Garden of Eden (3 page)

“Water,” he says. “You’ve probably noticed there isn’t enough?” There’s a touch of sarcasm in his voice or maybe it’s irony at the whole situation, or that rage they all feel they have to keep tamped, so that she looks back at him, into his eyes which, unlike her yellow-brown ones, are a pale blue and clear, almost as clear as the cruelly cloudless sky. “We’ve found a bore, now we’re trenching and laying the pipes. Should soon have a good supply.” He looks over in the
direction she has just been looking and says, “Well, it won’t be enough, but it’s better.”

“The formulas take a lot of water,” Lannie mutters, for want of anything better to say. She’s trying hard not to think of Mariam.
At least she’s well, at least she didn’t die.
This thought helps to dissolve the lump that formed in her throat when Almaz gave her the news of the child’s departure. “So do the showers and the hand-washing and the laundry and — everything.”

“After work tonight, would you consider having a beer with me in town?” She can see a flush rising under that redhead’s freckled, translucent skin of his that mirrors her own, and now he’s the one to toy in the dust with the toe of his boot. She thinks, no, remembers she owes her Canadian churches a new story and should write it tonight. About Mariam? No, not Mariam. But always on the lookout for camouflage too, not wanting to be labelled as eccentric, too much a loner, after a short hesitation she says, “Okay, but it’ll be late. Eight, maybe?”

“I can pick you up at your house,” he offers, “We can walk together.” She nods again. The girls all tease her about being a recluse. Sometimes it isn’t a joke. She knows they find her strange, cold, not pleasant. This will help, make her seem more normal. Provided one of them doesn’t already have her eye on Rob — he’s a nice enough looking man and he isn’t a Russian or an Italian or an Ethiopian — but if somebody else is interested in him, there’ll be trouble. A loud cry comes from a tent off to their right, a wail of grief, and then another. “My husband is dead, my heart has pain. It is finished, my husband is dead.” Such open mourning is not the usual thing these days. With so many dying, eerie silence has become the pattern of grief.

“I have to go,” she says, urgent now, raising her voice to be heard over the noisy buzz of the feeding tents and the sounds of grief. Rob’s face has gone blank behind his freckles. It is a stoicism she recognizes:
Don’t think about it, be strong,
it says. Another infant in the feeding tent has begun to howl.

“Yeah, me too,” he says, giving her a solid, assessing look. Then he walks away carefully, firmly, only a slight jerkiness in his stride giving him away.

“We should go and check the tents,” Caroline says. They’ve closed registration for the day, in a half-hour it will be dark. “I’m starving,” Caroline goes on, “but with so many coming in and the hospital so full, I’m afraid there might be sick unaccompanied kids in the tents nobody’s noticed.”

“Okay,” Lannie replies. She’d just as soon work right through until eight and then go out with Rob directly from here, get something to eat in town. Caroline will drag her off to supper with the others though, she supposes. And if she isn’t hungry right now, she knows she will be as soon as she smells food cooking. She can’t remember for sure, but thinks that today she has eaten only a couple of cookies and some juice at the afternoon break.

Dawit has gone back to his family in the nearby town for the night, so Caroline calls Teodoris, who is still tidying the office behind them in preparation to locking up. Teodoris will interpret. They all go to Amharic lessons two or three times a week, but after a day’s work most of them have trouble concentrating.

They set out to walk through the tent city, unable to go ten feet before children healthy enough to walk about and play a little have begun to hurry along with them, the bolder ones taking their hands, the others giggling and running alongside. Even though it’s almost dark they want Lannie and Caroline to stop and play ball with them as the staff sometimes does. It amazes Lannie that children can still play in the midst of such devastation, and this makes her think of all the ones who can’t, of the dead baby at the woman’s breast. Of Mariam, gone away.

Even if Mariam’s aunt comes back in a month’s time for rations, she thinks, she doubts she’d bring Mariam with her. She finds herself wiping moisture from her eyes, glad of the night falling rapidly over the camp, the people retreating inside their shelters to huddle together for warmth.

Caroline, Teodoris, and Lannie split up and thrust their heads into tent after tent. Teodoris calls, “Caroline!” and comes to her where she’s paused down the alley beyond him. He’s carrying a tiny child in his arms. The child’s limbs and his head against Teodoris’s chest bob loosely with his long steps. Lannie comes up to them, the only one here with little Amharic, ready to take the child from Teodoris.

