Garden of Eden (39 page)

An hour later Giyorgis knocks with polite firmness on her door. He drives her to a tiny souvenir shop, a three-sided corrugated-iron shelter squeezed in between two others. As they park she sees, a hundred feet or so down the road, a pair of tourists have lined up three little girls and are taking a picture of them with a camera mounted on a tripod. The little girls stand shyly together, not quite smiling, barefoot in the dust, their pathetic rags that do for dresses looking
picturesque. The man taking the photo and his tall, slender wife in the pale khaki safari suit with the shoulder-length, silvery-blonde hair, which somehow only wealthy women seem to have, are both smiling warmly at the little girls. A stab of pity goes right through Iris’s chest when she sees this and, feeling herself helpless in the face of this obtuseness, this cruelty, she twists away from the sight.

“I hope they paid them well,” she says to Giyorgis, who doesn’t reply. Iris is sure very little if any money will change hands, even though she knows it isn’t fair to assume this. Still, she wants the Europeans’ evil to be total. She doesn’t want to have to partly forgive them. But — isn’t she a rich tourist too?

A gang of boys about ten or eleven years old have been following her ever since they stopped their Land Rover in front of the shop and got out. She and Giyorgis go inside the shop and with Giyorgis interpreting for her, although the young shopkeeper speaks a little English, she buys a small, handwoven rug and a Lalibela cross. She doesn’t really want either one and she refuses to bargain. Everyone here is so poor, it seems to her that to try to get the price lowered or not to buy anything would be criminal.

Bowing and thanking them, she and Giyorgis leave the shopkeeper and his two helpers and walk back to their vehicle, the band of boys still following, chattering and giggling with each other in the way of small boys everywhere. A handful of men squat in the dirt along the wall, apparently with nothing to do, nowhere to go.

As she gets back into the vehicle, she’s distracted by a sudden racket from the boys. Two of them seem to be fighting. But when she pauses to look, she sees that one boy is abusing another. Although they’re about the same size, the stronger boy is wearing trousers, a shirt, and actually has on shoes, so Iris thinks of him as the rich boy. The other one, whose arm is being twisted so that he falls down in the dust, tears streaking down his dirty face, has the beggars’ no-colour, dresslike rags wrapped around him, he’s barefoot, carrying a staff, and his arms and legs are thin as sticks.

She shouts at the rich boy, “Leave him alone!” for the beggar child has sunk to the ground wailing under the pressure the other boy is exerting on his arm. Too weak from hunger and malnutrition to fight
back, Iris thinks, but the rich boy calls back to her, grinning, “Sister, he is very bad boy!” Iris is so enraged she’s almost crying herself. She feels Giyorgis standing helpless by her side, wanting to silence her, caught between her anger, his need to placate her, and whatever demands this community will make on him that she doesn’t know about or understand.

“It doesn’t look that way to me!” she shouts, holding back the accusation,
You hideous little bully,
out of deference to Giyorgis, out of not understanding anything that is going on here, out of not being in her own country. Giyorgis calls something in Amharic to one of the men lounging against the rough shop wall and pretty soon three or four other men join in and a loud conversation among the men is going on, nobody looking at the two boys or at Iris, while the beggar child sits on the ground crying and the bully stands above him, still grinning at all the adults who ignore him.

Iris refuses to look at any of the men, just sits staring straight ahead through the windshield while the words fall around her. Giyorgis doesn’t interpret any of what they are calling back and forth to her. She doesn’t even want to know what the men are saying to each other. It doesn’t matter. She hears a placatory note in Giyorgis’s rapid Amharic; she has put him on the spot, they probably all think she should just mind her own rich Western woman’s business, what does she know of their struggles and their suffering and the reason why a little beggar child has to lie crying in the dust, too thin and weak to defend himself?

“Take me to the hotel,” she says. Tears stream down her cheeks; she wipes her face furiously. Giyorgis says nothing, does something funny with his face, wiping away emotion; he starts the vehicle and inches away; Mrs. Rich White Woman having a tantrum. What is she doing in this terrible country anyway?

Lannie, she reminds herself. You’ve come for Lannie. But she finds she can’t remember who Lannie is or why she so badly wants her to come home. For one bewildering second she almost asks Giyorgis.

