Daughters of Silence

by Rebecca Fisseha

  My mouth hangs open. What has been merely the background noise of my life — Babbaye’s grumblings about his enemy’s enemy, Ema’s constant trips for mediations — has been Gela’s real life, not in the least abstract. The most I’d thought about it was if Ema happened to have “Hab Dahlak” playing, and even then only brief ruminations on how it seemed all the Eritreans ever wanted, from the British, the Talyans, the Ethiopians, was to be left alone. And was that too much to ask? Why should one be bound to a family one never chose?

  “How did you escape being deported?”

  “Escaping is what criminals do.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Our Ethiopian mother saved me.” I remember one of Ema’s letters, about “recent troubles” Ema swore she would keep Gela safe from. “That was when I came to live with the Shaleqa.”

  “So long ago.”

  “I told you, I have been there some years.”

  “Eleven years is more than some years. I thought you came last month.”

  The server hands out the second round of coffee. “When I look at our map,” Gela says, sipping her drink, “I see the borders as they used to be. I try to un-see it, look at the shapes of Ethiopia and Eritrea separately, but I can’t. I know the new border is there, clearly drawn in black. They will kill each other over one millimetre of it. All the same, my eyes refuse. I must force myself to not see the whole, what used to be.”

  I feel terrible for her. Almost everyone she loves — mother, father, grandparents, maybe even me — has always been on the other side of a border she can’t cross.

  Haltingly, I say, “Maybe, because borders are what you make of them? What the heart knows is stronger than what they tell you is real.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Stay with me. I have to go, but you can stay here as long as you want. Switch to 521 when it becomes available.”

  “The Shaleqa’s is my only home.”

  “At least let me call Wondu to drive you back.”

  “That hustler?” she sneers.

  “Can you blame him?”

  She shrugs. “Our grandfather has been by himself all morning. God knows what you gave him for breakfast. I have to return soon. Call who you want.”

  I decide this is progress enough for now. When Wondu texts to let me know he has arrived, I walk her to the parking lot. His eyes sparkle with delight when she opens the front passenger seat.

  She pauses before climbing in. “So, am I to wait until you send for me?”

  “I’ll return for you.”

  “When?”

  I spit on the ground. “Before that dries.”

  She shoves me playfully. I catch her hand and draw her into a hug. We hold for many breaths, our chests rising and falling in time.

  “I’m sorry I mishandled your letters,” I say.

  “I have others.”

  “Is . . .” I don’t know how to ask her if the rest of my story is in any of them. But she feels my question somehow, and steps back so I can see the answer in her eyes. Yes.

  “You, little flower, are a miracle,” she says. I feel newly created. “Don’t be a grinning tree out here. Go back inside.”

  Those were the first words she said to me when I arrived, if I don’t count the wailing. My stomach feels sloshy with tears as Wondu takes her away from me, but I manage to keep myself together until I get back to our room.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I’m awakened by a whisper. The balcony door is closed and the curtains hang still. I hear footsteps upstairs. I put a bathrobe over my sundress and pad along the hallway in the anonymous nighttime hush. I take the stairs to the fifth floor, and approach the Do Not Disturb sign on the door handle of room 521. No light under the door. I press my ear against it. No sound. From a tray of leftovers on the carpet, I collect slices of tomato, strawberries, and honeydew. I return to the stairwell, eating my findings, bypass my floor, and come out at the far end of the lobby. I push enormous, wood-framed glass doors open onto the landing overlooking the garden, patio, and pool area. I go down two stone staircases, past chairs upturned on the patio restaurant tables. There is a low, feeble metal fence around the pool. I hop over it, crushing young blooms into the soft earth under my heels.

  I climb to the highest diving platform and walk to the edge. Steam rolls off the water below, like wind-chased clouds, obscuring the cross-shaped water. The greenery is pulsing globs of oil paint. I look up at the hotel building. The dim glow from my bedside lamp is a setting sun in the dark, looming mass of the hotel. Ema is not watching me from the unlit balcony above. She won’t rush down to scold me, to make sure that nothing on me is broken. She knows I won’t jump again.

