Fitting into New Skin, short story, Althea Romeo Mark

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Fitting into New Skin

This story is about losing one’s home and finding a new one. It is a story that many today, including myself, identify with. It could be your story one day. The world is unpredictable.

Abba Woiwor Steiner is settled in Switzerland and is teaching again. Switzerland no longer feels like a heavy, itchy woolen hand-me-down. She has fitted into her new skin.

Fifteen years ago, she was suddenly uprooted from her homeland, Wayatelo in West Africa, due to a civil war. She had fled to this new, cold country, culture, and language and felt swept away in the groundswell of the sudden change. Haunted by the horrors inflicted by war, and past fears, nightmares stole her sleep. She struggled to hold onto her sense of self.

When Abba first arrived, English-language news channels were her constant companions. Her eyes were red from watching the news on TV. She welcomed the voices of newscasters who became her best friends. When her eyes were not glued to the news, she was engrossed in American soap operas, The Bold and the Beautiful, and The Young and the Restless, which her children, Miama, Heidi, Peter, and Patrick had discovered. Abba had become a fan of EastEnders on BBC, too.

Abba was, however, engulfed in recurring dreams about terrifying events in her life in Wayatello. She often dreamed about a certain warm summer night in her home country.

********

The sun had set, and people were back home from their daily occupations. Meals were already eaten and people were quietening down for the night. With few cars on the road, the dust had begun to settle onto rooftops, the galvanized-covered market stalls, branches, leaves, and anything that rested on the cooling ground.

In her dream, Abba drives her green Toyota Corona on Du Road outside the city’s perimeter. It rumbles, then abruptly stops, waking the dust from its settling sleep when Abba brakes. Her brow furrowed, eyes wide, Abba’s dark hands clenched the steering wheel. Miama, her beige-brown adolescent daughter, sits next to her in the front seat.

“What’s happening mama, why you stop?” Miama’s green eyes stare at her mother.

Abba is too numb to answer. It is dead quiet. Large stones lie across the dirt road.

Should I get out and remove the rocks. This could be the work of heart-men, Abba wonders. Heartmen were killers who hid in isolated areas, ready to pounce, capture people, cut their hearts out, and use them in ceremonies to gain wealth and high political positions. They were rumored to drive around on the Du River late at night in cars with tinted windows in search of victims. She knows the younger the heart, the better the result, and she is determined to protect her daughter, Miama, even if it takes her last breath.

Could they be waiting for us in the nearby bush?

After imagining she and her daughter being captured, dragged into the bush, their hearts gouged out, and their bodies never found again, Abba decides against removing the coconut-sized rocks. There are no witnesses on this silent, sleeping road. Only a dull moon looks on. She locks her door, presses down on the gas pedal, and speeds over the rocks. They bang and clang, batter the undercarriage as she zooms home, her knees shaking. The mushrooming dust hovers like an angry ghost.

At her gate, Abba’s hands shake as she tries to open it. She screams her husband’s name. “Rolf, Rolf, Rolf.”

***********

Rolf always gently shook Abba out of her dream. “That dream again”, he would say.

“It’s all this newness,” she said, sitting her petite, body up.

Rolf, who dwarfed Abba, hugged her tightly, his forehead crinkling.

“I am an uprooted tree planted in strange soil. I will not survive this.”

“Abba, you are my favorite plant,” Rolf would say, smiling. “ Don’t worry about watering. Remember what your mother used to say, there are no shortcuts to the top of the palm tree, enne? ”

Abba would grin. But soon there were new tears and a further rush of complaints.

“I cannot teach, can’t work,” Abba would moan, sometimes biting her nails, walking restlessly around the bedroom. “I can’t speak Swiss German. New language, new culture, new weather, a sea of white, stern faces everywhere. And the damned cold. They are my new heart men.”

********

Abba had met her Swiss husband, Rolf Steiner, twenty-five years before in Wayatelo. He had been a doctor working for Doctors Without Borders, a medical organization that had come to assist her country after a typhoid fever outbreak. They met while he was treating her mother, who had succumbed to the illness.

