Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “To bottom lines, let’s say.”

  “Dear old Dad.” She shook her head and signaled for the check. “Well, if it’s bottom lines you want, I can show you some. You may not like them so much as you think.”

  “So where’s this famous Gabi of yours, anyway?” They stood out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, waiting for Yohannes. The air had a faint blue cast; it smelled of dirt and woodsmoke and diesel fumes. “When am I going to finally meet him?”

  “That depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Oh, you know—” Her eyes flickered away; her face went stony. “On how close hell is to freezing over, basically.”

  Teddy reached for her hand. She conceded it without a fight.

  “We were on this train to Asmara,” she said. “There was this Italian girl, Giulia? She was sitting across the aisle, all tits and big hair and these really cool sunglasses. She was having some problem she said with the zipper on her backpack. At least she said it was on her backpack.”

  “Poor Pumpkin.”

  “You know what’s funny? He told me right away he wasn’t good at monogamy. And guess what? He was right.”

  “Oh well, fuck him,” Teddy said. “I never liked the sound of the guy anyway.”

  “I’ll tell you what he is good at, though. Getting women to be nice to him. He’s good at that.” She smiled bitterly. “His whole life, women’ve been cooking his meals and washing his boxers out in the sink and changing their lives around just to be near him and his famous charm and charisma. The gift of Gabi, I call it. Good one, huh?”

  “You were always clever with words. All your teachers said so.”

  “Yeah. Bully for me.” She looked down at her shirt with controlled distaste, as if she’d spilled something on it that might not come out. “What is it with guys anyway? Explain it to me. Why does it get old for you so fast?”

  “It doesn’t get old for everyone, Danny. The thing to remember is, you’re still a very young girl. There’ll—”

  “Don’t. I’m tired of being told how young I am. It’s not interesting. The only people who think it is are people like you, because you’re not.” Her face suddenly brightened. “Hey, look, here’s Yohannes. Right on time.”

  They watched the little blue car shoot toward them up the driveway.

  “See?” Teddy said. “A lot of men are faithful. You can’t write them all off.”

  “His girlfriend kicks him out early in the mornings. Her husband works nights.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t look so disappointed. He’s a really great guy. Come on, old-timer, get in. Time for the grand tour.”

  The streets of Addis, whatever else they might have been good for—begging, pissing, sleeping, herding goats and cattle—were no place to drive. The intersections, choked with cars and blue jitneys, were exercises in gridlock, the lane markings strictly for idealists. Buses wheezed and hissed like burdened beasts, lurching their way toward the curbs. Traffic signals dangled overhead like plastic fruit, ornamental but ignored. Any order to the flow of cars—any flow to the flow of cars—seemed accidental, haphazard. People poured out heedless into the streets. Men in cheap suit jackets, holding hands; tall women in bright skirts and heels; children in flip-flops—all took their chances, working their way fastidiously between the car bumpers and then pausing at the median strip, drowsy and impassive, to watch the cars whiz past like so many flies. Nothing disturbed their poise. They were the original people—the blameless Ethiopians, in Homer’s phrase—the source material for the entire species. They’d waited six million years already. Waited out the Stone Age, the Ice Age, the dynasties and jihads of the Middle Ages; waited out the Jesuits, the Italians, the Chosen One of God, the Emperor Haile Selassie I; waited out his assassin Mengistu and the thuggish Dergue. So a little car traffic wasn’t going to fluster them now.

  Yohannes honked the horn perfunctorily to warn them off, then gunned the Lada out into the rotaries. He steered the wheel with one finger, like a tycoon in a Cadillac. This was not his real work, he’d let that be known. He was a filmmaker. To support his projects he ran a video store with his cousin Teshome and went on errands for the foreign NGO types who administered the orphanage. Sometimes he took the kids on field trips; that was how he’d met Danny. Mostly though, from what Teddy could see, he talked on the cell phone. He was doing so now.

  Teddy turned to Danielle. “Is there always this much traffic?”

