A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times: Stories
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Synopsis
Release date: June 28, 2022
Publisher: Restless Books
Print pages: 220
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A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times: Stories
Meron Hadero
On Saba’s last day in Addis Ababa, she had just one unchecked to-do left on her long and varied list, which was to explore the neighborhood on her own, even though she’d promised her relatives that she would always take someone with her when she left the house. But she was twenty, a grown-up, and wanted to know that on her first-ever trip to this city of her birth, she’d gained at least some degree of independence and assimilation. So it happened that Saba had no one to turn to when she got to the intersection around Meskel Square and realized she had seen only one functioning traffic light in all of Addis Ababa, population four million by official counts, though no one here seemed to trust official counts, and everyone assumed it was much more crowded, certainly too crowded for just one traffic light. That single, solitary, lonely little traffic light in this mushrooming metropolis was near the old National Theater, not too far from the UN offices, the presidential palace, the former African Union—a known, respected part of the city located an unfortunate mile (a disobliging 1.6 kilometers) away from where Saba stood before a sea of cars contemplating a difficult crossing.
Small nimble vehicles, Fiats and VW Bugs, skimmed the periphery of the traffic, then seemed to be flung off centrifugally, almost gleefully, in some random direction. The center was a tangled cluster of cars slowly crawling along paths that might take an automobile backward, forward, sideward. In the middle of this jam was a sometimes visible traffic cop whose tense job seemed to be avoiding getting hit while keeping one hand slightly in the air. He was battered by curses, car horns, diesel exhaust, as he nervously shielded his body and tried to avoid these assaults. Saba quickly saw she couldn’t rely on him to help her get across. She dipped her foot from the curb onto the street, and a car raced by, so she retreated. A man walked up next to her and said in English, “True story, I know a guy who crossed the street halfway and gave up.”
Saba looked at the stranger. “Pardon, what was that?”
“He had been abroad for many years and came back expecting too much,” the man said, now speaking as slowly as Saba. “That sad man lives on the median at the ring road. I bring him books sometimes,” he said slyly, taking one out of his messenger bag and holding it up. “A little local wisdom. Don’t start what you can’t finish.” Saba watched the stranger dangle his toes off the curb, lean forward, backward, forward and back and then, as if becoming one with the flow of the city, lunge into the traffic and disappear from her sight until he reemerged on the opposite sidewalk. “Miraculous,” Saba said to herself as he turned, pointed at her, then held up the book again. Saba tried to follow his lead and set her body to the rhythm of the cars, swaying forward and back, but couldn’t find the beat.
As she was running through her options, a line of idling taxis became suddenly visible when a city bus turned the corner. She realized that as impractical as it seemed, she could hail a cab to get her across the busy street. The trip took ten minutes; the fare cost fifteen USD, for she was unable to negotiate a better rate, though at least she’d found a way to the other side. She turned back to see the taxi driver leaning out the window talking to a few people, gesturing at her, laughing, and she knew just how badly she’d fumbled yet another attempt to fit in. All month Saba had failed almost every test she’d faced, and though she’d seized one last chance to see if this trip had changed her, had taught her at least a little of how to live in this culture, she’d only ended up proving her relatives right: she wasn’t even equipped to go for a walk on her own. What she thought would be a romantic, monumental reunion with her home country had turned out to be a fiasco; she didn’t belong here.
She was late getting back to her uncle Fassil’s house, where family and friends of family were waiting for her to say goodbye, to chat and eat and see her one last time, departures being even more momentous than arrivals. Twelve chairs had been moved into the cramped living room. Along with the three couches, they transformed the space into a theater packed with guests, each of whom sat with his or her elbows pulled in toward the torso to make space for all. They came, they said, to offer help, but she sensed it was the kind of help that gave—and took.
It was time to go, and she was relieved when Fassil said—in English for her benefit—“We are running out of time, so we have already started to fill this one for you.” He pointed past the suitcase that Saba packed before her walk and gestured to a second, stuffed with items and emitting the faint scent of a kitchen after mealtime. At her mother’s insistence, Saba had brought one suitcase for her own clothes and personal items and a second that, for the trip there, was full of gifts from America—new and used clothes, old books, magazines, medicine—to give to family she had never met. For her return, it would be full of gifts to bring to America from those same relatives and family friends.
