Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  Did you get my message? Aba’s gone missing?

  Why aren’t you saying anything? Is there something you know about this?

  Should I notify the police? It’s been 24h+

  I need you right now.

  I am alone in this world. I have no mother, no father. And now I have no sister.

  Oh, fuck off. On top of these there are six missed calls from him. I delete the texts, I’ll not have him next to Isak on my phone too. I respond by email.

  Aba will come back. Just wait. Remember his thinking drives?

  I fear that I am naïve to be so certain. Like a protective spell, I add a sentence.

  He will come back, guaranteed.

  Nothing from Barb.

  I peek into my grandfather’s room. He is taking a nap, so tired from his day out he still has his shoes on. Asleep, his wrinkles softened, he becomes Babbaye again. Gently, I undo his shoelaces and pull off his shoes. His socks are brand new, George’s, the same brand Aba buys for himself in bulk from Walmart. I remove them too. I’ve never seen my grandfather’s bare feet. He has the cracked soles of a man who has walked all his life. His veins are a map of rivers. I loosen his belt and cover him with a gabi from his dresser.

  Through the partially open window, I overhear Gela telling the cooks in the alley that she’s going to step out for an errand. I leave the house through the front porch and catch her halfway down the flagstone.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Selassie to pay for Etye Zimita’s prayer tomorrow.”

  “You were going to leave without telling me?”

  She drapes on her netela and tugs it away from her mouth. “Are you police?”

  “I’m coming with you,” I say, descending the steps.

  “I’m walking.”

  “I don’t care.”

  On the way to Selassie Cathedral, I wish I’d stayed at the house. I see a phantom Le’ul in the dusk-obscured figure of every passing male. By the grand wrought-iron gates of Selassie, Gela bows, crosses herself, and kisses one of the stone pillars blackened by the innumerable caresses of the faithful. I mimic her, except for the kiss. I don’t want a nasty lip infection, Igziabher’s holy healing spirit notwithstanding.

  The cathedral sits as a high centrepiece surrounded by a lush compound of colossal eucalyptus trees. Stone angels and saints, from nooks in the building’s walls, and along the grand staircase, dispassionately observe measly humans chasing salvation. Past the gates, Gela turns left toward a small brick bungalow, fronted by a colossal fig tree with a sign wired around its trunk, Information and Ticket Office.

  Gela and I climb absurdly steep, rickety wooden steps to the one-room office. The clerk sitting at a desk inside has been thoroughly kneaded by life. He has rheumy eyes, and wears three layers of faded, frayed clothing. A flaccid baseball cap sits on his greying hair. None of this detracts from his officious persona. I sit on a chair by the door, under another sign. People Without Business to Attend to Are Not Allowed In.

  “We are here for a name-giving,” Gela says, taking a seat opposite the desk.

  As soon as the clerk sees her, or rather the scars on her face, he turns hostile. I watch them like a tennis game. The clerk serves.

  “You are not Orthodox.”

  “I am a Christian.”

  “Prayers are for Orthodox only.”

  “I’m here for the father.”

  “The father can come himself.”

  “You know my face,” Gela says sharply. “Three times a year, I come here and pay the name-giving fee to have prayers said for members of this family. The Shaleqa is old. He suffers bone pain. In this damp season, he cannot travel from home.”

  That is news to me, or she’s a quick thinker.

  “Who is she?” he says, aiming his Bic at me like a dart.

  “She’s the granddaughter, but she’s not from here.”

  I do my best to exude a granddaughter who’s not from here.

  “So why doesn’t she do the asking?”

  “We’re cousins,” I blurt out, in English.

  Gela hands him a pocket-sized yellow booklet. He compares what’s inside to Gela’s face like a passport control officer. Catching himself, he compares it to my face instead. “Yes, this woman could be either of your grandmothers,” he says. He picks up a calendar book, one of three notebooks next to his desktop flag. “For when?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He lifts and drops his cap on his head. “For late requests you pay extra.” He flips to tomorrow’s date. There is a long list of names on the page, in his indecipherable handwriting. Fifty-fifty shot that anybody’s name will be said properly during their prayer.

