These young visitors openly ask me questions about life in the outside-country, but don’t really listen to my answers because they already have their fixed ideas about “outside-country” and those of us who live in it. The questions are merely an excuse to stare at me, absorb all my features, mannerisms, to compare them against their assumptions.
They have their fixed ideas specifically about me, I know, whom fortune has smiled on apparently. My family’s departure was a voluntary, government-endorsed migration, not a life-or-death escape carried out under the cover of night, with forged documents, or none at all. “Oh, who taught you to clean?” One of them asks, when I moisten a tissue from my pocket with a drop of mineral water and use it to sop up breadcrumbs from a side table. I surprise not only them but myself with a clever comeback, bristling inwardly while my face betrays nothing.
“Dirt.”
Sara and some of the habesha posse from university had paid me a condolence visit in Toronto. Five days after Ema died, they showed up at my place. My concierge called me while I was at the cemetery. I told him to let them into my condo. When I returned, I found six women and five men I hadn’t seen in nearly eight years crowding my tiny living room. They used to bemoan how people in our community don’t travel to see each other — across town or across the ocean — until someone dies. I myself had gone along on condolence visits to the homes of habesha people I barely knew.
They declined my offer of refreshments. I went to my kitchen to get bottled water anyway. On my way back, I overheard Asrat, former shepherd now mathematics PhD, who never let his permanent freshie accent stop him from using English idioms, say, “So this is how the other half lives.”
I passed out the water bottles in a silence as loud as the constant hum of a plane engine mid-flight.
“I guess you can’t cut your hair,” Azmara, the only person there who was new to me, finally said in her sing-song Amharic. Habesha bereaved should wear black, which I was not, and the women should cut their hair, which I had not. The men would stop shaving their beards.
“Because of your job?” she asked, seeing my blank expression.
I gave her a long look, unsure whether it was an innocent question. “Yes.”
“Those jobs don’t come easy,” she said, cracking her bottle open. Not an innocent question, then. Her comment cranked up the awkwardness even more. I suspected Azmara was Sara’s latest disciple, wounding on her queen’s behalf. While Sara, who knew the group called her bandira behind her back because she wore such heavy makeup she looked bright as a flag, sat next to me on the couch, daintily sipping her water.
At the end of our fourth year at university, I had given Sara money for an outfit to wear to a mass interview for CanAir flight attendant jobs, and had gone with her to the Convention Centre on the day of, to calm her nerves. Somehow, despite my jeans and raggedy Converse slip-ons, I ended up getting invited into the interview room, and landing the job. I guess the best way to ace an interview is to not give a shit about getting hired. I am also tall, and speak two European languages, or claimed I did. So I became one of fifteen new hires out of seven hundred applicants. I figured I might as well enjoy a year of travelling for free before starting a real career. But according to Sara, one of those spots had her name on it. It was an open secret at the time that CanAir was starting its first Africa route, to Johannesburg, and that some spots were reserved for blacks.
Sara poisoned the group against me. They shut me out as fast as they had welcomed me in, four years earlier, during their kerfuffle with Student Affairs. I knew they felt that out of all of them, I least deserved this dream job. Little girls of our generation grew up coveting the life of a flight attendant. Hostesses, as they were called back then. I was not one of those little girls. My fantasy was to one day outrun the airplanes. I used to sprint on the observation veranda at Bole airport, racing the planes as they sped up for takeoff.
Even before the CanAir job drama, the group had already deemed me guilty of the good life. They saw me as spoiled since they had learned who my mother was from a photo of Ema in my dorm room. To me, she was just Ema. I didn’t think I had to tell them what she did for a living any more than they declared the jobs of their family members. But to their way of thinking, Ema was synonymous with the Ethiopian government, the source of all their problems, the reason for their exile.
