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  TIZITA

  The Fleur Trilogy, Book 2

  A Novel

  by

  Sharon Heath

  Copyright © 2017 Sharon Heath

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, with the exception of brief quotations in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. While some of the place names may be real, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Author photograph by Marcella Kerwin.

  Cover Photo: Hamar Woman with Copper Bracelets, David Schweitzer, Getty Images, under a Getty Images Content License Agreement.

  Excerpts from Waiting for Godot copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc.; Copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited (U.S. and Canada).

  Excerpts from Waiting for Godot copyright © Faber and Faber Ltd. by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited (Non-exclusive English language permission excluding U.S. and Canada).

  Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

  For Eve, who pulled me through.

  Table of Contents

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Part II

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Acknowledgements

  More Books by Sharon Heath

  About the Author

  Tizita (pronounced tizz-i-tah): an Amharic word for the interplay of memory, loss and longing, sometimes conveyed in an Ethiopian or Eritrean style of music or song of the same name.

  The tears of the world are a constant quantity.

  For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops.

  (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

  Part I

  Until the day breaks

  and the shadows flee,

  turn, my beloved,

  and be like a gazelle

  or like a young stag

  on the rugged hills.

  (Song of Songs 2:17)

  Chapter One

  Fleur

  NOTHING LASTS FOREVER. I hate to say it, but someday our dependable sun will kiss goodbye its penchant for fiery display to become first a red giant and then a white dwarf, finally shrinking into a cold clump of carbon floating through the ether. Even black holes evaporate, though a really big one can take a trillion years to die. Here on planet earth, where an organ roughly the size and shape of a clenched fist serves as gatekeeper between life and death, species as diverse as white-cheeked gibbons and black-footed ferrets manage about a billion and a half heartbeats in a lifetime. We humans do only slightly better, the healthiest of habits winning us no more than three billion beats before we succumb to the void once and for all.

  Which is only one of the reasons I was having trouble with the foie gras. It was Adam’s girlfriend, the enviably beautiful Stephanie Seidenfeld, who first introduced me to the dish not long after Adam had transformed from being my childhood tutor to, well, so many other things. I’d been sitting across from Stephanie and Adam in a red-leather booth at a bustling restaurant not too far from Caltech, nervously prattling on about my Reed Middle School classmates, who seemed to despise me for everything from my sorry social skills to my alacrity at algebraic equations and my ever-burgeoning breasts. Our waiter, who asked for our orders with one of those fake grins I associated with Little Red Riding Hood’s pretend-granny, interrupted my litany of grievances. Eager to get that toothsome smile away from our table, I leapt in with a request for my standard Angel Hair Diavolo. Stephanie ordered the goose liver pâté and a small dinner salad, and Adam hemmed and hawed until Phony Granny began to show his true colors, snappishly demanding, “It’s a busy night, man. Do you need another minute?”

  Adam forestalled his departure with a hasty, “No, wait. I’ll have the Pizza Vegetariana.” I gave myself over to pure hatred toward the waiter for making Adam turn crimson with embarrassment.

  Once our food arrived, I couldn’t help but notice the zeal with which Stephanie dispatched her glutinous loaf, pausing a few times to dot her coral lips with her napkin while the busboy refilled our water glasses. It was only when Adam described the force-feeding of the goose killed for her pleasure that I emptied the contents of my stomach onto the white tablecloth. Not exactly what Mother would call comme il faut, but I suppose I might be excused, being at the time only a green girl—alas, in more ways than one—of thirteen.

  Now, here I was—eight years, six months, two hours, and fifteen minutes later and twenty miles west of that Pasadena pizzeria—merely a shade less green than I’d been then and faced with the same abominable dish, this time presented with considerably more panache at a onetime drug rehabilitation center turned pricey hotel and restaurant, just a stone’s throw from the Santa Monica beach pier. The occasion: an intimate celebration of my turning twenty-one on a birthday shared with Josef Stalin, Jane Fonda, Benjamin Disraeli, and Frank Zappa. And if the astrologers out there would care to explain what we five have in common, I’m listening.

  My dinner companions this time were my best friend for nearly ever Sammie, her boyfriend Jacob, and my fiancé Assefa. Assefa was due to set off for Ethiopia the following day in search of his father, who’d gone missing with his childhood friend and co-researcher Zalelew Mekonin, presumably somewhere on the dusty road between Gondar and Aksum. Under the circumstances, none of us felt much like celebrating, but Assefa—nothing if not a respecter of ritual—had insisted that we had to mark my coming of age. Knowing how much anxiety he was pushing aside on my behalf, how could I say no?

  The Casa del Mar’s dining room was fragrant with the scent of fresh pine. We were four days away from Christmas, and the staff had gone all-out, decorating the imposing fir tree in the corner with so many colored lights and shiny ornaments that I couldn’t help but secretly pinch my thigh every time I thought of the homeless veterans and sunburnt psychotics I knew were encamped on the beach only a few blocks away. There’d been a time when I hadn’t understood why ample spaces like my father’s old Main Line Philadelphia estate couldn’t be made to accommodate those without homes of their own, but that was before I’d discovered the sacred status assigned to private property. The things people did to fend off the void were quite irrational and never failed to amaze me.

