‘Pardon?’
My Escape (365 days left)
‘Pardon?’
‘Could I go back to Addis early, Madame?’ I ask again. ‘I’ve finished exactly one year of the contract.’
To me, this would seem like an opportune moment to accept our differences and go our separate ways. Or at the very least, allow me to slip back to Addis intact with at least something in my pocket. Madame could find a new maid: one who’s less interested in eating food, retaining her virginity and generally surviving beyond the age of eighteen.
‘No.’
Madame is reading financial reports on her bed.
‘Why not, Madame?’ I persist.
‘Go away. Go find new dust. White socks day today.’
‘I will. But I’m owed a year’s salary now, today. Could I have that? Please . . . Madame?’
‘Don’t worry, I keep it safe . . . I am director of bank, remember?’
‘Sorry, Madame, but I want it now. It’s my money. Give me my money, please.’
‘Different ways to say “go away” in Arabic, some with words and some you not imagine with your small brain. Ask me one more time and we see about them,’ she replies.
Today, I expect to see money falling into my hands. At $100 per month for one year, I’m due $1,200. Even with that paltry amount for fifteen months’ hard labour, I will go home in blissful disgrace.
‘Make sure you collect your money each year,’ I remember Beti saying on the flight out, ‘or they might decide it’s easier to send you over the balcony than pay a couple of thousand bucks.’ But my Madame is not paying me. I have to speak to Beti about this.
‘Beti . . . it’s me, Meron! How are you?’ I say later.
‘Hey, sister! I’m wonderful! How you doing? Eating enough now?’
‘Not really, but surviving day to day. I don’t like the people here, Beti, they turn crazy over nothing.’
‘They paying your wages, sister . . . we all got our problems. Or has the master done something?’
‘Yes . . . no . . . but it was very close . . . I need to get out before it happens . . .’
A moment of silence.
‘I don’t know, sister . . . you survived a year . . . escaping could be more dangerous than staying. Girls caught escaping got big problems. Why not do one more year and collect the money? Can’t you do that, sugar?’
‘No, Beti, I can’t do that. He’s closing in, and besides, I can’t spend another year missing my family, another year starving and miserable, another year of beatings. I’m going home! But how, Beti, how?’
More silence.
‘I recommend you jump from the ledge.’
‘Eh?’
‘They catch you, they gonna push you anyways.’
‘Beti, please . . . I need passport and money, right?’
‘Not essential. You a pretty girl. With sex, you could get money on the street, easy . . . Arab guys fall for us real fast . . . and you need a fake passport . . . but I don’t want this getting back to me . . .’
‘Sex? Like a business girl? How much do I have to do?’
‘Depend on how good you are.’
‘I’m a virgin.’
‘Ha, ha, ha! If you’re really a virgin, you can forget about it! You need experience . . . you can’t just go out into the streets and make money like that.’
‘Oh.’
‘You really a virgin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Er, okay, so . . . what about the guy in your apartment . . . probably very interested if he knows you’re a virgin. You get him, maybe he’ll help you escape . . . understand?’
‘Eh? Shafeek?’
‘If he’s the master, yeah . . . get real close to him, might open doors. But careful, sister, these Arab guys don’t like condoms . . . pregnancy is also gonna give you problems.’
‘I’d prefer to sidestep that scenario . . . he’s the one I’m escaping from. If I steal money and passport from my Madame, I just need to get outside and run, don’t I?’
‘Where you running, sister? Think your ass can run home from here?’
‘To the Ethiopian Consulate. It’s just around the corner. I see the flag every day. They’ll help me.’
‘You can try that, or try the ledge . . .’
‘Come on, Beti, it’s our Consulate . . . Habesha helps Habesha, right?’
‘Good luck with that thing you got.’
‘What thing?’
‘The sweet innocence thing.’
