A Creature of Speed and Air
A novel excerpt by Rebecca Fisseha

In the Greektown Book City, I was browsing for the book my mother Ama wanted in the Remaining Hardcovers at Amazing Prices stack. My radar, a reflex learned in childhood and honed at work, was on—identifying potential crazies, remaining aware of exits.

One guy stayed too long at the stack without once glancing my way. Tall and slim. Jeans and t-shirt selected with casual care. Cloth bag. Beard. Vaguely habesha. I moved away, through Cards, Notebooks, New Arrivals. He kept reappearing, indifferent to me, like the love interest in a habesha music clip. After finding and paying for the book at the cash register, where he stood behind me, I saw him ahead of me on Bloor Street walking towards Broadview station. We got on the westbound train. I got off at Bathurst. So did he. I stopped at the bakery. He came in. Then I saw him waiting for my northbound bus, munching on a Spicy Beef Patty, which I knew by the red dot. Aboard the bus, I sat where I had a good view of him. He opened the book he bought. It was the same book I had bought!

I walked over to where he sat and clutched a support pole.

Habesha dudes usually open with: Don’t I know you? I said, “Have you met me?”

He allowed five seconds to lapse—the standard for an ignored “crazy” to move on—before lifting his attention from the Acknowledgements page.

“Are you habesha?”

I could have answered yes or no. Whichever answer I chose, it would be half true.

“No,” I said, turning away. “Excuse me.”

“Or does it depend on who’s asking?”

I sat across the aisle, trying to make it seem like I just chose to sit there because there happened to be an empty seat. “That must be why you’re following me.”

“You’re pretty keyed up for someone so young.”

Our eyes connected. I knew he meant that old-school paranoia of our parents’ generation, the ones that lived the Red Terror during the changeover from monarchy to military rule. The young and innocent, or old and accomplished, had had a way of being led into a disappearing fate by Terror squads on the hunt for suspected antirevolutionaries. That tension had seeped down into us, the next generation, evidently staining some more deeply than others.

“I just sensed you wanted to speak to me,” I said.

“Only if you’re habesha.” He winked. “I am, by the way.”

“Stating the obvious.”

“But mixed. Italian.”

“That’s rare,” I said. The Italians had been making love and war in Ethiopia and Eritrea for over a century.

He picked up on my sarcasm. “Let me guess, I wouldn’t be your grandfathers’ favourite person?”

“Probably true. Once invaded, forever wounded, as they say. But I only have the one.”

Shaleka had been on my mind of late, thanks to one of my holiday phone calls to him, when he had updated me about the expected success of his campaign to reclaim the Axum obelisk from Rome, where it had decorated a roundabout since ‘Talyan—Shaleka’s comrades’ way of saying “Italian”—looters took it during the occupation at the start of the Second World War. Every repatriation committee or commission that was set up, he was on it. Every letter or petition that was prepared, he signed. The obelisk was finally being returned. It only took sixty-eight years.

The man introduced himself as Isak. We swayed in time as the bus let out an airy fart and lurched out of the station. I glanced at the open book on his lap. “You read.”

He jerked his chin forward, shocked by my bluntness. I pulled Ama’s book out of my bag and brandished it in his face as if it were my passport to his company for the bus ride. “Same bookshop, same book. You didn’t see me?”

Using his thumb as a bookmark, he closed his copy and placed it next to mine.

“You’re right. We could have just bought one and saved the money.”

I leafed through the book. The ease of his “we” tripped me up. I had to be busy with something. He watched me in a way I didn’t mind.

“You’re a Buddhist,” I said.

“No. Are you?”

“Me? No. I just picked this up for my Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mother.”

“Why did you say me like that?”

“Ever heard of any Ethiopian Buddhists?”

“Faiths—not that I think Buddhism is one—are more similar than different.”

Listening to him intellectualize religion, I felt I was encountering a very young version of Aba. “There you go with the obvious again.”

