Katya stirred and talked in her sleep. I felt protective tenderness, a feeling that could not fill the emptiness, but softened it. I thought of the little girl I had seen in the store, the touching movement she had made with her head, and a single word came to me: faith. This is not a word I use often or hear used often except lightly, ignorantly or manipulatively. But there it was, standing singly in my head. This word has meaning, I thought. Whatever it has faithlessly been made to mean, it has actual meaning. But it was very little to hold on to: the image of a graceful girl in a dirty store in a hungering, wounded country—so small, so light, so surrounded by darkness.
In the morning, I opened the windows a crack. We showered; the fixtures in the shower were heavy brass, the tiles were thick with mold, and the loofah in the soapless soap dish was worn and moldy too. Wordless, we went down to the dining room for breakfast. I ate fruit and a little plastic container of vanilla pudding; Katya had coffee and a piece of bread. There were some Italians talking about the election a few tables over; we heard them say something about getting out of the country Then they glanced at us and fell silent. I thought, The world is tipping over, like a table, and everything on it is falling off. It doesn't matter if it's round; it's tipping and we're falling. We took our coffee and went outside on the terrace. The air was warm, thriving and dense with the smell of earth and minerals. We sat quietly for a bit. A car drove by, blaring pop music. Two boys walked by, driving two skinny cows, lustily slapping their bony haunches with whiplike branches.
Katya said, “Being here is like being in biblical times and modern times at the same time. Like all times are happening at once, and people are just walking back and forth between them.”
Not walking, I thought, falling.
I said, “Did I ever tell you that Thomas was the first man I came with?”
“No,” said Katya. “I didn't know that.”
“It's true. Not immediately, but yeah. First time for me.”
“The first time I came—I mean with a person, not myself—it was with a stranger,” said Katya.
“A total stranger?”
“Almost—I'd known him a day and a half. It was when I was sixteen. He was, like, twenty-five. He was probably more skilled than I was used to, or maybe he wasn't. I've no idea why it happened. We were doing it and—this huge feeling came and grabbed me up. Like a wave picked me up and put me on top of a building, and before I had a chance to look and see where I was, it took me back down. He was looking at me and smiling, because I'm sure my face was saying, What did you just do? And then the next day, he was gone. If that had happened with somebody I loved, I would've thought I came because I was in love. Sex would've been all about love in my mind. But as it was, it was impossible to make that mistake. I fell in love after that, and I came with people I loved. But I didn't think I was coming because of love.”
“It wasn't always about love with Thomas,” I said.
She started to respond, but her cell phone rang in her lap. Irritated, she picked it up. She listened; her attention went taut like a bow. She dropped the phone and shouted, “The mother brought the baby back!” and she grabbed the phone up again. It was Kebede. The mother had slept outside the hospital all night with the baby. She wanted to put him up for adoption, and she wanted Katya to have him.
It took a few days for the mother to do the paperwork, but we got Sonny right away. We went back to the store of ugly clothes and bought a little suitcaseful. We bathed Sonny and dressed him. But he would not stop screaming. It seemed to Katya that the baby screamed most when she tried to hold him. Sofia came to help us. She brought more of the spicy pasta dish that Sonny had devoured on the day we had met him, but the baby refused it with a frown that was deep and imperial. He refused to eat at all. “Maybe he wants to go back to his mother,” Katya said. “Do you think that's what he's saying?” “Nonsense,” said Sofia. “Don't even think it. They were sleeping outside during malaria season. Do you know what that means? The baby is already weak; if he stayed with that woman, he would die.”
“And besides, he's bossy like you,” I said. “Did you see the frown on him?”
And so we came before the judge. We took Sonny back to Addis Ababa. He screamed the whole flight. But Katya was unfazed; the strength of her doubt was now transformed and feeding her determination. We had fully entered our endeavor, and now, exhausted but almost mechanically activated, we were carried forward on a current of will that we had initiated, but which had become a force of its own.
