Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  “Not only for them,” Lomi says. The twinkle in her eyes tells me plenty about her relationship to the ale.

  After they have diluted the liquid and closed the lid, they start to seal the barrel with mud from a shallow tub. I unhesitatingly plunge my hands in. The women don’t protest. They have stopped trying to anticipate or fathom my impulses. I miss them already, delighted that now I, too, have people about whom I can exclaim, the way older habesha folks do about their age mates, Oh so-and-so? We came up mashing earth together, you know!

  Soil. All this pressure about Ema’s burial comes down to which soil is best. To Babbaye, there has never been a question of what soil is best. Even me, if anyone had asked me when I was very little, I would have said Ethiopian soil is best, too. Especially after the rain, when the soft lumps slid down my throat like butter.

  In the before-time, I spent so many afternoons making mud people that I would even get it in my eyes. I remember Le’ul holding my face up to the light, and using a corner of Ema’s clean pressed handkerchief to scoop out the dirt. He once tore out a blank page from the back of one of Aba’s books for me to make my mud people on, so he could carry them inside for me. That was how I stopped having a big leqso every time the cats destroyed my creations while they dried in the sun.

  SEVEN

  I was at Union Station, waiting for Isak and whatever he’d excavated to gift to me for our second anniversary, when Aba left me a voicemail. He said it was about Ema. I should come home when I landed. Since the day the nurse took away Ema’s flowers, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to visit my mother. I tried to remember the last thing I had said to her on the phone, or she to me. Something about time. Yes, before we ended our lethargic conversation, she had said, Never rush. That was how I knew, before being told. Ema was gone. I noted the present date and time on my phone: 2:15 p.m. March 14, 2010.

  When Isak arrived, I wanted to go to Centre Island. He reminded me it was off-season. Let’s ride the ferry anyway, I said, just for the view. He pried out of me why I was being so strange. I told him of Aba’s call and my hunch of what it was about. He said I had to go home immediately.

  “I should come with you . . .” he added.

  There was an unspoken but at the end of his offer. We knew that with habesha families, the only significant other you bring home is the one you intend to marry. You don’t subject your parents to round after round of cancelled futures every time you split up with a lover.

  “Is this your idea of a proposal?” I laughed. Isak didn’t. I turned away. “What’s the point? Hurrying back will not change anything.”

  I was too ashamed to go home yet, because the next thought that had come to my mind after I memorized the date and time was, I can finally leave Toronto. You finally got what you wanted, Ema. No more false alarms. You can go home for good now, and I will never have to be near Le’ul again for as long as I live.

  I was on the cusp of a whole new after-time. After Ema died. I wanted one last lull of normalcy before I faced the consequences of my failure as a daughter.

  Isak refused to ride to the island with me. He agreed only when he saw how determined I was. I would go with or without him. Aba thought I was away, so it was very important to me that I really did go away, even if it was for thirty minutes, and came back. Isak sat inside the ferry for the trip. Then he took my condo key, to wait for me there, while I went to the residence.

  Aba ushered me into the foyer like a guest of honour at a reception. A rush of mourners came out from the living room. He pulled me into a tight hug, as if to protect me from them, but really I knew he didn’t want to have to look at me when he whispered, so closely in my ear that at first I didn’t understand, “She didn’t make it.”

  As if dying was a failure on her part, when really the failure was mine, to motivate her to stay another day.

  I become rooted to the carpet, petrified by the snarling lion at my feet. Knowing the news in my gut and actually hearing it were very different things. My body wouldn’t move. It believed that being still could stop time, make the fact of Ema’s death untrue.

  A man parted his way through the mourners. Aba pushed me toward him. I fell into the person’s chest. It felt like home, gave me comfort, until I saw the nail of the index finger, withered by a boyhood infection.

  I was crying on Le’ul.

  My impulse was to shove him away, scrub myself clean, change clothes, run. But the more calculating part of my brain told me to stay put, receive Le’ul’s hug, sob dryly against his lean frame, allow his sweet cologne into my lungs. I would only have to do it this once. Everyone was watching. Hugging was what a grief-stricken brother and sister should do. I deserved the flashbacks that this contact brought me. This revolting embrace was punishment I must sustain for being a disgrace of a daughter who was already looking forward to burying her mother in Ethiopia so she could be free of Toronto, of Le’ul, at last.

