Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  “Until then, well, she is still here in spirit, for forty days, right Babbaye?”

  “I allowed for visits. I allowed for letters. Yet, when your mother came back to Ethiopia last time, two years ago, alone, under the shadow of death, she refused to stay in her old father’s house. She chose to pay for a room in a hotel as do streetwalkers. That also was punishment. She saw me but once.”

  This is news to me. If Ema was making a personal trip, she always stayed here. Maybe by that last visit, it was impossible for her to hide her sickness from him. So she stayed at her home away from home, the Ghion, to spare him from having to look at her gaunt body every day. She began self-quarantining here. Babbaye must have been stung, though, not knowing why she really stayed at a hotel, so I exaggerate the truth to heal that hurt.

  “She used to keep herself from us, too, to protect us from the harsh medicines in her body. In Toronto she had her own apartment. She never let us come in.”

  “For withholding from her a life of shame. For making her into someone with a name. For showing mercy by allowing her to see that girl, to write to that girl. For saying nothing when she visits longer with that girl than with me. For all the ways I forgave her shame, time and again, I am not in turn forgiven. I am punished.”

  “What girl?” But I babble on without waiting for an answer that terrifies me with its possibilities before I’ve even heard it, fills me in equal parts with the joy of anticipation and disbelief. “I can put earth from this garden on her grave. We can plant a mefakiya cutting?”

  I offer him the pictures again. He slaps my hand. The photos go flying. I jump away as if he has smashed glass. Then I rush back in to collect and re-stack them. They are all out of order, like his mind, images of what occurred at different times juxtaposed as if they happened at the same time. I have to be careful. I have to take command. I did not realize what great lies great desires can birth.

  Point by point, I re-establish order. “There is no other girl. She had me. I had her. She didn’t keep herself from you on purpose. These photos are the best we can do for you.”

  “Bring my daughter to me.”

  “No.”

  “You do not wish to meet your sister.”

  “I don’t have a sister.”

  “Bring me my daughter. I will give you your sister.”

  “Guests are waiting.”

  In the living room, I give the photos to Teka without a word and sit by the porch door. Teka flips through the photos, then hands them to the person next to him. They are passed around the room. The population of visitors has mushroomed. Everyone is keenly interested. More than interested, their faces brighten. The photos bring them relief. They needed this, proof of Ema’s being gone, her actual resting place. Gela was right, the bereaved do need a physical place, some thing, to focus their grief on. Why had Babbaye denied them?

  Gela is sitting by the back door. She covers her mouth with her netela, her hand supporting her chin. I can’t read her expression at all, as if her mind were an unreachable country, the way all adults I knew had seemed to me when I was young. I’ll be sad to leave her, when the time comes. I won’t be back, soon or ever. I can’t spit on the ground for her, like moms used to do when I was little, and promise she’ll see me again before the spit dries.

  If my mother wasn’t home, I used to shadow the maids. For as long as each maid lasted, whether she wanted to play the part or not, she was to me a substitute for the big sister I didn’t have. I would try to make myself as useful as I could, so that when Le’ul came to find me, she might refuse to let me go because she needed me. But she never did. She was glad to be rid of me. I was not her little sister. I was not her helper. I was a pest. She suspected me of being Ema’s little spy, or she was just tired of me slowing her down. So she always told me to obey my big brother. She never asked him what he needed me for. He wouldn’t have told her anyway. He thought maids were for pulling pranks on, not for talking to, definitely not for befriending. No matter how much I dragged my feet, I could not will any of my “sisters” to ask me to stay.

  I go out to the porch, down the stairs, to the gate, stumbling on the uneven pathway. I remove the stone propping open the gate, step out, and let it close behind me.

  NINE

  On the rocky lane outside Babbaye’s compound, I walk in a direction I’ve never gone, away from the main road, deeper into the neighbourhood. When we lived in Addis Ababa and came to visit Babbaye, Ema and Aba always parked outside the gate. They’d pick one of the eager neighbourhood kids to guard the car in exchange for some candy money. The next generation of those kids, playing soccer on the lane, stop to watch me pass. News about me has spread, I’m sure. Now here I am, their very own local diaspora. A few trickle over to keep pace with me. I smile. They do not scatter, but they do not return my smile either.

