I saw no Ethiopian to explain this custom. Not even an Eritrean.
When I stood again before her, the woman who had given Ahmed the documents looked at me as if I had walked across a clean floor with muddy feet.
“Yes,” she said, but her voice did not sound like one of agreement.
“I do not know,” I said in English.
“You do not know what?” she asked. Three parallel lines cut deep into her forehead.
“The writing of it?” I said. She sighed.
“Give those back to me.” She flipped the pages over and pushed them toward me. “French. This side.”
“I have no understanding,” I said.
“You don’t know English or French?”
I shook my head. “No. I speak a small bit of the English.” The way she looked at me, I wondered for a moment if I had grown two heads. “Amharic?”
“Amharic? What are you saying? You need an interpreter?”
I shook my head. If only I could understand her swift words.
“Take a number.” She pointed with her index finger to a red plastic device attached to a pole. “Sit. Over there.”
My ticket ripped when I yanked it as I had watched others do. I wiggled my fingers into the opening to get out the other piece and sat on a chair, holding the torn number.
“7-8-6,” the man called.
I followed him to a small fabric enclosure that did not reach to the ceiling. I sat on one side of the metal desk, the thin man with hair that grew around his head in a circle sat on the other. He arranged the papers and picked up a pen.
“Name?” he asked.
“My name is Tesfaye.”
“Is that your last name or your first name?”
“It is my name.”
“Yes, but it is your given name, or your surname?” The man dipped his head and looked at me over the top of glasses that sat low on his nose.
His stare was hard. “Well?”
“I do not know this last name,” I said.
“Okay, ‘Tesfaye,’” he said. His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “We will skip that question for now. What is your birthdate?”
“Birth-date,” I repeated.
“Yes, on what day, in what month, and in what year were you born?”
Such a difficult question. I knew there were only twelve months in North America. But I did not know the names in English. I could not even guess.
“How old are you?” he demanded.
I paused to think, not because I did not understand, but because the issue of my birth was complicated, and my age? It was of no importance once I had reached the time to begin school. I was born near to the Great Famine, but how did I translate that? The calendar in North America was off by how many years? Seven? Eight?
“Do you understand English?” The man’s voice grew louder, the words slower, more distinct. “Do you need a translator?”
“Yes,” I nodded. “No.” Every answer I gave seemed to be the wrong answer. “Yes, I understand.”
Then, there were the ages on the documents I had carried. What year was written on the certificate of my birth?
Which age was the right one? Which number should I tell him?
“Then answer the question!” he grunted. “I don’t have all day. How old are you?”
“I have passed fourteen years,” I said. This felt truthful. I must have lived fourteen, and so had Francis Marin and all of the other names I had been.
“Place of birth. Country of origin?” he asked.
“Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.”
“Are you a Canadian citizen?”
“No.”
“Are you a landed immigrant?”
“I do not know this immigrant.”
“I’ll take that as a no. When did you enter Canada?”
“I do not know.”
“Where did you enter Canada?”
I smiled. I knew this answer.
“English China.”
“There is no ‘English China.’” He stared at me.
The city where Yosef stayed.
“To-ron-to?” I said. He wrote on the paper.
“Were you lawfully admitted to Canada?”
“Yes?” What were these questions? So fast. So confusing.
“Have you remained in Canada continuously since your entry?”
“Yes?” The “yes” answers pleased him.
“Do you wish to remain in Canada permanently as an immigrant?”
“Yes?”
“Are you currently in possession of a valid passport or travel document?”
“No.” Solomon had taken the ones he had made. I had my birth certificate in my back pocket with the ten-dollar bill. Should I show it to this official?
“How much money did you have in your possession when you arrived in Canada?”
“When I came to To-ron-to?”
“Yes. That was your point of entry?”
“I had no money.”
“Are you receiving welfare? Do you have any relatives in Canada who can support you financially? Upon arrival in Canada did you present a passport or travel document to a Customs or Immigration officer? Upon arrival in Canada did someone else present a passport or travel document to a Customs or Immigration officer for you? What is that person’s name? What is that person’s connection to you? Did you intentionally avoid examination by an Immigration or Customs officer to enter Canada?”
Questions, questions, questions. So many I did not understand.
“Sign here. Go sit over there. Someone will call your name,” he said.
The second man pressed my finger in ink, then on a piece of paper, the way it was done when one votes in an election. He told me not to smile when he flashed me with a camera. He copied some items from the first paper.
“Okay,” he said. “Do you have any documents with you?”
I unfolded my birth certificate. The man examined it and printed neatly in the little boxes on his paper.
“Perfect. What is your address in Calgary?”
“I do not know this.”
“That’s fine. What is your address in Ethiopia?” I still did not understand the question.
“Where do you live? In Ethiopia?” This was easy, something we had practiced in school.
“My family lives in Addis Ababa.”
