Mona walked past the living room to the kitchen. “Muslims are killing Muslims,” Mona said.
“My son, there are no winners in wars. Muslim or not. That’s what they don’t tell you. Just countries full of broken people, hollowed-out spirits. I know this from experience.” Mariam sat beside her son. “Look at your father,” she wanted to add but didn’t. Ahmed’s childhood trauma was a heavy weight he’d always carried silently, the way she’d kept the details of her own nightmares a secret, even from her husband.
“All those Syrian refugees washing up in Europe —” Ismail said.
Suddenly Mona stood in front of Ismail, blocking his view. “Shut the hell up,” she said to him. “Why is no one talking about the Eritrean refugees who have been washing up in Europe for years? You know how many have drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea? Or the hundreds of thousands of African refugees who have been waiting for asylum for decades in horrible camps? Why don’t you show outrage over that?” She was yelling now.
Mariam looked at her daughter with surprise then pride. Usually when Mona got riled up about things, Mariam would just ignore her. Even when Mona wasn’t upset, the things she talked about made Mariam feel as though her daughter spoke in riddles just to annoy her. But that day, she recognized her own worry in her daughter’s forceful words. She could hear the love. That’s what women do, she thought: protect their men from themselves and each other. For the first time, Mariam imagined Mona married and raising her own children, and she felt hopeful.
“Yo, move!” Ismail shouted at his sister. “I don’t know nothing about people going to Syria to fight. But as a Muslim … ”
“But nothing,” Mariam said. “Your father and I didn’t sacrifice everything to come here so you kids can have a better future just to see you go and die in someone else’s war. You hear me?” She took the controller from his hands. She didn’t intend to raise her voice but fear was boiling to the surface and turning into anger.
“Okay, okay, Mom. Jesus. You’re always so intense. Relax, I’m not going anywhere. Now can I have that back?” Smiling, he reached for the controller then wrapped his arms around her.
Mariam always found reassurance in Ismail’s smile and easy demeanour. No matter how implacable he sometimes appeared to be, she knew she could always reach out to the loving and obedient boy behind the tough facade of his budding manhood. She knew he would not betray her. And through all the troubles he’d faced, no matter how worried she was about his future, deep down, she knew that since Allah had spared them once, He would protect them always. We’ve survived worse, you and I, she would think, holding her son’s hand. Whatever the hurdle, things passed eventually, she believed. She often indulged in daydreaming: organizing Mona’s and Ismail’s weddings, making the hajj, welcoming grandchildren and — Allah willing — maybe even great-grandchildren to fill her house with the noise of the big family she always dreamed of.
She knew that parents with means sent their teenagers to summer camps, or enrolled them in music classes or martial arts. She couldn’t afford these things, so last summer she took Ismail to her cleaning job in the tall buildings in downtown Ottawa. Ismail reluctantly followed her around, picking up trash cans and dumping the contents in the big bin she wheeled around from office to office. She spared him the cleaning of the washrooms. As they walked from cubicle to cubicle, she’d introduce him to some of the younger lawyers, the chatty ones.
“This could be you someday,” she’d tell him, pointing at these young men with their sharp suits, shiny shoes, and expensive watches.
Ismail would be courteous but abrupt, or uncharacteristically sullen, as though he had too much on his mind to partake in her chatter. Sometimes, he’d quickly acquiesce, then lean toward her and mutter: “Mom, you don’t have to do that. These people don’t care that I’m your son. Or that you have a family.” It was as if he saw things in the way these young men greeted them, heard more in their brief exchange than she could fathom.
“Don’t be proud, my son,” she’d tell him later. “Those are the kind of friends you should seek. Not those dropouts and gangsters you run around with. You have to choose your friends carefully.”
“Those are the guys I grew up with you’re talking about. You know them.”
“I don’t care. They’re in gangs, selling drugs.”
“You want me to go across town to make friends. Have you considered the fact that maybe these people wouldn’t want to be friends with me?”