  This silence, save for the gossipy leaves and smacking water, is the best conversation between Ema and I.

  I sit on the edge of the platform, swinging my feet, creating invisible ripples in the air with my toes. The turnstile squeaks as someone comes into the pool area. I pull up my feet, expecting hotel staff. It’s a guest. A man, the leathery-tanned, lithe, ponytailed Aryan species endemic to Africa. Of course he’d enter in the civilized way, past the ticket booth, and even leave money at the counter. He dives into the pool and swims vigorously, causing a minor tsunami in his wake, slapping the water with his oar-like arms as if it has offended him.

  So much for companionable peace. I walk back down the platform to the ladder. That’s when I see Ema’s room is ablaze, every light is on, when just moments ago the room was dark. I descend the ladder, and sit on the edge of the pool, the hem of my robe lapping the water. The man makes contact with my legs. He rears up from the water, pasting back his hair on his head.

  “The fuck! I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

  “Why not? You’re here.”

  He blinks at me. He’s forgotten English, or thinks I’m a hallucination. I point behind me at the hotel building. “That’s you?”

  “My wife is forever on my case about lights,” he says to my chest.

  When my wife is among the first words a man says to me, I know he already wants to sleep with me and is reminding himself why he shouldn’t.

  “What’s your room like?” I say, reaching under my robe to adjust my perfectly secure dress strap.

  “What’s my room like?”

  “Show me? When you’re done here.”

  Hey presto, he’s done. He heaves his long, toned person out of the water, throws his robe on, and leads the way. “I’m Braam.”

  We’re doing names? “Beza.”

  While the Scandinavian gets ice, I stalk room 521, wary as a cat, willing there to be something, anything, Ema might have left behind and that was miraculously never found by two years of guests or housekeeping staff.

  “You look as if you are searching for evidence of another woman. No forgotten earring, alas. I’m alone,” he says when he comes back. His words sound as if he has spoken them before, to another woman, perhaps in another language, when she surprised him in a hotel. He scoops up ice with the glasses and cracks open mini bottles of Rémy.

  “My mother stayed in this room once. She died.”

  He blushes so hard it shows through his tan. “In here?”

  “No. I mean recently.”

  “My condolences.” He pours the drinks, gives me a glass. “To . . . ?”

  I toss back the stinging cognac. Our hands touch again when I return the glass. I point at some papers with the logo of Highland Flora on the coffee table.

  “This from your job?”

  “You know the company?”

  “My mother grew roses all her life, the same plant, many gardens.”

  “I’m a breeder. I come up with new cultivars. My latest, seven years I spent in the lab, maximizing her vase life, bud size, hip width, stem length.”

  “Her colour must not be a selling point.”

  He approaches me. I stand my ground. “She’s the colour of every woman’s rose.” He picks up the papers, charts with thumbnails of different roses. “My latest is this one
.”

  Some tight, pink number. “Heidi? Doesn’t sound very Ethiopian.”

  “I named her after my daughter.”

  “Perks of being a breeder, eh?”

  “You could say.”

  I see photos of the red and white roses Teka had given me, also known as Gloria and Athena. I brush his fingertips with mine. “You’re pruning.”

  “Sorry?”

  “When you’ve been in the water too long, see the ridges? It’s called pruning.”

  He puts the papers on the coffee table, coils his arms around my lower back, pulls me in to feel his erection. “I also do grafting,” he says suggestively. He talks while kissing me. His mouth tastes of ash. I feel the honeydew come up the back of my throat. “After all my hard work, plus three years spent getting her ready for market, I come to Addis Ababa to shepherd the first batch of ten thousand to the auction, and what happens?”

  “Something big and hard erupts.”

  “All the way up to the sky. Ten thousand Heidi rot on a Cairo tarmac for a week.”

  “Wouldn’t want to be there when they open that cargo door.”

  “That’s exactly my fate, tomorrow.”

