Tizita

by Sharon Heath

  For the first time since I’d returned, my father looked me full in the face, but his voice was flat. “We were not honest with you.” My mother sat up and flashed him a sharp look. Abat nodded, as if responding to an unspoken command. “I was not honest.” His voice took on a pleading tone, and I found myself disliking him for it. “When I told you that you must not stay in Ethiopia with Makeda, I did not tell you why.” He stood abruptly and began pacing the room behind our chairs. I had to skew around in my seat to see him. “When we are young, we can lack ... wisdom. Sometimes we behave stupidly. I was more stupid than most.” He cleared his throat. “As I know you recall, the Geteye family next door was like family to us. Rede was my best friend.” My father’s face now streamed with tears, but from his voice you would never know that he was crying. “Genet—” He stopped himself. “His wife was your mother’s dear friend. We, I ... well ....” He shot a look at Medr, as if begging him to intervene, but my grandfather was sitting absolutely still with his eyes firmly closed, only his right hand pleating the gold border of his left sleeve betraying that he was awake. I saw the fabric quiver, as if responding to a slight tremor. “The two women became pregnant very close to the same time.”

  My mother cried out, “I was so excited to be with child in unison with that woman. She was like my sister.”

  My father reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and swabbed his face. “Assefa, you and Genet’s daughter were born only months apart. I tried not to think about the fact that you might in fact be ... related.”

  It was at that moment that the Hanging Man went airborne. It was with absolute dispassion, as if I were miles and miles away, that I heard Abat say, “Of course, the two of you became inseparable. And at some point, Genet began to worry—”

  “She told me,” Enat interrupted. “It was the day before Christmas, and we were fasting. We observed the ancient rituals in those days. She confided in me that she was pregnant again and wanted to reassure me that, at least with this one, she was sure it was Rede’s. I had no idea at first what she was talking about, but then suddenly the truth came upon me, and I knew.”

  My father sat down and tried to get hold of my mother’s hand, but she shook him off. “It was only a few times,” he pleaded, and I couldn’t tell if he was addressing her, me, or his father, whose hands were still now and lowered by his sides. Medr showed not a sign that he’d heard any of this. Now he really did look as if he could be dead. I worried that this actually might kill him.

  Somehow I found myself back inside my body. The room was stifling, my heart raced, and sweat had sprung up like a geyser across my forehead and cheeks.

  “Of course,” said Abat, “your mother confronted me immediately.” He looked blindly across the room, as if he were seeing something we couldn’t. “I remember watching you through the kitchen window playing ganna with Bekele and Iskinder while we struggled to talk it through. Your mother was—well, I’d hurt her terribly. I hated myself for it and knew that I owed her everything. I’d never stopped loving her. The other was only ... and God bless your mother, I realized that despite my ... lapse, she still loved me.” He tried smiling at her, but she ignored him. I sensed that the events of the past days had re-opened old and terrible wounds. “By the time we entered Timkat, our plans were made.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “By then, Genet had miscarried Rede’s child. Your mother and I never mentioned the ... circumstances ... again. Until you spoke to her about Makeda. About my daughter.”

  I shot him a searching look. Returning my gaze with a hapless shrug, he said, “Yes, if I’d had any doubts before, I was certain it was true as soon as we bumped into her at the airport. I saw my own mother in her face.” I heard a groan from Medr’s bed. “The woman is your sister. Half-sister. So you see why I ....”

  I reached out and slapped him, hard, across the face.

  Medr stunned us all by flinging back his sheet and flying out of bed like a napping cat springing for a bird.

  In this case, I was the prey. My thin-as-a-rail grandfather took both my hands in his and held them over my head, pushing his pointed chin into my face. “Never do that. You must not do such a thing. This is your father.”

  Father was in the corner, holding my mother away from the two of us. Wailing like a woman at a funeral, Mother fled the room, but not before Medr turned to my father and unloaded a series of curses. “This is what happens when you disrespect your family. The next generation learns to disrespect you.” Then his lower lip began to tremble and I watched in horror as he slowly sunk to the floor, gripping a chair leg to break his fall.

