Garden of Eden (27 page)

“Buna, buna
,” Fatima, crouched in front of her, is crooning holding out the small cup and saucer.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry!” Lannie says, but Fatima is laughing, apparently not noticing how upset Lannie is, or maybe she just thinks this is how
ferenjis
wake. She’s saying something else now, she has been calling gently to Lannie.

“She says, ‘Wake up,’” Abubech says. Lannie takes the demitasse and saucer and, remembering to bow, says,
“Betam amesegnalehu ‘ —
thank you very much — which now rolls off her tongue easily. As Fatima turns to go back to her seat and Abubech lowers her head to coo at the baby she is holding, Lannie tips a bit of the thick, black liquid onto the ground behind her leg. She finds her nausea at the odour is not so bad, though the
tukul
is redolent with the fragrance of coffee, her sensors for smell must be flattening out.

Abubech has decided that they will go up to Tigray. Their NGO has no project there, but the new government, Tigrayans themselves, are busy with reforestation projects, the terracing of fields — around two-thirds of the country’s farmland is on slopes of twenty-five degrees or more — and dam building and irrigation projects. They are even closing off a few of the worst-damaged fields to people and animals, to give them a chance to recover from centuries of overuse. On the lookout for any innovative projects that might help to provide for future food security, they’ve expressed interest in the project of which Abubech represents only a part. The men who run the project — the administrators, plant geneticists, and field specialists — have already been up there. Now Lannie and Abubech will make a preliminary survey of the area and draw up a plan of attack.

“Data, always more data,” Abubech said. “We can only hope it will eventually translate into some kind of action — beyond the preservation of biodiversity, I mean. Into respect for these women farmers who do most of the work; into concerns for their education, their health, their …”

But Lannie had stopped listening.

At least part of the reason Lannie stays with her is so she can study this hope of Abubech’s, what it really is, how to get some herself. She has lost her own entirely, afraid what will happen if she cuts loose from Abubech’s lifeline. She thinks again of Iris and Barney. Lately she has been thinking of sending them a letter or a postcard, just to let them know she isn’t dead, but the thought of what to say makes that grinding weariness overcome her again, so that she can hardly support the weight of the cup and saucer.

She sets them on the sheepskin beside her and leans back, letting the soft voices of the two women, the occasional gurgle from the now contented baby, lull her. She knows she’s drifting again, falling into sleep. She thinks of her work, of the answers she should be writing down, but she can’t nudge herself into caring. Abubech will remember, or will write them down herself. Then she drops so deeply into sleep that even her dreams are pale layers far above the abyss into which she’s sunk.

Tim Quennell’s apartment is on Spadina Avenue. Iris is just thinking that the neighbourhood looks pretty poor and rough when her taxi pulls up in front of a small grocery store with a handprinted sign in the window in Chinese characters.

“It’s over there,” the driver says, pointing at a door with the street number above it beside the store’s entrance. She pays him, hesitating over the tip — too much? too little? — gets out, and goes up the sidewalk to the door. She’s surprised to find it’s unlocked, pushes it open and is confronted by a few feet of dingy hall and a steep, high flight of wooden steps. The walls are scarred and nicked and sport scrawls of faded graffiti, as if somebody had tried to scrub them off. A dusty spiderweb hangs from the ceiling and the ancient black rubber treads covering the wooden stairs have ragged pieces missing. Nervously, she creaks up the stairs to the upstairs hall where she walks slowly, stopping at the first of the two doors. She knocks.

The door opens and Tim Quennell stands there staring down at her.

“Iris!” he says, “I mean, Mrs. Christie.” He’s just as awkward as he was when she met him at least eight years earlier. No, ten. He looks a little older, but unmistakably the Tim she remembers sitting on the side of the bed in her guest room, his head in his hands,
I love her,
and Lannie unconscious in the hospital. “What are you doing here?” he asks. “Come in.” He’s smiling as he stands back to let her pass.

The room she enters is surprisingly bright and clean. A potted lemon tree stands in a corner, its precisely shaped, dark green leaves etched in the sunlight against the white-painted walls; a red and blue
suncatcher revolves slowly in the upper part of the window that looks out over shabby rooftops, casting a shower of coloured light. Music is playing softly in the background, Bach — she recognizes it from long-ago, fruitless piano lessons. Two posters hang on the wall to Tim’s left: a photograph of an Asian woman with long, straight hair playing a grand piano, with a Sold Out sign pasted across her back, and beside it, a faded, slightly tattered painting of a young, bright-faced Chinese man in a Mao jacket saluting, Chinese characters running down — or up — one side. The room is a kitchen and every surface — the table, the chairs, the counter — is covered with untidily stacked books, magazines, and papers.

