Silence Is My Mother Tongue

by Sulaiman Addonia

  SIGNORINA: Well, I am accountable to no one, Mother. I love him. I don’t care that he is an African.

  MADRE: Love is a package. Other things are as important.

  SIGNORINA: I was born here. I am African too.

  MADRE: Hahahaha. Your naivety, daughter, knows no limit.

  Your stupidity knows no limit, said a boy in the audience, quickly hushed by others.

  SIGNORINA: He is different.

  MADRE: You are right. He is different. He wears different clothes to his people. He wants to please you so much that he lost his roots.

  SIGNORINA: It is not a weakness to be intrigued, to love something different from you. If he is weak so am I.

  MADRE: I am tired of this. I will not tolerate a young girl questioning me.

  SIGNORINA: I know, Mother. My sweetheart is rejected by his side and by ours. But his roots are in my heart, as mine are in his.

  Wild applause.

  Shush. Shush.

  PADRE (a large frame puppet, waking from his siesta in the veranda, yelling at Signorina): Never shout at your mother. Now go out and don’t come back until you have reflected upon what you have said.

  Signorina weeps.

  A few children stood up and screamed at the father. You shut up, fattening yourself with the wealth of our land. A boy kicked dust at the TV. The Italian family turned brown. A chorus of nationalistic song erupted. Freedom. Freedom.

  The call to freedom drew the singer. She played her krar, which started a dance around the TV that only stopped when Zahra’s grandmother called for calm. Turning to the TV, the old woman addressed the Italian father. He had regained his white skin after Jamal blew the dust off his face. The grandmother wagged her finger at the father, scolding him in his own language for his treatment of his daughter. She then reached with her hand through the hole in the box and stroked Signorina’s face. All women, black and white, are going through hard times, she said to the girl: Ma come, mia figlia, so che combatti per i tuoi diritti. Non dovresti mollare mai.

  Zahra applauded. Standing up, she told the children around her: Yes, she will not give up. Like my mother, she will fight for her rights.

  Jamal placed a coloured picture of Cinema Impero, where he had worked, at the back of the box. I know this cinema, said the Khwaja. Bella Asmara, he sang. Bella Asmara. Piccola Roma of Africa. Where stars are reachable from your turf because you are the high and mighty of all cities.

  Quiet, please.

  Saba waved at the Khwaja. The Khwaja nodded: Buonasera.

  Jamal slipped in a brown puppet. Signorina Patricia was watching a film at Cinema Impero in Mussolini Avenue. Dawit, forbidden access to the whites-only cinema, waited for the signorina outside behind a palm tree, his black skin helping him to remain invisible. Smoke that Jamal blew through a hole in the boy’s head coiled in front of Dawit. Saba squinted and followed Dawit through the fog of Asmara’s high mountains as she paced up and down. As the signorina exited, Dawit ran to her and they embraced on the footpath. Behind them chatters of disgust grew. Jamal leaned over the TV and blew his breath through the hole. Asmara’s winter wind bit the signorina. The Italian girl shivered in her lover’s arms.

  The lovers retreated to the back street.

  Another round of applause. And loud cheers: Yes. Yes.

  As if emboldened, Dawit’s voice grew: Let’s go to my house.

  In a bed made of a sardine tin and covered in thatch, a sheet of paper for pillows, the signorina and Dawit lay down.

  SIGNORINA: Do you hate my parents?

  DAWIT: Patricia, we are not original. Our story is a repetition. And the end is known to both of us.

  SIGNORINA: Yet we choose to engage in a story with a foregone conclusion.

  DAWIT: We are humans. We like a good fight because we think we can win where others have failed.

  Dawit and Patricia embrace each other.

  Padre breaks down the door. Gun in hand.

  The first show of the camp television had long ended. People had retreated into their huts. Hagos was asleep. Saba closed the door and stood outside. She noticed Jamal in the distance, surrounded by the committee of the elders. The midwife arrived with the athlete, who had rolled up his sleeves. His yelling overlaid the chorus of crickets rising from the bush. The air cooled down.

