Garden of Eden (24 page)

Eventually she sleeps and finds herself standing on the patch of prairie that drops into the coulee that opens out and deepens as it winds its way downward to the small river. The sun is still below the horizon, although the distant purple hills to the east are haloed with pale yellow light. She walks through translucent violet shadows, setting her feet down lightly, and the earth, yielding and warm, cushions her steps.

At the coulee mouth she stops and lets her nightdress drop, brushing her breasts and thighs softly as it falls to the grass. Naked, barefoot, she makes her way down a deer trail until she reaches the cool green-gold water of the slough. It’s like silver against her feet as she glides along its shallow edge, and the tall slough-grass brushes her thighs with raspy tongues. Smells rise up: damp clay, the water’s tang, pungent sage, grass, cactus, the sweetness of wild roses, the fragrant yellow blossoms of the wolf willow that lines the coulee sides.

She walks on beyond the water to a waist-high grove of shrubs: dark green badger bushes and thorny greasewood, stunted, gnarled poplars, chokecherries, Saskatoon bushes, their plump, wine-coloured berries glistening with the weight of clear dew. Leaves caress her cheeks and twigs catch in her hair and release. It’s cool down here in the animals’ lair. Rabbits in their hiding places lift their noses to watch her pass by and a doe whistles softly to her white-spotted fawn curled in the underbrush, as her feet brush past. Small brown and yellow birds resting on green branches fix her, not unkindly, with tiny, unblinking black eyes.

Then she’s out of the shrubbery, leaving behind the scent and the cool air for the hard-packed clay coulee where it levels out and widens before it deepens to continue its descent to the river. A
coyote, her pups playing at her back, watches her from the mouth of her den along the sloping coulee wall; she can see her saffron eyes shining like beacons in the pale light and shadows, she can hear her breath —
hhahhh, hhahhh, hhahhh.

The sun is nearer to the horizon now and a few stray rays escape its boundary to send out tendrils of rose light that flush the grasses growing up the coulee wall. At her feet stones of different sizes lie scattered against each other. Beige limestone or black granite or red sandstone, purple and white quartz or golden brown chert. Each carries a partial coat of lichen: orange, yellow, green, rust, black. The shards of light from the rising sun strike red and gold sparks in them.

At a patch of glistening white ground she bends to gather a little in her fingers, puts it to her lips to taste the salt tang of the earth. Three antelope stand alert to her left, the male sniffing the air, his head erect, his black horns precise against the background of glowing grass behind him. She walks on into the heat of the morning. Beside her the prickly pear cactus flowers bud and open to fragile yellow blooms, and the pincushion cactuses spread their small, spiky, fuchsia blooms.

She walks faster, the ground rises up under her feet to push her ahead with each footfall. Springing along, like an antelope or deer, a breeze swims along behind her, lifting her with gentle arms, then sets her down against a great, smooth, black-and-silver buffalo rubbing stone. She feels a weight and looks down. A thick, dull green snake has curled itself around her feet and ankles. As she watches, it writhes and bit by bit peels itself loose from its own skin to leave behind at her feet its transparent, crystal twin.

The new snake is a glowing, deep wine colour. It slides away to lose itself under the gnarled roots and limbs of an ancient sagebrush. When it is gone, Iris looks back to its discarded skin, but it has collapsed, lost its form, faded, and it disintegrates slowly into dust. But in the low distance she can see the dark red snake appearing and disappearing as it moves on past cactus and rocks and thorny, grey greasewood bushes. She turns to follow.

In the early morning she wakes, light streaming in around the curtains to remind her where she is. As she lies, not moving, her
dream washes over her, perfect in its every detail. She’s astonished by it, more than that, she’s in awe; it’s as if her body has opened and all her organs are dissolved in wonder. How she once conceived of the world has spread apart to reveal a dimension she’d never guessed at — whole, perfect, transcendently beautiful. For a long time she just lies there, contemplating her dream.

