Chapter Twenty-four

IF I THOUGHT getting to Gombe was difficult, finding my way from Addis Ababa to the orphanage at Tikil Dingay was like Theseus navigating the labyrinth. Thank goodness I had my own Ariadne, the extraordinarily kind Melkamu Berhe.

One thing Serena hadn’t told me about Melkamu was that he was in every way a big man. Not fat, but solid, and as tall as a basketball player. His spirit proved to be just as robust as his size, and his good cheer was infectious. Meeting a very relieved me at baggage claim, he shoved into his shirt pocket the hand-lettered piece of paper with the words “The Esteemed Miss Robins” with which he’d sought me out. Adjusting his round wire-rimmed glasses, he scooped up the boxes of gifts for the folks back home that I’d accumulated at my longish layover at Dar es Salaam International Airport, but only after enveloping me in something that gave palpable credence to the expression “bear hug.”

Both his strength and the hug turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. With its overwhelmingly crowded chaos and spiky (and spooky) modernistic concrete “trees,” Dar es Salaam’s airport had flung me precariously close to the edge of a particularly terrifying void. As soon as I’d spotted its shops, I’d taken refuge in my mother’s favorite form of therapy and had the two bulging boxes to show for it. Stuffed inside were:

1. A violet-blue tanzanite ring for Mother;

2. A Batik painting of women carrying baskets of fruits on their heads for Sammie;

3. Brilliantly colored Masai blankets for Dhani and Ignacio;

4. Carved wooden bowls and spoons for Gwennie;

5. A riotously fantastical Tinga Tinga painting for Stanley;

6. A turquoise and iridescent green men’s bead necklace for Adam that would bring out his beautiful owl eyes;

7. A red and white flora Kanga cloth for me to wear that was inscribed with a Swahili proverb that, according to a little piece of paper under its plastic cover, translated as, “The intoxication of love is the ultimate disease.”

Bole Airport was as spiky and modern as Dar es Salaam’s, but much grander, all steel and glass with pyramid-shaped sculptures and a geometrically patterned marble floor. Still, I was only too glad to be led away from the loud and incomprehensible public address announcements and the louder crowds of people to the parking structure, following Melkamu Berhe like a baby duckling.

I may have mentioned that, at sixty-eight inches, I’m considered rather tall. Melkamu Berhe was at least half a head taller. After easily hefting my two cumbersome boxes onto a cart, Melkamu told me to call him Melky—“All my friends do.”—and led me to a car that was so small I couldn’t imagine how he was going to stow himself inside. But, after he’d methodically shoehorned my boxes and backpack into what he called the boot and ushered me into the passenger seat, he performed the requisite acrobatic maneuver, throwing me a broad grin that showed he knew just what I’d been thinking.

I couldn’t wait to get out of Addis Ababa, which was as smoggy and exhaust-filled a city as I’d ever seen. We got lost seven times on our long and winding drive to Tikil Dingay, each time reduced to stopping and asking for directions, mostly from people walking in sandal-clad feet alongside the poorly paved roads. Our roadside advisers (male) wore knee-length shirts with white collars or (female) gaily colored loose dresses and shirts. Some of them also wore netelas, and one young woman balanced a cloth-wrapped package on her shawl-covered head. They invariably answered Melky’s requests in Amharic accompanied by lots of broad smiles, expansive gestures, and curious glances at me. Each time, I intentionally grinned what I hoped were friendly but bland grins, determined to show that Americans were a good sort, really, and that I wasn’t being kidnapped by Melkamu. I’d heard that western women could be vulnerable in Ethiopia, since they had a bit of a reputation for promiscuity. (Well, that certainly fitted, but I resisted the voidish urge to go there.)

As we passed lush fields of maize and wheat, I battled the desire to ask my garrulous host to stop and let me walk out to the grazing sheep, cattle, and goats to make their acquaintance. Melky seemed politely determined to pepper me with questions, insisting I share with him every detail of my trip to Gombe and each step toward the discovery that won me the Nobel Prize. When I described how I’d first met Serena at a Christmas party at the Fiskes’, opening the door to a big-eyed woman who’d said, “How good to see you again, Stanley,” Melky laughed so hard, thumping his thigh with his free hand, that I worried we’d go off the road.

