“So what did you do then?” I asked, hoping he’d just wished her luck and walked away, but I already knew him well enough to know that he hadn’t. And I couldn’t walk away myself because his story now had a hold on me.
He continued: “I responded to Marta, ‘Good evening to you as well,’ and added, ‘Don’t I know you?’ I thought that maybe she just hadn’t given me a proper look yet, but when she turned and looked me up and down with that judgment-filled face, she said, ‘No, I do not believe we have met.’
“We began to talk. I didn’t say much, just listened. She said she was going to stop by church to give thanks for how life had turned around for her. I realized this was my opportunity to ask about her life — maybe she would have a flash of recollection then. She told me some general details. She said there was a time she’d been in prison during the Derg, but that was then. I told her I had been thrown in prison too, by mistake, and she said, ‘What a shame.’ She leaned a little closer to me, so I got the courage to ask why she’d been arrested, and she deflected, saying, ‘Oh, I don’t remember, and besides, does it even matter?’ ‘Of course it matters,’ I said. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘They’d target you for the most absurd things.’ She shrugged as if she didn’t want to give it much thought. I imagined exactly what they must have said to her anyway. They’d accused her of being a bourgeois princess, more interested in the state of her closet than the very state in which she lived, skipping rallies to do her hair and dodging speeches to read fashion magazines. That’s what they might have said to her because that’s what I’d told them. That she was a nonbeliever, a threat to the cause. Those were the words I’d used to trade her freedom for my own. It had to be done.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“I’m sure you’d rather not be here.” He stared at me with despair. “You left and avoided these difficult truths. You haven’t had to see the heavy weight some of us carry around. Do you think I’m ashamed of having survived the way I did? Why should I be?”
I didn’t defend myself; what had I done?
“I never said I’m a good man,” he went on. “I was just a regular man, but the Derg, it made me... it made me and it unmade me. It took a regular man and then heightened my worst instincts. It gave me the permission to be worse than I was ever meant to be or would have been in another place, another time. It gave my sins a platform, gave them cover, gave them cause. And for whatever reason I still can’t explain, I took the Derg up on this opportunity to abandon my good senses and do as I pleased. I believe — really believe — there was good in me once. I guess I don’t know that for sure, but I think it’s true. I think I was decent once. I could have been a regular kind of man. Maybe I didn’t have the courage to be better, or didn’t have the luxury to be better. I couldn’t avoid the hard choices. I was here, made here, unmade here.”
He clasped my hand and held it closer, and the warmth of his breath on my skin began to repulse me. Why did I feel like I owed this stranger something? He seemed frail, and despite his bitterness toward me, I felt like he needed me. I felt his forehead again, which was a bit hot. He put his cheek to my hand, pursing his dry lips.
“So the rain was just pouring down now, and the cars were whizzing by loudly, and Marta was almost shouting, telling me she’d not only survived the experience of prison, but that it also made her more self-reliant and tough. As awful as prison was, she had to invent ways to endure what she thought would be unbearable, what she thought would break her. She said she struggled but eventually created a space to be calm within herself. Gradually she was able to create a space to let joy enter her life as well, even there in prison — they were the most fleeting moments, but they were something. She found a way to make those fleeting moments last. She found a way to forget, which was the hardest accomplishment of her life. And when she learned how to do that, she found a way toward purpose. She hadn’t cared about school before because she hadn’t cared about much, she said. But she made a choice to get educated, and she was able to do it. The Derg loved to throw intellectuals in jail — the students, the professors, the writers — and the prisons during the Derg were the best schools in the country, as some say. Marta also met her husband there, and when they were both released or escaped or otherwise got free, they fled together to America, swept up in that wave of refugees, and landed safely on a shore called New England where they went back to school and started a family. She got a good job and didn’t look back on that time except to acknowledge that she was lucky in the end.”
Gedeyon stopped to catch his breath, and I said, “Well that’s about as good an outcome as you could hope for.”
“You could say that.” He pressed his head to my hand once more. I could feel his fever now. He told me that he’d forgiven himself for the wrongs of the Derg, and damn anyone who judged him for that. “Damn you too, if you’re judging,” he said. But he hadn’t found a way to forgive himself for his other sins, and I saw then that he was making me his confessor.
“Is there someone I can take you to talk to?” I asked him.
“Would you rather me tell this to a friend? A friend who I want to respect and remember me well? Or tell my priest, who I have known all my life and who I respect? My family, who will carry forth my name? My colleagues in whose esteem I hope to remain? Would you rather me call it out from the rooftops and confess to the city?... Or should I tell a stranger visiting from halfway across the world who looks like she doesn’t make the return trip all that often? And who has managed to be a child of the Derg without carrying the same load, but who should shoulder it as well?”
And he paused, and I saw the evidence I’d been searching for all along, an empty bottle of pills falling from his pocket, and I couldn’t tell if these had been to help him or if they were what made him sick. I couldn’t even tell if he’d taken them.
When I asked him, he just said, “Listen, child, to my last words.”
What could I do but hear him out and share the burden of his secret now? I knew if I said nothing, he’d continue, and he did.
“I asked Marta, ‘What was it like, being a refugee?’ ‘It’s not for the faint of heart,’ she said, sweeping her short curly hair off her face with her left hand. The strands caught the light and shined, and I thought I’d never seen her look so sophisticated, so strong, so completely out of reach. I was drawn to her, so I pulled in a little closer to listen.
“She told me, ‘Not even my mother knew where I’d gone when I fled Ethiopia, not at first, but eventually I was able to send a letter, and then we corresponded as much as we could. When my family finally saw me after thirty-five years, they told me how good I looked for someone who’d come back from the dead.’
“I was gazing at Marta, clenching my fist so tight I felt my fingernails bending back, so I put my hands in my pockets and looked at the beams coming off the car headlights, circling her like she was encased in jewels, her body haloed by the glow of the streetlight behind her. She is still something, I thought. Not just someone who has reclaimed what’s lost, but someone somehow ennobled by loss. I don’t know how to explain this, but I looked at her like she was either my proudest creation or my most wretched punishment. I don’t exactly know what I felt, but with false pride I told Marta about my own life, the basics: I was a chemistry and math professor, had a wife once, but it didn’t last long. No children, my family mostly gone. I lived freely. Mine was what I called a content and unencumbered existence with routines, stability, and modest comforts, which was more than I’d been born with, and so I felt successful, for what was success if not to die with more than what you had coming into the world?