Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  Yet Lannie had to admit, when Abubech had asked, that even in the relatively speaking prosperous farming community she knew in Canada, the women traditionally, and for the most part, worked harder than the men.

  “The men work hard,” she said, trying to be fair. “During seeding and harvesting they put in long hours, but the women have to look after the children and the house and grow a garden and look after the harvesting and preserving of it. Lots of them still sew clothing and wash and iron the clothes, and patch them if they need it. Of course, they have all kinds of labour-saving devices these days, not like these women, but still they put in longer days than the men. They do the grocery shopping and cook all the meals, and drive the kids to hockey practice and music lessons and do community work and have part-time jobs if they can find them, and most of them help in the fields and the corrals too: they drive grain trucks or ride horses or combine or bale hay. And when it’s mealtime, they go into the house and the husband puts his feet up and reads the paper, and they go to the kitchen to start cooking.”

  “I thought North American women were supposed to be emancipated,” Abubech had said.

  “No women anywhere are fully emancipated,” Lannie had replied emphatically. This is about the only subject she can think of on which she has no ambivalence. “But if there can be degrees of liberation, for the most part, farm women are at the bottom of the heap in North America too. But they’ll never admit it. They’re disgustingly pious about their lives. I don’t know where they get that bilge from. Churches, maybe.” When she got like this Abubech always gave her the same look, perplexed, questioning a little.

  “What is bilge?”

  “It means stupid talk,” Lannie said. “In this case, pious untruths. All about a wife’s duty and what makes a good wife and a good mother. All that — nonsense.”

  “When you marry —” Abubech began.

  “I’ll never marry.” She was hard on men, she made them suffer. It killed her to see how she made them suffer, but she couldn’t seem to act any other way. So she tries to stay away from men. Since Tim, since Rob Sargent — it seems the only course. And, of course, Dimitri. So rather than adding year after year, man after man, to the load of guilt she staggers under, since Dimitri, she has become a nun. That’s what she is, a regular Mother Teresa.

  In the end, Abubech had taken her on as a sort of apprentice and for a trial period only, which she eventually had made permanent when Lannie had made herself as useful as she possibly could, even setting up the slide projector for Abubech when she had a speech to make, even carrying her briefcase for her, even driving her sometimes, following her through field after dusty field under the hot sun into hut after shabby, empty hut, to wait silently, making herself invisible, while Abubech went about her work.

  She is drifting into sleep and shakes herself awake. She has never fallen asleep before during one of these interviews; she’s surprised at herself. The drone of Abubech’s and Fatima’s voices that has been background to her ruminations now seems to grow louder, to break into chunks of sound that she recognizes as speech that she should be listening to. She picks up her pen again and directs her attention to them, trying to concentrate. Abubech turns to Lannie, raising her voice a little.

  “She says that she cares for the animals also. They have five goats and six cows. Did you get that?” Among other matters, in this survey they are counting the number of animals per household for which the women and their children are responsible. It’s an endless load these women carry, Lannie and Abubech constantly shake their heads over it to each other — in bad years often while eating only one meal a day: hauling water and finding fuel and bringing it home consume many hours of the day, never mind the food preparation by the most primitive methods which take forever, so there’s little time left for anything that might properly be called child-rearing. But most of all are the hours spent in the fields seeding, transplanting, weeding, watering, harvesting, and threshing. But nobody calls them farmers, only their husbands, who do less than half the work of farming are farmers.

  “Two,” Abubech says. “She’s been very lucky. She’s lost only two children.” Fatima is pouring water over the ground coffee beans and setting the mixture on the fire. Lannie doesn’t think she’ll be able to drink any and that will be an insult. Why not just admit she’s sick. But the thought of saying so makes her cringe. She’s praying the nausea will go away as silently as it’s come.

