It was that simple with her. She claimed me without even trying, while I, for my part, gratefully accepted her designation as one half of a “we” with nothing but pride.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You pick.”
She laid the books next to one another on the counter, and then opened each one to a random page in the middle. She read out loud the history of the laurel tree in Greek mythology, a passage about the mountain lion in North America, and then the last pages of The Brothers Karamazov. Alyosha’s speech to the young boys gathered around him, or perhaps it was the deliberately crude sketch drawing of the three brothers on the paperback cover, won her over.
“This one,” she said. “Let’s read this one.”
Inside the front flap of the book were the handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn’t help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.
“Write your name in here,” I told her.
“You’re not supposed to write in the books.”
“I know. But this is different. This is just your name. And this way, anyone who picks up this book years and years from now will know that Naomi once read it.”
I don’t know if it was that idea or the opportunity to defy authority that appealed to her. Either way, she took the pencil and wrote her name carefully, in cursive, on the last slot available.
7
Lying on the grass on the edge of Dupont Circle, away from the shade cast by the office buildings and trees, I listen closely to the sirens. They don’t fit in with the picturesque scene of office workers lunching on the grass, but there they are, faint, undoubtedly audible, and growing louder with each passing second. The couple that I followed to the circle from my store stand up and exit. As the sirens draw closer, the people lying on the grass look up from their books. Those who are strolling strain under the glare of the sun to see what’s coming at them, while the people on the benches, comfortable and relaxed, try not to bother. There’s more than one siren, perhaps as many as four or five, their sounds echoing and amplifying one another, so it’s impossible to be certain. The sound quickly takes over the circle. No one has any option but to watch the parade of police motorcycles, cars, massive black SUVs, and black limos heading toward us. People begin to point in awe. Some pull out their cameras and take pictures, while others clasp their hands around their ears to block out the nearly deafening roar. A lasso of black cars forms around the circle, blowing past stoplights, oblivious to the motionless cars trapped in their lane and the people standing perfectly still at all the crosswalks. We all have the sense that someone of great import is passing, and that we are fulfilling our role as observers. It seems as if time has been temporarily suspended, the world placed on pause as we wait to return to our ordinary lives. In Ethiopia the story was similar. Troops used to line whatever route the emperor took hours in advance. They swept the streets clean of beggars, cripples, and trash, and had faithful loyalists stand on the side of the road, ready to bow as he passed. When the emperor was finally deposed at the start of the revolution, he was carried out of his palace in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. At the time I had thought of it as a silly and pointless thing to do, but now I can see how wrong I was. Few things are as important as the last impressions we make when leaving. Take away the whirling lights and blaring sirens of a motorcade and this is what you are left with: an old man, slightly senile, in the backseat of a beat-up car.
As the police cars vanish, I imagine an entirely empty motorcade whose sole purpose is to remind people what they are up against.
The clock at the bank on the corner flashes the time, 1:28, and the temperature, 72 degrees. Branches are swaying in the wind, shedding their petals, just like they’re supposed to, while the red and yellow tulips along the perimeter of the circle bob their heads to the rhythm of the breeze. The lunch crowd is beginning to file back toward the offices and I stand up to join them. It’s like watching the end of afternoon recess on a playground. We funnel into the circle’s four exits, returning, no doubt out of habit, to the lessons of our childhood.
I walk to the pay phones near the metro entrance. I want to call my uncle Berhane to tell him that I’m getting on a train in the middle of the day to come see him. Over the course of the past two years, I have visited him three, maybe four times. We see each other almost exclusively in extreme circumstances. When his mother died in Ethiopia two years ago, we came together here in D.C. to mourn a woman whom, in the end, neither one of us really knew. We sat in his living room, our hands firmly clasped, in complete silence, as men and women whose names I hardly recognized entered the incense-filled room, offered their condolences, and sat quietly like black-draped ghosts on the paltry furniture. Tiny blue-and-white cups of coffee circulated ceaselessly around the room, along with plates of injera piled high with cabbage, greens, and chicken. A few women clicked their tongues in mourning as soon as they entered the apartment; I remember one man even wept. Everyone agreed it was God’s will, and a powerful old priest from one of the Orthodox churches was even called up to confirm it. After three days, the guests stopped coming, and Berhane, two decades older than me with a soft, stoic face and sleepy eyes, told me gently that I could go back home now. Eight months later, his girlfriend’s asylum application failed, and she moved to Canada to live with a cousin. On her last night in D.C., the three of us went to the nicest Ethiopian restaurant in the city and drank through the silence and awkwardness. This is the type of family we are. Two men who depend on each other in the oddest and most important circumstances. Even now, after nearly two decades in America, I continue to refer to him respectfully as Gashe.
I dial his number, and after a few rings, the answering machine picks up. I hear his soft, muted voice say, in its heavy accent, “Hello. Thank you for calling. You have reached the home of Berhane Selassie.” It took him almost two years to remove my name from that recording. Every time I hear that greeting I feel a small pang of regret for having left him in that apartment alone. I don’t have the heart to leave him a message and tell him I’m coming. It would only worry him, so instead I do what I do best. I close my eyes and hang up.
