These Dreams of You (29 page)

I
n the labyrinth, when she says to the driver, “No, this isn't right,” he turns and answers, Please. I can take you back to the car if you wish, he says, but if I do, you'll never find what you're looking for.

At the center of the quarter, in white rock that's part wall and part ground, is an entrance at an angle that's part door and part hole, and as it begins to rain, Viv steps down and in, ducking slightly though she's only a little over five feet tall. She passes through a cloud bled of light into a room or cavern just a bit less dark, as her eyes adjust to the stub of a single burning candle on the other side where she sees the young journalist whom she hired to find Sheba's mother. He rises from where he's sitting on the rock.

H
e says, “Hello, Viv,” and extends his hand. She says, “Are you hiding?” but he seems sanguine, almost good-natured about it. “Yes,” he says, “for a while.”

“How long?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure. Maybe it will not be so bad, maybe I will be able to leave the city at night.”

Upset, Viv says, “I'm sorry that I got you in this much trouble.”

“But you do not make the trouble,” the journalist assures her, “others make it. You asked a question that you have a right to answer.”

“My daughter someday will want to know who her mother is.”

“Of course,” he answers.

“She'll hate me if I haven't tried to find out.” She begins to cry and stops herself.

“Everyone who loves your daughter understands this.”

V
iv says, “I'm not so sure.”
“I have news,” he says. “In a way it's bad news and in another way . . . ”

“What's the bad news?”

“The bad news is that the woman we have been trying to find is dead.” He takes from his back pocket the photograph and hands it to her. “But the other news is that she almost certainly is not your daughter's mother. So it means that your daughter's mother may still be alive. It also means that there is no answer to your question at the moment, and that now it is a harder question than ever to answer.”

Viv looks at the photo as well as she can make it out in the dark of the room and the light of the small candle. “How did she die?” Viv says. The woman is young though hardly a girl; in the dark of the cavern she doesn't look like Sheba, nor will she on the hotel balcony the next morning when Viv looks at the photo again in the light of day.

“That's not certain but it's not important,” the journalist answers, “she is not the woman you look for.”

“How do you know?”

“It's better that I don't answer this,” the journalist explains sympathetically, “it may even be better for your daughter, if she were to return to Ethiopia someday.”

“I'm sure someday she'll want to come back.”

M
usic is what a room at the beginning of time sounds like—and when Viv steps into this place, do the days pass in a matter of moments? When she slips the dictates of western months, succumbing to a calendar drawn to the rhythms of a different moon, is she bound as well to slip old temporal moorings that measure, as much as anything that people have learned, what people have forgotten?

I
t's a music of subterranean harmonics, half voice and half caw, and comes from some human source like Sheba's music does, except it's not coming from the journalist
and certainly it's not coming from me
, thinks Viv,
I never could carry a tune
and there's no one else to be seen. It comes from the room itself, the woman and the journalist at the very axis of the transmission as though they're standing in one of the chambers of Sheba's radio-heart, from a time before she was born.

Minutes later, or is it hours or days? rising from the white rock at the city's center Viv brushes her head against a sagging sky the color of mauve. The blue eucalyptuses against the Entoto Hills have turned to glass, and in the sagging mauve sky a flock of flamingos bursts into flames. It reminds her of the time back home when the canyons were on fire, the inferno roaring toward the house; all around them the family could see the hazy hot red flare that circled the night. Viv and Zan packed up Parker and Sheba in the car along with the personal effects and valuables. It was shortly after Sheba came to Los Angeles—definitely it was
after
—and, two years old in her booster seat in the back, sucking her thumb, the girl wondered in her infant fashion how her life had come to this, on the other side of a world on fire. Viv remembers a talk that she and her husband once had: If ever there was a decision to be made for either mother or father to save each other or the children, they would save the children. It was the easiest thing they ever agreed on.

