Odd Jobs (137 page)

More scandalous yet, the Emperor’s officials turned out to be appropriating the food shipments sent in aid. And with astonishing effrontery, the Finance Minister, Yelma Deresa, demanded high customs fees from the overseas donors; when they balked at payment, the loyal press hastened “to denounce the rebellious benefactors, saying that by suspending aid they condemn our nation to the cruelties of poverty and starvation.” And:

The well-placed Ethiopians had trouble understanding what the fuss was all about. “First of all,” A. A. told Mr. Kapuściński, “death from hunger had existed in our Empire for hundreds of years, an everyday, natural thing, and it never occurred to anyone to make any noise about it. Drought would come and the earth would dry up, the cattle would drop dead, the peasants would starve. Ordinary, in accordance with the laws of nature and the eternal order of things … Consider also, my dear friend, that—between you and me—it is not bad for national order and a sense of national humility that the subjects be rendered skinnier, thinned down a bit.” The Emperor, after all, had issued a statement upon the famine announcing that he “attached the utmost importance to this matter.”

Such celestial reassurances to the contrary, unrest and criticism continued to swell, there were riots and strikes, and the Army—the biggest in black Africa, and since the 1960 rebellion the mainstay of imperial power—began, in February of 1974, to mutiny. The Dergue came into being, and the Emperor consented to meet with it. The last surreal act of the drama was under way; acting in the Emperor’s name, the Dergue gradully arrested all the Emperor’s officials and favorites, emptying the Palace around him. The grim farce was heightened by the arrival of some Swedish physicians who had been previously engaged to lead the court circle in calisthenics. “To prevent the rebels from capturing everyone at once, the grand chamberlain of the court pulled off a cunning trick by ordering that calisthenics be done in small groups.” The Dergue relentlessly continued its arrests, “cutting off great hunks of dignitaries, until in the end the Palace was picked clean, flushed out, and there was nobody left except for His Most Extraordinary Majesty and one servant.” This servant, like the Emperor, was an octogenarian. Through August the two old men held to routines of server and served in the vast void of the Palace: “It rained for days on end,” Mr. Kapuściński tells us. “Mornings were foggy and nights cold. H. S. still wore his uniform, over which he would throw a warm woolen cape. They got up as they had in the old days, as they had for years, at daybreak, and they went to the Palace chapel, where each day L. M. [the servant] read aloud different verses from the Book of Psalms.… Afterward, H. S. would go to his office and sit down at his desk, on which more than a dozen telephones were perched. All of them silent—perhaps they had been cut off. L. M. would sit by the door, waiting for the bell to ring, summoning him to receive orders from his monarch.” Delegations of young officers arrived, attempting to persuade Haile Selassie to yield up to them the millions of dollars he had secreted over the years in Swiss banks; he never did, though the Dergue did find the dollars he had hidden beneath his Persian carpet and in his great collection of Bibles. The night of September 11, 1974, was New Year’s Eve according to the Ethiopian calendar, and the two old men in the Palace did not sleep; in observance of the holiday the servant lit candles in chandeliers throughout the deserted rooms. The next morning, three officers in combat uniforms arrived, and one of
them read to the Emperor an act of dethronement that stated, “Even though the people treated the throne in good faith as a symbol of unity, Haile Selassie I took advantage of its authority, dignity, and honor for his own personal ends. As a result, the country found itself in a state of poverty and disintegration.” They told the servant to pack his belongings and go home. The streets of Addis Ababa were still empty under a morning curfew; nevertheless, the Emperor waved his hand at the few people they passed as he was driven from the Palace in a green Volkswagen. He was held in rooms of the Menelik Palace on the hills above Addis Ababa, close to where his pet lions were caged.
^‡
According to a report from Agence France Presse, he was granted many signs of respect by his captors and on his side repeatedly proclaimed, “If the revolution is good for the people, then I am for the revolution.” He died, according to a terse announcement in the
Ethiopian Herald
, a little less than a year after his deposition, of circulatory failure.

The Emperor
is a parable of rule which offers a number of lessons. Foremost looms the inevitable tendency of a despot, be he king, ward boss, or dictator, to prefer loyalty to ability in his subordinates, and to seek safety in stagnation. One of Haile Selassie’s problems, well managed as long as power was kept within court circles, was to balance the forces within his government so that no one branch or clique developed any initiative or momentum of its own. The price paid, of course, was a corruption and an inertia that broke the bonds between the monarchy and the nation. Another lesson, more elusive in its workings, is the fragile, even phantasmal nature of the connection between the ruler and the ruled. Haile Selassie was so accustomed to ruling, with its ceaseless pomp and protocol, that he displayed a sublime passivity—infuriating to some of his retainers—when the Palace began to sink. He allowed himself to be used by the military as its figurehead and through his non-resisting person permitted a transition to revolution. How much of this was intentional it would take another book to tell us. The courtier “C.” explained to Mr. Kapuściński, “His Venerable Majesty wanted to rule over everything. Even if there was a rebellion, he wanted to rule over the rebellion, to command a mutiny, even if it was directed against his own reign.” Perhaps, in his mind, as he conferred each day that summer with delegations
from the Dergue and—himself always dressed in military uniform now—visited his terrified ministers as they awaited incarceration, he was still ruling. These procedures might have seemed no less real than those of the days when his Ministers of the Pen and the Purse would translate his murmurings into governmental action. “It’s so very difficult,” mused “M. W. Y.,” “to establish where the borderline is between living power, great, even terrifying, and the appearance of power, the empty pantomime of ruling, being one’s own dummy, only playing the role, not seeing the world, not hearing it, merely looking into oneself.” For power, appearances to the contrary, flows upward from the governed: all the munificence of Haile Selassie’s court derived from the exertions of desperately poor peasants. And in fact power can be eventually withheld. Ethiopia in 1960 was not ready for revolution; by 1974, it was.

