Tizita

by Sharon Heath

  I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to the melancholy turn of Bob’s last remark. Instead, I fixed on his father’s message. Bob was implying that Assefa was one of those time wasters. Could that be true? Everything my lover had said and done before now had proclaimed he was decent down to his long and perfect ebony toes. Hadn’t he listened to my lengthy, multiple-alleyed stories without a hint of impatience? Accepted the presence of Jillily’s litter box in his own home without complaint? Worried constantly about his parents, his grandfather? Had as his passion in life the repair of people’s hearts? But then it occurred to me that perhaps it was his goodness that was causing my current problem. He was worrying about those orphans more than he was worrying about me.

  But a more cynical voice balked at my rationalization. What if Assefa was what Sammie liked to call a dog? At first, I’d assumed the term was a compliment. If men could be referred to as cats—in my book the highest praise possible—and given that Sammie herself used to call the two of us birds, and since dogs were generally thought of as good-natured (though I wouldn’t exactly have applied that to Chin-Hwa or one particularly sharp-toothed creature who’d lunged at me rather terrifyingly when I was a child), then why was “dog” such a dismissive epithet? Sammie had sorted me out on that one with a certain savage intensity, no doubt attributable to the two men she’d dated before Jacob, each of whom had cheated on her with far inferior partners.

  But now a stranger’s face was suddenly sticking itself just a few inches from my own. The woman’s long straight hair was being swept dervishly around by a sudden gust of wind. “You’re Fleur Robins, aren’t you? I hope those right wing bastards get thrown out and you can start up your project again.” I actually felt her spit splatter my cheek with the word “bastards.”

  Though I agreed with her sentiment, there was something in her eyes that scared me, and when Bob pulled me away, he said, “Don’t pay her any attention. Fame brings out the roaches of every stripe.”

  Before I knew it he’d shoved a Ralphs’s bag into my hand. Actually, as soon as he got the bag into one of my hands, he took my other hand in his own and tugged me toward a spot where a frothy wave was being sucked back out to sea. He knelt, and since he had my hand, I knelt with him, our knees knocking against each other on the ground, which was surprisingly firm given the fine dusting of sand—soft as powdered sugar—layered at the top.

  Within seconds, he’d scooped out a little crater of sand to reveal a spread of tiny shells—most of them broken, but some decidedly not: delicately crafted little exoskeletons whose twists and whorls had been crafted by an unseen hand into something as precise and perfect as a baby’s lips. He reached into one of his bags and pulled out a pair of crimson faux-velvet pouches, handing me one and pantomiming what I needed to do. The ocean was making conversation an unrealistic option. I deposited my first beige-and-white-patterned shell inside its soft new home with solemn care and placed the pouch at the bottom of my Ralph’s bag as I saw him do with his own. A sudden shaft of sunlight speared the horizon, giving the brown grocery bag a golden hue and illuminating the letters L-P-H like an ancient manuscript.

  So this was what Bob did with his bags. I didn’t want to move. The sound of the sea was mesmerizing. If we could find such gems right here, why go anywhere else? Ever. We could inhabit this moment eternally, impermeable to anything outside this sun-kissed spot, never again bothered by worthless friends or faithless lovers.

  But words like never are folly in this incarnate world. In this case, the change agent was Bob himself, who insisted we’d find more of such beauties, and larger ones, if we walked north, past the crowds of families and kids hugging the shore.

  “Besides,” he shouted against the roar of a breaking wave, pointing to an admittedly stinky pile of seaweed-wrapped jellyfish drawing more flies than the largest of Chin-Hwa’s pansy bombs. I nodded and followed him.

  I was sweating profusely by the time we reached Will Rogers State Beach. It was hotter than hell. So much for the climate change mumpsimusses. It had taken us about an hour’s walk to get there. We’d long passed the last family crowded near the Santa Monica pier with their broad umbrellas, broader smiles, and ice chests packed with Coronas and Cokes, and were now in the land of bikini-clad girls and surfer boys whose toned, athletic bodies brought me right back to dark thoughts of Assefa. But Bob was intent on getting me safely seated on a large rock jutting onto the sand so we could show and tell about the stashes of shells we’d each accumulated on the way.

