She remembered. His name was Adid. “I say, are you still doing double duty these days?”
His ivory teeth lit up the plane's dim interior. He said something to his friends. They smiled and nodded sagely. Such strong teeth they have, Hemlatha thought. She admired his blackness, a color so pure that there was a purple tinge to it. The headmistress at her school, Mrs. Hood, had been porcelain white, and the schoolgirls believed that if they touched her, their fingers would come away white; with Adid, she imagined they would come away black. Adid's regal manner, the slow play of expressions on his face, each thought matched by a lip-eyebrow combo, gave Hema the bizarre idea that she'd like to suck his index finger.
She'd last seen Adid in a headdress and flowing robes in the casualty room at Missing, unflappable, even though his pregnant wife was convulsing. When Hemlatha unwrapped the shrouds of cotton she found a young, pale, anemic girl. Her blood pressure was sky-high. This was eclampsia. While Hemlatha was in Theater 3 delivering this wife of her firstborn by Cesarean section, Adid disappeared and returned with an older wife, also in labor, who proceeded to deliver in the horse-drawn gharry beside the outpatient steps. Hemlatha ran out in time to cut the cord. She pushed on the wife's belly, but instead of the afterbirth, a twin popped out. Adid's smile when he saw the second child, the third total, reached from ear to ear. Hema suggested he wear a banner across his chest that said ONE NIGHT, TWO SHOTS, THREE KIDS. Adid had laughed like a man whod never heard the word “worry.”
“Yes, yes,” he said now, raising his voice to be heard over the drone of the engines. He had the clipped, French-accented diction of a Djibou-tian. “A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world, Doctor?”
Hema, who'd been thinking along similar lines just minutes before, decided she was a pauper by that yardstick. She said, “Amen. You must be a millionaire many times over then.”
An impish expression stole across his face, and with waggling brows and using just his eyes he pointed down the bench to a woman veiled and swathed in red-and-orange cotton robes. A very pale, henna-painted foot showed. Hemlatha guessed her to be a Yemeni. Or else a Muslim from Pakistan or India.
“And she is … ?” Hema said, hoping it would not be impolite to ask about her nationality.
Adid nodded vigorously. “Three more months at least. And one more expecting at home!”
“I tell you what,” Hema said, looking pointedly at Adid's groin, “I'll ask Dr. Ghosh to give you a special rate on a vasectomy, two for one. It will be cheaper than doing a tubal ligation on all the begums.”
The Gujarati couple across from her looked up scowling at Adid's thigh-slapping laughter.
“Why don't you bring the wives to the antenatal clinic?” Hema asked. “A smart man like you shouldn't wait till they get into trouble. You don't want them to suffer.”
“It's not my choice. You know how these women are. They won't come until they are unconscious,” he said simply.
True enough, Hemlatha thought. Years before, an Arab woman in the Merkato was in labor for days, and the husband, a rich merchant, brought Dr. Bachelli to see her. But rather than allow a male doctor to see her, she wedged her body behind the bedroom door so that any attempt to open it would crush her. The woman died alone, behind that door, an act much admired by her peers.
Because Hema was hungry, and to annoy the Gujaratis further, she accepted some leaves of khat from Adid and tucked them into her cheek. It was something she'd never have dreamed of doing before, but events of the last few hours had changed things.
The khat was bitter at first, but then the pulpy mass became almost sweet and not unpleasant. “Wonder of wonders,” she said aloud, as her face took on the chipmunk bulge and her jaw fell into the lazy, slewing rhythm of the thousands of khat chewers she had seen in her lifetime. Like a pro, she used her handbag as an elbow bolster and she brought her feet up to the bench, one knee flat, the other under her chin. She leaned toward Adid, who was surprisingly chatty.
“… and we spend most of the rainy season away from Addis, in Aweyde, which is near Harrar.”
“I know all about Aweyde,” Hema said, which wasn't true. Shed driven there years before on a holiday to see the old walled city of Harrar. What she remembered about Aweyde was that the entire town seemed nothing more than a khat market. The houses were hopelessly plain, not a trace of whitewash. “I know all about Aweyde,” she said again, and the khat made her feel that she actually did. “The people there are rich enough to each drive a Mercedes, but they won't spend a cent to paint their front door. Am I right?”
