He had no way of knowing if the house had a zebenya or if the owner would take him for a burglar. He didn’t mind if he was caught — he was too tired to care and maybe even a little crazed enough to be fearless. He sat on the steps of the porch and waited until the neighborhood dogs stopped barking. He didn’t care if the proprietor of the house was in the vicinity or not. All he wanted was a moment without being interrupted. It was quiet and no light was coming from inside the house.
He didn’t want to do it in a familiar place. The alcohol gave him the necessary courage and unreasonableness. He didn’t care about anything anymore — it was time for him to sleep. He was in such a hurry to get it over with that he didn’t even care about the consequences of breaking into a house. They could throw his body into a river for all he cared. All he wanted was to turn off the light and go to sleep. Besides, the light had not been great while it lasted. He wasn’t grateful for the light, he was bothered by it, and if he could, he would have turned it off permanently. Had he had some respect for the light, he would have gently blown out the candle, but he didn’t. He had no respect for anything at all, including himself, and he wanted to kick the switch and kill the light, in this strange midnight hour, in this strange unfamiliar neighborhood, inside somebody’s home he did not care to know. He decided here is where he wanted to sleep.
His head kept on replaying the sounds from his past, but he was helpless to drive these memories away. He couldn’t stand it, and he feared he might lose control over himself and start making noises.
The rain was still falling softly, but he was sweating. He searched around the house and found what he was looking for. The rope was just the right length and strength. He imagined it had been used recently for skinning sheep, but he couldn’t be sure. He believed it was placed there, on the iron pole, waiting patiently for him to come and use it. He took it down and gently made it into a noose. His hands were shaking but the tumult in his soul was ebbing, the rain that had been washing over his face tasting salty.
In the elementary school somebody referred to him as poor... and he broke their tooth with a rock. The next person who called him poor was a girl, and they were playing volleyball and he couldn’t hit the ball hard enough. He sweated his anger out and let it go. She was a girl, he told himself, and she was his first love. Later, he was disillusioned when he first saw her naked. She had big scars inside each of her thighs, like somebody had tried to stab her and had missed. She told him a dramatic story and he pretended he wasn’t interested, but in reality he was merely disillusioned because he’d thought she was immaculate and unblemished.
2 a.m. to 3 a.m.
He slept at length. It took, however, a long time to fall asleep, and none of it was pleasant. He felt as if he were an engine being turned on and then shut off, his body oscillating between two dramatic states of being.
Then he felt like he was being dragged out of his body, and while he would have liked to fly to the roof and toward the sky, he stayed until his body stopped kicking and became still.
It finally occurred to him while he was floating. It all became clear then, as he saw himself hanging on the high iron gate, a rope attaching him to one of the spikes.
It occurred to him that he was finally sleeping, resting.
There was no way of telling what might have happened if Rachel had not died so suddenly. He might have continued living even if he knew her death was caused by his neglect. Rachel had accepted her fate of loving Henock no matter what. The violent and unpleasant nights were her attempts to not accept this fact, thinking that escaping Henock meant escaping death. But something changed. Henock would have accepted her death if Rachel, after the struggles and tribulations, had finally given up on him. At last, she could stop loving him and go to the grave screaming curses and calling him names, just like she would do when they fought in the past. After she got sick, however, she had changed. Rachel had grown exceedingly silent and unapologetically loving. She stopped hiding her private feelings for Henock and would show affection openly. If she had feared that her feelings could spoil the relationship, that fear had completely disappeared. She would kiss his hands, which she’d never dared to do before unless he was fast asleep. After her illness, she started loving him all over again, this time softly. It was like receiving the love from a mother he never had. He’d had all kinds of experiences in life except being loved. Anger and distrust were the true parents who had raised him. What he gave to Rachel was the world he had grown up in.
Henock was not ready for someone like Rachel when he met her. She had already accepted her fate of loving him when he wasn’t even ready to accept himself.
Although he had spent his entire life with this trauma that had been mounting and suffocating him exponentially, he might have continued on if she were there. He would have lived alongside his multiple anguishes, drinking to oblivion, taking each day as it came. But after she died without his consent, something from the center of his soul drew the line. He had to give up, and he had no idea until his consciousness had punished him with sleeplessness. He didn’t think that time would run out, but in less than sixty hours, he faced the cruelest possible psychological deterioration: haunted by neighbors, chased by his own debacle of memories; devoured by his own guilt, then to be finished off with one final, dying wish of only wanting to sleep.
3 a.m. to 6 a.m.
He stayed hovering above his corpse until morning. He stayed not because he wanted to, but because he was anchored by some force and could not leave. He floated above the body and felt the coldness of it below him. The dogs kept barking and howling at the moon until morning.
It was the maid who first got up and found him. She was not the screaming kind, so she fainted.
9:50 a.m.
The police and the coroner were called. Nobody wanted nor dared to touch the body, so they made a provincial guard and another boy from the neighborhood carry him down. When the boy cut the rope, the body fell on him and he scrambled out from under it with a muffled scream. They helped the boy up, taking the rope from the corpse’s neck and throwing it away over the fence.
The moment they cut the noose he was free to go. Henock went up so quickly that he couldn’t tell how his body turned out or how they fought over the rope that was priceless in the black-magic market. The owner of the house couldn’t stop cursing as he turned the body over with his foot. The police officer dug into the corpse’s pockets and took out a wallet. It doesn’t contain any form of identification, the officer thought, but there’s plenty of money. The owner of the house cursed some more when he realized he had to spend the day explaining things at the police station.
10:06 a.m. (the end and beginning)
Henock went to the paramount zenith, with no sky having a limit, no star looking down from above it. The top: the end, the base flat as a table and final as death. Henock could look down at all there was and is, all below, all above.
Of the Poet and the Café
by Girma T. Fantaye
Beherawi Theater