Instead, we beetled along at a bumpy 50 miles an hour, stopping once at a small town with a dilapidated café that nonetheless served a yummy lentils and yam dish plentifully flavored with ginger. Before leaving, Melky had our waitress fill two silver flasks of his with bunna—“sweetened,” he assured me, “with tinish sickwar, a little sugar”—and we sipped it as we drove under what had to be the biggest sky in the world. White clouds drifted across it in constantly-changing patterns, and I fell into a powerful longing for Grandfather, with whom I’d identified the patterns made by the birds in our favorite sycamore, the one that Father had cut down.

Despite the caffeine and sugar in our bunna, we fell into a postprandial quiet. The road veered into a landscape of tall teff grasses, crimson-flowered hills, tiny mud-built houses, and lower-slung clouds looming heavily across a particularly sharp-peaked gray mountain. Melky pointed out a small sign covered in the stick-figureish glyphs of Amharic. He ran his hands excitedly over the steering wheel. “Getting close now. We’ve crossed into Tikil Dingay.”

Two sets of directions and only one wrong turn later, we came upon a paint-peeling building with a tattered old fashioned gold, green, and red flag of Ethiopia, a lion of Judah at its center, suspended from a rusty iron post pointing diagonally toward the sky. The dilapidated gate to what looked to be a rather dusty front yard bore a placard that someone had hung with the hand-printed words As-Salāmu `Alaykum. Peace be upon you.

Oh, God, I thought, adjusting my face to give him the grateful grin he deserved. I’d tried rehearsing it a million times, but I had no idea what I was going to say to Makeda Geteye.

To make it worse, lifting my suitcase from the boot, Melky casually announced, “I hope you don’t mind, Fleur, but I’ll be leaving you here for a few days. I explained to Serena that I’ve got a group of students arriving from England, and it would be rude of me not to greet them. But I promise I’ll be back to fetch you from your friends in good time to make your flight home. And I’ll keep your boxes safely at my place; we can pick them up on the way to Bole.” He set down the suitcase, stuck a hand into his shirt pocket, extracted the little greeting sign he’d made for me and shoved it back again, then fished around in his trousers pocket until he pulled out a computer print-out of my flight itinerary. He had me look it over. I nodded miserably, barely noting what I saw.

Melky looked a little surprised. “This is hardly Addis. Not exactly a vacation spot.”

I blushed. “But I can’t just invite myself. What if they have no room for me?”

He laughed. “Don’t worry. This is Ethiopia. There is always more room.” And then he lifted my suitcase and motioned with his head to follow him into the lion’s den.

I was happy to let Melky go first. The rusty gate croaked like a corvid, and a gaggle of small children quickly greeted us, jostling to be in front of the haphazard queue and flinging their most winning smiles at what they undoubtedly assumed to be potential adoptive parents.

A short-statured man sporting a rather wrinkled netela and a slightly bow-legged walk pushed through the children, issuing exasperated directives. “Get back, Lebna. Hagos, Girma—leave Kanchi alone.” Soon enough, I had two rough hands clasping one of my own and a pair of almond-shaped eyes inspecting my face, then Melky’s. I realized he was trying to assess what the relationship between the two of us was. He gave a nod to Melky. “Tena yistilign. Endemin-neh?” And to me: “Father Wendimu, at your service. Nominally executive director, but in truth All Around Dogsbody. We run a professional show, in that we’d give our lives for these beautiful imps, but we all pitch in as needs arise. In this case, we’re a bit short staffed. Our director, and the one who actually makes sure the trains run on time, is on a much-needed run for antiretrovirals.”

He paused for a moment, pulling his netela more securely around what I now saw was an ugly scar on his neck, then resumed, “Not that all the children are HIV positive; far from it.” He flicked another glance specifically in my direction. Why did I feel like his last words were a test? “But forgive me,” he murmured. “You are?”

Noting my deer-in-the-headlights expression, Melky took pity on me. “She is Miss Fleur Robins. From California. A friend of Jane Goodall, who is my mentor. She is here to visit one of your staff.”

I could see Father Wendimu recalibrate. The children had fallen exceptionally quiet, quizzically looking from one to the other of us. It dawned on me that they’d barely understood a word that had been said. I found my voice. “I’m so sorry to disturb you. I’m here to pay a visit to Makeda Geteye, but if she’s not here ....” I bent to reach for my bag.

Father Wendimu and Melky simultaneously put hands out to stop me. “No, no,” said the priest. “She will be here shortly, I can assure you.”

The children had grown bored. By twos and threes, they straggled off to play in a yard that looked even dustier up close, but offered a few benches covered with peeling paint, some wheelie toys and Coke cans, and a soccer ball. Father Wendimu shot me a canny look. “You are from California. Might I ask if you know our friend Assefa Berhanu? I see you have brought luggage with you. Perhaps you have come to spend a bit of time with us?”