  Assefa’s words were slightly slurred, his capacity to hold his liquor in some kind of inverse ratio to his y
ears spent in a tiny village near Gondar. He might have been raised by a couple of lapsed Christians, but he’d absorbed the ethos of his predominately Muslim community and was generally sparing in his alcohol consumption. Over the past several months I’d been suffused with gratitude more than a few times that he’d been brought to America before succumbing to the temptation to belong to the local majority, the price of admission a mere utterance of the words, “There is no god apart from God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”

  In that respect, Muslims had a lot in common with my deceased Father, whose insistence that there was no god apart from God, with Jesus as his son, seemed to ignore the fact that heaven has been rather overpopulated with gods and goddesses ever since primates began walking upright. It wasn’t exactly out of character that Father hadn’t even begun to consider that the Egyptian baboon-headed god Thoth, the Bushman dreaming-god Mantis, the many-armed Hindu goddess of destruction Kali, or even Jesus himself, for that matter, might actually feel less passionately one-sided about abortion than he and his Cackler followers.

  But Father’s crusade against abortion, let alone his attempts to discredit my own small efforts to advance our knowledge of the physical world, was far from my mind as Assefa urged me on, quite unfairly I thought, with a breathtaking batting of his thick lashes, “Tayshte ... taste it. Look at our dishes.” He gestured toward his own empty plate, which looked as if it had been licked clean. “You’ve got to at least try. It’ll be an insult to Antoine if you don’t.”

  Sammie, the traitor, joined in. Predictably, her original British accent was back in full swing after just one glass of Deutz Brut. She waved an expansive hand, the olive cheeks she’d inherited from her Jewish father and Indian mother glowing a rich burnt sienna. “C’mon, Fleur Beurre, Assefa’s right. How’s Antoine going to be motivated to keep delivering more goodies if we send your foie gras back untouched? You can do this, girl.” She licked her lips in search of any last little bits. “Your heart’ll forgive the cholesterol just this once. Antoine’s foie gras is brilliant.”

  Silently cursing Antoine, I managed a weak grin.

  Antoine was the reason we were dining at the Casa del Mar in the first place. Assefa’s next-door neighbor in their side-by-side duplex in Carthay Circle, he’d recently graduated from L.A.’s campus of Le Cordon Bleu with an offer of a job as sous-chef at the Casa. He’d promised Assefa he’d sneak us an assortment of yummy freebies for my coming of age party, and the pâté was evidently the first on his list.

  I’d met Assefa himself only six months before and had been bedazzled by him from the start. We were an odd, but complementary match—he a brilliant intern with an interest in cardiology and a background in literature as sophisticated as Sammie’s; me a whiz at physics, list-making, and cat quirks, and pretty hopeless at everything else.

  Despite the fact that Assefa was living at that time with his parents, a mere half mile away from Caltech, we didn’t cross paths until his mother Abeba came to work for my own overcommitted mother, babysitting and tutoring the orphaned Cesar Jesus de Maria Santo Domingo Marisco after the tragic death of my old nanny, who’d adopted the child when he was barely out of diapers. Mother taking on Cesar was just one instance of God’s taste for irony. When I was little, my mother hadn’t been able to get away fast enough from the unwanted children my father kept saving from the devil abortionists, yet here she was, on a fast jog toward forty, landed with full custodianship of one of them.

  Mother had found Abeba through an employment referral list offered by Caltech. As she put it at the time, “I have to assume that anyone who advertises her services to professors at the top science university in the country has to have more on the ball than your average undereducated nanny.” Looking forward with some curiosity to meeting a woman who could balance anything on a ball beyond a matchstick or a piece of lint, I felt an immediate affinity with Abeba when we were introduced, she warmly clasping my outreached hand in hers, which were surprisingly small and sealskin smooth.

  In a voice like wind chimes, she’d effused, “Ah, Fleur, I’ve been so eager to meet you. We two share a kinship in name, you know. I am a flower in Amharic; you are a flower in French.” As I saw myself bursting forth with petals somewhere in the French countryside, Abeba beckoned me toward Mother’s capacious kitchen. Pouring me a cup of the best coffee I’d ever tasted, she went on to share the name of her husband Achamyalesh, which she informed me translated as You Are Everything, as well as that of their only son Assefa, whose name, she told me, meant He Has Increased Our Family By Coming Into the World. You certainly couldn’t accuse the Ethiopians of minimalism.

  Abeba’s eyes positively glowed when she spoke of Achamyalesh. I learned soon enough that, like intelligent women the world over whose access to advanced education has been culturally constrained, she took particular pride in her husband’s achievements. She seemed oblivious to her own well-developed attributes, particularly her generosity and what Mother liked to call her “pull-out-all-the-stops enthusiasm.”

