Yes, Chef, page 24
Maya is ten years younger than I am, but in many ways she’s been exposed to more. She speaks Amharic, Dutch, French, and English, and she’s lived for long periods in Ethiopia, Europe, and the United States. Part of what I loved about her from the start was that she wasn’t jaded about New York or the restaurant world. I’d take her to events, and the way she’d remember people was Daniel, “the nice French guy,” or Eric, “the handsome guy with gray hair.” And just as I was comfortable around women because I had sisters, she had a ton of brothers and took no prisoners when we’d go to play basketball with my buddies. If we went to a black tie event, she knew how to be gracious and meet people and, of course, how to pose for the cameras. Someone as tall and beautiful as she is could easily be intimidating to people, but Maya is so friendly and welcoming that people are instantly put at ease. In my world, where relationships matter, her people skills count for a lot. She understands that the restaurant business is really about two things: food and conversation.
Gradually I introduced Maya to the New York that I loved. We went to eat everywhere—she was open to everything from dim sum in Chinatown to late-night dinners at Nobu, but she liked Floyd Cardoz’s Tabla best, probably because his Indian spices were closest to the ones she knew from home. For her part, Maya introduced me to Ethiopian culture in a way my blatte friends had never been able to. I may know more about African cooking in general, but Maya is a better Ethiopian cook than I am. She knows more about the food you eat on holidays and in certain regions and if you’re from a particular tribe. She will explain how the couscous in Ethiopia is thicker, more like barley than semolina, and how to eat it for breakfast with honey drizzled on top. She crisps injera in the oven and breaks it into chips that we can use with dips, and taught me how to drink coffee with butter and salt instead of milk and sugar.
I lived most of my adult life avoiding real relationships, telling myself that they would get in the way of my cooking, or that my mother and my sisters in Sweden needed me to be the man in the family, or that I didn’t have time for commitments. There was always an excuse, but the real reason was that I was not ready until I met Maya.
That housewarming party was that best damn party I ever threw. It changed my life forever.
OUR FATHER WAS ALIVE. Not Lennart, the one who loved and raised us, but Tsegie, the one who’d given me and Linda life. Linda discovered this. For years, she had been researching and retracing our Ethiopian roots. She was a diligent sleuth, and every year or so would turn up some significant new piece of the puzzle that was our past. One year, she got hold of our hospital intake forms from Addis, only to discover that we were not the ages we’d grown up thinking we were: I was a year younger and she a year older. It may sound silly, but my mind immediately flashed back to being in high school when I was axed from the soccer team for being too small. Knowing that I had actually been a year younger than my Viking classmates made me feel a little better, even all these years later. Pathetic, I know. But true.
Linda then managed to track down an uncle on our mother’s side. He responded to a letter from Linda with stunning news. Our birth father, Tsegie, had not died in the war with Eritrea, as we’d always believed. He was alive and well and living in a twenty-five-hut village called Abragodana, about sixty miles south of Addis.
As it happened, I was due to make my second trip to Ethiopia in a few weeks. I was doing a piece for Travel & Leisure about Addis, and I went with the talented and fun writing team of the Lee brothers, Matt and Ted. I would take them to the Merkato, of course, and we would check out Addis’s nightlife scene with a long-distance assist from Mes, whose uncle still lived in the city. But ever since I’d gotten the news of Tsegie, I could think of nothing else. I was going to meet my father. I was not the orphan I had spent thirty years believing I was. Imagine finding out that some fundamental truth about yourself, that you had long accepted, was not actually true. As if you’d grown up believing you were white, and then suddenly finding out you were black. I caught my reflection in mirrors, in the weeks before that second trip to Ethiopia, and marveled at the fact that I would soon be seeing some older version of my face—not figuratively, as I had on the first trip, imagining my older self in the faces of Habesha men on the trip, but literally, the way children do when they look into the face of a parent and see the family lines rendered in flesh and bone.
