These Dreams of You

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The grandmother spoke Amharic but the aunt spoke English. The aunt explained to Viv that — notwithstanding the adoption agency’s account, which always was vague — Sheba was raised by the grandmother. Supporting her family by making moonshine tej, the local honeywine, after her land was seized in the Eighties by the communist Derg that followed the fall of Haile Selassie, the old woman eventually was no longer able physically or financially to care for Sheba, who at the age of four months was left on the doorstep by the girl’s mother, an unwed Muslim.

When Viv first met Sheba, the girl vacillated between a psychic desolation almost impossible to fully accommodate and the insubordination that meant survival for someone so young needing so much. Then, just when Viv thought she was turning a corner with the girl, Sheba wanted nothing to do with her, an abstinence that lasted for days. What have I done, Viv wrote to Zan, what have I gotten us into. But the girl always followed her new mother with her eyes, and in the middle of the night, as the sax line of a song drifted through the open window of the hotel room, Viv felt a small finger constantly moving along the outline of her face to make certain she was there. Sheba grabbed Viv’s face in her hands and pulled it close as if to share the same breath.

Sheba’s father disputed his paternity. A former veteran of the Ethiopian Air Force and one of the countless wars that the country fought with the countries around it — or maybe it always was the same war — he insisted that wounds he suffered in battle made it impossible for him to be Sheba’s father.

“The old war-wound excuse!” Zan said in disbelief when he heard it. The father had no job to support the child. That he was Christian when the mother was Muslim only made the circumstances more difficult. But the grandmother acknowledged the baby girl’s DNA even as the father wouldn’t, and only after two years when she became more infirmed did she take Sheba to the local orphanage, where for two weeks the little girl waited vainly in the yard for her grandmother to return.