Cold White Sun

by Sue Farrell Holler

  No. Gashe, I would never give away a child to increase my influence. I would never inflict cruelty on another.

  I would no longer pretend.

  I removed the long-bladed scissors from the cabinet. One by one, I sawed the ropes of my hair and dropped the spears in the trash. When I was done, Ishi looked back at me from another world, but without the sparkling eyes that sought mischief.

  The eyes in the mirror were as serious and sad as the eyes of Ababa’s best cow.

  I cupped my palms, let water fill them from the tap. My hands so like Gashe’s, the bowing of the fingers that bound us. I bore his hands, his love of learning.

  I dipped my head, washed my face. Water streamed from forehead to chin.

  I had everything Gashe dreamed of for Ethiopia.

  I dropped my head again, the water cool and cleansing. I heard Gashe’s prayerful voice, In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, One God.

  I saw him bent in humility, hands covering face, forehead to the floor. A third time I dropped my head. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, One God.

  The washing away of sin. Baptism. Renewal. Oneness with God. I hid my clean face with Gashe’s clean hands. He would be so ashamed of me.

  17

  A snow blizzard raged its anger outside the windows of the school. I was the only student who had come to stick to his plan. Mrs. Mac stood beside the small table in the corner where I worked. She touched my shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. Her voice and her eyes were not harsh when I stole a glance at her.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am fine.”

  “Look at me,” she said. I swiveled my head in her direction, but I did not look at her. She lifted my chin.

  “Look at me,” she repeated. She was like Etheye, hard to ignore. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Nothing is wrong.” Nothing was ever wrong in Canada. It was the perfect place.

  She pulled a chair beside me and sat, close enough that I could smell the spicy soap she used.

  “You can trust me. I will not judge you. I will tell no one,” she said.

  What would I tell her? Of fear? Of worrying that this would be my eternal resting place? That I was dead to my family? Of knowing I could never go home?

  Snow whipped the windows, so much that I could no longer see across the street. Knives of cold sliced beneath the door. My ankles ached from the draft. Chicken flesh raised beneath my jeans. I lifted the hood and zipped my coat to the chin to cease the shivering.

  Mrs. Mac was not moved by the cold. She sat. She observed me. Without a word.

  She knew parts of my life, but not all. Should I tell her about my family? About Etheye? Her fingers gentle on my face. I never forget about you. Never. You are my soul, she said.

  But had she? Had she forgotten me?

  I huddled my shoulders, slipped my hands into my armpits and clenched my eyes. The wind whistled a high-pitched whine.

  Should I tell her about Ishi, the part of me that made me whole? How I never said goodbye?

  “I understand,” she said. She touched my arm. Left her hand to rest on my sleeve.

  I curled tighter. Head to chest.

  Hold. Hold it in.

  She could not understand. No one could.

  She could not know how it was to live without love. Or belonging.

  A grader shunted and chugged outside. Its blade scraped unyielding pavement. Beside me, Mrs. Mac’s breathing was even and slow. Her hand warmed my arm as she rubbed it.

  “Your family,” she said. My head snapped toward her, eyes open. “Do they know where you are?”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head.

  “No,” my voice a whisper.

  “They need to know.”

  Eyes open, back straight. “It is not possible,” I said.

  “Your mother needs to know. Think of her.”

  I thought of little else. Etheye, Ishi, Tezze, my sisters, my small brothers.

  Gashe.

  “I don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’ll find a way,” she said.

  “They told me that I must have no contact with my family. They told me I must forget about them.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The authorities at Immigration, and CSIS. The police. The people who asked so many questions and did not believe my answers.”

  “Well, I believe in you, and what’s impossible is to forget your family. Your mother needs to know you are safe.”

  “I cannot take this risk,” I said. “There is too much danger.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  I nodded.

  “If you want this, we’ll find a way.” She crossed the room to get a pen and a pad of lined paper from her desk.

  Could this bossy teacher find a way? I unzipped my hood.

  “First things first. Do you know where your mother is?”

  “No.” Was Etheye pleading at the prison door for information about Gashe? Was she wrapped in a drab netela begging in the streets, seeking coins for food? Was Kofi looking after her?

  “This task is not possible. I do not know where to look,” I said.

  “Anything is possible,” said Mrs. Mac.

  The windows of the school rattled. The edges were clouded with ice.

  “Would she be at the house where you lived?”

  “I do not know. She maybe sold the house to pay the smuggler.”

  “Would that take all of the money?”

  I shrugged. Why had I not thought of this? Why had I not thought of the stacks of birr locked in the cabinet of Gashe’s room? What did it cost her to save me? How much to bribe the guards that kept Gashe in jail? How much for his body?

  All of it. Etheye would haggle, but she would give everything — the VCR, the television, the Persian rugs. None of it mattered to her.

  “She would give everything, even cows if she had them,” I said.

  “Cows?” The teacher’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I just love cows. I grew up with them, you know.”