We met Yonas at the airport and he took us to a bed-and-breakfast exclusively for people who were in Addis to adopt. The place was a compound with barbed wire and shards of glass atop its high walls. The massive gate was opened by a wizened man with clawlike hands and eyes like clouded marbles, a single twist of opaque expression coloring their center. The house was a weird combination of sparse and luxurious; it resembled a brick two-story you might find in Queens, but the oversized door was polished mahogany and, inside, the floors were made of large marble tiles. The owners were a haughty upper-class Ethiopian woman and a neurasthenic Italian man who had written several unpublished children's books; his mother, an opinionated lady with a pug dog, was also there, visiting from Rome.
Because Sonny tended to get carsick, I stayed at the B and B with him while Yonas drove Katya around the city to get letters proving who she was and who Sonny was, translations of these letters into English and/or Amharic, a birth certificate, a passport, and a visa for Sonny. Katya mounted a daily assault on the Head, from whom she needed to get a letter of approval for an orphanage to sponsor the adoption. Each of these tasks was, of course, impossible. When I tell the story to people, I make it sound as if Katya flowed through the city coursing around the obstacles in her path with the smooth determination of water. But she was not water and she came home bruised and furious from bumping her head against every damn thing. She paced around, telling great tales of wild, shape-shifting bureaucracy, of crawling through its narrow mazes, up endless stairs and down fun-house chutes, confronting at every turn hydras made of obdurate, obfuscating, lecturing, lying, malicious, misshapen Ethiopian heads, plus some idiotic American heads thrown in. The Head was a pig and a bitch, and sometimes, so was I. When Katya came home tired out, still too sick to have an appetite, I would be desperate to leave the compound for something to eat, and she would not want to go. We quarreled about it until we were exhausted, breaking to feed, change, or walk the child, who, when he didn't sleep through it, watched the drama with interest. Then Katya would get up the next day and leave the house to do it all again.
My time alone was a different sort of maze: dreamlike and lullingly dull, the surreal darkness of grief blended with the bright reality of caring for a frail child. Sonny was not only frail; he was underdeveloped from his early life of illness and malnourishment. We had not seen the extent to which this was true, possibly because his spirit had stood out to us with such force. But our first day at the B and B we saw him with another child close in age, and, in comparison, his movements were weak, uncoordinated, somehow partial. He couldn't walk more than a few steps and his gaze was intense but not quite focused, as if he was suffering from a mild psychic fever. He didn't walk well, and at first he didn't want to walk at all. He just wanted to be carried around the house, out into the yard and back, again and again.
The first day, I carried him until I couldn't take any more; then I lay on the floor and rolled back and forth with him as he clung to me weakly, but with a hint of triumph in his raised head. I rocked him and crooned to him and dreamed of Thomas: of rocking him and crooning, of being rocked by him. Of straddling my husband and kissing him, bending to touch my breasts against him; of straddling him and struggling to reposition him on the bed, Thomas cursing me with strange half words because he could no longer position himself.
Sonny put his hand on my face and it came away wet. I kissed his tiny palm and held it. Thomas had lost motor control and could only get into bed by taking a si
tting position over it and then letting himself flop backward. I had to let him do it that way—it was important for him to do what he could. But I had to reposition him, because if I left him as he fell, he woke in pain. It made Thomas furious to be straddled and positioned, and it hurt me to feel that. Yet I treasured it; I treasured his anger as a vestige of his pride, treasured that it could still make me angry, make me feel once more like a normal wife with a strong husband to quarrel with. I gave Sonny my finger; he squeezed it and I rolled into a seated position, cradling him.
I wondered if the baby wanted so much to be carried because his mother, a day laborer, had carried him strapped to her body. Or if it was something even more basic—that he was like a plant and I a random patch of earth from which he wanted to draw all the nurture he could get lest he be uprooted again. I looked into his eyes and remembered Thomas's eyes: restless, strangely shapeless. At the end, he still had the childish pleasure of sweet tastes, of touching the soft fur of Zuni, the cat; to see that pleasure was a kind of sadness I had never felt before. Sonny fluttered his lids, then half-opened them—checking one more time—then slept, his dear soft fist against my chest.