  Watching Fatima work, Lannie wonders as she always does, if this woman has undergone the practice euphemistically known as female circumcision. It makes her skin crawl every time she thinks of it, but Abubech will approach the topic in each interview, and she has to write down the replies, if the woman will reply, and if, first of all, Abubech has judged this is a woman she can ask. And she will ask, too, if her girl children have undergone it, who did it to them, and if the mother requested it to be done, and worst of all, how extensive the operation had been. And if any of her children had died because of it.

  Lannie’s stomach turns over again and she measures the distance with her eyes from where she sits to the hut’s entrance. If she has to, can she make it in time? She can tell by the smooth way their voices mingle and part that Fatima and Abubech are merely conversing in a friendly way now, that the interview is suspended. She relaxes, leans back and lets her head rest against the mud-and-stick wall.

  She has been drowsing again, not even realizing it, when the powerful aroma of coffee is right under her nose and she sits up abruptly, nearly knocking the small cup out of Fatima’s hand. What has she been thinking of? She’s frightened, unaccountably she is drenched with perspiration.

  “Buna, buna,” Fatima, crouched in front of her, is crooning holding out the small cup and saucer.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry!” Lannie says, but Fatima is laughing, apparently not noticing how upset Lannie is, or maybe she just thinks this is how ferenjis wake. She’s saying something else now, she has been calling gently to Lannie.

  “She says, ‘Wake up,’” Abubech says. Lannie takes the demitasse and saucer and, remembering to bow, says, “Betam amesegnalehu ‘ — thank you very much — which now rolls off her tongue easily. As Fatima turns to go back to her seat and Abubech lowers her head to coo at the baby she is holding, Lannie tips a bit of the thick, black liquid onto the ground behind her leg. She finds her nausea at the odour is not so bad, though the tukul is redolent with the fragrance of coffee, her sensors for smell must be flattening out.

  Abubech has decided that they will go up to Tigray. Their NGO has no project there, but the new government, Tigrayans themselves, are busy with reforestation projects, the terracing of fields — around two-thirds of the country’s farmland is on slopes of twenty-five degrees or more — and dam building and irrigation projects. They are even closing off a few of the worst-damaged fields to people and animals, to give them a chance to recover from centuries of overuse. On the lookout for any innovative projects that might help to provide for future food security, they’ve expressed interest in the project of which Abubech represents only a part. The men who run the project — the administrators, plant geneticists, and field specialists — have already been up there. Now Lannie and Abubech will make a preliminary survey of the area and draw up a plan of attack.

  “Data, always more data,” Abubech said. “We can only hope it will eventually translate into some kind of action — beyond the preservation of biodiversity, I mean. Into respect for these women farmers who do most of the work; into concerns for their education, their health, their …”

  But Lannie had stopped listening.

  At least part of the reason Lannie stays with her is so she can study this hope of Abubech’s, what it really is, how to get some herself. She has lost her own entirely, afraid what will happen if she cuts loose from Abubech’s lifeline. She thinks again of Iris and Barney. Lately she has been thinking of sending them a letter or a postcard, just to let them know she isn’t dead, but the thought of what to say ma
kes that grinding weariness overcome her again, so that she can hardly support the weight of the cup and saucer.

  She sets them on the sheepskin beside her and leans back, letting the soft voices of the two women, the occasional gurgle from the now contented baby, lull her. She knows she’s drifting again, falling into sleep. She thinks of her work, of the answers she should be writing down, but she can’t nudge herself into caring. Abubech will remember, or will write them down herself. Then she drops so deeply into sleep that even her dreams are pale layers far above the abyss into which she’s sunk.

  Holy Fire

  Tim Quennell’s apartment is on Spadina Avenue. Iris is just thinking that the neighbourhood looks pretty poor and rough when her taxi pulls up in front of a small grocery store with a handprinted sign in the window in Chinese characters.

