“Alright, I’m ready to go,” she says, locking the door. She adjusts her overstuffed purse on her shoulder and, with long, determined steps, heads toward the visitor parking lot where Adam has parked his Honda Accord. Adam has already stored her two suitcases in the car.
“Let’s have one last smoke before we head to the airport,” he says as they step out of the apartment building. “It’ll give you time to say goodbye to the neighbourhood.”
Aisha turns her head toward him and quickly takes in his slim frame. Their eyes meet but there is nothing to say.
It is a little past six in the evening. The sky is a soothing blue except for the splash of turmeric across the sun. The aroma of charred meat from a nearby barbecue competes with the acrid smell of their burning cigarettes. They lean against the back of Adam’s car and watch the eastern white pines at the end of the parking lot wave their branches left and right to the rhythm of the wind, like lovers swaying to an old, slow tune.
“Here, before I forget,” Aisha says and hands him her apartment keys to deliver to the rental office on Monday.
“When it’s nice out like this, it’s easy to forget how cold it gets in the winter,” Adam says.
They hear the intermittent dribbling of a basketball from the court on the west side of the building.
“You know what? I’ll miss watching the snowfall from my window,” Aisha says, remembering the times she sat watching the white flakes drift down in a constant and tender flow, smoothing out the knots of anxiety in her chest. “Like thick balls of gutted pillow silently blurring the boundary between earth and sky,” Adam had said once.
“Sure, it’s easier to miss snow when you know you won’t have to deal with the bitter cold anymore,” Adam says, smiling.
“Yes. That’s how I want to remember it. I’ll think of black ice and frostbite when thirst and sunburn blister my mind with pain. That and when I realize I can’t run the way I used to.”
“Not with all the smoking you’ve been doing,” Adam teases again, nudging her elbow with his.
She looks into his eyes for a moment, as if he’d revealed a secret she didn’t know he knew, then looks away.
“Did I ever tell you about my first snow experience?” she says, turning her whole body to face him again. “As you know, it was within days of moving to Ottawa that I landed my first cleaning job in that government building on Laurier Street.” She points north. “The first day, I mopped vinyl floors and vacuumed carpets in the windowless basement. When I left the building, at the end of my shift at eight, the whole city was covered in white.” The cigarette tucked between her fingers draws waves in the air. “It wasn’t snowing anymore, so it was impossible to tell whether the white powder covering the ground, cars, and trees had descended from the sky or exploded out of the earth’s entrails. All the landmarks I had painstakingly memorized to get home were erased. Only a white world under a black silent sky.” She stops for a moment. “The terror I felt that night will stay with me forever,” she says, chuckling. Grey puffs of smoke escape her lips.
“Are you going to stay in Asmara for long?” Adam asks.
She knows Adam wants to know about her ex-husband but won’t ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I will report to the Ministry of Defence as soon as I can. Hopefully, I won’t have to spend too much time in the city.” She shudders at the thought of running into Yosef, of maybe finding out he has remarried and had children. But a part of her wants these things to be true so that she can keep Yosef in her past. She doesn’t want to betray Adam. She worries about her brothers’ reaction to her unannounced return. (Her mother had passed away while she was in the field.) Aisha didn’t tell her siblings she was going back for fear they might try to dissuade her. They had grown too dependent on her financial assistance to understand what it took to earn the money she sent them every month. Now she wonders if she’s made a mistake.
“What will you miss about Ottawa?”
She thinks for a moment.
“The radio program,” she says. “I’ll miss the radio station. I feel bad for having left Daniel stranded without a replacement.”
“I’m sure he’ll find someone else.”
Daniel had said her voice was made for radio. “It’s not a paid position, of course. It’s only a one-hour slot on a multicultural program funded by the university, but your contribution would be very important to the community and to the Eritrean youth growing up here.” His eyes were fixed on her like a puppy’s. “Children born or raised in Canada don’t have a clue about the Struggle, about the sacrifices people like yourself have made to free our country, so in a way you’d be our resident historian,” he’d said. Aisha wondered what kind of a woman she would have been if she’d grown up in Canada. Would she have cared about what happened in Eritrea?
