Somewhere in the Unknown World Read online

  In those two years, all of time became the suffocating moment, the frenzy, the crazy, impossible task of helping the sick ones make it through the painful process, one way or another. Near the end of the epidemic, the refugee camp hospital had no more gloves. We, lower level workers, handed the doctors in charge the gloves we could find. None of them took the gloves from our proffered hands. They shook their heads, too busy for words, and gestured for us to put them on. Sweat dribbled down their faces, dark faces glistening in the heat of battle, once pale faces now flushed red. The United Nations doctors saved the gloves for the nurses and the ambulance drivers like me. They worked without gloves, around the clock, through the night and the day, to save the people. Only seven hundred people died because of them.

  I promised myself then that if I had money one day, I would give it to the United Nations doctors. What they did in that Sudanese refugee camp saved a part of me that was in danger of dying. I had seen how people could take lives in Asmara. In the despair of the camp in Sudan, I saw how people could give life, and somehow in this knowledge, my dreams for humanity were saved.

  My daughters don’t know how the wind blows in the farmlands of Eritrea. They don’t know that once upon a time I was a boy who grew up believing I had a mother because I had my grandmom’s love. They don’t know about the camera I never had but the pictures my heart carries.

  All they know is that their father is getting old. They say he is a good storyteller.

  * * *

  In 1991, two years before Eritrea won its independence but just as the war was ending, I became an American citizen. The Star Tribune came to the ceremony. They published a picture of all of us new Americans. Of all the hands that were raised, mine, an old man’s hand, crooked and bent, skin with lines of white fanning out in all directions like a web, was the highest. It was God that I was speaking to, thanking him for loving me, my family, and my people and showing us that peace is possible if we hold fast to not only the bad stories but the good ones. Life is too short for just the bad to happen—even in a hard life.

  —MICHAEL TESFAY

  10

  Natalis: Same Old Tired World

  THE WOMAN LAY on the sofa, her head on its leathery arm, her cell phone in her hand. She’d put on weight. With each breath, her stomach rose, a soft mound of flesh beneath her polyester shirt. She needed a haircut. Her black hair, kept short, had grown long, its strands covering her eyes like a teenage boy’s. Her hair hadn’t been this greasy since the years when she’d worked the night shift and then spent the days caring for her young children. She had used the time she had to wash her hair for sleeping instead. She looked sluggish, sagging flesh and clothing, sitting on the sofa, her iPhone in her hands.

  The woman spent all her time looking at flowers on the Internet. She knew how to find and save the photos, flowers everywhere, from around the world, the tulip fields of Holland, the orchids of Thailand, the beautiful Buddhist lotus ponds, the purple heathers abloom on the English moors. Once she saved the photos, she passed the days editing them, changing the filters and cropping the images. She had over eleven thousand pictures on her phone.

  Sometimes she was afraid. She saw black things the size of cats move across the living-room floor. Her eyes frantic, she made no sound. Instead, she froze in place, her only movement her eyes helplessly searching for an exit from her body.

  She had vivid dreams of handsome men who came into her life on horses. They all wanted to marry her and take her away. In the dreams, she wanted to go with them, except she couldn’t quite lift herself off the ground and onto their high horses. Her body was heavy in the dreams, anchored firmly to the earth. Sometimes she woke up reaching for the handsome men only to feel the empty, lonely air of their absence.

  She couldn’t sleep at night without the drugs. Even with them, during the day she was tired, drowsy, had no heart for anything or anyone.

  Sometimes, she cried for her dead father. It had been nearly half a century since his death, but to her it was fresh as the morning. She believed she knew where he was, always at the edge of the horizon. There he waited for her with wings like the birds. He sent messages to her. He offered a promise to lift her up high so they could soar through the skies together. From there, he told her, she wouldn’t miss her children because she could still see them on earth.

  Most of the time, though, she spent her days on the sofa looking at her phone. She did not have the energy to cook or clean, two things she’d always attended to as a matter of life and death for her children.

  In the past, no matter how little sleep she was functioning on, she made traditional meals for her family, with no store-bought sauces and little fat. She boiled fish with lemongrass, tomatoes, green onions, cilantro, mint, basil, red hot chili peppers, a touch of MSG, and then salt to taste. She made bowls of rice with tofu and chicken soup. Her children loved her mung bean thread soup with minced pork and green onions and cilantro, black pepper galore. As they ate, she would stand at the sink waiting to wash each plate, bowl, spoon, and fork. Now she herself was never hungry and her children’s hunger held no power to get her up.

  All her life, no matter where they were—in the refugee camps or the housing projects of Minnesota—she and her husband’s bedroom was a place where the bed was always made, the floor clean, clothes folded in baskets, hung in closets, stored in drawers. No matter the mess beyond its doors, the chaos of the unsteady world was never allowed to enter. Now she’d place a blanket on the floor. The mountain of clean clothes that needed to be folded and put away was nearly as high as their rumpled bed. Now the dust of their lives had settled on her body and grown so thick she could barely move.

