Virgins Always Bleed: (Not a Vampire Book)

by Lemlem Tilahun

It was the theologian St. Augustine of Hippo who, thousands of years ago, said something about man’s natural tendency to seek divine worship. There is a hole, so to say, that God created for Himself in man’s soul that man tries to fill with everything else before he found rest by coming back to the creator. It is, apparently, what makes men fanatics, apologists, heroes or traitors, saints or heretics, politicians, soccer hooligans, or martyrs. [St. Augustine didn’t appear too concerned with women’s holes. But one must assume they have it too, and were perhaps preoccupied with trying to survive in a man’s world to ask questions, to write books, to start wars in an attempt to fill it]

A nineteen-year-old beauty who lost interest in him ever since she learned it wasn’t his parents’ riches that allowed him to learn horse-riding at the hands of a legendary showjumper like Shambel Melka, but his mother being a distant relative to the Royal Guardsman’s second wife.

So Austen-esque!

For although he was endowed with a manly figure that made him a vision on top of four-legged beasts of beauty and power, Messai was an unemployed twenty-one-year-old.

Memories are kind, though. They are generous. They sanctify the unholy and make what was bad appear not so bad. Like suede shoes that spent years under beds, it is easy to scrub their dust off and make them look shiny. They forgive and forget unkind words, selfish actions, cruel intentions.

Except for the unlucky few, take Hamsa Aleqa Gebru, to whom all good intentions turn sour, Ethiopia is full of characters the poor are willing to forgive [forget, and even exalt] for no good reason.

Before it was returned to the owners following the occupation, there lived in it an Italian who owned a small cooking-oil refinery and loved to dramatically slap his head with the flat of his hand and swear “Mamma Mia” a lot–as if he saw the need to be more stereotypical than he was.

As a former slave, Mahtebe was a hard case to crack. On the one hand, the fight was all about her, and people like her: the mistreated, the disrespected, the enslaved poor. On the other hand, Mahtebe was a willing, nay, zealous servant. A growling, grumpy, barely coherent creature whose hands were almost as fast as her feet, which were pretty fast. Although, right after the revolution, and before the [Red Terror] killings started, a couple of cadres visited Mahtebe at the house, explained the purpose of their visit, and made her sign her name by putting ink to her thumb, and proudly referred to her as “Comrade Mahtebe”, the old ex-slave showed no inclination to being “returned” to the people and/or having her freedom restored. She saw the visitors out unceremoniously and went about her day as if nothing had happened.

a Tolstoy-like character who rejected his family’s riches and went out, along his poor college roommates, to demand equality, freedom, end of oppression and exploitation to the peasant–most owned by families like his own.

We expect those who looked at us, when we looked at them, to come unattached. To have nothing but falling in love with us as the purpose of their lives theretofore. When they saw us, and in us they recognized “the one”, they would have no choice but to wait for us at bus stops, under hail or rain, hoping to see us again. To be driven crazy by the good that we are no one else but they can see. To sing love songs on our behalf and go out of their mind for want of us. [We are foolish]

Etsegenet, her semi-nun classmate who is born in a family of priests, had told her how the bible says. “In the end of times, seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, ‘We will eat our own food and wear our own apparel; only let us be called by your name, to take away our reproach.’” There is, practically, no time for playing coy.

She does have their number. She actually knows “their” number by heart. She had taken it, long time ago, hoping to call it and maybe hung up. Or talk to him under an assumed name. Talk to him and make him fall in love with her voice before showing up at the appointed place and time, being herself, voilà, to pleasantly surprise him. She had yet to dare dial it for her own personal reason, however.

All this, of course, the confession, came later. First was the polite dancing around. The opening of doors. The drawing of chairs. The pushing of her hand into her purse when she tried to pay for the cab. The conversation: About her family. About his family. About books, which led to her quoting a line on the beauty of suffering from “The Thorn Birds,” a romantic novel she happens to be reading, that made him–for once–not be jealous of people who spoke English better than him, rather ache to hear her talk in that foreign tongue, so he could dream of kissing those lips [glossy, plump, medium-rare], and make much of the little experience he had with Birdwatching tours at Awash National Park.

She’d have offered to remain a female eunuch than marry someone who she did not know, nor love, until she opened the bible and landed on Ruth 3:4: “And it shall be, when he lieth down, that thou shalt mark the place where he shall lie, and thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet, and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do.” It was a scene that has always bothered Yemsiratch, of a pretty young widow laying herself on a slab so a rich patron can carve her into sizeable bits just because her mother-in-law saw it as the only way to escape poverty. An unwashed, unpainted, unadorned form of prostitution, if Yemsiratch ever saw one, even if gentle Boaz proved too righteous to take advantage of the offer. It was the last straw. Yemsiratch said, “Nay, I would not,” and walked out of church two weeks later, breaking her covenant: a free woman! God does not seem to particularly mind. But she, being the non-deity half of the contracting parties, had a lot more to lose.

There was one person who did not voice his opinion on the change that came over her, this difference to her face, to her clothes, to her days. Not talking about God’s First Born, and only Son, here. If we come down to it, Jesus had no problem with Yemsiratch. He is plenty aware she had a problem with Him. That, ever since her mother was taken to a protestant church where her aunts were told existed a certain pastor who puts oil on sick people’s heads and prayed on them leading to many a recovery, He wasn’t on her favorite list. Alas, what can you do? With great power comes great responsibility. He wishes He was never placed in this position. That people whose respect He would have welcomed did not seem to have constant bones to pick with Him. But there it is. So, you smoke pot and try to get over it. Plus, the poor girl doesn’t seem to know most of this was in her head.