Somewhere in the walk through the sorghum stubble Lannie has lost the floppy green weed that she has been using as a switch to keep off the small blackflies. She holds on to her clipboard with one hand and bats them away with the other. Today they seem especially bad — or is it just that she’s sick to death of them, never wants to feel another one crawling on her lips or landing on an eyelid? Years, years she has been tormented by the hideous little creatures; she’d like to kill every one of them. She stops, surprised and a little shocked at herself. It’s just that today she feels lousy, and it’s her luck to have lost her switch and not noticed. Dr. Abubech had told her to write down something Fatima had said, and when she stopped to do it, she’d dropped her pen and her shoulder bag had slid down and — Abubech is speaking to her again.

“She’s invited us for the coffee ceremony.” Lannie knows enough Amharic that sometimes she doesn’t need a translation, but more often she’s lost, can’t get a single word. Amharic is a hard language with all its many inflections and, despite a few lessons years ago, she has never fully put her mind to trying to learn it, since most of the people she deals with nowadays speak at least a little English, and when they don’t, Abubech translates for her. In the camps there had always been translators.

It has occurred to her more than once that rather than waiting for translations or instructions from Abubech before writing down what’s going on, it would be simpler and probably more accurate to use a tape recorder. She rejects the idea though. Her position here with Dr. Abubech, she feels, is precarious and short term enough
that she’s afraid a tape recorder would make Abubech realize how superfluous she actually is. She can’t bring herself to think about what would happen if she loses Abubech and her work. Where would she go? What would she do then?

Fatima stops and looks back at her son and daughter, barefoot children of about six and eight years, the six-year-old lugging a toddler, while three other little ones in their ragged and dirty clothing trail through the dust after them. They are herding the family’s cattle, keeping the five or so cows from grazing up against the huts — the only fences are thorn hedges that enclose groups of huts — and from wandering too far away. She calls out to them in rapid Amharic — telling them to move the cattle back farther — turns, and goes toward her house.

The moisture situation is very poor right now, and Lannie hopes that when the major rainy season begins in June or July, it won’t let them all down too, as the lighter period has. In this country there is no margin for error, no excess to cover nature’s cruel vagaries. If there’s once again no crop, or a poor one, Fatima will sell those bracelets that jangle on her arm, then their few skinny zibou and their goats will go, then they’ll eat the seed they’ve kept for next year’s crop. And after that, if it still does not rain, they’ll have to go wherever someone will give them food. Lannie knows the sound of hundreds of feet trudging down a dusty road or through wind-driven dust sweeping across a naked, once-fruitful plain, no voices rising in conversation or song, just the steady, relentless slap and shuffle of feet, going to wherever there may be food.

Better just to pray for rain.
God is good,
Fatima will say, if she comments. But Lannie is tired; now she only listens, smiles, writes, does what Abubech tells her to do.

The other two have reached Fatima’s
tukul
(
tukul
is not correct, Abubech had said severely, it is more properly called a
gojo,
but Lannie has never heard anybody call it that). In the distance the blue mountains dotted sparsely with trees make rough outlines against the cloudy sky, their deep clefts patches of indigo. Lower and closer to her are the yellow hills with their small scattering of single trees. It makes her sad to look at the bare slopes, all the trees gone so the peasants will
have warmth, light, and fuel to cook their food. Too poor to buy kerosene, knowing exactly what they’re doing but unable to do anything else, they destroy their own future. She thinks of her own treeless, grass-covered landscape, broken occasionally by deep, shrub-filled coulees where deer and rabbits lie in watchful silence, and for an instant she’s gripped by homesickness.

She lowers her head to pick her way carefully over the uneven ground and is immediately engulfed in dizziness, so that she stumbles and almost drops her clipboard before the dusty stubblefield and the
tukul
at the edge of it right themselves again. The better part of seven years, off and on, in this country and she still gets ill regularly from food or water taken in villages. As if to emphasize that she’s much too careless, her stomach lurches upwards in nausea. She clenches her teeth, managing to force it down, as she reaches Abubech who has paused to wait for her at the door of the hut.

