A streetlight switched from yellow to red. He slowed the car and stopped.
“Kids think their parents will kill them. But fathers forgive. Whatever you did can’t be so bad, okay?”
“I did nothing wrong.”
“Of course. It’s always someone else who caused the problem. If you did nothing wrong, what gives you such fear?”
“I want to sleep. Where can I sleep?”
“You tell me nothing. I take you to police. You sleep there.”
I knew what the police would do. I squeezed the door handle and pushed. The streetlight flicked green. Ahmed gunned into the intersection. The door flew from my grip. Pavement rushed beneath the open door. Ahmed grabbed the shoulder of my jacket. I flung my DC backpack at his face. The car swerved.
“Shut the door! Idiot!” he screamed. I dragged the door closed. The cords in Ahmed’s neck were visible. “What are you doing? Trying to kill us? What’s wrong with you?”
He looked as if he might hit me. I shrank against the side, out of his reach, and pulled the pack to my chest like a warrior’s shield.
“Why are you scared of police? What I supposed to do with you?” he asked. I remained silent and watchful. I did not think he expected an answer. We crossed a river.
“What is in the pack?” he asked suddenly.
“A thick coat.” I was an idiot. Why had I not put it on? Ahmed remained silent but turned his head to look at me.
“And?” he asked.
What had Yosef called them? “Tubes for the feet.”
“Socks?” the driver used the English word.
“Yes, socks! And food. Injera. Water. Gloves for a mechanic, a hat of wool.”
“Why do you have these? It is spring,” Ahmed said.
“Solomon?” I said. Did he know Solomon?
He muttered to himself in Tigrigna. “That makes no sense. Kids have books. Music. A calculator. Maybe chocolate.” I caught parts of what he said.
“Why do you have those things?” he asked me. The fan shot hot air, the woman’s voice called on the radio.
“To stay warm?”
“But it is spring,” he said. “You come now? You just got here?”
“Yes, on the bus.”
“I don’t believe it. Money? You have money in that pack?”
“No.” The paper money with the number ten was folded in the pocket of my jeans with my birth certificate.
“Papers? Documents?”
“No.” Not in the backpack.
“You came on a boat? Where did you land? Vancouver?”
“English China, first,” I said. “Then Toronto, Canada.”
He spoke quietly to himself. “Vancouver, then. But why Toronto?”
We drove in silence. I recognized the buildings. We were driving in a large circle.
“How did you get in the country without papers?” he asked me.
“The smuggler spoke for me.”
“How many others?”
“Two. A woman and a girl.”
“His wife? His daughter?”
“They were like me.”
“Ethiopian?”
“No.”
“So this man pretended to be your father, brought you to Canada and put you on a bus? And now you are here?”
“Yes.”
“You must have papers. They do not let you in without papers. A passport.”
“He took them.”
“To use for someone else …” Ahmed spoke out loud again, but to himself.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” he said. He stopped in front of a large square building with big windows all along the front.
The air inside the brightly lit shop smelled of old coffee and a type of food that made my stomach feel sick. There were racks and shelves overflowing with colorful packages of chocolate and other sweets. An entire wall of glass displayed drinks, such as Coca-Cola, Fanta, bottled water and the boxes of milk that I had seen in Canada.
So much, so much of everything.
Ahmed and another man spoke in Tigrigna. About me, and my lack of identity papers. I was able to follow parts of it.
“We need to find out who he is and how he got here. You don’t just walk across borders. You don’t get in without documents,” the other man said.
This man, too, was near the age of Gashe, but he did not wear the mark of success. His shirt did not fully cover the bulge of fat that hung over his belt. His fingernails were grimed with grease. He smelled of gasoline, and beneath that, the stench of an unwashed body. The name on his shirt said Neguse.
“That is what I told him, but he kept saying he came on the bus. From Toronto.”
“There is more to his story. He could be someone important. Good thing you brought him to me,” the man said.
“You’ll keep him, then?” the driver asked.
“For now, he stays here where I can watch him. Come back at the end of your shift. I’ll figure out what to do.”
When night lifted to morning, Ahmed drove me on the smooth roads without life. We passed rows of tidy houses with square patches of grass, each with a lone tree. Cars and pickups parked in front or to the side, but not a single guard was visible, nor a cement wall to protect property.
He took me to a street lined on each side with a row of deep holes dug in black dirt, like a graveyard waiting for the corpses of well-fed giants. Amid the field of rectangular craters were the wooden skeletons of cheap buildings not meant to last. Far beyond, on the horizon, were the tips of mountains. Like Addis, this place was edged with mountains, but these were farther away, as sharp as spears and tipped with pure white. Mostly it was a flat land of emptiness.
Where was he taking me? Where was this place called Calgary? This country called Wild Rose? Where on a globe of the world were mountains such as these? I had been in Canada with Yosef. I had traveled several days by bus, crossed no oceans. The road signs and those on buildings were all in English. This must still be North America, but where, exactly, on the globe?