Mes’s uncle Workasef served as our translator for the trip, and he agreed to come with me to Abragodana. We planned to leave the photographer and the Lee brothers behind—I didn’t want the moment to turn into a circus—and hire a driver. Somehow, Workasef had gotten word to the village, and they would be expecting us. This in itself was nothing short of a miracle, since the village has no telephones, much less running water, gas, or electricity.
The drive—which took hours longer than it would have if we hadn’t been traveling over pitted and dusty unpaved roads, stopping regularly for herds of cattle or donkeys carrying mountains of charcoal lashed to their backs—had to be reminiscent of the journey Linda and I made with our mother three decades before. Looking out the windows of our rattly van, passing through tiny villages and barren landscapes, I went over the details of my life story—at least, what I knew of it.
At birth, I was named Kassahun Tsegie. I was the third child of a farmer and his wife, and we lived in the Ethiopian highlands, in a small village outside of Addis Ababa, the country’s capital. Most Ethiopians farmed or raised livestock; my father did both. He grew lentils and chilies and had cows. Their first child, a son, had died, and after him came Fantaye, my sister Linda, a girl with big round eyes and full brows like our father’s. And after Fantaye, I came along. We belonged to the Amhara ethnic group, not as large as the Oromo, who dominated our area, but still one of the largest of the many, many ethnic groups that made up the country’s population. I was born in 1971—not 1970 as I originally believed—when the country was in the midst of great turmoil. The Eritrean war of independence had been raging for ten years, and Emperor Haile Selassie’s four-decade reign was gasping toward an end while potential successors jockeyed for position. Political strife aside, the country had been ravaged by malnutrition and a tuberculosis epidemic that had infected nearly eight hundred thousand people. If left untreated, more than half of the people who have active TB will die. In Amharic, TB is called samba necarsa, cancer of the lung.
By my first birthday, I had contracted TB. So had my sister. So had my mother, and her case was the worst of all. There was no medical help in our village, so the three of us set out, by foot, for Addis Ababa, where there were doctors and modern hospitals. My mother worked some unknown miracle to get us through the lines of sick people outside the hospital to get us the care we needed.
My mother died in that Addis hospital and there was no record of our birth father, just a rumor that he had died in the war. Fantaye and I must have had less severe cases of TB, or maybe we found help—in the form of antibiotics—before our symptoms progressed too far to be put into check. We were taken in by the hospital, nursed out of crisis and back toward health. However long it took, we had beat tremendous odds. Months later, when we were well enough to be released, the hospital staff faced the question of what to do with us. One of the nurses, Ayem Alem—whose name meant “eye of the world”—stepped up.
“I’ll take them home,” she said. She took us to stay with her and her four daughters in a small house built on a postage-stamp plot of land issued by the government. “I’ll find an adoption center to place them.” True to her word, Ayem found a Swedish field hospital that administered adoption placements, and she convinced them to put us on their list. While she waited for us to find a home, she must have stretched to accommodate and feed two extra mouths. Maybe her daughters felt burdened by our presence when their mother was at work; maybe they liked us, fussing over us or delighting at my sister’s easy laugh or my smile. My Swedish mother has kept Ayem’s letters—which she continued sending to us over the years, long after we’d grown—and the way she tells us how her daughters haven’t forgotten us, and that she hopes we remember our Amharic names, are all telling details of how deep Ayem’s feelings were for my sister and me.
I mulled over these bits and pieces of my story as we passed through small towns and across long stretches of parched, barren land. Through the dust, I saw bright yellow and red signs for St. George beer everywhere. In towns that were having a market day, droves of people filled the road, indifferent to traffic. A man balancing a sewing machine on his head nearly walked into our front bumper, but a friend pulled him back just in time.
