“Speak to no one,” Solomon instructed before we left the house. “Let me do it, the talking. I tell them you not speaking the language. Understood?”
Each of us, in our own language, said we understood. Solomon was well dressed with newly polished shoes, but I noticed he was not wearing his Catholic collar. He had a plain gold ring on the second to smallest finger of his left hand.
I carried the backpack with both straps over one shoulder, hoping everyone on the bus would notice the DC logo stitched on the front. Solomon had given it to me. To Maria he had given an expensive pink backpack, and to Namuddu a leather handbag with a large purple flower sewn on the front. Inside my backpack was a T-shirt with a Quiksilver symbol, a football magazine, and food he said I could eat anytime I wanted. I wished it also had a Sony Discman with foamy headphones, but I remembered instead to be grateful for what I had. Still, Francis Marin would look so cool with headphones and a backpack.
Signs for international airlines hung from the roof of a huge building where the bus pulled to a stop. Solomon told us to get off.
The airport? We were going on an airplane? It was as if all of my dreams were suddenly coming true. Cool clothes and a cool backpack, adventure, an airplane. I paid attention to every detail inside the airplane so I could tell Ishi — the comfort of the seats with a bump built in to rest my head and how they tilted back, and about the little window with rounded edges. He would like the woman who showed us about using gas masks as we rolled along the pavement and told us how to get out if the plane crashed.
No one was putting on a mask. When did we put these on? Was there bad pollution where we were going?
I glanced at Solomon. He smiled slightly and consulted his watch.
The engines roared like massive fans. I imagined I was the pilot easing the throttle all the way forward. The airplane shuddered so hard it felt like it might come apart. Faster and faster, we sped down the runway, forcing the back of my head against the seat.
And then a miracle happened. We lifted off the ground, with me inside the plane. Outside the window was a perfect three-dimensional map: Streets and tiny houses, cars and buses that looked like moving toys.
“Look! Look! Everything so small!” I yelled, but I didn’t move my head a centimeter to let Solomon see.
Beside me, I heard a small chuckle. I gripped the edges of the window with my fingertips, wishing I could stick out my head to see better. The world became tinier and tinier as we rose higher and higher. Wisps of clouds beneath us made shadows on the ground as Kenya blended into a mass of colors, exactly like a topographical map in a school atlas.
I would tell Ishi how my feet went numb with cold, and how my body shivered from the wind that blew from the roof.
Solomon tapped my arm.
“Something to drink?” he asked.
The woman who had shown us the gas masks and the exits stood in the aisle holding a cart with a carafe, juice and soft drinks in cans. I glanced at Solomon. Did it cost something? I had a bottle of water in my backpack that he said I could have any time. Was I allowed to have something more?
Solomon twisted a latch and a small table released from the seat ahead of him. The woman put a steaming cup of coffee in the indented circle and looked at me.
“You would like something?” she asked. I had noticed a familiar red and white can on the top of her cart.
“Coca?” I asked.
“Coca-Cola,” the smuggler interpreted. I unhooked my tray. The woman reached in front of Solomon, passed me first a square of soft paper stamped with the airline logo, then a plastic cup filled with fizzing Coca. She also gave us each a small bag of cookies. I was glad to see that Solomon did not have to pay. I was also glad that she had given me two things. The cookies I would save for Ishi.
* * *
◆
We smoothed through the security checkpoints. Solomon smiled, motioned with his hand to indicate his family and gave the forged passports and travel visas to the agent. Francis Marin was too excited to be nervous. He grinned like an imbecile. He had been on an airplane!
“First time,” Solomon nodded with his head to me and chuckled.
The agent did not smile. He slammed a heavy stamp on each document and passed them back to Solomon.
The air outside was moist on my face, even though it was not raining. A private car picked us up, Solomon in the front with the driver, the rest of us in the back. It was a big city with signs in Arabic and English. The driver left us at another empty house. Solomon had a key.
“Where are we?” asked the girl.
“It is better that you do not know,” said Solomon. His voice was gentle. Did he know the girl had cried each night we stayed in Kenya?
“That was very well,” he said. He passed us each a paper with a new name, new birthdate and birthplace. “We repeat it the process with this new informations. Forgetting the old ones, as if you never heard them. Yes? You understand?”
“We’re not going to stay here?” I asked.
“No, we must continue going in this way. The bigger the distance, the more safe for everyone.”
How much farther could I go than days of driving and an airplane ride? The farther we went from home, the longer and harder it would be to get back.
“Okay?” asked Solomon, but he did not expect an answer. “It will be as before. You stay here. No going to the outside. I bring everything. No one to know you are being here. Practice it your new names, over and over, until you are forgetting the other names. Understand? All of our histories must match.”
It was the same as before. The woman cooked eggs and bread and made tea for everyone. I was careful to keep my jeans clean, and alternately wore the Quiksilver shirt and the monkey shirt. Solomon took new pictures, came with new passports and birth certificates, and we practiced. It was like being a prisoner. No books, no pencils, no paper, no television, no talking to each other, except to practice each other’s names. I began to like washing my shirt in the basin. At least it was something to do.