Madame doesn’t watch her back when opening and closing the bedroom ‘safe’ where cash is deposited. I have spied her through the crack in the door a hundred times. It is not a safe with a combination: more of a locked cupboard. Madame keeps the key on the same bunch as her door key and car keys. The bunch lives inside her handbag. When she’s not at home, the keys aren’t either. I have no escape plan. I’ll at least try for the money and passport: with these in my hands, I’ll bide my time until an opportune moment arrives. Like Kidist, the idea of escape is now embedded in every living cell dotted about my scrawny frame and probably in the dead ones too.
These are my thoughts as I wipe away the daily grime in Madame’s shower unit. It’s 2pm, two days since speaking to Beti. My head is dizzy from lack of nourishment. Earlier, I foraged through the kitchen garbage and found a half-rotten apple. Yes, Abush, free food! Addis street kids are better fed than me: Abush said the stomach adapts to eating trash and, anyway, all the germs are in Germany. Not funny any more. Half-rotten means half-edible, but half-brain-dead is what I am. My spinning mind turns to hairpins.
I have seen hairpins successfully used in movies. I have a hairpin in my hand, extracted from my hidden bushel of hair. I am at once in Madame’s bedroom. Unable to restrain myself, the hairpin is being twiddled around inside the lock of the money cupboard to see what happens. Within a few seconds, it clicks. The little wooden door floats open. I gasp at it. So simple! I laugh quietly.
Inside are piles of cash and documents. Ha! Got you! Neat wads of American dollars and Lebanese pounds rest within Madame’s secret bank. And passports! But only Lebanese. My passport isn’t here.
I carefully remove only the money I am owed, leaving behind handsome sums that could function well outside, but my moral compass holds me true. I will buy a new passport: why not from the Ethiopian Consulate? Isn’t that their job, to replace lost passports for Ethiopian nationals? Why do I need to prostitute myself in the streets for a pompous little book of blank pages?
One thing I’ve never seen in movies is the re-locking of doors with the same hairpin. Madame’s cupboard door obstinately hangs open, the hairpin now good only for pinning back my hair. I have the money but the threadbare plan is already blown apart. If only I had gum, or glue, or anything sticky to hold the door closed, to buy me time. There isn’t very much of that. It’s 2.35pm. Madame will be home in twenty-five minutes.
I rapidly sew two pairs of baggy knickers together, inserting the stolen cash between them, completely invisible to the most observant of Mesdames. I wear the knickers, now worth a fraction over $1,200. At last, the shapeless garments of oppression have some use and value. Hard-earned cash presses into the crack of my backside. This is probably symbolic in some way but I don’t have the time to deliberate why.
Madame returns from work promptly. I have failed to stick the cupboard door back into its closed position.
‘Hello, Madame! I took my first year’s salary from your bedroom cupboard, thank you very much,’ I sing out the moment her eyes meet mine.
I have never seen this in movies either: immediately confessing the crime to the authorities. Without proteinous food or mental stimulation, my mind has decomposed into the pure green mulch that Tadelle used to munch all day.
Madame pauses as she focuses on me. Her brain reorients itself to
deal with the maid claiming some outrageous theft. She giggles, thinking it a tremendous joke. Incidentally, it’s nice to see her genuinely happy for a few seconds, with a rare face of jollity.
‘Meron . . . I swear, you crazy! Very funny. You make me laugh. Yoghurt for you tonight.’
For the love of God, yoghurt! I love yoghurt. If a Habesha maid taking cash from the bedroom of a senior Lebanese bank director with a mere hairpin can be interpreted as funny enough for yoghurt then let her laugh. Except that it’s not a joke and she doesn’t know it.
‘Doorman coming in five minutes. Go to balcony when he calls up.’
Still tittering, she doesn’t wait for my answer, but gently pushes the front door closed. The catch of the lock doesn’t clunk shut with the usual solid click. The front door is not closed. I don’t think she has done that on purpose. Madame is usually so careful with locks, doors and so on. But she’s having a bad day, without even realising it.
Madame hurries into her bedroom, door keys still in her hand. Surely now she will see the cupboard door unlocked. Nerves gather themselves up in my abdomen. I could just run out of here but Sudan is downstairs. I hold myself in check for the abrupt buzz of the intercom. I hear the spurts of perfume spray. Why waste it on Sudan?
