“I can understand why.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners as he ticked a box. “Perceptive,” he mumbled. His attention returned to my face and he continued to mumble as he jotted down: glowing face, groomed and arched eyebrows, a mole under his left eye, would have been sexier under his lower lip. “No one is perfect, ah, Brhan,” he said.
I bowed my head.
“Brhan, correct me if I am wrong, but your slender body and feminine face suggest to me you are from the northwest of the country?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“I can’t hear you. Please look up as you talk.”
“Yes, you guessed right,” I said. For the first time in my life, I didn’t object to this comment about my appearance.
“Good, now pull down your pants and whatever you are wearing underneath,” he said.
When I did as he asked, he stood up with his piece of paper and directed his attention below my hips. He smiled. “Brhan, I must say you fit every single criteria. We will take you on. If you do the job well, then you will get five hundred dollars — not birr. My client deals in Western currency.” He chuckled. His face shook like brown jelly as he stood up to hand me the address of my client and the directions to her shack.
“Shack?”
“Yes, it is in Bela Sefer.”
Isn’t this sort of job for a rich place like Mekanisa? I thought as I glanced at the address again.
“She will be happy to meet you,” he said.
“She?”
Bela Sefer was built by the poor who came to Addis from small villages. But since they couldn’t afford to live in the city, they made their homes here, at the foot of the forest. Hence, these temporary buildings have quickly erected walls and makeshift roofs. Wind shakes them; a storm could rip all the shacks off the ground in a second. At times, when the forest rages, things fly around. If you were to walk in the woods, you could notice trees dressed up in shammas, zuris, and torn pages of holy books.
Negus was the most stable fixture in Hayat’s life.
They lived on the same street, their shacks opposite each other. A dusty and sloping alleyway separated them. Her desire for him was sown at night, when they used to bring their beds outside to allow their parents privacy in the small shacks. Because the pathway was narrow, their beds touched. She heard his dreams, just as she felt his warm breath. She first masturbated after he went to sleep on one of those nights and she feasted her eyes on his body, stretched taut and translucent in the moonlight. She climbed into his bed. The next morning, her aunt, Negus’s mother, who doubled as a circumciser, came to her shack with the news of her licentiousness.
It was early in the evening when I arrived outside the church in Bela Sefer on the day of the job, as instructed by the agency. When I got out of the taxi, I stepped on something with my foot. Red juice splattered over the dusty ground. Someone had dropped a tomato.
I trembled as I unfolded the directions, a series of Bela Sefer landmarks dotted on the yellow piece of paper: a church, a sex worker known for strangling her customers to exorcise evil as she brought them to orgasm, a Somali kiosk, a café, the only compound with a TV.
Just then a scream erupted behind me. I turned. This was the path that led to the sex worker’s shack. I was sweating. I took off my blazer and continued on my way to find the client.
Farther ahead, a group of women emerged from a bar. A quick dance competition exploded in the middle of the street and drew in a crowd. As the winner hugged her ten-birr note, the loser high-fived me. Her touch invigorating, I strode away, shaking my shoulders until I came across men in turbans with gabis draped around their shoulders, huddling in front of a café. They talked in whispers. We are a land of laughter and preaching except when it comes to sex and politics, I thought as I turned left and counted a hundred steps. In this stone-paved lane, I paused.
“Why am I doing this?” I mumbled. I had come all the way here without a thought about the risk. I had known an activist cousin and her friends who were kidnapped by the police. I had seen a woman surrounded by armed men because she had taken in a lover the same way her husband did.
I tried to remember if I had said or done anything political or controversial that could have led to me being lured to a secret place from which I would never return. I couldn’t recall an occasion of me being outspoken on any issue. I took my risks quietly, like staying up all night long to bring the woman in me to life, in the dark, when everybody around me was asleep.
But here I was, on my way to give my body to an Ethiopian woman who wanted me as I was, an Ethiopian man, with both my femininity and masculinity. I quickened my pace.
Hayat worked at a studio in Bela Sefer assisting an old photographer. In his darkroom, she learned that everyone had a dark side.
But she no longer wanted to conceal her dark side. Instead, she cultivated it until it became as visible as all of her other sides. Every evening, she would go to the forest that had become not only her place of solitude and reflection, but also the laboratory where she continued to experiment with her own body.
Months had passed since the celebration of Hayat’s cleanliness. One night, she was sitting under a tree in the forest, watching another man run down to Bela Sefer, his shadow darting on the moonlit leaves. The man tripped and fell in a hole she had dug to trap animals. She heard his scream and the deafening, maniacal laughter of hyenas.
She leaned back on the straw rug, the same one upon which she had been laid when her aunt carried out the operation on her, and when she turned on her side, her silhouette against the wild bush aroused her. She raised her legs, her toes dangling under the stars, the screams continuing in the background. That night, as she touched her anus, a burning sensation invaded her.
Dawn. Alive.
She climbed the tallest tree in the forest and looked toward Addis, where the buildings were so big that she didn’t know whether the clouds hung low or the city had stepped up. The billboards of shopping malls promising Western happiness appeared like a mirage against the hills. The cars on the bridge looked as if they were flying over the city. This was a change she didn’t feel a part of. She had once been called the future of Ethiopia. The future, though, had arrived without her.
Dazed, she lost her balance. What saved her from falling wasn’t herself. Rather, it was a subconscious thing, this residual resilience that the poor built over the years. Her arms grasped a branch and she swung from the tree.
She returned to a deserted Bela Sefer, breathless, dripping with sweat. She picked up a pair of scissors from her shack and returned to the passageway. Negus had gotten married earlier that day. She heard a moan coming out of his place. The moan of a virgin. Awhile later, he walked out and went to the back of his shack to relieve himself, where Hayat was standing with her scissors.
“Hayat, what are you doing here?” he whispered as she sat in front of him. She could smell sex on his penis, which quickly became erect when she took it in her hand. Memories came to her of the first time they’d both unveiled themselves to each other, of the dream that they would make endless love, before he told his mother about their kiss.
The trees of the forest rammed against each other. This blinding violence found itself to her veins. Hayat took the scissors to Negus’s thighs.