The Girl in the Road (25 page)

I was silent in reply and I felt a deep yearning. It had been so long since I'd thought of the ocean, the place you call home.

So do I, I said.

Have you ever seen the ocean? he said.

Yes.

(I could tell he was filing this information away, so as to better guess my origins, later.)

Instead he asked again, So is there seafood in Addis?

There's certainly fish, I said. Come with me. I know where to take you.

The restaurant would have been hard to find for him, as a ferenji. Only locals knew about it. We were seated at a traditional mesob, a woven table shaped like a chalice. A puffy golden lamp hung overhead. He was the only ferenji in the house and a few people stared. I ordered for us: two whole tilapia, grilled, from Lake Ziway. When the food came, he rolled up his sleeve and hunched over, his left arm propped on his knee. Eating was serious business to him. He turned the fish over once, then twice, like a dog ensuring his treat met muster, and then began to pull white flesh from the bones. He was adept with his hands. He had elegant, muscled fingers.

After a few mouthfuls to sate his hunger, he asked if it was bad for me to be seen like this: alone in the presence of a foreign man. He'd read that Ethiopian women seen in public with ferenjis were assumed to be prostitutes. I told him that attitudes had changed drastically, especially in Addis, and that I also didn't care what people thought. Impulsively I added, I've always moved lightly on the earth. Maybe a centimeter above it.

Ninety-nine people would have ignored such a comment because it was too strange for common speech, especially between near-strangers. But not Gabriel. He just nodded, as if he knew what I meant.

This is the moment, Yemaya, when I began to trust him.

When we were done with our fish, and nothing but greasy piles of bones remained, I ordered buna for us. Black, for me. I asked him what he liked; he ordered a macchiato.

I said, You like cream and sugar.

He said, I'm a self-respecting Indian man.

So I asked him to tell me more about himself. About his country. About what India was like. His feelings on Eritrea (“Let them be”). How many languages he spoke (five: Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, English). How old he was (twenty-one, one year older than me). How he liked Ethiopia (“fascinating”). Where else he'd been in Ethiopia (only Ambo so far, on a trip with the other medical residents, to bathe in the hot springs). What caste he belonged to (Brahmin mother, on her father's side; Kshatriya father). What kind of music he liked.

He liked Ethiopian jazz. He had real vinyl records and a record player, brought all the way from India in a trunk. He'd been combing the stores for pre-Derg records. Most had already been bought by foreign dealers who then sold them abroad to collectors for huge sums of money, but he'd found six so far. He intended to host a listening party at his flat for his fellow Indian residents and their fellow Ethiopian clinicians, and serve chaat, Indian street food. He invited me. I accepted.

See how well I fit in, Yemaya? It was all a bit of a game to me. This person Gabriel could never know me the way you knew me, I thought; and so in the meantime, I would humor him. I would humor myself, even. I would pretend that I was a normal young Ethiopian woman, orphaned but blessed, and ambitious. Foreign scholars from all over the world were interested in the fledgling, real, post-EPRDF Ethiopian democracy. In fact, I was offered a fellowship and could have skimmed right out of the country, but I turned it down to study at Addis Ababa University. I felt invested in Ethiopia and wanted to stay, but I admit that the real reason I turned them down was that I was afraid of leaving the country at all, in case you chose to come back. I didn't want to miss you.

And even though I began sharing my heart with Gabriel, I don't think he ever really knew me. He never watched over me and saw everything I did, as you did. There was the time—I'm sure you must have seen it—when I killed that man who was raping my neighbor. I had just started at the university and came back to my little flat near Tewodros Square. I heard a strangled scream from behind one of the doors and, my heart beating loud, tiptoed along the corridor to discern which flat it was coming from. I heard a man yell back. This was a normal part of city life—a city man bringing his village wife into the city and seven kinds of hell ensuing. The more I listened to the screaming, the lighter I felt, the more free. When the woman's screams reached a sustained pitch I knocked down the door with my shoulder. It was as if matter had become immaterial. I came in through the kitchen and the first thing I saw was a scissors, used for cutting meat from bone, lying in the sink. I went through the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom and there it all was, exactly as I'd pre-seen it in my mind's eye before rounding the corner, a man pressing his hands into a woman's back while she struggled to get out from beneath him. His pants were down and her skirt was up. He turned too slow; he didn't see me coming at all. He wore a black-and-white checkered shirt. He was unprepared. Jumping on him and stabbing him through the throat was one fluid motion. I kept the scissors there and he kept clutching at them, trying to pull them out, but it was like a contest of wills, and I pulled them out and drove them in again. Finally his hands stopped clutching and he relaxed. I had stopped him! I felt like I could do anything. I could run a race. I could fly from Oromia to the Simien Mountains. I could alight on mountain peaks, and find the Ark of the Covenant, and the True Cross, and Dinkenesh's grave. I could find them all in one day. In that moment, I knew where they were.

