“Are you fucking insane? Let go of it!” he snapped.
“No! He’s mine!”
“We’ll get another card!”
“No!”
“Let go of it now!”
The soldier echoed Nick: “Let go! Let go!”
“Here is what I was remembering!” I said. “Don’t you want to see?”
“You can just tell me. Don’t get us killed!”
“You have to see!”
I doubled over the camera, using all my strength, wishing I was an ostrich with a neck so long I could spot danger days away and gallop like the wind. The top of my head pushing against Nick’s torso, we shuffled in a primitive dance until we’d switched places, and Nick’s back was to the traffic and mine to the solider who hadn’t ceased his “No memory! No memory!” refrain.
The soldier grabbed my shoulder and slammed my back against the fence. The camera blasted out of my hand and fell at my feet. Nick, betrayed by the energy he had put into pulling the strap, toppled backward into oncoming traffic and got hit by a car before it swerved onto the sidewalk. Drivers stopped, got out, rushed with their hands on their heads to his broken body on the ground.
I was free of the solider. I could hear his boots slap-crunching gravel as he escaped into the bush, but I stayed plastered to the fence. By the weak flailing of his hands, I knew Nick was alive. Bit by bit, the crowd around his body grew layers like the rings of a tree trunk, and I lost sight of him. But he was still alive — that, I knew. I felt ashamed. He was the end to my loneliness, not some ghost, and I had almost turned him into the very thing he’d tried so hard to pry out of me — a dead man.
On the camera display, one body part at a time, the sleeping man faded, leaving a simple snapshot of a bare rise of gray cracked asphalt.
Dust, Ash, Flight
by Maaza Mengiste
Mercato
I
They would begin digging for bones tomorrow. Alfonso stood next to the jail staring at the flat landscape of the Addis Ababa military base. He’d come today because he wanted to see the site before Lara and the other forensic scientists started, wanted to quietly rest his photographer’s eye on the grounds they would soon be shoveling. He wondered if he’d be able to identify a femur from a humerus or distinguish what made one set of human bones young and another old. The Argentine scientists were in Ethiopia looking for the remains of prisoners who had been taken from their families and never heard from again. He came to photograph those remains, to trap between shutter and aperture fragments of prisoners like those he’d been forced to photograph in Argentina. Alfonso adjusted his camera to zoom in on a pick leaning against a wooden fence. Would there be anything in this drab compound that would remind him of the grassy land behind the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics in Buenos Aires?
It’s not what you’re used to, Lara had said the day she finally agreed to let him join the team traveling to Ethiopia. Your subjects won’t be alive, she said, her light-brown eyes sharp as she took in his stiff suit jacket and scratched cuff links. There’s no art in this, she added, disgust evident in the smile she let settle on his camera equipment and unopened portfolio. She was a woman shaped out of angles, her bones delicate. She’d kept a notebook with her during the interview but had written nothing while he talked, had chosen instead to pin her unflinching gaze on him. She’d looked tired, her eyes sunken, as if they would bend light if they could and bask only in shadows. You must know who I am, he’d wanted to remind her. I was the last face so many saw before they disappeared. Who better than me to photograph what remains?
The others might ask you about a relative who’d been jailed at the Navy Mechanics School when you were there, she’d said at the end as they stood at the door of her lab, interview over, his hand extended but ignored. It’s better to discuss those things after this job is done, don’t mix the two. She’d nodded and walked back to her desk.
Alfonso opened his lens wide to take in the dry, cracked earth. He saw two Ethiopian men watching him intently from a short distance. Each of them held a photograph to their chest, the image facing his direction. Alfonso felt his stomach tighten. He knew this ritual, recognized the hopes they were trying to place in his hands. He’d seen this same gesture in Argentina. Strangers would stop him in the streets and ask, Aren’t you the one the newspapers talked about? The photographer jailed at the Navy School who took those pictures? Then, out of nowhere, a photo. This is my mother, my sister, my father, my aunt, my grandson. So many. A procession of faces and bodies both candid and posed, staring at him, waiting to be found, to be taken out of the land of the disappeared and reclaimed.
Alfonso lowered the camera and held up both hands to the approaching Ethiopians. He walked backward, shaking his head. Yekerta, he repeated again and again, silently thanking the guide for teaching the scientists and him what would be the most important word on this trip, in this country full of people still waiting to properly mourn their dead. Sorry. I’m sorry.
It was Lara’s idea to go to the dusty tej bet near the hotel that night before the first dig. The rest of the team, tired from a day of meetings and briefings, had excused themselves to sleep, and only Alfonso remained.
“I drink one beer the night before we start working at a new place,” she said to him on the way there. “Everything will taste like dirt by tomorrow.”
The bar was a tiny, dim building made of what looked like adobe. It was painted blue with a pale-green door that swung limply on rusted hinges. A scratched-up slab of wood made up the counter and, behind it, a strikingly pretty waitress with clothes that clung to her soft body smiled and pushed two beers toward them as they sat down.
They drank in silence, Alfonso trying to feign disinterest in the envelope Lara had taken out of her purse and held gingerly at the edges.
It was then that Gideon walked in. Lara shifted her attention to the door and watched the old man with interest as he stopped and stared at them, momentarily startled, before taking a seat at the end of the counter.
She stared as if she were scrutinizing a document. When she spoke, it seemed directed to no one. “He’s lost someone,” she said. Her black wavy hair fell over her face and she pushed it back and took a drink of beer.
He stole another look at Lara. Despite what she’d told him at the interview, the other scientists had plied him with questions about those they knew who’d also been jailed at the Navy School. She was the only one who’d never asked.
They set their beers on the counter and watched Gideon as the waitress started talking to him, animated and tender-voiced. Gideon sat straight, alert and expressionless. He seemed to refuse to look their way; he simply pressed himself deeper into his seat and wrapped his fingers around his beer, nodding to the waitress’s chatter. It was the way he stared at his hands that made Alfonso look at his own. What was he doing in Addis Ababa?
It was hard to tell his age. Gideon looked sixty; he carried a weariness twice those years. In the soft light that outlined his straight nose and papery skin, Gideon resembled a worn prophet, a man who should have been illuminated by nothing but dying candles.
Tenastilign. Alfonso tried to repeat the greeting again. He’d never learn the hard consonants of Amharic, the lilt of the language. He dipped his head for a quick bow and waited for Gideon to return the greeting. He smiled, understanding after only four days in Addis Ababa the reserve of Ethiopians.