  Once I had calmed down, the mourners returned to the living room. Le’ul squeezed my puny hand in his muscular paw, grinding my bones, and told me to go upstairs and see what he and Aba had chosen for Ema to wear tomorrow.

  Ema’s black Max Mara suit, pink micro-pleated blouse, silk print scarf of Afewerk’s Africa Hall painting, black purse, and heels were laid out on the bed. I swept everything to the floor. This was unacceptable, all wrong. Ema used to remove this kind of outfit off her body as soon as she got home from work. She couldn’t wait to get back into her hager libs, what she dreamed of wearing every day for the rest of her life after retirement, when she would be back in her country permanently. If I knew nothing else about my mother, I knew that. She was always trying to feel as if she was in Ethiopia.

  I spread out several layers of her hager libs and netela, what she had worn for rest. I folded them perfectly and carried them downstairs. In the living room, Tiru directed me to sit on a sofa between Aba and Le’ul. She tried to take the clothes but I wouldn’t let go.

  From the gathered mourners sitting on every available surface, and leaning against the walls, I recognized only the consulate staff and their family members. I was surprised, a little jealous even, at how wide my parents’ circle of friends in Toronto seemed to be. Then it struck me that some of these might be Le’ul’s people. I still hadn’t looked at him directly, nor he at me. But I was aware of his high-boned, snakelike profile, wiry goatee, of his side pressing into mine, his hairy arms coming out of his rolled up shirtsleeves.

  After hours of sitting in state, as if we were the dead ones, Le’ul drove Aba and me to the funeral home. I gave the clothes I’d chosen for Ema to Stanley Chan, the funeral director, explaining that she would be happy with any of them, but she wore the set embroidered in orange thread most. I wanted to dress her myself, but I knew she wouldn’t want me to see all her scars, not at the same time. I also gave Stanley one rose from her garden, for her to hold. Stanley said she would be ready for viewing tomorrow. He gave us the codes to enter the building after hours, a shared code for the main door and a private code for the room she would be in.

  Back at the residence, I felt the mourners watching my every move. They watched Le’ul, too. Though we did nothing except sit next to each other. We didn’t talk, but I was sure they would think that was just from shock. Aba alternated between long spells of silence, moaning, mundane conversation, and bursts of anecdotes about himself and Ema.

  When dinner was served, I sat next to Le’ul because it was expected. He spooned rice onto my plate. I imagined Ema’s ghost pleased to see us so familial. After dinner, the mourners got to leave but I had to stay overnight because that, too, was expected by the staff. Once Tiru had turned in for the night, I locked the basement door behind me and slept on a couch in the den. I remembered Isak, and texted him to go home.

  The second day passed. I sat between Le’ul and Aba again, allowing myself to be looked at with pity, spoken to consolingly.

  In the afternoon, we went to the funeral home to see Ema, accompanied by an entourage of
mourners who gathered around to watch Aba and me cry over her, kiss her cold lips, squeeze her rigid feet. Le’ul stood aside, as stoic as a bodyguard. I overheard approving comments about Ema’s outfit. I felt vindicated. Finally, I had done one thing right by Ema.

  In the middle of the second night, I woke and found Le’ul curled asleep on the floor beside the couch. I’d been in such a daze I forgot to lock the basement door. I sat up and swung my legs over as if to get up. My bare foot, lit by the moon, hovered over his neck. I contemplated how, if I completed the motion and stood, I could swiftly crush his delicate throat under my heel. But I felt Ema’s sadness. Ema, alone at Stanley’s with only the rush of traffic outside for company, her gauze-thin netela and her hager libs useless against the cold.

  In my parents’ bedroom on the second floor, I found Aba lying awake on top of the bedcovers on Ema’s side of the bed, talking to himself. I said we had to take Ema a gabi. When I spoke, I realized how crazy I sounded. But Aba was up and in her closet, in complete agreement, angry with us for not having instructed Stanley to dress Ema in all the hager libs.

