On-Foot

University of Northern Iowa

On-FootAuthor(s): Maria ThomasSource: The North American Review, Vol. 271, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 5-9Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124776 .

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FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE

On-Foot

MARIA THOMAS

Marta is obsessed with getting out of

Ethiopia. She's been trying since

1982, but she can't get an Ethiopian passport. Once she can get across the

border, she says, she will cry out for

refuge and from then on, everything will be O.K. Sometimes desperation makes her sick, enough to be hospi talized with exhaustion. Last year she simply slept for two months and had to be fed with a tube. Her family came and sat by her bed. She wanted to die.

Part of Marta's family is from Eritrea and the other part from

Tigray, both places trying to secede, so she doesn't consider herself an

Ethiopian in any case. Although she would prefer to go to the United

States, she will go anywhere in the world. She has a brother in California and an Aunt in New York. She feels inside her that she "knows Ameri cans like brothers" because she had Peace Corps teachers who loved her and whom she loved in return. Miss Linda. Mr. Jerry. Mr. Mike. They came from El Paso.

"I have pictures of them," she told me. "Maybe you will know them and can tell me where they are now

because I have lost them." She car

ries everything with her in a big purse: scraps of old letters, old

addresses, pictures in folders.

People like Marta have devel

oped a vocabulary of exodus, usually in English. They talk to you about invitation letters, sponsorships, guar

antors, host families, passport mar

riages, 1-20 forms. Sometimes Marta isn't sure what these words mean,

even though she depends on them. And on alternate plans: "If you

become sick," she told me, "and you request to go for treatment, they will

give you a passport. You only have to find a doctor who will sign."

Or you can try to get a false job contract. This is when somebody that

you know fills out a form saying they will employ you full time while you are abroad. Marta has a friend who

got out this way, on a false contract,

to be the nanny of a Senegalese fam

ily in New York at the U.N. She flew there with them, but she was not their nanny: she was their friend. You can easily buy false contracts to work in Saudi Arabia, but you need dollars.

You change your name to a Muslim

name and you simply go! Marta uses a

gesture when she describes this act of

finally leaving Ethiopia, a hand

pushed into the air and tossed as if to throw something away.

The 1-20 form is what you used when you had been accepted as a student to a school or a university

somewhere, anywhere. These are

also false and very good because you tell the emigration people that once

you have learned this or that, then

you will come back to work for the

good of Ethiopia. These forms are

very easy to get in Italy. "False,"

Marta repeats, making it sound like a virtue.

Invitation letters simply offer you a place to live, and food, maybe pocket money. If you want to see a

friend or visit a relative who is out,

then they can invite you. If you are a

student, you can be invited by a host

family or a sponsor. All these things are false and can be arranged. Marta

knows everything, speaks fast, mix

ing her languages, sometimes whis

pering. Her brother, the one in Califor

nia, went out by the hardest, most

dangerous method. Walking. "On

foot," Marta calls it, using the Eng lish. He went out "on-foot" into the

Sudan and asked for asylum. Now he lives in California, where he has a job

and an apartment and a car and is

going to night school. She can see that he has a life, whereas she has none at all. She showed me pictures of him in his apartment near a table, a

stunningly handsome boy in jeans and a black t-shirt holding a bottle of Red Label and a glass.

On-foot: "You can go to Sudan.

You can go to Kenya. In Sudan you will immediately ask for refuge: you will reach to a camp: you will say I have nothing, I am Ethiopian." She has a gesture for this too, hands up in surrender. You did it on the other side of borders or in foreign airports.

Going to Kenya is more risky because there are no camps and the people there are bad. You can travel by hid

ing in lorries until you get near the border: then you get out and go across

at night. There are Somalis there who like to kill Ethiopians. Then you

must cross a terrible desert, riding in lorries to Nairobi. Marta knows of

one person who has made it that way,

who is now married to a Kenyan. On

foot to Sudan takes longer but is safer. You can reach refuge within

twenty or thirty days. You go to Gon dar: you dress like a peasant; you put butter in your hair, wear beads and a dress of old muslin cloth. For 200

birr, you hire someone to lead the

way. You walk at night and sleep dur

ing the day hidden in the forest. You must have foreign money, which you stitch in the hems of your clothes or hide in your hair. People prefer to go this way despite the war in Sudan,

despite the horror stories. She had heard on the BBC one night that 700

Tigrays who were trying to go out had been attacked, massacred and raped, even their children. Still, if she has

to, this is the way she will go. "If I die," Marta asked, "what

will be the difference?" Marta actually had her hands on

an invitation letter a few years ago, she said, from a doctor in England, but there was no stamp from an Ethi

opian embassy on it, so she could not

get a passport. She asked the doctor

December 1986 5



for another letter, with a stamp, but

by the time that letter came, she was

sick in the hospital, those two months she spent sleeping. When she tried to use the letter, they told her that the date on it had expired. She cried so

much that she became extremely thin.

