Asmara, Eritrea - 2008
He was seven years old and he had a specific way of eating mangoes.
Theo remembered this before he remembered anything else about that day, before the noise, before the smoke, before the thing he had done and not done that lived in him now like a second skeleton. He remembered Dawit sitting on the concrete step outside the building on Harnet Avenue, both hands wrapped around the mango, eating it from the side the way children eat things when no adult has told them the correct method yet. Chin forward. Eyes closed against the juice. Completely and entirely present in the mango, the way children were present in things before the world taught them to be elsewhere simultaneously.
Dawit was not Theo's brother. He was the son of the woman in the apartment below, a small serious child who had attached himself to Theo at age five with the focused determination of someone who had identified a useful older person and intended to make full use of them. He called him Khala because Theo was too many syllables for a five-year-old in a hurry. He asked questions in the rapid-fire sequence of a child who understood that adults had limited patience and was trying to get everything in before the patience ran out.
Why is the sky that color. Why do people pray. Why does the priest have that hat. Why do you never go to church. Why does God let bad things happen. Why why why.
Theo was sixteen. He had answers for most things and honest uncertainty about the rest and Dawit received both with equal satisfaction, which was more than most adults managed.
The conflict had been building for weeks in the way these things built, not dramatically, not with clear warning signs that would be obvious in retrospect, but gradually, the way water finds the cracks in a foundation. Asmara in 2001 was a city of managed tensions. The government's campaign against minority Christian denominations, the Pentecostals, the evangelicals, the independent congregations that operated outside the sanctioned Orthodox and Catholic structures, had been intensifying since the border war ended and the government had decided that internal theological independence was a form of political opposition it couldn't afford.
Theo's mother was Orthodox. Theo went to church because refusing was a different kind of argument than the ones he had the energy for at sixteen. He sat in the pew and watched the rituals with the detached attention of someone studying a phenomenon they had already formed conclusions about.
Dawit's mother was Pentecostal. She worshipped in a small congregation that met in a private home three streets over because their building had been closed by government order four months earlier. She was a quiet woman with strong hands who worked longer hours than the math should have allowed and who prayed with the specific intensity of someone who needed it to be true.
Theo had been warned, by a boy at school whose uncle worked at the local administrative office, that something was planned. The kind of warning that came pre-wrapped in deniability. There's going to be trouble around the Pentecostal areas this weekend, just so you know. Delivered casually, between other sentences, the way people delivered information they wanted to pass on without taking responsibility for.
He had told himself it was rumour.
He had told himself this because the alternative, acting on it, warning Dawit's mother, doing the specific effortful thing that the information required, would have meant admitting he believed it. And believing it meant believing the machinery of religious persecution was real and proximate and pointed at people he knew, which at sixteen was a weight he was not ready to pick up.
He had told himself it was rumour and he had gone to the library and spent Saturday reading and had not said anything to anyone.
He heard the riot from four streets away.
The sound arrived before the information did, a collective noise, the kind that had no single source, that seemed to come from the air itself rather than from specific human throats. He was on his way back from the library. He stopped walking. The sound was wrong in the way certain sounds were wrong, not loud exactly, but textured incorrectly, carrying frequencies that the body understood before the mind caught up.
He ran toward it, which was the thing he had never been able to explain to himself afterward. The correct action was away. Every instinct that had been calibrated by sixteen years of living in a country where the government's relationship with its citizens was one of managed threat said away. He ran toward it.
The street where Dawit's mother's congregation met was three blocks of chaos when he arrived. He could not immediately parse it into components. There were people running in both directions simultaneously, there was smoke from something burning that he couldn't see the source of, there were men he didn't recognise moving with the coordinated purposefulness that distinguishes organised violence from spontaneous anger, and there were congregation members in the street, some of them still clutching the things they had brought with them to worship, Bibles and notebooks and the confused dignity of people who had been inside doing something ordinary and private and had been pushed into the street without adequate transition.
He was looking for Dawit's mother.
He found Dawit first.