Solomon came every day to bring things, usually food. He put on a stern face and pretended he was an immigration official, testing our knowledge.
“Good. We do it same as before. A Muslim family this time. I speak. You do nothing. Be ready for the trick.” He gave scarves to the woman and the girl and taught them how to drape them over their hair, forehead and neck.
I put up my hand as if I was in school.
“Will not the authorities notice our different tribes, our different nationalities?” I asked.
“No be to worry,” he said. “We go to a place of white peoples. To them, we look all the same,” he said.
Another take-off and landing. Flying high above puffy cotton clouds. Another city, this one at night, filled with so many streetlights they looked like low stars. And when we traveled from the airport, I noticed no military trucks, armed soldiers, or checkpoints along the road. Instead the streets were filled with moving cars and buses even though darkness meant it was well past curfew.
A new house. A new identity. Ethiopia was fading from me with each move. How would I find my way home? And when would we stop? How far was far enough to evade the Special Police, their batons and their machine guns?
“Not yet,” Solomon said. “We continue. No fear. I be with you all stepping of the way.”
Kofi must have paid him a great deal of money. Was Gashe’s brother also looking after Etheye?
Her face had been so filled with worry. Would it make her happy to know I was so far away? Or would it make her sad for a lost son?
Where was she now? How was she living? Was my family still together?
Better not to think these things. Better not to think at all.
Better to memorize who I was now, where I lived, and why I was traveling. Better to forget everything in the past.
21
I wan
ted daylight more than anything, to go outside and kick a football, to feel the sun on my face, or the rain, or the wind. Anything but the cloying and cramped feeling of living all of the time inside with the silent woman and the girl who sobbed.
“Do not open. No one must know you are here.” Solomon pulled the curtains shut. The same warning each time he came.
But what would it hurt? Just one look out the window of this place. Where were we? When would we stop moving? I hated Solomon’s evasive answer: “It is better not to know.”
Everything moved too quickly when we were outside, too slowly when we were locked in. I had lost track of the days. How long had it been since I left Ababa’s village? Weeks? A month? Two months?
“Stay together,” Solomon instructed at the last airport. No checking of passports this time, no questions from authorities, but the flight had been long enough for us to eat hot noodles with cheese while looking down at the clouds.
Where were we? Why wasn’t there a sign?
“Move. Quickly,” said Solomon.
People wove in and out and around, in a pattern as random as the vehicle traffic on the roads that merged at Meskel Square. The movement a constant dance with no one running into anyone else, like ants rushing to bring food to the queen.
How did people know where to go? How did Solomon?
The noise at the airport was a thrum of sound, loud and constant, with garbled announcements over it all. Solomon brought us to the end of a queue at a kiosk where he bought tickets. People here, taller even than Ethiopians. And so pale. Gashe would love these giant people with straight hair and transparent skin.
“Follow me,” Solomon instructed. A moving staircase made of metal, a train that swayed on the tracks, a woman in uniform who checked tickets while single drops of rain smeared the length of the window.
Airplanes, now a train! Ishi would be jealous beyond belief.
Through another huge building, then outside. Not raining, as I thought, but the air so dense with moisture that I drank water with every breath. It felt like Addis when the rains came, but the air was so cold here, it made me shiver inside my jacket and raised small bumps on the skin of my arms, making me look like a freshly plucked chicken.
Black, orange, red and brown umbrellas danced up and down as people walked only on the edges of the road. We moved toward a collection of sleek, narrower trains with antennae that reached to electric wires. Curved tracks. Some trains moving, some stopped.
“Careful,” warned Solomon as he directed us toward one. “Pay it close attention.”
Solomon bought tickets inside the train. There were not enough seats together. The woman and the girl sat beside each other. Solomon and I separate, but I was beside a window. Glistening streets. Water outside the window. Not an ocean, not a river, but lanes of water lined with cement, like roads. Boats tied along the edges. Cars parked so close to the edge they looked as if they could be pushed into the water. Many bridges. Huge trees with leaves that quivered in the breeze. Colorful houses as tall and thin as the people, all jammed together.
The language? Like English. Too fast to understand.
Solomon nodded to me. “Next stop,” he said.
We stood at the door, me in front, Solomon, then the girl and the woman, all of us holding onto an upright pole to keep our balance. Down two steps to the road. Solomon grabbed my arm. A bicycle flew past, then another and another.
Handles wide, like the horns of cow. Riders with good posture, pedaling slowly, but moving fast. All in the same direction. Baskets in the front, bags draped over the back. A wheelbarrow attached to the front of one, with a small child inside.
Solomon took us across the street. Bicycle lane, train tracks, vehicles moving in two columns, right, then left, train tracks. Everything so orderly. No one blowing their horns or shaking their fists.
Solomon’s arm shot out to protect us.
“Watch. Bicycles,” he said. None were coming. Down a narrow street, past a machine digging its claws through the bricks with an arm that bent like a human elbow, a scoop that moved like a hand on a wrist.
