Walking through the Tukul Bar, Viv is surrounded by a hubbub of languages. Transactions are made on all sides of her, some more dubious but no less explicit than others. Her first night, an arms dealer tries to pick her up; like genies, hosts and waiters appear and retrieve wishes and disappear.
Assuming she can’t locate the journalist, she decides to track down Sheba’s father, aunt and grandmother. She has no idea what to make of their silence to her last message, but the implications seem more myriad than obvious.
Viv’s driver takes her up Avenue Menelik II with its tree-lined promenades, past the Jubilee Palace toward the merkato, retracing the direction to the orphanage where she first came to get the girl almost two years earlier. The orphanage is a single building with three rooms, the largest including makeshift beds and cribs shared by two dozen children who range from babies to young adolescents. Each child has a single set of clothes, most have no shoes. The toddlers who haven’t learned to use the bathroom wear plastic garbage bags as diapers.
There are a few isolated toys and a television that gets no reception but is connected to a DVD player. A new DVD different from the same four or five that the children watch over and over is an event at the orphanage, with all the children gathered around to watch. The food is a kind of stew that the children eat with injera, the slightly sour Ethiopian bread with a sponge-like texture that Zan never has gotten used to back in Los Angeles. On Viv’s first trip to Addis, one night she took all the children out for burgers and Cokes; some got sick. Viv also brought with her antibiotics that she persuaded a number of doctors in L.A. to prescribe before she left.
There’s a dirt yard where the children play during the day within a surrounding fence and gate that’s manned by a guard, a quiet young man that the children love. When Sheba lived in the orphanage, in the middle of the night she crawled from her bed where two other children slept, left the building, ran on her little legs across the muddy yard through the night rain to the small outpost where the guard stayed, and slept at the orphanage gate. She would curl up on the guard’s chest and sleep through the night.
When Sheba left the orphanage, the guard couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye, and at first Viv felt it rude to press the matter. Twenty meters beyond the gate, however, the new mother stopped the car and led the girl by the hand to the gatehouse where the guard clutched her to him, tears in his eyes, and whispered goodbye.
On her arrival at her new home in the canyon, when Zan took the girl in his arms for the first time and lifted her from the backseat of the car, he couldn’t know that, pressed against his chest, she was reminded of the guard at the orphanage. Though in Viv’s absence Zan prepared the girl’s room, painting it pink and yellow, those first nights she would leave the only bed she’s ever had for her own to cross the house like crossing a yard of black rain, stealing to her new parents to curl in their arms like she did at the orphanage gate. Now on Viv’s return to the orphanage, the young guard that was too embarrassed by his despondency at Sheba’s departure remembers Viv the moment he sees her and his quiet face breaks into a smile as they embrace.
Everyone at the orphanage is happy to see Viv but no one offers answers to her questions. No one to whom she speaks will claim or confess to remembering where Sheba’s father, aunt and grandmother live. The woman who runs the orphanage makes a phone call; though Viv can’t be certain, since the conversation is in Amharic, she supposes it’s to the administrator of the adoption agency. On hanging up, the woman tells Viv, not unsympathetically, “It all just makes trouble.”
“I’m afraid the mother may already be in trouble,” Viv answers. “I’m only trying to help her.”
“But do you understand,” the woman says, “that should you find her, she may not know of the adoption, and that while of course the adoption is legal and final, still . . . ” and the rest trails off.
“Still?”
“She might want back her child.”
Ever since Sheba came to be part of their family, now and then her combativeness crumbles long enough for Zan to catch her in a private moment. In such moments there is about her the palpable conviction that she’ll never possess the same love of her parents that they have for her brother. That she’s been passed from one party to the next out of love—from a single mother who couldn’t care for her to a paternal grandmother too old, to the orphanage and then Viv and Zan—is too exquisite a thing for the child to understand, or maybe anyone; but there’s no escaping how Sheba is short-changed, and it breaks Zan’s heart.
The African woman standing across the road from the pub at Leicester Square wears a mix of traditional and western clothes, jeans with a shawl for her head. “Sheba?” Zan says to the girl, and though she doesn’t respond, the woman looks at him as though she heard him, breaks from the girl’s stare and picks up the shopping bag at her feet and walks on. Sheba doesn’t move or speak but follows with her eyes the woman’s retreat into the city bustle.
In the pub, one of Zan’s two remaining credit cards is declined. Later that night, with the little girl snoring next to him in the double bed while Parker sleeps in a perpendicular single bed, the father goes online to check the limit on the card and finds the bank has lowered it to below what he already owes. This leaves one card left with credit. Zan monitors as well, each time with that familiar knot in his stomach that he brought with him eight thousand miles across the Atlantic, the website that posts foreclosure dates.
