Maybe I should save what was left. But no, I had gnawed the injera to a morsel, not worth saving.
How would it be to perish from hunger? Slow and painful.
Dying of hunger would be like Abiy Tsome. Fifty-five days without meat, milk, cheese, yogurt or eggs. Nearly two months with nothing good to eat. How famished we were for something delicious by the time Fasika came, and how we acted like locusts who set upon food without tasting.
Starving would be a fast without end.
Perhaps death by loose bowels would be better.
I put the last bite in my mouth, chewing, chewing, chewing, as thoroughly as a cow, trying to make it last. I longed to go home. I wanted to sleep on a soft mattress with Ishi and to be away from the stink of animals, the greasy burnt meat and the incessant praying of Ababa. I would not miss these things.
The moon, though. The moon I would miss. It was so bright here in the country, like a spotlight straight from the Heavens, so large when it was full that I could see dimples in its face. I knew this was the same moon Ishi and I spied through the rusted slots in the roof, I knew it, yet here it was even more beautiful, more peaceful.
And the stars. Who knew there could be so many in the black hood of the sky? I could hardly wait to tell Ishi I understood now why he watched the night sky, and I knew he could hardly wait to hear of my journey, and to tell me all that had happened in my absence. Telling him would make this strange dream I lived real. And living it in memory would be better, I was sure, than living it in real life.
17
Etheye came the very next day, as if she knew that I had run out of food. Kofi brought her. A stranger came also, but in a second vehicle. I wished they had brought Ishi.
The stranger was dressed in solid black pants and shirt, and he wore the Roman collar of a Catholic priest. His name was Solomon.
“It is he who will take you,” Kofi said.
“Uncle, if it pleases you? He will take me home? To Addis?” I could hardly wait to get home. Running water. A toilet that flushed. Fresh clothes. People who spoke the same language and understood me, even during the times I did not speak. No ticks. No bedbugs. No cows sleeping in the same room. No stinking feet. No foot worms.
“No,” Kofi said. His face was stern, like Gashe’s when he was not pleased.
“No?”
Etheye took my hand. Her cast, I noticed, was ragged along the edges, and she bore no scars or bruising on her face.
“He will take you away. Out of the country,” Kofi said.
“Out of the country?”
Why was Kofi trying to get rid of me? I had done nothing but deliver meaningless papers. I had simply driven through the city having fun with my friends. I had been an obedient son.
“Until,” he said. He scanned the village, then let his eyes rest on me. “Until all of this blows over. It will be so.” He dismissed further questions with a movement of his hand. I watched him step past the cooking fire to the river, back straight, head high, exactly like Gashe.
I could not leave Ethiopia. Like others at the Cathedral School, I would leave only to go to university, and then I would return immediately to help Gashe and to take care of Etheye and my sisters. That was the plan. I was not old enough for university. It was not my time to leave. What Kofi said was not possible.
I felt the heat of my mother’s body and the movement of her dress as she came near and took my hand.
“Etheye …” I said.
“It be for the best,” she said.
“How? How can it be for the best? I cannot leave!”
“You must leave. You understand?” Her look was direct and unwavering. “Here, you no survive.”
“What if I stay here? In the village? With Ababa? It is safe.”
“It not be safe always. They find you. Sooner or later.”
“But, Etheye …”
“They have ways. They know things. Sabba …” Her voice trailed off. She looked down, then raised her face to me and spoke with authority. “You must go. It be better to be a poor slave in the world than to be having no life here.”
A slave? I was going somewhere to be a slave? To Egypt, then.
“I can’t.”
“You can,” she said. “You will.” She cupped her hands around my face. We were both the same height, I noticed. We were both lean and strong. The curve of the baby had begun to round her stomach, like the waxing of the moon. She gazed into my eyes and spoke as if I was a small child.
“It be the only way you to survive,” she said. I wanted to ask news of the others, about my friends Obadiah and Moza and Daniel, but I was too afraid of what she might say.
“But how? Where will I go?”
“No worry about how. Kofi make it happen with his friend. You go,” she said.
Kofi had made things happen before — hiding in the mill, the village, now this. To be transported, to live as a slave … I could not. I had skills of the mind, not the body.
But to live? Wasn’t that the most important thing?
Yet my life drained away, seeped from my head, down through my body and out my feet. My life pooled on the soil and sank into the earth of my homeland.
A chilling breeze shook the leaves of trees and caught the sunlight like the discs of a tambourine. Etheye’s long skirt swirled around her legs. I glimpsed her feet, the second toe longer than the first. The wind rippled the sides of my favorite T-shirt, the lucky shirt with the grinning face of a monkey on the front.
My lucky shirt had not saved me. My life ended, standing with my mother in a village of mud huts.
“When?” I asked. I couldn’t look at her. Instead, I looked in the distance, to Kofi and his Catholic friend, talking by the river.
“Today. Now,” Etheye said. Her voice held the sorrow I felt in my heart.
“Now?”
