Chapter 4 Kal
4
KAL
I’m relaxing on an old sofa on our rooftop terrace, luxuriating in the memory of another exquisite sunrise that my housemates slept through, when a text comes in from Miz.
Miz: NEED to meet up tomorrow!
I sit up and quickly start typing back.
Me: Agree! It’s been a while—
I’m about to suggest SanRemo, our usual café, the closest thing I’ve found in Toronto to our teenage haunts in Addis, when a call from Donna, our company stage manager, interrupts my typing. I freeze. In three years, Donna has only ever called me once, when my family back home was urgently trying to reach me. Now, two thoughts clash in my head. Either something has happened in Addis again. Or something has happened with my papers. I take a deep breath and answer.
“Donna?” I say.
“Are you sitting down?” she asks sharply.
I lean forward and grip the railing. “Yes?”
“Your moment is here, Kalkidan.”
“My moment?”
Donna takes a deep breath. “You’re going on tonight.”
“What?” I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly.
“For the next eight nights,” she continues. “The rest of the show’s run.” Before I can collect myself enough to ask how this could be happening, she goes on to explain that last night, Grant, the lead actor who plays Antony in our production of Antony and Cleopatra , was involved in a serious car accident that left him with a concussion. My heart seizes reflexively but I try to focus so that I don’t miss anything.
“So you need to come in much earlier today,” Donna is saying. “You know, to go over everything with Oliver and wardrobe and props, and I’ll need you for the cue to cue. Provided all goes well, you can come in at your usual call times after today.” She sounds upbeat and businesslike, but I sense a tinge of apprehension in her voice. I stand up slowly, not trusting myself to let go of the railing.
“You good, Kalkidan? Hello?”
I want to say No! I’m not ready for this. Give the part to someone else! But I have ingested the role of Antony like none other, so much of the story, the love dynamic, familiar to me. Understudying the part, never expecting that I would be called on to share it with the world, has been an incredibly organic and cathartic experience. To say that I wasn’t ready would be an outright lie.
“Thank you very much, Donna,” I manage to croak. The cascade of children’s laughter from somewhere nearby suddenly cuts through the air. It should be joyous but, in that moment, sounds ominous to me, as if saying But can you really handle this?
“Don’t thank me. I’m just the messenger,” she responds briskly. “I’m rooting for ya! We all are. Call time for just you and Maeve is one o’clock. Gives you two enough time to rehearse and have a dinner break. And remember, keep yourself available going forward, just in case.”
“Got it. I’m there,” I say, forcing confidence into my voice. But when I get off the call, I can’t physically move. I’m frozen, like a statue. I don’t know how long I’m standing there until I hear a noise below and look down to see Silvio, the only other early bird in our household of five actors, locking his bike to the railing of the front steps.
“I’m up tonight,” I say hoarsely. He doesn’t hear me. “Donna just called me,” I say, louder this time.
He looks up, unclipping his bike helmet. “And?”
“Grant’s out for the rest of the run. Some kind of accident.”
“You serious?!” Silvio says, understanding what that implies. I nod, and he beams at me. “That’s incredible, bro!”
“For the rest of the run,” I say softly to myself again, as if it’s for the rest of my life.
Silvio disappears from view as he goes into the house. Moments later, he barges onto the rooftop, hooting, hollering, and slapping my back.
“It doesn’t feel real,” I say to him. “Am I dreaming?” I run my hand back and forth over my bare scalp, my head shaved for the role I’ve been playing as Cleopatra’s so-called “attendant” since June. Now what? A wig?
“No, you look very awake to me!” Silvio says with a grin. “That sponsorship is as good as done! They were really cutting it close.”
“You’re telling me!” There are six months and thirteen days left on my current work permit, which expires at the end of February, but I’ve been promised that the company will sponsor my permanent residence. That I’ve managed to go from post-graduation permit to regular work permit (twice renewed) since arriving in Canada eight years ago is more than I could ever have dreamed. When I first told my family my plan to pursue becoming a stage actor in Toronto, abdicating my growing responsibilities in the family business, they had seen it as a more extreme version of coping with the heartbreak of the split with Muna. They’d been waiting for me to come to my senses and return home, where they could keep a closer eye on me.
“If I’m being honest, I was starting to get worried,” I admit.
“Nah. Oliver’s always looking out for you, man! And once they see you tear up this part? Forget about it.”
A part I would never have got anywhere near as a new African immigrant Black actor, had it not been for Oliver, a Black-British, Lagos-based director who took me under his wing after he saw me in my theatre school’s final year showcase, claiming that he had found this generation’s Wegayehu, the legendary Ethiopian actor. I know it was pure chance that Oliver, with this deep knowledge of African theatre trivia, should come along at such a critical moment in my time in Canada.
I follow Silvio inside the house to start getting ready. One p.m. is hours away. I can do a full read-through of my scenes by then. “I have to tell Miz,” I say, as we cross through my bedroom. No one but Miz will be as happy for me as I feel for myself, not even my housemates, whose congrats will understandably be tinged with envy. They know how rare it is to be called up as the understudy to a lead part—and not just any part, but Antony in Antony and Cleopatra , one of the greatest love stories of all time.
Miz has been my biggest cheerleader from the moment we reconnected in Toronto when I moved here. Since then, she’s supported me so matter-of-factly, as if I was born to be onstage. She did not tell me to go get my head checked or insist that I was overreacting to heartbreak—the usual responses I got from everyone back home when they learned I was leaving a legacy family business, a city-wide chain of bakeries in Addis Ababa, to go study acting in Canada.
