by Sharon Heath
Father Wendimu and Melky simultaneously put hands out to stop me. “No, no,” said the priest. “She will be here shortly, I can assure you.”
The children had grown bored. By twos and threes, they straggled off to play in a yard that looked even dustier up close, but offered a few benches covered with peeling paint, some wheelie toys and Coke cans, and a soccer ball. Father Wendimu shot me a canny look. “You are from California. Might I ask if you know our friend Assefa Berhanu? I see you have brought luggage with you. Perhaps you have come to spend a bit of time with us?”
I sighed. “Yes, I do know Assefa.” Then, cringing a little, “I’m so embarrassed. I should have written first. It was so last minute .... But really, I don’t know what I ... I thought I could stay at a ... I’m sure this is an imposition. You have so much to do.”
At this point, Melky interrupted with an, “Excuse me,” to me in English and a torrent of words in Amharic to Father Wendimu.
“Awo,” Father Wendimu, replied. Then turning to me, he said emphatically, “Of course you can stay for a few days. It will be our pleasure. Any friend of Assefa’s is truly a friend of ours.”
Before I knew it, Melky—with a departing, “Dehna hun,” to Father Wendimu and a, “See you soon,” to me—was gone. He’d taken my boxes with him, as well as my nerve. I stood staring helplessly at Father Wendimu until the man lifted my bag, took me gently by the arm, and with a reassuring smile said, “Let’s see if we can scare us up some bunna, shall we?”
As he led me toward a small, thatch-roofed building, Father Wendimu attracted children to his side like a magnet. They were a noisy bunch, each one skinnier than the next, but as kinetic as cats covered in fleas. Father Wendimu barely seemed to take notice of them, but for a mock punch in the arm here and his lined brown hand rubbing a coiled head of hair there.
Expecting an interior as shabby as the fading and peeling paint on the outside, I ducked my head through the low doorway only to discover a beautiful blaze of geometrically patterned purple and green and red and turquoise hourglass-shaped basketry. The smaller sized ones, flat-topped, were placed in circles around the larger ones, all of which had domed lids. Father Wendimu beamed. “I still can’t get over it myself,” he said. “Until a week ago, we ate at the kind of benches you passed in the playground. But a couple of our adoptive parents chipped in for this, and we’re all so happy.” He motioned me to sit on one of the shorter baskets, woven in an intricate green and red pyramid design. “We call the stools barchumas and the tables mesobs.”
I’d encountered just such furniture when Assefa and I had grabbed a quick dinner at Addis Restaurant on a patch of Fairfax Avenue known as Little Ethiopia, just a few blocks away from his Carthay duplex. But I let Father Wendimu show me how the basket tables had lids that could be removed to allow pancake-like “trays” of spongy sourdough injera to be placed on top, upon which would be ladled chicken or lamb wat to be eaten by hand, using torn-off pieces of injera to scoop up the stew.
As if she’d known I’d be coming, a woman wearing her shama in what I knew from Abeba was medegdeg-style shuffled in with a tray bearing steaming cups of bunna and a little bowl of sugar with two spoons.
“Ah, Adey, aren’t you just the one? Fleur, this is both my right and left hand woman, Adey Gatimo. She’s been here longer than I have, and we’d be literally lost without her.” Now he broke into Amharic, and I understood only the words, Fleur, Assefa, and Makeda.
At this point, Adey directed a much more curious gaze at me, and I could only imagine what she was thinking. She said nothing more than a brief, “Siletewaweqin dess bilognal,” before leaving the room, and I knew by the empty pang in my belly that she already disliked me.
“Sugar?” Father Wendimu asked. I shook my head, and he proceeded to spoon a surprising amount into his own cup. I took advantage of his distraction to glance around the room. It was gleaming with cleanliness, despite its faded yellow walls. Someone had placed a chipped sage-colored vase on the mesob to the right of me, and I leaned over to examine its arrangement of what had to be the largest red roses I’d ever seen. They were perfect, each petal layering over its inner counterpart in a seamless pattern. But one sniff told me that they weren’t nearly as fragrant as David Austin’s Falstaff or even William Shakespeare. And I couldn’t help but note that these were the more standard roses, not the cabbagy, almost peony-like blooms of the Austins.