  Her husband, used to the woman from the past, perhaps hoping that she would return in light of the current conditions of their room, did not pull the covers over the sheets in the mornings or sit to fold the clothes, so the pile grew higher and higher.

  At the doctor’s office, the nurses gave her evaluations. Worksheets designed to see if she was healthy or not. The questions asked if she was feeling any pain in her body; if yes, where? On a scale of 1 to 10, how much did she hurt? How often did she hurt? Was the pain less or more than at the last visit? The questions asked if she had energy for the daily work of the living. Was she able to focus on a book or a television show? Was this more or less than at the last visit?

  Each time she answered “the same,” the doctors increased the dosage of her medication. When one prescription did not work, the doctor shifted to another. The woman was put on Wellbutrin, Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Cymbalta, and more.

  One pill made her believe that she was on the cusp of death. Her heart started racing. She grew short of breath. She spoke her death wishes: keep the funeral simple; I don’t want my death to be complicated.

  At the doctor’s office, on the suicide question, she shook her head adamantly, and said, “My biggest fear is that I’ll die and leave my children behind. I would never kill myself.”

  She wept.

  The doctor asked why she was so sad.

  She answered, “I don’t know what to do with myself. I am out of work. I’m too young to be useless. My children need a mother who can take care of them.”

  The doctor wanted her to go out into the world. Yes, she could no longer find a job with her shoulder being so bad, her disability documented, but perhaps she could volunteer in a community organization? She couldn’t drive. She didn’t speak good enough English. Her hands hurt. Her feet hurt. Her neck hurt. She was falling apart. The doctor said she could not change the conditions of the woman’s life; the only thing she could do was change the conditions of her head. No one knew what to do with her heart.

  Her fiery heart. The heart of the only girl in her village to go to school, to race ahead of the boys into the classroom. The heart of the young woman who’d chosen love in a war full of death and despair, made a decision to live in the face of death. The heart of the mother who would place each of her children, alive and de
ad, before herself with no misgivings or regrets. The heart of a wife who did everything hard so her husband, in a world that had given up on him, could not give up on her and their life together. Now her heart hurt.

  The pills made the woman so tired she could not fret about going out into the world. They numbed her body so she could not feel the pain in her hands, her feet, her neck. They glued her together inside a bubble of despair. The doctor could not change the conditions of the woman’s life, but she made it so that the woman could live with them.

  Each day, the woman floated further and further away, in a bubble of flowery images, framed and filtered. One day, the bubble rose high, a brisk wind blew, and it lifted far into the clouds of another world. The woman became a shining particle in the wide openness. This was, of course, her fondest fantasy.

  In actuality, her doctor referred her to Natalis. Its name sounded like a planet, but it was a medical office on University and Snelling Avenues, one of the busiest intersections in Minnesota. The office was housed in a large green building with a clock facing the intersection. Its architecture looked like the big Lego buildings her children built when they were younger. When her family had first arrived in Minnesota, she’d visited the building because there was an office in it that gave food and clothing to poor families. She had come here then, a young refugee mother with little ones holding fast to her hands, to see what was available in the food pantry, if there were coats that would fit the family for the approaching winter. It had been many years since the woman had been in the building. While the outside looked the same, the inside had been remodeled. Instead of the old nondescript wallpaper of the 1980s, there were now large ceramic tiles set into the walls and new pillars rising high.

  She saw that the people sitting on the chairs in the Natalis waiting room were no different than the ones who had visited the food pantry decades ago, except now there was even more variety of newcomer, men in salwars and women in hijabs, men and women with brightly woven handmade bags she recognized from parts of Southeast Asia. Most everyone had an interpreter with them, younger people busy looking at their phone screens or filling out forms.

  The waiting room was a big rectangle. There was an island in the middle where patients registered upon arrival. There was a small line of patients waiting to be registered. The woman looked nervously around the room, unsure of how to move.

  A plump young woman in jeans, a pair of heels, and a dark sweater came up to the woman: “I think I’m your interpreter.” The woman nodded. Although her daughter had driven her to the clinic, times were different now, and most clinics and hospitals preferred professional interpreters. It was easier this way. She didn’t want her daughter to be the one to repeat in English everything she might say to the doctors, depending on their willingness to listen or what they wanted to know.

  The young interpreter had messy hair. There was the remnant of a child’s sticker on the back of her head, clinging to her dark hair. Her sweater was stained with streaks of dried white, probably children’s snot. Her fingers were thick, her nails half painted. She wore red lipstick. She smiled and said, “I’ll sign you in.”

  The woman took a seat in the waiting area. All the chairs were too high for her short legs. She swung them beneath her in time to the sound of the validation stamper. The woman folded her arms around her purse and waited. Her daughter sat to her left, trying to make small talk. The interpreter joined them, sat a seat away, and brought a form to fill out. The woman admired her surprisingly legible handwriting—unlike her own daughter’s. The interpreter’s fingers held fast to a black pen and ran over the questions softly.

  “What’s your birthday?”

  “You’re a refugee?”

  “How long have you been in America?”

  “You don’t work anymore?”