He’d pick up the pace as they exited the building.
Hayat handed Mariam a small cup of hot black coffee. The ginger in the brew left a delicious sting on the tip of Mariam’s tongue. One of the other women presented her with a tray of himbasha. Mariam shook her head. She took a few more sips and got up to use the bathroom.
Before she opened the bathroom door in the hallway, she looked at the rows of shoes on the floor, almost hoping to find Ismail’s sneakers among those of his friends, the boys now gathered in the basement around her husband. Boys barely out of childhood, mastering the difficult work of self-control in the face of loss.
“Are you going to use the bathroom?” Ahmed asked.
She had not seen her husband approach. She became stiff when their eyes met. She grunted then quickly opened the bathroom door. Their two decades of marriage had crumbled in an instant when the police announced Ismail’s death. All that was left, the anger, pain, and disappointments, was now laid out between them like a field of broken glass. She sat on the toilet and closed her eyes. She wondered if all the little choices she’d made, all the steps she’d taken in life that didn’t mean anything at the time, were all to lead her to this.
Sometimes when she looked at Ahmed, she wondered why she’d followed him into exile. Her father had made a fortune in the textile industry. She could have managed one of his stores on her own. Maybe with time, she would have met a divorcee or a widower she could have married. And yet, she’d left that comfortable life and followed a broken man. A man still struggling not only with the scars of war of his teenage years but also with the shame of having abandoned her in the desert so many years earlier. She had used this guilt against him whenever he’d threatened to kick Ismail out for having dropped out of school or for not seeking employment. The last time this happened, it was a few weeks after one of Ismail’s friends was killed outside a nightclub and Ismail had come home so drunk he couldn’t stand without leaning on something.
“I can’t have you shaming us like this! Get out!” Ahmed had shouted, making a sweeping motion toward the front door with his index finger before he caught Mariam’s defiant eyes. Mariam could not bear the idea of her son out in the streets or begging his friends for shelter. It amounted to abandonment.
“You let this boy get away with everything. You’re ruining his life,” Ahmed had said to her with a tired voice before he went back to bed.
Had she ruined Ismail’s life? Would kicking him out have taught him a lesson? There were so many things she’d hidden from her husband to protect Ismail. The fake gun she’d found under her son’s mattress. The bag of drugs that she’d thought were herbs until Mona told her otherwise. So many mistakes had marked her path. There were so many things she should have done differently. Coming to terms with who her children were becoming, letting go of her plans, aspirations, and expectation of them was one thing. But this loss, Ismail’s death, was a complete annihilation of her reality. What was she if not a mother? And how was she supposed to make up to Ismail for what she had done now that he was gone? Should she go to the police? Would telling the police who she thought was responsible for her son’s death amount to snitching? Would that bring about another retaliation against her family?
“Ratting is like digging your own grave,” Ismail had told her once while they were watching a crime show on TV.
But like a lot of other things Ismail talked about, this didn’t make sense to her then.
How was she supposed to know that pressuring her son to do the right thing would cost him his life? Could she trust the police? Ismail certainly hadn’t. And if she didn’t, what was she supposed to do with all this pain? How was she supposed to carry it?
She slid open the small, grilled window for some fresh air. The smell of wood burning nearby took her, as it always did, back in time to her parents’ courtyard in Asmara where the soil in her mother’s little garden was as red and black as henna on a young bride’s feet. She remembered the coal her Quranic teacher ground in a short mortar to make ink and the pieces of wood he sharpened for his students to use to write verses on wood planks they then inscribed to memory. Some sheikhs would wash the words off these boards into a cup and offer the liquid as an elixir to soothe all kinds of ailments. She remembered how Ismail had laughed when she related this and other stories of her childhood to him. How she’d hear him repeat her words to his friends later.
“Yo, mon, that’s straight up the craziest shit I’ve ever heard,” his friends would say, their fists like a microphone on their mouths, their fledgling, manly voices reverberating throughout the house.
