Of Beetles and Angels

by Mawi Asgedom

  In the past, the Dumpsters had given us everything from bikes, desks, and school supplies to couches and even TVs. Why go shopping? It was graduation time, and our free mall was stocked, as the middle- and upper-class students threw away most of their belongings.

  A year later, a friend gave Tewolde another bench and more weights. We had more than we needed. So Tewolde asked me to help him: “I have a friend who needs these weights,” he told me. “He’s trying to get in shape but cannot afford workout equipment.”

  Hoping it wasn’t far, I followed Tewolde. It was across the street — in the nightmare apartments I had visited in elementary school. I’d had a friend who lived in the building’s cellar; it was the kind of cellar that made me think of turn-of-the-century factory workers. No lighting. No air. No life. How could such a place exist in Wheaton?

  We dragged the bench, the bar, and the weights upstairs and knocked on the door. A malnourished man answered, and I tried to remember where I had seen him. But I couldn’t place him.

  When he saw my brother, his gaunt, joyless face burst wide with laughter.

  “How did you get these?” he asked us, and my brother said we had an extra one. We stayed and talked for a few minutes, and he told us that he was trying to make it, trying to keep his job. But it was hard, so hard, to have confidence and hope.

  As he talked, I came to realize who he was. And as we left, I asked my brother: “How did you know where to find the address-book brother from the library? Did you run into him again?”

  But even as I asked, I knew the answer.

  My brother had found him housing and a job, encouraged him, and even given him money when he could — even though my bro had so little himself. All of this, without telling anyone.

  The second memorable trip to the library arose from earlier days, when my brother and I had worked like indentured servants. We had been too young to work real jobs, and even if we had been old enough, we would have been deterred by my father’s declarations.

  COMPUTERS RUN THIS COUNTRY; YOU CANNOT DO EVEN ONE THING WITHOUT THE HOUSE OF AUTHORITY KNOWING ABOUT IT. SO IF YOU WANT TO WORK, YOU HAVE TO WORK CASH JOBS. IF YOU WORK CHECK JOBS, THEY WILL TRACE YOUR MONEY AND YOU WILL HAVE TO REPORT IT, AND THEN THEY WILL SIMPLY TAKE THAT MONEY OUT OF YOUR WELFARE CHECK AND YOU’LL BE BACK TO WHERE YOU STARTED.

  To avoid the all-knowing computers, we worked cash jobs for a shifty brother who lived down the street from us on Route 38. He paid us five dollars an hour cash to restore damaged driveways.

  He would pick us up in his junky, rust-colored pickup — the kind that Redd Foxx owned in the TV show Sanford and Son — and we would roam from home to home.

  We always started by sweeping pebbles and dirt from the driveway and finished by sealing the cracks with tar. Laboring under the hot, summer sun, we fried.

  “You’re getting darker,” my mother would tell us. “This job is killing you, you should quit.” But twenty dollars a day was too much to pass up, at least for a while.

  Eventually, as luck would have it, my brother met our good friend, Jim Settacase. Jim ran his own cleaning service and he paid us with checks.

  Despite the checks, working for Jim was worth it because he paid a whopping seven dollars an hour. More important, he toiled and smiled and laughed alongside us, until we almost looked forward to work.

  I never saw my brother that next summer because he worked nights, cleaning the Toyota dealership with Jim, and I got a day job flipping burgers and cooking fries.

  Jim encouraged Tewolde and taught him to build from almost nothing. So at age seventeen, my brother ventured out and started his own cleaning business. “Working for somebody else, I make seven dollars an hour, but working for myself, I can make up to twenty-five dollars!”

  Tewolde’s business grew with the help of a high-school psychology teacher named Mr. Wimpleberg. He met with Tewolde after school and taught him how to market to different kinds of customers.

  Tewolde passed on the lessons to me: “You see, Selamawi, there are A-type customers, B, and then C. C brothers would never pay a dime to have someone clean for them; they are like us — they’ll clean it themselves first. B brothers have enough money and can be convinced, and A, well, forget about it with A. That’s where ALL the loot is.”

