For school, Abeba had to have a uniform, a book bag, exercise books, a box of pencils, and money to rent texts, all of which her uncle provided so she could attend Gethsemane Primary Academy, which lay on the north side of the road to Jimma and was owned and operated by an order of nuns. Each morning, Abeba walked to Gethsemane with her neighbor Tensaye. They stood in the bare earth yard outside a run of low classrooms, the classes lined up behind marks on the ground, while the national anthem played over a loudspeaker and the flag of Ethiopia was raised alongside the flag of Oromia. A teacher next read news aloud. Then they went inside, and classes started. There were seven classes of forty-five minutes each—English, Amharic, science, math, sports, art, and music—taught by nuns who wore the garb nuns wear and were often strict, as nuns can be, and lived in a nunnery uphill from the school, which the children never visited, and showed up each morning wearing sandals and socks along with their tunics, scapulars, and cowls.

  Abeba sometimes had homework, sometimes not, but the main thing was, she told Elsabet Tesfaye, that in school her ability to read improved, so that, when she arrived home, her interest, now, was in reading what was close at hand—newspapers, the Bible, and books she borrowed from neighbors. She preferred reading to playing outside, and began to keep a record of her reactions to what she read, and a record, too, of her daily activities. Not having a bound diary in which to write, she scrawled on sheets of exercise-book paper, tore them out, and put them in a box.

  Abeba had a strong memory of something. One night, just down the road, between where Uncle Solomon’s house stood and the hills of scattered acacia began, a pack of hyenas moved in to consume, in a riot of noise, the flesh, blood, offal, and bones of a calf they’d killed. Uncle Solomon went to look and returned to report that the beasts were too absorbed in their meal to pose a threat, upon which news the whole family ventured out. A lot of people were already on the scene. They formed a ring and made an arena, at the center of which a savage scene unfolded that held everybody with a kind of magnetism. The throng of spectators went four or five deep, so that children like Abeba couldn’t see what was going on. Uncle Solomon lifted her onto his shoulders. People were yelling and jumping in place, waving torches, and brandishing knives. The calf had toppled onto its side with its hind legs askew, and the hyenas were snarling over it with bloody fangs. After a while, Abeba pulled her uncle’s hair and said she wanted him to put her down. He settled her on his arm for a moment, and she told him that, in her opinion, everyone should look away while the hyenas ate the calf. Elsabet Tesfaye stopped Abeba in the midst of her recounting of this event to ask why that was so. It was so, said Abeba, because the spectacle of the hyenas and the calf bespoke evil. Why did people want to look at this, what were they so excited about, when, inside her, the spectacle of the hyenas and the calf elicited sadness? She’d had the sinking feeling, hurrying home, leaving everybody else behind, running, finally, with tears blurring her vision, that something was wrong with people. You would think, she told Elsabet Tesfaye, that people were better than that.

  * * *

  —

  Abeba had “strong maternal instincts,” Elsabet Tesfaye recorded in her notes. She gravitated, on the playground, in the direction of toddlers. She held their hands, wiped their noses, consoled them when they cried, pushed them on the swings, met them at the bottom of the slide, and poised herself to catch them should they fall from the play equipment. She pulled up their pants and tucked in their shirts. She read to them, pointing at pictures. She perched them on her shoulders, swung them in her arms, braided their hair, and brushed the dust from their legs and arms. She let them chase her, and she let herself be caught. She sang to them, and played a game with them called “corkies.” You stacked up bottle caps, Abeba explained to Elsabet, and if they toppled, you had to stand against a wall while kids threw soccer balls at you.

