Alemwa, I know you are watching over me although you have been dead for many years. I still remember, though I was so little at the time, how you lay down and closed your eyes for the last time. I can see how we carried your thin body wrapped in woven grasses and buried you at the bottom of the hillside where the path to the river took a sharp turn. My father said you had been a kind person who always took the time to listen to the problems of others and that was why you should be buried next to a path so that you would never lack company. Everyone said I was like you, especially my mother, and I think she was a little afraid of me in the same way she had been afraid of you. I can still feel your breath on my neck. It happens every day and it happened often on my long journey. I know you are close to me when I am in danger and there seems to be nothing but danger in this world.
Perhaps it was your breath that woke me up, Alemwa, that night when the soldiers came to take away my father. I remember how my mother screamed like an animal with its leg caught in a trap trying to gnaw it off. I think that is what she was trying to do; trying to gnaw off her arms, legs, ears, eyes, when they came for my father. They hit him until he was covered in blood but he was still alive when they dragged him away in the night.
I know I became an adult that night, way too fast, as if childhood were a skin that was torn from my body. I still remember the pain of seeing my father dragged away in a bloody heap by those soldiers, of knowing but not understanding. I think that was what made me grow up; the realisation that brutality could be accompanied by laughter. Every night during the following months my mother sat outside the hut waiting for my father to come back, to suddenly reappear on the roof so that she could lure him down with soft words and they could spend the rest of the night tightly curled up together.
Then there was the night when we heard that the laughing soldiers were on their way back. When my mother heard about it she covered her head with a white cloth and shook. I was the only child at home at that time. When she took the cloth from her face I could see she had been crying. Her face looked completely different, it had turned inward and I could not see any life in her eyes. She struck me with the white cloth and screamed at me to go away. She chased me away so that I would live.
