Throwing Stones — Dan Roskey
phrases. He did so with a gruff voice, standing at the head of the class and bending forward at the waist in an oddly formal, solicitous way. The teacher was a slight young Ethiopian, very lively. She translated Antoine’s Spartan lessons with much theater, and the children managed to have some fun and some laughs anyway. Suddenly, the parents had returned to the school, and they were gathering their kids and taking off in a hurry. The kids had only been there an hour or so. The teacher started getting calls, and started getting scared. The school guard, a dark-skinned local youth, built like a bullet, advised us to stay at the school for a while. Antoine didn’t like taking orders, and he tried to convince me to leave, but just about then we heard the first shots. The violence began that morning in the Mercato, in the west side of the city, and in the northern precincts. Shiro Meda was one of the latter. The school was located on a side road, several hundred meters off the larger, dirt road that led steeply down the hill, down from the asphalt road by the embassy. We were hearing guns, and the sound of people wailing and howling and whistling. Antoine and I step out of the school grounds. Standing in front of the school, we were relatively safe. From there, we were able to witness several waves of confrontation on the dirt road. As we watched, several boys run up the hill, throwing stones. As they run back down, they were followed by federal police with guns. We watched as they stopped to shoot. Then they pursued. They were accompanied by the hooting and whistling of women in their houses. It was the very sound of shame. Antoine and I just stood there stunned. It was the first time I had seen men shoot at men. I was powerless to form a thought. Antoine’s face was a study of concentration. But he said nothing. If someone had been hit, would we have heard? Were the police aiming over the kids’ heads to frighten them? Even so, releasing live ammo among our hills, our hills full of people! The truth is we would never have heard about it if someone were shot. Bullets were fired, and the hills absorbed them. It’s as if time, the
ultimate arbiter in Ethiopia, took them, like fog swallowing light. We retreated into the school. The guard and the teacher took care of us. No one left the school that day, once the children had all been retrieved. The staff all lived too far away, and they would not let us leave. All day we heard the sounds of strife, and at night we camped out in the classrooms. The guard and a visiting friend teased the teacher, as she bustled around a propane stove warming bits of food for us, preparing tea. We gathered around the guard’s portable radio, and it felt like we were dissidents in old Eastern Europe. By morning, things had settled down sufficiently for us to return home. We had to walk; all taxi services had stopped. Shops and businesses, and our little school, were all closed down. This would carry on for a week. I spent my idle days walking all the way down the hill to old Arat Kilo, where a few canny shopkeepers broke ranks. Otherwise, I would not have eaten. I walked slowly back up the hill to my house in Shiro Meda, amid the stream of hardy citizens lining each side of the road, chatting and laughing, as though, in the end , this will have been little more than a holiday. I lay in bed at night, staring blankly into the darkness. I might have been excused if I had longed for “civilization,” if I had wished for Roman cobblestone at sundown. But I didn’t. I was mourning, but I wasn’t scared. And I couldn’t despise the place for its turmoil. The spontaneous strike was eventually broken. The government declared that business licenses would start being pulled. Magically, taxi pulled out from their alleyways one day, and all was back to its shout and growl. It was like a Hollywood stunt: city comes to life. By then, Antoine was gone. I never saw him after we left the school. We walked up the dirt road together, and his jaw was set. He never uttered a word about what had happened. We bid each other be safe, and that was it. He walked away, kicking dust down the margin of the embassy road. I wondered about him after that. I pictured him lying back on the grassy slopes of the chilly 43
