CHAPTER ONE

A foreigner should be well-behaved.

—Yemeni Proverb

Dawit raced down the wide road behind his family’s tent, weaving around bystanders calling out his name and climbing over heaps of rice-filled sacks. The man chasing him from behind was yelling in Arabic, “Come back here, you donkey,” through heavy breaths. It was one in the afternoon in the middle of July—the hour in which everyone in the refugee camp avoided any kind of exertion in the stifling heat. Dawit was running against the wind, and he was running so fast he could hardly keep from falling. He made it around a bend, sidestepped a pile of dog shit, scurried past a crazy old lady that was always making high-pitched whistling sounds and shuffled between two bikers, as he passed twenty tents by his count. Ten short of all the tents in the camp.

It was hard to make a clean escape. The camp was small, crowded, and the air was thick with the smell of fish which made him hungry. But to get food here, you had to join a big queue. The more crowded the camp got, the less food there was to go around. It was especially unbearable in the summer months. So many bodies, so close to each other. For Dawit, the camp’s beauty lies in the way his stride runs over patterns of tents and windings paths as in a musical score, where not a note can be altered or displaced. He knew each path by heart. And no one could catch him if he didn’t want to be caught.

To create a diversion and escape his pursuer, Dawit entered a stranger’s tent, leaping over a hot stove and a sleeping body on a dirty mattress as he went out on the opposite side. The inside of everyone’s tent looked equally distressed. Everything that went on inside the tents was open to the world and was as transparent as mosquito netting, like leaves’ veins to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness. The covering on the sides that passed for curtains was ragged. And each tent was held up by three tree poles and covered with white polyester canvas sheeting with the UN logo at the front and on the sides, turning their homes into a full-blown advertisement campaign for the nech faranjoch, the white foreigners, as his uncles liked to call the UN employees. A straw mat covered the floor, but not all of it. These were the same straw mats he saw the white foreigners use to wrap the bodies that lined the roadside during the last cholera outbreak. His parents refused to let him roam around those days, not even to see his uncles and aunties.

Dawit and his parents recently upgraded to what was once a white mattress, now coated with dirt. They put a dark brown bed cover over the mattress to hide the dirt. They also started dressing Dawit only in black, to hide his pee stains.

He was wearing the black shorts his father recently bought him now. They were falling down under the weight of the tangerines in his pocket, so he sprinted with one hand clutching his shorts at his waist, the other cutting through air. He must have ran three kilometers by now. He could see his family’s tent. He sprinted through the open entrance in the back, came out the front, and wrapped his tiny arms around his mother’s knees.

“Dawit! I told you to cut your nails, eh.” His mother winced, sucking her teeth.

He looked over his shoulder and eased his grip on her kaftan dress, pulling up his shorts. Outside his parents’ tent, Uncle Ibrahim and Uncle Asefaw bickered as they traded opinions with his father on the latest political events in Ethiopia, stuff they heard on the radio at the café, their only tangible connection to life back home.

“They call themselves the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, but there is nothing democratic about them,” Ibrahim grieved. “Also, that title is just too long, that’s how you know the new government is a mess.” Ibrahim had a habit of carefully inspecting his pink palms and biting his nails while talking, and he was doing that now.

Uncle Ibrahim was Dawit’s favorite—the mere sound of his voice brought a smile to his face. Ibrahim must have been taller than sixty sacks of rice, by the far the tallest of everyone in the camp, with the fit build and stamina of a soccer player, a sport he exceled in. Everyone wondered if he was mixed with Italian blood because of his fair skin and flat, slick black hair. The local town people who didn’t know him treated him with a deference they reserved for white foreigners, thinking he was one of them, a man of means, a man with a passport.

Uncle Asefaw was Dawit’s second favorite. He was short and stocky and broad shouldered and authoritative enough to sometimes be taken for a professor, which pleased him but did not please the others. They found his know-it-all attitude annoying. He had piercing eyes and a shiny bald scalp that he was insecure about. Ibrahim liked to breathe on Asefaw’s head as if he was breathing to fog up glass and then rub it with the sleeve of his shirt. Dawit always wanted try but never dared the attempt.

