Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

Then, during the spells when Lannie is sleeping, or at least is still and silent, Iris takes the one wooden chair out onto the balcony and sits staring down at the heavy traffic passing by on the way to or from the airport, exhaust fumes rising to further taint the air already heavy with the odour of burning wood. The traffic din is horrendous and unending, but she isn’t much bothered by it. She sits in her own silence, a frown creasing her forehead, a cup of cold coffee balanced on her lap, and considers what has brought her into this tumultuous, horrifying, challenging new world. She thinks, laughing wryly to herself, that she’s in an Ethiopia of the mind too.

  It occurs to her that during these lulls she might use the time to write home to Ramona or to her mother, but whenever she thinks of this, the notion drifts away as loosely as it arrived; it is too much trouble, what would she say anyway, since she can’t possibly describe — at least not yet — Ethiopia, or what has happened to her here. Besides, she thinks, I’ll be home before a letter would arrive.

  So she sits on the balcony staring down at the traffic and off across the rooftops and the trees to the low wooded mountains that in the early mornings and evenings fade to a misty blue-green in the haze of smoke from cooking fires, or are partially obscured by the black and oily effluent from the nearby factories. Her thoughts are interrupted when she hears the bed springs creak or when Lannie calls out in a high, thin voice or, in a deeper one, makes gutteral sounds that might be words. Iris doesn’t recognize either voice, and this adds to her sense of all of this as a bad dream, an underworld she has inadvertently fallen into and can’t climb out of. Yet she feels curiously alive, her senses sharpened.

  The second morning when she moves her wooden chair out onto the cramped balcony to watch the crowds of people walking up and down the road on their way to school or to their jobs, it occurs to her that a man leaning against a fruitstand on the far side of the street was also there the morning before. Her eyes swing back to him and she catches him looking up toward the building and she thinks, with a tinge of fear, Is he watching me? She wants to dismiss this notion, she’s plainly becoming paranoid, reminded of the old joke that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t watching you. But she’s more than half convinced now that she knows something the government doesn’t want her to know. From then on, whenever she thinks of it, she goes to the small kitchen window and peeks out to the street below. He is always there.

  Iris is thinking a lot about her mother too, because every time she rushes to cover Lannie, or to wipe her face with a damp cloth, to give her sips of water or pills, or to talk soothingly to her when she cries out, she feels the shadow of her mother dogging her. All her life she admired her mother’s coolness in the face of illness, the firm way she could take charge and clean up blood or vomit as if they were nothing more than spilled flour, the way her very assurance, her calm, made whoever was ill feel less frightened. She finds that she has adopted that air of her mother’s and that pleases her.

  But she also hates this feeling of having become like her mother, to hear her mother’s voice in every word she says, to see her face when she looks in the mirror, to recognize her mother’s gestures when she moves her hands, to see her body that was young, shapely, soft, thickening as her mother’s had, the graceful silhouette dissolving, the skin sagging. No matter how hard she tries to will away the illusion, it refuses to go. It makes her wonder if far away in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in that nursing home where Iris too casually relegated her years ago — she thinks this with shame — if her mother hasn’t died and come to haunt her for her cruelty.

  If it’s true she’s dead, what could she do about it anyway now? She doesn’t want to even try to telephone to find out; she can’t grieve right now, her head is too full, her heart won’t settle down into some steady pattern, but keeps fluttering breathlessly, and she’s constantly in a cold sweat, her body clammy, she perpetually feels she needs a bath. She can’t deal right now with the fear that her mother’s dead.

  When she gets back to Saskatchewan, she’ll go to that old people’s lodge and take her home. That big house with only Iris in it — now she has seen Ethiopia, she knows it’s a scandal. Her mother deserves better and always has. She wills Lannie to get well so she can go home and take proper care of her mother.

  Two more days pass. Lannie shows no signs of improving; in fact, Iris is beginning to think she’s getting worse. She is always either in a sleep so deep Iris fears it is really a coma, or else she’s trying to get out of bed, raving and grimacing until Iris is afraid that if she ever does get physically well, she will never find her way back to sanity. What if she dies? What if everyone dies?