Lest Father Wendimu’s flowers feel insulted, I stroked one of them tenderly, and found myself appreciating its velvety, but sturdy feel. As Nana might have said, definitely not a delicate flower.
I sensed Father Wendimu staring at my back and skewed around to return his gaze. I was feeling voidishly vulnerable, sitting here in this foreign land with an utter stranger.
He gestured with his head toward the vase. “Makeda tries to pick a bunch nearly every morning. To cheer the children. Well, to be honest—us, too. They grow along a nearby hillside. We don’t know who planted the bushes to begin with. These are obviously not wild.”
“They’re beautiful,” I said, ashamed of my previous comparisons. I was dreading meeting Makeda more than ever, now that her world had assumed a reality that included the friendly Father Wendimu, gaggles of boisterous children, and the cultivation of roses.
Suddenly, I felt rather than heard the rustle of beads behind me, and I picked up the scent of something cinnamony. Father Wendimu pushed up from his barchuma. “Speak of the devil,” he said.
I rose and turned around, nearly bumping right up against the perfect breasts of a copper-colored woman with a wild frizz of black hair escaping her shama and the most attractive lips I’d ever seen, upturned over the faintest of feminine moustaches. Her dimpled grin was infectious. She stepped back to give me more space and put out a hand. “Are you here for one of our babies?” Except she pronounced it bébés.
I blanched.
Father Wendimu didn’t wait. “Makeda, this is Fleur Robins from Los Angeles. She’s a friend of Assefa’s, come to pay us a visit. Now isn’t that nice?”
I had to give it to Makeda. After a nearly imperceptible flicker of dismay, she summoned up a generous, “What a lovely surprise.” Without warning, she leaned forward to kiss me on each cheek, enveloping me in that intoxicating cinnamon smell, accompanied by a low note of something rich and green, like freshly mown grass. I wondered if it was teff.
Father Wendimu cleared his throat loudly and began moving toward the door. “Well, I’ll leave you two to it then,” he said. “I know you’ll have so much to talk about.”
Makeda and I stared at each other haplessly. Then—as if we’d orchestrated it—we slid onto barchumas at the very same second. We burst into laughter. “Twins!” Makeda cried. “We are twins.”
Of course, we weren’t. But, unlikely as it was, we seemed to take to each other. I was impressed by how perfect her English was and told her so.
She made a wry face. “People in the west think Ethiopians are ignorant because we are poor. But many of us learn several languages in school if we are lucky enough to go. My family and Assefa’s were intellectuals. Achamyalesh was offered his first teaching post at Addis Ababa University the year before they moved away, and he was gone—commuting—most of the time. My mother told me he needed to save up his money by staying in the students’ dormitories in the city, but he was here over the whole three months of summer vacation. When they left for America, my mother tried consoling me that they were going to leave our village anyway, but that is no consolation to a child.” For a moment I saw her as the girl she must have been, losing her best friend. I wondered what I’d do if Sammie picked up and moved back to London or Delhi. It took me a moment to catch up with where Makeda was going. “For me, it was very sudden,” she said. Without skipping a beat, she added, “How is he?”
Playing for time, I repeated, “How is he?”
“Don’t toy with me, Fleur. There is a reason you are here.”
If I’d gotten virtually no gui
dance during my formative first incarnation, at least Adam had taught me well in my second. “He’s fine now. He really is.”
She said nothing and sat as still as a statue. I realized this was torturing her. I took a deep breath. Then another. I know I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing out. “I don’t know if he told you we were engaged?”
“Engaged,” she said flatly. “Not exactly. But I knew someone was waiting for him to return.” She paused. “What do you mean by ‘he is fine now’?” Her dark eyes were penetrating, as if they were testing me for the veracity of my words.
“Well, we’re not engaged anymore. We fell out. It was ... complicated. I didn’t speak with him after that, and then I got a call that ....”
“That what?”
I think I stunned us both by bursting into tears. “He tried, he tried ....”
