He looked at me as if I was the one who was insane.
“Everyone wants a wife,” he said. He unzipped the pack and withdrew a pair of stiff boots with wheels.
“Look! Look at these!” He pushed off his sneakers and put his foot into the boot.
Whoever heard of a boot with wheels? Surely this friendly Ethiopian guy had gone crazy. Why would he do this?
He pulled the laces and tied on the boot. First one foot, then the other. He shuffled from the bench, moving his legs as stiffly as pendulums. On the pavement, he fell to his knees. He laughed like a hyena seeking a mate.
Over and over, he did this. I could not understand. Why would he do this thing?
He crawled to the bench like a baby before it can walk.
“Now you,” he said. “You try this. It is called skating. Inline skating!”
It was not a wise thing to do. It was like Ishi pretending to be Texas Tom, swinging a rope from the top of our wall, trying to lasso a passing cow. He had landed in a bruised and nearly broken tangle.
Yosef removed the boots and passed them to me. This was madness, but I was too exhausted and too confused to argue.
* * *
◆
Yosef and I both laughed like hyenas during the coming days as we tried to learn this inline skating. The girl remained on the balcony, preferring to sleep than to risk her life with skates. She left the balcony only to eat, and I noticed she ate little. Her hand moved to her mouth as slowly as if it was made of cement. Her eyes, rimmed with red, dropped toward sleep even as she ate. Still, I thought she should come with us, even if it was just to watch.
She shook her head. “No. I am too tired,” she said. “Too heavy.”
It was easier to keep our balance on the grass, but then, neither Yosef nor I could make the skates move, even if we pushed the other person. Mostly we ended in a heap. We watched as people swooshed by on the paved path, moving rhythmically and fast on the four slender wheels we could not master.
“How do they do that?” I asked.
“It is because of the hockey,” Yosef said. “Canadians, they are born wearing skates. Africans have to learn this.”
“The hard way,” I said. I lifted the leg of my jeans. I had a huge bruise growing on the side of my calf muscle. Yosef lifted his. He had cuts on both knees, like a little kid who runs too fast.
* * *
◆
On my fourth day in Canada, Solomon was at the living compartment when I returned. I was glad to see his familiar face, the way his eyes crinkled at the edges, and to hear his funny, staccato Amharic. Solomon looked happy to see me, too. He embraced me and kissed my cheeks.
“You like it here?” he asked. “Yosef, he treats you well?”
“It is like a dream,” I said. “There are so many things. So much of everything.” Solomon’s hair, I noticed, had turned gray around the temples.
I sat on the edge of the sofa where I slept. The bathroom door was open. The girl was missing from the balcony.
“The girl?” I asked. “She is not here.”
“She be gone. Away. She be safe,” Solomon said. His face grew serious. He looked much older when he did not smile.
“You must go, too,” he said. He did not leave time for me to ask questions. “It be safe here, but not enough safe. Your case be not approved here. You understand?”
“My case?” What was he talking about? What case?
“You be a refugee. Canada protects you from death, but too many people comes here. They not let you to stay,” he said.
Not stay? How could they not let me stay? I had come so far. I had a friend here. I was learning inline skating.
“You be going somewhere far and away. For the safety — for the safety of all — the woman, the girl, me, you.” He leaned toward me, elbows on knees, hands clasped together, face somber. “I make it the arrangements.”
How could I possibly go any farther than I had already gone? Had I not traveled from country to country? From city to city? Had I not crossed an ocean?
Pressure built behind my eyes and in the sockets beneath. He wanted me to leave? Again? I squinted to control the tears that threatened. I would not cry.
“Even without me, no matter the happenings, you be safe in this one country,” he continued.
“Then why must I go?”
“So they cannot find me, because of you,” he said. “Or find you, because of me.”
I listened as if he was Gashe or a respected uncle. Had he not helped me escape the Special Police? Was I not still alive with food in my belly and a place to sleep because of him? Had I not put all of my trust in him?
But I was so tired of the moving, of the running, of all the different people I was supposed to be. All I wanted to do was to sleep, and then to wake up to the sounds of my brothers playing, the annoying Bollywood music my sisters liked so much, and the aroma of chai and sweet buns drifting through the house.
It was time to wake from this dream of a perfect, too-clean world. It was time to tell everyone about it, and how crazy my imagination was.
Solomon had moved to the indoor kitchen and flipped on a light. Cool air seeped from the refrigerator when he brought out the platter piled with layers of injera. He rolled five of the discs, then slid them into a clear bag.
“No one be hurting you. You understand this? Canada be a safe country,” he said. He filled more bags with all the different types of wat. His movements were steady and unhurried.
“What if I am caught?”
“It be for that reason that you go away from me,” he said. He stacked three KitKats on top of the Ethiopian food and crossed the room. He looked into my eyes, his voice not angry or accusing, but kind. “I leave the country, too, but even if we be catched, there be no ties between us. We not know each other.”
I was in a strange country with strange customs and a language I barely understood. He was the only person I had trusted for weeks, and now, he, too, was leaving? He, too, would deny knowledge of me? It was the way the apostle of Jesus denied knowledge of his friend three times before the cock crowed.
