“That’s what she said,” I replied.
He stopped inches from me. “So, I’ve never belonged to a book club.”
I hadn’t even taken the book out of the shopping bag, much less cracked it open, so I redirected, fast. “Are you enjoy-ing yourself out here?”
“Not at first. There was the condescension of the Americans. Subtle, as it has to be within vaunted Ivy League halls. But detectable still, in the difference between what they explained to me versus what they assumed an African would already know. I’ve learned to take it in stride.”
“Good. Keep your eyes on the prize.”
“Except sometimes one needs to put them in their place. My roommate” — up went his index finger with the exquisite oval nail — “on day one nicknamed me his ‘starving Ethiopian’ as a kind of ironic endearment. Mind you, he was the one who looked as if he’d missed one too many meals. That kind of brazenness does raise my ire.”
“Any other part of you it raises?” My face grew hot. Damn. As if to meet a man a second time required me to be seductive. “I’ve been there, though,” I said, scrambling for normal. “People making assumptions about you.”
He excused himself to get us drinks. He returned, set down the mugs. “You need to know, if we’re going to go further with this,” he said, starting what I already recognized as his typical preamble to an important point, “and I think we are going to, or at least I think we can . . . I am celibate.”
My eyebrows shot up. I couldn’t believe my luck. “Forever?”
He laughed. “Well, I usually don’t plan that far ahead.”
I collected myself. This was where some would say he was too good to be true. But he was better than true. He was perfect for me. I nudged him playfully, now that I knew he wouldn’t interpret touch as an invitation to pounce on me.
“It’s okay,” I said, as if I had not come plucked, shaved, and moisturized, ready for the inevitable.
He stirred his coffee too long, watching me as if I was the one who had made the revelation. I watched him back. “What?”
“I’m looking at the first woman on either side of the Atlantic whose immediate question hasn’t been why.”
“Congratulations to me, then.” I took his stir stick. “May I? I assume we can share this, since you brought only one.” I sucked on it. Pure sugar. “Maybe I think sex is overrated, so I forgive you.”
“On the contrary, sex is misunderstood. Between having and not having sex, there’s a field of erotic potentiality wide as the space Moses parted for the Israelites to cross the Red Sea.”
I blew on my tea. “Lord have mercy.”
“Sex is, in fact, everywhere, when one learns to awaken to it in the everyday. Once one does, one enters a constant state of meditative arousal. For instance, have you ever peeled an orange? I mean, really peeled an orange?”
“I’m a cutter.”
“There would still be peel on the cut sections.”
“I pull the flesh with my teeth.”
“All right, say there’s no knife.”
“Then the orange lives another day.”
“You’re messing with me.”
In truth, I was already on cloud nine. In my twenty-five years, I’d never felt more relaxed with a man, a new relationship — if any of the all-inclusive resort flings, layover one-night stands, and Toronto-based situationships could be so defined. I have never actually wanted to have sex. I looked at sex as a required activity that I co-operated in, with convincing enthusiasm, in exchange for the good stuff, all that there was to life besides bumping fuzzies: snuggles, nature hikes, mojitos, thrift store shopping, bad movies, good theatre, sushi, sleeping. Sleeping.
That weekend with Isak, I slept the best sleep of my life with a man in the same bed. Nothing was expected of me. I lingered in bed long after I woke up. Later, I peeled, and ate, an orange.
Two weeks later, when Ema had returned from Ethiopia, I went to see her and Aba. Their Toyota was in the garage, but I couldn’t find them anywhere in the residence. I figured they were either in the office wing, or gone for a walk, so I waited in the bedroom on the second floor, flipping through television channels, texting with Isak. I called Ema, no answer. I called Aba. I heard his church drum ringtone nearby. I found him on the stairs to the uppermost third floor, stretched out in his tracksuit as if he was on the living-room recliner, reading his novel for this year, The Brothers Karamazov.
“Aba what is going on?”
He pointed his thumb over his shoulder, at the closed door to the third-floor landing.
“Your mother is up there.”
“I don’t . . . what?”
