I marched briskly, feeling small and vulnerable in this vast airy tunnel where there was nothing to grab onto other than a palace fence that was off-limits and the abrasive trunks of ancient trees teetering as if they were ready to collapse at the gentlest kiss of wind. Pedestrians ambled by, leaning into each other, more concerned with the uneven ground than the cacophonous rattle of cars speeding past. I kept my eyes on the ground too. All I could think of was the approaching rise, torn between wanting to see that man and not.
Nick mused pleasantly on the benefits of walking, how you discover details you never could from inside a vehicle. There were wrought-iron gates at every interval of the fence, and in the center of each were elaborate designs of shields, crowns, crossed spears, and Ethiopic alphabet characters. Predictably, he stopped at the first set of gates.
“Is this a coat of arms?” He traced his finger along a character that resembled a jigsaw puzzle piece. “How do you say this?”
“Ha,” I said.
“As in happy?”
“And that one,” I said, pointing at a three-pronged fork with a handle that dropped from its left side and bent slightly outward at the tip, “is se. As in since.”
“Happy since... infinity?” he said. He touched a character at the center of the design. It did resemble a horizontal infinity symbol, with a vertical line through its twist.
“That is keh,” I said. “Keh, as in...” But the snap of the k, like a breaking branch, would be impossible for him to sound out. “Never mind. You’ll never get it right.”
My voice had come out with edge. He flinched but kept a straight face, like my mother during those aborted fights with my father.
“What’s ha-se-keh?”
“The last emperor’s initials. First name, last name, title,” I explained, touching the corresponding characters.
“Out of sequence? Shouldn’t it be keh-ha-se?”
“Visually it works better, as you can see.”
Nick retraced the unifying but to him unpronounceable, not to mention misplaced, ቀ’s twisted loop. He gazed up beyond the treetops, his shoulders slouched like a child in awe. He shook the camera loose from his sleeve and dropped into his palm. He backed away from the gate, almost onto the road.
“Careful,” I said under my breath. He didn’t hear me.
I started walking again and glanced toward what — other than the coat of arms — he was most likely capturing: details of the fence segments with eighteen red spears joined by stars ringed with silver orbits, stone pillars between the spears. I returned my gaze to the sidewalk, itself geometrically beautifuclass="underline" six concrete tiles in a row, six inches square, each tile containing a diamond. Between the tiles were gaps of earth filled with knots of parched grass.
In the slight upward bend of the ground, I sensed the incline of the upcoming bump. I lifted my eyes toward the passing cars, then forced myself to behold the rise.
Nothing. Even through the constant blur of tires and metal, I could see that it was empty, neither the man nor his ghost lying there. The ostriches really had taken him away to rest elsewhere, like my mother had insisted. The past, having passed, was even lonelier than me. Up close, the bump looked insignificant. I felt silly to have been so frightened of it, sorry to have caused my mother so much distress.
I pried off a shoe and, like a swimmer testing the water temperature, skimmed my foot on the asphalt where it met the sidewalk. Other than the vibrations of traffic, my flesh detected no presence. I put my shoe back on. At the fence, I strained for a view of my long-forgotten friends, those elegant ostriches, in the overgrowth of the garden. There was nothing but the ancient trees, the tall grass.
The percussive bursts of Nick’s camera reached me before he did. I pointed into the compound like a shy kid at a zoo. He looked in that direction, expecting to see something worth a snapshot.
“There used to be ostriches in there.”
“That’s what you saw?”
“They saw me too,” I said. “But they’re dead now.”
He stuck his face through the bars. “Who knows how long they can live in the wild.”
“That’s not the wild. It’s a palace compound.”
“Could’ve fooled me. Maybe ha-keh-se’s lions snacked on them.”
“One forward kick from an ostrich can put a lion out for the count.”
He continued to take pictures, my eyes following the direction of his aim. On top of pillars: stone spheres. On fronts of pillars: iron-framed glass-shaded lamps. Or glass jagged. Or glass gone. Inside the frame was a white fluorescent bulb, naked like bone. Etched on stone pillars: warriors, statesmen, and statements. Lions above their heads. Lions on bellies, legs tucked, claws poised over edge.
“Can I have the camera?” I asked as he walked past me. I wanted to preserve only one part of this area: the bump. He handed me the camera and kept walking.
I stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and aimed the camera at the rise in the asphalt. The passengers couldn’t help dipping their heads as their cars bounced over it, as if in homage to its power. When there was a gap between the moving cars, I took the shot. The screen blinked, then reverted to showing the road and the blurred lower halves of cars.
As I turned to catch up to Nick, I saw in my peripheral vision a mass of earth rising from the deep bush of the palace compound. I stopped. The mound became a tall, slim figure with a small head. It lifted its long legs and stepped over the dry brush and shrubbery, onto the palace driveway. Steady, graceful like a thin gray bird, it advanced to the fence, gaining speed, one bony leg hurtling forward on the heels of the other. But instead of grand flapping wings, an enraged human voice shouted, “No photo!”
Not an ostrich, but an armed soldier sprinting toward us, chest puffed, in blue fatigues. The soles of his dark boots were jagged and his body bottom-heavy with a rifle and belt of bullets. His finger was on the raised beak of the trigger, ready to bite.
Nick ran back and stood between the fence and me. He put one hand out behind him to keep me back. “No photo!” he echoed urgently. With his other hand, he reached into his pocket. He extended a fifty-dollar bill through the fence just as the soldier reached us on the other side. The soldier slapped Nick’s hand away. The money sailed to the ground on the soldier’s side.
“We are sorry,” Nick pleaded.
“Memory!”
“We are very, very sorry.”
“Memory! Memory!” The soldier held out his open palm, the blank space between the head, heart, and fate lines hungry for the camera’s memory card.
As they screeched back and forth, I extracted myself from Nick’s extended arm. With a trembling finger, I pressed the display button on the camera.
There he was. The rise I had photographed, which had ensconced the sleeping man inside its bulge, had offered him up. My friend as I remembered him. No, worse — pulverized to almost nothing from twenty years of being forgotten, driven over by people hurrying on with their lives.
Still facing the solider, Nick made a blind grab for the camera like a driver clamoring for something in the backseat. I tightened my hold with both hands. Nick tugged at it, but not hard. He didn’t take my resistance seriously. Only when I yanked it close to my body did he turn around. In his eyes was that old terror of mine, translated by this lethal moment into absolute hatred.