Assefa
MAKEDA AND I fell asleep far later—and far closer—than Father Wendimu would have wished. I don’t know where he himself slept that night, as we two ended up talking for hours, wedged together feet to head on his rather narrow bed, with Makeda’s plump toes close enough for me to have to censor the impulse to nibble them, and my legs slightly overshooting her wild puff of black hair, spread gloriously across Father Wendimu’s small pillow. As the night air grew biting, Makeda got up to fetch a few thin green and yellow blankets to cover us, and it struck me that my bare feet with their thick calloused heels looked slightly ridiculous poking out of the covers to brace themselves against the back wall. We spoke as ceaselessly as we had in the old days, with only the barking laugh of hyenas, the high-pitched sawing of fruit bats, and an occasional child crying out from a nightmare punctuating our whispered conversation. Why we whispered, I don’t know, except that was how we’d talked long ago, two children sharing jokes and secrets in an innocent disregard of being opposite genders, let alone two separate beings. In those days, it was as if we were but one soul tricked into inhabiting two separate bodies—the ease of our laughter, the familiarity of our mingled smells, the finishing of each other’s sentences clues to our true unitary identity.
Needless to say, I was hardly heedless of our separate genders now. The heat from Makeda’s body could have lifted the chill of an Arctic winter. It lifted something else entirely in me. I borrowed Fleur’s penchant for pinching to try to keep my washela from pushing up the bedclothes, then sidestepped any further thought of my fiancée lest the hanging man spoil this dreamlike moment.
For the first hour, it was just old friends reconnecting. We caught each other up on our current lives, which for Makeda was almost entirely about the children. She explained the intricate bureaucratic hoops she and Father Wendimu had to jump through to make the adoptions of their young charges possible, how they had to prove over and over again that they weren’t part of the regrettable wholesale practice of impoverished parents selling their babies to unsavory adoption agencies. She told me that the three children she’d been shepherding to meet their adoptive Spanish parents when she bumped into my father and Zalelew at Bole Airport had nearly been turned back due to a last-minute slashing of quotas by Ethiopia’s Ministry of Women, Children, and Youth Affairs.
I was sufficiently in awe of Makeda’s dedication that I hesitated when she asked me about my own life. I had no such humanitarian enterprises to impress her with, but she beamed with gratifying pride when I told her I was planning on continuing on at UCLA for a residency in cardiology. When she asked after my family, I took care not to mention Fleur in my recitation of how happy Enat was to have a full-time job despite the temper tantrums of her young charge Cesar, how Medr was recovering from a bout of dehydration, how thrilled Abat was to break free from driving his cab to join Zalelew on this mission.
“A cab!” Makeda hissed, shaking her head in disbelief. “What kind of a country lets a brilliant man like your father drive a cab?” Noting my defensive shrug, she said, “I’m sorry. But which is the backward country, then? At least here, it is a blessing for Negasi, who never learned to read and write, to have such a job.”
Negasi was the driver who had ferried my father and Zalelew to Aksum, and she promised to track him down to have him take me to where he’d dropped them off. Which left my mind free to listen fully as she began to describe her life since Getachew’s dusty Corolla had taken me away from her all those years ago, her hand waving like a flag that ended up planting itself permanently in my heart.
“At first, I pretended you’d just gone off for a family holiday,” she said, so faintly I had to lift myself onto my elbows to read her lips in the dim light of Father Wendimu’s little lamp. I snickered, and she favored me with a wry grin. No one we knew took holidays in those days; the war with Eritrea had sacked the treasury and depleted the country’s rudimentary infrastructure to the breaking point.
But now her expression grew more serious, the steep triangle of a frown line appearing as if from nowhere to intersect her winged brows. “Eventually I started pestering my mother about when you were coming home. Each time, she managed to avoid me, until the morning my father returned from peace talks between the People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front and the Derg. Failed as usual. I thought I’d never seen him look sadder in my life.” She bit her lip, her voice raising several octaves, reverting to the girl-voice I recognized from long ago. “This time, I got up a bit more nerve, raising the question with both of them as the three of us sat at the dinner table, scooping up a particularly spicy kitfo that my mother had marinated in mitmita for a day.”