“Doctor, how could you know these things?” Adid said, astonished.
Hema smiled, as if to say, Very little escapes me, my dear man. And then she was thinking of the Frenchman's balls, of rugaeform folds, of the median raphe that separated one bollock from the other, of the dartos muscle, the cells of Sertoli. Her mind was racing, hyperaware.
The cabin was no longer hot, and it felt good to be heading home. She wanted to say to Adid: When I was a medical student, we had to do this test on patients to check for visceral pain. Visceral pain is different from when you bump your knee, for example. Visceral pain comes from the inside, from the body's organs. It's a pain that is tough to characterize, poorly localized, but painful all the same. Anyway, as students we had to squeeze the testes to check for intact visceral pain, because diseases like syphilis can cause the loss of visceral pain sensations. One day, at the bedside of a patient with syphilis, the professor picked on me to demonstrate visceral pain. The men in our group were snickering. I was bold then—I didn't hesitate. I exposed the balls— the testes, excuse me. The patient had advanced syphilis. When I squeezed, the man just smiled at me. Nothing. No pain. No reaction. So I squeezed harder—really hard. Still nothing. But one of my male classmates fainted!
Adid grinned, as if she had told him this story.
THE PLANE DESCENDED, slipping into and out of the scattered clouds over Addis Ababa. The dense forests of eucalyptus trees at first concealed the city. Emperor Menelik had imported eucalyptus years before from Madagascar, not for its oil, but as firewood, the lack of which had almost made him abandon his capital city. Eucalyptus had thrived in the Ethiopian soil, and it grew rapidly—twelve meters in five years, and twenty meters in twelve years. Menelik had planted it by the hectare. It was indestructible, always returning in strength wherever it was cut down, and proving ideal for framing houses.
The trees revealed clearings with circular, thatch-roofed tukuls and a thorn enclosure to keep the animals penned in. Then, at the edge of the city, she saw corrugated-tin-roofed houses, abundant and closer to gether. A church with a short spire came into view, and then the city proper. There was Churchill Road starting at the railway station and making a steep rise to the Piazza, with a handful of cars and buses plying its slope. This glimpse of the city center, which looked so modern, made her think of Emperor Haile Selassie. Hed brought about more change in his reign than the country had undergone in three centuries. Down at street level, his portrait—the hook nose, the thin lips, the high brow— would be in every house. Hema's father was the Emperor's biggest fan because just before World War II, as Mussolini stood ready to invade, Emperor Haile Selassie warned the world of the price of standing by and allowing Italy to invade a sovereign country like Ethiopia; such inaction, he said, would fuel the territorial ambitions of not just Italy but Germany. “God and history will remember your judgment,” he said famously before the League of Nations, and they did. It made him the symbol of the little guy whod stood up to the bully (and lost).
“You see Missing Hospital, madam?” This from Adid who peered over her shoulder.
“Missing is missing,” she said.
Near the airport an entire hillside had turned to a flaming orange from the blooming of the meskel flower which told her that the rainy season must have ended. Another hillside was covered with lean-tos and shacks of corrugated tin, the co
lors rust brown or a darker corrosive hue. Each shack shared a wall with its neighbor, so that collectively they looked like long irregular railway carriages that snaked across the hill, sending buds and offshoots in all directions.
THE FRENCHMAN BUZZED low over the strip so that the customs agent could get on his bicycle and shoo stray cows from the runway He circled and landed.
Cars and vans in the bile-green colors of the Ethiopian police raced up to the plane, along with every functionary of the Ethiopian Airlines staff. The cargo door was yanked open, and frantic hands rushed to unload the khat. They tossed the bundles into a VW Kombi, then into a three-wheeler van, and when those were full, they stuffed the police cars, and they all raced off, sirens sounding. Only then were the passengers allowed to disembark.
The engine of the blue-and-white Fiat Seicento whined as the six-hundred milliliter engine, which gave it its name, strained to carry Hem-latha and her Grundig. Shed personally supervised the loading of the big crate onto the roof rack.
