Garden of Eden (30 page)

But maybe having a child would have saved Lannie. How do I know?
Not having a child didn’t save me.
Save me from what? From life, she answers herself, but this only confuses her more, or upsets her, she doesn’t know what to think. And looking back, she can’t see that she could have done anything else. But what’s the point of thinking about that now? For no matter how she twists and turns, she is alone in her silent hotel room, far from home and friends and family and Barney is dead, and James too, and now even Jay has gone.

She gets slowly up off the bed, and walks across the room. This is her, Iris, carrying on.

Then she sees her skirt and blouse she’d worn the night before lying smoothly over a chair. Jay must have placed them there before he left. And there are her shoes placed neatly together under the chair, and her underwear lying in a silky heap on the skirt. She goes to them and gathers them in both hands, her creamy half-slip, her lace-trimmed bra, her sheer panties, and holds them against her chest, inhaling last night’s odours, cigarette smoke, perfume, that musky odour she recognizes as her own. She’s thinking, what a fool you are, Iris. As if a man half your age might love you.

It’s minutes before she can force herself to the bathroom. After she has bathed, she dresses in creased slacks, her yellow silk blouse, her cashmere jacket. She studies her face in the mirror; moving closer she makes herself look at the lines and wrinkles of her more than fifty years. Sadder but wiser, she thinks, and stares grimly at her reflection as she pulls the brush roughly through her hair.

She repacks her suitcase, checks out of the hotel and takes a cab to the airport. There are numerous flights to Ottawa, and she manages to get a seat on one leaving in under an hour. She’s begun to suspect that the real reason Jay has left her is the simplest, age-old one: now that he’s conquered her, he doesn’t want her anymore. She phones Ramona and tells her what she has found out about Lannie.

“I might have to go to Africa myself,” she says, to test how it sounds out loud. Ramona draws in a deep breath.

“Iris, don’t do anything silly, eh? Remember us, we’re here, waiting for you to come home.”

“People go to Africa all the time,” Iris says briskly. Ramona puts Vance on the line.

“Remember the land deal?” he asks. “Well, of course you do. Halvorsons and Wiebes have both signed. Not that they’re saying anything, but you know how word leaks out. They’ve been back here twice, too. Just won’t take no for an answer.”

“Do people know yet where the money’s coming from?” Iris asks.

“Some reporter’s been here and he says the provincial government’s trying to find that out before they’ll let the deal go through. Maybe you should come home so’s not to miss all the excitement,” Vance says.

“No,” she says firmly. “I haven’t found her yet. And if I’m not there, they can’t pressure me. Besides, Vance, we’ve got a deal, and I’m not backing down. Are you?” His answer is a snort that makes her laugh.

All the rest of the time, while she’s boarding her plane, flying the short hop to Ottawa and checking into her hotel, she’s thinking about Jay. His leaving her is such misery, she almost wonders if a night of lovemaking was worth it. Backtracking mentally, she tries to find the place where she might have stopped it before it began. No, she couldn’t have stopped it. She wanted it all along, but she wanted to be in control of what happened between them, it didn’t occur to her that he might have more power over it than she would.

She sets her suitcase down by the door of her new hotel room, which looks much like the one she just left, and goes straight to the phone, gets the book from the desk drawer and looks under “Sargent, Robert.” She’s about to dial the number when she realizes this must be his home phone number. She tries again under “Engineering” in the yellow pages, finds “Sargent, Bloom, and Atwater,” and copies the address down on the notepad by the phone. As she did not phone Tim first in Toronto, she doesn’t phone this company either. She’ll only get some secretary who, she’s sure, won’t let her speak to him.

She hails a cab — how cosmopolitan she has become in a few short days — and it takes her quickly to her destination. As she waits
in front of the office building for the driver to give her her change, she sees through the cab’s window all the people hurrying up or down the high, wide steps. A couple of men pass by, their ties flapping over their shoulders in the wind, talking on cell phones. Women pull their spring coats tighter around them as they descend, and wave to friends hurrying up the stairs. Iris could weep for the ordinariness of it all.

“Rob Sargent,” she tells the young receptionist who looks up from her computer when Iris enters the office. “Iris Christie to see him.”

