Black Is the Body

by Emily Bernard

  * * *

  —

  The twins’ grandmother brings out the baby we will know as Isabella. She is wrapped in the same light-blue quilted outfit that she wears in a picture that Helen sent months ago. Her grandmother, a slight woman with a lightly wrinkled face, stands in a space that separates two rooms of the family home. The sky shines a movie-star light down on the two of them. Isabella regards me dispassionately as she takes in the entire scene.

  Giulia emerges midwail. “She is afraid because she has never seen white skin,” Berhanu says, and gently touches John’s arm. Giulia continues to cry as we stand outside the compound and are presented with carrots so bright and large they could serve as props in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. John gathers us together for a photograph before we begin the trek back to the Land Rover.

  The return hike feels more arduous, the sun hotter, the air drier. I am trying not to show my exhaustion. The grandmother has a swaddled Isabella strapped to her back. Her steps are light and efficient on veins of rock that protrude from the earth. I walk next to one of the babies’ cousins, a girl of eleven or twelve. Her eyes are large and kind; the braids in her hair shine. She wears Giulia, who seems to be dozing, on her back, underneath a cloth secured to her faded green dress. We take turns looking at each other, and then looking away before the other one catches us. There is so much I want to ask and tell her, but the membrane of language, fine and opaque at once, travels with us like a mobile glass partition. Even though it feels a bit silly, the next time I sense her looking, I meet her gaze and, for the second time today, put my hand over my heart. I press down hard. When she looks away, she is still smiling.

  “You are a part of our family now,” an older male cousin tells us, but that’s it for good-byes. John and I are hustled into the car, whose rumbling engine inspires more caterwauling from Giulia. The babies are shuffled around. I hold Giulia, who screams and stares at me with tears cascading from her eyes. Isabella rests quietly in John’s lap, snug in the nest of his arms and chest. Suddenly, she sits up and opens her mouth slightly. Sheep’s milk spills out of her tiny body. Giulia follows suit. Before her second round, I take my hat and turn it upside down under her chin.

  Three hours later, we have become almost used to the smell and the feeling of our daughters’ vomit caked on our clothing. We are sticky with heat and sweat and bodily fluids by the time we arrive at the airport in Mekele. John leaves the girls with me while he rushes to the bathroom to clean out my hat and rinse Isabella’s excretions from his shirt. With a baby tucked into the crook of each arm, I sink into a plastic chair. My dizziness and blurry vision must be a result of the heat, I think. An older woman wearing a black hijab sits down next to me. She holds her arms open. I hand her Giulia, and she pulls a small blanket from her belongings and hands it to me. She and John each take one of my arms when it’s time to board.

  I still feel rickety as we walk toward the plane, but I have a firm grip on Isabella, who emerges from the cloth on my shoulder as slowly as a plant sprouting from the earth in a time-lapse video. She stretches her neck like a periscope and pivots her head slowly, a stern look on her face. Like a general assessing a battlefield, or Magellan surveying the Atlantic, I think, and when she smiles, I believe we are sharing our first private joke.

  Giulia has decided that it is my particular job to tend to her, so John and I trade babies once we are seated. She and I fall asleep quickly after takeoff. A few minutes later, a wave of pain propels me out of my seat and toward the bathroom. Along the way, I shove a miserable, indignant Giulia into the arms of a pretty flight attendant. I am on my hands and knees, in the throes of thudding, seizing abdominal pain, when the attendant knocks on the door. As soon as I undo the latch, she snatches the door open. I look up. She is stony; I am perpendicular. “Madame, your baby,” she sniffs, and presents me with Giulia, who looks down at me with what appears to be alarm on her twelve-month-old face.

  * * *

  —

  The thing about unpasteurized milk is that it does not agree with everyone. I spend the next few days at various tight angles on and around the floor of our hotel bathroom, my stomach in a losing war against bacteria. Gradually, I am able to climb onto the bed at night, where I lie on my back, breathing deeply, mouth open. Late at night, John takes the girls to the lobby when they become restless. Once, Giulia dozes while John calms Isabella by pushing her two inches back and forth until the short, rhythmic motion coaxes her to sleep.

  Our flight back to the United States leaves in four days. We had planned to stay in Addis another week, but we moved up the date of our return after Marjorie and Yonas assured us that the finalization of the adoption would be simple and straightforward. The girls spend much of their time in the foster home, which is a requirement for the adoption process. Once I am well again, I feel only slightly guilty for enjoying these days of freedom from nascent motherhood. There is so much to see, even in the hotel lobby. On his late-night trips, John becomes friendly with Abeba, a beautiful young woman with a blossom of curly hair who manages one of the kiosks. When I meet her, she is standing next to a glass case that holds gold watches, stainless-steel cigarette lighters, and pendants shaped like Coptic crosses. Soon she will open her own clothing and jewelry shop. She asks about the twins and nods when I tell her they are spending the day at the foster home.