"Before this I was beautiful." And she took out two pictures to

prove it, a round face of softened

planes. She was barely recognizable in them, now gaunt and chiseled.

One was posed on the steps of a hotel in a halter top and harem pants, the

other in a sundress standing on a lad der. Ethiopian girls like having their

pictures taken this way, with the camera angled up dramatically, like

movie stars.

Somehow Marta got an idea that I would befriend her and get her one of

these false letters, false contracts, or

1-20 forms. Her expectations thick

ened as time went on: she followed

me, appearing unexpectedly on cor

ners where I passed routinely. She took me to the houses of her rela tives.

She had a cousin called Jacky, who lived in one of Addis Abeba's

sprawling residential areas. The house was typical of the old style "villa," a design taken from the Ital ians?a flat roof and shuttered win

dows, wide porches, stucco over mud

brick. Inside, the rooms were big, and painted in harsh colors: a certain shade of turquoise, a hot pink. The floors were red hardwood, polished so

many times they had darkened and lost their grain. The furniture may

have come from the '50s, art deco

patterns and curvilinear hardware, a

collage of veneers. There was a side

board with glass doors closed on

empty shelves. The couches and

armchairs were worn. There was a

small tv set, high on a wardrobe and out of reach as if it were broken. The

space felt like waiting rooms where

people must sit unaware of time.

Pictures in the room told a story: Jacky came from a high family. Over the fireplace was a portrait, a large tinted photograph in a heavy gilt frame, taken long ago, of a nobleman

standing on a Persian carpet, posed next to a large urn. He wears an

extravagant uniform of velvet, richly embroidered and piped. A long cape covered with medals and decorations

hangs over his shoulders. His skin is

light, but the features are classic

Ethiopian?a domed forehead, aqui

line nose, almond eyes. Old tints in the picture have seeped: the carpet is a dampened pink, the gold a watery yellow, his skin a wash of brown. On the opposite wall was a picture of an

old woman, her head wrapped in

black, sitting on the ground and read

ing. On the sideboard in standing frames were three pictures: a man in

an army uniform, a stylish woman in a

gown, and a boy of eleven or twelve in a school blazer. There was a pic ture of Jacky, looking quite different as an adolescent with short curly hair, and as a small girl, barefoot in a

stream, carrying a traditional water

jug?like an Ethiopian peasant, only she's wearing pants.

I asked about the people in the

pictures. It was her grandfather over

the fireplace. He had been a

Dejazmatch, a military title from the Amhara court. He had done a lot for his country, Jacky told me, had de

veloped land in the south, built facto ries in the north. The old woman was her grandmother, the Dejazmatch's

wife, who gave up the world to study religion like a monk, and who was still alive but in seclusion. Jacky's

mother, in the picture on the side

board, was his daughter, educated in

England and France. The man in the

army uniform, her father, had served under the Emperor. He and her

brother, the boy, had been killed in

prison during the revolution. Her mother was kept in jail for two years and then released.

Jacky was in America at school in Idaho when the trouble started in

Ethiopia. In fact, it was in America that she got the name Jacky which she

kept even now. Of course she had to

stay there knowing her parents were

in jail. The only news she had was from relatives who knew nothing.

One day her mother wrote to her from

Ethiopia and told her to return. In order to live they had to sell all of their things and now her mother ran a restaurant from the back of their com

pound. This was how they survived. About her life in America, Jacky

said, "Idaho was a good place but my favorite was Nevada. I had Mexican friends because I look like a Mex ican. And they are kind people, like

Ethiopians. When I was in trouble,

they helped me. In California people thought I was Filipino and so there

were many Filipino boys chasing after me. I was always running from

them." She laughed, leaned back in her chair and smoothed her hair. It had been straightened and was stiff

and unyielding to her hand. She was

languid, overweight. Her English was perfect, with hardly a trace of accent.

