things are good now
stories
Djamila Ibrahim
Copyright © 2018 Djamila Ibrahim
Published in Canada in 2018 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ibrahim, Djamila, 1975–
[Short stories. Selections]
Things are good now / Djamila Ibrahim.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0188-9 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0190-2
(EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0191-9 (Kindle)
I. Title.
PS8617.B73A6 2018 C813’.6 C2017-901299-1
C2017-901300-9
Cover and book design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover image: amazingmikael / iStock
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program
the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund.
For my parents
contents
Little Copper Bullets
Spilled Water
Not a Small Thing
A Kept Woman
Things Are Good Now
Children Always Stay
Learning to Meditate
You Made Me Do This
Heading Somewhere
Acknowledgements
little copper bullets
The day the fighter jets came, Aisha was sitting on the floor between her mother’s legs. The backs of her own folded knees itched from the sweat built up in the creases. Her mother dug into her scalp with an afro comb to draw straight lines. Then, with assured quick movements, she grabbed strands of Aisha’s hair with her calloused hands and plaited it into tight braids. “Stay still,” she ordered now and then. “You’re not a child anymore. You are a young woman.” Her voice softened to a whisper although they were alone in the small, one-room hut they shared with Aisha’s father and her three siblings. Aisha hated being reminded she’d become a young woman, especially since her betrothal: the new responsibilities and restrictive rules, her fiancé’s large family watching her every move, their apprehensive whispers and furtive, appraising looks. It all made her feel like she’d turned into a time bomb overnight.
That’s when they heard the deafening noise and, almost instantaneously, felt the ground trembling beneath them as if the might and weight of the heavens had fallen right outside their door. Aisha saw only a moment’s confusion in her mother’s kohled eyes before her mother dragged her under the only bed in the room. They lay there for a long time, Aisha’s cheek against the ground, the taste of dust from the dirt floor in her mouth. Her mother’s body half on top of hers made it hard for her to breathe. They prayed. Aisha recited a succession of Quranic verses she’d memorized from her father’s lips, jumping from surah to surah, the continuous flow of mysterious, holy words forming a glue that prevented her heart from shattering in her chest.
That day, the village buried forty people in a mass grave. Aisha’s father, who had been herding his few goats toward their clan’s grazing land when the Soviet-made, Ethiopian MiGs bombed the village, was one of them. The next night, Aisha and four of her friends, all around thirteen or fourteen years old, left the village to join the Eritrean freedom fighters in the mountains. They travelled on foot, crossing for the first time the lowlands of their birth by the Red Sea all the way into the Sahel highlands of Eritrea. Seventeen years later, in 1994, Aisha took another journey, this time to a new life in Canada.
“Hello, Aisha,” Jamil, the convenience store owner says, extending a fat hand from behind the counter to shake hers. “How are you?”
“Hi, Jamil. I’m good. Du Maurier Light, please.”
“Hey, Aisha,” says Michael, his shiny bald head sticking out between two revolving stands of greeting cards and newspapers.
“Oh, hi, Michael. I didn’t see you there, hiding behind your newspaper.”
“I should make him pay for the free knowledge he’s getting, but my heart is too big,” Jamil says with a thick South Asian accent. He picks up a plastic stool from a corner and brings it closer to the counter. The seat disappears under his wide body.
“You know I can find these at the public library a few blocks away, right?” Michael says, with a hint of a Jamaican accent. He folds the newspaper, puts it back on the shelf, and comes around to the front of the store.
“I don’t think so. Probably old ones from last year,” Jamil says, flicking his hand in dismissal.
“This shows you have never set foot in a library, old man,” Michael says.
“I went to library all the time back home,” Jamil says. “I ask you, do you even have libraries in Jamaica?” He slides the back of one hand against the palm of the other to show the emptiness of Michael’s argument. “And who you calling old anyway? Have you seen your bald head?” Jamil adds, running his fingers through his thick grey hair. He winks at Aisha with a proud grin on his face.
Aisha doesn’t mind the old man’s shameless flirtations. She sometimes even feeds them, holding her own against the men’s squabbles and teasings. But not today. She leans against the glass counter under which colourful instant lottery tickets are displayed and listens with a quiet smile as the men argue and laugh. The rhythm and depth of their friendship is delicious to her ear. It reminds her of her early childhood, her large family, their gossip and banter, the idyllic, lively scenes forged in a time of peace.
She spent twelve years in the Eritrean resistance army where, in makeshift classrooms, moving from base to base, against a backdrop of gunfire, she learned to read and write. She learned about her country’s history, the roles old empires and powerful modern nations played in shaping her life. She learned to believe in and fight for an ideal bigger than herself. On a vast flat land of golden earth and blue mirage, and on the blisteringly cold mountaintops, she learned to use weapons. In the folds of damp caves, she practised facing fear, pain, and death; she prepared herself for capture, torture, and rape. And for the faltering of will.
