Ema wants Yene Abeba to understand this when she is old enough to have the letter read to her: Ema had to leave Yene Abeba behind and return to her father’s house because she was the only one of her siblings left, her mother was declining rapidly, and she now had not only her own life but all of her brothers’ lives to live.
I drop 1980 behind me to the floor. Ema explains to Yene Abeba in 1991 why she must leave her again, this time going farther, to outside-country, a city called Vienna. Ema promises to be back in Ethiopia in four years.
I let 1991 fall to the floor. Their second year in Rome without me, in 1996: Ema says she was forced to leave me! That was the only solution she could think of for the curse Igziabher had burdened her with, two children who cannot get along, a third child who longs to be with her but cannot. As the adage says, the womb of a mother has many colours. Ema hopes, with time and distance, Le’ul and I will relearn the value of family bonds. I will mature and understand, everyone has their pain. Pain shared among family is more bearable than the one inflicted by strangers. That letter is long, without any mention of the why. Dessie is just a girl of impossible, catlike anger, troubled from childhood.
I crumple 1996 and throw it to the floor. Ema reassures Yene Abeba in 1998 not to worry about “recent troubles.” By then I was alone in Vienna, at boarding school, so I know it has nothing to do with me. I am not mentioned at all. Ema will come for Yene Abeba and find her a safe place to stay. She has as much right to stay in Ethiopia as any habesha. I am not your mother if I cannot manage that for you.
Ema writes in 2003 how she went halfway across the world to be with me in Canada, but this daughter of mine would rather earn her bread as a maid of the sky, cleaning the leavings of others, than be on the ground with her sick mother. She shows no mercy for her mother’s broken heart. She suckles at pain and refuses to forgive. Here I am, completely at her mercy, available to her utterly, yet she shuns me. Ema promises Yene Abeba she will visit her more often, give her all the time she always deserved. The 2003 letter is the last of them, that my sister has permitted me to read anyway. I saw more letters in Babbaye’s hand, I’m sure of it.
I want to tear 2003 in two. But I won’t. I climb down from the window to reread — all the words this time — a sentence from 1980 that I had hurried over on the first read, because it hurt too much: Please forgive that I had to leave you in Dessie and return to Addis Ababa.
Dessie. My namesake is not the place Ema’s life was saved, but where it was stolen. Dessie was where she bore, nursed, then left her Abeba. From Dessie, Tobya returned to Addis Ababa, to the home where her father waited with her new name, a word that was both a lament for his lost sons and a command for her, the lone survivor: Zimita. Silence. The last seed of the Shaleqa was destined for excellence, not to be a single mother of an unplanned child. In silence, Ema resumed the studies she had been forced to interrupt because of the Terror. In silence, she carried her grief of denied motherhood. She graduated, began work, and married the other man who guided her in resuming her life — her tutor. On pain of disappointing the Commander of a Thousand, she excelled.
Now look how I turned out: not worth all that sacrifice.
I tear 1980 in two.
I tear the halves in two.
I stuff all the letters into my suitcase. I shouldn’t have read them. But my grandfather said my sister wanted me to read them. Reading a letter not meant for you is only wrong if you don’t then do something about what you learned from the letter. Yene Abeba is real. I’ve learned that. In Ema’s letters to her, Ema has omitted the main thing, the complete truth of what happened to me. I’ve learned that also. What I’m going to do is track down this rare flower of Ema’s, my sister, and fill in the missing parts of my story for her. Blood must know blood.
TWELVE
Yene Abeba, did you see earlier how I tapped our mother’s cigarette with my index finger, but rubbed the ash into the windowsill with my ring finger? That was our mother’s way. But you must know already. This habit comes so naturally to me because it is one of my earliest memories of Ema.
I am four, sitting beside her at the edge of the deep end of the Sodere Resort pool. Our feet are in the water. She is on the side of the sun, her cigarette in her far hand, so that her shadow will shade me. I wear a pair of Le’ul’s old swim shorts with the string double-tied around my scrawny waist, but I can’t swim yet. Ema’s swimsuit is bright swirling pinks and yellows and oranges.
