Don't Cry: Stories (25 page)

It was over in less than five minutes. After the mother walked

away with the baby, Sofia went to the car to comfort Katya I was too stunned by the scene to leave it that quickly Kebede stood for a while talking with the hospital people, but I could not understand what they were saying.

When we got back to the hotel, Katya lay down in bed. It was getting dark, but I did not turn on the lights. The room was stifling, but I made no move to open the windows. Katya spoke with her back to me.

"This was a mistake,” she said. “An arrogant mistake. People told me that, and they were right. I have been lazy and selfish all my life and I think I can just come and buy a kid after living in a world that stole the ground out from under their parents and their grandparents and sucked the blood out of them and—“

I said, “Don’t start with that. You aren’t buying a kid; you’re not giving anyone money. Even as a metaphor, it doesn’t work; Ethiopia never sold slaves.”

“Don’t give me that shit. This isn’t an English class. You know there’s, truth in what I say. And anyway, I am sick of everything always being wrong. With every relationship I’ve ever had, there’s been some reason it can’t work. Even with sex half the time, there’s something in the way; somebody is scared or married, or you touched him the wrong way, or he said the wrong thing and it’s gone. Or it’s there for six weeks and then it’s gone. And now this. Maybe I deserve it.”

“Katya,” I said. “That mother wants you to have her baby. I saw it. You saw it. Wait and see what happens."

She turned to face me. Her lips and eyelids were swollen pitifully. Unable to breathe, I got up to open the windows and saw there were no screens. The air was thick with mosquitoes; it was malaria season and we had not brought any antimalarial drugs with us. I closed the window. Katya reminded me that she had packed a mosquito net, but when she got up to help me with it, we discovered that there was no way to put it up over the bed.

We lay in the darkness and heat and talked about the baby and the mother and how the mother had looked when she had seen Katya; we tried to understand what her expression had meant. Soon it was too hot to talk, too hot to think. The few mosquitoes that had gotten in when I opened the window bit us, and we itched. We sweated so, we soaked our sheets. Again and again, we got up for water. Then we got up to piss and it came out scalding. The dark and heat became a private maze we wandered, in and out of a delirium that passed as sleep. Far away, I stood in front of a classroom, talking about a girl carrying her dead baby through a dark forest. There were a dozen students in that class, but Kevin was the only one whose face I saw before me. He had been right to despise me—I who had no child lecturing on this experience, like I knew. Tours is not the worst of sorrows.

But it was. I had wanted him to hurt me and he had. Or at least I thought he had. In fact, the real shock and pain came later, along with something worse: Weeks after I went into the hotel room, Thomas was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Now he was hurt and I had done it to him. Or at least it felt as if I had.

I touched the rings on the chain around my neck; I felt Thomas there, and his presence was not reproachful. But it was painful anyway. It was painful to know that even if my mind saw him, he wasn’t there, that my mind was at odds with reality, and that my mind could do nothing to change reality. I could see him. He wasn’t there. The emptiness between the two states was pitiless.

Katya stirred and talked in her sleep. I felt protective tenderness, a feeling that could not fill the emptiness, but softened it. I thought of the little girl I had seen in the store, the touching movement she had made with her head, and a single word came to me: faith. This is not a word I use often or hear used often except lightly, ignorantly or manipulatively. But there it was, standing singly in my head. This word has meaning, I thought. Whatever it has faithlessly been made to mean, it has actual meaning. But it was very little to hold on to: the image of a graceful girl in a dirty store in a hungering, wounded country—so small, so light, so surrounded by darkness.

In the morning, I opened the windows a crack. We showered; the fixtures in the shower were heavy brass, the tiles were thick with mold, and the loofah in the soapless soap dish was worn and moldy, too. Wordless, we went down to the dining room for breakfast. I ate fruit and a little plastic container of vanilla pudding; Katya had coffee and a piece of bread. There were some Italians talking about the election a few tables over; we heard them say something about getting out of the country. Then they glanced at us and fell silent. I thought, The world is tipping over, like a table, and everything on it is falling off. It doesn’t matter if it’s round; it’s tipping and we’re falling. We took our coffee and went outside on the terrace. The air was warm, thriving and dense with the smell of earth and minerals. We sat quietly for a bit. A car drove by, blaring pop music. Two boys walked by, driving two skinny cows, lustily slapping their bony haunches with whiplike branches.

