Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  “You didn’t tell him why.”

  “When your grandfather says no about something, that’s it! No,” Ema said angrily.

  “He wouldn’t say no if you told him why I can’t, I can’t . . .” Hiccups and sobs stole everything else I meant to say.

  “What is the why you would have me tell an old man who has grieved so much in his life that people tell him to his face they wish him the blessing of death? What is the why?”

  Since the day she explained the holy water to me, this was the most we had not talked about it while still talking about it.

  “Say I gave him the why, penetrated the knife into his soul. He will kill Le’ul. The life of an enemy is nothing to him. He has killed men with his hands. He’s the Shaleqa. He will walk right here to where we are and kill the boy. Can you be sure he won’t? Do you know how far that man has walked for revenge? What then? Of your father? Of me? Will you smear the lineage with the stain of shame?”

  I was silent. All this talk of her and Aba and shame and murder was confusing.

  “No one, but no one, lives life without a burden. Don’t think other families don’t have their secret pain. Other families, you think they are as happy as they look? Believe your mother, their joy is for show.”

  “Can’t just you and me go to Rome?” I said, speaking for the first time of my deepest wish of having her all to myself again.

  “Go tell your father his wife is leaving him. Turn off his light. Shatter his peace so he can’t continue the passion book he has waited his whole life to pursue, that Ethiopia will never be able to claim, that generations of her scholars will never get to hold, because one girl had to be happy.”

  Aba had said his latest book would be his masterpiece, his ultimate legacy, a book about the Mezmure Dawit, the psalter he learned by heart when he was a boy in the seminary in Harrar, training to become a priest, following in his father’s footsteps. By the time he rebelled and left the seminary to go to secular school — leaving religion to the monks, he said — he was a deacon. Once, washing his hands bloodied by a leaked red pen, he’d told me that in the neighbourhood where he grew up, he was the go-to boy for the women when they needed a male to bless a chicken or sheep and cut its throat.

  Ema shoved me. “Why aren’t you moving? Go tell him. Go, make your mother and father gossip for the community to chew on.”

  I went, but to the place Ema knew I would end up, my bed.

  Stupid, I should have kept my mouth shut, gone to Ethiopia for vacation, then refused to leave Babbaye’s house when it was time to go to Rome. Four years too late, I could have finally answered his question, and said, I don’t want to leave this land.

  SEVENTEEN

  Hail crashes onto the corrugated tin roof of my grand­father’s house. I snap awake on the bed in Ema’s room. Hail, so early in the season? I get out of bed, freezing, and add a second hager libs to the one I’m wearing over my slip. I open the inner window and push the outer shutters, just an inch, but I get pelted by dozens of tiny pearls of ice all the same. I close the shutters. From the floor, I pick up a few pieces of hail, and eat their refreshing coolness. There is no going back to sleep with all this racket. Warily, I look at my phone, which I have avoided since Le’ul’s messages. All the screen has to tell me is the time, almost midnight.

  The rest of the ice that I let in dissolves on the floor, leaving a wet trail as if someone walked by with a dripping cloth. The hail tapers off, replaced by a steady belg rain. A mouth-watering smell of wet earth seeps through the gaps between the wall and the window frame. I open the shutters. The courtyard appears sprinkled with clusters of softly glowing Styrofoam balls. In the aftershock of the icy torrent, the plants in the courtyard tremble. I too shiver from the cold hug of the night.

  I hear water dripping. The sound is not coming from the drainpipes, nor the tap in my bathroom. I open my door and look into the living room. The white chairs glisten. Gela enters from the back door, wringing out a washcloth into a small bucket. That was the sound I heard. She wipes more white chairs clean of grime. I knock on my door softly so as not to frighten her. She turns, sees me. I wave, wait for her to speak. She waits for me to speak. In the end neither of us says anything. It’s too late, or too early, for human voices.

