Things Are Good Now

by Djamila Ibrahim

  Stranded migrant workers should contact their embassies or the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for repatriation assistance …

  He spots a link to the IOM and learns they have an office in Damascus. He frantically clicks and clicks again until he finds their contact information. On a piece of paper he writes down the IOM’s number, under the one Sara’s mother had given him to reach her daughter at her employers’ house. He adds the Ethiopian Consulate’s number in Beirut to the list. He opens another link or two, then gives up. The news is too depressing to continue reading. He tucks the piece of paper in his shirt pocket. He’ll call early tomorrow morning. It’ll be afternoon in that part of the world by then. He’ll also try Sara’s employers’ house again. He closes his laptop, picks up his winter coat from the hallway closet, closes the front door behind him, and heads to the grocery store a few blocks away.

  Holding the corner post for balance, Sara climbs onto the patio chair. She wraps the bedsheet she’s tied to the ledge like a rope around her arm and slowly climbs over her employers’ second-floor balcony and down to the quiet street below. Unlike her Filipina neighbour who ran to her government’s embassy in the city, Sara had to find a way out of Damascus and into Beirut where she could seek help from the Ethiopian consulate. A metre or so before her feet touch the ground, she loses her grip and falls on the asphalt. She gets up quickly, adjusts the duffle bag on her back, and looks up toward the house. The lights have not been turned on. She takes a deep breath and searches the dark street for the ride Mohamed, her employers’ gatekeeper, had arranged for her. She spots an old van a few metres away. Its brake lights flash twice, as agreed upon. She walks toward it as fast as she can without running.

  “Get in the back,” the driver says from the half-open window before Sara has a chance to make eye contact.

  “Cover yourself with that blanket and keep your head down,” he orders with a rushed voice.

  Panic takes over as she slides the van door shut. What if this is a trap? She trusts Mohamed. He didn’t usually let her out of the compound alone for fear of losing his job but he was nice to her. And he has delivered on the promise of finding her someone who, for a fee, would help her. But this man could be taking her to the police station instead of the outskirts of Damascus where she’s supposed to meet another man who will take her to Beirut. She shakes the distressing thought away. There is nothing she can do now but hope for the best.

  She squeezes her slim body between two rows of seats as an extra precaution. Mohamed had said the military was intensifying its operations in the city and that soldiers have been stopping and searching cars often these days. She rests her head on her duffle bag and covers herself with the blanket. The man starts the car and heads toward Jawaher Lal Nahro.

  For a while, she listens through the van’s rattles for any changes in speed or signs of abnormal noise outside. Then, to ease her anxiety, she tries to think of happier times. Her earliest memory is of Ababa Tesfaye’s children’s TV show. Every Saturday at 6 p.m., she, Omar, and other neighbourhood kids would gather at the entrance of Emama Elsabet’s living-room-turned-bar. Wriggling around each other to get to the front of the line, they’d watch Emama Elsabet as she heaved herself onto a short wooden stool, removed the crocheted doily from the small TV on the shelf in the corner above the glass bar, and turned the dial to on. The children would then rush to get the best spot by the side door, from where they could watch their favourite show without disturbing Emama Elsabet’s customers. Some nights, there would be too many kids to fit in the tight space assigned to them. Fighting would erupt and the bar owner would shoo everybody home, cursing. On good days, though, they’d sit there, all senses glued to that TV, like seedlings turned to the sun, lost in Ababa Tesfaye’s tales of smart foxes and gullible little children, of greedy humans and misunderstood snakes. They’d sit on the chilly red-and-black-checkered cement tiles for an hour, their scrawny little bodies huddled together for warmth against the cold air coming through the open door. They’d return Ababa Tesfaye’s greetings, answer his questions, and cheer in unison when Good prevailed against Evil. Once in a while, Emama Elsabet or one of her waitresses would instruct them to keep quiet.