“He is seven years, they say,” he explains to Caroline. The boy can’t weigh more than twenty-five pounds and is the length of a three-year-old. Lannie can’t contain a gasp. Caroline, peering at him, says nothing, although for an instant she stands perfectly still. “He came in last night,” Teodoris goes on. “His mother died in the night. They have taken her away.” Caroline feels the child’s pulse gently, lifts one of his eyelids, says, “Lannie, take him to the hospital. We’ll finish up here and I’ll check on him before I go home.” Lannie had initially looked away at the sight of the child in Teodoris’s arms, then made herself look back again, feeling for a second that her face is acquiring the set of Caroline’s when she studies suffering: grave, gentle, clear-eyed.

Lannie takes the child from Teodoris and holds him carefully against her chest — a bundle of worn, chilled cloth. She shifts him so that his head rests against her neck as she walks carefully so as not to jostle him, down the row of shelters in the gathering darkness toward the lighted hospital. The child does not move or make a sound.

As she walks she remembers the first camp in Sidamo province where, not trusting the government who said there was no drought, no famine there, she’d managed to get a travel pass and gone to see for herself if this was true. She remembers lying awake listening to the drums celebrating the third day after the birth of a son. Sons, always sons, she thinks distantly, securing the child more firmly to her. Didn’t Iris say she’d once had a brother? One who’d died as a baby? She stumbles over a small rock, catches herself before she falls, and in that instant, her short time in Sidamo rushes back in …

When she’d seen blood pouring from the woman, her head lolling over the arm of the man carrying her, Lannie had instinctively run toward them, without remembering she wasn’t a nurse and couldn’t help. Abebe, the nurse on duty, appeared in the doorway of the examining room and shouted to her, “Here! Come!”

She moved toward him through the noise and too-bright light to the blood-soaked bundle of rags lying now on the examination table. The woman’s relatives, four or five of them, crowded around the table, looking down at her, one woman keening softly. “She must not bleed so much!” Abebe said, turning his back to the woman on the table, pulling open the cupboard where instruments, bandages, and
medicines were kept. “Get her clothes off!” He handed her scissors over his shoulder and she began to straighten the limbs of the bundle on the table who she saw now was a thin girl of perhaps fifteen years, her eyes rolled back in her head. But as Lannie touched her ankles she felt warmth. She started to cut away the soggy fabric and saw, or already knew, the blood was pouring from the girl’s vagina, had already thought it a miscarriage, when she caught a glimpse of the flesh torn away, red and pulpy, and she would have fainted or vomited at that and the blood pouring out all over the table had not Abebe pushed her back, lifting the girl’s hips and sliding a sterile pad under her, and then the Swedish nurse Inge shouldering Lannie aside, taking in the situation at a glance.

“Take them out!” she commanded Lannie. Lannie, clenching her teeth to keep from throwing up into the puddles of blood, removed the relatives from the room, going with them herself, closing the door behind them. She leaned against the wall shaking so hard she was afraid she might fall. After a moment she got a basin of water and a brush and began to scrub the puddled trail of blood from the cement floor.

It was a botched genital mutilation, Inge had told her later. The woman who did it was drunk, the relatives said, had cut clumsily and too deep, had — God, she mustn’t think of it. She’s glad she’s not a nurse; she doesn’t have the courage. She’d finally written a piece about it, but is certain the church magazines she was writing for didn’t print it. Maybe they didn’t believe it, not that they’d think she was lying, but out of a sheer inability, born of their utter naivete, to assimilate the story. Like Iris, she thinks. She can’t imagine telling Iris such a thing either. It’s one of the reasons she doesn’t write.

Climbing the hospital steps now, she edges sideways through the door, letting it slap shut behind her. Rita, the nurse on duty, looks up from where she’s bending over one of the pallets, soothing a skeleton who whimpers softly, too weak to form words. She hurries over, takes the child from Lannie’s arms.