  Abeba was a calm presence, Elsabet Tesfaye wrote, calm in the sense of mature and reasonable, not given to emotional extremes in front of other children, not acting out or in need of discipline, known to others as a prodigious reader, someone who refused invitations to games in favor of a book, someone who bowed out of games in favor of reading, someone who read on her bed and in the cafeteria and on the playground. She didn’t engage in squabbles or conflicts. She saw feuds and arguments as dead ends in which the consequences of resolving a problem by such means were more damaging than the problem itself. Math was her weakest subject, because her heart wasn’t in it; she excelled, though, in civics and English. She was an adequate soccer player. She was a moderately good jump roper. She was interested in the foreigners who came to the orphanage on missions she was curious about—people who volunteered or donated or were there in a professional or charitable capacity. She watched them come and go mostly, but sometimes sought to speak with them, making use of what English she had when it turned out a visitor spoke English, otherwise surrendering to circumstances and receding into observation of their mannerisms, voices, gestures, and clothing, their gaits or the way they climbed stairs, their bags, purses, backpacks, and phones, the clips or bands they wore in their hair, their vials of hand wash, sunscreen, and insect repellent, their sunglasses and umbrellas, their bracelets, necklaces, tattoos, and makeup, their shoes, their laptop computers, their expressions, their gesticulations, their laughter at times. She followed them about on tours and listened, from a distance, to what their guide said—that children slept generally eleven to a room with a nanny present overnight, and that their sheets and clothing were washed once a week, and that they showered regularly and ate healthy breakfasts, and that each had been issued not only two sheets, a towel, a pillow, and a bedspread, but also a donated stuffed animal. The tour guide introduced the visitors to children by stating a child’s name, age, and former place of residence, as in “This is Meron, age nine, from Gondar,” and “This is Marta, age eleven, from Harar.” When the time was right, the foreigners broke for liquid refreshment in the cafeteria, where the tour guide always spoke at length, explaining, for example, that the orphanage had once sought to save money by buying cows, slaughtering them, and freezing their meat for use in the kitchen, but that this had turned out to be a bad practice, because power outages were frequent, and gas for the generator was at intervals in short supply, so the meat would thaw and go rancid before they could use it, which meant that they needed larger reserve fuel tanks and a more efficient generator than they had, since the current one balked regularly and was old. When the visitors were finished in the cafeteria, the tour moved upstairs, to a room where chairs were arranged in a semicircle, and where the visitors were each handed a baby and given a bottle to feed it from, and where babies lay in cribs along the walls and toddlers sat in plastic potty chairs, and where the tour guide illuminated certain stellar cases—for example, in this very room, she said, there was once a child so tiny he literally fit in the palm of my hand and was supposed to die and had no chance, but then a Dutch woman appeared who wanted to volunteer at our orphanage and was determined that this boy would live and believed that she could make this happen by tucking him against her chest and keeping him there, which she did, said the tour guide, so that the boy survived, and he is more than a year old now, and in fact sitting in the lap of the woman three chairs to the right of me at this very moment. Then all traveled down the hall to the special-needs room, where there were children in donated wheelchairs.

  Elsabet Tesfaye noted that among the volunteers at the orphanage there’d been a French woman adept at knitting. Abeba had sat with her frequently, watching. They had no language by which to communicate, but the French woman was good at demonstrating, and eventually put needles in Abeba’s hands and stood behind her, guiding the movements of those needles, and let Abeba knit, which she enjoyed, and it was too bad, Elsabet Tesfaye wrote—though it also made sense—that Abeba couldn’t have needles of her own, or yarn, even though both were offered as gifts by the French woman, because advantages of that sort caused trouble in the orphanage, where no child was allowed to have more than the next.

  * * *

  —

  What is it like in America? was a question strongly on Abeba’s mind once the processes of her adoption were set in motion. Elsabet Tesfaye had to say she didn’t know, but that, since it was a country larger than Ethiopia, it had to have variety in its cultures and regions, there had to be different realities there, just as there were different realities here—people with enough or more than enough, people with close to little or even nothing, people who liked what their government did and people who didn’t and people in between, in all those ways, it had to be like Ethiopia, though, on the other hand, it had to be different. Regarding those differences, Elsabet couldn’t be helpful—all she knew was what she saw on the news or read about in newspapers—and as for the videos Abeba had seen in the cafeteria alongside other children, she shouldn’t assume that they depicted life as it was lived by Americans. Elsabet was sure that those videos were false and that there was nothing to be learned from what was in them, that those shows had to be like all the other shows—illusions, entertainments—and said nothing real about America. Elsabet could say that she had met Americans in the course of performing her duties in the orphanage and found them no different from Australians or Canadians, or from British people, or from German or Dutch people, really from any of the Westerners who visited, not any better dressed or any louder or quieter, not more polite or more rude, not any more ignorant or enlightened about things, not standing out in some particular way—except for one thing. A higher percentage of Americans, she noticed, were Christians, not Christians in the way that Ethiopians were Christians but Christians nonetheless, which they made clear to her by referring to God and Jesus when they spoke, references Elsabet generally did not hear made by visitors who came from elsewhere. In sum, it might be the case that Abeba was going to a particularly religious country. Beyond that, Elsabet didn’t want to speculate. Still, though, it was okay for Abeba to dream. Okay to hope for a good country and a good life, as long as you didn’t take your hope so far that reality, when it came, was ruined by expectation. That was something you could do to yourself. You could leave with dreams and expectations that by their nature were counter to your own best interest. Better to go with an open mind and take what comes and see what you can make of it. That was what Elsabet told Abeba. And it was tempered advice, essentially optimistic. But in me, reading it, and reading it again, eight thousand miles away in my garret—on a December night lit, outside my window, by holiday bulbs and yard lamps on posts—the irony of it provoked sadness.