When a few of his friends stayed over for the night, she’d wake up early in the morning to scramble a dozen eggs and fry two cans of beans with onions, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers to feed their growing bodies. They’d all look so peaceful and young, their bodies spread out on sheets on the living room rug, or on the couches, their lanky legs dangling. And as they walked out of the house as a group after breakfast, she’d wished they were all still small. Maybe if she had not fed Ismail so well, he would have grown up slower and would have stayed safer longer.
The doorbell rang. Mariam felt a bang of pain in her chest. She checked her watch. She waited for a sound, anticipating, hoping it would be Mona. She steadied her grip on the bathroom doorknob before she turned it. She looked out and saw one of Ismail’s friends sitting on the steps to the basement, his wide frame stooped, his eyes staring blankly at the wall in front of him. She had seen this kind of gaze on Ismail’s face before. The look of surrender in these boys’ eyes, when you caught them unguarded, was the kind of defeat she didn’t think one could experience outside of a war zone. At least, where she grew up, people clearly knew they were at war. Battles were announced and fought in the open — unlike the vicious violence taking place in dark corners of this city’s streets. How many friends had this boy lost? She wondered if those young lawyers in the tall office buildings she cleaned had ever known this kind of loss, this kind of resignation.
When she met Mona’s gaze, she saw reflected in her daughter’s eyes her own agony, and the tears she had yet to shed. She hesitated for a second before she leaped toward her daughter. Mona’s embrace fractured her resistance. She felt a dam breaking. Mother and daughter fell to the ground. Mariam heard a woman rushing toward her and pulling her by the arm.
Asma intervened. “Let her be. She needs to do this,” she said.
As she let herself drown in her grief, Mariam felt grateful to Asma.
A howl escaped her throat finally, and then the tears came.
She cried for having betrayed her son the day the police came to question him about a murder in the neighbourhood. The threat and urgency in the police officers’ voices had frightened her to the core, so without thinking, she’d ran to the utility room where she knew Ismail had hidden a big sharp knife with a scalloped handle. She’d seen a boy hand it to him the night before. She didn’t want her son to get in trouble for someone else’s crime. But after handing the knife to the cops, when she’d turned to explain to Ismail why this needed to be done, the hate and anger in his eyes, the clenched jaws and fists, had instantaneously transformed her son into someone she’d never seen before.
She cried for having pushed him again a few days later, at the detention centre on Innes Road. When she advised him through the glass partition to cooperate with the cops, to tell them whatever he knew to save his life, Ismail had refused.
“You don’t understand, Mom, I can’t,” he’d whispered, surveying his surroundings from the corners of his eyes.
Mariam had examined the police officers stationed at each end of the room. Then she’d turned to the young inmates sitting on either side of Ismail, talking to their own families. Their uniforms, closed faces and fists, their defiant air; they resembled her son and she hated them for it. She had to do whatever it took to get him out of there. That’s why she’d resorted to begging and crying noisily, relating for the first time how she’d risked her life to come to Canada.
“I wish I had died back then so I could have been spared this day,” she wailed.
When she looked up, Ismail’s eyes had turned red, as though he’d just cried too. Even though he’d stayed stoic and distant for the remainder of the visitation, she knew his resolve had softened. She felt victorious, capable, in control.
“I love you, Mom,” Mona said through her own cries, and hugged Mariam harder.
For a long time, Mariam had resisted saying I love you back to her children. It felt ridiculous to her, this stating of the obvious. Love to her was in how you woke up before your children and got their things ready for school, how you stayed up late even after a twelve-hour shift to make them tea when they studied for exams. Love was in how you pressed their clothes, combed their hair; in the way you disciplined them, trying to instill values you inherited from your own parents; in how you held their hands before they left you to go study in another city across the country the way Mona had done; in the many complicated dishes you prepared for days for when they finally came home; and in how you watched them eat as if they hadn’t eaten in days because they missed your cooking. But today, Mona’s words felt like a healing balm on a throbbing cut. They made Mariam miss hearing those words from Ismail’s mouth. He used to say them so often, she realized now, she had long stopped hearing them.