  Mosquitoes buzzed around her, their thirst for her blood seeming to have intensified with the arrival of the moon. Squatting down on the ground, Saba unwrapped the scarf from her neck and spread it over her shoulders, covering the flesh that appeared through holes of her dress, on her back, on the side of her arms. Saba contemplated the new mosquito bites on her forearm and felt the bump on her forehead from when she had walked into the pole of the hut earlier. A swelling on her foot had appeared, a scorpion sting. Her skin swelled in parts and Saba imagined herself rising up like a balloon. Rising above the shrub, above the men fighting Jamal, above the camp and gliding towards the starred sky.

  She heard Jamal yell. The athlete snatched the puppets out of the ex-cinema worker’s hands. He ripped up the cardboard characters and flung the pieces into the air. Jamal flitted past Saba like a shadow. Behind him, the lovers’ carved-up bodies scattered on the moonlit ground. The lovers died twice that night, Saba pondered, thinking back to that last scene when Dawit and Signorina had made love under the threat of death.

  Saba made her way back to the hut. The oil lamp flickered, the flame dancing across Hagos’s face. Saba stepped over him and sat on her side of the blanket.

  The blanket had aged. Hagos had patched up some of the holes by sewing colourful fabric onto the grey blanket. Green. Pink. Red. Yellow, the colour of the deceased woman’s dress. Every time she sat on the blanket, Saba felt the spirit of the woman as if her corpse had remained on the same blanket. Saba pressed against the jagged surface of the curved wall. The dazzling yellow dress sparkled to the stars shining through the window. The deceased threw her arms around Hagos and hugged him tighter. Death became animated on his warm body. Yellow paint melted on his skin. On a rivulet of his sweat a yellow hibiscus flower flourished.

  No matter how often Saba washed the blanket and scrubbed it by the river, the memory of death appeared woven into the fabric. That night, though, as she closed her eyes, it was the bodies of Dawit and Signorina that stayed at the forefront of her mind. She wondered if the smile on Hagos’s sleeping face was ignited by that same scene. Saba blew out the lamp.

  The next morning, Saba felt the sun burn as it filtered through the window. Warm air pressed against her chest. Beads of sweat trickled down her body as she rocked from side to side. Saba could smell her own skin, muddy and damp. Her mind was drawn back to when she was young, unburdened by guilt, or by society’s expectations of her. The world wasn’t confrontational then, because Saba hadn’t yet conjured up a dream. In those days, she and her mother talked and laughed. In those days, her thighs, like the rest of her body, were unscarred.

  Saba opened her eyes and sat up, breathless. She was naked, her chemise lying at the end of her feet, near Hagos’s head. She stared at her own bare legs, at the scars of healed wounds. Hagos had his hand around her shin. He placed his black foot on her purple thigh.

  Saba dressed and exited the hut and stood by the door staring into the empty square. She slid against the outside wall, next to the remains of the orange seedlings, which had died a long time ago. Only repulsion could grow in this place.

  She wrapped her arms around herself. It wasn’t Hagos’s fault. Most of her male relatives, younger than he, were already married, had children. In comparison, Hagos had sympathy. Sweet Hagos. That was what her cousin and her friends called him. Shukor, innocent Hagos.

  Saba stood up and peered through the window. Hagos hugged her nightwear in his arms as if a woman lay next to him.

  The square was deserted. Saba breathed in the air that was hers alone. Before long, people began to stream onto the square. It dawned on Saba that there were no animals in this place. She longed for dogs. To stroke ca
ts. Drink fresh milk. Have eggs. She longed to eat chicken stew, fried goat with berbere and lentils. The dust made her cough.

  It was a ration day. Queuing offered a purpose of some sort for Saba. In the absence of an aim to work towards, the aid centre became a focal point. Like going to the forest for wood, to the river for water.

  Saba joined the queue with those whose coupons specified Saturday. To her right, a few men sat in a circle playing cards. They would be playing all day long. Samhiya and her mother waved at Saba. They were chatting as they walked to the river. The sun glistened on the metal buckets they balanced on their heads. The heat seeped into her skin and Saba sweltered in her black dress. The English aid coordinator rolled up his sleeves and unbuttoned his shirt. He seemed to take energy from the same sun that sucked her dry.

