These Dreams of You

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When Viv went to Addis Ababa the first time to get her new daughter from the orphanage, lying on the hotel bed and feeling the small girl next to her at night she heard the sax line of a song drift through the open window.

It was a song that Viv heard everywhere in Ethiopia; later Zan would play it on his radio show. “Tezeta”—meaning memory, or nostalgia, or reminiscence or melancholy — was not quite a title as much as a musical species like the blues, and in this land where memory is a euphemism for the blues, this curling melody always sounded the same to Viv’s ears, whether played on sax or piano: smoke that got in your ears rather than your eyes. When the girl lying on the bed next to the mother ran her finger along the outline of Viv’s profile to make certain she was there, it felt to Viv like smoke itself.