Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  “She will still want her mother,” he says.

  “Do you want your daughter still? Now that her full story is known?”

  “Tobya wanted to be where all her children are,” he says, and repeats the phrase, lingering on each word, his face brightening by an almost childlike wonder of new understanding. “But for me, she would have been. She wanted to see her daughters asleep side by side every night of their youth, as I saw you with Gela yesterday night. She wanted to see the younger grow up trailing the older everywhere she went, helping her, learning from her, irritating her, as I saw you with Gela these five days. All I have seen, my eyes did not deserve. It was for a mother’s eyes to have beheld. Your mother spoke the wish of her life, not of her death.”

  Right. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter where one is buried. So much doesn’t matter. “She won’t mind coming home to you now, Babbaye. I can still bring her. Aba will protest, but he answers to me now. He has much to atone for. And if he followed Ema all over the world for love, he can follow her one last time to where they began their love.”

  “Leave things be. I have earned my punishment.”

  “Babbaye, Ema wasn’t punishing you. I want you to know, she tried so very hard to find out how a person forgives, so she could forgive you.”

  Ema pushed me so hard toward forgiveness not because she thought what happened to me wasn’t bad enough to hold on to, but because she knew the cost of a life lived without having forgiven. She knew the body will eat away at itself. She wanted to spare mine that worse misery, not deny the misery that had already happened to it. I had been unable to imagine anything worse, but then thinking about the lifetime of pain she and her father caused each other, and themselves, I can.

  I look at my fist, clutched tight the way nurses tell you to make your hand when giving blood. Flesh becomes soil. Where Ema is, one day it will become Ethiopia. I step nearer to the window, to Babbaye, and raise my arm.

  “Bless this for her then. I will mix it with the earth where she rests.”

  Almost shyly, he drapes his hand over mine, briefly closes his eyes. I lower my arm. In Ema’s room, I roll the soil in the handkerchief where I had collected her hairs from the rollers.

  The labourers return in their pickup truck for the chairs. When they have loaded their truck, Babbaye tells them to move the smaller furniture and décor from Ema’s room, and the larger furniture from the two maids’ rooms, back into the living room. He gives me their pay and puts me in charge of directing them. I don’t know where everything is supposed to go. Babbaye says it’s my home. I decide. So I do.

  I arrange the room the way I had wanted to find it when I first arrived, full of things older than me: Babbaye’s long sofa, three single seaters, coffee table, dining table for eight, television and stand, sideboard, and shelves. I give one of the men Ema’s leftover Djarums. He asks me where The Art of Forgiveness should go. With you, I tell him, it’s brand new.

  After the men have gone, Babbaye prepares for bed. I wait for him in his room and receive from him the shirt he wore that day. I toss it from his window, aiming for the clothes washstand in the side alley. It lands on the ground, nowhere near it.

  “With more practice,” Babbaye says, getting into bed.

  Yes, if I had lived with him, this would have been our ritual. I spread a gabi over his bedcover. “Babbaye? When we were leaving Ethiopia, would you have let me stay with you, if I had said I don’t want to leave this land?”

  “To that there is no answer outside of yes.”

  “Would you have taken me in if I had wanted to come back?”

  “Child, must a tired old man repeat himself?”

  I laugh. I take from his dresser drawer the last things missing from the living room, the framed photos of my child self, my grandmother, and my uncles. I line us all on the top row of the living-room shelf. I nudge Ema’s photo from above the porch door, stretching up on my tippy toes. I wipe away the water spots and dust and place her at the end of the row.

  TWENTY-TWO

  In the morning, after Babbaye and I say our goodbyes, I clatter my suitcase and tote down the flagstone path. The noise does not draw Gela out of her house, as I had hoped. The letters are gone. I knock. She opens, holding the letters in one hand, and in the other hand the ends of the shawl she has wrapped around her shoulders. Her black clothes are in my suitcase. I’ve decided to keep them. That’s what sisters do.

