Garden of Eden (35 page)

“Maybe I could go to Tigray?” she appeals to Hagosa.

“But where in Tigray?” Hagosa asks dubiously. “Is long way.” Seeing the dismay on her face, Hagosa says, “Or you could visit our country. The rock churches at Lalibela very famous, the castles at
Gondar, the obelisks at Aksum. Obelisks very famous.” When Iris says nothing, she goes on. “Some have fallen, they are broken. They have words on them, history, from kings and priests. They are very, very old.” Iris thinks wearily, What does it matter to me what I visit?

“How far is Aksum?”

“Is far,” she admits. “Two, three days by road. Gondar — is best to go by airplane to Gondar. Lalibela is closest — six, seven hours drive. Rock churches there.”

“Rock churches are at Lalibela? What are they?”

“I have not seen,” Hagosa admits. “Churches carved out of rock long ago. When King Lalibela rule. Very beautiful. Are still used.”

At dinner — Giyorgis has
injera wat,
and Iris has spaghetti — Iris questions Giyorgis about going to Lalibela.

“Yes, yes.” He nods vigorously. “It is good place to go. I myself go there many times when I was driver for U.N. The churches are most beautiful.”

“Is there a hotel there?” Iris asks, still uncertain.

“Oh, yes. Was Hilton before. Is very good hotel.”

After she has returned to her drab little room and is lying in her bed in the dark, her mind drifts. She finds herself back in the cabin, Barney’s body stretched out on the couch, the moment when she knew he was dead. She has to pull back before its full weight hits her again, his image then replaced with Jay, stretched out beside her on her hotel bed in Toronto, the way the fine black hair on his stomach glinted faintly, his eyes with their long, thick lashes closed.

She thinks of Lannie lying unconscious on her bed at home, the way Iris had found her that morning, her reddish hair spread out like a wound against the white sheets. She tries to form Lannie’s face in her mind’s eye, but in spite of that one explosion of memory in the Hilton in Addis, it eludes her. Will I even know her when I see her? she thinks. Maybe this woman people here call Lannie is somebody else, not the one she and Barney drove frantically to the hospital, her stomach full of James Springer’s sleeping pills. Or the one Iris took to the hospital in Swift Current to have an abortion.

She thinks again of Lannie’s years of silence— of her joy the day she left Chinook to find her father, and how happy for her she and
Barney had been, that she had at last gained the strength to take control of her life. And yet, from that much-desired beginning Lannie became even more lost, so much so that here I am searching for her in the most distant and foreign of countries.

Did I never do more than wait for her to speak to me because I was afraid of what would come out when she did open up? Is that why I didn’t even try to make her speak? She must have been full of — of what? Terror, Iris thinks, absolute terror for what would happen next to her life, and rage at what had already happened. And I didn’t want to hear it because I would have had to face what I am facing now — that there are not solutions to every problem, that there are not always happy endings to stories. And I thought that if Lannie never spoke, I would not have to hear what I couldn’t bear to know.

The road heading more or less north out of Kombolcha toward Dessie, Weldiya, and eventually Lalibela, winds around mountainsides revealing views of more low mountains, mostly having just enough trees left here and there to indicate to Iris that they must once have been covered with forests, and in level or gently sloping areas between or below them, those same small, square fields. Now and then they come around curves to find precipitous drop-offs to valleys far below. Even here on this narrow mountain road, although they are considerably fewer, people are walking, herding donkeys, cattle, sheep, and goats, or occasionally riding a donkey or a horse.

Frequently their vehicle is squeezed to the side of the road by huge trucks pulling a second, equally big box behind the first, both loaded with full burlap sacks. It occurs to her that they were passed by quite a few of these big trucks yesterday, too, on their way north to Kombolcha from Addis Ababa.

“What’s in those bags?” she asks Giyorgis. It seems the urge to ask questions, once succumbed to, is habit-forming.

“Grain,” he says, “going north to Tigray.”

“Oh,” Iris says, remembering the pictures Tim spoke of on television in the early eighties of starving people that had brought Lannie to this country. “Is there another drought up there?” Giyorgis looks as if he’s about to speak, thinks better of it, then says, “Maybe, I don’t know. They store it. Is always drought in this country. Each truck carries four hundred and fifty quintals.”