He closed his book and sat up. “This is as far as she’ll let anyone go.”
The third floor of the residence wing was guest quarters, almost never used. I climbed up to the door. Locked. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. I sat on the stairs, one step up from Aba so I could be eye level with him. “Why?”
“She has decided, from now on, whenever she comes home after the hospital, she will quarantine herself for twenty-four hours.”
“Quarantine?”
“Until the chemicals, or as she calls them the poisons, have left her system.” Aba gave me a you and me both look that let me know we had to let Ema have her way.
“Maybe it’s just as well, for everyone’s sake,” I whispered conspiratorially.
Ema’s moods had become increasingly unpredictable and atrocious since her cancer recurred. She yelled horrible accusations. All these false alarms, you must wish me dead already. In such instances, only Aba could calm me with a look that was like a hand firmly pressed on my sternum. Once, when I had to deal with Ema’s woe-is-me all by myself, I had snapped back at her, If you want to go, then go! I stormed out, fearing this was going to be the shape of our days from now on: I drop by for a visit — when Le’ul is gone and I know it’s safe — with the best intentions, end up saying something vile to Ema, then having to leave.
I apologized first thing, the next time I saw her. She brushed off the incident as if it was nothing. Show-off, I thought. She might as well have said, See how easy it is to forgive?
Aba’s phone rang. Ema, I thought. The screen said LE’UL. Aba declined the call. Thankful, I lay my head on his shoulder.
We sat, a pair of self-appointed sentinels hopelessly in love with our charge. Then Aba stacked his phone over his book and stood up. “Are you coming?”
“Let me stay here a bit with her.”
He went on to their bedroom. I listened as he turned off the TV I’d left on, then went to the ground floor. I twitched my ear to the third floor. Still nothing. There were noises from the kitchen below. At the residence, my hearing became attuned, like prey in the wild.
The housekeeper, Tiru, appeared at the bottom of the stairs, holding a tray with a bowl of soup and a plate of sliced bread. She excused herself as she went up past me, as if she was doing nothing more extraordinary than vacuuming around my feet. She left the tray on the landing for Ema.
On her way back down, she said, “Your place setting is at your mother’s spot for today. You’ll also want to look at the garden while you eat?”
I wasn’t hungry, but I stood up, “I guess I shouldn’t let my father eat alone.”
“Oh you know men, they started without you,” she said as she left.
I froze, and slowly drew my foot back from the step below.
The men?
Just knowing that on Aba’s phone Le’ul’s name was right next to mine had made my skin crawl, much less that at this very moment he was feeding in this house. I sat down, trying to absorb what was happening: Ema’s soup on the landing, her deathly silence behind the locked door, Aba’s carelessness — he had said, Are you coming, knowing what he was leading me into — were warnings. Life was changing. Either Ema had won Aba over to her quest for some kind of spontaneous reconciliation between me and Le’ul, or Aba had made himself her deputy. Or, once again, my needs had simply been shove
d aside.
I left through the basement. Since I couldn’t trust Ema and Aba’s cues anymore, I stopped going to the residence. What was the point, if I couldn’t even be sure that Her Excellency would be available to see me? After a couple of months, I suggested Ema and Aba come over for dinner and to watch Fool’s Gold. It had been a while since we watched a bad movie just to laugh at how bad it is. I missed that. They couldn’t come, because apparently Ema didn’t have the health anymore to go farther than her office or the hospital. So I went to her office. She looked fine. My distrust grew, but there were only so many appointments I could make with my own mother, only so many times I could casually ask Tiru whether Le’ul was travelling, before people started to talk.
I steeled myself and started visiting Ema at the residence again. Every time I input the gate access code, as the painfully slow mechanical gates opened — Le’ul perhaps watching me on the CCTV at that moment — I felt raw, bone-tired, edgy, weepy. It became harder to keep a tight smile on and curtly shake my head in response to the deceptively innocent question my parents kept pushing on me. Will you eat with us?
