The Girl in the Road Page 19

  It was almost dawn. Some of the drivers, still tense from the overnight drive, stayed behind to find food on the street and then sleep on the truck bed as usual. But Muhammed decided to rent a hotel room for the night, on account of wanting to rest his leg properly, and you said that we would also get a room. You said we deserved a special treat after so many weeks of sleeping on the truck.

  You took my hand and we walked with Muhammed away from the lot and up to the town center. We had to move slowly because Muhammed was still using crutches. He told us he knew where to go; there was a hotel on the piazza with a beautiful rooftop restaurant that might be seating customers already.

  I gripped your hand. The essential Ethiopian-ness I was trying so hard to discern from the truck was clearer to me here. I saw women covered in gauzy white fabrics, edged with deep jewel trim. Many of them looked different from us—their faces were colored lighter and yellowish, like mustard. Their noses were narrow and their lips were thin. Many of the women had dark blue tattoos of big crosses on their foreheads, or little blue crosses all along their jawlines. They didn’t smile. I imagined myself as a grown woman and thought, This is my future: regal and fierce.

  Muhammed was clearly glad to be back on his home soil. He pointed to this and that, proudly narrating his homeland. I think he mentioned the Battle of Adwa three times, how the Ethiopians beat back the Italians, and how Ethiopians alone among all Africans had never been conquered, never been colonized. He pointed to a thick stone wall along the road. That’s the Royal Enclosure, he said. The castles where the great kings of Ethiopia ruled.

  Do we have time to see it? you asked.

  Yes, said Muhammed. We’ll be here all day, leaving at dawn tomorrow.

  But first you need to sleep, I said to you, touching your face.

  You laughed. You were taken aback. How do you know me? you said. Are you the one taking care of me, now?

  I nodded and buried my face in your side.

  The manager made us wait on a padded white bench for half an hour before she was ready to seat us. Then she showed us to a beautiful table, wicker with spotless white cloth draped over it. After the waiter took Muhammed’s crutches and laid them against a nearby pillar, we ordered food, like a little family again, except with Muhammed instead of Francis as “the man.” I remember your being pleased that the restaurant took “cards” so that you wouldn’t have to “change money.” (It was years before I understood what all that meant.) The food arrived swiftly: a cup of fruit and yogurt, a plate stacked with gummy bread bent sideways, and a smoothie with four bands colored green, yellow, pink, and white.

  Muhammed acted as if he were greatly impressed with my choices. He explained what each thing was: there were papaya, watermelon, and mango chunks in the fruit cup; the gummy bread was called a pancake, filled with hot guava jelly; and the smoothie was called a mix juice, with layers of avocado, mango, guava, and banana. You spooned little portions of each dish onto my plate and you gave me a straw to drink my mix juice, but I’d never used a straw before, so I sucked too hard and juice came out of my nose. Muhammed laughed, but it was a kind laugh. He wiped my nose for me.

  After breakfast, I could see your feet dragging. I needed to get you to bed. When we got our room key, I led you by the hand down the hallway and into our room—huge, splendid, sparkling, like nothing I’d ever seen before. There was a clean bathroom with a shower and flushing toilet. A beautiful painting was on the wall, a portrait of a woman with dark blue crosses on her face, and a black rectangle on the opposite wall, which I thought might be a frame missing its painting, but later you told me it was a flatscreen for satellite television. I couldn’t wait to explore everything in the room, but you lay down on the bed and asked me to be quiet so you could sleep. So I did. I sat in a big soft chair and watched you sleep. You said Francis’s name only once this time. That was an improvement.

  I was still trying to figure out how to make everything perfect, to make us whole again. We were almost there, but not quite. Before long, after all the breakfast sugar, I was asleep too.

  I slept even longer than you did. I slept right through the shower you took. When I woke up, you were clad only in white towels, and they didn’t even cover all of you!

  I hid my eyes and giggled.

  What are you giggling at, little girl?

