Tizita Page 17

  Joining him at the dented front bumper, I asked, “Is there really no way?”

  I offered to open the hood, but he said with some asperity, “No. Don’t bother. It was just like this the last time I tried.” He reached into his pocket for a wrinkled handkerchief and swabbed his forehead. “Somehow I was hoping you might have brought some American luck with you. I know I should be more grateful for this old bus. It’s gotten me into town more times than I can remember. But now”—he stuffed the handkerchief away again and kicked the already mangled bumper with one last flare of anger, muttering, “It is like me—barely fit for the junkyard. I will have to ask Yohannes to fix it the next time he comes for a cup of bunna and a game of chess. And then I will owe him.” He shrugged. “But that is Ethiopia.”

  Our strides automatically adjusted themselves into an easy unison as we set out on the dusty road. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a vehicle in sight, though we passed an occasional whitewashed chikka-walled house and even a couple of tan-colored villas hiding behind bright explosions of orange bougainvillea. I marveled that a shabby town like Tikil Dingay could house at least a few families that had managed to lift up from the heavy gravity of poverty.

  Sadness washed over me that I hadn’t been able to find Bekele and Iskinder. Father Wendimu had assured me they were probably alive—possibly in Addis Ababa, to which war had driven most of Tikil Dingay’s version of a middle class. I’d reflected at the time that it said much that he and Makeda had chosen to stay.

  I saw Father Wendimu fetch his handkerchief from his pocket and mop his forehead. The day was becoming as hot as the one on which I’d first arrived. I began to ask, “Why does she—” but he interrupted, waving his cloth to the left of us, where a shower of brilliant purple flowers spilled from a stand of handsome trees at the top of the hillside.

  “Hagenia,” he pronounced. “We use it sometimes when we can’t get our hands on Prazinquantel. Damned tapeworms are the bane of my existence. Well, one of them, anyway.” He made a wry face. “Distillation of hagenia is only partially effective, but we do what we can. Sometimes it’s barely better than nothing. On the plus side, though, I’ve never had it kill a child. What is your oath? ‘First, do no harm’?”

  We continued on awhile in silence, except for the sounds of our shoes scraping pebbles and dry bark, the buzz of bush crickets, and the piercing trill of starlings flying in formation overhead. This was something I’d never get over. The sounds of the Ethiopian countryside were a universe away from the leaf blowers, humming traffic, and screaming sirens of Southern California. I imagined Fleur by my side, inhaling the scents of burning frankincense and fruity-smelling leaves crushed by our sandals. The cheap-soapy smell of hyena dung would surely drive her mad with delight. But then I caught myself, my heart as leaden as a sack of teff flour. Fleur would never join me here in my homeland. And even though we would not be together again at all, my notion that I had cut down my hanging man was the height of absurdity.

  I tried to summon interest in what Father Wendimu was saying. He was speaking about Yohannes, the cab driver who’d brought Abat to us on the third day I was here. Not only had Yohannes turned out to be the cousin of the man who’d driven me to Tikil Dingay, but was, according to my father, the nephew of Jerusalem, the woman who’d helped Enat care for our home in my first years of life. I remembered nothing of her, but her name caused me to reflect on the many ways my people had colonized themselves with Jewish mythology. After Abat had spoken of her, I’d reminded myself to say something about this to Sammie’s Jacob when my father and I got back to the States.

  That was when I was still imagining I’d be returning to Southern California. I had been so overjoyed that Abat and Zalelew were safe that nothing else mattered, not even the disappointment written across Father’s face that his project of a lifetime had been thwarted by politics—lord only knew, Fleur would commiserate with that—nor his obvious discomfort whenever Makeda came into the room. I had tried to draw him out about that, tried right up to the eve of our planned drive back to Bole Airport for our hastily booked flight. We’d been sitting outside after the others had gone to bed, the high-pitched cry of a distant cheetah sending chills up and down my arms. I asked him with a fake casualness: “Do you remember Makeda when she was little?”

  “No,” he said, his shoulder twitching almost imperceptibly. “Not so much.” How could that be true?

