Timid rain pitter-patters on the windshield. Wondu tells me the rain is the belg of April to May, before the deluges of kiremt from June to September. He cruises as slowly as the bluesy tizita playing on the CD player, a perfect complement to the orange-smeared sky, the emerging crescent moon poorly secreted behind thin clouds. The classic ballad for bygone love used to be the soundtrack of many of my parents’ evenings, whether they were having their endless low-voiced conversations under the bottlebrush tree, or working quietly in the same room, but under their own pools of light.
“Whose tizita is this?”
“The only one worth listening to, of course,” Wondu says. “Mahmoud’s.”
“My father would tell you no version compares to Bezawork’s.”
“Speaking of. Tell me about Gela. Where she is from, her family, relationship status.”
“How is that speaking of?”
“She reminds me of Bezawork.”
Gela looks nothing like Bezawork.
“I think she’s getting over somebody.”
“Oh, yes?”
“A guess, from her taste in music. Or she is fine being alone and just prefers sad love songs for entertainment.”
“So,” he says, “ripe for companionship, then.”
What a beautiful expression, I think. In Amharic, that is. In English, in my translation anyway, it sounds lecherous. We reach the turnoff into Babbaye’s neighbourhood. The trip was fast. I thought I had walked far, but I was only going in circles after all.
Wondu pulls over to the side of the road, shifts to neutral, and keeps his hand on the gear shift. “How old would you guess her to be? She would be your elder by ten years?”
“Outside-country air makes diaspora look younger than we are, don’t you know? Wait here, I have to run in for money.”
“Don’t worry about it, you’ll pay next time.”
To reciprocate his trust, or his clever way of ensuring I’ll call him again, I give him one more piece of information about Gela. “If you’re going to make a move, better hurry. She won’t be there long.”
“Where is she going?”
“I don’t know, but somewhere better. She carries herself with a certain . . . pride.”
“For a maid, you mean?”
I feel that I’ve said too much. Oh hell, might as well finish what I’ve started. “Yes. As if she knows the indignity of this domestic work is temporary, you know? And her day will come. Or something.”
“Her day will come,” he says, grinning like he is the bringer of days. “She is happy working for your grandfather?”
“Well, you yourself saw, how she seemed happy enough to cry.”
“Yes, forgive me. Of course, no one can show happiness in a house of mourning. But in her private moments, does she have cheer?”
“I don’t enter her private moments.”
I climb out of the car and pick my way over muddy rocks to Babbaye’s gate. I find it open. I ignore the few guests in the living room and go straight to Ema’s room. I close the door, and double over with silent, dry heaving sobs. For twenty-two years, I wanted a sister. For the duration of a couple of hours in Addis Ababa, walking, drinking in exhaust fumes, I had one, in my mind. Bit by bit, the swell of sorrow recedes. I undress to shower.
TEN
Hours before I was due to report for duty for my Toronto-Vienna-Johannesburg-Toronto trip, as I was coming out of the shower in my condo, I heard a key turning in my front door. I wrapped myself in a towel and cracked open the bathroom door. I saw the Shoppers plastic bag being placed on the breakfast bar first, then I recognized the hand. Le’ul’s.
I slammed my bathroom door shut, but I felt as if the barrier wasn’t there — so clearly could I still visualize him, as I stood with my palm flat against the door, staring at the floor tile, my heartbeat accelerating.
I added a bathrobe over my towel and triple tied it. My opal, sitting in the soap dish, gave me the courage to ask, through the door, “Who let you in?”
“Ema gave me her spare.”
“When?”
“Last time she was admitted, she wanted me to have it,” Le’ul said, in the same boyish tone he had used to convince Aba that he had not tried to turn a D into a B on his school report card. But I was not gullible Aba, willing to pardon all of an orphan boy’s transgressions, with or without a confession. I dared not openly accuse Le’ul of lying, though, so I said nothing.
“I brought you the Ricola. You wanted to save them. There was an unopened bag, too. I brought all of it for you.”