I sighed. “Yes, I do know Assefa.” Then, cringing a little, “I’m so embarrassed. I should have written first. It was so last minute .... But really, I don’t know what I ... I thought I could stay at a ... I’m sure this is an imposition. You have so much to do.”

At this point, Melky interrupted with an, “Excuse me,” to me in English and a torrent of words in Amharic to Father Wendimu.

“Awo,” Father Wendimu, replied. Then turning to me, he said emphatically, “Of course you can stay for a few days. It will be our pleasure. Any friend of Assefa’s is truly a friend of ours.”

Before I knew it, Melky—with a departing, “Dehna hun,” to Father Wendimu and a, “See you soon,” to me—was gone. He’d taken my boxes with him, as well as my nerve. I stood staring helplessly at Father Wendimu until the man lifted my bag, took me gently by the arm, and with a reassuring smile said, “Let’s see if we can scare us up some bunna, shall we?”

As he led me toward a small, thatch-roofed building, Father Wendimu attracted children to his side like a magnet. They were a noisy bunch, each one skinnier than the next, but as kinetic as cats covered in fleas. Father Wendimu barely seemed to take notice of them, but for a mock punch in the arm here and his lined brown hand rubbing a coiled head of hair there.

Expecting an interior as shabby as the fading and peeling paint on the outside, I ducked my head through the low doorway only to discover a beautiful blaze of geometrically patterned purple and green and red and turquoise hourglass-shaped basketry. The smaller sized ones, flat-topped, were placed in circles around the larger ones, all of which had domed lids. Father Wendimu beamed. “I still can’t get over it myself,” he said. “Until a week ago, we ate at the kind of benches you passed in the playground. But a couple of our adoptive parents chipped in for this, and we’re all so happy.” He motioned me to sit on one of the shorter baskets, woven in an intricate green and red pyramid design. “We call the stools barchumas and the tables mesobs.”

I’d encountered just such furniture when Assefa and I had grabbed a quick dinner at Addis Restaurant on a patch of Fairfax Avenue known as Little Ethiopia, just a few blocks away from his Carthay duplex. But I let Father Wendimu show me how the basket tables had lids that could be removed to allow pancake-like “trays” of spongy sourdough injera to be placed on top, upon which would be ladled chicken or lamb wat to be eaten by hand, using torn-off pieces of injera to scoop up the stew.

As if she’d known I’d be coming, a woman wearing her shama in what I knew from Abeba was medegdeg-style shuffled in with a tray bearing steaming cups of bunna and a little bowl of sugar with two spoons.

“Ah, Adey, aren’t you just the one? Fleur, this is both my right and left hand woman, Adey Gatimo. She’s been here longer than I have, and we’d be literally lost without her.” Now he broke into Amharic, and I understood only the words, Fleur, Assefa, and Makeda.

At this point, Adey directed a much more curious gaze at me, and I could only imagine what she was thinking. She said nothing more than a brief, “Siletewaweqin dess bilognal,” before leaving the room, and I knew by the empty pang in my belly that she already disliked me.

“Sugar?” Father Wendimu asked. I shook my head, and he proceeded to spoon a surprising amount into his own cup. I took advantage of his distraction to glance around the room. It was gleaming with cleanliness, despite its faded yellow walls. Someone had placed a chipped sage-colored vase on the mesob to the right of me, and I leaned over to examine its arrangement of what had to be the largest red roses I’d ever seen. They were perfect, each petal layering over its inner counterpart in a seamless pattern. But one sniff told me that they weren’t nearly as fragrant as David Austin’s Falstaff or even William Shakespeare. And I couldn’t help but note that these were the more standard roses, not the cabbagy, almost peony-like blooms of the Austins.

Lest Father Wendimu’s flowers feel insulted, I stroked one of them tenderly, and found myself appreciating its velvety, but sturdy feel. As Nana might have said, definitely not a delicate flower.

I sensed Father Wendimu staring at my back and skewed around to return his gaze. I was feeling voidishly vulnerable, sitting here in this foreign land with an utter stranger.

He gestured with his head toward the vase. “Makeda tries to pick a bunch nearly every morning. To cheer the children. Well, to be honest—us, too. They grow along a nearby hillside. We don’t know who planted the bushes to begin with. These are obviously not wild.”