That’s where she’d first met Yosef, amid the bombardments of their base in Af’abet. With the passion and decisiveness of wartime hearts, she and Yosef fell in love and married within a couple of months — he, a city bourgeois educated in the USSR; she, a girl from a small tribe of semi-nomads in the Semhar lowlands. But it was wartime, and the rebels observed the tenets of socialist equality full-heartedly. He was the patient comrade who’d opened her mind and eyes to the world beyond the narrow boundaries of her upbringing. The man from whose husky voice she had savoured flows of ideas ancient and new; the man with whom she dreamed a nation into being. In the secrecy of her mind, Aisha had felt grateful to the invisible hand of history, and even to war, for having brought them together.
After the liberation, she and Yosef settled down in Asmara. As a reward for his service in the armed struggle, he was granted a job in government. She was not so lucky. She was one of the tens of thousands of demobilized female fighte
rs left out of the redistributions of national resources and government jobs granted to the male rebels. But to complain or show dejection was considered unpatriotic, a testament to one’s reluctance to step up to the difficult work of building a country. Worse, to Aisha, it was akin to insulting the memory of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who’d lost their lives in the conflict, some of whom had been like family to her. So she settled for a volunteer position teaching illiterate women to write and read while she studied English in the evenings in the hope that a diploma would eventually get her a paying job.
Then one day she heard Yosef’s mother plead with her son: “That was wartime, my son. You don’t need a drunk for a wife. She doesn’t even try to be discreet about it. She drinks in plain sight, like a man. Please, put an end to this.” Aisha stood outside the small house, her hand on the doorknob for a moment, before retracing her steps out of the compound and into the neighbourhood bar she and Yosef frequented. She’d seen it happen too many times. Female fighters deemed valuable and admirable in the field were seen, in times of peace, as too hard-headed and independent to make good wives and mothers. Her own family had threatened to disown her for marrying outside of her tribe and faith, too, but she could handle them. Yosef, though, she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t wait to see him succumb to the pressures of family and tradition. She left him before he could leave her.
“Anyway, forget about this old man,” Michael says and turns to Aisha. “So, Adam said you’re going back to your country.”
Michael’s inquisitive eyes startle Aisha out of her memories. She nods and smiles, a slow stretch of her closed mouth. At times it was still hard, even for her, to believe she was going to leave the safety and peace Canada had afforded her in the last four years to go back and enlist in the Eritrean army. And as she’d expected, her boyfriend, Adam, had reacted badly to the news that she would be defending her country against Ethiopia’s second invasion.
Since they’d met last year at Habesha Restaurant on Rideau Street, Adam had been adamant that they could be together.
“So what if you’re Eritrean and I’m Ethiopian? We’re not the first couple in history to deal with a divided allegiance,” he’d said when she first told him why she couldn’t date him. She didn’t want to explain herself any further — there were no words to convey what wars do to people’s hearts, what a life sheathed in death does to the mind. Besides, she loathed civilians’ curiosity. How could they expect her to explain what it was like to pick up pieces of your friends, to try to remember the sound of their laughter or the shape of their eyes and instead only recall a mangled neck or guts spilling out? These things couldn’t be shared with anyone, not even your comrades. There was always a disconnect, even within the Eritrean community, between her experiences and people’s assumptions of war, what they expect an ex-fighter to be like and who she was.
Adam wanted to know about her time in the field, too; she could see it in his eyes. But he had a strong sense of propriety that put her at ease. He gave her room to be her own woman, not a heroine or a spitfire. Later, as she let herself go into his embrace, as she let the smell and sound of him permeate her pores, she was aware of a wall between them, an ever-caving and brittle one, but a wall nonetheless. With time, he became the lover she desired, the companion she trusted, and the raft she hung onto when she felt as if she were drowning. But some things are hard to share and some walls are hard to overcome. So when she heard about the new war, her thoughts rushed to him. She saw the wall reinforce itself between them. The realization of imminent loss was immediate, almost instinctive. Pain paralyzed her mind and body for days. Before she told him of her decision, she mourned the end of something that was never fully theirs.
“Yes, I am going back. And I heard what you told Adam,” Aisha says to Michael.
Adam had relayed their conversation to her. “Forget Aisha, it’s her loss. Go out and meet new people, son. You might stumble on The One sooner than you think,” Michael had advised Adam. Michael has been married to a Jamaican woman for twenty years. He hardly ever says anything good about his wife but he always calls her The One. “You see, I can’t stand that woman, but I can’t be with another. I think she has some Haitian voodoo shit on me, man,” he had explained once.
“Poor Adam,” Jamil says, shaking his head with exaggeration.
“You told him to find himself a white lady, didn’t you?” Aisha asks, searching Jamil’s face for a sign of surprise.