We walked to an open square edged with tall trees and outlined by brick buildings on three sides. To the left a waterway. We turned right, down the street.
“Not far now,” said Solomon, but I hoped the walk would last, that I would have time to see where he had brought us, that maybe he had a ball for us to kick on the grass.
Benches edged the grass. Women sat beside wheeled carts covered with fabric. Small children called to their mothers, climbed and hung upside down from a colorful apparatus.
“Quickly now,” encouraged Solomon. A steamy shop with rows and rows of electric washing machines, a restaurant with bright-yellow tables.
We followed Solomon to the end of the street and through an alcove that sheltered us from the drizzle. There were three heavy doors painted a glossy dark green. Solomon tugged off a rubber case beside the door, pressed buttons with numbers and retrieved a key.
I looked around while Solomon fit the key in the lock of the nearest door. Trees all of the same size and same type, planted equidistant from each other. Bicycles leaning against each side of them and on racks along the street. A hairless man hunched, sitting on a bench. He wore a long black coat, elbows on his knees, smoke trailing from a cigarette between his fingers.
I turned away quickly when he caught me looking.
The lock did not click open. The man was watching. I could feel his eyes on my back. Solomon pulled out the key, reinserted it. Tried, again, to turn it.
I wanted to grab it from him, shove it in the lock, break the lock if I had to and get inside where it was safe. Hurry, Solomon! Hurry! The girl whimpered. The woman’s eyes were large and frightened. Solomon examined the key and ran his finger along the jagged edge.
“You need to jiggle it. Up and down,” called the man on the bench. We all turned to his loud, authoritative English voice. He exhaled a long slow breath of smoke.
Solomon nodded. When he turned, I saw a worried crease line his forehead. Solomon joggled the key back and forth in the lock. The man, I noticed, continued to study us. The lock snapped open. We rushed into the hallway crowded shoulder to shoulder and closed the door.
It was dark and airless inside and smelled of must. The only light was from a bare bulb high up on the ceiling.
“Come,” Solomon beckoned. “Everything be fine.”
Everything did not feel fine. Before us was a steep, narrow wooden staircase. The steps were worn in the middle, like a scuffed and shallow dish. We followed Solomon up to a small landing, the passage so tight I could reach both sides without fully extending my arms, and so steep I was losing my breath. Then, up more stairs. Solomon in front, the woman, the girl, then me. We turned a sharp corner to a hall planked with rough wood. A shelf along the wall displayed dozens of pairs of shoes. Umbrellas dripped a puddle by a door.
Solomon swiveled to face us and held his finger to his lips. It was not necessary. We were too scared in this place to make any noise.
The wood squeaked and moaned. A dog with small sharp teeth barked. The woman gasped. I startled, too, and jumped backwards, causing five shoes to fly from the shelf on the wall. The dog yapped and scraped its claws on the door. I tossed the shoes on the rack. Passed the door quickly. Another turn. More stairs, up and up and up. How many? The smell of damp earth and rot. My heart pounded and I panted.
How far was he taking us?
Another landing, identical to the last, but with no rack of shoes. A railing on the right. I looked down, so high up we were. Everything made of wood. In an earthquake, we would die.
A bristly mat by the door. The lock clunked when Solomon turned the key. All of us inside. All of us breathing heavily and looking at each other with relief.
Safe, at last.
22
It had been days since Solomon p
ulled the shades on the windows and gave us the usual warnings: Do not open the curtains. Do not go outside. Do not to make any noise. Open the door for no one.
He had not returned as he usually did.
We listened for his key in the lock. I was sure I heard it many times, but when I went to the entryway, the lock was not turning and Solomon was not there.
We listened, too, for anything unusual. But every noise was strange and frightening. The creaking of a wooden floor when someone passed the door outside, a yell, the bark of the dog below us, even the gurgling of a toilet. Our nerves were stretched and tied in knots.
Where was Solomon? What if he had been caught?
I stood to the side of the large window.
What would it hurt to look outside? Just a peek. Just one little peek. No one would know.
I nudged the blind slowly away from the window and held it there, making sure to stay to the side, out of sight.
I was above the trees, looking down into a crown of leaves, the branches in dark contrast. I could see the bricked street and the benches, looking nearly as small as they had when I was in the airplane.
I looked both ways. Nothing moved. The street was deserted.
There was no one to see me. There was no danger.
Letting the blind flap against my back, I pressed the left side of my face against the cool glass and stretched my eyes to where I had seen the waterway on the day we arrived.
Where were we? I scanned the street. There were no signs on shops to give me clues. Everything was plain, all the buildings across and down the street were built with identical brick and identical windows.
It was then that I saw him. Standing very still in the window across from me, slightly to the left, one story up. Bald head. White T-shirt without sleeves.
I ducked to the floor, back pressed against the wall.
What had I done? The man from the street who had told Solomon to jiggle the key. It was him. He had seen me. Clear as day.
Cold White Sun Page 12
