Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  I patted the hair rollers dry with a towel and replaced them in the mesob in neat concentric circles. Aba told Le’ul that he was concerned about the pointy heels of Ema’s shoes breaking through the plastic bag Le’ul had stuffed them in. He ordered Le’ul to redo them, wrapping the heels in newspaper first. Le’ul went downstairs to get newspaper.

  I edged into the bedroom, holding the mesob of clean-as-new rollers, and put it beside my purse. I was going to keep it. Aba was placing Ema’s sandals side by side into a suitcase. I should have stayed out of this family complication regarding Babbaye’s wish for Ema’s body, but considering that I had no intention of calling Babbaye, I felt I should at least indirectly do something for the poor man, my hero as a child. He used to say openly what no one dared to say. He openly criticized Le’ul’s adoption, wanted Ema and Aba to have a son of their own. Secretly, I wished for a sister.

  “Aba, did you tell Babbaye what Ema wanted?”

  Aba looked at me as if I had made an absurd suggestion. “How do you tell the Shaleqa his one remaining child didn’t want to be buried in her country? How will that seem?”

  I slipped the handkerchief containing Ema’s hair into my purse. In Ema’s jewellery box, I searched for my key. “That’s not what she said. If you tell Babbaye exactly what she said, he would understand?”

  “Perhaps,” Aba said. “One day. When it is a better time.”

  “Then at least send him pictures of the gravesite. He’ll appreciate it.” I could have told Aba I already had pictures. But those were for Ema. “With pictures, Babbaye can see exactly where at least one of his children is.” Nothing of my uncles was ever recovered at any of the sites outside Addis Ababa during the exhumations of mass graves. They were out there in unmarked ground, still answering for unspecified crimes.

  “Don’t you think a father deserves that, Aba?”

  Aba said, “Yes, but when it’s completed, with the stone, the engraving. We have to meet with Stanley about the stone.”

  “Or send pictures of the plot as it is now. With the wreaths,” Le’ul said. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I hadn’t heard him return.

  “If they are still there,” I said, to Aba.

  Le’ul spoke for him. “When the headstone is installed, send more pictures. And when the roses bloom. We should plant a cutting from her garden. Continue what she started,” he said. In every city she lived, Ema had grown generations of a cutting from the rosebush Aba had given her as a wedding present.

  Suddenly, Aba became very worried that Ema’s stone would not be ready for the dedication on her tezkar. “If you had answered my calls, we would not be so late in ordering it,” he said, peeling newspaper sheets for Le’ul. He’d never spoken so harshly to me in my life.

  “Don’t worry about time, Aba.”

  To appease him, and be the better child, Le’ul insisted that we order the stone right then. So, we abandoned the packing and went to Stanley’s funeral parlour. Le’ul and I sat on either side of Aba on a dark brown leather sofa in Stanley’s office, browsing catalogues of headstones, statues, and fonts. Stanley sat opposite us. Neatly re-folded on the grand oak desk behind him, softly glowing in the light of his art-deco lamps, was a stack of snow-white cotton, the remainder of the netela and hager libs that I had given to Stanley to dress Ema in.

  “She said to never bury her in Adisaba,” Aba said, arguing with an unseen opponent, while he flipped through the catalogue of headstones.

  That was a very different version of what Aba told me Ema wanted. So different as to not be the same, at all, as, She wanted to be where all her children are.

  Aba paused, then responded to his adversary. “I refuse to have a permanent distance between me and Emwodish.” Aba became more vehement, using his pet name for Ema, you whom I love. “I refuse to have to book a ticket, fly fourteen hours, stand in the visa line, pass through customs. Just to sit for hours by her, talk to her about this and that, hear her replies. To be harassed by a sour, underpaid guard for seeking this simple pleasure? To pay a lazy, unmannered watchman to retain the glow of her marble, the life in her roses, keep her unmolested? I refuse such affronts. For myself, and for her.”