For almost four years I endured innuendo and jokes suggesting that I enjoyed the good life at their oppressed expense. Privately I laughed at them for their naïveté, to think a person could get rich through a career in the Ethiopian government. They had no idea it was actually my father who brought in real money, with his frequent invitations to guest lecture, be a visiting professor, or consult on research projects and design doctorate programs at universities all over the world. Regardless, when I “stole” a job that would have changed Sara’s life, with which she could have supported her entire family back home, I became the permanent unforgiven.
Despite my alleged betrayal, Sara kept in touch. I knew I was just a contact for her by then, useful if the airline issued another cattle call, maybe started flying to Addis Ababa. When that didn’t happen, I finally became dead to her. Until then, I went along with the charade. What did I know about how sisterhood works?
Every time I think I have felt my phone vibrate in my pocket, I go to Ema’s room to see if it is a call from Barb. But it always turns out to be a false alarm. Then, after lunch, I receive another email from Le’ul.
Aba wants you here for the dedication. In our culture it’s a big deal you know, when the monument is dedicated to the departed on the Forty. Exactly when did you say you’d return? Be well. We’re eager to see you soon.
Attached is a photo of him and Aba next to the headstone, also from the workshop. The engraving is complete. And now remain these three, faith, hope, charity. እምነት ተስፋ ፍቅር እነዚህ ሦስቱ ጸንተው ይኖራሉ. Because Le’ul and Aba are standing on either side of the stone, the words seem to refer to the three of them — the stone standing in for Ema. Le’ul has his hands locked behind him. He squints, probably counting down the auto-timer under his breath. Aba slouches, gazing out of the frame, directly at me. He has one hand on the knobbly top of the stone. He holds a flat object in the other. I zoom in. The object is a framed photo of me.
I return to the living room, gather some empty beer bottles by their necks, two in each hand, and leave through the back door. In the kitchen, the maids are scandalized. They vehemently reject any more help from me, as if I will break a bone from carrying empties. I get it. Protocol. Everyone has their role; I can’t wreak havoc on their system simply because I don’t want to play mine of sitting to be stared at, served, and judged. If I insist on playing the help, they say I have to get permission from their boss, Gela.
So I go searching for her, starting with the other rooms in the service quarters, all of which open onto the back alley — two maids’ bedrooms currently holding the larger furniture from the living room, a storage room full of blue plastic barrels, lastly the frightening bathroom. I backtrack, passing the kitchen again, and the mitad bet next to it for baking injera, and turn the corner past a clothes washstand. I follow the alley alongside the house, past Babbaye’s bedroom window and under clotheslines, which end in the courtyard.
Parting my way through hanging laundry, I hear a snatch of song — haunting lyrics I’ve heard hundreds of times on Ema’s phone — playing at such low volume that had the breeze changed direction a second earlier, I would have missed it. I reach the source, the lone house to the right of the gate. The door is ajar. I try to push it open further, but it sticks on something on the other side. I enter sideways, snagging my netela on the rough wood.
Gela, dressed all in black as she was yesterday, sits on a cushion-less settee against the wall opposite the door. She appears entranced by the music coming out of the rickety boom box on top of a coffee table, on which she has one foot propped. The only other place to sit is a bunk b
ed, the top of which is piled with suitcases. I stand in front of a massive wardrobe by the door. The singer, Teddy, promises that he is bound by oath to not betray his beloved, from whom he has been forcibly separated by unnamed powers.
The song repeats. Gela turns down the volume. “I hope you don’t mind a visitor,” I say. Gela waits, the expression on her face saying, What now? I know that look. It’s the same one I give passengers when they act the diva, forgetting they are in coach.
“The kitchen women won’t let me help.”
I hadn’t meant to sound so whiny.
“Lomi and Aberash are day-workers, hired for this mourning period. The Shaleqa will not end it until he buries Etye Zimita.”
“So my grandfather has informed me. Well I am here for this period, too, not to sit idle. I’m not a princess. I can work.”
“Tell them I said, ‘Let her do whatever she wants.’ Between your work and theirs, there is no difference. The Shaleqa told me how you earn your bread.”
I don’t appreciate her acting as if she’s doing me a favour.