  “May I?” Bob asked, reaching into my bag to select a small spiral shell with a dark circle on the outside. “You know what this is, don’t you?” I shook my head. “It’s a moon snail. Also known as a Shark’s Eye.” Well, that made sense. The black center was surrounded by a milky aura that looked uncannily like a staring eye. “Actually, its real name is neverita reclusianus, and it dates back to the Oligocene. Can you imagine this fragile-looking home of a tiny carnivore surviving at least twenty-three million years?” Of course, I couldn’t. Not when we comparative giants barely made it to a hundred.

  The soft creature who’d inhabited this dainty home had undoubtedly been protected by the intimidating ocular image on its outside. I wondered how many heartbeats the ferocious shark eye façade had bought the shell’s inhabitant. A billion? I asked Bob, who seemed to know everything there was to know about aquatic life forms.

  He frowned and enthusiastically took up the question. “Well, let’s see. I think your average mollusk lives at least five years. They’re about as slow moving as you get, so I’d guess they have a heartbeat of about ten a minute. So, what does that work out to?”

  “Something like twenty billion beats. That can’t be right.”

  Bob nodded in agreement. “Sounds like a lot.” I knew this one was going to drive me nuts until I tracked it down.

  We resumed sorting through our haul. Bob pulled out a couple of spectacular specimens, including a couple of perfect turtella ocayas, long spiraling cones without a single chip. After oohing and aahing enough to turn his skin just the side of fuscia, I marveled at the floral design on the outside of the one sand dollar I’d found. I speculated whether it was a fossilized imprint of a flower that the sand dollar had been lodged against. Bob smiled indulgently. “Actually, what you see as a flower is actually the fivefold radial pattern of its exoskeleton, which we call a ‘test.’”

  I felt more than a little humbled as Bob revealed the scope of his knowledge. Back at Caltech, he’d come in (and come across) as the acolyte, and I admitted to myself I’d looked down at him a bit. Well, actually, a lot. But in the open air Bob actually looked an inch or two taller, as if here at the beach he was one of its natural denizens. Which, I was soon to discover, had its dark side, too. On our walk back, we came upon a largish piece of plastic with indistinct blue lettering wrapped in and out of the ribcage of a rotting dead pelican. The bird had undoubtedly ingested the plastic before it died. Without warning, Bob sunk to his knees and pounded the sand, shouting, “I hate humanity!”

  I had to resist the temptation to flap, but I knew what he meant. The implications of the corpse were disgusting and all too familiar, signs of our species’ utter lack of concern for our biosphere. It stirred my own utter frustration at the standstill forced upon my P.D. team by a body of 379 men and 93 women blindly committed to an ecologically disastrous status quo. My team and I had discovered a potentially revolutionary means of getting from one place to another that might obviate the most egregious uses of fossil fuels, and Congress was blocking our research as a sin comparable to human cloning. Which it wasn’t.

  But I was yanked out of that familiar internal rant by Bob’s visibly heaving chest. I hesitantly put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re right. It’s awful. With all our vaunted intellect, we’re a short-sighted species.”

  He shrugged me off, his face twisted. “No, Fleur. That’s too kind. We’re the suicide bombers of the planet, willing to take down more than eight million other
species with us.” So this was Bob’s void. I stepped back, but Bob grabbed my hand, putting it against his chest, saying, “No, no. Listen, I’m sorry. It’s just that it gets me so fucking mad.” I didn’t have the heart to pull away, but was more than a little relieved when he finally let go of my hand. He seemed to be staring at something behind me. The slight smile playing at his lips took me by surprise.

  I turned to see. Why was he grinning? The bird carcass really was awful, as was the enthusiasm of the flies encircling it. I heard Bob say, “You know what they are, don’t you?”

  I looked back at him. It took me a minute. “The flies?” He nodded.

  “A swarm.”

  “What else?”

  “A cloud.”