It was a perfect sunny afternoon in Addis, and it made her forget that she was more than two days overdue at Missing. The light at this altitude was so different from Madras, suffusing what it graced rather than glaring off every surface. There was no hint in the breeze of rain, though that could change in an instant. She caught the woody, medicinal odor of eucalyptus, a scent that would never do in a perfume but was invigorating when it was in the air. She smelled frankincense, which every household threw onto the charcoal stove. She was glad to be alive, and glad to be back in Addis, but she didn't know what to make of the wave of nostalgia that overcame her, an unfulfilled longing that she could not define.
With the end of the rains, makeshift stalls had popped up selling red and green chilies, lemons, and roasted maize. A man with a bleating sheep draped around his neck like a cape struggled to see the road in front of him. A woman sold bundles of eucalyptus leaves used as cooking fuel for making injera—the pancakelike food made from a grain, tef. Farther on Hema saw a little girl pour batter on a huge flat griddle which sat on three bricks with a fire underneath. When the Injera was ready, it would be peeled off like a tablecloth, then folded once, twice, and once more, and stored in a basket.
An old woman in the black clothes of mourning stopped to assist a mother sling her baby onto her back in a pouch made out of her shama— the white cotton cloth that men and women alike wrapped around their shoulders.
A man with withered legs that were folded into his chest swung stiff armed along the dirt sidewalk. He had blocks of wood with a handle in each hand, which he planted on the ground, and then he swung his bottom forward. He moved surprisingly well, like the letter M marching down the road. Her brief absence made these sights a novelty again.
A herd of mules overladen with firewood trotted along, their expressions docile and angelic in the face of the whipping they were getting from the barefoot owner who ran with them. The taxi driver leaned on his horn. Despite the high whine of the engine, the taxi managed only to crawl along like another overburdened beast.
A lorry carrying sheep, the poor animals so crowded together they could hardly blink, overtook them. These were the lucky animals being carried to slaughter. Before Meskel, the feast celebrating the finding of Christ's cross, huge herds of sheep would arrive in the capital, the animals wobbly from exhaustion, barely surviving this march to the feast table. Then, in the days after Meskel, one neither heard nor saw any sheep. Instead the skin traders walked the streets and alleys shouting, “Ye beg koda alle!”—”The sheep's hide whoever has!” A household would hail him, and after some haggling, he'd drape another skin over the ones that he was already shouldering and resume his cry.
Suddenly Hemlatha noticed children everywhere as if they'd been invisible all these years. Two boys were racing their crude metal hoops, using a stick to guide and push, weaving this way and that and making motorcar noises. A toddler with railroad tracks of snot connecting nose to lip watched with envy. Its head had been shaved to leave a traffic-island tuft in front; Hema was told when she first came to Ethiopia that this strange haircut was so that if God chose to take that child (and He took so many), the tuft gave Him a handle by which to lift it to heaven.
The child's mother stood outlined by the bead curtain of a buna-bet— coffeehouse—though it was really a bar, offering things more potent than coffee. At night the bar would glow within from the tube lights, painted green, yellow, and red, and the woman, transformed by that hour, would offer drinks and her company. An espresso machine on a zinc bar established the class of an establishment—this was a legacy of the Italian occupation. The woman's flat eyes fell on the cab, then on Hema, and her expression hardened as if she had seen a competitor. She lifted her gaze to the strange container on the taxi's roof, and then she looked nonchalantly away as if to say, I'm not the least bit impressed. She might be an Amhara, Hema thought, with that walnut skin, the high cheekbones. She is so pretty. Probably a friend of Ghosh. A comb was stuck in her hair as if she were taking a break from teasing it into shape. Her legs shone from Nivea. She might even swallow a dab or two of Nivea now and then, in the belief it lightened the complexion. “For all I know, it works,” Hema said, though she shuddered at the thought.
Between the newer cinder-block buildings were huts, the wattle walls unpainted and revealing their sticks, straw, and mud. All it took was a pole stuck in the ground with an empty can inverted over the top to say, This, too, is a buna-bet, and though we don't have an espresso machine, and though we sell homebrewed tej and talla instead of bottled St. George beer, we offer the same services as the other.
