Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

I’m caught off guard to see my own name, Dessie Mesfin Endale, at the bottom of one short poem.

  “I wrote this?”

  “No,” Uncle A B Z says. “Usually, the funeral service supplies fixed poems into which the names of the departed are inserted. But yours, the Shaleqa himself composed.”

  I muscle through the heightened Amharic of the poem. Once I absorb, on the umpteenth rereading, the sentiments Babbaye has expressed for me, I find the metaphors, even the rhythms, are apt. If I thought grand thoughts like he does, had I never left Ethiopia, I would have come up with no better. I hear the voice of my parallel self, the one Babbaye could have made real if he’d taken me in when I wanted to return. That daughter could have written this.

  Uncle A B Z says, “Are there parts of it you desire to change? It is not too late to write your own words.”

  “I can’t say it better.” I give the pages back to him. What I would add are resentful thoughts I am not supposed to have toward my own mother anyway, now that she is among the irreproachable departed, about her burial forcing me to stay in a place I don’t want to be.

  I feel new tears coming on, the kind I cry just for Ema. I can accept black-framed photos of other people’s mothers hung over a doorframe or above a lit candle on a mantelpiece or printed on a tezkar program. Names of other people’s mothers can be wailed to the sky. But I can’t accept any of it happening for my mother.

  To calm myself, and because I don’t trust Babbaye has any more hugs left for me, I escape to Ema’s bedroom. In there, the smaller pieces of furniture and the decorations from the living room are piled in a high mess on the bed frame. The mattress is on the floor. Ema is everywhere in between; she has perfumed the air with her tizita. I wade through the memory of her to the open window, which overlooks the courtyard and Babbaye’s mefakiya garden directly beneath. I open my phone. There’s nothing from Barb.

  But, there is a text from Isak.

  Was your flight diverted too? Where are you?

  A firework of hot joy explodes in my chest. He’s been keeping track of me. I text back.

  In Addis!

  I watch my phone until the text confirms as sent. I know better than to stand waiting for it to show as read. This is how it goes between Isak and me when I am in places with bad networks. How it used to go. The simplest conversations took us hours to complete.

  I scroll up to the last message I had sent him.

  I need a break.

  I delete it.

  I never dreamed I would be the one to end us. With every word I typed of that last text, I hated Le’ul more than ever, as if he were controlling my fingers. Isak hadn’t replied. I hope he didn’t believe that I wanted to break up, and was giving me space to realize that in my own time. I would have said yes if Isak had asked me to marry him that day we rode the ferry. I would have had with him the children it had never occurred to me to want before my mother died.

  Still no reply from Isak. He was just being nice, not declaring his enduring love.

  This room has a bathroom en suite now. I don’t have to walk all the way to the end of the back alley, to the last room in the service quarters, to pee. When I was little, that room had been too dark and cavernous for me. I refused to go in there even with two adults standing guard, one with me and the other outside the door. So a dull red potty was kept in this bedroom just for when I visited, and whisked away by the maid after I used it. The new bathroom — a renovation financed by my parents, I’m sure — is tiny but has all the necessities: toilet, sink, shower.

  I return to the living room with a spring in my step, as if that little crumb from Isak was all the food I needed, and reclaim my spot beside Babbaye. Clustered nearest the porch door are half a dozen new visitors, soft and round elderly women wearing black head wraps over which they have draped inverted netelas, spread out to cover their dark dresses. Babbaye introduces me to the women as the child of the departed Tobya and her husband, Mesfin. Having my parents referred to by their first names is a jarring reminder that to the rest of the world they are regular people, not two ends of the axis on which my world spins. Spun.

  “Hi!” I say, automatically slipping into my chipper in-flight persona. I want to slap myself for my inappropriate greeting. I give a small wordless bow meant for the whole.

  “Ah, the only blood,” one woman says. They must know about Le’ul, the adoptee, of course, but to them blood is what counts, especially now that Ema is gone. They can choose to ignore the fact of Le’ul’s existence.

  “Yes, the only,” Babbaye says. His only surviving child’s only child. I feel the crushing weight of my responsibility to continue a lineage.