  Stanley remained neutral. Aba tapped his finger on the catalogue at a picture of an irregularly shaped, dark grey marble boulder with thousands of beige flecks. It looked like the raw material that is sculpted, not the final product. “She made me promise to not buy her an elaborate tombstone,” he said.

  “Promises are like rules,” Le’ul said, and gave Stanley a folded slip of paper on which was written the epitaph Aba had chosen for Ema.

  I took up the stack of white cotton and showed myself out ahead of Le’ul and Aba. As they followed behind me, I heard Le’ul say that we should stop by Scarborough Bluffs now to take the photos for Babbaye. The light was perfect, apparently. It was ordinary light to me, but what did I know, I was no professional.

  By then, I was queasy to the point of throwing up. I had prepared myself for a few hours, not a whole day, of being around Le’ul. I promised myself that going to the Scar-borough Bluffs Cemetery with them would be the last obligation I forced myself to go through. When we arrived at the cemetery, we found the groundskeeper had removed Ema’s wreaths. Aba got upset.

  “By definition, cut flowers are dead. Who is he to decide they are too dead for a cemetery?” He sent Le’ul to find the man so he could complain to him personally.

  I walked to the edge of the grounds. No blue butterfly today either. I sat on a bench overlooking the lake. Aba joined me. I took out the camera from my purse and clicked through the pictures of Ema’s wreaths — going back in time, seeing them revive; going forward in time, seeing them shrink.

  Aba watched the lake with fixed concentration, as if Ema might appear gliding on the water, like the biblical Queen of the South incarnate. Softly, he repeated the Bible verse that was to be her epitaph. Then he quieted. Then he started again, until I lost count. He mixed up the words. Remain these three. Three these remain. Over and over, until I couldn’t bear it anymore.

  “Aba, it’s these three remain.”

  “Faith, hope, love.”

  “Charity. The verse ends with charity.”

  “Is love not better?”

  “We already ordered charity.”

  Sensing Le’ul nearby, I looked around. He had returned, alone, carrying a shopping bag. He kneeled by Ema’s grave and began to arrange small objects and flowers on her soil.

  I got up. “Let’s go,” I said to Aba. He needed to see what Le’ul was up to. But Aba had completely forgotten his earlier agitation about the wreaths. He was stuck on the difference between love and charity.

  I made myself walk up to Le’ul, to stand on the other side of Ema’s grave. He was tucking three heaven-gazing stone angel busts at the base of the simple wooden cross. There was more, from the cemetery gift shop: garish plastic flowers. He wrapped the wire stems around the cross, at the corner where the horizontal plank met the vertical.

  “They didn’t have real flowers?”

  “The axis is the symbolic intersection of the earthly and heavenly,” he said.

  I wanted to stare, study him closely, his nest of uneven dreads, every shred of hemp he wore. To break him down to more manageable chunks. But I couldn’t look at him for long without remembering pinpricks of daylight coming in through closed shutters. There in the cemetery, with him in front of me, my eyes wide open, I still felt blindfolded, disoriented. He was someone about whom I would always know too much, yet also about whom I would know nothing at all. I could turn him in my mind until the day I die. I will never find a satisfying answer to the first, lasting question of my life: why?

  He got up, brushing soil off his knees. “Take the pictures.”

  “Me?”

  “Is that not a camera in your hand?”

  He went to the water tap. I aimed the camera and waited for my hands to stop shaking. The angels and plastic flowers looked even sillier on the small screen.
I took pictures. On panoramic mode, I did a slow scan of the grounds, ending on the lake and the tiny figure of Aba on the bench. Le’ul returned with a full watering can.

  “If you think the Shaleqa won’t like these, how about I Photoshop your flowers on the photos?”

  “My flowers?”

  He grinned sheepishly. “I’ve come here with you all those afternoons. I kept my distance because I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  The implication of what he said sank in slowly, like the ornaments in the fresh mud created by the stream of water he was pouring on the grave. My finger spasmed on the camera’s on/off button.

  “I came to be alone with her.”

  “You don’t need to be alone as much as you think you do.”

  I knew exactly how alone I wanted to be.