  “Do you know what happened to her parents?” I sought his eyes. “To her?” He shook his head. There was such terror in his expression that I could not bear to tell him, but that didn’t stop me from wondering what terrible thing had stopped my father from asking what had happened to Demeke and Shewa Geteye. Why was he treating the daughter of his best friend like a stranger?

  What a couple of tap dancers we were, eventually distracting ourselves with a conversation about Ethiopia’s sorry relations with Somalia and Eritrea under a star-filled canopy that cared nothing of nations. All the while, I carried on my own rant, but internally, deciding right then that I would not return to the U.S. with Abat. If I could travel all this way to find my father, only to be met with such palpable dissembling, then I would be damned if I’d be guided by a need to satisfy his expatriate dreams.

  I stood and told him so on the spot. Except, with my anger curbed by a self-betraying cowardice, I put it that I wanted to take advantage of being here to soak in a bit more of the country of my birth. I could see that he was shocked.

  “But what of your school?”

  “I’ll deal with it when I get back.” Heat rising in my face, I’d added, “As far as they know, I’m still looking for my father.”

  He looked as though I’d slapped him. “Your mother will not like this. You will have to tell her yourself.”

  I promised him I would call her before his plane touched down in L.A. But I still hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it. Instead, here I was walking into town with the bonhomic Father Wendimu, who hummed under his breath as we continued along the pebbly road. We reached a bend and found ourselves approaching what looked like an Ethiopian version of the farmers markets of Pasadena and West Hollywood, though far more rough and enticing. Flanking the humble row of salmon, green, and cream painted shops where I’d first gotten my directions to the orphanage, netela-clad men and boys and women wearing colorfully embroidered kemis displayed a vast variety of goods overflowing from large wooden flats supported by wheelbarrows.

  Many of the men had flung off their Plakkies, which were strewn like a dance-step diagram on the dusty ground beneath the flats. Faded floral umbrellas stretched to a suddenly cloud-scudding sky, protecting vendors and perishables. Which didn’t stop the flies from making an incessant buzzing accompaniment to the lively patter of good-natured bargaining. After I was offered a slice of honeyed dabo from a young boy’s colorful flat ukhaat moot basket, I was tempted to taste everyone’s wares—my mouth watering at the fragrant ripe bananas, soft lab cheese wrapped in banana leaves, the spiced beef jerky that was called Quwanta.

  But Father Wendimu wanted to introduce me to everyone, and before I knew it, we’d had our goods bundled in plastic bags and I was rushing to catch up with him as he pushed forward into the store where I had purchased my Coke and map of Amara. The screen door, rent by holes large enough to admit swarms of mosquitos, banged behind me just as I saw the skinny man behind the counter pass a white packet to Father Wendimu. Both of them glanced over at me, exchanged a meaningful look, and then Father Wendimu cleared his throat rather formally before asking for a couple of five pound bags of teff flour. I knew I had just witnessed an illegal transaction, and the wide-eyed shopkeeper had no way of knowing that I’d never tell. He looked only too relieved when Father Wendimu reached across the counter, clapped him on the shoulder, hefted up the two bags, and told him that, since we wouldn’t be able to carry much more on this trip, he’d probably be back again in a day or two. I caught him winking at the man just before I led the way out the door.

 
; Our conversation on the way back was far more serious. There is something sobering about carrying a heavy load. The sun had reached its zenith, and we kept stopping to swipe the sweat from our eyes. Father Wendimu suggested we take shelter under a stand of dobera glabra trees and make a little picnic of Coca-Cola and the kolo he’d bought, wrapped in paper cones. I was only too happy to take a rest, but wasn’t so thrilled when Father Wendimu mentioned that the wife of the man who’d sold us the teff flour had recently lost her oldest sister to AIDS.

  “It’s the anal sex, you know. That and the damned clitorectomies and Pharaoinic circumcisions.”

  “What’s a Pharaonic circumcision?” I laid down my kolo on top of one of the plastic bags.

