by Sharon Heath
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“That it comes from Dire Dawa.”
We shared a laugh.
On our way back to the orphanage, we detoured through a small farmers’ market spread out before a line of little shops on a haphazardly paved street. Makeda stopped to speak to one of the vendors, a young man with flashing eyes and acne scars and a narrow beard that nearly came to a point. I noticed a couple of old men seated on faded stools. They were playing a game that involved the metal tops of beer bottles and a rough piece of cardboard with checkers drawn onto it.
One of the men, skinny and wrinkled and with skin a mottle of copper and dark chocolate, grinned a partly toothless smile at me and gestured across the board. “Dama.”
I repeated after him like a young child. “Dama.”
He nodded with pleasure.
Makeda joined us. The musical clicks and slides of Amharic flew around me like the chattering of blue jays. She turned to me at one point and translated, “They would invite us to join them, but one is happily beating the other for the first time in his life.”
I grinned and motioned for them to continue. Makeda and I left the market carrying creased, old brown paper bags filled with bananas and prickly pears and two bottles of Coke that Makeda had bought at one of the little shops.
We ended up gorging on the fruit at the edge of a teff field, waving away bees and wasps that tried to horn in on our feast. Gwennie Fiske would have fainted if she’d seen me take long gulps of sugary soda after each mouthful of the slightly biting raspberry-ish cactus fruit, but Gwennie Fiske was nine thousand miles away.
We made a little ceremony of burying the thorny skins of our fruit, lest someone come by and step on them. As I was patting my own mound, Makeda murmured in such a soft voice I had to go over it in my mind to register what she’d said, “Isn’t he beautiful?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, he is.”
I think we were both stunned by the sudden intimacy.
“What happened?” she asked. “Please, I need to know why he tried to hurt himself. You can’t come out here, tell me half of it and just leave me hanging.” She realized as soon as she said it that the word choice was terrible. A vagrant coil of shiny black hair had sprung free from her shama. She tucked it back with trembling fingers.
“You don’t want to know.”
But she was implacable. “You must tell me.”
So I told her about Assefa’s violation of me and Stanley’s shocking intervention.
She looked at me as if I’d let loose one of Sister Flatulencia’s silent but deadlies. Her words crawled out thickly, as if each one cost her everything she had. “Sometimes I cannot sleep. Particularly when something very evil has happened that day. And sometimes I have to face the evil in my own heart. I wished you ill even before I knew you. I begrudged that you could have what I could not. But now—that teacher of yours is a very evil man to have driven such a good one to nearly cut his life short.”
I felt that my heart would burst from my chest. “But Assefa isn’t just good. He was cruel to me. Forcing me.”
I saw a shudder work its way from her head to her shoulders to her hands. She grabbed hold of her netela as if to stop it. I knew she was recalling being forced herself. Violated. Cut.
“Do you ever think of the mantis? Is the act of eating her mate pleasurable to her? Does she enjoy it even more seeing the suffering of her prey?”
I buried my face in my hands. “Stop! Can’t you see I—”
But without ceremony, she’d pushed up from the ground and was walking away from me. Her predilection for walking off was starting to resemble Sammie’s penchant for hanging up on me whenever we argued back in the early days.
I rose and stumbled after her, cursing myself for saying too much.
“Oh,” she cried, turning back to face me, “what a fool I am. I thought I understood you. I looked you up on my computer last night after you went to sleep. You are the one who kept going when the others thought you were wrong. You have an idea that might save our species. I tell myself, ‘This woman has come here to see if there is a claim on the man she wants to marry.’ Now I see you have come here to assuage your guilt. Yours and that of the ugly man you call your mentor. Why should I believe what you say? That Assefa tried to rape you? Please. He could have any woman. Why would he ...?”
I lashed out, “He couldn’t have you.”
And then she threw her head back and laughed. Her laughter was harsh, so low-pitched it sounded almost masculine. It was not an infectious laugh. It did not welcome me to join in.
As we marched along, her bark-laugh turned into tears And then she stopped, her face goopy with snot. I wanted her to say something, but she just stared at me.