  I notice the boxes of loose pages of Ema’s memorial programs. Sticking to her word, Gela hasn’t let anyone touch them. I’d forgotten all about them. I sit by the boxes and lift out a stack of cover pages from one box. I flip them like an animation flip-book, but Ema’s image doesn’t move. She’s fixed as Tobya or Zimita, depending on the direction I start from. From each box, I take a page of the program, arrange them in order, and fold them as cleanly as Ema would fold her newspapers after she finished reading, so precisely they looked unread. I run my nails hard along the edge. I tuck the folded program under my thigh. One down. I allow myself to look at the family photo on one of the booklet pages, taken on Ema’s birthday on the lawn of our Vienna apartment building.

  Yene Abeba, would you agree, some birthdays are more special than others? On my thirteenth birthday, I got the best gift of a sad realization that approached me like a new friend. The perfect solution had been in front of me those four years. I had no pen pal. I had no sister. I had no parents, no grandfather. I turned one precious thought in my head — I only had me.

  “If I can’t stay with Babbaye then let me stay here alone,” I said to Ema, in the bright light of morning, one month before the move to Rome, while we were at breakfast. Le’ul and Aba were still in Ethiopia on vacation. The three of them had gone together. Ema returned earlier. I hadn’t gone at all. She didn’t trust me to come back from Ethiopia with them, so she had — accidentally she said — enrolled me in an expensive, non-refundable, after school German intensive.

  Having Ema to myself didn’t bring me the same joy as it once did, because I knew the feeling wouldn’t last. She was reading her crisp International Herald Tribune. She started to do this every morning after her double promotion from Third to First Secretary, because Aba said it’s clear they now consider her ambassador material, though as far as he’s concerned she has always been Her Excellency.

  Ema contemplated what I’d said without taking her eyes off the newspaper. Then she imitated me like a noteworthy headline she was reading aloud. “I will stay back, she says.”

  “Why do you always change my words? I said let me stay here. I want to become a boarding student. You’ll always know where I am.” She lowered the newspaper, letting it crumple. I sensed my advantage. “If you make me go to Rome, I could go missing again.”

  “You think you can handle being alone in the country of strangers?”

  “I was fine the last two weeks you all left me alone. You lived alone in Dessie, when it was bad for you to be in Adisaba. Staying away was how you survived.”

  She blew on her cold coffee. “We’ll see if your father agrees.”

  Aba and Ema did not say anything to Le’ul about my staying in Vienna. We were all packing, so he did not guess that this was where I would split from them. On departure day, they three got on a plane. I stayed on land. Maybe Le’ul felt happy for the first time in a long time when he realized I wasn’t coming with them, as I had felt on my first airplane ride four years ago, thinking he was out of my life forever.

  Gela and I work quietly, she cleaning her chairs, I folding Ema’s programs, under Tobya’s photo over the mantelpiece. The phone rings. I jump. Gela picks it up before the second ring. She doesn’t say anything after hello. She holds out the receiver to me. “It’s him again. The one who calls himself your —”

  I don’t hear the last word, because my mind has skipped over the now, to another year, another hushed moment ruptured by the ringing of this same phone. It was a kiremt afternoon, the hail drumming on the roof, Le’ul guiding me to the bed for checking-time.

  He pauses, I pause. Through a thin part of my blindfold, I see the light change his naked brown shoulders to gold as he turns toward the sound
within the sound. We wait for the ringing to stop. But the phone insists, its noise breaking through the hammering of the falling ice. It must be Ema, calling from the office. Le’ul throws a bathrobe on me, unlocks the door, pushes me out to the hallway still blindfolded. I stand disoriented. I feel a hard shove, Le’ul’s foot on my back. I hit the wall. I push my arms into the sleeves of the robe, tie it, and pat my way down the hall toward the nook, to the phone that has saved me like a screaming mouth.

  Gela holds her arm extended toward me as if it’s too dark for her to see that I am waving her away with both hands, refusing. Why this phone? Why didn’t my parents sell this phone as they had everything else we owned? She puts the receiver on the floor and goes back to her chairs. I approach the phone. I raise it to my ear. I hear my name.