Makeda was gripping my arm, mercilessly pushing past my sobbing. “What did he try?”
In response to her commanding voice, and with tears continuing to cascade down my cheeks, I offered a garbled, “He tried to hang himself. He very nearly succeeded. At his own hospital. A nurse saved him. She had red hair. And a dream. He was very lucky—no permanent damage. But I’d never seen him so ... frail. He’s gone now.” I saw her eyes widen. “No, no, not that. Gone from SoCal. Just before I left for Gombe. He transferred to an internship at a university hospital in New York.” I knew I should stop talking. I had just met this woman. How do you do? Your true love tried to kill himself. What was wrong with me? Makeda was visibly trembling. And still I went on. “It was only after ... his episode that he told me about you. I mean really told me.” And then—I couldn’t help it: “Did he tell you about me?”
“You?” she asked. But her mind was clearly somewhere else. “I cannot believe it of him,” she said, not so much to me as articulating her own thought process. “When he saved Father Wendimu I thought, how strong he has become.”
“He saved Father Wendimu?”
She seemed to recall herself to the present. The eyes looking into mine were confused. “Yes. One of our more troubled kids attacked Father Wendimu, trying to steal his khat.”
I frowned. I’d learned about khat from a National Geographic special. “Father Wendimu takes khat?”
Makeda brushed away my surprise with an impatient, “Don’t judge him. Don’t judge us. Your Assefa liked it just fine.”
Now it was my turn to look away. Was it a different Assefa who’d inhabited this Ethiopian universe? Perhaps if I’d known that to begin with, something entirely different would have played out. Would it now? Just last month, I’d read a paper by Yakir Aharonov of Tel-Aviv University suggesting that the quantum world preserves the illusion of causality by masking the influence of future choices upon the past until those choices have actually been made.
Makeda coughed. I looked up. “What happened?” I asked. She stared at me blankly. “What did he save Father Wendimu from?”
She flushed. “Sorry, I’m just a little .... It was Dawit,” she said. “Foolish boy. Never meant for a good end. He slit open Father Wendimu’s neck with a knife and cut Assefa’s hand and ended up with a broken nose himself.” She smiled slyly, undoubtedly sensing I’d be shocked. “Assefa broke it for him.”
Shocked I was. I tried to re-sort Assefa in my mind. I’d seen Father Wendimu’s wound. This Dawit hadn’t been kidding.
But Makeda was just picking up steam. “Assefa operated on Father Wendimu right here in this room. Adey and I assisted. Father Wendimu would have bled out without him. Assefa will forever be a hero to the children. Sometimes they ask me to tell them the story before bedtime. They love hearing about something turning out well for a change.” She stood. Asked if I was finished with my bunna. I nodded. She took the dirty cups and began to walk with them toward the door. Just before exiting the room, she turned back, her expression grimly set. “Dawit wasn’t so lucky. He got into a fight with a local boy over a girl and was knifed to death on the road to Sar Midir. His cousin found him the next morning. Father Wendimu wept like a baby at the news.” And then, just like that, Makeda walked out.
She hadn’t asked why Assefa had tried to hang himself. Perhaps I’d be saved from that one. Instead, I’d been dismissed. Rightfully so. So much for wearing out the welcome mat.
The room felt eerie as soon as she left. There were ghosts here with me, and I wasn’t at all sure they were friendly. I hastily made my way out to the yard. The children were playing in teams, kicking and running after soda cans. Dust swirled everywhere they ran. It covered their worn sneakers, the bottoms of their pant legs. I kept my distance. Watching children play had made me a little anxious ever since my abortive Sunday school days, when I’d ruined any chances I’d had to join the other kids with my whirling and flapping.
I found a bench and sat down, closing my eyes. The children’s excited cries pierced the void in interesting patterns. I sat for what felt like an eternity, sat long after the sounds diminished and the sun grew warm enough to bead my upper lip with sweat. So lost was I in trying to fathom the reality of strangers who’d been no stranger to Assefa, of Assefa himself, who’d become even more of a stranger to me, that when Father Wendimu came to sit beside me, he had to poke my shoulder to get my attention.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
Opening my eyes, I sighed. “I thought I’d understand him better if I came here. But now ....”