  Nothing, I said.

  You’ve never seen a naked woman?

  I shook my head.

  You were in a high, wild mood. You talked fast. You said, In Morocco, they have common baths called hamams, where all the women bathe together. It’s so humane. Every society should have them because then, girls see women’s bodies and how they take pride in them. Then they become proud of them, and not afraid.

  It had never occurred to me that my body should be something I was afraid of. Something that felt fear, certainly—the kreen whined even when my attention wasn’t focused on it—but not something I should be afraid of.

  I’m not afraid! I said.

  You narrowed your eyes at me. I went still. I understood that you were about to test me.

  You took off both towels and stood before me naked. I gaped like a moonstruck goat. You were tall and broad-shouldered, with thin muscled arms and high teardrop breasts, and nipples darker than your skin; your waist was high, and your hips flowed down from it like the drape of a dress.

  This is what a grown woman’s body looks like, you said. You turned around and slapped your own bottom. I was too dumbstruck to giggle. Or maybe I was in religious awe, suspecting what I now know for certain!

  You’re pretty, I said.

  You smiled and said Thank you, little girl.

  And then it became clear to me what I should do, to make us truly whole again.

  I pushed myself out of the chair and stood. I took off the plain shift I’d been given at the clinic. I climbed up onto the bed and laid down on my back.

  You weren’t looking at me. It wasn’t how I wanted you to react. I had to be clearer.

  Come here, I said.

  Why? you said.

  I have something to give you, I said.

  Still not looking at me, you sat on the edge of the bed. What? you said.

  I sat up and took your hand, and laid it over the place between my legs, and lay back down.

  My golden meaning, I said, even though I didn’t understand what that meant. I just knew you had to be the one I gave it to.

  Your hand was light on my skin, but you didn’t take it away.

  You don’t know what you’re saying, Mariama.

  I do, I said. I want you to have it. There’s no one else I want.

  You need to be older, you said. It’s not for me to take, not even me.

  But your voice was getting weaker.

  No, I said. I say now.

  A command had come into my voice. The kreen was speaking now. It seemed that I was the elder and you were the younger.

  This can’t be the way to heal, you said to yourself.

  Yes it is, I said. We both need to be one and whole again.

  How could you know, you said. How could you know.

  Your hand became heavier, and then you curled one finger up into my body. I was young, so I thought that’s as far as it could go. But your finger wriggled and pushed and made new room as it went and as it went it sucked the breath out of me. It felt like a stick of cayenne. I watched your shoulders rise and fall ten times and tried to breathe along with you. We both knew we had to wait, to count to ten, to make it real.

  Then you withdrew and turned me on my side and hugged me from the back, while inside me, the kreen licked up the new flame.

  It was late in the afternoon when we set out for the Royal Enclosure, my hand in yours. Your mood was even higher and wilder, as if now that we were whole again, a single electric current was coursing through both our bodies.

  When we were crossing the piazza we saw a woman stirring red stew in an iron pan. You spoke to her and gestured a lot, and laughed in a high, hys
terical pitch I’d never heard from you before.

  You turned to me and said, She’s going to give us a bit of shiro! It’s a kind of spicy bean paste. This will be your first real taste of Ethiopia!

  The woman handed me a morsel wrapped in brown paper. I picked it up with my fingers, a flap of spongy bread soaked in red sauce, and ate it. It was mushy-sour-savory-spicy.

  You like it?

  I nodded vigorously. It tasted like what we had just done in the hotel room.

  You gave the woman a bill and then we continued on our way. You babbled: If you like shiro, you’re going to fit right in here. In Dakar there was an Ethiopian restaurant my friends and I used to spend time in. There was a whole circle of dancers and artists that stayed there for the coffee in the afternoon and the honey wine at night, which they call tej here, remember that, for hours on end, playing music or talking about politics. That’s how I learned about Ethiopian dancing and music and jazz. Some of us wanted to go to Lagos or Johannesburg. But most of us talked about Addis, where the president spoke Hindi and wore a traditional Amharic dress to state meetings. There’s a whole team of women devoted to spinning her dresses from the best cotton in the world, and three master embroiderers who make the edges, and after she was elected, the fashion shows in Dubai and Mumbai all showed Amharic dresses.

