Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  I lift my hand out to my side to feel for the shutter ribbon. I find it. I wonder if I could have reached it then from the bed; if I could have exposed us; if I could have saved myself so easily. I pull the ribbon. Sunlight leaps in. Illuminated, the room is still nothing more than the facts of it. Built-in closets. Aged hardwood floor. Dirty white walls. I drop the shutter. I dress, unlock the door, pull out the skeleton key. A flimsy thing. I bury it in my pocket. I look through the keyhole. There is the bedroom where my mother and father slept through my terror.

  I open the door and cross the gap between the bedrooms. No doll in my parents’ room.

  I retrace my steps back down the hall. I crouch in the dim phone nook and breathe, little by little, until I fill out from girl to woman and beyond, too big for the walls to contain me. I have to go outside. Dry-faced, calm, I walk out to the front yard.

  In a far corner of the lawn, there is a boulder as big as Ema’s headstone. I guess that must be what Babbaye used to sit on. The tenants probably rolled it in here from outside, to pre-empt any more visits from the strange father of their distant landlady. But when I get close to it, I realize it’s a giant tortoise, soft parts retracted, but alive with the quiet self-importance of a paperweight.

  The koshim is so thick it has swallowed its thorns. The bottlebrush tree in the centre of the lawn, on its own circular patch of soil, has grown so much the drooping branches touch the grass, hiding the trunk. Back when the tree was young, Ema and Aba, their passion ignited by her first surgery and believing the worst had passed, used to sit underneath it every evening, leaning against each other to spare the tender trunk their combined weight. They would stay there until the moon joined them. If it was the warm season, my bedroom window was left open. I would fall asleep to the soft bubbling stream of their murmurs. Tizita. Remembered pain, remembered pleasure, a sweet melancholy for a lost place and time, for a love, for a mood your soul revisits endlessly.

  I missed happiness here by such a narrow margin. It was as close as the hibiscus under the bedroom window, where, on the odd days when I felt brave, I would hide in a crowd of leaves, to delay the inevitable.

  Such memories aside, it is a beautiful house. Deep red brick, plenty of space to park cars, to play. French windows which open to a generous porch, cream-coloured iron grille railing, a lawn with enough space for a pan fry of the string-cut, marinated meat of a whole sheep. A lawn dripping pink and yellow and burgundy from plants looming like gentle elders. A house you should pass down. But I have all the inheritance I want from here. My key. He will never lock me in again.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  At Bole airport, the telltale red of my CanAir flock is nowhere to be seen in the parking lot or the terminal. Barb’s phone is off. They didn’t wait for me. I’m glad. At the ticket office, I join a lineup of stranded travellers all trying to get out of Addis Ababa at the same time. I have no choice but to buy a ticket for a labyrinthine journey with multiple stopovers. No rush. I will get home.

  I text Isak. On the move! Will reach Boston in 2 days. Meet at Peet’s?

  I email him a picture of my itinerary. It settles in for the long wait in my Outbox, like the passengers at my gate, a separate glass-enclosed area with its own entrance, bordered by other gates, the security screening area, and the walkway to and from planes. We’re all early to resume interrupted journeys, our faces dazed like people who’ve awoken from a long, disturbing dream when we hadn’t meant to fall asleep in the first place.

  One row down from me, a little cross-eyed habesha boy plays with a puzzle. He is so small his feet stick straight out from his seat. He is like a tiny professor, with Coke-bottle glasses too big for his face, a sweater with elbow patches, and corduroy pants. I instinctively love this boy. I feel a primal concern that when he messes up in life, there will always be someone who will remember his once innocence.

  The boy completes the puzzle and looks up, proud of himself, at a middle-aged white woman in a yoga outfit, who I think is his adoptive mother. I look to her, to make sure she is not wasting this moment. She is looking at me, as are a lot of the people at the gate, collectively willing for me to turn toward the gangway.

  There, beyond the glass, like a fixed pillar around which arriving passengers flow, is Le’ul.

  I am stunned. A memory of the after-time crashes through. I am coming around the side of my house. I feel Le’ul’s glassy, hungry stare. I turn and see him at the window. I hear the summon of his eyes, Go clean yourself.

  My phone rings in my purse. Le’ul has his phone to his ear. I stand up and walk to him, slowly at first, then suddenly I charge the glass and slam it with my palm. Le’ul leaps away, startled, as if I’m a tame zoo creature that’s suddenly gone wild.