Rolf had fallen in love with Abba’s kind, large eyes and her quiet, self-confident manner, despite her small stature. They married and had four brown-skinned children, two girls and two boys, the oldest being Miama.

He, an only child, was visited once a year by his parents, both doctors, who had also spent many years working in foreign countries. They always brought Basler Laeckerli, Swiss chocolates, and lots of English books and were loved by their grandchildren. Abba was grateful that like Rolf, they spoke English.

Then the civil war, started by a man who felt he was anointed by God, led to the country rapidly falling apart. Abba and Rolf made plans to leave after people, fleeing the killings, told stories of tribal slaughter. Abba’s ethnic group was on the wrong side of the conflict. Some of her people were forced into a church, locked inside, and the building set on fire. The war was creeping closer and closer to the city. People were guilty by association with certain groups. Foreigners were in danger too. Checkpoints were everywhere

*********

Abba also dreamed about a terrifying experience she had while driving to the capital city of Wayatello during the conflict. Armed soldiers had waved her car down, commandeering it.

Three sat in the back seat and one in the front next to her. “Le’ go, le’go,” the soldier in the front had ordered. They sat pointing their guns out of the window. She had smiled politely as they had jumped in. I could be one minute away from becoming a ghost, she had thought. Abba imagined a hail of bullets piercing her body if she hadn’t stopped. Her knees quaked. She saw her body raped, mutilated, lifeless, lying like a large sack of rice on the roadside next to abandoned firewood. But on arriving in the city, the soldier, occupying the front seat, said, ” Stop, we getting’ down here.”

She remembers, how, when they were out of sight, she got out of the car, bent over, and vomited.

********

After calming Abba down from one of her dreams, Rolf would leave for work at the Institute for Tropical Disease. He had found a job there with the help of friends. She would watch him hurriedly pull a white shirt over his pale slender frame, and stick his lanky legs into his trousers. All those years in her Wayatelo hadn’t fattened him up, she thought. His blue eyes narrowing, brow knitting, he said goodbye as he bowed his greying blond-haired head, stooping to avoid hitting it as he exited their attic bedroom.

Abba would drag herself out of bed after Rolf left, shower, and dress, before readying the children for school. She was upbeat when Rolf was in Basel and not off in some country far away. She hated having to cope with school problems alone. She had to accompany the younger children, Peter and Patrick to an elementary school nearby. The two older ones traveled to school on their own. They were all in “Fremdsprachen” classes then, learning German. Eh!, look at my children, she would say to herself, they ready for this country, yah. I am a bleating goat tied to a fence, and cannot escape. I am not fitting in. Abba sighed at the thought. I have to pull myself together.

Abba suddenly became a housewife after years of being an assistant principal at a private elementary school in Wayatelo. At home, a nanny dressed the children and a cook who made breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The houseboy cleaned, washed, and ironed. Now, she made breakfast and prepared lunches for the younger children on different schedules than the older ones.

Rolf would be gone all day. The institute was always busy fighting some new contagious outbreak somewhere in the world. Sometimes, Rolf would be gone for one to two weeks. Then she would lean on her children who did not understand why they became her spokesperson. But, she hated looking like the stupid tongue-tied African woman.

In some of their children’s classes, foreign students were the majority. Once when they had first arrived, she and Rolf were summoned to the girls’ school to speak to the class teacher. During the discussion, the teacher, who spoke English, said she was concerned that Heidi, their second daughter, didn’t speak enough, and was too quiet. Then Rolf’s native Swiss-German emerged as he explained that Heidi and her siblings had just escaped a civil war and that they needed time to process sudden change. He said, “This you do not understand. You have not walked in their shoes.” Then Rolf summoned Heidi and Abba and they left. The teacher, understanding, never to be called them again.

At the supermarket, the language was a muffled sound of guttural words. Abba pointed at things she wanted and could not complain about poor service, or items not adding up correctly at the check-out counter. They so dry-face. Ah done lose my tongue, oh. Every day, ah looking for it.