  “What do you expect? It’s a city.” She waved a hand toward the windshield. “You remember cities, don’t you, Dad? Places that don’t have cows and cornfields, where you can actually go out and enjoy yourself?”

  “I reckon I heard of them, all right,” he drawled drily.

  “God, we’ve got to get you out of that ridiculous town. Really, it’s getting kind of pathetic, don’t you think? The same little stores, the same little people, everywhere you look. How do you even breathe?”

  “It can be hard to breathe anywhere.” He reminded himself to do so now. It wasn’t easy, with the stink of the diesel fumes, and his daughter’s smug new habit of wielding her independence over him like a club. Plus he disliked sitting in the backseat. He could hardly see where he was going. “As I recall, you used to like that pathetic little town. You used to talk about getting married and having children and settling down in that pathetic little town, in fact.”

  “I used to play with Barbies too.”

  “No you didn’t. You never played with dolls. You had no interest in make-believe at all. No fantasy stuff, just facts. Like me.”

  “God forbid.”

  They drifted through the slummy, shapeless sprawl. Dusty unpaved alleys wound mazelike behind the shops. Jackhammers pounded at the sidewalks. Half the buildings were going up, the other half, stripped to cinder blocks and rebar skeletons, coming down. From where Teddy sat you could hardly tell the difference. He rubbed his eyes, watching the signs flick past. How mediocre and jerry-rigged it was, this business of human occupancy. Nissan, Mobil, Reebok, Fujifilm. Danielle was right, he thought, cities were cities: everywhere you went, the Esperanto of commerce prevailed.

  She was still talking in the front seat, pointing out the sights. The monuments, the museums, the government buildings, the emperor’s palace. Endearing, the effort she was putting in, showing him around. If only he were a better tourist. If only he weren’t so tired, so crabby. She turned to face him. “Hey, still awake? You’re awful quiet back there all of a sudden.”

  “Just thinking.”

  “Should we go up to the mountains? There’s a nice view of the city from there.”

  “It’s your town. Whatever you say.” Maybe it was the altitude, the jet lag. Something was lagging anyway. Ever since he’d woken that morning to the terror and monotony of the muezzin’s call, he’d felt sunken in apathy, buried in it like a seed.

  They turned off the main road and began the slow laborious climb through the foothills. The air grew cooler. Bark came peeling off the trees in long faded strips. Soon the roads were no longer paved, and instead of sidewalks there were grooves in the earth, narrow drainage trenches that stank of sewage. Deep tire tracks lay etched in the dirt. Mongrel dogs loitered in sullen packs, short-haired and indolent, like skateboarders in front of a convenience store. A young girl came trudging toward them down the mountain, bent double under a staggering load of wood. Danielle pointed her out. “That’s what you smelled last night at the airport. Eucalyptus. Acacia too. About eighty pounds of it I’d say.”

  “But she’s just a kid. Why isn’t she in school?”

  “No reason. It’s just this little problem they have that gets in the way. Poverty, it’s called.” She examined the girl in the rearview mirror. “She’ll sell that load downtown on the sidewalk for ten birr a bundle. Then she’ll come back up here for more.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “No. But the cops are foxes in a henhouse. If they catch her, they may beat her, or rape her. Or both.
Unless they’re sober, in which case they may just let her off with a bribe.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to burn acacia wood. It’s supposed to be sacred.”

  “Who says?”

  “The Bible. And there’s the Osiris legend too.”

  He could see she had no idea what he was talking about. They’d sent the girls to Unitarian Sunday school, ten grand a year, filled their heads at bedtime with the best world mythologies, and neither of them retained a thing.

  “Osiris,” he said pointedly to Yohannes, “was a great Egyptian king. Until his brother conspired to kill him, unfortunately.”

  “Is a shame,” Yohannes agreed. “Between brothers there must be love.”

  “Yeah, well, this one had issues. What he did was, he had his best carpenters make a sarcophagus from acacia wood and cover it with rubies. He told his brother the king it was a magic box from the gods. Whoever fit inside it would live forever. The king, being your basic greedy excitable type, climbed right in. Wham! They threw down the lid and tossed him in the Nile.”