Did my mother, whose name was Ahnu, really make this trip alone? With two small, sick children? Perhaps my father went with her, or maybe he stayed with the farm while a brother or uncle accompanied us. I’ll never know for sure. We probably went by foot, which would have taken days, and we would have traveled in the cool of the evening, and spent our days resting in whatever shade we could find. For food, we would have carried dried injera, and quanta, a beef jerky made from long strips of meat, seasoned with pepper powder and salt and left to dry for up to a week. We would have had to carry our own water. That we even made it to Addis astounds me, but of course it was no guarantee of salvation. Hospitals were so overcrowded that people slept in the streets for weeks just to get inside. Did Ahnu ever make it into the hospital? Did a doctor ever see or treat her? I don’t know. What I do know is that she left the village with us and she died. And that she was twenty-eight years old.
BEFORE I LEFT NEW YORK, I’d gone to the bank. Anyone who has traveled extensively in Africa knows the drill. Cash is king, not credit cards, not traveler’s checks. Just as important as the bank is the run I always make to the sporting goods store where I purchase two dozen brand-new soccer balls. These are the currency I will share with the kids that I meet.
On the plane from New York to Addis, I was so aware that for the first time in my adult life, I was traveling not as a chef, chasing flavors—but as an orphan, chasing history. And yet, I was also piggybacking work on the trip—traveling with a team from Travel & Leisure. When I look back on it, I can see clearly that work was a buffer from all the question marks and possible disappointments that might await me in Ethiopia. If I did not get to meet my father, if he was in any way a disappointment, I could change course and focus solely on cooking and the food feature that we were creating for the magazine. But at the time, it wasn’t anywhere near as clear, and I told myself that the day I was going to meet my birth father was merely a side trip, like the afternoon I had spent learning how to make injera with the old women in the hut.
Once our team arrived in Addis, we drove through the city to an old orphanage to meet my father and the woman who had brokered the deal. It was chaos to get there, as it is chaos to get anywhere in Addis. Goat pimps run across the street, herding skinny goats. You get dust in your eyes. A Mercedes speeds by. A hand is out and begging. At the same time, your eyes can’t quite believe the beautiful embassies and villas that are home to the city’s wealthy residents and the expat elite. And there are runners—both men and women, tearing down the sides of the street like it’s the New York City Marathon. But it’s not a marathon, it’s just a day ending in y and Addis is pulsing with the rhythm of three million feet, many of them barefoot.
We were traveling in an old Toyota Land Rover. That’s what all the expats drive, but even a Land Rover can’t protect you from the waves of dust. An hour after we’d gotten into the car, we knocked on the door of the compound. There was a guard at the gates and he was dressed in old military gear from some long-ago war. It was a hundred degrees, but he had the full regalia: military pants, jacket, shawl, boots. It’s the way every guard in the city lets his power and importance be known.
I walked in the door and the first person I met was Rahel, the woman who got us the information about my father. Rahel worked at the agency that handled Linda’s and my adoption. But in a country with 75 percent unemployment, she took a great risk to let us know our father was alive. In fact, she and Linda had been in touch for years before we finally learned the truth. Rahel waited until three months before she retired to make this introduction.
There was an older man sitting next to her. Rahel gestured to him. “This is your father,” she said.
My father. Not Lennart, fair skinned, Swedish, muscular, born of the sea, with a love of the land. This man had dark skin and gray, thick, long hair. Right away, I was impressed. To be eighty in a country where the majority of men are lucky to see forty is nothing short of a miracle. “He is a farmer and a priest,” Rahel told me. I sat in silence as my birth father began to pray in these beautifully melodic chants. The whole thing was so overwhelming. I was holding it together, but then I started crying. Once the tears came, they never really stopped.
———
MY FATHER JOINED our group, we got back into the Land Rover, and we headed toward his house. It was a two-hour ride. In that car ride, we had to get to know each other. We both knew that once we got to his house, his wife would be there, as would his other kids. The time in our car—it was our only real moment.
What to say?
I knew I didn’t want the first thing I said to be, “Why did you give us up for adoption? Why did you let us think you were dead?” It couldn’t be a blaming game. And that, in and of itself, was its own challenge. There was a part of me that wanted to jump out of the Land Rover and to run away from my father, the mystery, all of the questions for which I feared I would receive no real answers.
