Somewhere in the Unknown World Read online

  When my immediate sadness passed, I noticed the flood of “sorry” on my grandmom’s face. In the light of the day, her face sagged. Her mouth was open but there were no words. Her eyes, half covered by wrinkles, shone with her tears. It was I who reached for her then and said, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. You’re my mom. Don’t cry.”

  The conversation that day did not change my life in any remarkable way and yet it was and it remains the point at which I knew I was not like my best friend or the other children in our farming village. The knowledge set me apart and cemented a new and lonely perspective I would have of life and death.

  My father, when he returned later that day, brought candy for me as I knew he would. When he handed it to me and hugged me, I buried my face in his neck and I held on to him tighter than I ever had before. His arms held me close.

  He said, “What’s going on, Michael? What’s going on?”

  I shook my head, refusing to say anything.

  It was my grandmom who informed my father of our conversation earlier in the day over dinner as we gathered around the big plate at the center of the table to eat the zigni and injera bread. My granddad sat with his head bowed in a soft silence as my grandmom talked. In the evening light, they looked old and weary and defeated.

  Berhane, my older brother, looked from my grandmom’s face to our father’s expectantly but our father showed no reactions. Once grandmom was done sharing the story, my father reached a cool hand to hold the back of my neck and said, “It is okay, Michael. I am as I have ever been. I am both your father and your brother. I will always be this way—just as your mom will always be your mom even though she could not raise you, and your grandmom will continue to be your mom because she has raised you.”

  My older brother, Berhane, nodded as if he had known the truth all along. His thin face and big eyes with long lashes made him look like a camel. He sat up straighter and made himself older than me by saying, “Yes, Michael. Everything will be all right.”

  Later, in our shared bed, I asked Berhane if he had known all along. He gave me a mysterious answer: “I kind of knew everything and I kind of don’t all at the same time. Don’t be sad, Michael. We love you and God loves you and we will all take care of you until you can take care of yourself. Then maybe you’ll even take care of all of us.”

  Whether Berhane knew it or not, his words that night would become a charge I’d strive my whole life to live by: to live with the love of those around me and that of God, and to do my very best to take care of the people around me as I had been cared for. In some other world, without the kind of love that my grandmom and my granddad and my father and my brother and what my stepmother would eventually show me, I would have died along with my mother many years ago. But I was very much alive with my gratitude and great loneliness.

  * * *

  I turned eighteen years old in that farming village beneath that fierce sun. Grandmom and Granddad were getting older. We needed money. It was not asked of me but I offered to move to Asmara to become an ambulance driver so I could send money home and help support my primary caretakers in their old age. By then, my father had remarried and had seven more children so I knew whatever money he earned had to stretch far.

  My grandmom was worried because she had a feeling that hard times were coming for Eritrea, but I had been a farm boy, removed from the political happenings of the big city. I was eager to be part of a bustling city, doing good work to help people who I believed would share the same fate as me: survive despite the circumstances around them. I told Grandmom not to worry.

  In the country, I had not paid particular attention to the mood of unrest in the realms of government. From school, I had learned both Amharic and British English, so I felt an assurance that I could communicate across different groups. If I couldn’t, there was still the simple fact that I was a harmless person, a man out to earn some money to take care of my elderly grandparents only. I was young and strong and willing to work hard, so I was more concerned about our poverty than politics.

  In my ambulance, I drove around Asmara admiring all the buildings outside the car windows. In 1890, Eritrea had been colonized by the Italians, so the architecture of the city of Asmara had been developed in accordance with their tastes and technological capacity. During Italy’s effort to take over Africa in the 1930s, the very best Italian architects had worked hard to re-create southern Italy in Africa. The streets were lined with storefront cafés and wide sidewalks; the buildings were covered with tiled roofs beneath the towering palm trees. The city was filled with cathedrals and mosques. Each piece of architecture was a reminder of how far I was from the farm.

  * * *

  I fell in love in Asmara. At twenty-three, I met a young woman named Lete. She was nineteen years old. She, like me, came from a humble background. She was in the city working hard to support her mother just as I was working to support my grandparents. Neither of us had much money but we were both hardworking and we were both tall and slender, so we believed we were each other’s best chances for a beautiful life. Beneath a windswept sky of blue, Lete and I made a decision to be together forever, to get married and have a family, to make the best life we knew how for each other. Love, when a person’s options are limited by finances, can be very straightforward and honest.

  * * *

  A year after our marriage, in 1974, the hard times that my grandmom had feared found us in beautiful Asmara. In my family, personal tragedy struck. My granddad died. He was only sixty-eight years old. In my country, the quest for Eritrea’s independence had turned bloody. In the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations had declared Eritrea as part of Ethiopia, but we did not feel we were one people. We Eritreans wanted our independence and the Ethiopians wanted to continue their hold over our country. In the big capital city, only one massacre is on the books but there were more than that. Beyond the massacre of December 28, 1974, there were others.