Unlike her cousin Marta, perhaps because she had been there, Jacky doesn't want to go to America. If she ever has to leave Ethiopia, she will go to Israel. "Israel," she told me, "is a

Christian's country. America is noth

ing. There is no religion in America." Her notions of the Holy Land tran scended politics. Lebanon, she

thought, was a very bad place for Christians. They know all the good places and bad ones, a geography of exiles. In Germany, Marta said, the

immigration people are terrible.

They will not let an Ethiopian step from a plane. Italians will try to help Ethiopians but there is no work there. Italians themselves leave and

go to Germany and Switzerland. If

you know English, as Ethiopians do, then the logical places to go are En

gland, Canada or usa. England is useless and full of Indians. The word is out that in Canada and usa, if you ask for refuge you will get it, you will

get money every month and papers to work. There are jobs everywhere. If

you become sick, a doctor will care for you.

A maid in a patched uniform car ried a plastic basin and a pitcher of

warm water to us so we could wash

our hands before eating; a towel hung over her arm. Then our lunch came

on a painted tray. There were thick tumblers full of tella?a quick smokey beer made of barley and

hops. There was a stew of red lentils and cabbage cooked with hot green chilis and turmeric, a salad of tomatoes and onion dressed with lime. Everything was spicey and

heavy with salt. There was freshly baked injerra, a flat bread made of soured dough.

Marta couldn't eat. She pushed the food around on her plate, almost

drugged by agitation. Jacky said, "Our religion is deep,

you know. When you are in church

you can forget about these Russians who have stolen our country. You feel God's love. In this way Ethiopians will become strong." Her eyes were

drawn with black liner; there was

blue mascara on her lids. They were the same eyes as her grandfather's and the forms of her face were his, the fair, delicate skin that proclaimed their advantage.

"What kind of people are we

now?" Marta asked. It was a familiar

6 December 1986



question, as if after three thousand

years, Ethiopians don't know any

longer. "They have poisoned us, made us different." Her eyes shone with it as though she were in pain. "Last night. Here in this area. Ethio

pians came with guns, searching for

Ethiopian boys. They will take them to fight in Nambia. Who will return alive?"

"Do you mean Namibia?" I had never heard anything about Ethio

pian soldiers being sent to Namibia, but this was her news, unreliable,

mispronounced, without source.

They were people who existed on rumors. A wrong place-name was all

she had, and her belief that it was

Russians who were to blame for these

night-time conscriptions. "Even in this house," Jacky went

on, "where there are no boys. Look

ing in our closets. Under our beds.

They are fools."

Neither Marta nor Jacky knew where Namibia was or why Ethio

pians might be going there to fight. "Near Sudan?" Marta guessed. "Rhodesia?" Then she said, "swapo, yes, that's it!" She didn't know what swapo was, either, but

that didn't alter what had happened in this house last night.

"When they take them," she

said, "their mothers are crying, O!

Etiopia! O! Etiopia! are you still my

country?" "You wake up in the morning,"

Jacky said, "and you say, I will get sugar today or flour and you stand in the lines until your time has finished.

Everyone has problems, but this is how we must spend our lives. And at

night, when we hear the crying out

side, we become afraid."

The party was made of con

trasts?the two young women and

their guest, Jacky's religion and her

worldliness, what her family had been and what they were now?and

the flavors, sharp and salty, of the food. The maid brought coffee from the kitchen, appearing quietly as

Jacky beckoned to her. She came to me first, holding her service on a red enamel tray. I saw that the cups she carried were old. They were

astonishing cups, white porcelain bowls set in holders made of beaten

gold, a deep rich gold with tints of red.

Marta took me to her uncle who lived in the industrial area, an apartment inside a factory compound. On the

gate were the three faces?Marx,

Lenin, Engels?and a sign, in Eng lish, "Ethiopia will be the home of

heavy industry." The factory, how

ever, appeared to be closed, with no clue as to what had been its purpose.

The earth in the compound had been trampled to dirty gray as if some white residue had colored it? cement or plaster dust. A rubble of

scrap, shards of tin and hanks of wire?a tinker-toy factory, aban

doned and desolate, with its glaring ground.

It seemed an improbable place to live and made me wary, as though she

were leading me to a trap, a hostage to her desire to escape. I saw no signs of habitation, no animals or trash or clothes hung to dry. Not even win dows. Only doors arrayed around the

yard. A woman let us in and hurried

away. She wore the necklace of an

Eritrean, a heavy gold ring on a skein of dark embroidery thread. We stood in a cool sitting room where all the

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silence in with the wax, a house of too

many servants.