  Water dripped from the snout of the can, level with his hip. “Did you see the pictures I took for you?” he said. “Every day when I came here with you, and I saw you photograph the flowers, I kept hoping you would notice those pictures. That’s why I wanted you to have the camera. Did you see them? I don’t think you did; you would have said thank you. I was right to take the pictures for you. I know my sister. She wants to keep as much as she can of her mother. I preserved everything which was around Ema on her last day of life, and even after they took her away to the morgue.”

  I was paralyzed. What I deleted, on the first day I came back here to be with Ema, were not random mistake shots. They were the final moments of her life. The last places she went, the last things she saw: the last view she saw out the car window, the room she died in, last sheets she lay on, last pillow that cushioned her head.

  Le’ul waited. If gratitude was what I felt, I resented it. This was the kindest, most bizarre thing he’d ever done for me. Not to. For.

  “You deserved to have mementos. You were working non-stop. We don’t embalm. Surely you know. So if you had been on a multi-leg trip, it would have been impossible to delay the funeral for you. But I would have taken pictures of her even in the coffin for you.” He put his hand over his heart. “What a brother does for his sister.”

  He rested his hands on either side of the horizontal bar of the cross and kissed the wood very deliberately, first puckering his lips hard in preparation. He was there for several breaths before I understood that he was posing. I felt light-headed. I used to hate seeing him kiss my mother. And isn’t kissing the dead inherently unfair, worse than kissing a sleeping person, who can at least wake up and refuse the intimacy?

  I raised the camera and pretended to press the button. “Okay,” I said, then I thought, he would find out that I did not take the shot, and even destroyed the pictures he took for me out of kindness. I shouldn’t feel such girlish panic over such small deceptions and innocent mistakes, when what he had made of me was a thousand times worse. But I said, “Wait. Again.”

  He kissed Ema’s cross again. Then he kneeled to cradle it from behind, pressing it with the length of his body. I took the shot.

  I lowered myself to the earth, packed so tight even worms couldn’t squeeze through. Ema didn’t choose me. She chose us. All her children. Her final move in her forgiveness project was her very body, tethering her children together in this city forever.

  Le’ul was waiting. I knew what for. “Thank you,” I said. I wanted to scream at the lake, at the sky. Rake through this soil. Shake Ema out of her spell. Run to the cliff’s edge and leap. Soar, over Aba, over them all. Fly, fly, fly.

  Before I take the pictures to Teka in the living room, I go through my phone calls and texts to see if I’ve missed anything. I refresh my browser window for news updates. Same old. Crickets from Barb. Ditto Isak. I scroll back through our texts from before the ferry ride. He is not communicating with me, nor I with him. We are in a holding pattern for a place that won’t have us feeling robbed or manipulated.

  I refresh my email. Another from Le’ul. Dess, I am worried about Aba. He’s unfocused, this life seems to hold no interest for him anymore. I’ve heard him mumbling “These three. These three.” He means us, Dess. You must return fast.

  I shove my phone in my pocket and lean out of the window for air. The drying laundry on the clotheslines in the side alley is a multilayered rippling white wall. That roof-jumping tomcat is today curled into a crescent of sleep in the shade of a broken chair leaning against the clothes washstand. I envy his ease, and the confidence of a tiny green bird I see marching toward the edge of the corrugated tin roof of the service quarters, assured that when the tin ends its wings will take over.

  From the kitchen comes the thud-crack of Gela pounding roasted coffee beans into powder, covering the mouth of the mortar with one hand, slamming the solid iron pestle through a gap between her index finger and thumb, grinding it against the bowl.

  I hear the creak of the bedroom door and turn around, the photos in my hand. Babbaye enters. He sits on his bed. Avoiding the white glare of the laundry behind me, he addresses his words to the blue wooden chest at the foot of his bed.

  “When you go, will you return with my Tobya?”

  It has been thirty-eight days since Ema died, but I haven’t given up expecting her to come around a corner or walk through every doorway. I wish she would come in now and convince him that she’s fine where she is.

