In the early evening, Katya said, “We have to get something to eat. We haven’t eaten for almost twelve hours.”
“We can’t go out,” I said. “It isn’t safe.”
“Sonny is out of food. He hasn’t eaten for eight hours.”
“Katya, nothing is open; you heard Yonas.”
“The fruit stand will be open. There’s no way they’ll close, They’re just down the street.”
“We’re hearing guns.”
“The shots aren’t close. I have to go out. If you won’t go, I’ll go alone.”
We took Sonny; I carried him because Katya was too weak. Outside on the street, people and animals were walking around like normal. Who were these people? I felt half-scared of them, half-linked with them, and didn’t know which feeling was most real. I reached inside my shirt and held the rings for a moment in my cupped hand. Thomas’s face, flat and beautifully misshapen, rippled in me like a reflection in water. There was a boy at my side, trying to push a cow out of the yay Thomas’s face stretched unrecognizably on the moving water. The boy came suddenly around the cow and tore my chain off my neck. I screamed; the boy flashed
down the street. I was after him. My legs are long and I almost had him, but I couldn’t grab him because Sonny was screaming, forgotten, in my arms. I darted back to Katya, who was standing motionless, and thrust Sonny at her. The boy was a quick pixilation of limbs, disappearing. Katya shouted, “Janice!” and I ran. The boy was bright movement that I chased like an animal with a single instinct. I turned a corner, stumbled into a pothole full of warm brown water, and nearly fell. I staggered and bent to catch myself with my hands. I looked up; he was gone. I whipped my head around, looking, my instinct trying to leap in every direction—but it had nothing to leap at. I panted raggedly, sweat running in my eyes, my instinct exiting through my eyes as I stared around, wild. Women holding children stared back at me. Faces peered from the broken hole of a window. Skeleton dogs, fierce and cringing watched with starving eyes. My instinct felt them all as it felt itself: quick force in slow mammal bodies; soft brain in hard bone; a machine of thoughts; a machine of sex. The dark radiance of emotions; the personality; eyes, nose, mouth. You, specifically. A little boy with a large round head pointed at me and said words I couldn’t understand. My instinct broke; everything that had been joined was now in pieces again. I put my face in my hands and cried like an animal.
I came out of the alley to find my way back to Katya. I tried to stop making noise. I couldn’t. I felt people following me. I understood. The current had reversed. As I had chased the boy. they would follow me. They would kill me. I heard myself sobbing. Thomas was dead. I had let him die. They would kill me. It was right.
"Miss? Miss?” A small voice was at my side, gently tugging me without touching me. “Miss? What’s wrong miss?”
I looked at the voice. There were two young girls, maybe thirteen years old, tagging at my side. They were dressed in school uniforms. Their faces were soft but intensely focused. I wiped my face; I glanced behind me. There was a small crowd following me, made up mostly of teenage girls and a few boys with curious faces. I turned to face them. “My husband died,” I said. “He died and somebody stole our wedding rings. Now I don’t have anything.” Tears ran down my face—human tears now. “I have to find my friend and her baby. Thank you.”
The girls nodded gravely. I continued to walk. One girl followed me. “It will be all right,” she said. “God will help you.”
I said, “Thank you, honey.” Machine-gun fire sounded in the distance. The girl dropped away.
“Janice!” It was Katya, rounding a corner, Sonny in her arms. She said, “What happened? Why did you do that?”
“I was robbed. That boy took my wedding rings. I couldn’t catch him.”
“Then we need to call the police.”
If she hadn’t been holding Sonny, I would’ve slapped her. Do you know how stupid you sound?” I said. “Call the police?” “Janice—”
“Look around you!” I was trembling, still dripping tears with no force. “They’re in the middle of a war and you think the police are going to come because of my rings?”
“Janice—”
“Shut up!”
I turned to get away, to go back to the B and B. In my head was Thomas well and virile, Thomas sick, our house with its marble shower, its riches of detail, its condiments and candies, paintings and knickknacks, baskets on the wall, baskets from all over the world, from places we had traveled together, shelves of books, the books he had written, the languages he had spoken, his children,
my students— Now I don’t have anything. But once I’d had everything; I had betrayed everything so I could fuck somebody I didn’t love, “Stop.” Someone touched my arm from behind; I turned. A very small old man stood before me.
“What?” I asked, or thought.
“Stop,” he said. “Don’t cry. Please. It’s okay.” He said “Please,” but his eyes had an expression of command. I lifted my hand to wipe my eyes. He reached out and took it. He held it palm up; he put my rings in my hand and closed my fingers over them. “Okay?” he said.
“But how—M m
He shook his head and said, "Just don’t cry. Okay?”
I stopped crying. He turned to go.
“Wait,” I said. “There was a chain, too?”
He turned his head and looked hard at me.
"The rings were on a chain. Do you know about that?”