Alone again in her room, waiting for dinner, she throws herself back on her bed. But she’s too upset even to close her eyes or lie still. Every time she does she sees the corpse in the hole in the rock wall
lying there like a cast-off shoe, she sees the forty-year-old beggars who look seventy, she sees the beggar child’s tears and the sticks that are his arms and legs, she sees the men, how thin they all are — and dust and dirt everywhere, not a blade of grass.

She would tell herself,
It’s no use thinking about it, there’s nothing you can do.
But turning away no longer works, she can’t let this pass. If she does, she is indeed the fool she’s always suspected deep down that she is. She knows now finally, two-thirds of the way through her life, that she’s responsible for these people. And she will never turn away again.

When Giyorgis knocks to let her know it’s dinnertime, she gets up, combs her hair, puts on a fresh blouse, and goes out to meet him. All through dinner, in the midst of the laughter and multilingual chatter of the other tourists, she and Giyorgis sit in silence eating, or make polite conversation about the food, about going back to Kombolcha in the morning. And all the while she sees the little girls smiling in the dust, the barefoot infants herding animals on the rocky mountain slopes, the women bent double under their loads of water or firewood.

After dinner there is folk dancing and singing. This isn’t arranged by the hotel — first a thin young man comes around to each table and asks the tourists if they will pay to watch the dancers. Iris doesn’t care, but she opens her purse and pays what he asks. The dancers are a troupe of local men and women, and they give a rousing performance full of the vigour and the sense of fun of the non-professional. They are accompanied by drums and by stringed instruments, which Giyorgis says are called a
kirar,
which is like a small guitar, and a
masinko,
which has only one string.

As the program goes on, the men, laughing at their own exertions and at each other, are clearly trying to outdo each other in the display of finesse and speed with which they dance. Grinning, they snap their heads in unison to the left and to the right, knees wide apart and bent, hands on their waists, their torsos tilted back and rippling effortlessly. The women advance, shaking their shoulders, their small
breasts bouncing in a way that at home would be considered provocative, but that here has a beauty and a clarity of meaning that Iris recognizes as the frank joy of being female.

Despite the shouting, the drums, the clapping and cries from the watching tourists, after a while Iris finds she can’t concentrate on the display before her. She can only think of all she has seen, of the reason she has come here, and finds herself sitting among strangers in this shameful, counterfeit palace. The noises fade, the swaying, red-banded white skirts, the full white cotton trousers, the golden arms and hands and faces of the dancers blur.

In the shadows around them she sees Lannie’s face, but finds she’s no longer sure that the woman she has been scurrying after really is the child she and Barney raised. For the first time it occurs to her that if Lannie had wanted to be found, she’d have written; if she needed help and wanted it from Iris and Barney, she’d have asked for it; if she’d wanted her brother and sister and her father, she’d have stayed with them. What Lannie? Who is she?

Now, in the cacophony of voices, a singing that sounds to Iris more like wailing, in the insistent, high-pitched jingle of the sistrum and the unrelenting rhythmic boom of the drums, she feels herself transported, removed. It’s as if she’s sitting here at her table in front of the performers, while at the same time part of her is viewing the scene from above and beyond it. And suddenly, hovering above, she understands clearly that when Barney died, he did not love her.

Sitting here in this remote dust heap of a town, she can hide it from herself no longer. He wanted children, he wanted us to have babies of our own. He said so, but I couldn’t hear him; I wouldn’t hear him.

Abruptly, a huge weight has descended on her. It is the weight of knowing her own selfishness finally destroyed Barney’s last shred of love for her. She can’t move, she can’t stand up, she can’t breathe.

And I came all this way,
she marvels at herself while in front of her the dancers shake their shoulders in frenzy, the drummers drum frantically, the singers keen in an eery, minor timbre that makes her want to throw herself on the ground and wail along with them,
I came all this way, all the way to the dark side of the world, to this ancient, stony kingdom so I wouldn’t have to face myself.

Iris sleeps badly, fitfully, waking over and over again to a noise she thinks is an intruder or to some dreaming imperative that vanishes when she opens her eyes to find herself in her dark room, the stone of the hotel absorbing and deadening all sound so that it’s as quiet as a night back on the farm. She has been dreaming, she knows, but what the dreams are about she can’t remember, only a veil of figures, pale green and blue, soldiers maybe, but what they were doing she can’t bring back.