  In the business center, I update friends and family via email, and try to ignore what is going on in front of me: an American with a face the color of marbled ham hisses at a hotel employee. She turns and smiles wanly. “Yes, sir?” I describe the interaction to Loree in an email. “I am so tired of this dynamic,” I write. I have already described the scene at the bar: white men in business suits and military gear, loud and bloated with alcohol or power or both, pulling laughing brown women by the arm and letting their fleshy hands travel down the women’s backs. Abeba tells me that some of the women are prostitutes and such scenes are common at large hotels in the capital.

  The soldiers are here because Ethiopia has entered another phase of its epic war with Somalia. “Ethiopia just dropped a bomb,” I report to friends. But it is terrifying to walk through the lobby past white men in camouflage and black berets. I have never seen so many guns in one place and up close. Soldiers stroll the hallways, holding high-powered rifles and guns against their bodies as they peer through the glass of the kiosks.

  John and I spend most mornings at an Italian café just outside of the hotel and watch the world go by. We hear Arabic, Italian, and French. We meet an Australian journalist and his Ugandan girlfriend. We befriend a couple from Ireland. The woman pushes a sleeping brown baby in a stroller; the father holds the hand of a small brown girl in a pink dress and fancy shoes. John takes pictures of them and other people that we meet, but the subjects of most of his photographs are what we eat and drink: crunchy biscotti packed with almonds; fresh cannoli bursting with sweet ricotta; short, shapely bottles of Pellegrino; and espresso served in small, gleaming silver cups. He also takes photos of what we don’t eat, like thick columns of salami and prosciutto in the market adjacent to the pasticceria.

  These are moments of peace that we steal before plunging into the chaos that now determines the course of our days, which turn into weeks of frantic activity and confusion. We turn in circles in Addis, spinning like bumper cars from one bureaucratic holdup to another. The names on the girls’ birth certificates are in the wrong order; this mistake costs us a day at the immigration office. Incorrect information on their passports takes almost a week to fix. Other key documents are botched. We go again and again to the U.S. embassy, only to be turned away each time. My heart sags when Yonas confesses the depth of his inexperience, but we are still sure it will work out in the end. He has successfully completed the adoption for another American couple, a considerate and scrupulous pair from Montana, whom, like us, he had inherited from Helen.

  Helen has found us. We have not seen her,
but she calls our hotel room at odd hours. Sometimes the phone rings just as we enter our room. I feel surrounded. She is not the person I once tried to enchant under a pavilion in Vermont. This woman is ugly with fury and wild with rage at the agents and the world in which they, along with every other human being, live. No one appreciates her talent and industry. Everyone is trying to “ruin” her; she is the target of a conspiracy and a victim of slander. Then she changes course and begins whimpering about her knee, which she has hurt recently.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  I would happily break Helen’s knee myself if it would render her unable to visit our hotel and skulk around the lobby, waiting for us to appear. She has thoroughly alienated the couple from Montana, whose soon-to-be son is a two-year-old named David. One day John and I sit with them in the hotel lobby as Helen approaches us, arms outstretched. The new parents pull David close and walk away. John chokes back his own rage, but I greet Helen warmly. It is the Scheherazade legend in reverse: I must pay attention to the narrative she is weaving in order to save my life.

  Helen tells us the bureaucratic struggles we have been having are actually the result of nefarious activity on the part of the agency, that den of thieves. “Don’t tell Yonas any of this,” she warns.

  I tell Yonas all of this the next morning when he comes to take us to the foster home. As much regret as I feel for having occasioned the anguish on his face, his distress upon hearing Helen’s story reassures me. At least he is the person he has seemed to be all along.

  We take the twins with us to the embassy this time, hoping that the sight of the girls will elicit some sympathy for our predicament. An agent with thick brown hair parted on the side calls us to her window. Her hands appear to be shaking as she points out yet more inaccuracies in our papers. She looks at me and Giulia, who rests in my arms.

  “Have you been working with Helen Franklin?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “This case has to be reinvestigated.”

  I scramble to disown Helen, but it’s too late. The agent informs us that reinvestigations sometimes take months.

  “Please be honest. Is it possible that the girls may never be ours?”

  “Yes,” she says. Her voice is soft.

  The tears are uncontrollable. I look down at Giulia. I will always remember you, I think, but you will never remember me. She gives me a look, like Lady, lighten up.

  A week later, the same agent calls us to congratulate us: we are parents and free to return to the States with our new daughters. She does not mention Helen, and we do not ask.

  Helen never calls us again, and we never call her. But when she sends me a friend request on Facebook, I accept without telling John. Despite the pain and terror she has occasioned in my life, when I see her profile picture, I feel gratitude.

  * * *

  —

  Before we leave, John, Giulia, Isabella, and I have breakfast in the hotel restaurant with Marjorie and Linda, another representative from our American agency, who happen to be in Addis on business. One of them complains about the “weird” food in the country. “Thank God for good old bacon and eggs!” she says, and I wish I could stand with a banner that says, THIS WOMAN DOES NOT BELONG TO US.