At the language school she attended on Wednesday nights, Abba had started to learn the basics. “Guten Morgen, guten Tag, guten Abend,” a standard German not spoken by the locals. The dialect spoken was old Medieval German mixed with a smattering of French that were choking sounds to her ears. “But little by little grow the bananas.” Abba would say to herself.

Abba remembered the time when the doorbell rang from the front entrance to their upstairs flat and she ran down four flights of stairs to open the door just a crack to see a man with knives in his hand. He gesticulated in an unfamiliar tongue, waving the knives around. She drew back, uncertain if she was being threatened. He left with a long face. She walked back up, to the apartment, long-faced, too. When Rolf returned home, she explained what had happened. “The man was selling knife sharpeners,” he said, laughing.

The tug of war with German and the Swiss dialect often brought on a deluge of tears that Rolf wiped away with “ Eh yah! Me bebe. No mine yah.”

Abba beamed at the sound of her country’s creole.

*********

In Abba’s German classes, many like her had fled wars. Some of her classmates had married Swiss men and needed to learn the language to communicate with their in-laws, apply for jobs, and get on with their new lives. Others, who had not finished school in their homeland, had difficulty reading, and could not cope with the complexity of German grammar declensions, where the articles, der, die, and das needed to match genders.

German grammar gave Abba migraines. She felt swamped by it, the way the Du River that led to their home in Wayatelo flooded the roads, making them impossible to navigate. She dreamed of drowning, too.

********

Du Road was a long and weaved through a fast-growing settlement near the Du River. It flooded every rainy season. Black pythons and other snakes slithered along its banks after the deluge. Young men saw the floods as an opportunity to make quick money and dug deep, wide holes in the road so cars would sink. They stood on the side of the road offering victims their assistance for a small fee.

If you were familiar with the bush’s layout, you drove through it. Abba had done that once. The river almost swallowed her and her car. After that, she gave in to the tricksters.

During another rainy season, Abba was returning home with her children when

rain fell like a thick curtain. Her stomach was knotted. She couldn’t see beyond the hood of

her car. Then, suddenly a man with dreadlocks burst through the torrent, waving her down,

and lunging at the windshield. Her heart pumping faster, Abba stepped on her brakes only to

see that the man was naked. Her children were too stunned to cover their faces. His nakedness

stared at them. They cringed at the sight of his dangling manhood. Roadside marketers and

buyers, wading into the mud and deluge, whipped, boxed, and dragged him away, shouting.

“He crazy, oh, sorry, sorry.” She turned her window down briefly to thank them. And

he, still not quite subdued, shouted a message of hell and brimstone as they disappeared with

him into the downpour. She drove home, her heart in her mouth.

********

In comparison, in Switzerland, the unexpected rarely happened. It was orderly and pristine. Everything had to be in place and done at a special time. The trams, trains, and buses were mostly punctual. Abba was grateful. It was a relief compared to the chaotic transport at home. But she found the roundabouts with traffic going in circles and people navigating the roads, perplexing. Her grandmother’s warning came to mind: A fly that dances carelessly in front of a spider's web, risks the wrath of the spider's teeth. She did not attempt to drive.

Orderliness and rules in a tram seemed overbearing if you had a hungry, crying child. The old men and women, the enforcers of rules of cleanliness and forbidden eating, gave you a talking to if you handed your child a pretzel. Abba remembers Peter, the youngest, sticking his tongue out at one. “Baaay.” Abba had chuckled loudly.

You were assigned a wash day in their apartment complex and had to stick to the time. You had to leave the washing machine, dryer, and washroom spick and span. If you did not, you received a warning from the "Hauswart", whose position as caretaker made him feel superior. And if you were foreign, you got more warnings than the others.

Loud music offended your neighbors, so Abba cautiously played her turned-down high-life West African music. She did not want anyone banging on her door or thumping their ceiling or her floor, with a broomstick.

