Please. Let it be a mistake. Make it not be the same man. I wanted to slide up from the floor and lift the edge of the blind again. To look at him once more. Just a glance. To be sure.
My heart rammed my ribcage as if it were trying to get out. My hands trembled. I could breathe air only in small gasps. Was I dying?
I stared down the long hallway, directly at our only exit. A thick door painted blue. I had to do it. I had to be sure it was him. I had to know the level of danger.
My fake mother padded toward me, her dress swishing from side to side, her feet bare.
“What’s wrong?” Her face turned worried when I didn’t answer. “Why are you on the floor? Have you heard something?”
I shook my head. I could not look at her. She would know.
A deafening buzz filled the flat. The sound, loud like a swarm of angry bees, came from the door. The woman and I glanced at each other. Our eyes held. Our bodies frozen. The noise stopped. We breathed. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Over and over. Buzz. Buzzzz. Buzzzz.
The girl, rubbing her eyes, came from her room. She squinted at the door, then looked at us with lemur eyes.
Buzzzz. Buzzzz. Buzzzz. Buzzzz.
We remained as still and silent as prey. Banging on the door now. The side of a fist. Two fists. Loud and insistent, banging, banging. A weaker door would splinter. The voice, a man’s, belligerent and angry.
“Open! Open de deur!”
The woman stepped, as if she would answer the call. I gripped the hem of her skirt in a fist and held tight. The girl scurried toward us. She slid in a crouch beside me. My free arm went around her back to hold her close and to lessen my fear.
What had I done?
A woman’s voice screeched outside the door. Thump, thump, thump, someone running on the steep stairs. A slap. Angry voices, the woman’s and the man’s. Arguing outside the door.
“Idioot!” The woman’s voice. A slap, and then another. Thump, thump, thump up the stairs. Quick, light steps. Followed by ones heavier and slower. A door above us slammed. The picture of flowers on the wall tilted. A crash of breaking glass above, water running through the pipes.
Tears came to my eyes for the relief, for the terror being now with someone else. I hung my head and drew my legs to my chest.
I was so weak. How could a man be so weak? The girl rubbed her hand in circles on my back.
“It is fine now,” she said. “The bad man has gone.”
Water poured from the tap. I heard the click, click of the burner igniting, the scrape of the kettle on the flame.
How long could we keep this up? How long could I live like this?
“Have no worry, brother,” the girl said.
“It will be over soon,” said the woman, as if reading my mind. “Solomon will keep us safe. Then it will be as if none of this happened.”
But what of the other man? The bald one who had seen me? Why was he watching us? Why didn’t Solomon come and take us away?
Water churned and bubbled on the stove. A piercing, high-pitched whistle. Steam whooshed from the spout.
“I will make tea for all of us. We will drink it together. We are a family, no?”
Honey drizzled from the spoon into my cup. The tea burned my throat, but it took away the other pain, and somehow, drinking tea with the woman and the girl lessened my panic.
A floorboard creaked. The three of us looked, one to the other. The woman reached a hand to each of us and squeezed tight. A key in a lock. We moved to the hall. The bolt turned and snapped. The handle turned. The blue door opened.
Solomon, with hair as black as a village night, stepped through the door.
We ran to him as if he was our real father, and we were too young for school.
II
Toronto, Canada
2001
1
The hinged flaps on the wings adjusted as we drifted toward another landing. Beneath us, no longer clouds or an ocean but a city studded with electric lights strung yellow and white.
The airplane pounded onto the pavement, bouncing and shaking as it flashed down the runway. The engines blasted. The world outside the window blurred. Too fast! The food in my stomach roiled. What if it overflowed? What if I vomited all over the comfortable seat?
Closing my eyes made it worse. I clutched the armrests and stared out the window. We were going too fast.
When we crashed, the belt, would it hold me?
There were eight emergency exits – two in the front, two in the back, four in the center. The nearest emergency exit was in front of me, just over the wing.
“Egzi-Abeher, save me!” I cried.
It was one of God’s miracles that the Boeing 767-300 slowed down almost to a stop. I panted like an overheated dog and gave thanks to Almighty God.
We rolled beside a plane with the red leaf of Canada on the tail, and a platform with a rectangular metal box scissored up to it. A small truck trailing a train of empty carts swiveled toward our plane, the workers all wearing bright-colored vests made of mesh.
Solomon touched my arm and stood. There was movement all around me as people lined up and rummaged for bags in the overhead bins, but the sound was wrong. The voices seemed to come from underwater, and deep inside my head, something hard pressed on my eardrums.
I followed Solomon off the plane and noticed him take the hand of my pretend mother as we turned up the ramp from the airplane. The girl was beside me when the smuggler smiled and passed our documents to the scowling Chinese official. The uniformed man examined the passport photographs and looked at each of us individually, matching our faces to the pictures. My heart beat so hard, I was sure he could see it thumping beneath my shirt.
Why was he taking so long? Did he know?
He asked Solomon some questions. In English. His voice was far away and muted, as if it were down a long tube.
“My wife’s sister, she lives here,” Solomon lied. He put his hand lightly on the small of my fake mother’s back. She moved closer to him and gazed at him with romantic movie eyes. “She is not well. We have come to assist her.”
