Don't Cry

Don't Cry

Our first day in Addis Ababa, we woke up to wedding music playing outside the hotel. We had traveled for twenty hours and we were deeply asleep. The music entered my sleep in the form of moving lights, like fireflies or animate laughter, in a pattern, but a loose and playful one. I was dreaming that I was with Thomas. In the dream, he was very young, and we were chasing a light that had come free of the others, running down a winding path with darkness all around.

When I woke, at first I did not know where I was. The music seemed more real than the dingy room; its sound saturated me with happiness and pain. Then I saw Katya and remembered where we were and why. She was already up and standing at the window, lifting a shade to peer out — the sun made a warm place on her skin and I felt affection for her known form in this unknown place. She turned and said, “Janice, there's weddings going on outside—plural!”

We went outside. All around our hotel were gardens, and in the gardens were crowds of people dressed in the bright colors of undiluted joy. Brides and grooms were wearing white satin, and the streets were lined with white limousines decked with flowers, and together with so much color, the white also seemed colorful. Little girls in red-and-white crinoline ran past, followed by a laughing woman. Everyone was laughing or smiling, and because I could not tell where the music came from, I had the sensation that it was coming directly from these smiling, laughing people. Katya turned to me and said, “Are we in heaven?”

I replied, “I don't know,” and for a second I meant it.

My husband, Thomas, had died six months before the trip to Addis Ababa. The music that woke me that first day touched my grief even before I knew it was wedding music. Even in my sleep, I could hear love in it; even in my sleep, I could hear loss. I stepped out of the hotel in a state of grief, but when I saw the brides and grooms in their happiness, wonder spread slowly through my grief It was like seeing my past and a future that was no longer mine but that I was part of anyway.

In the dirty hotel restaurant, we had dry bricklike croissants and lots of good fruit — papaya, mangoes, bananas, oranges, and pineapple. The coffee was burnt, so we decided to go to the espresso place wed been told was just a few blocks away We never found the place, although we walked a long time. At first, we walked on a crowded street made of pavement, with department stores, an Internet café, and a grocery with a big Magic Marker drawing (green and red) of fruit and vegetables in the window Starving dogs wandered freely The pavement abruptly fell off and gave way to rocks. We saw another wedding party in a Mercedes decked with rich-colored flowers, moving through a herd of donkeys, the herders lagging behind, talking on their cells. Beggars swarmed around us, shouting and showing us their deformed limbs, their blind eyes. We forgot our espresso. The rocky street gave way to dirt with pools of muddy water. Houses, patched together with tin, plastic, canvas, and wood, bulged out, sagged in, lurched and leaned this way, then that. Beggars swarmed us, chanting. Wedding guests in gold pants and silky shirts pushed their broken car through slowly parting pedestrians. A little boy marched along blowing a horn; he was followed by a smaller boy who was shouting and rhythmically shaking a clutch of bells on a strap. The smell of fresh shit rose up suddenly and mixed with the odors of sweat and cooked meat. An old woman seated in the roots of a giant tree sold bundled sticks and dresses mounted on smiling white mannequins. Trees made soft, blunt, deep green shapes with their boughs. Katya turned to me, her face dazed. “Wed better go back,” she said. “We're getting lost.”

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 head. “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.

The head nun was a tall, erect woman with a still, cold face and fiery eyes — but the fire seemed to come from far away, far down in the hole of herself. We sat with her in her office and she told us the story of another woman who had come to do an independent adoption; the story took almost an hour to tell, and in the end, the woman had left Addis Ababa to look elsewhere. As an afterthought, the nun added that, at present, she had no babies.

“But what about the girl who was outside the door a few days ago?” asked Katya. “She was obviously very sick and she had a beautiful baby and I was wondering if you took that baby in?”

The head nun said that if the girl was sick, she was probably with her family now. And then she made it clear we were to leave.

Some version of this episode was repeated for several days at several different orphanages. Sometimes we were not allowed in at all. Sometimes we were allowed in but not allowed to see anyone in charge. Finally, Katya went to the ministry that oversees adoptions to meet with the man that everyone referred to as “the head;” we never discovered his actual title. He suggested that we go to an orphanage on the outskirts of town, but when we got there, we were told that they had no babies available, either. Just as the supervisor, or whatever she was, told us this, a baby began crying in the next room.