  Here were little ones, Isak would say, enjoying an authentic Ethiopian childhood. I do what he would do in this scenario. I step up to a streetside kiosk and ask the shopkeeper for a bag of imported candy. From one of the yards on the other side of the lane, a girl, no more than twelve or thirteen, emerges. She scolds the kids for following me. She wears a drop waist dress, her week-old cornrows go down the side of her head from a centre part. She has tattoos, a small green cross on each side of her jaw and on her chin. In the middle of her forehead, there is a cross with a circle in its centre.

  Touching my face, I ask her, “How long did that hurt?” She starts to herd the children away. “Your name is what?”

  Before she opens her mouth, a spry little fellow who could have stepped out of one of Le’ul’s urchin photos answers for her, struggling against her pull. “Senait! Name Senait!”

  He breaks away and runs back to me. The other kids follow, all of a sudden animated like arcade Whac-a-Moles, in a hurry to have this get-to-know-you part over with so we can begin the important business of eating the foreign candy, which the shopkeeper has placed on the counter, his hand firmly on the bag.

  “Henok Meron Selamawit Fasil Tsehai Enat Robel Nardos Abeba!” There isn’t even one shy child keeping off to the side.

  “I will bring you the money later. I’m right there,” I say to the shopkeeper. I point to Babbaye’s gate. In response, he points to a notice on the wall behind him. Written in bold, angry black marker, NO CREDIT.

  “But I am of the Shaleqa’s family.”

  He puts the bag back on the shelf. Out of pity, he plucks one piece of cheap local candy out of a plastic jar on the counter and drops it in front of me. No conversation on credit either, I guess. I unwrap the single piece of candy. Holding it in a pinch, I crush it between my back teeth. Gently, I release the shattered candy onto my palm. I offer the slivers, like the sections of a clementine, to the kids.

  Each child steps up, plucks a piece. They get quiet, sucking on the candy probably lodged in the grooves of their tongues.

  I could imagine these kids on Le’ul’s web page. When he wasn’t out on assignment for aid agencies, documenting their good deeds among the unfortunate all over the world, Le’ul’s ongoing passion project was photographing street urchins, especially orphans, in developing countries. On his fancy web page, where he exhibits his photographs next to links for purchasing prints and making donations, he explains how he feels a special affinity with his subjects, being an adopted orphan himself. There go I but for the grace of God and all that crap.

  “And me? Who am I?” I say, brushing my empty hand on my jeans. “Come on, I’m sure you know my name. No? Run to the Shaleqa and ask! It is the name of a city north of here, on very high ground. On posters it is the heart of Ethiopia. The kiremt chill there breaks bones.” Cold heart, I think.

  “Dessie?” Senait says. She scrunches up her face, surprised, distorting her sun-cross.

  “Why?” Henok says. Senait smacks him on the back of the head, but he doesn’t stop ogling me. She must want to know too, because she steps closer.

  I had always accepted my name as Dessie because that is
the city where Ema stayed during the Terror. But after what Babbaye has said, about Ema punishing him for Dessie, I wonder what else happened there, what it has to do with that girl. Everything feels suspect.

  “Because my mother hid there from the Terror,” I say. “Do you know the Terror?” They shake their heads. Maybe more exciting things have happened in the time since. Or maybe, their terror — like mine — is not the one in the history books.

  “Well, sorry I don’t have a better story for you.”

  I wave goodbye and walk away. Eventually, the lane joins up with the same main road that curves around the neighbourhood. I keep Babbaye’s house behind me. The road rises steadily and meets a wide avenue. Across it is fencing so long I can’t see where it ends. It must belong to a government building, maybe even the Palace, because on the stone pillars, at regular intervals in the fence, there are armed soldiers stationed in high booths, and signage forbidding photography.

