Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  Up in the sky was like the bus to Sodere, but bigger, the engine hum was louder, and we had packed for four years not four days and outside the window were clouds not country girls and when clouds melted I saw all of Babbaye’s Ethiopia like crumpled green and brown paper.

  The hostesses were beautiful just like in the Ethiopian Air­lines posters. They wore dark green uniforms, bright scarves around their necks, and red lipstick. They brought me extra pillows to sit on, extra peanuts, extra Sprite, extra crayons I could keep. I felt like a princess.

  Ema put both our drinks on her little legless table. On my little legless table, I drew roses without leaves for her. A cutting from her wedding present rosebush was in her purse, rolled in wet paper.

  “Your stems are empty,” she said. I added thorns, badly, but I would improve because Le’ul was gone. I felt a little bit sad about that. I would miss the Le’ul who wasn’t mean.

  “Is Aba coming?”

  Ema sipped her dark beer. “He will.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “A place called Kulubi Gabriel.” I looked out the airplane window. “We are going north, my sweet. Kulubi Gabriel is east. First you fly or ride a bus to Dire Dawa, but not as far as Harrar where Aba’s people are. Then you walk seventy kilometres east again. You carry rocks on your back the entire way and don’t wear your shoes or socks. You can drive, but you should make the journey in pain and difficulty if you earnestly need the archangel to grant your request.”

  Ever since I started full-day school, Ema’s way of helping me to understand something new was to make it into a story but stop at the most curious part so I would have to ask a question. About Kulubi Gabriel, I only cared that it meant Le’ul was gone. But I felt her waiting for a question.

  “Request?”

  She caressed my hair. “For Le’ul to get better.”

  “He’s sick.”

  “If the archangel listens, he will be healthy again. Aba should have gone with Le’ul to Kulubi sooner, but it wasn’t safe for people to travel outside Adisaba. It wasn’t safe for even letters to be sent. You know, they will be walking in the direction of Harrar.” She had said that already. “Where Le’ul was sent from when he was a little boy.”

  “He didn’t come from you and Aba?”

  She ran my ponytail braid between her fingers. She finished her drink. She told the hostess to bring her a second one. She ordered only dark beer because it was the closest thing to tella. “Le’ul was found working as a listro boy by an old friend of his dead mother. The boy’s father did not want him. That old friend asked around, until he discovered the boy’s only remaining relative was Aba. He sent him to Adisaba. When the boy came to our door, he still had his shoeshine box with him.”

  “So Aba is not his father. You are not his mother.”

  “Not by blood.”

  “But he was my brother?”

  “Is. He is your brother. Only you don’t share flesh.”

  I drank my Sprite. It scratched my throat like tiny needles.

  “We do.”

  She kissed the top of my head. A hostess brought her a new dark beer and me a slice of sponge cake in a clear package, like Uncle Pilot brought me when he forgot the apple. Ema talked to me more, breaking a slice of sponge cake into one bite at a time, feeding me one, feeding herself the next. Crumbs fell to the line between her breasts.

  “Your father named the boy after the title of the son of a king, Le’ul, because the meaning is the same as his own, Mesfin. But at first your father had wanted to rename him Alemayehu after a long ago Ethiopian orphan prince, who journeyed far from home and never returned.”

  I felt joyful. I understood the real story Ema wanted me to know. Aba took Le’ul to Kulubi to get him better, but then he was going to return him to the village. Then Aba would come to Vienna alone. At last, it would be just us three.

  FIFTEEN

  My grandfather and I come out of Wondu’s taxi and walk up Churchill Avenue. I see Teka standing underneath his store sign, Servant of God Funeral Service, flanked by triangle wreaths propped on tall bamboo stalks. Corrugated cardboard rolls teeming with roses and carnations spill out from funeral home storefronts for many blocks, making the area look like a flower market.

  Teka flirts loudly with a voluptuous woman jaywalking across the street. “Come in and look anyway, maybe you will need my services for your husband soon? Watch the road, lady! It’s not a box I have plans to lay you in!”

