Things Are Good Now

by Djamila Ibrahim

  “Are you okay, ma’am?” the police officer asked.

  She saw her husband’s bloodshot eyes at the foot of the bed. She nodded and closed her own eyes again.

  As the fact of her son’s death surged through her mind, it brought with it a new awareness: she knew why her son was killed. She recognized her hand in it. She remembered how agitated and reclusive Ismail had become after he was released from jail, the accusation that burned bright in his eyes whenever he deigned to look at her. She’d felt too triumphant for having saved him from imprisonment to consider the dangers she’d exposed him to.

  This realization now sat at the centre of her heartbreak like a big block of ice slowly melting into her bloodstream, eroding her body from the inside out. She wished she had not recovered consciousness at all. Or that she had died that time eighteen years earlier — seven months before Ismail’s birth — when she’d said her shahada on that unforgiving, barren land on the border between Eritrea and Sudan and had closed her eyes on the world. She wished to go back to that moment so she could close her eyes but for good this time. But death doesn’t come so easily to those who seek it.

  Mariam felt a cold draft as a tall, thin man in a leather jacket closed the front door. For a second her heart leaped across the room; she thought the man was Ismail.

  “Assalam Aleykum,” said Hamza, her husband’s friend, as he took his shoes off at the door, his voice devoid of its usual gaiety.

  “Aleykum Assalam. Tefedal,” the women in the kitchen replied with equally restrained voices.

  Mariam watched Hamza make his way past the women and children to the living room before she got up to greet him.

  “I’m so sorry, haftey. I was away for work. I just heard today,” Hamza said, his right palm on his chest, his body bent slightly in reverence.

  “Thank you, Hamza. I know.”

  “Ayee! This is such a painful loss to all of us. He was such a good boy. So polite, respectful of his elders. Just like a son to Fatima and me.”

  “I know, I know. Thank you, Hamza.”

  “May Allah grant you patience and fortitude in this time of trial, my sister,” Hamza said.

  “Thank you, brother. The men are downstairs,” she said, averting her eyes from him.

  This is another thing she was tired of: people describing her son to her as if he weren’t the boy she gave birth to, the boy she’d nursed for two full years. The baby smell in the folds of his chubby little neck and arms that she used to love so much. The way it made her feel, the first time his little body wobbled on the snow, weighed down by the pink snowsuit and matching winter boots she’d bought him from Zellers — she didn’t yet know that in Canada, pink was for girls. His boundless energy, his easy laughter, his hunger for stories. When he was a toddler, only her stories could keep him seated long enough to be fed. But by the time he was in preschool, he had his own stories to recount — tales of good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers, sirens and chases, gunshots and surrenders, all picked up from other kids in the neighbourhood. She didn’t make much of this back then. Boys got excited over toy trucks and firefighters, too. Later on, she’d wondered if she should have paid closer attention, if Ismail’s interest in these kinds of stories presaged his future failings. But children grow up so fast. She didn’t see any of it coming until one day, when he turned fourteen, she noticed he had shot up like wild grass to tower over her and his father and suddenly, trying to talk or beat sense into him had become harder than trying to infuse life into a brick wall.

  When she first followed her husband into exile, she knew the journey across the border into Sudan would be arduous. That’s why she’d left Mona, who was two years old at the time, with her own parents in Asmara. But only when, four days into the trek, they ran out of water did she realize the trip would prove to be dangerous even for a healthy young woman such as herself. Two days later when the encouraging smiles on Ahmed’s face turned to a look of resignation and maybe even of irritation, she knew her end was near. She didn’t want to see her shame in his eyes so she’d squinted one more time for a sign of hope past the shimmering, arid landscape in front of her, then scanned the mountains for government soldiers and rebels before she’d let her body fall to the ground.

  “Leave me be,” she’d said. “It won’t be long.”

  But Ahmed and their guide had picked her up and carried her for a while until she was able to walk on her own again. Eventually — she learned this later, in Khartoum — her eyes had rolled back, her body flailing for a second before she’d collapsed. The men had covered her body with her shawl, stretching and weighing the ends of the dirty cotton cloth down with rocks. They’d scooped sand with their hands and spread it on her body. Then, after reciting a quick prayer, Ahmed had touched her face one more time before he followed the guide’s agile steps.

  What she remembered later were the hallucinations she’d had as she waited for death to come. First, the wind blew hot sand the colour of gold, copper, and silver around her. Then came the children’s cheerful voices. She heard Mona’s laughter. She heard the rustling of many lush trees. She became aware of herself sitting under a tree in the middle of an oasis, watching over the children with a newborn in her arms. Her visions superimposed themselves onto the story of Hajar her mother had told her when she was little. Hajar had despaired for days, alone in the Arabian desert without food or water, a baby in tow until, through Allah’s grace, the Zamzam Well sprung with cool, fresh water and saved her and her son’s lives. In Mariam’s delirium, the woman who was looking after the children shifted from herself to Hajar and back again.