  Back then, Omar wanted to follow in Ababa Tesfaye’s footsteps, and Sara dreamed of becoming an actress or a singer, anything to get her on TV. Together, they would memorize Ababa Tesfaye’s stories and re-enact them in front of their friends and families. How strange and remote that part of her life feels now, as though she’s lived two consecutive lives connected only by brittle threads of memory.

  Sara looks around hoping to find a familiar face. A dozen African and Asian men and women are sitting on the shabby linoleum floor, all staring at the dirty walls in front of them or at their own hands. None of them is Habesha. A piece of fabric that might once have served as a tablecloth curtains the only window in the room. A light bulb hanging low from the ceiling bathes the room with a dim orange hue. This apartment must be in one of Damascus’s western suburbs, near the border into Lebanon. That’s what Mohamed had told her, but her driver had only grunted when she asked him to confirm this as he dropped her off. She sits beside a Black woman with a dirty shawl around her shoulders and waits for the car that will clandestinely transport them into Lebanon.

  “Where are you from?” Sara asks her neighbour. A tuft of hair has escaped from the woman’s several-months-old braids as if someone had pulled her by the hair.

  “Uganda,” the woman replies without turning, her voice cracking a little.

  Sara waits for a second. “I’m from Ethiopia,” she volunteers.

  The woman nods slightly without looking at her.

  Sara leaves the woman to her silence, folds her legs closer to her chest, and discreetly takes out a piece of paper from her bra. She examines the portrait-size picture of Jesus in her palm, one of the few things the recruiters at the employment agency had not confiscated when she came to work in Damascus ten months ago. If only they hadn’t taken her cellphone or the thin gold necklace Omar had given her before he left for Canada. She could have sold them and used the money now.

  “You know, your saviour seems more in need of saving than the people he presides over,” Omar had said once, pointing with his chin at a framed portrait of Jesus her mother hung on the wall above the credenza in their living room. Making fun of each other’s religion was a subtle way they had of testing the parameters of a possible future together.

  “I prefer him to your faceless Allah,” she’d retorted.

  Now, staring at Jesus’s soft golden hair flowing like mead around His oval, blemish-free face, His big childish blue eyes, His delicate hand pointing at a heart that resembles the strawberries her madam reserved for important guests, Sara wonders if her innocent and fragile-looking God could indeed save her from the nightmare she’s in. She quickly shakes the blasphemous thought away, cautiously crosses herself, and tucks the picture back into her bra.

  Omar picks up a plastic basket from a pile by the grocery store’s entrance and joins a crowd of after-work shoppers. He chooses a pack of whole-wheat spaghetti from the pasta and sauce aisle and heads to the organic produce section. He squeezes through a mostly white and middle-class group of people who are, with the seriousness of a physician examining patients, stroking ripe mangoes and pears or studying the crispiness of leafy vegetables. He grabs a bag of mixed greens and walks past other patrons comparing the nutritional values of condiments in tiny jars and takes his place at the end of the express lane.

  He prefers regular pasta but Marianne is big on healthy eating except for her weekly indulgence of a Big Mac, poutine, and Diet Coke. He once or twice pointed out the irony of the Diet Coke in this meal, but to no avail. His wife can be stubborn sometimes, not very unlike Sara, except Marianne’s unyielding nature comes from a life of comfort, free of wants and doubts. He admires Marianne’s assurance, her deep-seated confidence that nothing is out of reac
h, that every broken thing or person is potentially repairable. That must be what she saw in him, his potential; he was someone she could save and fix.

  It was pure chance, how he’d met Marianne. She, a Canadian foreign service officer on her first mission abroad, had accompanied the new Canadian consular officer to a function organized by the Ethiopian Tourism Commission to welcome new foreign diplomats; he, a third-year Addis Ababa University student, had escorted a distant aunt, a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, to the event in lieu of her ailing husband. Marianne would tell him later how she’d watched him from afar as he talked his way around the room, mesmerized by the ease with which he carried himself despite his apparent youth and the ill-fitting blazer he wore. And how a rush of curiosity and desire had taken her over, a wonderful stirring of the heart she hadn’t felt in the year and a half she’d lived in Addis Ababa. And how, surprising even herself, she’d accepted his offer to show her around the city — even though she’d already seen all the tourist spots — to satisfy a sudden need to be wooed by a tall, handsome man.

