Garden of Eden (26 page)

“I will stay with you,” he had said. “I will follow you everywhere. I will not let you keep me away.” He had tried to break down her barriers thinking, she knew, that if he could, she would be able to love him. One night on the dark road to her house he had stopped walking, caught her wrist, and facing her, holding her by her upper arms, he had said from between clenched teeth, “I’ll make you pregnant so you’ll have to be with me.” She couldn’t move then, couldn’t get her breath. She hadn’t bled since the day she’d set foot in Ethiopia.

Rob had done his best but in the end, full of a bewildered, raw anger, he had given up and gone back to Canada without her. A year later a Canadian nurse who’d gone home on leave, then returned, had mentioned casually to Lannie that she’d run into him — he was married and his wife was pregnant.

Lannie had rushed outside and vomited, had managed to finish the day at work, but then she’d stayed in her darkened bedroom for three days, retching every time she tried to get up, until finally the sickness had worn itself out. Had she loved Rob? Or was it something to do with — she could hardly bring herself to think of it —
her abortion that she’d had so long ago? Even though she will always be grateful to Iris for making her have it, she is ashamed in some dark, unclear way that she will not examine.

Mornings now, when she rises, buttoning her blouse sometimes takes more strength than she can find. She has to sit down on her bed until moments later she notices her hands effortlessly fastening the buttons. Thinking it’s her negligent eating habits, she has been trying to eat more, or better. But the same thing happens when she stands in the door of her kitchenette — she’s too tired to cook a piece of meat or peel an orange or tear lettuce for a salad.

Or is she ill? She’s had enough of doctors, wouldn’t go to one even if she were covered with festering sores. Poking and prodding and asking stupid, cruel questions, and all the while she can see in their eyes that she’s a failure, she’s human refuse. But she doesn’t know what’s the matter with her — I’m a basket case, she tells herself. Maybe I should just go home.

Home. Which is where? Saskatoon where she lived for three years while she went to university? She remembers a moment: dancing, her body fitted against the slowly moving body of a man she has just met, she knows by some careful chemistry he’s the one she’ll go home with — the heat from the crowd, the flashing coloured lights, the racket of the guitars, saxophone, keyboard, drums, so loud it threads its way through her skin, laces itself around her molecules to lift her — no, she never wants to see that city again.

Iris and Barney’s farm where her father left her that day so long ago without even asking them if they wanted to raise a half-raised child? She can’t go back to them, begging them to take her back in when she’s still a failure, a liar, and a betrayer —

Her childhood rises up before her: a trim little wooden house with a neat white picket fence around it, tiger lilies and dahlias along the sidewalk, lilac bushes and tall poplars in the backyard, and a brick barbecue pit her father built, stripped to the waist and sweat pouring off him, Dillon beside him asking question after question in his piping little boy’s voice, while her mother sat on the back steps fanning herself with a magazine against the summer heat, her other hand rocking the carriage where Misty lay asleep.

Quickly she opens her eyes and shifts to a sitting position. Fatima has finished roasting the beans and, seated, is grinding them, the mortar and pestle in front of her. Fatima’s baby begins to wail in a thin voice. It isn’t healthy, Lannie has heard enough unhealthy babies to know. Immediately she sees a child lying on a pallet in the tent for the gravely ill. A girl about six years old, reduced to skin stretched over bone, barely conscious, in the last stages of starvation. Mariam. She wills herself to remember Mariam as she was the last time she saw her: healthy again, her plump cheeks, her shy dark eyes, her sweet smile — Fatima brings the child around from the nest in her shawl against her back and puts the baby against her breast. The whimpering stops.

After the camps she’d dreamt about the children every night for a year, would wake sweating, filled with a heavy, nameless dread. The endless, silent lines of people waiting patiently for rations that often gave out before everyone was fed, the children — “This is an old country,” an Ethiopian doctor had said to her — “You’ve no idea how old it is, nor how complicated are the reasons for this, or that it will happen again and again and again, as it has in the past. How much good do you think you do, you NGOs with your tonnes of grain and your doctors and your nurses? You feed people today so they can die tomorrow. Tomorrow, if it isn’t more starvation that kills them, it will be guerrilla fighters or government soldiers who shoot them. Or they will die under torture in the country’s prisons. You don’t know this country; you have no idea.”

“Why are you here then?” she’d replied. And when he turned away she had, for a second, thought herself vindicated.

“Where else to be?” he said over his shoulder, smiling humourlessly. She was rocked by that remark, it expressed a sentiment she was beginning to understand. Where else indeed?

“Tell me how you got to this country, why you are here.” Abubech had asked her this during that first interview almost a year ago now. She had been surprised by it, having already answered it a thousand times since her arrival; she’d told Europeans — nurses, doctors,
reporters — she’d told Ethiopians — government officials, friends, strangers. She was about to give what she privately thought of as her short answer which she knew from experience satisfied, but stopped herself. It would not satisfy Abubech.

Involuntarily, her hand went up to her face, the heel pressed against her eyes, her fingers swept her hair back. “I came because it seemed to me imperative that I not turn away from such suffering, that I do what I could, no matter how little. I don’t know why it seemed that way to me. I’d never felt like that before. It was as if I had suddenly found a way to —” She paused, unsure of what to say, chose finally the truth. “A way to either end my own suffering or to bury it in the greater suffering of others. I believe I thought it would save me.” Then she’d laughed, appalled at what she’d said, dizzy with it.

Abubech said simply, “How did you get a visa?”

“I couldn’t get a visa, I couldn’t find a relief agency that would take me. So I wrote to some churches I knew about in Saskatchewan and Alberta. I offered to go to Ethiopia at my own expense to write about the relief effort. To find out what was happening to the grain they were sending here. I asked them to get me press credentials so I could get into the country. That’s how I got here. And after I’d been here a while and had seen the relief camps, then I knew there were a dozen small ways I could help even though I wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. So I worked in the camps through late 1984 and into 1985 until the people dispersed and went back home.”

“And after that?” Abubech asked.

“I worked for development agencies. A couple of them, office work mostly. And I did other things. I left once. I went to Greece for a year. In ‘88 and ‘89.” She doesn’t mention — didn’t even know it at the time, somehow Dimitri kept it from her — that while she had briefly escaped to his villa, Ethiopia was going through another drought and famine.

Abubech had not taken her eyes off Lannie’s face while she made this reply, and there was perhaps the faintest hint of softening in its firm set as she gazed at her. It suddenly occurred to Lannie that Abubech already knew her short history in this country, someone
had told her, or after Lannie had called for this interview, she had gone about finding out.

“You have to understand,” Abubech told her, “that I talk only with the women, that my work is to document specifically the role of the women as farmers and to gather information on how they choose the seeds to be kept for seed for another year, why they choose them, and how they store them. We need that information because the women farmers are the only ones who have it and what they do is vital to the continuance of biodiversity. This has not been acknowledged or even noticed before. I gather that information, but I also take the opportunity to find out other things about their lives. It is a base of information that will one day be used to better their lot in life.”

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.