  Saba queued instead of her brother. If he could talk, she was sure, he would have done it. If silence was a language, she would not have forced herself to be his voice. She talked to people even when she didn’t feel like it. She queued for hours to ask the aid centre questions about better food, better clothes, for her, her mother and Hagos. She bore the scorching sun as she waited for food, and like the trips to the river to fetch water or wash clothes, or to the bush to collect firewood, it marked its presence on her body.

  By contrast, Hagos’s skin was smooth. Even after one of his journeys into the wild, nature would not leave a trace on his body. There were no marks of thorns on his legs, no cactus milk on his arms. He glided through the bush as he did among people, unnoticed, unmarked.

  Saba had given all her femininity to her brother. She remembered the midwife’s words about Hagos. But Saba didn’t have enough femininity to give, just as Hagos didn’t have enough masculinity to give her. They were born like that. But what struck Saba the more she thought about the statement that the midwife made, and that others had made about her and Hagos, was how they saw household chores as what defined being a woman. It was more than chores. Hagos allowed the woman in him to direct his life, the way he felt, the way he moved through life. Saba saw it in his freedom, his boldness to be himself, his ability to be gentle and strong. He made his presence felt not by shouting himself to the front, but by holding himself together despite all his wounds, to shine even in the dark.

  Saba’s thoughts were interrupted when the man behind her in the queue pushed, his weight pinning her against the man in front. Squeezed, Saba couldn’t move. When she felt a state of passivity between the two men, she squirmed herself out of the queue and wandered off without direction. When she arrived in the south of the camp, she realized she was on the road that connected the camp with the rest of this country, the road used by the workers that led to somewhere, a village, a town, another country, a river or a cliff or the sea. A road, nevertheless, Saba mumbled to herself. A road that led to freedom.

  Refugees are easy to police, the Khwaja once said. The authorities know that fear and ignorance of our surroundings makes it cheaper and easier to keep us here. But one day, one of us will break this fear and ignorance and be free. When he said this, the Khwaja punched his fist in the air, as if breaking through invisible walls.

  But was it freedom she was looking for? Saba could have been happy in the camp if there had been a school. Freedom, Saba realized now, meant different things to different people. The Khwaja wanted to read his newspaper, as he told her once, on the day of publication. With a cup of espresso, as I used to do in Asmara, he said, his voice rising to a high pitch.

  Zahra wanted to help her mother with her quest to free a country, while Hagos didn’t need an independent country or a school or a job. He was as carefree in the camp as he was back home.

  Saba looked around her. There was nothing. Not even evidence that the aid coordinator’s Land Rover had driven through here earlier in the morning, the marks of his car’s wheels on the sandy road wiped out. Which way was the way out? Saba wondered. She fixed her eyes on the dusty empty road ahead. Through this desiccated umbilical cord came the Englishman and his staff, came the lorries with sardines, oil and sugar. She stood on her toes, as if by doing so she would be able to see the rest of this country on the horizon. The country their lorry driver had sung about on their journey to the camp.

  As Saba walked she imagined a lush village by the bend of the Nile. Tractors working the fields, hot loaves of bread sold from the back of bicycles, women in thobes standing in front of blackboards with chalk in their hands, students in school uniform hurrying through passageways full of life.

  Saba’s legs felt light. She sprinted. The few trees populating the road at the beginning of the camp were behind her now. She tripped and fell on her knees, breathless and thirsty. This was not the way to freedom but to loss.

  On her way back to the camp, Saba stopped by the large field at the south designated by the aid workers as the place for the future school. Unlike the open toilet, this field was left untouched. Nature lived freely here and grass grew stubbornly in this dry place, it expanded into the horizon and reached the height of her ribcage. Saba wondered how long it would take for a school to be built in this spot of land.

  Things would have been different, she thought, if the authorities had built the camp near the city. Nearer to a school or a college or university. She remembered the moment on their journey to the camp when she thought that was the case, when their lorry had left the outskirts of the city which they had arrived at on camels, and Saba had seen tents on the side of the asphalt highway. Is this the refugee camp? she asked the driver.