Katya said, “Being here is like being in biblical times and modern times at the same time. Like all times are happening at once, and people are just walking back and forth between them.”

Not walking, I thought, falling.

I said, “Did I ever tell you that Thomas was the first man I came with?”

“No,” said Katya. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s true. Not immediately, but yeah. First time for me.”

“The first time I came—I mean with a person, not myself—it was with a stranger,” said Katya.

“A total stranger?”

“Almost— I’d known him a day and a half. It was when I was sixteen. He was, like, twenty-five. He was probably more skilled than I was used to, or maybe he wasn’t. I’ve no idea why it happened. We were doing it and—this huge feeling came and grabbed me up. Like a wave picked me up and put me on top of a building, and before I had a chance to look and see where I was, it took me back down. He was looking at me and smiling, because I’m sure my face was saying, What did you just do> And then the next day, he was gone. If that had happened with somebody I loved, I would’ve thought I came because I was in love. Sex would’ve been all about love in my mind. But as it was, it was impossible to make that mis
^>
take. I fell in love after that, and I came with people I loved. But I didn’t think I was coming because of love.”

“It wasn’t always about love with Thomas,” I said.

She started to respond, but her cell phone rang in her lap. Irritated, she picked it up. She listened; her attention went taut like a bow. She dropped the phone and shouted, “The mother brought the baby back!” and she grabbed the phone up again. It was Kebede. The mother had slept outside the hospital all night with the baby. She wanted to put him up for adoption, and she wanted Katya to have him.

It took a few days for the mother to do the paperwork but we got Sonny right away. We went back to the store of ugly clothes and

bought a little suitcaseful. We bathed Sonny and dressed him. But he would not stop screaming. It seemed to Katya that the baby screamed most when she tried to hold him. Sofia came to help us. She brought more of the spicy pasta dish that Sonny had devoured on the day we had met him, but the baby refused it with a frown that was deep and imperial. He refused to eat at all. “Maybe he wants to go back to his mother,” Katya said. “Do you think that’s what he’s saying?” “Nonsense,” said Sofia. “Don’t even think it They were sleeping outside during malaria season. Do you know what that means? The baby is already weak; if he stayed with that woman, he would die.”

“And besides, he’s bossy like you,” I said. “Did you see the frown on him?”

And so we came before the judge. We took Sonny back to Addis Ababa. He screamed the whole flight. But Katya was unfazed; the strength of her doubt was now transformed and feeding her deter-mination. We had fully entered our endeavor, and now, exhausted but almost mechanically activated, we were carried forward on a current of will that we had initiated, but which had become a force of its own.

We met Yonas at the airport and he took us to a bed-arid-breakfast exclusively for people who were in Addis to adopt. The place was a compound with barbed wire and shards of glass atop its high walls. The massive gate was opened by a wizened man with clawlike hands and eyes like clouded marbles, a single twist of opaque expression coloring their center. The house was a weird combination of sparse and luxurious; it resembled a brick two-story you might find in Queens, but the oversized door was polished mahogany and, inside, the floors were made of large marble

tiles. The owners were a haughty upper-class Ethiopian woman and a neurasthenic Italian man who had written several unpublished children’s books; his mother, an opinionated lady with a pug dog, was also there, visiting from Rome.

Because Sonny tended to get carsick, I stayed at the B and B with him while Yonas drove Katya around the city to get letters proving who she was and who Sonny was, translations of these letters into English and/or Amharic, a birth certificate, a passport, and a visa for Sonny. Katya mounted a daily assault on the Head, from whom she needed to get a letter of approval for an orphanage to sponsor the adoption. Each of these tasks was, of course, impossible. When I tell the story to people, I make it sound as if Katya flowed through the city, coursing around the obstacles in her path with the smooth determination of water. But she was not water and she came home bruised and furious from bumping her head against every damn thing. She paced around, telling great tales of wild, shape-shifting bureaucracy, of crawling through its narrow mazes, up endless stairs and down fun-house chutes, confronting at every turn hydras made of obdurate, obfuscating, lecturing, lying, malicious, misshapen Ethiopian heads, plus some idiotic American heads thrown in. The Head was a pig and a bitch, and sometimes, so was I. When Katya came home tired out, still too sick to have an appetite, I would be desperate to leave the compound for something to eat, and she would not want to go. We quarreled about it until we were exhausted, breaking to feed, change, or walk the child, who, when he didn’t sleep through it, watched the drama with interest. Then Katya would get up the next day and leave the house to do it all again.