“Ibrahim,” his mother yelled (she was always yelling in those days). “How are things going with that NGO lady, eh?”

Dawit came out of the open tent with his mother, who was carrying water and dates.

“Why are you hollering?” Ibrahim asked, looking around as if searching for the explanation.

Dawit’s mother was a petite woman with prominent cheekbones and brown eyes. Her hair was wavy, natural in curl and color. A gap between her front teeth made her girlish figure even more attractive. There was a gentleness to her features, but her voice was rough, harsh, and commanding. His father was the opposite, each word came out measured, sharpened, and weighted down with care.

“This is my normal voice,” she said, glaring up at Ibrahim, arms akimbo.

“Her name is Judy, and we’re doing well. She’s teaching me English—”

“English!? You don’t even know Amharic. How are you learning another language when you don’t even know your own?” Dawit’s mother sucked her teeth.

“And what does she get in all of this?” Asefaw asked.

“Well, you know, she teaches me English, and I share with her some of my God-given talents,” Ibrahim said, winking and swaying his hips back and forth.

Asefaw and Dawit’s father laughed at Ibrahim and shook their heads. Dawit’s mother rolled her eyes and went back inside the tent.

“Hey, I’m just trying to find my camp-wife like you did, Hailu,” Ibrahim said.

“That’s no easy feat,” Dawit’s father replied.

Dawit’s parents had been together for almost six years, but they were only married for three months before Dawit was born. They always marked their anniversary on his birthday for some reason, which was annoying. It was his birthday! Who cares about an anniversary?

Uncle Ibrahim told him that when Dawit’s mother arrived at camp, she had many suitors, navy men, Yemenis from town, and men who’d barely escaped death, like his father and his uncles. But there was no one she loved like Dawit’s father, the kindest man she had ever met, she once said. Yet she’d made him beg and plead for months before she finally chose him. She had him sink to his knees, in the rain, as if he was reciting a well-worn prayer in a forlorn murmur. Except the rain his father felt was his mother’s tears. She was a proud woman, but the nights in the camp were cold and long and dreary. There was no electricity. Even in the light of a full moon, there was no glow to their surroundings. She was glad that she didn’t have to live in that darkness alone anymore. A woman by herself didn’t stand much of a chance.

Since his father didn’t have the money for it, he proposed with a ring that he’d carved from a tree branch. She didn’t wear it often because it pricked her finger, and it was too small—an unwelcome reminder of how much weight she’d put on during the pregnancy. Dawit’s parents never talked about those days—all that he knows, he’d heard from his uncles—but his mother must have been in a permanent state of fear. She was the only one who had a child in the camp, and children were the most vulnerable. They needed protection.

When the laughter of his uncles and his parents died down, they all turned their attention to Dawit. Where he’d been this whole time, and why he was drenched in sweat? He explained that the goat—a stray goat in the camp, believed to have some holy significance—had started chasing him. He knew they would believe this lie, for it had happened often enough. Dawit had had a target on his back ever since the day he’d yanked the goat’s tail, barely avoiding the sharp kick of its hooves. Since then, the goat had memorized his scent, and every time it caught wind of him, it chased him for hours. That’s when Dawit learned that goats have excellent memories and are way smarter than people give them credit for, a fact relayed to him by Asefaw.

After he finished telling the lie about the goat, Dawit saw the man who had been chasing him walking up to their tent with a menacing look. Wide-eyed, Dawit caught at his upper lip, trying to think. He thought about running again, but there was nowhere else to go.

“There you are, you little monkey,” the man said, pointing at him.

Dawit took a step back, hitting one of the poles that held up the tent. The man faced his father. “Hailu, you better watch your kid. He stole from my shop today and had me chasing after him around camp. If you don’t discipline this child—”

“Don’t tell us how to raise our child, Khalid. What did he steal?” It was his mother who replied, standing behind Dawit with a hand on his shoulder, eyes narrowed.