  “You’re not familiar with it? You’re lucky. The fools remove the clitoris and labia, stretch the remaining skin across the vagina from each side, and stitch them together so it’s nice and tight for the women’s husbands. Of course, they have to keep doing it over and over again each time they have sex. You can imagine what a fertile fuel that’s provided for the conflagration of HIV throughout Africa.” He sighed. “It’s what happened to Makeda, but she managed to avoid the sex.”

  I stood and staggered to a nearby bush, vomiting up my dabo and kolo.

  When I returned, Father Wendimu looked abject. “What an idiot I am.”

  This was more information than Makeda had shared. If I’d thought the Hanging Man was intolerable, what of these millions of women whose chances died on crosses of ignorance and cruelty?

  When we got back, it was dark. I looked in on Makeda’s room, but her bedclothes were unwrinkled. She had to be with one of the children. I knew that many of them regularly suffered nightmares.

  That night, I had nightmares of my own. Fleur was a pale ghost haunting me through a disjointed series of images: back in Carthay Circle, clutching my sheets to her generous breasts, her eyes pooling with tears of hurt and accusation; skipping with Stanley across the one of Caltech’s manicured lawns, something I’d actually seen her do; shoving her back against a rusty protruding nail in her Nana’s closet. I’d not seen her do that myself, but I’d shuddered when she’d described to me this childhood practice of hers. It was this that made me wonder if she truly was an Asperger’s girl. Autistic or not, the professor on my psych rotation would definitely classify it as masochistic.

  I got up from my straw bed, nearly tripping over the protruding leg of Menelik as I exited the hut. His goat smell competed with the scent of jasmine. I felt impelled to light a cigarette. I’d resumed my adolescent habit in the past few days, this time smoking Nyalas rather than Marlboros. Enat would kill me if she knew.

  The acrid taste of smoke defeated the scents of jasmine, myrrh, even goat. I poked a finger through a smoke ring as a shooting star sped by. Who was the masochist, Fleur or me? My love of two women of an unusual fate kept me strung up on my own painful cross. Fleur, twice exceptional, condemned to be an outsider by birth and upbringing. Makeda, condemned to estrangement from her instincts, the swift slashes of an old woman’s knife guaranteeing she’d never know the carnal pleasure I’d imagined in all my foolish fantasies.

  Really, each of them was superior to me. Makeda, a flaming, sturdy Erythrina tree; Fleur, like one of her namesakes, a delicately nuanced rose, vulnerable to the vagaries of the wind. The harshest wind of all had been my phone call to her. I had been ice. I had not known how to announce my betrayal in any other way.

  I don’t know what time I returned to the hut and fell asleep, but I woke far too early, shooting up from my makeshift bed. The sun was just beginning to rise. It was way too early for such screaming. I ran outside.

  For a moment, I thought they were doing some odd dance. Hand to hand, moving in an ancient ritual. But my senses came to me, and I realized that Father Wendimu was struggling with a green-shirted boy who brandished something that glittered in the dawning sun. My body knew it was a knife before my mind fully realized it. With a life of their own, my legs propelled me forward, my ears ringing with the shouts of women.

  I saw the young man slash the neck of Father Wendimu, saw the blood spring up against his ebony skin like a crimson necklace. I leapt to grab the boy’s wrist and struggled to wrest the knife from him. For someone so skinny, he was surprisingly strong. I felt something caress my left hand. It took a moment for me to register the pain, which nearly bent me double. I pulled back my right hand and slammed his face with my fist, feeling satisfaction at the sound of bone shattering. The boy dropped to his knees. In my confusion, I wondered, Is he praying?

  But the knife was still in his hand. I kicked so hard that it literally flew through the air. The boy collapsed onto his side, and for a moment I didn’t care if I’d killed him. I turned anxiously toward Father Wendimu, but Adey had already reached him and was pressing her shama against his neck. I motioned to her and whipped off my shirt and held it firmly against a point between his carotid artery and his jugular vein. The blood was still springing up from my own wound, and Adey now pressed a pleat of her shama against my hand as I put full pressure on Father Wendimu’s neck. I realized I was shouting. “Don’t die on us! Don’t you dare die!” I was still too close to terror to trust my clinical assessment, but the wound seemed superficial enough. If he got stitched up and we could avoid infection, he might actually live.

