Tizita Page 8

  Dhani giggled, reminding me of the comely young woman Father had hired to replace Cook, whom he’d fired in a fit of scapegoating after the media had actually deigned to give his pro-choice rival (and Adam’s father), Senator Manus, equal air time.

  Time does many things to people, but rarely alters their essence. Though Dhani’s round black eyes were now creased at the corners and her waist had widened in the nine years since Angelina was born, her heart was still as generously full as the lips that I’d once, in horror, watched Father nibble.

  “No, really,” I said in earnest, worried that she’d mistake my wisecrack for ingratitude, “it’s all delicious. I don’t know how you do it. I just hope you’re teaching it all to Miss Beauty out there.”

  Dhani eyes lit up in maternal pleasure. “Yes, she is that. And yes, I am teaching her, slowly, which my naniji said was the best way.” I knew Dhani had learned to cook from her grandmother, her communist mother being too busy with the cause to bother much with the kitchen. Now her expression became mischievous and she gave me a mock-slap on my butt. “Now, off with you, my girl. Your guests are going to feel ignored.”

  Re-entering the dining room, I sat down next to Sammie, realizing soon enough that hostilities had just broken out. Sammie replied with a testy, “No, and I wish you wouldn’t remind me,” to Aadita’s question, “So, did you manage to get a meeting with the gallery owner?”

  I saw Jacob shoot Sammie a sideways glance.

  Even in normal families, mothers inevitably seem to reach a point where they fail to understand their daughters—whether because the daughters grow past them or veer into their mothers’ blind spots or fall victim to blind spots of their own. In Sammie’s case, I knew it was her frustration that Jacob didn’t want to have children that was making her so irritable lately—and who better to take it out on than her eternally adoring and reliably forgiving mother?

  Actually, it wasn’t so much that Jacob didn’t want kids. He was one of those guys born to be good fathers. I’d seen him enough times goofing around with his young nephews to know he was playful and enthusiastic, with reams of patience for playing the same game over and over with a child who insists repeatedly, “Again!” But he was anxious he wouldn’t be able to support a child. Money wasn’t exactly one of the major perks for a comparative religion student, whose best-case scenario would consist in getting hired for a university position, which, given the state of the economy, was about as likely as an ethical politician getting elected.

  Sammie’s interests were hardly conventional—her art, ecstatic dancing, Kundalini yoga, Jungian analysis, old foreign films, the more noir the better. But her personal dreams were pretty white picket fence-ish. She wanted to get married, buy a quasi-reasonably-priced house somewhere on the Westside, and have two children, ideally a girl and a boy, and preferably without the aid of fertility drugs or the latest hotshot Chinese acupuncturist.

  Sammie was convinced they’d be able to get by, especially if she applied her own M.F.A. degree toward becoming a museum curator. Lord knew, she had the brains for it. But, to everyone’s surprise, Jacob was out-picket-fencing her, insisting that he couldn’t possibly have kids until he could comfortably support both kids and mother. Having been a latchkey boy himself, the thought of his own progeny being partially raised by a nanny was simply beyond his tolerance level.

  The whole thing confused me. If everyone decided not to have kids for fear of replicating whatever they’d had to endure as children, the human race might as well pack it up once and for all.

  Which, come to think of, might be pretty much what we were doing, anyway.

  It was at that point in my ruminations that Sammie threw down her napkin and left the room. Aadita looked around the table with palms raised, as if to say, “What did I do?”

  Jacob slid over to Sammie’s chair, took my hand in his, and gave it a courtly kiss.

  “How’s tricks, kid? Was that Our Man in Ethiopia you left the table for? It’s all us Jews’ fault. If it weren’t for the Ark of the Covenant, Achamyalesh would be sitting right here with us, and Assefa would be the lucky dude holding this pretty hand of yours.”

  I gave him a grateful grin. Sammie had once said that Jacob’s hands were as smooth as butter, and she was right; the sensation was quite comforting. But then I caught sight of Aadita conferring anxiously with Mother and Arturo, and I slipped my hand out of Jacob’s, telling him, “You’d better go get her, or she’ll be mortified tomorrow that she spoiled my party.”

  Jacob made a face, instantly pushing back his chair. “Damn. You’re right. Lemme go find her.”

