Garden of Eden
Sharon
Butala
of eden
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother
Ethiopia
January
1985
When the muezzin calls faintly from the mosque in town it is still dark, but Lannie is awake, listening to the mournful notes floating, dreamlike, through the silence. Even though she knows the country is still more Christian than Muslim, the sound is, for her, an incarnation of all the sorrows of its people, a fitting way to announce another day with its endless, stale afflictions. Each morning when she hears it, not knowing even what the words mean, the disembodied voice drifting woefully across the rooftops and dusty fields, she listens as closely as any of the faithful. It is the only moment close to prayer in her life, the only moment in which she allows herself to grieve, although for what she hardly knows: for the centuries of suffering these people have endured, for the daily multitude of pointless, cruel deaths, for the countless injustices. If, in these few weeks she has been here, she has been schooled in nothing else, she has learned humility.
The muezzin, having altered the silence, is quiet, and Lannie begins her daily task of girding herself to face whatever this day will bring. She will look only at what she must look at, she will keep silent, she will make herself as useful as possible. She will be willing and quick, gentle and firm. She will be grateful to be here, never forgetting that this is life — what she would go home to is not life at all.
Thus fortified, Lannie gets out of bed. Her bedroom contains only her narrow bed, a small table, and a closet. She washes perfunctorily with water she pours into a basin from the jug she has filled the night before — if she wants to, she can shower later at the hospital — pulls on her worn jeans, her baggy blue T-shirt, her scuffed white runners. She remembers first that Sarah is off for two weeks’
rest in Addis. She runs a brush through her fine red-blonde hair, pulls it back from her face and fastens it with a rubber band into a low pony-tail. She has been getting more and more run-down, what with the long hours and the trauma they all live with every day. Some of the nurses stand it better than the others — there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell in advance who will have the hard struggle and who will go on evenly day after day, no matter what happens. But Sarah has turned out to be one of the weak. Or maybe it was the innocence Lannie saw shining out of her eyes that had defeated her. Already, after only a month here, she has had to take time off. It’s possible, Lannie thinks, that she won’t be back at all, that her agency will thank her and send her home. To come all this way, prepared to give a couple of years of your life to good works, determined to live and work steadily in the midst of horrors, only to be defeated in a month by the trivial: fleas, lice, rats, exhaustion from overwork, and the lack of the comforts of home.
As she dresses, she reflects on what has happened to Sarah, how there is a parallel, maybe, with the people who come here to the famine camp. It was a seasoned nurse’s observation:
Strange how some nothing will kill, while others cannot survive even with food. As if they lack something,
she’d said,
some … integrity of character maybe.
Lannie had thought it a harsh judgement, believing it instead to have something to do with refusal, with some kind of private decision. For herself, she is grimly pleased by the absence of frills; how could she bear a soft couch, a footstool, when outside her door children sleep without even a blanket on the hard ground?
In the kitchen she finds Caroline, the head nurse, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the pot she’s made herself, since the kitchen staff doesn’t arrive for another hour.
“‘Morning,” she says, and yawns, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. Lannie replies, “‘Morning,” and accepts the mug of coffee Caroline, without asking, pours for her. It is just as she likes it, Canadian-style but strong, too hot to drink. She cups the pottery mug in both hands and blows on it before she sips. Caroline points to the slice of buttered bread on the plate sitting on the table beside them, but Lannie shakes her head no.
“Big day today,” Caroline remarks, looking across the long, nearly empty room now and not at Lannie, and sighing. She’s about fifty, slender, although not as thin as Lannie, and taller than Lannie who at five seven is not considered short. Even in her dressing gown Caroline exudes the calm that at work transforms itself into authority.
“Yes,” Lannie agrees. She clears her throat. “It’ll be big.” The house is quiet, the others not yet stirring, and the two women sip their coffee standing side by side. Both like silence first thing in the morning, while Maggie shoves a tape into her tape player the moment she opens her eyes and starts the day to the loud, soulless music Lannie remembers without fondness from her student days in Saskatoon. If she could, she would wipe out every trace of her past; she would forget it all.
Lucy, on the other hand, tends to pray, audibly, endlessly, before she emerges for breakfast. They’ve all grown used to the murmur coming from behind her door. A plain, dark girl, she has on occasion tried to talk to Lannie about Jesus. At first, Lannie laughed out loud.
Are you insane?
she’d asked her, before she could stop herself.
Look around you!
Ever since, Lucy has watched her closely, with a touch of mournfulness in her eyes that infuriates Lannie, when she allows it to affect her at all. Some days, though, she finds herself envying Lucy, some days it’s hard to keep from bursting into Lucy’s room and falling on her knees beside her.