“The tangerines in his pocket.”

Dawit looked down, his face red now. The truth poked out of his pocket. In the heat of telling his fabricated story, he had forgotten all about the damn tangerines. He kept his head down. His father asked how much they cost, paid Khalid, and calmly reassured him that it would not happen again.

“Oh, and Khalid, call him a monkey again, and I’ll make sure to knock your teeth out,” Ibrahim added with his jaw clenched and his body erect like a boxer waiting to get in the ring.

Khalid looked over his shoulder, spat on the ground, and walked away.

Fruit was a luxury that his parents rarely indulged in, and Dawit was tired of asking his parents for money they never had. He had stolen from Khalid’s fruit stand a few times before. His greed was the only reason he got caught this time, stuffing more into his pockets than his shorts could hold. But Khalid was an asshole, always yelling at his customers as if he was doing them a favor by taking their money. He overcharged for his products, knowing that folks in camp wouldn’t make the six-mile trip down the mountain to buy from the stores in town. Khalid was ugly on the outside, too, with his buck teeth and slanted smile.

Khalid also hated the Habesha people in the camp, even though he was half-Ethiopian himself—a part of him that he refused to acknowledge.

“You little scoundrel, you’re making trouble in the camps, eh,” Ibrahim added, only half joking. He kicked Dawit, softly, with his open-toed rubber slide sandals. Dawit felt the pointy sharpness of Ibrahim’s toes, but the pain paled in comparison to the beating that he knew was to come.

His mother’s weapon of choice varied: his father’s belt, a tree branch, her bare hands, the back of a wooden spatula, sandals. When her patience was entirely worn away, she would simply use her words. His mother knew how to cut with her tongue the way a surgeon cut through flesh with a scalpel. Didn’t matter if you’d dodged bullets. You could never survive her sharp tongue.

Now Dawit felt his mother’s firm cupped hand smack the back of his head. Then she yanked him by the collar of his shirt, dragged him inside the tent, and threw him to the corner. He stumbled trying to gain his balance, arms outstretched. He fell to the ground, dust rising and clouding his view. He heard his mother unpin the covers and pull them down from the side. More dust blew. Dawit grabbed the tree pole at the center of the tent and put his other hand on his knee to lift himself up.

He heard his uncles protesting on his behalf. “Genet, take it easy. He’s just a child,” they said, but she waved them off. In their voices he also heard his father’s silence. Dawit’s father rarely, if ever, intervened on his behalf when he got his whippings, so it didn’t surprise him. The expression on his father’s face confirmed his approval of the punishment, but he never uttered a word, pretending to maintain some form of diplomatic detachment. Even when speaking, with his head tipped back, he gave the appearance of listening. Everyone loved this measured quality about him, and they came to seek his counsel to settle disputes, just as they had on the navy ship when he was their lieutenant. But Dawit hated him for it.

Still, he was thankful that his father never got involved, never joining in or laying a hand on him. The last time his father laid a hand on him, Dawit was bedridden for a week. His mother had to apply Vaseline to the left side of his face every morning. That’s all it took. Just one slap to knock him unconscious. Even when he recovered, a sense of dizziness would come over him randomly, the kind of dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble.

He could still taste the salt from his father’s hand. It all started with that day. The day when his only desire was to leave, to go down the winding paths of the mountain where the camp stood and visit the city below, the one made of marble and cement with banks, factories, and a school with kids his age.

On his daily walks with his mother he would see the harbor where the docks were high over black water that slammed against the retaining walls, and the stone steps descended, made slippery by seaweed. The sight of someone sliding and falling always made them laugh. From their vantage point, he could make out diminished forms, all wearing shawls over their heads, climbing up boats and vessels, saying their farewells. The people remaining behind would stay fixed to the ground, their eyes following the ship until it rounded the cape. He’d never seen a boat come back, as if the city below only knew departures, not returns. Just like the camp.