  So my brother printed up his impressive black-and-white cards that said “ProClean: No One Cleans Better,” and he was in business. Soon he had a chiropractor’s office to clean — twice a week, forty dollars for two hours.

  Soon after that he started cleaning windows — who could have imagined that you could get paid seventy-five dollars to clean windows? — and then word spread about his business.

  That’s when he started to dream: “Forget this fifty here and hundred there, let’s make some real money. Selamawi, I think I can make thirty thousand dollars. Maybe I shouldn’t even go to college next year.”

  So he looked for business opportunities and began staking out the three-floor Wheaton Public Library.

  He awoke with the night cleaners, arriving right after them, and carefully documented their errors through the windows. Returning during the day, he snooped around some more and talked to the day janitor, whom he had known for years.

  I told him he was crazy. “Look, bro, how many of them does it take to clean that place? I’m not gonna wake up at four A.M. to clean it with you — I gotta study and sleep and run cross-country — and you can’t do it by yourself.”

  But he was determined. His new heart had been inspired by his faith in God, and he believed that God wanted him to try “impossible” things. He kept watching the janitors, hoping he could approach the library’s management. One day, he might convince them that he would do a better job than the night cleaners.

  But Tewolde never talked to the management, and he never graduated from high school. A drunk driver killed him midway through his senior year.

  One close friend, our white grandma, brings him up every time we see her:

  “You know, your brother was the most precious boy. I remember how at church, I would go up on the second floor after the service, and I would see all the high-school students. You know how high-school students are, they refuse to say ‘Hi’ to you if you are old, even if they know you and have known you for years, because it is not ‘cool’ to acknowledge old people.

  “But your brother, no matter who that boy was with or how many people were in his way, he would always leave his group of friends and wade through the crowd to hug me and talk to me. His love knew absolutely no shame.

  “He was a special boy, and if I’d had a son, I would have wanted him to be just like Tewolde.”

  He is often remembered among our habesha community, too, even though it’s been almost eight years:

  “Yes, he was a blessed one, bruck neyroo, abey kirikeb — where can his like be found? — that eldest son of Father Haileab.”

  “Listen, now, there was that one time when their mother had gone back to Adi, and I came over because some guests were coming and I had promised to help with the preparations.

  “I came over and soon found myself overwhelmed with cooking the sebhi and injera, let alone doing everything else. And then that boy came.

  “I did not ask him to help, but he came in like a whirlwind, washing the dishes, sweeping the floors, straightening out the living room, helping me prepare the food, asking me to sit down and rest. Before I knew it, he had done almost everything himself and wanted to know if he could do anything else.”

  Not long after his death, I went to his room and looked through some of his papers. A single picture stopped me. It showed a dark-haired South American boy, about five years old, with the warmest, brightest, most hopeful eyes, and the hint of a smile on his light-brown face.

  I flipped the card over and read it: “Here is your child. Thank you for sponsoring him. With your twenty dollars a month, he goes to school, receives medical care, and eats healthy food.”

  I wondered how my brother had donated $240 a yea
r to Compassion International, when he had so little money to spare. He was struggling to save money for college and was trying to help his family, too.

  I thought of the Biblical tale where a rich man donates a large sum to a synagogue and a poor woman donates her last two cents. As the story goes, her gift is worth infinitely more, for the rich man gave out of his surplus and she out of her scarcity.

  As I reflected on what my bro had meant to the child, I thought of what he meant to all of us.

  I thought of my mother, and her special relationship with him, and how when he was a child and misbehaved, she would grab the leather belt and try to whip him. But the harder she whipped him, the more Tewolde laughed, and the more he laughed, the harder she whipped him. He would keep laughing, smiling at her with every blow, until she gave up and joined him in laughing.