The firmament went up in flames that night and now rising from the white rock, at the center of one of the highest cities in the world, Viv reaches up and draws a blue line in the ash sky. She looks at the blue dust on her finger then looks up and knows with certainty that the woman in the photograph that she holds in her hand is buried there behind the sky's soot. When Viv reaches up again and scoops out of the heavens a hole, the music roars up out of the hole in the white earth behind her and through the blue puncture she's made, like air sucked out of a rocket in space.

No, Sheba's father says the next day when Viv goes back to the family to show them the photograph. The aunt won't look at it; the grandmother is near blind with cataracts. Sheba's father takes the photo, and as Viv hands it over and the father's hand stops briefly midair before taking it, she makes no effort to hide the intensity with which she studies his reaction. He doesn't look straight at the photo but peers down as though his lids might hide whatever Viv can see in his eyes. After several seconds, maybe as many as five or seven or eight, he says, utterly impassive, “No.”

B
ut, she thinks, the eight or seven or five seconds are endless; he takes so long to answer. And now she wishes that she pressed the journalist to explain how he knows what he thinks he knows, so that she can put Sheba's father's no in a context of pain or fear or the same rejection by which he so long rejected fatherhood. “No,” he says for the third time, either to make it final or to protest one time too many.

Viv's last night in the hotel she is too distraught to sleep. Outside her window a storm blows into Addis, and lying on her bed in the dark she feels the room tremble around her, the floor tremble beneath her; as the wind picks up though the balcony doors, she thinks the rumble of the room is from the storm but then realizes that the thunder coming up through the bed is percussive and mesmeric, and it's music. Full of wrath and sorrow at everything, Viv hurls the sheets away from her, gets up. Beneath her brief lowcut nightie she pulls on some jeans and shoes and throws a wrap around her shoulders and heads downstairs to the lobby.

T
he storm is picking up when she reaches the ballroom of the hotel. Enough of the eucalyptic wind from outside finds its way through some hidden breach to rustle the room's potted fronds and small dingy chandeliers turned down low; Viv buys a glass of tej, the moonshine honeywine once made by Sheba's grandmother. She drinks it down, buys another.

He took too long to say no
.
He said it too many times
. To clear a space in the middle of the large ballroom, its round tables have been pushed to the walls with such abandon the wind might have blown them there, and the room churns with five or six hundred otherworldly-looking Ethiopians with their african skin and european features dancing to half a dozen musicians on a bandstand at the room's far end. Viv buys another glass of tej:
Who is she?
the woman in the photo,
and if she's dead and has nothing to do with Sheba then why show me the photo at all?
and, watching the dance, immediately she knows she'll never know.

U
nlike in the West where the dance begins in the feet and moves up the body, here in the city of the abyss the dance begins in the shoulders, the part of the body made for bearing a weight, shoulders shimmying as though to shake away the burden of human time before the dance moves down to the clasped hands that lurch forward in a frenzy to cast something off, down to the legs galloping to catch up with whatever gauntlet the hands have thrown.

To Viv the music isn't african in any sense with which she's familiar but a bizarre blend of funk, swing, big band, cabaret, manzuma, armenian soul. It's a rhythm and blues from the future that's spiraled round the sphere of time to come back up through its birth canal. Beginning seventy years ago under the rule of Mussolini and sung down through the communist Derg, the songs have become a code: “Wax and gold,” the Ethiopians call it, when the golden messages of liberation and revolution are hidden inside the wax of the outer lyric and melody; and through the century the songs have been passed bearing the secret songs inside. In the swept ballroom of the Addis hotel tonight the band begins to play “Tezeta” and dancers break off in circles, partners claiming the center in order to dance each other into submission. As the small wrap slips from her bare shoulders, the white woman with paling blue hair finds herself vortexed into one of the circles with a young Ethiopian woman who smiles at her; ululations rise from every throat around them. Eighteen hours from now, under the English Channel thirty-six hundred miles away, Zan will think to himself how music plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession.