  “What are we keeping the rest of them for?!” he said, messing up her stacks.

  I hurried him out of the house and drove away quickly before he noticed Le’ul wasn’t with us. We found Ema just as we had left her. I tried hard to detect any difference, to prove that she was fooling us, that she had changed her mind about dying as casually as she used to change her flights. She hadn’t. Her mouth was still closed over her fallen jaw. The rose was still trapped under her rigid, overlapped palms. She looked more emaciated than ever. Her Mariam kisses blended into her darkened skin. I covered her with the gabi we had brought, leaving only her face exposed, but her chill seeped through the fabric. She would never be warm enough.

  “Had she been in Ethiopia,” Aba said, “we could not have had this pleasure, her all to ourselves. She would have been at the church overnight. Her face never revealed.”

  “When are we flying her home?”

  I’d heard of other habesha sending bodies back to Ethiopia. I’d donated money for families I didn’t know when they were raising funds for repatriation. I’d worked many flights where I knew which passengers were escorting the remains of their loved ones in the cargo hold. But I never paid attention to the details of how it was done. I never expected I’d need to know.

  “Does Babbaye know we are bringing Ema soon?” Babbaye had wanted Ema back since 1991, when we left Ethiopia. How bittersweet this would be for him. Aba didn’t answer. He seemed so brittle. He had aged decades in days. He had new grey hairs. His skin looked smeared with ash. I feared that if Aba had to think about one more thing he would disintegrate. I let the question be.

  Aba started to chant, in Ge’ez, the psalter that he had known since he was a little boy training to become a priest at the one church in Harrar. I had never heard him recite from Mezmure Dawit, but I knew the things of childhood never really leave you.

  I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, listening, drifting at the edge of consciousness, where the guttural sounds of the ancient language seemed to belong.

  Early on the third day, accompanied by double yesterday’s entourage, we escorted Ema from the funeral home to an Ethiopian Orthodox church I didn’t even know existed in Toronto, on Eglinton West. Ema’s coffin was draped in embroidered red velvet and placed in front of the altar. Aba and Le’ul were in the front pew of the men’s side. I sat nearest the aisle in the front pew on the women’s side, with Tiru, who that morning had pulled me into the powder room and urged me, Don’t let your father see you cry.

  During the hours-long service, through the fog of incense and chanting, I didn’t have to see all the sad faces behind me to know none of them felt a fraction of my grief, not even Tiru, who stood for the entire service instead of sitting for the sitting parts, weeping enough for the both of us. For all that show, and notwithstanding the numbness I’d been moving through the past two days, I knew nobody would ever love or miss me the way I loved, missed Ema.

  Everything that had ever been between us landed on me in one solid mass of sorrow and regret over words said and unsaid, actions taken and abandoned — but at the core, unscathed, constant, was a simple, timeless kernel of love that obliterated the petty clutter of our history. I burst into tears, suddenly walloped by a desire for a daughter of my own. I cried for a child who might never exist. I needed to create a her who would love me as only a daughter can love a mother, whether she told me all the time, or never. I loved Isak, but I truly understood love only after Ema was gone. Even Aba’s grief was pitiful in comparison to mine. Sure, he knew her longer, but what was romance compared to being one flesh, one blood?

  Even at his best, Isak never would give me the love of my own child. Even she might not be able to fully comprehend her own feelings. I’d learned, in the seconds it took for Aba to whisper in my ear, She didn’t make it, as if it was a dirty little family secret, how impossible it is to love a mother as absolutely as she deserves to be loved until after she is gone. What better company for the departed than the aura of a child’s pure adoration?

  In the car after church, I fell asleep on Aba’s chest in the back seat, as if knocked out by the realization that hit me during the service. When I awoke, we were driving into a place called Scarborough Bluffs Cemetery.

  “Why are we here?” I said. “Aba?”

  He patted my shoulder, to strengthen me for what was about to happen. “She wanted to be where all her children are.”