“What?” I pleaded.
“Do you have any idea what I would have given to bear Assefa’s child? To lie with him?”
Without thinking, the words popped out. “But you couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been good at all. It would have been incest.”
I didn’t see it coming. Before I could move, she’d pulled her arm back and brought it forward with ferocity, slapping me in the face. The force of it threw me back a few steps. “How dare you!” she cried. And then, “What do you mean?”
My face stung so hard that I couldn’t stop blinking, but that wasn’t what hurt the most. I couldn’t believe what I’d just done. I’d promised Assefa I’d never tell anyone. And then to tell her? There was something terribly wrong with me. First my Nobel speech about my grandfather’s balls. Now all this.
How dishonest I’d been to judge Stanley H. Fiske. What was it Jane Goodall had told Serena? She admonished me not to expect any creature to behave better than I do in my worst fantasies.
“What do you mean?” Makeda insisted, arms akimbo, her shama completely askew.
I bowed my head. “Forgive me. That was terrible. I had no right.”
“You had better damned well finish what you began.”
I shook my head. I’d dug myself a grave; I might as well jump into it. “Assefa only found out when he came back to the States. He didn’t tell me until after he .... His family was afraid he’d return here. To you.”
She stared at me, her face a map of anguish.
“His father. Your mother. His father swore it was only a few times.”
“Who are you?” she cried. “The devil? You come here—why? To rip my heart from me?” And then she crumpled, reaching out helplessly toward my arm and taking me down with her. We knelt awkwardly on our knees, and I held her as she sobbed. I was weeping myself. Her body felt so much lighter than I would have imagined. My own felt like something I wished I could crawl out of.
Plato was wrong. The truth is not an abstraction. Jesus was wrong, too. It will not necessarily set you free.
Stanley had once told me that he couldn’t possibly believe in any God who’d create a world where absolute innocence and absolute cruelty co-exist. But wasn’t that what the universe itself was?
In sharing what I’d heard from Assefa in confidence, I’d turned another woman’s world inside out and bound myself to her in a way I wouldn’t have imagined. I’ve heard it said that saving someone’s life makes you responsible for him or her forever, but no one had told me about the impact of wrecking one. I cried inconsolably alongside Makeda over the terrible thing I’d done.
The remainder of our walk back to the orphanage took place in silence, with me having to run to keep up with her. But when we reached the rusty gate with its hopeful flag, I mumbled that I’d be back in a while. She nodded without looking at me, and I kept going. I trudged long enough that my feet began to hurt and nothing was recognizable. I stopped to dig pebbles from my shoes and rose to find an elderly couple approaching, she bearing a bright green and orange basket of bananas on her head and he leaning heavily on a gnarled stick. Very dark in visage and, seemingly, mood, they exchange not one word with each other as they walked, nor did they acknowledge my presence as they
plodded past me. I imagined them as an eternally unhappy married couple. I knew that many marriages in rural Ethiopia were arranged. It was sobering how much the quality of our relationships depended on chemical connections with one another. Put two human substances together and you’d get either a caustic or magic. With Assefa I thought it had been one, but it had turned out to be the other.
It wasn’t long before I found myself in an informal enclave of roughly built huts surrounded by trees and forming a horseshoe-shaped clearing of hesitant grass. Someone had lit a fire nearby. I couldn’t see it, but I took in with a deep breath the sharp aroma of burning teff. It smelled wonderful, but stung my eyes. Pointed gray-thatched roofs topped the huts here, and I saw a woman smiling at me from one of the doorways. She wore a netela with a blue-toned border in an intricate diamond design.
“Sälam,” she called out, and I responded in kind. Then she tilted her head and rattled off a long series of words in Amharic, which I of course failed to understand.
I shrugged helplessly back at her, asking, “Do you speak English?” though I doubted she did. In turn, she shrugged, held up a finger, then disappeared, only to emerge a moment later bearing a somewhat battered silver tray with two steaming cups of bunna. I hardly needed much encouragement to sit down with her on the scrabbled earth. We had our own little coffee klatch, she speaking to me, gesturing excitedly, in Amharic, and me speaking to her, equally animated, in English. I obviously had no idea what she was saying, nor she me, but we had a jolly time, her generosity washing away, at least momentarily, my awareness of my awfulness.
