What did he see? All I saw were stars high in the sky and the smiling sliver of the bright moon.
The driver worked faster than a machine, cranking, releasing the spare, lifting the vehicle, swapping the tire, tightening the bolts, lowering it, re-tightening. He threw the old tire in the back, tossed in the crates and slammed the door.
“Let’s go!” he said. I piled in the front seat.
“I’ll drive,” said the guard. He tossed the AK to the driver, who caught it mid-air.
The driving was less frantic, and we encountered no more bandits, but now and again the headlights caught the shine of animals’ eyes moving in the darkness.
The Pathfinder jerked to a halt just past sunrise, pitting my forehead against the dash. The vehicle pointed straight down. A river with steep banks was below.
“You will never make it,” said the man in the back. The man at the wheel did not answer. He gunned the accelerator. I shot my hands against the dash and stiffened my legs against the floor. We careened toward the water. The Pathfinder’s engine roared, then sputtered when we plowed into the churning water.
“I told you! I told you!” the man in the backseat yelled, thrusting his arms into the air. “Why do you never listen? You should have let me drive!”
“Get out!” the driver said. The rear door opened. “You, too,” he said to me. “We stop here.”
The muddy water sucked at my legs and pulled them downstream. I clung to the door as I sloshed through the river to the front of the vehicle. The first driver loaded the food and water bottles into the guard’s arms. He swung the basket over his shoulder, like a woman going to market, then took half the load. They hoisted the boxes onto their heads and waded through water that swirled in circles and deepened as high as our waists.
16
The mud path from the river was narrow but well packed, as if trampled by many feet. But unlike mine, in shoes with a Velcro strap that squished water with every step, I suspected the feet that had gone before were bare. I should have been tired, but I was strangely awake, glad to walk for hours and to carry nothing as we followed the dirt trail. It was humid and damp, but not lush jungle as I expected. The grasses were green and the huge trees with soft trunks were plentiful and of a kind I did not know. I recognized the long wide leaves of banana trees but little else. The trill of birds I could not identify filled the moist air, and sometimes I caught the rapid movement of small animals in the undergrowth. In the spaces without trees, I could see forever, rolled out in front of me in muted shades of yellow and brown, complemented by a sky of transparent blue.
How different things looked on foot and away from the city, how richly beautiful was the landscape of my country.
I smelled the village before I saw it. The familiar aroma of smoldering eucalyptus and dried cow dung, the scent that meant Etheye was cooking, mixed with roasting meat. Saliva poured into my mouth, and my stomach rumbled its warning of hunger.
When had I last eaten?
The wood smoke and the soft notes of singing brought us to a clearing with an assembly of round mud huts with grass roofs. A thin stream of smoke drifted from the top of each one. A rooster with a wobbling wattle pecked the roof of the largest hut, which was set slightly apart from the others. There were animals everywhere — cows, goats, sheep and chickens that grazed and foraged without curiosity about intruders. Two women squatted near a cooking fire burning meat on a long-handled stick. Others I could see in the distance, slapping clothes on rocks near a murky river and draping the shirts, dresses and pants over low bushes. Children of all different sizes yelled and ran to kick a wad of leaves. They abandoned their game when they saw us and rushed to greet us, the girls like birds in bright-patterned dresses, the boys in sandals made from scraps of leather or old tires.
They swarmed like mosquitos, touching my hair, my clothes, my arms and hands. They pointed at my feet and laughed, as if my sneakers were funny, and they exclaimed over my watch that glinted in the sunlight. I bent to show them, but the numbers were incomplete and fading; the battery was failing. After they’d had a good look and they kissed me all over, they grasped my arms, several on each side. Chattering all at once, and too quickly for me to understand, they pulled me into the village. The guards followed, carrying my food on their shoulders.
Some of the village women had black lines inked along the front of their necks — straight, horizontal lines, zigzag lines, or a combination of both. The women looked up from their washing and cooking, their glances as curious as those of the children, but they did not stop their work.
The hut of Etheye’s father was the one set a little apart. He was dressed in tribal clothes, a long tunic of cotton gauze and pants held up by a drawstring. His smile when he saw me showed all the teeth he had left. He kissed me on the cheeks, praised God for bringing me here and spat on the ground the way Etheye so often did. He held me at arm’s length to examine me, turning my shoulders to the right and to left, and indicating that I should turn around so he could see all of me.
He looked just as tall and just as dark, but somehow softer here, more relaxed, more wise than he did when he came to stay with us in the city. In Addis he sometimes looked ridiculous, how he sat on the front edge of the seat, clinging with his fingernails to the dash of Gashe’s car, as if it was a terrifying thing to move through the city so fast. But here in the country, he did not look frightened or stupid. He looked thoughtful and dignified as he greeted me and invited me to sit.
“What brings you?” he asked in Gurage. He spoke slowly and clearly.
“Kofi, Gashe’s brother, sent me,” I said in Amharic. I wished I could speak his language, at least as well as I could understand it, but the sounds and the twists of the tongue eluded me, no matter how hard I tried.
“Ah.” He nodded sagely. “I see.”