“They’re beautiful,” I said, ashamed of my previous comparisons. I was dreading meeting Makeda more than ever, now that her world had assumed a reality that included the friendly Father Wendimu, gaggles of boisterous children, and the cultivation of roses.

Suddenly, I felt rather than heard the rustle of beads behind me, and I picked up the scent of something cinnamony. Father Wendimu pushed up from his barchuma. “Speak of the devil,” he said.

I rose and turned around, nearly bumping right up against the perfect breasts of a copper-colored woman with a wild frizz of black hair escaping her shama and the most attractive lips I’d ever seen, upturned over the faintest of feminine moustaches. Her dimpled grin was infectious. She stepped back to give me more space and put out a hand. “Are you here for one of our babies?” Except she pronounced it bébés.

Father Wendimu didn’t wait. “Makeda, this is Fleur Robins from Los Angeles. She’s a friend of Assefa’s, come to pay us a visit. Now isn’t that nice?”

I had to give it to Makeda. After a nearly imperceptible flicker of dismay, she summoned up a generous, “What a lovely surprise.” Without warning, she leaned forward to kiss me on each cheek, enveloping me in that intoxicating cinnamon smell, accompanied by a low note of something rich and green, like freshly mown grass. I wondered if it was teff.

Father Wendimu cleared his throat loudly and began moving toward the door. “Well, I’ll leave you two to it then,” he said. “I know you’ll have so much to talk about.”

Makeda and I stared at each other haplessly. Then—as if we’d orchestrated it—we slid onto barchumas at the very same second. We burst into laughter. “Twins!” Makeda cried. “We are twins.”

Of course, we weren’t. But, unlikely as it was, we seemed to take to each other. I was impressed by how perfect her English was and told her so.

She made a wry face. “People in the west think Ethiopians are ignorant because we are poor. But many of us learn several languages in school if we are lucky enough to go. My family and Assefa’s were intellectuals. Achamyalesh was offered his first teaching post at Addis Ababa University the year before they moved away, and he was gone—commuting—most of the time. My mother told me he needed to save up his money by staying in the students’ dormitories in the city, but he was here over the whole three months of summer vacation. When they left for America, my mother tried consoling me that they were going to leave our village anyway, but that is no consolation to a child.” For a moment I saw her as the girl she must have been, losing her best friend. I wondered what I’d do if Sammie picked up and moved back to London or Delhi. It took me a moment to catch up with where Makeda was going. “For me, it was very sudden,” she said. Without skipping a beat, she added, “How is he?”

If I’d gotten virtually no guidance during my formative first incarnation, at least Adam had taught me well in my second. “He’s fine now. He really is.”

She said nothing and sat as still as a statue. I realized this was torturing her. I took a deep breath. Then another. I know I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing out. “I don’t know if he told you we were engaged?”

“Engaged,” she said flatly. “Not exactly. But I knew someone was waiting for him to return.” She paused. “What do you mean by ‘he is fine now’?” Her dark eyes were penetrating, as if they were testing me for the veracity of my words.

“Well, we’re not engaged anymore. We fell out. It was ... complicated. I didn’t speak with him after that, and then I got a call that ....”

Makeda was gripping my arm, mercilessly pushing past my sobbing. “What did he try?”

In response to her commanding voice, and with tears continuing to cascade down my cheeks, I offered a garbled, “He tried to hang himself. He very nearly succeeded. At his own hospital. A nurse saved him. She had red hair. And a dream. He was very lucky—no permanent damage. But I’d never seen him so ... frail. He’s gone now.” I saw her eyes widen. “No, no, not that. Gone from SoCal. Just before I left for Gombe. He transferred to an internship at a university hospital in New York.” I knew I should stop talking. I had just met this woman. How do you do? Your true love tried to kill himself. What was wrong with me? Makeda was visibly trembling. And still I went on. “It was only after ... his episode that he told me about you. I mean really told me.” And then—I couldn’t help it: “Did he tell you about me?”

“You?” she asked. But her mind was clearly somewhere else. “I cannot believe it of him,” she said, not so much to me as articulating her own thought process. “When he saved Father Wendimu I thought, how strong he has become.”

She seemed to recall herself to the present. The eyes looking into mine were confused. “Yes. One of our more troubled kids attacked Father Wendimu, trying to steal his khat.”

I frowned. I’d learned about khat from a National Geographic special. “Father Wendimu takes khat?”

Makeda brushed away my surprise with an impatient, “Don’t judge him. Don’t judge us. Your Assefa liked it just fine.”

