Things Are Good Now

by Djamila Ibrahim

  Alem found some things difficult at first, of course, but she took to her new life faster than I’d expected. She appreciated the calm and reserved demeanour of Canadians, which she thought made them seem incapable of suspicion or belligerence. She worked long hours scrubbing pots and pans in one restaurant kitchen or another with the dedication of someone who’d always known they were destined to do just that. In the spring, she lined our little balcony with potted herbs and flowers. For a while, whenever we went to the grocery store, she insisted we go through each aisle, running her hands over the neatly packaged goods, her eyes leaping from one overflowing shelf to another as if only in that space could she believe she no longer had to wait in line at the kebele, government-issued ration card in hand for meagre allowances of basic necessities. But once in a while, this excitement would give way to a shroud of gloom.

  “It’s just not fair, is it?” she would say. “All this luxury. All this peace.”

  When I lived alone, I had only a mattress, sheets, and a few dishes. A week before Alem arrived, I’d furnished the apartment with a couch, a dining table and four chairs, a bed for her, a cassette player, and more dishes. Everything was second-hand, but I thought the furniture gave the apartment an air of respectability. With the spices she’d bought in Khartoum and improvising with what she could find in Indian stores in Toronto, Alem cooked us dishes that approximated food from home. With her beside me, I became a person again. In her I saw myself reflected, my name and roots restored. I was no longer a ghost.

  I wanted to do all the things normal families did: go on trips, talk about our hopes and frustrations, invite friends to our home for dinner parties. But Alem was frugal with money and didn’t care for friends or talk. She especially avoided fellow Ethiopians, choosing, if any, the company of immigrants from other countries.

  “It’s better this way. We don’t need anyone meddling in our affairs,” she explained once.

  I wanted to point out that we didn’t have much in the way of “affairs” that necessitated isolation but I let it slide. Whenever any of my Habesha friends dropped by the apartment, she turned stiff, resisting any attempt at familiarity, like a feral animal.

  “Your sister is so reserved,” they said, but I knew they meant she was a snob.

  All in all, under the circumstances, I thought she was adjusting fairly well, so I assumed it was just a matter of time. Even the nightmares seemed to have subsided, although she still slept with her bedroom door ajar and the light on.

  One day, after Alem and I had been living together for six years, I invited Nick, Alem’s boss, to dinner to thank him for giving her rides home whenever she worked late.

  “This might be too spicy for a white man’s palate,” she said in the morning while stirring the doro wet. This was her way of telling me she disapproved of the invitation. The smell of berbere and spiced butter in the thick red-brown sauce had invaded all corners of the two-bedroom apartment we’d just moved into and carried out to the hall. I worried our neighbours would complain.

  “Have you been back to Ethiopia yet?” Nick asked, sitting on the edge of his chair, kneading its corduroy-covered seat with his fist as if to scratch an itch.

  I poured him a glass of Johnnie Walker.

  “Not yet. Plane tickets are expensive,” I said, taking a sip of my whisky.

  Nick watched my sister’s brisk walk to and from the kitchen, his eyes lingering. I imagined him following her around Swiss Chalet’s kitchen, teaching her how to turn powder starch she had mistaken for flour into mashed potatoes or inspecting the storage rooms she had just cleaned while making jokes she didn’t quite understand or care about.

  Alem poured various meat and vegetable dishes onto the injera on our plates.

  “Alem told me you study modern art,” he said.

  “Yes. I also work at Loblaws.”

  “Good, good … I study political science at the University of Toronto,” he volunteered with obvious pride. “Only part-time though.”

  I nodded, my mouth too full to speak.

  “You know, Alem is my best employee. She’s never late, never sick. If I could only get more words than hello and goodnight out of her,” he continued with a guttural laugh. “She’ll make a fine nurse when she graduates.”

  Beads of sweat were building around his widow’s peak.

  “This sauce is spicy, right? Have some more cheese. It will kill the sting,” Alem said with a sudden wide smile.