We passed the Haile Selassie palace. There was a brand-new tower. Always, always, there was the contrast between the luxe Mercedes-Benz sedans and the impoverished kids on the street. It is Harlem times twenty. I looked out of my window at the street vendors selling pictures of Usher and Tupac. The smell of berbere was everywhere. We zoomed past a Starbuckks with two ks. We zipped past a Mariott with one r. Men and women were eating out at a restaurant called Burger Double King. I stared out of the window to avoid staring at my father’s face.
He started by asking me questions: “How’s Anne Marie? How’s Fantaye?”
He knew that my older sister Linda remembers more about Ethiopia than me. He remembered her more vividly as well. He said, “I have a very clear image of her.”
I began to ask nervous, peripheral questions: “How was the harvest this year? Is it difficult to get water?”
I’ve talked to other Swedish Ethiopian kids who’ve met their parents. “It’s just a money war,” they told me. “They just want money from you.” But I wanted to be open, I wanted to build a relationship. I wanted to sweep away the dust and swat away the flies and find something beautiful in my newfound family. I just didn’t know how.
I was looking out of the window and after a while, there were no roads. The red clay caked my face and I coughed. I began to see more giraffes and fewer people. Kids were running toward us because they were so excited to see a car. Dried-up mud was everywhere. We were in the savannah of Africa and everyone was yearning for shade: Animals curled up under trees; families slept under the trees; everybody and everything were swatting flies.
I wondered, Is this the road my mother walked with us?
I wondered, When can I ask about my mother?
I couldn’t wait to tell my sister Linda. When it comes to our life in Ethiopia, both before and in Sweden, Linda is my truth teller. I tell her things and I know that they are real. She tells me things and I know that I am hearing the truth.
I thought, Petrus, Linda’s son, would go crazy if he was here. He is so much like his mother. He longs for Ethiopia, too.
My father talked about his firstborn son, my older brother, who died in infancy. He wept openly at the loss. I cannot gauge, or begin to imagine, what he has felt about losing Linda and me all those years ago.
Luckily, just when I was sure that the reunion was too much for me to handle emotionally, we arrived in my father’s village. It looked like the same patch of dried-up mud that we had been scaling for hours, but my father knew where he was. He directed the driver to take a right.
I remembered being out in the ocean, in Smögen, with my uncles. They would say, “Stop the boat here,” and we would find all these fish. As a child, I wondered how my uncles could see markers in the big blue sea. My father saw markers in the red clay, in exactly the same way.
We turned again on an even smaller dirt road and there were maybe sixty kids running toward us. All the kids in the neighborhood were jumping on the car. My father waved them away with a stick the whole time. We stopped the car and got out.
A woman ran up to me, wailing with joy. This, I would later find out, was Kasech, my father’s second wife. She was closer to my age than his. She held my face in her hands and kissed both my cheeks again and again, then took me by the hand to lead me through the throng of spectators and into the yard. She walked me into their hut, gesturing for us to sit on the benches lining the wall while she and another woman performed the coffee ceremony. In Ethiopia, this is one of the greatest displays of hospitality: roasting, grinding, and then brewing fresh coffee for your guests. Burning frankincense is part of the ritual, as is a bed of grass strewn on the floor, a suggestion of luxury carpeting the parched earth. While you wait, you snack on popcorn, unsalted and cooked in front of you.
My father’s home consisted of two clay houses—one with a roof, one without.
The one with no roof was where they went to the bathroom. There were two oxen walking around the compound. One skinny goat.
The house was all of forty square feet, with a small oven for making injera. The walls were decorated with beautiful clean pictures that Linda had sent—of Jesus, Petrus, me, my mother, Linda, even Zoe. There were eight people in the family and even without all of us visitors, there was no way everyone could fit inside at the same time; I saw the rolled-up mats in the corner and I knew that every night, some of the kids slept outside with the animals.