Now it was my turn to look away. Was it a different Assefa who’d inhabited this Ethiopian universe? Perhaps if I’d known that to begin with, something entirely different would have played out. Would it now? Just last month, I’d read a paper by Yakir Aharonov of Tel-Aviv University suggesting that the quantum world preserves the illusion of causality by masking the influence of future choices upon the past until those choices have actually been made.

Makeda coughed. I looked up. “What happened?” I asked. She stared at me blankly. “What did he save Father Wendimu from?”

She flushed. “Sorry, I’m just a little .... It was Dawit,” she said. “Foolish boy. Never meant for a good end. He slit open Father Wendimu’s neck with a knife and cut Assefa’s hand and ended up with a broken nose himself.” She smiled slyly, undoubtedly sensing I’d be shocked. “Assefa broke it for him.”

Shocked I was. I tried to re-sort Assefa in my mind. I’d seen Father Wendimu’s wound. This Dawit hadn’t been kidding.

But Makeda was just picking up steam. “Assefa operated on Father Wendimu right here in this room. Adey and I assisted. Father Wendimu would have bled out without him. Assefa will forever be a hero to the children. Sometimes they ask me to tell them the story before bedtime. They love hearing about something turning out well for a change.” She stood. Asked if I was finished with my bunna. I nodded. She took the dirty cups and began to walk with them toward the door. Just before exiting the room, she turned back, her expression grimly set. “Dawit wasn’t so lucky. He got into a fight with a local boy over a girl and was knifed to death on the road to Sar Midir. His cousin found him the next morning. Father Wendimu wept like a baby at the news.” And then, just like that, Makeda walked out.

She hadn’t asked why Assefa had tried to hang himself. Perhaps I’d be saved from that one. Instead, I’d been dismissed. Rightfully so. So much for wearing out the welcome mat.

The room felt eerie as soon as she left. There were ghosts here with me, and I wasn’t at all sure they were friendly. I hastily made my way out to the yard. The children were playing in teams, kicking and running after soda cans. Dust swirled everywhere they ran. It covered their worn sneakers, the bottoms of their pant legs. I kept my distance. Watching children play had made me a little anxious ever since my abortive Sunday school days, when I’d ruined any chances I’d had to join the other kids with my whirling and flapping.

I found a bench and sat down, closing my eyes. The children’s excited cries pierced the void in interesting patterns. I sat for what felt like an eternity, sat long after the sounds diminished and the sun grew warm enough to bead my upper lip with sweat. So lost was I in trying to fathom the reality of strangers who’d been no stranger to Assefa, of Assefa himself, who’d become even more of a stranger to me, that when Father Wendimu came to sit beside me, he had to poke my shoulder to get my attention.

Opening my eyes, I sighed. “I thought I’d understand him better if I came here. But now ....”

“Listen, dear, Makeda is shaken, too. She begged me to extend her apologies for leaving you like that. She is too proud a woman to cry in front of you.” Thinking back to my own tears, I wondered if I suffered a deficit of pride. He cleared his throat. “I, too, was distressed to hear about Assefa. I have met many broken souls in my life, but I can’t recall any one of them who tried to take his own life.”

“No,” I said urgently, turning to face him. “Please don’t think of him like that. I was terribly angry with him, but he’d fallen into the abyss.”

What an idiot I was. How could I imagine anyone normal would understand what I meant? “He—I think he was torn between two worlds.”

Father Wendimu sat with that a bit, rubbing his forehead. “Ah. Yes. I can imagine that. Do you think he is going to be okay?”

Words began tumbling out of my mouth. “I hope so. He’s a good man, really he is. He just got caught in something that he couldn’t ... he didn’t know how to ... if I thought for a moment he wouldn’t be okay, I couldn’t stand it. I’m just hoping that a change of scene will help. I know sometimes it can. I felt ever so much better after I moved to SoCal. I’m sure it will take him time. He’ll probably have to take it slowly, but ....”

Father Wendimu stared at me curiously. I flushed. “There was a reason he loved you, wasn’t there?”

I hung my head. “I don’t know about that. I did a lousy job at loving him. It was a selfish kind of love, really. I loved him for how he made me feel.”

Father Wendimu raised an eyebrow. “Oh that. Excuse me for blundering into territory I know nothing about. Isn’t that how all love begins?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered, pleating the hem of my blouse. “I’ve never gotten to the middle.”