  A splash of crimson spread over Nick’s tawny face.

  “And what do you do for fun?” Nick asked me. “I know Alem doesn’t believe in fun,” he teased.

  “I go for walks by the water sometimes. It’s relaxing,” she said, a slight defiance in her voice.

  “Oh, Joseph told me he goes for strolls in the city too. You two should go for a walk by the lake sometime,” Nick said, taking a quick gulp of whisky, his eyes on her.

  A sturdy man of few words, Joseph was Alem’s new co-worker from Haiti. He had escaped Duvalier’s brutal regime with a scar that ran down his neck like an earthworm crawling under his deep brown skin. Alem didn’t talk much about him but I had sensed a bond transcending words between them — broken people have ways of finding one another.

  “Sure,” she said, without looking up.

  “I sometimes hang out with friends at an Ethiopian restaurant-bar on Bloor Street. It’s called YeSheba Bet. Do you know it?” I asked.

  Alem shook her head. “It’s a place for people without a purpose in life. Sitting around all night, drinking and arguing about politics. A waste of time and money,” she said, with a barely contained grumble in her voice.

  Alem’s life had been entrenched in chores and responsibilities for so long now that I often had difficulty remembering the jaunty, coddled teenager she once was.

  “Speaking of politics, I heard about your president on the BBC,” Nick said. “They said he dismantled the old feudal system almost overnight, implemented land reforms … ”

  “Yes.”

  “And he sends college students to teach the illiterate masses in remote villages. That’s good for the country, right?” Nick said, his eyes eagerly waiting for an affirmation.

  I looked at Alem out of the corner of my eye. She stared at Nick with pursed lips. She had lashed out at one of my friends before for complaining about the underground resistance’s inefficiency, but that was a while back and the guy was a pompous ass anyway so I was proud of her when she put him in his place. She sometimes snapped at me for little things, too, but we’d managed to avoid serious altercations and I usually made sure to quickly quell any talk of politics around her. But I guess the alcohol was getting to me.

  I said: “You see, the revolution was a good thing. People were tired of Emperor Haile Selassie’s extravagances, and their demand for change had gone unheard for too long. But then, soon after taking control of the government, the Derg started killing or imprisoning all who questioned its authority, so —”

  Nick interrupted me. “Yeah, they talked about that too. But you know, the way I see it, history is written by ambitious leaders who sometimes have to cheat and kill.”

  “Well, it doesn’t —”

  “Sometimes these countries need a strong man to clean shit up, don’t you think?” Nick interrupted me again.

  “He is an animal! Him and all his minions!” Alem shrieked in Amharic, scowling at Nick. The light from the cheap lamp hanging over the dining table exaggerated her glaring eyes. “Hundreds of thousands of people have been tortured and killed. Thousands disappeared without a trace,” she continued, tapping the table with her index finger. “And you. What do you know? You wouldn’t have lasted a day in those jails. You would have shat your pants,” she said, now pointing her finger at him.

  I translated her words, omitting the reference to prison, and got up to clear the table.

  As if c
oming out of hypnosis, Alem put a plate she’d picked up back on the table, her hands trembling. She quickly mumbled an apology and disappeared into her bedroom.

  “How about that, eh? I never thought I’d see Alem raise her voice,” Nick said, his flushed face stretched into a wild grin hovering between fright and excitement.

  After Nick left, I tried to focus my attention on a new class project. I opened my sketchbook and started to absentmindedly scribble in the corner of a page. Alem came out of her bedroom then stopped in her tracks with a look of surprise that made me wonder if she wished I had left with Nick. After a second or two that felt like an hour, she returned to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  I sat there staring at my sketchbook, downing one glass of whisky after another until I emptied the half-full bottle.

