Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  The mound of soft soil was all but covered by heaps of flowers. A wooden cross stuck in the earth like an explorer’s stake in terra incognita proclaimed her full name, Zimita Tessema Gedlu. This was my mother now, I thought, this collection of objects, which I’d seen countless times in other contexts but never expected to see in relation to my own flesh and blood.

  Alone with her for the first time since my last visit to Princess Margaret Hospital, when she didn’t even recognize me, I felt shy. I was with an intimidating stranger. Even if I could think of something to say, what was I supposed to address? The approximate location of her head, the air, the soil, the cross, the lake, the flowers?

  “Do you like your flowers?”

  No answer. Silence. True to her name.

  “You have yellow, white lilies, sunflowers, red, white roses, pink gerberas, white daisies, a spray of purple somethings.” I hoped she liked them. “You would have loved them.”

  The past few days had been unseasonably sunny and dry for early spring. The flowers were drooping. I wished I had a way of saving their beauty, before they rotted in the compost bin by the gates. Something, maybe her, reminded me the camera was still in my purse. I first deleted the few pictures from the memory card, mistake shots that Aba or Ema took of unidentifiable things while figuring out how the camera worked. They never did well with technology. Then I photographed Ema’s flowers. Over the next two days, as the flowers wilted further, I took many more pictures, relieved to have a purpose.

  After my so-called friends, Sara and her posse, paid a condolence visit on my last day off, I cut my hair in my bathroom. Later, I got it corrected at a salon. Just as I had hoped, I got my first shift back at work the day Isak was arriving on his visit. Only a quick run to Halifax, though. My crew, who were informed of my bereavement, found it easier to cheer me up by complimenting me on my new look, as if it was a fashion choice, than by directly telling me they were sorry about my mother’s death. I hated the feel of my exposed neck, when I stood chiming greetings at the open door of a turboprop. The air coming through the gap between the plane and the gangway felt like the unwanted touch of a man. I had to make a conscious effort to keep the grin pasted to my face, welcoming people to a space where there are no sharp edges and anger is officially taboo.

  When I got back to my place, Isak buzzed me up. He didn’t get up from the couch as I hung my purse on the same hook where he’d hung my key. “Is it because he’s adopted?” he asked. I had barely kicked off my shoes. “You don’t consider him your real sibling?”

  “Only technically he is family.”

  “Not technically. He is your family.”

  “He’s Aba’s very distant cousin-by-marriage. He was raised by a single mother in some village near Harrar, then orphaned at eight. People in the village saw him on the street, asked around, and sent him to us in Adisaba. He literally turned up outside our gate one day. That’s what I’ve been told. My parents adopted him. No one consulted me. He and I were never close. Even actual siblings sometimes have completely separate lives, you know.”

  “But they acknowledge each other’s existence.”

  “What do you want me to say? Now you know. I have a . . .” I refused to use the word brother. I got so tired of agonizing over adopted brother or step-brother. Ema thought it would help if I said not-flesh brother. Le’ul was all and none of those. He was someone I couldn’t shake off any more than I could step out of my own skin. I was trying to grant myself permission to not speak of him.

  “Brother.” Isak finished the sentence for me.

  “Adopted brother.”

  “Big deal. He’s still your brother.”

  If Isak said that word one more time, I was sure I would stab him.

  He wasn’t done lecturing. “You need to let go of this bad habesha mentality of adoption as something to be ashamed of. We’re happy enough to give away our children to whites, but can’t claim them ourselves?”

  “Did he call me his sister?”

  “Who else would he say you are?”

  “Why didn’t you go home last week? How did you find out where the funeral was?” My turn to interrogate. “What’d you do, ask around at Ossington and Bloor? Can’t throw a rock in that area without hitting a big habesha forehead.”