A
t the airport early the next morning, Viv finds there's not enough credit on her card to get back to London. Her cell hasn't worked since she got to Addis and the battery is dead, and if she returns to the hotel and stays another night to email Zan, it's money that could go toward getting her back. She's not certain what Zan would be able to do anyway. Zan would be the first to acknowledge that it's in such situations when he becomes most flabbergasted that Viv is coolest.

Beginning to feel the hangover of the long sleepless night, she finds thinking that much harder. She decides to try and use the credit card to buy a less expensive ticket to some place in Western Europe from where she'll find a way to England. Her best prospect appears to be Berlin, more out of the way than she would like, and she's about to book a seat when, at the last moment, a flight to Paris becomes available.

A
fter the seven hour flight to Orly by way of Khartoum, Viv takes a bus to Paris' outskirts and then the metro further into the city, making the mistake of getting off at Châtelet. From there she could transfer to a direct line to where she wants to go but doesn't know this; pulling her bag into the street, she keeps hailing cabs until she finds one–in the thick of rush hour as dusk falls on the city–whose driver seems to understand that she needs to get to whatever station will put her on the express rail to England.

Once in the taxi, however, she's not so sure the cabbie understands at all. The only thing clear is he's drunk and agitated; she can smell the Côtes du Rhone like she's sitting in a cask of it. “Train station!” she keeps trying to explain, “anglais!” but then realizes it must sound like she's commanding him to speak English when what she means is England. He lets loose a torrent of French and something else, Turkish or Eastern European she supposes, and then–with deliberation and intent, she's certain–he drives his cab straight into the limousine before him, nearly hitting what looks in the twilight and blur of the event to be a young boy about Parker's age, pulled from danger at the last moment.

V
iv hurtles forward in the back of the cab, hitting her head hard on either the ceiling or the seat in front. To her astonishment, the collision hasn't sobered the driver but sent him further into a rage. He backs up the cab and floors the accelerator, careening again into the limo in front, and then does it again.

He keeps doing this until finally she grabs her purse, throws open her door, leaves behind her luggage and lurches from the vehicle. She half expects to leap into the path of oncoming traffic; the repeated crashes, however, have brought everything around her to a stop. She hits the ground, stumbles, picks herself up and keeps running, into the large glass building before her, and the only thing that could almost astound her as much as what she's just been through is to discover that in fact she's where she wants to be, in the Gare du Nord, from which the Eurostar departs for London.

S
he doesn't have enough money for the train, and on sheer adrenaline from what happened in the rue Dunkerque outside, she almost slips past the ticket booth before one of the officials stops her.

Depressed and rattled, she can't bring herself to sleep in the station. She wanders several blocks east, to the cheapest no-star hotel that she can find on the rue d'Alsace.

P
aying for one night upfront, she spends the next day at the Gare du Nord casing the crowd like a thief, sizing up its ebbs and flows, points of vulnerability. She thinks, I've become the vagabond rebel of my youth, who hopped trains on a whim. She spends a second night in the hotel, slips out in the morning without paying, spends the second day at the station; hungry to the edge of nausea, she rations out to herself juice and a single baguette. Having left her bag with her clothes in the cab that she fled two days before, she breaks down and buys a hairbrush and clean underwear.

From Addis to Khartoum to Orly to the Gare du Nord, she's viewed every telephone—the broken ones on the walls, those on the other sides of windows, those that people gaze at in their palms as they walk along never looking up—with an unbearable longing, believing her family only a flurry of digits away. When she finds a public phone that works, she stares in dismay at the foreign instructions, terrified she'll waste what money she has on a call that won't go through. For as long as she can remember, she's had a recurring nightmare in which she rushes from dead phone to dead phone trying to make a call; and now she's in that nightmare. A couple of times she asks someone if she can borrow a phone and they just push past, glaring at her temerity if they understand at all.