Abba had found a Black British hairdresser who styled her hair. She felt lucky. Black hair products and tropical food were rare. Trips to African quarters in Mulhouse, France, had to be made.

Neighbors barely spoke. And Abba, unable to speak German, could not break the ice. Rolf, after living so many years in Wayleteyo, found it off-putting, too. The isolation at times made her depressed. She cried in the bathroom.

Her sons had had their own challenges, too. Patrick and Peter as teenagers, had had run-ins with the police who suspected that a gathering of four or five young foreigners on any doorstep was a reason to shake them down for drugs.

Then there was that time, when Patrick, the older of the two boys dashed through their front door, looking back and wheezing. He, an image of his father, looked as though death had been snapping at his heels.

“What happened?,” Abba had shouted at Patrick, springing to her feet from the sofa. He was gasping for air, so she waited for her son to calm down.

“For God’s sake, what happened, Patrick,” Rolf impatiently asked in Swiss German.

“A bunch of neo-Nazis chased me and Ahmed,” Patrick said, between labored breaths. “They were shouting whites only for Switzerland.”

Rolf turned red, gasping. “What!?”

Abba covered her mouth. Her head began to spin, so she sat back down quickly.

Rolf recalled a recent headline in a German newspaper: Neo-Nazis Beat African Doctor to Death. Onlookers had made sounds like apes while they stomped on him and shouted, go back to Africa.

Abba was wringing her hands.

Rolf grabbed Patrick’s shoulder to anchor himself as sudden pain daggered his stomach.

Abba rose again and wrapped her arms tightly around her son’s waist. “You’re my first boy. Don’t go die on me, oh. Stop staying out so late,” she cried.

“They were shouting, go back to the jungle,” Patrick added, now calmer.

Rolf’s hand still gripped Patrick’s shoulder. “ I beg you, be vigilant,” he said.

“I know, Mommy, Daddy,” Patrick replied, unloosening their grasp and disappearing into his bedroom.

At the time, Abba had wondered, if this was any different to the “heart-men” that tried to trap her and Maima in Wayatelo. Are we safe in any country?

Why do I miss the misty choking dust, the floods, mud, the sound of slashing wood, the choking fumes of burning weed and twigs as they cleared the land for planting, the laughter of the market women selling, braiding hair, breast-feeding their children, the smell of fresh meat, fruit and vegetables, bitter leaves, cassava leaves, potato greens and the aroma of healing powders, roots and bark, the disorderliness of crowds and traffic chaos? The threat of heart-men and other frightening stories are part of the lore my children expect to hear from me. They are a part of my life, my people.

Abba’s older children missed eating roasted corn, cassava, and sugarcane which was part of the after-school ritual they had shared with their mother in Wayatelo. But they do not miss the hugging dust, the market smells, the familiarity of chaos that Abba misses.

*******

A few years after they arrived in Basel, Abba decided to take charge of her life. She had walked in the same shoes as her fellow refugees from war. She would be her own Lazarus. She saw the miracles that German teachers worked on her fellow students who refused to be defeated. She wanted to do the same and decided to become a teacher of English as a foreign language. Then she enrolled in an English As A Foreign Language teachers’ course that would take her to Zurich once a week for several months.

At the ESL course, Abba met English native speakers, who like her, were inspired to become English teachers. Most were married to or divorced from Swiss partners. They had a family to support. As she got to know her colleagues during the course, Abba learned that she was not the only one who felt like they had fallen into a black hole. Abba realized then, she was not alone in her struggles. It was a rite of passage that you had to survive. They were survivors. It was what Abba needed to emerge from her mental paralysis.

*******

Abba is wearing Switzerland better now. It is no longer an uncomfortable fit. She stands on firmer ground, not threatened by change and challenges. She is the snake that has shed its old skin and has finally adjusted to the new. She often tells her children, "If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do us no harm."

Notes:

1. Enne… .ain¨t it, ain’t so.

2..Dry Face .. to be bold in your actions, especially wrongdoing,

3. No mine yah…never mind,

4. Eh yah…expression of sympathy.