Clouds of smoke gathered above Bela Sefer. The forest where she used to get lost, hide, shower in the rain that dripped from the tree, that large, dense forest where she’d met Negus and they opened their eyes to each other’s naked skin, where she buried his foreskin next to her clitoris, this place now smelling like their sexes.
A mustached man in a three-piece suit preached to passersby from a high chair, holding leaflets in his gold-ringed hand. “I will teach you ten ways to overcome poverty and get rich,” he said in a bad American accent. “Places are limited. Grab this information pack and book fast to avoid disappointment.”
I took a leaflet with an American flag printed on it, the symbol of a place where God and money could coexist. But I wanted neither. I unbuttoned my shirt, as if to air out that thing caged inside me. It isn’t only governments that imprison, I thought. We are just as capable of doing that to our own selves.
I was deep in my thoughts when I saw the preacher strut to a nearby Mercedes. Girls surrounded the car, some with babies strapped to their backs, while others carried firewood or buckets.
My eyes moved from the girls to a group of boys forming a circle around two youngsters who stood back-to-back, the beginning of a duel. The fighters turned their hands into the shapes of guns and paced away from each other. When they turned sharply, it was as if their shots missed each other and instead made the sky bleed. Dusk arrived to Bela Sefer with a splotch of red seeping through the thick clouds.
I checked my client’s address once again. She lived along the last row of the shantytown at the bottom of the forest.
Following the hastily written sign pointing to the forest of Bela Sefer, I turned left. The ground became darker and steeper, and the water in the potholes rippled in the breeze. I caught the reflection of a boy standing on a barrel, urinating, and I shuffled past. Finally, I spotted the cluster of corrugated tin shacks: some roofless, others covered with wooden planks or fabric. My spirits sank. Is this a hoax? I wondered. How is it possible for someone living here to pay this kind of money, and what could “sexual nature involved” mean in this place?
I pondered whether to turn back, when I remembered the girl in my school who had changed my voice.
“Your voice is too high, like a girl,” she’d said to me one day at recess. “Here, this will help you to deepen it.”
She’d placed a handful of herbal leaves in my hand that I put in water overnight and drank every morning before I came to school. And every morning, she would take me aside and test the depth of my voice. The day she was satisfied, she introduced me to her friends as her new boyfriend.
But it was more than a defect in vocal cords — it was the voice of someone else. The other me I couldn’t name back then, but now could feel and would soon present to a Habesha woman. The very thought of being able to openly express myself alleviated my doubts and set me forth on my way to my client’s shack, illuminating the path ahead of me.
I passed through several alleyways with the damp air sticking to my face and arrived on a bright street. Although there were no lamps, light still emanated from furnaces and stovetop fires. I ducked under the clothes hanging on ropes tied between two shacks. Water dripped on my head and the scent of Imperial Leather soap made me light-headed.
A woman with her hair set in rollers emerged from a shack and wiped her child’s bum, then walked toward a group of women sitting in a circle around an open furnace. Murmurs broke out. I moved closer and listened to the crackling fire, watching their faces glow from the embers, their eyes squinting as the smoke curled in front of them. Above their braided heads, a flash of lightning struck as they recollected men lost to wars and women isolated in opulent homes across the Red Sea.
The moonlight broke through clouds. Hayat lit a cigarette and glanced at her watch. Brhan, a light, was bound to arrive in her life. She had sold her mother’s wedding jewelry to hire him. She went inside the shack, leaving behind her a cloud of smoke.
I arrived on a street lit by a single dim bulb. The noise of a generator spilled out from a compound. I peered over the stone wall and saw men watching a Bruce Lee film under a rhododendron tree.
As I approached my client’s home, Ethiopian jazz emanated from her shack. I leaned against the wall and my shoulders slumped. It had been a long time since I’d had a girlfriend. I always told myself it was because women couldn’t understand me, but it was only here, in this darkness, that reality began to reveal itself.
I had never had an orgasm before. My last girlfriend left me, like the others did, because she thought I was impotent. I would always grow still around women’s naked bodies, forgetting that I was meant to drive them to some memorable destination. But I couldn’t live up to their expectations, nor did I want to do the driving. When I reached my client’s door, I realized that I could only satisfy a woman who wanted to take charge and knew her desires.
The music stopped. I peeked through the window and slipped inside the shack. The flame of an oil lamp licked the turquoise-painted tin wall, and a horsehair flyswatter hung on the wall next to an empty picture frame. I studied the space but could see nothing else besides shoes on the bare ground and some clothes scattered on a bloodied straw rug.
I was about to turn away from the window when I noticed soapy water trickling onto the floor in rivulets. I assumed a shower room was adjacent to her shack. I heard a door opening somewhere inside, but I couldn’t angle my head enough to get a good look. I then saw her silhouette on the wall, the shadow of her head and chest fitting perfectly within the empty picture frame. I stared at the scene, the live painting changing as she twisted her hair into a bun. My eyes lingered across her collarbone as she placed a cigarette in her mouth. As she inhaled, the glow of her cigarette illuminated her dark nipple on the turquoise wall.
Breathless, I knocked. A few moments passed before she opened.
She wore a long, wide dress, a gabi around her shoulders. “Are you Brhan?”
I looked at her in silence.
“Are you Brhan? Yes or no?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, don’t just stand there.”
She smelled of alcohol, but she walked in solid steps.
I followed her through a curtain in the middle of her shack to a small adjacent room. I could see a bed, a black box, and an old typewriter next to a pile of papers.
“Take off your clothes,” she said. “All of them.”
I didn’t. I leaned against the door, my arms crossed over my chest.
“Surely I don’t need to remind you that you are here to satisfy me,” she said. “And it starts by listening to me.”
After a moment of staring down at my feet, I turned around to undress.
She chuckled. “Actually, I am not after your penis. But it seems you instinctively know what I want.” She ran her hand over my buttocks. I felt a squeeze on my wrist. “Now turn around.”
I did as she asked. She took off her clothes. When I noticed a tattoo in the shape of Africa between her breasts, I realized this was a woman who loved our continent and perhaps nothing else.
“The lights of Bela Sefer will go out soon, so allow your eyes to feast,” she said. “I want my body fixed at the front of your mind like a mural sparkling in the dark.”
I followed her with my eyes as she strutted to the other side of the room. Sitting on her bed, she asked me to come toward her. “But slowly,” she said. “We have all the time in the world.”
I had never felt so exposed, so inspected. Yet it was what I had always dreamed of; not so much to be owned, but to be released from the shackles that tied me to an idea of manhood I couldn’t fulfill. I wanted to create my own definition of what it was to be a man: I could take the role of a woman with a woman if I wished, or take the role of a silent lover. When I realized that all of the rage that had accumulated inside me was because I was trying to be someone I was not, I moved slowly toward her. When I arrived to her side, I decided to let go and surrender to the unknown, thinking that this was the key to my freedom.