Katya stood up, one hand on her hip, the other pointed toward the sound. “And what,” she demanded, “is that?”

“Obviously, that is a baby,” said the woman stiffly. “But as this baby has AIDS, he is not up for adoption in America.”

Katya sat back down; she put her head in her hands. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I don't mean to be rude.”

The supervisor sighed and leaned back in her chair. She looked out the window for a long moment. When she looked back, she said, “I should not tell you this, but I am going to tell you. The head of Social Services explicitly told us that you were coming. And he explicitly told us that we were not to do any independent adoptions. That's it. No independent adoptions.”

Katya jumped up. “But he told us to come here!”

“If he has changed his mind,” said the woman, “then he needs to put it in writing. You need to get a letter from him stating that he gives permission. And I doubt that he will give it to you.”

The next day, Katya was sick with diarrhea and couldn't eat anything but clear tea and a banana. Still, we went to see the head of Social Services. Katya went in to meet him in his office; I stayed in the car with Yonas. He talked to me about the election; he said the government had lied about the results in order to hold on to power and that people were going to fight about it. I asked him how he had learned to speak English so well. He said that he had studied it at the university and that driving had given him the chance to practice. He had studied for only a year, even though he loved it; his brother and sister had children and he needed to help make money for them, so they could get the best education possible. He also volunteered for an organization specifically for the education of girls. “Like that girl we saw outside the orphanage,” he said.

When he asked about my family, I told him about Thomas: that he wrote books about Spanish literature, that he had been an amateur bullfighter when he was young. I described for him a film clip of Thomas leaning into a bull, his brow pressed against the brow of the animal, as if both to conquer it and passionately kiss it. It wasn't as daring as it looked; the animal was about to die. In fact, the next moment, Thomas stepped away from it, and the animal fell and died.

Katya came out and said, “What a prick!” She got in the car and slammed the door. “Sorry for my language, Yonas. The agencies must've gotten to him; that's the only explanation. He said I don't need a letter, so why should he write me a letter. I said, ‘How am I going to get a child?’ He said, ‘That's your concern, not mine.’”

Yonas drove us back to the hotel. “I just don't know what to do,” said Katya. “We can't stay here forever. I don't know what to do. God I feel sick.” She took out her cell phone and began rifling through her purse.

“Who are you calling?” I asked.

“A guy named Kebede. Meselu gave me his number. He's a sort of liaison between the hospital and orphanages in Arba Minch. I didn't want to call, because he's in a whole other city But I don't know what else to try”

Yonas muttered unhappily; we were suddenly floating in a flood of people and donkeys. Katya got Kebede on the phone. Music came from somewhere, lots of instruments blended energetically. I smiled; I remembered the first time Thomas and I had had great sex. Right after, he'd put on an old pop song and danced in his underwear. He danced comically but also intently The song went: “I've got a hard-ass pair of shoulders / I've got a love you can't imagine.” Katya frowned, covering her other ear. “Really?” she said. “You know the head of Social Services?” Suddenly, her voice was round and shining. A boy shot past us on his bike, no-handed, beating time to the music with plastic bottles. Thomas danced; the car bucked forward; we rolled past a graveyard of white tombs and faceless angels standing guard over the dead. Katya hung up the phone. “He has a child,” she said. A love you can't imagine. “A boy Almost two. His mother dropped him off at the local hospital and hasn't been back for six months. The hospital just gave the child to Kebede and he's at Kebede's house, he hasn't gone into the orphanage yet. The rules don't apply to him. Kebede says to call back tomorrow.” She looked like she'd been struck by lightning.

Two days later we were on a plane to Arba Minch. The weather was turbulent and the small jet bucked like an open boat on choppy water. Katya clutched her armrests and for the dozenth time went over the details of her conversation with Kebede. She had been too sick to her stomach to eat for several days, and her thinness made the taut, tense nature of her will more visible.

The plane banged around; a woman gasped so loudly it was nearly a scream. I stood slightly and looked at the cockpit; it was open and I could see the pilots. They were leaning back in their seats, laughing and talking as if they were sharing a very good joke.

I said, “The pilots look drunk.”

“Oh, sit down,” said Katya.

I sat down and looked out the window; the wing was vibrating ferociously. I began to sweat.

“I loved Thomas,” I said. “I loved him right up until the end.”

“I know,” said Katya. “I know you did.”

The plane dropped suddenly, then steadied, then rose above the clouds. The sun hit the wing with piercing brilliance.