“I’m looking for Lannie,” she says abruptly, turning to him, tilting her face up to his, seeing again the thick, pale lashes, the unkempt, white-blond hair, the crookedly buttoned, rumpled shirt. He’s looking intently at her. Even with the window closed the steady roar of traffic is audible behind the music.

“Lannie?” he says, taken aback.

“Yes,” Iris says. “Do you know where she is?”

“Not here. She left here — I mean, Toronto — at least seven or eight years ago.” He’s obviously both puzzled and surprised to find Iris doesn’t know where Lannie is.

“Where then?” Iris asks, in her anxiety and her confusion — the tumult of the airport, the ride downtown in the taxi, the huge hotel — forgetting mannerliness, forgetting Tim’s feelings.

He’s not smiling now. They stare at each other and Iris begins inwardly to crumble.

“Would you like some tea?” he asks, after a second. Iris turns away from him, momentarily at a loss. She wants Barney, and thinks, irrationally, just like him not to be around when I need him.

She sets her purse on the pile of books on a corner of the table and sits down hard on a yellow-painted wooden chair without being asked. He turns on a burner under the kettle and glances at her over his shoulder.

“Hasn’t she been keeping in touch?” he asks finally. He occupies himself restacking books, lifting them from under her purse to pile them higher on a chair and setting two small, fragile blue-and-white
Chinese cups on the table. For the first time she notices the old manual typewriter beside her. The piece of paper rising from it has short lines of type on it, a poem. Below them and outside, a siren begins to wail. She waits till it passes before she tries to speak.

“It’s been a long time, years, since we heard from her. Her uncle — Barney — is — he’s — dead. Lannie doesn’t even know.” Tim is studying her with a gentle expression. He says softly, “I’m so sorry.” Suddenly what she hears in the echo of his voice are the voices at Barney’s funeral saying to her, over and over again,
Sorry for your loss, Sorry for your loss.
It confuses her and she says again, “Where is she?” hearing the quaver in her own voice.

“I don’t know,” he says simply. “When she left here — when she left me” — he corrects himself — “she didn’t write to me either. When did you lose track of her?” He’s curious now, looking off into space, his eyes sad. Visibly he shakes himself, and when he speaks his voice is crisp, efficient. “She thought the world of you and her uncle. It’s hard to believe she wouldn’t even write.”

Iris is remembering the whole sorry mess, how Lannie had come home from university, pregnant, although Iris didn’t know it, how she’d phoned Tim to come, that was when Iris guessed Tim must be the baby’s father, her suicide attempt before Tim even arrived. Then, how happy Lannie seemed to be the day she left their home for good, the abortion over and done with, her future open to her. “She did keep in touch at first. She worked in Vancouver for a while, in a library and then —”

“Then she came to Saskatoon, where I was and we started living together. We came here, to Toronto.” She waits for him to go on with his story, but he has fallen silent and is staring into space again, forgetful of her presence.

The kettle begins to whistle, he gets up slowly, more like an old man than one who can’t be much over thirty — about the same age as Jay, she finds herself thinking.
I’m a poet,
he’d said to Barney, in a dogged, angry way — and pours the water into the blue-and-white teapot that matches the handleless cups, carries it back to the table, pushes aside some magazines, and sets it between them. The door at the end of the room opens slowly, Iris catches a glimpse of a shabby
red sofa and a desk with stacks of neatly piled paper on it, and another young man enters, staring down at a book open in his hands. He’s wearing a neatly pressed blue denim shirt and khaki pants and his lustreless black hair is perfectly barbered, she can see the teethmarks of his comb. He lifts his head — Iris sees he’s partly Chinese — and seeing Iris there, looks surprised and then embarrassed.

“I made it, Allan,” Tim says quietly. “Want a cup?”

“Uh, no,” Allan says, and glances with some curiosity at Iris, but Tim makes no move to introduce her. The glance he and Tim exchange stuns Iris: not smiles exactly, but carrying a mute intimacy that puzzles her. Allan goes back into the living room without looking at her again, shutting the door quietly behind him.

“My roommate,” Tim says. “We edit a poetry journal together. He works in there, I work in here.” He laughs softly. “He’s neater than I am. We drive each other crazy.” Suddenly Iris wonders, are they a couple? But how can that be? She gives up the question as quickly as she has asked it.