  She runs through an immense field of ripe, shining wheat. The beards of the stalks catch at her, tangling in her skirt, scratching her legs until they bleed, she leaves a scarlet trail behind her. She’s searching for her mother who’s gone away, but she isn’t far, Lannie knows if she just keeps running she’ll catch up with her, she’s just over that next rise. She stumbles and falls, the rich aroma of dirt fills her nostrils, the wheat scratches her cheeks so they bleed, and she’s calling, Mother, Mother, but she’s too far ahead, running through the damp, faded native grass, Lannie can’t see her, the wheat catching at her, hissing as it tries to hold her back. Running again, her legs are so heavy she can hardly move them forward and her lungs feel on fire, sweat pours down her face and neck and chest, her heart knocks so hard it’s as if everything she is has coalesced into a great thumping ball in her chest: “Mother!” she cries, “Mother! Mother!”

  Iris comes quickly, stopping to refill the basin with cool water, rushing to push Lannie back against the pillows. She calls, “Lannie, it’s all right.” Lannie settles back, mumbling and twitching and reaching toward Iris with flailing gestures that make Iris despair. She holds Lannie’s face gently between her palms for a long time, in hopes that her warmth will seem to Lannie like her real mother’s touch.

  For the first time Iris accepts that Lannie might die. She brings a few of the floor cushions into her room and sleeps on the rug by her bed so as to be there instantly, the minute she rouses. Whenever she goes into the kitchen she looks out the window to see if her watcher is still there. He is, although it isn’t always the same man. She senses, when she looks down at him, that he has to hold himself back from saluting her.

  Her own dreams are troubled and broken now and there are interludes when she’s caring for Lannie in a state somewhere in that borderland that’s neither sleep nor wakefulness, so that in the morning she isn’t sure how many times she got up with Lannie and how many times, when she thought she was up, she was dreaming it.

  She dreams of Jay: he’s come to see her, he bends over her as she lies sleeping in her bed at home, and puts his open mouth on hers and kisses her with such passion that his kiss travels right through her, and all her woman’s parts from her knees to her breasts grow fluid and ache with it. When she wakes and sees his shadow dwindling from her as she reaches out for him, she feels a desperate grief, and catches herself calling out loud “Jay!” as Lannie in her sickness calls for her mother.

  Then she sobs and rocks, seated on the floor cushions, and blames herself for being such a fool. Because, no matter what, she shouldn’t have fallen in love with Jay, she shouldn’t have fallen for his beautiful eyes or his long-fingered gentle hands, for his silences heavy with pain that it seemed to her so matched her own. She can see as clearly as she can see Addis Ababa through the glass of the balcony door that women fall in love with him all the time.

  The doctor comes again, spends a half-hour with Lannie, while Iris and Abubech stand together at the foot of her bed.

  “I didn’t think it would come to this,” he says, pursing his lips in an annoyed way, putting his stethoscope back in his black doctor’s bag, clicking the bag shut. His hands are small, his movements precise. He questions Iris closely about Lannie’s fluid intake and output, whether she swallows her pills or not.

  “I crush them,”
Iris says. “I sit by her side and put them into her mouth with a teaspoon. I stay until they are all inside her. I do.” The doctor looks even more closely at her, and Abubech touches her arm gently.

  “We know how well you care for her,” Abubech says softly. The doctor moves his feet impatiently, as if this whole situation is intensely irritating to him.

  “I will set up an I.V. for her,” he says. “She is not very dehydrated, but — it is protection for the possibility. I will teach you to look after it.” When he has finished doing this, and Iris has learned to check the I.V. by counting the drops per minute, to watch to be sure the needle doesn’t come out of the vein, he stands back. “If you have to disconnect it, or if it disconnects itself, do not try to start it again. I will come tomorrow.” He studies her again. “Wait until I come,” he cautions. She follows him to the door, trembling, trying to hide it.

  “You remember I told you nursing care was everything? Do you wish to hire a professional nurse?”

  “No, no!” Iris says, shaking her head fiercely.

  “Perhaps you are tired. Perhaps the I.V. worries you?”