  As in, we’ll never see each other again. As in, are we doing this or not? The night is old.

  “Why don’t you go freshen up?” I say.

  “We can freshen up together.”

  “Darling I was born clean.” I slap his ass. He jogs to the bathroom, pulling down his shorts. The minute I hear the shower start, I grab a teacup from the breakfast bar, the closest thing to a memento of Ema I will have from 521, and scram.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When Ema took up her first of two postings in Rome, Babbaye had started going to our old house. He would walk across Addis Ababa and sit all day on a boulder across the road from our gate, sometimes helping himself to a koshim fruit from the hedge. This went on for weeks. The expat tenants’ watchman left the old man in peace, but the unnerved tenants contacted the district authorities, who in turn contacted the real estate broker, who in turn contacted Aba, who in turn passed the problem to Ema. She called Babbaye to ask him what he was doing there, as if there might be a valid explanation. His response was, I have come for mine.

  So have I. I have come back to my childhood home, for me. It is my last stop before the airport. Barb did call finally, after I went back to bed for a few more hours’ sleep last night, to tell me to report for duty this morning. I said to wait for me, I had stuff to do.

  She thought I’d lost my mind. “You want the flight to wait for you?”

  “What can I say, Barb. Sometimes you can’t take the girl out of Ethiopia.”

  My new, as yet nameless, taxi driver wanders in my old neighbourhood, which has become a mishmash of new shops and eateries. Granted, my directions were less than specific, but Wondu would have found it, if he didn’t already have a date with Gela at Effoi pizzeria.

  The driver passes a new high-rise hotel several times. He holds no hope of finding the house because everything in this area has been redeveloped. Then I see that the hotel occupies the land of the house which used to stand behind ours, the cats’ shortcut from our place to the main road. We drive around the hotel and into what is now a paved, gated zone. Perhaps because it’s daytime, the road barrier is up and the guard booth unmanned.

  The dense koshim hedge concealing our house is the only bit of nature in the row of new brick boundary walls topped by electrical barbed wire, protecting a mountain range of mansions that have risen around our compound. Our rooftop, visible over the top of our gate, looks so pitifully small in comparison to the grandiose villas that it could be mistaken for the service quarters. I order the taxi driver to wait for me, no matter how long I stay. I intend to go into my garden, into the room where I lost my childhood, to cast out forever the demons in the walls of my bedroom and lurking behind the door.

  Most of the baby blue paint on our gate has peeled, exposing metallic grey underneath. The outer doorbell hangs like a popped eyeball. I press it. The house next door has been turned into a bar. Drinkers on the patio upstairs, birds of prey attracted by my red uniform, watch me from above. A watchman half-opens the small door in our gate. He’s bundled up in a knit scarf and army surplus style trench coat. After a period of mutual staring, I accept he can’t just tell by looking at me that I am the first inhabitant of this place.

  “I know this house.”

  “No one is living here,” he says, suspicious.

  I was too young when we left to have been issued a district ID card with the house number, which would identify me as connected to here. Impersonating Babbaye’s powerful tone, which tells and does not ask, I say, “This is my childhood home. I am looking in.”

  The guard pulls out a flip phone from the folds of his coat and dials uncertainly, as if the keypad is a Ouija board. Barely two rings later, he hangs up.

  “No answer. I have not been told to let anyone in.”

  I sigh heavily and go through the motions of the powerless. I’ve picked them up from Lomi and Aberash. I set my face in a broken, resigned expression and step back, eyes downcast, adding a deferential bow, mumbling, “Igziabher repay you.” Just as he begins to shut the door, I flip the script. I hold out two hundred birr. “For your troubles.”

  He is unimpressed, never mind the birr are crisp from the Ghion ATM. I stuff them in my purse. I pull out a Canadian ten dollar bill instead. He looks at me fiercely, as if I am taking him for a fool. He’s about to slam the door in my face when I produce an American ten dollar bill.

  He takes it and swings the door wide. “As you want.”