“Or,” Silvio says, excitedly tapping my script, which I’ve picked up from my desk, “you could just let her show up and get the surprise of her life.”
I take a moment to let that scenario play out in my mind. “You know what,” I say, warming to it, “I like that. Who knows when I’m going to have a moment like this again, right?” Silvio gives me a thumbs-up. Yes, I will wait until Miz comes to closing night, as she always does. I open my text to her and delete what I’d been writing.
Me: Sorry, I can’t.
Miz: Sunday?
There aren’t any shows on Sunday, but just to be on the safe side…
Me: No Sunday’s also out.
Miz: But Sundays you’re off.
I frown. Miz is usually pretty easygoing—it’s not like her to be so insistent. The reason I chose Canada and not the US or Europe, where I have plenty of friends and family, was exactly to avoid people who would be a drain on my time and energy, a distraction. Here I knew no one other than Miz, who has stayed as breezy and carefree as she was at fourteen.
“It’s going to kill me keeping this to myself the rest of the week though,” I admit to Silvio. “I have to tell somebody!”
“What am I, chopped liver?” Silvio says in mock offence.
I wave the script at him. “You know what I mean, man.”
He scoffs at me and heads out of my room. I pull up WhatsApp and dial Eske. “Hey, Sister-of-Kalkidan,” I say, when she picks up. I move around packing the necessities for rehearsal: script, clothes, snacks.
“Costs you a US dollar every time you call me that, you know,” she retorts, her always-a-decibel-too-loud voice slicing through the city noise. “I’m invoicing you when you come home.” Being older than me, even if only by eleven months, Eske is very touchy about being referred to in a way that prioritizes me. As the latecomer babies of a family of five kids, we might as well be twins. We have been equal partners in crime since day one, taking the fall together no matter whose bad idea it was that got us busted. And it was usually for something involving the house—almost burning it down, crashing the car into it, flooding it. Eske is my buddy, the part of my Addis life I miss the most.
“Oh, it’s worth it,” I say, laughing at her reaction. I share the good news about the lead part.
When I finish telling her, she responds, “You’re still coming home for the anniversary, right?”
I scoff. No matter what I say about life here, with Eske, all roads lead back to when I’m coming home next. She took it hardest when I broke ranks and left the bakery eight years ago, and has never lost hope that I will get over my “life crisis” and return for good, not just for visits. I’ve only been back to Addis twice since my move—once for a regular visit and once for the funeral. She knows that if it weren’t for our parents’ wedding-anniversary party in January, five months from now, I would stay put in Toronto until my papers were finalized.
“Eske, I’m not even going to answer that,” I snap. I am the last person whose presence should be doubted. I was the only one who supported our father when he insisted the party go forward as planned even though Emay was gone. The celebration was originally meant to have been seven years ago, for my parents’ fortieth anniversary, at a lakeside resort in Bishoftu, but kept getting pushed back year after year because of delays in the resort’s renovation. And then Emay died, and everyone in the family thought my father had lost his mind when he announced two years ago that he wanted to have the party. To him, though a ruptured brain aneurysm had stilled his wife’s presence in body, her presence in spirit remained vibrant. I had never been prouder to be a Son-of-Legesse than in that moment. Forget Shakespeare, my father was living his love in the purest, time-space-defying way.
She may be gone to you all , I remember Abay saying, when my siblings tried to reason with him to cancel the party. Not to me. Oh, how we talk. You would envy our conversations. He was dismayed that his own children believed mere death dissolved love. I didn’t say so, but I felt I knew, by a lesser fraction of course, what my father felt. After Muna had ended our relationship, it had taken me a long time to stop having conversations with her in my mind. I can only imagine how much more intense that attachment would have been had we married.
“Good. Because nobody gets to skip that,” Eske says, always having the last word even when no one is arguing with her.
“But Eske, did you hear me? I got a lead part! I am Mark Antony!” I reiterate, taking myself downstairs to the kitchen where I begin filling up my water bottle, phone pressed between my ear and shoulder. It does sting that she’s ignoring the most exceptional news I’ve had in years. Is it too much to ask for a little enthusiasm?
“Obviously, you are Antony,” Eske says. “Who else are you going to be, his horse?”
“In nothing less than the greatest true love story in history,” I add, on purpose. After Emay and Abay’s, of course. And what, once upon a time, I had thought was Muna’s and mine.
“Excuse me?” Eske says, her pitch rising to take the bait. I smirk. Now we’re even. “How about Atse Tewodros and Tiruwerk, Makeda and Solomon, Seble and Bezabeh. Do those sound familiar to your ears? Or have the Agents Smith washed them all out of your brain, Matrix -style?”
“Impossible, dear sister of mine,” I mollify. “They are tattooed on my soul.” I hear a text coming in. “Hold on.”
Miz: Hello?? Sos WHEN?
She sent the message with Echo effect, so that dozens of the same message bubble up and disperse across my screen.
“Got to go,” I say to Eske. I disconnect while Eske’s still saying, “I better see you in January, Antony!” then I type a response to Miz, all while I throw my water bottle into my backpack and zip it up.
Me: I can’t. Sorry. Work stuff.
I hate avoiding her, but she’ll understand soon enough.