She thought about the East African youth who came to party at Habesha Restaurant after the other clubs closed, moving seamlessly between the larger Canadian world and the restaurant’s more traditional setting and interacting with each other free of the politics of older Habesha patrons. They did these things as if exercising their birthright, casually, the way people who’d never had to ponder the meaning or price of rights would. “These kids just don’t know how good they have it,” Adam would say. “If I was a teenager growing up in Canada,” she’d reply, laughing, “I’d probably break all the laws and rack up speeding tickets just for the thrill of it.” Outside the glass walls of the DJ booth, students rushed from one building to another, along cement pathways criss-crossing the immaculate green lawns. Two young women were reading under a willow tree, thin leaves raining down on their shiny long hair and their books. Aisha loved the scenery. It made her feel cheerful. She thought of how energizing it would be to spend a couple of hours a week around so many learned people. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe this is my chance to do something different. I could go back to school, get a better job, she’d reasoned before she accepted the offer to host the program.
“May 24, 1991: the day our valiant men and women marched into Asmara — what had been the last bastion of the Ethiopian invaders,” she’d announced the first day, trying to keep from accidentally pushing the buttons on the broadcasting console in front of her. “It was the best day of my life. Days-old sweat stains on my clothes, my face caked with dust and dirt that made it feel rough like bread crust, but none of that mattered. Nothing else in the world mattered. I was among thousands of my comrades. We entered Asmara in broad daylight, triumphant and proud. No more clandestine missions or furtive glances in the dark to avoid running into Ethiopian soldiers. All around us on Liberation Avenue, an ecstatic and incredulous population gathered to greet us with songs, ululation, and dancing. Old women waved palm leaves, little kids ran alongside our trucks, Jeeps, and tanks. Even the dust seemed to join in on the celebration. That’s when it really hit me that the dream had materialized. We had become a free nation.” Her voice was energized by the recollection of that day’s events.
The callers were supportive at first. Then one day, a young woman called in. “Instead of bending our ears with glossy dreams, why are you not talking about the people rotting in prisons across Eritrea right now?” she said in broken Tigrigna.
Aisha felt slighted. How dare she, was what first came to her mind, but she held her tongue. She tried to reason with her young listener: “I was as brash an idealist as you once, but know this: it takes time to build a nation. It took many atrocious wars waged over many centuries for the West to get to where it is now. We’re not perfect, I admit, but we’re learning from our mistakes. We will find a way.”
“The dream has been defiled,” an older caller said. “We can’t shut our eyes and ears anymore. We can’t let the wound fester. It will kill us.” Aisha found it reprehensible that her fellow Eritreans expressed their opposition to their leaders in such a public way, but she couldn’t admonish them on air. She started to drea
d these calls. She wished she had a way of filtering them out.
“Instead of placating your listeners with platitudes you don’t believe in yourself, you could use your platform for good,” another caller said. “Why don’t you join forces with those of us working to fix things? What are you afraid of?”
This last question struck a chord. Was she afraid of something? Then one day, on her ride home from the radio station, she found herself reimagining the program’s function. She started mentally composing her next piece — something about the need to revisit the tenets of the rebellion that birthed their nation and the real risk of perpetuating the crimes of the oppressor. She was still aware of a transgression taking place, but the possibility of being part of something meaningful again had created an exhilarating sense of purpose in her. But soon after that, the Ethiopian invasion was announced, and she and most of her listeners closed rank around the Eritrean government, rallying back against the common enemy.
“Maybe you can work in communications, then, in that war of yours,” Adam says. “If you must go, I’d rather you stay as far from the front lines as possible.”
“Yes, maybe.”
They smoke in silence for a while.
“Well, we better get going if we want to make it to the airport on time,” Adam says.
Aisha nods without looking at him, aware of the tension of goodbyes building up between them.
Adam turns the CD player on. Mulatu Astatke’s smooth “Tizita” fills the car like a soft, fragrant perfume. He then switches the dial to the radio.
