EIGHTEEN
“It will wash,” Gela says, shaking me awake. The air smells metallic. I scoot away from a huge leak of blood that has spread on the bedsheet, from my side. I am mortified.
“I am so sorry.”
“It’s only blood.”
What could be worse than blood? We get out of bed. She gathers the stained sheets and goes out. The mattress hasn’t fared any better. The stain will never come out completely. What will we do, flip it over? This will be the house’s souvenir of me?
Faint dawn light filters in through the window shutters. I am standing over my open suitcase, tearing at a new travel-size box of tampons, my thighs sticky under my two ruined hager libs and slip, when Gela returns with a blue plastic bag of Modess. I haven’t worn pads since junior high, but I accept her offer. In the bathroom I roll up what I’d slept in and stuff it into a plastic bag. I wash and change into a clean pair of underwear and yesterday’s black clothes. The pad feels as cozy against my triangle, just like the first time.
Yene Abeba, isn’t it funny how so many phrases have abeba in them? Ema was making a cutting from her rosebush on the balcony. I was with her, to be close for the last hours we had before they flew to Rome, memorizing the outline of her body that I could see through her hager libs.
She closed her hand around a red rose and pulled out the petals. “You’ll need to know what to do with these,” she said, opening her palm. I thought she was going to give me a cutting from the plant too. “Soon, you will see yewer abeba, messy red like this.”
In the bathroom, she wrapped her cutting in wet toilet paper. She took out a pad from a blue box of square white cottons labeled Modess. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, she demonstrated how to catch my monthly flowers with the cottons.
She gave me a pad. “Show me you know what to do now.” I showed her, washing my hands before and after. “And change it no less than every three hours,” she said. I waited for the part about babies, but Ema didn’t mention that, as if these blossoms were just poorly healing cuts that broke open every month. She played with the adhesive strip of the pad, folding one corner to the opposite long side, then over to the other long side, until at the end a small strip was left, which she tucked into one side of the triangle.
“This will continue until you are an old woman.”
“Like you?”
She pressed the tip of the paper triangle down the centre of my face. “Take it off.”
“Later?” I liked having a tiny, snug pillow between my triangle and the world’s harm.
“You have to bleed to wear it.”
“Why waste it?”
“Well, you might as well get used to the feel.” She packed six boxes of Modess in my suitcases. “Never leave your blood behind. Always check you don’t leave petals on your clothes or bedsheets. People will laugh at you before they tell you what’s wrong,” she said, as if that was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.
From memory, I fold the waxy adhesive strip of the pad Gela gave me, in a repeating sharp triangle the way Ema had — the way, as I would later learn, the flags used to cover the coffins of fallen soldiers are folded. I tuck it into the mirror frame. I wash my stained underwear, squeeze out every last drop of pink water, and roll it up in the cleaning towel Gela had draped over the sink last night.
On my way to the clotheslines outside, I pass Gela returning to the house with a fresh bedsheet folded in a triangle. In the cold dawn air, I hang my underwear, hidden within the folded towel, at the farthest end of the clotheslines, almost under the eaves of the service quarters roof. Below, the sheets soak in the washtub, making a mockery of my attempt to be discreet.
I re-enter the living room. In the moment when I have a sightline into Ema’s room, I see Gela standing over my open suitcase. I pause. The bedsheet triangle that she holds against her chest is still. She is not breathing. Slowly, reverently, she lowers her hand into the suitcase. If I moved a little bit to the right, I could see what she’s reaching for, but even the softest creak would risk breaking the spell of this moment. I know, already, what she is reaching for. I hear the crinkle of paper. The only papers in my suitcase are my mother’s letters.
Gela’s hand trembles as she picks up a piece of 1980.
What girl? Her.
She is the hidden image in an optical illusion, astonishing for how invisible it had been while in such plain view, and impossible to un-see. All our moments together coalesce into a simple truth. She is that girl. How she welcomed me; her stares; how she lacks the self-effacing quality of maids; her overbearing, big-sisterly inability to mind her own business. Even her testy moments. My sister.
Fearing she will vanish, I try not to blink. But I do. The floor creaks. Gela swiftly drops the torn letter and unravels the bedsheet. I enter the room.
“My mother used to fold her gabi that way too,” I say.
“It’s a common style.”
She snaps the sheet open like a clap of thunder, her fury at the torn letter. The sheet refuses to land evenly over the mattress. The fabric furls back to her, desiring its original, imperfectly contained form. She snaps it away from her. It hurries back. The corners of her mouth go up. She has my fake smile. The next time she tosses the sheet out, I catch the opposite side. Together we position it evenly over the mattress, covering the stain she has scrubbed as best she could.
“Don’t stretch it too tight,” she says. “It will soak up the wet.”
I want to sweep her up in a hug. That’s how this moment should go. Haven’t I imagined it? But I’m blocked because she has known who I am all along, who Dessie and Gela are to each other, yet she has said nothing. I remind myself her silence can only be my grandfather’s doing. He must hold so much power over her. He has told her to keep her mouth shut, until he says when. She has obeyed. Even Wondu, who has nothing to lose, took one look at our grandfather and clammed up. I don’t have to. She is close enough to touch. We can start being sisters right now, just us two.