  Three years later this girl I was dating, Julie, and I were on my balcony, smoking weed. I heard Julie say: “Hey, Alem, care to join us?” My girlfriend had stretched her arm past my face to hand the burning joint to Alem with the silly smile of someone who was still recovering from deep laughter. I turned around to face my sister. It took me a moment to grasp the situation. Alem stood against the balcony door, one hand folded into a fist on her hip and staring at me in that way Habesha mothers have of terrorizing children into confession without uttering a word. I instinctively smacked Julie’s hand away with the back of mine. The joint flew out of my girlfriend’s fingers and over the balcony railing.

  “Alem, sorry. I didn’t think you … ,” I said, almost stammering before I stopped. I realized I was too high and dumbstruck to make sense of things. I suspected Alem knew about my smoking weed, although I had never done it in her presence. I was also getting angry, but right behind my exasperation, as usual, my guilt stood guard. Alem went through an unspeakable ordeal. The least I can do is indulge her occasional outbursts of anger, I reasoned.

  “How could you? Drugs? Ayee goud! Is this why Emaye pawned the last of her jewellery to get you out of the country? Drugs? Drugs?” she repeated with a shrill voice.

  “It’s not a big deal, Alemiye,” I said, as softly as I could, even though I knew she didn’t take well to cajoling words anymore.

  “Not a big deal? You want to pretend everything is fine. You are somehow absolved of responsibility while others are rotting in prison or dead, is that it?” she continued.

  “What are you talking about?” I said, rubbing my eyes and wiping sweat from my forehead.

  “Oh I forgot. You are Canadian. You are beyond the petty skirmishes of savages in faraway lands,” she said, dismissing imaginary people far behind me, the way one shoos rowdy kids away. Her mouth twitched with something like amusement and contempt.

  I was at a complete loss. Had I smoked too much?

  “Cut it out, Alem,” I said and walked past her to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

  She accosted me as I came back from the kitchen.

  “This stuff is not as bad as cocaine or heroin or … sometimes I just need to relax. Forget everything and relax, do you understand?” I said.

  “What do you have to forget? What have you seen that needs forgetting?” she said, her voice brimming with disdain.

  I’d never hated anyone as I hated my sister at that instant. It was as if I was back home again and instead of my little sister, I was facing my father. But unlike Father’s inflaming scorn, Alem’s held in its centre something swift and cold, like a knife stab. I put down my glass of water on the coffee table and sat on the couch. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw Julie sitting beside me, looking at me with confusion.

  “Sorry, Julie. Maybe you should go,” I said with a sheepish smile.

  “I’ll call you later,” I added as I closed the door behind her.

  “You know what, Alem? I do what I can. I sponsored you. I send my share of money back home. What else do you want me to do?”

  “It takes a man to do something,” she grumbled and went into the kitchen.

  I went to my bedroom and stood by my window. Kids were chasing each other around the slides and swings across from our building. I wondered again if there was more to Alem’s anger than she led our parents and me to believe.

  When we were kids, every Sunday morning after church, our parents would invite neighbours over for coffee. Father and the guests would sit on the veranda in their traditional white cotton garb, forming a crescent around Mother. They’d all sip thick black coffee out of tiny white-and-red porcelain cups while the aroma of diffo bread right out of a clay oven joined the scents of freshly cut grass and myrrh and frankincense smoke in the air. Some days, Mother would call Alem and me and hand us cups of coffee. We’d take a sip of the bitter brew and grimace. She’d then dump the rest of the liquid and study the patterns of coffee grounds on the bottom of the cups. With a solemn face, she’d interpret the criss-crossed maps of rivers, roads, and dwellings only she could see.

  “You, Benny, you will become a wealthier and stronger lord than your father ever was,” she’d say. “You, Alem, you will become a very successful teacher and marry a rich and honourable man.”

  Alem and I would argue about our assigned careers, at which point the adults would intervene with further speculations and teasing. Except for Father. He’d look from Alem to me and back with a pained smile on his face, certain that there was an irrevocable mix-up in the way his children turned out.

