The Girl in the Road (26 page)

Elyas noticed me lingering and called to me. Don't stand there, he said, She'll hypnotize you! You'll go running out into the desert and never return!

The other children laughed. I returned to the group, feeling embarrassed.

But since then, I'd gone back to visit her many times. Whenever I visited Addis for any reason—to minister with the nuns, to read one of my poems, or to interview at the university—I stopped by and said hello. I watched other tourists come in and comment on her. They were Chinese, Indian, and South African. There were even some Americans, who I could tell by their angular pronunciation of English, every morpheme at a right angle to the previous. They said things like:

She's smaller than I thought she'd be.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Look at the way her wrists dangle.

Just a blues brotha, walkin' down the street.

I listened to them until they noticed me in the corner, watching them with the eyes of the kreen. I made them nervous. They'd apologize and exit quickly.

I was the first of Gabriel's friends to arrive at the listening party. Then more guests began pushing the doorbell. There were only two other Ethiopians who came, both men, Dawit and Haile; the rest were Indian. We Ethiopians clumped together. We all spoke English, though I spoke it better than the other two, and they soon looked isolated and impatient as the Indians chattered on in English. English was the lingua franca for the Indians, who spoke dozens of languages, each with its own heritage and pride, such that no speaker of any one Indian language would accept another Indian language as the Indian lingua franca, so English it was.

Meena placed seven steaming platters and a stack of ceramic plates on the table. I watched the Indians for clues on how to eat. They first spooned chaat onto their plates, then bent forward over it, engrossed in eating (much like Gabriel had behaved with the tilapia) or sat back against the pillows. I was relieved to see that they, too, ate with their right hands. They molded the food into bell shapes and then bent down to shorten the trip from hand to mouth.

Meena saw that my bells were falling apart. She said, Make sure you have enough sauce to hold it together. A few of the other Indians lifted their heads to take note of my incompetence. I felt anger at being called out. But I made myself say thank you because I didn't want to be a rude guest.

One of Gabriel's Indian friends admonished him to put on some music while we were eating. Gabriel said, Of course, and got up immediately, abandoning his plate, and went to the corner, where he crouched by the record player. I thought this marked him a good host, the sign of a good man. He straightened up from the record player and I recognized the voice of Bizunesh Bekele warbling from the speakers. He returned to his place slower than he had left it, already lost in the music. His eyes gazed inward and saw nothing. When he ate, again, he ate slower.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I noticed everything about him. I'm much older, now, Yemaya, and I know my folly; but when I was twenty years old, he was such a delicious mystery to me! I noticed the way his collarbone rose like a wave in his skin. How broad his shoulders were, and the round muscles of his calves. His feet were large. I could see his toes from where I sat on my pillows. Each toe was distinct and articulated. This was a man who had spent his life barefoot.

In turn, Meena was watching me. As soon as I met her eye, she looked down at her food. There was something I disliked about her, something I mistrusted. She was a beautiful woman, arrogant and fierce and, I could tell, used to getting her way. She was wealthy, probably Brahmin. She had grown up doted upon by her father, fighting with her mother. She had never experienced any kind of hardship. She had never known anything like the kreen.

The purpose of the listening party was not only to enjoy and appreciate Ethiopian music, but for the Indians to discuss their lives here. I could tell my opinion was valuable, and that Gabriel knew I would impress people with my laconic answers, after each of which Gabriel would smile at me as if I'd said the most brilliant thing in the world. His friends looked back and forth from him to me, and smirked.

Meanwhile, Meena acted out. She announced strong opinions. She dropped a serving spoon with a loud clatter and didn't apologize. I felt smug because I suspected she had feelings for Gabriel, whose attention was on me, instead.

Forgive me, Yemaya, I didn't know what I was doing.

I hear a shot and see an explosion on the surface of the water.

I drop down. Then I hear a voice yelling from far away and my glotti barely picks it up.

ENGLISH
: Who are you?

A woman's voice, not friendly. “Durga,” I yell back.

ENGLISH
:
What do you want?

I default to the science-fiction classic. “I come in peace,” I yell back.

ENGLISH
:
Stay where you are. Rahel, guard the other side.

I keep my head tilted to the side to demonstrate docility. These people have firearms, Mohini. I don't want to piss them off. I feel thumps on the scales until someone's shadow crosses my body. The woman's voice calls back to her companion,

OROMIFA
:
She's not the one we saw. She's much bigger.

If they ever lower their firearms, I'll have to ask what she's talking about.

She addresses me again.

ENGLISH
:
What do you speak?

“I speak English,” I say, “Hindi, Malayalam, and some Marathi.”

She switches to Hindi. “You can get up now,” she says. “Move slowly. Hands on your head.”

