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vague number of small children. I would have traded places with him, at least at that moment. But of course he would not have agreed.
    The great director sat with me, our bare feet in the sand that felt like dirt but fell away clean. “This island was once used for sacred burials. We are lucky that we do not have to bury Alena here.”
    He sat with me on the boat as I held Alena, and together we watched the volcanoes recede.I had planned to hike up into the cloud forest of the dormant Madera to see the lagoon in its crater. But now I focused on the perfect cone of the taller, still-active volcano, Concepción, and tried hard to feel worse for Alena than for myself.
    The director personally arranged for the several forms of transportation we required, and Alena lived enough to arrive, unconscious and two days later, at the hospital in Managua. During some of the hours of waiting, I tried to picture what our lives would be and failed.
    On the way home, there were other hospital layovers, in Atlanta and London. Alena would never again agree to travel pregnant, but, of course, the damage was already done.
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    Late, late, and I was alone, walking the corridor outside of the grain collections, my turn to guard.
    I placed my feet slowly, heel rolling to toe,heel rolling to toe, making no sound myself, only remembering the sound of the great director’s gait. Click, click, an even rhythm covering an uneven stride, longer on the right but faster on that side too, creating a symmetrical sound but a biased walk that had to be corrected by a step to the right about halfway down the corridor, where I now stood, shifting left so I could step right, imitating.
    What I had thought of doing many times over the past weeks, I did now without thinking much about it.
    Just a few kernels of a few kinds, taking nothing too rare, taking the last of no variety, rearranging the remainder to hide my weakness. My sore teeth, barely able to split raw rice, faired better with the soft pop of millet, the clean chew of teff.
    Perhaps I had no right to the rice, no claim on the millet, but the teff was my find, mine to take back. I had collected it with my own hands on one of the first of my many trips withthe great director. “Abyssinia,” I said aloud, my mouth full. “Abyssinia.”
    Our steamer harbored in Djibouti the last week of 1926. The great director spent his night alone. Mine, I spent with a wide-eyed, French-speaking Somali girl with a smooth back and beautiful ankles. The next day we proceeded overland, by train, to Addis Ababa.
    We were received by Emperor Menelik, who, it turned out, shared an interest in agriculture, wheat in particular.
    He granted permission for our expedition as we ate our way through a procession of dishes, increasingly hot with spice: orange squash in coconut milk, mashed eggplant, raw marinated beef, lentils, mixed simmered greens, chicken-and-egg stew. We scooped mouthfuls of each with the thin stratum of fermented bread on which it was served. This
injera
grew like a sponge in my stomach, filling me far beyond comfort and pushing the meats and vegetables into my intestines too soon.
    The flesh of my mouth — the insides of my cheeks, the softness under my tongue, and my palate more than my tongue itself — burned, pasted with powdered red pepper. My breath stung my eyes. I interrupted the great director, the emperor, his entourage, to retire.
    The next morning, the great director woke me early to accompany him to the market to procure sandals for the fourteen men who would guide and serve us on our journey.
    This was our second time on the errand, as the men, preferring money to shoes, had sold the first pairs given to them. An assistant to the emperor had advised us to leave the men barefoot, shackled at the ankles so they would not abandon us in trouble, but the great director refused this course. I assured him that I understood his desire