  As I looked out my bedroom window into the jungle of high-rises, parking lots, and basketball courts, the world of kings, lords, and nobility that had died with Emperor Haile Selassie’s deposition fifteen years earlier, in 1975, felt like the fantastic invention of a creative child. I felt a renewed rage bubble inside me. I missed my life before Alem. The loneliness and isolation were tough to bear, but at least back then I lived peacefully. I went to the kitchen, picked up an empty tomato can to use as an ashtray, and returned to my bed. I lit up a new joint and pressed play on my old tape player. Peter Tosh’s “Johnny B. Goode” filled my senses.

  “Give her time. She’s been through a lot,” my friend Samson said when I told him of the incident the next day.

  I was watching Samson throw one full bag after another into the garbage bin at the back of the Loblaws where we worked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s not the only one who’s gone through hard times. Others did time too. Your brother for longer than she did. Eventually, you just have to move on, right?”

  “Do you want some tea? It’ll help you sober up. I can’t believe you came to work high again. You need to stop this shit, man,” he said.

  We sat on the edge of the sidewalk in front of the grocery store’s glass doors. The birds perched on the tall, naked trees across the deserted parking lot looked like dark, hard fruits against the streetlights.

  He poured tea in his thermos lid and handed it to me. I watched the steam undulate in the cold October night.

  “You know, growing up, I never could be the son my father wanted me to be,” I said. “The more I tried, the more the concept eluded me. I was in trouble if I didn’t do well in school. And if I spent more time than what he’d consider necessary in my room, he’d snatch whatever I’d be reading and shout: ‘I am raising a son, for God’s sake! Go outside and get into a fight or something.’”

  “Same. My father never gave me time to ask what I did wrong before he charged at me with his belt,” Samson said, laughing. “And I knew better than to ask questions.”

  “And regardless of what I had done, it always invariably turned to the Italians. ‘Do you think we hid under our mothers’ skirts like you?’ he’d bellow. ‘We fought them with whatever we could put our hands on. Like men.’ I wanted so badly to remind him that the Emperor had run away to England when the Italians first invaded, but I didn’t want to get punished for that too,” I said. My anger was starting to wither.

  “Oh, you definitely would have gott
en the whipping of your life,” Samson said. “The idea that Haile Selassie’s move might have helped save the country didn’t sit well with some of the more hardcore feudals such as your father and mine.”

  “Father was a completely different person with Alem though,” I said. “Alem could refuse to eat or demand a different dish. She loved to play pranks on the old women in the neighbourhood. When Mother tried to chastise her, Alem would run to him and nobody could touch her. I hated her then.”

  The next day I told Alem I was going to move out. But before our lease was up, Father fell gravely ill so we were forced to stay in the apartment to save extra money for his hospital bills. We lived together for another two years, not as siblings but like an old couple who’d been angry at each other for so long they couldn’t remember what had happened between them and no longer cared to fix it.

  The day Alem finally divulged the secret that had been gnawing at her soul for over a decade, we were at our family home in Addis Ababa. It was in 1993, a few weeks after she and I had flown from Toronto for Father’s funeral. A torrential rain was pounding on the tin roof of our house. Our mother’s flower garden behind the screen of mist on the window was a blurry mix of reds and yellows bleeding into greens, reminiscent of watercolour applied on wet paper. I was thinking about our father.

  “He was a war hero. And such a fair-minded and generous lord,” Father’s old friends had said. The withering hands and cloudy small eyes of recent pictures didn’t belong to the unswerving man I remembered as my father.

  “Do you remember how much Abaye loved playing his krar?” Alem said, brushing lint off my shoulder — Father’s death had brought us closer together again. “One night, he was playing the instrument on the veranda. I sat with him as he finished a song. He sighed and, caressing the strings with his fingers, told me that, if it wasn’t for his noble birth and the war against the Italian invaders, he would have pursued a career in music. Can you believe it?” she continued. “I guess he’d had a little too much to drink, because I could swear I saw tears in his eyes.”