  I step over the threshold. The hibiscus, bougainvillea, yewef zer, bottlebrush of my childhood bob their heads in the breeze, seeming to say, yes we remember you too, little flower. I trek through the front garden. The mefakiya has been trimmed down to knee height, or perhaps it was only ever that high. The lawn seems minuscule now, as if it has shrunk away from the expanding stone tile.

  “What happened to the roses? Here were yellows, there were pinks.”

  The watchman pats the diagonal tips of bunches of short stems sticking out of the ground between the mefakiya. “The gardener makes cuts at this time.”

  I squat to one such drastically pruned rosebush, pressing one hand on the moist earth for balance. The watchman squats, feet flat, legs folding easy. He crumbles the loose soil like so many lumps of soft gold.

  “It is good earth,” he says.

  “Good enough to eat.”

  “Isn’t it so?”

  “I used to make people. Their dusty-wet aroma, so irresistible, a mother’s scent.”

  The bedroom window on the right side of the house is shuttered. I feel a flash of panic, then remember. I am outside, safe, and all of the windows are shuttered, not just the one.

  I adjust my purse strap. “I am going inside the house.”

  He nods, smartly interpreting my casual gesture to mean more American dollars are in it for him if he complies. He walks back to the gate to shut the door. He is short but thick, with arms sculpted by labour, or perhaps violence. But I don’t feel even a twinge of fear that I am going to be alone with a strong man in an empty house and not a soul, save for the taxi driver, knows I’m here. And he may abscond, figuring he’ll get more value out of whatever is in my bags than what’s in my wallet.

  The watchman and I walk down the driveway, past the cinderblock wall and the car shed, to the backyard. He unlocks the back door and leads the way, turning on the lights as we walk through the small family dining room, then the formal one, and the living room. Unfurnished spaces should feel bigger, but this is a dollhouse. The watchman blabbers about how well the house has held up for being over thirty years old, too bad it will be demolished sooner or later, how the person who bought it has patiently waited as the land value skyrocketed year after year, waiting for the perfect time to sell for a maximum return on his investment. The last phrase, perhaps having heard it often, he says in English.


  I am trying to feel something beyond language. In the dining rooms, bathrooms, hallway, the nook where the phone used to be: nothing. I can’t believe I feel nothing now, when I endured such vivid terror here for three years. I walk more quickly than I want to, trying to lose the man for even a precious half minute, so that the past might creep forward with the shakiness of a traumatized puppy. At the end of the dark hallway, much shorter than I remember, where there’s nowhere left to go but to the bedrooms, my legs won’t budge. I sift through my store of Amharic for a tactful way to tell the guard to let me have a moment alone.

  “Wait outside.”

  His wariness comes back. “Why?”

  “I need personal time in here.”

  He regards me with a look that says, not kindly, who can ever understand why diaspora do what they do?

  “What is in here but walls, windows, floor?”

  “Brother, don’t you have a special place, where you grew up and wish to go back to, so you can go forward?”

  “My lady, I grew up on Kazanchis road. I go back to it every evening,” he boasts in the way of sufferers.

  “This place has tizita for me.”

  “You are too young. From what I am told, the first owners left for outside-country with their children twenty years ago.”

  “Nineteen. They had one child only. I won’t stay long. Please work with me.”

  I adjust my purse.

  On cue, he obliges, walking out the way he came, through the living and dining rooms, to the back door. I hear him switch off all the lights, and the shriek of metal on concrete as he pushes the back entrance closed.

  I reach the end of the hallway in three strides. Then, the bedroom. I enter the dark and stand in the middle. I lock the door. It’s pitch black now, save for pinpricks of light coming through the lowered shutters.

  I unfurl my neckerchief and let it fall. I unbutton my shirt and remove it with my blazer. I take off my skirt, slip, nylons, shoes, underwear, bra. I walk naked to the bed. I don’t bump into the past, into the body of Le’ul. I wait to hear his commands. There is no sound. No cool, soft hands. No scrape of a withered fingernail on my skin. My inner thighs touch only each other. Only tingling air outlines my body.