She paused. “Do you believe it?” she said wonderingly. “I even remember what we were eating! I told them how much I was missing you and demanded to know when I would see you again. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, Abat spilled his glass of Harrar into his lap, and looked down at it like a boy who’d wet his bed. My mother behaved just as strangely. She didn’t move, merely flicked anxious eyes at him, like a kudu alert to a stalking panther, until she finally wagged a finger at me. ‘Hush, child,’ she said. ‘The boy will never come back.’ And then she fetched a towel for my father to wipe himself, adding, ‘Not any of them will be back here again.’ And all this time, my parents didn’t look at each other, and my father never uttered a word.
“And so,”—she smiled apologetically—“I have to confess it to you. I was a girl, preoccupied with all sorts of foolish things. I put you out of my mind. Not to excuse myself, but life was also changing so quickly. Other people in the village were leaving, too. Men were disappearing from their families in the middle of the night. The war was heating up.” She shot me a look of sheer misery. “What is it with our people, Assefa, always at war?”
It took me a moment to register what she was saying. I was distracted by her story of her parents’ mysterious behavior, which so mimicked my own parents when I’d brought up her name. My delayed response was to mutter dryly, “Ethiopians are hardly the only ones.”
She clapped a hand to her forehead. “Dedabe! I am an idiot. Have you fought in your war with Iraq? Afghanistan?”
I heard my voice rising. “It’s not my war!” I made what I realized even then was an overdramatic gesture, like a circus shill. “Step right up, folks, take your number. Eritreans, Ethiopians, Marxists, Nationalists, Muslims, Christians. All of them up for a fight. Oh, and don’t forget the Jews, their treasure locked up in an Ethiopian church, whose priests had to borrow their chosenness because they didn’t feel they were good enough on their own. Believe me, Ethiopia holds no patent on war.” I thought of Medr, a world away from where his wife had been brutalized beyond comprehension, speechless in his hospital bed in a new land whose soldiers had posed for pictures flaunting its enemies’ body parts.
She sat up in dismay, putting a hand on my knee. Embarrassed now, I put my own lightly on top of hers. “Don’t worry, Makeda, no one fights in America if they don’t want to. We don’t even know we’re at war. Instead, we walk around like crazy people speaking to the air—well, really, into our cellphones, and we’ve got twenty brands of toilet paper to choose from when we go to the market to keep us distracted.”
“You’re teasing me, yes?” I shook my head. It gave me such pleasure to see the arc of her neck as she threw back her head in laughter. But my relief was to be short-lived. She withdrew her hand from mine. The shout of a lone jackal sliced through the night, and it occurred to me I could probably identify the cries of nearly every creature out there. Moving to a new land layers but the thinnest of skins over bone and heart.
Makeda turned onto her side. I shifted to accommodate her, wanting to lay my head against her leg, but forcing myself not to. “Oh, Assefa. It’s as if you’ve come back to us from another universe. I can’t imagine so much toilet paper, especially when we made do for so long with no books.” She shook her head, disheartened. “They actually closed the school, you know, not all that long after you left. Before the next spring the soldiers were advancing. We didn’t even know if they were theirs or ours. The Derg were bad enough.” She looked at me with assessing eyes, and for one moment I felt terribly exposed. And small. “Do you really want to hear this?”
Something about her tone prompted my muscles to tense. But still I nodded. I wanted to know everything about this woman now that I was here with her in the flesh. Hadn’t I been dreaming of this moment forever? She shifted onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, her voice growing huskier. “We heard stories of houses being torched. Oddly enough, that didn’t worry me too much. I couldn’t really take it in. But Enat and Abat became irritable with me, and I spent long nights wondering what I’d done wrong. Very early one morning—really, it was still dark—I woke to shouting. It was as if the whole world was howling. I ran outside without thinking. The sky was on fire. I thought it must have been more of the lightning that had killed dozens of people that winter. And then a big boom! I looked around, and there was Abat, on his hands and knees in the dirt, flames reflected in the tears running down his face. Then, and only then, did it dawn on me that your house was on fire.”
She was speaking of burning, but her voice was chilling. I felt the hairs rise on my arms and had an impulse to put a hand across her mouth, to stop her from whatever she was about to say. But she was relentless now, and I remembered an old saying of Enat’s, “When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.”
I was in a net and Makeda’s words were tightening it around me. “That was the last I saw of him. The next thing I knew, I’d been grabbed from behind, my hands tied behind my back—even now, I can feel how the rope bit into my skin. Some kind of heavy cloth was thrown over me. I couldn’t see. Could barely breathe. I was dumped onto something and felt the vibrations of a vehicle starting up. It was moving very fast. My body was tossed around by every turn. I could tell we were ascending. I knew Enat was somewhere nearby—I could hear her shouting and shouting until they must have cracked her across the face with something very hard because I could hear the sound of metal against bone, bone splitting, really, and then I heard her no more.” Her voice went flat. “I never saw either of my parents again.”