Then I heard a bird sing. The call and answer.

Nhoo-nhoo? Nho-no-no.

Nhoo-nhoo? Nho-no-no.

I remembered that I'd needed to get rice on the way home from the theater. Had I remembered? Yes, I remembered buying it. Indian jasmine white extra-long-grain. It was in my backpack. Where did I last have my backpack? It was in the corridor.

That was when the sweet buzzing in the back of my mind broke into its component pieces, and became the cadences of a human voice.

I turned to face the woman who was huddled in the corner with her face in her hands.

He was hurting you, I said, not as a question.

The woman kept crying as if I'd said nothing. I recognized her. I'd seen her in the elevator before. She always wore a mustard-colored shawl over her Western clothes.

I tossed the scissors toward her. They left a smear of blood on the tile and came to a stop at her feet.

Say it was self-defense, I said. His pants are down. They'll believe you.

I walked out of the bedroom and stopped in the kitchen. I washed my hands. I used the spray fixture to make sure I got every spot until all the water ran clear down the drain. That's when I noticed the orange rinds and the waterlogged garlic. She'd been preparing a meal. I thought of cleaning it up for her but then decided to leave it be. I stepped out of the flat and pulled the door shut behind me until it clicked. I picked up my backpack where I'd dropped it.

I went back to my own apartment. I felt so relaxed, sweating, cool. I lay down on my couch. I pulled a blanket over myself. I could feel the buses rumbling on the street below. Ever since childhood, I could only sleep if there was a tremor underfoot, like the hum of our truck on the desert road. I fell into a deep sleep. In my dream, I was trading gursha with the man I'd just killed. He was still wearing the black-and-white checkered shirt. He held up a morsel of kitfo wrapped in injera, all of it soaked in red berbere sauce, and the bite was delicious, the spongy bread and the striations of lean beef muscle. I did the same for him. He was laughing, eyes sparkling, though his teeth were all red from the sauce.

Gabriel's flat was in a high-rise on Medhane Alem. It was located just a block from the new 3D multiplex and galleria, so before the listening party, I went to a café called New Sheba on the highest floor of the galleria, where I could look out the windows and down onto the roof of the cathedral. Women wrapped in white were strolling the grounds far below, small as ants to my eye. I ordered a mix juice and read a little about Kerala, putting aside my prejudices, for the moment, about India as a whole. I learned that Kerala was the only freely elected communist government in India, and had been for decades. That it was a green and wet country, even more so than Senegal or Cameroon. That everyone could read and write. That women made up over half of its local and state legislatures. That queer people were free and protected by the government. All of these things made me think well of Gabriel. I reminded myself again that my quarrel was not with Indian people, but the Indian government, and more immediately the Ethiopian government. I had no contest with Gabriel or his friends I was about to meet.

I wanted to be on time to make it to Gabriel's place. I didn't know how Indians regarded time; I thought it safe to be punctual as per Western custom. His building was sleek and modern, with brown glass paneling and bronze beams, Africa Nouveau–style. There was a man in a garnet uniform guarding the front door. He greeted me in Amharic and called the elevator for me. He asked if I was a maid for a family in the building. I told him no, I was seeing a friend. Ishi, he said. He seemed to have drawn his own conclusions: that I was a maid who was lying about being a maid.

I took the elevator to the twelfth floor. Gabriel's flat was at the end of the hallway. When he opened the door, delicious warm aromas flooded out. He looked handsome in a white linen shirt and a blue dhoti tied around his hips. A woman's voice called from the kitchen in Hindi, Is somebody here?