When Yemsiratch heard this from her aunts, she forgave Mary’s Boy Child, thanked Him icily, and asked if they could–you know–draw a truce from here on. She won’t ask Him for any more favors, as long as He did not interfere in her life. Jesus, either because He was too stoned to care, or because He had a thick skin as the less ethereal member of the trinity, or because He was born of a woman, seems to have heed to this bargain.

When her grievance goes overboard, and she feels like screaming/crying/throwing a punch, she stops talking about Him in a roundabout way and confronts Him head on. “Calling yourself a God,” she sneers, “Look at the world you created! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

Yemsiratch loves and feels sorry for her dad. Sometimes she feels less love and more pity. Sometimes she feels more scorn than pity, as when he voices his opinion on politics.

Not because he was in any way wise. Or old. Or had something to say other than what every other person is trained to say by society and longevity. But because he was a teacher by trade before settling into a life of sitting at home in winter, summer, and the middle season in between.

Messai is a pure child of nature. Since his needs and beliefs were simple, he finds himself endlessly attracted to those who appear complicated.

Sorry to break it to ya, kid, but the world won’t become asexual because Yemsiratch prefers her love clean. Everyone you see around you, from your co-workers to your neighbors to some of your friends, they are all busy pounding or getting pounded by someone when the light goes out. They eat, they shit, and they fuck. And they won’t stop doing so just because you gave them the stink eye,”

Messai was afraid. He had not told Yemsiratch that. But the things he does, the values he would like to develop, the person he would pay to be seen as [that he suspects he hasn’t got the ingredients for] were clear indications of a cry for help. If ever there was a man whose seeds were stopped from sprouting by the birds of the sky, by a severe sun, by the rocks he was forced to tread upon; that man was Messai. Still, it was painful–nay, beautiful–to see him struggle to go back to what he could have been; much like an absent-minded man trying to retrace his steps.

It was a cowing courage. It was a humbling humility. It was a heart-breaking way of being loved. It made her feel guilty, and wretched, and tearful–when she thought about the little negative things she may have privately harbored of his “silliness”. How undeserving she was of his trust. Of his blind devotion. Of his love.

Yemsiratch had learned, to her chagrin, that most of the “artists” that he introduced her to were mere wolves, if you will, in sheep’s clothing. That their knowledge of souls and beauty was no better than the average Joe’s [or Yohannes, as it were]. And that, when it comes to being versed on literature, language, and poetry [beauty and truth, truth beauty; on stopping for death, or by woods that are lovely, dark, and deep; on what happens to a dream-deferred or what went down when a priest and Satan met in the isolated Lebanese village of Annina], her “Encarta”-gleamed knowledge was much more extensive than theirs.

Even if she does not read books as much as she used to, the sight of books is enough to excite her. She had nursed many a crush on men whose name she did not know because of the books they carried. And the soul-fullness those books promised.

Ah! That is it exactly!

Then the phone rang. “It is for me,” said her heart. “It is for her,” her father said. “You have a phone call,” Ankush said, poking her head in.

But you can ask anyone, Wooriye, the whole village would tell you that there was none, not one moment of passion, between her and I,” Yemsiratch tried to think how she would go about asking the neighborhood of the alleged non-passion between Messai and–Firtuna. True or false? Fill in the blank? Please write what you know of the pregnancy of a child, one Fiqir Messai, in the empty space provided.

Munaye wasn’t the first person to try to instill religion in Yemsiratch. Men and women, from high school to college to University to work, have approached her–at bus stops, in taxis, outside churches–with their bibles, their crosses and tracts, their Jesuses, their Jehovahs, their Baháʼu’lláhs and their Joseph Smiths. The last of which she found so hilarious even she, who doesn’t give a gosh darn about patriotism, asked, “You seriously think that God would talk through some white guy who lived in America less than 200 years ago?!”

Such a fucking child, her dad. So immature. So pitiful without inspiring any pity.

Why indeed when she knows she’d take what he said, bury it somewhere she can’t revisit it, and continue to be with him.

When the pretty girl looked up, as pretty girls are wont to do, eventually, she found herself being smiled and ogled at by half a dozen men drinking by the restaurant side of the Bar & Restaurant.

Nature. Beautiful from afar. Dull and uninspiring when driving by it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, from Dickens to circa 1998 G.C. Ethiopia, that people took special pride in claiming they have not slept at all, and most indignant at repelling a charge that they–as a matter of fact–were snoring down the tent-roof all night long.

But not go crazy. Crazy isn’t an option. It is not on the table. It is the weak person’s way out. It had been made obvious for Yemsiratch that it isn’t madness that takes strength. It is sanity.

He doesn’t seem sure of anything, which Yemsiratch found oddly comforting. Doubt wasn’t a very Ethiopian trait. People, generally, knew. They were sure of everything. Everything they did not know, they suspected. Those they suspected, they alienated. Which is probably why the alienated go quickly insane. There is really no room for standing outside in a tightly knit community where everybody considers himself and herself inter-related, interdependent, and a stakeholder in every other person’s business.

God, as usual, shrugged off her request. “Have it your way!” Yemsiratch said after half a day of patient waiting, fully attired in her knit dress with the lace collar that her aunt Senait gave her as a graduation gift, a modest - if expensive - attire fit for the House of God , “Do your worst! Don’t forget you are the one who broke the covenant first, when you killed my mother. I didn’t overlook that either.”

That, although a man’s best friend maybe a dog, a woman’s best friend were her aunts. Aunts and women who have been there, like her, singing, just like her, “It’s not right, but it’s ok” along with Whitney Houston.

What she knows, what she is certain of, are the things she is unwilling to trade: her independence, her sense of self, and a good sex life. A very good sex life. The rest she can figure out as she goes along. She is sure.