I call Joseph’s restaurant next. He’s been a waiter at the Colonial Grill for over eight years now, and I’ve never once been inside the restaurant to see him. The excuse I’ve offered has always been that I’m too busy with the store, but that doesn’t hold any longer now, does it? When Joseph first began to work at the restaurant, he would demand that I come and eat there during his shift so he could, as he liked to say, “take care of me.” “Come in sometime, Stephanos. Close the store. Take the day off. And I’ll have you treated like the king of Ethiopia.”
When I reminded him that the emperor had been killed and buried under a toilet, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “These things happen. We all make mistakes.”
When the hostess answers, “Colonial Grill. How may I help you?” I ask her if Joseph Kahangi is working today. She hesitates for a moment and replies, “Yes, he is.” Before she can ask who’s calling, I hang up. Today is not a day for trivial questions or useless answers. I take another quarter and call my answering machine. I have two messages, both from Kenneth. He says the same thing in each one. “Pick up, Stephanos. Where are you?”
I take my last quarter and call Kenneth’s office one more time. I want to tell him that today is a beautiful day, and not to worry. I want to reassure him and tell him that I am going to do something, with my store and with myself, just as he asked me to. I have one more name for him first: Valentine Strasser. It’s an impossible name: Valentine Strasser. At twenty-five he became the youngest coup leader in Africa’s history and the youngest head of state in the wo
rld. In pictures his small eyes peer out over a flat, hairless face too young to have killed and ruined so many lives. I hang up just after the first ring. Strasser, with his baby-soft criminal looks, is too fresh in our memories for this game.
I take the quarter back and call my store. I keep my finger on the lever. The phone rings once, twice, and then on the fourth ring, someone picks up. I’m too startled to speak, and so, apparently, is the person on the other end. Neither one of us says anything. It’s been nearly two hours since I abandoned my store. Everything that has or has not happened to it since could fit into this silence.
I hear children yelling in the background. Their voices are happy, exuberant even. And why not? There is nothing in my store that they can’t have. Someone shouts, “Get the fuck outta here,” after which there is a tumbling, tossing noise. It’s the sound of cans of soup raining on the ground, my store falling to pieces.
A steady but nervous voice, slightly frail, finally whispers, “Hello.” It repeats itself, more confident and assured, a few seconds later. “Hello. Who is this?”
It’s the “Who is this?” that gives it away. It’s the same voice that in the morning yells out from the first-floor window, “Don’t forget my milk,” and in the evening, “You got my milk?” On the weekends the voice monitors my comings and goings, scrutinizes my clothes, tells me to polish my shoes, asks me whether or not I think it’s going to rain, makes me pitchers of sweet iced tea, encourages me to come to church, and more recently, can sense my loneliness and occasional despair and tries to wash it away with a firm grip on my hand and a wet kiss on my cheek.
God bless you, Mrs. Davis, and all the widows of the world, I think as I hang up the phone.
The escalators that lead down to the metro are vast and cavernous, an enormous yawning mouth that swallows and spits out thousands of people each day. My uncle lives at the end of the red train line in one of the poorer suburbs of Maryland. At worst, it’s a twenty-minute ride on the metro and a half-hour walk from there, a paltry distance for two men who are otherwise thousands of miles away from any other living relative. There are no subdivisions, and you would be hard pressed to find even one well-manicured lawn. Instead of pleasant gated communities, twenty-story slabs of gray concrete apartment buildings line an overly congested road developed to the point of breaking with a dozen strip malls. In Ethiopia, my uncle barely ever figured into my family’s life. A powerful, wealthy man, he lived just outside of Addis on a sprawling ranch that I visited only once as a child. It sat on the edge of a ridge with sweeping views of the shallow green valley below. It’s difficult to remember that places like that ever existed. They seem conjured, the fictitious dreams of a hyperactive and lonely imagination. Today, all I can remember of the house are the dust-caked walls and the wooden rafter beams on the ceiling. I remember there were windows everywhere, and that entire rooms seemed to have been made of nothing but glass and light. The house, I learned later, was inspired by a picture of a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie home my uncle had seen in an issue of Architectural Digest. Berhane designed the home himself, entirely from the memory of that photograph. The house, he said, was supposed to disappear into the landscape, invisible to the naked eye until just the last moment. Whatever his business was, he tended to it from there. He knew even then to be distrustful of the city.
His exact relationship to my mother remains a mystery. He is not her brother, but throughout my life, I have known him only as my uncle. He came to D.C. two years before me after having disappeared in the middle of the night without telling a single person. His house and all of his possessions, down to his car keys and family photographs, were left perfectly intact, as if he had disappeared into thin air just as his home had always suggested he would. Two weeks later troops showed up at his door, disgusted to find that the entire estate had become occupied by the relatives of his maid, guard, and cook. The servants who lived on his estate never knew where he was going, and for this they were beaten (but never killed) by the roaming gangs that spent their evenings knocking on the doors of the rich. No one tended to the house, and each man and woman lived briefly in a state of garish splendor, consuming food and clothes with the full knowledge that none of it would last.