  When he sees us, he redirects his attention without missing a beat, like an azmari in a tavern who’s spotted new subjects to satirize in song. “Shaleqa!” He gestures at the unoccupied doorways of his competition, knowing full well we’ve come for him. “They’re dead! All dead, like your enemies! Sadly. So you must come to me.”

  The interior of the store smells like a combination of greenhouse and carpenter’s workshop. Against one wall, narrow coffins lined with colourful fabric, embroidered with golden thread, are stacked all the way to the ceiling. On the floor, littered with rose leaves and stems, a circle of men sit making wreaths. Teka offers us plastic stools to rest on by the door but my grandfather declines for both of us.

  Seeing the amazement on my face at all the roses, Teka says, loudly over the noise of traffic and passersby, which is amplified in this cramped space, “So many roses, I know! At Teka’s we only use real flowers, not paper! Roses for premium wreath. Carnation for standard wreath. Now my supplier Highland Flora has so many roses she cannot ship out to the Amsterdam auction because of the flights to Europe being stopped. She is selling the backlog for very cheap. We can use roses for all the wreaths. But no extra cost to customer. Give thanks to Igziabher’s weather.”

  The men on the floor carve the stems of the roses into sharp points with their stubby knives, twirling and slicing the bark off the ends of the stems in four quick strokes. They insert these beautiful daggers into a foil-covered triangle of foam on the floor between them, with a satisfyingly savage pop.

  I want to stab the foam with the business end of a rose, too, instead of acting earnest while my grandfather negotiates a verbal contract over Teka’s handling of Ema’s body. I edge toward the carvers. One of them offers me a rose, I ask for his knife instead, causing laughter. I squat down, pick up a stem, and begin carving.

  Next thing I know, Teka is coming at me with his cellphone held out. He has dialled his “opposite in Canada,” Stanley Chan, who is on the line to talk to me.

  I stand up slowly to hide my panic. “It’s very late in Toronto.”

  “Oh, but death doesn’t have office hours, so neither does Stan!”

  Until I actually hear Stanley’s voice on the speaker, I don’t believe this is happening. I have no idea what I should say. I haven’t thought that far ahead. Stanley sounds surprised. He is used to talking to Teka on the phone, but he didn’t expect to hear from me again, especially all the way from Ethiopia.

  “I’m calling about my mother,” I stammer. All eyes, even those of the rose carvers, are on me. I sweep my hand up, away, and down in the motions of shifting an object. Teka carefully relieves me of the knife I still hold in my hand. He translates under his breath for my grandfather.

  “Hello?” Stanley says.

  “Sorry. It’s about my mother.”

  “I understand that you want to disinter the body and relocate the burial site?”

  “You said it.”

  “You’ve decided to repatriate after all, then.” He’s just as gung-ho as his opposite in Ethiopia about the prospect of new expensive business, but out of courtesy he feigns hesitation.

  “Your father took such care with the selection of the stone, and the Ethiopic engraving. It is being delivered to Scarborough Bluffs tomorrow for the dedication.”

  “We’re not asking for a refund. Just, you know, things happen.”

  “This being Toronto, there is plenty of repatriations,” he says. Teka mutters in agreement. “Your people have had one kind of political tension or another ba
ck home since the seventies, so to bury your loved ones out here was the only way. Even the living didn’t want to return. But for some time now, your people have been setting things right.”

  The man knows his customers. The carvers resume their repetitive motions, slower, listening. “That’s the thing. It’s about setting things right.” Although my family must hold the record for how quickly we’ve changed our minds. “There was some misunderstanding.”

  “Because it hasn’t been a year or even a season, it is unlikely the lid will be crushed in.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother’s was a wood casket. It has only been about a month since the interment,” Stanley says. “Because of the weight of the earth, even a metal casket will eventually cave in. The more time, the more seasons, the more pressure. Snow, rain, it all accumulates. Regardless, we must incinerate the burial casket. A new casket will have to be purchased. I recommend you bring back the extra cloths I had returned to you.”

