8. The weirdness of it all

THE PRINCESSES were exhausted.
The tension of the day began to overwhelm them, but they knew they could be murdered in their sleep and so they decided, during a family council, that one of them must be on guard at all times.
Princess Sara found a tin can and if anything happened during the night, the princess on guard duty was to beat on this can.
"How we were to defend ourselves against these criminals, God only knows, but we were absolutely determined that we were not going to be murdered in our sleep," said Princess Rebecca.
She vividly remembers the surreal setting of the women's quarters of the End of the World.

Princess Rebecca: Then they took us to the women's quarters. In the dark, it looked like a mausoleum, the way the moonlight struck its roof. The first thing that hit us was the stench. Then the weirdness -- all the women in dirty blue uniforms, with shaved heads. At first, there was an awful silence -- no one said a word. Then one of the prisoners took off her blanket and, tentatively, offered it to my mother. Then others offered us their extra mattresses, or shared their meagre food. Some of them got down on their kneess and tried to clean the hole in the ground -- the Turkish toilet it was called. It was the first kindness we had seen all day, and we were overwhelmed. This was also our first contact with hard-core criminals.

Their sanity was maintained by dancing in the prison cell and performing the traditional ceremony of roasting coffee beans, which had been practised for hundreds of years in Ethiopia, whenever they could.
They had no furniture except for mattresses, which relatives had brought them from home. The mattresses were their dining table and exercise area, as well as the place where they slept. Their world had shrunk to an extremely tiny space. The cell had no running water, and they bathed, when they could, from large barrels, in the open air, behind the prison block. They had one toilet -- a hole in the ground -- and only one light, a bare ceiling bulb, which was never extinguished. If the Derg had a purpose in mind, it was apparently to humiliate Haile Selassie's family.
From the other side of the wall, the princesses began to hear familiar voices.
With each passing day, more and more women of the Emperor's Court arrived. But the princesses weren't permitted to speak to them. They were totally isolated, for months, for years.
The daily routine of making morning coffee, battling fleas or killing rats, disinfecting the cell, lining its floors and walls with newspapers and wringing the moisture out, marching across the compound once a day, under the watchful eyes of the guards became the most reassuring part of the princesses' prison lives.

Princess Rebecca: Once a year, every year, they would take us to the administrative office. One at a time. They asked us only one question for all those years: 'Where is the Emperor's money?' They were obsessed with it.

Early each summer, the royal women began to hope they would be included in the annual amnesty, marking the anniversary of the Derg.

Princess Rebecca: That was the worst time. You pinned all your hopes on that particular day, and there was no way to know. The releases were totally arbitrary ...

The years went by, and the princesses' names were never on the list.
Then in 1983, Princess Rebecca and her sister, Mimi, were released.
"The anniversary had passed and I had made up my mind that we would never be released as long as Mengistu was still alive," remembers Princess Rebecca. "I was always the strongest of ou group, bu that Sunday, I fell apart. I couldn't stop crying. I knew I would rot in prison. Nine years is a hell of a long time. I was ill, and was in the clinic in my pajamas, as a matter of fact, and I went to my mother (Princess Zuriash) to say good night before they locked us up. I heard the commotion. Everyone was shouting -- the murderers, the thieves, the guards. 'You've got your papers, Rebecca! You can go home!'"