“All of you?”
“Yes. It has been many years since we have seen her. The children, you know, so big now!” The conversation was difficult to follow, even though I knew some English from school.
“How long will you be in the country?” My heart sped up. Surely it would explode from the pounding. No one had asked us questions at any other border.
“Ten days. The children, you know, must return to their studies,” Solomon said. I rehearsed my name, birthdate, birthplace, the names of family members, my school, the sick aunt, and remembered she had surgery for her gall bladder.
“How lucky you are. Two children, so close in age,” the official said. He looked at us and at the pictures again. He knew!
He put the passports beneath a scanner. My heart was in overdrive and still gaining speed. My hands trembled. A knife drove through my eardrum.
“Agghh!” I screamed. I cupped my ear with my hand and doubled over. The pain was excruciating. My pretend parents and pretend sister rushed to surround me. Garbled voices full of concern. Hand on my shoulder. Hand on my waist.
“What’s happened? Are you all right?” my fake mother asked in Amharic. Her eyebrows pressed together, vertical lines between them. Eyes frantic and worried. She removed my hand from my ear to check for injury and smoothed her thumb gently on the outer part, the way Etheye would.
The knife twisted and then released.
“The pressure,” the official said. He twirled his hand in the air. “From the descent.” I heard him clearly. He lifted a stamp. Smashed it on the passports. KaClunk! KaClunk! KaClunk! KaClunk! He folded the documents and slid them across the counter.
“Welcome to Canada,” he said.
He said “Canada.” But everyone was Chinese. The cle
rk had been, the security guards in blue uniforms. All of them smiled at us or nodded and said, “Welcome.” Why would Asians welcome me to the frigid country Canada? And if I was in China, why were the signs in English?
Flags were everywhere — the red leaf, the two vertical bars of red on each side — the symbol on bags of grain I had seen at the mill. Canada? North America. A happy place where everyone was rich, but very cold. Ice and igloos. White bears. Fur coats like Russia.
We moved quickly through the airport. Everything was fast. Wide conveyor belts that moved people. People running on them, carrying suitcases and rolling others on small wheels. Cellular phones pressed to ears. Crowds of people moving left and right. Smiling and laughing. So much English coming all at once, and another language I did not recognize. Not Italian. But similar. Spanish?
Solomon told the girl and the woman to pass through an opening.
“Toilets,” he said. “We meet again here.”
He and I went through a curved passageway that opened to an entire row of basins below a huge mirror. Men stood near a wall, backs to us. Solomon pushed a door on a small enclosure where there was a toilet. Just what I needed.
Everything clean as a cathedral! Men lathered their hands at the basins, but there was no soap, no way to turn on the water. Liquid squirted into Solomon’s hand when he held it below a plastic box on the wall. The water turned on by itself when he needed it. I mimicked his actions. The water stopped when I pulled away. I stuck my hands beneath again, and it turned on. Such a miracle! Hot air gushed from the wall to dry our hands.
Ishi would definitely think I was lying.
Solomon stood beside the passageway, his eyes dancing.
“Come,” he said.
“This is a public toilet?” I asked as we left the room. I looped my arms through the backpack as we crossed the glistening hallway to meet my make-believe sister and mother.
My sneakers squeaked with every step as we strolled through the tall wide hallway, so shiny that the overhead lights reflected on it. There were restaurants and market shops on each side, and a moving staircase. The double doors at the bottom of the stairs opened automatically, sliding into a wall of fogged windows. Beyond them, we were greeted with joy, kisses, hugs and handshakes from a group of Ethiopians I had never seen before.
“Welcome!”
“Ah! Look how you’ve grown!”
“We are so glad to see you.”
“You had a good flight?”
“Come, come. This way! We have a party planned.”
They met us and fussed over us as if we were family.
It was as if I had come home.
2
“Come! Come with me!”
He was a young man, displaying all of his teeth, even the crooked ones on the bottom. One of the men from yesterday. Not a man really, but not a boy either. Older than me, but not by much. He showed me the television that had more than one channel and that he said worked all day and all night.
His name?
Ah! Yosef, the father of Jesus.
“Hurry! I have something to show you!” His words in Amharic came fast. “Put on your clothes. Brush your teeth.”
I rubbed my eyes. Daylight seeped around the edge of curtains. A thin covering edged with satin blanketed me. A green sofa beneath me.
Where was I? Was this real? Or was this a dream?
Yosef, yes, but who was this impatient Yosef? A cousin? Come from the country to avoid the soldiers?
“Come on!” he said. He yanked the cover from me and pushed the long curtains aside. I was blinded by sudden light. The girl was on the balcony, curled in sleep. I snatched the blanket to conceal my naked body. Yosef was in the cooking area, pulling food from the refrigerator.
I had been at home sleeping beside Ishi, telling him, “Don’t worry. We will always be together. Nothing can separate us.” There had been the smell of roasted coffee and the spices Etheye liked to use.
Where had all of that gone? How could this dream with Yosef and the girl and the green sofa be so real?