He sounded so proud of himself. Trying to impress, to woo, me?
He knocked on the door. “Don’t you want it?”
He didn’t have to stay out there. He was choosing to. In one continuous motion, I opened my door, stepped out, grabbed the bag from the breakfast bar and walked to the far end of the dining-living space, behind the coffee table. Only the floor-to-ceiling windows were between me and an eighteen-floor fall to the parking lot, wet from an April downpour.
“Thank you,” I said, holding the bag against my chest.
“I’m sorry. I thought you would be out on a flight.”
“I’m going out now.”
“Where to?”
“Sydney.” CanAir’s farthest destination.
“Long trip. Let me give you a ride to Pearson. I came in the car.”
It was an order, not an offer. I almost said that Isak was coming by, then I remembered I might never see him again. I hadn’t heard from Aba either, since the “thinking drive” he took me on the previous week. Seemed he, too, had dropped me. I felt brutally alone.
“The shuttle will come,” I said.
Isak stuck his hands in his pants pockets and frowned at the scuffed, pointy loafers on his sockless feet. I feared I’d upset him. But he started to sob, not covering his face. I could almost feel Ema at my back, nudging me toward doing what sisters are supposed to do. Comfort.
“What’s happening to Aba?” Le’ul said, choking on his emotion. “I’m losing him.”
Not we, but I. Ever since he was a boy he’d been possessive of his father. For the most part, Aba had reciprocated Le’ul’s devotion. The one time Aba deprived Le’ul of his attention was when Ema first got sick. She and Aba had become newly inseparable.
“Help me. I don’t know what to do for him.”
The little boy whine in his voice touched my heart, despite everything. I couldn’t help imagining the eight-year-old village boy I had heard about who had come to our gate clutching his shoeshine kit. I couldn’t help seeing the thirteen-year-old adoptee who was bereft, thinking his new father had tired of him.
Seeing him crying, confused and afraid as he was back then, activated the five-year-old part of me, his little sister, who interrupted her big brother while he was doing his homework, wanting to make him feel better. But I hung back, not wanting to make the same mistake I made then. If I had just left him alone when he threw me out that first time, we wouldn’t be where we are now.
Gulping his sobs, sucking back and swallowing his snot, Le’ul approached. I had no weapon, not so much as a thorn, only a word: no. But my voice would barely span the gap between us, much less carry any weight. So what was the point? I couldn’t blame him for expecting comfort. I had fallen into his hug moments after I heard, She didn’t make it. I left the basement unlocked. I shared Ema’s Ricola with him. I discussed the Babbaye situation with him. I thanked him for his thoughtful photos. He wouldn’t hear no from me now.
I let him hug me. I focused on the plastic bag in my hands, between us, containing the one unopened packet and loose pieces of Ricola.
“Please, Dess,” he said. “I am only trying to be a brother to you again. You need one. For too long you have been without one. And I need my sister.”
Why all this declaration? There was no one we had to play normal for. No mourners who needed to see two siblings being strong together for their grieving father. I didn’t know what Le’ul meant by u
s needing each other. Brothers hug sisters, yes. I’d seen. In good times and bad. We must have hugged at some point in the before-time, the way children do — clumsy, spontaneous. But did a grown brother and sister hug when she was wearing only a towel? I had a robe on, too. Did that make it okay? I didn’t know.
Still in his arms, I shifted my body left, toward my bedroom. “I can’t be late.”
He let me go. “When do you return?”
“Not for a while.” I calculated how many days I would say, if he pressed me for specifics. I would need respite after I got back from Johannesburg, time enough to change my lock if not my address.
“Go get ready.”
I wanted to shut my bedroom door, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I left it ajar and dressed like I do in the change room at the pool, exposing only my legs and arms.
I heard him pull open the curtain of the shower where I’d been naked only moments earlier. He turned the water on, then off. “How long has your water pressure been so intense?” he called out. I heard the clink of him bothering the opal in the soap dish, setting me further on edge. Now I couldn’t take the opal with me. He wandered through my condo. “Your walls need a new coat of paint, something other than this default eggshell. I love a sea blue for you.”