“Set up that camp bed,” she tells Lannie. Lannie runs to the bed leaning against the wall and pushes the legs down as quickly as she can while Rita waits, holding the child. She sets the boy gently down
on it and Lannie waits as Rita takes his pulse. “It’s okay,” she says to Lannie, glancing at her over her shoulder as she crouches by the child. “I’ll take it from here.” Then she hesitates, staring up at her, and says, “You should go home now.” Home. For one instant Lannie sees the farm kitchen, its bright yellow walls — Iris loves colour so much. Before that they’d been turquoise and before that, hollyhock pink — Barney grinning a silent good morning at her over the paper, his eyes brightening at the sight of her, Iris turning from the toaster to say,
Did you sleep well, dear?
as if there were no horrors in the world lurking in the shadows just out of arm’s reach. “You look exhausted,” Rita tells her.

“But I’m not!” Lannie answers, flushing. She pushes loose strands of her hair back from her face, forces a laugh, and its falsity makes her blush more. Rita doesn’t answer her, rises, goes quickly to the medicine cupboard. Lannie turns away. She catches a glimpse of her reflection in an aluminum basin hanging on the wall. She’s a ghost, the freckles dusting her high cheekbones and the bridge of her narrow nose barely visible. Two dark holes for eyes, a blur of palest pink her lips. Shaken, she skims her eyes away from the image, erases it, leaves the hospital.

And yet she does not wonder what she’s doing here. She knows now, in this camp, what it is: it is escape from her own too-marginal, too-pitiful, too-ugly history. There is a part of her that is grateful for this famine, this drought, this pneumonia, this tuberculosis, leprosy, the spear-wounds, the kwashiorkor and endless, desperate cases of marasmus, even the grenade wounds — no, not for the bloody, inhuman war — she is grateful for all the rest of it because it saves her from her own hopelessness, from the pointlessness of her life. But she hates herself at the same time, for her heartlessness, that she would use this devastation to escape the pain of her own wounds.

Rob is sitting in their living room being entertained by Lucy and Maggie when Lannie and Caroline get back. Lannie sees at once that Maggie is smitten — the way she laughs too much, fingering her long, blonde hair that she has to keep pinned up at work, as if she’s
calling his attention to it. In the background they’re playing a tape of a rock group unfamiliar to Lannie, and it seems to her annoyingly loud.

“There’s some supper left in the kitchen,” Lucy says. “If the bugs didn’t get it.” They all laugh.

“Thanks, but I’m having supper in town,” Lannie says. Rob doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t want to sit here with all of them trying to eat while Rob waits. She isn’t really hungry anyway, would rather have a plate of
injera wat
in town.

“I’m ready whenever you are,” Rob says. “Thanks for the conversation,” he says to Maggie, smiling at her. Maggie smiles back, brightly. She wants to make an impression.

“Don’t forget curfew,” Caroline sticks her head out of the kitchen to warn them. Rob says, “They kept Todd and Larry in jail overnight a couple of nights ago when they didn’t make it back to the camp before curfew. Our director had to get them out. He was pretty mad.”

“Wars!” Caroline exclaims, a mixture of disgust and acceptance. She should know, she’s seen enough of them, Lannie thinks, in northern India, in Guatemala, in Angola, and elsewhere. But just this, the famine and the war in Ethiopia, are enough — more than enough — for Lannie.

She and Rob go out, shutting the door carefully behind them; if they leave it ajar, rats and snakes get in. Rob steps away from her, then comes back quickly. She sees with gratitude that he’s carrying a long, heavy stick.

“A man came into the hospital today with a hand half-eaten by a hyena,” she says. “I didn’t see him, but Lucy said he was trying to save his son. Some other men came along and drove the pack off.”

“We found a body,” Rob says in a low voice. “Or what was left of one. Not here, out of Dire Dawa. I was working on a water project there. She was collapsed from starvation, we think, that was how they got her. It was pretty awful.” They walk along in silence for a minute. She shivers and Rob draws close to her, puts his arm over her shoulders. “Are you cold?”

“A little,” she responds. Her impulse is to shake his arm off, it’s heavy, and allowing it to stay says too much about the possibilities of
the relationship, possibilities she doesn’t want to contemplate. But its very heaviness is comforting. His Canadianness, the world they’ve both come from that they know exists solid and stable back there — that, like it or not, must surely be what gives them the courage to stay here — is implicit in the warm weight she feels across her back, stilling her. It’s shaking down the day’s horrors, steadying her, loosening her stride. After a while he drops his arm and takes her hand in a light, casual grasp. Again, she’s glad it’s dark. And she wonders, too, which of the kitchen or the camp staff is the government informant who will report that she and Rob have walked to town together.