The first mistake a non-Habesha wife makes is the teakettle. Eritrean spiced tea is a treat and a daily ritual. The kettle is filled with cardamom pods, cinnamon bark, gingerroot, and cloves, so that the water is always infused with the spices. The tea—in our case, strong Kenya tea, brought or sent by Ficre’s sister who lives in Nairobi—is sometimes boiled loose-leafed in milk and then brought to the right level of intensity with the flavored water. Or a quick tea is made with the spiced water and a teabag, and lots of sugar and heated milk are added. Delicious either way, always proffered for company, which in the Habesha household, is never-ending. Habesha: a word I learned and loved, meaning Eritrean and Ethiopian people. Some say Queen Hatshepsut in 1460 BC first used a version of the term to mean a foreign people from the incense-producing regions. In contemporary use, it is an interesting term of self-identification because it refers to Ethiopians and Eritreans, despite the historically rooted enmity that lingers amongst some in both groups.
One day the new, non-Habesha housewife will fill and put on the kettle, bring it to the boil, and empty the water into a soup she is making, or accidentally use it to steam vegetables, or pour it over French-press coffee. She will shriek at the brackish brown water and sticks that rush out. Thereafter there will be two kettles on the stove, and she will always remember which is which.
Though tea is usually taken with milk and sugar for the Eritrean highlanders abroad, Ficre said his mother occasionally liked it with sugar and a slice of lime when she took tea with her friends in the afternoon, as she also liked papaya, with a slice of lime.
I close my eyes and see the color of papaya, of all melons, and the walls of the home he grew up in, and their delicate reprisal in his paintings.
Seven
“I find the nest and you feather the nest,” he would say. I called him from Munich, where I was on a poetry junket right after our marriage, newly pregnant with soon-to-be-Solomon, who seemed to us the first child born on earth. “I found our apartment,” he said, after I had complained that though I loved his painting studio, it was not a place for us to have a baby, with its exposed nail heads on the floor, twenty-four-hour construction outside, frequent fire-code violations, and mouse visitors. He found a beautiful two-bedroom apartment with a proper dining room—my heart’s desire—and we moved in as soon as I got back.
Months later, with the child to be born within weeks, Ficre came home one night late from the restaurant and told me he had something he had to show me, now. It was raining, it was midnight, and I was a zeppelin, anticipating the falafel he would bring me after work and which we would eat while watching Frank’s Place and Frasier in reruns. Come, come, come! he exhorted, against my protestations. He held the umbrella for me as I waddled three blocks down our street.
He stopped us in front of a house that was blazing with light so that we could see two men inside on ladders, painting the walls. We walked around to the backyard.
“Look,” Ficre whispered. The men saw us at the window and, improbably, beckoned us in. Would you like to see the house? they said. And walked us through, at midnight. There was going to be an open house on Sunday, they told us. The next morning, we called the broker and preempted it, for Ficre had found our home.
As soon as the aptly named Solomon was born—righteous little man who blazed into this world fist-first—and I could stay on my feet, the family from both sides gathered to help us move. The men swiftly and silently loaded a U-Haul truck with our belongings, proud African oxen all. A collection of nieces and my parents walked lamps and glasses and garment bags back and forth the few blocks between the apartment and the house, and I carried the baby pasha to his palace.
With milk crates as our tables and chairs, we fortified ourselves with legendary New Haven pizza and set up our home. Solomon’s room gleamed with buffered light off the hardwood floors. The cradle our carpenter friend Carlo had made us was in the corner. Our eldest niece, Senayt, set up the diaper pail with the fancy closure that neither Ficre nor I could figure out. One of Ficre’s sisters made ga’at, the dense barley porridge meant to saturate the mother with iron after childbirth and repair her uterus. It is presented in a mound with an indentation in the center, into which is poured hot, clarified butter spiced with berbere, then cooled with yogurt.
Life on Livingston was lovely. Annie Fischer lived next door. She was an extraordinary gardener whose plate-sized flowers were her glory. I overlooked her yard from the window in the room where I worked. In summer she had loud, boozy parties on the back porch and we would go to sleep smiling listening to her raucous laugh, her joy, the sound of tinkling ice in g-and-ts. She had old rusty tin signs in the yard and a bench for sitting and thinking. She used to come to the fence with flowers for us, calling FIIII-KIIII, to him in his backyard studio, just as he came to her so many mornings with cappuccino as he went into the backyard to have his first cigarette and inspect his organic plot.