  “We remember how you cried at the farewell,” the woman says. I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond. Should I cry again for them, the new arrivals? We don’t call condolence visits leqso without reason. One goes to “a cry” to, well, cry.

  Other than that, there’s no mention of how I have grown or changed since I was eight. My adult self, what I’ve made of my life, even the fact that I’m wearing blazing red when everyone looks as if they walked out of a black-and-white movie, is irrelevant when held up against my basic identity: Child of Zimita. I am distilled to my essence, my daughter-ness.

  There is some curiosity behind the women’s eyes though; I know they are sizing me up against Ema. Has the Little Patriot who cried so hard when she left Ethiopia turned out to be worthy of her mother’s legacy? Do I carry her well enough that they can set down their burden of grief? They throw pleased glances at my short hair. No one asks what I do for a living, but if they did maybe they’d agree with me that as a flight attendant, my scarf always tied to the side of my neck like my mother used to do, I am also representing a nation.

  We sit in a grim mood punctuated only by Babbaye’s sporadic mutterings. “My child. My Tobya. So you decided, you have had enough of this life? I say your name. Please answer.”

  Clearly, Babbaye has a long and shared history with all those gathered. They are still coming to sit with him, so long after Ema was buried in Toronto. But none correct him when he continues to speak of my mother as Tobya, the name she was given at birth. He changed it to Zimita, silence, after the end of the Terror, when she was a young woman. In death Ema has become Tobya to him again. It makes no sense that the picture mounted for all to see is of plain Tobya, the young nobody, and not of distinguished Zimita, the pride of her country. But maybe sense is too much to expect from a man who has outlived all his children.

  I want to touch, comfort Babbaye, but my hand stops at his cane. I reposition it this way and that, lean it against the wall, though it was leaning against the armrest just fine before I moved it. I push my nails into the dense foam handle, to watch the impressions fade.

  “And your father is here also for the Forty?” another woman asks me.

  “No, he hasn’t come,” I say. Maybe he would have, Le’ul in tow, as usual. They come to Ethiopia once a year, pay their respects to Babbaye first, then go exploring in rural areas. But Babbaye’s constant long-distance grumbling about Ema’s burial place had to have scared them off. Why go in the direction of trouble you can avoid? Unless you’re me, of course.

  I’m even the only stray female sitting among the men. I miss Aba terribly, remembering how he loathes when genders segregate at social gatherings, as if a mixed group couldn’t possibly have anything in common. He would have introduced the women to me too, believing that I had as much right to know who they are.

  The time is long past lunch, too early for dinner, but a meal is about to be served because it is nefs yimar food that the women have brought. A couple of maids in their twenties enter behind Gela through the back door, from the kitchen across the alley. They have towels draped over their forearms, and carry urns full of hand-washing water, with bowls to catch the runoff. In their long patterned dresses worn over leggings, with mismatched tops, shawls draped about their shoulders and heads, they remind me of the maids and nannies who had a hand in raising me
. One after another, they would fall short of Ema’s exacting standards and there’d be a brutal scene of her firing them. Until their faces faded from my memory, I would look for each of them in the faces of the country girls — bent under clay water jars or bundled lengths of eucalyptus branches as long as their bodies — whom we drove past in the tourism bus every kiremt, on the way to Sodere Resort.

  Gela does the honours for Babbaye first. There’s a wordless synchronicity to their movements. She knows just when to stop pouring the water so he can lather his hands, and just when to start again so he can rinse.

  After the hand-washing, the maids return to the kitchen then come back, one carrying a stack of plates, the other following her with a tray of rolled injera. I am so hungry, I could probably eat two whole injera by myself. But I feel too much shame to binge on this occasion. So I take only one roll, which is a quarter of one injera. The maids leave and come back again, behind Gela, each carrying one bowl of shiro, gomen, or misir wot. As before, they make their way around the room, pausing for each person to put a spoonful, just one, of each stew on their plates. Easter has just passed so fasting is over. It’s not Wednesday or Friday either. So I guess it’s just my luck that we’re making do with split peas, greens, lentils — made with oil, not butter, and barely salted. To give myself more energy, I pick a Coke when the girls return with bottled drinks resting on their sides on trays.