  All Ema’s hager libs and netela are at my condo. I have a vision of blue-orange flames dissolving the last fragile hand-spun cotton Ema was ever supposed to have worn.

  “You can leave it to us to deal with Justice and Health and the Bluffs and RCMP.”

  “What do you need the police for?”

  “To ensure nothing untoward will happen. You never know. It takes all kinds to make a world.”

  “Doesn’t it though?” I say, lamely.

  I remember Sara and the others in university, talking in horrified tones about grave robbers in Ethiopia stealing coffins for resale on the black market, tossing aside bodies, prying crucifixes loose from mausoleums. Those tiny ovals of glass protecting the faded images of my grandmother and great-grandparents looked as though they had been deliberately smashed, just for spite, the cracks branching out from a single point of contact. The worst I can imagine happening in Canada is racist vandalism or graffiti. Maybe that angel’s head in Scarborough Bluffs didn’t fall off by itself.

  “Your father will have to complete and sign the application and consent forms.”

  “No problem.”

  “Only his signature will be required. Whenever he decides to come is suitable. Then we arrange for the date of exhumation. Someone has to be present then because the cemeteries will do nothing but pull the casket out for you. If no one is there to pick it up, they assume no responsibility.”

  “Got it.”

  “I communicate with Teka directly. We know one another’s procedures. We’ve done a lot of business together,” Stanley says. Teka puffs up. Stan tells me about the rest of the process — resealing the body in a pouch, and purchasing a new hermetically sealed casket. Part of me finds it fascinating. “No rush, of course. Time is certainly not of the essence. The ground in Ethiopia doesn’t freeze, and we have many months before winter here.”

  The magnitude of what I have set in motion weighs on me. “Thank you for all this.”

  “Glad to help.”

  I wait for him to hang up, as if we’re sweethearts. Teka takes the phone off speaker, says goodbye to Stanley. As a token of further goodwill, Teka offers us free roses, insisting that even though his services are in great demand, the roses will spoil before he can use them all. I refuse, but my grandfather remembers Gela said to pick up roses for tomorrow, for Ema, so I pick two dozen, a mix of white and red.

  Yene Abeba, did our mother tell you that she grew her first outside-country roses on the balcony of our Vienna apartment? On Saturdays, she did my hair out there. It was while she did this on the first Saturday after Aba and Le’ul came to Vienna, that she said to me, “The water under your brother’s bed is only for him. From Igziabher.”

  Aba did come to Vienna, but he brought Le’ul with him. Aba and Le’ul did not even go to Kulubi, I knew, because their feet didn’t have bruises or even little stones stuck in the flesh of their soles from long walking without shoes or socks. The first night, before Le’ul went to bed on the bottom bunk, Aba did a ritual on him. I only pretended to be asleep, on the top bunk. Aba took a plastic water bottle from where he stored it under the bed. He made Le’ul drink one capful, like a medicine. He poured a second capful on Le’ul’s head. He prayed over Le’ul’s wet hair, calling him by a religious-sounding name: Kidane-Gabriel. I was curious about this water. The next morning, when I was alone in the room, I smelled and tasted it. It was just tap water.

  My mother pushed the tooth of the comb into the top of my hairline and made a straight part down the middle of my head, then pushed the sections aside and gave me one section to hold. I wordlessly asked the lonely cutting from her rose plant, sticking out of the soil in the planter, why Le’ul got anything from God when he was so mean to me. God never answered my prayers to make the kiremt hail fall hard enough to break down the roof of the bedroom during checking-time. Ema parted the other half of my hair into two, this time from the top of my head to my ear, and gave me one of the sections to hold in my other hand.

  “The water is holy because it is blessed to heal the sick,” she said.

  “Le’ul is sick?”

  “He did things he didn’t know a brother must never do.” She swept the quarter section of my hair in her fist, the way our gardener gathered grass to slice it with his sickle.