  “Not one of your really sharp great Egyptian kings, was he,” Danielle said.

  “Ha!” Yohannes snorted appreciatively. “Good trick! So this king he then dies?”

  “Yes and no. See, Isis, the queen, gets wind of this, and goes down to the river, and there’s the sarcophagus, floating against the bank. Lo and behold, an acacia tree’s growing out of the wood. Isis takes this as a sign—the king’s still alive. So she fishes him out of the river, and then, and I don’t remember how this part goes exactly, but she gets herself pregnant somehow, and then the king dies for real, and she buries him way out in the desert where no one can find him, and the gods are so impressed by how well she’s handled the whole thing they make Osiris lord over the dead. And from then on, according to the myth, the wood of the acacia tree was supposed to be sacred.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s sacred here too,” Danielle said. “They use it for cooking. And it’s girls like these who have to haul it around.”

  “What about the men?”

  “Good question.” Danielle playfully punched Yohannes on the shoulder. “What about the men?”

  “Men is too busy.”

  “See? Patriarchal society,” she said, “just like your story. The women do the dirty work and make all the magic, and the guys sit around partying and chewing khat. If the women stop working miracles, this place’ll fall apart. And how do the men pay them back? By giving them HIV they get from their girlfriends.”

  “Not me,” Yohannes said. “Safe sex. Safe sex only.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “Famous last words.”

  After lunch, Teddy was hoping to nap for a while and restore his strength. But it seemed Danielle had other business. They drove along the city’s western outskirts; to his eyes they were indistinguishable from the eastern outskirts. The same fetid streets lined with the same corrugated-tin shanties, everything jumbled together like worms in a bait box. People kept turning to look at him as they drove past, as if the paleness of his face were an advertisement for something. He had no idea what.

  At last they pulled into the driveway of a square, high-walled compound. To signal their arrival Yohannes honked the horn twice. It appeared to be his favorite mode of expression.

  “Where are we?” Teddy asked.

  “I thought you’d like to see where your daughter spends her days. Give me a sec, I’ll go see what’s happening.”

  She leaped out, slammed the door behind her, and slipped through the blue iron gate. The girl was as impatient with petty delays as he was. Good. He sat there scratching a bug bite on his elbow. Yohannes fiddled with the radio dial, skipping from station to station. Banana palms fluttered in the invisible breeze, nodding like chess players. Atop the whitewashed walls, shards of colored glass glittered in the sunlight like costume jewelry. You could do some damage to yourself, he thought, trying to force your way in here.

  Meanwhile Yohannes had now found his desired music. He drummed on the dash with the flat of his palm. In the rearview mirror his eyes could be seen, bulbous and inquisitive, checking out the Leica around his passenger’s neck. “Your camera, Mr. Teddy. How much will it cost?”

  “I don’t remember. It’s just your basic thirty-five millimeter. Here, try it out.”

  “For me digital is better.” Yohannes hefted it in his hands. “Lighter to carry. But this looks quite good also,” he added charitably.

  “Danielle tells me you’re in the movie business.”

  The driver’s eyebrows lifted affirmatively in the mirror. “Yes, I and my brother. We are planning an action film now. Big scale. Good guys against terrorists. Prostitutes with golden hearts.”

  “Sounds like a hit.”

  “There will be many impressive explosions, you may be certain of that. In Ethiopia we like these films very much.”

  “Americans too.”

  “I like to go to America someday,” Yohannes said. “But it is very difficult to get the exit visa. Many people in Ethiopia will like to go to America.”

  “Well, I’m sure there are many Americans who’d like to come to Ethiopia too.”

  “So?” Yohannes snorted, incredulous. “I think they must be crazy people. The political situation in our country is very nasty. We are in danger all the time. When we shut our eyes, we are afraid.”

  “Oh, we’re used to that.”

  “Last year the police arrive, and I am taken from my bed in the night and beaten in the kidneys until I bleed.” Yohannes eyed him skeptically in the rearview. “Surely you do not mean in America you are used to this?”