“Why?” Aisha asks, looking at him with a frown.
“Too sad.”
The slow lament of the saxophone in “Tizita” has become Aisha’s earworm. A piece that, without words, articulates all the ways she loves Adam: the way he finds her when she loses herself in the turbid waters of blind restlessness, the way he holds her gaze with lustful eyes as he eagerly peels her clothes off, the way he sometimes makes her want to bask in the dreams afforded normal couples. She looks out the window. The sun has spread its red hue on the horizon like a wildfire about to consume the black trees in its path. The apartment buildings loom over the silhouettes of teenagers on the basketball court.
She smiles. Before she met Adam, sunsets were only the end of a long day. The subtleties of colour in a sunny sky didn’t mean anything but favourable weather to her. She imagines how he would describe the horizon she’s looking at: “Like an abstract painting of energetic brushstrokes of black ink on a crimson background. There is a fiery energy in the way the landscape is resisting its descent into darkness.”
Adam suddenly stops the car a few metres from the turn onto Main Street and pushes the hazard lights on.
“Don’t leave, Aisha. It’s not too late to change your mind,” he says, his voice firm.
She looks into his eyes for a second and turns her head away, aware of the doubt filling her own eyes.
“I’m not my country, Aisha. And you’re not yours,” he continues.
When she first started dating Adam, her friend Semra had told her, “I know you’re scared, but holding his background like a noose around his neck is not the way.”
Before she met Adam, Aisha could always tell right from wrong. Now she wishes that, if only for a moment, she could glimpse the future, see all the complications, hurt, and beauty that are overwhelming her senses detangled and clearly laid out. But it doesn’t work like that. She turns and examines Adam again: his thick facial hair so black, almost blue in the twilight; his big melancholic eyes surrounded by deep creases; his smoke-stained full lips; his skin just light enough to give in to blushing; his hooked nose she enjoyed teasing him about. She remembers something else Adam said. Something she’d almost forgotten she’d heard: “I’ve lost people to Mengistu’s regime too, Aisha. We’ve both lost people.”
She leans her head back and takes in these words again.
She then lets herself open up to other thoughts. She thinks about her old frustration with the Eritrean government that, many years ago, had denied her and many of her female comrades their dues — the disillusionment that had pushed her to seek asylum in Canada. She thinks about the conservative society of her upbringing that might threaten the freedoms she’s come to take for granted in her new home. She allows herself to reconsider using the radio program to speak up about women’s and girls’ rights and to hold the Eritrean government accountable, not only for its past shortcomings, but also for those that will inevitably arise from this new war. Would speaking up now amount to treachery? Will there ever be a right time?
She extends her hand and gently covers Adam’s fist around the gear shift knob. She offers him a light smile, almost too afraid to give in to a real one.
They sit still for a long time while darkness finishes swallowing their day and the sun begins to loom on the other side of the world.
Later, Aisha realizes that Ethiopia’s new attack on Eritrea’s sovereignty was only part of what made her want to return home. She remembers a lonely and taciturn old Somali man she met at the hospital where she worked. The old man’s landlord had found him on the floor of his apartment, lying in his own excrement, after he’d suffered a severe stroke that left him paralyzed from the neck down. A nurse had told Aisha about the old man, thinking she might be Somali too. Aisha had heard of these kinds of things before. Lonely immigrants, usually older and male, whose decomposing bodies are often discovered in sparsely furnished apartments by landlords or neighbours disturbed by the smell. But this particular tragedy happened a few days after the news of Ethiopia’s invasion of Eritrea had reached her. That day, as she stared at the old man’s bony face, a fear she’d never known gripped her soul. She pictured all those immigrants who’d let the decades-old dream at the centre of all their dreams — the inevitability of their glorious return home — slip away with their last breath, acutely aware of their failure. She knew Adam would deem her fear irrational, but that’s when a conviction as hard as a rock started to form in her heart. She didn’t want to die alone on foreign soil. If she had to die, she wanted to die among her own people and for a cause worth dying for. She wanted to be buried in the Semhar of her birth, the smell of warm sea breeze in her nostrils and the taste of salt on her tongue.
spilled water
“Halloween is a Canadian holiday,” Claire, my adoptive mother, said as she drove me and my new brother, Josh, to the mall a week before Halloween. I didn’t want to sit in the back with Josh but I was ten years old so I couldn’t sit in the front yet. Noticing my perplexed look in the rear-view mirror, she translated: “It’s amet baal. We put costumes on and go around the neighbourhood and people give children candies.”