  I did not know. But it made me feel good to learn this. Etheye would like this woman.

  “Where would she go?”

  A woman without means? To the streets? To the Korah? And what of my brothers and sisters? And the servants?

  “There would be nowhere for her. She could not earn enough of a living in the city.”

  “What about the country, then? Could she go there?”

  “Her father, he lives in a village. But it is a great distance to travel.”

  “But, if she had nowhere else …”

  It was where she sent me. Would she go to Ababa?

  “She would not leave Gashe if he was living,” I said. But was he living?

  “So the city then? She would stay in the capital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we send a letter? How do you get mail in Addis?”

  “I do not know. Gashe receives messages. I think they pass person to person.”

  “But conceivably, we could send a letter.”

  “It might be a possibility. But Etheye cannot read.”

  “You can write it in Amharic,” Mrs. Mac said. “It would be good practice. To help you remember your language.”

  “Etheye cannot read in any language.”

  The teacher looked up from her notepad. “Someone could read it for her?” she asked. “Your brothers? Your sisters?”

  I thought also of the men who sat at small tables on the street writing things down and reading documents aloud for people who could not do it for themselves.

  Mrs. Mac fetched a pen from the tin can on her desk and pulled two sheets of paper from the computer printer. She held them out.

  “What you are going to do now is write a letter to your mother,�
� she said.

  I shook my head. “You do not understand.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  I rolled my lips inward, pinching them tight in the manner of Ishi when he held in emotion. Mrs. Mac waited. The overhead lights hummed. Hot air shot from the vents near the windows.

  “By a letter they will find me. The police would see the stamp, the postmark. A letter would send my family to the jail.”

  “I see.” Her head tipped to one side, eyes gazed at the ceiling. She tapped her lips with the pen. “There has to be a way. Maybe I can get someone to mail it when they travel to another country …”

  Mrs. Mac thought all things were possible. But contacting Etheye was one thing she could not accomplish.

  “I want you to write a letter anyway. Even if we can’t send it,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be long. Just let her hear your thoughts. Tell her you are safe.”

  It was simple idea. Write the words. Tell Etheye I am safe. It was a waste of time, but to please Mrs. Mac, I held the pen to the smooth, white paper.

  Where could I begin?

  There was no beginning. The words inside my head were English words. The sounds and flowing symbols of Amharic frozen in my mind.

  I wrote one word.

  Etheye.

  * * *

  ◆

  “I’ve been talking to some people,” Mrs. Mac said several days later. Her cluttered desk was between us. I stood before her, a completed assignment extended in my hand. She nodded, dropped my work on a stack of papers and leaned back in her chair.

  “There is the idea of writing a letter and having someone deliver it, but I don’t know anyone who travels to Africa, let alone Ethiopia,” she said.

  She faced her palm to me when the telephone rang. When the call ended, she said, “Telephones!”

  I did not respond.

  “Are they common in Ethiopia?”

  “In the city, yes. But they are not commonly used.”

  “Your mother? She has a telephone?”

  I nodded. The ringing had startled me the night of the edire. Phone calls were rare. They were also dangerous. Etheye’s speech had been rapid to keep the call brief.

  “You know her number?”

  “In Ethiopia, people do not have telephone numbers, houses do.”

  “So, the telephone number for the house would be the same, even if she didn’t still live there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember the number?”

  “Yes. I know this.”

  “Oh, my God, Tesfaye!” Mrs. Mac leapt from her chair and put a hand on each of my shoulders. “We can telephone her!”

  My heart pounded. A phone call from so far away? It was not possible. I had flown over the ocean. There were no telephone wires.

  “She will not be there,” I said. I could think of no way she could afford to stay in the house without Gashe.

  Mrs. Mac rummaged through books on a shelf.

  “We can try,” she said.

  She withdrew a book with a paper cover, licked her middle finger and whipped through thin pages. “I know it’s here somewhere,” she said.

  She passed a colored map of North America. “Canada. USA. Caribean,” she said. “Here! Frequently called country codes.” She ran her finger down a list.

  “Ethiopia. 251!” she said. “The country code is 251, and if you know the telephone number of the house. Tesfaye! We can do this!”

  She continued reading out loud: “To direct dial all other international countries, dial 011 plus the country code, city routing code and number.”

  “You do not understand,” I said.

  Mrs. Mac held her finger on the page and looked up.

  “The telephones are monitored.”

  “Monitored? Every phone? All the time?”

  “I think this, yes. It is another way the government can find information it wants.”

  Mrs. Mac tapped her finger on the book, then rested her chin on her hand. She flipped more pages.

  “Let’s at least figure out the time difference …”

  “The time,” I said.

  I pictured the house in darkness, Gashe turning the dial that lit the radio stations, Tell no one what you hear.

  “The international radio stations work best late at night,” I said.

  18

  It was another day when wind carved faces into leather and blew snow from rooftops. Another day when I was the only student left at school.

