“We ate them all for Fasika,” the driver says, laughing. “If you had come three weeks earlier you would have been fighting them for a taxi.” He holds out a battered business card over his shoulder: Wondwossen (Wondu). Driver. Anytime Day or Night.
“Thanks,” I say, reaching for it.
“No, add my number in your contacts.”
It takes me a moment to catch on. Maybe he can’t afford to give these out willy-nilly. Could be his last one. I do as he says, grateful for the chance to dally here.
“Nice slogan.”
“Ya, our kind we don’t sleep much!”
I pay him in American dollars, with tip. He insists on carrying my bags and escorting me to Babbaye’s gate. We pick our way down the rocky, muddy road, along Babbaye’s cinder block wall that is topped by broken glass embedded in cement. Babbaye’s red metal gate, and the pedestrian door built-in on its right side, are closed.
“Go back, Wondu. You’re not parked well,” I say.
“No trouble.” He puts down my bags, and bangs loudly on the door. We wait, studying what’s left of the peeling paint, a pattern resembling the map of some unknown planet with red continents and metallic grey oceans.
A tall housemaid opens the small door in the gate. She is dressed all in black. An inverted netela is draped over her shoulders. She looks irritated, as though this is her house and we’re bothering her. As soon as she sees me, she flings the door wide.
“Dyesiye!” she exclaims joyfully, like she’d been on the brink of giving up hope that I’d ever come. Her rural accent adds a third syllable, making my name sound like the Amharic word for “my happiness.” She steps over the threshold, throws her arms around me. I have no idea who she is.
She releases me and falls at my feet, nearly pushing me off balance. From the ground, she wails at the stones, slams herself against them, questioning God’s judgment, calling out Ema’s name. “Why, why, why did Igziabher do this? Where is she? Zimita!”
Wondu calmly intervenes, trying to raise her up. She slips out of his grip and back into her dramatics, pounding her chest on each word. I am not sure which is heartfelt, her happiness in the first seconds of seeing me or this outburst immediately after. Wondu alternates between consoling, commanding her to stand up, then pulling her when she won’t. Their movements look almost choreographed. I hope he’s not copping a feel.
“Say her name,” the woman intones, slapping the backs of her hands on the ground with each phrase. “Call to her. She won’t answer you. Try. She won’t respond. Where is she? Is she here? Is she with you? Igizabher should have taken me. Why spare me? Show her to me. Such a mother, such a daughter she was, such a daughter you are. I know she is with you. I know you have brought her.”
“Get up. Stop it. Enough,” Wondu says.
This woman is everything I’ve wished I could be from the moment I heard my mother “didn’t make it.” So this is where my words and my body have been. But what right has she to so much sorrow? It’s as if she’s using this occasion to shed tears stored up for somebody else.
Passersby stop. They cover their mouths, or hold hands over their hearts while mumbling phrases of condolence. Nefs yimar, nefs yimar, beseeching God’s mercy for my mother’s soul, then move on as abruptly as they stopped. Some add salt to the wound by naming Ema’s brothers, who preceded their sister to the Creator. One man says nothing. He steps around us to enter the courtyard. Following his cue, I pick up my tote and step over the wailing housemaid. That shuts her up.
Wondu walks in behind me with my suitcase. The woman follows us, sniffling, dabbing her eyes with the black edge of her netela. We walk single file down a flagstone pathway, through a leafy courtyard lined by coffee, banana, and lemon trees. The pathway splits in two in front of the stone steps that lead up to the porch running the length of Babbaye’s house, which is built on a high stone foundation. A second branch of the pathway, passing in front of Babbaye’s mefakiya bushes, leads around the right side of the house. On lower ground, to the left of Babbaye’s house, there is a row of attached homes, their entrances obscured behind enormous hydrangea plants.
I put down my tote at the foot of the porch steps. Wondu, his work of delivering me safely completed, does the same with my suitcase, glances at the housemaid, and jogs back to the gate. The woman stands back, looking star-struck, as if I’m a legendary person whom her friends will never believe she actually met. She regards me with her whole body, the way you stare only if you know the person doesn’t know you’re staring. Except I do, and she’s not in the least deterred.