Tim stares down into his teacup, deep in thought, or perhaps, Iris thinks, he’s remembering Lannie, how she was in those days. When he spoke to her, fixing her clear yellow-brown eyes on him as if, until she heard his voice, she hadn’t remembered he was there.

“We were happy, I guess. For a while, anyway. We both had Mcjobs” — Iris doesn’t know what this means, but lets it pass — “And she was finishing up her degree at U of T, at night, you know? I was writing a lot then. I don’t know, I just could write then.” He falls silent again, Iris waits. “Then she started seeing pictures on TV, awful stuff. You must have seen them too. For a while there you couldn’t avoid them, they were everywhere.” Iris sorts through possibilities in her mind and gives up. “The famine in Africa,” he says, as if he has realized she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “In Ethiopia. You remember? It was in ‘84. Late in the year.” Iris thinks, In 1986 we went to Expo in Vancouver. “At first she just looked at them, you know, like we all did. But then, after a while, it was all she talked about. It was like it haunted her. She was — she was obsessed.” He’s lost in his memory for a moment. “The shot that I think tipped her over the edge was of some aid workers loading
babies — infants, orphans — into the back of a van to take them to an orphanage, I guess. Like they were so many cabbages. They were all crying and nobody was even trying to comfort them. Just loading them — it was the most awful thing.” He pauses, visibly swallowing. “Anyway, she talked me into going to Ottawa with her to volunteer to go there — to Ethiopia — to help, as relief workers, you know?”

“What?” Iris says, surprised. She recalls Angela’s postcard. “What about Iraklion?”

“What about it?” he replies. “I don’t know anything about Iraklion.” When Iris doesn’t respond, he goes on. “Of course they turned us down, we couldn’t do anything. We weren’t nurses or doctors or nutritionists or whatever, and half of Canada was lined up to volunteer. And nobody knew how to do anything.” He sighs again and puts his hand on his teacup, forgetting it’s empty. Iris is frozen to her chair, the image of Lannie crouched in front of the TV, suffering anguish, when Iris had been picturing her happy at last, overwhelms her.

“We came back here, finally,” he said. “She was okay for a while. I kept telling her, you did what you could, you give them half your money, you can’t do anything else. But she wouldn’t listen. She quit her job at this bookstore when we decided to go to Ottawa, and she couldn’t get another one, or she didn’t try. Things were going wrong for her. I could see it — she couldn’t sleep, and she hardly ate anything. She’d get this look on her face — Then one morning I got up and she was gone. Note on kitchen table.” He recites, “‘Dear Tim, have gone to Africa. Love, Lannie.’ End of note. End of life.” But there’s a wry note in his voice at this last, and Iris finds she’s relieved to hear it. He’s not quite so bare to fortune, is this Tim, as the one who sat in her guest bedroom and cried for Lannie.

Tim rouses himself and pours tea for both of them, slopping a little into Iris’s saucer.

“You tried to find her—earlier, I mean?” he asks. Iris shakes her head no, and when she sees his look of surprise, she says, “Because —” Because why? She can’t remember. Because Lannie was so smart and so capable, so full of hope when she left; because she didn’t like people trying to get close to her; because, after all, it was her father she’d gone to, underlining that she and Barney were only stopgaps. She thinks of
her own avoidance of the whole subject, not even being sure how long Lannie has been gone, her refusal to think clearly about Lannie’s disappearance, to deal with it. She feels sure that whatever it was she did when she was raising Lannie had a lot to do with Lannie’s going away and not coming back. She’s afraid Tim can see right through her to her weaknesses, her shallowness, of which she’s only beginning to catch an unwelcome glimpse herself.

“For a while there were letters. And phone calls. We sent her money. In fact,” now it’s coming back to her, how could she have forgotten? “In fact, Barney set up a bank account for her in Vancouver when she was there and put money in it. A lot of money,” she says. “I wondered about it at the time, but he — got angry. He said he didn’t want her having to beg, and he wanted to be sure she’d be okay. He said she’d never get any help from Howard. She’d find that out soon enough. So he put a lot of money in an account for her and he told me he didn’t want to hear another word about it. As if I might try to stop him. I just didn’t know why he did it, that was all. I just wanted to know why. It was my father’s place after all, when you think about it, more mine than his —” She halts the rush of words, surely she’d never said such a thing to Barney himself. She hopes not. And she didn’t mind the money, God knows they had more money than they knew what to do with, and she did love Lannie. It was just that he didn’t even ask her. “That was the last time you heard from her?” He nods.