  “It’s over there,” the driver says, pointing at a door with the street number above it beside the store’s entrance. She pays him, hesitating over the tip — too much? too little? — gets out, and goes up the sidewalk to the door. She’s surprised to find it’s unlocked, pushes it open and is confronted by a few feet of dingy hall and a steep, high flight of wooden steps. The walls are scarred and nicked and sport scrawls of faded graffiti, as if somebody had tried to scrub them off. A dusty spiderweb hangs from the ceiling and the ancient black rubber treads covering the wooden stairs have ragged pieces missing. Nervously, she creaks up the stairs to the upstairs hall where she walks slowly, stopping at the first of the two doors. She knocks.

  The door opens and Tim Quennell stands there staring down at her.

  “Iris!” he says, “I mean, Mrs. Christie.” He’s just as awkward as he was when she met him at least eight years earlier. No, ten. He looks a little older, but unmistakably the Tim she remembers sitting on the side of the bed in her guest room, his head in his hands, I love her, and Lannie unconscious in the hospital. “What are you doing here?” he asks. “Come in.” He’s smiling as he stands back to let her pass.

  The room she enters is surprisingly bright and clean. A potted lemon tree stands in a corner, its precisely shaped, dark green leaves etched in the sunlight against the white-painted walls; a red and blue suncatcher revolves slowly in the upper part of the window that looks out over shabby rooftops, casting a shower of coloured light. Music is playing softly in the background, Bach — she recognizes it from long-ago, fruitless piano lessons. Two posters hang on the wall to Tim’s left: a photograph of an Asian woman with long, straight hair playing a grand piano, with a Sold Out sign pasted across her back, and beside it, a faded, slightly tattered painting of a young, bright-faced Chinese man in a Mao jacket saluting, Chinese characters running down — or up — one side. The room is a kitchen and every surface — the table, the chairs, the counter — is covered with untidily stacked books, magazines, and papers.

  “I’m looking for Lannie,” she says abruptly, turning to him, tilting her face up to his, seeing again the thick, pale lashes, the unkempt, white-blond hair, the crookedly buttoned, rumpled shirt. He’s looking intently at her. Even with the window closed the steady roar of traffic is audible behind the music.

  “Lannie?” he says, taken aback.

  “Yes,” Iris says. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Not here. She left here — I mean, Toronto — at least seven or eight years ago.” He’s obviously both puzzled and surprised to find Iris doesn’t know where Lannie is.

  “Where then?” Iris asks, in her anxiety and her confusion — the tumult of the airport, the ride downtown in the taxi, the huge hotel — forgetting mannerliness, forgetting Tim’s feelings.

  He’s not smiling now. They stare at each other and Iris begins inwardly to crumble.

  “Would you like some tea?” he asks, after a second. Iris turns away from him, momentarily at a loss. She wants Barney, and thinks, irrationally, just like him not to be around when I need him.

  She sets her purse on the pile of books on a corner of the table and sits down hard on a yellow-painted wooden chair without being asked. He turns on a burner under the kettle and glances at her over his shoulder.

  “Hasn’t she been keeping in touch?” he asks finally. He occupies himself restacking books, lifting them from under her purse to pile them higher on a chair and setting two small, fragile blue-and-white Chinese cups on the table. For the first time she notices the old manual typewriter beside her. The piece of paper rising from it has short lines of type on it, a poem. Below them and outside, a siren begins to wail. She waits till it passes before she tries to speak.

  “It’s been a long time, years, since we heard from her. Her uncle — Barney — is — he’s — dead. Lannie doesn’t even know.” Tim is studying her with a gentle expression. He says softly, “I’m so sorry.” Suddenly what she hears in the echo of his voice are the voices at Barney’s funeral saying to her, over and over again, Sorry for your loss, Sorry for your loss. It confuses her and she says again, “Where is she?” hearing the quaver in her own voice.

  “I don’t know,” he says simply. “When she left here — when she left me” — he corrects himself — “she didn’t write to me either. When did you lose track of her?” He’s curious now, looking off into space, his eyes sad. Visibly he shakes himself, and when he speaks his voice is crisp, efficient. “She thought the world of you and her uncle. It’s hard to believe she wouldn’t even write.”