  We were not going to the airport, as I had assumed. We were not taking Ema to Ethiopia. We were burying her here in Toronto.

  As my mother’s coffin was lowered into the ground under a rain of soil and roses, a blue butterfly darted under it and never came back out. No one else saw, only me. I feared the butterfly was crushed. I walked away, in search of that dash of blue. I roamed the grounds all the way to the perimeter fence, a few feet in from the edge of the bluffs that rose above the lake, and then turned around. At first, I thought my butterfly had turned into a person. A human being whose shape, height, colour I knew, who wore the suit and sunglasses of the man I love. I looked away. My mind was tricking me. Isak shouldn’t be here, so it couldn’t be him. Again, I looked. Yes, Isak.

  Isak stood next to Ema’s grave, hands in pockets, patiently waiting for me. He didn’t see the one person walking against the flow of mourners, coming up behind him. Le’ul. But he felt Le’ul’s touch, a comradely slap on Isak’s shoulder. Isak turned, already offering his hand in greeting. They chatted, facing each other, perfectly aligned. One person with two heads.

  Isak had to return to New Haven right after the burial. I saw him off at Union Station. I flinched away from his goodbye embrace. Because of grief, he probably thought. I couldn’t erase from my mind Le’ul’s hand on his shoulder, the memory of breath passing between them.

  “I will call you from the train. I will call you again when I get to Grand Central. You can call me any time. Call me every minute.”

  I nodded, knowing I wouldn’t. There was puzzlement in in his eyes — you told me you were an only child — but he left without asking. I knew I had to explain, sooner or later.

  When I was halfway home, Isak texted me. He’d accidentally taken my condo key with him. I had left my spare with Ema. I went back to the residence to get it. I couldn’t find it anywhere upstairs. I was too nervous to go to the third floor, where Ema never wanted any of us to be, as though she might still be up there and yell at me to go away. I gave up and returned downstairs, figuring my concierge would let me in. I crossed the empty formal dining room toward the French windows that open onto the garden, in the same moment that Le’ul entered from there.

  I became still, stared at the floor. The watchful, trapped-animal feeling of my childhood sprang back. Only the length of the sideboard was between us.

  “Where were you?” This was only the second time he’d spoken to me in the last three days, again in Amharic which made m
e feel grabbed by the neck and yanked to the past.

  I spoke in a small voice, in Amharic, afraid that if I responded in English Le’ul would think I was defying him. “At Union Station.”

  “Your friend is gone.”

  “Yes.”

  Le’ul took a digital camera out of his jacket pocket. “I was getting this for you from the car.” The camera was brand new; I remembered Aba gave it to Ema last Christmas. I received it, warm from his body heat. I slipped the handle around my wrist.

  “It should be in your bag. Handle it with care. That’s an expensive camera.”

  I obeyed. On the sideboard, there was a bowl of Ricola cough drops. He plucked one out and tossed it to me. It fell. “You don’t want one,” he said.

  “It’s the last batch Ema bought.”

  “She would want us to enjoy them.”

  I stooped to pick up the Ricola. I unrolled the wrapping as slowly as Ema used to, the weaker she got. Le’ul watched, like this was essential medicine I must swallow, until the lozenge disappeared between my lips.

  When he was gone, I spit it out into my palm. Yet, as I shut the garden doors behind me, I couldn’t bear to let go of anything of Ema’s. I put the sticky, warm thing back in my mouth.

  Isak offered to FedEx me my condo key so I wouldn’t have to wait until he returned on the weekend. I wanted my key, but I wished he’d not visit me again so soon. Rather than say so, I told him I could wait, and booked off two days right after the end of my four bereavement days, so that I would be working at least part of the time Isak was here. I spent the days at home, going out only once, in the morning, to see Ema.

  Every time I went to Scarborough Bluffs Cemetery, I felt I was going there to confirm that Ema would be in Toronto forever now, and so would I. How could I ever work up the willpower to abandon Ema, after not even saying goodbye to her, knowing she chose me over New York, over becoming Her Excellency, over resting with her ancestors in Ethiopia? She chose me. I had to choose her.