“She says she hopes this year to have a little seed left over to trade for a certain kind of sorghum she likes —
‘wotet-beguncle,’
she calls it — that’s ‘milk in my cheeks,’” Abubech says to Lannie. Absurdly, Lannie thinks of “winterfat,” a grassland shrub at home desirable for its high protein content. “It’s called that, she says, because it’s good for her children. It has higher nutritional value than some of the other landraces. This I have proved in the laboratory.” Abubech smiles with an edge of triumph at Lannie, her thesis — that farmers can teach much to scientists — confirmed once again. When she’d said this early on in her teaching of Lannie, Lannie had replied, “I wish North American scientists and government officials thought that. Instead, they think they are the experts and without them farmers would know nothing.” Now, dutifully, without speaking, she writes down
“wotet-beguncle
— ‘milk in my cheeks,’” then follows Abubech into the dwelling.

Windowless and dark inside, her eyes need to adjust after the bright light outside, and in the instant when she feels the cool air on her face and sees only blackness, she almost sinks to the ground with gratitude. How tired she is, always, these days. Even before this new bout of mild illness that at home she would have called flu, she has been feeling her energy, what little of it there is, leaking out of her
body day by day. Sometimes in the middle of the day, seated at her desk transcribing her field notes, or typing Abubech’s papers, she’s overcome by exhaustion and wants only to lie down on the cool, rough grey rug and close her eyes.

And yet, when she first came to Ethiopia at the end of 1984 during the Great Famine, she would work all day and half the night and never really feel tired. And now — she sleeps eight and more often ten hours a night. She eats her small supper, reads a little, if you can call it that, and goes to bed to sink into a heavy slumber.

Books have stopped making sense. She can still read the symbols, and the words and the sentences and paragraphs. But she can’t get a grip on what they mean, the simplest book seeming difficult and esoteric to her now. She’s buffeted by life. Drowning in it. Books cease to make sense because they insist on their point of view, their opinions, their attitudes — and confused, trying to make sense of her own, she can’t any longer let herself be engaged by the book for fear of accepting a formula, a proof for the way life is, the acceptance of which might allow her escape so that she would not doubt or question the incomprehensibilities of her own. Or perhaps it’s only that she has no room left for what she finds in books.

It’s clear something’s wrong, it’s been this way for months, and while it never gets worse, it never gets better either; maybe she just needs a vacation or something, she doesn’t know what.

“Why don’t you go home, go back to university there, get your own focus, if you want to be a documentalist?” Dr. Abubech had asked Lannie when she had gone to her office to ask for a job.

“I don’t want to be a documentalist. I don’t want to go home,” Lannie had said. She considered adding, Addis is my home, but refrained because it would sound like the self-righteous lie she knows it to be. The fact is, she’s a person who has an apartment in Addis Ababa where she lives, almost certainly temporarily, until something else happens that makes her move once more. Money, for instance, she has begun using the sum Barney deposited to her account so long ago and which for years she’d refused to touch, and it won’t last
forever, which means she won’t be able to afford her new apartment on Bole Road for more than a year. Addis isn’t a cheap city, not for expatriots anyway, and her apartment is the first decent place she has lived in since she came to this country. Well, she reminds herself, don’t forget Dimitri’s house in Dire Dawa — marble this and marble that — Dimitri was rich. And there was that delicious interlude in his house on Crete — but oh he was terrible, a terrible man, and she has to smile, not without a trace of bitterness, because he was exactly what she deserved. Until she’d had to leave him because even she could endure his rages no longer, what she’d always known was his contempt for her, his absolute refusal to see her as an individual, and not just a pretty girl to show off on his arm. Still, she’d had moments there of something close to happiness. She remembers sending Angela a postcard during one of them, and feels herself blush a little with chagrin at her own foolishness. Hope rearing its ugly head again.

“Unfortunately, my research grant leaves me no money to pay an assistant,” Abubech said slowly. Lannie said hastily, “You don’t have to pay me. I have my own money. I want to help, that’s all.” Abubech had looked steadily back at Lannie for a moment without saying anything. Lannie held herself rigid under the older woman’s gaze, feeling herself colour, but forcing herself to look steadily back, although inside she felt no steadiness at all, only embarrassment and a kind of weary shame; after all these years, still that ineradicable shame at the bottom of everything. She knows, she has studied psychology, that she should dissect that shame, pull out every strand of it, examine it with a microscope in a good light until she makes it disappear. But whenever she thinks of this her weariness overcomes her: it’s too hard, there is too much there, she can’t possibly do the work, it’s difficult enough just to keep it shoved down so it doesn’t incapacitate her utterly.