Assefa
FLEUR WAS RIGHT to be angry with me. Of that much I was certain. I knew it during our first phone conversation, knew it during our second, knew it in between, when, feigning interest in the tedious monologue of the Anglican priest at my side on the four hour Air Emirates trip from Dubai to Addis Ababa, I saw myself for what I was: a hanging man, suspended between what I wished I could be and what I actually was—a monster of hiddenness and secrecy.
The shame of such falseness was unbearable. The girl I had asked to be my wife had a heart as soft as that silken wrist of hers that I liked to circle with my thumb and forefinger. Her gift for happiness as sweet as a ripe apricot. When she was sad, her tears freely flowed. Frustrate her, and she’d bang her head. But I—I had to be ... complicated. My own heart a warren of abrupt twists and jagged angles. My washela standing at attention for the enticements of pale gold hair, a crooked smile, shy thighs bursting open like the petals of a white rose. The same washela a sword of ecstasy rising to the memory of a bunna-skinned girl with ancient eyes and a krar player’s long fingers, her smell an intoxicating blend of rich earth, tej, mitmita.
No one had warned me how love reshapes your world. The delicate turn of a falling leaf resembles the sweep of your lover’s hand. You wonder what she is doing when you are pulling on your socks. Her concerns become your concerns. You begin to feel annoyed by those little traits of others she cannot stand. Her skin and smell become your touchstones. The song that she can’t help but move her hips to becomes your favorite, even if you’d detested its mediocrity the week before. Details that once comprised the impersonal wallpaper of modern life become animated and shaded with particular meaning.
The landmarks of Fleur’s life had become my own. A pro-life rally reported in the news filled my belly with acid at Senator Robins’ betrayal of his daughter when, little more than a child, she’d fallen pregnant. Medical school discussions of the debunked relationship between vaccines and autism were reminders of her continual questioning whether her quirks put her on the spectrum. Every cat I encountered was a harbinger of the pain my lover would endure when she inevitably lost her aging Jillily. Suddenly references to black holes were everywhere: newspapers, gossip magazines, popular songs.
But there was still the matter of the invisible companion I’d brought with me as a boy to this bleached continent. That one, Enat called her, not liking to see what came over my face when anyone uttered the name Makeda.
Makeda, who, like Fleur, also bent and shaped my world, even as her actual features faded into ghostly glimpses of flashing black eyes and the sweet promise of generous lips. In some moments, the two of them, Makeda and Fleur, formed an uneasy mandorla leaving a bare minority of me to think my own thoughts, the majority swinging to and fro between Assefa-Makeda and Assefa-Fleur.
Assefa-Makeda had been born in the time before memory. Makeda herself had been the constant playmate of my earliest days and refused to leave me—or to be left, even when, clad in the crisp white shirt and short blue trousers of my primary school, I’d slid into the backseat of my uncle Getachew’s Corolla for my first, and last, journey out of the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Tucked in tightly between Enat and Medr—the two bulging suitcases on the floor of the car forcing our knees to our chins—I’d felt nothing but a gathering gloom. Even my boyish shoulder-shoving goodbyes to Bekele and Iskinder could not compete with the image of Makeda, standing in front of the only home I’d ever known, her café au lait palm waving like a windblown flag, “Sälam, Sälam.”
That moment had fastened itself onto my mind with the force of a leaping kudu, like the one who’d failed to run fast enough from the spear of Demissie after he’d insisted on teaching me and his grandson, my best friend Girma, to hunt in the old way. I ended up telling the kudu story to the Anglican priest on the flight to Addis Ababa. The man insisted I call him Bertie, which sounded a ridiculous sort of name. Hadn’t he the dignity to call himself Albert? I could barely stand to look at him, my eyes immediately straying to what looked like an incipient goiter pushing against his dog collar. I knew I had to keep talking, if only to forestall his pitying tone when I told him about my missing father. I didn’t like, either, the too bright light that shone from his eyes when he described his calling to work with AIDS orphans. As a literature major turned pre-med student, I knew what it was to want to be useful, but there was a touch too much zeal in how the man spoke of the appalling conditions in the country of my birth.
I launched into my story as soon as a stewardess swept away our packages of curry-flavored crisps. “It was like this,” I said, watching Bertie settle in like a child for a bedtime tale. “My friend’s grandfather was a hunter. He was a highly respected elder of his village, and physically large—his hands as wide as a dog’s head—with a personality to match.”
I hadn’t thought about that day for years. Demissie’s voice had been intimidatingly deep, his gaze pitiless. I felt he could see into the weakest corners of my soul. The first time Girma and I paid him a visit, Demissie had insisted it was his duty to teach us boys what it was to be a man. “Not some weak city version,” he said, spitting on the ground, “with all the force leeched from your bones by Western music, the fumes of automobiles, the comfort of indoor toilets.” As if to drive home his point, he spat again.