“I loved him,” I said.

“Yes,” said Katya.

“But I was unfaithful.”

Katya turned to face me, her fear interrupted by her surprise.

“It was only once. One person, once. A student. Not even technically a student — he had just graduated.” I spoke rapidly, almost pattering. The plane jerked quickly to the side, then righted itself.

“How did it happen?”

“He was someone I really disliked — rude in class, so arrogant that it made him stupid. It was clear that he disliked me, too. I was glad to be getting rid of him. Then we saw each other at the graduation party and he came over to talk to me. I was surprised at first. Then I realized after about two minutes that it wasn't exactly dislike he felt for me. And I didn't dislike him, either. And Thomas wouldn't be surprised if I came home late.”

“Was Thomas sick by then?”

It was a blow, but I could not be angry at her for striking it. “Yes,” I said, “but I didn't know it yet. He had become very bad-tempered and strange — he was always starting fights and yelling at me — cursing at me, which he'd never done before. I was really mad at him. That partly explains why I did it, but not fully I can't explain it fully I wanted sex and I wanted it to hurt. Not physically but …”

“I know,” said Katya. She said it quickly, as though to stop me from saying any more. “That was there, in the situation.”

I looked out the window. Below us was a forest of textured green, a still mass of depth and roughness, of mesmerizing sameness. I looked at it and my thoughts dissolved like foam on an ocean. Again came the image of my face and spread knees on the floor. Unthinking darkness rose inside me, darkness and numbness. The plane steadied.

“I didn't know that he was sick,” I said. “But I could tell that something was changing, that he was leaving me. The parts of Thomas that I knew as Thomas were leaving.”

Katya put her hand on my arm and stroked it. Beneath us the forest fell away We flew over bare ocher earth. I sat on the bed next to Thomas and tried to coax a spoon of soup into his mouth. He would not take it. I closed my eyes. On one side of me was the dark image of my grief. On the other side was bright sky, a rattling plastic window, and the torn edge of my seat cushion. How strange the contrast. How strange that I wished I could return to that moment of sitting on the bed, trying to get Thomas to take a spoon of soup.

We began our descent. I turned away from the window and saw Katya sitting very erect and tense; I was struck by the intensity of her thinness and paleness, the swollen darkness under her eyes. Her face said, Don't desert me. Link with me. Link your will with mine. With a mental side step, I did. The plane hit the ground with an exuberant thud; a woman burst into laughter.

Kebede was waiting for us in an old pickup truck. He was a small fine-boned man with a high-bridged nose, unsmiling, his eyes quick and clear. He asked whether we wanted to see the baby now, or go to the hotel first. Katya said, “The baby, please.”

I had wanted Kevin to hurt me. I also feared it terribly. We went to a hotel. I was so afraid, I couldn't walk without trembling. If he had not taken my hand at the threshold of our rented room, I might have stopped and walked away — but he did take my hand. I looked at him and saw that his eyes were wide and determined, which made me understand that he was actually uncertain and possibly a little afraid himself. I put my arm around him and leaned my head against his shoulder. We went into the room.

As we neared the town, the vegetation became more lush. We glimpsed a great blue body of water between the trees and rich greenery. We turned down a street of stone houses mostly hidden behind walls and gates; we saw courtyards through the gates; we saw somebody's garage painted with flamboyant brown spots, like the hide of a cow.

Kebede's house was small but elegantly constructed of big smooth stones, contrasted by a door made of rough wooden planks. His young daughter greeted us and led us into a long, narrow, vaguely furnished room. A woman in a vermilion dress emerged from a side room with a crying baby in her arms. “This is Sofia, my wife,” said Kebede. Smiling, Sofia handed the baby to Katya. The baby stopped crying. Cradling him, Katya looked at us, grinning as if she had given birth.