On the day of Ismail’s testimony, Ahmed, Mona, and Mariam had taken a seat on the benches behind Ismail’s lawyer in clear view of the witness box. Mariam had looked at two thick folders in the lawyer’s hands, wondering why her son’s short life needed so many pages, so many words to defend his innocence. She’d felt her heart shatter when she saw Ismail come through a side door escorted by an officer, his hands and feet in shackles. And when her son looked at her as he took a seat in the witness box, she knew something had irrevocably changed in him. Though she didn’t understand most of what was said that day, though it took his death for her to finally grasp the retaliatory laws of the streets Ismail had to abide by, she’d understood the message in Ismail’s gaze when he looked at her before pointing at the accused in the glass box against the wall: You made me do this.
heading somewhere
Omar types domestic workers Syria and waits for the page to load. Images swirl in his mind like a gutted photo album set to the wind: his old girlfriend Sara, his childhood friends Meseret and Naima, another girl or two whose names he can’t remember. Young women who’d left Addis Ababa to work as maids in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere, light on luggage and high on anticipation for a better life. Words chase these images like guided missiles — isolation, beating, rape, and murder (disguised as suicide) — but Omar doesn’t want to think about these things right now. He wills his mind in another direction: Sara wading through Damascus’s narrow, winding streets, past busy, dusty souks — a landscape he only knows from pictures he’d googled recently — to find a way out of Syria before civil war engulfs the city.
It’s only 4:15 p.m. but the snow cloaking the quiet Ottawa neighbourhood is already turning to soft indigo. Omar hopes to find a lead into Sara’s whereabouts or at least a contact number before his wife, Marianne, comes home from work in an hour.
The rebels have taken control of Douma, a city only ten kilometers away from Damascus, he’d heard announced on the news last night.
Sara might already be in one of the NGOs’ makeshift shelters, waiti
ng for a flight home. If only Ethiopia had an embassy in Syria … or maybe she’s on her way to the Ethiopian consulate in Beirut. He keeps speculating, as he’s been doing for the last two days, ever since Sara’s mother called from Addis Ababa to ask him for help in getting her daughter out of Damascus.
When he was little, back in Addis Ababa, whenever he and his friends heard screams coming from the police station adjacent to their compound, they’d rush to stack up boxes, tires, or any piece of trash solid enough to stand on against the concrete wall separating the compound from the station so they could glimpse whomever was being interrogated that day. Sara would already be there beside him, her eyes sparkling eagerly. Together, they’d dare other children to join them. Serious interrogations were done behind closed doors so only screams and echoes of unintelligible words could be heard, but the kids would line up beside each other anyway, stand on tiptoe and crane their little heads over the wall, hoping to see some poor, petty criminal writhe and scream on the dusty court surrounded by police officers beating on him with batons and straps. Sometimes, an officer would catch them watching and threaten to lock them up, wagging a finger and cursing, or even flinging rocks at them. They’d all run away, clumsily tripping over their cobbled-together stands, down dirt paths riddled with potholes and sharp rocks half-buried in the soil, to their homes. Some would be on the verge of tears by the time they stopped, but not Sara. She would laugh, her mischievous eyes wild with exhilaration. Omar loved and hated that about her. He admired her fearlessness and yet lived in constant worry that in the eyes of their peers, she, a girl, might one day prove to be the braver of the two.
This childhood memory melts into a sadness in Omar’s gut. He shakes his melancholy away, opens a link, and scans through the news:
We heard gunfire and we saw black smoke behind the buildings but our employer told us there was a celebration at the army barracks.
We wanted to return home but our employers left the country and we were locked inside their house.
Things Are Good Now Page 15