Garden of Eden (31 page)

Night after night she dreamt vivid dreams of stunning beauty so that when she woke every morning she found it necessary to lie in bed rehearsing them in her mind until she had managed to cross the border from them into the everyday world of Ottawa in early summer, and Barney’s absence, and Jay’s defection, and her own quiet solitude that she found herself savouring.

Occasionally she dreamt her now familiar water dreams: the darkness of an unending night — no, a world where there seemed to be only night, a nightworld, and herself in dark water swimming, or in a mysterious ferry as a passenger, the other passengers silent and
hooded, heading for a distant shore where lights flickered, but no detail was revealed of the city there or its inhabitants. In these dreams she was not afraid, although her struggles were desperate, her chances of gaining that shore seeming slight, and there was no one to help her.

Other nights she dreamt about the wild grasslands of her home as she remembered them from her childhood, or as she remembered them through her parents’ and her grandparents’ stories:
When people first came to this valley the grass was so high it brushed your stirrups when you rode through it, you could set down your mower anywhere and cut, and there weren’t no fences at all.
She was back in her childhood walking with her grandmother to the old farmhouse on the prairie above the deep coulee, or she was in the coulee climbing its rough, crumbling clay side past a coyote’s den and a golden eagle’s nest while the eagle soared, screaming above her; or she was rolling in the grass, her face buried in its pungent sweetness, and lifting her head a little, she surprised a sparrow hiding out of the wind between two small rocks, and saw tiny holes in the light brown soil where the smallest insects lived, and the minute tracings of their comings and goings. After those dreams, she woke filled with longing, the fragrance of sage, sweetgrass, wolf willow, and wild roses still scenting the drab air of her room, the clear prairie light slowly being subsumed by the hazy eastern sunlight fighting its way through the room’s grubby windows.

One night, the silent woman came to her: that open, direct gaze held her transfixed, a look that penetrated through her skin, her flesh, her bones. This time, instead of the white gown, she wore black robes, not the dead black of nuns’ gowns, but a rich black that shimmered with hints of other colours. Iris woke and realized that this was her wise woman, her guide.

She began her series of shots at a medical clinic: hepatitis, meningitis, typhoid, polio, diphtheria and tetanus, yellow fever, which made her think of diseases, of soldiers and rape and murder, of plane crashes, and lonely deaths in desert or mountain wilderness.

“I believe I’ll be all right,” she told Ramona carefully, when Ramona called to express concern at her intention to go to Africa, as if Iris had thought it all over and on balance felt she would come out
of this adventure alive, when in fact, something well beyond rationality was driving her.

“Want me to put your garden in for you?” Ramona asked. Iris had forgotten about her garden. She opened her mouth to say no, she’d do without a garden this year. What did she need a garden for with Barney gone? But in that instant’s pause she smelled the fresh earth in sunshine; she was catapulted back into that moment when, gardening, she forgot her everyday self and her borders became the borders of the garden, and she moved in rhythm with it and with the wind and the songbirds and the seeds she held in her palm and dropped solemnly, one by one, into the earth. She was overcome with longing for the pleasure of her garden. When Ramona said, “Iris?” into the silence, she heard herself make a small, odd sound of regret before she said, “Oh, don’t bother, Ramona. I’ll put it in myself when I get back.” And was grateful to have remembered, both for Ramona’s sake and her own, that she would be coming back.

“You’d better stay at the Hilton,” the nurse at the clinic told her. “If you can afford it. Failing that, the Ghion. You have to worry about being robbed otherwise and my guess is you’d prefer comforts if you can get them.” She’d worked in Ethiopia for an NGO, “That’s a non-government organization,” she explained, “like the U.N., or Save the Children, or Oxfam,” during the ‘87 famine, that was how she knew what to suggest to Iris. “And don’t forget to take your malaria pill once a week,” she’d lectured her sternly. “You should be safe in Addis because it’s so high — over seven thousand feet — so there aren’t supposed to be mosquitoes there, but personally, I wouldn’t take the chance.”