“How much is a quintal?” she asks.

“It is …” he says slowly. “Ah, yes! I think — is a hundred kilos.”
Iris makes an attempt at the mental arithmetic, but gives it up without solving it. A lot, that’s how much it is, a whole lot of grain. Especially when truck after truck squeezes past them, all heading north.

Is there or isn’t there a drought in Tigray? She ponders what she knows. As a result of too much starvation, too much neglect by the central government, both under the emperor and then the Dergue, the Tigrayan guerrilla movement had at last overthrown it and itself become the central government. Doubtless the Tigrayans had vowed that as the new government their own people would never starve again. She’s sure if she were in that position she’d do exactly the same thing.

Three hours later they’ve reached Weldiya where Giyorgis searches out a suitable place for Iris to eat lunch — suitable because the cleanest and most modern, at least from the exterior. Over what Iris is learning to view as the inevitable
injera
and a meat sauce, he tells her that from here they’ll travel for a while on “the Chinese Road.”

“The Chinese build it,” he says. “When Mengistu was here. I admire them for it. Chinese died building it. It is a good road.” As they’re about to leave Iris asks him to inquire where the ladies’ bathroom is and she’s led outside, across a courtyard and into a small, tiled, none-too-clean cubicle within which there is a wastepaper basket, a bucket of water, and a hole in the floor. Lord, she thinks. How could Lannie stand to live like this year after year?

The Chinese Road is indeed a better road, even if it is only gravel. For the first time since they left Addis they’re able to travel at fifty miles an hour. But it too curves precipitously as they climb higher and higher. In places they’re so high and the drop-off on one side or the other is so deep, she’s reminded of driving between Banff and Jasper, although the mountains here aren’t as high or as craggy, nor are their peaks snow-covered. In the distance, though, she can see a rugged blue range which Giyorgis tells her is the Simien Mountains where Ras Dashan, the highest mountain in Ethiopia, is. “Over four thousand metres, the fourth highest mountain in Africa.” The Simiens look like the Rockies.

This road is a little easier on Iris’s posterior and she loses herself in the constant surprises of the landscape that open to viewing around
each of the bends and spread out below each rise. The lower hillsides all look as if they were once tree-covered, but nothing is left now but low green shrubs here and there, and as for grass, there’s very little of it. At one point they come upon two men on foot driving a herd of more than fifty young camels, and she wishes she had a camera. They arrive at a fork in the road and Giyorgis says, “From here seventy-seven kilometres to Lalibela.”

The track they turn onto from the splendour of the Chinese Road is a narrow, dusty trail that reminds her of the road at home that runs through the back of Cypress Hills Park to Fort Walsh, bearing the sign Impassable When Wet. Giyorgis tells her that soon, during the rainy season, Lalibela will be unreachable by road. She isn’t surprised. This hardly deserves the name “road,” dusty, rocky, and unmaintained as it is. But although they’ve had to slow to about twenty-five or fewer miles per hour and more than once in low spots they drive through streams that have spread across the track, Iris doesn’t worry. She’s used to roads like this, and she keeps reminding herself that under the mud holes and the long stretches of loose dirt, unlike at home, here the bottom is rock, so that getting stuck is unlikely, even if they weren’t in a four-wheel drive. And she trusts her careful driver Giyorgis.

As they leave behind all vestiges of cities or towns or even large villages, the countryside appears wilder, the mountains closer and more rugged. It initially appears empty of people. Yet even without villages or people on the road now, it quickly becomes evident that the countryside is populated. Every hundred yards or so they see above on the mountainside or along the sides of the road another child herding the family’s five or six cows, or few stunted goats and sheep. She thinks how at home, around where she lives, she could drive for two hours or more and not see another living soul, not even meet or pass another vehicle.

The children all wave and shout and grin when Iris waves back. Some of them run to keep abreast of the car for a little way. Iris wonders where they live, and now and then she sees high above them on the sloping mountainside a cluster of two or three of the thatched-roof, conical houses. The walls seem to be made of some
sturdy but narrow vertical poles which must somehow be woven together and then plastered with mud.