“Who are you?” I ask, in case she is another distant “cousin” from what’s left of Aba’s side, way out in Harrar in the east — none of whom I’ve ever met — which might explain why she is so devastated by Ema’s death.
“I am a worker of this house.”
“Since how much time?”
“Some years.”
She must know me from photos that Babbaye has on his living-room shelves. The top row was photos of the departed — his six sons, his wife. The one below was just for photos of me, one taken at my baptism, another at my kindergarten graduation. My parents must have sent him more recent ones. I am touched that he may have kept me up there all these years.
“And your name is what?”
A smile precedes her answer. “Gela.”
She clearly enjoys saying her own name, as if she picked it herself. At the gate, Wondu is having trouble with the latch. “Please don’t stand here. Go inside,” she says to me, as she goes to open the gate for Wondu.
I am impressed by a name at once so basic — simply meaning body — yet sensual. Wondu looks impressed too, as much by Gela’s profile as by her door-opening abilities.
Gela returns. She picks up my tote. I climb the steps to the orange-tiled porch. The once-white ceiling is now rust-coloured and sagging. I stop and turn to Gela.
“Do you do crying or shouting to everyone who visits?”
“What can I do?”
“You shouldn’t give people fright.”
She is older than me, but she doesn’t challenge this scolding from her junior, because I am family, and that gives me the right.
Hanging on the stained beige porch wall, above the door, is a black frame with an eight-by-ten of Ema’s most recent official picture, taken seven years ago in 2003, when she became consul general in Toronto. Around her neck in a loose side knot she wears her silk print of Afewerk Tekle’s painting King Solomon Meets the Queen of Sheba. Her look is one of grim resignation. A half-inch frown line sits boldly between her plucked and pencilled eyebrows, confirmation of a hunch, which shows only faintly in her wedding portrait, that life would turn out to be no laughing matter.
The double doors leading from the porch directly into the living room are open. Below me, Gela sighs broken-heartedly, looking at my tote as if it is a baby that has finally dropped off to sleep. Her forehead and chin are scarred where there once were tattoos, typical markers of a rural Christian. She endured having crucifixes needled in, then removed when she came to the city. By heat or blade, who knows. I think of the daisy that I carved on my inner wrist with the tip of a compass when I was ten. That mark is so faded only I know it is there.
I am grateful that, unlike this woman, Ema’s scars from her surgeries were all out of sight. She had, however, developed an unconscious habit of lightly scratching the back of her thigh over her clothes, where the first irregularly shaped mole was removed. Her gesture was a constant reminder of the unseen scar.
“She is here now. Igziabher yimesgen,” Gela says, praising God while looking up at my mother’s picture, then at me. I hurry into the living room before she begins another round of her hysterics.
TWO
The living room is bare, just a dizzying expanse of zigzag parquet. Stiff-backed chairs line the walls. There is one side table, at which four old men sit huddled, pens in hand, marking up papers. Babbaye sits alone at the spot of my interrogation nineteen years ago. I
hurry to him and hide my face in his old neck, what I have wanted to do since the day I rode away from that red gate for the last time. He lets me cry my longing for what is empty to be filled, for what is missing to be replaced. When he’s deemed that I have wept enough for now, he puts his hands on my cheeks, his lips between my eyes, and kisses me.
Babbaye trembles with the effort of maintaining a proud bearing. His uncombed hair, his beard, are as full as that of young arbegna. He still wears his green khaki suit with the rigid brown leather belt, and his extendable metal cane with the foam handle is, as ever, hooked on the armrest of his chair. His skin is the same deep, etched brown of a rifle stock, his smell the clean earthiness of Ethiopia.
There’s the business of living, and then there’s this, coming face-to-face with your origin, which makes everything go quiet, as if the years you’ve been apart never happened, or they mean nothing.
“Where is my child?”
“I’m here, Babbaye.”
“Where is Tobya?”