If Ema happened to be in quarantine, and Aba was out or breaking bread with his son, I foraged from Ema’s meal tray. She would have been furious if she had caught me. I dare your poisons to do their worst, Ema, I thought. This is not the first time I’ve purposely swallowed something that could kill me.
FOUR
My cellphone rings. I snap awake and sit bolt upright on the floor mattress, ready to fly. Yes, it’s Barb. No, we’re not flying out today, nor any time soon by the looks of it. The ash is thick. We’re caught up in the worst global flight interruption in aviation history since the Second World War. The crew, resigned to their impromptu East African holiday, is browsing the day trips on offer through the Hilton. Their thoughts are with me, is all Barb says. Had the circumstances been different, I think they might have fished for an invitation to Babbaye’s house. Or I would have lured them with a promise of the authentic local experience of meeting the last of the arbegna.
I have an email from Le’ul. About Ema’s headstone. He has attached a photo of the one we’d picked from the funeral home’s catalogue.
We went to see it in the mason’s workshop. Aba got Stanley to tell him where he has them made. Can you believe Aba tried to lift it? He must think he has the strength of Samson. You should be here for the dedication on tezkar day.
Le’ul has never messaged me. Not email, not text. Not even so much as a sticky note. Ema must have given him my email address. Am I supposed to respond? I won’t. I do want to know how Aba is doing, but asking Le’ul about Aba feels overly familiar, an encouragement toward a relationship I don’t want. Since I was five, I’ve only ever obeyed then avoided Le’ul. What are the rules of a world without Ema?
The partial gold engraving of Ema’s epitaph in Ethiopic script trails the bumpy surface of the marble boulder. How unique the stone will look in Scarborough Bluffs Cemetery, I think, where the headstones are neat slabs like miniature doors.
I get up, resolved to follow the example of my crew and make the best of this unplanned, indefinite layover. They don’t call what I do emotional labour for nothing. Stay cool, smile, avert disaster. If disaster happens, save others first.
I have a hunch Ema’s hager libs won’t be the right outfit for today. Everything else I have packed is sundresses, sandals, and light blazers, for early spring in Johannesburg and Vienna. Over my slip, I wear the darkest things I have: black jeans, a grey blouse with white polka dots. Footwear will have to be my old white Converse. I wrap one of Ema’s netela over my head and shoulders, completing my hybrid look.
I find Babbaye on the porch, sunning himself in a chair, while brushing his teeth with a mefakiya twig from his garden. I sit on the topmost porch step, my back to him, and lean against the wood railing.
In my mind, I skip down the flagstone pathway ahead of me, between the trees, and out the open gate. Beside it, there is one small house, which I didn’t notice yesterday. Like Babbaye’s main house, the others in the compound are also old-fashioned wattle-and-daub construction, from when Addis Ababa was a town. My great-great-grandmother, who was blood related to some royal, brought this land into her marriage. She intended these homes for the generations. Of her two daughters, one was barren. The other — my grandmother — had seven children. Of those, only my mother survived the Terror. But I suspect I’m not the only remaining descendant. Maybe my barren great-aunt’s husband had illegitimate children. Babbaye’s sisters, who dispersed during the occupation and with whom Babbaye never reunited, must have had kids too. Cousins once removed, who I’ll never meet.
Had Ema lived to inherit all this, she probably would have sold it. My parents sold our old house in Bole years ago. They had accumulated a stack of brochures with artists’ renderings of neat communities, intending to buy a pre-construction condo on the new edge of Addis Ababa.
“Who’s been living in these homes?” I ask.
“Tenants,” Babbaye says. His tone does not invite further questions. The man who walked in past us when I arrived yesterday must have been one of them.
I wish, instead of spending the day sitting in a room full of long faces again, Babbaye and I could just go for a long walk. Maybe to my old neighbourhood, for old times’ sake. Babbaye used to regularly walk from this house to ours — about a forty-minute drive — which would cost him the better part of a morning. One of my earliest memories is of waiting by our gate, to hear the crunch-tap-crunch of his boots and cane on the gravel outside. As soon as I saw his boots in the gap between the bottom of the gate and the ground, I’d start yelling hello so loudly that the maid, all the way in the back kitchen, would know to rush out and open the door. If she took so long that he had to ring the bell of his own daughter’s house, God help her.
