I yanked out a gabi from the bottom of a stack, toppling it. Forget counting, I was so mad I could have watched all that cotton go up in flame, set the fire myself. I stepped on the mess on my way out of the closet, and threw the gabi at Ema. It unfurled midair, and landed partly on the floor. “I know what you’re doing,” I hissed. “Maybe all those politicians you negotiate for, they don’t see you coming, maybe they have no idea how you get them to do what you want them to do. But I know what you’re doing.”
She pulled the gabi over herself. “Forgive him.”
I felt my heart seize. “What about me?”
“I am thinking about you.”
“Really?”
“I’ve had to forgive worse.”
“What could possibly be worse?”
“He didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Were you there?”
“He’s suffered. You haven’t seen because you stayed behind in Vienna. In Rome —”
“In Rome you three lived nicely without my presence.”
“In Rome he almost died.”
My stomach plunged. The image that came to mind was my little boy brother Le’ul in the photo, not the adult monster. I waited for her to explain if he hurt himself or if someone, something, hurt him.
“Is that all you’ve got? Well I’ve got news for you, too. We are all almost dying, every moment. You should learn how the human body works.”
She was so shocked that she lifted herself up onto her elbows. We stared at each other, dumbstruck that I, normally such a good-natured daughter, could be so cruel.
“What?” I huffed, with shaky bravado. “You’re the only one allowed to keep saying mean things?” The more I felt pressured, the quicker my boarding school self emerged, the vicious twelve-year-old who I didn’t like any more than Ema did.
“Please, my sweet, obey me,” she said, getting herself tangled in the gabi as she crawled up to kneeling. “Say yes. Grant me more life. Don’t shorten my life.”
She reached for me. I swung my arm out of her grasp. “You give me too much credit, Ema.” I staggered back and tore out of the room.
Just as I barged into the foyer downstairs, I saw the handle of the front door being lowered. I retreated to the living room, to listen for signs of Le’ul. But the gentle closing of the front door, the scratch of Velcro, finally Aba’s long exhalation as he lowered himself on the bench and removed his walking shoes assured me it was safe to step into view.
Aba’s face broke into sorrow the moment he saw me. He shook his head. “Oh why did she tell you? We had agreed between us, there was no use in you knowing.”
I guessed he meant Ema’s latest prognosis. I waited for details, afraid if I asked, I wouldn’t get them. Aba was too stricken to continue, and the most exposed part of the house was the last place I wanted to stay, so I spoke first.
“She can’t help what she says anymore, Aba.”
“Dr. Hoggs advised me privately after her appointment. He said he won’t discourage the families of his patients from believing their loved ones have less time than they actually do. Why can’t these doctors talk plainly?”
I stared at the pattern of stylized lions and doves on the wool rug until the meaning came to me.
“Ema will live.”
Aba relaxed. He held out his arms to me. I walked into them and got a grateful kiss on each cheek. My translation had given him peace. If only he knew it was my refusal, not the cancer, that was single-handedly robbing Ema of time.
From then on, I decided the best thing I could do for Ema’s health was to not see her. When I knew she was in for treatments, I sat on a bench in front of the cardiac centre, opposite her hospital. When she was at home, I gave her strength by doing for her what she used to enjoy but claimed she could no longer do. I walked to the waterfront on her favourite route. I watched the movies she’d have loved-hated. I shopped for her style of simple black clothes. Sometimes Aba was with me. He understood. Other times, Isak was. He didn’t ask, just got used to eating a lot of mille-feuille, Ema’s favourite dessert.
For our first anniversary gift, while we were cooking a pasta dinner at my place, Isak gave me a rock. The stone looked dull. So did my face; I couldn’t hide my disappointment.
“It’s not any rock,” he explained. “It is an uncut Ethiopian opal, from deposits newly discovered in Gonder. In water it changes colour, but will crack if dried too quickly.”
