He Wants to Cut Your Balls Off, Ferenji
A Day in the Peace Corps Life
Ato Abebe, the war hero – the war, that is, that Ethiopia’s resistance guerillas had waged against Mussolini’s brutal Italian invaders – glowered down at me. He was standing. I was sitting. He had a knife, eight inches of blade, honed sharp, and shiny on the cutting edge. I had a spoon.
A pressure lantern hissed on the low round table at which I sat, throwing hot white light on my plate of heaped up tibs. But the lantern was closer to the great hero than to me. My chair was back against the wall of the cramped, closet-sized room. A criss-crossing web of security wire, nailed across the small, square window just above me, cut off that escape. The only way out, a narrow doorway, was behind Ato Abebe.
His knife hand was trembling, the razor-sharp knife edge glistening; his free arm was half-extended towards me, his fist opening and closing. Ato Abebe was spewing words. But I was only two weeks in the country then, and maybe my Peace Corps trainer had skipped the language lesson on a berserk war hero with a twenty year case of PTSD. I didn’t understand what Ato Abebe was saying. He had my attention, though. 100%.
Ato Abebe’s voice rose, and he was making grabbing motions with his fist, then swiping across the table with the knife. His face was weathered, his grayed head bald at the front, and under his dark skin, veins bulged in his temples, pulsing streaks throbbing through his thin hairline. Totally focused, I suddenly recognized a word in his diatribe.
“Italiawi,” I heard, and shortly, again. “Italiawi”, an accusation aimed straight at me. The knife swiped.
“No – Yellem! Ine Amerikawi nen,” I choked out. “Yellem Italiawi! No!”
In quick succession, I wondered about knocking the pressure lantern straight at him, about parrying his knife with my spoon, about tossing the tibs and using the plastic plate as a shield. Behind him, a green curtain was pulled shut across the narrow entrance to the room, and my only escape was to get past Ato Abebe and through the door to the public bar on the other side. It was through that green curtain Ato Abebe had burst just after a server had brought in my supper.
In the first seconds, he stared straight into my uncomprehending eyes. Maybe, I thought, he wanted the other chair that was crammed into the tiny room. He was welcome. I had no use of it. But now, that other chair cut off one way around the table. I could go over the table, straight at the old man, or I could shimmy to my right, where with a lunge, he could pin me to the wall.
Fighters, 1940s
“Amerikawi,” I said again, louder, and then again, very loud. “Ine AMERIKAWI nen!”
Behind Ato Abebe, I saw the rings on which the green curtain hung slide to one side of the wooden rod. A arm shot forward on each side of him, then the arms bent up and locked the old man in a full nelson. “Italiawi yellem!” I heard. “Amerikawi newet!” Ato Abebe’s captor eased him sideways, and I saw the bar’s owner had come to my rescue. He talked calmly to Ato Abebe. Then a bar patron reached in and took away the knife, and the raging veins in the aging hero’s temples began to deflate.
Alemayhew, still holding Ato Abebe, looked at me. “Sorry,” he said. “He gets like this sometimes. White skin, you know. He thought you were Italian.” He said something to Ato Abebe and there was a soft reply. Alemayhew let go the full nelson, and motioned to the empty chair. Ato Abebe sat down. Alemayhew called for more food, a bottle of tej and glasses of tea. “He’ll remember you if we spend some time together. You’ll be safe in the future.”
We ate and talked and drank, and drank more, and I got over the top with the renowned Ato Abebe, known throughout the southern districts as the fiercest warrior of the resistance. “The Italians killed his brother,” Alemayhew told me. “So Ato Abebe killed ten of them. He drank their blood.” He paused. “All that blood. It’s made him crazy.”
“Well, thank you, Alemayhew,” I said. “I really didn’t want to die today.”
Alemayhew gave me a quick stare and spoke rapidly to Ato Abebe, then looked back at me. “Oh, he wasn’t going to kill you,” Alemayhew said. “He wanted to cut your balls off.”
“Ferenji!” Ato Abebe said, leaning at me. “Ferenji!” He thrust out his arm, made a grabbing motion with his fist, and with the other hand, now unknifed, swiped sideways across the table. But this time, he was laughing.
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