I looked in the shopping bag. Le’ul had lied. The loose pieces of Ricola were Honey Lemon with Echinacea, but the unopened bag was not. He added that himself. Ema only bought Honey Lemon. I stashed the bag in the back of my closet’s bottom drawer, with the camera.
When I came out fully dressed in my red uniform, Le’ul took my suitcase and tote for me. He locked my door with Ema’s-my-his key and pocketed it. The keychain was a small, black leather pouch he had bought for Ema from Thailand. My key, on that pendant, was as close as Ema had managed to bring Le’ul and me to each other while she lived. Giving Le’ul this key was Ema’s boldest, most desperate move in her forgiveness project, one whose outcome she wouldn’t have to witness if it went sideways. I found her persistence maddening. But I couldn’t walk out on her anymore. She had complete access to me. I felt myself more powerless to deny her now than when she was alive. If Ema wanted Le’ul to have my key, who was I to get in the way?
The whole ride to the airport, all I wanted was to reach between my blouse buttons to rub feeling back into the spot over my heart, where I was still numb from the tight twist of my towel. A simple enough gesture, no less innocent than reaching under my neckline to adjust my bra strap. I let my hands grow heavy on my lap. I looked out at Toronto, my eyes aching from suppressed tears. Toronto was never really my city, just as the residence where my parents lived was never my home. No matter where I went, there was always the risk of crossing paths with Le’ul. By sheer luck, I’d been spared that for five years; I had enjoyed a kind of freedom.
“How do buddy passes work?” he said.
“What?”
“I’d book top assignments if I had unlimited free access to any destination.”
“Depends on where.” What are “top assignments”? Where more photogenic people are suffering more picturesquely?
“I don’t yet know where.”
“It’s not tax-free, and I can only get a few passes per year.”
“Thanks, buddy.” He winked at me. “I appreciate you.”
I didn’t know if this, too, was a ploy or a genuine need. He never had a problem charging trips on his credit card so he could nab assignments that didn’t pay expenses. Letting our parents pay his bill. That was the final piece of information about Le’ul which Aba had offhandedly forced on me, in the early days after their move to Toronto. I never wanted to know anything about Le’ul, so I had tried changing the topic, and then stopped talking altogether. What finally worked was when I walked out on Aba from the coffee shop we were in at the time.
I reminded myself that I can do the same now. End this torture. I have had three conversations with Le’ul in the space of a little over four weeks. Enough. I am an adult. I don’t have to do a single thing against my will.
I was on the verge of telling him to stop the car, but I said, “Will I get back my key?”
“You’re not okay yet.”
“I’m fine.”
He didn’t speak until he was pulling up to the drop-off area in front of Terminal 1.
“I love a sea blue for you,” he said again.
I didn’t know if that was what I would see on my walls when next I walked through my own door, or if he meant something else. What I left behind was not what I would return to. That much was a given. I could expect more expressions of his grief-stricken, new-found, brotherly love.
ELEVEN
When the last of the day’s guests have left and I hear Babbaye’s porch doors being latched, I go to his bedroom, resolved to be a better granddaughter from now on. He is in his nightclothes, his face wet, holding bundled up in his hand the clothes he wore today. I take them from him and throw them in the wicker basket. This would have been a nightly routine for us, had we lived together. I might even have improved on it, eliminated a step by tossing the dirty clothes out the window into the washstand outside.
He motions for me to come closer. “Have you been crying?” The pulsing vein on my forehead, the telltale sign I am about to cry or have been crying, must still be there.
“The way I left. I embarrassed you.”
He pats my arm. “Don’t cry.” He opens the blue wooden chest and digs around. He knows that he, also, went too far. He must have spent the day coming to his senses, regretting the depths to which he sank just to gain control over a situation he was powerless in. He’s pleased that I am saving face for both of us by not even mentioning that girl.