  “No,” he said, dignified. “I called the consulate and expressed a wish to pay my respects. The death of a diplo­matic representative touches their community. It is not a street gossip topic.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  From the turnout, it was clear that Ema’s funeral was the social event of the year for the broader community, right up there with a Teddy concert. The ambassador and his wife came from Ottawa. People came to gawk as much as mourn, I was sure of it, to capitalize on at least the first floor of the residence being opened to the public. See how the other half lives. Once a year, on the twentieth of Ginbot, the anniversary of the day Addis Ababa was liberated by Babbaye’s enemy’s enemy, all embassies threw a reception that was by invitation only, for dignitaries and prominent members of the habesha community. For Ema’s funeral, it seemed if one could sour up one’s face and wail convincingly enough, there were no questions asked.

  “Community my ass. They’re all pretenders. I fucking hate them.”

  “Has it occurred to you that your mother was well liked? That the community genuinely considered her family, or wanted to stand in for her family who couldn’t make it?”

  I snorted at the idea of Babbaye flying to Canada to attend Ema’s funeral, or even see her grave. Babbaye, who had been so hostile to anything foreign since the resistance, then his exile from Ethiopia on the Sudanese side of Metemma, and finally his triumphal return to Ethiopia ahead of the emperor. That Babbaye coming out here!

  I wondered if I should call him. I never had, only talked to him if I was with Ema or Aba when they did. I wouldn’t know what to say. Sorry for your loss? Sorry we buried your daughter out here? Believe me, I had nothing to do with it?

  I walked to Isak. “Fine, but I hate that now they can get to Ema any time they want, without an appointment. They don’t have the right. Who knows what they’ll do or say to her?”

  Isak stood and hugged me. “You’re paranoid, people have better things to do than travel across town to haunt your mother’s grave.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  I slid my hands down his back, under the waist of his pants, around to his front. I started unbuttoning his shirt from the bottom up. He pulled back, rebuttoned it. Back and forth we went, up and down, until he seized my hands.

  “Dess!”

  I got up on tiptoes and kissed him. He didn’t flow to the next move. He never does.

  “No,” he said.

  “I want you to hold me.”

  “I was holding you.”

  “Not just hold me.”

  I did want him to hold me, as Ema used to hold me at naptime. I wanted him to draw me into his chest, curve his body around mine so I could burrow deeper. I felt a clawing need to get pregnant.

  “Touch my neck.”

  He massaged my neck. “Short hair suits you, unfortunately.”

  “Told you I’m a cutter. Kiss it.”

  While he did, I unzipped and pushed his pants down. “Your dick doesn’t care who died either,” I whispered, pulling at it until he was breathing in the way of all men inching up to the point of no return. I made him approach that peak, watched his hands frantic on my body. There it was. My Isak was gone, not in the room. He was just a hard heavy-breathing glassy-eyed male now. I was a hole to be entered.

  I turned around, fell forward, spread open, bracing against the coffee table, and shoved him in, racing to replace an abiding memory with one as graphic, as scalding. Wanting to get and give it hard, fast, angry, mean. Rushing to be without my body, or to exchange it. Reaching to pass all shame and disgust. Wanting something slammed, clawed, wrenched, choked out. I thought of Ema. Of Aba. Of Le’ul. Of this body I carried around, these breasts I c
ouldn’t tear off. I was cold, in the room where Ema had lain, holding under her lifeless hands one desiccated rose.

  Spent, Isak looked at me with the shame I wanted him to feel. I looked at him with sadness, not anger, at what he put me through. I couldn’t imagine how I had ever found him attractive, how I had fantasized about our entwined, ecstatic bodies. We behaved cautiously toward each other the rest of the evening. We ordered in what I wanted for dinner, Thai. We got ready for bed without once touching each other.

  He plunked down on the bed with a forced casualness and flipped on the TV. I lay next to him, my head on his pillow. I touched my belly as if it was swelling not with food but a child. “Don’t worry, we’ll raise her in Ethiopia.”

  He stared at the TV. I fell asleep, holding his arm tight. The next day, he said he had brought a lot of reading to do, having assumed I’d go to the residence for Ema’s Seventh Day. I went out and wandered on the Danforth. When I returned late in the afternoon, he had changed his train ticket to an earlier time.

  While he was still on the train, I sent him a text. I need a break. Immediately, I wanted to unwrite it, but I could see that it had been read. Days went by without a response. I ran the opal he’d given me for our first anniversary under hot then cold water, exposing it to sudden temperature change, exactly what he said not to do. It didn’t crack. The opal was okay, so we were okay. I didn’t have to try to remember the last thing we had said to each other.