“No, no, I didn’t say that … ”
When Adam had first introduced her to Jamil, he’d said, “Jamil has spent so much time imagining how things would have been different if he’d immigrated to Canada without a wife and children that he has come to believe in the possibility of a Don Juan version of himself. That dream now lives among his most cherished possessions and accomplishments.”
Michael laughs, his strong, fat-covered body shaking. “No way. White women are trouble. When they leave you, they take everything — your children, your money, everything. I told Adam to find a woman from his own country. And that’s only if he can’t convince you to stay,” he says to Aisha’s inquiring eyes. “Why do you want to go back anyway?”
Adam had neglected to tell her this part of the story. Why? Did Michael’s suggestion appeal to him? What if it confirmed Adam’s pre-existing plans? She feels her blood boil, her stomach sour. After all that talk about building a life together. After all those nights they spent at Habesha Restaurant: she, teaching him to synchronize his steps to the beats of Tigrigna songs and he, showing her how to shake her shoulders to the rhythm of Amharic music. Did he wish she were Ethiopian, then, that he didn’t have to teach her these things?
“It’s my home,” she says. “That’s why. Anyway, yes. I came to say goodbye.” She extends a stiff hand across the counter and suddenly feels claustrophobic in the dim convenience store.
Michael has put into words what she had always feared, and this provokes an irrational hatred toward him. That she was the one who’d decided to leave Adam did not ease her jealousy; it just made her anger unfocused, more volatile.
“I was just joking, Aisha. You know that, right?” Jamil says, both of his hands covering hers.
“Be good now,” Michael says, pointing at her. He steps closer, past her extended hand, and wraps her body with his. She stays stiff for a moment before giving in.
“Have a nice trip, Aisha. And good luck,” Jamil says, craning his head toward the door as she leaves the store.
Aisha stops at a red light across from her nineteen-storey building. She looks up at the lifeless grey assemblage of shabby concrete and metal.
“This building would be a great setting for a remake of George Orwell’s 1984,” Adam had told her once, a couple of months after they started dating.
She’d looked at him with questioning eyes. Adam has always tried to kindle a passion for art and literature in her. She loves the way his eyes light up when he talks about these things, the way he meshes worlds and ideas together and transforms them into fantastic or touching stories, but she prefers tangible, real-life events to fiction. She once told him she admired Margaret Thatcher. The next day, he bought her The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher. She looked at the picture on the cover for a moment: the Iron Lady’s chin between her motherly fingers, her mouth slightly open as if, after much deliberation, she were about to utter a condemning sentence. When she first learned about Thatcher, Aisha was in the field and had believed she too could pursue a career in government after the war—Aisha was often praised for her leadership skills on the battleground. But she’d quickly found out after independence that political clout, and marriage and family were two almost contradictory aspirations for an Eritrean woman to entertain. When Aisha looked up from the book to thank Adam, she found in his eager smile the look that her ex-husband wore when he was excited about something. Her past had superimposed itself on the man standing before her.
Although Adam and Yosef looked nothing alike, the vision bothered her for days, made her wonder if people changed at all or if they always fell for the same person over and over again.
Adam swivels his chair around to face the glass wall of his sixteenth-floor cubicle. He stretches his long legs on the moss-green industrial carpet and rests his clasped hands on his stomach. It’s 4:30 p.m. on a Friday and he has not met his weekly quota of processed passport applications. This would have bothered him a year ago. These days, it only aggravates his overall weariness. His thoughts dissolve into the piece of grey sky trapped between some of Ottawa’s tallest buildings. He wonders if he could still dissuade Aisha from leaving or if he’s crazy for thinking of it.
He has tried many times to imagine Aisha in the field, her life as a freedom fighter. He has tried to picture a younger version of the Aisha he knows climbing semiarid mountains, an AK-47 slung on her shoulder, ammunition dangling around her waist and across her chest, or squatting for days in camouflaged trenches, hiding from fighter jets as they hunted for targets like hooded vultures above a rocky terrain. He’d composed this collage of images from documentaries he’d watched and an old black-and-white picture of her she’d shown him once of a dark-skinned young woman in khaki fatigues under a frankincense tree, rifle by her side, offering the photographer a wide smile of slightly protruding teeth and squinting eyes framed by a wild afro. But he can’t extrapolate. Especially when he thinks of the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian soldiers who died in that thirty-year-long war. Sometimes an irrational fear consumes him. What if he finds out someone he grew up with had died from her bullets? Maybe Girma, his neighbour, or Abye, his cousin. What if she’d been an interrogator? All kinds of war crimes are exposed on the news all the time. These thoughts cause sweat to build up in his armpits and on his palms, and wipe his mind blank. He always veers back to reason though. Our countries were at war, he tells himself. She did what she had to do.
Things Are Good Now Page 1