“Like Enkutatash,” I said. “In Addis Ababa, girls go around the neighbourhood, singing, and people give money. Boys make pictures of saints and sell them.” I didn’t know what costume meant but I was too excited by the prospect of celebrating a familiar holiday to bother asking. Besides, going to the mall had, in the past two months since I’d moved into my new life, meant only one thing: shopping. And shopping was a confirmation of the life of abundance that Etagegn, the cook at the orphanage in Addis Ababa, had predicted my future would hold, and maybe even proof that, unlike the American couple I’d heard about at the orphanage, my new parents were not murderers. Surely, people didn’t spend so much money on someone they planned to hurt.
About six months before my adoption was finalized, I’d overheard Nurse Meron tell Etagegn about an American man who’d killed the girl he and his wife had adopted from Ethiopia. My friend Amsalu and I had just come back from school and were hiding outside, behind the orphanage kitchen at the end of the service quarters, to avoid having to help the younger children wash up before dinner. We were crouched behind a pile of truck tires under the open kitchen window when we heard Nurse Meron and Etagegn’s conversation.
“It was on the news,” Nurse Meron said. “H
e beat her, then locked her out of his house. The girl froze to death in his backyard while he and his wife watched TV with their biological children inside.”
“I never thought ferenjoch could hurt children,” Etagegn said. “Poor girl.”
“We all know kids need discipline,” Nurse Meron said, “but these white people say we shouldn’t spank our children from one side of their mouth and then do things to kids that shouldn’t be done to adults. We shouldn’t allow them to adopt our children.”
The aroma of frying onions and stewing berbere from the kitchen was making me hungry. I pushed my hands on my belly to quiet the growl and stretched my neck closer to the window.
“Men yedereg, dihinet,” Etagegn said, kissing her teeth.
“I’d rather stay poor. Tell me, what kind of a future is this if you end up dead or, at best, an outsider to your own language and roots?” Nurse Meron said.
“Shhh, keep your voice down. The children.”
“I’m just saying … ”
“Well, it’s terrible, but what can be done?”
“These kids get called nigger at school. They’re told to go back to their country.”
“What’s nigger?”
“Baria.”
There was silence for a moment.
“Even our kids can be cruel sometimes.”
“I’d rather be mistreated in my own country, by my own people.”
“Meroniye, you’re an educated woman so you understand the ways of foreigners better than I do,” Etagegn said. “But you’re young and never had to want for much, so you’re also prone to idealism. Think about it. What’s the alternative? Once they turn eighteen, it’s the streets for most of these kids. All you and I can do is take care of them the best we can while they’re here and pray they find good homes.”
A few weeks after I heard Etagegn and Nurse Meron’s exchange, I had a dream. In this dream, the woman in charge of washing the children’s clothes had sent me to fetch water from the fountain behind the orphanage’s service quarters. I was walking with my eyes on the narrow, uneven pathway between the kitchen and the compound wall, carrying the heavy bucket, the other arm stretched out for balance, when a man bumped into me. The bucket of water fell out of my grip and onto its side, the water spilling into the gutter and out of the compound’s walls. I couldn’t see the man’s face because the sun was in my eyes. I stared at the empty bucket and the wet spot on the ground, my feet pinned in place, more terrified of this silent man with a shadow for a face than of Mrs. Saunders, the orphanage director, who would scold me when she found out I had wasted water. I waited for the man to walk past me or say something but he just stood there blocking my way.
Things Are Good Now Page 3