Gabriel called back, It's Mariama from the march!

Oooh, Mariama! I want to meet her!

A woman emerged from the kitchen. She was very tall, almost taller than Gabriel, queenly and curvy. She looked like a doll of a classical Hindu dancer. She wore dark-pink salwar kameez, the scarf fluttering behind her like two wings. When she offered her hand, a dozen gold bangles rang like chimes.

Meena Mehta, she said. I'm pleased to meet you. Rama has told me a lot about you.

I shook her hand and said, Rama?

She calls me Ramachandran, even though it's my father's name, he said. But especially in Ethiopia I go by Gabriel, to blend in better.

Oh yes you blend right in, I said.

Meena laughed loudly and Gabriel's golden skin darkened. I regretted the joke, thinking, Ethiopians have a morose sense of humor and maybe Indians don't.

Meena said, Please excuse me, the pakoras are frying. She turned and her long silky hair swished behind her, like a waterfall rippling.

Gabriel asked if I would like a drink. I asked for water. He returned with a bottle of Nordi, expensive Norwegian water, and a filigree-etched glass filled with ice. He invited me to sit on piles of beautiful pillows, expensive embroidered ones that I could tell were all from the same stretch of the Women's Market, Shamanade, north of Sidist Kilo. The poor fool must have been browbeaten by those women. I wondered how he'd gotten all those pillows home. Didn't they bargain in India? Could he not say no to a woman? I decided that he must have a strong mother.

He asked me how I was. I replied that I was well. He seemed anxious. He launched into a catalogue of things he'd been thinking about since our last meeting. He could barely formulate one thought before he was on to the next. Immediately we were on intimate terms. He wanted to know the name of the restaurant I'd taken him to; he believed it was enchanted, because it was the best meal he'd yet had in Ethiopia, and the tilapia we'd eaten had spoken to him in his dreams. He wanted to know whether I agreed with Worknesh Gebremariam, the ARAP deputy Speaker who believed that all foreigners, even students and other so-called goodwill ambassadors, should leave the country for the time being. He wanted to know why Ethiopia, like India, had had a particularly hard time dealing with religious and ethnic pluralism; or whether he was equating the situations of two countries that were actually very different. He said that India was called Karma Bhooma—the Land of Experience—because in India, everything that could happen under the sun had already happened. But
he
felt that Ethiopia was the true Karma Bhooma.

Why? I asked.

Because humanity began here, he said. Like you said, Dinkenesh walked this earth. You convinced me.

He was passionate, even a little wild. He was drinking tej from a slim-stemmed glass.

It's the womb of the Earth, he continued. The Great Rift Valley is like the two legs of the mother goddess, opening.

Upon hearing that, Meena admonished him from the kitchen. He blushed and looked into his wine.

But I thought it was a lovely image. I smiled at him and asked if he had yet seen Dinkenesh.

No, he said, sitting up and looking at me intensely. Will you take me?

I said I would. See, Yemaya, I had already been to visit Dinkenesh many times. The first time I saw her, I was on a chaperoned trip with the other students who had won the national poetry contest. I was eleven years old. Our guide was named Elyas, who was a great storyteller. He jumped up and down and waved his arms and did different voices to make us laugh. When we entered the room where Dinkenesh was kept, I was at the back of the group. Elyas said that Dinkenesh had been found by a team of French, British, and American scientists. They had missed her burial place over and over again, and it was only a hunch of a hunch that led them to see an arm bone protruding from the earth. Elyas reenacted their amazement in French, British, and American accents that made us all giggle.

MON DIEU!

BLIMEY, OLD CHAP!

WELL, I'LL BE DAMNED!

Finally the group shuffled into the next gallery, and I lingered to get Dinkenesh all to myself. I remembered everything you'd told me about her, about her being our mother's mother's mother's mother. I looked up into her skull holes. And they reminded me of something I hadn't thought about in ages: the girl in the road, with black wings, whom I'd spoken to after I'd been thrown from the truck, who turned out to be just a dead body after all. I wondered whether that girl would one day be discovered too, millions of years from now, bones and cloth preserved, her skeleton reconstructed and placed in a glass box, her skull tilted to one side, just as it was when she questioned me, What is your name?