“Go! Go! Wash yourself. Brush your teeth as I showed you. We haven’t much time,” he said.
The tiny living compartment was in a building so tall it nearly touched the sky. It was built of stacks and stacks of light-filled boxes, one on top of the other. There had been millions of streetlights, a city that wasn’t dark even at night. It was the dream again of floating in a movie. The fast car, the belt across my right shoulder and hips so I couldn’t run away, the orderly traffic, streetlights that blinked yellow, then red, then green. The celebration with strangers. So many people, more than enough food. Delicious food from home, plenty of doro wat well spiced, boiled eggs and chilled yogurt. A working refrigerator with milk in a skinny rectangular carton with a picture of a cow. Cold milk that tasted like water.
“Bihlahh! Eat. Eat more,” the women encouraged. No limits. I ate until my stomach was stretched full and round, hardly able to breathe with the weight of it.
Laughter. So much laughter. What had been so funny?
The make-believe mother who had traveled so far with me had gone after the meal, touching my shoulder as she left. “Be well,” she said.
The girl had stayed.
Yosef put his face close to mine. His eyes were shining. “Come!” He lifted a backpack into my line of vision. “We haven’t much time, but I want to show you.”
I swung my legs to the floor that had carpet all to the edges and pulled on the jeans that had been given to me the night before. Yosef pointed to the small room where a roll of soft paper for blowing the nose hung from the wall, and the toilet flushed every time. I pushed the small handle twice, just to watch the water swirl and eddy and be sucked away. Hot water when I turned the tap, or cold, whichever I wanted.
How could people be so rich? How could I dream such miracles?
I squeezed paste on the small brush to clean my teeth as Yosef had shown me. The mint frothed white and overflowed my lips. I looked fierce, like a rabid dog, so I scrunched my nose and growled before I spat. The T-shirt I pulled over my head was the one I had brought from home — the lucky one with the monkey on the front.
The hallway smelled of warm cumin, cardamom and coffee, and behind the row of closed doors, each one painted the same dark brown, came the sounds of Amharic. A circle on the wall lit up when Yosef pressed it. There was the noise of a shunting object, then two metal doors slid to opposite sides to create an opening.
I backed away from the death trap. Yosef took my arm.
“Come! Come! It is quicker than the stairs,” he said, pulling me inside the mirrored box.
I braced myself against the walls when it plunged, afraid of the crash that would kill me. Yosef grinned.
“Why so scared?” he teased. “You make it look like you have never been in an elevator.”
Who, with a choice, would use such a device? Electricity could stop at any time, or there might be an earthquake. Fear kept the words inside of me.
Yosef watched the lighted numbers above the door count backwards. The landing was smooth. The door slid open. Outside, the street sped with delivery trucks, shiny fast cars and expensive SUVs. Everything so fast, so new. So much to see. Everything spotless and so organized, as if someone had scrubbed the silt from buildings and roads. People walked on raised cement platforms beside the road, the cars in the middle. No dust at all. No stinking gutters for waste. No reek of diesel fumes. There was an emptiness of smell, a vacuum.
There were no animals, no beggars. No dogs lying in the shade ready to tear at my legs. Only one animal, a curly-haired dog tied to a woman who walked alone.
I looked straight up between the towering buildings to a blue sky with wispy clouds. The sun on my face lacked heat. But this was the best dream ever. I hoped never to wake up. The only thing missing was Ishi. Why wasn’t he here? He was in
all of my dreams.
But everything was so mixed up, the real and the not real. I wished I could make sense of it, put it in the proper order.
“Now you are safe,” Solomon had said. “You are safe here.”
Uniformed Asian guards saying, “Welcome to Canada.” Tall buildings of light. Cool air that raised bumps on my skin. Trees without leaves. Not one igloo or bear or expanse of ice, but still, I shivered inside my jean jacket.
Well-dressed people of many nationalities walked with brisk purpose. Gigantic shops closed to the street had windows to display food and clothing. The aroma of coffee drifted from doors that opened.
If not a dream, then a Hollywood movie. It was impossible for my eyes and ears and nose to take in all the sensations. There was too much. Everywhere I looked, all around, in every direction, abundance and something unusual to see.
“Do not worry so much,” said Yosef. But what did I have to worry about in this perfect place? Was this Heaven?
We stopped beneath tall trees with scratchy bark. The grass was a mix of yellow and green, clipped short, the same as the garden at home, but I saw no foraging goats. There were patches of flowers, pale purple with yellow centers, and taller ones, bright yellow, that looked like a cup and small plate on a stem.
I sat beside Yosef on a wooden bench, the backpack between us.
“Soon, you will be like me,” he said. His eyes were huge and earnest when he said this. “Soon, you will have a job and be able to send money back home.”
He had a good job, he told me. “I work in a restaurant. It has many fancy dishes that must be washed in a certain way. I use a machine to wash them!” he said.
A machine? To wash dishes? And who would have use for so many dishes that they would need a machine to clean them? Even in a dirty restaurant.
“And when you get enough money, you can get married! I can’t wait to get a wife,” said Yosef.
“I don’t want a wife,” I said. “I want to go to school. To learn more things. To study.”
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