In Ethiopia today it is seven years ago. 2017, when I could still sleep without seeing in my dreams the faces of those who died. In England it is 2024. Your priests determined that Jesus Christ was born one day long ago, and our priests decided another. Since then we have been seven years estranged, locked in parallel, but – yesemayi ābati – I would give anything to live 2017 anew.
I arrived in London as a young man in the nineties and my brothers soon followed. We were happy with our new life, our new flat in the tower block. I gave the boys their meal after school, prepared for my night shift in the cab. I loved to see them rest their brains, straining at invisible guitars with their scholars’ fingertips over full bellies, bawling out Springsteen with eyes squeezed shut. You can’t start a fi-ire. That song taunts me now. Can’t start a fire without a spark…
As children in Addis Ababa we cut the driest switches of acacia for the building of our demera bonfire on the feast of Meskel. Our mother gathered fresh daisies from the hills beside the city, fashioning a yellow cross with flowers to crown the green tower. I tied my twigs into chibo bundles with such care that Jonas, the youngest, clicked his tongue. Eager to run and sing hoyene hoye! for coins at our neighbours’ doors, he wailed. ’You take so long, Behailu! Why must you make it so itty-bitty so when just now it will burn?’ He frog-bulged his eyes at mine to make me flinch. ‘WHOOSH!’
I was a child that loved to wait and watch. Held my breath for the procession and the braying of the prayers until some subdeacon proffered a plastic lighter, thumbed the spark-wheel against the flint. Touched the flame to a pale wax taper worthy of the bishop’s hand to light the demera. Whoosh.
When I saw your Norwegian fir here at Trafalgar Square in winter, I imagined myself home for Meskel, flames hot on my face. From habit I eyed the slope of the steep green tree for signs. Tradition at home decrees that the demera’s bright sparks spat into the dark must dance eastward for good fortune in the years to come, but with your tree I couldn’t say which way they might fly.
Now I know. In place of chibo bundles, you clad your towers with Arconic aluminium. You insulate them with Celotex RS5000, because this is cheap like the seventy-two lives of my neighbours. Inside our tower in Kensington my refrigerator malfunctioned in the night, sparked a flame that set all your slow kindling ablaze.
Always in the headlines here the flames lick, the fire consumes, the smoke belches and spews. So greedy, these infernos with their tastes for social housing! But I did not light this fire. The spark of my refrigerator caught the eyes of those searching for a scapegoat, but it is not me but you must answer.
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