  The conversation is peppered with Vienna, just as it was at our farewell party. When we were leaving Ethiopia, everyone was talking about where we were going: Vienna. Now, everyone is talking about the place from which we never returned: Vienna. Everywhere else my family has travelled to or lived since, together and apart — for work, for love, for pleasure, for escape — becomes collapsed into one word, Vienna, which summarizes what matters: we went away and stayed away.

  That evening, after everyone has left, I hover by the door to Babbaye’s bedroom. Babbaye sits on the edge of his bed. I’m unsure whether he needs help getting ready to sleep, and if so whether I am the person to help him or if that, too, is Gela’s department.

  In contrast to the clutter-packed bedroom on the other side of the wall, this room is sparse, furnished only with bed, dresser, wicker basket, and a blue wooden chest at the foot of the bed. That blue chest used to hold clues to a life before I existed. Babbaye’s metal helmet, his chest plate of medals, my grandmother’s rolls of hand-spun cotton thread, ancient family photos in plastic bags. What else, there must be so much else. The chest is so big and deep.

  “My Tobya hasn’t come,” Babbaye says.

  I feel myself start to lose my patience with him, just a bit. My heart aches for him, too, though. He will need a long time, probably all his remaining days, to accept that his daughter’s body is staying buried in the Canadian earth, no matter how many times he calls and writes for her to be brought home. There’s nothing he or I can do about it.

  Ema hid her cancer from her father throughout her life. He deserved to know what was happening to his one child. He still does, for what it’s worth. I can’t tell him anything about her last day, her final moment, because I wasn’t there. But I can share the withheld part of her story.

  I part my dry lips, peeling a strip of skin. “Many years ago,” I start, gently, “when I was a little girl, a bad spot was erased from Ema’s skin at Tikur Anbessa hospital. Do you remember that’s where I was born, Babbaye?”

  Having a regular conversation in Amharic is one thing, but explaining a medical condition, especially Ema’s as I understand it, is like trying to untie shoelaces wearing mittens. The back of my neck seizes up. I barely recognize my voice, and I feel myself hunching over.

  “The bad spot was a false kiss of Mariam,” I say. “You know she had lots of them naturally. But that one the doctors erased was unnatural.” A kiss of Satan, I suppose. “That spot was not on her skin from birth. It was dangerous so they cut it out, from the back of her leg.”

  Babbaye frowns. He either understands me well, or not at all. I press on. “But they had not cut away all of it, as they had thought. A piece was left behind.”

  All those years, here and in Europe, Ema’s doctors and Aba had regularly checked her skin for new moles. That had been pointless because the leftover speck from the original was deeper within her, beyond detection.

  “That piece, it grew, became . . .” I am at a loss for the Amharic word for cancer, then it comes. “She had nikisat.”

  “Nekersa?”

  “Yes.” Nikisat is tattoo. Idiot. What Gela used to have on her face. What my grandmother used to have on her neck. What I once drew on my wrist without ink.

  I give up on further details of the surgeries that Ema had in Canada every time Dr. Hoggs discovered that the melanoma had spread into a new organ, and all the treatments Ema had in between surgeries to keep it at bay.

  “It was her wish to rest there?” Babbaye says. He doesn’t want to rehash what took his daughter, when there is the harder to stomach issue of where she is now.

  “Yes. Aba said.”

  “A thousand fighting men used to obey me, but in my own family I am refused. My wish is not important.”

  “Isn’t hers?”

  “Did you hear her, with your own ears, utter the words that she wanted to be received by the earth of strangers? When she spoke this, were you present?”

  I can’t bring myself to tell a simple lie: Yes, she did say so, I heard her. I’m kind of on a roll with the truth. I repeat verbatim what Aba said she had said.

  “She wanted to be where all her children are.”

  Babbaye tilts his head, his mouth curves into a wry, tired smile. “Is that so?”