She would bring a chair out to the garden for Babbaye. He would lean his cane against the side of the chair, direct me to sit by his feet at the spot where he could easily pat my head, and we would commune with the sun at exactly the blazing time of day everyone else avoided it. I imagined we were arbegna on lookout, though only stray cats sauntered past, oblivious to us. If I fell asleep on the grass, Babbaye would wake me when it was time for a snack, fruit from the young koshim hedge that was our fence. He’d push his hand right through thorns as long as my little finger to get the wild peaches for us to feast on. Afterwards, he would brush his teeth with a twig. I remember once, after much nagging over many afternoons, I finally persuaded him to make a twig toothbrush for me. I scrubbed away happily until bitter saliva mixed with the juice of the branch began to collect in my mouth.
“Can I swallow the juice?” I mumbled.
“Only by experience can one know what kills,” Babbaye said, calmly scraping under his nails with a koshim thorn.
Terrified, I gulped, accidentally swallowing the strange fluid. Babbaye thought I’d called his bluff. He stopped wiping the tip of the thorn on his palm mid-motion. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping death didn’t hurt. Babbaye laughed. I opened my eyes.
He was saluting me. “Tinishwa arbegna!” he said. Little Patriot. “You have earned a dagger. Here!” He gave me his thorn. My bony chest expanded with pride. I knew my parents would take away my prize if they saw it, so I stuck it straight down deep in the soil under the yellow hibiscus. When I went back for it another day, it was gone. I only found the slimy body of another frog that Le’ul had beat to death with a bat.
Now I reach through the slats of the railing to tug at a branch of a mefakiya bush in Babbaye’s garden. The plant surrenders a branch with a shiver. I dig my fingernail around the bark at the tip, peel it. Between my back teeth, I grind the lime-green stem into a fine brush. It’s splintery and shockingly bitter but I brush vigorously anyway, slipping and stabbing my gum. I can feel Babbaye watching me.
“What you have broken is gesho,” Babbaye says, behind me. “For making tella. To brush with gesho is to make yourself cry from the bitterness. Mef
akiya is the plant next to it.”
The plant next to it looks the same. Same leaves. Okay, maybe fatter, smaller leaves.
“Ask me to prepare a brush for you.”
I shake my head. I made my twig, I will brush with it. Bloody saliva and sour breath are nothing to a warrior.
I can’t. I drop my hand and turn aside to spit, repeatedly. Babbaye doesn’t comment. I rub my tongue on my sleeve. Female voices, wailing loud enough to wake the neighbourhood, start to make themselves heard from the other side of the compound wall.
“Shouldn’t loud crying have stopped by now?” I say.
“They will stop when Tobya comes.”
I hear the scrape of the chair as he gets up to go inside. I follow him, before the mourners let themselves in and I have to face them alone. One by one, Uncle A B Z and the other three old men arrive, accompanied by the same women from yesterday, who I decide are the wives. There is another group, younger people who may or may not be their grown children. Again, the introductions are one-way.
One of the maids brings a tray of pre-filled cups with coffee and tea. The other brings breakfast, a basket of homemade bread cut into cubes. No sign of Gela. Throughout the morning, a steady stream of mourners arrive. The women’s loud, demonstrative grief tapers off into low-voiced small talk — once they have drifted off into the gender zones, settled into a chair, and moaned at the parquet for a respectable length of time. Then, with fresh wails from up the road, the restored calm is shattered, and the cycle starts all over again.
I hope to fade into the background but I feel assessed, today by the younger folk, like an imported doll fresh out of her packaging. Even the simple, dark outfit I have chosen feels extravagant, as if Ema’s lacy green slip underneath glows neon through it. The damn netela keeps slipping off my head. Every move I make, or fail to, confirms or throws into doubt everything they believe they know about diaspora — a catch-all name for us who live abroad, I learn, as if we are a sub-species or divergent strain of habesha people.
Daughters of Silence Page 5