  Before the massacres, we were both consumed with the fact that Lete was pregnant. Her belly grew round and her face soft. We had visited my grandmom to warm her heart and her hearth for the Christmas holiday. We were full of thoughts of Mary, Baby Jesus, and the blessings of Christ.

  * * *

  On the morning of December 28, 1974, I was in my ambulance, making my slow way toward the hospital to report for the day’s work. I loved my morning drives in Asmara, the buildings around me peaceful and sleepy in the rose-gray dawn. I turned my ambulance around the street corner, expecting nothing out of the ordinary, just the routines of early morning: students walking in groups, café owners sweeping their front walks, the merchants transporting their goods.

  As I turned the corner, I saw something I had never seen before outside the hospital walls and in the churches: I saw dead bodies.

  The photograph in my head is black and white. It is of twenty-seven students, men and women, strangled to death with piano strings. There were some with faces, gray as the pavement they rested on. Others with heads hanging by a thread of skin. The bodies were littered about the alleys and the doorways in a mess.

  My eyes were drawn to the faces. I stopped the ambulance, knowing it was all too late for me to do anything.

  From the ambulance, I studied first one face than the next. I was sure I had seen them alive at different intersections, walking, laughing, and talking around the city, boys and girls in well-ironed school clothes. Now those very same clothes lay wrinkled and wet against their limp bodies. Their feet, which had been going places, were stiff and still, pointed in different directions.

  I said to myself, again and again in the car, “Michael, your job is to attend to the living.”

  I put a hand to my heart and said, “Michael, your job is to witness their deaths.”

  Small groups of silent people gathered around the bodies.

  The whole of the city had grown abnormally quiet. We had all become mutes. Even the cars around me had stopped making their noises. The birds? Where were they? The children? Were they not
hungry or upset? Everything had stopped for those young people.

  I told myself, “Drive, Michael. Drive to the hospital. They might need you there.”

  My lap was wet with fallen tears when the driving was done, and at last I was in front of the hospital. My eyes were open but the camera inside my heart was stuck on the images of the students.

  * * *

  On another day, off the record, I drove through another street lined with pillars of bodies. They had been killed by wires around their necks. There were men, women, and children. Their eyes were half closed and half open, bulging.

  Fear was precisely the reaction that the Ethiopian government wanted.

  On yet another day, at the hospital, a general barged in through the doors. He wore army fatigues. He had on boots. A hat. A gun. He towered over the head doctor, a thin guy with thick glasses who shook out his words one at a time, like a sputtering engine, “I will, I will, I will not document your seventy-six dead bodies on the streets in my hospital records. My job here is to document the deaths within my hospital. It is the job of the government to record the deaths of those they kill. I am not going to write anything down for you. It is against international law.”

  The general stormed out as he had barged in. He’d brought cold air into the hot room. We felt the chill of his visit only upon his exit.

  For four years, we lived this way. All the while, the camera inside filling up with images that could never be erased.

  * * *

  By 1978, Lete and I had two young daughters. They both had my eyes. When my daughters looked up at me, I saw pools of warm caramel spilling sunlight. We named the oldest Hadas and the younger one Mahta.

  I’d never seen a photograph of my mother. None existed. But the moment my grandmom and my father saw Hadas, they both said, “That is your mother’s face and your mother’s eyes looking at you, Michael.”

  I had not known that I had been looking at the world with my mother’s eyes. I gazed at myself in the mirrors and my daughters before me and pieces of my mother slowly appeared in my life. The loss that I had believed was absolute became something else, something more mystical and magical.

  Mahta, unlike Hadas, had her mother’s calm about her, a softer, rounder face and serious eyes, perpetually thinking. In this way, she offered me a glimpse into others I had not known, considerations that were new to me.

  Lete and I loved each other, but our children were our most sacred gifts and responsibilities. From the moment I became a father, it was as if my heart had turned into liquid inside of me. I felt love in my arms and my legs, my fingers and my toes. Everything I did, I did more gently than before, from the way I handled the patients, alive and dead, to the way I drove a car, made a turn, stopped, or started the ignition of the ambulance.

  In every conversation I had with my grandmom after the girls were born, she said, “Michael, you have to take your beautiful children and leave. You have to go somewhere where they can grow up and know peace in their hearts, smell the clean air and lift their faces to the bright sun.”

  The place she wanted for my children was the world of my youth. We could not return to the past, so I looked for possibilities in the future. I knew people were fleeing to Sudan, but I knew my grandmom would never leave Eritrea. I could not choose between the mother she had been to me and the father I would be to my daughters.

  One evening, when we returned home for a visit to the farm, after dinner as our family sat talking in the gray evening light, listening to the wind blowing through the fields, far away from the chaos that had become life in Asmara, I tried to talk to my grandmom about leaving.

  I said, “Mom, if I leave Eritrea, will you leave with me?”