Zan can’t risk lying in the dark thinking, because hopelessness will overcome him. To distract himself, he composes in his mind playlists for the radio show, as if Sheba could transmit them to the canyon an ocean and a continent away. After mentally compiling countless unrelieved hours of Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, Celtic Frost, Cradle of Filth, Carnage, Dismember, Revolting Cocks, Dark Tranquility, Morbid Angel and Kevorkian Death Cycle, Zan dreams of rats streaming out of every crevice of the house in death-metal mode the moment the family locked the door behind them on the way to the airport. A mosh pit of revelrous rats stampedes across his imagination.
In Addis Ababa, Viv sits in the car outside the orphanage walls lost in thought, discouraged and wondering what to do next, when the young guard from the gate taps on the window. As he exchanges words with the driver, the guard peers back over his shoulder toward the walls and orphanage beyond; he motions to the driver with his hands, indicating the road ahead.
The driver turns to Viv in the backseat and says, “I can take you to the girl’s family.” Viv looks at the guard and says softly, “Thank you,” pressing five hundred birr toward him through the window that, after a longing glance, he refuses. She gestures, insisting, but he shakes his head emphatically. The driver explains, “He wants to say he loves the little girl,” and Viv nods, raising her hand to the guard in a final goodbye.
The house where Sheba spent most of the first two years of her life is two rooms, the larger one a square nine meters, the smaller one with a single cracked window, one large bed, two chairs, a tiny table and, most prominently among the belongings, an injera maker.
Sheba’s father is in his thirties, maybe nearing forty in that way that’s impossible to determine among Ethiopians, more than six feet tall and limping slightly from his time as a paratrooper in some Somali War or another. Solemn tho forthcoming Viv describes him in the last email that Zan will receive from her, seemed at first a little awkward & I think in this male-oriented culture he feels inadequate he couldnt care for his daughter. His mother (Sh’s grandmother) had 10 children, 2 died, her husband died & she had difficult time raising & feeding them, and though Sheba’s family weep to see her again, Viv can tell they’re wary. There have been questions from the police about the money, and the family doesn’t seem especially surprised by Viv’s return. When she raises the subject of Sheba’s mother, trying to explain that now she’s less concerned about contacting her than helping her if she’s in trouble, a heated exchange takes place between Sheba’s aunt and grandmother, during which
Sheba’s father is even more circumspect than usual.
It’s obvious to Viv that the aunt and grandmother are upset, maybe even angry. Later, as translated to Viv by the driver, the father describes Sheba’s mother as beautiful and “fat”—Viv realizes after some back and forth that what the father and driver mean is voluptuous. The father and mother were together less than a year, maybe more briefly than that, when she became pregnant, and as Viv asks more questions it becomes less clear that any of them, including perhaps the father, ever met the mother’s family.
The grandmother declares, through the translation by Sheba’s aunt, You are her mother now, we chose you. You will make the best decision. Only at the last moment does she impart to Viv something new, which on the tape of Viv’s recorder is almost impossible to hear over the rain: instructions where the driver should take her, with no indication who or what will be found there.
Zan barely can bring himself to return J. Willkie Brown’s phone calls or overcome what petty satisfaction lies in making the other man call first. When they meet at a bookstore near Montague and Great Russell Street, sipping cold coffee drinks—the new London seems to have more coffee than tea now—on the afternoon of the family’s fifth day in the city, Zan spends most of the first few minutes fretting over whether the young woman behind the counter neglected to decaffeinate Sheba’s mocha. Maybe decaffeinated coffee, he worries, is one of those notions that Europeans find oxymoronic to the point of senseless.
It seems to Zan that Brown visibly labors not to go out of his skull at the children’s very presence. Always thin with a loping gait, he’s lost even more weight since Zan last saw him years ago, in a way that appears distinctly unhealthy; his once long hair is now cut short and he’s as disheveled as writers are expected to be, or as disheveled as Brown expects that writers are expected to be, anyway. Appraising the kids with an affected patience, he has a voice and manner of speaking that’s less bombastic than slightly and quietly superior.
Sheba gives not the slightest evidence of decaffeination. “I trust this is all right, then,” Brown finally says uncomfortably, looking at the place around them; the two men shift where they sit. “Fine,” says Zan. “I was going to suggest a pub we were at yesterday called the Ad Lib—or it used to be called that. I don’t know what it is now.”
Both of them perpetually uneasy, Brown nods, musing, “Swinging London. Sixties landmark,” he remarks to Parker sitting in the next chair. “The upstairs part, actually.”
Parker tries to be polite about it. “My dad said.”
“Dawn of Man as far as they’re concerned,” says Zan.
“How is Viv?” asks Brown. Good for you, thinks Zan: Let’s get to the elephant in the room. “She’s fine,” he answers. “Parker, you think you can keep an eye on her?” Sheba is starting to gyrate; soon she’ll be toppling glass cases of rare Eighteenth Century manuscripts.
“Why me?” Parker protests.
“Still at it with the photography, the art . . . ” says Brown.
“Sorry?” says Zan.
“Viv. The art. . . . ”
“Yes.”
“Heard about the great scandal, of course. Arsehole.”
Zan says, “What?” For a moment he thinks J. Willkie Brown is slipping insults into the conversation, like the bank officials on the telephone.
