I searched her eyes for other things I might not have known or had forgotten about my father, about my past.
“He loved you, you know,” she said with a distant smile.
I shrugged and looked away.
“He did. You are a lot more alike than you think,” she said. “I wanted so badly for Abaye to think me worthy of his respect. I was so jealous of you.”
“What are you talking about? It was always only about you,” I said, not bothering to hide my old resentment.
“No. He let me do whatever I wanted when we were kids because, as a girl, he didn’t expect me to amount to much. The best he could hope for me was that I’d marry someone like him. But you … he worried for you. He wanted rank and respectability for you but he didn’t know how to express this. And deep down, in a way, I think he also envied you. He’d traded his dreams for honour as expected of him but you, you were never bound by tradition or duty. You always did whatever you wanted. You were always on the run, as though you were afraid someone might catch and nail you down to the ground.”
I felt something inside me suddenly break open at the same time as I felt a tightening in my throat. I rushed to the veranda for some air.
The rain had stopped by then. Mother turned the cassette player in the living room on. I could hear an Orthodox Church kidasse, a choir of men and women clapping and chanting, leading the way to a climax of exultant drum beats that resonated throughout the house.
Alem came to sit beside me on the floor.
“I’m not going back. I’m staying here,” she said after a few minutes.
To my silence, she added: “I’m staying, permanently.”
Her words slapped my face raw.
“What? Why?”
“Death has a way of waking people up, I guess,” she said, folding and unfolding a handkerchief our father had given her before she left for Canada.
“What about your job and the plans we made, remember? Save money and sponsor Mother. What are you going to do here?”
“You don’t need me to sponsor Emaye.” She stopped for a second. “You, you have your girlfriend. I know Elizabeth wants to settle down. You have your career. You love teaching and who knows, you might get tenure soon.” She counted on her fingers the pieces that constituted my life in Canada.
“What about Joseph?” I said.
“It won’t work,” she said. “We’re from two different worlds.”
“People work things out, Alem. He loves you.” I knew I had run out of ammunition.
She shook her head. “Besides, I don’t want to be an assistant nurse for the rest of my life. Here, I can put my diploma to full use.”
We stood in silence for a while.
“I also want to work on this new committee the government is setting up. It’s tasked with tracking down members of the old regime,” she whispered.
Two years earlier, in 1991, rebels from the North had toppled the Derg’s seventeen-year-long reign and taken over the country. “Things are good now,” everybody had been saying since, a slight wariness in their voices.
“The new government seems pretty reasonable,” she said, reading my mind.
I thought of how the old government seemed reasonable at first too.
“Alem —”
“Those animals need to be apprehended,” she interrupted me. “I need to do this,” she said with a resolute voice.
I clenched my teeth.
“When I was in prison, there was another girl named Alem in my cell,” she continued, studying the handkerchief in her hands, searching, it seemed, for an omen in the intricate embroidery of red flowers and green leaves.
I sighed. “How many times do I have to say it? You can’t —”
She put her hand on my mouth and turned to look straight in front of her.
“One early morning, two guards came in our cell. All the women were still asleep. I was sitting by the wall facing the door, wondering if I would ever come out alive from that place —”
“No, seriously. You can’t go on living your life in the past,” I said.
She ignored me. “There was a lot of confusion in those days and the guards seemed edgier than usual,” she said.
The rain began again. This time, it was light and silent and surrounded us like a protective screen.
“When one of the guards called out my name, I froze,” she continued. “I couldn’t speak or move. Everything around me became blurry. It felt as if I was having a vertigo attack. Then I heard my namesake cry and beg for her life, her voice distant as though I was under water. I was confused at first and then it hit me: she had not heard my last name called out.” Alem stopped for a moment to swallow, her eyes still on the handkerchief in her trembling hands.
“I knew what I had to do but my body refused to act,” she continued. “I felt myself disintegrating into the concrete floor. The guards dragged Alem out of the cell, screaming and fighting. I just sat there … I just sat there. She never came back.” Alem sobbed, her back folded in. “A girl who had a mother and a father and three siblings waiting for her on the outside died because of me, Benny. I stole her life,” Alem wailed, the ravages of her long-buried secret spilled on her face. “I’m a coward. I let her die,” she continued after a while, still shaking against my body.
That night, I lay supine in my childhood bedroom, the cool night quiet save for Mother’s phlegm-filled coughs coming from the next room and the occasional barks of stray dogs outside our gates. Snapshots of the twelve years Alem and I spent together in Toronto speckled my consciousness. I finally understood why she never talked about what had happened to her in prison, focusing instead, the very few times the subject came up, on generalities, on what had happened to everybody.
A week later, on the way to Addis Ababa Airport, Alem and I sat in the back of Uncle Gueta’s old Volkswagen with our mother. For the first time, I wished for Father’s presence, to sit in that car beside the man I’d spent most of my life avoiding. I tried to imagine clasping his hand and reading love and care in his stern words but I could only picture his disapproving gaze.