  We arrived at the front gate of the Royal Enclosure. You paid for us both. We walked up the pebbled path under blooming hyacinth trees shooting up through the ruins. Birds had built nests on the tops of the pillars. We walked through banquet rooms, empty and echoing, with lizards scooting in the corners. We came into a grand hall with a vaulted ceiling, but the ceiling had crumbled and showed right through to the sky. There were doorways and stairways that led to nothing but air, and diamond holes that showed other castles, far away.

  We wandered from ruin to ruin, quiet. Yemaya, I don’t think I’d ever been so happy in my whole life, not even in Ouagadougou. Whatever we had done in the hotel room, it’d worked. We were whole again.

  When we returned to the hotel, we joined Muhammed, who was dining alone.

  So, he said with obvious excitement, it looks like we’ll be headed to Lalibela right in time for Timket.

  Neither of us knew what that was.

  It’s the holiest day for the Ethiopian Church, he said. Lalibela has the biggest celebration of it. It’s famous all over the world.

  Is that a good thing or a bad thing? you asked.

  It means more headaches, for where to park, where to eat, where to sleep, he said. But it’s a very holy day for Christians. They hold mass baptisms with water hoses. I’ll go and watch just for the show of it.

  So we said we would go too.

  Baptism

  You were quiet the next day, as quiet as you had been excited the previous day. It felt like an anticlimax since I thought that, once we were in Ethiopia, and once we had become whole again, your mood would get better and stay that way all the time. How little I understood!

  I followed our route on the map splayed on my lap. We were going south, around Lake Tana, which was a gigantic blotch in the middle of the country. Muhammed showed me the lake itself, far below us. At first I was confused—I couldn’t see the other side, so I asked Muhammed if that was the ocean, if we’d made it all the way across to the other side of Africa. He said, No, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it is. It’s a very big lake. A false ocean.

  I found you to tell you what I’d just learned about Lake Tana.

  I know, you said.

  Do you think it’s safe to swim in it?

  I don’t know much of anything anymore, you said.

  What an answer! So I knew you were still in a quiet mood, so I didn’t prod you further.

  It was hard to keep my balance on the truck that day. We kept winding up and down hills, which was not a landscape I’d ever experienced before. I didn’t know the land could be so bumpy, and not only bumpy, but sheared such that I could see land rearing up above me, or plunging away below. Now I know, of course, that we were driving down the outermost lip of the Great Rift Valley.

  We passed through a town called Debre Tabor, but only to stop for fuel and snacks, as Muhammed wanted to push on through the night. I tugged on your hand and said, Let’s go check and see if there are Indian sweets. You nodded and got up and we dismounted the truck and walked into town. It was twilight. By silent agreement, we went into the most modern-looking store we could find. It turned out they had a huge display of Indian sweets—the biggest selection I’d yet seen. They weren’t even prepackaged. They were in tin pans, sitting in syrup, or wrapped in wax paper.

  The clerk told you that there was an Indian community in Debre Tabor, and that one of the families made sweets to sell at the markets. Apparently Ethiopian sweets left something to be desired, so Indian sweets were filling the market niche.

  Can we take one of each? I said.

  Let me see how much money I have, you said. You rummaged in your bag, and then caught a glimpse of my face, which must have looked pathetic, because then you said, Of course we can get one of each.

  We left the store with a yellow plastic bag filled with sweets. And when we got back on the road that night, you turned on your sirius so we could see what we were eating. I think it was that night that converted me to gulab jamun, Yemaya. They’re best fried, so it’s impossible to prepackage them. A fresh one tasted like heaven on earth. I finally agreed with you.