“Sometimes they build with sorghum stalks,” Giyorgis explains. “That is why they grow very tall sorghum. And, also, it is firewood.” The huts blend so completely into the low shrubbery and stony earth of the hillside that she really has to look to find them.

And the children! When they slow to go around a rocky, rising curve, she gets a close look at a little girl standing about ten feet above their vehicle. She is barefoot and filthy, but then, who wouldn’t be in this dirt, Iris reminds herself, and she’s wearing what was once a dress, but is now better described as a rag, faded to a no-colour, torn or worn through in places. Worst of all, the child is perhaps four years old.

“They don’t go to school?” she whispers, meaning, Don’t they play? Don’t they have childhoods?

“No, too poor,” he says. “Or, there is no school.” He keeps both hands on the wheel and looks straight ahead so she knows he’s upset by this too, maybe ashamed or sorrowful for the state his country is in, or for his own helplessness. She even thinks this would be bearable if it were only one child, or only one four-year-old child, but the children are everywhere she looks. A four-year-old herder is commonplace.

Two hours have passed since they started out on this road and Iris’s back is beginning to ache from the constant jolting, and her tailbone is sore from two days of sitting. She would complain, but it wouldn’t do any good, so she keeps silent.

At last they see a village ahead. Village is perhaps too grandiose a word for this collection of eight or ten of those conical African huts with the thatched roofs, but as they draw closer they see a crowd of people gathered on the dusty track running between the huts their Land Rover is travelling down. Iris is apprehensive as Giyorgis slows their vehicle and, just short of the crowd, pulls to a stop at the side of the track. There are perhaps twenty people, nearly all adults, the men wearing what she guesses must be traditional garb, a short-skirted — well above the knees — togalike garment of natural-colour cotton, one long end brought up from the back to hang loosely down
over one shoulder, the women wearing layered, dresslike garments, worn and dirty, and held together at the waist with cords.

One of the women who must not have seen their approach is still wailing loudly and turning in circles in a movement that is like, but seems not to be quite, a dance. As their vehicle stops, she stops too, her wailing cut off in mid-cry.

So quickly Iris doesn’t see it happen, their vehicle is surrounded by villagers. They press up against the car, their faces within inches of hers and Giyorgis’s, she couldn’t open the door if she wanted to for their bodies, and Iris, aware of her rudeness, hastily rolls up the window she’d just rolled down. She feels acutely that there is only one thin layer of glass between her and these strangers. What puzzles her even as it frightens her is that all those faces three and four deep crowding in on her, staring at her, are not threatening. They are, instead, blank. Just, it seems to her, carefully, wilfully, blank.

Iris’s heart is pounding, her mouth has gone dry. Is this where she’s going to meet her death? Here, in this godforsaken corner of the earth, far from home and family and people who speak her own language? Will they soon drag her from the car and — she’s trembling through and through, about to say — no, to order — Giyorgis to put the vehicle in gear, his foot on the gas, they can at least try to escape, when she glances quickly at him. He’s speaking to one of the villagers, a man dressed in the traditional garment carrying a tall staff who towers over the others. Giyorgis turns to her and says calmly, “It is a funeral.”

“What? Where?” Now she sees at the far side of the crowd, a half-dozen men lifting a long, narrow pallet to their shoulders. Whatever is on the pallet is shrouded in cotton, but it takes Iris only a second to realize that the cotton covers a body.

“It is him,” Giyorgis says. When he gestures and she turns her head quickly to look, the people pushing up against her side of the car turn their heads to look too. Giyorgis says quietly to her, “It is only that they wonder. They are curious.” She recognizes that he understands how frightened she has been.

Now, from behind the huts two horses and their riders come into view, moving slowly to the track behind the Land Rover, going in the
direction Iris and Giyorgis have just come from. The riders are men wearing robes and wide white turbans; Iris notices the horses are small but strong-looking, and both are covered to their knees in gold-trimmed, green brocade ceremonial blankets that fasten at their chests and from which their tails protrude. Even while Iris is trying desperately to see everything, her heart still pounding from the fright she has had, the splendour of the horses’ blankets beside the people’s rags is not lost on her.