  When, against all odds, she was rescued by a Beni-Amer family travelling on the same route across the border to their home in Sudan, and when, seven months later, she gave birth to a son — she hadn’t known she was two months pregnant when she’d started her journey — she remembered her hallucinations and drew a parallel between her ordeal and Hajar’s. Allah had spared her life and that of the baby she carried, the way He’d saved Hajar and her son’s lives. That’s why she named her boy, her miracle baby, Ismail — after Hajar’s son.

  To avoid engaging with those around her, Mariam stared into the distance, past the rows of shoes filling the hallway from the front door to the kitchen like pebbles on a beach. She tried to recall the last time she saw Ismail opening the front door. She pictured him tilting his head slightly to the side so he wouldn’t hit the door frame. She remembered how, when he forgot to bend down and bumped his head, he’d inspect his carefully groomed, short hair in the hallway mirror, looking for chips of peeled paint. She focused her attention on the peephole. From where she sat, it was only a dark spot on the door. She imagined the impatience on her son’s face as he waited for someone to open the door because he’d forgotten or lost his keys, which happened often. She saw the smooth jawline and thin, long neck which, if it wasn’t for peach fuzz on the chin and the prominent Adam’s apple, could have caused him to be mistaken for a girl. And below that neck, she saw the ghastly, ashen cut on the jugular again, a distorted, second mouth that had been sewn shut, as the police had explained, by the pathologist who’d performed the autopsy. She wished now she hadn’t insisted on seeing Ismail’s face before the men who performed the ghusl at the mosque had tied the cotton shroud over his body in preparation for the Janazah prayer and burial. But she needed to see for herself that her miracle baby, the boy who’d survived the trudge from Asmara to Khartoum so early in her pregnancy, the one who, against all odds, had made it through her dehydration and exhaustion, had met his demise in his prime and in this land of peace and plenty. Even now it all felt dubious, as though someone else’s image were superimposed over her son’s beautiful brown skin. She clenched her teeth remembering the photo shown on the news: a boastful Facebook profile picture that made Ismail look more like a hardened criminal than a murder victim. Why didn’t the news people ask her or Ahmed for an appropriate photo? She shook her h
ead and sighed.

  She felt an urge to see where her son had drawn his last breath. She wanted to collect his blood from the sidewalk where he was found, wash the ground clean with a soft, wet washcloth as if that pavement were Ismail’s body. She didn’t want strangers to trample on her son’s remains, didn’t want her son’s blood to dry and settle into the cracks, to become a forgotten, anonymous dust on the thoroughfare of the affluent and indifferent. She owed him at least that, she who had pushed him to his death.

  She looked at the two women sitting across from her whispering to each other. These people wouldn’t allow her to leave the house. She checked her watch again and sighed. She needed her eldest child by her side. That’s all that mattered to her now. Mona was the only one who knew what was in her heart. The guilt and pain that can’t be voiced.

  “They can’t even wash their dead for burial anymore. The risk of contamination is too great,” Asma said to the whispering women.

  “Can you imagine saying goodbye to your children, to your parents under such circumstances?” one of the women replied, raising her voice and shaking her head.

  “If they cared about Black people, I’m sure Ebola would’ve been history by now,” Hayat, Mona’s friend, chimed in as she set up the coffee service against the wall in front of the older women.

  Mariam dwelled on this concept of Blackness. When she was a little girl, she’d learned from her parents to identify with her tribe, her father’s family line especially. She was Saho. She prided herself in knowing her forefathers’ names up to seven generations. She knew whom they’d married, how many children they’d each had. As a teenager, she and her family had moved to the capital, Asmara, to help run her father’s clothing store. There she’d acquired a new identity: she became Eritrean, finding affinity with people she’d only heard about in her uncles’ travel stories, far away from her village, such as the Kunama, Bilen, and Tigre. The war against Ethiopia and the tegadelti — rebel fighters — who passionately advocated for the unification of the diverse peoples of the region had reinforced this identity. When she came to Canada, she became African. But Black seemed to imply that she was the same as Black Americans and Jamaicans and other Caribbeans with whom she had nothing in common except skin colour.

  Mariam was never one of those curious women who revelled in the scraps of information they gathered from the TV news or from what they overheard their husbands discuss. But as Mona and Ismail grew older, they brought home more and more of the outside world. With time, so much of what her children talked about became unintelligible to her, as if the world had expanded while she was busy raising them, often holding down two jobs, or her mind had shrunk as her children grew taller.

  As Ismail began to mimic the Black American men on TV, repeating when he thought she wasn’t listening the words the rappers spewed, she started to worry about her son’s future. All the rappers seemed to do was prance around half-naked, grope scantily clad women, or taunt the viewers and each other with guns. Ismail had tried to explain that not all of it was bad, that some artists talked about real issues affecting Black youth.

  “Also, dancehall is Jamaican music, Mom, and hip hop is American,” Ismail explained.