  I could just spy Sister Flatulencia, Dhani, and Abeba hovering through the crack in the dining room door. No doubt they’d already lit the candles on my cake and were waiting for the guests to get their collective act together and be seated.

  The fact was, the dinner party had become more than a little chaotic. Ignacio was lurking outside the plate-glass-walled dining room on the back deck, a cigar clamped in his lips while he inspected the stylish MoMA birdfeeder he’d installed for Mother earlier in the day. Cesar and Angelina were sitting across from me, laughing noisily over some game on Cesar’s iPhone, and my physics team was huddled together at the other end of Father’s long table, no doubt mashing up the latest thinking on the Eridanus supervoid. Who was missing?

  Just then, I felt a tug at my sleeve. I turned, and there was Bob Ballantine’s face, just inches from my own. I knew he was nervous, because his left eye was twitching faster than usual. He gave an anemic little cough before murmuring, “Nice party, what?”

  Was he kidding? Nice party, what? Poor Bob had been watching too much Masterpiece Theater. But who was I to judge? I’d only acquired the few social graces I had because Adam had taken me under his wing when he was a physics wonder boy and I a feral creature of twelve.

  I laughed. “Let’s be honest, Bob. It’s all a little bonkers, which is what you’d expect at a party for an odd duck like me, don’t you think?”

  But Bob was nothing if not earnest. His brown eyes got bigger and rounder and he actually clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead. “Don’t. You shouldn’t. You ....”

  I felt ashamed then. If I was an odd duck, then what was Bob? Crazy as a hoot owl? Nuttier than a fruitcake? Probably. But it wouldn’t do to rub it in.

  “Sorry, Bob. I’m awful. It is nice. Definitely nice for all of you to show up for me. And I’m glad you’re having a nice time.”

  And then Bob said something I never would have imagined. In a voice I never would have imagined. In a tone about two timbres lower than the one he generally spoke in. He said, “Nice? This has to be the happiest moment I can remember. Actually, it’s the happiest time in my life, period. I mean, landing on a team headed up by you, after what you did ... not just your brilliance, but also your courage. Letting it all hang out and not giving a damn. The Nobel Committee. The media. All those assholes mouthing off on Fox News. And you just telling it like it is. That science doesn’t just exist in a vacuum. People’s lives get changed because somebody, somewhere, had the balls”—he blushed, remembering just why my Nobel speech had been so controversial in the first place—“to go with her gut instinct and say out loud things that other people don’t even dare let themselves think.”

  By the time he’d finished, I’m sure my mouth was hanging open.

  I was saved from having to respond by Sister Flatulencia, Dhani, Abeba, and a reassuringly handholding Sammie and Jacob bursting into the dining room, singing, “Happy birthday to you ....” Bob looked disoriented for a moment, but then, he, too joined in. Letting my eyes travel around the table, I saw everyone looking at me, and then their faces started to blur. I wanted to clap my hands in gratitude, but instead found them covering my eyes.

  I realized I was crying. I noticed another thing, too. This was starting to become a habit.

  Chapter Five

  Assefa

  I KNEW IT was wrong. It wasn’t as if I had forgotten Fleur. H
ardly. Her crooked smile was a guilty punctuation mark to my thoughts. Her constant heart thrummed close to my chest. The earnest single line lightly bisecting her brows was like a Mnemosynian thread tied around my little finger.

  But a hanging man cannot hold still, and Makeda had pulled me toward her like a powerful gravitational force. It was shocking to realize that only yesterday I had walked for miles in the hot sun, lightheaded with the altitude and jetlag, increasingly worried that I had misunderstood the directions I’d been given to the place where I might find her. Stopping to remove my shoe and empty it of three tiny, but vexing, pebbles, I had nearly decided to turn back, but then made a deal with myself that I’d follow the winding, scrubby road for one more turn. Sure enough, there it stood, the orphanage where I had been told Makeda worked, its whitewashed chikka walls bearing a simple, hand-lettered sign, “As-Salāmu `Alaykum,” below a weather-beaten ornate Ethiopian Orthodox cross.

