Gospel (114 page)

The pilot and copilot appeared in front of the cockpit door and smiled; a man up front knelt before them and kissed their hands. Not necessary, not necessary, the pilot shooed him away. The pilot announced in Arabic: we must send to Bahir Dar for a repair truck, and then we will take off again and get to Addis Ababa. He announced this with such casualness that O'Hanrahan was momentarily confused as to their ever having been in serious trouble. Was this a common happening on this air service?

The round-faced gentleman in the dashiki across the aisle asked O'Hanrahan in musical West African English, “You thought we were to die, mon?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, my daughter is to marry dees next week and it has been foretold dat I should be at her side, mon. So we could not die.”

“Wish I'da known that,” O'Hanrahan said, breathing more normally.

“No no,” the man said cheerily, getting a bag down from the compartment above him. “There was no doubt, sha.”

Lucy fell back in the seat and put her head down, exhausted.

O'Hanrahan then let go of Lucy's hand. He was mildly troubled, then ashamed that he could not declare his love for her in what could have been a last gesture. I am stone inside, he thought plainly, I am desert.

(
And I will take away your stony heart and I will give you a heart of flesh.
)

“You all right, Luce?” he asked, still shaken.

She nodded.

Up front, many passengers were going to the door of the plane and lowering themselves in the open doorway for a survivable jump to the ground. Once there, the ground was kissed and the earth praised, then they stood with outstretched arms to the sky and praised again the wondrous Allah, the Exalted, the Evident, the Deferrer, the Enduring, the Incomparable, on through the 99 Holy Names. They cried aloud: is He not a good God?

(Well, Patrick, what do you say?)

“I say,” he said to Lucy, “we're getting off this plane. No more surprises. We're in Ethiopia and we can hitch a ride from here to Gonder and get a bus to Addis.”

“But maybe we should—”

“No more plane rides,”
he issued.

“Okay, just a minute,” said Lucy. “I need to sit for a moment and … I feel weak.” She reached into her handbag with shaking hands for her water bottle and took a long sip. She watched O'Hanrahan go to the front of the plane and receive assistance, comically, from several Sudanese men who helped lower his heft to the dirt road below. Lucy closed her eyes and experienced peace, breathing deeply and rhythmically.

I know, Holy Spirit, what You're up to, she prayed.

(Yes, My child?)

A moment ago all I could see ahead was death and the end of things. Now I am alive and my future has been returned to me. What a small burden it is to me now whether a child is part of it. How happy I should be to bear it and give it life!

(You know We are with you always.)

So forgive me when I inform you that I am unregenerate. I still don't want to be pregnant. Having come so near death, now, more than ever, I want my freedom.

Then from out of nowhere, she imagined David McCall. Somewhere in this land, out in this vast scrub. He could be the key to my future happiness, she decided calmly. I will confess my sins to him, put it in his beautiful hands. She found herself looking at the man in the dashiki and kofi upon his head who was grinning in radiant joy:

“My daughter is to be married, yah? Lemme tellya sha, God tole me I was to dance at de feast, and God do never lie. No sha, God do never lie.”

*   *   *

Lucy opened her eyes to the sound of helicopters flying over. She wondered where she was briefly, then she flashed back to the plane going down, the short trip to the Degoma refugee camp where they had been offered lodging, then she doubted it had ever happened … She sat up straight in bed, realizing it had. She was in the nurses' barracks and a crack of light shone under the heavy canvas tent flap.

Lucy sat up on the creaking bed and, careful not to disturb a sleeping nurse two beds away, went over to the tent entrance hung with thick black material. It was still light outside; very late afternoon. Jeeps and medical supply trucks drove in and out of the camp replacing the dust, stationary in the air. She surveyed the camp. The aid-workers and tent hospital were on one side of the road; on the other in a scrubby field began the tent villages of the refugees.