He droned on about the opal’s properties. Then he stopped. Normally, he had no problem with the sound of his own voice. He loved to read his papers aloud. That day, my undisguised inattention, added to my failure to at least pretend to be pleased, “raised his ire.”
“So, you are not beyond all that after all,” he said.
“Beyond what?”
“The trappings of what can be got out here in outside-country for lots of money.”
Despite his stylishness and unaccented English, I found him most charming when he had his fresh-off-the-boat slip-ups, like using the Amharic expression wuch-hager, to mean anywhere not Ethiopia.
“I thought you were the type of person who appreciates something of her own.”
“I do. I thought it was just a rock at first,” I said.
“So what if it was? The fact of it originating from your own country makes this rock more meaningful than all the jewellery you can get out here in the so-called better life.” He spread uncooked pasta on the countertop and aligned the pieces in a straight row. “I for one am not impressed by the West. People sacrificing even their offspring for it, fragmenting their children . . .”
We hadn’t discussed marriage, much less children. I ignored the implication that sex would happen someday after all, along with the sadness that welled up in me at the prospect.
“Who are you calling fragmented?”
“I’m not calling you anything,” he said, picking out the broken sticks of pasta and throwing them into the sink. My job was to stir the sauce, boil water, and clean up. “But have you not told me how conflicted things became between you and your mother the moment you moved to Venice?”
I smiled.
“What?” he said. By then he could tell which were my real smiles, and which were irritation, annoyance, or fury pulling up the corners of my mouth.
“We’re good now.”
“But you said things got so bad you were sent to boarding school? Maybe if they’d sent you back home instead —”
“I didn’t get sent anywhere. Boarding school in Vienna was my choice.”
“The point is —”
“And I turned out okay.” I flourished the sauce-coated spoon in the white kitchen.
“That kind of rupture can be avoided. If not avoided, reversed.”
“You want people to move back when they start a family? Never mind there are hundreds of thousands of habesha abroad. Where would you store us all?”
“Taking a child out of its native environment creates problems, sooner or later.”
“Everything is hunky-dory in Ethiopia? Must be the holy water.”
“Don’t worry about getting the hang of things back home. My sisters are there.”
“Why? Where are you going to be?”
“I’m sure I will have some work-related travel.”
“You will have work-related travel? Have you met me?”
“How long do you see yourself as a hostess?”
“Flight crew.”
“Whatever is decided, I’m sure everyone will adapt,” he backtracked. The air buzzed with the question, How did it never occur to us to talk about this? He upturned his right palm and held it out to me. “Come.”
I was supposed to put my left palm over his while we talked it out. It was some sort of woo-woo couples’ activity he read about. The person who has their hand on top was supposed to feel a much-needed sense of control.
“Fuck off.” I wet a paper towel to clean up the pasta sauce I’d spattered on the kitchen walls, imagining Babbaye stabbing Isak’
s Talyan grandfather to death on the battlefield. That was my gratifying go-to fantasy whenever I saw what lay dormant in Isak, beneath his hipster New Age façade and vintage Ray-Ban tortoise-shell frames: his habesha core, a bone-deep patriarchal authoritarianism that claimed final say.
Isak’s version of our future was clear. Isak’s career, a real one, driven by passion and talent, would take priority over the one I’d stumbled into: a waitress of the sky. Forget the one I have given up on, so much that he didn’t even know about it, art therapist. We would become a continuation of my parents. Except Isak would be Ema, the high-profile spouse doing big things in big places. I would be his faithful follower, allowed to pursue my interests but with the understanding that I can drop it any time, and pick it up wherever.
Such an arrangement worked for my parents. After Ema became a diplomat, Aba finally had the freedom to write his books on the most obscure Ethiopian topics. What would I do, following Isak around? Raise kids? I couldn’t see myself embodying the image that always came to my mind when I thought of motherhood: Afewerk Tekle’s painting Mother Ethiopia. This eternal habesha mother seated in a pose evocative of the shape of Ethiopia, against a blue background, cradling an infant in the folds of her thick, white yards of gabi. Incidentally, that was the only one of the maître artist’s works of which Ema didn’t own a silk print scarf.