  Of course he would come all the way here. Hadn’t I been braced for it since he called for me at the house yesterday? A couple of annoyed airport security staff get him to move along with inviting gestures that are really strict orders. They follow him close until he reaches and disappears down the escalator.

  “Who was he?” a nearby passenger says to me.

  “Nobody.” But Le’ul is not nobody, no matter how much I wish it so. I pick up my purse and walk to the security check. I prowl for Le’ul from security through passport control, customs, baggage claim, and in the expectant crowd gathered behind the barriers in front of the sliding doors discharging passengers.

  At the Arrivals café, a lone patio island in a sea of black-and-white marble, I sit at a table for four. The waiter comes. I tell him to first take away two chairs. I don’t need a mother and father any more. Twenty-one years ago, Ema and Aba could have made a real difference by talking to Le’ul and me openly, instead of doing roundabout hocus pocus on Le’ul, convincing themselves that I was all right. But now, the reckoning can only be between Le’ul, the brother I never asked for, and me, the sister he never deserved.

  The waiter brings my order, bombolino and a tea. And one large mineral water, which I tell him to open, but leave the cap. Then Le’ul comes, composed, stern again. But fear peeks through his mask. He drapes his jacket on the back of the other chair, brushes the seat, tosses his phone, wallet, and keyring — my condo key included — on the table.

  I gnaw an enormous bite of my sugar-coated lump of deep-fried dough. I blow on my tea, replace the cup on the saucer.

  “I’m going to let this cool.”

  He interlocks his hands on the table. I lick my sugar moustache.

  “What you started to say on the phone. Don’t say any more.”

  I’m cold. That is all I remember.

  I take a second bite. “Or else what?” I say, spraying crumbs out of my mouth.

  “Aba will find out what you’re really doing here.”

  Savour my pastry. Sip my tea. I put up my finger, channelling Isak. I laugh. I feel a little kooky. “Firstly, there’s no law which says buried once, buried forever. Secondly, do you think Aba will be more disturbed by what I almost did to a dead body than what you did many times over to mine?”

  Le’ul’s mask dissolves completely. He looks terrified. All this time I was scared of him, he was actually the one scared of me. He had admitted as much, inadvertently, by threatening to kill me if I told.

  He fidgets with the bottle cap, scrapes the bottle label with it. I wipe my hands clean of oil and sugar. Easy as that, I can kill this so-called grown man. To this day, Le’ul has had no idea, or he has been in denial, that his parents have known what he did to their daughter. Not everything, but enough to drag him on pilgrimage to an exorcist. But there is no demon here. Only an avenging angel. I will rob him of his life. He has robbed me of mine. There has always been the skin-crawling intimacy of a murderer and his victim between us. It’s high time we reversed roles. Who wouldn’t rather kill?

  I gulp my tea, savouring the lead-up to his annihilation. The warm syrup glides down my throat. I slam down the cup. Le’ul jumps. He jumps! I speak too loud too fast like a kid hyper over a brand new toy.

  �
�Why do you think Aba took you on pilgrimage to Kulubi in ’91, before Vienna, and whatever rituals they did on you while you were there? It was what, more spiritual tourism? And after you came to Vienna, with the holy water, the prayer on your head every night? Was Aba initiating you into the priestly life he himself abandoned, oh, Kidane-Gabriel?”

  He scrapes his hand with the bottle cap. “That was father-son time.”

  “Oh like your annual vacations for two?” Maybe that was Aba’s way of giving me some respite from Le’ul.

  “Yes.”

  He looks so boyishly happy with the memories that something stays my tongue. A new feeling where my fear used to be. I don’t know what it is. Is love not better? Aba had asked me by the lake. Yes, Aba. But it’s still too late for love. The ­closest I can come to love, much less forgiveness, for Le’ul — this lost soul who’ll spend his life evading the magnitude of his wrongs, clamouring for shreds of peace — is pity.

  “Love was all I was offering you, when we were little, in the form of an innocent game meant to make you smile. Why did you respond with terror? A brother protects.”

  “I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”

  “Did you ever stop to think what kind of damage you were doing? Or you did, but didn’t care? Why was I just flesh to be used?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t always hate me. Tell me the why.”