  “No!” Iris says, adamant. The doctor considers briefly, then shrugs and goes away. Abubech stays a little longer, but eventually she has to leave too. As if the doctor’s mere presence has helped, for a few hours Lannie sleeps quietly, and Iris takes advantage of this respite to collapse on the floor cushions in the living room and try to sleep. But she is consumed with the fear that Lannie is dying. Now in between trips to Lannie’s side she paces the apartment crying, talking to herself, wringing her hands. Sometimes the crying turns into wails and moans. She hears the sound she’s making distantly, as if it may be coming from someone else. The sound interests her, that she could make such noises, but she doesn’t try to stifle it, knowing no one can hear her over the racket of the traffic in the street below, knowing no one would care if they did hear her.

  Precisely when it’s time for Lannie to take pills, Iris rises from her burrowing among the pillows, wipes her face and blows her nose, and goes to sit by Lannie’s side, making her take sips of water or fruit juice in which Iris has dissolved her medication. Sometimes it takes a half-hour or more, and during the whole time tears pour from Iris’s eyes to run down her face and drip off her chin, as they did, it seems months ago, when she came back to Kombolcha from Lalibela.

  One night she cuts her finger deeply with a paring knife while she’s peeling an orange Abubech brought in a basket of groceries. When she welcomes the stab of pain, and the dark blood trickling down her hand and arm, she sees, with exhausted clarity, that she has just made a miniature suicide attempt.

  After this Iris begins to have quiet spells during which she falls asleep and dreams vivid, chaotic dreams which she can’t remember when she wakes. Except for one: she’s lying on her side, curled foetuslike on the floor of her bathroom at home. The floor opens and she is sucked out into empty, absolute silence and stillness. Stars gleam coldly eons away, giving no light. Nothing moves, nothing is alive. She floats, weightless and alone, through the boundaryless caverns of space.

  She wakes, bathed in the sweat of pure terror, gasping for breath, and clings to Lannie’s hand as a drowning victim clings to her rescuer. Long minutes pass before she is able to assure herself of the untruth of the dream — she is alive, she is not alone in the cosmos, there are walls around her, a ceiling overhead.

  In the darkness of the apartment she hears the warbling yip and bark of coyotes, and she rises, setting Lannie’s hand back on the cool bedclothes, and follows the sound into the living room where it grows louder. Coyotes, a troop of them, are calling her with their wild, lonely cries from the night-dark range of hills just beyond the pile of floor cushions. The moon shines down, illuminating the long, sloping silhouette of the hills on the edge of her farm at home. The coyotes’ lament rises to fill her head, piercing her heart with its passion, its ancient, unkempt wisdom, its unending grief. The coyotes are calling her: to the west they bark like a pack of unruly dogs, fast and in different keys, their voices tumbling over each other’s; to the east one yodels repeatedly, while above it, another raises her voice to a clear high note and holds it. Farther back in the hills, faintly, a whole chorus sings.

  She is standing in a rock circle in the moon’s silver half-light; it is just enough for her to make out the rocks’ planes, their jagged rims, the quick sparkle of gold or silver, the flat gleam of quartz. A mouse crouches in the dark, matted grass at the base of a rock and stares, motionless, up at her out of bright, frightened eyes.

  Her brothers and sisters have sung her into their skin. Her mouth is full of wildness, her entrails surge with it, her heart roars as if it would burst with it. She paws the ground, brushes it with her thick tail, lolls her long tongue out and pants, saliva dripping off her ivory teeth. Her wild coyote heart is pounding against her furry chest, she blinks her yellow coyote eyes and stretches around to nuzzle her flank, while a coyote chorus encompasses her, swelling, soaring and falling and ascending again. She opens her jaws and gives an experimental answering bark, and then puts all her considerable strength into a full-throated tenor cry of mingled supplication, defiance and joy. It fills the silver-edged, night-black air, it soars upward to the crystal stars, descends to fill every coulee and draw, every hole and den and animal’s hiding place in the distant, glowing hills.

  Abubech comes. Iris opens the door and when Abubech gets a good look at her, her face changes and she says gravely, “She is very ill, I know it. The doctor will return today, but there really is nothing more that can be done. You are taking the best care for her. No one could do better.” By Abubech’s expression Iris realizes that she has let herself go. It scares her a little: she hasn’t even noticed that her hair is a rat’s nest, she has that musty smell of the unwashed, and her clothes are wrinkled and soiled. She wants to explain to Abubech that if only Lannie would get well, or if that man who’s watching her would go away, Iris would stop being so crazy. But she says nothing, obeys when Abubech makes her bathe and wash her hair while she watches Lannie.

