full bloom, and on the same evening that my father, Yosef Getachew Woldemariam, declared the need for a violent and unrelenting upheaval of society to a café crowd of recently radicalized college students, he promised Mariam that as long as there was breath in his lungs he would love her. With so much at stake, it was easy to give yourself over to another person. Declarations of love were general all over Addis, offered simply, without hesitation.
Here she was now at the foot of the stairs, three years after they met, her hair still shoulder length but without the curl, a sign perhaps of a growing maturity and wisdom, a sign perhaps that there was not that much left to question or wonder over. As Mariam Woldemariam, twenty-eight years old and three months pregnant, lifted the loose door handle of the 1971 red Monte Carlo her husband had scraped and saved to buy in order to live up to an old black-and-white picture that was itself a lie, my father sat hunched across the steering wheel, thinking to himself over and over, in a voice that rang as true as if the words had been spit from a god, that if he wasn’t careful, this woman would surely destroy him.
IV
When I returned home that evening, Angela was already back from her office. She had taken her position at the dining room table where she often worked late into the night on whatever legal memo was due the following day. She seemed genuinely surprised when I entered. Since I had moved in she had never come home from work and found the apartment empty without knowing why in advance; doing so now had awakened a series of old anxieties within her.
“Where were you, Jonas? I called you several times but your phone was off.”
“I stayed late at the office to help Bill with a statement,” I said.
I could see a faint trace of relief come over her with those few words, which I said as convincingly as if they had been true. Her greatest fear was of abrupt and sudden abandonment, whether it came through death or a simpler form of departure. She tried like most people to never show that, but it was evident even in the way she insisted on always holding hands when crossing a busy street, as if that offered any protection against what she feared.
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that you would be so worried.”
“You know that’s how my father left us,” she said. She kept a perfect, straight face whenever she said that. There were already at least a half-dozen ways this imaginary father of hers had left. She turned to him whenever she felt she needed to prove that she hadn’t actually been worried. He’d been arrested multiple times for various petty crimes from which he never returned. Once he’d gone out for milk and vanished, for cigarettes on a different occasion. I tried to detect a pattern in the stories, one that would say more about who Angela was and what she had gone through, but the obfuscation was too great; all I could see were hints of an injury that she had yet to let go of. This alone would have almost been enough to make me love her; the fact that she chose to make a mockery instead of a spectacle out of her past moved me, in part because a deeper damage was implied. On one side was Angela, my girlfriend; on the other, fragments of a child whose wounds from time to time pierced through the skin like the shred of a bone on a broken limb. I understood the reason behind her efforts and the price that she paid to make them as clearly as if they had been my own.
“He never came home from work,” she continued. “My mother and I sat up all night waiting for him.”
“Was dinner still in the oven?”
“Of course it was. It would have been good too, but we never got to eat it.”
“Because your father didn’t come home.”
“Exactly.”
“You told me last month your mom threw him out of the house.”
“Did I say that?”
“You also said you never knew him.”
“Did I say that too?”
“You want
Here she was now at the foot of the stairs, three years after they met, her hair still shoulder length but without the curl, a sign perhaps of a growing maturity and wisdom, a sign perhaps that there was not that much left to question or wonder over. As Mariam Woldemariam, twenty-eight years old and three months pregnant, lifted the loose door handle of the 1971 red Monte Carlo her husband had scraped and saved to buy in order to live up to an old black-and-white picture that was itself a lie, my father sat hunched across the steering wheel, thinking to himself over and over, in a voice that rang as true as if the words had been spit from a god, that if he wasn’t careful, this woman would surely destroy him.
IV
When I returned home that evening, Angela was already back from her office. She had taken her position at the dining room table where she often worked late into the night on whatever legal memo was due the following day. She seemed genuinely surprised when I entered. Since I had moved in she had never come home from work and found the apartment empty without knowing why in advance; doing so now had awakened a series of old anxieties within her.
“Where were you, Jonas? I called you several times but your phone was off.”
“I stayed late at the office to help Bill with a statement,” I said.
I could see a faint trace of relief come over her with those few words, which I said as convincingly as if they had been true. Her greatest fear was of abrupt and sudden abandonment, whether it came through death or a simpler form of departure. She tried like most people to never show that, but it was evident even in the way she insisted on always holding hands when crossing a busy street, as if that offered any protection against what she feared.
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that you would be so worried.”
“You know that’s how my father left us,” she said. She kept a perfect, straight face whenever she said that. There were already at least a half-dozen ways this imaginary father of hers had left. She turned to him whenever she felt she needed to prove that she hadn’t actually been worried. He’d been arrested multiple times for various petty crimes from which he never returned. Once he’d gone out for milk and vanished, for cigarettes on a different occasion. I tried to detect a pattern in the stories, one that would say more about who Angela was and what she had gone through, but the obfuscation was too great; all I could see were hints of an injury that she had yet to let go of. This alone would have almost been enough to make me love her; the fact that she chose to make a mockery instead of a spectacle out of her past moved me, in part because a deeper damage was implied. On one side was Angela, my girlfriend; on the other, fragments of a child whose wounds from time to time pierced through the skin like the shred of a bone on a broken limb. I understood the reason behind her efforts and the price that she paid to make them as clearly as if they had been my own.
“He never came home from work,” she continued. “My mother and I sat up all night waiting for him.”
“Was dinner still in the oven?”
“Of course it was. It would have been good too, but we never got to eat it.”
“Because your father didn’t come home.”
“Exactly.”
“You told me last month your mom threw him out of the house.”
“Did I say that?”
“You also said you never knew him.”
“Did I say that too?”
“You want
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