My time alone was a different sort of maze: dreamlike and lullingly dull, the surreal darkness of grief blended with the bright reality of caring for a frail child. Sonny was not only frail; he was

underdeveloped from his early life of illness and malnourishment. We had not seen the extent to which this was true, possibly because his spirit had stood out to us with such force. But our first day at the B and B we saw him with another child close in age, and, in comparison, his movements were weak, uncoordinated, some-low partial. He couldn’t walk more than a few steps and his gaze was intense but not quite focused, as if he was suffering from a mild psychic fever. He didn’t walk well, and at first he didn’t want to walk at all. He just wanted to be carried around the house, out into the yard and back, again and again.

The first day, I carried him until I couldn’t take any more; then I lay on the floor and rolled back and forth with him as he clung to me weakly, but with a hint of triumph in his raised head. I rocked him and crooned to him and dreamed of Thomas: of rocking him and crooning, of being rocked by him. Of straddling rtiy husband and kissing him, bending to touch my breasts against him; of straddling him and struggling to reposition him on the bed, Thomas cursing me with strange half words because he could no longer position himself.

Sonny put his hand on my face and it came away wet. I kissed his tiny palm and held it. Thomas had lost motor control and could only get into bed by taking a sitting position over it and then letting himself flop backward. I had to let him do it that way—it was important for him to do what he could. But 1 had to reposition him, because if I left him as he fell, he woke in pain. It made Thomas furious to be straddled and positioned, and it hurt me to feel that. Yet I treasured it; I treasured his anger as a vestige of his pride, treasured that it could still make me angry, make me feel once more like a normal wife with a strong husband to quarrel with. I gave Sonny my finger; he squeezed it and I rolled into a seated position, cradling him.

I wondered if the baby wanted so much to be carried because his mother, a day laborer, had carried him strapped to her body Or if it was something even more basic—that he was like a plant and I a random patch of earth from which he wanted to draw all the nurture he could get lest he be uprooted again. I looked into his eyes and remembered Thomas’s eyes: restless, strangely shapeless. At the end, he still had the childish pleasure of sweet tastes, of touching the soft fur of Zuni, the cat; to see that pleasure was a kind of sadness I had never felt before. Sonny fluttered his lids, then half-opened them—checking one more time—then slept, his dear soft fist against my chest.

Friends ask me when I suspected that something was wrong with Thomas. I don’t know how to answer; I think I knew before 1 > knew. There were indications, most of them disguised as age and its eccentricity. But at least once the disease paraded itself garishly before me, and I didn’t see it because I couldn’t categorize it. Four years before he was diagnosed, we went to Spain for three weeks. We got back home in the evening, left our bags in the front hall, and went to bed. The next morning, I found him sitting in the kitchen, visibly afraid. He had no memory of our trip, yet he realized when he saw our bags in the hall that we had been somewhere. I made breakfast; I described for him everything we had done on the trip. He said he remembered, and I made myself forget it. Because nothing quite like that happened again, I could.

After a few days, Sonny began to eat in earnest—mashed bananas, cereal, formula, pasta, all of it. He built pyramids of empty fib*
¹
containers and prescription bottles and then knocked them down. He unscrewed and screwed the top on the milk bottle over and

over. He discovered he wanted to walk and then—as if a bomb had gone off in his brain—he discovered that he might walk up and down the stairs. I passed through a sad and enchanted mirror: I walked Sonny like I had walked Thomas, his hands in mine, giving him a footstep pattern to follow, holding his eyes with encouragement. Everything depended on the slow movements of his blunt feet, of their exact position, trusting it, finding it again.