Not that peasants, as such, revolted. The eloquent and philosophical A. A. observes:

It is no paradox that the customary fomenters of modern revolution are young members of the middle class rather than of the oppressed masses. It is these who have had opportunity to think of more than bread, yet have not attained an entrenched position in the established order. Haile Selassie distributed scholarships and selectively encouraged education and thus helped create the class that brought him down. Both the leader of the failed coup of 1960, Germame Neway, and of the successful one of 1974, Mengistu Haile-Mariam, had spent time, at the imperial government’s expense, in the United States, which continues to export, in the form of raised consciousness, more revolution than the Soviet Union.

Ethiopia is distinguished from most Third World countries by its ancient history of independence, on its craggy African plateau. It is typically Third World, however, in that its government is the nation’s one significant accumulation of capital and therefore must serve as the main avenue to wealth. Mr. Kapuściński calls it “a poor country, in which the
only source of property is not hard work and productivity but extraordinary privilege.” The United States and the other industrial nations of the West are fortunate insofar as high political office is financially unattractive, except as a stepping stone to best-selling memoirs. When the most energetically entrepreneurial types are drawn elsewhere in the economy, a possibility of altruistic service enters officialdom. But until a society can generate superior economic opportunity elsewhere, government is apt to be a league of exploiters, a protection racket dearly selling the governed a modicum of peace. The jacket flap of
The Emperor
claims that when it was published in Poland, in 1978, “it was widely viewed as an allegory of dictatorship in general. Critics saw its publication as a key event in shaping the consensus for reform in Poland.” Perhaps; but the Cold War moral that stands out is the orthodox Communist call to revolution against autocratic and elitist regimes. The intolerable extent of callously regarded misery allowed to flourish under Haile Selassie is firmly, though gracefully, indicated, in this book devoted to the melodious ghosts of his regime. The vivid charm of these voices—the courtesy, the irony, the rhetorical flair, a certain antique quality of dispassionate speculation amid timeless horizons—transports us to an atmosphere perfumed with the lingering scents of the Queen of Sheba. The Emperor himself, though he is the titular subject, remains less than vivid—something of a mystery to his court as he was to the world, a grave and soft-spoken king seen through the wrong end of the telescope, a man who became invisible when he went to bed. Yet his world, the abruptly abolished world of the Amharic aristocracy, lives in these pages, so curiously delicate, of remembrance collected amid danger and ruin.

L
ETTERS AND
D
RAWINGS OF
B
RUNO
S
CHULZ
,
with Selected Prose
, edited by Jerzy Ficowski, translated from the Polish by Walter Arndt with Victoria Nelson. 249 pp. Harper & Row, 1988.

This is a book of remnants—a scrapbook of those drawings, letters, and uncollected prose pieces that Jerzy Ficowski, no less devoted a posthumous
executor for Bruno Schulz than Max Brod was for Franz Kafka, has been able to find in the forty years since World War II’s horrendous work of destruction and scattering ceased. Schulz was born in 1892 in the Galician province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a territory that after 1923 became part of independent Poland; he was murdered by a Gestapo agent in 1942 during a minor—for those black days—massacre in the Jewish ghetto of Drohobycz. Here in this town (now Drogobych in the Soviet Ukraine) Schulz had spent all fifty years of his life, supporting himself as a teacher of drawing and crafts in the secondary school. His training had been in architecture, and his first artistic exertions had been in graphic art. He published, in his fifth decade, two small but amazing books, whose awkward American titles are
Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
(1934) and
The Street of Crocodiles
(1937). In the few years before frail health, chronic depression, and the advent of the Holocaust silenced him, he enjoyed a modest literary celebrity and communication with the brightest spirits of the Polish artistic world. After the war, Schulz’s works have found—what he vainly sought during his lifetime—translation out of Polish into the major languages of Europe. The fevered brilliance of his descriptive prose and the bold mythologization he imposed on his childhood impressions have generated, if not quite the universal impact of Kafka’s or García Márquez’s fantasy, an exalted reputation among other writers. I. B. Singer has called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived,” Cynthia Ozick has paid Schulz the homage of devoting a novel (
The Messiah of Stockholm
) to the supposed discovery of the Polish writer’s lost work
The Messiah
, and the Yugoslav Danilo Kiš has said simply, “Schulz is my god.”

Schulz was, as his critical essays and comments make manifest, a bold and profound literary theorist, whose program has a postmodern ring to it. He approached literary works, including his own, as above all texts, collections of words encoded with “polysemantic, unfathomable” significance. His most extended and rapturous review praises a novel few non-Poles will have read,
The Foreigner
, by Maria Kuncewicz; in Schulz’s interpretation, the adventures of the heroine, Róza, all work to deepen for her the meaning of a nonsensical German verse—“
Diese, diese, o ja, wunderschöne Nase
” (“This, this, oh yes, absolutely lovely nose”)—encountered in her girlhood, during her first romantic involvement. “This was the text of Róza’s fate, the couplet she would recite endlessly, each time with a different intonation, each time closer to understanding.” Until this understanding is reached, she will be terrified by death, “which
is devoid of meaning when it does not seal a destiny fulfilled.” She cannot “be redeemed except by the words uttered that single time, the couplet that was her curse.” The couplet somehow returns in the mouth of a doctor, and she attains the grace of psychological healing: “Discrepancies of time, place, and person are irrelevant to the psyche, hence they vanish before the essential semantic identity.” But more happens than one heroine’s revelation: “Into the clinical case, the psychoanalytical interview, eternity steps unnoticed, and it transforms the psychoanalytical laboratory into eschatological theatre.” Or, expressed with an image of characteristically Schulzian violence: