Make Your Roads Glad for Us
Alula Selassie
Our grandfather told my sister and me stories about the pre-Christian gods as if they were ghost stories. Behind his back, Meron suggested that he was afraid of God, not in the faithful way but in the way we were afraid of our periods. That made me collapse laughing. As we approached puberty, she and I fought like intertwined snakes. Since we last clashed and she left me behind, I’ve been waiting for someone to make me laugh like she did.
Homer called the Ethiopians eschatoi andron, the most remote of men. He must’ve known our grandfather. Even before Meron vanished into the hills, he kept his heart buried. He would read in the garden all day, enveloped in tendrils of incense smoke. The silver glint of his cross poked through the gossamer shawl hiding his lips. Every now and then he’d bring out the black and white photograph of us when we were five, arms around each other. One of us smiling directly into the camera, the other staring at something or someone out of frame. No one could remember which girl was which.
Even though we were identical, boys only gravitated towards her. Probably because they sensed in her a defiance we didn’t share.
“Our people were the first to worship gods,” our grandfather said. “With such long familiarity comes strain.” Attar ultimately yielded the morning star to Lucifer. Beher, god of the sea, died when we became a landlocked country. Stories about serpent kings who ruled the land and devoured everything that people grew; pagan mysteries imported by merchants and practiced in secret in the forests surrounding our village.
Ever since various species of human scalped each other for dominance of the highlands, inexplicable occurrences have cropped up like fossils in these hills. The townspeople hardly blinked when Meron’s search party returned from the forest gloom with a series of ailments: vomiting, nose bleeds, lapses in memory. The hyenas laughed unseen. My aunt scoured the woods for several days and nights until she started losing her hair in clumps.
When I first find out that I’m pregnant, I lie awake thinking about armored bugs that sever the tongues of fish and then live in their mouth, gorging on stolen food until the fish wastes away. I crave spiced heaps of crimson beef. In my bones, I sense a presence observing me. Gods or unearthly consciousness, what’s the difference if both are so unfathomable? I feel chained to a rock in the middle of a shoreless ocean.
The last person to ever see my sister was an outsider named Zelalem. Years later, my uncle told me that he was a student from Addis, hiding from the tentacles of the state. That’s why the night after she disappeared, he came to my mother and not the local police. The shadows of his eyes gave him an impression of the zār. He told her he was driving his cousin’s car up the road behind the school, around noon, when he saw my sister walking along the forest’s edge. He identified the red sweater she left the house with that day, which was really mine. As he drove past, she turned her head and their eyes met for a flying glimpse. Then she turned off the roadside and walked into the woods as if she had a set destination in mind. Days later, Zelalem evaporated from the face of the earth too. My uncle says someone turned him in; our neighbor swears he saw him in America. I have good reason to doubt all that. The secrets in my family are treasured like heirlooms.
In those days of the terror, the whole country was inclined to keep secrets. The military ruled by the gun the way lions’ teeth both carry young and tear flesh. They foisted clumsy reforms on the people while armed bands invaded homes and snatched them out of their beds. Countless families lost relatives without a trace, stories that will never be told—so what was one more missing village girl?
The guttural cries of hens fleeing the rooster’s advances woke me up that gray morning. Her side of the bed was cold, her pillow still damp with tears. She didn’t tell me where she was going.
For months afterwards came rumors of Meron wandering the moonlit hills. The rumors ossified into lore. My mother cried herself blind. I learned I couldn’t exist as one. I need to be observed to crystallize who I am.
In a fountain of sunlight between gnarled fig trees, Meron reads our mother’s spellbook. Its parchment smells of earth and perfume. Or am I the one reading it? It doesn’t matter. These conflicts are hollow.
Our grandfather used to tell us our mother’s grandmother never married because she had visions. Pregnancy unleashes dreams unlike any I’ve ever had. In these half awakenings, the forces that took my sister reveal themselves to me in shades. They come at night and replicate me and my unborn child, atom by atom. Replicate is probably the wrong word, because it implies an original. None of us have priority over the others. We sisters all think of ourselves as the precedent.
They take my sisters with them across pillars of glowing dust. Entangled with each other, we form a web of shared thoughts and sensations. Boundaries of self blur and dissolve. Sometimes the fear is primordial. We see mirrors so distant the sun will be dead before its light can touch them. In forgiving ourselves we forgive our sister for not taking us with her.
When I’m an old woman, surrounded by lion-haired grandchildren, my sisters visit me and are as young and full of mirth as the day they left.
Alula Selassie is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Wharton School. His work also appears in the Maine Review. He dedicates this story to the people of Tigray.
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