Don't Cry Page 18

  Katya was in Ethiopia to adopt a baby; I was there to help her. Katya had asked me to go with her because I am one of her oldest friends, going back to our waitressing days in Manhattan. She is a narrow little woman with a broad, bossy air: ugly-beautiful, full lower lip a bit too pendulous, hips and breasts small but highly charged, black hair big, curly, and shining with secreted oil. The restaurant wed worked in was run by Mafia thugs, and they would sometimes come in before the shift to do coke with us. The head thug really liked Katya; he would confide in her and ask her advice and she would console him and boss him around.

  In those days, I was putting myself through a writing program; she was having experiences. I got married and turned into an English professor who publishes stories in quarterly magazines. She started various businesses, which she either failed at or got bored with and sold. She had family money to begin with, and in spite of the failures along the way, she has actually amassed some money of her own. She now runs a boutique in D.C., which is where she lives. She has made some Ethiopian friends, one of whom, a woman named Meselu, runs a “big woman's” store across the street from Katya's business.

  Katya had been thinking of adoption for some time; she didn't want to go through an agency in America because it pissed her off that while agencies gave the birth mother full disclosure regarding the adoptive parent, there was no reciprocity She didn't want to go through a foreign agency because most of them required a two-year wait, and she felt that, at forty-nine, she was already too old. She had learned through someone on the Internet—a woman in California who'd already adopted an Ethiopian child—that independent adoptions there were relatively easy It helped, of course, that Meselu could hook her up with people in Addis Ababa, including a driver named Yonas, who specialized in clients there to adopt.

  When Katya asked me if I would go to Africa with her, I said yes, because Thomas had died four months earlier and I had still not gone back to teaching. In the emptiness of my life, it didn't seem to matter what I did; between doing nothing and doing something, it seemed better to do something. Thomas and I had never had children, and, maybe without thinking about it, I wanted to help my friend give a child safe passage. Katya had never been lucky with men and I knew she had always envied my marriage; perhaps I was hoping to balance my loss with something good for her. In any case, before I left I took Thomas's wedding ring from the altar I had made in our bedroom, took my own ring from my finger, and put them both on a gold chain around my neck.

  When Yonas came to pick us up at the hotel, he told us that every Saturday at this time of year, people in Addis Ababa come out to get married, and that our hotel was an especially popular spot because of the gardens. Yonas was a young man with a beautiful face and a profound feeling of age about him. When we told him how heavenly the weddings had seemed to us, he gravely bobbed his head and made the quick, sharp inhalation that we were beginning to understand meant yes. He held the door of his rattling Soviet car for us and said something I couldn't understand. We got in, sank into the broken, reeking cushions, down almost to the floor.

  We couldn't go to the orphanage on a Saturday, so Yonas took us up into the mountains, a trip I remember in the way I remember my dream that morning. I remember getting out of the car to stand at the top of a steep street, with big broken stones on each side of us, and looking down at a jumble of shanties and tiny houses careering up and down a hill. Farther out of the city we saw houses made of mud and gray thatch that appeared soft as hair from a distance; there was one house surrounded by a beautiful fence made of light, slender branches of all shapes and sizes linked in a winding, nearly musical pattern, varied by the curves of certain branches that suddenly and softly digressed before returning to the music of the pattern. Big flowers grew through the branches in random places, spilling their pink petals. There was a woman in the yard with a bright red scarf on her head. The sky was full of soft, swollen clouds.

  That night, we had dinner with Meselu's relatives. We were taken to the house by Meselu's uncle, who spoke a little English; we brought huge bundles of clothes, batteries, and toiletries that Meselu had sent. The house was behind a high stone wall with an archway bowered by thick-growing plants.

  The head of the family was a matriarch named Zeyneb, who served us a spread with dozens of little meat dishes—goat and lamb in a variety of sauces with a grain called teff Zeyneb sat at the head of the table in a crimson dress and passed the dishes in a formal manner. Most of her family was there—one of her two daughters, three of her four sons, and six grandchildren. The uncle translated as well as his skill would allow. We couldn't understand a lot of it; we heard something about the election and the government. Zeyneb said something about adoption and things being different than they had been. The grandchildren talked loudly and happily among themselves, listening sideways to the translations of our speech. Zeyneb asked how many children I had. When I said none, one of the little girls looked at me piercingly.

  That night, we went to bed early—we had to. The power was out and it got too dark to read by 8:30. We lay in the dark and talked for a long time. We talked about the jumbled streets, Zeyneb, the mountains, and the fence—which, we agreed, would cost thousands of dollars in the States. It was almost cold, and so we slept with the windows shut; the muffled street sound had a lulling effect. Katya said she was too excited to sleep, but she drifted off quickly; it was I who stirred all night, unable to sleep or to stay fully awake. The wedding music from the morning crowded my mind, the bright colors and smiles, the running girls, the laughing woman. Cars mingled with donkeys; a little boy blew a horn. Beggars came bursting out of the wedding crowd, shouting. One of them was a boy I had seen that morning, and tried not to notice, a boy with a gouged-out eye socket. We emptied our purses—I gave the gouged boy handfuls of coins—but it was not enough.