“Anyway, you thought I was a Buddhist, didn’t you?” I nodded. “And your mother seems as if she’s interested, if indeed that’s who it’s for, or else she wouldn’t have asked for it.” He held up two long fingers as symbols of his two well-made points. His nails were long clean ovals. There was a green ink stain on the inside flesh of his index finger that I wanted to suck clean.

“You got me,” I conceded.

“Oh, come on, fight with me.”

“What for?”

“You must be an only child.”

“Maybe.”

“I have five sisters.”

“Wow.” I would have envied him one, yes. But five seemed gluttonous. “Where?”

“All back home.” He checked the upcoming stop.

“Let me know what you think of the book once you’re finished? I’m not much of a reader,” I said. I took out a pen and poised it over the inside flap of his book, intending to write my phone number. He repositioned my hand over his inner wrist, where his skin was warm and took to the ink on the first stroke.

On the bus, my comment about his reading had reminded Isak about his first year at Yale, where he was on a full scholarship for graduate studies in Geology. The innuendos he’d received then had been more sophisticated—within those vaunted halls, they had to be. He felt them most acutely in the difference between what people explained to him versus what they assumed he already knew, being African. But he took it in stride, his eyes on the prize. When he graduated, a job was waiting for him with an American company licensed to mine in Ethiopia. One day he would head his own mining enterprise and unearth more of Ethiopia’s vast untapped deposits of gems. But the same presumption, no, the brazen tactlessness, coming from me had really raised his ire.

“Oh your ire, huh?” I said, weeks after our first encounter, after I’d gotten to taste myself in that beard. “So that’s what you call it. Translation: made you hot for me.”

“Made me forgive your creepy stalking of me all the way from Book City,” he countered.

“You followed me. Where were you going that day? You never got off the bus.”

“Neither did you.”

I failed to think of a good comeback in the same way I always lost out whenever I accused Ama of gazing at me too intently, and for too long, for no apparent reason. She would counter, How could you know I was watching you, unless you were watching me, too?

That No. 7 bus ride with Isak, up Steeles and back, became the first session of our book club. Swiftly, we expanded our subject areas, though reading was the least of our activities. For our one-year anniversary, Isak gave me an uncut Ethiopian opal. He always carried rock samples with him, but that opal was from deposits newly discovered in Gondar region. The stone looked dull. In water, it changes colour, he said, but will crack if dried too quickly. He explained more, but I remember none of it. That always happened when he got on a roll about his rocks, sounding like one of his essays, many of which I had also sat through, half-listening, as he tested their flow. Most statements he made were foregone conclusions to him, not points to win me over on, except the fact that all habesha children should be raised in Ethiopia. 

“A fragmented upbringing on shaky ground is not something to which I feel my children need be exposed,” he pronounced one day. We hadn’t discussed marriage, much less children.

Uncharacteristically, I interrupted him. “Who are you calling fragmented?”

“Have you not spent so much time telling me how hard things became between you and your mother the moment you moved to outside-country?”

“I turned out okay.” He knew nothing of my past with Leul, the brother that I barely mentioned, and who was out of town most of the year. I planned to keep it that way.

“That kind of rupture can be avoided. And if not avoided, reversed.”

“Never mind that there are hundreds of thousands of diaspora habesha,” I said.

“On a fundamental level, taking a child out of its native home creates problems, sooner or later. After adulthood, no problem. If it’s getting the hang of things back home that you’re worried about, my sisters are there for you.”

“Why? Where are you going to be?”

“I’m sure I’ll have some work-related travel.”

“Work-related travel? Have you met me?”

“Doesn’t CanAir have a base in Ethiopia?”

“No.”

“Whatever is decided, I’m sure everyone will adapt.”

“Yeah sure, we can ping-pong between Ethiopia and Canada every few years,” I said. He said nothing, though his nanosecond of reaction to Canada showed that he wasn’t quite sold on my country either. The air became abuzz with How did it never occur to us to talk about this?

