Careful So

By Dana Roskey

"How does something like this happen, they always wonder. 'How does a guy like you end up in Addis Ababa sleeping in the back room of a school house?' I tell them about Leeza. I want to say something about grief. My theory is that only radical action is the correct response to loss. But action is dangerous. I have no right to say anything like that. I just tell my story with a shrug. This is what I did. Kind of foolish, but at least it was decisive."

Careful So is a story of love and loss. It is Dana's story, spanning a decade and three continents as he struggles to fulfill Leeza's dream.

On a summer evening in 2003, an auto accident took the life of his Ethiopia-born fiancée. For Leeza, Dana traveled to Ethiopia to open schools for underprivileged children. He gives a vivid account of the country and its customs. He is the 'faranj' in a strange land, but in the end he finds success, healing, and a new beginning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326828301

Book preview

Careful So

Careful So

by Dana Roskey

Copyright

© 2016 by Dana Roskey

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN 978-1-326-82830-1

Cat Food Press

Minneapolis

Rotterdam

www.catfoodpress.com

▪

Cover art by Troy Zaushny

So careful

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.’

▪

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam LVI

Chapter One

‘Are you missing home, Leeza?’

'Very much,' she says.

'Let me take you. I want to go there.’

'Andekan,' she replies. 'One day.'

▪

So she is moving. It's summer. It's fall. I don't remember the season. I am helping her carry her boxes up the stairs of her new house. It's a two- or three-story clapboard house on 35th Street. Her room is going to be at the top, a tiny dormer room, furnished with a bed and narrow chest of drawers. There is a window under the slanting roof that looks out over the street and that offers a distant view of downtown. Soon it will look out over winter. It will collect ice in the corners of its pane.

I find it funny what I remember at this distance of time and what I don't. I have no distinct picture of where she is moving from. I seem to remember a place in the Northside, a blank flat in public housing in a dangerous neighborhood. Is that the place she shared with her friend Nejat? Or is she moving straight from St. Louis Park, where she was staying with a group of friends in a suburban apartment block?

Leeza is from Ethiopia. She won the Diversity Lottery and came to America, much against her own instinct, as it turns out. She was talked into it by her friends and family, by her boyfriend. She is studying at the community college, studying accounting. This place will be the first that is wholly her own.

I can't remember what car I was driving. I think it might have been Madge, the green '69 station wagon with wood paneling along the sides, the beast I had bought in Sacramento while visiting my brother and that I had driven back to Minneapolis. Madge would have had plenty of space to move Leeza’s boxes.

It might have been Hank, the white S10 pickup with the blue highlights. I miss that sturdy little truck. I bought it second-hand during one of those quiet years at the end of the millennium. The truck could have easily accommodated her few possessions in the back. Leeza doesn't have much to move. She has only been in the U.S. for a few years.

Memory is like the close spaces of the stairway up to her room. The staircase is designed economically, the tunnel in a warren, with barely the space to accommodate the frame of the average man. It is dim. I sense that the wooden steps are kept tidy, though the light doesn't allow inspection. The climb is slow; the climb is quick. The walls are painted a dull yellow. You look ahead; you look at one's feet.

One particularly large box requires the efforts of the both of us. She is backing up the stairs, and I'm below, holding the box high, up to my chin. She has to lean forward, and our faces are close. She becomes aware of how close halfway up the climbing passage. She is embarrassed, and doesn't know what to say once we reach the top. We push some boxes around, arrange furniture.

Memory is like that room, so confined, so defined in its odd shapes. It's not a cube, but has a sloping roof, broken by the one window. The room fills quickly, and the clean lines are obscured among the things. The bed stands just inside the doorway. One practically falls into it entering the room.

But memory can also be like the big sky outdoors, a shot of freedom every time, emerging from the tight spaces of the little house. The air is fresh, and I breathe it in gratefully. The eyes adjust to the vast and open. The city is cluttered and busy, precise with a million details, but there is space for them. Lines are sharp, only broken by their own proliferation. We find our car, a pickup this minute, a classic station wagon the next, and we locate our moving collections of stuff. We heft it; we sweat over it.