  He motioned, “More,” with his hand. I grimaced, frantically scouring my mind, but I didn’t have it. I sighed. “Okay, I give.”

  His expression was victorious. “A business!”

  Damn! I had read it somewhere. Ages ago. “You’re right,” I said with a grudging groan. “A business of flies.”

  Bob rewarded me with a sly expression I wouldn’t have imagined he was capable of. “I think that entitles me to cook you some dinner. Why don’t you come back to my apartment and hang out?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Assefa

  WHEN OUR BEGINNINGS are marked by extraordinary cruelty, whatever comes afterward either confirms our mistrust or threatens the wariness we employ to ensure we’ll never be that vulnerable again.

  So powerful was the force of Makeda’s love for her orphans that it completely disarmed them. When I woke the next morning, it was to the same laughter, singing, and exultant shouting that had greeted me upon my arrival less than a week before.

  On my second night here an exasperated Father Wendimu had asked Adey to make up a cot for me next to the goats. As the younger man, I’d adamantly refused to take his bed and so had fallen asleep in the shed to the not altogether unpleasant sensation of a kid’s wet nose pressed against my neck. There was a reckoning the next morning. Struggling to rise from a wooden plank covered with two colorful but thin blankets, my knees and back chastised me and I cursed myself for my politeness. But now I reminded myself that stiff joints were a small price to pay for having finally committed myself wholly to one course and one course alone.

  The sweet smell of jasmine greeted me when I stumbled out of the thatch-roofed tukul. Inhaling appreciatively, it occurred to me that, despite all my washing under the surprisingly efficient outdoor showerhead at the back of the property, I must stink of goat.

  I scanned the yard and saw a rooster strut unconcerned past the orphanage’s lone cat, a ginger-colored creature that looked malnourished compared to Sammie’s similarly colored feline back in Pasadena. A small group of orphans clustered around a sun-faded, painted wooden table. I approached closely enough to see Makeda preparing to give the HIV positive children their antiretroviral meds. I held back for a moment. She was making it into a game, singing, “Ete emete yelome sheta ....” The children’s rousing accompaniment was punctuated by a certain amount of sputtering and coughing as diminutive young throats struggled with large capsules and pills.

  By now I’d learned that over 80,000 Ethiopian children were living with HIV. It was partly why I’d decided to stay. Despite advances spurred by Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health and its Office of General HIV Prevention and Control in reducing HIV infection of mothers and children, those 80,000 who’d already been infected were doomed to short, miserable lives without the kind of consistent care Father Wendimu’s charges were getting. Back in the U.S., these kinds of statistics would have remained just that for me: statistics. But now?

  Last night, I’d washed the worryingly thin limbs of six-month-old Eldana in a battered tin bath and sung a hyperactive Kanchi to sleep with Ehsurusuru. Earlier in the day, I’d played Kelelebosh with two limber, dimpled twins named Hagos and Girma and a boy called Lebna, who laughed off what I knew was a painfully mangled hand to beat us all. We’d finished up with a game I’d never heard of that involved a small bean bag, a pile of Pepsi bottle caps, and lots of triumphant running. The thought of children who could be my own distant kin dying for lack of medical care was intolerable.

  As Makeda registered my presence, her lips widened in slow motion to reveal her perfect teeth like the sensuous peeling of a luscious fruit. My washela rose in Pavlovian enthusiasm until I remembered. I still could not grasp how women who held each other in the moist, warm earth of their own wombs would want to cut away from their daughters the source of one of life’s sweetest pleasures.

  I walked over to help, aware of sharp pebbles already in my shoes, but not caring. She wrinkled her nose, undoubtedly at my goat smell, and reluctantly handed me a couple of pill bottles, tapping the heads of a few of the children in front of her, their black coils already glistening in the morning sun.

  While Father Wendimu had actually danced a little jig when I proposed shifting my studies to Addis Ababa University, Makeda herself was far less encouraging. She’d argued, “You need to go back to your woman, get your fine education. Devote yourself to helping HIV children, if you must, but do it where you belong.”

