Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  I usher Emmahoy into the women’s section of the cathedral’s cavernous interior, down a side colonnade of white mosaic pillars. Wall-to-wall red carpeting absorbs the sound of our footsteps. We settle in the first of a dozen rows of wood pews. The altar area is layered with Persian rugs. The back half of it is hidden behind an opulent green velvet curtain hanging off an arch. Above the arch is a mural of brown angels in Afros, against a soft yellow backdrop, flanking a haloed trio of red-robed elders on a platform of clouds.

  A microphone crackles. Then, the voice of an unseen male, seeming to come from behind the curtain, releases the first drawn-out syllable of chant. The sea of worshippers covered in white netela swells to standing. The clergy emerge, a vision of beards, head wraps, jewelled crowns, gilded umbrellas, flowing satin robes and capes. Their cryptic motions don’t resemble what the priests at Ema’s funeral had done, motions I was told were very important for her soul.

  The four hours–long loop of standing, sitting, bowing, prostrating, preaching, and chanting puts me in a trance. I snap out of it only when Emmahoy tugs me down.

  “Now, the baptism names of the departed are called,” she whispers in my ear.

  The disembodied male voice that started the show tears through dozens of names in one breath. I miss hearing Ema’s. Gela was right. Even a hundred birr gets you nothing these days.

  After mass, we exit at a snail’s pace, through throngs of worshippers pushing containers at a deacon wielding a giant kettle of holy water. By the entrance, dependents have been replaced by trader women, propping up steeples of freshly cut grass and refusing to haggle. With Emmahoy’s money, I buy three thick bundles for Gela’s coffee service.

  TWENTY

  The chairs in my grandfather’s living room are askew. Guests who’ve reached the house ahead of us have already ruined Gela’s two perfect rows so they can sit in clusters, chatting in cliques. The relaxation is palpable. The living are finished keeping Ema’s soul company in this realm for forty days. Her being truly gone is now just another fact, a rock, around which the river of life — food eaten, news shared, plans made or revised — will flow on.

  As she requests, I seat Emmahoy close to the coffee service, which Gela has set up beside the fireplace and the vase of roses, so that she’ll be warmed by the heat from the brazier later. I undo the knot around the bundles of grass from Selassie, and spread it around on the floor in front of the coffee service with my hands, creating a thick carpet. There’s a soft, fetid smell to the roses, sweet but on its way to repulsive. I yank out petals and sprinkle them on the grass. The conversations become subdued. I turn around. The guests raise their eyebrows at each other, look to the Shaleqa, Who’s going to be the one to tell her?

  “What, it’s a celebration today, right?” I say. I know damn well it’s not that kind of celebration. “A farewell. Today my mother departed to the heavenly realm.”

  Gela enters from the alley, carrying an urn, bowl, and towel to begin the hand-washing rounds for lunch. She stops dead when she sees what I’ve done. “Didn’t you say so, Gela?”

  Uncle Whiskey speaks. “The child of Zimita is not wrong.”

  Gela is so thrown off that she begins the hand-washing rounds with him instead of the Shaleqa. Uncle Whiskey soaps his hand. “Zimita bid us farewell today.” He plonks the soap into the water and rinses his hand, turning the water murky with his dirt.

  Uncle A B Z, next in line for the water, chimes in. “Yes. This room has seen many a farewell for Zimita. The last was nineteen years ago.”

  Uncles Pilot and Bug contribute in turn, reminding all about the celebration for Ema’s university graduation, which she accomplished on time. The uncles’ wives pick up the subtle reference to the Terror and address me in chorus.

  “We raised Tobya, after.”

  “We women were also at Zimita’s wedding, the farewell to her girlhood.”

  “We who cooked her feast then are eating Welete-Mikael’s tsebel meal today.”

  I listen, shucking the thorns from the rose stems with the edge of my thumb and throwing them on the grass. Tizita about that grand day, their most cherished recollections of Zimita and Mesfin’s wedding, are tossed from mouth to mouth, a lazy game of catch, as people clean themselves by fishing the doughy soap out of the increasingly filthy water. They direct their words to me, but I know they are really speaking to Ema. Their kindness is meant to reach her, just like their joy so long ago was not for the new graduate or bride but for her father, and for the dead on whose behalf she would live well.