  He holds the golden tip of his Bic poised over the page. “The name?”

  Gela turns to me.

  “Zimita,” I say.

  “The name by which she was baptized,” she says.

  “I don’t know any other name.”

  “How you don’t know?”

  “I never had reason to call her anything other than Ema.”

  “We need this name for the priest to call with those of other departeds in the mass.”

  “Igziabher knows her by her everyday name, I am sure.” Then, I throw out a far-fetched possibility. “Tobya? She used to be Tobya. My grandfather has been calling her —”

  Gela is irritated with me. “For your own private prayers to Igziabher, you can say any name you want, but not for the priest. I would think, if normally you don’t know it, at this kind of time you would.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Recently you would have heard it.”

  “I would?”

  The clerk leans his elbows on the table and overlaps his hands, his pen sticking up between his fingers. He takes a moment, as though he’s dealing with a child, then speaks to me in English.

  “A compound name, often a joining of sibling names, as for example brother-of or sister-of, with angels’ or saints’ names, as for example Gabriel or Mikael. Ihite-Gabriel. Sister-of-Gabriel, do you see?”

  There is one such name I do know well, having heard it every night long ago. Kidane-Gabriel.

  “It is spoken at death, at the end of life just as at the beginning. The abbat didn’t speak it at the funeral?” the clerk says.

  “My father wasn’t exactly all there.”

  “Abbat is priest, holy father,” Gela says.

  I switch to Amharic. “Oh, him. If he did, I don’t remember. What use is a name you need exactly in moments when you are least likely to remember it?”

  The clerk says, again in English, “At a baby’s baptism, the parents tell their own baptism names to the priest. The baby receives his own.”

  “I don’t have a baby. And for understandable reasons, I don’t remember anybody’s baptismal name from my own baptism, do you see?”

  “This name is also used for brides and grooms.” He looks at my left hand.

  “Don’t recollect my parents’ Orthodox wedding either, I’m afraid.”

  Movement at the door distracts us. I turn, startled. Just a couple of white backpackers. I wish I was with them. Truly a stranger to this strangeness, not a stranger who everyone expects to know what the fuck is going on. I turn back to catch the tail end of an exchange of exasperated looks between Gela and the clerk. Gela whispers to him the name. “Welete-Mikael.”

  He writes in the calendar. “For full prayer or half prayer?”

  “Full,” Gela says.

  “One hundred.”

  Gela gives him a hundred birr note. He sticks a carbon sheet between the pages of a receipt book and inscribes the purchase in triplicate, referring to the yellow booklet. He tears off a copy of the receipt, tucks it into the booklet, and returns it to Gela.

  On our way out of the bungalow, I stop Gela partway down the steps. “Why did you let him do all that to me in there? You knew the name.”

  “Etye Zimita is your mother, right?”

  “Let me see the book.”


  Gela gives me the booklet. She continues down the steps. On the cover is a sketch of the cathedral. The first page has a purple-stamped black-and-white photo of my grandmother. The star of Emmahoy’s dream. The photo is a wallet-size of the portrait that used to be on the living-room shelf. Rows of plaits bloom out to loose black curls at the nape of her tattooed neck. The booklet is a cathedral membership ID, good for the owner and their immediate family — another perk of having royal blood.

  When I look up, I catch a stunning view of a section of tombstones in the cemetery that, backlit by sunset, looks like a city skyline. Gela waits at the bottom of the steps. She follows the direction of my gaze. “That is the monument for the Ethiopian Airlines girls from the Beirut trip. Are you coming?”

  “What does welete mean?” I say.

  “Daughter of.”

  “So I would be Welete-Zimita?”

  “Your mother is not a saint.”

  That she isn’t.

  “And kidane?”

  “Promise. Or vow.”

  “I thought church names were for healing the sick,” I say.

  “The baptism name is used to approach Igziabher for any spiritual purpose.”

  “What else, for example? Beside sickness and prayers for the dead?”

  “Please, let’s go.”

  “What else, for example?”