The next morning I woke to the sound of a cock crowing outside Makeda’s window. I was in her room. In her bed. She’d insisted on sleeping on an unsuitably narrow cot with one of the children and hadn’t listened to my objections. I’d gotten a sense right then of how stubborn she could be. I’d gone to sleep enveloped in the cinnamon scent of her, dreaming amaranthine butterflies with flecks of black and gold on their wings. Now she poked her head into my room, a purple and black shama flowing over her shoulders. “Would you like to take a walk with me?” she said, awfully cheerily, I thought, for the stroke of dawn, and an odd contrast to her saturnine mood of the night before.

I threw on a pair of jeans and an orange Caltech Beavers hoodie and met her in the yard. The sun was barely rising, and a heavy dew gave the handles of the childrens’ tricycles an iridescent glow. I closed the rusty iron gate behind me, wincing as it creaked, and breathed in the scents of burning fires, animal dung, and the balsamic hint of what I later learned was wild hagenia nearby.

The dirt road felt soft and forgiving under my sandaled feet as I paced myself to match the swaying gait of my hiking partner. We said very little, with Makeda pointing out the spot where she picked her roses. The elegance of their display was in sharp contrast to the wayward shrubs surrounding them. A small red bird with a blue beak swept past, just inches from my nose. I gasped, and Makeda cried out, “A firefinch,” her laughter like wind chimes. We approached a field of maize where sheep and cattle stood like stolid sentries. I could hardly contain myself. Navigating the tall, scratchy plants, I made my way to a particularly appealing brown and white cow, but ended up edging away from her implacable brown gaze, deciding she hated me for eating spicy beef wat just the night before. But when I backed away toward the road, a lamb appeared out of nowhere, full of ridiculous exuberance. I could sense Makeda watching in amusement as I matched its frolicking, my breasts bouncing as I ran after it until it disappeared around a curve in the road.

Panting, I resumed my place by Makeda’s side. She mused aloud, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a grown woman with such play in her. If you would stay with us, the children would fall in love with you.”

We both fell silent at her unlucky choice of words. We walked more quickly now and soon approached the bank of a shallow-running river. Water spilled with a pleasing splash over gray and cream and salmon-colored rocks. Spreading trees with flaming red flowers lined the bank. Makeda waded into the soft soil and plucked one of the flowers. Climbing back up with infinite grace, she handed it to me. “We call it the tree of Dire Dawa.”

On our way back to the orphanage, we detoured through a small farmers’ market spread out before a line of little shops on a haphazardly paved street. Makeda stopped to speak to one of the vendors, a young man with flashing eyes and acne scars and a narrow beard that nearly came to a point. I noticed a couple of old men seated on faded stools. They were playing a game that involved the metal tops of beer bottles and a rough piece of cardboard with checkers drawn onto it.

One of the men, skinny and wrinkled and with skin a mottle of copper and dark chocolate, grinned a partly toothless smile at me and gestured across the board. “Dama.”

Makeda joined us. The musical clicks and slides of Amharic flew around me like the chattering of blue jays. She turned to me at one point and translated, “They would invite us to join them, but one is happily beating the other for the first time in his life.”

I grinned and motioned for them to continue. Makeda and I left the market carrying creased, old brown paper bags filled with bananas and prickly pears and two bottles of Coke that Makeda had bought at one of the little shops.

We ended up gorging on the fruit at the edge of a teff field, waving away bees and wasps that tried to horn in on our feast. Gwennie Fiske would have fainted if she’d seen me take long gulps of sugary soda after each mouthful of the slightly biting raspberry-ish cactus fruit, but Gwennie Fiske was nine thousand miles away.

We made a little ceremony of burying the thorny skins of our fruit, lest someone come by and step on them. As I was patting my own mound, Makeda murmured in such a soft voice I had to go over it in my mind to register what she’d said, “Isn’t he beautiful?”

“What happened?” she asked. “Please, I need to know why he tried to hurt himself. You can’t come out here, tell me half of it and just leave me hanging.” She realized as soon as she said it that the word choice was terrible. A vagrant coil of shiny black hair had sprung free from her shama. She tucked it back with trembling fingers.

So I told her about Assefa’s violation of me and Stanley’s shocking intervention.

She looked at me as if I’d let loose one of Sister Flatulencia’s silent but deadlies. Her words crawled out thickly, as if each one cost her everything she had. “Sometimes I cannot sleep. Particularly when something very evil has happened that day. And sometimes I have to face the evil in my own heart. I wished you ill even before I knew you. I begrudged that you could have what I could not. But now—that teacher of yours is a very evil man to have driven such a good one to nearly cut his life short.”