  For the first time in my life, I walk alone in Addis Ababa. I follow women walking with their arms around each other’s shoulders, the sides of their bodies fused in a sisterly love, and smitten couples, the girl’s arm hooked around the boy’s, and young men loosely linking pinkies with their friends. We all have to step around maimed beggars, and destitute young mothers breastfeeding their babies, sitting on the ground behind tattered cloths laid out for receiving coins. I pass through parts of the city that feel familiar but soon dissolve into unfamiliar sights. When sidewalks crumble, then end, I walk a narrow strip between traffic and gutters.

  I come to the entrance of the post office. I raise my arms for a pat-down by a female guard, then wander down to the basement. The numbers on the mailboxes extend into five digits now. As a girl, I loved being sent to get the mail while Ema waited in the car. Until the time both of us knew I wouldn’t find any more of my pen pal’s letters. I return upstairs, through the parcel section, and exit down the back outer staircase crowded with sleeping dogs.

  Every time I see a woman my age, that girl sneaks up on me. No, if Ema had had a baby, it would have been years before me. That girl would be at least thirty. I search for resemblances between myself and the women I pass. I can’t get any to make eye contact. I share with them all the features common to most Ethiopian women of highlands stock: red-brown skin, high forehead, huge almond-shaped eyes, narrow nose, plump lips, long neck. I don’t see Ema in any of them. The only recurring trait among all the women I see is an air of melancholy.

  My feet hurt. I sit at a café patio. The waiter floats by. I tell him I’m waiting for someone. I am. I just don’t know if here, now, is how we’re supposed to meet. Or even if we’re supposed to meet. The men stare at me overtly, the women covertly. Are we all hoping to recognize somebody we used to know or feel we ought to know? The waiter takes away the three chairs around my table. Now the space around me is off-kilter. I had Ema sitting in one chair, my sister in the other, Aba in the fourth. Our waiter would be Le’ul. Aba would tip him well. Le’ul would be grateful. He would run after us to thank Aba personally. The end of this block would be as far as he would ever go with my family.

  If I asked Aba about that girl, I don’t know which answer would hurt less. Yes, it’s true, I could have had a sister all along, become someone else altogether, led a different life, been happy. Or no, Babbaye lied, I never had a sister. How I am is how I am meant to be.

  When Ema came to see me during Christmas holidays because I refused to come to Rome, she told me of a dream she’d had throughout her life, of falling from a great height. I thought that sounded terrifying, a nightmare. She said it wasn’t a nightmare, because she always woke up before she hit the ground. It was just a dream. But to me, dreaming of falling night after night, never finding out if I got rescued or I shattered on the ground, was a nightmare. I feel that’s what I am in, since finding out I might have a sister, a space between a dream and a nightmare.

  I should wait until I am back in Toronto to ask Aba. I can’t cause him more distress, when he is already in so much pain. Did your wife have a child before she met you? is a question one weighs the pros and cons of asking, then asks in person. For all the weighing, however, it is a question I have to ask. The sooner the better. We’re still in that raw phase where it is possible to ask anything. Not to mention, I suffered for him — going to the residence to pack Ema’s belongings, then to Stanley’s to choose her stone, then to the cemetery to take those pictures — all in Le’ul’s shadow. Aba’s turn now.

  It’s midday in Toronto. I dial Aba’s number. I hope I will find the right words. He picks up. I get off to a mumbling start, asking what used to be a basic question.

  “How are you?”

  He makes general sounds that could mean he’s all right, he’s getting by, or he’s pinned under by grief.

  “Where are you?” he asks me, which he never used to do, since the answer, even when true, was only good for a day or so. But now he wants to know every city I’m in. Le’ul hasn’t told him, then, about Sydney.

  I would have lied to Aba too, but I have to come clean if I expect him to do the same. So I tell him where I really am, and why.

  “Oh,” he says. “How is the Shaleqa?”

  “Only thinking and talking about the one thing.” I don’t have to say what. He knows.

  “The pictures didn’t satisfy him, as you had hoped,” he says.

  “They look so false.”