  I touched the wedding rings around my neck; Thomas appeared to me and sat on the bed. I stretched out my hand to him; the street crowd vanished. I remembered Thomas inside me. Once I'd said, “I want you inside me all the time,” and he'd replied, “I will be.” Children peered around a dark corner—first they were.

  Zeyneb's grandchildren; then they were unborn children waiting for Thomas and me to conceive them. Among them was the boy with the gouged eye, not begging, but waiting to be born. “I want you now,” I whispered. Thomas replied, “I am here,” but faintly Chanting sounded. It was haunting, stern, implacable as a machine made of powerful feelings cut away from their source. Rules, I thought. Punishment: it's coming. Chanting filled the suffocating room. “Shut up!” I hissed. “Just shut the fuck up!”

  Katya stirred and murmured, “What?”

  “This noise, what is it?”

  “Zeyneb said it's from the churches. Go back to sleep; it's going to go on all day.”

  That morning, Yonas drove us to the first orphanage on our list. It was Catholic. It was a compound made of cement, with a tin door, heavily patched with roofing tile, that, had it been open, would've been big enough to drive a car through. A girl pocked with open sores and dressed in filthy rags was huddled near it, a baby in her arms. I thought she would beg from us, but she didn't have the strength; she didn't have the strength to swat the flies from her. We tried to give her money—I bent down and put it in her face—but she didn't even look at it. She just looked at the door. We tried the door and found it locked. Katya knocked. No one came. I looked at the girl's baby; its eyelids were encrusted with parasites and swarmed by flies. Katya knocked again, louder and longer. Street traffic went back and forth. Again, I tried to give the girl money She stared at the door as if I weren't there. I tried to look into the baby's eyes, but its little face was numb with suffering; it didn't see me, either. Katya knocked again. We waited. I imagined children peering from behind the door. Still no one came. Finally, Katya turned away, her face very pale.

  When we got back into the car, we asked Yonas if there was something we could do for the girl with the baby.

  He shook his h
ead. “I don't think we can help her. Probably she's dying—she knows she's dying and she wants her baby to be taken into the orphanage when she does.”

  His tone was gentle and matter-of-fact, and there was no response to make to it.

  At the next orphanage, we knocked and the door was opened. We were escorted through a barren courtyard—we heard children singing but didn't see them—and into a large office with a cement floor. A young child dressed in shabby Western clothes passed by the open door, craning her head to look at us as she did. We waited a half hour before a young woman came to tell us that the head of the orphanage was not available. We asked when she might be available and the young woman shook her head no. Katya asked if we might meet some of the children anyway; again the young woman shook her head. “They are busy,” she said.

  No one of authority was available at the next orphanage, or the next one, or the next after that; all the children were busy. When we got back into the car, Katya said to Yonas, “Get us out of here. Please. Take us someplace out of the city Someplace where we can breathe.”

  We drove down a street of tin shanties and stalls hung with bananas and talismans that appeared to be made of hair; a dim electrical buzzing began in my ears. “He can't breathe.” Elena, Thomas's daughter, had said this just before he died. His breath had become faster and shallower. He was still alive, but decomposition had begun—I was so used to it that it didn't even seem horrible to me. I was so used to it that, even then, when I touched him, I could feel him. His warmth, his personality, everything I had thought of as his physical energy—I still felt it when I put my hands on him; it was moving in him still. Though maybe moving out of him instead of through him.

  We passed a street that looked like a dark pit letting loose its buildings and people; smiling and talking, they came out of the pit. There was garbage strewn all around. A woman in a huge hat crouched in it, selling what looked like prepared food. I thought of Thomas's old aunt Lucinda in her big hat, picking through somebody's garage sale. Lucinda had raised Thomas, because when he was seven, his mother had gotten on a bus one day and never come back. Lucinda was the only one of his family to really accept me, and she was half-senile. When Thomas showed her a picture of me days previous to her meeting me, she thought it was a picture of his mom. “Where'd you get this?” she asked.

  The car thumped as the concrete ended and the rockiness began. When Thomas and I met, Elena was already a young woman; I'd see her and her brother, Frank, on holidays, and it was mostly polite. But when Thomas got sick, she rented an apartment to be near us. She was there for her father, but her feeling for me had changed then, too; I could tell it by the way her hip would touch against me when she kissed me good night.

  The car thumped again as the rocks gave way to dirt. But Frank, the son—at the beginning he flirted with me, and by the end he was screaming at me about money. Especially he screamed about my having redone the bathroom with a luxury marble shower while his dad was sick—but that damn shower was one of the last things that Thomas had been coherent about. He'd wanted it, not me.

  The buzz in my ear grew louder. “Look!” cried Katya. We were passing monster anthills, three feet tall, shaped like weird pricks with live streams of ant semen pouring out. The buzzing sound subsided, as if my ear had suddenly realized it was just the sound of my own body and I did not have to pay attention to it after all. Suddenly, there was a smiling lion carved on a stony hill, climbing a three-stepped stair, at the top of which a carved Coca-Cola bottle announced a refreshment stand. We parked and Yonas hired two teenagers to take us up into the mountains for three U.S. dollars.