“Is he expecting you?” She’s young enough to be Iris’s daughter, younger even than Lannie would be now.

“Yes.” She’s nervous about this tack, but it gets her taken immediately into his office.

He turns out to be in his mid-thirties, a stocky, well-muscled redhead, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled to his elbows, his striped tie loosened. He looks up from his computer screen and sneezes, snuffles into a tissue, and apologizes, “Sorry, excuse me.” His secretary goes out, closing the door behind her. Rob sneezes again, another apology, looks up inquiringly at her.

“You sound as if you should be at home in bed,” Iris tells him. He agrees glumly, then offers her a chair across from his cluttered desk, and asks her what he can do for her.

“I’m looking for my niece,” she says, and tells him the story briefly. “I understand you were there, in Ethiopia, during the famine of ‘84 and ‘85.”

“Yeah, I was,” he says, his voice is clogged, his tone heavy. “I was working for a relief agency doing engineering work — helping put up buildings, piping in water to the camps, that kind of thing. Got a picture of her?” Iris reaches into her purse, pulls out the snapshot Tim gave her, and hands it across the desk to him. He takes it, his swivel chair creaking loudly as he leans forward.

“Her name’s Lannie, Lannie Stone.” Before he even looks at the picture, his head jerks up, and a flush rushes across his face.

“Yeah,” he says heavily. “I saw her. I remember her. Lannie. Lannie Stone.” He tosses the picture back to Iris with a gesture of something: anger? dismissal?

“Where was she?” Iris asks. “Was she all right?”

“Harbu. And then I knew her in Addis and Korem and . . there-abouts.” Iris finds she has been holding her breath and lets it out quickly. “She moved around a bit,” he says and sighs deeply, shifting in his chair, making it creak again, swivelling to look out the big window behind him which overlooks the downtown core, the Parliament Buildings, the river. “I met her at Harbu. She was running around, doing this and that. Working hard.” He falls silent again, still looking out the window. After a moment, he lifts a tissue and blows his nose into it. “Sorry,” he says. “This damn cold. I can’t shake it. I’ve had it for weeks.”

“You knew her,” she says slowly, as if she isn’t quite convinced.

“She was a little spaced-out, as we used to say, but who wouldn’t be, after seeing what we both saw.” Iris reflects on this as Sargent sits sunk into some glumness she can’t read. “Her aunt, are you?” he asks finally. “She said her parents were dead, but I don’t remember her mentioning an aunt.” This startles Iris, but it could be he has just made a mistake about what Lannie said.

“Did she say where she was going? Was she coming home? Here, I mean?”

“Sometimes she’d be working on a story. We used to meet in Addis, after I left Harbu. I think she’d been in the south, too. I forget.” He stares sombrely at his lap, then rises slowly and goes to stand looking out the window. She takes the opportunity to look around the room and notices a picture resting on a filing cabinet in front of a drooping plant. Probably his wife, and their three young children.

“Wait a minute,” she says. “Working on a story? Is that what you said?”

“Yeah,” he says. “She worked sometimes for some church magazines here in Canada. I don’t remember their names. Doing stories and photos, you know?”

“But, I thought she went to do relief work.”

“You couldn’t just go there and help, you know, if you weren’t a nurse. And when the agencies hired non-medical people, they hired locals, for obvious reasons.” The reasons aren’t at all obvious to Iris, but she lets it go. “Apparently she made a deal with a string of small
church papers in the West that she’d go at her own expense if they’d get her a press card. That’s how she got there. Then she just — made her opportunities. We … dated,” he tells her. “As much as you could in a country like that, at a time like that. We were working eighteen, twenty hours a day. Then I came home. The worst was over — at least, that’s how it looked — and I had a career to get started.” He turns back to her. “She was a strange girl,” he says. “Sorry, I forgot she’s your niece.” Iris says nothing. “There was a T-shirt people wore there then,” he goes on. “It said, ‘Check One: Missionary, Mercenary, Masochist, Misfit.’ I was number three: masochist. When I figured that out, I quit and came home.”

“And Lannie?” Iris asks.

“Oh, number four. I was pretty disillusioned with the job. You think you’re helping, but really — you’re just propping up a violent, repressive regime.”