The baby was beautiful, fragile and small for his age, with a severe mouth, a high forehead, almond-shaped eyes, and slightly pointed ears that made his gaze seem radically attuned. When you held him, you felt the pure unprotected tenderness of an infant, but in those eyes there also was something uncanny and strong, nascent and vibrating with the desire to take form. He had come to the hospital half-starved from pneumonia and parasites, and although he was now healthy, he was still undernourished and weak. I thought, It matters who this child is, specifically. Sofia made us all a pasta dish with spicy onion puree, so spicy that I could barely eat it, so spicy that Katya didn't dare eat it. I wouldn't have expected even a robust baby to eat something so strong, but this baby ate it. He ate and conveyed with each bite, I intend to thrive. “Son,” said Katya. “Sonny. I'm going to name him Sonny”

When we were done eating, we took Sonny back to the hotel. Sofia and her other daughter, an eleven-year-old in braids, whose name was Mekdes, went with us. Mekdes was amazed at the hotel's plumbing; she kept turning the water on and off. Katya was itching to buy baby food and clothes — what Sonny had on was filthy — and so Sofia made Mekdes calm down and instructed her to watch the baby while we went shopping.

“Can she do that?” asked Katya. “At her age?”

“Of course she can,” said Sofia. “She's cared for children younger than this one.”

The clothing store was a dark little hole stuffed with boxes of ridiculously ugly baby clothes from Eastern Europe; Katya loaded her arms with them. Sofia's phone rang and she turned her back to us to answer it. A small girl capered as she walked in behind her mother; the mother frowned, planted herself in front of a box, and started digging. Still capering, the child made a beautiful gesture with her head, nuzzling the air the way a kitten might rub against its mother. Smiling, Katya held up an orange corduroy jumper with a lavender collar. Sofia turned to us. “Stop,” she said. “You have to stop. This is my husband. The mother just came back to the hospital. She is very angry She wants her baby back.”

Kebede drove us to the hospital. Sofia held Sonny; Katya didn't want to. She had pulled into herself and become very contained. Kebede told us that the hospital staff was very upset with the mother for showing up after leaving the child for so long.

“Why?” said Katya tonelessly “It's her right.”

“She's a day laborer,” said Kebede. “She lives outdoors; she lives from hand to mouth. The hospital staff say she's retarded. The baby will die with her.”

There was a crowd of hospital staff gathered in front of the hospital, and they came forward to meet us when we got out of the car. They were all talking loudly, but my eyes went to the only silent one among them: a small beaten-looking woman with long dirty hair and flat breasts hanging way down her body. She was dressed in filthy ragged clothes and the earrings had been torn from her ears. Her eyes were small and hot and I could not read their expression; it came from too far back in her head. I looked at her and thought, This woman is not retarded. Her eyes went past me and fell on Katya; her deep expression came forward slightly Katya steadily returned the look; I could not read her expression, either. Sofia went forward and put the baby in his mother's arms. Everyone fell silent. The mother glanced at Sofia, went toward Katya, and tried to hand the baby to her. Everybody burst out talking. Katya automatically reached for the baby, but before she could take him, Kebede stepped in and took him. The baby screamed and reached for his mother. Looking meaningfully at the mother, Kebede gave the sobbing baby to a female hospital staffer. The staffer handed the child back to his mother. The mother took the child, walked around the staffer, and tried to approach Katya again. Everybody was yelling then. Kebede moved in front of the mother, blocking her. The baby screamed. Katya hung her head and turned back to the car, both hands pressed against her chest.

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. Yours 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 mistake. 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 determination. 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-and-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, somehow 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 my 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 I 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 I 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 film 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.

Everything depended on it: I pulled my husband out of bed to a standing position and led him backward, holding hands. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me. I got him on the john, waited for him to finish, and wiped him. I bathed him in the marble shower, which was so big, it made the whole room a shower where we could be naked together. We sat on the fancy marble floor and played, passing the hose back and forth, spraying, laughing. … And Sonny, with his little forehead blazing, several times nearly falling, climbed the stairs, leaning heavily into my hands. His hands radiated into my hands, imparting his being and sampling mine. “Look,” I said aloud. Look, my husband, my father, my lover, my child: Look at this little boy and bless him.

When Katya came home, she would jealously take the baby from me — of course jealously. Every day, she walked in and saw me having intimacy she couldn't have because she was out doing the shit. What she didn't see: It didn't matter. Sonny knew that Katya was his mother and that I was his nurse; the uncanny gleam we had seen the first day had found mental form quickly. But still Katya grabbed him jealously and fed him and talked angrily about the Head while I ate dried fruit and nuts. I half-listened. I looked at the spoon going in and out of the baby's mouth. I thought, If I am the nurse and Katya is the mother, who or what is the birth mother to him? Is she the earth of Sonny, the sky? The unseeable place the child walks when he sleeps? When I asked Thomas what he remembered about the birth mother who had abandoned him, he just said he liked her. He said he liked to picture her getting on the bus with a battered suitcase, in a long coat and flat shoes, her large eyes bold and intense, her hair like a movie star's. She was an adventurer, he thought, and he didn't blame her for leaving.