  She crosses herself. “For the casting-out of buda.”

  “Demons?”

  “I’m not waiting for you.” She hurries off, as if now demons will descend on us from the shadows, flapping and screeching.

  “What if the wrong name is used?” I say, slowly descending the steps. Perhaps then the sickness stays. The demon doesn’t go back to where he came from. When I was eight, I thought the holy water ritual didn’t work on Le’ul because I had drank some of the water. Then, of course, I realized it was all nonsense. Or if not nonsense, not the kind of help he needed. Maybe it was Aba’s fault that the ritual didn’t work. Because he had Le’ul’s baptism name wrong. Maybe Le’ul never knew what it was, or maybe Aba changed it, or the man who sent Le’ul to us had it wrong, or Aba and Ema changed it. They did change his everyday name when they adopted him.

  Despite her threat, I find Gela outside the gates. “What is the time in your city, maybe the man has called for you again,” she says, moving fast again. “So late it is already.”

  Yes, I think. So late for so much: amends, new beginnings, for if only. If only Aba had used the right baptism name on Le’ul. If only that water had been holy. If only I had left Le’ul alone. If only he’d leave me alone.

  Yene Abeba, have you ever had an enemy you felt would never leave your life? When Le’ul went away to university, far in another outside-country place called America two years after Aba brought him to Vienna, I was ten years old, in fifth grade. I started to sleep all night, go anywhere in the apartment without thinking about it first. But after a month away, Le’ul quit. Aba brought him back from America. The returned Le’ul was quiet, walked around the apartment in his underwear. If he was not out all day, he was on the couch. He even slept on the couch at night because he couldn’t stand to be near me. He ordered me to always keep a certain distance away from him. If he had to touch anything I had touched, he wiped it down first. If I annoyed him, he made me drink too-hot water.

  There was no more checking-time. But Le’ul’s touch stayed on my skin like the burn after a slap. My body angrily pushed out two aching bumps on my chest under my nipples and little hairs as ugly as black wires through the skin of my triangle, that stung when I pulled them out. I carved a daisy into my right wrist with my geometry compass, making my own bracelet like the one impressed on the arm of my old doll. I kept my daisy red by peeling the petals that turned brown. The girls at school avoided me. They were obsessed with boys anyway. There was a boy I had a crush on too, but I couldn’t have him find out how disgusting I was so I didn’t talk to him. The day-students were always jealous of the boarding students because the girls and boys could secretly meet in each other’s dorms. I wished I was a boarding student, too, but so I could be away from Le’ul and living in a house full of sisters.

  After I turned eleven, Ema and Aba let me go out by myself, so I roamed Vienna on foot for hours after school, after swim club, or French class. I stood too near the edge of the U-Bahn platform. On the train, men stared or stood too close and rubbed their knuckles against my triangle or sat across from me and petted their thick red veiny flesh outside their open zippers. I went up to Kahlenberg, where Ema and I had taken the bus on our first weekend in Vienna. We can see all of Vienna from here, Ema had said. Equal to seeing all of Adisaba from Entoto, Aba had said, when all four of us went up there later that month because he wanted to celebrate our reunion.

  I was twelve, at the end of our last year in Vienna after which all four of us would return to Ethiopia, when I realized that I could never get rid of Le’ul, but I could get rid of me. I didn’t plan it; I let it happen. I disappeared. On a Sunday when Ema and I went to Prater amusement park, I took a different path on my way back from the toilet. I wandered into a thin scatter of trees which gradually became dense. The trail ended. I walked on, alone. I knew I was lost, but I didn’t feel anything. I was watching an uninteresting film about me.

  “Brown Venus, why do you look so sad?” said an Austrian man in German, weaving out from between the trees on a bicycle. He was thin, with a thick blond ponytail, watery eyes. He walked his bike alongside me. I wasn’t surprised or frightened.

  “Where do you walk?”

  I shrugged.

  “Would you eat a Magnum?”

  I stopped walking.

  “I have one.”

  I looked at the bike.