I break eye contact. So brilliant is his grief, it’s like looking directly at the sun. I’ve never heard anyone refer to Ema by what I know is her old name, Tobya, the folk way of saying “Ethiopia.”
On the far wall of the long, wide living room, next to the back door, there is a huge colour photograph hanging in a frame as big as the black void of the fireplace beneath. A single white candle burns on the mantelpiece. Tobya is the young woman in that picture: Ema while she still had a gap between her top front teeth, rocking a seventies blowout, large hoop earrings, and a wide-lapel floral shirt. Only because of that picture can I be sure that my mother was once a carefree girl.
“Haven’t you brought my Tobya?”
Oh no, not this again. When Aba, Le’ul, and I were packing Ema’s belongings at the residence, about three weeks ago, Aba had told us how Babbaye hadn’t asked if we were bringing Ema’s body back, but when.
Under a chair in a corner, I see our old blue rotary phone, the thing I’ve heard Babbaye’s voice through for nearly two decades. I could just call Aba on it now, have him tell Babbaye what Ema wanted for her burial, what she actually said.
The four old men pause in their writing to listen for my answer. These, Babbaye’s oldest friends, must have been the ones Aba said had come here to Babbaye’s house, at dawn, the day after Ema died, to tell Babbaye the merdo of Ema’s death.
There is no sign of the photos of Ema’s grave at Scarborough Bluffs Cemetery. I had emailed them to Aba for Le’ul to doctor, before they were sent to Babbaye. Aba must not have sent them. One should have been tucked into the corner of Tobya’s breezy portrait, to complete her story.
Where Ema rests now, it is utterly dark, in a box deep inside the Earth. Though in my mind I see her in there clearly, as if she’s asleep under a spotlight, intact, despite what I’m told happens to flesh and skin after death.
Haven’t you brought my Tobya? is not what I wish it was: a grieving father posing the same question again and again, knowing the answer will never change, because he can’t not ask. No, it is a real question with only one right answer.
Yes I have.
But I haven’t. I don’t have the right answer for Babbaye. I have brought only myself. My useless self. Although I’m welcome, I’m not who is wanted. I look down, wishing I were not here, wishing that on the day I heard the merdo from Aba, I hadn’t taken it for granted that we would return Ema to Babbaye, that she would be picked up by a funeral director at Bole, and buried in her own land with her own people. I want to punch myself for having been so oblivious, and then so compliant.
I should re-enact Gela’s theatrics at the gate, demonstrate my sorrow in the proper way. The room has been emptied out for such a show, after all. Not just to reflect the starkness of loss, which is how it seemed to me at first glance. It is a stage for interpreting grief. For women to howl, spin, fall, keen. To beat their chests, pound clutched fists the size of their hearts hard enough to splinter the flat bone, punish their flesh for powerlessness against death, and their unworthy hearts for the audacity to keep on beating.
But I don’t feel any impulse to move or make a sound. My fists are clenched but my arms stay limp, in a half-formed cultural instinct. I am not going to risk falling on my knees and hurting myself. Barb might call at any moment. I will my phone to ring and for it to be her, telling me that the jet stream is clear of ash. It’s time to go. It was never time to come. Ghion Hotel never seemed so appealing, so much of a haven, as now.
Gela enters, carrying my bags, from the porch. She puts them in the larger of two adjacent rooms across from us, the bedroom where all Babbaye’s children slept until, after the Terror, Ema slept alone.
Gela exits through the back door, which connects the living and dining area to the alleyway between the main house and the service quarters. Babbaye’s gaze leaves me, as do his hands. The men pick up their Bics and resume their work, understanding that the Shaleqa will not get what he wants. Yet, their postures seem to warn. To everyone else my grandfather will always be the Shaleqa. By the time of his retirement from the Ethiopian army, Babbaye had risen to the rank of Commander of a Thousand. Only Ema called him Abbaye — father. What I call him, Babbaye, is a childhood mispronunciation, which stuck.
I try to see the papers the men are scribbling on. Based on what the cover page says, it is a memorial program in the making, for Ema’s Forty Day. So the tezkar is a real thing. Not another tradition Aba made up so he could get Le’ul and me together.
