He knew. He had to know. He’d known all this time, and he’d never called after her. He’d known all this time, and he’d never stopped any of it.
Pressing down on his palm to extract the glass, Robel started to choke on his own words. They came tumbling out rapidly, his heaves interspersed with thick tears that only served to intensify Meskerem’s anger. She hovered above him as the general told her everything, her body shaking. Robel’s blood seeped into the paper as he spoke of his father’s threats, and she snatched the sheet out of his hand. Turning toward the door, she noticed Girma’s name carved into the oak frame. This had been his office too. This is where he had made the decision. This is where her mother’s life had been wagered. She knew then that they could never coexist, that the general had a debt to pay.
Robel tried to steady himself and stand again, calling after her. “Babiye,” he whimpered, stumbling as he rested one palm against the desk where his father had drawn up the plans to have Tigist killed.
“Babiye,” he repeated, finally resting his weight against the desk where he’d begged for her life to be spared, for the baby to live.
“Benatish,” he whispered, stretching the bloody palm out to touch her shoulder.
She turned to face him quickly, her body moving with an untrained agility more frightening than his own.
Meskerem’s eyes were the last thing Robel saw before she reached the last rifle Girma had left him. They were warm, sad.
They looked so familiar.
Ostrich
by Rebecca Fisseha
National Palace
The ostriches are so vivid to me still, as if I had photographed them with my heart. If it weren’t for their small bulbous heads and huge round middles, they would have blended in with the iron bars of the palace fence that ran the length of the avenue that my mother drove down daily. They used to observe us, standing in twos and threes, or alone, deep in the tall grass; willowy creatures as mysterious as everything else in the palace compound beyond that fence.
I never noticed them until my mother pointed them out, to help me power through my terror of a rise halfway down the avenue, a speed bump that to six-year-old me was pure torture because on every lead-up to that momentary bounce, I was horrified that my heart would fly out of my mouth. As we approached the drop to that avenue, I would beg my mother to let me get out and walk. She convinced me that the ostriches came and stood near the fence every day just to see if I would be brave once again. It worked. Every time I survived the bump with my heart intact, I would lock eyes with one segon and feel all its approval.
But one afternoon during my first year of school, I forgot all about the ostriches because I saw a man sprawled on the ground where I would normally brace for the jolt. After we passed him, I watched him receding through the rear window. He was lying on his side on the lane closest to the palace sidewalk. His legs were bent as if he were running. A newspaper hooked to his shirt, flapping his chest. He was yawning in his sleep and his hands were outstretched. Maybe he had been reaching for something before sleep overtook him, or he was holding that thing in his dream.
My mother usually kept her window down, resting her left elbow on the edge and driving with only her right hand. After passing far enough down the avenue that I could barely see the man on the ground and I began to wonder if he had been there at all, we emerged from the shadows of the trees and into the light, crossing a short bridge over a dirty stream. I turned and saw that my mother had rolled up her window. She held the steering wheel tight with both hands and leaned forward as if there were something written on the hood of the car that she had to read.
Seeing people on the street was nothing new in Addis Ababa, but I had never seen one asleep on the asphalt.
“Why was he sleeping there?” I asked.
My mother braked suddenly and shot out her right hand toward the passenger seat, as if my voice, coming from the back, was an animal that had darted in front of the car. Slowly, she pulled back her hand and picked up speed past the church, racing across Revolution Square without checking for merging cars from five other roads. Overlooking the square was a big poster of three Russian men in profile. We were on our way to pick up my father from work. His office was in the direction of their gaze, but my mother took the road behind them, which leads to the airport.
“I missed seeing my segon today,” I said.
Realizing her mistake, she turned onto another street. A tear rolled down the side of her face.
“It’s okay, I’ll see it tomorrow,” I said. Her tears multiplied. “Won’t I?”
“Sit quiet.”
We crossed the square again, this time slowly and carefully, passing under the billboard of the three Russian men who watched us disappear up the road that led to my father’s office.
Once there, he stepped into the car and kissed my mother hello where the tears had been. “You’re late.”
“We took a wrong turn.”
“I saw a sleeping man on the road.”
Before my father could tell me for the thousandth time not to interrupt adults, my mother said, staring ahead, “Expect us ten minutes later from now on.”
My father forgot about me but said what I was thinking. “Why?”
“I’m not driving past the palace anymore. I’ll find another way.”
“But that would take longer. There’s no sense in that, with the gas rations.”
She shrugged.
“But that’s the quickest way home.”
My father waited. I knew that wait. It meant that their conversation was one response away from becoming a fight. All it needed was for her to say words sharper than his. Unlike other adults, my parents never hid their fights from anyone. They believed that disagreeing was normal and good, and always kissed afterward, no matter who won.
But my mother didn’t respond that day. She let the silence be. It lingered even after my father rolled down his window to the sound of the city.
At home, while I was supposed to be playing in the garden until dinner, I hovered outside my parents’ bedroom window.
I heard my father say, “In this curfew, every minute is precious—”
“Get yourself home if you’re in such a rush.”
I smiled. The wait was over. We were still normal.
“Walk? Take public transport? You mean the very risks we should keep to a minimum?”
“Keep pushing me and I’ll never drive again,” she said tearfully. This threat was real. She was the only one with a driver’s license. But my father brushed it off.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Try me. If you think you can get a license with your condition, go ahead.”
My mother’s crying became muffled. My father must have been embracing her, calming her down — she had won the fight.
Plucking leaves from a bush and staring at the soil below it, I listened, crushed that I might never see my segon again.
“The sleeping man?” my mother said. I jumped, thinking I had been discovered eavesdropping, which was just as bad as interrupting them. “The sleeping man your child thinks she saw on the road?”
It was quiet for a while. Then my father said, “He wasn’t asleep.”
“No.”
“None of them are,” he said, inhaling deeply. “But love, where can you drive and not see that now? Soon there’ll be very few roads without a dead body.”