  I remember the drive to Lalibela only through dreams: that we were winding back and forth up a mountainside, ascending a road to heaven. When I woke, we were parked in a lot that sat at the edge of an abyss. The plain was a thousand meters down. My brain could not comprehend the distance. I’d dreamed the truth: we’d come to the doorstep of heaven.

  You’d been out already. Before I even had my breakfast, you told me to look on the front seat of the truck where, inside a plastic bag, there was a small white dress made of cottony gauze, with deep blue borders and a blue cross embroidered on the front.

  You told me to try it on. You held up your blanket while I changed behind it. I was happy to take off my old shift and put this new garment on. You knelt in front of me and showed me how to tie the matching sash around my waist, and then the matching headscarf around my hair. When you were done, you called Muhammed to look. He said I looked just like a little Amhara shepherdess. There were tears in your eyes. Looking back, Yemaya, now I know why.

  The two of us set off into town alone. What a spectacle! The town itself was like something from another world, a village of round houses, high on the mountainside above that vast plain. And the mountainside was swarming like an anthill. We were two of thousands of people come to the city for Timket. Everywhere we turned, there were people, families and their donkeys and whole flocks of children running free. Almost everyone was wearing white, many of the women in dresses like mine.

  We walked with the crowds because there seemed to be a direction to the flow. You were quiet again, but seemed serene. Now I know why you looked that way: you were preparing for what was to come. The sun broke through the clouds and fell on us hosts of white, rivers of pilgrims spilling from ledge to ledge, down into the ancient stone-cut city, into the trenches and churches.

  You picked me up and carried me on your shoulders. I wrapped my legs around your back and kissed both of your cheeks and tasted tears. I knew you were as happy as I was. From this height, I could see again how high up we were. The rest of the earth was so far away! Cliffs and escarpments could only dimly be seen, in pale watery colors, across all that distance. I had trouble breathing because the air was so thin. I had to gulp it in.

  We made a turn in the labyrinth. On the street ahead of us was a line of youths advancing, step by step, with bright golden faces, each arrayed in white, hunched and cupping their hands as if to catch water.

  You turned your face up to me, and indeed, tears were streaming down your face. They’re singing to you! you said. They’re singing to Mary!


  As they stepped forward, you stepped back. It was like a game. Like we were leading them. You turned to face forward and I twisted back, to make sure they were following us. I didn’t speak their language but I could beckon. The youth followed. They were praising me, just like you said. They were calling my name.

  We passed down into a crevice of rock that widened again to reveal an ocean of white. The procession of priests moved through it, toward us, carrying their jeweled crosses and fringed umbrellas and water hoses. The song of the youths swelled and merged with the song of the priests and then water rained down on us from above. The crowd pressed forward to receive the blessing. We were picked up by the crush of other people’s bodies, lifted and carried, coming closer, to where a priest was swinging a hose, back and forth, mouth open in prayer. The spray hit me squarely on the forehead. It was ice-cold and I shrieked and laughed and my brain felt numbed. I was baptized.

  And then I realized I was no longer sitting on your shoulders! I was one leg down and one leg across the shoulder of a teenage boy who gave me a confused look.

  I called your name. I crawled over people’s heads, but that made them angry. I lost my balance and fell. A large woman seized me by the waist, carried me out like a sack of meal, and deposited me just beyond the press of people, where I wouldn’t be crushed. She said a few stern words in a language I didn’t understand and then went back in. I was alone.

  I called your name. I turned around and around. But you were gone.

  Meena

  The Shallows

  I consult my counselors about the handprint I saw underwater. Their answers unfold in my mind like glotti text.

  MUTHASHI: So you were hanging underwater during a cyclone. That is a stressful situation. And you were in an environment of strict sensory deprivation. I would be surprised if you hadn’t hallucinated. You have been hallucinating already: the barefoot girl, the naked woman.

  MOHINI: Consider it one of the chambers. A shocking one, a scary one, but just another chamber to pass through.