At the end of the street — amid all of the nothingness — was a tall plastic house with a massive door on the front, so big that a car could drive through, maybe two cars. We entered through a smaller door. Inside was a huge cavern with high ceilings, like the interior of a cathedral, but without the benefit of curved arches. The walls were plain white, without cracks or signs of repair. It was mostly bare of furniture and it smelled of fresh paint.
He took me down a short flight of stairs. He shook a blanket onto a sofa like the green one in Toronto, but this one was patterned in rich shades of brown, and covered, all along the back, with a row of cushions.
“You will sleep here,” he said. Ahmed climbed the stairs and put out the light. I heard him lock the door.
6
The voices were above me, raised in anger.
“He cannot stay here!”
A wooden spoon striking a metal bowl.
“He has nowhere to go. He has no one.”
“What were you thinking? Bringing him here?”
Shuffling feet. The creaking of wood.
“He was alone. His face covered with blood.”
“What if the authorities find out? What if he is a spy?”
The happy sounds of small children running.
“He cannot stay here! He will ruin our chances. Ruin everything!”
A door opened. Ahmed stood in silhouette. A blinding light strobed.
Ahmed pulled me close, like a brother.
“You will come with me to work. Until I can think of something,” he said.
He took me as he had the night before to the shivering cold shop that also sold gasoline. I drifted in and out of sleep on a stiff metal chair behind the counter where Ahmed grinned like a simpleton, nodded and took money and plastic cards from cus
tomers. In the evening he drove the taxi and Neguse kept his eye on me like a hungry hawk waiting to strike. I remained still and invisible and useless, and drifted time and again, home to Addis. I jerked awake when I drifted too far ahead in the chair, all senses on alert, and once, I fell to the floor.
“Stupid boy! Get up!” yelled Neguse when the bells on the door signaled the customer had left. “What do you think you are doing? Do not draw attention!” He flipped back his hand as if he would hit me, but dropped it before he swung.
I sat up as straight as if I was in school and focused on keeping my eyes open. But it felt as if I was in a maths class in which the teacher droned the same simple lesson over and over again. Why wouldn’t they let me sleep? Why couldn’t I just lie down among the cardboard boxes in the back room? Or even here? Behind the counter, where Neguse could watch me? If only I could sleep, I could think. If I could think, I could find a solution. Why wouldn’t my brain work?
Ahmed returned during the rising of the sun. We drove to his plain plastic-covered house to eat the food his wife cooked and to sleep in quivering darkness that gave me no rest.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Ahmed and Neguse asked in each of the days and nights that blended together in a heavy gray fog. The same questions every day, one following the other. Did they expect different answers?
I repeated my name, but what did I want? I wanted what was impossible. I wanted to go home. To all that was familiar and comfortable. To the brother who was the other half of me.
7
The waking of the sun colored the horizon pink, the moon still visible as I drove with Ahmed to his house. I pointed out the window.
“The moon. It’s wrong!” I said. The crescent curled to the right, like an ear. “What has happened?”
Ahmed leaned forward and looked up.
“It looks fine to me,” he said.
“It’s on its side,” I insisted. “Do you not see? It has tilted.”
“The moon in Canada, it always looks like this.”
“In Canada?”
“Yes. Where do you think we are?”
“In Wild Rose country.”
“In wild … Ho-ho,” Ahmed laughed. He slapped the steering wheel with his palm and wiped a tear from his face. “I can hardly wait to tell the others,” he said.
He glanced at me, then explained. “It is a slogan for the province. The province is Alberta. The country is Canada.”
“We’re in Canada?” Canada was a safe country. It gave aid to the world. No one would hurt me.
“Yes, this is Canada.” He pointed to the sky. “That is the moon. Anything else you need to know?”
“The moon at this phase should look like a smile. My brother and I watch it all the time.” Ahmed did not look convinced.
“You know, how it is on a mosque?” I asked.
Ahmed parked the car in front of his house. He gazed at the sky and scratched his cheek.
“You are right,” he said. “The moon does look different in Africa. It has been a long time for me. I had forgotten.”
He pulled the keys from the ignition and opened the door. “But the mosque I remember.”
At the shop Ahmed allowed me to refill the shelves with chocolate and shiny bags of crisps when it was his shift, and to clean the machine that dispensed syrup and ice, but he had stopped looking at me and stopped asking questions.
The two of us rarely spoke these days. It was as if I had become a heavy piece of luggage to be dragged from his house to the shop and back again. But I didn’t mind the quiet.
I noticed tiny leaves now on the trees that had been bare sticks when I first arrived, bright yellow-green that twitched in the breeze like the sequins on Etheye’s best dress when she walked. I wanted to roll down the window of the car to listen to their sound.
“My wife,” said Ahmed. He removed his hand from the wheel, glanced at me quickly. “She says to get rid of you.”
I studied his profile. There was no laughter in his voice. His wife? Why would he care what she thought?
Ahmed stared straight ahead, as if it took all of his concentration to keep the car on the empty road.
“Because of the sister. You understand,” he said. “An unmarried man cannot be in the house with an unmarried woman. It is haram. She comes soon, the sister. Very soon.”
