Throwing Stones Dana Roskey That was the year of the riots. None of the expats in Ethiopia will forget that year. Unless it’s Antoine. I wonder. I had met Antoine only a few weeks before. It was one of those idle days when I could walk all the way down the hill to Arat Kilo. Arat Kilo is the name of a district in Addis Ababa. It’s a piece of the old city, the imperial city, bestowed with mid-century ministry buildings, Parliament, and expansion campuses for the university. It hosted the city’s Orthodox cathedral and the offices of the Patriarch. But my Arat Kilo was a district of tiny cafes lining dirty streets. There was one on the road toward Piassa, one that had internet. The storefront room had space for the proprietors to hang two small decks above the cafe floor, making the place feel like a fifteenth-century caravel. Two opposing staircases led an unsteady way up. On each decks were two rows of three computers, facing the wall and facing the plate glass windows. The machines were slow as you could imagine. Each email could take five minutes. I had logged out, and was waiting for the attendant when Antoine came in. He was a lanky white guy with dreads nearly to his belt. He had a goofy smile. He sat at the station behind me, swung around in the ancient swivel chair, reeled and had to reach for the ground. We laughed. “That’s a long way down,” he cracked in an accent immediately recognizable
as French. He had to wait for the attendant to begin, and we chatted. “How long have you been in Ethiopia?” “A long time,” he replied.Who could you be writing to?” he asked me cheerfully. “You are more far away.” If the words tumbled awkwardly, his accent was musical. “Nobody writes to me anymore.” “So why did you come to an internet place?” He shrugged, and said something about hope always pouncing. He had his own set of adages. Being a rather round-eyed Rastafarian, he often reached for Biblical references, and mangled them in some charming way. He explained himself once, rather cryptically, with a quote: “And now after the king has satisfied the every desire of the Queen of Sheba, she has returned to the land of Cush.” He spread his arms and added, “Here I am.” We met up again, this time at the Romina Cafe in old Arat Kilo, and we told our stories. His was simple. He had left Paris, predicting plague, and he had come to Ethiopia. Here he had stayed. By the time we met, it had been four years. He had never bothered to renew his visa, so he was illegally in the country, and doubtlessly owing thousands in fines. He was effectively trapped. Antoine didn’t care. He sat on hillsides and smoked weed. Sometimes he traveled. He said he had children in a few cities around the country. 41