Saba knew this suitcase wasn’t just a suitcase. She’d heard there was no DHL here, no UPS. Someone thought there was FedEx, but that was just for extremely wealthy businessmen. People didn’t trust the government post. So Saba’s suitcase offered coveted real estate on a vessel traveling between here and there. Everyone wanted a piece; everyone fought to stake a claim to their own space. If they couldn’t secure a little spot in some luggage belonging to a traveling friend, they’d send nothing at all. The only reasonable alternative would be to have the items sent as freight on a cargo ship, and how reasonable was that? The shipping container would sail from Djibouti on the Red Sea (and with all the talk of Somali pirates, this seemed almost as risky as hurling a box into the ocean and waiting for the fickle tides). After the Red Sea, a cargo ship that made it through the Gulf of Aden would go south on the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, to the Pacific, up the American coast to Seattle. An empty suitcase opened up a rare direct link between two worlds, so Saba understood why relatives and friends wanted to fill her bag with carefully wrapped food things, gifts, sundry items, making space, taking space, moving and shifting the bulging contents of the bag.
Fassil placed a scale in front of Saba and set to zeroing it. She leaned over the scale as he nudged the dial to the right. The red needle moved ever so slightly, so incredibly slightly that Saba doubted it worked at all, but then Fassil’s hand slipped, the needle flew too far, to the other side of zero. He pushed the dial just a hair to the left now, and the red needle swung back by a full millimeter. He nudged the dial again; now it stuck.
“Fassil, Saba has to go,” Lula said, shaking her hands like she was flicking them dry. “Let’s get going. Her flight leaves in three hours, and with the traffic from all the construction around Meskel Square and Bole Road.…”
Saba leaned toward that wobbly needle as Fassil used his fingernail to gently coax the dial a breath closer. A tap, nearly there. A gentle pull.
“Looks good, Fassil,” Saba said kindly but impatiently.
“It has to be precise,” Fassil replied, then turned to the gathered crowd. “Look what you’re making the poor girl carry.” He pointed to that second suitcase.
Saba tried to lift it, but it was as heavy as an ox. Fassil rushed over and helped her pick it up, and when he felt its weight, he said, “There’s no way they’ll let her take this.” The room hummed with disapproval, punctuated with tsks and clicked tongues. “I can just pay the fee,” Saba quickly said, but Lula stood again, put up her hands and boomed, “You will not pay a fee. It’s too much money. You are our guest, and our guest will pay no fee!”
“It’s okay,” Saba said. “If we must, we must.” But now the resistance came from everyone. Saba looked helplessly at Fassil. “Let me pay. I have to go. What else can I do?” she asked. She looked at the others and wondered if this was one of those times when a “no” was supposed to be followed by a “Please, yes!” “No, no.” “Really, I insist.” “No, we couldn’t,” “Really, yes you must.” “Okay.” “Okay.” Was it that kind of conversation? That call and response? Or was it the other kind, the “No, no!” “Really, I insist!” “No, we just couldn’t.” “Okay, no then.”
“Of course you can’t pay. They will never let you,” Fassil said, ending Saba’s deliberation. He announced, “I’ll weigh the suitcase,” and there was a general sigh of approval. “But,” Fassil continued, “if it’s overweight, which it is, we are going to have to make some tough choices.” He turned to Saba. “You are going to have to make some tough choices.” She nodded and hoped silently that it would come in at weight, please. If she could be granted one earthly wish in this moment, that was what she would wish for. She watched Fassil heave the suitcase onto the scale and winced as the needle that hovered, almost vibrated, above zero shot to the right. Thirty kilos—ten kilos too heavy.
The crowd began to murmur anxiously, and a few shouted out sounds of frustration. Then one by one, the guests began to speak in turn, as if pleading their cases before a judge. Konjit was the first up. She was old, at least eighty, a verified elder who settled disputes and brokered weddings and divorces, part of that council of respected persons that otherwise held a neighborhood together. As Konjit walked toward Saba, Saba bowed a little.
“Norr,” Saba said, a sign of respect.
