“When this woman turned back and saw me, I thought she planned to talk to me. I noticed, then, that her gait was quite odd. She moved very slowly, like she was trying to free herself from gravity or was made of elastic. (A few curl their lips in mockery.) I thought then of my lover, my Woede, my sugar mama. (Some smile, a few chuckle.) Please do not laugh, I need money, guys. As I told you, I used to see this same old woman in white every morning from the window of my office. It feels strange when you see at close range the woman you are used to seeing from a distance, and whiter too. There were vendors on the street shouting and selling green grass and Meskel daisies. There is something wrong with buying flowers when your life is upside down. (Some stare at him in disbelief.) Mine? Yes. It is upside down. I have to cajole Woede for vacation money.
“Let me get back to the more serious matter at hand. I became curious and timidly followed the lady in white. She walked hunched, like this. (He shows them what her hunch looked like.) You see? She looked young and yet she walked like this? I mean, she was old, but not old enough to hunch. It is like she was intending to pick something up from the street and yet picked up nothing. What was she going to pick up? Who knows — maybe she had an idea, or saw something that deserved to be picked up. Dead women tell no tales. If you’re dead, you’re dead. It is done. It is fini. Why was she so bent? Why didn’t she watch where she was going? It was the end of winter and there was a glimmer of sunshine that exaggerated her presence on the street. She was a small woman and yet somehow more present than all of us. Strange, eh? I suddenly discovered that she had a shadow that was darker than mine. Mine was a sort of washed-out gray. What could that mean? Maybe I’m wrong — maybe I was seeing things. The world thinks in black or white. If you are a fence sitter, everyone will hate you. It is better, I always say, to be hated by half of the populace, so I take sides. It does not matter whether it’s for good or bad, as long as half the idiots don’t hate you. I don’t care what people say, but I swear I felt the heaviness of her shadow in my chest, pushing me like a hand.
“Now, there was this truck driver with a face crumpled like raisins. I saw him with his torso bent forward as if he were commanding a submarine. The fucker. He was driving slowly. Have you ever seen truck drivers drive slowly? (Silence.) No. This guy was driving so slowly that he could have easily turned to avoid the woman. Instead, he drove right into her. Why? Maybe he was on his phone. Maybe he was a shepherd who just got his driver’s license. The truck tapped her on her left shoulder, but tapping and slamming an old woman is the same. After that, do you think the truck stopped? No! I couldn’t write down his license plate number because I didn’t have a pen. Why is it that on that specific day I didn’t have a pen? I ran to where the woman fell and tried to help her up. She was a tiny woman, but she was as heavy as ten men. How could that be? Her arm was broken like a stick and you could see the bones. Her hips were a mess. The guy from that fruit shop came running and we carried her together, away from the center of the street to the sidewalk. But then I noticed something odd. It was rainy and muddy, yet there wasn’t a speck of mud or dirt on her dress. Do you believe me? (Silence.)
“What’s even stranger is that she had scratches, broken bones, loose teeth, and a cracked head, but no blood. Not even a drop! There was torn skin on the back of her hand (he showed them the back of his hand), but no bleeding. Here too! (He showed his palm to everyone.) No blood. Where was her blood? Where was it? Does anyone know the answer? Anybody?”
(After a few seconds of silence, the circle of seven friends — with the exception of Zerish — grinned, chuckled, howled, roared, snorted, cackled, chortled, until some bubbles of beer foam quietly popped.)
Part IV
Police and Thieves
Kebele ID
by Linda Yohannes
CMC
Helen knew the moment the new housemaid said “Meron” that it couldn’t be her real name. Even without the traditional ear-to-ear tattoo that she tried to hide under a scarf, or the accent that twisted the city name, or that unmistakable odor of sheep hide, Helen could still tell the new housemaid was from the country. Later, when Meron had been with Helen and her husband Dawit for so long that domestic chores felt impossible without her, Helen would feel guilty for disdaining Meron that first day. But today, staring at Meron’s Kebele ID card after she’d disappeared with the 35,000 birr from Helen’s closet and finding out that Meron was really Aregash, Helen wished she hadn’t stopped intuiting.
Helen and Dawit were deeply grateful when Helen found a well-paying job with a Turkish company, but Helen wished the location was nearer to her home. Commuting from their one-bedroom condominium apartment in CMC to the office in Akaky Kaliti, partly by minibus taxis and partly on the city train, was too much given the wretched public transportation of Addis Ababa. Helen sometimes shut her eyes to keep out the sight of desperate, late-for-work people in the long taxi lines. She knew that once the people were inside the taxi, the fare collector could announce he was charging up to five times the standard amount. “If you don’t agree, get out right now,” he would say. “No arguments.” Helen took out her frustration in embittered Facebook posts, which were then liked by other passengers. As a lady in a taxi full of twelve people or more, it wasn’t easy to be the one to rouse a protest. Instead, she hoped to buy a car in the near future, and Dawit wanted to help with this.
One evening, he called and told her to meet him downstairs. When he held her hand and led her through the parking lot, she thought the surprise was a person — perhaps an old friend or even a housemaid, the latter being something she had long been desperate for. But then he arrived in a yellow Hyundai Atos, went around and stepped into the passenger seat, rolled the driver’s window down, and told Helen, “This is for you.”
It took her some time to believe that Dawit had indeed bought her a car. Even after he repeated how he had done it — he took out a loan for 200,000 birr from work, a private construction company whose owner favored him among the civil engineers, and borrowed another 100,000 from his brother — the news still floated around her head, unable to settle. She slowly began to believe it as she ran her hand over the stereo, the heat and fan buttons, the faux leather on the small wheel, the tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.
“You’re too good to me.” She turned to him and hugged him in the narrow cabin.
It was about a month later that their next blessing, Meron — now Aregash — came into their lives.
It had been ten years since Aregash left her childhood home in rural Gojjam for a job in the city, and Dawit and Helen were her best employers so far. They were going to pay her 1,000 birr and they wouldn’t control what or how much she ate. “You are thirty-five years old,” Derib, her boyfriend, always said, “a nobody counting empty years.” He often told her that and reminded her of her tiny salary. “If you want to be somebody, you need to do something — maybe go to the Arab countries. That’s how others make it,” he said enviously, remembering his day-laborer friends and their housemaid girlfriends.