Assefa
LIKE A LION in the bush, the past stalks us wherever we go.
After an uneventful flight from Ronald Reagan National Airport to JFK, I collected my luggage and was directed toward the taxi stand outside the American Airlines terminal. A blast of hot air hit me, and I broke into a heavy sweat. The man who inserted my luggage into the trunk of his yellow Nissan looked so familiar he could have been a relative, but I would learn soon enough that he was Eritrean, hailing from Asmara. As I slid into the back seat, he reached over to shake my hand. His own was rough and dry, and I felt unusually long fingernails graze my palm. “I am Adonay Gevreselassie,” he smiled, and I introduced myself to him.
“Ethiopian?” he asked, and I nodded, a little nervous. But he kept on grinning, and as soon as he started up the engine, a languorous melody filled the interior of the cab. It took me captive.
I shouted excitedly, “But who is this singing?”
He called out, “Qorchach!” His eyes flashed at me from the rearview mirror. He turned down the volume to add, “He is called Qorchach, but his Habesha name is Tesfalem Arefaine. The song is Ztegefe Aymlesen Eyu. It is in my native language, Tigrina. It is tizita music, one of many things in common between our people. It reminds me of home. I myself sometimes play the krar.” That explained the long fingernails.
I liked the song very much and felt well-disposed to Adonay Gevreselassie as we compared notes regarding his own experiences of driving a cab and the stories my father would share at the dinner table. The only discordant note during our cab ride came from a niggling voice that reminded me that my grandmother had died at the hands of Adonay Gevreselassie’s kinsmen.
Adonay had the devil of a time getting me to the glass and brick Riverwalk building on Roosevelt Island, cursing and calling in to his dispatch office many times before finding his way to the bridge that brought us to the front of a massive complex where I would somehow have to find my new home. I had known ahead of time that the hospital’s staff housing was shared with measured proportions of the rich and the poor, but I had not been prepared for a building so imposing and prosperous. I shook hands with the Eritrean after he deposited my luggage on the sidewalk, and I watched with a surprising pang of regret as his cab pulled away from the curb. Before lifting up my bags, I fished around in my wallet until I found a dog-eared old business card from someone named Theosophus Kelly—I had no idea who he was. I hastily penciled “Adonay Gevreselassie” on the back and replaced it in my wallet, in case I wished to look him up sometime.
The lobby of this architectural landmark was what one might expect: large view windows, subdued modern lighting, shiny parquet floors. The medical center must be incredibly well endowed to subsidize such princely accommodations for its Heart Institute staff. But this complex looked too much like the tall buildings lining Westwood’s Wilshire Blvd. for comfort. Despite being stuck inside the handle of my heavy suitcase, my hand automatically wanted to reach up to finger the scar that remained on the left side of my neck. It had become something of a habit, a confirmation, I suppose, that it had not all been a dream. For a brief moment, I saw the faces of the nurses who’d been leaving the elevator as I entered with nothing but death on my mind.
In accepting Stanley H. Fiske’s offer to secure me a residency in New York, I had harbored a secret hope that in working among heart patients fighting for their lives, I might once again discover an appetite for my own. But would it prove true? I set down my bags and raised a hand to ring the doorbell to Apartment 553A, where I knew only that two cardiac medicine residents were sharing their rooms with a staff member of the United Nations and, now, me.
The barefoot, bare-chested fellow who answered the door with a quick, “Hey, you must be Assefa. I’m Samuel. Hang on a mo’, brother,” disappeared as soon as he’d opened it, leaving me to move my bags into a sun-splashed room with the same parquet flooring as the lobby’s, but furnished with much cheaper furniture. I heard the telltale sounds of a shower being turned on. Still sweating despite the unmistakable air-conditioning, I pulled off my light jacket and stuffed it in the crook of my arm as I took in the two mismatched upholstered chairs—one an ugly mustard color, another a liberally stained beige—opposite a stainless steel wheeled stand supporting a large flat-screen TV that had some kind of zombie movie playing. At the far end of the room stood a tiled coffee table missing a few of its tiles. Just behind it was a newer-looking Ikea-style navy sofa. And there my eyes came to a full stop. On the sofa was perched a goddess with midnight skin.
Her slender legs were slung like a lazy smile from sofa to table. I couldn’t help but notice the little square bottle of nail polish on the table, nor the brush in her long-fingered hand, nor that she’d already painted all but two of her perfect toes a glittery green. I saw now that at its far end, the sofa was companioned by a diamond-patterned mesob of bright yellow, red, pale blue, cream, purple. Across its knobby lid was strewn a shama with a gold and silver fringe. Was it hers? I tried to imagine the shama struggling with her curly explosion of obviously dyed, brilliant red hair. The truth was, I couldn’t imagine anything different, or better, than the insouciant stare with which she regarded me, the way her rolled-up jeans and cropped red T-shirt hugged her boyish chest with its sharp little nipples, nor the way her hair rose from her round forehead in a crown of flaming waves. She threw back her head, and a fountain of laughter gushed from her throat, betraying a beguiling gap between her front teeth. I saw now that she had a thin gold band curling around her right nostril. She looked like no one I’d ever seen, a strange blend that was extremely satisfying.