“Bugzer,” Konjit replied, acknowledging that the order of things hadn’t been completely turned on its head. Konjit lifted the edge of her shawl, flung it around her shoulder and walked slowly right up to the suitcase and unzipped it. She took out a package of chickpeas and tossed them on the ground, and though someone grumbled at this, Konjit just smoothed her pressed hair behind her ears as if she were calming herself before an important announcement, an orator about to make a speech, an actress set to perform. Konjit held a hand up and waited for total silence. Then she turned to Saba, put her hands on both her hips, which swayed as she stepped closer, and said in a low voice that filled the small space, “Please, Sabayaye, I haven’t seen my grandchildren since they were two years old. How old are you?”
“Twenty,” Saba said apologetically.
“Twenty? Ah, in all the time you’ve been alive in this world I have not seen them. Imagine! I’m old now. Who can even say how old I am? I’m too old to count and getting older. I want to send this bread so they know people here love them.”
Most of the others in the room nodded in agreement, but not Rahel. Rahel shook her head as she stood from the couch and walked right up to Konjit, putting a hand on Konjit’s arm. “Who can say how old you are, Konjit? Me, I can say how old you are. Not the number of years, of course, but I can say for sure that I am older than you. One month, remember.”
Rahel brought up that one-month position of seniority often, and Saba had come to expect it. Within just her first week there, Saba learned that Rahel and Konjit had grown up and grown old fighting often about things like which church had the most blessed holy water, Ledeta (Rahel) or Giorgis (Konjit), or whether it was better to use white teff flour (Konjit) or brown teff flour (Rahel), or where you could get the best deals on textiles, Mercato (Konjit) or Sheromeda (Rahel). Without fail, each argument ended with Rahel staking out a win by virtue of being slightly elder.
Rahel bent down and removed one of the three loaves of bread from the suitcase and tried to hand it back to Konjit, who refused to take it. Saba, wanting to hurry things along, reached out for the loaf, but Rahel placed the bread on the floor by her feet. “You can bake a loaf, Konjit, I give you that, but it takes you three hours to make that bread? Eh? I spent two days—two days—making this beautiful doro wat for my nephew. The power kept switching off. I had to go to Bole to freeze it in Sintayu’s freezer, and she has all those kids and all those in-laws and hardly any space in her house, let alone her freezer, but still, that’s what it took to make this beautiful wat. Then, I had to wrap the container so tight that, should any melt in transit, it will stay safe and secure—and with these old, old, old fingers,” she said, putting up her index, middle and ring finger. “Can you believe it? These old, old fingers,” she said, now raising her pinky and thumb. “These fingers a month older than yours, Konjit.” She pulled Saba over and put her fanned fingers on Saba’s left shoulder, leaning on her. “Just take this beautiful wat for me. It will be no problem, right?”
Before Saba could say that this seemed reasonable, Wurro walked up to Saba, and Saba shifted her attention again. “I may not be the oldest, and my hands don’t ache like Rahel’s, but please, think about this objectively, Saba,” said Wurro, whose utilitarian views led her to make obviously questionable decisions like employing fifteen workers in her small grocery so that fifteen more paychecks went out each month and fifteen more families would be happy, even if it put her one family on the verge of ruin. Wurro never argued her utilitarian views as forcefully, though, as when they matched her own purposes. She cleared her throat, and Saba waited for what she feared would be another well-argued plea. Wurro began, “If you don’t send this bread, Konjit, your family will still eat bread. If you don’t send this wat, Rahel, your family will still eat wat.” Wurro took Saba’s hand, and said, “My niece had a difficult pregnancy. You have to take this gunfo because if you don’t take it, well, there is no way to get gunfo in America, and who has ever heard of a woman not eating gunfo after labor? If you don’t bring it, she won’t have it. Milk for the baby, gunfo for the mother. It’s natural logic. You can’t deny it.”
“But American women don’t eat gunfo. Do they eat gunfo, Saba?” asked Lula.
“She’s never been pregnant in America, right? How would she know?” asked Wurro.
“She’s never been pregnant here. Does she even know gunfo?” Konjit asked.
Saba said, “I know gunfo,” and was met with whispered words of approval, so she refrained from adding how hard she had to swallow to get a spoonful down of the thick paste made from corn, ...
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