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By Root 1446 0

all but abandoned by the American Protestants. During that first year she'd watched as soldiers—some of the young men buried here—as well as Italian civilians poured in to populate the new colony: carpenters, masons, technicians. The peasant Florino became Don Florino when he crossed the Suez. The ambulance driver reinvented himself as a physician. She had carried on, just as the Indian shopkeepers, the Armenian merchants, the Greek hoteliers, the Levantine traders had carried on during the occu pation. Matron was still there in 1941, when the Axis's fortunes turned in North Africa and in Europe. From the Hotel Bella Napoli's balcony, Matron watched Wingate and his British troops parade into town, escorting Emperor Haile Selassie, who was returning after six years of exile. Matron had never set eyes on the diminutive Emperor. The little man seemed astonished by the transformation of his capital, his head swiveling this way and that to take in the cinemas, hotels, shops, neon lights, multistory apartment buildings, paved avenues lined with trees … Matron said to the Reuters correspondent standing beside her that perhaps the Emperor wished he'd stayed in exile a little longer. To her chagrin, she was quoted verbatim (but fortunately as an “anonymous observer”) in every foreign paper. She smiled at that memory.

She rose, brushed away her tears. The two of them trudged on.

They walked down the path between one row of graves, then back up another.

“No,” Matron said abruptly. “This'll never do. I can't imagine leaving our cherished daughter in this place.”

Only when they broke out into the sunlight did Matron feel she could breathe.

“Ghosh, if you bury me in Gulele, I'll never forgive you,” she said. Ghosh decided silence was the best strategy. “We Christians believe that in the Lord's Second Coming the dead will be raised from the grave.”

Ghosh was raised a Christian, a fact that Matron never seemed to remember.

“Matron, do you sometimes doubt?”

She noticed that his voice was hoarse. His eyelids sagged. She was reminded again that this was not her grief alone.

“Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief. Our beloved Sister believed … I worry that in a place as damp and disconsolate as Gulele, even Sister will find it hard to rise when the time comes.”

“What then? Cremation?”

One of the Indian barbers doubled as a pujari and arranged cremations for Hindus who died in Addis Ababa.

“Of course not!” She wondered if Ghosh was being willfully dense. “Burial. I think I might know just the place,” Matron said.

THEY PARKED AT Ghosh's bungalow and walked to the rear of Missing, where the bottlebrush was so laden with flowers that it looked as if it had caught fire. The property edge was marked by the acacias, their flat tops forming a jagged line against the sky. Missing's far west corner was a promontory looking over a vast valley. That acreage as far as the eye could see belonged to a ras—a duke—who was a relative of His Majesty Haile Selassie.

A brook, hidden by boulders, burbled; sheep grazed under the eye of a boy who sat polishing his teeth with a twig, his staff near by. He squinted at Matron and Ghosh and then waved. Just as in the days of David, he carried a slingshot. It was a goatherd like him, centuries before, who had noticed how frisky his animals became after chewing a particular red berry. From that serendipitous discovery, the coffee habit and trade spread to Yemen, Amsterdam, the Caribbean, South America, and the world, but it had all begun in Ethiopia, in a field like this.

An unused bore well occupied this corner of Missing. Five years before, one of the Missing dogs had fallen into the well. Koochooloo's desperate yelps brought Gebrew. He fished her out by dangling a noose around her, almost lynching her in the process. The well needed to be sealed over. In supervising that task, Matron found used prophylactics and cigarette butts around the rock wall; she'd decided the area was in need of redemption. Coolies cleared the brush and planted native grass