  A rusty iron gate hung beside the sign at a slightly skewed angle. I pushed it open, cringing at the loud screech of metal against metal. Scanning a wide dirt yard where a score of noisy children played, I spotted her immediately, repositioning the sun-burnished toddler on her hip as she turned to see who’d come. Despite the fact that her proportions had elongated, her graceful habesha kemis dress revealing hips and breasts flaring from her lithe torso, she was exactly as I had dreamed her. My loins nearly exploded. With an exultant shout of recognition, she broke into a near-run across the dusty, uneven ground, a chaotic crowd of children falling in behind her. As she came closer, I saw an expression pass momentarily across her face of mysterious indwelling, reminding me of pictures Abat had shown me of Aksum’s renowned black Madonna, St. Maryum Sion.

  Reaching a mid-point between us, she halted and looked down, issuing a sharp, “Tew!”—stop it!—to a child at her feet who’d dared hit another with a stick. Despite that momentary fierceness, the impression she created was soft and welcoming. Her shapely arms made a sweet sling for the lucky baby suspended above the high-pitched, scrabbling crowd below. I sensed she must be, for many of these orphaned children, a living buffer zone against the abyss.

  All this I saw in those few, brief moments, and more.

  Wretched man that I was, I couldn’t help but contrast this woman and the one I’d left behind only two days ago, but several light-years before. Fleur looked a child compared with this imperiously postured, kink-haired goddess hurrying towards me, her white shama nearly falling off one shoulder. Her gaze never once left my face, her moist black eyes claiming the old intimacy, an ageless twinship of the soul.

  Each sway of her hips awoke in me a world of cellular familiarity. In America, I was the Ethiopian boy, the one with a taxi driver for a father, bound by the good fortune of intelligence and physical charm to rise up in the world. I never mentioned it to Fleur, but something in me never quite forgot that my mother worked for her mother. Oh, I knew it was not fair to blame the daughter for the mother’s social class. And lord knew, my mother needed the work.

  But the truth was that, while Margaret Robins called my mother her friend, she was still her employer, the one who guaranteed that, even on one of my father’s low-volume days, we would still have wat to ladle across our injera on our dinner table. My father had once remarked how odd it was that the same Angelenos who installed locks and deadbolts and alarm systems in their houses simultaneously offered beloved pets and children to the care of virtual strangers, women whose addresses they often didn’t know, with backgrounds they didn’t check and phone numbers that changed with some regularity. “Think of it!” he’d said wonderingly. “They entrust them with their jewelry, credit cards, silver, favorite articles of clothing ....” He stopped abruptly, and it occurred to me that he might as well have finished his sentence with “their stained underwear.”

  The gap between our visceral assumptions was so vast that Fleur and I might as well have come from entirely different universes.

  I had found my way back to this village with Makeda my true north, telling myself she would be the clue to my Father’s whereabouts, but secretly hoping she would cut the rope and let this hanging man down. Dropped off in Tikil Dingay’s dilapidated version of a main street district by the driver of a blue and white taxi far worse for wear than Father’s yellow version back in Pasadena, I had aimed for the closest shop and had been informed by its clearly curious proprietor that Makeda’s home was long gone, as was mine, burned to the ground.

  The mantis-thin man lowered his heavily lashed eyes and made a dismissive gesture before finally spitting out that the torching had been committed by the PFDJ, which I knew to be Eritrea’s Peoples Front for Democracy and Justice. But my informant didn’t waste another minute, hastily directing me to the orphanage where Makeda worked, nearly pushing me out the door as I clutched my just-purchased, but nonetheless creased and worn map of Amara and a bottle of Coke. I suspected that this spear of a man, purveyor of bunna, unguents, brightly-colored textiles, and probably—given his racing speech and nervy demeanor—khat to a small community that rarely saw a stranger, couldn’t wait to inform anyone who’d listen that an American was asking after Makeda Geteye—youngest daughter of the Geteye family, the very same Geteyes whom my mother and father refused to speak of once we emigrated, though I was never able to learn why.

  I would worry about that later. For now, my sole challenge was to contain myself as Makeda bypassed my slight bow by leaning forward to kiss my cheek three times. The sensations of her plump, dry lips against my skin and the sweet and sour smell of the scalp of the baby in her arms, whose moist forehead gently butted against my neck with each of her kisses, were nearly intolerable. I wanted her to let that wide-eyed child onto the ground, encircle me with her arms, and bring back the boy I once was, the one who’d known this brown earth as a Mother for whom he was but a natural extension, a bush from a branch, a toe from a foot, a rush of blood from a rhythmically pumping heart.