  The day he left Addis Ababa a married man, he’d stood outside the bedroom he’d shared with his three brothers, his eyes travelling from one corner of the room to the next, trying to look at his childhood’s landscape from the perspective of his future Canadian self, as he imagined a cartographer or an archeologist would do upon discovering an ancient site. Would he recognize the way the sun’s rays, nonchalant as only eternal things can afford to be, spread on his single bed, diluting the brown sheets to a soft caramel tone? Would he recognize the sandalwood smell that clung to every corner of the two-room house from his mother’s daily incense burning to voracious spirits who’d never answer her prayers? Would he remember the names of the girls whose initials he and his brothers carved on the legs of their wooden beds when they were teenagers? He didn’t want to forget these things. Others, he wished to erase: the ugliness of the newspaper-covered dirt walls, the paper brown and stiff in places from water damage; the smell of urine in the pink plastic chamber pot his mother kept under her bed for when it was too late to go to the communal bathroom at the other end of the compound; the misery and hunger that forced him and his siblings to work as shoe-shiners and street vendors before they were ten years old.

  Rivulets of cold sweat had run down his armpits as he walked past rows of old, pastel-coloured houses and their rundown verandas on his way to the car that would take him to the airport. He’d felt a little dazed, like a prisoner stuck on the threshold between dream and reality, his mother’s hold on his arm as she limped beside him the only weight constantly grounding him back into the tangible world.

  On their way out of the compound, he’d stopped in front of the little house Sara shared with her parents. He’d stared at what must have once been deep bright red steps where Sara and other neighbourhood girls used to play marbles when they were little, now turned to the colour of raw beet skin. It was on these steps that he’d said goodbye to her the night before, and where he’d promised to send her sponsorship papers as soon as he could. He’d wished he had the power to fuse her body onto his then, melt flesh on flesh and mind to heart, so he could take something real of her with him, so he could reassure her of his love and commitment, convince her that Marianne meant nothing to him, was only a means to an end, a gateway to their future happiness in Canada. But he was never good at serious talk. His was the language of a street hustler and Sara knew all his tricks.

  The woman in front of Omar in the grocery store’s express lane leans her head to the side of the line then turns to him and says: “It’s never going to stop, is it?” And to Omar’s perplexed look, she adds, “The snow,” pointing at a wall of white outside the store’s sliding doors.

  Omar nods.

  “I wish I was in Jamaica right now. Or anywhere else but here.”

  “Be careful of what you wish for,” Omar says with a sly smile.

  The woman looks at him, puzzled for a moment. Then she says, “Well, not anywhere, but you know what I mean. Some place warm and pleasant.”

  Omar nods again and scrolls through his cellphone, looking for missed unknown or international calls.

  The Canadian embassy has already closed its office in Damascus. Otherwise, he would have asked Marianne to contact one of her colleagues there to help him find Sara. His wife has always been a little touchy about his history with Sara, but this is too important. Marianne would have put her feelings aside, at least until Sara was out of harm’s way. The tension, innuendos, and outright accusations might have started again later, the way they did last year when Omar, too busy planning his first trip back to Ethiopia, and too absorbed by the prospect of seeing Sara again, had neglected Marianne. Thankfully, his wife didn’t go as far as threatening him with a divorce as he had feared. He resented Marianne her power — divorce meant the loss of his permanent resident card, maybe even deportation. More importantly, though, he was furious with himself for having let his guard down with her. However, things are different now between Sara and him, and his wife probably knows that.

  Last year, after four years in Canada, Omar had finally made it to Addis Ababa for a month-long visit. And Sara had just returned home from a three-year stint in Dubai. At first, their reunion was all that Omar had hoped it would be. The outburst of contagious joy that was her laughter had become somehow dimmer, her manners more poised. Still, her face had retained the fullness of her teenage years and under the restrained demeanour she wore like a protective veil, he could discern the contours of the vivacious girl he grew up with. But it didn’t take long before his excitement was shattered. In tightly knit communities like theirs, secrets rarely stay hidden. His best friend, Alemayehu, was the first to tell him what Sara had been up to in Dubai.