  While I’d never regretted moving away from Mother’s New York penthouse to the far humbler Pasadena cottage of my physics mentor Stanley H. Fiske and his sister Gwen halfway between my twelfth and thirteenth birthdays, I’d been touched when Mother had elected to forgo the joys of MoMA, the Met, and Mile End Deli to pack up the massive contents of her apartment and the remains of Father’s estate to move to nearby San Marino to comfort me after my Nobel debacle.

  Mother being Mother, always depending on one kind of group or another, it hadn’t been surprising that she’d brought with her to SoCal the retinue of angels with whom I’d grown up in Father’s Main Line mansion—Nana, Sister Flatulencia, Fayga, Dhani, Ignacio, as well as a decidedly seraphic No-Longer-a-Baby-Angelina and the rather devilish young Cesar.

  And me being me, it had been pretty predictable that I’d found a way to continue to sleep at the Fiskes’ once she arrived. The fact that Mother took it in good stride—filling her void with her Bill W. friends and her studies to become a librarian—wasn’t all that surprising. Neither one of us was in the habit of much mother-daughter intimacy. I’d bet money on her feeling a bit relieved when I made my excuse that Caltech was more convenient to the Fiskes’ bungalow than to her 12,000 square-foot Tudor-style home, just a hop and a skip from the Huntington Gardens. What I didn’t tell her was that her new digs bore more than a passing resemblance to Father’s sweeping Main Line grounds, and it would take more than a few angels to make it tolerable to live somewhere like that again.

  But once she’d introduced me to Abeba, I found myself detouring almost every afternoon to Mother’s on my way home from Caltech. Dispatching a noisily reluctant Cesar to his room to do his homework, Abeba would proceed to ply me with Ethiopian versions of after-school treats, regaling me all the while with stories about the remarkable Achamyalesh. Those visits were a godsend, especially on the days when my team and I had butted our heads for hours against some unyielding mathematical problem. Shoveling in handfuls of dabo kolo, crunchy nuggets of spice heaven that I learned to wash down with little sips of bunna—Ethiopia’s far superior antecedent to Starbucks’ finest—I couldn’t help but grow curiouser and curiouser about Abeba’s other half.

  Who wouldn’t want to meet someone named You Are Everything? Especially when said all-inclusive soul was an African anthropologist who, according to his wife, avidly kept up his research despite being reduced to driving a cab in the U.S.? My curiosity was rewarded soon enough, heralded on one of those typical SoCal June-gloom days that left you despairing that summer would ever come. I was mounting the Malibu-tiled steps leading up to Mother’s front porch, appreciating their vibrant design as only someone who’d never lived in the house could, when Abeba dramatically flung open the front door. She clasped my elbow and excitedly tugged me so impatiently into Mother’s vaulted-ceilinged living room that I almost tripped on the Persian rug in the foyer. “Oh, Fleur, it is such good news I have. The Anthropology Dean at Pasadena Cit
y College has read Achamyalesh’s VITA. She is going to give him a chance in their evening public lecture series.” Abeba’s mood was contagious. I skipped after her into the kitchen, where she automatically reached for a pot and poured me a cup of bunna, nearly spilling it in her enthusiasm. “He will be speaking in just two weeks on the work he has been doing on the cultural folklore surrounding the Ark of the Covenant.”

  Thanks to Adam’s thoroughness as a tutor, I already knew about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s claims that the cask containing God’s covenant with the Jewish people had been in their possession near the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion at Aksum ever since the Ethiopian Menelik, son of the Queen of Sheba and the Biblical Solomon, brought the Ark back home after a visit to his wise father.

  I tended to greet stories of wise fathers with a certain skepticism. Personally, I’d never met one. As for the Ark itself, I’d been fascinated by its storied contents ever since I’d learned that, according to Biblical historians, the Ten Commandments were preceded by another set of ten precepts called the Ritual Decalogue, which included such pithy prescriptions for a righteous life as “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.”

  The controversy surrounding the whereabouts of the Ark spoke to who owned the truth, who owned a special connection with God. But I hadn’t yet met a soul who actually lived by God’s Commandments. Oh sure, I didn’t know many murderers. (None, to be honest.) But even the smaller taboo against coveting seemed to put our species on the spot. I couldn’t possibly enumerate all the physics colleagues I’d met who’d told me they envied my brilliance (read Nobel). And every time Apple released a new iPhone, the amount of coveting that went on would certainly have driven Moses to despair.

  I set Mother’s zebra-festooned, Hermes “Africa” espresso cup onto its saucer and asked excitedly, “Oh, Abeba, do you think Achamyalesh would mind if I attended his talk?” Little did I know I’d played right into her hands. I learned later that it was Abeba who’d persuaded Assefa to accompany his father to the lecture. The rest, as they say, was history.