I get to my feet and get a look at her. The first thing I notice is that she's holding a dart gun. Probably loaded with sedative or something. How do I know that? Action movies. That's what this is: I've walked onto the set of an action movie. This woman has a great costume. She's dressed in tattered blue fatigues. Her hair is shaved close. Her skin is as dark as mine, but with yellow undertones instead of red.

She's doing the same racial assessment of me. “Indian?” she asks.

I remember to nod instead of shake my head. Then I remember:
Oromifa
. It's one of the languages of Ethiopia. Fuck.

She gestures forward with her dart gun. “You first,” she says.

Now I can see her companion, Rahel, twenty scales away, with short straightened hair, also dressed in blue fatigues, holding a rifle and slouched to one side. I'm surprised she didn't also have a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. The costume department did a great job. They look like a pair of Phoolan Devis. They bring me up alongside their set, which looks like a dinghy moored to the Trail and rigged with an all-weather canopy. I hadn't even seen it while walking. I must have been too much in my own head, talking to you, Mohini. I can see a console inside. And there's an antenna six meters high poking up out of the canopy.

“Drop your bag, please,” says Rahel. I do so.

“Can you tell me what you're going to do?”

“No.”

“Am I being robbed?”

They don't answer.

I can feel the dart gun behind my back, like a finger pointing at my spine. I feel defiant and sassy in spite of, or maybe because of, the danger. This is all being filmed and so I need to play the part of the rogue hero.

Finally Rahel looks up at her companion. “Nothing,” she says. “She's just a backpacker.”

“Is that what you are, a backpacker?” the other woman says.

“Can you tell me who you are first?”

“Fatima.”

Classification of stratum complete: Ethiopian, Oromo, Muslim. “Okay, Fatima. Yes. I'm a backpacker.”

“You come from where?”

“Southern India.”

“And you're doing this for fun?”

I want to tell them it's because I'm on pilgrimage to visit the city where a fucking Ethiopian woman murdered my parents.

“I wouldn't call it fun.”

“What would you call it?”

“Right now, honestly, a waste of time.”

“What do you know about Ethiopia?”

This seems like a trap. “That's a big question.”

“Ethiopian politics.”

“I know ARAP got beat in the last election.”

“Rigged. Like every single one since Haile Selassie,” says Fatima.

“I'm sorry,” I say. And immediately I know it's the wrong thing to say. Rahel and Fatima exchange looks and roll their eyes. But I'm tired of holding my hands on my head and so I say my next line and hope it lands well. “My parents lived in Ethiopia,” I say. “That's where I was born.”

“What did your parents do? Farm to feed Indian mouths?”

“They were doctors,” I say. “They worked at a clinic near Meganagna.”

Whatever that name is, it seems to touch them. Their shoulders drop. I'm glad I retained it from the articles.

Rahel says to Fatima,

OROMIFA
:
Our Lady of Entoto Hospital.

After a few moments Fatima says, “You can put down your hands.”

“Thank you,” I say, though I don't mean it.

The two women are awkward now. Neither of their guns is pointed at me anymore. They're both looking toward the dinghy. Now the first source of tension in this scene is dissipated and so I have to create the next one. The director will be pleased with my improvisation.

“What's in there?” I ask.

Rahel looks to Fatima, who seems to be in charge of information dissemination.

“Semena Werk,” she says, and my glotti says:

AMHARIGNA
:
Golden meaning

The heroine knows that phrase, of course, but never knew its meaning.

“I don't understand,” I say.

“It's the name of our radio program. We broadcast from here.”

So Semena Werk in India has a pirate radio station on the high seas, Mohini! What a good subject for film. “Why?”

“Banned in Ethiopia. Unwelcome in India.”

“Why do you care about India?”

“There are not a few of our countrypeople in India now,” says Rahel.

Fatima sits on the edge of the dinghy. “Indo-Ethiopians get their news from us.”

“Where do you get your news?”

“Our contacts on the ground. You've heard of Semena Werk, I imagine?”

I drop the big reveal. “They tried to kill me.”

Fatima throws her head back and laughs, which I did not expect. “All Indians think all Ethiopians are trying to kill them.” She comes up close to me, assessing, such a good scene partner. “Semena Werk is the kernel of an Amharic poem. We revere the poetic form, as do your people. So whatever you are looking for in Semena Werk, you have to look deeper. What you first see only reflects your prejudice.”

I have no lines after that, so I remain silent. A beeping noise comes from the console. Rahel climbs into the dinghy and disappears under the tarp.

“So you've never been to Ethiopia,” says Fatima.

“No,” I say. “But I plan to go. After I make it to Djibouti.”

“Why aren't you going with your parents?”

“Because they're dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Thank you.”

A moment passes.

“Died in India?”

“No, in Ethiopia.”

Now it's come. Dear Fatima has to deal with the fact that some beloved comrade of hers murdered my parents.

“Were your parents A. R. Gabriel and Meenakshi Mehta?”

The camera zooms to my stunned face.

“So you're the baby.”