  She said, “Michael, I want to go back to my home village when I was a child far from here.”

  She said, “Michael, I see so much in my mind for you and your family but I don’t see myself with you all in this happy future.”

  She said, “Michael, if you stay here, you will die for me. Do you understand that if you go, then you will get to live for me?”

  My grandmom had a different kind of camera clicking away inside of her. It was a world in which my daughters would live free and happy.

  On my last day in Eritrea, I packed clothing and food and I sent my grandmom to the village where she had been a girl. There, we had an uncle who I knew would take good care of her. At the uncle’s house, my grandmom took a seat by his fire. Her face was illuminated by its flames.

  She said, “Michael, be careful.”

  My grandmom reached for me with both hands. She kissed my face, on either side. Then, she hugged me—much as she had done when I was a child.

  In parting, she said, “Don’t cry, Michael. Don’t cry. Even when I die, you just pray for me and that is enough. Your work taking care of me is done. Now, your work is to take care of your children. God will always be with you, my son.”

  * * *

  On my last day in Eritrea, I saw no deaths but I knew that the only mother figure of my life would die without me there to comfort or care for her, this grandmom of mine who had mothered me with love and patience. By the time I returned to my family, thick clouds had fallen low in the sky. Although it was early in the evening, the world outside was dark. Lete had packed the children already. She placed Hadas on my back and I placed Mahta on hers. We secured the children to us with fabric. Then, we ran in the heavy downpour toward the forest.

  Our goal was to get to Sudan. Once we were in the thick of the forest, the rains ended, washing away whatever footsteps we might have left. We settled in a small clearing. I knew the journey would take three days.

  In my arms, Hadas was restless.

  She said, “Daddy, I want to go home to my bed.”

  I offered her a blanket.

  She said, “Daddy, I don’t want to sleep in the dark.”

  I made a fire.

  Mahta cried. Lete gathered her close and breastfed her in the light of the fire I had made.

  That night, Lete and I dared not talk. We searched the heavens for the things we wanted to say. We found the dark clouds parting and the stars shining down.

  In the morning, we made it to a desert town. I negotiated for some camels to take us northwest toward Sudan. We met other refugees making the two-day trek from the villages of the highland through the deserts. We were kind to each other, recognizing that we shared the same plight, all hopeful that Sudan would welcome us as refugees.

  * * *

  In Sudan, we made friends with a family of Eritreans who’d left earlier in the conflict. They gave us food and shelter in a town close to Wad Sharife Refugee Camp. I did not want to move my family into the crowded camp but I knew I wanted to work in it.

  With my experience as an ambulance driver and ability to communicate in English and Amharic, I got work with the American Red Cross. My job was to drive the doctors from town into the refugee camp, to drive around sick patients, and to drive the medical supply trucks when necessary.

  Every day more refugees streamed in with their hurts. The doctors did what they could to treat what they saw, but the wounds they couldn’t see went untended. While there were no physical war wounds on me and I was not sick in body, my heart ached and the camera inside of me kept playing the reels of the people dying on the streets of Asmara again and again. There was no relief to be found inside of me, so I pushed all I had into the work outside of me.

  Lete and I were able to find a little house for our family. We did not have electricity or running water but we made do with what I earned, feeding our children and keeping them in school. We lived in Sudan for nine years. In that time, we had three more children: Helen, Yoself, and Mehret. Each offered me a connection to a past that was bigger than me and a future I hoped fervently to see.

  In that time, my father came to visit us. He was sick. He died during the visit far away from the farmlands of his boyhood and mine. Beneath a hot sun, in the desert sand, we buried the man who had been as much a broth
er as a father to me.

  In Sudan, I learned that beyond the guns and torturous murders committed in warfare, when a country fights, it must do so on all fronts; diseases were rampant in the conditions of our lives.

  In 1985 and 1986 there was a big cholera outbreak in the refugee camps across Sudan. While the outbreaks remain officially unconfirmed—just like the continuous killing of civilians in Asmara—I was there and I lived through it.

  In the refugee camp, at the height of the crisis, there were twenty-five thousand people sick with cholera. The disease did not discriminate among the poor and war-stricken population. On the hospital beds, men and women and children lay head to foot, side by side writhing in agony, or so quiet and still and depleted they appeared dead. The people were like tubes: what we put in one end flowed out the other. In the camp hospital, doctors and nurses and all medical personnel were called to attention. We ran down the aisles doing our best to respond to the cries and the pleas of the sick and those who loved them. The stench of vomit and diarrhea, of human sweat and fear filled the rooms, and the flies flew in swarms of black.

  The sick people sat, if they could, hands holding their tummies and their heads. Those who could not sit slept on the beds, skin and bones disappearing beneath the clothes they wore. Their eyes were closed. Their eyes were open, holes in the skeletal faces. They stared without seeing. Sounds of human suffering abounded, day and night, with the endless buzzing of the flies.