~ ~ ~
No, she concludes, she can’t go back. The book is one of life’s markers now, one of experience’s receipts destined to disappear one day, and now on this night it has, in this way. So she steps onto the train and is swept to the sanctuary of Berlin’s tunnels, before the last five minutes overwhelm her like a wave.
~ ~ ~
She’s black, Zan decides once and for all, pushing the laptop away. Fuck whether I have the right to make her so. My imagination gives me the right. Hearing a Ray Charles record when I was Parker’s age may not mean I know anything but it means that I can imagine something I wouldn’t have imagined otherwise. It’s a little like what Descartes said about God, that the fact men can imagine a god proves there must be one.
Viv receives an email from the Ethiopian journalist she hired. Hello Viv, it reads, this is to inform you that I have at once uncovered a most tantalizing lead and also confronted an unexpected obstacle in our search for Zema’s mother. Since we believe she was Muslim it narrows my investigation to suggest one of two different women, the first with family heritage in Oromia to the south and the other with no family in Ethiopia and who in fact may have grown up not in this country but somewhere in Eastern Europe and then immigrated. Of course few people who I meet are very willing to talk and the closer I come to answers then the more silent that people become but I persist and press on and hope to have more news soon.
~ ~ ~
For months the new president is the only thing that makes Zan happy, the only thing that interrupts the billowing gloom of his life. At the moment it doesn’t matter if this is delusion. By now Zan knows better than to place hope in any one thing or person; it may be that the fact of this particular presidency rather than its occupant is what cheers him, because it signals the existence of the politically miraculous. Zan also has identified the connection between the candidate of forty years ago whom he saw in the campus quad, whose presence ripped the fabric of the collective rationale to reveal behind it a national delirium, and this current man with so many parts of the country making up his form.
~ ~ ~
There has followed the new president’s election a mini-Era of Good Feelings, remarkable for the overwhelming sense of national crisis with which the feeling coexists. Zan finds the hysteria for the new president at once inspiring and unsettling, since it’s as unsustainable by the public as it is by the man himself.
Not everyone shares such sentiment. Skepticism crosses political and philosophical lines. I heartily dislike him, writes a good friend, an anarcho-syndicalist who lives in the Texas Panhandle. I never did and never can trust him. A prima donna with that damned smile I can’t look at and all his round-the-world photo ops who nonetheless is unwilling to make people afraid of him — the worst of both worlds. He’ll never be worth a shit.
~ ~ ~
Viv receives another email that is both exciting and disconcerting. Hello Viv, it reads, I am writing to alert you in regards to the search for Zema’s mother that the trail of the woman in Oromia has led to nothing but that I believe I draw closer to the other woman who is indicated to originally be from Czechoslovakia or Poland or Germany — perhaps you might contact the aunt and grandmother to see if at least they will confirm this? — and now may be here in Addis closer than we ever suspected, within a mere few kilometers of Zema’s orphanage. I hope to deliver good news soon.
~ ~ ~
In front of her laptop, staring at the email astounded, Viv says, “Czechoslovakia or Poland or Germany? Good lord. Sheba might not even be Ethiopian?”
“We are all Ethiopians!” Zan declares grandly and his wife glares at him. “Well, Sheba’s half Ethiopian anyway,” he points out.
“How can she not be Ethiopian?”
“The father is Ethiopian,” Zan persists. “In Muslim cultures, that counts.”
“The father isn’t Muslim,” she says. “Ethiopia isn’t a Muslim culture.”
“There are lots of Muslims in Ethiopia.”
“Twice as many Christians.”
“O.K.”
“Well.”
“Sheba is half Muslim. In the Muslim culture, the father counts and he’s Ethiopian.”
“But he’s not the half that’s Muslim,” she says.
“So he would count only if he were Muslim?” though Zan admits to himself that this discussion, his half in particular, doesn’t make sense to him anymore. “Why don’t you write to Sheba’s grandmother, like he suggests?”
~ ~ ~
Viv writes the email and sits before the laptop waiting as though an answer will appear immediately. I chose you to be her mother, is the answer when it comes from the grandmother, as translated by Sheba’s aunt, through God, almost exactly as she said to Viv two years ago.
The night before Viv receives the message that changes everything, Piranha disappears, having braved and broken through his high-voltage corral once and for all. Viv stands on the deck of the house calling, but only when Sheba howls her half of their duet does the dog howl back in the distance. It’s a howl that defies interpretation. Maybe it means goodbye, maybe it means so long, suckers, maybe it means help I’m being pursued by coyotes, maybe it means you try wearing one of these fucking electric collars and see how you like it. In any case, he’s gone.
~ ~ ~
Returning home from the radio station the next afternoon, Zan finds Viv fetally curled up on the couch in the family room. She buries her head in the cushion.
He sits next to her, puts his hand on her thigh. She doesn’t move; on the white cloud-shaped formica table that Parker always leaps over, her laptop is open. “Hey,” says Zan.
~ ~ ~
He looks at the laptop and an open emaiclass="underline" Hello Viv. I write to you with troubling news and that is the woman who I believe might be Zema’s mother appears to have disappeared under suspicious circumstances related to my questions about her. It is not clear if she has run afoul of the law and is in jail or something more ominous has taken place. It also is possible that she has fled the city or even the country. In any case if indeed there ever was someone at the end of the trail, now she has vanished. For reasons and by means too complicated to explain here, it would seem to have come to the attention of the authorities that you have been sending money to Zema’s grandmother and family which has raised suspicions of child-trafficking and the possibility that Zema was sold to you by the mother, though it is difficult to be certain how seriously they take this. It all is most unfortunate I know but is becoming a common concern as adoptions are on the rise. The police are not answering any questions but ask many and it is all most confusing I am afraid. For the moment nothing has happened to Zema’s family but an investigation seems under way and no one is saying anything and strongly I would suggest that whatever contact you have cease for a while and that any inquiries as to Zema’s mother stop as well. It also is possible that the woman in question is not Zema’s mother at all, this has not been established. I now must be careful with my investigations and perhaps go “undercover” awhile but should I learn more information I will attempt to send it along in as discreet a fashion as I can. I am sorry for this news.