The buzz comes. Madame has changed into a lacy nightie. Sudan is on his way. I have money in my knickers, an open front door and the Ethiopian Consulate only a block away. Look, Kidist! An opportune moment for escape has arrived! My pulse races. I have to make a decision. Come on, Meron! Escape!
Nothing. I’m frozen to the spot. Confidence eludes me. Meron Lemma is going nowhere.
‘Me-ron! He coming. Go on balcony!’ shouts Madame at me. ‘Still daydreaming about your break-in? Ha! Ha! Ha! You really are . . .’
Madame has wandered back into her bedroom. She screams. At last, she’s noticed the hairpin’s masterstroke. Now!
‘Me-ron!’
My hand is already on the front door handle. And I’m out! I glance at the lift indicator. The red light says it’s coming up, now on floor six. That’s good enough.
I fly down the stairs, jumping alternate steps for greater speed. I hear Madame’s flusters above me, but she’s going nowhere in that nightie. Lebanon is Muslim. No one runs around like that!
Down and down I leap. Finally, I arrive at Sudan’s vacated exit. I stab the buzzer by the door with my index finger, preparing my Arabic for a quick ‘Open the door!’ but all I hear is a furious Arabic voice coming back at me, and not really good Arabic: it’s the Turk. Madame has alerted him from upstairs. What now? I’m finished. I am completely stupid. Nuria was right.
After a few moments, just standing, awaiting my inevitable crucifixion, Table Lady appears at the door. She has a key. The door is open!
‘Meron! What are you doing?’ she muffles through her niqab, slightly alarmed.
‘Escaping! Sorry!’
I slip around her. I hear a few spluttered utterances from her, but they have a positive ring. She has no intention of stopping me.
Within a second, I’m outside. Outside! Cars, people, shops, freedom! I have arrived in Beirut!
Unlike Addis, the pavements are good and solid, and there are hardly any people just loitering. My vision is immediately filled with the pale grey of concrete, smearing itself over every building: roads and people seem to be wedged in amongst the gaps and shadows between the vast skyward slabs. But at least these lucky souls are free!
Behind me I hear the door crashing open. Sudan is right behind me. I start sprinting along the street. I’ll outrun a Sudanese doorman. All he does is read the newspaper all day. I’m Ethiopian. We outrun everyone. Except I’m almost immediately breathless and Sudan is yelling at my back.
‘Stop her! Stop her! Thief!’
What do you mean? Thief? What’s all that about? What does Sudan know? He’s charging after me as though this is personal. I’ve never hurt him. Sudan and Ethiopia are not at war! Not yet anyway.
The plastic sandals feel like huge sofa cushions attached to my feet. People are staring at me. If I don’t speed up, someone will grab me.
Focus! I think of our great Olympians. Derartu, Tirunesh, Haile, Kenenisa, Abebe Bikila, Miruts Yifter: come on, Habesha heroes, shift her!
Sudan can’t get me. I’m round the corner and into a busier street now, but too many pedestrians to run smoothly. I drop into the gutter. It’s going well. But where am I going?
I look upwards for the Ethiopian flag. Nothing. I have no idea where to run. The view from the apartment made it seem easy. It was a simple hundred metre jog ‘home’. But down at ground level, I’m blind. Help me, God! Intervene!
‘Excuse me . . .’ I start to say to a swarthy man in sunglasses.
A car screeches behind me, then toots again and again.
‘Stop her!’ screams Madame from the car window.
I don’t even look round, just sprint again, Madame’s Porsche almost at my side, traffic cop ahead in a dark blue uniform, his swift eyes catch me.
‘Stop her . . . she’s a thief!’ shouts Madame. I try to dodge round the thick-set cop, but his hands are as fast as his eyes. The cop holds my wrists until Madame pulls up beside us.
‘I want to go to my Consulate!’ I scream.
‘I want to take you there!’ Madame snaps back at me, wrapped up in a patterned shawl to cover herself. ‘Get in!’
I am bundled in. The police guy wanders away smiling at Madame’s flirty wave. Inside the car, she says nothing to me.