  “The risk is small,” said Mrs. Mac. Her words were slow, her tone serious. “People I trust have advised me. Today, right now, we are going to phone your mother.”

  My hands trembled, and my lips.

  Phone Etheye?

  Mrs. Mac lifted the receiver of her desk phone.

  “Tell me the number,” she said.

  The phone rang over and over, the bells loud against the cement wall, the cord still, curled and twisted. My heart pushed so hard against my chest with every ring of the telephone that I thought my heart might fly out of me and across the room. My right leg vibrated.

  Brr-ring. Brr-ring.

  Who would answer? What would I say?

  Brr-ring. Brr-ring.

  No one was there. Everyone was gone. The phone echoed in a silent house, with me on the other side of the ocean, waiting.

  “Allo?” The voice of Ishi.

  Could it be possible? Mrs. Mac turned from the tears that trailed fire on my cheeks.

  “This is Tesfaye.”

  “It cannot be! Who plays this trick?” I saw him in my mind, standing in the space between living room and unused North American kitchen, holding the phone to his ear.

  “My brother, it is me.” The words choked in my throat. To hear my language, to use the familiar words that flowed suddenly from my mouth like breath. His voice, so close, as if he were beside me.

  “You live?”

  “Yes,” I wiped the tears with my fingers, but as much as I wiped, more came. More and more and more, until I could not see. “Can the dead speak?” I asked.

  “He’s alive! He’s alive. Tesfaye is alive!” Ishi screamed. He dropped the phone. It spun on its cord and clunked against the wall and the floor. “Tesfaye is alive! Tesfaye is alive!” He ran through the house, and outside, waving his arms, flapping his hands and yelling while I dangled from a spiraled cord. Etheye’s quick steps were next, bare feet slapping on white marble veined with black.

  “Tesfaye?” Her voice enveloped me like a soft breeze.

  Panting breaths. Mine. “Etheye,” I breathed, my voice as high as a girl’s. Mrs. Mac touched my arm. Her eyes overflowed.

  Voices exploded around Etheye. Running feet as everyone gathered to watch the telephone.

  “Etheye,” I said to the phone. “You are well?”

  “Thanks be to God our Almighty Savior! You live? Such good fortune has come!” I heard her spit three times. “I pray this every day that God protect you. That I do the right thing.”

  Sobs closed my throat. My hand sweated from squeezing the phone. I pushed it harder against my ear. Her voice in my head. So clear. Across the ocean. To this country of too much.

  “Where be you?”

  “In Canada. A very big country. In North America,” I said.

  “You be safe?”

  “Yes. Safe. It is a good place. I live with a white family!”

  “You be a slave? Ah, my heart, they treat you well?”

  “Not a slave, Etheye. A student!”

  “A student? You use your good mind?”

  “Yes, and I have a strong teacher. A woman, Etheye. Can you believe it?”

  “I cannot believe you live.”

  A man’s voice in the background, lower than the fluttering excited sounds. Whose?

  �
�Gashe?” I asked.

  “Nothing. He be not returned yet.”

  “And you? How do you live?”

  “I be well. Your brothers be well. Your sisters be well. How you talk to me from America?” she asked. “How it be that I hear you?” Her voice suddenly became as hurried as it had been the night she made me leave with Kofi.

  It was his voice in the background. What was he doing there?

  “I put away the telephone now,” she said. Her voice fell to a whisper. “Do not use the telephone again. It be too dangerous, my heart. They find you. You must live.”

  The line hummed. Dead.

  19

  Ishi was alive. Etheye was alive. Everyone was fine. They lived still in Gashe’s house. I could picture them there. The phone call had taken me home.

  The man’s voice in the background. Not Gashe, but perhaps Kofi. Gashe would trust him to care for Etheye. He would provide. He would be kind to her.

  I imagined my family standing around the phone, necks jutting out — a phone call from so far across the ocean. I knew of no one who had received such a call. It was unfortunate they could not brag of it.

  “What are you smiling about?” Iced fog frothed from Devina’s mouth. I had heard her running to catch up, the sounds sharp and clear in the morning cold.

  “There is no wind,” I said.

  Devina’s eyes rolled. “Weirdo,” she said. “Do you know how often you complain about wind?”

  I lifted my chin and puffed frost into the morning darkness as we walked side by side. Devina copied me.

  “Choo. Choo,” she said. She glanced at me, then rolled her eyes again. “Trains, stupid. We’re olden-days trains. Our breath is the steam coming out the top. Don’t you know anything?”

  “There are no trains in my country,” I said. “A short track. But no train.”

  The woolen ball at the end of Devina’s hat swished to and fro when she shook her head. “Who builds a train track that has no train?”

  I had no answer, so remained silent. I liked the crisp silence and the squeaking rhythm of our boots.

  “Look.” I pointed to the horizon.

  The sun crept from its dark bed into the frigid stillness, and with it, the twin suns embracing each other in a halo that circled the sun. We stopped to watch.