  But to Mariam’s ears, it was all angry noise laced in profanities masquerading as music. She didn’t understand why the people who owned the TV stations would put these gangsters on twenty-four hours a day. Didn’t they know they were poisoning the minds of boys? She felt ill-equipped to protect her children against the dangers of the vast world outside her doorstep. She became wary of Black people.

  “What are Blacks in America angry about?” she once wondered aloud as a rap music video came on while she flipped through the TV channels. “In a country as rich as America at that, with none of the language and cultural barriers immigrants like us face,” she added. This was before the police shootings of Black people in America started to make the news and before she learned about it from her children.

  “Centuries of racism, violence, and discrimination. And still ongoing. You people just don’t know,” Ismail said, shaking his head.

  “All I’m saying is that your father and I didn’t come all the way here for our children to turn out like those gangsters. Work hard. That’s all you need to do to be successful in this country. So stop watching this nonsense and go study,” Mariam said.

  “We — all non-white immigrants in this country — should be grateful to African Americans,” Mona said, looking up from her cellphone. “They fought and continue to fight while the rest of us just waltz in and reap the benefits. You think we could just choose which schools to go to, where to live if it wasn’t for the Civil Rights movement? And then you have the nerve, the nerve … I just can’t.” Then she stomped away.

  Mariam had regretted her question. Mona had a way of showing her exasperation, especially since she started university, a way of talking about rights, choice, and freedom like they were a mother’s milk, hers to have whenever she pleased, that disconcerted Mariam.

  “We live in Canada,” she wanted to tell her daughter but didn’t. She thought instead of an Ethiopian proverb about daughters teaching their mothers the ways of childbirth. That’s what Canada does to parents, she thought: makes grown people feel as if they’re their own children’s understudies.

  “Oh, there was a case in Spain, just a few days ago,” one woman said, snapping Mariam back to the conversation in her living room.

  “That’ll make them pay attention,” Hayat said as she roasted coffee grains on a single burner a few feet away.

  “Imagine the victims,” another woman said as she cut slices of the himbasha Asma had baked. “Coming to terms with your imminent death while soaking in your own excretions and knowing that even the dignity of a proper burial will be denied to you.”

  “May Allah protect us from such tragedies,” Asma said, shaking her head.

  Mariam wanted to dismiss these women’s argument. To tell them how, when you reached that level of despair and pain, nothing mattered anymore. You didn’t think about the how of your burial. Only the living worry about protocol, she wanted to tell them, but she knew they couldn’t possibly understand. She closed her eyes to relive that moment in the desert years earlier when the prospect of sleep, painless and eternal, had felt as clear and delightful as cool water. Her body cleansed by hot sand, ready to return to its home. It’s the nightmares, if you survived, that were unbearable. Her nightmares were always about being buried alive again and again, choking on sand. They invariably happened when she fell asleep on her back. It even happened once while she was awake. She was caught in a snowstorm when her bus broke down on Fallowfield Road and the surrounding expansive farmland had transformed into a constraining white wall.

  When he turned fifteen, Ismail started staying out later and later. As she walked home from the bus stop, after her evening shift, she’d find him standing on a street corner with boys his age, all talking nonsense over each other or just sitting quietly and surveying passersby, acting like the neighbourhood’s gatekeepers. Since it was summer, she didn’t make much of all this. Besides, he was a boy, what harm could it do? But when she heard that the police frowned upon such gatherings, that they assumed these boys were in gangs or were out selling drugs, she panicked. She’d always expected it would be easier to raise a boy. Back home, daughters were deemed a liability. A mother’s negligence to shield her daughter from the violence of men (and failure to curb the trusting inclinations of a girl-child) could ruin the life of a young woman and smear her family’s name in shame for generations. But a boy, a first-born son especially, was a family’s pride, the one who would provide for and protect his family in lieu of his ageing father. For a mother, a boy was also a piece of herself soaring out and far from the limitations of her lot, her surrogate and even her revenge on the world that confined her. In Canada, it seemed as though the roles were reversed: it was the boys you had to worry about, to kee
p away from drugs, gangs, the police, and these days from zealots intent on polluting young Muslim minds with violent rhetoric.

  Mariam and Ahmed had done their best to teach their children the five tenets of their faith — shahada, salat, zakat, sawm, and hajj — the way their own parents had done. They encouraged their children to be observant so that their faith could keep them away from the temptations and dangers of the world. But when Mariam learned of young men and women in Europe and even Canada fleeing their families to join fights in the Middle East — she paid close attention to the news now — she was alarmed. For weeks she thought about ways to broach the subject with Ismail before she said: “I hear a Somali youth went to fight in Syria. Do you know him?”

  “No,” Ismail said as he thumbed his video game controller in the living room. Animated figures of Black men played basketball on the TV screen.

  “That’s a terrible thing to do to your family,” Mariam said.

  Ismail shrugged his shoulders.

  “I feel for his parents. They left their country because of violence and these stupid boys go looking for wars?”

  “It’s also really bad what’s happening over there, Mom.”

  “Bad things happen everywhere.”

  “They’re Muslims … ”