“You understand? Even if they bring us to the same room. Even if the police have evidence. I say I not know you. I say that I never see you before in all of my life,” he said.
“I will go … alone? You will not come with me?”
“It be your time to be a man,” he said. He squashed a puffy coat into the bottom of the pack he had given me in Kenya, then added bottles of water, a can of Coca-Cola, an apple, two oranges, the KitKats, and the transparent bags filled with injera and wat.
So much food. Why so much?
“How far will I go?”
“You just go. Someone to tell you when you go far enough,” he said.
He passed me the pack. It bulged with the food, a roll of paper tissue and the strange clothing Yosef had given me — the cotton tubes for my feet, the scratchy knitted hat that stretched over my head, the gloves for a mechanic, and the gonch to wear beneath my jeans that made Yosef cackle with hilarity when he demonstrated their uselessness.
Why did I need so many pieces of expensive clothing? Where was Solomon sending me? High into the mountains with air thin and cold? To an igloo where the arctic winds blew? Why did I need to go by myself?
And yet part of me was proud of all of these things I had been given, the backpack with the American logo, the high-top basketball shoes that did not seem as if they would fall apart if I used them to kick a ball across a pitch, and the puffy coat. How would it feel to wear it?
I was scared to leave Solomon. The thought of it made it hard to breathe, but I was excited to be an explorer in a strange land. For the first time in my life, I would be alone, to make my own decisions about how to live. This is what it meant to be a man.
I fed my arm through the two straps of the pack, slinging it over one
shoulder the way I had seen Canadians do on the street, but the weight made my shoulder ache to hold it this way, so I wore it on both shoulders, like an Ethiopian going to school.
“There maybe comes a time when you need this,” Solomon said. He placed one hand on my shoulder, and with the other he gave me a folded piece of paper. It was one I recognized by its size and color and its worn creases.
The certificate of my birth, the one that carried not only my picture, but my real name, the name of my parents, the place and date of my birth, bordered by all of the twists and turns of the Greek meander key. It stood for infinity, the eternal flow of all things. It meant love and devotion, and its corners held the four points of a compass.
I swallowed the rock in my throat and turned so Solomon wouldn’t see my face.
Etheye. She had given him this. What was she doing, precisely now, in this minute? What would she tell me to do?
And Gashe? Did he live?
Do not think. You cannot go back. You can change nothing. Go to the future.
“You maybe also need this,” Solomon said. From his pocket, he unfolded two bills, colored purple and yellow, like a bruise that has begun to heal. They were the size and shape of birr, with a large number 10 in the corner. He gave one to me. The other he returned to his front pocket.
“It be money. For buying things,” he said.
I slid the papers into the back pocket of my stone-washed Levi jeans, stood tall and took a deep breath. The compartment was quiet, the girl and the woman already gone.
Did this room wait now for more refugees? I inhaled deeply and exhaled.
“I am ready,” I said.
3
The bus station was as busy as the Mercato before a Holy Day. There were people everywhere, carrying children, hoisting duffel bags on their shoulders and dragging wheeled cases behind them. There was every color and nationality of people — Asian, African, Indian, North American — and their voices combined into indistinguishable noise, like loud static.
Solomon passed me a ticket, explained the bus would stop often, but that I must remain on it.
“Stay until someone says to you get off,” he instructed. He told me there was a toilet on the bus, as there had been on the airplane, and reminded me there was food and water in my pack and money in my pocket. He gripped both my shoulders.
“You be safe,” he said. He kissed my cheeks, then made a small cross on my forehead with his thumb. “May God go with you.”
He put his arms around me, and I around him. Our embrace was brief but strong.
This bus was unlike the buses in Addis where as many people as possible jammed in, arms and legs touching, children — and sometimes grown women — sitting on laps. Here there were many seats lined up, two on each side. Seats with tall backs and a wide aisle like the airplane that crossed the ocean. A metal rack above the seats was stuffed with coats and packs. More luggage and plastic market bags were piled on the seats nearest the aisle. The seats beside the windows that reached almost to the roof were taken by people reading or staring out the window, though there was nothing to see but the inside of the station. A fat man overflowed his seat. Two children sat hip to hip in the same seat beside their mother.
Would I have to stand?
At the very back, I found an empty seat. A girl with hair as black as a panther, tribal markings, and metal studs in her eyebrows and bottom lip dropped her backpack in the aisle and slumped into the seat beside me.
“What a load of crap this is,” she said. “A full load.” She dug through her backpack and put Sony headphones over her ears. I could hear the hard beat of the music as it pounded into her head.
I shoved my pack beneath the seat in front of me the way I had learned on the airplane. Was this the right thing to do? The girl moved her head back and forth like a chicken walking in the garden. She kept her worn-out pack on her lap and fished out a magazine.
The bus flew on the wide smooth streets filled with all types of automobiles and trucks of all sizes.
Where were we going? Would it seem stupid to ask the girl? Yes, yes, it would. No one gets on a bus without knowing the destination. There were more cool cars on the streets of this city than I thought existed in the whole world. So many that I could not identify them. I didn’t see a single Peugeot like Gashe’s.