  “I’m going to stay at Ghion Hotel. Where I wanted to go in the first place.” I intend it as an invitation. “I want to spend some time where Ema was, last time she was here.”

  Without a word, she walks with me to the main road and gets in Wondu’s waiting taxi. Wondu perks up, excited to see Gela. I can practically see his brain spinning for something impressive to say in the short time he has with us. He makes the most of it, of course, by driving exceedingly slow, letting many cars nudge into his lane, steering with his palm, resting his other arm on the open window.

  We ride alongside a lorry piled high with hundreds of yellow jerry cans strung together. “All that is going to be for water collecting, you know,” he blurts, building his ideas as he talks. “I go on field work for Highland Flora — a flower company that exports to Europe.” I recognize the name of Teka’s supplier. So I know Wondu is not bullshitting. He looks for Gela’s eyes in the rear-view as he talks. “Highland Flora has their rose farm in Oromia, out by Sebeta, just off the road to Jimma. I drive a Rover for them. I can show you a tour.”

  He pauses to let us be impressed. He shifts to sit straighter in his seat, energized by a new idea. “On the road I see rural girls carrying water in these yellow jerry cans. Their foremothers fetched water in traditional insira. So many tales of love from their time begin with a girl weeping over her broken clay water jar. But now, with unbreakable plastic containers to draw their water in, what love stories can our generation possibly create?”

  He shakes his head, regretting this great loss of culture. I think, How about romance which doesn’t begin with a girl weeping? Gela, watching the streets go by, ignores him spectacularly. Already, my big sister is teaching me a lesson. Sometimes the best response you can give a man is to just be silent, so he can hear himself.

  When Wondu pulls up at Ghion, Gela follows me in. In the incense-cigarette-cologne-perfume-coffee-infused lobby, many people glance at us — one local woman in black dress and netela, one diaspora in flimsy floral sundress and sandals — but no one’s gaze stays on us. If Gela was carrying a baby, their eyes might linger, assuming her to be the nanny, wondering if they know, or should know, the rich man whose girl I am.

  At the reception desk, Gela finds her voice. “We want 521.”

  With those words, she finally acknowledges our sisterhood. But 521 is occupied.

  “Yes I know,” she says. For a split second, I, too, believe Ema is in the room. She would be smoking on the balcony, the TV volume turned up on Al Jazeera so she can hear it, wondering what is taking us so long, rubbing her ash into the stone railing.

  “The guest is expecting you?” the receptionist says.

  “Remember me?” Gela says, as if she were here two days, not two years, ago.

  “What’s the name of the guest, please?”

  I wait for Gela, Gela waits for me, to say the name. But neither of us want to spoil the illusion. This could have been real, if Ema hadn’t hid Gela, if Ema had let me stay with Babbaye when I wanted to. Gela and I could have been two regular sisters going up to see their mom who is visiting from abroad, bringing us fresh supplies of the toiletries and junk food we’ve developed a taste for. The three of us could have been so happy.

  I slide over my global discount card. “Give us whatever you have.”

  Gela unlatches the balcony door of room 421, one level directly below Ema’s, and steps out of view through the curtains. I turn Al Jazeera on and sit on the bed. Banners across the bottom of the screen say that all flights are expected to resume in a day. I will hear from Barb s
oon. Almost a week has passed since Eyjafjallajökull erupted. Still, no news anchor has learned to pronounce its name, which reads as if it were made by a tomcat skipping across a keyboard.

  Through netela-thin white curtains, I spy on Gela, in plain sight, as from day one. There are two wicker chairs on the balcony, but she crouches on the cement ground, fidgeting with her letters. I go out to the balcony.

  From up here, Addis’s ugly spill of metal, wood, and glass is almost scenic.

  Gela stares vacantly through the gaps shaped like the Axum Obelisk in the balcony railing. I say, “My father claims the obelisks were the pagan Axumites’ grave markers.”

  Gela is as responsive as a statue. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned fathers.