  I dropped down next to him and pulled his trunk toward me. As I hugged him, he sobbed. His chest was terribly narrow and his arms felt like sticks. My God, what had I done to him? What had the Hanging Man done to us all? Had my father been a Hanging Man, too?

  But the next thing I knew, strong arms had encircled me from behind. I smelled the bunna of my father’s breath, moist and warm against my neck. We three swayed, and I recalled the moment only a few weeks ago when Makeda and Father Wendimu and I had listened to Seyfou Yohannes singing his version of Tizita in Father Wendimu’s tiny closet.

  Wordlessly, my father let me go and came around to help his father onto his feet and into his bed.

  I heard my parent’s phone ring, and the next thing I knew Enat was kneeling beside me, handing me the phone. I nearly mistook my mother’s voice for a stranger’s. It was strained and tight, and I realized she was struggling to stop a torrent of tears.

  “Here,” she said, urging the phone on me. “It is Fleur on the telephone. She said your phone has been disconnected.”

  It occurred to me that I might not have paid my Verizon bill before I left for Ethiopia. I accepted the phone from my mother and, pushing myself up from the floor, took it with me into the next room. There was so much I needed to take care of.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Fleur

  IT WASN’T UNTIL Adam left for Boston that I plucked up the courage to contact Assefa. But when I did, he failed to return my call. Or should I say calls? I must have tried his cellphone ten times over three days. Which is why I finally swallowed my pride and phoned Abeba to ask her to have him call me. I didn’t know whether to feel lucky or not when she told me—rather tensely, I thought—that he was at her house and that she’d fetch him.

  From the moment Assefa’s voice came on the line, he sounded distressed. “Fleur,” he sputtered, “I really do need to talk with you, but I’m .... How about if I call you back a little later?” Then, as if he was trying to gather himself, he added, “We can have a nice, long talk.”

  A nice, long talk sounded terrible. My body curled in on itself like a touch-me-not. I dreaded the thought of some protracted phone conversation that would hide all the visual cues I’d need to see if I believed anything he said. After countless little sighs and bitings of my lower lip I suggested we meet in person, and we wrangled over when like a couple of Mideast peace negotiators.

  Our original plan was to meet the following Thursday evening, when Assefa would be finished with his rounds and I’d be done with the small, select group of first year Caltech students I was tutoring on worm holes, C-Voids, and superstring theory. But Fate intervened rather rudely in the person of a sweaty and distortedly muscular man in an ill-fitting suit pushing past my departing students, getting close enough to shove an envelope into my hand. He hissed rather threateningly, “Fleur Robins, you’ve been served,” disappearing just as quickly, leaving behind a miasma of a particularly odious cologne.

  The summons was a shocker in more ways than one. The closest I’d ever gotten to the legal system had been during my ill-fated incident with the Boy Who Called Me Beautiful, when I’d had a policeman’s gun pointed at my naked breasts before being locked in a jail cell.

  Leaving the last vestiges of my late lunch of Gwennie’s vegan lasagna in the Lauritsen lab (which was a damned shame, since I doubted I’d ever be able to eat it again), I left a guilty
message for Assefa, then called home and read aloud to Gwen the demand that I appear to testify in the civil suit of Fidel Marquetti vs. Kun-wu Kang.

  “I can’t believe it!” exclaimed Gwen. “He kills the poor man’s dog and then has the gall to sue him?”

  It struck me that Gwennie was omitting the little fact that Chin-Hwa had bitten Fidel Marquetti in the butt, but nonetheless I wailed, “Why does he want me to testify?”

  “I don’t know, love, but I’m calling our lawyer. I’ll be damned if we’ll let you be bullied by some idiot racist’s attorney in a fishing expedition.”

  I’ll save the deposition for another day. Suffice it to say it’s a great mystery to me how it’s possible to be so intimidated by what Stanley H. Fiske likes to call iguanid inferiors, men in jackets and ties with limited imaginations and too little heart.