  Iris is remembering the whole sorry mess, how Lannie had come home from university, pregnant, although Iris didn’t know it, how she’d phoned Tim to come, that was when Iris guessed Tim must be the baby’s father, her suicide attempt before Tim even arrived. Then, how happy Lannie seemed to be the day she left their home for good, the abortion over and done with, her future open to her. “She did keep in touch at first. She worked in Vancouver for a while, in a library and then —”

  “Then she came to Saskatoon, where I was and we started living together. We came here, to Toronto.” She waits for him to go on with his story, but he has fallen silent and is staring into space again, forgetful of her presence.

  The kettle begins to whistle, he gets up slowly, more like an old man than one who can’t be much over thirty — about the same age as Jay, she finds herself thinking. I’m a poet, he’d said to Barney, in a dogged, angry way — and pours the water into the blue-and-white teapot that matches the handleless cups, carries it back to the table, pushes aside some magazines, and sets it between them. The door at the end of the room opens slowly, Iris catches a glimpse of a shabby red sofa and a desk with stacks of neatly piled paper on it, and another young man enters, staring down at a book open in his hands. He’s wearing a neatly pressed blue denim shirt and khaki pants and his lustreless black hair is perfectly barbered, she can see the teethmarks of his comb. He lifts his head — Iris sees he’s partly Chinese — and seeing Iris there, looks surprised and then embarrassed.

  “I made it, Allan,” Tim says quietly. “Want a cup?”

  “Uh, no,” Allan says, and glances with some curiosity at Iris, but Tim makes no move to introduce her. The glance he and Tim exchange stuns Iris: not smiles exactly, but carrying a mute intimacy that puzzles her. Allan goes back into the living room without looking at her again, shutting the door quietly behind him.

  “My roommate,” Tim says. “We edit a poetry journal together. He works in there, I work in here.” He laughs softly. “He’s neater than I am. We drive each other crazy.” Suddenly Iris wonders, are they a couple? But how can that be? She gives up the question as quickly as she has asked it.

  Tim stares down into his teacup, deep in thought, or perhaps, Iris thinks, he’s remembering Lannie, how she was in those days. When he spoke to her, fixing her clear yellow-brown eyes on him as if, until she heard his voice, she hadn’t remembered he was there.

  “We were happy, I guess. For a while, anyway. We both had Mcjobs” — Iris doesn’t know what this means, but lets it pass — “And she was finishing up her degree at U of T, at night, you know? I was writing a lo
t then. I don’t know, I just could write then.” He falls silent again, Iris waits. “Then she started seeing pictures on TV, awful stuff. You must have seen them too. For a while there you couldn’t avoid them, they were everywhere.” Iris sorts through possibilities in her mind and gives up. “The famine in Africa,” he says, as if he has realized she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “In Ethiopia. You remember? It was in ‘84. Late in the year.” Iris thinks, In 1986 we went to Expo in Vancouver. “At first she just looked at them, you know, like we all did. But then, after a while, it was all she talked about. It was like it haunted her. She was — she was obsessed.” He’s lost in his memory for a moment. “The shot that I think tipped her over the edge was of some aid workers loading babies — infants, orphans — into the back of a van to take them to an orphanage, I guess. Like they were so many cabbages. They were all crying and nobody was even trying to comfort them. Just loading them — it was the most awful thing.” He pauses, visibly swallowing. “Anyway, she talked me into going to Ottawa with her to volunteer to go there — to Ethiopia — to help, as relief workers, you know?”

  “What?” Iris says, surprised. She recalls Angela’s postcard. “What about Iraklion?”

  “What about it?” he replies. “I don’t know anything about Iraklion.” When Iris doesn’t respond, he goes on. “Of course they turned us down, we couldn’t do anything. We weren’t nurses or doctors or nutritionists or whatever, and half of Canada was lined up to volunteer. And nobody knew how to do anything.” He sighs again and puts his hand on his teacup, forgetting it’s empty. Iris is frozen to her chair, the image of Lannie crouched in front of the TV, suffering anguish, when Iris had been picturing her happy at last, overwhelms her.