The oldest profession in the world raised no eyebrows, even with Hema. Shed learned it was futile to object—it would have been like taking exception to oxygen. But the consequences of such tolerance were evident to her: tubal and ovarian abscesses, infertility from gonorrhea, stillbirths, and babies with congenital syphilis.
On the main road Hema saw a work crew of grinning, dark-skinned, big-boned Gurages supervised by a laughing Italian overseer. The Gur -age were southerners with a well-deserved reputation for being hardworking and willing to take on what the locals wouldn't. Gebrew, when he needed extra hands at Missing, would simply step out of the front gate and yell “Gurage!” though of late, that could be seen as insulting, so it was safer to shout “Coolie!”
The crew was barefoot but for the overseer and one man who had squeezed into ill-fitting plastic shoes, having cut holes in them for his big toes. By all rights Hema should have been incensed by this sight of black laborers and a white overseer, and she wondered why she wasn't; maybe it was because the Italians who stayed behind in Ethiopia after it was liberated were so easygoing, so ready to mock themselves, that they were hard to resent. Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals. Or maybe that was just the way of being that they found worked best in their circumstance. Hema saw the laborers stand still as soon as the overseer turned away. A snail's pace, but nevertheless, schools, offices, a grand post office, a national bank, were coming up to match the grandeur of Trinity Cathedral, the Parliament Building, and the Jubilee Palace. The Emperor's vision of his European-style African capital was taking shape.
PERHAPS IT WAS BECAUSE the Emperor was still on her mind, and because her taxi was at the intersection where, in place of the string of shops, there once stood a gallows, but suddenly Hema was thinking about a scene that haunted her.
It was at this very spot in 1946 that she and Ghosh, in their first months in Addis, had come upon a crowd blocking the road. Standing on the running board of Ghosh's Volkswagen, Hema had seen a crudely constructed frame and the three dangling nooses. A modified Trenta Quattro with military markings had pulled up. Three handcuffed Ethio pian prisoners on the flatbed were hauled to their feet. The men were coatless, but otherwise, in their shirts, shoes, and pants, they looked as if theyd been interrupted while having dinner.
An Ethiopian officer in Imperial Bodyguard uniform read fro
m a piece of paper and tossed it aside. Hema watched, fascinated, as he put the noose over each head and positioned the knot to one side, behind the ear. The condemned seemed resigned to their fate, which was in itself a form of extreme bravery. The bearing of a tall older man made Hema certain the prisoners were military. This graying but upright prisoner spoke to the Imperial Bodyguard officer who inclined his head to listen. He nodded, and removed the noose. The prisoner then leaned over the truck and held his handcuffed wrists out to a weeping woman. She removed a ring from his finger and kissed his hand. The prisoner stepped back, looked down like an actor searching for his mark onstage, then bowed to this executioner, who returned the gesture and replaced the noose with the delicacy of a husband garlanding his new bride.
Hema didn't understand what she was seeing, not then anyway. She half believed it to be a form of theater. The violence of what followed— the truck roaring away, the thrashing forms, the awkward and impossible angle of head on chest, the mad rush of onlookers to tear off the dead men's shoes—was less disturbing than the idea that she was living in a country where such things could take place. Sure, she'd seen brutality cruelty, in Madras, but they took the form of neglect and indifference to suffering, or they took the form of corruption.
The event left Hema sick for days. She contemplated leaving Ethio pia. There'd been nothing about it in the Ethiopian Herald, no comment the government wished to make. The men had been planning revolution, so people said, and this was the Emperor's response. He was keeping a fragile country on course.
Hema had never forgotten the reluctant executioner, a handsome man, his temples forming a sharp angle with his brow so his head was shaped like a hatchet. His nose was flattened at its base as if from an old fracture. She remembered his stately bow to the condemned before he carried out his orders. Shed felt pity and even respect for him. The conflict between his duty and his compassion was revealed by that gesture. Had he refused to follow orders, his neck would have been stretched. Hema was sure he'd acted against his conscience.
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