These Dreams of You

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Now on her return to Addis to find Sheba’s mother, when Viv stops in the labyrinth at the city center where the driver has led her and says, looking around, “No, this isn’t right,” she hears “Tezeta” rise mournfully in the distance like an answer. She has no idea what the answer is. The walls of the passages resonate with distant chants, the thunder of gathering storms, and Viv feels the past and future yearn for each other. Though she’s almost certain the song she hears isn’t just in her head, now she hears things in the Ethiopian memory-blues that she never heard the first time, lying on the hotel bed with Sheba beside her.

The song is ravenous for memory, and Viv hears in it everything that’s happened to her and her family since that first time she came, the struggle of everything since Sheba came to live with them, the whispers between her and Zan in the night that somehow everything will be all right even as it becomes harder to understand how that can possibly be true. Lost here in these passageways Viv has a realization bordering on a small epiphany: It’s the memory of how quiet Sheba was those first nights lying on the hotel bed beside Viv wreathed by “Tezeta,” and how it wasn’t until Sheba got back home that her own small body began to broadcast its music, as though a secret word was spoken that turned her up.