I saw Ababa then, coming down the hill from the village church where he often went to pray. He held a long stick upright in his hand, but he did not lean on it. He lifted it with each step as a shepherd will when he walks with his sheep. He stopped in front of me, opened his arms wide, and with his deep voice resonant, he called everyone together. Slowly, everyone left their tasks and circled around. He explained that I would be going on a journey, and he asked for God’s blessing. It was no coincidence that he faced me to the east, the direction of Christ’s second coming.
“Blessed Almighty God, we give You thanks. We adore and glorify You. O Lord have mercy on us,” he said. Everyone but Ababa pressed their palms together, fingertips up. He lifted his arms and face toward the sky. I dipped my head.
Ababa prayed to God and to the Blessed Virgin that I would remain safe. The others joined him to intone the Mariam prayer: “Hail, O Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with Thee …”
We stood then, in silence, Ababa’s hands still in the air as I felt the villagers’ energy and prayerfulness enter me in a way I had never experienced. Why had Gashe kept me from church as I grew older? With his thumb, Ababa made the sign of the cross on my forehead. When he released his hands, everyone, including me, made the sign of the cross. “In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God.”
My grandfather took my face in both his hands, kissed me once on each cheek, then once again on the first cheek. Then he pressed his lips against mine — a lovers’ kiss, like in the movie Titanic. And when he did, he forced a great wad of saliva from his mouth to mine.
My eyes flew open. My eyebrows hit my hairline. A gag rose in my throat, and although I did not know this custom, I knew the offense I would cause if I spat his spit in the dust. Etheye stood behind and to the right of Ababa. Hers was a broad, knowing smirk, and her eyes danced. She had known this would happen, yet she had not warned me.
Ababa’s spittle pooled in my mouth, mixing with my own disgust. Everyone stared at me. Not moving.
Then I heard Gashe’s voice in my head, the day I had foolishly taken tere sega. Just swallow quickly. Then it will be over, he had said.
Obedient son, I swallowed. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, to wash my mouth with big gulps of Coca.
Everyone came to kiss and hug me, nod, grin and offer Etheye’s style of spit blessings for my safety. Kofi and Solomon moved toward the vehicles, heads close, voices low. They stopped beside the car and shook hands. Solomon got into the driver’s seat. Kofi went to his vehicle. Etheye held my hand and stroked my face.
She kissed me on both cheeks, the forehead and my chin, then pulled me close and held me as if she would never let go.
“You be safe, my heart,” she whispered. Her eyes pooled.
A fist swelled in my throat. A man must be strong and brave. A man must not cry.
She pulled back and looked into my eyes. “You a clever boy, a strong son. I never forget about you. Never. You be my soul,” she said. She squeezed my hands. “You must live.”
And she spat on the ground.
Three times. To ensure good fortune.
18
The backseat of Solomon’s car was covered with cardboard boxes, bright blue where they weren’t worn at the corners, and heavy enough that they squished the upholstery. Suitcases were piled on top, also old. The kind with soft sides, zippers and belts around the middle.
“I will keep you safe,” he said after a time, but he didn’t have the thick neck and shoulders of the men who had kept me safe before. He looked more like a teacher than a guard, and I had noticed no gun.
“Do not fear,” he said. But how would he protect me from bandits if they came again? Or soldiers? Or police?
He spoke Amharic, but he did not speak well. He groped for words and often used the wrong ones. How much did he understand? Solomon was a Ugandan name, but neither did he look Ugandan. Near his hairline was an unusual ridge of black that looked like a stain of ink.
At the outside edges of his eyes were the crinkles of an elder, but he had no strands of white in his hair, and he moved in the village with the health and assurance of a younger man. I sensed something about him that was false, but I could not discern what it was.
Solomon gripped the steering wheel with both hands and focused on keeping to the path I had walked a few weeks earlier with the guards who had carried bottled water and boxes of Coca on their shoulders. Giant leaves and branches scraped both sides of the vehicle. Solomon’s jaw was clenched, and the bones of his knuckles showed through his skin.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Away,” he said.
“But where? Etheye said, ‘out of the country.’ To which country will we go?”
He took his eyes from the trail briefly and glanced at me. “I cannot tell you this. Trust me. I take care of you. You understand?”
“No, I don’t understand. I would like to know, at least, where I am going.” I did not like giving my trust to a stranger and not knowing what would happen next.
“There is danger,” he said. “Too much danger in knowledge.”
And so, again, I would be kept in the dark as my life was decided for me. You will not be an artist. You will no longer share a room with your brothers. You will finish top of your class. You will not ask questions. You will do as I say. You will obey, obey, obey! Each command like the lash of a whip in Gashe’s hand.
The river, when we came to it, was no longer full and swirling in wild rage. I leaned out the window to watch how the water splashed as we drove across easily, soaking, this time, only the tires.
“I have water. Clean water. For you to wash before pray,” Solomon said. He took his left hand from the wheel and pointed out his side window. “East. We can stop when it is time. Just tell me. It is fine.”
He was Catholic, but he knew the Orthodox traditions. Should I tell him I was a bad Christian? That my belief was weak? That I hated to pray?