“Cat caught your tongue, Assefa Berhanu? I’m one of your crazy new flat mates. Don’t worry. I don’t bite.” She patted the space beside her on the sofa. “Come sit and keep me company.” I complied, my limbs moving slowly, as if soaked in honey. I set my jacket down next to a book splayed open on the sofa. I saw it was Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I had always meant to read it. The woman turned away from me to methodically dab polish on her two bare toenails, but she kept speaking. Her voice had a distinctive skip to it, alternately husky and light. “Dumb to do this right now. They’re going to take forever to dry, and we’ve got somewhere to be.” She threw me a quick glance. “All of us. I hope you don’t mind that we’ve already made plans for you. Really—it’s amazing: they’re actually opening a little bunna bar a couple of blocks away. Right here on Roosevelt Island. And we’ve invited some members of the community to join us there to meet you at the grand opening.”
As if sensing me staring at the tattoo stitched across her anklebone, an Amharic rendering of the word “woman,” 
, she skewed around, leaned back against a throw cushion on her side of the sofa, and—astonishingly—stretched out her other leg straight across my knees. “You’re supposed to read this one first,” she chided. Her other ankle bore the script 
. “Blue Nile.” Which I knew was, for at least some of my people, the holy river called Gihon that flowed from the Biblical Eden.
I tried to subtly slide my jacket over my erection, and she hastily retracted her leg, as if only now realizing the audacity of what she had done.
But her laughter was light, teasing. “You must forgive me. I haven’t even introduced myself. My benefactor always told me, ‘Lemlem Skibba, you are a terrible girl.’”
It was obvious from her comfortable laugh that whoever had said that hadn’t meant it. But I was curious. “Benefactor?”
“I am ‘tooth mingi.’” She gestured toward the gap in her teeth. “My tribe is Kara. They only stopped sacrificing girls like me a few years ago. Bad luck. They thought we were bad luck.”
I could not speak. Was there no end to the cruelty of my people?
As if reading my mind, Lemlem Skibba said with no little heat, “Don’t even go there. It was Kara people who saved me. At significant personal sacrifice. Ignorance and cruelty are equal opportunity cultural phenomena. We at the U.N. have that lesson beaten into us every day.”
“Actually,” I said slowly, “We might have more than you’d imagine in common. I am bad luck, too.”
I listened to the shhh of the air conditioner as she considered me more carefully. Suddenly, she pushed up from the sofa and deftly slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops. She called out toward the rooms I hadn’t yet seen (including, presumably, my own), “Samuel Zerezghi, are you done admiring yourself in the mirror? Let’s go!” I stood myself, and she slipped her arm into mine and began walking us toward the front door, commenting in a slightly surprised tone, “You know, I do believe you and I are going to become very good friends.”
Wondering whether the past need necessarily determine the future, I submitted to the electric sensation of her arm touching mine.
“If you say so,” I replied.
The ride back down to the lobby was far different from the one going up. Samuel made up for his rather cavalier initial greeting by offering up a surprisingly strong hug, after which he and Lemlem rapid-fired questions at me about the quality of my internship at UCLA, the number of Ethiopian restaurants in Los Angeles, how much racial discrimination I’d experienced at school, and which movie stars I’d met. To his credit, Samuel didn’t ask one question about why I’d transferred from one of the top heart hospitals in the country to another. Instead, he filled me in about our missing fourth roommate, Sisay Mulugeta, who was born in New York to Ethiopian parents. As we were happily marching off to a café opening, Sisay was evidently assisting at his first coronary bypass, which reminded me that I’d left L.A. determined to bury my sorrows in work.
We passed a series of small community gardens. The streets of Roosevelt Island seemed extraordinarily clean for Manhattan, and I ventured a comment to that effect. Lemlem snorted, “Bloomberg likes to take all the credit for it, but people here have taken pride in their community long before he was even elected.” It went unsaid that Samuel and Lemlem were once lovers, but I knew it had to be true. There was something about their easy familiarity. Or was this how roommates behaved? I did not know that I could ever achieve that.
There was a yellow and green banner displayed across the shop front of the Bunna Head Café. The crowd waiting to get in was boisterous and friendly and dressed as casually as Lemlem and Samuel. They seemed to be mostly Ethiopians, many of whom I was introduced to (with me knowing I’d never remember their names), but I saw some white faces, too, including a blond-haired girl with a crooked grin who I mistook—for one agonized moment—for Fleur. The ache that swept over me was physical, and I bent over as if stricken. Samuel asked, “Hey, man, you okay?” But as quickly as it came, it was gone.
I straightened and reassured him. “Not to worry. Just a little cramp. Bloody airlines treat you like sardines.” When the café’s doors opened, I let myself be carried along by the crowd, whose voices automatically rose to compete with the refrain of Sawa Sawa Sawale blasting from the sound system until some of them gave up and joined in, singing along with Ziggy Zagga and dancing in place, shimmying and shoulder shrugging. I was convinced I could smell Lemlem’s nail polish behind me. I knew I could not even imagine what was to come in this new life of mine. Fired with adrenaline, I raised my own voice to sing along with the crowd.
Yet even in that moment of release, with Lemlem tapping me on the shoulder and me inching around in the crowd to face her so closely I could smell the peppermint of her breath escaping from her gap-toothed grin, there in my heart was tizita. Some part of me would remain forever betrothed to the memory of my dukula. Would it be the same for her? It shouldn’t matter, but I knew it did.
As people found their seats, the chaos began to sort itself. The group of men and women who’d surrounded the booth where Lemlem had slid in beside me moved aside to allow our waiter to approach our table. His glistening dreadlocks reached down to touch the shoulders of his Lion of Judah T-shirt. When I gave him my order, he asked, “Do you want your bunna ‘tinish sickwar’?”
I’d never taken sugar in my bunna before, but without a moment’s thought, I heard myself answering, “Yes.”