  Marjorie and Linda have Helen stories to tell, but I am weary and happy and don’t care anymore. I recall the visit we made yesterday to the foster home. Giulia was asleep on a couch with a dried stream of milk drool stuck to one side of her mouth. Even this sweet image is powerless against the nasty chatter, however, so I try to imitate John’s look of honest concern.

  A group of black Americans sits at a neighboring table. I am excited, having encountered no other black people from the States thus far. They wear matching T-shirts that read “Black to Africa Tour.” I smile at them as I walk to the breakfast bar. I hear two women among them talk loudly about “white people who come here and steal our children.”

  They can’t mean me, I protest internally as I take a plate and survey the food under the heated lamps. I am black like them, after all. Aren’t I exempt? I look around the room for offending white couples and see our Irish friends and their children in the lobby outside the restaurant. I ladle eggs onto my plate. Though we are all parents of black children, I think, we are not the same.

  But this isn’t true. I know it isn’t true because the thought stays trapped in my mind and fails to travel south to my gut, that place of deep bodily knowing. I am nothing like the Black to Africans. Instead I am just like our new Irish friends, along with other grinning new parents—white parents—in this hotel who tote brown children in BabyBjörns fastened to their backs and fronts. If they are thieves, then I, too, am a thief. I am not sorry.

  * * *

  —

  Before we leave, we spend a lot of time with Eleazar, who reprises his role as shepherd. He takes us to the Zebra Café, where we meet his friend Kelile, who speaks English and adores Ernest Hemingway. The same day he escorts us to the home of another friend, a young woman named Fana, who hosts a coffee ceremony for all of us. As is the tradition, she roasts green coffee beans over hot coals, and then waves the smoke in our direction so that we can savor the aroma before she crushes the beans with a mortar and pestle. Along with coffee, she serves us khat, a leafy green plant with amphetamine-like properties. We chew the leaves and wait for the high. No luck. Fana and I share no common language, but we giggle like kids and trade accessories—her scarf for my glasses—for the duration of the ceremony.

  We meet Aster again, too. She introduces us to her twin sister who, though not identical, looks like her exactly. They give us a tour of their factory, where men and women sit at rows of looms moving their hands in tandem as precisely as harpsichordists.

  We spend a lot of time with the kids at the foster home, all boys, and all eager to show us packets of pictures from their American families-to-be. When we enter the building, they scream, “Yes!” but mostly for John, who makes a percussion instrument out of his body so that the boys can perfect the hip-hop dance moves they saw on the foster home television before Helen took it away out of spite.

  There are also people we don’t meet whom I will never forget, like the comely young Italian couple I pretended not to watch in the Zebra Café as they argued loudly and gorgeously, the woman’s shiny black hair swinging like a blade, and their equally stunning brown baby howling in a high chair between them, as if staking his claim in the disagreement between his new parents.

  I see the Italian couple again in line at the Addis airport ticket counter along with other fellow parents or bandits or both. The languages and accents of Italy, England, the Netherlands, and America fix us new parents as securely as pins on a map. Everywhere I turn, brown children are crying and still; peaceful and fussy; blank-eyed and staring. Soon they will jet off to disparate corridors of the world and experience never-before-imagined adventures in cities, towns, and villages that have not yet imagined them. Perhaps they will make whole lives where they land, or maybe curiosity and circumstance will keep them forever in motion.

  * * *

  —

  We have two hours to kill before our flight boards, so I wheel a napping Isabella around the airport terminal. In the window of a clothing kiosk I see a dress. It is a simple habesha kemis, which is marketed in the States as an Ethiopian coffee dress due to its ubiquity at coffee ceremonies. A long, embroidered, dark green Coptic cross, bordered in black, decorates the front. Green and black lattice stitches outline the neck, hem, and sides of the dress, which is a long, fluid rectangle with short, wide sleeves. As I hold the dress against my body, the shopkeeper smiles in greeting and then continues her conversation with another woman in rapid Amharic. They lean into each other from opposite sides of the counter, their words a series of high, tender clicks. Each woman has big liquid eyes that look as if they have been outlined in kohl, a cosmetic as ancient as the Bronze Age b
ut banned for years in the States because of its lead content. They keep their bodies close while they observe Isabella in her stroller, her head lolling to the side. The woman behind the counter asks me a question in Amharic.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Oh, you’re American!” exclaims the shopkeeper and puts her hands together.

  I nod, pleased to be taken for a native, one of them, in the final hours of this journey.

  “Your daughter?” The friend gestures at Isabella.

  “Yes. She was born here. In Adigrat.”

  The two women nod as their eyes move from me to Isabella.

  “You’re very good,” the shopkeeper concludes. She looks at me gravely and puts her hand over her heart.

  “No, no,” I respond. “I am lucky.” I try to match my look to hers and, for the third time since I have been in Ethiopia, put my hand over my own heart. A current of understanding passes between us, and I feel a wave of relief.

  I leave the store carrying the dress in my hand, and two lines from our exchange that rush like a waterfall through my entire being, assuaging forever the rage I felt toward Helen, and circulating inside of me like blood for many years to come: Your daughter? Yes.