Yet, on balance, Isak was a rare find. Not just a significantly evolved habesha guy but also someone who felt familiar the first time I met him. I’d been steered to him in Book City by the girl I used to be. If she’d had a chance to grow up, she would have picked Isak too. She knows precious from common.
I had become used to having superficial, brief conversations with Ema on the phone, so I didn’t realize right away that she wasn’t making sense and her pauses were abnormally long. Then Aba told me they had upped her morphine. When she was in again at Princess Margaret Hospital, I waited until after visiting hours and went there purposely in uniform so I could talk my way in explaining that my job made it impossible for me to visit at any other time. At the reception desk, the nurse confiscated the bouquet I had brought for Ema, grabbing the stems in a chokehold and shaking them until pollen dusted our wrists, to show me why, as if I didn’t speak English.
So I stood empty-handed beside Ema’s hospital bed. Half of Ema’s face was covered by a breathing mask. Her hair was dishevelled. Her eyes were deliriously blank. I waited for her to recognize me, play our game like we used to when I was little and followed her everywhere at home, in the billowing wake of her green velvet dressing gown. She’d suddenly stop, whirl around, and act baffled to find me behind her. Hey! Where did you come from? Whose are you? she would exclaim. For the split second it took for her velvet robe to swirl around her body, I’d be a deer in headlights. Her question sounded so genuine every time, for a second I really felt like a stray. Then I’d remember to say: Yours! She’d laugh at her silly mistake. Of course, my sweet! she’d say, and continue striding long and sure, while I hurried to keep up.
I slipped my palm under Ema’s inert hand connected to the IV. What new game is this, I wondered, my heart descending the length of my body like an empty elevator. Ema was the one looking up at me, unable to ask me the important question. And I could barely breathe, much less remind that tall goddess in green velvet that I am hers.
SIX
On the morning of my second day in Addis Ababa, Barb has no new news. I am weary of keeping a smile pasted to my face. Babbaye tolerates me. He doesn’t pay me any more or less mind than he does anyone else. Mostly, he sits pensive, murmuring his sorrow when moved to speak, or his response to the words of consolation from his visitors.
Gela gives me one more responsibility: to make sure that the rock, used to keep the gate open, stays in place. She suspects one of the tenants, specifically that man who stepped over her yesterday, keeps removing it in a silent protest against their landlord’s unending mourning period, which has people coming and going all day. So, I step out regularly to check on a rock. As a reward, on every trip back to the house I get a crash course on what life can do to a face — when I catch a fleeting simultaneous glimpse of my mother’s two portraits above the porch door and the fireplace.
Late in the day, as I reopen the gate, two women arrive. One is a tiny, yellow-robed old nun who smells heavenly of church incense. Her raisin face is topped by a skullcap. She holds a double-headed wood cane in one hand, amber prayer beads in the other. She shuffles over the threshold, assisted by the other woman at her elbow, a novice so demure she might have been a virgin plucked out of choir practice in the Garden of Eden.
In the living room, the novice sits next to the nun, and focuses on the parquet as if it were inscribed with sacred texts. In a rare show of deference, Babbaye walks to the nun, intercepting me while I am asking visitors about refills. I follow him, an empty glass in each of my hands.
He seats me between him and the nun. He says, “Listen to this woman. She is your relation. She is your grand-aunt, your grandmother’s only sister.”
The barren one, who late in life had apparently taken vows to become one of the Ethiopian Orthodox post-menopausal nuns. A widow who took her vows after many years of husband-minding, renouncing the world before it renounces her.
“This is the daughter of Zimita,” Babbaye says.
“Selam, Emmahoy,” I greet her, proud of myself for remembering her title.
“I knew,” Our Mother squawks, clicking her beads, launching into a speech, “I knew this would happen. My child, listen. I saw it in a dream.”
My guard goes up. What’s this? It? That my mother would die? Or I would come?