“Yes, but where?” He paused. “What is the address?”
“My sisters have a dress.” I pictured them in my mind, dancing, with all of the colors swirling together. The man stretched his neck toward me and squinted.
“No, you don’t understand. Where is the house?” The man held his Bic ballpoint pen as if it was a spear that he meant to throw at me. “If I went to Addis Ababa, how would I find it?”
“There is a wide gate with four holes.”
“What is the name of the street?” The only street name I knew was the famous Bole Road that led from the airport to the center of Addis. He held his blue pen above the paper.
“Bole Road,” I said.
“And the number?”
“The number?”
“Of the house. What is it?” His face looked like a sweating pomegranate so full of rot that it might explode.
What should I say? Ahmed’s house had a number on the front.
“1-6-0-5,” I said. The man wrote the number on his paper.
“Who is your next of kin? Who cares for you?”
“Etheye.” The man repeated the syllables slowly and wrote down the English sounds.
“And she lived with you? At this address? 1605 Bole Road?”
“Yes.” This man had strange questions. Of course Etheye lived with me. Where else would she go?
“And so, you would like to claim refugee status?” I did not want to stay in a ref
ugee camp, but to answer “no”? Would they send me back to the Special Police?
“Yes,” I said. “A refugee.”
“What is your mother tongue?”
“My mother’s tongue?”
“Yes, what language?”
“Etheye speaks Gurage and Amharic.” He expelled all of the air from his lungs.
“But you. What language do you speak?”
“I speak in English.”
“Yes, but English is not your first language. In …” he consulted his paper. “In Ethiopia, what language do you speak? At home.”
“Ah,” I said. “Amharic. Amharic is my mother tongue.”
He asked unusual questions about marriage, education, occupation, diseases, crimes and debts. He also asked how much money I had.
Was this the time I was to offer him a bribe? Why had I not paid more attention to how this was done?
I unfolded the paper money with the number ten that had a picture of a man with no hair on the top of his head, and a nose as large as an Italian’s. I put it on the man’s desk and flattened it with both hands. I nodded as if I knew what I was doing. Gashe sometimes paid with a roll of bills.
Was this enough?
The man recoiled as if I had given him a poisonous snake.
“What is this?”
“A gift,” I said. “For you. For your hard work.” I smiled the way Gashe and Kofi did when they presented such gifts.
“Is this all that you have? Ten dollars?”
“Yes.” It was not enough. The bribe was too small. Would I go to jail now for coming to this country with the wrong papers?
The man pushed the bill with the ugly man across the desk toward me.
What had I done wrong? Perhaps he did not understand.
He wrote the number ten on his paper.
I slid the money back. “For you,” I said. “For your family.”
“Are you trying to bribe me?”
“Yes!” I said. “It is everything that I have.”
“It is an offense to offer bribes in Canada.”
He was offended? How, then, in Canada, did one get power and influence?
“It makes me sorrow to cause this offense,” I said. He passed the money to me.
“Put it away. We’ll pretend I didn’t see it.” Ah, it was important to keep it concealed!
There were more people who asked questions with no answers. The same questions, sometimes. The same answers, but it was as if they did not believe that Solomon had brought me to this country and sent me on a bus.
I was glad when a man named Rob came and took me away.
9
Rob parked in front of a two-level house, white with a thin metal door fitted at the center.
“Come on,” he said. “This is where you’re going to stay. For now, at least.”
He dragged a plastic market bag from the backseat. It contained the clothing he’d taken from a shop after he displayed a small plastic card like the ones I had seen at Ahmed’s gasoline shop.
“I will have work here?” I asked. Etheye said I was to be a slave in this country, but so far, no one had asked me to do anything except fill shelves with sweets and answer ridiculous questions. No one beat me when I made mistakes.
“No. No one is going to make you work. Not here.”
Inside, we stood in the middle of two sets of stairs. One set went up, one set went down. Along the side and at the top was the type of wooden railings that should be on a balcony, and on its top edge, a small camera pointed at me.
“Melissa! We’re here,” Rob called. He used the toe of one shoe to pry the heel from his sneakers. A woman with frizzy hair the color of faded brass appeared at the top of the stairs, wiping her hands on a cloth striped with red and blue.
“Hey,” she said. “Welcome, stranger. I haven’t seen you in a long time.” They hugged briefly. Rob beckoned for me to climb the stairs. I removed my shoes as he had, toe to heel and pried. Why did they not have Velcro here? Velcro was much more convenient.
“This is Tesfaye,” said Rob. “Tesfaye, Melissa.” I tried for a friendly smile and waited for the woman to embrace me. She stuck out her hand the way I had seen Gashe do when he completed a business transaction. We moved our hands up and down. How long was I supposed to do this? She pulled back her hand.
“We’re going to have to work on that handshake,” she said. It was then I remembered the good English manners I had learned in school.