  As it happens, the Idiot Racist’s Attorney didn’t get to cross-examine me a second time, since Plaintiff Fidel Marquetti and Defendant Kun-wu Kang ended up settling out of court. I learned of that on the day I finally met up with Assefa. Mrs. Kang ran up to me as I was leaving Mother’s, where I’d had a ridiculously yummy breakfast of Uttapam (a pancake-ish rice and lentils thingy topped with chopped vegetables and spices guaranteed to murder my butt the next day), rustled up by Dhani for Mother, me, and herself on—thank God—Abeba’s day off. Mrs. Kang told me that she and her husband were moving, having sold their house to a realtor, who, Gwennie later grumbled, was sure to “flip it and pocket a small fortune.” Mrs. Kang hastened to assure me that it wasn’t as if she and her husband had been bankrupted or anything by the settlement, but that they’d decided they’d feel more comfortable living in Los Angeles, in what Stanley later informed me was Koreatown. When he told me that, I felt almost as voidish as when I’d seen Chin-Hwa’s dead body. It struck me as tragic that an immigrant family had been pushed into a kind of ghetto by another immigrant, one who kidded himself that he wasn’t viewed by many people as an outsider himself.

  This phenomenon was something Sammie amplified for me when I related to her the dismissal of my second summons to appear in court. She and I were lounging on her unmade bed with Midge plopped down between us, creating a regular racket of purring and snoring. Sammie commented unhappily, “This whole Marquetti-Kang affair brings back all those times I was called ‘nigger’ by poor white kids when mum and I stayed with my bubbie and zayde in Orange County. Not to mention the little wannabe gangsters mumbling, ‘Cocolo,’ under their breaths the year I taught art to middle schoolers in the barrio. It’s a divide and conquer sort of thing,” she muttered bitterly, petting Midge so exuberantly that he pushed his fat belly up from his cushy mound of duvet and waddled to the foot of the bed. “Actually,” she added, her voice rising ominously, “the history of the South is rife with it. And now? Getting poor whites to identify with those who exploit them by encouraging them to feel superior to blacks and immigrants segues so nicely into convincing idiots to look down on intellectuals.” She hesitated. “What was that?” That was Midge catapulting his bulging body off the bed in response to Sammie’s increasing stridency. The good news was that it managed to at least persuade her to turn down the volume of her rant.

  Sammie was in what she confessed was a “shit mood” because she’d had, for the umpteenth time, another row with Jacob. When I related to her my conversation with Assefa, she seemed more than happy to extend her rage to him. “Girl, the guy’s a player. Can’t you see it?” And as if that weren’t enough, she emphatically raised one perfectly shaped black eyebrow and threw in, “Fuck the sod. Actually, don’t.” Then, after the slightest pause, she shifted her tone. “Why don’t you give Adam a whirl?” she asked, as if he were an amusement park ride.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I snorted. I didn’t mention that, when I’d driven Adam to the airport, he’d leaned over to kiss me goodbye and somehow our lips had accidentally touched. Had it been my imagination that we’d lingered just the teensiest bit before breaking away?

  The reason Sammie was going after me so fiercely was that I’d confessed to her I was still vulnerable to Assefa’s charms.

  He and I had met at last at the Huntington Gardens. He’d explained on the phone that he was going to be having dinner with his parents and would be in my part of town. There was no way I could handle the intensity of meeting him at their house. Or at the Fiskes.

  Things did get intense, nonetheless, right from the beginning. Not in the way I’d imagined, not with me tempted to scream in anger or whirl and flap in distress, but with my heart cracking open like a glacier as I saw Assefa approach, tentatively padding toward the crowd convened in front of the ticket booth, gathering speed once his eyes picked me out.

  Instead of shouting, I simpered. And instead of holding myself aloof, I rushed into his embrace. I felt his heart thudding rapidly—or was it my own?—as he whispered into my hair, “Fleur, Fleur. Kiber le geta. My God, I’ve missed you.”

  We aimed for an unoccupied bench overlooking a perfectly manicured, broad sloping lawn. Our hands found their way to each other, and Assefa broke our prolonged silence with a contrite, “I am sorry, my dukula. You have no idea how sorry I am.” He shook his head mournfully. “And how wrong I was.”

  I really shouldn’t have let him call me his “my” anything. Could I be elevated so easily from discarded to dukula? But the heart has little use for the head when love comes to call. Burying my nose into his neck and letting him nuzzle me back, nothing else mattered.

  We ended up having what I felt at the time was a cleansing heart-to-heart. Warily skirting the topic of Makeda, I asked Assefa why he’d wanted to stay in Ethiopia.