“It is not necessary to stop,” I said. He sighed, a sound of great relief, and relaxed his hold on the wheel.
“That is good. The biggest danger is now. In this country,” he explained, his voice a strange staccato. “It is safer across the border. We be there soon.”
If east was on the left, we were pointed south, toward Kenya. We continued mostly in silence. Me thinking of Ishi and how perfect it would be if he were with me. If the two of us were going, it would be a great adventure. We would make our own futures and not be told what to do, and when we were rich enough, we would come back and get Etheye so that she would not be under the thumb of Gashe.
But that was not right.
She would no longer be under his thumb, anyway. Gashe had not returned from the edire. He had vanished as if he had never been born.
Music drummed from the radio, a beat that got faster and faster. My sisters would like dancing to this music, shaking their shoulders and their bums wilder and wilder, keeping up to the beat until they collapsed in a heap of giggles. The eerie, echoing peal of a news bulletin pierced the song. Solomon switched off the radio and accelerated.
“We caught in Ethiopia, we go in the jail,” he said.
He did not need to explain what that would mean to both of us. My brothers and I had heard stories. People who went to jail rarely came out in one piece. Others “disappeared.” What, exactly, would happen to someone like me whose name was on a list?
Solomon was correct. Ethiopia was not safe.
Hours and hours passed with little conversation as the endless gray road stretched through an emptiness I could never have imagined. Solomon looked at me once in a while, as if he wanted to say something but didn’t have the words. I had nothing to say as he took me farther from home. It was better not to think about it, to just stare at the dotted white lines that separated the road, one side from the other.
And yet my mind wandered to what was at the end of that road, across the border in Kenya. A sprawling refugee camp filled with thousands upon thousands of people adrift and homeless. Living in plastic tents. Crowded, Muslims and Christians together. Pushed in with Somalis and Eritreans, our cruel and bitter enemies of decades-long wars. How could I stand such a sad makeshift life of waiting and waiting, maybe until I was an old man, praying for a future that might never come?
Would I find anyone like me? Could I find other Amhara to help? Or would I find only enemies I could never trust?
Solomon lifted the flap of his leather bag and passed me a bottle of water. I twisted the cap and took a swallow.
How would I live? I knew nothing of survival.
Or, had I been sold already into slavery?
My life had been so easy, so good. I had a family and a home, a good school, the best teachers in Addis. I was the son of a respected businessman. The only thing expected of me was to do well in school. There were too many rules, too many high expectations, but maybe the rules had been not so bad.
I would go back, then. I would ask Solomon to turn around. Maybe Gashe had come home after all. Maybe everything could go back to the way it was.
I turned in my seat to speak to the driver, but he spoke first.
“You are …” Solomon said. The front tire crashed into a rut when he looked at me. It bounced out and he wrenched the wheel to keep the car on the road. “You are,” he paused again. “You are not safe here. You are one telephone call away from death. You know this?”
His simple, blunt words felt like a kick to the stomach. I knew what he said was true. I knew, but still I wanted to stay.
“When we leave, you will be safe, okay? To find you, they would have to hunt. They will not do that.” Solomon glanced at his watch, and after he did, he pressed the accelerator to go even faster. The car vibrated so much that the suitcases on the backseat slid to the floor, knocking over one of the boxes. The lid slipped off as I caught the carton and pushed it back. The box was crammed
with papers in manila folders. “If someone hunted you, it would be … to make a statement. They have your father. I do not think they come for you. They lose interest, okay?” he asked.
How was it that what I had done was so wrong? How was it that my name – a good student, a good son — was on a list of those to be arrested?
Solomon checked his watch often, and whenever he did, I checked my digital Casio with the built-in calculator, forgetting each time that the battery was dead. But what did it matter? I didn’t even know where I was going.
“You are hungry? I have the food,” he said. I shook my head. “I brought the proper food. That you like.”
“Ayi,” I said.
I would never be hungry again. I would never have happiness. How could you have happiness when you were leaving the country of your ancestors? When your mother got smaller and smaller, until you could no longer see her? How could you ever be hungry, not knowing when you would laugh again with your brothers or run with them chasing a football? I had not even said goodbye to my brothers. What would happen to my family? What was happening to my family while I bounced around on the road to nowhere?
Solomon interrupted my thoughts. “More people will come. Together. With you and me,” he said. He moved his hand back and forth between us, then pointed his fingers down and wiggled them as if they were legs walking. “Going across.”
“We will all go together. A lot of people,” I said to show him I understood. He nodded enthusiastically and grinned. He repeated my words the way I had repeated the Gurage words the children in Ababa’s village had taught me.
We slowed when we passed through the gates of a place that reminded me of the edire at Dire Dawa, a mud street and a string of colorful single-story buildings all joined together. Solomon stopped in front of a place with turquoise paint that was patched roughly with plain cement. The cinnamon aroma of morning tea enticed us inside to a room moist with steam and crowded with tables where people shoved food between their lips and didn’t cover their mouths to chew.
“We eat here,” said Solomon. He shooed flies from the table and motioned that I should sit.
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