The red-line train bound for the suburbs of Maryland is delayed. The trains of this city continue to amaze me, regardless of how long I live here. It’s not just their size, but their order, the sense you get when riding them that a higher, regulatory power is in firm control, even if you yourself are not. All around me people check their watches, shake their heads, and stamp their feet. The platform begins to fill up as people instinctively begin to cluster around the gleaming fluorescent-lit billboards. Behind me is an ad for the Virginia community college I briefly attended. The school’s ad campaign and motto, “Taking You to Where You Want to Be,” is splayed across the bottom in gold-faced letters tilting as if caught in a breeze. Four students—one white, one black, one Asian, one Hispanic—are walking across the lawn, books in arm, smiling at one another. After seventeen years here, I am certain of at least one thing: the liberal idea of America is at its best in advertising. Sixteen years ago, I saw those same smiling faces strolling across the neatly trimmed lawn on a roadside billboard, a pastoral scene that at the time was so appealing to me I was willing to buy it with no questions asked. In the absence of a family, a home, friends, and a country, being a student was as complete an identity as I had ever hoped for. There was a power to the word, something akin to being the citizen of a wealthy, foreign country. To the friends and acquaintances of my uncle, all refugees like him, I was already a moderate success, someone to be teased and bragged about over dinner conversations. To my mother in Ethiopia, I was the penultimate accomplishment of a long-awaited dream. The first aim of the refugee is to survive, and having done that, that initial goal is quickly replaced by the general ambitions of life. I didn’t leave Ethiopia to attend classes in the northern suburbs of Virginia, but to hear the story told then, that was what I had done. During my one year in college, I brandished my title as frequently as possible. I introduced myself as a student to every person I met, often without their asking. I made it the raison d’être for my being in America, even as the famine in Ethiopia briefly dominated the news, along with hints at the long-standing civil war in the north. Images of starving children with bloated bellies and fly-covered faces were ubiquitous. When pressed for a response, all I could do was shake my head and agree that yes, what was happening in Ethiopia was indeed a tragedy. But what did I know about any of this? I was a student, studying engineering. All I wanted was to tuck my books under my arm and stroll across the campus lawn with that permanent grin stretched across my face.
By the time the train pulls into the station, the platform is thick with people pressed tightly together. We all squeeze our way into the train, avoiding eye contact even though we can feel the breath of the person next to us blowing on our neck. Standing next to me is an exceptionally tan young blond woman with a ponytail sticking out of her baseball cap. She’s wearing a blue Georgetown tank top, gray Georgetown shorts, and a black backpack with the Georgetown insignia stitched into the center. I always note the fresh, scrubbed faces of the city’s collegiate crowd with a smatter of envy and wonder. Joseph, in particular, has taught me to appreciate them. He still makes frequent trips to the Georgetown campus, using his long-expired student ID to get him into the library, where he will pull a half-dozen books off the shelves and pile them haphazardly around a table. He likes to play the role of an aspiring academic lost in his deep thoughts about poetry, religion, and politics. The handful of adult continuing-education classes he took there scarred him forever. He used all of his savings to pay for noncredit courses in American Religious Pluralism, Symbolism in Dante’s Commedia, and Gender Relations in Twentieth-Century Post-Colonial Africa. Almost five years have passed since then, a mere technicality for Joseph, who continues even now to reread his class notes and highlight passages from the Inferno.
Throu
gh a round aperture I saw appear,
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
When he’s drunk, he likes to declare those to be the most perfect lines of poetry ever written. “Think about it,” he says. “Dante is finally coming out of hell, and that is what he sees. ‘Some of the beautiful things that heaven bears.’ It’s perfect, I tell you. Simply perfect. I told my teacher that no one can understand that line like an African because that is what we lived through. Hell every day with only glimpses of heaven in between.”
There was hardly a single thing in Joseph’s life, though, that hadn’t become a metaphor for Africa. From great lines of poetry to the angle of falling light on a spring afternoon, he saw flashes of the continent wherever he went. Kenneth hated him for this.
“If you miss it so much,” he yelled at him once, “why don’t you go back? Then you don’t have to say every day, ‘This is like Africa, that is like Africa.’ You can’t go back, though. You would rather miss it comfortably from here instead of hating it every day from there.”
Joseph had no response. For once, his symbolic grandiloquence was too big even for him. The words “That is what it’s like to be an African” always hovered around the edge of every conversation Joseph had. At times, it was almost miraculous the way he would manage to find a way to insert them. There wasn’t a sport played in the world that couldn’t be better grasped by the African mind. And as for politics, who understood its weight, capriciousness, and value better than the citizens of a continent devastated by coups and tyrannical old men? A history teacher at my northern Virginia community college said once that there had been only three real revolutions in the past two hundred years: the French, Chinese, and Russian. Everything else was merely a rebellion, insurrection, uprising, protest, strike. Tsk. He didn’t know how easily an entire society could be made and remade. More than just having garish billboards painted on the sides of buildings and multiple-story statues in city squares, Africa’s dictators were busy reshaping their countries to their own liking.
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