I remember the kitchen as well as I do the bedroom. She invites me back in gratitude, in friendship. Leeza is unusual among Ethiopian women in that she doesn't know how to cook. She knows that she should; she knows it's a part of hospitality. It's an especially good project when a man visits. She does her best. She overcooks the pasta, and whips up a weak sauce with a few vegetables. I'm enchanted, whatever the taste. We sit at the kitchen table a while, while summer still streams in the sliding glass door behind us. We talk about her school, about our friends, about her past.

I know about Leeza that it means everything to make it on her own. She came to America with a boyfriend. She received the visa; he didn't. They married. The relationship didn't work out. She's very hurt and bitter about it for reasons that I'll never learn. It's been a while, and she's alone in America. It may not have been her idea to come here, but she will make it work. And she wants and needs no boyfriend to lean on. She makes that clear.

I make it clear that I am infatuated. I have no reason to deny it. After dinner, we go outside, through the sliding glass door onto the porch, and I admire her grace and her spirit. She tells me we can't be together, and I say, 'Okay.' She says she'll find me a girlfriend, and I say, 'No, thanks.' I just smile.

There is a beauty to her that might be her culture, a gentle and a generous way, a humanity that makes everyone else seem clumsy and rough. There is a beauty that is her own, a life in her eyes and in her smile that I find so pleasant. More, I find it redemptive.

We move to the porch outside her new kitchen. We sit in the afternoon sun, and we chat easily. I don’t expect anything. I just enjoy her company.

In the end, her own feelings come as a surprise to her. It is deep autumn and the chill has descended over Minnesota, the early dusk, and the long nights. We go for walks, just like we did in summer, but we bundle up. We stroll around the city lakes, still talking. Now I can name the city where she was born, Addis Ababa. I can name her religion, Orthodox Christianity. I know about her family. Her father's mother raised her after the age of eight. A fire burned down her mother's house. Her grandmother cooked for her, cleaned for her, spoiled her. The old woman couldn't stand to discipline her sweet granddaughter.

She's telling me about her grandmother in such a soft voice, I have to lean forward. It's been a hazy day. It's a soft night of low clouds. The light of the city reflects off the haze to create a glow over the town and over the lake. It's cold, but not unbearably so. We have been able to walk a few miles beside Lake Harriet. We have found a bent tree that has grown laterally over the water for some three meters before turning toward the sky. We are standing on the trunk of the tree. She stands ahead of me. I am holding her steady. Her voice has dipped, and I lean forward to hear her better. She turns her head, and suddenly she kisses me.

She cries out immediately afterward, her eyes widening in surprise. I'm holding my breath, and also holding back great laughter. She whispers, 'I have to go,' and we step backward off the tree trunk. We return along the bike path beside the lake. She can't hide how agitated she has become. She starts to say something, and she stops. She apologizes. She walks on in anxious silence. I'm quiet. I try to reassure her. I tell her it's all right, not to worry. Then I’m quiet.

Oddly enough, now I don't remember the next day. I recall in the vaguest way quiet discussions in the aftermath, occasions when I made clear she was free to do as she liked. We shared a kiss. She owed me nothing. How long her decision took, I can't remember now. But she does decide. We will celebrate the date of the kiss as our anniversary.

There are so few years we have. Each year has a thousand images. Each has one.

Leeza's community of Ethiopians are taken aback. There are friends who liked me well enough before, and well enough later, but who are cast into dark suspicion when they find out we're together. Leeza, who was so unsure of me before the kiss, defends me now with an iron determination.

I don't react. I have no reason to react to their doubts. I'm always friendly. My friend Troy and I attend parties in their apartments in the public housing buildings. We eat their cuisine, the dark, bubbling sauces prepared on American gas stoves in second-hand pots. They pour the sauces over the improvised versions of their bread, injera, which has to be made from the wrong grains. We buy it in unlabeled plastic bags at the tiny Ethiopian storefronts on Franklin.