Today is day thirty-six since Ema’s ireft. Rest, the Amharic euphemism for death. As if it is really a rest between this life and whatever comes after, a stopover where the dead decide if they want to travel on or turn back.
The portrait on the cover page is the same one of Tobya on the wall. Below it, Consul General Zimita Tessema Gedlu. The Ethiopian calendar dates are written first: Miyazia 27, 1951–Megabit 5, 2003 (May 5, 1958–March 14, 2010).
Noting my interest, one of the old men gives me some of the pages to read. I remember him. He’s the professor Aba was TA for at Addis Ababa University, the one who got Aba the gig tutoring Ema when she returned to Addis Ababa from Dessie. She had fallen behind in her studies, having been away in Dessie to hide from the Terror. If not for this old prof, I would never have come into this world.
On the program’s inside front cover, the same portrait of Tobya appears again in black and white. Her official photo is on the inside back cover. Her beginning and end. There are more captioned photos on the pages in between. Zimita Tessema Gedlu and Mesfin Endale Getachew in front of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University 1973 (1980). Wedding portrait 1975 (1982).
An embassy function in Vienna 1995 shows Ema in a strapless ball gown; Aba looks more like her dad than her husband in his rented tuxedo. I’m amused to see Zimita Tessema in front of the Axum Obelisk in Rome 1996. There are many photos of Ema moving from the edges to the centre of grouped dignitaries as she rose through the diplomatic ranks — at the UN General Assembly at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City 1998; presenting her credentials to Canada’s Governor General 2003.
The back cover is a family picture, the only recent one, taken on Ema’s birthday in 1995 on the lawn of our Vienna apartment building, days before the move to Rome. Sun, cake, tray of champagne. I wear a Disney princess smile, displaying the exact opposite of the terror I feel inside. Le’ul is scowling darkly. Between us, our parents look content.
In none of the photos is the woman I know as Ema.
The rest of the pages are text, in Amharic and English. The prof explains that Ema’s programs are to be given as keepsakes to guests at the memorial gathering on the Forty, and sent by post to mourners abroad. He is glad that I can still speak Amharic, save for the occasional fumbled syntax or mispronounced word. As for reading, I admit that I can get through a passage if I really have to.
He understands. “We spend too long to get to the point,” he says. “Very often the reading
hasn’t been worth the trouble of enduring paragraph-long sentences.”
“So I should just skip to the end?” I ask, to see if he remembers our old joke. When Aba used to take me to campus to show me off, this man loved to ask me to recite my ABCs, knowing I would skip right to Z, just for a laugh.
“I recommend it!” he says. I interpret this as permission to ignore the Amharic text altogether. The English translations are formal messages of condolence to the family from colleagues, the university, diplomats, and the ministry.
Along the bottom of every page is a Bible quote in Amharic that I don’t read so much as recognize — Ema’s epitaph, which will be engraved on her tombstone in both languages. It’s not just the dates there are two versions of apparently, because I see there’s a discrepancy between the Amharic and English versions of the epitaph. The one word Aba had worried over, sitting on the bench beside me at Scarborough Bluffs Cemetery, the day we had gone there to photograph Ema’s grave for Babbaye. Charity versus love. We had chosen charity; here the translation says love. But I am not going to be the one to point out the difference to the scribes when I don’t know if it’s intentional or not.
Aba’s poem of lament, which Uncle A B Z tells me my father co-wrote with him via email, spans three pages. Since Uncle A B Z is the one who introduced Ema and Aba, Aba wanted his input, in case he was forgetting crucial details of their early days. Dear Aba, always making sure his references were impeccable. When did he find the time to write all this, I wonder, while failing to send the photos and sidestepping Babbaye’s requests for Ema’s body?
The poem, depressing even in English, ends with Aba confessing that he married the much younger Ema because he felt confident that he’d never have to endure a world without her in it. Like Tilahun’s slow jam played at practically every habesha wedding, where the singer basically implores his beloved to outlive him.
Daughters of Silence Page 2