  “Symbolizing doorways to the afterlife.” Shut up, D. No one cares. Faint pop music wafts up from the patio restaurant. The nebulous clouds of steam on the thermal pool are mesmerizing.

  “You can see better from up here.”

  In the pool, children splash and dive, their wet, black hair pasted on their gleaming brown skin. They shout up to me, making silly faces. I tap my chest. Me? They flop around in the water, slapping their butts. Yes you. I blow them kisses. They mime choking. I ball up my fists under my eyes in a pretend cry. I stick my tongue out at them. They bellow ahhh while slapping their palms against their open mouths.

  I look up. Sure enough, there is a plane passing overhead. “When you were little did you also yell at the airplanes in the sky?”

  Gela looks up. Thank God, a sign of life. “When I wished they brought my mother.”

  I turn and lean on the railing. “How was it when you were upstairs with her, when you had her all to yourself?”

  She puts the letters down, unfolds herself from the corner and stands in front of me.

  “I should ask you to tell me about having her all to yourself. What are my rare few days, my two weeks, when you have had her for twenty-seven years?”

  “And yet, you were a better daughter than me. Good, loving, forgiving.”

  She opens her arms in supplication. “Please, my sister,” she says, hopelessly, knowing she will be rejected. “Still bring my mother. Don’t deny that I, too, can bury her.” A breeze nudges the unbound letters toward the edges of the balcony and the gaps. “Give her to me now. Even after the end. I will take her. Because such is my fortune.”

  When she welcomed me on the first day, falling, weeping, it had seemed part performance, but now her hoarse voice, the hiccups she suppresses, the vein tracing a path down her temple, are all true. The way she says sister has blood in it. One by one, the letters flutter through the gaps in the railing and land on the branches of trees, the surface of the pool, the lower balconies, the thatched roof of the patio restaurant. On the wet children. As if the papers have an innate wisdom, not one piece glides on the wind back to where we stand, from where they have been released.

  “Please, my sister. Our mother is gone. Aren’t I, your living sister, enough for you?” I say. But I sound hopeless, too. I know I’m not enough for her any more than she is enough for me. There are angular spaces in us only a mother as sharp-edged as Ema can fill. Gela grabs and tries to kiss my hand. I pull away. “It’s her you want? So go to her. In letters, in visits, she has always been the one to come to you. Now is your turn to go to her.”

  Gela looks pained. “How? I am a dog leashed to this land.”

  Now I’m the one making up my ideas as I go. “I will help you. You are my sister. I am allowed to bring my sister into my country.” With those scars on her face, we could claim she’s a veteran. No one would doubt us. “Ema should have brought you when we all left. That day, I cried very hard, you know. Do you think my soul sensed you were being left behind?”

  Why not, I think. What if the problem all along hasn’t been those of us who left failing to return, but that there has been one who should have flown away with us, whose departure has been too long delayed? Our future can belong just as much in the outside-country where we have already committed the first, the best of us, to its equally welcoming earth.

  “My father says you are dead. I will bring you to life.” Gela gasps and begins to cross herself. I stop her hands. “No. No more rituals. I am your deliverer. I know you have dreams. I dream, too. I was always good at drawing. I want to help people paint their stories if words in any language won’t do. What do you want to be?”

  This idea of leaving here is already growing on her, I can tell, because she tells me the truth that I know. “A dressmaker?”

  “Say it like a statement! I talked to Babbaye about coming too. Four days ago, he didn’t want to hear of going to outside-country to see Ema’s grave. But this morning, he didn’t say no. You will accompany him. I will show you everything about Ema in Toronto, in Vienna. Now, please, show me how you spent your time here with her. This room is identical to hers, I’m sure. Let’s pretend she was here. I want to share in her time here through you. I want to know where she sat, which side of the bed she slept on. Where she kept her things. Even from which cup she drank her coffee.” I pull her inside. “Come on sister, let’s play.”