“And Lannie? Did she come home too?” she asks.

“No. She didn’t agree with me. She said no matter what, you can’t let people starve.” She sees the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth, as if he’s remembering the way Lannie spoke. Then he sighs. “She didn’t say she was coming home. She said Africa was her home.” Iris waits. It’s as if he knows much more than he’s saying, if only she could wrest it out of him.

At last she says, “I’m going to go there, to find her.”

“Oh? It’s funny, but I don’t know how she got out of Addis. Maybe she stole a ride with a food convoy or something. They travelled at night, to avoid the bombing. She could have hidden in one. She never told me how she did that.”

“Bombing! What do you mean — She had a passport, didn’t she?”

“There was a war on,” he says, surprised, lifting his head to look at her. “Didn’t you know that? It was at its worst right about the time you’re talking about. You could still get into the country, but you had to get a travel permit to move around and that could be pretty hard to do.”

“I want to know about the war.” He has been fiddling with a pen and at her question he swivels back toward her, tosses the pen down and tells her about the Emperor Haile Selassie.

“He wasn’t any bigger than you are. Smaller, in fact. He was deposed in 1974 by the
Dergue,
that’s Amharic for ‘committee,’ really the army. That happened because there was a major drought going on and thousands were starving, especially in the north, and the magnificent emperor — who later was strangled in his bed, there were rumours that in his last years he was sacrificing virgins — said there wasn’t, and didn’t help and didn’t let anybody else help either. When word got out, he was finished. The
Dergue
took over the country.”

He pauses, then, when he sees how intently she’s listening, continues. “The
Dergue
was Marxist, allied with the Soviet Union. It nationalized all the land in the country, set up collective farms, and there was the Red Terror —”

“What?” Iris asks, but Rob only wipes his nose and stares at his desktop in silence for a minute, before he goes on.

“It was to stamp out all resistance. People were torn from their beds and never seen again. They were shot in the streets. They were tortured hideously.” He pauses. “Mengistu’s regime was harsh, terribly harsh, there were people who said they were better off under the emperor. Guerrilla movements began in separate parts of the country: Eritrea, Tigray, the Ogaden, and so on. That was the war.” She nods, not taking her eyes off his face. “In 1991, Mengistu was overthrown and a new government took over the land, was promptly unnationalized, the province of Eritrea separated to become its own country, and the war was over.”

“All those years she was living in the middle of war?”

“There was danger,” he admits. “Early on some relief workers were killed, but on the whole, as long as you did what you were told, you were reasonably safe.”

“The war is over?”

“More or less,” he says. “The new government is pretty stable.” She reflects.

“I don’t speak Ethiopian. How will I find her?”

“You mean Amharic. It’s the official language — or was, until the new government took over. It’s probably Tigrayan now. Anyway, a lot of people speak a little English. They learn it in school. If they go to
school.” At this last he turns his head away from her in a quick movement that fails to hide — anger, she thinks. “Maybe you should let her be.” Iris isn’t sure she has heard him correctly, she’s about to ask when he says, “Not everybody can be saved.” A deathly silence envelops them as Iris understands his remark. “Not everybody
deserves
to be saved,” he says, and the unexpected passion in his voice brings Iris to her feet.

“You’re wrong,” she says quietly, firmly. “She deserves a normal, happy life as much as you or I. I am going to bring her home.”

In years to come she will never be able to say what was going on with her during the month she spent in Ottawa waiting for her passport and visa and having her immunizations, for when she should have been full of grief, when she should have been dying with loneliness, and eaten up with fear, she wasn’t. She didn’t worry about Barney’s or even Jay’s abrupt departure except distantly, as if she were the one who had died and crossed an impermeable border from them, and although she could see them in the distance, their shapes were muted, she felt little when she thought of them.

Her hotel room was not beautiful, but it was large and comfortable, and when she went inside and locked the door she was safe from all demands on her; she could be purely herself. She hadn’t known she wanted to be free of demands, or maybe it was only that she’d never before been alone and a complete stranger in a strange place, and she experienced it as oddly pleasurable, a kind of surprising, agreeable suspension in time and space.