  “Dessie.” In my ear is the pillow of Ema’s voice. “My sweet, you ate your snack and lunch?” Before me, I see only black. Under my feet is cool tile. At my back, I feel Le’ul’s eyes. Words that could save me spill from my mouth, but they are soundless. Ema is not here but through the phone I can smell the burning clove of her cigarettes. So my mother should smell my stink. Ema and Aba know all, how do they not know what is happening to me in their own house?

  “Dessie?”

  “Yes Ema, I did.”

  “And your penmanship exercises?”

  “I did.”

  This kiremt I am practising writing the English alphabet letters without lifting my pencil. I am between first and second grade. Ema and Aba make us study ahead. Our reward is the same each year, a weekend trip to Sodere. Ema starts to say goodbye.

  “The afternoon is long, Ema.”

  “Do something else then, my sweet. Paint me the roses in the vase.”

  I try not to breathe on Le’ul, but I do.

  “Dessie,” he says.

  Gela moves to the back door. I yank her shirt to make her stay. I turn in a slow half circle, to keep her in my sight. The telephone cord wraps around me.

  Le’ul says, “I called Stanley when they didn’t deliver the stone. Why is he saying you cancelled the order when we are supposed to dedicate Ema’s gravestone tomorrow?”

  I don’t remember all I said on the phone call from Teka’s shop, with Teka echoing my every word to my grandfather and the rose carvers. But I am sure I did not say anything about the gravestone.

  “Did Aba come back?”

  “I told you the car was always here.” He had not. “He was upstairs,” he says impatiently, as if that was never an issue, as if yesterday he hadn’t been losing his mind about it like a bitch.

  “Where’re you calling me from?” I want to lock Le’ul into a specific location I can visualize, so as not to have all of him in my ear.

  “I told you. The residence. Aba is upstairs praying.”

  Chanting, probably. His rediscovered hobby. Of course he is upstairs. Now it seems obvious that after Ema was gone he would seek her out in the one place she didn’t admit anyone.

  I can see Ema so clearly: pen poised over a paper on her desk; gesturing to her assistant through the glass separating her office from the secretaries’ area; crossing her legs under the desk so she can massage the scar on the back of her thigh, through the fabric of her slacks, with the ring finger she uses to rub away her cigarette ash when it misses the ashtray. But she can’t see me to ask me, Why are you wearing nothing but a bathrobe in the middle of the afternoon? Why is your hand shaking? Who tied your eyes?

  “Aba says he made no such call telling Stanley we wanted to cancel the stone. I didn’t either. You’re the only person that misdirect could have come from. He’s very disturbed.”

  “I didn’t cancel the stone.”

  “Then what did you tell Stanley to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Or not do.”

  “Nothing.”

  Le’ul knows. Disturbed is too strong a word to describe how Aba would feel over a delayed stone. But Le’ul is going to make me suffer. He wants me to confess. Or he is going to let me go now, so he can use the information he has, to force me to do something for him later. Something that will cost me more than a couple of buddy passes.

  “Did you or did you not talk to Stanley,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you even doing in Ethiopia?”

  I seek eye contact with Gela. She’s obviously eavesdropping, as much as she can understand. I push my fist against the wall.

  “I’m stranded here.”

  “Of all places?”

  “Haven’t you watched the news? The volcano?”

  “I know the news. I don’t know if I can trust you.”

  “Ask Aba.”

  “You told me you were going to Sydney.”

  Ten days that feel like ten years ago, I lied to Le’ul about where I was flying to, only so I would have some extra days of peace after I returned from Johannesburg. Not to ensnare myself. “The volcano…”

  “Which took place on the other side of the globe from your flight path?”

  “I wasn’t going to Sydney.”

  “Please. Stop it. Stop your lying. If you and I are going to have a relationship, trust and honesty are paramount. Tell the truth.”

  “It’s late here . . .” I’m scared to hang up.

  Ema she has to go, she has work to do. Even if I could keep her on the phone, I will have to let her go in the end, so she can drive home. In that time, I will be alone again with Le’ul. I don’t want to live even that short time.