Plastic crinkled. The smell of open spices at the market. What spices? Cayenne? Peppers? The girl lifted a triangle of food to her mouth. It crunched loudly when she chewed. The sides of my mouth oozed with saliva. I tried not to pay attention to the smell. I tried not to watch the girl.
Her eyes lifted from the magazine, looked at me for a few seconds. Then she tilted the open bag toward me.
“Want some?” Her voice was loud. She shook the bag closer to me. “Go ahead. Have some.”
I dipped my thumb and forefinger into the bag to extract a curled, triangular crisp. I nibbled it slowly. Salt, then sweet, the slow burn of hot peppers on the very tip of my tongue. A flicker of tiny, invisible flames lit up the front edge.
Immediately, I wanted another one.
“You ate that like you’ve never tasted chips before,” the girl said. I wished she would speak more quietly. “Like it?”
“Yes.” I nodded. What was the English word for “delicious”? “Good. Very good.”
“My favorite,” she said. “Sweet Chili Heat.” She turned the shiny black bag toward me. The picture showed a chip with its edge on fire. She offered me another.
I wanted to talk to the girl, but what could I say? I didn’t have enough English words. Why did I always want to talk to girls who didn’t speak Amharic?
The markings on her face and neck interested me, as did the rows of white beads wrapped around her wrist and looped around her pointing finger. Why the tattoos? Her skin was lighter even than Gashe’s. With skin so pale, she could pass as white. Were they the markings of a slave? But why would a slave have an expensive CD player?
I touched my fingers gently to my eyebrow, then patted my neck to correspond with her tattoos.
“What tribe?” I asked.
“What?” She pulled the headset from the top of her head and hung it around her neck.
“The drawings. What tribe?”
She laughed. “You think I’m an Indian?”
“I do not know.”
“Well, I’m not. I dye my hair like this. Usually I’m blonde, but I hate blonde. Men always hit on blondes and think they’re retards.” She sucked the spices from her finger, then her thumb.
“Yes,” I said. Was that the right answer? What was blonde? Why did people speak so quickly?
“It’s like you’re right off the boat.” She studied me as if I was the exhibit of our famous prehistoric ancestor, Lucy, whose bones are kept in the National Museum in Addis. “Are you?”
“No,” I said. She traveled without an escort. She must be a servant.
She laughed. “Want another chip?”
“I have food,” I said. “It is the time to eat?”
“It’s a free country. You can eat whenever you want.” The girl slouched in her seat, pressing her knees against the chair in front of her, and peered at the magazine.
I pulled apart the top of the clear plastic bag of injera the way Yosef had shown me, then pressed it together. I shook it upside down. No matter how hard I shook it, the food did not fall out. Was there no end to the marvels of Canada? Ishi would believe none of this.
The girl stopped reading. She put the magazine in her lap and watched me.
“Really? You’ve never seen a Ziploc before? Where are you from, anyway? Mars? Pluto?” she asked.
I smiled. I knew the English names for the planets. “I am Ethiopian,” I said.
“That’s like where? Africa or something?”
“Yes!” I raised my eyebrows high and nodded vigorously. “Ethiopi
a is in the north.” I waved my right hand as if I was demonstrating on a map. “East! North and east.”
The injera was still soft, not dried out and crispy the way two-day-old injera usually was. I offered the bag to the girl.
“Injera,” I said.
“The same to you,” she said. I shook the bag the way she had shaken her bag of Sweet Chili Heat. “What do I do? Just take the whole thing?” she asked.
“Like this.” I tore a small piece from the roll and chewed. The girl ripped off a piece and chewed slowly.
“Interesting. Rubbery. Kind of like naan, but thinner,” she said. “Or maybe a crepe.”
I dug into my backpack and opened a bag of wat and showed her how to scoop it with the injera. She tasted slowly, a smile growing on her lips as the spice spread fire on her tongue.
“Oh, my God! Hot!” She fanned her hand in front of her mouth. “Hot!” She rummaged through her pack, swiveled the cap from a water bottle and glugged half. “Oh, oh, what is that?”
“You like?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She panted like a dog. “God, that was like the hottest thing I’ve ever eaten. It was like … straight habaneros! You eat that? In Ethiopia?”
“More?”
“God, yes!”
We shared a full roll of injera, then the girl returned to her magazine with shiny pictures of angry women wearing almost no clothing. I let my full stomach and the vibration of the bus motor carry me home.
Days and nights, dreams and waking flooded together. Ishi and I fought for the football. Fiyeli chased after us and called Aw-lubba-lubba. Etheye whispered in my ear, “You be my favorite. So small. You gave me no pain.” Isaias’s muscled arm held me on a tank. The bus stopped and started. People shuffled on and off. The soldiers with the wild hair came. Coughing. The smell of cigarettes. Gashe took me with him in his 504.
I woke to light in the bus, but outside, empty darkness. The girl with the Sweet Chili Heat was gone.
Was she real? Had I dreamt her? Ishi stared back at me from the window. An elder with long straggly hair who reeked of cigarette smoke snored beside me, body splayed, his mouth open. I pressed farther into my corner by the window, not wanting to touch him.
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