  EIGHT

  On my third full day at Babbaye’s, there is a new face in the living room, a cheerful man in a black suit, of medium height and build, with a head of dense, dyed black hair. When I enter from the porch after a routine trip to prop the gate open with the rock, he crosses the room toward me and blocks my path. I’m forced to stop.

  He touches my shoulder with his fingertips. “To me, death is life,” he says, by way of greeting.

  I sit so I can separate myself from his touch. “Okay.”

  He takes a chair beside me and produces a business card, which he offers with both hands. Tekalegn Sime, CEO of Gebre-Igziabher International Diaspora Funeral Services.

  “But please,” he says, hand over heart, “know me as Teka.”

  “Do you want me to have the card?”

  “Of course. Keep it, keep it.”

  If Babbaye came up with this next strategy after Emma­hoy, the nun with the fetching dream, left yesterday, or if it is all part of the same play, who knows? Babbaye is not even looking our way. I fold the brand new card into four. Teka looks pained, as if I am folding him into four. I tuck it into the pocket of my grimy jeans. I have been wearing the same outfit every day, stuffing my dirty undies at the bottom of my suitcase, but if I’m smelly I can’t tell because there are so many aromas flying around this house. Who knew grieving was so fragrant? If it’s not the coffee, it’s the fresh injera or bread, or the food constantly reheated, or spilled beer and soda, or the unmade-bed odour of the elderly. Right now, the predominant scent is the coffee Gela is roasting in the kitchen. Today might be the day I let my diaspora flag fly and ask for mine in a big mug.

  “Who’s my opposite in Canada?” Teka says.

  “What?”

  “Your funeral person there, who is he?”

  “I don’t think you’d know him.”

  “Try, try. I work with Toronto people, too.”

  “Stanley Chan?”

  “Oh.” Teka slaps his knee, as if I’ve mentioned a dear friend, with whom he came up mashing earth together. He wags his finger at me. “Because of that man, you know, I have seen countries where I never dreamed I would go. Stan hates flying. With the miles he earns from sending remains, he buys me airplane tickets for a small fee. So, you see, really because of death I have life.”

  According to Teka, the two have even met, on Skype, to discuss a partnership, a sort of one-stop shop for body repatriations. “Though of course the flow of remains sent home,” Teka says, clearing his throat, “will always be greater from your end.”

  I focus on twirling pairs of cotton strands on the fringe of my netela. Since Teka’s getting nowhere with me, he shuffles over several seats, to Babbaye, to introduce himself. Maybe Teka is the funeral director’s version of an ambulance chaser, who scouts residential areas for signs of bereavement — the rental tents for the overflow of mourners, the inverted netelas, people dressed in black, coming and going, the wails. Oh, the wails.

  It seems a genuine first meeting between Teka and Babbaye. But my suspicions return when Babbaye launches into questions too specific to have just occurred to him. Teka, to his credit, doesn’t lose any of his verve. Using the formal plural to refer to Ema, he says, “After the accompanying person signs for their remains at Bole Special Customs, a representative from my shop will wait at the Customs Morgue to receive them.”

  “Who, exactly?” Babbaye says.

  “I, gashe,” Teka says, straightening up into sir mode.

  “Are there special handlers?”

  “Special handlers will remove them before any other cargo or luggage.”

  “What kind of vehicle do you drive?”

  “A black Volkswagen van. We have removed the back seats. On the front and back we attach wreaths, with real roses of any colour of your choosing, at no charge.”

  “Your men are gentle, respectful?”

  “What else would they do, gashe, peek?” Teka says, indignant. I am as impressed by Teka’s daring as by Babbaye’s self-delusion. He expects to contract this man’s services one day.

  “The coffin will not be opened?”