The boy was standing at the edge of the street approximately twenty meters from the building entrance, which meant he had followed his mother to the service, which he sometimes did when the neighbour who was supposed to watch him cancelled, which Theo had known was a possibility and had not thought about when he decided not to say anything on Saturday.
He was standing completely still in the way children stood still when something had overloaded their processing, not frozen with fear exactly, but paused, the way a machine paused when given instructions it couldn't execute. He was still holding the small cloth bag his mother made him carry his things in. His eyes were moving but his body wasn't.
Theo reached him in seconds. Got a hand on his shoulder. Said his name.
Dawit looked up at him. The expression on his face was the expression of a child who has just discovered that the world is a different size than he thought.
"The-o," he said. "Why are they—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
The movement came from Theo's left, not targeted, not intentional in the specific sense, the chaotic ricochet of a crowd that had lost its geometry. A group of men retreating from something Theo couldn't see collided with the edge of the space where he and Dawit were standing and the pressure of it, bodies and momentum and the specific physics of panicked movement, pushed Dawit sideways and down and into the concrete wall of the building beside them with a force that was mechanical and impersonal and absolute.
Theo had his hand on Dawit's shoulder.
He did not hold on.
He would spend fifteen years trying to understand why he did not hold on and arriving at the same answer every time: he didn't hold on because his body made a decision faster than his mind did, a decision about balance and survival that his conscious self had no part in, the same decision every body made in that same moment. It was not a choice. It was physics.
It felt like a choice.
Dawit hit the wall and went down and did not get up.
---
The next four minutes were a specific variety of chaos that Theo could still access with complete sensory accuracy sixteen years later, the smell of the smoke, the sound of the crowd, the texture of the concrete under his knees when he dropped beside Dawit, the weight of the boy when he gathered him up, the particular quality of stillness that was different from the stillness of sleep.
Dawit's mother found them two streets over where Theo had carried him. He did not remember the carrying. He remembered the moment before and the moment after and nothing in between except the weight.
She made a sound he had no word for.
She prayed. Immediately, instinctively, with the totality of someone for whom prayer was the first language and everything else was translation. She held her son and she prayed with her whole body and Theo knelt on the pavement beside her and watched her pray and felt something happen in his chest that was not grief exactly. Grief came later. Grief was almost a relief when it arrived. But something prior to grief. Something that closed.
A door, shutting.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
---
He did not speak at the funeral. He was not asked to. He stood at the back and looked at the small wooden box and conducted, with the methodical compulsion of someone who had no other tools available, a precise accounting of every decision he had made in the seventy-two hours prior.
The boy at school. The warning. The library. Saturday afternoon. The book he had been reading. He remembered the book, a physics primer, Feynman's lectures. He had been reading about the behaviour of particles in closed systems.
The specific texture of the decision to say nothing, which he had dressed as uncertainty and which had been, underneath the dressing, fear.
The hand on Dawit's shoulder.
The moment the hand did not hold.
The priest spoke about God's plan. About the mystery of suffering. About the child now resting in the arms of a loving creator who had called him home for reasons beyond human understanding.
Theo listened to every word.
He filed each one.
He did not believe in God before Dawit died. After Dawit died he understood, with the cold finality of a proof completing, that belief was not the issue. The issue was that something was being worshipped. Something was being fed. And whatever it was, it had watched a seven-year-old boy get pushed into a concrete wall by a riot it had inspired and it had done nothing, and the people who loved that boy were now standing around his box thanking it for the privilege of the pain.
He left Eritrea eight months later.
He did not say goodbye to Dawit's mother. He told himself it was because he had nothing adequate to say.
He carried Dawit for twelve years in the way you carry something you have no place to set down, not always at the front, not always visible, but always present, always contributing to the weight of everything else.
The photograph on his desk in Geneva, the one turned face-down that no one had ever asked about directly, was a mango.
Not a photograph of Dawit. Just a mango, cut and peeled, the kind you bought from the market on Harnet Avenue in the summer. He had taken it years ago and printed it and framed it and turned it face-down because looking at it was too much and throwing it away was impossible.
Some griefs didn't need a face.
They only needed a mango.