  But I didn’t have long to linger in that fantasy. At the very moment that Makeda stepped achingly back onto her own separate patch of ground, laughing just a little and brushing the child’s forehead with what I fancied was a sudden shyness, a voice broke in. “Sälam neshway?”

  The sea of children surrounding us parted to make room for a quick-footed man, small and wiry and wearing a rather soiled netela over his long jodhpur-type trousers. He grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down enthusiastically. “You are surely Assefa Berhanu, yes? Son of Abeba and Achamyalesh Berhanu?” I nodded, disconcerted. “Father Wendimu.”

  He noticed my surprise and added quickly, “Sorry. Still go by the old appellation. The Church and I parted company a few years ago—the good Lord had His own ideas for me—but nobody in this town seems to want to pay that any attention. Power of habit, I guess. Anyway, lad, it’s so good to see you after all this time. My God, it has been ... how long? Eighteen years?” He stopped, still holding my hand, which he now clasped with both of his. I was all-too aware of Makeda grinning at my confusion. “Forgive me. Your father was my friend. Does he ever mention me? Used to beat me regularly at chess.” He gave a short, barking laugh and scratched what looked, under his netela, to be a nearly bald head. “Don’t worry. I’m not psychic, but I would have known you anywhere. You have his same forehead and ... the famous smile. He was always a one for the ladies. He is alive, Makeda tells me, and on his way to Aksum.”

  Makeda nodded. “They should be there by now.”

  Father Wendimu went on. “So you’ve come to join your father.”

  I opened my mouth to explain, but he was already on to another question. “And your mother, blessed woman, how is she?”

  “She’s well,” I replied. Father Wendimu’s voice had summoned an unfamiliar, but insistent memory. My father and another man bent over a chessboard in the corner of a narrow room. A large window behind them framed a darkening sky that looked as if the entire universe was contracting. Thunder crackled and suddenly the whole world—the sky, the ochre wall
s surrounding the house, our little room—was brilliantly alight. The white of the two men’s eyes looked exaggerated and frightening. I clutched at the folds of Enat’s green and red apron, feeling shame as I saw both of the men throw back their heads and laugh. I buried my head in my mother’s skirts, ashamed to be the butt of their amusement.

  But now I realized that they’d been laughing at their own surprise and terror—unmanly, perhaps, but unavoidable, automatic.

  I loosened my hand from Father Wendimu’s and turned to Makeda. She was staring at me quizzically, as if aware that my attention had wavered for a moment. “Actually,” I said, “I’m not here so much to join my father as to locate him. We haven’t heard from him since he left Pasadena.”

  She shot me an uncomprehending look. “I am more happy to see you than I can say, but is that really why you are here, Assefa? Because your father has not contacted you?” She shrugged, and her shama slid down to reveal a generous half-moon of breast. “You know how it is. Everything here moves slower than a forty-year-old camel. You send two pieces of mail on the same day and one gets to its destination in thirty-six hours, the other shows up thirty-six years later. Buses break down, so you try to hunt down a hire car. Phones work, and then they don’t work. The PFDJ blocks a road and as soon as they get a little khat, they forget they were supposed to be blocking it, but meanwhile there’s a burnt out car blocking the way. And then you decide to take a little detour, visit an auntie who knew you as a child, take a little nap that turns into a series of naps, and as soon as you get going again, your hired car breaks down and you need to wait for someone in the closest village to track down the friend of a friend of a friend who might be able to fix it.”

  Laughing a little, she reached out a hand to my cheek, then seemed to think better of it. “Don’t worry, Assefa. Your father and Galelew were well and full of excitement when I met them. I was going to bring them here, but your father thought better of it and decided to hire a private taxi to take them to Aksum. I know the driver.” She turned to Father Wendimu with an informative, “It is Negasi.” Then back to me, “We both know him well. He sometimes brings adoptive parents here. He is a good man. Your father is safe, my friend.” She made a circle on her abdomen with her free hand and the baby in her other arm made a mimicking circle on his own. “Please don’t worry.” Despite the fact that I knew nothing more of my father’s whereabouts than I had on Fleur’s birthday, something in me relaxed a little. I found myself smiling.