Inside, the hut was dark and hung with animal hides. The air was thick with the odors of cows and goats, their feed and their dung. It was like the room in the servants’ quarters where Etheye kept her goats and chickens but worse. Much worse. The invisible stink choked me like smoke. I wasn’t sure how long I could sit there in silence with Ababa.
The insides of my stomach pressed on themselves, squeezing, squeezing. I stumbled from the hut, bent over, sweating and gasping for air. Vomit burned my throat, but when I swallowed and gulped air, the contents of my stomach receded. A girl brought water in a gourd, but I shook my head. I wanted it so much, but Etheye had warned me about drinking the water here or eating village food.
“You be sick,” she said. “Very sick. And die fast of loose poop.”
Where had they put my bottles of water and cans of Coca? I worked my mouth to make as much spit as possible to rinse away the awful taste of vomit.
Ababa came outside. He seemed to be trying to suppress a smile.
“Why don’t you keep the animals outside?” I blurted. “They should be outside!”
Ababa threw back his head to laugh in the way we laughed at our country cousins who knew nothing.
“The cows are my wealth,” he said. “Why would I feed my wealth to the jackals?”
And so it came to be that I slept on the straw with the animals and with the ticks and spiders that lived there. The smell gagged me and I worried all through the night that one of them would step on me and break me or perhaps worse, that one of them would spray me with urine or empty its bowels on my face. And the sounds of the night kept me awake, the shifting of the cattle and their lowing, the crunching of hungry goats, and the calling of hyenas in the distance.
How they laughed at me, far from home, living in a mud hut.
* * *
◆
Village life had the incessant rhythm of the women’s songs. Everyone kept busy washing clothes, boiling food, collecting water in clay pots, slashing huge plants with machetes, tending to animals or to babies. It was a pattern of life that seemed to hav
e no end. Elders squatted on the ground to talk and tell stories, drink coffee, sing and pray. They spat on me when I ventured too close. Only the very youngest children understood fun. Like me, they loved to chase anything that rolled, and to keep it from the others.
With legs nearly as long as they were tall, I had the advantage with distance, but they were swifter and more cunning with their feet, stealing the ball and burbling with glee, and calling to be ready for a pass.
But even the youngest of children had animals to tend. I followed them like a towering, orphaned goat as they herded cows to the feeding grounds. They gathered sticks for cooking fires and sometimes helped the women dig roots. They hooted and pushed away my hands when I tried to help.
Only I was useless, with no skills to offer. What good was the ability to read and write and to calculate numbers in the village?
When I trailed after the women, they tried to carry me across streams as if I was an infant child, worried I might lose my balance and land in the water with my foolish shoes. But to go barefoot? Sharp stones, thorns and prickles tore at my city feet. I couldn’t wait to go home.
I walked to the hilltop behind the village to see the large round hut topped with a cross that served as a church. It was also the best place to see what lay beyond the village.
I explored the slow-moving river upstream and downstream, surprised that the women fetched water for cooking and washed clothes in a river where cattle drank less than a half-day’s walk away. Across the river were open fields where oxen dragged plows and turned dirt to prepare for the planting time. What would they grow here? Teff? Nug? Wheat? I didn’t know, nor could I ask. I had discovered my knowledge of Gurage was as limited as my ability to speak it. Ababa was the only one I understood, and he was kept too busy with prayers and elders and animals. Everyone else spoke Gurage so fast that it blended like the garbled melody of a song that made no sense. By the time I picked out a word I knew, they had used a hundred more words I did not know.
Back at the village, the women chattered as they used the hard shells of gourds to scrape and scoop the dirt near the base of a magnificent tree with a wide trunk. They dug for hours until the ground beneath it was hollowed like a deep bowl, exposing gray roots thicker than my arm that protected a heavy pot wrapped in giant leaves. A woman used a machete to hack at the roots, cutting out the bulbous tumors that another woman chopped into pieces and added to the pot of stew that bubbled over the low fire.
When she put down the machete, I moved closer to see what was inside the leaf-wrapped pot that had been buried. She shucked the dried leaves and released a metal band. Inside was a stink so powerful and so rank it had to be poisonous. Yellow or green or black — a rotting, fermented smell that sent me stumbling away from the raucous laughter of the women.
It was as if I was an imbecile who could do nothing right — unless you counted giving people a reason to laugh.
How had Ishi survived this life? Perhaps he was correct. Perhaps he was stronger and tougher than me.
There were many plants and trees I did not recognize, and more birds than I had ever seen or heard before. I worried snakes might slither near my feet or dangle from trees ready to strike. Or that vicious animals might stalk me. I kept alert to sound and movement, and noticed that sometimes a girl trailed me at a quiet distance. Still, I jerked back in horror the day I found a hare hanging from a tree, a thin wire looped around its foot.
The breeze was slight, the hare newly dead. It made me think of Gashe, how he liked to say that when spiders unite they can tie up a lion. I had always pictured the lion in a spiders’ net hanging from a tree. I had also wondered how many spiders, exactly, it would take. Thousands? Millions? And how long would the spiders have to work? Could it be possible?