  “What can we do?”

  “They’ve confused him more. Now he says things that make no sense.”

  “Well, his sense and other people’s sense . . .”

  “There’s either a girl or there isn’t.”

  “What girl?”

  “Exactly. A sister he’s convinced I have.”

  “What does Emwodish’s burial have to do with that?”

  “Apparently I will want to meet her so much, I will make you return Ema.”

  “What an arrangement!”

  “I already said, his mind is confused.”

  We are back to what is known. Babbaye is a very lonely, much bereaved man.

  “Would you have wanted very badly to have a sister?”

  I stand up, toppling the chair. I grip the phone tighter. “It’s true?”

  Aba exhales more breath than he’s taken in.

  “She was born.”

  I walk away from the patio, and lean against a telephone pole.

  “But, she didn’t live a moment. The child was a stillbirth. That’s what Emwodish said. Perhaps that was a blessing. She wasn’t ours,” he says, answering my next unspoken question. “It happened before, when she was young,” he concludes, as if that is all the explanation needed.

  Before, and young. No long story.

  I try to picture Ema with a man other than Aba. He must have been hurt to find out he wasn’t her first. Though there is no way, considering their age gap, that she would have been his first. She hadn’t broken his trust any more than I would be breaking Isak’s, if I had let some man buy me a drink at the café, and gone on for something more potent at his place without asking how many guests his house is designed to bed.

  “Do you remember the verses I chanted from Mezmure Dawit, on the night you and I went to see her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you understand.”

  “No.”

  “I spoke the verses of repentance,” he says, as if I am fluent in Ge’ez and understood a word of the chant.

  “Repentance for?”

  “For denying her the family she wanted. To your mother, even though the child was never with us, this family always had three children. There should be three children.”

  “Should have been,” I correct him. Could have been. I start to walk. Ema had a before, too. A secret grief she carried all her life. When her cancer first returned, shortly after she was posted to Toronto, she had said, My body is a place of death. I ignored her, thinking she was being melodramatic about a perfectly curable cancer. She must have meant that the body in
which I had thrived had once before killed a baby. Maybe this is why she used to watch me so much. For all I know, she was trying to see if I was her first daughter reborn, or somebody new entirely.

  “I saw pictures of Ema’s stone.”

  “Will you be here for the tezkar dedication, day after tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I tell Aba about my time here so far. To my joy, he chuckles a bit over the ways Babbaye has tried to ambush me, as if I had any say in the matter of where Ema is buried.

  “I am surprised to hear Emmahoy is still alive and kicking,” he says.

  “Dreaming, rather,” I quip.

  “Remember,” he says, “you are facing a man who used the Talyans’ own weapons on them. No telling he won’t lob something in your path still, to blow it apart just when you think you are making way. Speaking from experience. Keep your wits about you. Stay firm. Be polite.”

  “Yes gashe,” I say, glad to have Aba to talk to about Babbaye. I let Aba go. I notice the depth of my anger at Babbaye in the moment it leaves me. I feel awful to have left him the way I did. Of course he has always known that the girl was only born. He just had to try everything to bring his daughter home. I can’t judge him. We are both dealing with our loss of Ema in ways that make sense to us, make us feel as if we are keeping some part of her still. Do I not stick my face in her pack of Djarums for a sniff on the regular? Did I not almost go to the Ghion Hotel to lurk outside a stranger’s room?

  Suddenly, I can’t wait to get back to Babbaye’s. I call Wondu and describe where I am. I wait for him, pacing on the sidewalk, being ignored by shoeshine boys who take one look at my canvas slip-ons and conclude I’m no good to them.

  Wondu arrives. I sit in the front. In preparation for merging into traffic, he crosses himself and kisses the wooden crucifix hanging from his neck by a thin, black thread. He is about the age of the men executed or disappeared in the Terror, and the men who were sent to the front to fight for Babbaye’s enemy’s enemy. I wonder if, despite his hard-knock life, he considers himself blessed to have avoided the fates of men like my uncles, or if he envies them their martyrdom.