Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  “Why are there so many men on the streets in Addis Ababa? Don’t they have jobs?”

  “No jobs, no. And they are soldiers, you know? After war they are not soldiers and they have no jobs so they come to Addis and they wait.” He shrugs. Now she notices that many of the people on this road are children.

  “Aren’t the children in school? Is it a holiday?”

  “Some go to school,” he says vaguely.

  Iris contents herself for a while watching the scenery they’re passing through. It is a landscape stunning in its strange beauty, its — compared to her own vast, spread-out landscape — small-scale ruggedness. Now she can see clearly where most of the trees have been cut off the mountainsides, she guesses by the smell in the air which she’d noticed filling the air in Addis Ababa this morning too, for firewood. She asks Giyorgis.

  “They cut all the trees,” Giyorgis says. “All. They have no fuel, so the trees — they go.” He shrugs his shoulders in a way that conveys regret. “And the government, it bring eucalyptus trees here, where no eucalyptus grows. Because if you cut, it grows back fast.”

  After a while they pass three tall, skinny pack camels being led down the side of the road. She has never seen camels before in her life and her delighted exclamation makes Giyorgis laugh. The farther they go, the more Iris relaxes and begins to enjoy herself, especially since her driver is friendly without being forward, solicitous of her comfort.

  They stop for a break at Debre Berhans, which Giyorgis tells her means, “Mountain of Light,” but all Iris sees is poverty everywhere. It’s hard to tell how big the town is since much of it is out of sight behind or below trees, or disappears behind hills. The houses she does see are small and shabby, made of a muddy-looking plaster with sheets of corrugated iron for roofs, and, in fact, she isn’t sure which are houses and which are businesses or offices. But the people seem cheerful — the children follow her giggling, one little girl shyly taking her hand, until Giyorgis speaks loudly to them in Amharic and they fall back and drift away.

  “They beg,” he says angrily, and she sees he’s embarrassed. They had been saying, “Give me pen. I stu-dent,” and “Give money,” and rubbing their stomachs in a woeful way that Iris recognizes as bad acting, but some of them are so thin and ragged she suspects that though the begging may be a performance, the need is real. To these she gives out her few coins, the denominations of which are so small they’re worth practically nothing in Canadian money. Following Giyorgis’s lead, she ignores the few adult beggars whose absolute destitution appals her no less than when she first saw it. And, of course, there are the maimed and crippled ones, their condition so shocking that it upsets her. How could Lannie have lived with this all these years? The town itself looks as if it is teetering on the edge of total decay.

  Giyorgis says, “In sixteenth century Ahmad Ibn Gran stopped here to get ready for more war.” Iris doesn’t know who Ahmad Ibn Gran is or what war Giyorgis is referring to. It occurs to her that she could ask, that she has spent a lot of her life not asking questions because answers only complicate life. She wonders, Is that why I turned away from university? She thinks of a girl in her Grade Twelve class from a Christian fundamentalist home who’d turned down a scholarship to university, explaining that she was afraid university would make her lose her faith. What was I afraid of? Iris wonders. She turns to Giyorgis.

  “Who was Ahmad Gran?” she asks. “What war are you talking about?” He stops walking, turns to look directly down at her, taking note of her interest. She doesn’t look away.

  “He was Muslim,” he says, opening the door of the café he’s picked out for them to snack in. “He invade Ethiopia and destroy many, many things. Books, churches. Killed many people. Ethiopia was Christian since fourth century. But Gran, he destroyed Aksum. Everything. But not all obelisks. Some still lie there.” He indicates the ground with his hand.

  “Aksum?” Iris asks.

  “Where Ethiopia begin,” he says, as if he’s amazed she doesn’t know this. “North. Is now Tigray. Aksum was powerful kingdom. Was a city, Aksum, too. Gran destroyed.” He clearly wants to tell her more, but is hindered both by his inadequate command of English and some other, interior control he seems to have placed on himself. Maybe someone has told him that too much history bores ferenjis.

  Lunch consists of a greyish, rolled flatbread which Giyorgis tells her is injera, and meat in a highly spiced gravy which apparently is supposed to be mopped up with the bread, using one’s fingers. Iris tries valiantly to eat, but tears spring to her eyes and she wheezes for a moment when she swallows what must be a piece of crushed chili, if chilies grow in Ethiopia, and Giyorgis laughs, then commiserates. The owner of the restaurant brings her a fork.

  Then they are off again toward Kombolcha through country slightly more intriguing and various than before. At one point, the great valley Iris had spotted earlier off to the east reaches to within a half-kilometre of the roadside and she gets a closer look at the ruggedness of its terrain. She has the feeling that they’re climbing higher too, although the road runs up no obviously steep hills. Every few kilometres Giyorgis has to slow down and honk so that people herding cows or goats or a few small donkeys can get themselves and their animals out of the way of their vehicle.

  At one point he laughs out loud and, turning to her, says, “Do you know this story? Once a donkey, a goat, and a dog each went for a ride in a — a —” he fumbles for an English word, “contract — taxi. The donkey paid his fare, so he owns the road. That is why he does not move off it when I go by. But the goat, he did not pay. That is why he runs away each time. The dog, he paid, but the taxi driver ran away with his change.” He pauses for drama, grinning. “And that is why the dog barks when I go by.”

  It is a charming story, Iris thinks; it pleases her that Giyorgis would tell her this folktale.