His uncles’ stories made the allure of the city even greater. Stories of a blind man with a cheetah on a leash and girls dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils and half-revealed. Stories that praised the flesh of camel meat cooked over fires of seasoned cherry wood and sprinkled with sweet oil. Stories of old men with the odor of elephants after the rain. No story was repeated, each tale came with a new discovery of the same city. Much unlike their lives here, where the inhabitants repeat the same scenes, the same speeches with variously combined accents, opening alternate mouths in identical yawns.

That day, when his father slapped him, his mother was out getting water and his father and uncles were out in the markets, in the city below. Dawit was perched on an olive tree, and he thought he could make out his father in the part of town that was overladen with ornaments and offices. He jumped down, scraped his knee, and walked to the entrance of the camp where there was a large gate usually manned by a sleeping guard. The door was open and no one who knew him was around. He ran down the winding path that repeated itself along circular lines, all the way to the city below where the streets were long and straight, the houses clumped at intervals and separated by open slots that made up the alleys.

He moved in the direction of people and animals shouting, that’s where the market was. He didn’t see a blind man with a cheetah, but he did see blind men tapping their canes on the city’s cobblestones. He advanced through with his head turned back, just like his uncle’s taught him to do if he was walking late and he sensed that he might be in danger. He could hear the voice of people rising steadily, interrupting one another, huffing, bantering, laughing.

In contrast, the camp felt like an unfinished copy of the city below. No walls, no ceilings, no floors, no windows. The camp had nothing that could even make it seem like the city below, except for the water wells that rise vertically where the houses should be and the ditches that spread out horizontally where the floors should be. You would think that somebody built this place that they called home on a whim, leaving before the bricklayers arrived, making it feel like they were planted there at random.

Dawit’s father was exiting the market when he saw him playing soccer with a random group of boys while others were taking shelter from the rain under an arcade. A voluptuous vibration stirred the city and made the game even more exciting, as if they were playing in an actual football stadium. The other boys stopped playing by the time Dawit realized his father was behind him. He turned around to see his father’s giant hand covering his view in complete darkness. He doesn’t remember much after that. By the time he woke up he was back in their tent, bandages and Vaseline covering the left side of his face and part of his left eye. His father avoided the sight of him and his parents rarely spoke for a week.

His mother kept saying “my baby, my baby. I’ll kill him if I have to,” when Dawit first woke up. He felt bad for the tension and strife his actions generated. All he wanted to do was to see the city below, to live like they live for just a day. To be seen and see other children. To be a character in his uncles’ stories.

Many days after that day, his uncles told him that there were many stories about the city that they haven’t told him—bad, scary things. They said children were always disappearing down there. The camp was much safer for him. If something were to happen to him, his mother would lose her mind and end up like the crazy lady at camp that was always making high-pitched whistling sounds. She too was once a mother to a child that died in the city. Dawit didn’t want that for his mother, or anyone. The image alone weighted him with guilt for weeks as he walked through the camp with eyes now digging into the dirt, the foundations, the wells. Ever since that day, his mother was the only one that could beat him. Her beatings were far less severe but far more frequent.

Later that night, after his mother was finished with him, Dawit watched his father put down his grip on the plastic chair outside their tent and gaze about him. He dragged his body in muffled steps over the rocky ground, ready to call it a night, but he turned his head as if the wind spoke to him. Then the flaps of the tent closed, and his father came in, hands first.

Dawit knew those hands had toiled on his grandfather’s coffee farm, weathered and worn, hard and beaten. They’d clenched, hammered, screwed, pulled, strained, and then cracked. His knuckles were knobs that stood out under the chapped skin. His hands betrayed his father’s ruggedness, the scars leaving a trail that charted his journey across the Red Sea. They were the same hands of the man who had given him life. But Dawit also knew—from his uncles’ war stories and the glint of moonlight that pierced through the empty space where his father’s left pinky finger should have been—that those hands, had also taken a life away. They had nearly taken his own life away.

PARABLE OF THE CHILDREN IN THE FIELD