  He braces his hands on his knees as if to rise. I straighten up as if to complete the movement for him.

  “There is no such place.” He bends to remove his shoes. The conversation is over because clearly I haven’t proved myself capable of it. Fine then.

  “If my work calls me I’ll have to go. I’m not sure if I can stay,” I say. Now a lie comes easy. “But I came anyway because I had to be here for the Forty.”

  Babbaye unties his shoelaces, so slowly, with one hand, the other cupping his knee. He couldn’t care less about me being here, alive. Why get precious over a woman’s body unless she’s dead?

  In the larger bedroom next door, where I am to sleep, Gela finishes putting sheets on the mattress. As should a proper mourner, I will be camping out on the floor. I close and lock the wooden exterior shutters, which I couldn’t reach as a child.

  “What else do you need?” Gela asks me, straightening up.

  “Nothing.”

  But I do wish for life to rewind back to when it was simple, measured in snacks, naps, play, a time when I could do no wrong because, as a child, I was a constant miracle.

  I unfold a pillowcase and turn it inside out. My arms inserted into the pillowcase, one hand in each corner, I gesture for the pillow. “Can I ask, what is the Forty about?”

  Gela hands the pillow to me, watching me curiously. I grab it by the tips.

  “Tezkar is when the spirit of Etye Zimita leaves this earth, to rejoin Igziabher.”

  “Oh.”

  She is so casual with my mother’s name, even adding the affectionate possessive of sister. Sister Silence.

  “Only after that day is she completely gone,” she says.

  With one flick of my arms and a few shakes, the pillowcase slips over the pillow. I toss the pillow on the mattress.

  “So where do the knowers say her spirit is, in the meantime?”

  “With you.”

  “Just me?”

  “With all who she loved and who loved her.”

  “She is still loved. So, if the tezkar is about the spirit, what does it matter where her body is? When even Igziabher doesn’t care about that?”

  Her eyes widen, she’s stunned. “The grounds are pretty,” she says, gathering herself. “I have seen the pictures of the resting place that were sent.”

&nbs
p; Aba did send the pictures I took, then. They are in this house somewhere. “Yes, it is a beautiful resting place. When her monument is finished, you’ll see how it’s even more pleasant.”

  I step out of my shoes, and undo the hook of my skirt zipper. I start to unbutton my blouse from the top. Still she doesn’t leave. “But,” she says, “can there replace here, Ethiopia, with all her kin? Is she not alone in that land?”

  “Loneliness is not so bad. Besides, you just said she is everywhere with all her beloveds. I’m confused. What is the part of us that feels, Gela? Our spirit or our dead body?”

  She bends and smooths wrinkles on the bedsheet. “You being at the Shaleqa’s side for Etye Zimita’s Forty Day is what is important.”

  Classic habesha deflection. I can’t blame her. I’ve just done to her what I hate when passengers do to me, getting too personal precisely because soon they’ll never see me again.

  “Am I safe under all that? It’s like a mini Ras Dashen,” I say, baptizing the towering mess on the bed frame in the name of Ethiopia’s tallest mountain.

  “After the Forty Day, all will be put back in its original place,” she says. She bids me good night and shuts my door after her. I unzip my skirt and pull up my blouse. The wrinkled bottom half of Ema’s slip comes out, dark green silk with black lace trim, my favourite one. As a child, I was so fascinated by these pretty, flimsy dresses, beautiful secrets women wore underneath their clothes. Such a treat it was to slip my hand under the hem of Ema’s dress to feel the slippery fabric. But I also couldn’t wait to grow up so I, too, could wear a secret of my own.

  I drape my neatly folded uniform on the extended handle of my upright suitcase, my purse on the top, and my shoes beside my tote — the way I do at home prior to a trip.

  In the bathroom, I turn the shower on as hot as it will go and sit on the toilet lid, resting my elbows on the sink. The floor quickly becomes wet with water spattering out from under the too-short shower curtain. Steam blurs my face in the mirror. I wipe it away to reveal only my nose, jawline, and lips, the parts of my reflection that are identical to Ema.