“Your grandmother came to me in a dream, to this house, through those doors. I sat here, as I sit now.” I look at the porch doors, expecting a woman I have never met, then back at her, a woman I have just met. “The wife of the Shaleqa wears the whitest hager libs. Her hair is plaited back from her forehead in thin rows and gathered at the back like a black cloud. Her netela is open at her neck showing her nikisat.”
She has just described the portrait which has been on the first row of Babbaye’s shelf since the dawn of time. The tattoos were seven green rings around her neck. Her cause of death was grief, when she accepted that the Terror would never return her sons, alive or dead.
Instinct tells me I’m not going to care for where this line of dream-telling ends up. I tip the glasses in my hands until they are horizontal, testing the rims with the dregs of Fanta and St. George beer, daring them to spill over the imperceptible lip.
“Your grandmother is as beautiful as Fasika day. I say, Sister, why have you come after so long away? She answers, I have come to fetch someone.” Emmahoy taps a gnarled fingernail on my knee for effect. “Have come to fetch someone.”
All that’s expected from me is to submissively accept Emmahoy’s enigmatic testimony. Or riddle it out quietly like the enkokilish Aba used to distract me with when I got restless in restaurants as a child. He’d introduce a session by calling, Enkokilish!
I would give the response, Min awkilih! What should I know?
What feeds you like a mother, but punishes you like a stepmother?
A honeybee.
What I should do now is hold my peace. Shut up and breathe through my nose. These nuns, Aba has told me, don’t want their pronouncements questioned any more than the monks and priests for whom they cook and clean.
“Fetch who?” I say.
Emmahoy is surprised. “Your mother. She had come to fetch your mother.”
“Did she say that?”
Emmahoy’s eyes, gleaming furiously, flick to my grandfather. I believe Emmahoy had this dream, but not what she and Babbaye say it means. Why would my grandmother be so interested in a daughter she didn’t want to live for? She came to her sister, in her husband’s house. Obviously she came to “fetch” one of them. I spill the Fanta, suddenly frightened by even half a chance of Babbaye’s imminent death.
I don’t know what’s
taking Gela so long. Usually she comes in within moments of a new guest arriving to offer an assortment of refreshments on a tray carried by Aberash, just like the lead hostess in business class.
“Let me bring you some water, Emmahoy.” I can’t imagine what else a nun would drink. I escape from between these co-conspirators.
The kitchen is empty. I know Aberash has gone out to return empties. I grab a plate, heap misir wot from some so-and-so’s house, and wolf it down with bread. With each bite, I feel myself calm down. Babbaye is so determined to get Ema back, he has even recruited an ally from the brink of the afterlife to present a compelling argument for his case. Like the Axum Obelisk, he won’t stop until he’s accomplished his mission. For Babbaye, the one silver lining in Ema’s two-term posting to Rome was his belief that she was using her position to keep alive the obelisk repatriation issue. Ema and Aba used to joke about how Babbaye behaved as if the Talyans had looted the stone from his own backyard, in the late thirties when he was a sixteen-year-old resistance fighter. For sixty-eight years, he kept up pressure for the stone’s homecoming. He sat on every repatriation committee. He signed every petition. Two years ago, in 2008, the tall rock, repatriated from Rome, was finally reinstalled in Axum, in its original hole.
I finish my food and gargle my mouth with the last bottle of mineral water in the kitchen. I go to the side alley to spit. A tomcat observes me from the roof of the main house, then hops soundlessly to the roof of the service quarters. His landing on the corrugated iron creates a delicate rumble that fades as he saunters away.
Pacified, I go to the storage room to get bottled water for Emmahoy. I walk into a dense fume of fermentation. Gela and Lomi stand over one of the blue plastic barrels. Lomi pours water into the barrel from a deep pail. Gela stirs it in with a wooden stick.
“Stay back,” Gela says. I go closer and peer at our distorted reflections in a well of dark brown liquid. “It’s tella for the guests on the Forty.”
“All this?”
Daughters of Silence Page 7