  Stung—who was she to decide where home was for this hanging man?—I’d argued that there were plenty of doctors in the States eager to do just that, but very few willing to commit to the children of Africa, which was, after all, as much my home continent as hers. That silenced her, but it didn’t stop her from compressing her lips later in the day when she walked into Father Wendimu’s room as the two of us were talking about the practicalities of making the shift from UCLA to Addis Ababa University.

  Nor did it stop me from ruminating on her implication that I belonged with the materially pampered back in the U.S. If anything, I was savoring life’s preciousness in this place where it was constantly under threat. Only last night, having finally soothed young Kanchi to sleep, I’d tiptoed out to see the stars, and Father Wendimu had come out to sit beside me on the rough ground, commenting quietly, “You know, she’s tightly wound for a reason, is Kanchi. We buried her little cousin Afeworki only days before your arrival. The two of them were inseparable. Two years ago we woke to find the two of them curled around each other at our gate, and we never got quite clear on what their story was, except that they were related and spoke to each other in a secret language, which is more common, as I’m sure you know, in twins. I don’t know how the child is going to manage now.” What he didn’t mention was that his own struggle to manage was constant. He and his tiny staff were all that stood between these children and the abyss.

  I had grown very fond of this Khat-chewing infidel, so I was more than pleased when he caught me on my way to the shower this morning. He looked me up and down, for a brief second inserting a forefinger between my bare chest and the thick, wrap-around blue and white-fringed towel that Fleur’s mother would have died for.

  He grinned. “We may be poor, but our people weave the best towels in the world.” He squinted up at the sun. “I wish the same benefactor who supplied our towels would subsidize the appetites of children recovering from starvation. The cost of enset and injera alone are criminal.” He shook his head, and I noticed for the first time that he had a thin vertical scar running from his hairline to his jaw. How had he gotten it?

  “But enough of my complaining,” he continued. “I’m going in to town. Would you care to help me pick up some provisions? I’m sure that was one thing you didn’t do as a boy.” He grinned. “We can get you some stronger soap while we’re there.”

  I was mortified. Even though I knew he was waiting for me, I showered for longer than usual, actually until the water ran out, and once I was back in my hut, I shoved away the normally endearing Menelik the goat.

  Sniffing my arms and hands several times for reassurance, I went looking for Father Wendimu, noting in passing that Kanchi was sitting on the far side of the yard, her sticklike legs spayed out like a wishbone from her too-large turquoise and orange dress,
her arms wrapped tightly around little Eldana in her lap.

  I found Father Wendimu poking his head into Adey’s corrugated-tin-roof hut. Stopping just behind him, I peeked in to see Makeda inside, busily sewing nearly knee-to-knee with Adey. Adey shot us her usual somber look and Makeda barely raised her eyes when Father Wendimu announced, “We’re going now. Can you handle lunch on your own? We’ll be back before dinnertime.”

  I ambled out to the yard while Father Wendimu ran back to his room for his car key. I held the rusty gate open for him as he passed through, but I struggled to close it behind me, muttering under my breath, “My kingdom for a can of WD-Forty.”

  “Here,” called Father Wendimu, stepping back to deftly perform a little twist of the spring latch that made a terrible screech, but did the trick. Rubbing together his wide hands, he grinned. “Takes a little convincing, but easier than budging the hard head of a woman who thinks she knows what’s best for you.”

  I laughed. So he knew. But there were more obstacles to be navigated that morning. One was the motor of Father Wendimu’s battered blue Corolla. As I slid in onto the stained and frayed gray cloth seat, Father Wendimu shot me a smile, gave a little flourish with his hand, and turned the key to absolutely no effect. The motor didn’t even bother trying to turn over. Not even a cough. The only sounds we heard were the wra wra of a couple of chickens and, in the distance, a wailing child. That is, until Father Wendimu slammed the dashboard and let loose a joltingly loud, “Dikala!” With a guilty look, he mumbled, “Sorry.” He sighed and opened the driver’s side door. “I guess it really is good I asked you to help me. Care to take a little walk, son?”