I knew it wasn’t only his wife who wanted me gone. Ahmed, too, was tired of me, and Neguse had never disguised his dislike. They had figured out no way to make money from me.
The silence in the car grew as heavy as clouds before hail. Ahmed switched on the radio, to a chirpy woman’s voice speaking rapid English.
I didn’t know why Ahmed kept me as long as he did, or even why he had picked me up in the first place. I wanted to leave, but where would I go? How would I live?
Ahmed stopped in front of his house and cut the engine.
“What will happen to me? Where will I go?”
Ahmed lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “This, I do not know. I want to help you, but …”
The slam of the car door jolted me like the explosion of a bomb. He walked up the stairs without looking back.
Did he mean now? That I should walk away?
Ahmed strode back to the car. He rapped a knuckle on the window.
“Hurry up!” he said. “Don’t keep my wife waiting. The food will be cold.”
I stayed awake as the sun warmed the day, huddled in the cold darkness of below ground, trying to make a plan. But what was a boy with no skills — who did not speak the common language and who did not have identity papers — supposed to do?
The children scurried beneath the high table where Ahmed’s wife had put steaming bread, sour cabbage and orange cheese for my mid-day meal. The boy had the same sparkling brown eyes as my young brother, Kato, who liked best to be chased. Their voices turned to high squeals when I lowered my head beneath the surface to peer at them with my eyes bulged and mouth twisted. They dashed, helter-skelter, from the room with grins on their faces, and flapped their arms as if they were bat wings. When I looked up again from the food, I caught them peeking around the corner of the doorway, popping out of sight as my brothers and sisters did when they were caught.
Ahmed’s wife scoured the cooking surface, pressing hard to the rhythm of the drums and whistles that came from the radio. She watched the children and she watched me. Ahmed was in the next room, speaking into a telephone.
“You keep him then!” Ahmed yelled. His voice lifted over the music and the laughter of his small children playing. “I have kept him long enough!”
His wife stopped the circular paths of her scrubbing. The children froze. We all stared at the doorway.
Ahmed stormed into the room. My body twitched when he smashed the phone on the table. He wore his taxi-driving clothes. These were not the clothes he wore for the afternoon shift at the shop that sold sweets and gasoline.
“Come on,” Ahmed said. “Let’s go!”
The chair scraped on the floor when I stood. I had eaten little of the food. His wife would be insulted and hate me more. I looked at her to offer apology, but she was looking down, having resumed her cleaning.
“My backpack?” I asked Ahmed. Would he allow me to retrieve it? Or must I leave that, too?
“Go! Hurry!” he said, his voice and his face gruff.
Ahmed maneuvered through the patient lines of cars and pickups but did not take the proper turn for the sweet shop. He drove straight and fast until he stopped in front of a plain cement building with a flat front.
“It grieves me to do this to you. But you must understand, I do not want trouble,” he said. “Yes? You understand?”
I nodded but I did not understand. “How do I get to the next place where I am supposed to go?”
Ahmed shrugged.
“That is not my business,�
�� he said.
“But Solomon …” I said. “He made the arrangements.”
As soon as I said the words out loud, I realized they were just words, that the smuggler had disappeared and that he had made no arrangements.
Ahmed was the only person I had. I followed him into a room with a low ceiling and outlined by a row of matching chairs.
“I have a boy here. For you,” Ahmed told a woman behind a tall counter.
“Stay here,” he told me. He pressed his hand on my shoulder and turned to leave. “Be well.”
“Hey, wait!” the woman called in English. Ahmed stopped and turned. “You can’t just drop him off! He’s not a dog. This isn’t the SPCA.” Ahmed approached the counter.
“It is with my eyes I see he is not a dog,” he said calmly. “He is not my son. I do not know him. I have no responsibility.” He turned again to leave.
“Wait. You can’t go! You have to …” She withdrew a sheaf of papers from a slot and waved them in the air above her head. “You have to fill out some forms.”
“You fill them out,” he said. “I have work.” He was nearly to the door. The woman’s chair rolled behind her when she stood.
“It is against the law,” she said. “I will call the police.”
Ahmed stopped.
“They will come and take you,” she said.
He strode to the counter and leaned over it, his face close to the woman’s face. “I know this not to be true!” he said. He and the woman glared at each other like two goats about to fight. The woman picked up the handset of the telephone.
“Who will pay for him? Me? Why should I have to pay for this beggar who has come at my door?” All eyes in the room turned to the conflict.
“Paying isn’t the problem,” she said, her voice calm. Gently, she put down the telephone. “But we need information. Fill out these forms and take a seat.”
“I will lose a whole day of work because of this? Who will pay?” Ahmed asked.
“Fill out the papers and take a seat,” she said.
When the woman turned to face the computer, Ahmed left me.
8
I picked up the sheets of paper Ahmed had placed on the chair. Everyone sitting in the room held a set. They were covered in small blocks and tiny English words. A thin man with shoulders curved inwards appeared at intervals, said a number, and someone holding the long papers followed.
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