  Teka shakes his head. “The same day, or next, we deliver to church, then to the resting grounds. We stay until the earth is sealed for the final time,” Teka boasts, as if he has the power to ensure that. “We can recreate anything. The headstone, the flower arrangements. I only will need photographs of Stan’s work.” So Ema is Stan’s work now. Soon she is supposed to be Teka’s work. “Also of course a photo we can enlarge for the ceremony, or affix on the stone. Anything! I can create or recreate!” His eyes sparkle with a new thought. “Except life!” He chuckles. “I can’t recreate life. Only Igziabher can!”

  Babbaye sends me to his room to bring the pictures of Ema’s grave that Aba mailed him, to show Teka the wreaths. I am to find the envelope in his dresser. In Babbaye’s bedroom, I open the top dresser drawer, but it is full of the framed photos that used to be on the living room shelf, of my baptism and kindergarten graduation, my grandmother, and my six uncles who were scooped for questioning by the Terror on Christmas 1978. Each son had been a namesake of one of Babbaye’s brothers who had been executed by the Talyans during the occupation. A kind of replacement. I wonder who Ema was supposed to have been a replacement for. Perhaps for Babbaye’s runaway sisters, in case they, too, had perished at the hands of the Talyans?

  I’m about to try a lower drawer when I spot the edge of a Canada Post Express envelope. The photos in it are Photoshopped. Le’ul, as promised, had integrated the photos of Ema’s flowers, which I took on my bereavement leave days, onto the photos of the bare grave, which he made me take on the day I went with him and Aba to Scarborough Bluffs Cemetery. I had never meant to go. That day, I thought my time with them would be limited to the residence, where Aba had summoned me so we could pack Ema’s belongings, as a family.

  For the ten days after Isak decided to ignore my breakup text, I worked non-stop, but only short trips in the Northeast. Aba called me several times a day, never leaving a voicemail. When I finally responded, he said, All three of us have to pack her belongings together. It seemed that Ema’s death outranked what he knew of my childhood. March 14 was officially now the worst thing that had happened — a new, permanent grief, which we had in common, which cancelled out what happened only to me. Well, so be it, I thought. At least my terror had trained me to bear the unavoidable.

  At the residence, I found Aba in the bedroom, between the walk-in closet and the bathroom, absent-mindedly testing the seams on a suitcase.
Le’ul was in the walk-in closet. I claimed the bathroom. Even with the buffer of the bedroom, and Aba, between me and Le’ul, all my senses were alert to Le’ul. I sat on Ema’s vanity chair, my grandmother’s mesob full of Ema’s hair rollers on the counter in front of me, taking as long as possible with my unnecessary task. I was extracting Ema’s black and silver hairs from her rollers, one strand at a time, and collecting them on a white handkerchief dotted with tiny blue flowers which I had spread out on my lap. When I finished collecting the hairs, I folded the handkerchief and pressed it flat. Then I began to scrub the rollers, one by one, with an old toothbrush under running water.

  I heard Le’ul walking to the bedroom. Aba spoke.

  “The old man sent me more emails.”

  My instinct told me the messages must be about Ema’s burial in Canada. I turned down the water flow so I could hear the conversation.

  Le’ul said, “Email? I bet he bullied some kid into writing them for him.”

  Aba said, “He has not contacted me this many times in all the years he has known me. Now he is offended because he believes I am ignoring him, denying her body the company of her ancestors.”

  Before Aba gave up the professorial life to accompany Ema to Vienna, he had been a man close to his father-in-law’s heart. Babbaye respected Aba’s brand of patriotism, where the weapon of choice was the pen, not the bayonet. Babbaye hadn’t anticipated how much Aba would disappoint him by supporting Ema as she accepted promotions abroad, instead of convincing her to return to Ethiopia at the end of each four year cycle. Babbaye had not changed his mind, even when Ema became a consul general, which Aba told him was as significant as the old royal title of Enderase.

  “One ignores the Shaleqa at their peril,” Le’ul said.

  “You know the first thing he said when his old friends, my former professor and that group of men, told him the merdo? He wanted to know when we are bringing her home.”

  “Not if?”

  I shut off the water. I knew it. Even after so much time had passed, and at such a distance, Babbaye and I once again wanted the same thing, for our separate reasons. I wanted Ema to leave me, so that I was not the one to leave her again.