by Dohra Ahmad
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 reenact 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 reach, 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 turned 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?
She imagines her mother counting and recounting what’s left of the money she’d sent her four months earlier, devising ways to make it last until the next time. But there won’t be a next time. The money Sara made in Dubai was supposed to have been enough to supplement her father’s modest income. She had dreamed of her parents running a small business together, perhaps a pastry shop, working side by side, filled with a joy only a sense of recovered dignity and pride can bring. She had even fancied she’d have enough extra money to cover her flight to Canada when Omar sent her the sponsorship papers he’d promised. Instead, all that money and all the gold Abu Karim—the old Emirati widower whose mistress she’d been for a year before his sons kicked her out of his house—was spent on her father’s medical bills when his diabetes suddenly attacked his vision and kidneys.
“My ma’am was killed when she was coming home from her friend’s house. A bomb fell on the building next door and took her life,” Sara hears a middle-aged woman sitting across from her say to her neighbour. “Everybody was running and crying. I went to my ma’am’s room and took money from where she hides it and ran away.”
“The taxi driver I paid to bring me here almost handed me over to the police,” a young man said to the middle-aged woman. “I open the car door and run away when I saw the police station sign.”
“My ma’am refused to give me food. She beat me until I was unconscious. I was not sorry she died,” the middle-aged woman said, adjusting her shawl on her head.
Sara looks down at her sweat-stained clothes, her jeans dirty from when she fell as she jumped out of her employers’ house, her fingernails chipped and dirty. How self-conscious she’d felt last year when she first saw Omar in Addis Ababa after four years. He had greeted her with open arms and the same boyish smile she remembered. He’d hugged her, too, but his embrace was tentative, as if he were suddenly unable to trus
t the memory of their intimacy. Although she didn’t recognize his scent, she hoped he’d recall the perfume she wore, the one he’d bought her long before he’d left for Canada.
She sat across from him in one of the two wooden chairs in his mother’s living room. In the dim light, she searched his face for signs of time’s passage or the strains of distance that might have altered her knowledge of him. Omar’s dark skin, which used to glow like freshly roasted coffee beans in the summer, had gotten lighter, his body fleshy, yet not fat. She thought it suited him, but these manifestations of comfort had proved her fear right: time and circumstances had erected an insurmountable barrier between them.
She’d tucked her dry hands between her thighs, rubbing them together in the folds of her skirt to smooth out their coarseness and, by the same token, the memories of the years spent in Dubai, first cooking, scrubbing floors, and washing eight people’s clothes by hand. And then, after her employer made it a habit of forcing himself on her whenever his wife and children were away, of sleeping with men for pay.
“If you can’t stop them, might as well have them pay for it,” a girlfriend had said to her.
She had found it hard at first, but like anything else in life, only the first steps were unbearable. She was lucky to have attracted Abu Karim’s eye. Within a month, she had gone from a battered maid to a prostitute to a live-in mistress. But some scars are hard to conceal. Omar’s gaze was a burning sun melting her cover. If he ever saw her naked again, she was sure he’d be able to discern the outlines of Abu Karim’s pale, spotty hands as the old man squeezed her thighs until they hurt in a pathetic attempt to summon his long-lost vigour, and the foul lust of all the others before him.
Only the state of Omar’s mother’s house quieted her fears a little. Nothing in the living room had been moved or replaced in decades. His mother’s single bed with its thin mattress occupied one dark wall. Another corner housed the family’s modest belongings, piled up under an old bedsheet. She was abashed by the fact that noticing these things improved her mood, made her think that perhaps Omar was not as out of reach as she had thought.