  Gela satisfies my demand. She remembers everything. Every inch of a room our mother never entered becomes crowded with her, Tobya, Zimita, Ema, Welete-Mikael — the teenager who was ordered to start over, the mother who wanted still to have her child know her, the woman who loved the man but not his son, the woman who could help the son but not rescue the daughter, the woman who had to lose both daughters so she could keep them, the woman who believed her body was poison. Our mother becomes numberless, more than the sum of all her names.

  We end up back in the lobby, where an entire corner is a stage set of a large, permanent coffee service. Gela sits on one of the three-legged duka arranged in a semicircle around the server. I ease myself into the low scalloped seat of the stool next to hers, praying the inward curving legs do not give out under me. Focusing on one muscle group at a time, I cross my ankles and tuck them in, trying to imitate Gela’s demure elegance, which matches the server’s.

  The server is a poster-worthy brown Venus, hair plaited back in shurruba like our grandmother, wearing a blue hager libs decadently embroidered in gold, green, and purple on the wrists, neckline, down the centre, and around the hem fanned out at her feet. She sits on a platform behind a brazier of hot coals that sear a jumbo jebena even I couldn’t drink all of in one go.

  For once, Gela and I are going to be served. The other customers gathered for this mid-morning coffee are a mix of tourists, locals, expats, and in-betweens — the kind who live abroad half the year and sport at least one patriotic tattoo. There are also the latest generation of business-class dads I know so well from work, who after a few drinks always lament to me how with their frequent absences they’ve already repeatedly broken their children’s hearts long before their children are old enough to break theirs.

  The jebena spouts steam like a freight train. The server lifts it off the coals and sets it at an angle on a woven ring to settle. She holds out a bowl of kolo to the customer to her immediate right. The roasted grains are passed around, each person taking a token pinch. With a pair of tongs, she removes a few lumps of red-hot coal from the brazier and drops them into an incense holder. She heaps a spoonful of loose, rocky incense from a mesob, a mini version of grandma’s mesob, and sprinkles it on the coals. A cloud of smoke curls up into a thin hypnotic line.

  “Sign of a good day to come,” the server says, pouring the coffee high and thin.

  “You have bigger cups?” Gela asks her.

  “It is okay,” I say. “For this round let’s be the same.”

  The server stands and walks around the circle with the tray of sini brimming with scalding black coffee. I lift one carefully by the rim, not wanting to burn myself but aware also that her dress is dangerously close to the fire while she waits for us to help ourselves. We drink our hot-as-love buna, lost in our separate thoughts — what Wondu would call “private moments.”
r />   “He was so curious about you,” I say.

  “Who?”

  I give her a look. She knows who. She has known, from the way he held her body when she cried on the ground on the morning of my arrival, from the way he pretended to be confused by a simple gate latch, from his earlier attempts at smooth talk. But I don’t press the point. Our sisterhood is too new for frank boy talk. We return our empty sini to the server, and wait for the second round, watching loopy incense smoke merge with loopy cigarette smoke.

  I ask something I feel I do have a right to know. “What’s Dessie like?”

  “Nothing special.”

  “I would love to visit.”

  “It’s a rest stop on the way to better places.”

  “You have people there?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “They died?”

  “Could have, by now.”

  “Is it fair you know everything about me?”

  “No one can know everything about anyone.”

  “But let us balance our stories a little bit. Who raised you in Dessie?”

  She sighs, exhausted with her little sister. She wets her fingertips on her tongue and twists the strands of the fringe of her netela in pairs. “My father’s parents. The year I was born, 1978, the government sent my father to the Eritrean front to fight for Ethiopia, knowing his parents were immigrants from Eritrea. They had lived in Dessie since the time of the emperor. Whether he defected to his ancestral side, or died, we don’t know. He never returned.”

  Like mother like daughter indeed. Of all the boys Ema could have hooked up with when she was out of her parents’ house, she had to pick an Eritrean. And now look at me, with Isak, my Talyan boy.

  “So . . . your grandparents?”

  “Seventeen years ago, they voted for Eritrean independence in the referendum, never thinking that a war would come and they would be deported to an Eritrea they had not seen in forty years.”