| Warm Milk
and Closed Windows |
| Today,
I am longing for milk in a way I haven’t ever before, not even as a young
girl.I am in a bus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with friends, people I’ve
known for a year and a half.We have swapped stories of outhouse catastrophes,
teaching successes, intestinal maladies.Dave, the hippy Ohioan, sits on
one side of me and Kim, the chain-smoking New Yorker sits on the other
side My thighs are glazed sticks of dynamite smoldering under my skirt.
I know that
in Gambella there is not only milk, but cold milk like the milk you have
as a little girl, after rock skimming and tree climbing. Kim last had cold
milk on her vacation to South Africa. I keep going to hot-milk countries,
and I look forward to Gambellan people that play checkers with cork pieces
and the cold milk that I thought nothing of as a child but now look forward
to with ludicrous, laughable zeal. I tell Kim how much I miss milk.“Tell
me about it.” she exhales her smoke, and she’s so urbane it kills me. |
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Kim’s teeth
are yellow-brown from cigarettes and perhaps from something else. She
is only twenty-five.
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In the Addis
station, we sit in the bus and wait while men work on the engine. Under
the vast sky, girls sell oranges and lemons from plastic bowls; boys
have metal pails filled with bottles of Coca-Cola and Sprite.The bus
attendants are incomprehensible auctioneers yelling destinations to people
who don’t listen. |
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| We sit in
the front seat to avoid backward stares. Kim smokes furiously and rivulets
of sweat roll lazily down the three of us, making white trails down our
dusty skin. We are in an old ‘78 Cacciamalli bus, the only
decent thing the Italians left behind before abandoning attempts at colonization.
The trip is
supposed to be fun. I have never traveled with a man before. I feel
lucky because it all seems rather like an easy day. “Yeah, I noticed
that too,” Kim said through a nicotine cloud, “Incredible isn’t it?
I thought maybe it was me, but no, you’re right. No one is really bothering
us.”
Dave had just
left to relieve himself somewhere off the main road, probably an outhouse
behind a nearby suk.
The bus is
full, and balsa stools were pinned down the center aisle under the weight
of passengers. |
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Offshore
Resources Gallery
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| Already a
middle-aged man of about forty-three is growing cantankerous, yelling in
Amharic, “Close the windows. The breeze will make me sick.” He is two rows
behind us, and in the seat between is a woman breast-feeding her baby.
I turn around
and say in polite Amharic “The bus isn’t moving yet. Please, my brother,
we are hot.” The angry man is a highborn red, with the expansive, open
forehead of the rich Ethiopians who live in the capital. The man
is adamant.
He hovers over
the woman with the baby, and Kim says “Fresh air is healthy, it is the
heat and all the people breathing that will make you sick.” But the
man stands up and yelling, he reaches forward in front of him, pushing
the woman with the baby in his attempt to push me from the window.
He is slamming the window shut and the woman’s head wrap is undone and
the baby is free of the nipple, wailing in a round siren cry, and I feel
full enough with anger that I grab his arm as it extends outward.
“You push
a woman and a baby, because of a window?” I say. He slaps my
arm away when I open the window; he shuts it, and I open the window again. |
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| I am angry
and I slap his hand repeatedly. Kim stands, too, and is yelling with me
in Amharic, and now it seems the whole bus is having a really wonderful
time. There are the old men in the cloth wraps, barefoot, with walking
sticks; they murmur to the man that we don’t know any better. The old women
yell at us to obey. The baby is crying louder. Someone helps the mother
climb over people in the aisles and sit on a stranger’s lap. I already
know I have lost.
Dave returns
in the middle of the pushing. Kim is pointing in the man’s face and
talking of God, and I am now screaming that I am hot, and I am calling
this man a du-riay, which means something like no-good-piece-of-trash.
All I want is to see Gambellans and drink cold milk from a glass.
The man lowers his hands when he sees Dave and stops looking at us entirely.
He says to Dave, “Tell them to close the window!”. |
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Offshore
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| Dave’s wide
eyes, his open jaw, and red face tell me this is completely new for him.
He looks at us with compassion, as if it were new for us, too. Dave turns
into some absurd figure, full tall, moving in front of us, shoving us behind
with a bold elbow and shoulder. I imagine there is a red cape slung about
him.
He yells in
Amharic and breaks off into English because he can’t concentrate enough
to yell properly. He gesticulates, raking his hands through his strawberry
blond hair. The son of a mailman and homemaker points in the man’s face
and pushes his arm back, saying in Amharic “You do not hit women!” and
“This is unacceptable. I don’t even believe this!” The man is uncomfortable,
puzzled, and sits down silently.
Dave is shaking
and muttering to himself. Kim and I are calm now, and we look at Dave,
then each other, exchanging quizzical glances, but when he sits beside
me, I pull away on the seat and lean closer to Kim. I feel the point of
the argument has shifted. The baby is still crying, and the mother
is across the bus-aisle looking at me blankly. Dave’s hands are trembling
and he clenches them at his sides, turning back repeatedly, giving the
man a hard stare and muttering “Absolutely bloody incredible. Unbelievable.”
For a moment
I feel bad for Dave, but then I suddenly hate him and do not know why.
I am angry at this virginity of his. His never having had to fight for
things. When I look around I see amusement and vicarious interest
of the usual sort, but Dave being around somehow makes the fight seems
a bigger deal than it is when I am alone and it happens. I want to punch
him in the face. I look hard at the women and the little girls. I search
for something not there.
I look at Dave
and in a sharp movement, I slam the window shut. Dave snaps. His
blue eyes are wild, fierce. “Don’t close it, for him.” he says moving his
hand to indicate the man. I say through gritted teeth “We always
have to fight. If you weren’t here, I would’ve lost the argument, so the
window stays closed.”
Kim is silent,
stunned with a realization, and says to Dave, “This is actually new
for you, isn’t it?” Dave is tight-faced and steely, and he slowly deflates
as his eyes drift downward to his lap and his face grows flush and his
hands release from fistedness.
Ten minutes
later, we are off towards Gambella. The music is blaring, and Dave’s
face has grown pale. At the next stop, I get a Coca-Cola for him, a Sprite
for Kim, and for myself, a Fanta orange, which is really just Sunkist.
I buy the drinks from a girl, the same as a boy, since she has not yet
developed. She is about eight, I think, and she is not wearing a
skirt because she cannot afford one, not even the town-made ones with the
cheap, fluorescent pink fabric. She has ripped shorts and the hole shows
her bottom, though no one notices. I give her a trip, climb back on the
bus, and give the sodas to Dave and Kim. I remember it is still four days
to Gambella, and all I think about is a cold glass of milk.
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