“You have accepted my Tobya will come. Rest with her own. Now, everything will be as it should.”
I drop my head, suddenly bone-tired. I thought we were back to reality, but he can’t even use Ema’s proper name yet. “Nothing will ever be as it should. Please hear me.” I lean to his ear and raise my voice over the clatter of the things he is moving around in the blue chest. “Tobya will not come. There is no girl. Aba told me there was, but she died as a baby, Aba said she never lived a day. Even if there was a girl, I still can’t bring Ema to you. I have no power.”
He finds what he had been rummaging for. An old, self-sealing plastic bag, protecting an overstuffed manila envelope inside. He tries to force it into my hand.
“Something to keep you, until you meet your sister. Didn’t I say I was a more merciful father than all others? No other father would have allowed for all these. These are letters your mother wrote to that girl.”
I hide my hands behind my back, horrified.
“To a dead girl?”
“They are not written to a dead girl.”
He leans on the dresser and opens the bag, takes out a stack of yellowing papers folded in three. He unfolds the top page and shows it to me.
“Your sister is alive. She knows your life.”
I recognize Ema’s handwriting, all squat upper case, but I only read the first and last words, where she addresses Yene Abeba and where she has signed Tobya, her old name.
“If she is alive, why do you have these letters?”
“Your sister gave them for me to show you.”
“Why she doesn’t come find me?”
“She wants her mother first.”
“I won’t read this.”
I refold the letter, return the stack of letters into the envelope, the envelope back into the bag, and the bag in the blue chest.
I close the chest.
I go back to Ema’s room, where I drop on the mattress, hitting the ground of her nightmare.
I am transfixed by Yene Abeba. My Flower. An ordinary endearment of mothers for daughters. The longest, most complex phrase in the world.
Time to go to sleep, on a bed, not on the floor. I will not sleep on the floor for a mother who has betrayed me twice. Who destroyed my letter to the one friend I had, my pen pal, while sending letters to
the daughter she preferred. Withholding my sister from me while forcing on me a brother she never wanted for a son. In the name of forgiveness and family, legacy. Because the quiet torment of a little girl who lives on, even while her body grows into a woman’s, is secondary, at most.
I noisily dismantle Ras Dashen and re-pile it in a corner, where it looks less like a mountain, more like fragments of history the house has regurgitated. I drag the mattress onto the bed frame. The Art of Forgiveness slips out from under the pillow. I kick it to the corner where it sticks in the pile, back where I found it, and lie down on the bed, stiff as a doll.
A dog starts barking somewhere, the same dog that barks every-damn-where.
I get up, find the pack of Djarums from my purse. At the open window, I light one and balance the pack and matches on the windowsill. I cough, not from the smoke but the disgusting taste. All my life, I had assumed that Ema preferred Djarums because of their clove flavour. Turns out, she went around smelling sweet but had a bonfire taste in her mouth. My eyes water. The skin around my mouth itches. But I force myself to finish the nasty burning stick, spitting into Babbaye’s garden throughout, and then flick the extinguished butt into the mefakiya bushes.
She didn’t live a moment, Aba had said. She was a stillbirth.
How careless of him. Words can hurt people. Even thoughts can kill. What if my sister dies before I can get to her? Before I can say hello or goodbye.
Babbaye will be asleep by now. If I am very careful, I won’t disturb him when I open the blue chest, for the letters. Soundlessly, I open my door. I don’t have to go further. The letters are waiting outside on the floor. I take them in, and lock my door.
I need a new place to be. I hop up onto the windowsill and swing my feet out, dangling them over Babbaye’s garden. I unfold the topmost one, light a second Djarum. The flame almost licks the edge of the letter. I read the letter in bits, as if taking it in all at once will hurt my eyes: the year it was written, 1980. Tobya to Yene Abeba in 1980. I smoke some more. Then, I brave the body of the letter.
Daughters of Silence Page 12