  * * *

  —

  Abeba knew people in the orphanage it was difficult to say goodbye to. There was a girl named Kassech she thought of as her best friend, who had no family and therefore no visitors on Sundays, when the families of other children came to visit; a girl named Kalkidan who slept in the next bed; a girl named Emebet who also liked to read; and a girl named Samwarit who was also from Sebeta and who had also gone to the Gethsemane school. They all slept in the same dormitory. They had all seen other children leave, and been to their goodbye parties, and watched the vans pull out bearing them away. There was a nanny Abeba was fond of, too, and a teacher who’d loaned her books to read, and a woman who hung laundry in the courtyard who also liked to read and had suggested to Abeba a novel called Fikr Eske Mekabr by Haddis Alemayehu, claiming that it was very famous and should be read by everyone and that it was so beautiful that it would make her cry. It was about young people who fall in love, the young man a tutor and a poet, the young woman possessed of great intelligence and beauty, the two warding off parental disapproval and an onslaught of social condemnation. The laundress had given Fikr Eske Mekabr to Abeba, handing it to her with the warning that it had been written for adults and was sad. With these caveats in mind, Abeba hadn’t opened it, but brought it instead to Elsabet Tesfaye to ask her opinion—should she read this book or not? Elsabet had answered, By all means, yes, because if it’s beyond you in terms of what you can understand, so what, you’ll still take something from it, and if it’s sad, so what, too, you already know about sadness, there can’t be anything in the book sadder than what you already know.

  * * *

  —

  The last thing was to say goodbye to Uncle Solomon. On the day she was to leave for the airport, he came to Elsabet Tesfaye’s office, took off his hat, and sat down beside Abeba. With the two of them in front of her, Elsabet could see plainly that they were relatives: both had conspicuously wide-set eyes, tapering fingers, and narrow shoulders, and both had calm, reserved demeanors and spoke with the same quiet clarity. Solomon had brought Abeba a necklace, a pair of earrings, and an envelope with photographs in it of her father, himself, his sons, his daughters, the neighbor boy named Tensaye she used to play with, the exterior of the home she’d lived in with Solomon and his family, and, finally, a photo of Abeba herself, squatting by the water tap inside their compound, wearing plastic zoris. If I had better pictures I would give them to you, he said, but these are what I have. Then he turned each of the photographs over and showed Abeba the dates he had written there, and the names and ages of people he’d inscribed, before sliding all of it back into the envelope and handing it to her.

  Uncle Solomon held Abeba’s hand. He said that he knew the story of her life from the beginning, having heard the missing parts from her father, and that he remembered seeing her for the first time in the police station when he’d come for them after their sojourn from Bale, and that on first impression it had seemed to him a good sign that Abeba was in a strong condition after so much travail, not as beaten down as she might have been after what she’d been through. He remembered that she picked at a large scab on her forehead and ate bananas in the donkey cart as they made their way to his house, and that she drank a lot of water at first and slept a lot and ate all they put in front of her, but within two days seemed recovered enough to play outside and look around the garden and poke her nose into things. Anyway, said Uncle Solomon, we all loved you right away. How could we not? As far as I’m concerned, you’re my daughter every bit as much as my other daughters; I feel the same about you as I do about them, not one bit different, exactly the same. I’ve watched you go to school in your uniform. I’ve watched you feed our chickens and gather their eggs and water our garden. I’ve been ill a lot, and you’ve shown me gentleness. But the main thing I want to say is that if things were different and better for me, I would never have sent you here, to this orphanage. I would have kept you at home, because I love you like a daughter, but also, selfishly, because you help our family. Keeping you at home might have been better for me in the long run, and I thought about that a lot and prayed about it, because, really, there was no right answer, there were only these bad circumstances in which it seemed to me that the time would come when you would have to go do what your cousins have to do in Kuwait, and live like that, and be treated like that, and be spit on and beaten, and when I thought about that, and understood you had an option, that there was something possible for you not possible for them, then I came to accept that I could not be selfish, and that if I loved you I had to lead you toward a better life, and that’s the reason I brought you here, Abeba, not because I didn’t love you. I don’t want you to go away with the thought in your head that I didn’t love you, or that I abandoned you, that somehow you were the last thing on my mind and the easiest burden to drop, that I brought you here because it was convenient for me, an easy way to lessen a problem, a means of making my own life easier, when the fact is, bringing you here has made me feel like your betrayer. I’ve second-guessed myself about it. I’ve wondered if I did the right thing. Is it better for you to have what you have now, this opportunity in another country, or is it better for you to be with the people who will always love you no matter what?

  Uncle Solomon’s eyes welled. I made a choice, he said, on your behalf. I love you, Abeba. May you be blessed.

  He was quiet then, and tearful. It was Abeba’s turn to speak. Uncle Solomon, she said, I’m going away, but only for a while. I’m going to live with Americans, but I’m never going to forget about you. Is that what you think? Well, it isn’t true. I’m coming back to Ethiopia one day. We’re going to see each other again. Wait and see, Abeba said. I’m going to return and take care of you.

  Trial

  The Harvey trial unfolded in a bland summer heat wave that shimmered across the fields of the Skagit Delta. In the courtroom, the hum of air conditioning was heard daily. The louvered blinds were always closed. The fluorescent lights were always on, and the wood surfaces always shone. Each morning, the stenographer entered carrying her stenograph, while behind her a clerk wheeled a cartful of documents. The gallery filled, the lawyers entered, and the accused were brought forth, grimly, by deputies. The bailiff, curtly, told us all to rise, and at last the judge emerged from her chambers. Perched high on her bench at the epicenter of symmetries, she banged her gavel underneath the pronouncement fiat justitia emblazoned below the ceiling trim.