But I can’t speak. I am afraid Gela is mad at me about the crumpled and torn letters. Their dishevelment is proof that I am the lifelong pain Ema told her I am. I won’t reinforce that impression by stealing our mother’s special day too, and making it all about me. No, today is your day, Ema. I may not owe you my reconciliation with Le’ul, but I am not stingy enough to deny your spirit a drama-free release. I can be generous now. Let today be about marking off the past from the future. I want to wait for a proper time to tell Gela I now know who she is. For now, I have a new memory — the time I saw my sister — to add to my imaginary box of precious odds and ends, except this memory is fresh and whole.
We watch the loosely laid sheet. The moisture doesn’t seep through.
Our reasons are different, but at our core Gela and I are the same. We are waiting for the perfect moment to speak, to acknowledge, while causing the least collateral damage. It would have been hard enough to meet each other had it been planned, had Ema brought us together herself. But we have been thrown together without warning. I was not supposed to be here. Ema was not supposed to die. I almost laugh with relief that I can now stop the ghoulish process of bringing her here.
“That’s how it will stay?” I say to Gela.
“For now. We will take care of it properly later. Go back to sleep on the dry side.”
“No.”
“Or should I prepare the sofa cushions on the floor for you?”
“I am going to Selassie with you.”
“Mass begins later. You attend with the Shaleqa then.”
“Are you going to stop me from giving charity on behalf of my mother?”
“Who am I to do that? Do what you like. Only, it might displease the Shaleqa.”
“God forbid.” I jokingly flutter my fingers. But Gela doesn’t crack even a pretend smile.
NINETEEN
The clink of china on marble as the Shaleqa places a saucer on the mantelpiece under Tobya’s portrait seems to gently announce the official s
tart of the Forty Day. Still in his nightclothes, he lights a tall white candle for Ema, melts the base, and presses the candle on the saucer. I am beside him, where he wants me to be today for this daily ceremony. He puts my hand over his until the candle is fixed in place. He closes his eyes, to pray, I presume.
My hand is on top of his, but I’m his captive. I grew up hearing of the feats of poorly equipped arbegna who exhausted a modern adversary, but only now do I feel that I have grasped what the Shaleqa is capable of. He allowed for so much between his daughter and granddaughters — letters, visits, being under one roof — not out of mercy but because he knew we lacked his caliber of baffling nerve.
Gela tiptoes in from the back alley, with a vase of water and Teka’s roses in their cardboard chokehold. She puts both on a chair and leaves. I remove my hand from my grandfather’s. He opens his eyes. I free the roses from the cardboard and arrange them in the vase. I put them in the fireplace. They fan out and glow against the sooty brick.
“I am going to do the charity food giving,” I say, tearing up the cardboard.
“That is well.”
He returns to his room through the two-row deep amphitheatre of clean-as-new chairs. In the kitchen, I wedge the pieces of cardboard between the coals in the coffee brazier. Gela presses a knife deep into the stack of injera she had separated into a mesob yesterday, cutting the pile in half. Onto the topmost half, she scoops out one ladleful of misir wot from a bowl, which she must have portioned out from the giant pot of the stew the cooks made. She folds the top injera over the misir wot, making a loose samosa shape, which she puts in a baggie. She ties the baggie, with extra air for cushioning, and lays it in a deep, stiff canvas bag on the ground. She repeats the process. I take over holding the baggies open and packing them.
“Where did you say you grew up?” I say, fully expecting her to lie.
“What does it matter where a nothing like me grew up?” she deflects.
“It’s a simple question.”
“Simply, I grew up in Ethiopia.”
I wish I could tell her that if she’ll just acknowledge me first, I will move us through the Shaleqa’s anger and the rest.
“Do you dream of her?” I say.
“Who?”
“Etye Zimita.”
“Why should I?”
“Anybody can dream of anybody. I wish I dreamed of her.”
“If we don’t dream of the departed, it means they are truly at rest.”
“Rest? I thought she is still travelling everywhere where there are people who love and miss her, until after today.”
“Besmea’b wold mefes kidus,” she whispers, crossing herself to cast out my blasphemy. “At least you remember about the reason for the Forty.”
“There are many questions she left behind.” All beginning with why. Why, for a woman with so much power and independence later in her life, did she continue to be ruled by her father and husband?
“The questions we would ask of the departed, our soul already knows the answers.”
She is full of convenient theories. Eighty injera-samosas later, the canvas bag is full of baggies, the mesob is empty, and there’s not a drop of misir wot left in the bowl. Gela’s portioning was exact. She takes a yellow jerry can with a rope looped around its handle, and a small jug, to the storage room next door. I follow, avoiding the stream of rainwater coursing down the alley. She breaks the mud seal on the blue barrel of tella, releasing a sour ale smell, and dips in the jug, from which she fills the jerry can. I follow her back to the kitchen. From a cupboard she passes me a roll of one birr notes.
“Hold this.”
“We have to pay them to eat, too?”
“It’s symbolic. Not even a hundred gets you anything these days.”
