Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  I take off Ema’s slip and drape it over the shower rod. Under the uneven, weak waterfall, I unfold a washcloth and scrub myself without soap, enjoying how thin black curls of dead skin fall away from me, flecking the white shower floor. Then I wash the slip as best I can. When wet, the green silk turns almost black. I rinse every inch of the fabric, believing I am bathing Ema’s body, as I should have done. Dripping with water, the slip weighs as much as a newborn. When I wring it out, it becomes almost weightless, a shifting mystery.

  I step out of the shower, towel off, and lay the slip flat on the toilet lid. With my travel blow dryer, I run a stream of heat over it, imagining the feel of rippling hot silk is as soothing for Ema as it is for me. I slide the clean, dry slip back on my clean, dry body, loving how the warmth of the silk mingles with my heat.

  In the bedroom, I layer one of Ema’s plain white, loose-fitting cotton hager libs over my slip, and another one over the bedsheet for extra warmth. I plug my phone in to charge, turning the ringer up to the loudest setting. I pop a melatonin, turn the light off, wriggle under the covers, then lie staring at the distant ceiling, swallowing repeatedly to get the sleep-adjusting tablet down my throat.

  The looming heap of objects on the bed frame above me creeps me out. I think of the mountain in Iceland that caused the air travel havoc, a volcano quiet for almost two hundred years then blowing up, hurling a scalding blast of shattered rock up into the jet stream. I turn my phone flashlight on again and pass it over this mountain, trying to discern if this cluster — decorative ornaments, wall hangings, plastic flowers, a radio, a VHS player, sofa cushions, drawers, lamps, and even a tank shell casing the size of a child’s leg — is stable.

  I see a book in the pile. I crawl over and extract it.

  The mountain trembles, then resettles.

  The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace.

  The edges of the pages are still crisp, flush. I trace my finger over the cover, a forest of purple bamboo bordered by green diamonds. Ema didn’t even start this book. I tuck it under my pillow, like the Metshaf Kidus, Mezmure Dawit, or Wudase Mariam prayer books that habesha parents store under their children’s mattresses, to protect them from evil spirits.

  THREE

  “There’s a book I want you to get for me,” Ema had said to me almost exactly two years earlier. “I need something to read when I’m in Adisaba.”

  She was going to Ethiopia again in a month, at the end of April. Her almost-Excellency, my mother, was in high demand. Really, she was wasted on Toronto.

  We were as alone as two could ever be in the residence wing of the consulate on St. Clair Avenue West. She was sitting in front of her gilded triple-mirror bathroom vanity, parting the wet hair at the back of her head in a perfect grid with a pintail comb. The front half of her hair was already set. I had her pink hair rollers beside me on the wide edge of the Jacuzzi, organized into neat regiments, along with securing clips and pins, just as I used to do when I was little and insisted on being her helper. She had let me, even though I slowed her down.

  I responded to her in English. “As if you don’t have enough reading material, Ema.”

  “I’m not going for work. You still have family there.”

  “Just Babbaye.”

  She dropped her hand and gave me a look that said who have I raised? Her Djarum, tucked into the groove of the turquoise stone ashtray on the countertop, scented the bathroom with clove. “Hab Dahlak” played softly on her phone. I handed her a roller. She took it and pushed her phone toward me, then dragged deeply from her Djarum. The smoke she exhaled was as diaphanous as her hager libs, the only thing she ever wore at home.

  I paused the song on her phone. I would give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe just this once, the book actually was for her, and not something she wanted me to read with the hope that it would crack my unforgiving stone of a heart.

  I opened her browser window. Just as I thought. I slid the phone back on the counter.

  “Order it online.”

  She held out her hand for a pin. “It’s private.”

  “Then have your secretary pick it up.”

  “Dessie. I want you to buy this book.”

  “Even if you start reading it, we both know you’re not going to finish it.”