  “No, you’re right. Our fear is different.” The bite on Teddy’s elbow was itching miserably. Could he have caught yellow fever already? “But if no one likes this government of yours, how does it manage to stay in power? I thought you guys had a democracy over here.”

  “Ah. But you must ask yourself this same thing. Who benefits for our government to be so militaristic? Who is the one who gives to our government the billions of dollars in development projects and aid funds? And why? So we will kill Muslims for you.”

  “But you still want to come.”

  “Yes, of course.” Yohannes sighed; the issue seemed too complex to explain. Then, as if savoring the taste of some fresh inspiration, his heart-shaped lips pursed thoughtfully. “Perhaps you would like to help me and my brother produce our film?”

  “Me? I wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”

  “Is not so difficult, I promise you. Actor fees are very low. The camera, the editing machine…maybe birr sixty thousand together. Please, I assure you, I will not go beyond your capacity.”

  “Sounds like a lot.” He did a fast conversion in his head. It came out somewhere around $7,000. Roughly the value of his Pfizer stock. “It’s not my usual thing. But let me think about it.”

  “Think, think,” Yohannes agreed. “I will wait for your answer. I swear by the names of God.”

  Names? But then Teddy recalled that the Muslim God had ninety-nine names, every one of them flattering. So maybe Yohannes was a Muslim. He made a mental note to ask about this, to get a fix on exactly who the good guys were in this movie of his, and who the evildoers. Surely it wouldn’t do to invest in a propaganda tool for your own destruction. Unless of course part of you wanted that destruction. Wanted to burn down your life to its blackened foundations. Wipe the slate clean and start again.

  Finally the iron gate, with a grudging squeal, swung open on its hinges. Yohannes gave Teddy back the camera and engaged the gears. No sooner had they entered the compound and parked then there came a tremendous thunk; it shook the car’s roof like a bomb.

  Teddy ducked instinctively. He couldn’t help it. All day he’d been fearing an attack of some sort, and now here it was.

  “Is okay, Mr. Teddy, is okay.” Yohannes was laughing. “It is only a football. No one is shooting you.”

  “Yeah, well, the day’s still young.”

 
They were parked, he saw now, roughly in the center of at least four different games—hopscotch, jump rope, basketball, soccer—going on at once. No one appeared to object to their presence. A few of the children detached themselves and flocked over to greet Yohannes, who was clearly a great favorite. Only after they’d high-fived and chatted for a while did they cup their eyes against the window to check out the big old white guy dusting himself off in the backseat.

  “How you doin’?” Teddy said agreeably. At this point he was used to being gawked at. “Good to see you.”

  The children pressed closer. It was as though they’d been sent to free him from this shoddy, rattling cage in which he’d arrived. Remembering the boys outside the hotel, he reached for his wallet. “No need, Mr. Teddy,” Yohannes said. “They only wish to meet you.”

  “Oh.”

  “The children have heard that Danny’s father will be coming today. A great teacher from America. A very important man.”

  “Who told them that?”

  “I think Danny, must be.”

  “An important man, eh? How do you like that?” He pushed open the door. No sooner had he extricated himself from the Lada than his hand was seized by a skinny long-faced boy with a shaved head. “And who might you be, son?”

  “My name is Mekas,” the child said. “And please, what is yours?”

  “Call me Mr. Teddy, I guess.” This foolish and insipid name seemed as good to him as any other. “At your service.”

  “Mr. Tony, you must take my picture, so I will find a family in America.”

  “Teddy.”

  “You will help me find a family?”

  “Okay, sure, no problem. Let me just get the thing focused…”

  All at once Yohannes hissed fiercely in Amharic. The boy blanched and went still. His eyes, large and dark, receded into their sockets; his lips swelled up like tires. Then he ran off and disappeared behind an outbuilding at the end of the courtyard.

  “What was that for?” Teddy demanded. “I was just taking his picture.”

  “You are the guest. The childrens have been told this many times. They are not to take advantage of your kindness.”