Lucy observed a line of miserably thin Ethiopians being marched to an aid station, just arrived, the bawling children, the silent mothers still too scared to hope for food even though they were now so close, the men who were expected to provide for their families marching automatically in some trance of utter humiliation and surrender. She observed this line of people, strangely patient and unexcited, plodding along, and Lucy comforted herself that at last there was food for them, that they were saved, and she warmed herself with this thought until her eyes happened upon an emaciated woman limping behind the others, fingerless, and—with a shock it registered—no nose on her face.

She turned away. Leprosy. A treatable thing now, but perhaps her village, wherever it was, whoever destroyed it, didn't know that. Her children, altering their pace only to swat at a fly, followed blankly. Surely they had the disease too, but there was time for them. What must they think, observing their mother; had their little minds made their peace with that any more than they had found some way to accept their homelessness, this eternal war, the atrocities, the numerous brothers and sisters they had already lost?

“Leprosy,” said a nurse at Lucy's side, standing near the tent flap.

“Yeah, so I guessed.”

Lucy and the nurse, who was about Lucy's age, with short hair, sort of mannish, exchanged names. Lucy learned the nurse had served a summer with World Vision, and now was here with Catholic Relief Charities. “Though I'm no Catholic, these days,” she added.

Lucy shared her thoughts. “They look so … indifferent.”

“That's the hunger,” said the nurse. “A phase of starvation. They spend all day in these camps staring off into space, barely able to move, even when there's food a few yards away. We can't assume they'll come get it even when it's right next to them. We've had mothers starve to death in sight of food. They don't think straight.” The nurse turned to go inside the tent, her shift over. Lucy was struck by her passionless assessment: “But then a woman loses a kid and you see her cry. They're still alive in there.” The nurse averted her eyes from Lucy as she said, “There's a woman in the east tent city who just lost her seventh child this morning. Imagine.”

The nurse ducked into the tent and Lucy stood there watching a next wave of refugees file by. Lucy was miffed that O'Hanrahan had deposited her for that well-deserved nap of deep, postcrisis sleep without leaving a clue to his whereabouts. She turned and walked to where she imagined the headquarters of this camp to be, and where O'Hanrahan might be.

The headquarters was an abandoned service station, the pumps long ago removed. Where a large glass pane once was, canvas flaps hung down. There was a crowd of Ethiopian aid-workers milling around the door with an array of problems, waiting wordlessly and patiently, inhumanly calm … or maybe it was some deeper philosophical patience that took its source from Africa itself. She wondered if she should wait in this line, and then reasoned it might be days before these people's needs were met.

Lucy shyly stuck her head in the doorway, into the surprisingly clean front office. “Anyone speak English?” she asked.

One aid-worker did, and directed Lucy back to the street and told her to walk into the village, such as this road junction was, and find the stone building with
Scuola
engraved upon it, a school building from the brief Italian colonial days of the '30s. O'Hanrahan would be there near the only working phones.

Lucy dodged two snarling wild dogs that, after a bark or two, had no interest in her. She forded the rutted street, muddy with dung and filth, to enter the council building.

“Lucy, over here!” cried O'Hanrahan.

He sat in the back of a vast warehouse that was once an auditorium, now filled with aid-workers and local bureaucrats. Two black phones, with small lines to use each of them, stood at one table and a policeman between them, listening in; there was also a radio set against the other wall with a doctor yelling to make himself heard into the microphone. O'Hanrahan, chipper and alert, a paper cup of something in his hand, waved her back to his table.

“You managed to find a cocktail out here?”

“It's not that bad,” he said, looking into the cup at the brownish mixture. His tone suggested it was that bad. “It's
swa.
Made from fermenting bread. An inventive people, the Tigreans.”

A policeman nearby looked quickly at O'Hanrahan, who had spoken the name of the forbidden rebel faction.

“Wanna sip?”

“No thank you.”

“I've called the U.S. Embassy in Addis and they were relieved to hear we had survived. They're sending someone up to fetch us from the capital. By car, thank God.”

Lucy now noticed an older priest who was rambling in some language to himself, Abba Selama. Lucy noticed the extraordinary face of the priest: he was obviously old in his eyes and in his gray beard, but his face and princely cheekbones seemed young, as if a young black actor had not too persuasively pasted an old man's beard on his smooth face.