  “Soon,” the Shaleqa says, “we will celebrate her final welcome, her rest with her own.”

  The plates, the injera, the wot, are trotted out. The feasting commences. That’s it. Between mentions of what are agreed to be Ema’s milestones, dutifully reflected in the memorial programs — the unstapled pages of which are half falling out of the pockets and purses they’ve been haphazardly stuffed into — Ema’s whole life is deemed honoured. Her first love, teen pregnancy, the daughter she had to leave behind in Dessie — never happened. Whether the omission is intentional or the guests truly don’t know that Ema’s time in Dessie wasn’t only about survival, this enormous fact which so deeply affected me, her, and Gela, goes unacknowledged.

  Shaleqa radiates contentment. I should sit to eat beside him, but I have no appetite. From the kitchen I bring around bowls of food for seconds. No one objects to my working on this day, perhaps because the food today is tsebel, eaten in honour of the departed’s spirit. Therefore they think it appropriate that her daughter serve it. I spoon out generous additional helpings of wot on the guests’ plates, heap on the bread and injera. I want them to eat until they hurt, so they will feel some pain, even if it is the temporary, physical kind, not permanent like mine and Gela’s. And boy do they eat. Their megderder doesn’t have the typical false note of a pretend refusal. They genuinely welcome being overfed, as if they are eating for two, themselves and Ema, to prove how much they loved her.

  I try to fill in the missing part of her life story, get them to see that Gela and I are both Ema’s daughters, by smiling every time Gela does, imitating her gestures and phrases. I fail. Other than our height, we have nothing visibly in common. She resembles her father, I our mother.

  Gela doesn’t get recognition even for the tella, which flows before, during, and after lunch. No compliments to the brewer on the polished, creamy aftertaste of the bitter fizzy ale. Claiming good tella never runs out, Gela frequently dispatches Lomi and Aberash to the living room with brimming pitchers from the kitchen, where she keeps two backup pitchers full from the barrel in the storage room.

  On one of my trips down the alley from the storage room, where I prefer to top up my glass in private, filtering through my teeth the bits of what I assume is gesho, I misjudge the lowered step into the kitchen and stumble, spilling half of it on my blouse.

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Lomi says, giggling, clearly tipsy.

  “What?” I say.

  Aberash reprimands her with a hard push. The women slink out around me, carrying full pitchers. “Don’t mind them,” Gela says, heading out to the storage room with an empty pitcher.

  I follow, suddenly intoxicated. “I mind.” Gela lifts the barrel lid. The ladle that was on it slides and falls. She looks down at the ladle, sighs, then plunges the pitcher in the barrel. The tella swooshes in.

  “Well?”

  “When the Terror . . .” She lifts out the full, dripping pitcher, wipes the sides with her hand. “When the Terror came, the Shaleqa hid Tobya.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t know where he hid her.”

  “In Dessie.”

  “Before Dessie.”

  I had never considered before Dessie. I had assumed the squads simply didn’t consider a wisp of a girl like my mother worth taking up space in their truck.

  Gela dries her hands on her dress. “He hid her in one of these barrels.”

  “She never told me that par
t.”

  “Often all a woman needs is for someone to ask.”

  I want to slap the smug out of her. “The barrel happened to be empty?”

  “On Genna day? What do you think? It had tella.”

  “She would have drowned.”

  “If she had, you wouldn’t be here. Aren’t you her child?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  She quickly picks up the ladle from the floor, as if it fell that instant, and dashes out. I mean to go after her — it’s what I do, I trail after maids — but my body moves in the direction it is facing, to the open barrel. The tella reflects my face. I look aghast, like the angels in church art, whose wings seem to grow out of their cheeks. Could it have been this one Ema was hidden in?

  I break the surface of the tella with my right hand, sending my arm in up to my shoulder. I sweep my fingers along the inside of the barrel, feeling for bumps, grooves Ema scratched out with her nails until they broke, while she held her breath so that she could live. I pull my arm out. I imagine her being pulled out of the barrel. Dripping, gasping, drunk, fingernails bloody. Stinking, as I do. She vomited what she had to swallow. Her smell washed off. What stuck was the silence, after. After Dessie. She suffocated for life anyway.