On our seventh day in Addis, Katya succeeded; she came back with a letter from the Head and another letter from an orphanage (run by a friend of the Head) that said they would sponsor the adoption. Out of fighting mode, she was dazed and unsure of how this had happened. “We were going at it as usual,” she said. “I told him I would be back in his office every day until I got permission, and he said, ‘Fine.’ And then a stomach cramp doubled me over; my head went between my legs, my teeth were gritted, and my intestines made this indescribable sound — I thought I was going to have diarrhea right there. The only reason I didn't leave was that I was worried about what might happen if I got up suddenly He didn't say anything. He just looked at me — almost like he felt sorry for me! Then he got a piece of paper and wrote the letter and pushed it across the desk.”

That night, we finally went out for dinner. We wore the dresses we had brought to celebrate in; Sonny wore his orange jumper. I chose an Italian restaurant we'd walked past several times, because the people in it always looked lively. But it wasn't lively this time. On the way there, the streets were nearly empty and the few people who were out seemed angry and tense. We were the only people in the restaurant. Katya didn't feel well enough to eat more than a few bites of pasta and she was too tired to talk much.

The next day, Katya and Sonny went to the American embassy in the morning and returned early in the afternoon. Sonny was tired and cranky so Katya wanted to rest before going to the travel agency to arrange our flight out the next day. They napped together while I went to the laundry room and washed our clothes. While I was in the dining area, waiting for the clothes to come out of the washer, I met our host's Italian mom. She was feeding her pug dog sliced fruit from a dish in her lap. I told her we were about to leave; she said it was a shame that we hadn't gotten to Lalibela. “I hope you can get out,” she said. “You choose a terrible time to come. You didn't know about the election?” I pointed out that she was here. She shrugged and meticulously peeled the skin off a fig. “I grew up here,” she said. “I know the place. You don't.”

I woke Katya and we tried to call Yonas. We couldn't reach him. This was unusual. We waited an hour and tried again; nothing. We waited another hour. We heard the huge gate open; people came in, talking loudly Someone ran up the stairs, past our door. Katya and I stared at each other. Sonny stirred. It wasn't right then that we heard gunfire, but maybe ten minutes later. It wasn't close by But close enough to hear. Not steadily, but off and on, during the afternoon and into the night.

Much closer than the gunshots was the machine of my body buzzing inside me. It came from inside me and also enclosed me like the darkness and the warmth of the night. It said, It doesn't matter if you die here. It might be better if you die here. But Katya and Sonny have to get home. It won't be better if they die.

The next day, Yonas came in his uncle's car instead of his taxi. We saw him pull into the driveway, and we ran out to meet him. From the car, he held up a hand to indicate he was talking on the phone. We stopped; he had never signaled for us to wait before, and this signal scared me more than anything so far. But he didn't keep us waiting long. He put the phone down and got out to tell us: There had been a demonstration about the election. Twenty-five people had been killed. The city was under martial law. He could not take us anywhere. He would be in touch. He had to get home as quickly as he could.

We played with Sonny all day both of us, going up and down the stairs, knocking the film containers all over the stairs, then picking them up again. When we heard shots, we looked up and then went back to what we were doing. The buzzing said, Your parents are dead; your husband is dead. You should be dead. But Katya and Sonny don't deserve to die.

In the early evening, Katya said, “We have to get something to eat. We haven't eaten for almost twelve hours.”

“We can't go out,” I said. “It isn't safe.”

“Sonny is out of food. He hasn't eaten for eight hours.”

“Katya, nothing is open; you heard Yonas.”

“The fruit stand will be open. There's no way they'll close. They're just down the street.”

“We're hearing guns.”

“The shots aren't close. I have to go out. If you won't go, I'll go alone.”