  “What will happen if I have some of the water?”

  She twisted the quarter section of my hair until it was as tight as a snail without a shell, and secured it with elastic. “You are not sick so you don’t need to be healed. You are perfect as you are. Look how well you do in school, my sweet, in English!”

  She didn’t know that I only spoke if what I had to say was something I remembered how to say in English from the five letters I wrote to Anja. “How easily you will make the best of friends, I can only imagine. How sorry I would be if you weren’t mine.”

  She released my hand from the other small section of hair, and began to twist that. “Never touch the bottle again, hear?”

  I nodded, loosening her painful grip. “The family Igziabher has brought together must love and forgive each other anything. We must be willing to do anything for each other. We must learn to love those whom our beloveds love. Remember with the holy water Le’ul is healed.”

  But he wasn’t.

  Ema and Aba were always telling me to reread passages for comprehension, but Ema read my letter maybe once only; Aba maybe didn’t read it at all. Ema had probably told Aba what I had written, but in her words, making the checking-time sound not so bad. Why else would they have put me in the same bedroom with him, with the only protection of tap water?

  I wished I had written a better letter. I could have. My English was good. I spoke new thoughts in the moment. Even my German was okay. And I took French on the weekends in a language academy. My parents were proud I talked to them in English, but I only did it to remind them of the letter. But I was too scared to write a second letter. I couldn’t risk a second chance of Le’ul killing me. I decided that I would rather feel dead for two more years.

  Only two more years. Then he would go away to university in a faraway place called America. So, whenever it was checking-time, I did what I used to do in our old house. I sent my doll to him in my place. I waited on my parents’ bed, even though their bed was not there anymore, and the room was not theirs anymore.

  SIXTEEN

  In the side alley of my grandfather’s house, a tarp spread over the clotheslines shields against possible rain. Under it, two of the new temporary-hire cooks who’ve come to make food for tomorrow stand beside giant pots of misir wot placed over two wood fires. They stir the stew with ladles long enough to lean on. I wade through the thick smoke and turn the corner from the side to the back alley. As I pass the first room of the service quarters, the mitad bet, I see Gela through the humid, yeasty steam wafting out, so I stop in.

  In there, the other two new cooks have two mitads ­going. One woman makes the injera, pouring a high, thin stream of batter in a perfect circular pattern inwards from the outside edge
of the hot flat clay of one mitad. The other opens the lid of the second standing oven and transfers the newest injera to a cooling rack, then into one of a pair of shallow, wide mesobs. Gela, her hands in the second full mesob, counts injera.

  Recalling a bit of old superstition, I say, “Isn’t that bad luck, to count injera? Or was it bad manners?” Either way it sounds like the kind of line invented by my grandmother’s aristocratic relatives, who had more food than they knew what to do with.

  Gela restarts counting. “I’m separating what will be for kurs at the church tomorrow.”

  “We have to serve breakfast?”

  “Only for the dependents. In memory of Etye Zimita.”

  An insurance for her soul, I guess, a toll for the final passage of her spirit. I put the roses on the ground and insert myself into the bakers’ work, attempting to pour injera batter in a perfect thin circle. I end up doing the same thing I did when I tried it as a little girl, standing on a chair. I dump the batter all in one gush in the middle of the mitad. When the oven lid is reopened, it reveals what looks like a thick white amoeba. The women tell me that is called ingocha. I made the mess, I have to eat it.

  Gela finishes counting while I stuff my mouth with warm ingocha. “If we feed eighty dependents, it’s enough,” she says. She lifts the stack of injera, supporting the weight under her forearms, then stops at the door, remembering something. “A man calling himself your brother telephoned for you.”

  She walks the injera to the kitchen next door. I follow her down the alley, almost choking on my mouthful of goop. “Where from?”

  She shrugs. “Is he to visit for the Forty, too?”

  I rush to the house. In Ema’s room, on my phone, multiple texts from Le’ul tumble out. Over twenty-four hours Aba’s been gone now!