  “What did you do when you were working?”

  “You were an assembler? Just like my mom.”

  It was this offer of information that made the woman smile unexpectedly. Her teeth, stained by time, were strong. They gave her face something hard to contrast the softness; they gave her a piece of herself back.

  * * *

  I liked the young woman with the uncombed hair. I asked her what her last name was. I asked if she was married and whether she had kids. My daughter gestured toward me and when I leaned close she whispered in my ear. “Mom, you’re not supposed to ask her so many personal questions. She needs to be a professional.” I moved my ear away from her words. I was tired of all these young people telling me how I’m supposed to act in America, what is and isn’t proper.

  The interpreter said, “You’re just like my mom. She comes here, too. Everybody comes here. All of you older people, when you were busy raising children and working, you didn’t have time to think about the war and all the people you left behind. But now you’re old and out of work, and you spend way too much time thinking about the past, it’s made you sick.”

  I told her she was probably right.

  Almost every person who had returned to the waiting area from the single door that led to the back offices had come out with crumpled tissues in their hands, their eyes watery and red. They weren’t looking left or right or even straight ahead, but at their feet. One of my sisters-in-law had told me that the doctor she was seeing wanted her to go and see “a crying doctor.” I realized that this may very well be where I was.

  The realization made me uncomfortable. We, all of us in this place, were sad and broken. My sadness and brokenness made me embarrassed. I didn’t want people I knew seeing me here. I had heard stories of other elderly refugees trying to con disability by pretending to be crazy. I had known such people in my life. One time a widowed neighbor had taken to licking her shoes at the doctor’s office. Her back was hurting her, a bullet wound from the war, she couldn’t work standing up at the factory anymore, and her kids needed time to grow up, so she had taken the only path she knew to survive in America. She pretended to be crazy. She’d told me how embarrassed she’d been but that her integrity meant less than the needs of her children. I, too, had lost my job and the outlook for my family was not good, but I wasn’t ready to pretend to be crazier than I am.

  The interpreter interrupted my thoughts. “They just called your name. It’s time for us to go in.”

  I got up, still holding my purse in front of me, a weak shield against what was to come. and I followed her toward the door. My daughter followed me.

  Inside, we found ourselves in a dim hallway. Around the corner, the nurse had me stand on a scale. I asked my daughter to hold my purse. I took off my shoes but left my socks on. I’d gained fifteen pounds in the last six months. I stood by the measuring wall, pushed my chest out, and leaned back. I’d lost nearly half an inch. My blood pressure was good enough. The nurse took the numbers down, the interpreter explained them for me, and then we were led into a small office. The big wooden desk in the room faced the window, so we sat facing the wall. The desk was empty except for a box of tissues by its edge. There were degrees with fancy letters hung behind the desk.

  The nurse told us that the doctor would be in soon.

  We sat quietly. My daughter and the interpreter both took out their phones, so I did the same. I didn’t have Internet connection so I couldn’t find more photographs of flowers. I opened up my old images and cropped the ones I’d already saved. I hated the photographs of beautiful floral landscapes that included people. I knew why photographers did that—so that years later, they could look back and remember. But they weren’t me and I wasn’t there and I only wanted to see the beautiful pictures of the flowers by themselves, uninterrupted by anyone else’s intentions. I took a deep breath. My daughter looked at me with concern.

  There was a knock on the door before a tall man in a white coat entered. He was the doctor. With him was a well-dressed and healthy-looking older woman. He said she was a resident. He introduced himself as a psychologist who specializes in working with physicians to prescribe medical interventions. He had
a small file on me, but he sat behind the desk and asked me what was going on.

  I told him the truth. I told him about the dreams. I told him when I’d started taking the latest medication and what I was seeing. He listened, his hands clasped on the desk, looking at me occasionally and then back at his folded hands. He nodded thoughtfully when I finished telling him what was going on.

  He asked, “You’re still sad?”

  I didn’t have time to prepare for the tears. They bubbled forth. My hands reached blindly for the box of tissues on the desk. The doctor pushed the tissue box closer to my hands. I held tissues to my eyes and I nodded.

  He asked, “Can you tell me why?”

  I started to tell him my story. I talked about my mother and father. I told him that my father was already an old man by the time I was born, that he’d planted a huge orchard of citrus fruit for my brothers and sisters and me so that when he died, we’d always have a place to go and find the sweetness of life. I told him that my mother had been an orphan and had grown up without a mother’s love and that she’d always wanted to be kind to her children, and that she had been the kindest mother to me. I told him that I was only sixteen years old when I got married and I had to leave my mother behind, because my father had died when I was just eight. I wanted to tell him about the war, but I could see that he was looking at the watch on his wrist, so I stopped.

  He smiled kindly at me. I looked to the well-dressed resident beside him and she smiled, too.

  He said, “I’m going to up your dosage for your current prescription. You can continue taking the Trazadone to help you sleep at night. I’ll see you again in six months’ time. If you experience anything worrisome, call your primary doctor.”

  I nodded.

  He said, “Do you have any questions for me?”