  No, said Tahir. They are nomads, he said, pointing to the men in jellabiyas and the women in black veils. Saba slumped back into the seat as the Rashaida’s tents flicked by, the city fading in the side mirror, the fragrance of ripe mangoes and ripe bananas waning. The road in the middle of the desert, its black tarmac shimmering under the sun. Express buses were overtaking the lorry. Each carried a promise of rapid arrival to the capital painted onto its sides. Their advertisements were meant for free people. Saba already felt trapped inside a moving prison.

  A lizard raised its head and stared at Saba. A gatekeeper in graceful pose. Saba walked into the field, towards the rock she often sat on. With each foot pressing, the blades of grass leaned forward. A ladybird flew and landed on her hand. Saba wanted to make a wish when the bug flew off. She stretched her arm in a vain attempt to catch it.

  Once deeper into the field, she sat on her rock – wheezing and out of breath – where she closed her eyes, imagining herself in the future, in a classroom in a school built in this field, surrounded by the smell of books and ink. Saba hugged her knees and rocked back and forth as she looked out over the plumes of grass that lapped against each other in the wind. Something rustled in the grass next to her. A girl’s manicured hands appeared through the thick grass. Saba jerked back on her rock. Her eyes followed the long fingernails digging into the dry ground.

  Saba retreated to the other side of the rock, hiding behind a cactus plant. The girl moaned.

  Stop, Saba heard a girl’s voice say, sounding as familiar as the other one who asked: Why?

  Well, my love, until you marry me, you are not allowed to put anything up my pussy. I didn’t make up the rules. Now, go back to where you were, Athlete. Behind me.

  Snorting laughter.

  Silence.

  Slurping kisses. The moans returned. If she could only see the lovers who made a bed out of this overgrown field, see the girl whose moans reminded her of the early mornings in her own bed back home. When the girl stood up, half her body appeared between the gaps in the grass. One kohled eye, half of her red lips, half of her chest, her dark nipple protruding like a bud. Saba saw it was Samhiya.

  When Saba arrived home, Hagos was sitting on the blanket. He didn’t ask where she’d been. Around him she was free. Unlike her friends back home, she had never had to report her every move to the man in the house.

  At times, his silent presence in her life made Saba think he was a figment of her imagination. An ideal brothe
r made up in the mind of a lonely child. He was perfect. And perfection didn’t exist. And if it did, it was bound to shatter. Saba shuddered at the thought, quickly knelt by his side and embraced him. Soaked by her sweat, Hagos took off his shirt and lay back on the blanket, his head on his palms. From his oversized shorts protruded his long, smooth legs. Stripes of light fell on his chest. Saba stretched next to him. His bare skin smelt of jasmine fragrance. He always smelt this way, as if he was a jinni that had burst into this world out of a perfumed bottle.

  Hagos kept his gaze on the ceiling. I wish I knew what you are thinking about, Saba said. She turned her face towards his, attempting to deduce an answer from it. As her eyes dwelt on him, Saba imagined him many years from now. Still alone. Time, though, moved on. The athlete and Samhiya married. With children. All the while, Hagos lay still in this camp, in this hut, on this blanket. Wrinkles had formed on his cheeks. And underneath his long eyelashes and kohled eyes, lines of exhaustion and of fatigue crammed together, clogging up his sight. He smelt of neglect, of years gone by untouched. An old, sexless, loveless, lonely Hagos trailing the youthful athlete who had taken a different path to old age, with frequent stops at several oases to replenish his soul in the arms of lovers.

  Saba looked away from the scene in her mind to find Hagos’s head on her shoulder. As she stroked his hair, she closed her eyes. They fell asleep like this.

  Then the door opened. Its bump against the wall sent Saba jolting from her sleep. The midwife stood still, her hand holding the doorknob, their mother behind her.

  Hagos turned around and continued his nap.

  Do they sleep in the same blanket together?

  Their mother nodded. A smile shadowed her creased lips as she said: What can we do, we didn’t bring enough blankets and Saba, as you know, is a bad sleeper. My whole body aches, and I can’t take extra pain from her.