  I walk down the alley with new caution. From the back entrance to the living room, I watch Gela. All I have to do is wait out here. She has to come out eventually. She has settled behind the brazier, and is about to roast the coffee beans on the pan. Her eyes dart quickly to me, then down to the flames leaping out of the brazier. She balances the pan on the flaming coals. I’ll wait. She fans the coals. She will roast the beans with a long flat iron rod for about ten minutes, wrap a cloth around the wire handle to remove the pan, and then set the kettle of water to boil on the brazier. While the water heats, she will take the pan to the alley and crouch, skirt tucked behind her knees, slide the glistening hot beans into the mortar, and pound them into powder — thud, crack, thud — covering the mouth of the mortar with one hand, aiming the iron pestle in the gap between her thumb and forefinger, never missing, never tearing that delicate web of flesh. The coffee powder she doesn’t use up today, she will save for later. Always later, always when it is a better time. Always how will it seem?

  I enter the living room, which vibrates with the murmurs of the sated. The guests and the Shaleqa are too involved in their clusters of conversation to pay me or my tella-soaked clothes any mind as I squeeze around the chairs and go to my room. One by one, I smooth out the crumpled letters on the bed. I refold each neatly. And tap the stack until the edges are perfectly aligned.

  They come with me to the living room, weighing my hand like a live grenade. They jump on Gela’s lap. She springs back, her arms up, away.

  “I’m done with these,” I say.

  “No,” she says, barely above a whisper.

  “You didn’t want me to read them?” I raise my voice. “The Shaleqa said different.”

  We’ve captured some attention. Most know what this scene seems like at first glance, the lady of the house confronting the maid with a charge of theft.

  The coffee beans release an earthy steam. Gela nudges them around the pan with the rod, as if there’s nothing in her lap. I can’t see her expression, but her shoulders have collapsed. I avoid looking at our grandfather. I don’t want to go back to being a coward. I sense no gesture from him. Maybe he doesn’t believe I will speak on, even after having come as far as bringing the secret out of the bedroom.

  I point at Gela, like an accused saving her skin by exposing another’s, and say a simple phrase I’ve always fantasized saying.

  “That’s my sister.”

  As if I’ve inflicted a curse on her, Gela drops the iron rod and covers her face. She stumbles out, blindly, her body bouncing off chairs and the frame of the back door. The letters sail off her lap and land on the moist grass. All breath and motion in the room cease. I am out of words. I thought there would be more to say, volumes, but the rest of the words fell behind in Ema’s room.

  I startle back as from the edge of sleep. From where I stand, I can see the porch, the courtyard, Gela’s little house, the open gate. I should run after her, and beg her to believe me when I say I didn’t mean for our reunion to be this way. All the way from the storage room to the living room to the bedroom and back, I wanted to stop. But something said now.

  A sip, a rearranged limb, a cough later, the hum returns. The guests shake off the spell and resume their enjoyment where they left off, tucking this incident away to dissect later. For now, though the letters are on the floor, the thing to do is behave as though nothing has happened. This is the generation that, even in private moments, does not react, whom Terror has killed with fear. I don’t know why I expected that speaking would bring about change, when I’ve had warnings all along that those present, those living, are often no better than the dead when it comes to acting on what they know.

  Finally, I look at the Shaleqa. He watches me from a distance wider than the room, as if I am already only a tizita. His gaze is as unreadable as the framed Tobya’s; what made her laugh, who captured her smile, will remain a mystery. She cares nothing for tears, rituals, programs, candles, or stale roses in the black chasm of the fireplace. All that is for us, the living. None of it is what we need to live: the truth, spoken and heard. Wrongs corrected.

  The coffee beans crackle and burn. I grab the wire handle of the pan, burning my hand. I yell in pain and drop the pan. I suck my fingers. My chin crumbles at the taste of myself, the rest of my face follows. I cave into a cry. Finally, I am wailing excellently. But my grief has no dance. I am fused to the parquet, a freakish growth that should be sanded off. I hide my face behind my hands too. No one rescues me either. Gela and I are like enchanted girls. We have bodies but no one can see us.