Her uncle had been sleeping and came into the room yawning, a

homely man with protruding teeth. Soft and tired, very tired, in his slip pers and designer jeans. What made him tired, he explained, was that there was no work for him to do in his office in one of the ministries. "Sit

ting and sitting, you become ex

hausted," he smiled apologetically. The maid served us Coca-Cola

and roasted grains. Marta placed a

record on a small turntable, an old

portable model in white and red plas tic, but there was no electricity,

which made her angry. We talked a little about the various separatist

movements in Ethiopia?Eritrea,

Tigray, Oromo, Somali. Mostly, of

course, the uncle said laughing, he was interested in Eritrean liberation,

though not enough to die for it, or even to live up there. The ease of his own capitulation shocked him. He

shrugged and seemed to collapse as if exhausted by his paralyzed will.

We were served lunch on the cof

fee table, a red stew of chopped meat. Marta heaped food on my plate and tore pieces of injerra for me. It

was warm and yeasty and as seductive

as the fiery spice and the skim of raw sour butter on the stew. Then we ate

oranges and tiny sweet plums as small

as grapes. We began to talk about how to get Marta out of Ethiopia.

The family did not want her to walk out the way her brother had done and

were willing to pay her airfare, any

thing to stop her from walking which was too foolish, too dangerous.

Marta began a flurry of stories,

how everyone else was getting out. A

friend of a friend was sent to training in Russia and never came back; spec

ulations on how he had escaped, a

story of suitcases full of contraband

jeans, slipping through a gate in

Paris, like the mysteries of the uni verse.

"When they were lifting the

Falasha out," she said, "to carry

them to Israel, people ran to Gondar.

They wore David stars, they pre tended. In the rush they were getting away. In planes to Sudan."

She showed me her invitation let

ters, the ones that had failed. There were two, on small personal station

ery with a letterhead, Dr. Kofi Akin

woonor, a West African name. The

first was a proposal asking her to come

live with him?"We will be happy together in London," he wrote:

"Please send me a full length photo of yourself." It was dated Sep tember, 1982. I had a suspicion that

they had never met.

"Was he your boyfriend?" I asked her.

"Yes." It could have been a lie.

Her eyes were blank. I felt irritated that I'd been tricked into thinking there was some level of legitimacy in her story, even a very low one, and

sad for Marta, not because she

believed in Dr. Kofi (and after all, he had come through with a letter; two, in fact) but because she believed there was a system and was trying to

prove it to me. The second letter,

dated a few months later stated that she had been enrolled as a student in

London (no mention of where) and

requested an 1-20 form. Somehow this letter had been stamped, per haps not officially but with an official

stamp at the Ethiopian Embassy there.

"But how? Surely no one can be fooled by such things as this?" I refused to go on submitting to her

lunacy.

"They are not fooled," her uncle

began. "They just ..." He tossed

his head in a gesture that implied an

explanation too long to be given ver

bally, or perhaps he wanted to signal me regarding Marta's precarious posi

tion, the need at least to have faith.

She was on the edge of the sofa, sift

ing through more and more papers as

if she had lost something. "Everyone is getting out," she

insisted. The uncle nodded, his hands folded over his chest.

Life here is shaped by the people who run away. They are around,

these defectors, like the spirits of

departed ancestors. They offer alter

native banking from all over the world: a person can leave dollars with

an Ethiopian in Boston, say, and pick up birr from a relative or agent in Addis which is a way to get money out. Anyone can tell you how much it costs to send berb?re, a blend of hot

pepper and spice that no Ethiopian can do without, to someone in the

U.S. or Canada, and a lot of people in Addis know the phone exchange for Silver Spring, Maryland. Meanwhile, there has been some kind of Christ

mas radio broadcast from 18th Street and Columbia Road in Washington,

D.C., where there are countless

Ethiopian restaurants and where

every other cab driver is Eritrean. The broadcast was like a letter home, no real information, only the sound of voices from thousands of miles away sent in the air, but it expanded the sense of community: it made Amer

ica seem more possible to everyone.

Abeba's sister lives in Wash

ington D.C. She's been gone now for two years. She doesn't write to her

family very often, and this worries

them, not knowing how she is. She had gone for a vacation to Italy with one suitcase and she never came

back. "Missing" is the word Abeba uses to describe her sister's situation.

