“Are you sure?” he asked quietly, the words hanging in the thick air between them. He didn’t bother repeating himself. He knew.
Girma smelled the fear on his son the moment Robel walked into his office the next morning.
“What did you do?” the general barked, pushing Robel into the carvings in the oak door that listed his military honors in Ge’ez.
Robel shrank, his voice cracking as he tried to relay the information. His head spinning, he explained how the girl had come to feel like home. He wanted to do this right, he insisted, eyes trained on the floor.
“I love her,” he whispered, his attention suddenly turned to the row of rifles hanging above his father’s desk. They shone with a menacing gleam, crafted to be beautiful even in their violent precision. Robel gulped as the last word escaped his lips, a foolhardy attempt at pulling it back into himself.
Girma laughed, a throaty snarl that rose from the pit of his stomach. Spitting at his son’s feet, he growled two words, each its own sentence: “Fix. It.”
Turning to walk away from the trembling young man before him, the general mumbled something in Amharic through gritted teeth. Reeling from the encounter, Robel could hardly hear what escaped his father’s lips, but he didn’t need to.
“Or else I will.”
When Tigist woke up in Tikur Anbessa Hospital a week later, her nurse did not address her. Instead, she turned to Almaz, who was reading Baldwin with heavy eyelids in a wooden chair beside her niece’s reclining bed.
“She’s awake,” the nurse announced plainly, meeting neither the woman’s eyes nor Tigist’s. “Maybe she’ll talk now.”
Almaz had been sitting in the cold room with her niece for seventeen hours. Each second had felt longer than the last, but she didn’t dare sleep. The thin girl lying in the bed looked more fragile than Almaz had ever seen her. She was gaunt, broken. With her body a maze of tubes and plaster, Tigist was lucky to be alive. The doctors had regarded Almaz with concerned eyes when they asked about her niece: Who would want to hurt someone so young, with eyes so warm? What could she have done to earn a beating reserved for prisoners of war?
“Teseberech,” Almaz heard herself telling Tigist’s mother when she could finally access the phone in the hospital’s graying lobby. “She fell down the stairs on campus. I am here with her now. The doctors said not to worry.”
Before racing back toward Tigist’s room, Almaz spun a toothless lie she knew her sister would not question until the girl recovered. “She was racing to class. Beka, she missed a step and so she fell. That’s all.
“I’ll pay for it,” she’d added before hanging up abruptly as she caught sight of the clock. Tigist might be awake now, and Almaz had no time to argue with the girl’s mother over money she knew her sister did not have. Tigist needed her aunt; everything else could wait.
“Tigist? Can you hear me? Almaz negn,” she offered tentatively when the girl’s eyes first opened. “You... you fell, lijey. But you will be okay.”
The girl tried to move toward her aunt, but the IV yanked her back. Eyes bloodshot and filled with tears, she strained to move a bruised hand toward her stomach. Her breathing quickened, her body tensing. Turning her gaze downward, Tigist whispered: “They can take me, but not my baby.”
She couldn’t lose this baby, not to the swarm of uniformed men who’d descended upon her. She blinked back tears as images of their terrifying grins played themselves back on an infinite loop.
“Babiye!” she’d screamed as the first man pinned her arms back so another could kick her so viciously that she lost consciousness. The word came back to Tigist as a whisper now. “Babiye.”
Almaz sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me? We could’ve fixed it. This would never have happened.”
Almaz had known her niece was gallivanting around the city with some general’s son. She’d warned the girl not to get too close. Powerful men were dangerous, their lust for dominion more potent than any love they might claim to feel for a woman. Powerful men enchanted easily, but their affections waned with all the grace of poison.
By the time Almaz saw the two of them together, waltzing around Shiro Meda in search of a second gabi for Robel’s room, she knew it was too late. This boy, half teeth and half arrogance, had gotten under her niece’s skin.
It did not matter to the girl that the boy’s father was a man whom her aunt spoke of only in hushed tones. Almaz had called her that evening, whispering into a pay phone near Meskel Adebabay with fearful contempt: “The only thing that boy’s father loves more than his son is his power, Tigist. Do not stand in his way; you will be trampled.”
The memory of those words filled the space between Almaz and Tigist for hours, the silence punctuated only by the staccato beeps of the machines attached to the girl’s body.
Robel had never defied his father before. Mischievous as he was, the boy had never transgressed beyond disobeying orders regarding his schoolwork or telling white lies about khat.
But when Robel ran up three flights of stairs at Tikur Anbessa and saw the girl he loved fighting for two lives Girma had tried to extinguish, his resolve ossified. He didn’t want to walk in his father’s footsteps if it meant this.
Breathless and full of youthful indignation, he laid his head in Tigist’s lap as she slept. Terrified, Robel had waited behind the hospital until he saw Almaz leave. She’d stormed out of the hospital after Tigist had fallen asleep, presumably to tell her superiors at the university that she would not be teaching class the rest of the week.
In Almaz’s absence, Robel cried thick, heavy tears into Tigist’s lap. He pressed his head against her stomach, praying for some sign of life as he knelt against the edge of her bed. The girl looked gray now, her skin purple in places where he’d once worshipped its brown richness.
His face a gnarled mess of tears and shame, Robel did not move when he heard Almaz’s footsteps approach. He knew she would be enraged at the sight of him. He knew she had a right to be. Still, even the jolt of her heel nearly puncturing his thigh could not match the blunt force of the words Almaz flung at him upon seeing that he’d sneaked his way into Tigist’s room.
“How dare you touch her? Her blood is on your hands already!” the woman heaved at him as the girl lay sleeping. “The best thing you can do for her is forget about her. May you and your father carry the shame of your sin until Satan calls you both home!”
Robel whimpered. Wiping tears from his face with scratched, ashen hands, he made a simple plea: “Let me fix it. Let me keep her safe. I will sacrifice my happiness to keep her alive.”
When Tigist landed in Washington, DC, she asked the first Ethiopian cabdriver she saw if she could use his cell phone to call Almaz.
The rest of the family had stopped speaking to her, content to pretend the foolish pregnant girl now leaving for America had never existed at all. The days preceding Tigist’s flight all seemed like a blur now. Only one thing stood out to her amid the dizzying sequence of packing, pain medication, and rushed goodbyes: Robel had never called.
Dialing Almaz’s number as the cabdriver smiled at her for two seconds too long, Tigist wished more than anything that she could apply her family’s miraculous power of memory erasure to Robel. If it weren’t for Robel, she wouldn’t be standing here alone, cold and vulnerable. If it weren’t Robel, she would still be home.