I am writing the last of my notes, leaning against a tree just beyond the site, when Alfonso and Gideon walk over to me. They seem to hesitate as I look up.
“Sí? Can I help you?” I ask Alfonso, not wanting to be rude, trying to respect what he must have seen and endured in the Navy School. I realize that the tormented look I first noticed when he came to us has not changed. It is permanent, like a scar.
“Gideon. He has something to show you.” He points to Gideon, who takes a picture from his suit pocket and holds it out to me, cupping it like an injured bird. “This is his son, Samson,” Alfonso says. “He disappeared years ago, he was jailed here.”
I shake my head, already knowing the question. “We’ve found everyone. There’s no one else here. Tell him I’m sorry.” And I have to wonder at a man who wants the bones of his son, who chooses not to believe in escape and flight.
“Please look,” Alfonso says. He pauses. “For his sake, just look at the picture. Then tell him.”
I see a young man, a boy really, with eager eyes and a wide smile. I see his father’s strong jaw and high cheekbones, a chipped front tooth and sloping forehead. He is flesh and blood, this boy, so alive. We dig only the dead.
“No,” I say. “He isn’t here.”
Part II
Translations of Grief
Father Bread
by Mikael Awake
Kechené
They nicknamed him Abba Dabo for the bread he offered the poor each Sunday. Devout as dawn itself, he would rise, say a prayer, iron one of his two good shirts, and climb the steep hill to Guardian of the World Church. He nodded kindly at the white-shawled women who sold candles along the road, while two of his little orphans struggled to keep pace behind him, lugging a golden loaf the size and weight of a table.
Abba: Father. Dabo: Bread.
The drunkards in the tavern, still up from their endless night, would feel a rare sweet lump of sorrow in their throats as they watched them pass.
“There goes a good man,” one would say.
“You mean a smart man,” came the reply.
“What’s the difference?” another would say.
“If you don’t know, you must be a good man.”
Back and forth they would jest until the warmth of a new day covered their mouths with sleep.
Waves of progress were crashing over the city, but washed along the gates of Guardian of the World Church was what the tide had left behind: legless old men dragging themselves through the dirt, blind girls nursing howling babies, listless boys from the country, all begging for spare change from the sweet-smelling churchgoers who had come to pray away their sins. Every week, Abba Dabo would stand before the hungry and unveil the loaf from its muslin cloth. It drew them in like iron filings to a magnet. They would tear eager handfuls so quickly that the taste almost immediately became a memory.
“Come with me,” Abba Dabo would tell the children. “We will feed you like this. We will love you as one of God’s chosen, and we will find you an earthly home.” A cloud of wispy white hair ringed his shiny pate.
“Like the halo of an angel,” said the churchgoers, who bowed and blessed him as they passed.
The children who returned with Abba Dabo to his orphanage had traveled from the parched villages of Arsi and the flooded farms of Gurage. They came from the fertile Omo Valley where foreign investment had bared its teeth. Most would only stay a few weeks before they were lured away by the promise of the sprawling city below, never to be seen again. Only the most desperate stayed with him long enough to find homes elsewhere in the wealthier parts of town or with families abroad. Of course, many of the children were suspicious of his generosity, casting wary glances at Abba Dabo and quietly leaning against the crumbling stone wall of the church to finish their bread.
“He can keep his love,” they’d say, “but I’ll eat the bread.”
The day he arrived at the orphanage door, the boy was alone, barefoot, eyes laden with shame, fatigue, and grief. His body was smaller than it should have been. A tattered shirt with the Converse logo went below his knees. Abba Dabo thought he recognized the boy from the church gates, one of those usually shoved aside in the line for bread. He must have followed us home, Abba Dabo thought, then summoned the girl who worked in the kitchen to bring him some bread.
“My child, eat,” he said, offering the boy a plate of injera. “Where are your parents, my child?”
The boy stood staring at the plate balanced in his tiny hands, afraid to look away for fear it might disappear. His ashen head was fully shaved but for a small strip of tight black curls near his forehead, which he shook from side to side.
Abba Dabo uttered a mournful sound from the back of his throat and made the sign of the cross over himself. “My little lamb,” he said, “did the crops fail?”
The boy shook his head.
“Did the well dry?”
Again, the boy shook his head.
Abba Dabo made the usual guesses — flooding, violence, eviction — but each time in reply, the boy simply shook his head. This struck him as unusual. There must be something wrong with him, Abba Dabo thought. In the past, he’d made the mistake of caring for badly damaged children and knew the costs outweighed the benefits. “May God bless you,” he said, laying a gentle hand of farewell on the boy’s head. “May God protect you.”
Just then, the boy lifted his eyes and muttered, in the softest voice anyone had ever heard, “Hyenas.”
The boy was from Toglet, a remote valley deep in Amhara, a place as quiet and unknowable as the afterlife, whose people were stoic and meek but had a reputation for vengefulness. For centuries, the lush vale was crisscrossed by narrow footpaths and only accessible by mule, but recently Chinese contractors had built a paved road leading to town. They say that a woman carrying kindling was walking along the Chinese road when she stumbled upon him. Those early morning hours were so thick with fog that she didn’t see the boy until her damp feet tripped over his.
She recognized him as the youngest son of a landowning farmer, a man of some stature. The boy appeared as she’d always seen him, wearing an oversize flannel shirt hung like a dress over a tattered pair of shorts. But today his clothes were damp and discolored.
“Have you been hurt?” the kindling woman asked.
The boy shook his head and pointed with his thumb at the fields behind him, where his father and all fathers had ever worked and lived since the childhood of man. The woman followed his thumb — it was clubbed, with blood under the sliver of nail — to a lonely, fenced gojo in the middle of the field.
The boy would not answer her, not lifting his eyes from the ground. The woman dropped her pile of bound wood on the road with a sigh and took his hand in hers. She passed this way regularly on her way to town, but you did not trespass a man’s land without good reason. She was curious, but she was cautious. They walked in silence toward the lonely homestead. All was still. A rooster strutted into the front yard, hiccuping. The sheep were agitated in their pens. No other noises came from within. The boy’s hand in hers was small and soft as the tendril of a fern, and they were slick with a sticky kind of dew that she would only later know was blood.
If you ever go to Toglet and find yourself up at dawn, hold your breath for a minute and sit in complete silence. They say that if you do this, you can still hear the kindling woman’s whooping screams echo through the valley.