She wasn’t a particularly attractive woman, her nose rather beaky for an Ethiopian and her teeth so large they looked liable to bite through her lips at any moment, but her honey-toned skin was flawlessly smooth, her gesticulating hands as graceful as a ballerina’s, and her smile a winsome child’s. After I downed the last of my cup, a white goat approached us and butted its head against my cheek until the woman shushed it away, clapping her perfect hands so sharply that the sound of it rent the air like thunder. The goat skipped off awkwardly, and I guffawed. The woman looked at me in surprise, and I wondered whether such a loud laugh was impolite in this part of the world.
But I couldn’t avoid Makeda forever. I was going to have to return to the orphanage. Thanking the woman profusely—at least I knew how to pronounce Betam ashmesugenalew—I knelt and reached toward the tray, but she gestured for me to stop, instead planting a kiss on each of my cheeks and whispering, “Minem Aydelem.” Her hair smelled of bunna and frankincense underneath its white shama. I left her without looking back, her kindness a warming cloak across my shoulders.
The gate to the orphanage was wide open when I returned. Beside it stood a cab with its motor running. Its driver appeared suddenly in front of me and walked hastily past, the whites of his eyes so bloodshot I wondered what was wrong with him.
Entering the yard, I saw Makeda sitting on one of the colored benches, dandling a baby I learned was named Eldina on her lap.
I approached with sagging shoulders. “Makeda, I .... How are you doing?”
She replied without expression, “I am doing what I was born to do.” She cupped a hand around a drooling Eldina’s chin.
“But ....” I felt inhibited by the presence of the little girl. “I’m so sorry .... You must feel—”
She interrupted, waving an impatient hand, “Feel? You Americans with your feelings! I have learned from these bébés that it is a conceit to believe that my suffering is worse than anyone else’s.” I involuntarily took a step back. But now she was gesturing with her head toward the main building, her voice as smooth and cold as stone, “You have a visitor.”
Oh, God. Had Melky come already to fetch me? Though a part of me wished I’d left twenty-four hours ago, the timing felt stark and terrible.
The feet that took me into the building moved as if stuck in molasses, my heart as heavy as lead. That—and the human mind’s dependency on context—delayed my response time. Father Wendimu was seated facing me, and opposite him was the back of a man with light chestnut hair. That man turned and rose as he undoubtedly noted Father Wendimu looking up toward me. It took me several seconds to register that it was Adam limping around barchumas and mesobs to get to me.
His arms wrapped around me as tightly as they had when I was a girl of twelve, whirling and flapping over my failure to understand Sartre or Rousseau. I let myself collapse into his embrace and took a nice long whiff of his Campbell’s Chicken Soup B.O.
I was laughing and crying at the same time. Father Wendimu had left the room. I knew, because when I pushed away finally from Adam’s warm hug, only a second cup of bunna on the nearest mesob—alongside a worn black and white photo—remained as evidence that he’d been here.
“Adam, what in the world are you doing here?”
He shook his head. “I could ask you the same question. When Stanley called Serena to see how you were doing and she told him you were traveling on your own to Ethiopia, we were all worried sick. While everyone else dithered, I bought a ticket.” He spread his hands in frustration, reminding me of the old days. “Fleur, what got into you? Don’t you realize how dangerous it can be to travel around as a single, young American woman in Africa?”
Evading his accusing eyes, I reached instinctively for the photograph, took one look, and collapsed onto the nearest barchuma. Assefa and Makeda must have been about five or six when the photo was taken—it was surely they; I fancied I saw a similarity in their grins. They were standing in front of a twisty-trunked olive tree, holding hands and smiling impishly at whoever had held the camera.
“Fleur, what is it?”