There is laughter. There is a lot of chatter. These are conversationalists. Troy and I lean back in our chairs, our own conversation traveling at half the altitude of the Amharic one all around us. Among the bursts of laughter, it is hard to be anything but cheerful. Leeza's laughter, in particular, loud and joyous, sometimes high and fluting as birdsong, sometimes loud as a shout, has the power to uplift. Her eyes, large and deep brown, are laughing. I stop to watch her.

There is dancing. No Ethiopian party passes without dancing. Ethio-pop is cued up on the boom box, and that cues the banter about the musical taste of the host. They cycle through a variety of choices, and finally something clicks. They start to move.

The dancing is a revelation for Troy and I, something clearly dreamed up far away. The spirit resides in the shoulders. It moves in elegant waves that can be very affecting; it moves with abandon, in snaps and jerks.

Leeza performs the eskista. She rolls her shoulders slowly, her chin turned demurely aside. She raises an eyebrow provocatively. She holds her hands out to me in invitation. I respond, but only to perform a kind of silly mimicry of her movements. Eskista is almost impossible for foreigners. (No matter what the gracious Ethiopians tell you, you are not doing it right.) And then I lapse into generic American movement next to her, which feels quite all right.

I sit, but the Ethiopes call out for Gurage. They do this because it's the one Ethiopian dance I can imitate. I have no idea what I’m doing. Everything I know about the dance I learned from watching Fantu in action, and Fantu can only maintain a few minutes at a time, old man of nearly thirty. I have gathered that each dance represents a region of the country. Gurage is a place and a people. Their dancing is very similar to what we did in the early 80s and called New Wave, running in place, and pumping with the arms, though in the Ethiopian version the hands are held forward in a kind of praying position. So I perform, and I add a sort of Cab Calloway flourish with a big grin. Everyone is pleased. Troy and Leeza are laughing out loud. I'm free now to return to my food.

International students are often trapped in the city. They don't have cars; they don't have time. They may not know that there is anything of interest outside the city. They may be scared of the people in the countryside. Leeza has traveled across the world, but she has seen very little of Minnesota. I encourage her to take some trips with me outside of town. We take drives to see the grasslands, the hills, the lakes. She takes a particular liking to Stillwater on the St Croix River, just across from Wisconsin.

It's a small town, quaint, historical. We take walks by the river. We find little beaches lined by summer trees. In winter, we test the ice, leave tracks in the snow. We take photos, and the images survive to remind us of our fun. After a few viewings, they become the memory, they become the visits. I see them now in my mind's eye. Leeza stands by the frozen banks of the St. Croix, her arms at her sides, hanging at angles dictated by the many layers she wears. Her dark skin is striking, set against the white background.

Now she stands in similar stance and similar winter gear, but this time by the side of Lake Harriet, where we first kissed. She has a brilliant smile. She's laughing. Flip to the next photo, and you'll see her lying in the snow, making a snow angel. We talk about sending these to her family, startling them with the sight of snow.

We think the sight of summer might be just as startling, the glowing green of it. She stands beside the St. Croix again, but this time there are brown summer shadows on the waters, and shadows among the depths of suspended leaves on the other side of the river, suggestive of miles of quiet forests.

There are no photos from our courtship, from the late summer days we strolled across the Stone Arch Bridge downtown. In the unconfirmed picture in my mind, we're talking about trees. I mean, I'm talking about trees. The trees of the Midwest fascinate me, California boy that I am. I've been reading field guides to trees, and I've been practicing the art of identifying them. That's an elm, I tell her. That's an oak. The bridge hasn't left the river shore behind yet, and the leaves of the riverside trees are beside us. She listens politely. I show her the shape of the oak leaf, and she pretends interest. It’s not too important what we talk about. We walk on, and we're above the rushing waters of the Mississippi.

It's summer again. It's our last summer. My apartment is on the third floor. All the windows are open. The fan is blowing. Minnesota humidity is standing in the room. Leeza is so somber. She's sitting on my sofa, with her hands clasped between her knees. She doesn't know what to say. She loves her grandmother so much, and she feels as though she is letting her down.