  “I never hated you.”

  “Why did you come into my family?”

  “I didn’t. I was sent.”

  “So leave. You should have, long ago. Go back to shoeshining. You still have your listro box? Maybe some mediocre photographer will snap arty pictures of you, too.”

  I brace for him to lunge across the table and attack me. He bends the bottle cap, blinking away tears. “So long I’ve wanted to beg your forgiveness.”

  “For? Name it.”

  “What I made you do.”

  “Name it. You do something so horrible, for so long, but can’t speak the name once?”

  “Erasing you.”

  I grab the bottle, wanting to smash it on his skull, drag the edge across his neck. He flinches. “Don’t flatter yourself, you failed.” I sit back, clutching my weapon. “So what now? Confess to Aba yourself. Let him know who he has for a son, what kind of brother he gave me.”

  “He is suffering already. The blame, the responsibility, the guilt, the shame should only be mine, always has been mine.”

  “This better not be your grief talking.”

  “Something was wrong with me.”

  “Something is. So, what now?”

  He extracts my key from his keychain, too slowly, what with his shrivelled index fingernail. He offers the key to me, his hand spasming, as if he’s scared I’ll stab him with it. But the thrill of thinking up ways to torment him is already old. I blink fast, to banish the speck blurring my vision.

  “Keep the damn key. I don’t live there anymore. I am going to be where and with whom I want. You, stay away from me. I used to wish so much that you would find wherever the dead go and recognize it enough to stay. Make my wish come true now, be dead to me. Trouble me again, Aba will hear about every detail of checking-time from me. You will become again some feral little thing, wandering the streets, starved for love. Whatever scraps you ever got, will ever get, from your borrowed father is thanks to me. Never forget. That’s the or else.”

  I pour water from the bottle on my palm, and toss it in his face. “From holy springs. Full of healing minerals.”

  Then, I stand up and leave him, really leave him, behind.

  As I journey to Departures, I feel I’m catching up to the before-girl who races speeding planes. One day, I will fall in perfect time with her. As one, she and I will sprint down the observation deck until, at the edge, freed from gravity’s jealous grip, we soar. We will rise and keep rising, flapping our blue butterfly wings to the rhythm of a little phrase that once began a broken child’s letter.

  No body know one thing about me.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to my parents for steadfast love, and initiating me to the wonder of books!

  Much misgana to my tribe of sisters, repeat readers, commentators, advisors: Meseret Mekonnen, Serkalem Mekonnen, Elsa Haile, Djamila Ibrahim, Heran Tsedeke, Adey Kidanu, Rehaset Yohanes. Thank you to the best cheerleaders Haimanot Kidanu, Milka Khattar, Colin Knight, Omar Khattar. Betam ewedachualehu! And Biggie, you’re all right too.

  My agent Marilyn Biderman, thank you for tenaciously championing my work and patiently addressing my million concerns. The Goose Lane Editions team, thank you for bringing this novel to the world. Paula Sarson, thank you for insightful, exquisite copyediting.

  A special thank you to my golden editor Bethany Gibson, for going above and beyond, trusting my impulses, and making me a better writer.

  Karen Connelly and Janice Zawerbny, thank you for multiple reads, edits, and your mentoring and friendship. Pauline Holdstock, Helen Walsh, Erika Westman, thank you for your kindness and support. Thank you to editor Erin Parker for substantive and stylistic edits on an early draft. Sarah Curley, via Becky Blake, thank you for telling me about flight attendant life.

  I am grateful for the support of the Writers’ Trust Scholarship through the Humber School for Writers, and the funding of the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and through the OAC Recommender Program: Diaspora Dialogues, Mawenzi House Publishers, Dundurn Press, Inanna Publications.

  Finally, thank you, dear reader.

  Rebecca Fisseha explores the universal and unique aspects of the Ethiopian diaspora in her writing. She was born in Addis Ababa and now lives in Toronto.

  A graduate of York University, the Vancouver Film School, and the Humber School for Writers, Rebecca Fisseha is the author of wise.woman, a play that reimagines the legend of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, produced by b current in Toronto. Her articles and short fiction have appeared in Selamta: the in-flight magazine of Ethiopian Airlines, the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Room Magazine, the Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Anthology, and Joyland Magazine. Daughters of Silence is her first novel.

  photo: Chris Frampton