We’re outside the elusive Consulate within seconds. From the outside, it looks like a pleasant residential block, apart from a plastic strip across the front saying ‘Consulate General of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia’. Beneath this are our flag’s three colours: the horizontal green, yellow and red bands. It’s a welcome sight.
‘Get out!’
Holding me by my hair, she hauls me inside the building and up a single flight of steps. Stuck to a reddish-brown door I see a poster of our Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, smiling benignly. Again, this encourages me. Friendly Ethiopia, my country, is behind this door.
The reception is a small room with chairs that seat two Habesha girls and a single Lebanese soldier. He seems surprised to see us: maybe we need an appointment. Impulsive escape wasn’t on my mind this morning, sorry. The two Habesha girls prefer not to look at us.
Another Habesha girl pops out from one of the offices leading off the reception.
‘Yes?’
‘I want her out of Lebanon!’ demands Madame.
‘Yeah, me too . . . I want to go!’ I add with equal force.
‘Sit down, please,’ says the Habesha girl leading us into a cramped office. She speaks good Arabic, but her young face is twisted up like the warped rails they used to bring back from the Dire Dawa stretch. The heat did that. Maybe she blames the heat as well.
‘She’s stealing my money!’ declares Madame.
‘They treat me like dirt!’ I retort.
‘She’s so lazy, insolent . . .’
‘They don’t feed me enough!’
‘Today, I offered her yoghurt and she stole from me! Please lose her!’
‘Her son wants to get me . . . like he did with the last one . . . I’m very frightened . . .’
‘Enough!’ shouts the girl. ‘We’re closed.’
‘You close at five . . . now three-fifteen,’ says Madame.
‘No problem for me . . . I’ll sleep here in my Consulate,’ I try.
The Habesha girl is quick with the contempt, sighing like someone who’s found a dead rat in her wat, the customer service very much in the Addis style. I feel at home. A tart aroma hangs in the cluttered room. It’s late lunchtime injera. I glance around in case there’s a handy plateful nearby. I am home!
‘You’re not sleeping here. This is a Consulat
e not a hotel. Where’s your passport?’
‘I have that,’ says Madame. ‘Well hidden.’
‘Okay, are you sure she’s Ethiopian, not Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi or . . .?’ asks the Habesha girl ridiculously.
‘I am sure. Listen, this girl . . . I don’t know what she’s doing here. I feel like she only came into my house to cause problems. Her housework is bad, she lies so much, steal, talks back at me . . . they’re not usually like this!’
‘Please,’ says the Habesha girl, ‘what do you think we can do?’
‘You’ve got the contract . . . send her back!’
‘With what? The Consulate doesn’t have money for that. You’ll have to pay her air fare.’
‘What? I already lost money taking her into my house. She stole my money today!’
‘Did you?’ asks the Habesha girl.
‘Yes, but they’ve treated me very badly . . . bad food, too much work, no day off, beat me if I make a mistake, no outside contact . . .’
‘Wallahi, she lying!’
The Habesha girl’s face twists a little more as she looks me up and down.
‘Yes, I can see you’re not a good worker. That doesn’t actually surprise me.’
‘Eh? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We’re the same nationality. You’re paid to help people like me, not to agree with the Lebanese,’ I say, finally switching to Amharic.
‘When you come here, you have to be a donkey,’ she replies back in stubborn Arabic. ‘Ethiopian girls can’t clean well . . . we all know that. The day you leave Ethiopia, you have to do exactly what they want. If they want a donkey, be a donkey, if they want a horse, be a horse, cow, be a cow . . . doing whatever they tell you.’
‘But I’m a person, not a farmyard animal!’
‘No! The moment you leave Ethiopia, forget about being a person.’
Madame nods in agreement.
I launch into a stream of Arabic curses. I don’t know what they mean but the way I spit them out creates a sudden hush in the Consulate. Where’s the support from my government? The Consulate is of no use to anyone in Beirut, except for those who draw a salary from it and for the Lebanese with errant servants.
No Lipstick in Lebanon Page 23