  If I tell Babbaye how I wish Ema had been buried here too, he won’t ask me why. He will assume it is for the same reason that he wishes it.

  For all the good these photos did, Aba should have just sent the pictures of the grave as it really looked that day, before Le’ul “decorated” it: an honest heap of crumbled brown earth stuck with an unadorned wood cross. Perhaps Babbaye detected there was something off about these touched-up pictures, and that was why he did not display them.

  I consider showing Babbaye the headstone photo from my email, but decide against it. The last thing to do now is show him more evidence that what’s done is done. I hold out the photos to him. He waves my hand away.

  “If you will have me, I will return. Me only.”

  “Living long shows one much. The way of nature is, the parent punishes the child. I now see the child can punish the parent.” He is speaking metaphorically, as people of his age love to do. Where’s a translator when I need one?

  “She will not allow me to bury her.”

  “Babbaye, no parent should bury his child. Her choice is a kindness to you.”

  “Tobya is punishing me.”

  “Why?”

  “For Dessie.”

  “For sending her to live in Dessie? She survived the Terror because of being sent away to Dessie. You saved her life. She even named me after the city.”

  Behind his closed lips, he grinds with his front teeth on a strip of thought he wants to spit out. He regards me with pity, as an adorable, innocent lamb he must slaughter. “Tell her,” he says as if Ema were alive, a petulant teen refusing to come out of her room. “Tell her it was for her own good.”

  “She has always known it was. Am I not named Dessie?”

  “She waits until the end of life to punish me for Dessie? For Dessie, she refuses me, refuses her land the honour of her body? What did I withhold from her but a life of shame, as should any father?”

  Never having witnessed, in real time, the unravelling of a mind, I don’t know what to do. I feel as if I have blacked out and missed a chunk of this conversation. I steer as close as possible to what makes sense, things I know for sure about Ema’s burial.

  “Ema’s plot is on the highest ground of a sloping clifftop over Lake Ontario.” Aba had told me that Lake Ontario is as big as Tana, the biggest lake in Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile, itself once believed by scholars to be the biblical river Gihon. But I do not want to make a claim that I can’t back up, so I cling to facts.

  “Scarborough Bluffs Cemetery is in the southeast of Toronto, very beautiful. One can go by car or by the underground train. Line two. I just call it the Bloor. It’s green on the map.”

  “I was not a mer
ciless father who completely separates a girl from her mother.”

  We’re not talking about Dessie the city. We’re talking about me. Before I splintered off from the family to stay in Vienna and go to boarding school, I had wanted to come back to Ethiopia to live with him. He had refused me. I always doubted whether Ema had really asked him to take me in. I guess she had. I wonder if he also told her to tell me that it was for my own good. He thinks Ema has held a grudge about that all this time.

  I sit on the blue chest. “Babbaye,” I say. “That doesn’t matter anymore. She was never upset with you over me.”

  “What you said, the day you came. She wanted to be where all her children are?”

  “Yes!” I scoot over, and sit on the bed beside him.

  He speaks each word distinctly. “There is no one such place.”

  “We travel, yes. All of us travel. But in the end we will ­always come back to Toronto, because she is there. She has been buried by an Ethiopian Orthodox priest. He did everything right, all the words, the movements. Three times.”

  Aba ensured that. I couldn’t have interpreted the priest’s motions, incantations, if my life had depended on it. And I did not care. We were about to leave my mother in a box deep in the ground, as if she wasn’t a person anymore but shameful proof that I had failed to keep her alive.

  “I allowed for so much. Other fathers would have been without mercy.”

  “Come visit. Her grave. We will send an invitation letter so you can apply for a visa. If the embassy of Canada here is made aware you are the father of a diplomat in their country, they can’t deny you. For the one-year memorial maybe? Or come every year, if you wish. Why leave at all? Stay! Live with us!”

  If he would only listen to me, it could be like those days we spent in the sun on the lawn of my old house, eating wild peaches, scraping our nails with thorns, brushing our teeth with twigs. All of High Park could be our lawn. We can buy our tooth-twigs from Noah’s.