I hadn’t yet had my psychiatric rotation, but I’d heard about the dissociation that comes of trauma. I detected it in Makeda now. She was speaking with as little emotion as if she’d been quoting the price of yams. I, on the other hand, was trembling all over. My upright washela was history. I was just slightly aware that I was shielding a shriveled version of it with two hands tucked between my thighs. Makeda must have sensed my distress—on that bed, we were, after all, fitting together like two interlocked pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But in that moment, she had no pity.
“I was sent to a place for war orphans, somewhere outside of Tigray, but as unlike this place as night and day. There was no Father Wendimu to put a stop to the madness. They were all women there.” She laughed harshly. “The first thing they did, those Tigretes, when I arrived, nearly out of my mind with terror and thirst, was to determine I was still a virgin. They wouldn’t take my word for it. An old woman with all her front teeth missing took it upon herself to check first hand. She spat on the ground when she saw I still had my clitoris.” A long tear spilled from the corner of Makeda’s right eye and made a tortuous journey down her glistening cheek. “She took care of that on the spot. She said they couldn’t have anyone unclean amongst the younger children to pollute them.” Suddenly, Makeda pushed her body away from me and out of the bed. She disappeared into Father Wendimu’s closet, and soon I heard the strains of Seyfou Yohannes’ Tezita coming from the little room.
And then Makeda was standing by the bed, completely unclothed but for a rolled up cloth between her legs. My eyes widened and my washela rose like a kudu’s ear, but my belly was as tight as a kebero drum. She had something in her hand. She stuck it inside her mouth and then came over and handed me some. I didn’t know what to do with it. Though green, it smelled of bananas. I learned later that khat is often packed in banana leaves. “Unclean,” she said wonderingly, sitting on the bed and then sliding next to me again under the covers as if I were not even there. “She cut with me a knife so rusty I was picking little bits of rust out of my wound for weeks.”
I myself dissociated right then. I registered her words, but could not find the feelings that should have accompanied them. She was speaking much more quickly now, the khat doing its work. “It was only once the orphanage was raided and I was brought back here to this village, to the church, only after Father Wendimu got hold of some antibiotics—lord knows what he sold of his own possessions to obtain them—that my body had a chance to heal. I’d become a wild animal by then. Even when my body began to hurt less, I was useless.” She made a fierce face, and I saw chewed bits of leaf covering her teeth. “Until the other children began to arrive. In the beginning, they were war orphans like me, but then the AIDS babies came, younger and younger, dropped off outside our gates in the middle of the night, brought by nurses from one of the makeshift hospitals. More than a few had just been set down by the sides of their dead mothers, howling to the point that they were hoarse for days afterward.”
Now Makeda sat up suddenly, and I shrank back a little from her heedlessly displayed breasts. A shaft of moonlight entering through an ill-fitting window illuminated her face, and I had the fantasy she was actually a ghost. She smiled then. Actually smiled. “It was the children who saved me. Father Wendimu knew exactly what he was doing. He made sure I was assigned the worst cases, the ones closest to death. I had to mobilize. And he—he begged, borrowed, and stole whatever he could to get me supplies. As soon as books became available again, he found me books for beginning nurses—I don’t know how. Over time I became something resembling a human again. I began to think of them as my children. Even when I knew they would leave me. Hoped that they would leave me. Igzee’abihier, the Lord of the Universe had made them mine, and I knew that some essential part of them would be mine forever.”
I, too, had stayed hers forever. Witch! What force was it that this woman possessed? And now the moon had found a way to insert as much of its glow as possible into this little room, as if the two of us were spot lit on a stage. Makeda looked me full in the face. “That raging infection would prevent me from having a child, and my disfigurement and my shame took care of any desire I might have had to make one.” She looked at me with something akin to pity. “Pain, Assefa. All I know here”—she touched a hand between her thighs, as if for emphasis—“is pain.” And now she touched her naked breast. “But here, what I know is love.”
I knew this was not dissociation. This was truth. This was an uncanny form of grace. For the face of my old friend Makeda was now identical with Ethiopia’s own dark virgin, Maryam of Sion. And she was asking me, “So, tell me, what is the name of the girl you have left behind?”
