The smell of fermenting honey elicited a Pavlovian response from my taste buds. A dour Somali met us at the door and led us to a dining room six steps down from the front landing. We found a half-dozen men eating at the picnic tables and benches, with room for a dozen more. The wooden floor was strewn with freshly cut grass, just as it would have been if this were a home or restaurant in Addis.
We washed our hands and took our seats, and at once a buxom woman arrived, bowing, wishing us good health, and placing water and two small flasks of golden yellow tej before us. The cornea of her left eye was milky white. Mesfin said her name was Tayitu. Behind her, a younger woman brought a tray of injera, on which were generous servings of lamb, lentils, and chicken.
“You see?” Mesfin said, looking at his watch. “I can eat here quicker than I can pump gas in my car. It's cheaper, too.” I ate as if I had lived through a famine. The waitress in New York who first told me about the Queen of Sheba's had been right. This was the real thing.
Later, through a side window that looked out onto a sloping yard, I saw a white Corvette slide up. A shapely leg in heels emerged, the skin a café au lait color, with a shade of nail polish that B. C. Gandhi called “fuck-me red.” A baby goat appeared from nowhere and danced around those elegant feet.
Soon a lovely Ethiopian lady came cautiously down the stairs, careful not to snag her heels. She said over her shoulder to the Somali, “Why is that silly boy letting the baby goat out at this hour? One of these days I'll run over it.” Her golden-brown hair had red streaks, and it was cut in a perky, asymmetrical style that revealed her neck. She wore a maroon pinstriped blazer over a white blouse and skirt.
The Queen, for there was little doubt that this was she, bowed in our direction while continuing on to an office next to the kitchen. She stopped abruptly. She turned as if she had seen a vision and she stared. I was in my suit, my tie loosened—did I look that out of place? Within the confines of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, all the tribes of Abraham were represented and I felt no more foreign than my patients or the staff. Now, as I attracted her attention, and that of the others there, I felt like a ferengi again.
“Praise God, praise His Son,” the Queen said, her hands on her cheeks. She shifted her tinted glasses to her forehead, revealing eyes that were wide open in astonishment. I looked behind me; could she be talking to someone else? Her expression, at first quizzical, now turned joyous, showing brilliant white and perfect teeth. “Child, do you not know me?” she said, coming close, her rose-scented attar preceding her.
I came to my feet, still puzzled.
“I pray for you every day,” she said in Amharic. “Don't tell me that I have changed that much?”
I towered over her. I was tongue-tied. She had been a mother and I a boy when I first met her.
“Tsige?” I said at last.
She lunged toward me, kissed my cheeks, held me at arm's length to better examine me, then pulled me to her to bump cheeks again and again. “My God, Blessed Mary and all the saints, how are you? Is it you? Endemenneh? Dehna ne woy? How are you? Can this be you? Praise God that you are here …”
After six years in America, it was only at that moment, standing in that yellow house, in her arms, cut grass under my feet, that I felt at ease in this land, felt my guard come down and the muscles in my belly and neck relax. Here was someone from my past, from my very street, someone whom I liked and with whom I had always felt a bond. I kissed her cheeks as vigorously as she kissed mine: Who would stop first? Not I.
Tayitu peered in from the kitchen. Two other women looked over the upstairs rail. Our fellow diners stopped to watch. They were displaced people, just like us, and they understood all too well these kinds of reunions, these moments when a piece of your old house comes floating by in the river.
“What are you doing here?” Tsige said. “You mean you didn't come to see me?”
“I came to eat. I had no idea! I've been living in New York for six years. I'm here just for the day. I'm a doctor now. A surgeon.”
“A surgeon!” She gasped, falling back, clasping her hands to her heart. Then she kissed the back of my wrists, first one, then the other. “A surgeon. You brave, brave child.” She turned to our audience and in the tones of a cantor she continued, still in Amharic, “Listen, all you unbelievers, when he was a little boy, and when my baby was dying, who took me to the right place in the hospital? It was he. Who called the doctor, who was his father, to see my child? He did. Then who was it who stayed with me as my baby fought for life? No one but him. He was the only one by my side when my little baby died. No one else was there for me, if only you knew …” The tears streamed down her face, and in an instant the mood in the room went from the joy of reunion to profound sadness, as if those two emotions were invariably linked. I heard sympathetic clucks and tsks from the men, and Tayitu blew her nose and dabbed at her good eye, while the other two women wept freely. Tsige was unable to speak, head bowed—she was overcome for a moment. At last she straightened her shoulders, raised her head, the lips parted to smile bravely, and she declared, “I never ever forgot his kindness. Even today, when I go to sleep, I pray for my baby's soul, then I pray for this boy. I lived across the street. I watched him grow up, become a man, go to medical school. Now he is a surgeon. Tayitu, give everyone their money back, for today is a feast day. Our brother has come home. Tell me, ye of little faith, does any one of you need some other proof that there is a God?” Her eyes glittered like diamonds; her hands, palms up, reached for the ceiling.
For the next few minutes I solemnly shook the hand of every person in the house.
LATER I SAT WITH TSIGE on a sofa in a living room upstairs. She had kicked off her heels and tucked her feet up under her. Still holding my hand, she touched my cheek often to exclaim how happy she was to see me.
I had plans to return to New York that afternoon, but Tsige insisted on sending Mesfin away. “You can take a later flight,” she said.
“Are you sure I can find a taxi here?” I said, pretending to be serious.
After a beat, she threw her head back and laughed. “See, you have changed! You used to be so shy.”
Through the window I saw six or seven baby goats in a large wire enclosure. Behind that was a chicken coop. A dreamy-looking boy with a long narrow head sat stroking one of the goats. “He's my cousin,” Tsige said. “You can see the forceps marks on his forehead. He has some problems. But he loves to take care of the animals. You should come here when we celebrate Meskel on Meskerem Day. We slaughter the goats and cook outdoors. You will see not just taxis, but police cars. They come from the Roxbury and South End stations to eat.”
Tsige said she left Addis a few months after me. A patron of the bar, a corporal in the army, had wanted to marry her. “He was nobody. But in the revolution, even the privates became powerful.” When she declined his advances, she was falsely accused of imperialist activities and imprisoned. “I bought my way out after two weeks. In the time I was in Kerchele, they confiscated my house. He came to see me, pretending he had nothing to do with my arrest. If I married him, he said, everything would come back to us. The country was being run by dogs like him. I had money hidden away. I never looked back. I left.
“In Khartoum, I waited a month for asylum from the American Embassy. I worked as a servant for the Hankins, a British family. They were nice. I learned English by taking care of their children. That was the only good thing that came out of Khartoum. I don't mind the cold in Boston because every cold day reminds me how good it is to be out of Khartoum.