  Makeda knelt beside me. I smelled the fear emanating from her pores. A quick glance confirmed she held the boy’s knife. Returning my gaze to Father Wendimu—who was blinking in confusion, as if he literally didn’t know what had hit him—I said, “We need to get him to a hospital.” The two women stared at me, and it occurred to me there was no hospital in Tikil Dingay.

  Adey cried mournfully, “A hospital is only in Assela.”

  I tried to reassure her, “I believe he will live.” I struggled to subdue my trembling. “But I will need your help.”

  I gestured with my head toward the boy, who lay curled in on himself just a few feet away.

  “I’m afraid he will live, too,” muttered Makeda, “but with a crooked nose. I warned Father Wendimu that his khat habit would attract danger like flies to shit.”

  I understood her rage, but hadn’t we chewed khat together only a few nights before? Despite the distraction, my critical care training kicked in. Showing Adey where to press, I rose and ran through the options. There was one. Only one. “Okay, then, we’ll start with Father Wendimu. Where’s the best place to clean this wound? I’ll need your help getting him up. I hope to God you have a decent suture pack.”

  That evening, after we’d seen to the children—who’d stayed frozen in their beds while chaos reigned in the yard—and with Father Wendimu in his bed attended by Adey and a chastened young Dawit stretched out on the floor, Makeda and I sat outside together and shared a Nyala. The moon was full and bright, and I could see every nuance of her features. She looked beautiful, even with her hair in a lopsided nap and deep circles under her eyes. There was a little streak of teff flour on her cheek, and I gently brushed it away with two fingers. She gave me a faint smile and gently took my bandaged hand in her own. It throbbed with pain, but I didn’t care.

  Looking up at the sky, she said in a voice just slightly above a whisper, “Your courage. It was the spirit of the kudu.” I started in recognition. I knew it was true. I saw the eyes of the kudu—as brown as the earth—fog over and close. It was one of the few times in my life where a moment from the past was as alive as the present, as if two universes had merged. Still holding my hand, Makeda twisted around to face me. “You have redeemed the calf and done what God sent you here to do.” She let go of my hand. “And now you have to go.”

  I rose up to my feet, stumbling a little, my voice simultaneously angry and pleading. “Go? There is no way I’m going to go! Can’t you see that you need me?”

  She laughed harshly. “Do you think I need you?” She thumped her chest. “I have you forever. You are written on the inside of my skin.”

  “No! This is crazy. This pl
ace is falling apart all around you. You are two women and an old man. What would you have done without me today?”

  She pushed herself up from the ground, brushing the dirt from her habesha kemis. “Yes. We needed you today, and we will never forget you for what you have done. The children will tell stories about you. They will tell others who come afterward what you did.” Her face was somber as she locked her eyes into mine. “And now you must go so that I do not suffer every day with a longing for something I will never experience. You will go to spare me the pain of never bearing your child.”

  She began to walk away, but then she turned back, clearly struggling to express something she hadn’t thought through. “Assefa, you will go as a kindness to me. Out of your love for me. But you must leave that love behind as you left that kudu. I have learned from my own suffering that love has a life of its own, that we cannot possess it like a jewel, like a medal. Sometimes love must be released so that something else can be lived. My enat and abat have gone from my life forever so that I can serve as many children as possible. You must not even think of me when you are gone, you must not hold me with your spirit. If you do, we are so connected that I will feel it, and I will not be free for the particular joy God has allotted to me. Now you must find what God wants to allot to you.”

  And with those words, I was flung onto the sorrowful road of learning how to say goodbye to Miryam Makeda.

  Chapter Twelve

  Fleur

  LET’S FACE IT. I’m a weakling. After all he’d done to try to rescue me from the void, I didn’t have the heart to say no to Bob. When he invited me for dinner, all I wanted was to get home as soon as possible, put on my pink flannel PJs, sneak a gallon of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, slither under the covers with Jillily, pig out, and die. I think I was as surprised as Bob was when I opened my mouth and heard myself utter a traitorous, “Sure.”