At first light she gives up, extricates herself from her knotted bedcovers, and begins to get out of bed, but her body is stiff and aching, her eyes feel grainy, her mind buzzes stupidly; her head fills with recurring images, as if in a film projector gone mad. She puts both hands up and rubs her face hard.

Her old life shines in that space behind her eyelids. This morning it appears as one of those small glass domes inside of which a plastic scene is anchored, Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, plastic snow drifting downward to glitter on the village rooftops. The farm, her own village, hovers there for an instant before it slowly dissolves and vanishes. A confection, a falsity, a foolish dream.

There’s still no water, so without washing she pulls on yesterday’s clothes. There’s no electricity either, and it’s so early the room is still deep in shadows. She feels claustrophobic, in need of fresh air and space to wash away the night’s accumulated woes. And she has to wait for Giyorgis to get up before they can leave. She pockets her key, opens her door quietly, and, concentrating on holding it so it will shut noiselessly, steps into the hall.

“Sister,” someone whispers loudly near her ear. She spins around, taking in her breath sharply, stifling an exclamation. A tall, very thin man she guesses to be in his forties is standing behind her, one hand raised as if he meant to touch her shoulder and then thought better of it. “I must speak to you,” he whispers urgently to her startled face. “I wait here — all night,” he says, “so I may speak to you.” Then, while she’s still getting over the fright he has given her, he walks a couple of steps down the hall, going in the opposite direction from the lobby, stops and looks back. “Come,” he whispers, his eyes glittering, when he sees she’s not following.

Iris hesitates, reluctant to follow a total stranger in this strange place, thinking of the benefits to him of kidnapping a
ferenji,
but then she reminds herself that she’s in a modern hotel inside a guarded compound, that on three sides there is a sheer drop of twenty feet or more. Probably the grounds are patrolled regularly too. All she has to do is scream and people will come running from all directions.

He says again, “Come, sister, please.” The way he says it, in a tone more imploring then commanding, and all the things she saw yesterday — especially all of that — overcome her caution. She follows him in a way that’s almost angry, nevertheless rising onto her toes so as not to make a sound on the stone floor. They turn the corner and walk a few feet to an exit leading into the hotel garden, but where an angle of the building shields them from the view of the guards at the compound entrance. He holds the door open for her, then follows her as she goes through.

It is going to be another cloudless, bright day, but this early there are still shadows in the clefts of the mountains around the town and high up the sky is still a deep night blue. The air is chilly and she shivers. The man stops and faces her. He is darker skinned than most Ethiopians she has met and she guesses from this he is a farmer. Or is he a priest, who apparently are also farmers? Does he perhaps look a bit familiar? Maybe she saw him yesterday in one of the rock churches, or leaning with his companions against the wall in one of the passages.

“Yes?” she says uncertainly, staring up into his eyes. He bends his head toward her and stoops a little from his shoulders to better compel her attention.

“I ask you, sister. We have no food.”

“What?” she says, although she has heard him perfectly well.

“Sister, you must tell the NGOs to come.” He’s treating her as if she’s his last hope in the world, as if she absolutely must understand him. As the import of his message strikes her at last, she takes in her breath sharply. “The NGOs,” he repeats urgently. “You must tell them to come. You are Canadian — we need Canadian grain.” How does he know she’s Canadian? Oh, yes, her passport presented at the desk. She wonders suddenly if the hotel guards let him come in. Or is he, maybe, one of them? Still perplexed, she asks, “But — but won’t the government help you? I saw all those truckloads of grain going up to Tigray —” Abruptly he drops his eyes from hers.

“We cannot get government grain,” he mutters, as if he is ashamed to say this, or afraid. After a second’s hesitation Iris says, “What?” again, thinking she couldn’t have heard him right. Aware she’s frowning, thinking out loud, she says, “But they’re building that new air strip —” meaning that if they can build a new air strip, surely they have the money and the means to transport food here? He shrugs and looks over the barbed-wire fence to where the distant mountain Giyorgis told her is Abuna Yosef is flooding with the clear, pale light of the rising sun.