Empire. You can loot market stalls and get in no trouble at all, you can perform a midday bank heist or a midnight palace coup. That’s what he’s starting to learn from Mengistu, who explained that if he recruited enough people, his chances of success would be big. Very big. Because the emperor—well, everyone is tired of him, of how detached he is from the people, the cult of personality around him, and the paranoia that has joined forces with delusions of grandeur to take him over like a fever. They are sick of the cleansings taking place every day, sick of the snitching, sick of the list of targets that he updates on a daily basis, sick of the helplessness and of the fact that only a minority of subjects is literate and that there are no doctors in any of the hospitals. They are tired of seeing nothing but ignorance, abuse, indifference, barbarism, and tyranny wherever they turn, while the emperor continues to nurture his affection for decadent international travel. They are sick of it all, truly. More than anything, they are sick of the growing understanding that the emperor is living on another planet, not simply above the law but as the source of the law itself, unbound by rules and norms. That’s what Mengistu explained to him at length two weeks ago as they rode to Harar together. He said there was no time to waste in removing these privileges, wiping out feudalism, and returning farmers to their land. Otherwise… otherwise…

“Don’t make me a part of this,” he’d cut him off, reserved, tense, gripping the steering wheel with both hands, and Mengistu looked him over, his face falling, then shrugged. Then Mengistu leaned his dark head back and told him to calm down, nothing was happening yet, at least nothing like that. And he didn’t ask, “Like what?” He’d figured it out, and they drove on in silence until they reached the gas station on the outskirts of Harar.

Either way, one could hunt a gazelle. That was a fact. All they did was leave camp at midday for a brief hunting tour, shoot a young gazelle, slice open her stomach, empty out her inner organs (what the hyenas didn’t eat, the vultures would peck at), drag her to the Land Rover, hang her from the hood like a big, hairy medal, and drive like that all the way back to camp, where Mengistu and his men helped them skin her.

What would be the point of lying to the girl?

Wearing her pretty Shabbat dress, she stands frozen before the wall onto which the slide is being projected. She stares at it for a long moment, her face pale, and then looks to her father, and then to the leftover roast beside the pile of gnawed-up bones at the center of the table. Everyone can tell she’s about to cry, but she doesn’t.

“Enough of this nonsense,” her father says, mussing her hair. “We brought back a gazelle, which is fantastic meat.”

“Why don’t you just shut up,” her mother says, fixing him with an odd look. “Just shut up.”

“She’ll get over it,” her father says.