Lannie is working on registrations today because of Sarah’s absence, until either she returns or somebody new arrives to take her place. The others can’t understand what Lannie’s doing here. She’s not a nurse or a nutritionist or pharmacist, she hasn’t signed a contract with any of the non-governmental relief groups the way they all have, she can’t boast years of experience in other countries — Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, South Africa — as Caroline and some of the others can. It was only Sarah who didn’t ask.
Caroline, as if she has divined Lannie’s thoughts, says gravely, “I think it’s probably better if Sarah spends her contract time doing office work in Addis.” Lannie clears her throat again softly before she says, “She’d have to live with her failure if she just goes home.” Caroline draws her breath in slowly, her eyes distant, as if she’s seeing shy
Sarah filing papers in a dingy office in Addis. She pushes herself away from the rough plastered wall she’s been leaning against.
“See you later,” she says. “Eat something.” This last as if she’s thinking of something else — Lannie knows her mind is already on the day’s work ahead of them — and, taking her coffee with her, she goes out of the kitchen toward her room on the other side of the house from Lannie’s. Caroline’s departure always leaves her feeling the same way — faintly bereft, faintly lonely.
She knows it’s her own fault she doesn’t fit in with the women nearer her own age. She’s not interested in the things young women are supposed to like: men, dating, dancing all night in clubs, gossip, and long, intimate talks lasting half the night. If she were like some of them, here for religious reasons, the others would forgive her her difference, or at least tolerate her better, but she isn’t religious, nor is she drawn to them any more than to the ones who are here out of curiosity, out of a desire for adventure, or even because they can’t find a job at home. Then she chides herself for this thought too, all-encompassing as it is, and unfair. Some, maybe even most of them, are here because they want to help the suffering. Period.
She glances at the slice of bread Caroline has told her to eat, but instead, puts it back inside the tin box on the table. Another of those baffling contradictions they’re all surrounded by here, that they don’t lack for food when a hundred yards away people are dying of starvation. She picks up the slightly grubby white cardigan that’s draped over the back of a chair, puts it on, leaves her half-full mug for the kitchen staff to clean, and goes softly out of the kitchen, into the small, square room that they use for a living room, with its broken-legged couch propped up on bricks, the two shabby chairs, the brown, black, and cream Ethiopian rug covering most of the splintery board floor, the long wooden table with its ancient, chipped white paint.
She pauses for a moment outside the door. The sun is up now and for one instance she catches herself yearning — easily squelched — for the soaring clarity of the prairie light at home, instead of the haze this sun produces. The day is windless, promises to be hot later, although right now, in the shade of the roof’s overhang that is propped up with poles at regular intervals to make a veranda of sorts, it’s still chilly.
The house, once a school, is long and narrow, with six brown-stained doors across the front, each one opening from the outside into a bedroom, and each room having interior doors leading from room to room. It’s actually a mud house — when she first came it struck her more than once how horrified Aunt Iris would be if she knew she was living in a mud house — but the exterior has fairly recently been freshened with a whitewash, and as the house is situated on a slope, the veranda is supported by a rough stone foundation, which gives it a smarter air than most one-room, mud, tin-roofed shacks housing eight or more people each, in the nearby town. I am living in the lap of luxury, she thinks, and would laugh did she not find it so appalling.
She descends one of the three sets of crumbling cement steps that lead to the dirt road, crosses it, follows a row of eucalyptus trees down the lane, and then strikes off down a well-trodden, narrow path across a farmer’s unploughed, unseeded field toward the camp. Without rain, why plough, why seed. He probably ate all his seed anyway, to stave off starvation, Lannie thinks, or sold it, and now has none to plant. Perhaps, if it rains, some agency will give him seed. If he’s still alive. The low mountains with their scruffy, sparse vegetation rise up beyond the camp, dusty in the morning’s dull-lemon light. She looks off across the field and across the roofs of the city of tents and low pole-and-plastic-sheeting shelters to the gap-toothed row of trees on the far side that protrude above them. Almost a mile away, in this light they too look pale and unhealthy.
In the far distance she sees the moving black dots she knows to be the gravediggers carrying their shovels and picks, trudging up the road to the high field, to carry on with their never-ending work. She knows too, without looking, that the road from town, hardly differentiated any longer from the dusty fields it bisects, and that comes down from the mountains beyond it, is thick with people moving mutely, slowly toward the camp. The knowledge of their approach hurries her. When she puts each foot down a puff of reddish dust rises up to settle on the toes of her runners.
She wonders if she has time for a quick visit with Mariam, feels a small glow start in her chest, then squelches it; she can’t take the
time, she’s needed at work at once. Lannie has fed Mariam every day for two weeks now, helping to bring her back from the brink, and she has become attached to her, waits each day for the moment when she enters the feeding tent and Mariam’s eyes grow big at the sight of her and she smiles and raises her arms to Lannie. Although Lannie knows she should, she can’t find it in herself to regret her attachment.