Aba and Le’ul float near our feet, then swim away again. In the afternoons, they play cards in the poolside huts. One day, Ema and I are walking away hand in hand to find a hut to nap in when Le’ul shouts to her from the water about a dead leaf stuck to the back of her thigh. After we return to Addis Ababa, Ema goes to Tikur Anbessa. When she comes back, she has a scar where the “leaf” was.
Aba says, “The doctor removed it with a special eraser. From now on I must check your mother regularly for new leaves.”
Ema says, “Can you believe it? Mister who didn’t see the first one.”
“I can check,” I say. I don’t want her to go back to the hospital.
“Bless you, my sweet,” she says, her hands on my cheeks the same way she cups the first roses that bloom in her garden in the New Year. “You think I would trust your father’s old man eyes with my life? I have a handsome young doctor to check me properly two times a year.” She winks.
Aba laughs. “What did you say? I’ll show you an old man!” He pretend chases her to their bedroom. More and more, Ema and Aba lock themselves in their bedroom to check her for new leaves. So more and more, it’s just me and Le’ul, bored. Before, most of the time I had Ema all to myself. He had Aba all to himself.
Like I miss Ema, Le’ul misses Aba. He sits sadly at his study desk between our beds. To make him happy, I create a two-people game. I am good at drawing. I draw leaves on my skin with one of the Bics always sticking out of Aba’s coat pocket. I go to Le’ul when he is doing math homework.
I pull on his sleeve and say, “I am getting leaves, too!”
Le’ul throws his ruler at me so that I will get out of the room. But it is my room, too. So I tiptoe back to the door. I sit in the hallway and watch him cry. Maybe because math is hard. But I think more because of Aba.
Another day, Le’ul throws his pencil case at me. The third time I try, I go to our room without my dress and undershirt, so he can see the leaves on my chest stomach upper legs.
“See, I am not lying,” I say quickly before he picks up his compass. “Look at all my new leaves! See! I’m scared.”
Le’ul’s eyes open wide, like they did when he saw the three flavours of ice cream at Saiy’s café. Ema and Aba took us there to celebrate after she got erasered. They bought us each one flavour but the man behind the counter gave Le’ul an extra scoop of a second flavour since he is twelve, almost a man.
Because I showed my leaves to Le’ul, I get him to play. He searches me like I search Ema’s skin for new leaves. I do this when she naps with me because she is the one who falls asleep. I have not found new ones on her. But Le’ul finds the new leaves on my skin. I know he will, because I drew them. He cleans each leaf off my skin with an eraser, just like the doctor must have done on Ema.
“Will you help me if I find them again?”
“Get out.”
I draw new leaves, so I can tell him I found new ones. Again, he erases them. I tell him he is a better doctor than Ema’s, because his eraser doesn’t make a scar. Aba and Ema don’t know what we have found to do alone so often, but they are happy that even though Le’ul is so much older than me, we have a game we both want to play.
The next kiremt I am five. Ema and Aba room together at Sodere. They put me with Le’ul. The first night, Le’ul says he wants to check if I have new leaves. I am surprised. I want to go to the bathroom to quickly draw new leaves, but I don’t have Aba’s pen. I can’t go to Ema and Aba’s room because the resort people warned us that hyenas come out at night and even in th
e daytime I am scared of the monkeys that chase me on the terrace.
Le’ul says he must check right now, I will have new leaves by now. I don’t want him to be disappointed and cry. But I have no choice. I take off my dress. He will find nothing to erase because there are no new leaves. I have to close my eyes he says, because his new eraser won’t work if I’m looking. I close my eyes. His new eraser is softer, warm, damp. He only checks one place. I have never drawn any leaves there. In my triangle. But he finds leaves and erases. Maybe I do have real leaves in my triangle that I can’t see myself; it is a hard place to see all of.