I felt that my heart would burst from my chest. “But Assefa isn’t just good. He was cruel to me. Forcing me.”

I saw a shudder work its way from her head to her shoulders to her hands. She grabbed hold of her netela as if to stop it. I knew she was recalling being forced herself. Violated. Cut.

“Do you ever think of the mantis? Is the act of eating her mate pleasurable to her? Does she enjoy it even more seeing the suffering of her prey?”

But without ceremony, she’d pushed up from the ground and was walking away from me. Her predilection for walking off was starting to resemble Sammie’s penchant for hanging up on me whenever we argued back in the early days.

“Oh,” she cried, turning back to face me, “what a fool I am. I thought I understood you. I looked you up on my computer last night after you went to sleep. You are the one who kept going when the others thought you were wrong. You have an idea that might save our species. I tell myself, ‘This woman has come here to see if there is a claim on the man she wants to marry.’ Now I see you have come here to assuage your guilt. Yours and that of the ugly man you call your mentor. Why should I believe what you say? That Assefa tried to rape you? Please. He could have any woman. Why would he ...?”

And then she threw her head back and laughed. Her laughter was harsh, so low-pitched it sounded almost masculine. It was not an infectious laugh. It did not welcome me to join in.

As we marched along, her bark-laugh turned into tears And then she stopped, her face goopy with snot. I wanted her to say something, but she just stared at me.

“Do you have any idea what I would have given to bear Assefa’s child? To lie with him?”

Without thinking, the words popped out. “But you couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been good at all. It would have been incest.”

I didn’t see it coming. Before I could move, she’d pulled her arm back and brought it forward with ferocity, slapping me in the face. The force of it threw me back a few steps. “How dare you!” she cried. And then, “What do you mean?”

My face stung so hard that I couldn’t stop blinking, but that wasn’t what hurt the most. I couldn’t believe what I’d just done. I’d promised Assefa I’d never tell anyone. And then to tell her? There was something terribly wrong with me. First my Nobel speech about my grandfather’s balls. Now all this.

How dishonest I’d been to judge Stanley H. Fiske. What was it Jane Goodall had told Serena? She admonished me not to expect any creature to behave better than I do in my worst fantasies.

“What do you mean?” Makeda insisted, arms akimbo, her shama completely askew.

I shook my head. I’d dug myself a grave; I might as well jump into it. “Assefa only found out when he came back to the States. He didn’t tell me until after he .... His family was afraid he’d return here. To you.”

“Who are you?” she cried. “The devil? You come here—why? To rip my heart from me?” And then she crumpled, reaching out helplessly toward my arm and taking me down with her. We knelt awkwardly on our knees, and I held her as she sobbed. I was weeping myself. Her body felt so much lighter than I would have imagined. My own felt like something I wished I could crawl out of.

Plato was wrong. The truth is not an abstraction. Jesus was wrong, too. It will not necessarily set you free.

Stanley had once told me that he couldn’t possibly believe in any God who’d create a world where absolute innocence and absolute cruelty co-exist. But wasn’t that what the universe itself was?

In sharing what I’d heard from Assefa in confidence, I’d turned another woman’s world inside out and bound myself to her in a way I wouldn’t have imagined. I’ve heard it said that saving someone’s life makes you responsible for him or her forever, but no one had told me about the impact of wrecking one. I cried inconsolably alongside Makeda over the terrible thing I’d done.

The remainder of our walk back to the orphanage took place in silence, with me having to run to keep up with her. But when we reached the rusty gate with its hopeful flag, I mumbled that I’d be back in a while. She nodded without looking at me, and I kept going. I trudged long enough that my feet began to hurt and nothing was recognizable. I stopped to dig pebbles from my shoes and rose to find an elderly couple approaching, she bearing a bright green and orange basket of bananas on her head and he leaning heavily on a gnarled stick. Very dark in visage and, seemingly, mood, they exchange not one word with each other as they walked, nor did they acknowledge my presence as they plodded past me. I imagined them as an eternally unhappy married couple. I knew that many marriages in rural Ethiopia were arranged. It was sobering how much the quality of our relationships depended on chemical connections with one another. Put two human substances together and you’d get either a caustic or magic. With Assefa I thought it had been one, but it had turned out to be the other.

It wasn’t long before I found myself in an informal enclave of roughly built huts surrounded by trees and forming a horseshoe-shaped clearing of hesitant grass. Someone had lit a fire nearby. I couldn’t see it, but I took in with a deep breath the sharp aroma of burning teff. It smelled wonderful, but stung my eyes. Pointed gray-thatched roofs topped the huts here, and I saw a woman smiling at me from one of the doorways. She wore a netela with a blue-toned border in an intricate diamond design.