He shook his head and walked away.
Years later, I told this story at a party at the university. I told it to a woman who had traveled extensively in Africa. She was a big woman, very grand, with a high chest and a chunky necklace made of precious stones. When I told her how I had lost my rings and how the old man had given them back, she made a face. She said, "Really, you make too big a fuss of yourself. You should not go to Africa and then make such a fuss.” I answered her vaguely. I let myself be chastised. Because in that room, she was right. In that room, I was a privileged and foolish woman running around bawling about rings while a whole city fell apart and people were killed.
But I didn’t meet the old man in that room. I met him in a place of biblical times and modern times, where people walked back
and forth between times, all times. In this place, I walked back and forth between the time of the living and the time of the dead. In the middle of my walking, war broke out, and the path between I the living and the dead opened up and everything dear to me fell down the crack. I fell, too, and I might’ve fallen forever—but the I old man came and said, “Stop.” And I stopped.
That same night at the university, another person asked, “Did you thank him?” And I was amazed to realize I didn’t know. Probably I did not. How could I? Thanking him would have been like thanking an angel.
I sit in my darkened house sometimes, holding a glass of wine, and I thank him.
The next day, we rode through the streets, crouched on the floor of a car Yonas had borrowed from his uncle. We rode to the American embassy, sharing the car with five Ethiopians, women and girls whom Yonas was taking “to safety.” He didn’t dare drive his cab lest taxi drivers striking on behalf of the protestors turn it over and-burn it. But there were no taxis in the street, no cars, no people. There were huge high trucks full of soldiers in camouflage with automatic weapons. Still, the Ethiopian women sat on the seat and we crouched on the floor, hiding the whiteness that declared us paying customers. One of the women, a girl really, held Sonny against her breast. A military truck passed close by, bristling with guns. The girl holding our baby looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. Katya pressed her forehead to the sweat-drenched seat and stretched her hand up to clasp Sonny’s foot as though it were a hand.
Outside, the embassy was surrounded by guards with machine guns; inside, it was jammed with frightened people and officials
behind windows. We took a number and waited. Waiting next to us was an American doctor who had been on emergency-roo
m duty when gunshot victims began to come in. He was calm, overcalm, but he smelled like fear, and when he got up to one of the windows, he began talking loud and fast, telling someone, really everyone, that there had been many killings, many more than the reported twenty-five. The whole room smelled of fear. Something was missing from Sonny’s file, and Katya was shouting at someone, her jaw moving like cheap animation on her stark chalk white face, her body giving off a smell that was nearly savage, the smell of something ready to attack. She turned to me suddenly and I flinched. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ll be back.” She was already dialing Yonas on her cell.
I went to take Sonny from her, but the child refused; he hadn’t let me hold him since I’d handed him off and run down the middle of the street and come back howling in pain. So I held his hand and walked out to the hall with him. Thomas walked out of the sun-shadowy water, stepping on his elegant pants, damp and sagging, and his shoes squishy wet, smiling as he handed me the dog’s chewed-up ball, the dog, standing on its hind legs, dancing. With an ecstatic face, Sonny took the steps two at a time. Thomas’s mother smiled and boarded the bus, the sun shining on her beautiful hair. Sonny looked up at me, gurgling with pleasure, forehead shining with effort. I stroked his hair. I thought of his mother s beaten face, her torn ears, her breasts hanging down. The child grabbed my hem with his tiny fist. Katya came back beaming, papers in her hand, her sweat rank and innocent.
That night, I dreamed Katya and I were in a small dark house of mud and thatch. Thomas was there, too, asleep on a dirty mat, and so was Sonny’s mother, who was terribly sick. Katya kept trying to nurse the mother, to suckle her at her breast, but the woman
couldn’t hold her , head up, and I kept wanting to say, Stop. It’s ridiculous. She's the mother. But I was distracted by Thomas’s mother in the next room, laughing as she played with Sonny; I was distracted, too, by gunfire, which came closer and closer....
I woke in the dark with my heart pounding; I reached for my wedding rings on the table beside me.
“Katya,” I whispered, only half-expecting her to be awake, too.
She replied unintelligibly.
“When Sonny gets older, and he asks you about his mother, what are you going to tell him?”
She didn’t answer. Shortly, she began to snore.
But the next day, when we were at the airport, she answered. She said, “If he asks, I’ll tell him that his mother was a great woman. That she was a fighter, and because she had to fight so hard, she gave me her most precious child to keep him safe. Something like that. Here.” Without thinking, she handed me the baby, and bent to pick up her bag. I stiffened, expecting Sonny to protest. But he didn’t; he reached for me. For the first time since I’d run down the street, Sonny let me hold him. I thrive, his body said to mine, I will thrive. I put my hand on the back of his head and held it to my shoulder, my cheek against his hair. It was time to go.
Don't Cry: Stories Page 21