Her sister is "missing" and she "misses" her sister: she connects the

two words with a smile. When the sister failed to come back, the gov ernment put her on a defectors list,

then they came and locked up her flat and sold everything from it to pay her debts. But the debts have not been

paid and the bills keep coming. Abeba wonders if her sister has become fat, if she is happy where she is living, if she has found a job. Once

her sister called home from New York. The call came early in the

morning at 5:30 and her old father was overjoyed. A few months later

the phone rang again at that time, but

everyone was sleeping and by the time the old man answered there was no one on the line. "My daughter!

My daughter!" he kept crying into the dead phone. Now, Abeba says, he gets up everyday at 4:00, dresses in his white clothes, wraps his shemma around him in the cold and sits by the

phone, waiting. Melaku and his wife Laketch live

in Washington too. She worked for Mobil Oil and was sent to California for training in accounting. He stayed behind, but one day, his ministry told him he was being delegated to a con

ference in Rome. Luck had found them. In Rome he got a tourist visa for the States. Now they have asked

8 December 1986



for asylum. The children are still in

Addis, where they live with Melaku's mother and father. The mother and father worry because their phone is | broken and they have lost immediate contact. Letters are unreliable and

often read before they arrive. They want to send the children right away,

but the Americans won't give visas

until Melaku's asylum has been set

tled. The children will also need

Ethiopian passports which will mean

going forth and asking, calling atten tion to yourself, to the babies, when it's best, for safety, to keep down, to

be hidden. The three year old is fine; she's happy and eating well, but the older one, almost nine, is becoming

thin, waking in the night with bad dreams. Someone has brought a tape of her parents' voices which she lis tens to for hours and hours. Her

grandparents want to push the case,

but slowly, from behind, hoping to find a way with no danger.

The emotion is dread. Too much has happened to Ethiopia in the past twelve years: two terrible famines,

the coups, the civil wars, a border war

with Somalia, a revolution no one

understands, the massacres of the

late '70s, and now the bludgeon of colonization. They've been through too much. Like the members of a

family under a bad sign, hit by trag edy after tragedy, they've gone

numb, waiting for the next blow.

When I left Addis, Marta came to say

goodbye. She had fixed her hair in a severe style, rolled sleek and back, blackened and oiled. She had made

up, roughed her cheeks and outlined her eyes. It hardened her rest

lessness. She was wearing a red

jumpsuit, broadened by shoulder

pads, a wide shining white belt and white spike sandals. She began to

weep. She said her little sister, four teen years old, had gone on-foot,

from Tigray to Sudan. Her parents had heard it from some of the girl's friends. Fourteen years old. It seemed to challenge Marta, whose tears could have been more for her self than for her loss?as though she should have been the one walking out there.

"Now I will have to go," she said. I "I will go on-foot within the next

month." She had taken a snapshot from her stash: blurred faces, barely ? outlines, girls standing in a walled j garden. "This is me. This is my sis ter. She was eleven then. Now I will have to go." D

KAREN FISH

"THE GOOD RETURN"

(the name of my great-great grandfather's

trading ship?middle 1800s)

All I know is he kept what he had by leaving it.

?Debora Greger

My face is whittled by sunlight, the same harsh light that turns even this New England water turquoise? as if spilled through a funnel, a child's beach sieve, the same brittle flood of glare that somewhere else takes

the color from the fields, draining the corn of its green,

pushing it into forgetfullness, to harvest, toward the shade

of dust.

Right before a storm the steep waves run in bunches

toward the beach

and if I close my eyes I can still see the

strange shapes of maps . . .

imagine thrusting my arm

into one of the large porcelain spice jars lining the hold.

I can hold onto a memory like the captain keeps land

in perspective?waiting

for it to rise up real, a mountain again

at the edge of vision.

You can keep someone where you left them if you don't return . . .

in your mind they will remain in the house, walking it

like a nomad from window to window watching the water move

away from the shore.

Smell the thick whale oil burning. A thin trail of smoke, thin as an animal trail hangs in the in-ward reflection of a black window.

Land and water meeting without silhouette.

One could travel forever to get away?

keeping things you wanted out there.

You learned to enjoy the wanting, the waiting. Remember the way the spoons were so thin, the family spoons, silver?the details of trade, the things that were supposed to make you

proud.

The footstep back, the black polished boots, the heavy wood sea chest slowly lowering onto the deck?

Her desire landlocked in her breast,

still, in the rope bed,

strong as the smell of paint.

December 1986 9



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