Out the car window, people and beasts crossed streets at random points, and dilapidated blue and white taxis spewed charcoal-grey smoke in stalled traffic. I tried to imagine Alem wading through that mayhem, fending off catcalls from hustlers in crowded markets and our mother advising: “Ignore them, Alem. Otherwise, they’ll know you’re a foreigner and the pestering will get worse.” Or navigating, with the urgency of an idealist, the snail-paced bureaucracy and general disorder of a government made up of guerilla fighters. “Be patient, my daughter, things are different here,” our mother would counsel. I searched Alem’s eyes for a sign. Would she be happy here? Would she find peace at last?
“I hope you’ll have room for me in your new place,” she said, her face peeling into a slow, reassuring smile. “You know, in case things don’t work out here.”
I arrived in Toronto at noon. After a twelve-hour sleep, I dragged myself to the living room. Alem’s absence was palpable in the vapid air and dusty furniture. I went to the kitchen to get something to drink. On the fridge I noticed the calendar Alem used to catalogue her days. I started flipping through it. She had her work schedule at the hospital written in red, her evenings and weekends cleaning job in green. She’d also pencilled in major Ethiopian Orthodox holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries as a reminder to call home to wish our parents well. During all the years we lived together, Alem had kept her life on the other side of the world intact. I, on the other hand, couldn’t remember the last time I’d picked up the phone to call our parents. Alem did the calling. She sent them the money I gave her. But she did more than that. She kept us grounded, linked to the other side of ourselves. This realization stirred in me a new kind of loneliness — the kind you feel when, having just arrived in a new city, you accidentally lose the only map of the plac
e you had.
I went to the living room, stretched my limbs, and opened my fat suitcase to unearth from it a gabi that used to belong to Father. I lay on my couch wrapped in the thick fragrance of incense, spices, and home trapped in the cotton comforter. The intricate embroidery of royal blue and gold on the edges of the cream material distracted me from the suffocating silence of the apartment. I thought about my father and the fragmented memories of what we’d been to each other again. I thought about the years Alem had spent flagellating herself for having once succumbed to the most basic of human instinct: survival. And all the years I wasted running away from or reeling under the weight of her suffering. There was nothing I wanted more at that moment than to make up for lost time. I had missed my chance with Father, but I still had Mother and Alem. And for their sake and mine, I knew I had to start building a bridge. I needed to find a way to reify the home I left behind and to suture that world with the one I would wake up to daily.
Before I drifted off to sleep again, even though it was the middle of summer, I decided that I needed to purchase a new calendar.
children always stay
Helen knew a thing or two about leaving. When she was six, she and her parents left their home and everyone they knew in Addis Ababa in the middle of the night for a new life in Canada. Two years later, her father had walked out on her and her mother. Helen was relieved that the shouts, cursing, and cries that permeated her daily life had stopped. She didn’t notice he had been gone any longer than usual until her mother told her he was never coming back. They were in the backyard, hanging clothes. Her mother washed their clothes by hand as a reminder of the things she’d lost: their big house in Addis Ababa with chauffeurs, gatekeepers, and maids; her expensive jewellery and clothes; her social standing as the wife of a powerful government official.
“I started out well, you know,” her mom said. “I was only seventeen when I met him, but I already had a job in the city and a place of my own.” She rested her hands on the clothesline, her head down as though she was talking to an invisible audience at her feet. “But that’s what men do: take, take, and take. Your youth, your dreams. Your soul. Whatever they can until you’re nothing but a hollow shell, dry and brittle like onion skin. Then they’re gone. You better remember this.” Her mother wagged her finger at her.
Helen’s father had never taken anything from her, but Helen could tell from the fire in her mother’s voice it was an important lesson. She nodded but her mother kept on staring at her for a long moment. There was something in her mother’s eyes that Helen didn’t have a name for. Something that made her little heart tighten.
Only on her deathbed, ten years later, did Helen’s mother bring herself to speak about Helen’s father or any other man again. Her mother had long ago discarded everything that belonged to Helen’s father — his clothes, photos, books, favourite furniture — but something of him had persisted. It lived in the older woman’s heavy sighs, in the dark circles around her eyes. And it hid in the shadows of her words and thoughts the way dust hides in dark corners of a house. Even when Helen hit puberty her mother couldn’t bring herself to talk to her about sex or relationships with men. She’d just looked at her daughter’s obstinately feminine body with furtive glances that spoke of fear and despair. It had made Helen feel tainted, repulsive.
Helen had run away from home when she turned seventeen and had been living with a friend for six months when she found out her mother was dying.
“Soon I’ll be gone and you’ll be truly alone,” her mother said, reaching out for Helen’s hand on the hospital bed. “But know this: men come and go,” she continued, her voice raspy with lung cancer. “They talk a good talk about loyalty, morality, and family values, but when it comes down to it, they’re the first ones to cheat, the first ones to break a vow, the first ones to desert their families.”
Helen pulled the drab hospital curtains shut around them.
“Don’t let them fool you. You hear? Don’t waste your life on a man the way I did,” her mother continued, as she struggled through a coughing fit.
Helen wiped the sweat on her mother’s forehead.
“Men come and go,” her mother said again. “Children, on the other hand, children always stay.” She cleared her throat. “Even if they leave, they always come back. Like you did,” she said, finally holding Helen’s gaze, their eyes burning with all things unsaid.