  She waited for me to give her a pin. I didn’t move. I didn’t trust myself to not press the pointed tip into her flesh, break her skin, sink it in as deep as love and hate will go. She scooted over and took a pin herself, knocking the advance guard of a regiment into the tub in the process. She secured the roller in her hair, parted the next section. I concentrated on not getting up and walking away. I pressed my palms flat on the skirt of my uniform. Stay put, D.

  The one thing that I had wanted Ema to read, a simple one-page letter I wrote in an eight-year-old’s beginner English, she might as well never have read, for all the difference it made.

  Ema reached for another roller. I quickly passed one to her, and rescued the fallen rollers from the abyss of the tub. I reunited them with their comrades in the formation. Ema pulled her sectioned hair taut in the roller’s teeth, raising the flesh on her scalp.

  This was one of those rare times I had my mother all to myself. I could stay as long as I wanted. Aba was out on one of his “thinking drives.” He would be back by midnight at the latest. If I slept over I would see him, too, for a bit. The important thing was that Le’ul was not here. He’d locked up his room and gone to his latest assignment somewhere in Asia.

  “You look like a clown with your hair like that,” I said.

  Ema started coughing, a sound I dreaded, being an undeniable reminder that my mother’s body was invaded by disease. I unrolled a Ricola from a bowl on the counter, one of the many such bowls she kept all over the residence. She abandoned the section of hair to receive the cough drop from me. I then took over her hair, but I tangled it in the roller because I couldn’t make myself pull it tight.

  I cupped her chin, turned her cheek up, and kissed her, as if I were the mother, she the child. “I have an early flight tomorrow. You can handle the rest of this without me.”

  I shoved all the pins, clips, rollers into her mother’s mesob. I placed it on her lap. One woven basket, where my grandmother used to keep her raw cotton with spindle, was the only thing Ema had kept of her mother.

  Ema grabbed my hand and kissed my palm, wordlessly thanking me for spending my time with her, as if she wasn’t worthy. I slipped my hand out of hers and left the residence by the back way, through the French windows to the garden, so I wouldn’t have to chit-chat with Tiru or the other staff.

  I wished Aba had been at the residence. We three could have had a perfectly nice visit pretending that I am their only child. Ema wouldn’t have tried to send me on yet another errand to buy a book or a poster or a ticket to a talk about forgiveness, which she pretended to need for herself, when I knew it was just her latest way to prod me toward Le’ul. Mostly, she sent me to look for books. So far, my admittedly weak countermove had been to deliver what I was asked, no comment, then fly away on a work trip, or hole up in my condo by Kipling Station.

  My God, I thought, even “Hab Dahlak” defers reconciliation until the next generation, who will hopefully have less baggage, more love. During the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the late nineties, while her own cancer returned and spread undetected, Ema had shuttled between three continents to broker a peace that had held about as well as the bond between two incompatibly damaged people. “Hab Dahlak” came out after all that, in 2005. Ema had three years, hundreds of listens, to hear what it was telling her. Leave things be. To my thinking, Ema’s cancer was all the more reason to leave things between Le’ul and me as they had been for the past twelve years. To her, it was exactly why she must tamper with the carefully drawn borders between her children. She was not about to give up. Hers was the long game of a diplomat.

  I didn’t care what absolution, what relief, it would be for Ema if I forgave Le’ul. I w
ouldn’t, ever. If I could, I wouldn’t have chosen to live alone in Vienna, when they all went off to Rome, and then moved to Canada, the farthest place I could think of. When Ema, Aba, and Le’ul followed me to Toronto five years ago, I almost quit my job and left. I wasn’t about to hesitate, even when Aba told me that Ema had declined the greater promotion of ambassador to the US in New York, to be with me in Toronto. She would have been Her Excellency by now; she chose you instead.

  What trapped me was the progress of Ema’s cancer, detected the same month they arrived. I couldn’t abandon my sick mother a second time. But the only way I could bear to stay was by leaving as often as possible. What was supposed to have been just a gap year of flight attending — before I started something real — became a lifeline.

  Three weeks after Ema asked me to buy the book, I found myself in Book City on the Danforth. To buy only magazines. A girl who travels for a living can never have too many magazines.