  At last, tenderness. A paper-soft hand pulls me into a deep embrace. Prayer beads caress my cheek. Emmahoy. She shuffles me to Ema’s bedroom, onto the bed, my face buried in her unsuckled breasts. Finally, I am held as I’ve craved to be, since I grew too big to nap with Ema. She coos in time to my sobbing. “Beka beka,” she says. Enough.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I awake to the sensation of being pushed away. Emmahoy, having protected me as long as she could, is rising to leave. In the disordered living room, only her angelic escort, the novice, waits.

  My grandfather’s door is closed. Tobya’s candle is flickering its last.

  I guide Emmahoy down the porch steps and over the flagstone pathway, keeping ahead of her, holding out my arms as if I am teaching the old woman to swim the air. We part without words. She has had no dreams. I am out of questions.

  Gela’s door is closed.

  From the side alley, I hear the tinkle, splash, and clang of Lomi and Aberash washing dishes in the washstand outside, with hardened feminine hands that have wed, birthed, buried plenty. I find a straw broom among the hydrangea bushes. I sweep the flagstones. I sweep the Shaleqa’s steps. I sweep his porch. I sweep the parquet twice. It’s hard to get around the chairs and the letters. Using a stray booklet page as a pan, I collect grass, rose petals, crumbs, and dried mud in a corner and lean the broom over it. Daylight fades, but I don’t turn on the overhead lamp. I’d rather not see how much I’ve missed.

  I scrape the melted candlewax from the saucer and light a new candle. While I flatten, knead, and mould the old warm wax into a ball, the rising flame from the new candle brings Tobya’s image back to life. I tuck the ball of wax into the base of the new candle.

  I reorganize Gela’s letters and put them outside her door, under the rock that I’d been using to prop the gate open.

  I stoop to the soil under the mefakiya bushes to search for the two cigarette butts I threw out last night. I find them, and push them deep into the soil, which is still soft from last night’s downpour, easy for me to dig up a fistful. I squeeze it. When I open my hand the oval has the impression of my fingers, like besso, the food of soldiers on the march back in the Shaleqa’s day.<
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  I feel watched. The Shaleqa is looking down at me from the window of Ema’s room. I brace myself for hard words. I can survive a hit. I am a Little Patriot after all. But in this dense quiet between me and my grandfather now — he studying me, me worrying a leaf — I feel something I doubt the real Patriots felt. Regret. That I didn’t wait to see if Gela would claim me herself. That I gave in to a righteous impulse at the worst possible time. That I didn’t heed Ema’s advice to never rush.

  Tentatively, I reach back further in time, to my second grade pen pal letter. Was that worth all the pain that followed? Would I, and those I love, have been better off if I’d just kept my story to myself and learned to deal? Couldn’t I have just pushed on alone?

  There is a wall of regret that will always be inches from my nose. I think maybe, the wall won’t be so dense if I say I am sorry. The three short words collect in my chest, they move up sluggishly to my mouth, teeter on the tip of my tongue.

  But Babbaye speaks first.

  “My wife,” he says, resting his elbows on the windowsill, “my wife willed her womb to first make six boys. To replace my martyred brothers. Kidist Mariam granted my wife six boys. Then, my wife travelled to Gishen to pray to the Virgin: close my womb, firmly and permanently, as the door to a room a woman never wants to re-enter. The Virgin granted once more. But after five years I wished for new fatherhood. ‘Wife,’ I said, ‘I desire a damp child, as we say in the old way.’ She said, ‘Husband, dip your youngest in a tub of water.’” He smiles at the memory of grandma’s wit. “But by the Virgin’s grace, we received one more child, a girl, a gift covered in her kisses.”

  “Not a replacement for anyone.”

  “No. Simply herself. Tobya.”

  I look across the courtyard at Gela’s closed door. “Babbaye, please believe Gela did not tell me she is my sister.” At Tobya’s letters to her under the rock. “She wants her mother first,” I say, admitting that that’s why she had kept quiet, not because she was afraid of Babbaye sending her back to Dessie or wherever.