  When he confronted her, to his surprise, she didn’t deny the allegations nor did she try to repent.

  “I did what I had to do … just as you did,” she said.

  He could taste the venom in her contained voice, the sarcasm in her dry laughter afterwards. He felt a gush of hatred toward her for implying that marrying Marianne for Canadian citizenship was akin to the life of prostitution she’d chosen. Why didn’t she just return home after she’d run away from her abusive employers’ house? He wished he could lay his hands on the nameless people that had pushed her into such degradation.

  “I couldn’t come home empty-handed,” she’d said. “I went there to make money.”

  He should have known that Sara couldn’t have allowed herself to give up on her responsibilities. If a lifetime of struggle teaches anything to someone as strong willed as Sara, it’s perseverance.

  What surprised him most later on was that their last confrontation was not infused with insults and tears the way their fights used to be; their final breakup was not inscribed in a specific, single instance that he could replay in his mind. Instead, the irreparability of the matter was felt rather than heard, the reality of it taken in slowly, like the smell of rot carried by a light breeze over a distance. Only recently did he realize why his anger had, for so long, felt muddied, unripe for outburst, his vexation rigged with confusion and despair: it hid his own shame. The shame of a man who’d failed to protect the woman he loved.

  If only everyone he trusted had not joined the others in vilifying Sara. “City girls can’t handle hard work. You’d never hear of village girls debasing themselves that way,” said his old neighbour, a woman who’d known both Sara and him since they were babies.

  “A Muslim girl would not have done that,” his mother said.

  But he can’t blame anyone. No matter how modern he believed himself to be, he just couldn’t shed the image of other men possessing Sara’s warm, lithe body. It had damaged the truth of his love for her and sullied the dream he had for them.

  For months after returning to Canada, he’d felt as though he was afflicted with permanent jet lag. Even the childhood memories he used to cherish tu
rned to ashes in his mind. For a while, the only thing he clearly remembered about his trip was the clinking sound of the gold bracelets Sara wore daily as if to remind herself it was all worth it.

  Now, surrounded by people who have never experienced the stink of abject poverty, a new truth reveals itself to him: Sara might pay for his ego with her life, caught in the crossfire of a civil war. Would he be able to live with himself if something happened to her in Syria? Why did she have to go to Syria anyway, as though Dubai was not bad enough?

  The woman in front of him in the express lane interrupts his thoughts again. “I bet it’s always warm where you’re from.”

  “Yes,” Omar says and turns his head left and right, pretending to be searching for someone.

  On any other day, he would have been more receptive. He would have told the woman about Addis Ababa’s two-thousand-kilometre-high altitude, the blazing sun in January and the cold teeth-shattering early morning wind at the height of the rainy season in July. He would have told her about the hail, sometimes as big as ping-pong balls, that crackled against his house’s tin roof like popcorn. He would have told her how, when he was little, sometimes he’d collect hail from his neighbours’ front yards in his mother’s rusted enamel bucket then dump it in front of his house, spread it around quickly before it melted, and pretend he lived in America, which in his mind at that time encompassed the whole of Europe and Canada. But not today. Today, he just wants to get to the cash register, pay for his groceries, and go home. He wants the churning in his stomach to stop. He wants the night to end so he can try to contact Sara tomorrow.

  Sara brushes her arm against her small chest to feel the thin wad of cash in her bra. There’s just enough money to cover the fare to Beirut and some food. She’s going home empty-handed. She bites her lower lip hard to stifle the anger in her throat, then remembers her surroundings: she might not make it out of Syria at all. She realizes that she shouldn’t have come to Damascus, but how could a poor girl with only a high school diploma and average looks achieve anything in a country of tens of millions of unemployed youth?