“Then I’ll find those roads, no matter the detour.”
“And the day you take too long to pick me up, and find me asleep?”
“What do I tell our child? That nowadays people just fall asleep on the streets? She’ll understand they are dead people. And then?”
“Remind her to close her eyes and think of her segon.”
The next afternoon my mother sat me in the front passenger seat on our way to pick up my father. When we neared the bump, I screamed and shut my eyes. She swerved but continued driving. “What’s wrong?”
“The man from yesterday is still there.”
She looked stunned, like a rock had hit her through the window. She didn’t say anything else to me. When we picked up my father, I moved to the backseat.
The following afternoon, I closed my eyes even earlier, because I could already see him.
“My dear, he’s not there,” my mother said, but she sounded unsure. “The segon took him to a better place to sleep.”
I kept my eyes closed.
“Open your eyes, it’s waiting for you.” I only opened them after I felt that we had driven over the little bridge beyond the avenue.
The next afternoon, at the top of the avenue, I begged her to use the two lanes farthest from the palace. She pulled over under the stone lions guarding the first palace gate.
“Do you want to walk? You’ve always wanted to walk.”
I shook my head violently, terrified at the thought of being any nearer to that man.
“Good. Then stop closing your eyes. There’s no one on this road. How much the segonoch must have missed seeing those pretty eyes!”
From then until we left Ethiopia, we continued to drive down that avenue, on that lane, running over the man. My mother would say, “It’s just a bump,” pretending that nothing was wrong. I was not afraid of the bump anymore, but I hated it. I had to feel the car crushing the man’s head, breaking his hands and feet, flattening his tattered red chest under our tires. I hated it for the squelching sound of the man’s flesh and the jab of his splintered bones that vibrated into my body, past the tires and the metal of the car.
Through my tears, I would see my segon and it would seem to multiply, as if it had called the rest of its friends from deeper in the compound to come out and watch what a brave girl I was growing into.
At home, my mother began to respond to my father’s disagreements with silence, changing from a brief electric lull of the better days to a suspended tension that tinted the rest of my childhood. I stopped listening for the fights outside their bedroom window because listening to silence was exhausting.
I began to see the ostriches everywhere in Addis, no matter what road we drove on, whether I had my eyes open or closed. That avenue cut so deep in my memory that even with a map in front of me, I would have insisted that all Addis roads were teased out of it, that it was the origin and destination of all journeys.
Years later, the memory found me in Toronto, outside the window at my Queen’s Park office, where I had a desk with a view of University Avenue that dropped away from an intersection just like the one in front of the palace.
With age, I accepted that what my younger self had kept seeing had been that man’s ghost. He faded into the background of my life until my parents died. Then I began thinking of him again. He seemed to be the only other being whose loneliness matched mine. I wondered if he was still there, watched over by the ostriches, unclaimed and alone like me. I hoped for it. If he wasn’t, I was truly alone.
“Why have you been brooding out of that window lately?”
The question came from Nick, my colleague with a desk across from mine, a lanky, bearded redhead with big brown eyes and an effortless smile. We’d been hired as clerks on the Justice Policy Committee at the same time — four years earlier — and had stomached the depressing job longer than all who came after us. When my parents died, only he among our colleagues didn’t wimp out with, Call me if you need anything. Instead, he got into the habit of randomly calling me up just to chat, and one day bought me a coffee mug identical to his. So it didn’t occur to me to lie to him.
“University Avenue reminds me of another avenue from my childhood,” I said.
“Where in Addis is that?”
“In front of the National Palace.”
Of course, he immediately began googling it.
“It cuts the city evenly top to bottom.”
He frowned. “Not quite.”
“What? I’ll have you know my city began on Mount Entoto. Originally, the avenue was just a dirt road for coming down from there.”
“It’s called Menelik II Avenue.”
“Okay.”
“And there are hotels and gas stations before it joins with—”
“Revolution Square.”
“Meskel Square.” He double clicked on the mouse to zoom in. “And before the square there are cafés. A post office. Banks. Even a little... bridge? And a church. St. Stephen’s. And a big fat street, Jomo Kenyatta.”
It was as if a memory wire had been tripped — the bridge over which I’d fleetingly spied slick teens bathing in a muddy, garbage-flecked stream, the church where I had prostrated myself for my sins every Good Friday — all these places sprang into my mind.
I was now looking over Nick’s shoulder at the bird’s-eye view of Addis, a city I’d mostly known from behind car windows, with its streets labeled and points of interest dotted with icons. There was a roughly rectangular green patch across from the palace, called Africa Park. Nick moved the cursor over the map, graciously not pointing out additional facts about that avenue. Not only did it not go down the dead center of Addis at all, but it was also merely an offshoot of Entoto Street, which itself began timidly somewhere near the base of Mount Entoto in the city’s northeast.
I liked that Nick hadn’t taken my word about the avenue as truth and hadn’t assumed that I would know what I was talking about simply because I was “from” there. I rewarded him with a smile and went back to my desk.
At the end of the day, he caught up with me on my way to the Queen’s Park subway station and suggested we walk to the next stop. He adjusted his long strides to match mine, stepping firmly like a man determined that his footprints would be found by archaeologists thousands of years from now.
As we came around the crescent where University Avenue began its drop, he asked, “So, you never explained why lately.”
“Why lately what?”
“Why lately you’ve been looking out the window while thinking of Menelik II Avenue when you should be transcribing witness statements.”
“I rode down that avenue every day with my parents.”
“But they died awhile ago.”
I stopped in my tracks. “According to who?”
“Sorry.”
“I guess it’s all relative,” I said wryly. I started walking again. “I saw something there once, and I wonder if it’s still there. I’ll look for it when I go back next month.” Officially, I was going back to represent the diasporic portion of the bereaved, but more than that I wanted to soothe my ache for a trip to the one place in Addis that might stir my blood.
“What did you see?”
“Okay, we’re here,” I said, and descended the stairs at the St. Patrick station. I purposely took the train in the opposite direction from the one Nick had to take.
The next time we left the office at the same time, he suggested we walk to the second subway stop beyond Queen’s Park, as if more walking was all that was needed to induce an answer out of me.
“You know, if we keep going in this direction we’ll eventually get to Ethiopia,” he joked.