I was surprised by this deluge of narrative coming from a stranger, and then tried to do what I thought I should: I felt his forehead, which wasn’t hot. I checked his pulse, which didn’t race. I rolled up my sleeves and sat down beside him. I tried telling him to take it easy, but he had more to say.
“So that night was — how do they say it in the movies? — a dark and stormy night,” he went on in English.
“A dark and stormy night,” I repeated. “That’s what they say.”
“Besides the rain, the power outage made it hard to see except for the bursts of lightning that lit up the street, lit up the homes, lit the acacia trees on the hillside. The lightning flashed just as I was about to take out my keys and open the gate, and that’s when I saw her: Marta Kebede standing under a big black umbrella, looking the same as the day she was arrested back in 1980. I hadn’t heard of her or seen her since, though I’d thought of her often, of course.”
With the words “of course,” I knew I had to interrupt, because I thought, This man has mistaken me for someone else. He said “of course” like I knew him well, like none of this should come as a surprise to me, and on top of that, the way he leaned his head close and whispered into my ear felt intimate, as did the soft way he grasped my hand. The only thing I could think of worse than unrequited intimacy was mistaken intimacy.
“Sir, I think you have me confused with someone else,” I told the man. “Just rest. I think you’re hurt. Let me get you a car. I could give you some money.” When he declined, I looked again for a wound or sign of injury, but couldn’t find any.
He didn’t seem moved by my concern and just said, “If you have a minute... I just need to rest a minute. If you have a minute, I will take that.”
I didn’t really have time to spare. This was a short visit to see relatives, and almost every moment was accounted for. Yet I felt like I should stay with him just a little longer.
He didn’t wait for my response and simply continued his story: “So I’d just seen Marta, the first time in decades, and there she was, caught in the middle of a storm. The lightning stopped for a moment and I could no longer see her silhouette. I tried to speak into the darkness, but thunder smothered my hello. I jogged toward where she had stood, moving with both excitement and hesitation, for the sight of her made me feel conflicting emotions: elation, dread, and also grief. Isn’t that the way it is with grief, though? First we mourn the grief we bear, and then later we mourn the grief we’ve caused.”
As he said these words, the helplessness on his face that I’d taken for kindness seemed to vanish. I thought that this switch was strange, that his emotions could change so easily, so suddenly and completely.
“So that night on that dark street, I called out again to Marta, saying the only words I could think of: ‘Let’s go for dinner.’ It was an awkward thing to say, but once I had said something, I started saying everything. ‘It’s me, Gedeyon. Don’t you remember? We were students in the same class at university — you were getting your degree in pharmacology, and I was studying chemistry. I asked you out on a date the first week, and you said no, and you made fun of my shoes, saying that they were farmer shoes, and that you wouldn’t date a boy with farmer shoes because your father would kick you out of the house and your mother would drag you to the priest and drown you in holy water. I saved up a whole half year to buy new shoes, really nice ones, and I asked you out again, and you didn’t know who I was. I told you I was going to be a professor and you said you wouldn’t go out with me, but this time you didn’t bother with a reason. I guess I must have loved you. How else could I explain the lengths I went to get your attention, your approval? I wish it hadn’t happened that way, and I still wonder if we would have turned out differently if things happened some other way.’ Isn’t that a lot to say into the darkness?” Now he gripped my arm and lifted himself onto the boulder to sit upright.
“Yes, it is a lot to say.” In any light, I thought.
“If she had acknowledged me, if things had gone a little differently between us, maybe I wouldn’t have accused her. Did you ever live here during the Derg?” he asked, not giving me much time to consider what he’d just revealed. “I think you didn’t. I think you lived somewhere Western, some wealthy country with peace and freedom.”
“I know the Derg,” I replied. “I was a child of the Derg, born of that era.”
Gedeyon shook his head. “Those of you who left here when you were young, without a scratch, and had the luxury of living somewhere else don’t know what some of us carry. You know what the Derg technically is, but you don’t truly know. You know the Derg as a definition, a Cold War junta that lasted too long and did too much harm. But those of us who got to truly know the Derg, who knew it as an uninvited guest dropping in on each meal and in every interaction, well...”
I felt my face flush, and now it was the grip of guilt that kept me there as he went on.
“I had been tortured by the Derg — that’s how I got to know it. Some of the students avoided school back then to reduce the risk of being arrested and just stayed home. But I was poor. I went to school every day, whether there was a demonstration or the threat of arrest or nothing at all because we got free lunch at the university, and if I didn’t go, I didn’t eat all day. It was a simple fact of life. So I went to school every day and was arrested, and who knows why back then. Maybe I had a friend or associate who was suspicious, or maybe my hair was too long or too short, or my fingernails were too clean or too dirty. Maybe it was on account of my nice new shoes — who knows? But when the Derg interrogated me, lashing my feet, asking me to name names to get myself free, I gave them Marta’s name. She was wealthy, had power, and I thought she could escape, that she’d have a better chance of surviving it than I would. And it’s not that I hated her, but she’d stung me. Marta had stung me. Those subtle stings to pride — they’re worse than the big ego blows because they’re not like some obvious pebble you can remove from your shoe. They are like shards that you know are there but can’t find and can’t get rid of. Oh, Marta, I wish she’d never made fun of my shoes.”
“So did Marta accept your dinner invitation during the thunderstorm?” I asked, trying to keep him awake since I saw his eyelids beginning to droop.
“Well, I kept asking her to dinner, but she didn’t say anything. I stood there waiting for another bolt of lightning, and when it came, I saw her far down the street talking to someone, but I didn’t know who. The dark, the rain — everything was obscured. I approached her cautiously, ducking behind a tree, waiting for the right moment when I could finally go up to her and try to speak again. After another strike of lightning, she was alone at the minibus stop where I’d just come from. I walked over and stood next to her tall, illuminated figure. I just stared, hoping she would recognize me and start up a conversation. She eventually turned toward me, even smiled, and said, ‘Good evening.’ She offered to share her umbrella, so I shifted closer to her. But she didn’t seem to know who I was.”
“You said you last saw her in 1980? That’s a long time ago,” I said.
“Not long enough to forget a friend.” The way Gedeyon twisted his lips with spite made me think this was a man of impossible expectations. “She should have remembered,” he said. “The thing is, she has always been on my mind. I wrapped all this guilt up around Marta, all this significance and longing; so much so that I could recognize her anywhere, even in the middle of a blackout with just a flash of lighting to reveal her face. It never occurred to me that her feelings wouldn’t mirror mine, at least a little.”