  A man stood too close to me in front of the rack I was browsing. Tall, slim. Jeans and T-shirt worn with casual care. Cloth bag. Beard. Shambhala beads. Vaguely habesha. He glanced my way once. He stared at the magazines but didn’t pull any out. My instinct for identifying weirdos, making sure I have a clear pathway to the exit — learned in childhood and honed at CanAir — compelled me to move away. Without making my escape obvious, I walked through cards, notebooks, New Arrivals. The man kept reappearing, apparently indifferent to me, like the love interest in a habesha music clip.

  From the remainders stack I’d barricaded myself behind, the stranger picked up a book, and flipped through it. The title jumped out at me.

  The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace.

  He lined up at the cash register with the book. I stood in line behind him. I bought something too, though I forgot what the moment the clerk handed me the shopping bag. Outside, I saw the man ahead of me on Bloor Street, walking toward Broadview Station. We got on the westbound train. We got off at Bathurst. We stopped at the bakery. Then I saw him getting on the No. 7 Steeles bus, munching on a spicy beef patty, which I knew by the red dot. I boarded the idling bus. He opened the book. I walked over to where he sat by the window and clutched a support pole, towering over the empty seat next to him.

  If I were a habesha dude I would have opened with their signature line, Don’t I know you? In English, I said, “Have you met me?”

  He allowed five seconds to lapse, the universally accepted length of time that weirdos should be ignored so that they will move on and bother somebody else. I stayed. He lifted his attention from the acknowledgements page to look steadily at me.

  “Are you habesha?” he said, in Amharic.

  I could have answered yes or no. I am, and am not, Ethio­pian. Whichever answer I chose would be half true, like a broken clock that is correct twice a day.

  I turned away. “Excuse me.”

  “No problem,” he said, in English. “Or who you are depends on who’s asking?”

  English it was. I sat across the aisle. “I just sensed you wanted to speak to me.”

  “Only if you’re habesha.” He winked. “I am, by the way. But mixed. Italian.”

  “Talyan?” I said, with Babbaye’s inflection. “That’s rare.”

  He noted my sarcasm with a single clap. Talyans, Babbaye’s first enemy, had been making love and war either in Ethiopia or Eritrea for over a century. In such moments, I sent a quiet thank you to Aba for imparting to me the fun facts of our history, like the twenty dollar bills he stuffed into my hand whenever I saw him, just in case. A queen for my princess.

  “I wouldn’t be your grandfather’s favourite person,” Talyan man said.

  “Once invaded, forever wounded, as the saying goes.”

  The bus let out an airy fart, lurched out of the station. We swayed in time. Talyan man introduced himself as Isak. I switched to the seat next to him, took The Art of Forgiveness out of his hands, and brandished it in his face as if it was my passport to his company for the ride.

  “I was in the same bookshop. You didn’t see me?”

  “What did you buy?”

  I patted the shopping bag, trying to remember what was inside. “Same.” I opened his book. “You’re a Buddhist?”

  “Are you?”

  “Me?”

  “Why do you say me?”

  “I’ve never met any Ethiopian Buddhists.”

  “Now you have.” He pointed his index finger up to emphasize himself. His nails were long, clean ovals. He levelled the finger at me. “And you at least seem interested in Buddhism.”

  “I’m raised to be Orthodox Christian.”

  “Faiths — not that I think Buddhism is one — aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s all one.”

  Listening to him intellectualize religion, I felt I was en-countering Aba as he might have been when he was young. Isak watched me less like a man, more like a friend. I wanted to keep talking.

  “True.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said, “fight me on it more.”

  “I’m not confrontational.”

  “You must be an only child.”

  “I resent the implication, but yes I am.”

  “I have five sisters.”

  “Wow. I would envy you one. That is all I ever wanted. Older. But five is unfair.”

  “You can have one of mine.”

  “How nice of you.”

  “But they’re all in Adisaba so you’d have to move back.”

