“You a good swimmer?”
“The best.”
Using tactics we both knew well from committee sessions with witnesses, he kept trying to find out more. He was earnest yet gentle, so that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him to mind his own business. I began to enjoy our walks, and I did feel an inner loosening. Whenever we found ourselves in front of the elevator at the same time at the end of the day, I felt something I hadn’t felt since those rides over the bump: a little jolt of my heart.
Eventually, we walked all the way to Harbourfront. There was nowhere to go other than into the lake, unless we took a ferry to the islands, but it was too early in the season. He invited me to his place.
In his living room, there were many battered Lonely Planet books marking his backpacking trips every summer to places like Cambodia, Myanmar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Guatemala. When he told me that these locations corresponded to the backgrounds of his ex-girlfriends, all of whom had been asylum seekers, my heartbeat sped up.
“So do you go to the scene of the crime before or after you take the women under your healing wing?” I said. “Let me guess, you first pick a place, go there, and then come back and find a woman whose trauma you can whisper away. Or do you import them with you?”
I waited, just like my father used to do.
He said, “Why not?”
“Fix historic wrongs one girl at a time, huh? Who do you think you are, a one-man Red Cross? Why not start in your own backyard, then? Oh wait, they don’t print Lonely Planet for reservations.”
“Even if they did, a white settler like me shouldn’t—”
“Right, right,” I said. I tossed Guatemala back on the coffee table. We stared at it as if it might get up and do a Mayan dance. “There are stone lions on top of the pillars of the first palace gate in the fence,” I continued, “at the intersection where it falls away like University Avenue does.”
“Stone lions, eh? Not real ones?”
“Nope.”
“Because the emperor used to have a bunch.”
“Everyone knows that,” I scoffed.
“What’s something everyone doesn’t know? That only you know?”
I got up. “That it’s time for me to go home.”
“Want company?”
I knew he wasn’t talking about my apartment. “What’s in it for you?”
“I’d like to see that road for myself.” From the way he was looking at me, I could swear he’d somehow found out that whenever he was away from the office for a long period, I would take his mug out of the kitchen cupboard and put it in my desk drawer for safekeeping because I couldn’t stand the thought of anybody else’s lips on it. “I wouldn’t mind,” I finally said.
Within weeks I was behind his sofa, peering over his shoulder at a computer screen again. One of the tabs on his browser was open to the Hilton Addis website.
“Is that in your budget?” I asked.
“You see how close it is to Menelik II Avenue.”
“Addis didn’t used to be a place you go wandering around on foot,” I couldn’t help objecting. “When I lived there, we always drove on the shortest route possible. On Sundays, cars weren’t even allowed on the road. Because of gas rations, only cars with license plates that started with even or odd numbers could be on the road on alternating Sundays.”
“Everyone had a car?”
Shit. “We did,” I faltered. “But even people on foot kept moving.”
“Things have changed.”
Clinging to one fact he couldn’t debate, I said, “You could only ride downhill on that avenue.”
“You mean it’s one-way. Otherwise you could as easily be heading up or down, depending on where you were going or coming from.”
All I knew is that we were always going down.
Nick read Lonely Planet Ethiopia on and off during most of the fourteen-hour flight there. I couldn’t. The very idea of a Lonely Planet for Ethiopia bothered me. Worse, it said nothing about the avenue. The guide was already showing signs of wear and tear, and wouldn’t stay new or lonely for long. Like all the other used Lonely Planet volumes back at Nick’s, Ethiopia would come to bear the odors and stains of the places we passed through. Its edges would fray and curl in on the sum of our adventures, and its spine would crack.
During the taxi ride from Bole International Airport, Nick kept it in his hand, with his index finger between the pages marking the beginning of the Addis Ababa chapter, a mere twenty-six pages long. He watched the city with the smugness of having done his homework, as if he were taking me to his home country.
He pointed out all the pedestrians in the streets, despite the time of night. “That’s a lot of people going somewhere with purpose.”
They materialized out of the black air in the glare of the headlights, lasting only as long as it took us to pass them. Though it was night, what struck me about Addis was the quality of the light — the trembling glow of single bulbs over produce stands and kiosks; the blinking stammers of festive strings at the doors and windows of humble bars; the exclamations of streetlights and billboards as we neared the center. Together, it was an illuminated murmuring whose message my ears had yet to decipher.
As soon as the taxi crossed Revolution Square, then Jomo Kenyatta and the church, then the little bridge before joining the heavy traffic ascending Menelik II, our stalled debate over the avenue’s directionality became moot. It turned out that the avenue was actually a pair of roadways going in opposite directions, separated by Africa Park.
My memory widened out, bringing in sunrise and sunset and the distinct shadows each cast over the palace side of the avenue. Preempting yet another self-satisfied observation from Nick, I said, “In the mornings, it was an uphill drive, and in the late afternoons, near sunset, it was a downhill drive. Of course, I only just remembered the side that runs along the palace.”
“Leave it to you to recall only the downhill side.”
“The sunset side,” I said. It used to be the best the part of the day, when my mother and I went home together.
The next morning, we stood at the intersection before Menelik II Avenue. Ahead, cars dipped out of sight as the avenue swallowed them up one by one. Beyond awaited curbstones like bad teeth, grass-fringed sidewalks, the long palace fence with evenly spaced gates, columns of trees, and a glimmer of light that marked the opening to Revolution Square.
From this distance and with so many cars racing across all three lanes, the bump was indiscernible, to say nothing of any ghost that might still be lying on his side, arms outstretched and mouth yawning.
Nick stood with feet planted apart, arms akimbo, like an old-time hunter-explorer striking a pose beside his kill, taking it all in when even the stone lions, still perched atop the gate pillars, preferred to look away.
“I was thinking we’d start here, going downhill, then continue on to wherever these four well-performing legs of ours take us,” he said. “And hopefully at some point you’ll find what you used to see and let me in on it.”
Morning light illuminated the half of the avenue not shadowed by a row of old trees that stood along the palace fence like sentinels. The pressure from their roots made the sidewalk look like a bunched-up carpet, begging for someone to grab it by the corners and snap it flat.
We began to walk single file down the broken sidewalk: Nick behind me, Lonely Planet straining the left pocket of his long shorts, crisp American fifties for emergencies stuffed into the right, camera tucked up his sleeve, the strap around his wrist.