“Adam, you’re right. I am a stupid, stupid person. I hate myself! I really do.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Fleur
THE DINNER THAT Adey Gatimo served us that evening was unusually delicious, but that might not have been the only reason I was behaving like such a bellygod at the meal, nervously scooping up so many mouthfuls of wat with my little rolls of injera that I could sense Father Wendimu and the three children perched around our mesob eying me with no little astonishment.
Once we’d all seated ourselves in the dining room, we set about rhapsodizing over the sunset we’d observed before we came inside. Unfettered by intrusive cityscapes, the vast sky of Tikil Dingay was free to reveal its treasures without restraint. I knew that many of the world’s people worshiped sky gods and goddesses. In my teens I’d developed a particular fondness for the Sumerian Inanna, also known as the Queen of Heaven, an appellation that was later extended to the mother of Jesus. The image of Inanna being stripped naked in her descent to the Underworld and then managing to come back up again had helped me no end after I’d made such a fool of myself in my Nobel speech. I needed her now.
Tikil Dingay’s sunset was like a celebration of the Queen of Heaven’s re-emergence with a brilliant display of raspberry, amaranth, and heliotrope fireworks. As if preparing for her comely brown head, pale pink clouds were plumped across the sky like royal pillows, each dramatically outlined in near-blinding white light.
As we regretfully went inside, Father Wendimu had commented, “I think of a sky like that as a God sky. Reminds me that I inhabit a mystery I will never comprehend.”
I had an urge to bring up Inanna’s story right then, but thought better of it. Instead, as we settled onto our barchumas, I set about explaining that an intense sunset like this one required at least a few high clouds, since the sun’s rays are less dissipated by the lower atmosphere, where the air has more particles.
“Of course, pure sunlight is seen by us as white, encompassing all the visible colors of the electromagnetic spectrum. The dissipation of light as it enters the earth’s atmosphere is called ‘Rayleigh scattering,’ discovered by a Nobel physicist who was born John William Strutt, but was later called Lord Rayleigh. Go figure. Anyway, call him Strutt or call him Rayleigh, he found that amazing sunsets like this are the result of photon
s penetrating objects with much smaller particles than their own wavelengths. It’s amazing what can happen when something large encounters something smaller.”
Maybe I should have brought up Inanna after all. My scientific comments were met with a uniformly blank stare. By all but Adam, who was seemingly more interested in smiling at Makeda than paying attention to anything I’d said. Unsurprisingly, Makeda herself had made the most perfunctory of eye contact with me. As the conversation shifted to what the children had learned that day, I contended with a large force of my own. Why was I so overly conscious of Adam sitting at the next barchuma? On his lap sat young Elfenesh, who kept reaching over to tickle the tummy of Kanchi, who was sitting on the lap of Makeda. With each tickle, Makeda and Adam laughed just as enthusiastically as the little ones, but their laughter was much saltier.
My mind slipped down mossy steps into a dank grotto, where a familiar beast with bulging green eyes emerged from the shadows and sank its teeth into me.
Adam wasn’t just anyone. He was my oldest friend. Everything that came before him was prehistory. When we first met, I was intellectually precocious but emotionally illiterate, confined to expressing myself by pinching, whirling, screaming, and flapping. Hired by Mother to tutor me in philosophy, art, and physics, he had the sensitivity to understand I also needing tutelage in the language of feelings. It was no wonder it was his face I imagined when I first learned how to make mini-explosions in my tweeter after my episode with The Boy Who Called Me Beautiful.
But now I sensed Father Wendimu’s eyes on me. I realized I was shoveling food into my mouth at a speed that should be illegal. Slipping off my barchuma, I turned to Adam. “I need to talk to you. Outside.” Looking back, I’m embarrassed by my rudeness, which the considerably more gracious Makeda leapt to excuse with a hasty, “No, no, you are guests—please,” on the heels of Adam’s flustered, “Fleur, we really should help clean up.”
He vented his irritation with me as soon as we cleared the doorway, the shadows of benches and tricycles eerie now in the light of an orange half moon. The sound effects of a ranting hyena didn’t help. Adam barked at me, “What the hell was that about?”