  We walked for about two hours. The landscape was more densely beautiful, wilder and less populated than the place wed gone the day of our arrival. The sky was a soft rolling gray, deep and full of round shapes amid stretches of radiant blankness. Beneath us was a valley in which grew dark clumps of bushes and trees, pale grasses, and deep patches of turned earth. We passed farmers plowing the earth with wooden plows drawn by oxen, turning up earth and chunks of stone so crystalline, they gave light back to the sun. I wished that Thomas were there to see it.

  And then he was there, in the sky; I felt him there. I was flooded with memories of our first meeting: I was twenty-four and he was fifty-two. People say that young women are attracted to older men because of social power. But my response was like strong weather—not chosen, not social. I was a graduate student and he was a visiting writer, and a party was held for him in the house of some faculty eminence. It was dull, and I went out into the yard to play with somebody's dog, a chocolate-spotted terrier with a chewed-up ball that I threw until it landed in a pond with a skin of chartreuse scum. The dog and I were looking through the weeds at the water's edge when the guest of honor appeared with a drink in his hand. “Did you lose something?” he asked. He wore an elegant suit and expensive shoes. He was ripe, confident, bursting with sex. “The dog's ball,” I said. “It went in the water, I think.” And, still holding the drink, he walked into the water in his suit and his expensive shoes and got it for me.

  I shifted my eyes. White seeped through the soft gray of the sky; the earth hummed through the waving hairs of its pale grasses, its bright leaves, the pores of its dark flesh. My body remembered the flesh of my husband's arms, the warm intelligence of his chest, his willful, goatish belly As my memory embraced him, his body changed: I felt his muscles grow soft, his will diffuse and fade, his chest become sad hairy boobs.

  One of the boys turned to us and said something. I dried my eyes. Yonas said, “Okay, we're here.”

  He had brought us to a church built into the earth. The church was in a ravine; looking at it was like looking down into a ruined palace without a roof, a system of courtyards, chambers, and antechambers that, instead of being built into the air, had been carved into the earth. There were footholds going toward it that had probably once been steps, but they were eroded and overgrown now. Still, we made our way down slowly, crouching and clutching at bushes and vines that felt alive enough to close over our heads and swallow us, not like an animal, but an element. We reached the bottom and looked up at the lip of the gully and the sky, and it looked to me like something temporal and far away from this place that had the power to swallow us and not give us back.

  Inside, the church seemed to have originally been carved so that it would appear nearly natural, an expression of the earth's mind. In its decay it was covered with lichen, deep-colored moss, and small trees; it smelled like rock and hummus. There were remnants of stone arches in the roof, thickly overgrown with clinging vines. Niches were carved into the walls, and in the niches were stone figures with the faces worn away. There were stone benches, too, like pews. Farther inside, there was another short descent into a grotto, a chapel with a stream of water running through it like a vein of shining blood. The steps descending into the chapel were intact and so the descent was not that difficult. We reached the bottom and stood there, wordlessly absorbing a feeling of power opposite to the sky, embodied by earth but bigger than earth. Again came the fear of being swallowed, but also a desire to be swallowed, as if by a seducing lover. I clasped my hands and bent my head as if to pray. Instead of prayer, a memory came to me, half-blotted in darkness; a memory of my cheek on the floor, my spread knees on the floor, eyes closed, naked.

  I loosed my hands and looked up. The darkened memory passed, or became a memory of something else, someone else— someone I had not thought of for years, someone I had not really thought of at all. She was Thomas's first wife, the mother of Frank and Elena; he had left her to be with me. I never met her, but I saw her once, when Thomas and I were walking down the street in Manhattan. He'D taken my arm abruptly and muttered her name under his breath. I looked and saw a small middle-aged woman in glasses looking fixedly ahead as she passed. I had turned away embarrassed. But now I saw her vividly. I saw her and felt her loneliness. On the street, she had looked about fifty—the same age I am now.

  The power was on that
night, and we were more comfortable. Still, I couldn't sleep for a long time. Again, Thomas came to sit on my bed. But this time his presence did not comfort me. I thought of the girl outside the orphanage, dying publicly while my friend and I stood over her, knocking on the door. Katya might go back to America with a healthy baby I would go back home and lecture writing students on the importance of specificity and the role of description. “I want you to describe it in the way only you could see it,” I would say, “you specifically.” In the dark, I hit myself with my fist—how stupid I had been. Did it matter who this girl was specifically, even to her? Her baby was sick and she was dying. Nothing more specific than that mattered, and life had made that plain to her. It was I who had been fooled.

  For two days, wherever we went, no one was available to speak with us. Finally, we went back to the first place we had tried. This time, the dying girl was not there—though I thought I could make out a shadow, perhaps an indentation or soft mark where she had lain. We were about to turn and go, when the door was opened.