“Abba Selama has been kind enough to come down from Debra Istafanos to vouch for me,” explained O'Hanrahan, “since the police here think it's best for us not to go anywhere until the people from the U.S. Embassy arrive. We didn't miss getting arrested by much. Anyone who drops in like we did is thought to be a spy, and they can be shot without a trial.”

“You sure know how to make me feel secure, sir.”

O'Hanrahan shuddered uncontrollably.

Lucy feared a convulsion. “Are you all right?”

“It's the
swa,
Luce. Brrrr, this packs a punch! Sure you don't want a sip? A little sip?”

Lucy tersely: “No thank you.”

The priest turned to Lucy, put his hand briefly on his heart, took Lucy's hand politely, then returned his hand to his heart, smiling.

“Consider yourself blessed, Miss Dantan.” O'Hanrahan braved another sip of the bread brew. “Good God in heaven…”

“Stop drinking it,” she snapped, irritated, “if it's so awful.” Lucy eyed the radiophones. “How's the phone situation here?”

“The black phones are strictly third-world. The trick is to wait in line for time on the radio set and make a satellite call. You calling those African datelines again?” Lucy's impatience prompted him to be helpful. “See that man there? The doctor in the filthy white coat, black guy with a hundred pens in his pocket? That's the head of this show down here. Ask him if you can place a call. And, Lucy, pretend it's life-or-death business so they'll give you time on the radiophone.”

She nodded gratefully.

Lucy took from her handbag the address of the Austcare camp that David McCall had given her and showed it to the chief aid-administrator. This man knew quite a bit about the ups and downs of refugee camps and aid stations during this phase of the rebellion. It turned out that David's Debra Zebit camp had moved due to the war. What's more, he told her, foreign-aid supply lines had been cut off by President Mengistu because this villain didn't want to risk feeding any of his enemy and so had confiscated the supplies of international aid and sold it to other poor countries for profit in order to purchase more Russian and Cuban arms. Austcare had moved westward to Debra Tabor and was working with an existing camp set up by the Red Cross and CARE.

Having learned this information and the Debra Tabor frequency, she asked the radio operator to place an outgoing message to David McCall. She got a doctor who spoke broken English, then an American nurse who knew that Australians had joined their camp but had never heard of him, then two people who spoke something thoroughly unrecognizable. And then the next second:

“Hello?”

“Uh, David?”

“Yes, who is this?” He sounded worried. Surely no one would call with good news, or just to say hi.

“Lucy Dantan. You remember from a couple months ago?”

“It must be costin' you a fortune to call me here!”

“I'm in Ethiopia. Right down the road.”

“Naawwwww…”

“Yes, about five miles out of…” She asked quickly for where this was. “Degoma, near Gonder.”

“Well, that's not too far from me. About sixty miles?”

“Yeah, well, I wanted to call. If it was near, I hoped I could visit, hitch a ride with some aid people.”

“I have a Jeep,” he said lightly, as if picking her up was no more trouble than a run down to the store back in Chicago.

“Yeah, but you have work to do—”

“I'll just go pick up our supplies a day early in Addis Zemen and bop up there.”

“But the war…”

“Oh, we're fine for now. They even ran bus-tours up to Lalibela last week.”

“I'd love to see you.”

“Well, I'd like to see you too.” He laughed freely, putting the phone aside. “Hey, John, Georgie—guess what? That girl I's tellin' you about, she's in friggin' Ethiopia!” Then he put the phone to his mouth again. “Is Patrick with you?”

“Believe it or not, yes.”

“Christ almighty!”

She wanted credit for her adventurousness. “Our plane got shot down by the SDLP and we ditched it near a town called Aykel and have hooked up with the Degoma camp until someone from our embassy comes to fetch us.”

David squealed with delight. “Lord Jesus, our poor little evacuation pales beside that! Well, welcome to Ethiopia! ‘T only get worse!”

“Not if I see you.”