  I thought of our younger brother, Hntsa. Tewolde knew that seven-year-old Hntsa loved quarters, so he would keep a lookout each night when he cleaned the Toyota dealership with Jim.

  Tewolde always found several quarters — and if he didn’t, he took some out of his own pocket — and left them in his shoes for Hntsa. As soon as Hntsa woke up, he would run to see how many quarters his older brother had left for him.

  I thought of Mehret, the lone girl among us after Mulu got her own place; Mehret could always turn to Tewolde for an ally. I thought of my pops, and the high level of respect that Tewolde always showed him, even when doing so meant swallowing his own pride.

  Then I thought of myself, and of what the word bro means to me.…

  It means a measuring stick,

  A higher standard,

  A heart that sees angels,

  A lifelong inspiration.

  It means God be with us …

  And may we meet again.

  In Sudan, from left to right: Tewolde, Mehret, Tsege, and Mawi.

  COFFEE TALES

  As children, Tewolde, Mehret, Hntsa, and I knew better than to breach certain topics with our parents. High on the “Never Bring Up” list were boyfriends, girlfriends, and all things sexual. My parents had married by arrangement and considered dating to be a uniquely American sidinet, or wickedness, that their children would never practice — at least not while we lived under their roof.

  One day, my father grabbed Tewolde and me and sat us down.

  DO NOT HAVE SEX. YOU WILL GET AIDS. YOU WILL DIE. YOU WILL HAVE CHILDREN THAT YOU CANNOT SUPPORT. WAIT UNTIL YOU ARE MARRIED.

  Conversation over.

  My sister Mehret? Ha! One afternoon, the poor girl got spanked because she was stranded three miles away at her high school and she accepted a ride home from one of my church friends. My dad was right there to see her get out of the car, and he almost went crazy when he saw her alone in a car with a guy.

  GESRET! SIDEE! WHO IN YOUR MOTHER’S NAME ARE YOU GOING TO SAY TAUGHT YOU? IF I EVER SEE YOU ALONE IN A CAR WITH A BOY AGAIN, I WILL MAKE YOU LOST!

  Truth be told, the only way we could attend school dances was by appealing to our parents’ deep respect for all things educational. We assured them that school dances were highly educational events, that all our classmates attended them, and that we would be left behind if we did not go. Convinced that the dances were vital to our education, our parents let us go — sometimes.

  Only one subject was more taboo than sex. It was full of homesickness, displacement, and harsh, harsh separation.

  We never asked, sensing the layers of nightmare that asking might uncover.

  We always wondered, though. Why had Papa left us in Adi? How did we find him again in Sudan? What problems did we encounter on the road? How had we survived?

  As we got older, my parents gave us the answers. But as kids, we had only one way of piecing together our past: the coffee tales.

  When three or more of my people come together in a home, the woman of the house usually asks the other adults if they want boona, or coffee, and they usually say no. Not the least bit fooled, the woman asks again, and the guests usually say yes.

  The process of brewing boona is different from the American coffee-making process. The woman pours the boona beans into a skillet and heats them over a stove until the powerful aroma of coffee invades the entire house. Sometimes the cooked beans give off too much smoke, and the smoke detector goes off.

  After heating the beans, the woman scoops them into a filter, runs water through, and serves the coffee in small, fragile white cups decorated with bright Oriental designs. The cups are small enough to fit between your fingers, so small that one gulp could empty them. But no one gulps the coffee — everyone sips slowly. The boona reaches in and uncuffs their tongues, allowing them to discuss memories they would otherwise leave untouched.

  Sometimes, they recount stories of adjusting to life in America.

  Of Fisoom, who mistook his apartment’s refrigerator for a clothes dresser. He organized his trousers and shirts on the shelves, even placing his underwear and socks in the pull-out drawers on the bottom.

  Of Gebre, who upon arriving at the airport saw a darkskinned, uniformed airline worker and panicked, thinking that the worker belonged to the Dergue army.