When her mother passed away, Helen had nothing else left to lose. A distant uncle sold her mother’s house and had her remains flown to Addis Ababa. When her mother’s body was lowered into the ground, Helen’s uncle and grandmother stood beside her, their hands pressing against hers. Helen didn’t feel anything for them. She watched the ground swallow her mother. Her whole chest cavity had by then contracted itself around her heart and there was no room for anything or anybody else in it anymore.
The first time she walked out on a man, Helen was eighteen and travelling through California. She loved the uncertainty of foreign places, the anonymity that allowed her to reinvent herself, and to come and go without leaving a trace. He was a painter, very tall and wiry. He reminded her of the palm trees lining the streets of Venice Beach where he’d always lived. He had a serenity about him that made him look as though he could weather any storm. She found this reassuring, but it also made her despise him a little.
The day she left him, they had been seeing each other for three months. That morning, she’d turned on her side in his bed, away from him, and rested her eyes on one of his new paintings on the wall. Shades of brown, red, and green, a Black woman with an infant in her arms, mother and child blissfully smiling at each other.
“What do you think?” he asked, spooning her.
She turned her head and looked at him, almost surprised to find him there, even though they’d just had sex.
“Not bad,” she said.
“That’s it?”
“Well … it’s a bit of a cliché, this depiction of Black womanhood, don’t you think?”
He was silent.
“Let the words simmer in your mind before you speak,” her mother used to tell her. But no matter how hard Helen tried, sometimes her thoughts just flew out of her mouth like projectiles.
“I mean, the colours are nice but … ”
He hastily slid off the bed.
When she heard the shower running, she got up, almost stepping on the condom lying on the floor like a deflated balloon. There were variations of the same Black Madonna and baby on a few canvases stacked against the wall in the dining room. She felt queasy when she recognized her own features in the paintings.
She turned the coffee maker on and poured some milk to boil in a small pot. She turned the burner to low and stared at the milk.
The day before, they’d gone to Rodeo Drive, in Beverly Hills, just so they could pretend to be rich for an afternoon. They’d walked into an art gallery and stopped by one of Dalí’s famous sculptures of a female figure with drawers set into her body. This one was called Woman Aflame. He’d walked around the small piece, enthralled.
“Dalí thought a woman’s mystery was her true beauty,” he’d said, reading the inscription on the plaque at the sculpture’s feet.
“Give me a break,” Helen had muttered. It bothered her, this silencing of women, the false pretense. “What is it with you men? You just can’t help it, can you?”
He’d looked at her with the innocence of a missionary. “What now?” he said. “How is complimenting a woman’s beauty a bad thing?”
Helen had wondered what Dalí’s wife, the strong-headed, outspoken Gala, must have had to say about her husband’s views on feminine beauty.
“You used to be nice,” he told her now, a towel around his waist, water droplets scintillating in his short afro. “These days all you do is criticize me or my work. What’s going on?”
She skimmed her index finger over the milk in
the pot. The milk skin stuck to her finger. She lifted it. It looked like a tiny closed umbrella in the space between their bodies. It reminded her of the used condom drying out by the bed. The ruins of lovemaking, bliss in past tense. She looked at the man in front of her and inscribed his features to memory.
As she drove out of Los Angeles surrounded by mountains that resembled camel humps, she thought of something she once read: The nomadic blood aches for departures even when it’s singing of arrivals.
She had this recurring dream where she was a refugee woman crouched down beside her child in an old cart pulled by a dying donkey. Or perhaps she was the bloody child in rags and the older woman was her own mother, spine collapsing with each lift and drop of the wheels along the uneven path. All around them were dark skyscrapers, with brightly lit windows for eyes. They bent and contorted their metallic spines to prevent the refugees from leaving. Thousands of robotic eyes watching, threatening, while the sky above them slept the careless sleep of a god. These dreams were always the harbinger of another departure, another leap toward the unknown.
The next man she left, she’d met while teaching ESL at an elementary school in Osaka. She found a bit of familiarity in the manners of the Japanese she talked to outside of work — shopkeepers, waiters, and random strangers. The way they bowed their heads to greet her, the way they stretched both arms to hand her the merchandise she’d bought or how they received their payment with the same humble gestures — it all reminded her of the manners she was brought up on as a child, long since replaced with Western mores.
He was short and solidly built and had been living in Osaka for five years. He looked as if he could keep her steady against the shifting of the ground or the anger in the winds.
The day she decided to leave him, they were in Tokyo for a few days. That evening, she’d held on to his arm as they walked among hundreds of pedestrians in Akihabara district, gleefully basking in the clement fall weather, her senses saturated with the reds, blues, yellows, and pinks of the neon lights flashing off giant boards advertising manga characters, video games, and other electronics. He suggested they check out one of the gaming centres. There was an urgency and childlike excitement on his face that demanded acquiescence. They walked up one escalator after another, past aisle upon aisle of arcades and VR stations. On the top floor, there were two white-and-pink stations set up in a secluded corner, as if put there as an afterthought, to cater to female gamers’ interests.
Things Are Good Now Page 11