She shoulders the jerry can of tella by the rope. We each grip one handle of the canvas bag, and set off under an umbrella she holds over us against the day’s first belg rain. At the gate, on impulse, I kick off my flip-flops and wiggle my toes. The flagstones are slippery, the dewy grass chilly from last night’s melted ice.
“Today is my Kulubi Gabriel,” I say, in response to Gela’s bewildered look.
She tilts her head up to the umbrella, beseeching divine forbearance. The light filtering through the blue polyester gives her face a greenish hue. “What are you requesting from the archangel? Common sense?”
“I am thanking him, for a gift I received this morning.”
“You call blood a gift?”
“The greatest.”
“Princess, you are walking in the city, not in the open country-side. Wear your shoes.”
I lay my flip-flops on the food packets in the canvas bag and drag her out through the open gate with me.
On the main road, we catch a minibus taxi. From my window seat at the back, the cushion springs digging into my legs, I refold each birr note individually. Gela extracts two birr for the fare collector who is perched on the rear wheel arch of the van’s interior. He is a strikingly hot teenager with toffee eyes, razor-sharp chin, and gabi lint in his curls, dressed in threadbare Western castoffs. He’s organized his bills lengthwise by colour and tucked them in the groove of his thumb. He plucks our change from the cylinder of coins in the middle of his palm.
The taxi drops us across from the roundabout circling the resistance monument, a grey five-sided pillar spotted black by the morning drizzle. As soon as we start the walk to Selassie, a beggar woman, wearing plastic shoes, with a baby slung on her back, comes up beside us. She opens her food sack full of leftovers from many households. It smells like a compost bin.
“What is the name?” she asks, keeping pace.
I stop, forcing Gela to do the same. She glares at the beggar. “Selassie is where we are giving.” The woman glares right back, shoving her sack at her.
“What’s the difference between here and there?” I say.
Gela snatches the topmost baggie of food from the pile and picks one birr from my bundle. She slaps the money in the woman’s hand and throws the baggie in her sack. She slams the jerry can on the ground. With each sudden noise the baby twitches in its sleep. The woman pats its bum with one hand, holding out a wrinkled empty water bottle to Gela with her other hand. Gela fills it halfway with tella, without touching the mouth of the jerry can to the bottle.
“Welete-Mikael,” Gela says.
The woman bows to me, tosses a nasty look to Gela, and walks toward Selassie. Even with the child on her back, she is nimble, one shoe barely touching the ground before the other leaves it. I imagine her prayer for Ema will be just as efficient. Igziabher hoy, please look after the soul of Welete-Mikael, daughter of your archangel Mikael. Amen.
Gela closes and re-shoulders the jerry can. We have almost reached the south branch of the roundabout when another pair of beggars, a blind man with his hand on the shoulder of a guide a step ahead of him, make a beeline for us. I tug the handle.
Gela snaps at me. “Don’t you mistake me for your pack animal! There is a system to this. The difference between here and there is I have made enough for the dependents there, not for every beggar your heart jumps for on the way.”
I grab two baggies and let go of my handle. She snatches up the second handle and waddles on under the weight of the bag in one hand, the tella on her other shoulder. I realize I’ve left her umbrella in the taxi. I’ll wait for a better time to tell her that.
I grip my toes on the asphalt, waiting for the blind beggar and his guide to reach me. Breathing through my mouth to not smell them, I give them the bunch of baggies and money.
“What is the name?” the guide says.
I remember the look the Selassie clerk exchanged with Gela in the office yesterday, making me feel stupid.
“Zimita,” I say. Ema’s everyday name for her everyday soul.
“What is the name?” the guide says again.
“Zimita,” I shout, wondering if he is deaf.
They hesitate. “What is the name?” the blind one says.
I catch up to Gela at the cathedral gates. She places the plastic baggies firmly into the hands of the blind, mouths Ema’s baptismal name for the deaf, and aims her jerry can very carefully at the plastic water bottles, not wasting a drop of tella. I leave her half the remaining roll of birr in the canvas bag, and wander off to continue my mischief of telling Ema’s true name. When the dependents go over to Gela for tella and food, she’ll tell them the fancy one. They can take their pick, or pray twice. It’s all a sham transaction anyway, so the dependents can get food and the independents can get peace.
Case in point, the mother we first gave alms to brazenly comes back for seconds.
Finished, Gela and I sit on a stone bench so I can brush my feet clean. Gela falls into a contemplative mood, her netela draped softly around her head. I search for any other inheritance I might have missed on her face.
“Staring is rude,” she says.
“You could be a tourism postcard.” She gets up, compacting the canvas bag. “What are you thinking of?”
“The things postcards must think of.”
“How wrong it is to be sent out into the world without the privacy of an envelope?”
“That’s why the space for writing is small,” she says, indulging me. “So people don’t say too much.”
At the house, Gela rinses and hangs my bedsheets. I collate the rest of the memorial programs and distribute them on the chairs. Mid-morning, I return to Selassie for mass with the Shaleqa, his friends, their families, his neighbours and compatriots, and my grand-aunt, Emmahoy. Gela stays behind to oversee lunch preparations and set up the coffee.
Daughters of Silence Page 18
