These Dreams of You

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Assuming she can’t locate the journalist, she decides to track down Sheba’s father, aunt and grandmother. She has no idea what to make of their silence to her last message, but the implications seem more myriad than obvious.

Viv’s driver takes her up Avenue Menelik II with its tree-lined promenades, past the Jubilee Palace toward the merkato, retracing the direction to the orphanage where she first came to get the girl almost two years earlier. The orphanage is a single building with three rooms, the largest including makeshift beds and cribs shared by two dozen children who range from babies to young adolescents. Each child has a single set of clothes, most have no shoes. The toddlers who haven’t learned to use the bathroom wear plastic garbage bags as diapers.

There are a few isolated toys and a television that gets no reception but is connected to a DVD player. A new DVD different from the same four or five that the children watch over and over is an event at the orphanage, with all the children gathered around to watch. The food is a kind of stew that the children eat with injera, the slightly sour Ethiopian bread with a sponge-like texture that Zan never has gotten used to back in Los Angeles. On Viv’s first trip to Addis, one night she took all the children out for burgers and Cokes; some got sick. Viv also brought with her antibiotics that she persuaded a number of doctors in L.A. to prescribe before she left.

There’s a dirt yard where the children play during the day within a surrounding fence and gate that’s manned by a guard, a quiet young man that the children love. When Sheba lived in the orphanage, in the middle of the night she crawled from her bed where two other children slept, left the building, ran on her little legs across the muddy yard through the night rain to the small outpost where the guard stayed, and slept at the orphanage gate. She would curl up on the guard’s chest and sleep through the night.