  “Dessie. The best thing you can do for yourself is tell the truth, now. What did you do? Why did you do it?”

  “I was only pretending, at first.”

  “What you’re up to, what you’ve done, is not right.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  My head hurts, I don’t know which side is up, which down. I feel I am wading through versions of a nightmare I have been having since Ema called from her office that loud afternoon. Sometimes in my nightmare, there is an emergency. I must make a phone call, shout out something important. But I always dial the wrong number. I know it is the wrong number, but my fingers will only press the wrong numbers. Other times, I dial the right number. Someone answers, but no matter how much air I push out through my throat, even until my stomach cramps, I can get no sound out. My mouth is clogged by a stringy glob. I use my fingers to pull at it. I only make it more viscous. Other times, I get sound out, but just a hollow wheeze, or the wrong words, or the right words jumbled out of order.

  Ema says goodbye. I don’t. I can’t. My mouth is numb like after the dentist’s needle. There is only the busy tone, but I hold the phone for a long time.

  Many years too late, the blindfolded girl naked under the bathrobe, spills the saving words, the right words in the right order.

  She is gone. She can’t hear me anymore. I tell her.

  “I’m cold.”

  Le’ul’s voice. “What did you say?”

  “I’m not wearing enough.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You forced me.”

  “Do not accuse me of something you started.”

  “Legs open, mouth, if I feel teeth I will end you.”

  I listen to the husky dial tone for a long time. I turn to Gela. She is still pretending to not care about me. Ema, in the big photo, is as usual: there, but not.

  I move to Gela, until the phone cord tightens around my hips. I drop the receiver to the floor and continue toward her, gripping the tops of the chair backrests, dragging the phone on the floor behind me. I let go of the last chair before I reach her. In that moment, Gela coming to catch me with open arms, everything goes black.

  When I come to, I am retching, gagging over the bathroom sink, scraping my nails down my tongue, pulling out something invisible. Gela wets the face towel she had been cleaning the chairs with in cold water. She pastes it to my forehead. She fights me for my hand and rinses it under the tap in hers, not disgusted by my saliva. Clear water swirls down the drain. Because I a
m not sick. Ema said so.

  How sorry I would be if you weren’t mine. Did she say that to you, Yene Abeba?

  “For you to cry is good,” Gela says. “It’s good.”

  She drapes the towel over the edge of the sink and walks me to Ema’s room. She pushes me to lie back on the bed and sits on the edge. Our bodies are as close as they were on the day she threw her weeping self at me.

  “From when I opened the gate until now, you never cry, about anything. Here your grief is, expressed. From now on, I don’t worry for you. There. Only a delay in feeling. Was it something the man said?”

  “Will I ever know the why?”

  She strokes my face. “Princess, you are unwell.” She shuts the door and comes back to the bed. She lies down facing me, but upside down, like a playing card.

  “The programs. I didn’t finish Ema’s books.”

  “Sleep now. Tomorrow comes with a lot of work. Before sunrise I must make food packets to give to the dependents at Selassie.”

  “The charity? Let’s prepare it now.”

  “Who told you Gela does not sleep?”

  “You were awake to wash the chairs.”

  “Now I want to be asleep.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sleep, little flower.”

  From this angle, Gela has a different face. To have her body so near but her voice coming from so far away is strange, like speaking to her shadow, her nighttime self, instead of the one I know by day. She turns on her other side. Her attention, which has been a balm to me, is gone in an instant. I close my eyes.

  A few minutes later, the door handle clicks.

  He is here. Paralyzed with fear, I peek through my lashes.

  My grandfather stands in the open doorway. I almost get up, thinking something has happened to him and he needs help. But he is still.

  I count my breaths, willing the apparition gone. He retreats quietly. I sit up. On Gela’s face are telltale signs of deep sleep: dropped jaw, softly parted lips. I turn myself upside down and curve my body behind hers, mirroring her position without touching. When people spoon, they can’t see each other, yet it is the most tender embrace. Sometimes that is the best kind of comfort, like a child in the mother’s womb.