  He replied, “Even before I left the States, Fleur, I’d begun to think of myself as a potted plant, someone who would never become the man he was supposed to be in the soil of a foreign land.”

  His words took me aback. I’d had no idea that he didn’t feel at home here in SoCal. Did I feel foreign to him? With his familiar smells and tender touch, he hardly felt foreign to me.

  But he did get me thinking. Where were my roots, where was my natural soil? Here I was, nearly three thousand miles from where I’d been born, several incarnations beyond my months in Mother’s Manhattan penthouse, a far cry from my cramped summer digs as a post-grad at the Sorbonne, a world away from the quaintly dilapidated Oxford lodgings where I’d researched macroscopic dissipative systems with fellow Nobel laureate Sir Anthony James Leggett’s team. The fact was, I’d been uprooted more times than Assefa, though I’d never had to travel so far. No wonder I’d found it physically impossible to leave Stanley and Gwennie’s even after Mother followed me to Pasadena.

  But perhaps more importantly, what kind of plant was I? Notwithstanding Abeba’s insistence on our floral kinship, I was unquestionably less a flower than a weed: hardy, determined, and not infrequently (at least in the case of Big Oil, the Cacklers, my father, and Congress) despised.

  That particular train of thought made me sufficiently melancholic that I came out with the question that had been lurking at the back of my mind ever since I’d coaxed Makeda’s name from a sleepy Assefa’s lips. Rising with him to walk toward the main building’s restrooms—I was peeing like a waterfall lately—I asked (in a fake casual tone), “How much did Makeda have to do with you flying to Ethiopia?

  I could have sworn Assefa’s eyes shifted guiltily as he replied, much too quickly, “You know why I went. To look for Abat.”

  “Okay,” I reluctantly gave him. “But coming home after you said you weren’t going to? Returning to the ... pot?”

  I thought I saw a shaft of anger rise up in his eyes, but his voice was controlled. “It was not to be.” Reading my lack of satisfaction from my crossed arms, he hastily added, “I came to understand that we could not be together.” His pace quickened and I had to skip a few times to keep up with him. “We really couldn’t.”

  I stopped in my tracks, forcing him to stop with me. “Did she reject you?” I flung at him, my own ang
er unmasked.

  Assefa groaned, and in that sound I heard great pain. A vast, conical void presented itself before me, and I had to stifle the impulse to flap.

  “Ah, dukula,” Assefa said, coming closer, “you are looking for simplicity in something complex. Isn’t it enough that I am choosing you, to be here in this country with you?”

  I let him take me in his arms, let him rub his chin across the top of my head.

  But making love a few days later was another story. Mother had gone to a Friends of Bill W. conference, leaving Cesar with Dhani and Ignacio, and Assefa and I took advantage of their absence by enjoying her pool. We swam like two seals, streaking wavery lines of light in the water. When we finally emerged, we collapsed onto twin chaises lounges, drying ourselves off with Mother’s ultra-soft Missoni towels. I closed my eyes, stinging a little from chlorine, and saw a brilliant red film give way to a light show of cloudy gold, yellow, and pale cream phosphenes. I had to force myself not to get up to find a pencil and paper to diagram their patterns.

  I wondered about the patterns in my own life. If Gerardus ’t Hooft was right, I was a tiny beam of the cosmic holograph. Bob had informed me that pufferfish males created complex and beautiful circles in the seabed to attract females, whom they guided to shore for egg release when the time came. The females were pretty much the passive ones in the process, and I wondered if I saw a reflection of myself in their compliance. I certainly seemed a sucker for any man who showed the slightest interest in my body.

  As if to prove my point, here was Assefa, laying a light hand on my arm as a prelude to tracing feathery spirals toward my breasts. He let his fingers inside my bikini top, pinching my nipple just enough to raise gooseflesh up and down my arms, amplified even more by a slight breeze. Suddenly I felt very cold, but now Assefa was sliding one hand under my butt and the other beneath my neck. He lifted me like a baby and took me upstairs into Mother’s bedroom, where he stood me in front of her antiqued silver framed dressing mirror. With a deft touch, he urged me out of my bathing suit and then swiftly removed his trunks.