Her grandmother has flown to America from Ethiopia. She’s visiting with Leeza in Minnesota before she visits Leeza's father in L.A. She has been staying a long time, while Leeza has been working and conducting a job search. Leeza just graduated from college, and she needs to find her first permanent job. It’s a stressful time. Her grandmother doesn’t want to leave the apartment. She sits in the small studio apartment all day. She complains, and she worries. Leeza sends her friends to entertain the old woman, then she rushes home and she apologizes. She is forced to reflect on how little she has. She's been in America for seven years, and what does she have to show for it?

Leeza’s father has been out to Minnesota to visit recently, for Leeza’s graduation. Leeza looks up to him. He's a supportive dad, and he's a stern dad. He has continually pressed her to finish her education. He has offered support, and when she was able to, proud Leeza has refused. He has pressed her to move to L.A., but she wants her own life. She has been ashamed for family to see how poor she is. She wants him to be proud.

'You've been in school,' I tell her. 'You've been doing the right thing.'

She's crying now. 'You don't know,' she says. And it's true. I don't know the pressures on the Ethiopians who have ventured overseas. Expectations are high. America is rich.

When I tell her I want to take her back to Ethiopia some time, she demurs. What will they think? She doesn't say it, but it's written in her eyes. What will they think: about me, about her life, about her poverty, about her new ways, about her new thoughts. Minnesota does something to people. I know; I'm from somewhere else, too. It takes the shout out of them. It imprints them with a snow-squint, and marks them with the quiet of deep winter. They pause. They choose their words. How will she accommodate the two places in her story?

Not yet, she says. She can’t go home. Something has to happen. Her life has to take some shape. I'm disappointed. I want to do something with her sadness, wash it away, box it up, or work it out of her, like massaging a knot out of the muscle in her shoulder. I'll work on it as long as she needs me to.

There aren't many pictures from our last summer. I've agreed to teach a few summer school classes, but I'm investing a lot of energy into enjoying the summer. I'm hanging out with Troy, staying out late. I'm reading in the park, watching the river currents, and I’m coasting along the hot streets on my ten-speed. I see Leeza when I can, but she is so busy.

My last images of her flicker like old film stock. The light is failing. Her face is drawn. She is wearing a scarf over her hair. She is distracted. She has stopped by the cafe. I am holding her hand on the cafe table. I am telling her she's beautiful. She's restless. She has to go. She is passing the windows of the cafe on her way out, returning to where she has parked her car.

And everything falls silent. Movement and love have been muffled into long, mute submission. Memories are a drug, and one awakens from them as though from a profound sleep. All I have been doing for hours is looking out a small window, into arid space, into wisps of cloud. There is now that subtle dip, the slight tilt forward, and one intuits that the journey is coming to an end.

The lights come up. The plane banks. There is a stirring among the passengers. The airplane leans into its final descent into Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We have already passed over the city once, the city nestled among its California mountains of dull green and brown. I've seen boulevards below, crooked avenues and their tributaries. I've seen the jumble of roofs, some flashing with reflected sunlight. Now, flying low in preparation for landing, we cruise over circular huts amid yellow fields. My heart is pounding. 'What have I done?'

The plane is taxiing toward the back of Bole International. The new terminal stands alone, tall and rectangular, looking like a modular building made up of white plastic shelving tubes. It's an odd imprisonment one undergoes, sealed inside an airplane with hundreds of others, approaching a new terminal, firmly under the thumb of choices made in more hopeful, or more desperate, moments.

The customs area is as cold and colorless as any customs area, made of tall and square rooms, tiled and unfinished. With a stamp in my passport, I am released into baggage claim. From the baggage area, I glimpse the waiting families. They gather many deep at the barrier beyond the door into the lobby.

Bags in hand, I silently close the distance. I know there is no going back, and I feel very keenly how another life is waiting beyond that barrier. I have seen photos of Leeza’s sister and brother, but the actual encounter in the airport lobby is jarring. They seem in that instant small and alien. Saba looks up at me from underneath her black veil, and I see nothing familiar there. Dalul smiles awkwardly. Neither speaks English. I'm submerged in a terrific internal struggle.