He stops quickly. There were leaves, but not many, he tells me. For every night in Sodere, he checks again. He takes longer each night, because he says he finds more of them each night. After we return home to Addis Ababa, he makes new rules about the checking. He slaps me when I make mistakes. I don’t like the game anymore. It makes Le’ul frightening and mean. But I don’t tell on him because it must be for my own good. I am afraid of the way his eyes look before he calls me in to check me, like when people fall asleep but their eyes are still open. He reminds me a lot that if I tell people he is checking my triangle, he will have to stop checking, and the new leaves he hasn’t erased will kill me. Even his eyes say, If you tell, I will kill you.
Killing causes death. Death is a place people go to but can’t return from. A person can also go to death if they have sickness. I haven’t been killed. I am not sick. But I feel I have gone to the no-return place. Or I have left someone like myself there.
The me who is here, in the after, learns to escape even when she is blindfolded and locked in the bedroom, Le’ul pressed against her. To escape, the after-girl thinks of her doll. When Le’ul tells her to clean herself for checking-time she first lays her doll on her parents’ bed to wait for her. Checking-time is always when Ema and Aba are not home. Checking-time is always when Babbaye has not come to sit in the garden with her. During checking-time, after-girl thinks of her doll. Sometimes she mixes up who is on her parents’ bed, eyelids clicked down, and who is under Le’ul, eyelids pressed down. One day, after-girl stays on her parents’ bed. The doll instead goes into the room where Le’ul is waiting. But he doesn’t catch the trick. That the obedient girl is made of hollow, outside-country plastic, with a false face. When after-girl stays away, her skin doesn’t feel his soft chilly fingertips; her nose doesn’t smell his lunch breath; her eyes don’t see his shining eraser; her ears don’t hear, on the other side of the koshim, the sing-song refrains from the mop-hawkers and scrap collectors, cars honking to be let into their yards, dogs barking. Her smiling mouth doesn’t open.
When after-girl turns six years old, she starts swimming lessons at the Ghion pool. She learns very quickly to float because she loves that nothing touches her. Her instructor says she is a natural. One day after her lesson, she sits alone on the edge of the children’s pool, waiting for her mother to pick her up. Her instructor plays with his girlfriend in the grown-up pool. The grown-ups’ pool is shaped like a fat cross. At the top of the cross there is a diving tower with three stone tongues.
After-girl sneaks carefully over the slippery cold stone from the children’s pool to the grown-up pool and climbs the ladder of the tower. She stands on the edge of the highest tongue. She looks down. It is so far. If she jumps, she will be in the air, in another place where nothing will touch her.
From up there, her instructor and his girlfriend are as small as a boy and girl. The woman throws her head back, laughing. She sees after-girl’s face, peeking over the edge of the platform. The woman shrieks, reaching up her hands. The instructor shouts at her to climb back down. But he doesn’t come out of the water.
After-girl’s warm pee flows down the inside of her legs. She pushes off. From that moment until the water slaps the back of her thighs, she is free. Then she is standing on the slippery cold stone again, her nose and eyes burning. Ema is shouting, crying. She turns and squeezes after-girl, like she has just been made and Ema wants to be sure all parts are in the right place, not in the wrong places like after-girl does to her doll when she rips out her arms and legs and head after checking-time.
“Do you want to die? Is that what you are trying to do? Who will I replace you with? Who? Did someone tell you Ema has another little girl somewhere?”
Ema wants an answer to all those questions but Ema doesn’t ask why after-girl jumped. Aba doesn’t find out she jumped. Her swim lessons stop. She is allowed in the water only once a year, at Sodere, where there are no diving towers. She promises herself that one day she will climb as high and fall as long as she wants.
She starts first grade. Checking-time changes to when the contract taxi brings her and Le’ul home at the end of the school day, while Aba and Ema are still at work. Le’ul always orders her to clean herself first. When he finishes with her, she is scum. She scrubs with a dry towel, until the skin he touched comes away in dark curls. In the garden, she breaks twigs from every plant and sucks the juice. She wants the poisonous one that will send her to the no-return place where there is no Le’ul.