The heroine cannot form words.

Fatima twists around.

OROMIFA
: Rahel! Guess who we got here.

A voice comes from the darkness under the tarp.

OROMIFA
: Who?

OROMIFA
: Election Baby.

OROMIFA
: What are you talking about?

OROMIFA
: The 2040 election when those two doctors were killed.

Rahel's face emerges from shadow. “You're the baby?” she says.

The heroine finds her voice. “Am I a celebrity or something?”

“You're known,” says Fatima.

“I remember when that happened,” says Rahel. “I was in Nairobi, remember, Fatima?—and saw it on the Internet. Terrible.”

“The Indian media jumped on it,” says Fatima. “A good story of Indian nurses saving Indian blood in the face of Ethiopian brutality.”

“The story also says that the Ethiopian police didn't bother to chase the killer because they hated Indians,” I say.

“Do you believe that?”

I shrug, fall back. “I don't know enough to believe it or not.”

“She probably went to Djibouti,” says Rahel. “Do you intend to go looking for her?”

I try to look heroic for the camera. “Yes.”

Fatima stands again. I can tell she's looking at me even though I'm not looking at her.

“What she did, she didn't do in the name of ARAP,” she says. “She was already unhinged. She wasn't even Ethiopian. She came from somewhere in West Africa.”

Something in me dissolves. I laugh. “I didn't know that.”

I look to the southwest, where the Trail heads. The wind is dead today and the sea is flat. “Which West African country? I need to know who to hate now.”

Fatima shifts her weight and spits into the ocean like Clint Eastwood. “Just pick one.”

I nod. The Wise African is wise.

“You should be on your way,” she says. “But be careful. We were raided three nights ago.”

“Is that why you trained guns on me?”

“We thought you might be the thief, but you're much bigger than she was.”

“She?”

“We could tell that much.”

“Maybe it was Bloody Mary.”

Fatima's eyes change. I imagine the camera lenses are telescoping for a close-up. “What do you know about Bloody Mary?”

“Rumors.”

“They might not be. Bloody Mary might be our thief. No one mystical, just a parasite.”

“What did she steal?”

“Dried mango rings.”

“I could go for some of those.”

“Got anything to barter?”

“A tongue scraper.”

We all have a good laugh. We make the trade. And the camera pans up to film me from overhead, and the infinite ribbon of the Trail ahead of me. We don't see its end before the scene changes.

I'm at 2,020 kilometers. I don't have a map but I remember that the Trail enters the barrel of the Gulf of Aden at some point. Not close enough for me to see Yemen to the north or Somalia to the south. But the way gets narrower.

I pick up our conversation where we last left it. Mohini, I was being followed by a barefoot girl, yes. But the hallucination or spirit or whatever it was went away. She didn't follow me onto the Trail.

That's because you told her to go away. You banished her.

Huh. I don't remember it.

What about the body you saw on the Trail? she asks.

What about it? It wasn't following me.

Didn't you wonder who she was?

She was wearing a golden sari.

Why didn't you look at her face?

Seemed disrespectful.

Why didn't you bury her at sea?

She wasn't mine to bury.

What did you think her story might be?

I don't know. Maybe she was a refugee from another seastead nearby. Or maybe this was a cruel and unusual death sentence. Not by a court, but by, I don't know, the woman's spouse. Drove her out here in a boat, blindfolded, and then left her here with no supplies.

India is far away.

There are lots of Indians in Oman and Yemen. Shit, there are lots of Indians in Africa. They could have come from Djibouti and said, “Walk home, bitch.”

I've never been to Djibouti. It looks like a nice place.

Yeah. I'm excited about it. And not just because it'll be the first land I see in four months but because, I don't know. Because for most of my life I hated Africa because of my parents getting killed, but now recently I love it because I want to get to the root of everything, and Djibouti becomes this sparkling magical place, but it's only the antechamber, the doorstep to Ethiopia, which will be even more magical.

Magical how?

It's the last chamber. The ultimate chamber. I can go to the physical place where my parents were murdered, and look at it, and be okay, and keep going. Life will continue.

It didn't for the woman in the golden sari.

I get that.

(You say nothing.)

You know, Mohini, she looked just like you.

(You say nothing.)

She looked like you right when I left, and you weren't responding to me. You were just limp, and your head was falling off the bed. And your eyes were barely open, like you were tired.

You say nothing, but you don't have to because, just then, I come across another body on the Trail, and it's the same one. It's yours.

Sensory deprivation again: what I see in my head manifests. I step over it and keep going. Chambers are chambers.

The five wounds in my chest still haven't healed. But it's not because I haven't taken medicine. It's because I've started to worry them. Their cultivation has become a comfort, something I sow and reap on a daily basis. I pick them, they bleed, I apply dressing, I go to sleep. When I wake up they're scabbed over again. A self-perpetuating recreational activity.