All things are possible. I heard Gashe’s words in my head as distinctly as if he was standing beside me, laying a hand on my shoulder. But I was alone on this path I walked.
Where was Gashe now? What had they done to him? I turned from the hare, the image too awful. I ducked low and pushed leaves and branches from my way as I edged the muddy river. Why was it so wrong what he did? Why couldn’t he have left things alone?
I remembered the papers that had gotten me in trouble, how they swirled and blew from the back of the pickup. I remembered how happy I had felt that night, and how free.
I rubbed my back pocket, then slid my fingers inside. Holes had worn through at the folds of the leaflet I had saved for Ishi, but the words were clear: Let us be strong. Let us be one people.
As I returned the paper to my pocket, I felt the girl’s eyes on me. I hadn’t sensed her today. It was the girl with the curious eyes who had a thin line tattooed below her bottom lip that ran straight to her chin. She had brought me water on my first day in the village. Whenever I caught her looking, she dipped her head and glanced away, but not before I saw her lips curve upwards.
Why did she follow me? Was it to make sure I didn’t get lost?
As with every other day, I ignored her. But I slowed my pace. I hoped she would catch up and want to come beside me.
I would like to talk to her, but what was I supposed to say?
On the days I saw her busy with the endless work of women, I repeated Gurage words while I explored outside the village, trying to work my tongue around the unusual sounds. I practiced separate words, and some things I might say to the girl: “The moon tonight is pretty. Ah, I see that you are making food. What are you cooking? Your eyes shine like stars. The pattern of that basket you weave makes me think of a rainbow. What kind of seeds are you sorting?” Everything I thought of saying sounded stupid, and with my accent and handicapped tongue I would seem even stupider, and she would laugh at me, and it would be a great embarrassment. So mostly I pretended that I didn’t notice her.
In the evening, the only light was that of the stars and the moon. I lay on the cool earth, arms crossed behind my head, and listened to the night sounds of bats, crickets, frogs and distant hyenas. I stared at the face in the moon, directly where its forehead would be. I wondered if Ishi was doing the same thing. I concentrated my powers to send Ishi a message with my mind.
My message was this: What is the best thing to say to a cute girl? I waited for a long time, until all of the stars glittered in the sky — many more than we could see in Addis — but Ishi did not answer. I wished I had paid more attention to my sisters’ romance movies. How did you get a girl to like you that way? What were the proper things to say?
Some younger children came and lay beside me, all in a row, all lying in the dirt exactly as I was.
I pointed at the moon. “Chereka,” I said in Amharic.
“Hay hay,” they laughed. “Candra.” They giggled when I repeated the Gurage word. Then we pointed at the stars and exchanged those words.
All of a sudden, the kids jumped up. They grabbed my hands and pulled me to the middle of the village where everyone was gathered around a large fire to share the food the women had made.
Although I knew the insult, I shook my head each time they invited me to eat. I didn’t want to die in the manner Etheye said I would if I ate their food, so instead I sat a little apart, drank fizzy Coca from a can and ate the injera that Etheye had packed for me.
I snuck closer after the meal, when they told stories by the light and warmth of the fire. Babies curled in their mothers’ arms, some latched on their mothers’ breasts. Older children sat close together, some of them propped back to back. Their faces glowed eerily from the shadows cast by the flickering and snapping light. The adults laughed loudly in a way that spread even to the smallest of children.
I watched the storyteller’s expressions, and those of the listeners. I wished I knew the places to rock back, laugh and slap my leg.
This was also the time they cleaned their feet. I was glad to have eaten little.
The smell of rot was overpowering, like the stink of eg
gs forgotten in the sun. They scraped with twigs at the black fungus that grew between their toes. This night, a man near me eased a worm from the place between his smallest toe and the next one, calmly pulling it where it had crawled through his skin. Bile rose in my throat, but still I watched, fascinated at his skill. If he broke it, would two worms grow?
There were exclamations and pointing when he lifted it high to show everyone, as if this was a great prize and not an embarrassment that wriggled from his fingertips. His grin was glorious as he flung the worm into the fire.
Singing, clapping and the patter of drums followed the stories, and soon the women’s colorful dresses swayed to the music. And then, when the flames died down and Ababa’s final prayer was said, I fed Gashe’s leaflet to the red coals. I watched the paper ignite, flame its brilliance, then turn to ash.
* * *
◆
The days passed slowly, one after the other, each one the same. The flow of the river had lessened, and the moon had shrunk its face by half. All that was left of Etheye’s injera was a piece the size of my palm. I nibbled it slowly around the edges, savoring each tiny bite and thinking of Etheye, how she mixed the batter and poured it with such care in a circle from the outside in, and how it bubbled on top to a pitted finish. How many times had I watched her do it? How many times had I wished I were a girl so I could hold the bowl high and make it pour? Why always the same way? From outside in? Why not start in the middle?
The tasty bits of wat had been gone for days. Tomorrow I would be out of food completely. What would happen next? Would I be forced to eat the villagers’ stinky concoctions? How long would it take before I died?
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