Rather than drag out that not-quite-hypothetical discussion about our future with Isak, I had retreated to my go-to fantasy whenever I detected in Isak that tone of finality that betrayed his true habesha core, a bone-deep patriarchal authoritarianism dormant beneath his hipster, New Agey façade of J. Crew seersucker outfits, ample scarves, and imitation vintage Ray-Ban tortoise-shell frames. I fantasized about my forefathers, possibly Shaleka himself, plunging their swords deep into his ‘Talyan grandfathers’ guts on the battlefield.

In Isak’s version of our future, it was no mystery how things would go. I would become Aba. Isak would become Ama. Isak’s real career, driven by passion and talent, would take priority over the one I’d stumbled into: a waitress of the sky. Eventually I would surrender to the life of Isak’s dreams, become Mother Ethiopia, my thick white yards of gabi falling about me in Ethiopia’s original shape, like on that Afewerk Tekle painting.

But I am a creature of speed and air. No life of hanging on a wall, collecting dust, for me. 

Yet the fact remained that, on balance, Isak was something of a holy grail: an evolved habesha guy, for the most part, even if genetically diluted. He didn’t feel like a new relationship, either. He felt like someone I’d already been dating, hit a bad patch with, and was falling in love with all over again. His name fit on my tongue from day one, and I loved how he said mine. “Especially when you’re mad at me,” I had told him. “You don’t even say it to my face, but to the sky, and softly, as if I’m sleeping up there and you’re trying to wake me.”

On my way to meet Isak for our second, belated Valentine’s long weekend on Centre Island, I had received an unusually simple, direct voicemail from Aba, saying it was about Ama and to call him as soon as I landed.

Ama’s hospital stays had become routine to the point of being another fact of life, no longer the sirens of death. She’d even developed the habit of accusing us of being secretly weary of the back and forth to the hospital. “All these false alarms. You must wish me dead already,” she’d said. I was never weary of that, only of her moaning about it. I began to avoid her as much as I could until finally, I had snapped, “If you want to go, go!”

Strangely, she seemed gratified by my outburst, and was quick to forgive me when I apologized. But I, ashamed because there was truth in what I had said, visited her less after that, spending most of my free time with Isak instead.

After listening to Aba’s voicemail, I went ahead to the ferry docks and met Isak, feeling in my heart that Ama was finally gone, but that hurrying back would not change anything. I wanted one last lull of normalcy, of my ‘before’ life, before I faced the consequences of the future, and ultimately, my failure as a daughter.

On the ten-minute ride across the lake on the Centre Island ferry, Isak pried out of me why I was so quiet. When I told him my suspicions, he said I had to go home immediately.

“I can come with you,” he added, with less insistence.

“Maybe,” I said. We knew that when it came to habesha families, taking a guy home is no small matter, especially in this context. The relationship would become irreversibly official. As a rule, habesha don’t take endings well, so if Isak and I split up, there would remain a shadow of a cancelled future.   

“It is too late for everything now. She could have warned me, so that I could have rushed and reached her in time. Obviously she didn’t want me.” 

Isak and I stayed on the ferry and returned to Toronto and to the Consulate Residence on condition that Isak would accompany me only as far as the front door. He was to go to my condo and wait for me there.

Taking no note of Isak, who stuck to our agreement and stayed back, Aba ushered me into the foyer like I was a guest of honour. A rush of consolers came out from the living room. Aba did not waste a moment, as if all that was required to give death-news was for a roof to be over our heads and a carpet under our feet. He took me in his arms and whispered, avoiding my eyes, “She didn’t make it.”

I became rooted to the spot. If I didn’t budge from that carpet, it wouldn’t be true. Then, for the first time in nine years, I saw my brother. Leul parted his way through the consolers, coming at me with his arms outstretched like a desperate zombie. I fell into his chest, his whole body transformed into a site of comfort. It was as if I had always been home. ■