But I wanted to know what happened to his wife and her lover. He welcomed the question.
‘They stayed on the rock by the side of the road until six-thirty at night — maybe six hours or more. People laughing at them, a big crowd. The two nakeds — man and woman.
‘Then when it was getting dark, an army truck passed on the road and saw him. “Colonel!” and “What-what.” The truck stopped and they untied them and put him on the truck with my wife, gave them some clothes and took them away.
‘I left her. Left the house. I say, “This is my children’s house. They must go on living here. It belongs to them.” I got another place to stay. All I left with was two suitcases — my whole life in them. Nothing else. I went and started all over again. I said, “God saved me.” ’
Was he done? He was still gray-faced and reflective — and hadn’t he said something about prison?
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘three months later I was arrested for “attempting killing” because I had a gun and threatened the soldier. I went to court. There was a judge. I was sent to prison for two months.’
This was the only ex-prisoner I met in Ethiopia who had actually been charged and given a trial. It was also the shortest prison sentence I had heard about.
‘Then God saved me again,’ Ali said, a little more intensely. ‘I was walking in the street in Addis and I saw them in the street, my wife and the soldier, holding hands.
‘I decided to kill her. I went to my brother’s house, where I was keeping my gun, because I had nowhere to lock it where I was staying. My brother was not there. He had gone away and no one had the key.
‘For three days I tried to get the key. I wanted my gun — I was planning how I would kill her. Then my brother returned with the key. He opened the safe and gave me the gun.’
He was massaging his scalp, remembering, but saying nothing.
I said, ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. You see, time had passed. I said, “So what? Why kill her? Let her live — it will be worse for her. She has lost everything.” God saved me.’
After that, having unburdened himself with this story, having heard nothing from me of my life, he said that he felt he knew me well, and it was as though we had known each other for a long time. I could see that he meant it and was moved by this feeling.
I told him what I felt about time exposing the truth — that time did not heal wounds, but that the passing years gave us a vantage point to see the reality of things. I added that it was no fun to grow old but that the compensation for it was that time turned your mental shit-detector into a highly calibrated instrument.
Ali said, ‘Now I know that no one is virtuous. Women will sleep with anyone. Why do they throw everything away? Why they do these things?’
‘Because men do them.’
But he was baffled to think that a woman would behave so badly; that she would not do exactly as she was told. It was strange to him, this realization that someone so low and so despised had a mind of her own, an imagination, and the ability to devise elaborate stratagems for deceit and pleasure.
Through Ali, I met old Tadelle and young Wolde, man and boy, who were driving to the southern region to pick up spears and shields, beads and bracelets, milk jugs from the Borena people, ivory bangles from the Oromo, carvings from the Konso, and whatever baskets and knick-knacks they could find. They were traders.
‘If you go with someone else they might rob you,’ Ali said. ‘There are bad people on the road, bad people in the buses. Tadelle is a good driver and has a strong vehicle. Wolde is a good boy. They know the places to stay. You will be safe.’
In Africa when someone said, as they often did, ‘There are bad people there’, I tended to listen. I was sure Ali got a cut of the money, for I paid him and he paid them, but the price was fair. Besides, this was a way of going the whole way to the Kenyan frontier. The day I got my Kenyan visa — four days after I applied — we set off in a southerly direction on the longest road in Africa.
The potholed roads in Addis prepared me for much worse ones out of town. Addis lies at 8500 feet — I gasped for breath after I had rushed across a road to dodge a speeding car — and so our progress took us through a series of rounded hills and crowded settlements, through dry valleys and the highlands again. Among the goats and donkeys, the farting motor scooters and beat-up cars, I saw a skinny athlete in bright red shorts and a yellow jersey and Reeboks, running fast, weaving through the traffic, a marathoner in training. He was one of many. Apart from the emperor, the best known Ethiopian is the 10,000 meter gold medalist, Haile Gabre Selassie (no relation), who was born near here. These south central highlands are the home of many long-distance runners, with great legs and powerful lungs. Their speed has freed them from the hard life they would have faced as farmers and herdsmen, for there is no work here, and for the past thirty years there has been nothing in Ethiopia but uncertain harvests and war and political terror.
Tadelle said that he had been down this road many times. In fact he had been into Kenya.
‘Tell me about it.’
Haltingly, for his English was poor, Tadelle said that he had sneaked into Kenya twice, and made his way to refugee camps. It was his dearest wish to leave Ethiopia for good and to emigrate. ‘Anywhere — I go to any country!’ He hated life in Ethiopia, he said it would never get better, and anywhere in the world would be better than life here. America would be just about perfect.
But the United Nations interviewers at the camps both in Nairobi and Mombasa said he was not a genuine refugee. ‘I say, “I no like Ethiopian government. I hate zat — all of zat.” ’ But they sent him back to Ethiopia.
‘I go again sometime,’ Tadelle said.
About three hours south of Addis we came to Shashemene.
‘This bad place,’ Tadelle said. ‘Very bad place. Too much thief. They are all termites.’
‘Let’s stop,’ I said. Shashemene was part of my plan.
If Ethiopia was the spiritual home of the Rastafarians, Shashemene was its capital — not Addis, though Addis too was full of un-Ethiopian-looking black men in bulgy bobble hats of multi-colored wool, the Rasta banner of red, yellow and green, which were also the colors of the Ethiopian flag. Haile Selassie had granted some acreage in Shashemene to these devotees to satisfy their desire to return to Africa and have a place to settle. Ethiopians described them as impious and faintly ludicrous. The Muslims called them infidels, the Copts claimed they were misguided Christians. No one took them seriously, and many Ethiopians tended to stare at them, sometimes giggling at the Rasta get-up and the African’ affectations, beaded bracelets, horn necklaces and woven shoulder bags. The dreadlocks were weird to Ethiopians, not African at all, and not the cultural statement Rastas regarded them, but just the epitome of a bad hair day.
As soon as we entered the outskirts of Shashemene I saw this coiffure and these colors and these men, very skinny ones, striding along the roadside.
We had agreed that in return for my paying for my passage I could stop wherever I wanted, within reason. Our aim was to get to the border in three or four days. Tadelle and Wolde drove into town looking for a place to stay, while I nosed around, searching for a Rastafarian to talk to.
Through a succession of chance meetings and introductions I met Gladstone Robinson, one of the earliest pioneers, virtually the first Rastafarian to settle for good in Ethiopia. He was seventy-one, the father of eleven children; his youngest, a one-year-old, was crawling out of his hut. His radiant and smiling young wife — ‘She’s twenty three,’ Gladstone said — was heavily pregnant, so he would soon be father to an even dozen.
Gladstone was friendly, funny and alert, youthful in spite of his age, with a jazz musician’s easy smile and silences. He was skinny but supple, with a knotted stringy beard and gray dreadlocks drooping from beneath his wool hat. His hut was just a cement shed, two rooms. The room we sat in was stacked with files and strewn with papers, some old photos on the wall, the requisite pictures of Haile Selassie and Bob Marley, and a bulging paper bag on the table.