  “You only have to hold on. I will not let you fall.” He remounted his bicycle, one foot on the ground. “Sit in front.”

  I did. He would speed off with me to another nowhere, which would be better than our apartment, than our house in Addis Ababa, than any place with Le’ul. Pedalling fast, the man threaded his way through the trees. I thought he sniffed my ear, or my hair.

  By a tree with long drooping branches, we got off his bike. He guided me behind the curtain of branches, into a space around the tree trunk. I remembered the signs that meant checking-time. I closed my eyes to undress. The man said stop. Only watch. I pretended to, but really I was swaying with the leaves.

  Afterwards, we left the park through a wide gap forced in the chain-link fence and came out many blocks up from the main gates of the park. At a pedestrian light, we had to stand waiting even when it was our right of way, because there was a police siren. The man became nervous. He sped away from the crossing, back into the forest through the forced-open fence.

  I went the long way around to the park entrance. There, Ema wept. The Austrians ignored her. She grabbed and patted me all over like she did the day I jumped from the highest diving platform at the Ghion. She pinched the underside of my upper arm, where it used to hurt.

  “Don’t you know what can happen to a girl out there?” she said through her teeth.

  I unstuck her nails from my flesh. “Out where, Grinzing?” I said, the name of our neighbourhood. She didn’t speak to me the rest of the day.

  Late at night, after Le’ul was asleep on the couch in the living room, and Aba had turned in, she came to the room Le’ul and I used to share. She stood by the top bunk in the dark, eye to eye with me. The light from the hallway spilled in. The top of her breasts showed through the black lace trim of her green silk slip. Her head wrap slipped off her head partway, so I knew she had slept some, or at least tried to.

  “You don’t say good night to your mother. Have you no love?”

  “It’s almost morning.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  I turned over and pulled the covers over my head.

  One night later in the year, as Ema and Aba ate dinner from the same plate, chatting in low tones, I heard them say how Babbaye would react when he f
ound out his daughter would be serving in the capital city of the Talyans next. That was how I found out, when we went back to Ethiopia at the end of the year, it would be only for a visit. Ema had been promoted. The ministry was sending her to a new post. We would leave Ethiopia again, for four more years, to go to Rome. I knew of Rome. Babbaye had picked a fight with the people there for many years, about a stolen rock.

  I didn’t wonder if Le’ul planned to go with us to Rome, too. I accepted he would always go where Aba went. Aba said that Le’ul was fragile because he had fallen into a depression. The only depression I knew of was Danakil, in Ethiopia, the hottest place on earth. For every thing I learned in school, Aba always taught me the Ethiopian version or equivalent. But Le’ul was not in any faraway geography. He was in my life still. If he was burning up as much as I did when he forced me to drink hot water, I could not see it. All I knew was that if he could, he would peel my skin and feed it to dogs.

  I went to Ema in her bedroom late at night. Aba was in the kitchen, transcribing notes for his manuscript. I knelt beside Ema’s bed and waited until she felt my presence. She woke up. She turned on the bedside lamp. I turned it off. I said, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be in this anymore.” I began to shiver like I do after I’ve thrown up. She leaned over, raised me to the bed, and rested my head on her belly until I settled down.

  “Ask Babbaye if he’ll take me? I can live with him. You three go to Rome. Let me stay back.” I began to rise but she pushed me back down. She combed my scalp with her nails for a long time. It was so soothing I almost fell asleep, but I fought it, determined to fix my eyes on her upside down face until I heard a yes.

  “If he wants you. I’ll ask.”

  What a silly thing to say. There was no question he would leap at the chance to have me stay. She moved to the middle of the bed, pulling back the covers. I climbed in and tucked into her side. We lay down front to back. No words needed. She drifted off to sleep. Out of old habit, I counted the kisses on her back.

  Only two days later, Ema told me Babbaye said no. She asked him to take me in, to let me live with him. He said no. Of course he would say no, I told myself. Why would he agree without knowing the true reason? He shouldn’t need a reason, if he really loved me, but I pushed the thought away. I went to her room another night, my eyes stinging even before I spoke.