Outside the doors of the airport, I see the eastern side of the city laid out before me.  Urban development follows a line of gentle hills that lead north into a low range of mountains that remind me of the landscapes of my childhood in southern California. It’s not the sight of the city that is most striking. I am struck by a scent in the air that is strong and unique. It reminds me for a moment of a trip to Egypt some nine years before. But there is something different.

Over the years, I have come to look forward to breathing in that scent on arrival. It contains many things: the red earth of Ethiopia, charcoal stoves, coffee, and the native red chili spice called berbere. It’s a scent of home. Leeza is here.

Chapter Two

‘What do you really want to do, Leeza?’ It’s such an American question.

She pauses, and there’s a shy look in her eye. ‘I want to go home and open a school for the poorest children.’

This is unexpected. I’m staring at her, momentarily speechless. I'm always more in love with her. "Well, let’s do it,’ I say.

▪

Leeza died on July 11, 2003. She was struck by a car being chased by police around the streets of Minneapolis. The crime was a minor drug offence. Her car was tumbled across three lanes and into a light pole. She had to be cut out of the car, but she was dead before she arrived at the county hospital. It was a Friday. I was only a few miles away, waiting near her apartment because we had a date.

Leeza is still gone. This is the revelation that sends me into blind fits of pain day after day for years afterward. She will always be gone.

When I begin writing about Leeza in 2008, I break open some boxes. They have been in storage since I left for Ethiopia five years earlier. Inside one of the boxes is a small glass jar that I sealed up in the summer of 2003. Inside are keepsakes of Leeza, gathered within a week of her passing. There’s a long, curling strand of her black hair; a few dried roses from a bouquet she once gave me; and a miniature Eiffel Tower, a gift from Nejat that Leeza had attached to her key ring. There’s a feather in the jar, too, the souvenir of a little miracle.

Inside one box are journals. There are several notebooks from 2003. I had been jotting down thoughts in one, and dreams and quotes from reading in another.

▪

July 9 (two days before Leeza died)

I’m feeling very upbeat this week. I’ve been biking around, reading in the park – exactly what I wanted out of this summer. Yesterday I biked over to Nicollet Island. I sat on the river side of the island, facing the falls. The impression is old. I have memories of when I used to go there and read Plath, daydreaming and wanting to be somewhere else. I was so depressed then. It seems like I encounter a lot of these cold spots around town. I’ve lived over them, through them, worn a new groove. It occurred to me that if I could reach all those depressed zones and reprogram them, I’d be free.

▪

August 21 (a month and ten days after Leeza died)

From Orlando, by Virginia Woolf: ‘For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.’

Again, from Orlando, words attributed to Swift: ‘I hate life when I think it exposed to such accidents; and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth, while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing.’

From De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde: ‘Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.’

Psalm 22:29: ‘… and none can keep alive his own soul.’

▪

September 10

I write, ‘She’s everywhere when I dream, when I close my eyes. I’m in some apartment and howling with pain, having lost her, trying to understand. I’m conscious of others around. People are praying to her as St. Anne. We’re in a cave-like church. We’re conscious of spending our last days together. I’m crying. I tell her I’m angry at her. She asks why, and I say, You’re leaving. She says, I’m not. She kisses me and I feel her lips very vividly. She’s wearing a short, cardinal red pleather jacket uncharacteristic of her. It’s kind of an indulgence because she’s leaving. We laugh about it.’

Thomas Hardy: ‘… human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a somberness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.’