As I spun my tale for the wide-eyed Bertie, the vividness of our hunt was borne back to me like an evil wind. I remembered how we’d spent half the morning looking for the herd. It had been hot and dry, and I was unspeakably tired before our hunt even began.
I had not mentioned to Girma or his grandfather that I had brought a disability of sorts with me to our journey. I had a sore anus from a miserable episode of constipation I’d suffered the previous week. “Too much spiced cheese,” Enat had muttered, shaking her head at my greediness. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t warned me.
I have to admit to a streak of cruelty. I found myself describing in infinite detail to my goitered companion how my bum had chafed like the devil with every step I took. I asked him, “How could Demissie have suspected that my mind was as far as could be from that dusty forest we traveled, inhabiting instead a world about an inch or two wide, where I was sure blood was beginning to erupt from a tiny volcano that made up in intensity what it lacked in size?”
Bertie the Anglican didn’t know whether to look away in embarrassment or make a sympathetic nod; he compromised with a sort of a twitch, his goiter making a little dimple in his white collar, which by now was damp with perspiration.
I didn’t mind one bit that I was making the man uncomfortable. If anything, it made my memory even sharper. I could almost smell the bitter sack of fear thrown back and forth between Girma and me all those years ago.
I took a long draught of iced tea before continuing. “At last, Demissie relented and indicated we could take a break, motioning us to drink from our water pouches. He deftly slit open a papaya for us with a sharp knife he’d extracted from his goatskin bag. I lay awkwardly on my side, while Girma sat up tall and straight, mimicking his grandfather. Demissie said nothing to me about my odd posture, but the look he gave me signaled his contempt for my presumed laziness.”
“But I didn’t care. Anything to ease the acute stabbing sensation at my bottom caused by movement, though in truth the throbbing I felt while lying there wasn’t much better. All too soon, Demissie waved us to our feet. I nearly tripped as I struggled to stand, and my friend disloyally snickered, shooting a quick sycophantic look at his father’s father.”
“In the end, it wasn’t a herd that we found but a female and her calf, the white stripes across their flanks looking almost painted onto their brown hides. The terror in the mother’s eyes put all thoughts away of my own pain. But Demissie was a swift hunter, and he reacted automatically. Mother and baby fell without sound, the baby’s front hoof crossing its mother’s stunned eyes like a blindfold. I could not stop myself. I ran to the fallen pair and dropped onto my knees beside them, putting my hand under the cheek of the dying baby, which gave three great quivers before its heartbeat ceased.”
But now I stopped. There was something I did not wish to reveal to Bertie the Anglican: only Makeda knew, and even she I had confided in with considerable hesitation, “I know, Makeda, that the calf’s spirit came into me in that moment. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.”
Tears streaming down cheeks the color of weira bark, she’d nodded in comprehension. “You don’t have to worry. You will know—the spirit of the calf will tell you—when the time is right.”
Ah, Makeda. A sudden pang of longing for her was making me feel increasingly antagonistic to the man sitting beside me, the man who couldn’t begin to comprehend the land he was heading for. I wanted to rub into his mind every detail of Demissie efficiently ripping off the skins of the still-warm animals. But as I watched Bertie the Anglican gag, I sensed that the time Makeda had referred to was fast approaching.
It occurred to me then that there was a strange similarity to flying in a plane and sitting in a hospital waiting room: the stale air, the sense of being captive, sharing intimacies with total strangers. I must have fallen asleep on that thought, though it couldn’t have been for long. My conversation with the Anglican had taken the better part of three and a half hours. But it was time enough to dream the dream I’d been dreaming since my voice became a man’s voice, tufts of hair springing up like dense forests under my arms and below my belly. The dream began as always, with me inserting my washela between the welcoming thighs of a now-grown and laughing-eyed Makeda. This time, though, I became aware of an Eritrean soldier to my right, his camouflage trousers pooled at his ankles as he plunged his washela again and again into my sayt ayat, the wife of my now-mute grandfather. Horrified, I looked back to the face of Makeda, whose expression had taken on a sense of urgency, and I found myself unstoppably thrusting my washela into some nameless mound of death and disease.
I came to with a start. I must have cried out, for I woke to the alarmed face of a dark-eyed stewardess. “Sir? Sir?” As I straightened myself from my cramped position, I saw Bertie the Anglican leaning well away from me, as if he wished to push his back through the wall of the plane, anything to get away from this mad African, who told stories of vulgar brutality and didn’t even know how to dream a dreamless sleep.