Not a single one of the maids ever asks why a teenage boy needs to be alone with a little girl for so long, so quietly, in a locked bedroom, in the daytime, with the window shutters down. After-girl wills them to walk down the corridor, try the door, or go around to the front garden, tap on the window shutters. If just one of those women had cared to cup her ear against the door or the closed window shutters, she would have heard the boy’s voice, commanding: tie your eyes, clothes off, get down, legs open, wider, turn, sit on it, slowly, sway, kneel, mouth, no teeth, don’t breathe on me.
THIRTEEN
Early in the morning, a car honks outside my grandfather’s gate. I roll out of bed, and over to the window. The Djarum pack with the remaining cigarettes is balanced on the edge of the windowsill. I toss it to the pile in the corner of the room. Gela runs out from the side alley to open both sides of the double gate. Outside, a pickup truck is backed up, loaded with stacks of white plastic chairs. Two labourers are perched on the edge of the truck bed. They hop down and carry the chairs into the yard, up the porch steps, into the living room.
From the clotheslines that extend into the courtyard from the side alley, Gela unhooks a black blouse and dress. “What’s all this commotion?” I croak, picking out my eye boogers. My mouth tastes rotten. I feel and smell stale.
“The chairs are for tomorrow.” She comes into the garden underneath my window and holds the clothes up for me. “I have washed these for you to wear. I think you didn’t bring anything else black.”
“I hate black. Black was Ema’s colour. I’m red.” Gela just keeps holding up the clothes. I take them. Even after reading Ema’s letters, I am able to pretend as if wearing black, “celebrating” the Forty tomorrow if I am still here, all matter to me. Obviously Ema never meant for me to see those letters, not while she lived. Ema loves me. She does. She had to write the letters precisely so she could love me even in my worst moments. That is the only way I can accept them. She had to release all the resentment, anger, disappointment, and guilt about me somewhere, didn’t she?
The clothes smell musty. Gela is lying. She didn’t wash them. If anybody knows the difference between the dampness of washed clothes versus clothes hung outside overnight to give the illusion of freshness, it’s me, the girl who lives out of a suitcase. But I am not a mean person of catlike anger, to quote Ema’s letter. Today my face is as friendly as a clear summer sky. Nothing and no one is going to make me crack. So I let it go.
I say, “What needs to be done for tomorrow? Whatever it is, leave it to me. It is my duty. After Babbaye, I am Zimita’s only blood here.”
“Emmahoy too,” Gela says, stone-faced. Four women I’ve never seen enter through the open gate alongside Lomi and Aberash. They greet Gela as they pass around the house to the service quarters at the back. As soon as they are out of sight, she drops her gracious smile for them and shoots me a blatant stink eye. “The new women
are hired to make large quantities of food for special occasions. Should I tell them to go home, leave the tezkar cooking to you?”
I hear the chime of an incoming text message. “Is there a clothes iron? These things are still damp.”
“You’ll find it under the table in my room. The ironing board is in the kitchen,” she says, walking away.
I open the message. Not Barb. Not Isak. Not Aba. Le’ul. Aba is gone. He left his phone at the residence, didn’t come back last night. What do you know about this?
I know the same thing Le’ul should know. That Aba has gone on one of his “thinking drives.” When he does this, he rarely tells anyone he’s going. But we know, because no one would have seen or heard from him for hours and he is not responding to calls or messages. Once he has had enough thinking, he always comes back. Ema never worried.
Last time Aba and I were together, we were in the car on the 401 West, heading back from the cemetery where Le’ul’s plastic flowers were, of course, holding up against the elements. One angel bust had gotten decapitated though. I was driving. Aba sat with his body angled against the passenger door. With a month’s growth of beard, he looked like a problem passenger who might try to shoulder the door open mid-trip.
As I approached the Don Valley ramp, he said, “Keep driving.”
“Why?”
“Just keep driving.”
My first thought was, Ema is not dead. There was a mistake, a big misunderstanding. She is alive. She just needed a new place where she could live where no one knew her and no one could ask anything of her, but she missed me, so Aba was guiding me to this incredible surprise. Finally, it would be just me, her, and Aba, only us three forever. I reached for the gearshift. By the time my hand was back on the steering wheel, the illusion had vanished. There was no mistake. Ema would always be under the headless angel.
Daughters of Silence Page 13