“Babbaye never talked so much.”
“He has been poor for hearers.”
If I have one pet peeve it’s people underestimating my job. No matter how it may look, I, the granddaughter of a Patriot, the daughter of a professor and a diplomat, did not end up a maid. “Actually,” I say, “there is a difference between your work and mine. In my work, my responsibility is to save lives. Serving, cleaning is —”
“To pass the time until someone dies? I saw in the news a few months ago how much lifesaving you can do,” she says, referring to Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409, which crashed into the Mediterranean shortly after takeoff from Beirut this January.
“We do our best, but we’re not Igziabher,” I say.
“There were thirty-one habesha on that journey. Twenty-three domestics like me, eight lifesavers like you. All thirty-one bodies were brought from the ocean home to Ethiopia. For their grave, there is a monument in Selassie Cathedral. It was commemorated on their tezkar. Yesterday, you asked about the Forty. I answered you, but not fully. The Forty is also when the monument for the departed would be revealed. And there would be a celebration.”
“I’m aware.”
“The Shaleqa, as you know, has no grave for his daughter to dedicate a monument on, yet. But still he wants a celebration on the Forty. Don’t ask me why.”
“I didn’t.” I mean to fold my arms but end up semi-hugging myself. “You shouldn’t play music during mourning.”
“This is not music.”
I quote Aba at her. “All politics, but you can still dance to it.”
“This is a song of mourning.”
“For my mother?”
“For anybody separated from their love by a force greater than either of them.”
“Who are you supposed to be separated from?”
“Does it matter?”
I pull at the snagged thread on my netela, tug it back over my head, ashamed of myself for being so small-minded. I look away. Through the open gate, I see a soccer ball bouncing down the lane. She stops the music and gets up. I back out of her way then follow her toward the service quarters behind the house. As we walk, she reties her head wrap over hair that, despite her show of grief yesterday, has not met with scissors.
In the kitchen, the day-worker who Gela introduces as Lomi is cutting cubes from a flat, round homemade loaf of bread dotted with black seeds. The other woman, Aberash, is at the sink, washing the dishes from the lunch service. She steps aside to let Gela rinse dozens of tiny, handleless sini. Gela signals for her to give a tray to me. I’ve got my green light.
I hold the tray out as Gela lines the wet sini on it in concentric circles. From the stove, she picks up an enormous stainless-steel coffee kettle. She fills each cup to the brim with the dark potion, raising the stream high without interrupting the flow between cups, unbothered by the splash or spill-over, as if that is part of the appeal. I hold the tray steady but squint against the coffee spatter leaping into the air between us. Gela catches me doing this, and smiles. I feel at once so glad that she may like me after all, and surprised at how much I care.
“Tell me you hate these tiny sini as much as I do,” I say.
“Why?”
“They’re not even traditional. They’re made in China.”
“What isn’t? One day even you and I may be made in China.”
“I’ve been there,” I say, then reflexively brace for one of Sara’s scathing of course you have looks. But they’re just interested in what I have to say. “In one small-town bus station, they rubbed my skin to see if the brown comes off.” All three of them gasp in shock. I finally feel let in. “Sini are unfair for buna,” I say. “Why aren’t we allowed to have buna all at once in a big cup, why do we have to drink it in tiny amounts that get weaker as the ceremony goes on?”
“It’s not a law. Drink from any size cup you want,” Gela says. Lomi and Aberash agree.
“Back home I drink the whole jebena in one mug,” I blurt out. The atmosphere cools a fraction. Shit. I don’t know which part of what I said was wrong.
“Enough talk,” Gela says, “go serve these before they cool.”
Transporting a tray of full sini from the kitchen to the living room is a delicate operation with many obstacles: the raised threshold from the kitchen to the alley — over which I almost stumble — the dip in the centre of the alley, the two low steps to the threshold of the main house, and the blind landing before the living room entrance.