  Pass, I almost said, but stopped my tongue just in time. I didn’t have a great history with born-and-bred habesha chicks. I’d never met any as an adult, in fact, until I started at the University of Toronto.

  When I came to Canada, I didn’t know a single person. I had fantasies of reconnecting with Anja, my grade two pen pal from when I lived in Ethiopia, who I’d long ago lost touch with. At the time, there were no habesha students in the psychology or art departments where I’d enrolled to become an art therapist. But midway through my freshman year, I saw a bunch of habesha students in the food court, at a table with a sign that said Africa Is Not a Country. They were battling Student Affairs for denying their application to start a habesha student association since there was already an African Students’ Association on campus. One of the women, Sara, asked my name and added it to the petition. Before I knew it, I had dozens of sisters. For life, I thought.

  “Let me see how it goes with you first,” I said to Isak.

  “Do you want to let me know what you thought of the book, when you finish?”

  I couldn’t tell if he knew I had lied. He took out a pen from his canvas bag and poised it over the inside flap of his book, intending to write my phone number.

  “Oh don’t spoil a brand new thing.” I repositioned his hand over my inner wrist, where my skin was so warm, it took to his ink on the first stroke.

  I didn’t recognize the area code. He told me he lived in Massachusetts. He was a graduate student in geology at Yale. “If the Canadians had offered me a full scholarship, the University of Toronto would have been my first choice,” he said.

  “We could have met before now.”

  “Your stalking indicated as much.”

  “You were following me.”

  “All I know is we’re both on this bus, and neither of us is checking for a stop.”

  I failed to think of a retort, in the same way I always lost when I accused Ema of looking at me intently for no reason. She would say, How could you know I was watching you, unless you were watching me, too?

  Isak changed the subject by telling me about the job waiting for him with the Geological Survey of Ethiopia, and his plan to one day head his own gemstone enterprise. We ended up back at Bathurst station. He stayed on the bus, I got off, thus settling the matter of who was following whom. He pops into Toronto on long weekends, he said, leaning out of the bus like a prince in his chariot. Next one was Memorial Day weekend. “Call me in the meantime.”

  I promised to, then rode the eastbound train,
back to Book City, where I bought the book Ema had wanted. I waited one more week, until the day she was to leave for Ethiopia, to give it to her. Her departure time was an hour after I returned from a flight, so we met at her gate. I got there with minutes left before she boarded, so there was only enough time to hand over the book.

  Walking Aba to their car afterwards, I almost asked him how he met Ema — though I know the facts: it was at Addis Ababa University, quite the scandal what with him not just her personal tutor but also fifteen years her senior. What I wanted to know was how they had felt and talked the first time. If they had needed the excuse of a book to set up a proper date. I wanted to know when was the very first time Aba teasingly called Ema my leopard on account of all her birthmarks, and when did she craft her rejoinder, The leopard and the elephant. What a sight.

  But Aba spoiled my mood by indirectly bringing up Le’ul. “Am I spending Fasika this weekend alone?” he said.

  That was code to let me know Le’ul was back from an assignment. If I said yes, Aba would make plans with Le’ul. If I said no, Aba and I would celebrate Ethiopian Easter at my place, or most likely at the smaller Lalibela restaurant.

  “Yes,” I said, just to punish Aba for ruining the moment.

  The conversation should have ended there, but Aba asked, “You have a trip?” I nodded, lying, and taken aback that he even asked. My parents had stopped tracking my flights long ago, perhaps when they realized that sometimes I say I’m away when I’m not.

  “To . . . ?”

  Right then, I decided I didn’t want to wait until Memorial Day weekend to see Isak.

  “New Haven.”

  Two days later, a little over a week after I met him in Book City, Isak welcomed me at Boston Logan. We went to Peet’s in the airport for a drink before we took the train to Yale. Without discussing it, we gravitated to a corner nook in the café, the kind of prime spot people hogged for hours.

  As we shuffled in from opposite ends of the booth toward the centre, he commented, “That’s one way to get in.”