▪

October 30

I have a series of linked dreams as I drift in and out of sleep. Leeza is dying. She hasn’t slept in days, but she won’t tell me. She surrounds herself with friends, so that I can never be alone with her. I’m so sad. I feel mistrusted and cheated. Wes visits me at 3am to check on me. Eric is there, singing songs. Again she calls on me. She has slept a little, and looks horrible. She is surrounded by friends. I’m helpless, so sad, so lonely. I’m left wondering who I am, what I’ve been doing, who I’ve loved. At the end, she’s dying. She’s whispering to me, ‘You’ve been my heart,’ and ‘Are we still heroes on the other side?’ I’m so alone, but I realize this is how she had to go through the dying, as a hero in the way her culture has dictated, helping her friends. I’m abandoned.

▪

November 13

Rimbaud, via Henry Miller: ‘In the end I will ask to be pardoned for having fed myself on lies.’

▪

The second time I see the aurora borealis is the night Leeza dies. She is already gone by the time I see it, but I don’t know.

Troy and I have gone to Dusty’s and had a few drinks. We’re regulars at Dusty’s. It’s just a block and a half from our apartment building on Marshall in Northeast Minneapolis. I’ve been living in that building for about three years, and Troy for nearly that long. We moved in because our friends were the custodians of the building. By the time of the events recorded here, those friends have bought a house and moved out, but Troy and I have remained. I have the lookout over the building’s tiny, buckling back parking lot, and Troy has the lookout over the street and the river.

Dusty’s is a true neighborhood spot, in a part of town known for its neighborhood bars. The bartender knows us, and knows what we drink. There’s a weekly meat raffle and pull tabs. Groups of ageing locals come in and commandeer tables, raising Cain. Local bluegrass and blues musicians perform on the awkward little stage that faces only a few barstools dead ahead. In this narrow, little place, the only tables are to the performers’ right, underneath the corner TV, by the kitchen and the bathrooms. When I visit Dusty’s years later, the same bartender is still working, and she recognizes me. ‘Where have you been?’ Africa. ‘Oh, wow. What are you doing there?’ Yeah, I’m not really sure.

On the night of July 11, I force Troy into a game of chess. I’m brooding because Leeza has stood me up. We were supposed to meet at 5:30, after work. I waited for half an hour in the park on Franklin underneath her apartment complex, calling her on my cell phone. There was no answer. I’m annoyed. I’m uneasy. She never called back.

She has her reasons, I assure myself.

Leeza’s life is changing in 2003. She is anxious. She has been finishing her schooling, piling on the credits during her last term. It's time for career, but work has been hard to find. She has been hosting family, her father flying in for her graduation, and her grandmother coming to visit America.

America, land of hope. For seven years, Leeza and her friends have worked in clothing shops and hotels and restaurants, accruing debt and soldiering through university courses in English, their second or third or fourth language. They live in chilly rooms and public housing. They meet furtively to dance to their own music. And they fear the day their family discovers them for who they have become, lonely refugees, still poor in a sea of apathy. They build their new lives stone by stone, but it takes so long. Family members survey their work with a sneer or with grief.

Her grandmother is called Etalem by the family. Etalem will need a lot of care and help, but Leeza lives alone on the eighth floor of a public housing block. Her grandmother wouldn't know what to do if she went outside. She sits in the tiny apartment, and she protests that she is fine, even as she suggests that something is not right about this life. The windows look out over flat spaces, the blocks south of Franklin stretching on, obscured by the many trees in full summer growth. Directly below is the small park where I will wait for Leeza to get home from work.

Leeza has a part-time job that I can't even recall at this writing, except to say that it took her to the neighborhood near Lake Calhoun. She walks by the shore during her breaks. She sits in the grass and looks out over the lake, summer skies reflected in the water.

She’s been interviewing. She has applied to a non-profit in St. Paul, and she sincerely hopes she gets to start her career there. I call them. The woman who interviewed her says that Leeza was one of her leading candidates. I can't know whether she says that out of sympathy. I believe her.

The strain on Leeza has been extreme this summer. I’ve been worried. I’ve been impatient. I haven’t seen as much of her as I would like. She breaks our dates. She has too much on her plate. Still, she hasn’t called me. I’m uneasy.

She has her reasons. I cannot let myself worry.

Returning up Marshall from Dusty’s, we decide to go to the railroad crossing. Just north of our apartment building, rusting