By: Mintiwab Tamegne

It used to be the old judge's chapel. Actually, it was larger than a chapel, yet smaller than a church. The house consisted of one very large middle room surrounded by four smaller rooms at each of its four corners.

The middle room had a rectangular dome that extended beyond the roofs of the surrounding rooms. The dome was made of tinted glass. It was said that the old judge's wife, who was almost a saint because she predicted the time of her death, carried some of the foundation stones on her back during the construction of the chapel. When the judge died, he left the house to his daughter. She in turn passed it on to her daughter. And when that daughter married her new husband, the children from her first marriage, my two brothers and I, moved into the chapel. We called it "The House of Pictures."

Its stone walls were covered with fading icons celebrating the glories of God and great men, who then seemed one and the same to me. Pictures of battles with great kings and warriors who fought in them would stare at you from various parts of the wall.

Rows of Italian soldiers with equally oversized heads and eyes would be shooting at rows of Ethiopian soldiers who also had equally oversized heads and eyes. The only difference being that one row of men was a bit paler than the other.

Saint George killing the dragon was as real and as great a hero as the warlords whose tales the servants wouldn't tire of retelling.

The never-ending legend of the Queen of Sheba (who went to the court of King Solomon to get herself impregnated) was reinforced with captions under each picture explaining the very obvious scenes. Unlike the Queen of Sheba, the Virgin Mary, also an inhabitant of the walls, never had to explain how she became the mother of the Child she was carrying in her arms.

The Indian architect who designed and built the chapel must have known that some day little children would call it their home, for why else would he have the ceiling painted with floating Indian ladies wearing bright saris in a blue meadow full of flowers? They had nothing in common with the fearsome and solemn figures on the walls that surrounded them. Sometimes, when you were all alone in the big room, the people on the walls would talk back to you and, when they did, their eyes would get even bigger. The Indian ladies would definitely tell on you if you stole a piece of cake or candy.

Other than the pictures on the walls, the house was very bare. There was some very old furniture that had seen better days. The velvet of the two remaining German armchairs was anything but the original purple. The gold leaf of the armrests was now dull and you could see the bare wood through it in places. A few old leather and carved wooden Ethiopian chairs were cluttered along the walls. Some had animal skins thrown over them. At one corner of the wall, there was a strong bare wooden table with chairs. That was where we children took our meals.

My mother's nanny, who looked very ancient with her nun's skull cap and slightly stooped back, and the old Eunuch, who had been a man of power in my great-grandfather's house, would preside over our meals. The old man's very big and black frame was not comforting to us children, with the exception of my older brother, Alemu, who would be treated like a spoilt prince. Other than Alemu, all the kids in the house were afraid of the man.

He would threaten us with one of the many canes he had because of a bad leg. Even Mother, who lived in a small house near the chapel, was afraid of him. Every time we hid behind her for some crime, obvious only to him, we could feel Mother shrink back in fear when his voice thundered at her. The saving grace for us children was the constant power struggle that went on between the two archaic figures of the nanny and the old Eunuch. This gave us the room we needed to explore and make a world of our own. Besides these two very dominant people were a number of servants and their children living within and around the house.

About four times a week, a young priest would come to teach us the Ethiopian alphabet. Those children who could already read and write would learn to recite the Book of David from the Old Testament. I never knew why the Book of David played the central role it did in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but that's the way it was, and still is.

The alphabet consists of thirty-two basic letters with seven vowels for each letter, making a total of 224 characters to be studied. It would have been easy enough for us to learn had the teacher taught us the logical pattern behind the vowels. Instead, he preferred us to repeat the characters after him, a seemingly endless litany.

It did not really matter if you could identify the letters or not, just repeat loud enough for him to hear, "Ha...Ha" "Hu...Hu" "Le...Le" "Lu...Lu," and so on.

Sometimes, he would leave one of the older children in charge of the class, go into the kitchen, eat a meal and have some homemade beer or honey wine. At other times, he would take one of us on his lap or between his legs, pressing hard against us. Whoever went to sit on his lap would be in charge of class for that day. But, of course, none of us was really very eager to be the chosen one.

We were an odd assortment of pupils: my two brothers and I, three cousins, a number of the house children and a young girl named Tamarind, who, at that time, seemed quite old to me with all her thirteen years.

No one really knew where she came from. She was just there one day. Wherever she was from, they didn't have priests or alphabets. She could neither read nor write. She didn't have a particular place to sleep at night. Sometimes she would sleep on the floor of our bedroom, other times she would lie on the kitchen mat.

Whenever our nanny couldn't find something, Tamarind was the first to be suspected. Nanny herself or one of her helping hands would chase her. But, whatever Tamarind lacked in her knowledge of the books, she made up for with her swift feet. Nobody could run as fast. She would run and climb the tallest fig tree, swift as a cat, and wouldn't come down, no matter what. At times, she would even sleep in the tree. By morning, whatever had driven her to seek those heights would be forgotten.

One day, all of a sudden, she disappeared. No one asked where she could have gone to, just as no one asked where she had come from. She left our lives as effortlessly as she had entered.

Wube, the cook, who had no say in anything that went on in the chapel, was our ally. She would tell us wonderful stories of her home which was somewhere in the highlands of northern Ethiopia: how she had been abducted from her family by a bandit; how she had lived as his wife for a few years; and how, to get away from her husband, she had joined some traders passing through on their way to Addis Abeba.

I especially liked Wube because she would sometimes get hold of one of Nanny's keys and share with me whatever goodies we could find in the pantry cupboard. Wube was the one who told me about the talking Indian ladies. She said, "If you ever take anything you're not supposed to or do anything you shouldn't do, do it outside the big room, or the Indian ladies will tell on you."

And, to prove her point, she would smack her lips, and sure enough, one of the ladies would smack back at her.

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