The Tower
A short story
1.
“Let us have sex,” He said.
Even though the afternoon sun penetrated through the hut’s door, and the fire in the middle of the hut burned, I shivered.
“If we had sex, he wouldn’t want you.”
Two months ago, a rich man had come to our town, he wanted to marry me, he’d said, and I’d told him there’s a man I love and I was going to marry him. Now the words coming from the man I love made me feel like I’d worn a dirty skirt. He wanted to have sex with me because no man in our town would marry a woman who was not a virgin. “Our love is not like this.”
He looked at me across the hut. “You know I love you.”
“Then let me go.”
He shook his head. “I’m keeping our love safe.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. Did he mean because he was hiding me in this hut, hiding me from the rich man, that our love would be safe?
At the door of the hut, while he was staring at the ensets, a bird sat on his shoulders. Was that—I approached Zenebe. He was opening his left hand. The bird was the same warbler I’d seen weeks before. That day, we’d sat outside his hut and this warbler had sat on the inside of his left hand.
“She is beautiful. I want to keep her.” He had said, his right hand coming down on the warbler.
I didn’t think he wanted to hurt the bird. Once, he’d chased two boys who’d thrown pebbles at birds on the sky. Still… I’d stared at his right hand, on top of his left hand, I’d felt the warbler squirming, her croak had sounded choked, and I’d smelled her fear. “Let her go! She will come back to you.”
And his right hand had loosened. Now, I wondered how the warbler found him even though I was sure the hut I was in now was far from his hut. I stared at the bird on his left hand, waiting for Zenebe to raise his right hand like he did last time, but he didn’t.
“I can’t lose you.”
When he’d told me that before, I’d felt loved, I’d leaned into him, no space between us, wanting to stay on his chest forever, listen to his heartbeat, and breathe in my favorite smell in the whole world, a forest smell, but now I felt what the warbler must have felt, when a hand came down on him—fighting for air to breathe in.
Once, I heard a story on the radio. There was a man who loved a woman. He wanted to show her how much he loved her. The man built her a beautiful tower at the top of a mountain in the town they lived. Every time the man hugged the woman, “you’re mine,” he whispered.
The woman loved hearing this until the man said, “I hate it when men look at you,” and did something so men would not look at her.
2.
The next morning, something about the hut felt familiar like I had seen it before. Jebenas and tabas filled the walls. I couldn’t take my eyes off the fireplace in the middle of the hut, which was circular and big. I lurched from the mat. We’d talked about what our home would look like when we got married. This was exactly what I’d wanted our hut to look like. He’d built me my dream home and yet all I wanted to do was scream.
I ran outside.
There was no one. Maybe he was letting me go, I thought. He knew how much I loved fresh air and walking around town, and listening to birds. When I saw birds flying I started walking away from the hut but men came out of the ensets. I didn’t know what was worse, that he gave me this small freedom to see birds flying, or that I could see but I couldn’t follow them to wherever they were flying to.
In the tower, the man kept saying, “I don’t want to lose you.” The woman said she loved him and that he would never lose her. Then the man built her a grocery in the tower.
The woman was touched until she realized why he’d built the grocery in the tower, he didn’t want men to look at her, he didn’t want her to leave the tower.
3.
“Someone will know you kidnapped me,” I said, when Zenebe came back in the afternoon.
“It would be too late by then.”
What did he mean? Before I opened my mouth, he stood and went to the back of the hut. A minute later, he came back, holding a Habesha Kemis. When he dropped it on my lap, I could only stare at it. A few months back, we’d gone to the city, and I’d seen this Habesha Kemis through the window of a shop that sold traditional dresses. I’d wanted to buy it but it was expensive. Now, I wondered where he got the money. Maybe he had sold one of his cows. I didn’t know what to feel about that. My hands hovered around the Habesha Kemis, scared to touch it. If I touched it, it would mean that I was okay with what he was doing.
4.
The next day, shouts woke me up.
“Birr Ambar Sebereleho! Birr Ambar Sebereleho!”
In our town, we said Birr Ambar Sebereleho the morning after a wedding night. But why were people saying that now?
I ran outside. Our town people had gathered in front of the hut. I stood there, refusing to believe what I was hearing. The man I love wouldn’t do this, he wouldn’t do this, I told myself, even while I watched our town people stare at me, smiling, their hands clapping.
“Birr Ambar Sebereleho!”
I noticed two men waving a bed sheet smeared with blood, no, not blood but wine. Once, Zenebe had told me, “The morning after our wedding night, we can show our town people a bed sheet smeared with wine.” When he told me that, we were in his hut, and he was laughing, and I knew he said that because we’d both wanted to jump on his bed, and now I searched for him among our town people, and there he was in the middle of the crowd—smiling. His smile I loved seeing I hated seeing it now. Then he came to me, when his hands touched my face, his touch I loved feeling now felt like someone threw me in our cold river. I kept staring at his face, even while I wanted him to turn to the crowd and say he’d lied, to tell me he was sorry, that he wouldn’t be this man who would trap me into a marriage. Until that moment I’d told myself I would forgive him. He kidnapped me because he didn’t want to lose me. I loved him, I didn’t want to lose him, either. But, now, this, lying, it was not even the lie but the why of it, he lied because I wouldn’t have any choice but to marry him now, made me imagine the woman in the tower, in their beautiful bedroom, in the middle of the night, staring at the face of the man she’d thought she would wake up next to forever, then moving toward their bedroom door, but then her legs gave out and she fell on the carpet. I imagined her frantically looking at the man she loved, scared he’d woken up but he had not moved, for a moment she wanted to jump on their bed and touch his face, but she would remember when they’d walked in their garden a few days ago. A pebble had hit her foot, and she’d fallen. The man had picked the pebble, squeezed it in his hand as if he wanted to squeeze the life out of the pebble, and said, “You hurt the woman I love.” That night, the woman hadn’t slept. In the middle of the night, when the man woke and found her awake, he hugged her tight. “Are you still hurt?” he asked her, even though she’d told him her foot was fine. After he fell back to sleep, she’d stared at their ceiling, wishing his hands on her waist would loosen up so she could breathe, and she’d started plotting her escape.