“He’s an arsehole,” says Brown, “everyone knows he’s a plagiarist. You should sue him.”
“Oh,” Zan answers, “yes. We would if he could afford to.”
“Surely there’s a solicitor who would take it on, contingent on the outcome? Of course it’s a hard thing to prove, plagiarism. Nothing’s original, I suppose.”
“No, nothing’s original,” Zan says, “but this comes damned close. Stained-glass windows recreated in butterfly wings? There’s not a single documented example of anyone doing that before Viv.”
“Well there you are.”
Brown says, “Off to Africa, then, is she?” watching Sheba and appearing to become even more nervous than her father.
“It’s complicated. I . . . ” Zan glances at the girl, “ . . . should explain another time.”
“Right,” says Brown. “But I trust she’ll be back before the lecture next week.” Discernible in his eyes are images of Sheba amok on the university grounds.
“I hope so, for all kinds of reasons. Mainly I’m worried about her.”
“Viv always was resilient,” Brown shrugs.
He’s trying to be reassuring but Zan doesn’t need any reminder of how well Brown knows Viv or whatever way it is he thinks he knows her. “She gets lost,” Zan says, “she has no sense of direction.”
“Mount Kilimanjaro and all that, as I remember.”
“Mount Kilimanjaro is up,” Zan points out, “that direction she’s mastered. Most people would have taken the Mount Kilimanjaro experience as a warning, given that she missed the only flight out that week. Viv took it as a lifetime Get Out of Insane Situations Free card. Except when she’s being a mom and worrying the kids are going to drink the Drano. Listen, James,” Zan announces somberly, “here it is in a nutshell: I’m the family’s sanest person. Do you understand? Can you wrap your head around the implications of that? Can you envision the . . . the . . . state of general derangement this portends? I’m the most stable member of the family. That’s like Ahab being the captain of a Carnival Cruise line. Sheer dementedness increases in direct proportion to the decrease in physical size, until you wind up with the world’s worst dog, who finally breached an electric fence for the sheer thrill of it, like someone tasering himself.”
Brown says, “I’m certain you’ll hear from her soon,” which is curious, since Zan hasn’t actually said anything about not hearing from her. Brown clasps his hands together and rubs them, torturing the empty space between his palms. “Hotel is satisfactory, I trust.”
“Sure,” says Zan.
“Working on anything these days?”
“Uh . . . ”
Brown can’t be certain what this means, since Zan isn’t either, but replies, “A novel, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“Brilliant. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Since the last.”
“Yes,” says Zan, “and you?” changing the subject: Let’s talk about what you really want to talk about. “Still the journalism, of course.”
“Yes,” Brown says, “a proper piece about the impact that torture at Guantanamo has had on the Muslim world. The waterboarding, sexual humiliation. All that.”
Zan struggles to suppress a nationalist impulse, though not as much as the impulse to puncture what he regards as the other’s pomposity. “The president signed an order,” he says.
“Oh well, then, right,” Brown answers, “it’s all sorted.”
“I think an order against waterboarding is a good thing, James.”
“Yes, though he won’t let us see any photos, will he? The sexual humiliation, none of that.”
More fed up than he expected, Zan looks at the kids. “That’s not torture,” he says, surprising himself.
“No?” says Brown.
“Tawdry, stupid, puerile, counter-productive. Pick one or all of them, but not torture.”
“Really?” not actually said as a question.
What is it about the fucking British? Zan seethes, mostly at himself for being baited into this. Politely hostile. Gracefully aggressive. Zan says, “Torture is fear of death—like waterboarding, thinking you’re going to drown. Infliction of pain. Drilling someone’s teeth like that movie where Laurence Olivier is a Nazi”—he goes for the British actor, of course—“pulling out fingernails, hanging by eyelids on meat hooks. Being tied to a chair and made to watch a naked woman? You pay money for that in Vegas.”
“I see,” says Brown. What happened to the trusty silence into which Zan reliably falls when confronted by the indignation of others? It’s like the woman on the plane berating him for irresponsibility; suddenly he’s surrounded by people whose politic
s take on the tone of personal accusation. Or is it just a sign of Zan’s newly less-than-robust objectivity about things concerning the new president, a deeply dangerous protectiveness? In his own way, has he gone off the rails about his country no less than everyone else?
Zan rises from his seat. “Abdul,” he continues, “probably goes back to jail afterward and all the jihadists have a good laugh about it. Parker, are you watching her?” he barks at his son, gazing about a bit madly for his daughter only to realize she’s at his feet, staring up at him. Neither child says anything, watching their father intently; Zan is aware he’s slipping into a rant. “Gets back to his cell and it’s, you know, ‘Feature this, guys, they tortured me with the naked woman today!’ A routine, like Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch. ‘Oh no, whatever you do, not the naked woman! I might tell you anything if you make me watch the naked woman!’” He looks at the kids and it’s clear that, while slightly scandalized, they find this the most interesting thing their father has said in years.
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