“Listen, dear, Makeda is shaken, too. She begged me to extend her apologies for leaving you like that. She is too proud a woman to cry in front of you.” Thinking back to my own tears, I wondered if I suffered a deficit of pride. He cleared his throat. “I, too, was distressed to hear about Assefa. I have met many broken souls in my life, but I can’t recall any one of them who tried to take his own life.”
“No,” I said urgently, turning to face him. “Please don’t think of him like that. I was terribly angry with him, but he’d fallen into the abyss.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
What an idiot I was. How could I imagine anyone normal would understand what I meant? “He—I think he was torn between two worlds.”
Father Wendimu sat with that a bit, rubbing his forehead. “Ah. Yes. I can imagine that. Do you think he is going to be okay?”
Words began tumbling out of my mouth. “I hope so. He’s a good man, really he is. He just got caught in something that he couldn’t ... he didn’t know how to ... if I thought for a moment he wouldn’t be okay, I couldn’t stand it. I’m just hoping that a change of scene will help. I know sometimes it can. I felt ever so much better after I moved to SoCal. I’m sure it will take him time. He’ll probably have to take it slowly, but ....”
Father Wendimu stared at me curiously. I flushed. “There was a reason he loved you, wasn’t there?”
I hung my head. “I don’t know about that. I did a lousy job at loving him. It was a selfish kind of love, really. I loved him for how he made me feel.”
Father Wendimu raised an eyebrow. “Oh that. Excuse me for blundering into territory I know nothing about. Isn’t that how all love begins?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, pleating the hem of my blouse. “I’ve never gotten to the middle.”
The next morning I woke to the sound of a cock crowing outside Makeda’s window. I was in her room. In her bed. She’d insisted on sleeping on an unsuitably narrow cot with one of the children and hadn’t listened to my objections. I’d gotten a sense right then of how stubborn she could be. I’d gone to sleep enveloped in the cinnamon scent of her, dreaming amaranthine butterflies with flecks of black and gold on their wings. Now she poked her head into my room, a purple and black shama flowing over her shoulders. “Would you like to take a walk with me?” she said, awfully cheerily, I thought, for the stroke of dawn, and an odd contrast to her saturnine mood of the night before.
I threw on a pair of jeans and an orange Caltech Beavers hoodie and met her in the yard. The sun was barely rising, and a heavy dew gave the handles of
the childrens’ tricycles an iridescent glow. I closed the rusty iron gate behind me, wincing as it creaked, and breathed in the scents of burning fires, animal dung, and the balsamic hint of what I later learned was wild hagenia nearby.
The dirt road felt soft and forgiving under my sandaled feet as I paced myself to match the swaying gait of my hiking partner. We said very little, with Makeda pointing out the spot where she picked her roses. The elegance of their display was in sharp contrast to the wayward shrubs surrounding them. A small red bird with a blue beak swept past, just inches from my nose. I gasped, and Makeda cried out, “A firefinch,” her laughter like wind chimes. We approached a field of maize where sheep and cattle stood like stolid sentries. I could hardly contain myself. Navigating the tall, scratchy plants, I made my way to a particularly appealing brown and white cow, but ended up edging away from her implacable brown gaze, deciding she hated me for eating spicy beef wat just the night before. But when I backed away toward the road, a lamb appeared out of nowhere, full of ridiculous exuberance. I could sense Makeda watching in amusement as I matched its frolicking, my breasts bouncing as I ran after it until it disappeared around a curve in the road.
Panting, I resumed my place by Makeda’s side. She mused aloud, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a grown woman with such play in her. If you would stay with us, the children would fall in love with you.”
We both fell silent at her unlucky choice of words. We walked more quickly now and soon approached the bank of a shallow-running river. Water spilled with a pleasing splash over gray and cream and salmon-colored rocks. Spreading trees with flaming red flowers lined the bank. Makeda waded into the soft soil and plucked one of the flowers. Climbing back up with infinite grace, she handed it to me. “We call it the tree of Dire Dawa.”