Friends ask me when I suspected that something was wrong with Thomas. I don't know how to answer; I think I knew before I knew. There were indications, most of them disguised as age and its eccentricity But at least once the disease paraded itself garishly before me, and I didn't see it because I couldn't categorize it. Four years before he was diagnosed, we went to Spain for three weeks. We got back home in the evening, left our bags in the front hall, and went to bed. The next morning, I found him sitting in the kitchen, visibly afraid. He had no memory of our trip, yet he realized when he saw our bags in the hall that we had been somewhere. I made breakfast; I described for him everything we had done on the trip. He said he remembered, and I made myself forget it. Because nothing quite like that happened again, I could.
After a few days, Sonny began to eat in earnest—mashed bananas, cereal, formula, pasta, all of it. He built pyramids of empty film containers and prescription bottles and then knocked them down. He unscrewed and screwed the top on the milk bottle over and over. He discovered he wanted to walk and then—as if a bomb had gone off in his brain—he discovered that he might walk up and down the stairs. I passed through a sad and enchanted mirror: I walked Sonny like I had walked Thomas, his hands in mine, giving him a footstep pattern to follow, holding his eyes with encouragement. Everything depended on the slow movements of his blunt feet, of their exact position, trusting it, finding it again.
Everything depended on it: I pulled my husband out of bed to a standing position and led him backward, holding hands. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me. I got him on the john, waited for him to finish, and wiped him. I bathed him in the marble shower, which was so big, it made the whole room a shower where we could be naked together. We sat on the fancy marble floor and played, passing the hose back and forth, spraying, laughing. … And Sonny, with his little forehead blazing, several times nearly falling, climbed the stairs, leaning heavily into my hands. His hands radiated into my hands, imparting his being and sampling mine. “Look,” I said aloud. Look, my husband, my father, my lover, my child: Look at this little boy and bless him.
When Katya came home, she would jealously take the baby from me—of course jealously. Every day, she walked in and saw me having intimacy she couldn't have because she was out doing the shit. What she didn't see: It didn't matter. Sonny knew that Katya was his mother and that I was his nurse; the uncanny gleam we had seen the first day had found mental form quickly. But still Katya grabbed him jealously and fed him and talked angrily about the Head while I ate dried fruit and nuts. I half-listened. I looked at the spoon going in and out of the baby's mouth. I thought, If I am the nurse and Katya is the mother, who or what is the birth mother to him? Is she the earth of Sonny, the sky? The unseeable place the child walks when he sleeps? When I asked Thomas what he remembered about the birth mother who had abandoned him, he just said he liked her. He said he liked to picture her getting on the bus with a battered suitcase, in a long coat and flat shoes, her large eyes bold and intense, her hair like a movie star's. She was an adventurer, he thought, and he didn't blame her for leaving.
On our seventh day in Addis, Katya succeeded; she came back with a letter from the Head and another letter from an orphanage (run by a friend of the Head) that said they would sponsor the adoption. Out of fighting mode, she was dazed and unsure of how this had happened. “We were going at it as usual,” she said. “I told him I would be back in his office every day until I got permission, and he said, ‘Fine.’ And then a stomach cramp doubled me over; my head went between my legs, my teeth were gritted, and my intestines made this indescribable sound—I thought I was going to have diarrhea right there. The only reason I didn't leave was that I was worried about what might happen if I got up suddenly He didn't say anything. He just looked at me—almost like he felt sorry for me! Then he got a piece of paper and wrote the letter and pushed it across the desk.”
That night, we finally went out for dinner. We wore the dresses we had brought to celebrate in; Sonny wore his orange jumper. I chose an Italian restaurant we'd walked past several times, because the people in it always looked lively. But it wasn't lively this time. On the way there, the streets were nearly empty and the few people who were out seemed angry and tense. We were the only people in the restaurant. Katya didn't feel well enough to eat more than a few bites of pasta and she was too tired to talk much.