“Sälam,” she called out, and I responded in kind. Then she tilted her head and rattled off a long series of words in Amharic, which I of course failed to understand.

I shrugged helplessly back at her, asking, “Do you speak English?” though I doubted she did. In turn, she shrugged, held up a finger, then disappeared, only to emerge a moment later bearing a somewhat battered silver tray with two steaming cups of bunna. I hardly needed much encouragement to sit down with her on the scrabbled earth. We had our own little coffee klatch, she speaking to me, gesturing excitedly, in Amharic, and me speaking to her, equally animated, in English. I obviously had no idea what she was saying, nor she me, but we had a jolly time, her generosity washing away, at least momentarily, my awareness of my awfulness.

She wasn’t a particularly attractive woman, her nose rather beaky for an Ethiopian and her teeth so large they looked liable to bite through her lips at any moment, but her honey-toned skin was flawlessly smooth, her gesticulating hands as graceful as a ballerina’s, and her smile a winsome child’s. After I downed the last of my cup, a white goat approached us and butted its head against my cheek until the woman shushed it away, clapping her perfect hands so sharply that the sound of it rent the air like thunder. The goat skipped off awkwardly, and I guffawed. The woman looked at me in surprise, and I wondered whether such a loud laugh was impolite in this part of the world.

But I couldn’t avoid Makeda forever. I was going to have to return to the orphanage. Thanking the woman profusely—at least I knew how to pronounce Betam ashmesugenalew—I knelt and reached toward the tray, but she gestured for me to stop, instead planting a kiss on each of my cheeks and whispering, “Minem Aydelem.” Her hair smelled of bunna and frankincense underneath its white shama. I left her without looking back, her kindness a warming cloak across my shoulders.

The gate to the orphanage was wide open when I returned. Beside it stood a cab with its motor running. Its driver appeared suddenly in front of me and walked hastily past, the whites of his eyes so bloodshot I wondered what was wrong with him.

Entering the yard, I saw Makeda sitting on one of the colored benches, dandling a baby I learned was named Eldina on her lap.

She replied without expression, “I am doing what I was born to do.” She cupped a hand around a drooling Eldina’s chin.

“But ....” I felt inhibited by the presence of the little girl. “I’m so sorry .... You must feel—”

She interrupted, waving an impatient hand, “Feel? You Americans with your feelings! I have learned from these bébés that it is a conceit to believe that my suffering is worse than anyone else’s.” I involuntarily took a step back. But now she was gesturing with her head toward the main building, her voice as smooth and cold as stone, “You have a visitor.”

Oh, God. Had Melky come already to fetch me? Though a part of me wished I’d left twenty-four hours ago, the timing felt stark and terrible.

The feet that took me into the building moved as if stuck in molasses, my heart as heavy as lead. That—and the human mind’s dependency on context—delayed my response time. Father Wendimu was seated facing me, and opposite him was the back of a man with light chestnut hair. That man turned and rose as he undoubtedly noted Father Wendimu looking up toward me. It took me several seconds to register that it was Adam limping around barchumas and mesobs to get to me.

His arms wrapped around me as tightly as they had when I was a girl of twelve, whirling and flapping over my failure to understand Sartre or Rousseau. I let myself collapse into his embrace and took a nice long whiff of his Campbell’s Chicken Soup B.O.

I was laughing and crying at the same time. Father Wendimu had left the room. I knew, because when I pushed away finally from Adam’s warm hug, only a second cup of bunna on the nearest mesob—alongside a worn black and white photo—remained as evidence that he’d been here.

He shook his head. “I could ask you the same question. When Stanley called Serena to see how you were doing and she told him you were traveling on your own to Ethiopia, we were all worried sick. While everyone else dithered, I bought a ticket.” He spread his hands in frustration, reminding me of the old days. “Fleur, what got into you? Don’t you realize how dangerous it can be to travel around as a single, young American woman in Africa?”

Evading his accusing eyes, I reached instinctively for the photograph, took one look, and collapsed onto the nearest barchuma. Assefa and Makeda must have been about five or six when the photo was taken—it was surely they; I fancied I saw a similarity in their grins. They were standing in front of a twisty-trunked olive tree, holding hands and smiling impishly at whoever had held the camera.

“Adam, you’re right. I am a stupid, stupid person. I hate myself! I really do.”