  After she has dressed in clean clothes, she finds Abubech has made coffee and wants her to sit with her on the cushions in the front room.

  “Do you have children?” Abubech asks her. This is a surprising question coming from an Ethiopian with their exquisite courtesy, but after a second Iris recognizes that Abubech is trying to bring her back to normalcy.

  “No, we had no children of our own,” she tells her politely, conversationally, as if what seems like only moments ago she hadn’t been on her knees banging her head against the floor. Then she says, “My husband died a few months ago,” and it’s as if she’d forgotten, because there’s this bang in her chest and things slip sideways, and she has to blink and blink again before they right themselves. And in that instant it is clear to her that she has been mourning Barney.

  She can smell the faint residue of the cleaning fluid she’d been using. The factory down the road must be spewing that oily smoke again, because she can smell it in the air too. Sunlight breaks through the glass doors to spill across the floor and lie warm on her bare toes. The room is small and clean and anonymous; it is the residence of someone who does not want to live.

  Iris clears her throat, swallows, and continues. “I realized I needed to tell Lannie. I needed to find her. She — we lost touch with her a few years ago,” and is embarrassed again at having to admit that for so long she didn’t even try to find her. She moistens her lips with her tongue, swallows again, before she goes on. “Lannie was very troubled, because of her mother’s death, you know. And then her father — her father left her with us, and took her brother and sister to live with other relatives in the city.” She pauses to listen, but there is no sound from the bedroom. “I was just as glad to have her gone. More than once I wondered if Barney hadn’t begun to love her more than he did me. Mostly, though, I had become so afraid of what was inside her.” In the ensuing silence it surprises Iris a little that s
he didn’t just admit this to herself a long time ago, instead of all the excuses she’d thought up for why Lannie should stay lost. “If she let it — her real emotions — out, I thought it would destroy us — her, Barney, me.”

  Time has stopped; nothing moves; all is silenced. Then horns honk on the street below, and the familiar roar of traffic rushing by returns. Tiredness, pure exhaustion, sweeps slowly and fully through Iris’s body.

  When Abubech speaks finally, the timbre of her voice hasn’t changed at all; it’s as if Iris hasn’t just voiced these shattering things.

  “You are a farmer?” she asks gently. Iris nods, opens her mouth and waits to see if she can still speak. Amazingly, the voice that comes is as calm as Abubech’s.

  “I was born there, but I didn’t do the actual farming myself. My father did it, and then my husband. But now I’m the one who has to make the decisions about it. Maybe I’ll have to learn how to farm myself, I guess.”

  “I believe Lannie said it’s a big farm?”

  “It’s the biggest in the district. Everyone is after it now that Barney’s — gone.” Abubech is carrying on with her own thoughts, and a vibrancy that wasn’t there before has entered her voice.

  “What a wonderful thing that is,” she says. “A woman with much land. What power! How good it is to think of a woman with power.”

  Iris says, with a rueful laugh, “Power? I’m helpless. I need a man to run the place for me.” Abubech gives her a stare so grim Iris has to look away.

  “Land is power,” she tells Iris firmly, deliberately. “If you were a woman in this country, you would know it. Men will try to take it from you, but you must hold on to it. You must use it to make changes.”

  “But no one wants to steal it, they want to buy or rent … or marry it.”

  “But you see, no one wants you to have it, am I right? Men don’t like a woman having land, especially not a lot of land. They think all land is theirs.” When Iris says nothing, Abubech goes on. “In this country someone will take the land away from a woman, even if it is hers legally. If her husband dies, the land will go back to her husband’s family and she will be turned out. Or to stay she will have to marry the husband’s brother. If she has no children, or no son, she’ll be divorced and driven away.” She’s looking hard at Iris, compelling her to listen, to understand. “If women have no enforceable rights to land, they will never have any power, they will continue to be beaten and starved. Did you know that most of the people who died during the famine, even in the relief camps, were women and children? They were more undernourished to start with and so they died sooner. Even most refugees are men. And women will continue to be circumcised — it may be women who perform the operation, but they do it for men who believe that if women feel no sexual pleasure, they will not be unfaithful. They tell them that the way God made women’s bodies is dirty and ugly.”