The next day, Katya and Sonny went to the American embassy in the morning and returned early in the afternoon. Sonny was tired and cranky so Katya wanted to rest before going to the travel agency to arrange our flight out the next day. They napped together while I went to the laundry room and washed our clothes. While I was in the dining area, waiting for the clothes to come out of the washer, I met our host's Italian mom. She was feeding her pug dog sliced fruit from a dish in her lap. I told her we were about to leave; she said it was a shame that we hadn't gotten to Lalibela. “I hope you can get out,” she said. “You choose a terrible time to come. You didn't know about the election?” I pointed out that she was here. She shrugged and meticulously peeled the skin off a fig. “I grew up here,” she said. “I know the place. You don't.”
I woke Katya and we tried to call Yonas. We couldn't reach him. This was unusual. We waited an hour and tried again; nothing. We waited another hour. We heard the huge gate open; people came in, talking loudly Someone ran up the stairs, past our door. Katya and I stared at each other. Sonny stirred. It wasn't right then that we heard gunfire, but maybe ten minutes later. It wasn't close by But close enough to hear. Not steadily, but off and on, during the afternoon and into the night.
Much closer than the gunshots was the machine of my body buzzing inside me. It came from inside me and also enclosed me like the darkness and the warmth of the night. It said, It doesn't matter if you die here. It might be better if you die here. But Katya and Sonny have to get home. It won't be better if they die.
The next day, Yonas came in his uncle's car instead of his taxi. We saw him pull into the driveway, and we ran out to meet him. From the car, he held up a hand to indicate he was talking on the phone. We stopped; he had never signaled for us to wait before, and this signal scared me more than anything so far. But he didn't keep us waiting long. He put the phone down and got out to tell us: There had been a demonstration about the election. Twenty-five people had been killed. The city was under martial law. He could not take us anywhere. He would be in touch. He had to get home as quickly as he could.
We played with Sonny all day both of us, going up and down the stairs, knocking the film containers all over the stairs, then picking them up again. When we heard shots, we looked up and then went back to what we were doing. The buzzing said, Your parents are dead; your husband is dead. You should be dead. But Katya and Sonny don't deserve to die.
In the early evening, Katya said, “We have to
get something to eat. We haven't eaten for almost twelve hours.”
“We can't go out,” I said. “It isn't safe.”
“Sonny is out of food. He hasn't eaten for eight hours.”
“Katya, nothing is open; you heard Yonas.”
“The fruit stand will be open. There's no way they'll close. They're just down the street.”
“We're hearing guns.”
“The shots aren't close. I have to go out. If you won't go, I'll go alone.”
We took Sonny; I carried him because Katya was too weak. Outside on the street, people and animals were walking around like normal. Who were these people? I felt half-scared of them, half-linked with them, and didn't know which feeling was most real. I reached inside my shirt and held the rings for a moment in my cupped hand. Thomas's face, flat and beautifully misshapen, rippled in me like a reflection in water. There was a boy at my side, trying to push a cow out of the way Thomas's face stretched unrecognizably on the moving water. The boy came suddenly around the cow and tore my chain off my neck. I screamed; the boy flashed down the street. I was after him. My legs are long and I almost had him, but I couldn't grab him because Sonny was screaming, forgotten, in my arms. I darted back to Katya, who was standing motionless, and thrust Sonny at her. The boy was a quick pixilation of limbs, disappearing. Katya shouted, “Janice!” and I ran. The boy was bright movement that I chased like an animal with a single instinct. I turned a corner, stumbled into a pothole full of warm brown water, and nearly fell. I staggered and bent to catch myself with my hands. I looked up; he was gone. I whipped my head around, looking, my instinct trying to leap in every direction—but it had nothing to leap at. I panted raggedly, sweat running in my eyes, my instinct exiting through my eyes as I stared around, wild. Women holding children stared back at me. Faces peered from the broken hole of a window. Skeleton dogs, fierce and cringing, watched with starving eyes. My instinct felt them all as it felt itself: quick force in slow mammal bodies; soft brain in hard bone; a machine of thoughts; a machine of sex. The dark radiance of emotions; the personality; eyes, nose, mouth. You, specifically. A little boy with a large round head pointed at me and said words I couldn't understand. My instinct broke; everything that had been joined was now in pieces again. I put my face in my hands and cried like an animal.
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