Disturb Her

There’s a cloud over Lake Tana that reminds me of summer and a day in a boat when Amara took me looking for hippos.  The rains had been ferocious the night before but this morning the lake was calm while flamingoes helped the fishermen in their red papyrus boats look for the freshest fish of the day.

“Don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her” Amara said when he saw the female hippo bathing with her two young calves.  I didn’t move an eyelash and could barely breathe.  She spotted us from a distance and wriggled her ears, came closer to her young and then all three gracefully turned under the water like Disney ballet dancers accidentally marooned in 21^st century reality.  Amara waited a while before putting the engine back on, in case the mammals were under the boat but we started to move north soon and I watched as the birds followed us.  Bright yellow, green, purple and pink birds that I had never seen before and didn’t know the names of and still don’t.  Later we stopped again, this time for our picnic of mangos, bread and fried chicken and we spent the entire day with just one sentence between us “don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her”.

By sunset the lake had changed and Amara was concerned that we should stop and rest before it got too dark.  The equatorial sunset reflected on the water and the source of the Blue Nile was stiller than it had been all day.  As we came closer to the shore I could see some women collecting water from the lake in their bright orange plastic containers while some children bathed and swam and laughed.  The children waved at me and called out “hello foreigner” and I waved and shouted back at them “hello Ethiopians”.

Amara smiled at this interaction and asked me again “why don’t you have any children?”  I shrugged and tried to explain again that I neither knew why or how I didn’t have any children, that it had never been a conscious choice at any time and that now it was too late as I was too old.  I wasn’t sad about it as I didn’t usually think about it much and normally people in Europe didn’t question me.  Only in Ethiopia was it a topic to raise such interest.  He frowned and replied “everyone should have children” as if this were an absolute and well documented truth of life.

We tied the boat ropes to a lime tree and walked the short way back to his home.  Outside his house we sat and drank some beers and honey wine and smoked cigarettes and ate injeera with lamb.  We talked about his work and his life and his son who lived with relatives in a nearby town because his wife had died and Amara couldn’t take care of him alone.  But it wasn’t long before we came back to his fascination with my life without children.

“Why don’t you take my son back to Europe with you, give him an education, let him live with you.  This would be very good for him.  And also very good for you” Amara suggested with a casualness usually reserved for asking someone the time or what their favourite colour is.

“You serious?”

“Sure, why not?”

I couldn’t think of a reply so I finished my beer and went inside his house and crawled under the mosquito net we’d bought the day before at the cattle market.  The rains began again and splashed down onto the corrugated iron rooftop with surprisingly subtle synchronicity and eventually I fell asleep to those sounds while he stayed outside finishing the honey wine and the last of the cigarettes.  He was watching the lake and watching the bright night lightening storm and might even have been watching as a female hippopotamus took care of her young and wriggled her ears.

Don’t move at all or the ripples will disturb her.