“Hello, my name is Tesfaye,” I said. “Are you okay?”
Melissa twisted her face when she looked at me. “Ah … yeah … I’m okay.”
I grinned. I had gotten it right.
“You’ve read his file, then?” asked Rob.
“Yup. Got it. No history? No priors?” she asked.
“Nothing we can find, anyway. No real info. No ID. He had a worn-out piece of paper he said was a birth certificate.” Rob shook his head. “Pretty amateur.”
Rob glanced at me. I smiled like a child who had been given a square of chocolate.
“He seems co-operative, but he refuses to give his last name, anything to identify him. The address he gave was bogus,” he said. He turned back to Melissa. “Delusional. He thinks he’s from Africa.”
“Ethiopia,” I said. “In the north and in the east.” I waved my right hand to show them on an imaginary map, the way I had shown the slave girl on the bus.
“Well, at least he’s the right color for his delusion,” said Melissa. “Drugs?”
“Seems clean. Nothing in his pack. Just clothes and some weird sort of food, which we disposed of.”
“So, what’s the story? A runaway who showed up at Immigration claiming asylum that nobody knows what to do with?”
“That’s about it. He said an Eritrean taxi driver dropped him off.”
Melissa shook her head slightly. “What’s an Eritrean taxi driver?” she asked.
“More farther in the north,” I said. I waved my right hand again, but higher up on the imaginary map, then moved my hands as if I was steering a car. Rob and Melissa exchanged a look that I did not comprehend.
“The truly weird thing is that there was a small package of cookies in his pack from Kenya Airways. I don’t know what to make of it,” said Rob.
“Maybe that’s why he thinks he’s from Africa,” said Melissa.
“Yeah, maybe,” said Rob. “The good news is he understands English, speaks some,” said Rob.
“Hooray.” Melissa’s sarcasm was apparent, even to me. “I can tell he’s going to fit into this loony bin just fine. Come on, you,” she said to me. “I’ll show you what goes down ’round here.”
The room Melissa showed me had the smell of a medical clinic. It had two narrow mattresses on wooden frames. There were cameras in the corners of the room, like eyes.
This was a prison.
“You’re sharing with another boy. You’re what, fourteen? Fifteen?”
A question, but what had she asked? What was 1415? I did the friendly smile again and nodded.
“His name is DJ. He’s not here now. He’s at Calaway for the day. Probably good. We’ll get you settled in. Go over the rules.” She slung the bag of clothes on top of a mattress.
“This one is yours,” she said. “Got it?”
Another question. I nodded.
“Bathroom down the hall at the end. I’ll get you a set of towels. Clean up after yourself. We don’t have any slaves here. No servants, either. Not even your mother.”
“No slaves?” I asked.
“Uh, no,” she said. “That was outlawed a long time ago, like a century ago. Actually, I don’t know if there ever were slaves in Canada …”
“No slaves?” I asked again.
“Not a one,” she said. “You have to look after all your own sh …” Me
lissa glanced at me. “Sorry. Stuff. You have to look after your own stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Yeah, like your clothes and sh …” She paused again. “Shoes. Like your clothes and shoes. Stuff. Don’t leave it around for someone else to pick up, or there will be hell to pay. Understand?”
What were the words for “speak more slowly?”
* * *
◆
Three boys and two girls sat around a table in the cooking area the next morning. Everyone seemed to be my age or younger. Two boys did women’s work at a basin beneath a window. They flicked soap and water at each other and fought with their elbows, the way my brothers and I sometimes did when we prepared for the Sabbath.
“Get a bowl. Eat,” said Melissa.
On the table was a box of milk and a brown-and-yellow carton with a fat bee drawn on it. I mimicked a girl. Small, hard rings tumbled too fast and overflowed my bowl.
“Hey, slow down, there. You’re wastin’ the good stuff,” the boy named DJ said.
“Leave him alone,” the girl said. She reached for the milk. I swept the zeros from the table and piled them on top. I took milk, too, even though I felt no sickness. The zeros shot from the bowl again.
“Hey, I told you not to do that,” said DJ. The others laughed.
“Ignore him,” the girl said. I pinched the dry bits into my mouth. Sweet. Crunchy. Very sweet. The milk was so cold it made my fingers numb when I stuck them in the bowl to sift the wet bits.
“Man, I’ve never seen anyone eat Cheerios like that before!” said DJ. The metal spoon clattered to the table. He plunged his hand into his bowl, not just his fingers, and lapped at the milk like a thirsty cat.
What would Etheye say? This did not seem a polite way to eat, with one’s tongue hanging out. But then I heard Gashe’s voice in my head when he first sent me to the Catholic school. Go, and learn their ways, he said.
Like DJ, I sucked noisily from my fingers, too, and licked them clean.
DJ punched me on the shoulder. “Com’ on, Africa Boy. We’ll show you ’round.”
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