I manage the first trip just fine, even with Lomi breathing down my neck as she follows with the basket of bread. On my second trip I have to wait in the corner of the living room with the tray while a new visitor finishes her erratic display of grief in the middle of the floor. I’ve come to understand that a little wailing, some moderate tossing of the body, is just how one announces oneself to this house of perpetual mourning, even if it means the coffee gets lukewarm. So much for Love and coffee are best when hot, a favourite saying of Aba’s whenever he had to wait too long for Ema to get dressed and come down for breakfast.
Shuttling sini, rinsing and putting them face down on the drainer, ready for the next round, making sure people are drinking tea, soft drinks, or beer in the interim, become tasks reserved for me. Gela, Lomi, and Aberash seamlessly manage the bread, the chairs, the ice, returning empties for new drinks, doing the dishes, reheating the food that women bring for the next meal, maintaining the logbook of who brought what, warming water for hand-washing, buying new hand soap, laundering hand towels, keeping the scary bathroom at the end of the alley clean and stocked with toilet paper, and — no one’s favourite task — indulging the occasional mother or aunt so-and-so who comes into the kitchen to play lady of the house.
Lomi and Aberash are impressed by my industriousness. Gela was right, I think. Take away my uniform, I am really mostly a maid who occasionally gets stopped for questioning, as happens in flight. I accumulate a large collection of bottle caps on my tray. As I dump them all into a Tupperware container, Lomi says to Gela, “The caps are not returned with the bottles, does she know?”
“I know,” I answer. True to her name, Lomi’s acidic like a lemon. She has insisted on treating me as if I don’t know Amharic since I mis-conjugated one verb, one time.
“She’s teasing you,” Gela says to me, playing peacemaker.
“In that case, later we can play Pepsi,” I say to Lomi. She titters, covering her mouth. Pepsi was not what I used the bottle caps for when I was little. The game can’t be played except with a group of girls. I didn’t have a group of girls to play with. I only had Le’ul. His game was hammering the bottle caps flat with a rock, which he needed me for because my right index fingernail was not damaged like his was, so I could dig out the plastic under the caps. He had to save them. I was happy that I could do one thing better than my big brother. With rocks he hammered the bottle caps in the car shed, which annoyed the maids no end. I thin
k, flattening bottle caps must have been part of the process of making some kind of village toy Le’ul remembered from before he came to Addis Ababa and Ema and Aba adopted him.
This memory of my and Le’ul’s before-time is one of many such fragments that have begun to surface after Ema’s death. Some are memories of things I believe really happened. Some, I know I’m imagining based on childhood photos of us. Some are as singular as a dream. But I cherish each one, like a child does her precious collection of odds and ends. I like to relive them now, when I so miss having a true brother, with whom I could grieve.
FIVE
On a day that Ema wasn’t quarantining herself on the third floor of the residence, I found her lying flat on her bed, eyes closed, hands on her belly. I kissed her awake. She said she was cold, one of those phantom breezes only she feels. I went into her walk-in closet to get her a gabi, maybe the newest addition to her collection from her last trip to Ethiopia. In recent years, I’d developed the habit of counting her gabi and hager libs, for reassurance, ever since I heard Aba ask her when she was going to stop buying new ones, and her response, When I die. The taller the stack, the more life she expected.
But the first thing that met me in the closet was a childhood photo of Le’ul and me, intentionally placed on top of a stack of hager libs.
I just got here, I thought, I literally just got here and the pressure has already started. Ema was ready for me with her latest tactic in her forgiveness project: this picture, from back when our lawn was so new that the koshim hedge was mere saplings along a chicken wire fence, through which the unpaved neighbourhood road was visible. Le’ul and I are dressed in our Sunday finest, for a family excursion to Bole airport park, where families went to stroll, take photos, enjoy the café, admire the pilots and hostesses, and wonder at the planes from the observation deck. I am about three, mid-giggle, holding on for dear life to Le’ul’s hand, as if my joy is too much. He faces the camera head on, looking stern as an eleven-year-old who has sworn on his life to protect his sister.
Daughters of Silence Page 6