  Sometimes, the adults even tell stories of why they left their homeland. Of how a rebel group hunted them, and how they fled across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia and spent months in a Saudi prison. Of how they somehow made it back across to Port Sudan and then to the States.

  The adults in my house would sip slowly and resurrect their pasts. Even my mother. And whenever we could, we kids hid behind the stairs and listened.

  When we were in our country, we were doing well. Tewolde, Selamawi, Mehret, they were all born there.

  We lived in our own home, with three rooms and a long hall and made of cement — not like many of the other homes. My husband had set up a small clinic and practiced there. We had a pharmacy where we sold pills, penicillin, and soap.

  Many village folk came to my husband with malaria; many came with snake bites but died before my husband could treat them; village folk came to my husband on mules and took him back to their villages to help their women give birth.

  In those days, many women died as they tried to give birth, and their children died, too.

  Sometimes they would bleed to death after they gave birth. Village folk did not understand, they would let the women bleed. But my husband would come and lift their legs up — not too much, just a little bit — and tilt their heads back and let them sleep in this position, so that they would not bleed to death. He would inject them with painkiller, too, and then he would give them light food.

  My husband treated everyone. Some came to him almost dead from stone fights, some had hurt themselves as they watched their livestock, some came wounded from the war. No one taught him how to treat all of their different sicknesses, but he had a great ability to figure out what to do.

  After a while, though, there came a time without peace; a time of leaving your home and fleeing, of leaving your children and fleeing; a time when a husband would flee, leaving his wife; a time when all fled, leaving their possessions.

  In that time, the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam and his Dergue regime waged war against the Woyane rebel group and the Jebha rebel group. Sometimes the Jebha and the Woyane waged war against each other.

  When the Woyane or Jebha were said to have taken a village, the Dergue would come and try to take it back. When the Dergue came, the people fled, or hid in their homes, or sent their children to the countryside, for they did not want to be caught between the Woyane, the Jebha, and the Dergue.

  Mengistu’s decree, “Yematfat zemacha,” struck fear in our hearts. “Kill all living creatures, spare none.”

  Whenever the armies approached, my husband fled to the wilderness and hid there for several days. He feared that they would take him away, maybe kill him, maybe make him join their ranks as a doctor. One day it became too much — they approached and he fled to Sudan alone. He could not take us with him, for he was being watched closely b
y those who did not want him to flee.

  We did not know if we would see him again; it was only the will of God that kept us all alive and brought us back together.

  All the villagers mourned when he left, the whole territory did, because he had never refused them and he had not feared to put himself in danger when treating them. They wept, saying, “How will we find another like him, like Haileab, the son of Zedengel?”

  Some time passed, and my husband had travelers bring us messages: “Come, come, come. What are you waiting for? Come to Sudan, leave the livestock, leave the house, leave everything. Just bring the children and come.”

  But how could I leave my people and my home?

  Dergue kept coming in and out of our village, and we started to fear that Dergue and Woyane would clash in our region.

  More and more of our people started to hide in the wilderness, and one time I sent Tewolde and Selamawi to their uncle Nigusay in the village they call Geza Gono. I kept Mehret with me.

  Uncle Nigusay came back several days later and told me that he would never again take them. He told me that his daughter and Selamawi were sleeping near the doorway on some bedding that Uncle had set up for them, and that while they slept, a snake came in from outside and started to slither onto Selamawi’s body.

  “We could do nothing,” he said. “We could have hit the snake, but then the snake might have killed Selamawi. We could have warned Selamawi, but Selamawi might have moved in fear and caused the snake to bite him. So all we could do was watch and pray.

  “The snake moved slowly, from Selamawi’s body to my daughter’s body, and we kept watching, praying, able to do nothing, until finally the snake slithered past them.

  “Once we had killed the snake, I raised my voice and my hands to God, and looking up, begged, ‘Savior of the world, please save me from breaking the trust that has been given me. Please spare these children’s lives and let me bring them back to their mother safely.’”