We took Sonny; I carried him because Katya was too weak. Outside on the street, people and animals were walking around like normal. Who were these people? I felt half-scared of them, half-linked with them, and didn't know which feeling was most real. I reached inside my shirt and held the rings for a moment in my cupped hand. Thomas's face, flat and beautifully misshapen, rippled in me like a reflection in water. There was a boy at my side, trying to push a cow out of the way Thomas's face stretched unrecognizably on the moving water. The boy came suddenly around the cow and tore my chain off my neck. I screamed; the boy flashed down the street. I was after him. My legs are long and I almost had him, but I couldn't grab him because Sonny was screaming, forgotten, in my arms. I darted back to Katya, who was standing motionless, and thrust Sonny at her. The boy was a quick pixilation of limbs, disappearing. Katya shouted, “Janice!” and I ran. The boy was bright movement that I chased like an animal with a single instinct. I turned a corner, stumbled into a pothole full of warm brown water, and nearly fell. I staggered and bent to catch myself with my hands. I looked up; he was gone. I whipped my head around, looking, my instinct trying to leap in every direction — but it had nothing to leap at. I panted raggedly, sweat running in my eyes, my instinct exiting through my eyes as I stared around, wild. Women holding children stared back at me. Faces peered from the broken hole of a window. Skeleton dogs, fierce and cringing, watched with starving eyes. My instinct felt them all as it felt itself: quick force in slow mammal bodies; soft brain in hard bone; a machine of thoughts; a machine of sex. The dark radiance of emotions; the personality; eyes, nose, mouth. You, specifically. A little boy with a large round head pointed at me and said words I couldn't understand. My instinct broke; everything that had been joined was now in pieces again. I put my face in my hands and cried like an animal.

I came out of the alley to find my way back to Katya. I tried to stop making noise. I couldn't. I felt people following me. I understood. The current had reversed. As I had chased the boy they would follow me. They would kill me. I heard myself sobbing. Thomas was dead. I had let him die. They would kill me. It was right.

“Miss? Miss?” A small voice was at my side, gently tugging me without touching me. “Miss? What's wrong, miss?”

I looked at the voice. There were two young girls, maybe thirteen years old, tagging at my side. They were dressed in school uniforms. Their faces were soft but intensely focused. I wiped my face; I glanced behind me. There was a small crowd following me, made up mostly of teenage girls and a few boys with curious faces. I turned to face them. “My husband died,” I said. “He died and somebody stole our wedding rings. Now I don't have anything.” Tears ran down my face — human tears now. “I have to find my friend and her baby. Thank you.”

The girls nodded gravely. I continued to walk. One girl followed me. “It will be all right,” she said. “God will help you.”

I said, “Thank you, honey” Machine-gun fire sounded in the distance. The girl dropped away.

“Janice!” It was Katya, rounding a corner, Sonny in her arms. She said, “What happened? Why did you do that?”

“I was robbed. That boy took my wedding rings. I couldn't catch him.”

“Then we need to call the police.”

If she hadn't been holding Sonny, I would've slapped her. “Do you know how stupid you sound?” I said. “Call the police?”

“Janice—”

“Look around you!” I was trembling, still dripping tears with no force. “They're in the middle of a war and you think the police are going to come because of my rings?”

“Janice—”

“Shut up!”

I turned to get away, to go back to the B and B. In my head was Thomas well and virile, Thomas sick, our house with its marble shower, its riches of detail, its condiments and candies, paintings and knickknacks, baskets on the wall, baskets from all over the world, from places we had traveled together, shelves of books, the books he had written, the languages he had spoken, his children, my students— Now I don't have anything. But once I'd had everything; I had betrayed everything so I could fuck somebody I didn't love.

“Stop.” Someone touched my arm from behind; I turned. A very small old man stood before me.

“What?” I asked, or thought.

“Stop,” he said. “Don't cry Please. It's okay.” He said “Please,” but his eyes had an expression of command. I lifted my hand to wipe my eyes. He reached out and took it. He held it palm up; he put my rings in my hand and closed my fingers over them. “Okay?” he said.

“But how—”

He shook his head and said, “Just don't cry Okay?”

I stopped crying. He turned to go.

“Wait,” I said. “There was a chain, too?”

He turned his head and looked hard at me.

“The rings were on a chain. Do you know about that?”

He shook his head and walked away.