  But this road is also in a scandalous state of disrepair; her bottom is getting sore from so much jarring, and she has to change position often to keep her back from aching. When she remarks on the state of the road, Giyorgis explains that the Italians built it during the Second World War. “For five, six years they were here,” he says. “Before we drove them out.” Oh, that’s why the waiter offered me spaghetti, Iris thinks.

  By the time they reach Kombolcha it’s after six and dark, and Iris is tired. Giyorgis apparently knows the town well because without hesitation he leaves the main street with its streetlights and drives directly down street after bumpy, unpaved, and unlit street until they arrive at the end of a road tucked into a dark corner of the town. The inn gate opens, Iris catches a glimpse of the two men in long robes, one of them with something — a rifle? — slung over his shoulder, who’ve opened it. Giyorgis drives through, and the men close it behind them.

  The Land Rover’s headlights reveal a long, single-storey, white-painted building with a veranda running its length at the level of the parking lot. Iris has a strange feeling in her stomach, a kind of tingling, from the sight of that gun — if it was a gun. She does not know what it is to protect them from, has so far seen nothing of which to be frightened. But then, she thinks, I suppose the only way to keep those who have so little from trying to take more for themselves is with guns. It is a sobering thought.

  They park, get out, stretch, and go inside. Branches laden with scarlet blooms brush Iris’s hair as she enters the inn behind her driver. In her exhaustion she’d forgotten until this minute that behind this wall Lannie may be eating dinner, or lying asleep in a bed, or sitting studying, as she used to do at home on the farm in Saskatchewan, her books spread out before her, her long, fine hair glinting red in the desk lamp’s light. She begins to tremble, and her stomach goes queasy before she wills it to stop.

  Yes, Lannie Stone and Dr. Abubech Tefera have rooms here. The middle-aged woman who tells them this is tall and big-boned, dressed in a plain wool skirt, a white blouse with a shawl draped loosely over it that also covers her hair. She speaks surprisingly colloquial English. But
, she goes on, they are not presently in, they have flown up to Tigray for a few days and are expected back on the weekend. But of course there are rooms here for Giyorgis and Mrs. Christie, and the dining room remains open until ten. She’s very polite, but casually so, in an unEthiopian way. When Iris congratulates her on her English, she replies that she had an aunt and uncle in the United States and as a girl visited there often, once staying almost two years. “After the war my uncle has come home, here.”

  Giyorgis, ever-mindful of his duty to Iris, begins to explain about the war, but Iris, tired as she is, interrupts. “I remember. The Tigrayan freedom fighters fought Mengistu and the Dergue and won. In 1991,” she adds.

  “Indeed, it is so,” Giyorgis says. The woman says proudly, “I am Tigrayan.”

  Iris notices that Giyorgis is looking at his shoes. She remembers Giyorgis isn’t Tigrayan, and she wonders what has just passed between them that she hasn’t understood.

  “Under the Dergue our country was Communist,” the woman remarks. “Communists!” she says, as if the word means some kind of terrifying, disgusting plague. Which reminds Iris of the many red stars, rusting and broken, or just the faded outline of ones that had been removed, over gateways or on public buildings, she saw both from the taxi, and today as they drove through Addis.

  As if she’s remembering her manners, the innkeeper says, “I am the widow of Afewerk.” She gives her own name too, but it has too many syllables, and Iris fails to catch it and doesn’t like to ask the woman to repeat it. “I’m pleased to have you as a guest here.”

  Iris thanks her, warmed by the kindness of this greeting, but the fact that once again she has missed Lannie and has no choice but to stay here or go back to Addis and wait there is slowly sinking in. Giyorgis is waiting for her to make a decision. So is the woman who stands with them in the room which can’t properly be called an office but serves as one. Iris is getting used to the poverty of Ethiopia and finds she doesn’t even miss the fake-wood counter, the computer humming insistently in the background, the swimming pool in the room next door to the office, or the polite indifference of the desk clerks.

  She teeters a little and Giyorgis steadies her carefully by putting his arm gingerly around her shoulders and stepping close to her so she can lean on him if she needs to. She is grateful to him.

  “Of course, you must stay at least until morning comes,” the innkeeper says to her. “Then you can make your decision whether to wait in Kombolcha or not.” She calls into the next room and another, older woman, wearing a white shawl over a cotton housedress, an employee, a housekeeper, enters from a back room carrying a handful of keys. Afewerk’s widow speaks to her in another language, then says, to Iris and Giyorgis, “Hagosa will look after you. Good night.” She goes out.

  Giyorgis says, “We meet at seven for dinner, here,” pointing to a dining room Iris now sees through an open door on her left. The housekeeper hands him a key, he goes out of the room and disappears down the corridor. She says to Iris, “Come,” and Iris follows her down a hall in the opposite direction.

  “You are waiting for your niece?” she asks Iris, over her shoulder. Had she been listening through the door? She is more forward than Afewerk’s widow seems to be, or curious maybe, about Iris, the ferenji. “You will go back to Addis in the morning?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Iris replies. They have reached her room around a bend in the corridor and the woman unlocks the door, goes in ahead of Iris, and puts on the light by pulling a string hanging from a bare bulb in the centre of the ceiling.

  “Dr. Abubech will bring her in three, four days. You wait here,” Hagosa suggests, holding up fingers in case her English is wrong. The room is clean, but so dismal with the poor light and the shabby, insufficient furniture, that the thought of staying here for any time longer than she absolutely has to chills Iris.

  “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.

  Lalibela

  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 nort
h 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?