Years later, I told this story at a party at the university I told it to a woman who had traveled extensively in Africa. She was a big woman, very grand, with a high chest and a chunky necklace made of precious stones. When I told her how I had lost my rings and how the old man had given them back, she made a face. She said, “Really, you make too big a fuss of yourself. You should not go to Africa and then make such a fuss.” I answered her vaguely. I let myself be chastised. Because in that room, she was right. In that room, I was a privileged and foolish woman running around bawling about rings while a whole city fell apart and people were killed. But I didn't meet the old man in that room. I met him in a place of biblical times and modern times, where people walked back and forth between times, all times. In this place, I walked back and forth between the time of the living and the time of the dead. In the middle of my walking, war broke out, and the path between the living and the dead opened up and everything dear to me fell down the crack. I fell, too, and I might've fallen forever — but the old man came and said, “Stop.” And I stopped.

That same night at the university, another person asked, “Did you thank him?” And I was amazed to realize I didn't know. Probably I did not. How could I? Thanking him would have been like thanking an angel.

I sit in my darkened house sometimes, holding a glass of wine, and I thank him.

The next day, we rode through the streets, crouched on the floor of a car Yonas had borrowed from his uncle. We rode to the American embassy, sharing the car with five Ethiopians, women and girls whom Yonas was taking “to safety.” He didn't dare drive his cab lest taxi drivers striking on behalf of the protestors turn it over and burn it. But there were no taxis in the street, no cars, no people. There were huge high trucks full of soldiers in camouflage with automatic weapons. Still, the Ethiopian women sat on the seat and we crouched on the floor, hiding the whiteness that declared us paying customers. One of the women, a girl really, held Sonny against her breast. A military truck passed close by, bristling with guns. The girl holding our baby looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. Katya pressed her forehead to the sweat-drenched seat and stretched her hand up to clasp Sonny's foot as though it were a hand.

Outside, the embassy was surrounded by guards with machine guns; inside, it was jammed with frightened people and officials behind windows. We took a number and waited. Waiting next to us was an American doctor who had been on emergency-room duty when gunshot victims began to come in. He was calm, over-calm, but he smelled like fear, and when he got up to one of the windows, he began talking loud and fast, telling someone, really everyone, that there had been many killings, many more than the reported twenty-five. The whole room smelled of fear. Something was missing from Sonny's file, and Katya was shouting at someone, her jaw moving like cheap animation on her stark chalk white face, her body giving off a smell that was nearly savage, the smell of something ready to attack. She turned to me suddenly and I flinched. “I've got to go,” she said. “I'll be back.” She was already dialing Yonas on her cell.

I went to take Sonny from her, but the child refused; he hadn't let me hold him since I'd handed him off and run down the middle of the street and come back howling in pain. So I held his hand and walked out to the hall with him. Thomas walked out of the sun-shadowy water, stepping on his elegant pants, damp and sagging, and his shoes squishy wet, smiling as he handed me the dog's chewed-up ball, the dog, standing on its hind legs, dancing. With an ecstatic face, Sonny took the steps two at a time. Thomas's mother smiled and boarded the bus, the sun shining on her beautiful hair. Sonny looked up at me, gurgling with pleasure, forehead shining with effort. I stroked his hair. I thought of his mother's beaten face, her torn ears, her breasts hanging down. The child grabbed my hem with his tiny fist. Katya came back beaming, papers in her hand, her sweat rank and innocent.

That night, I dreamed Katya and I were in a small dark house of mud and thatch. Thomas was there, too, asleep on a dirty mat, and so was Sonny's mother, who was terribly sick. Katya kept trying to nurse the mother, to suckle her at her breast, but the woman couldn't hold her head up, and I kept wanting to say, Stop. It's ridiculous. She's the mother. But I was distracted by Thomas's mother in the next room, laughing as she played with Sonny; I was distracted, too, by gunfire, which came closer and closer. …

I woke in the dark with my heart pounding; I reached for my wedding rings on the table beside me.

“Katya,” I whispered, only half-expecting her to be awake, too.

She replied unintelligibly.

“When Sonny gets older, and he asks you about his mother, what are you going to tell him?”

She didn't answer. Shortly, she began to snore.

But the next day, when we were at the airport, she answered. She said, “If he asks, I'll tell him that his mother was a great woman. That she was a fighter, and because she had to fight so hard, she gave me her most precious child to keep him safe. Something like that. Here.” Without thinking, she handed me the baby, and bent to pick up her bag. I stiffened, expecting Sonny to protest. But he didn't; he reached for me. For the first time since I'd run down the street, Sonny let me hold him. I thrive, his body said to mine, I will thrive. I put my hand on the back of his head and held it to my shoulder, my cheek against his hair. It was time to go.