Iris wanted to ask the nurse many more questions, but she couldn’t clearly form them. Instead, she went to a bookstore and asked for books about Ethiopia. The store had only two, both published by the Ethiopian government and full of practical information about currency, banking, the climate, public holidays, taxi and bus service within Addis Ababa. Mostly they were made up of brightly coloured photos of the city taken from a distance, the buildings interspersed with greenery, some of it palm trees, or of cathedrals and mosques, hotels and government buildings, or of silver jewellery displayed on
black velvet which might be bought in Addis Ababa, or pottery, or woven straw basketry, and of pretty young women dancing in nightclubs wearing red-trimmed white gowns while behind them men beat with their palms conical drums hanging by straps from their shoulders. In the photos all the people looked well fed and happy. Remembering what Rob Sargent told her, she recognized this as government propaganda.

One morning she woke and it was the day she was to board her plane to Europe. She bathed, dressed, ate breakfast, collected her suitcase packed with the new, more appropriate clothes she’d bought for her trip — she’d mailed home to Ramona the things she didn’t need — checked out of her hotel, and took a cab to the airport where she boarded her plane. She felt a little as if she were sleepwalking through the world of her dreams.

But then, a day later, after changing planes in Frankfurt, even her anxiety dissipated; she’d grown too tired to worry, hadn’t any energy left for it. Instead of changing to a little propeller-driven plane, the engine missing, the doors tied shut with baling wire, flown by a fasttalking African pilot with maybe two other sorry-looking, mysterious passengers, as she’d half imagined, she was flying Lufthansa in a huge, sparkling-clean jet, every seat taken, and more of the passengers looking just like herself — Caucasian, Western — than dark-skinned, and Arab or African in colourful robes and hats and veils. A few of the passengers with their video cameras and waistpacks were clearly tourists. It seemed that, after all, one could go to Africa without a pith helmet and machete. And the view of the countries they were crossing over down below was so marvellous that her awe squeezed out any fear. When the pilot told them they’d be following the Nile for the next while and she looked out the window and saw a tiny silver river snaking south through limitless warm brown desert, she felt breathless with excitement.

She had flown out of time, that was what she’d done, and no rules applied any more, no ideas, no facts. Staring down at the world as she moved through space faster than time itself, past and future vanished; she was grounded in the moment, a wholly new experience. The world is real, she thought, and in her excitement, her pure,
unadulterated joy, heard herself make a small noise somewhere between a sob and laugh. Then they were landing in Addis Ababa.

The realness of the place stuns her: the clouds of evil-smelling black exhaust all the vehicles spew — vans, buses, taxis, cars, Land Rovers, and trucks; the crowds of people on foot — the women in Western clothing or in ankle-length robes and cotton shawls that cover their heads and shoulders, mostly white, but sometimes in bright pinks or faded pastels, at whom she stares drinking in the grace and drama of their clothing, and who look back at her out of dark, mildly curious but not unfriendly eyes as she rushes past them; the men, some in Arab-like garb with big turbans on their heads, or knots of slender young ones, mostly in Western clothing, lounging on street corners or in front of shops. She stares at the small three-sided, roofed shops made of corrugated iron with quarters of raw red meat hanging in them, or bunches of yellow bananas, or colourful straw baskets and dishes, or items she hasn’t time to identify before they whip past; the shockingly potholed city streets, and the close, lush blue-green hills. She feels it all invading her body like a disease, intensifying her sense of herself as a small woman riding in a bouncing taxi through the beauty and squalor all around her. It is at once as fully magical as it seemed to her before she’d even seen it, and as real and ordinary as anything she has ever known.

This Addis is a small town, but one that’s spread out for miles in every direction, all haphazardly treed, no city planners here. Or maybe she hasn’t been paying attention, fragmented as her attention is by the traffic, the — she almost can’t believe it — the cattle and donkeys, and the sheep and goats so underfed they’re the size of dogs, nonchalantly grazing the narrow boulevard and sauntering among the cars waiting at the traffic lights. And the beggars who stand mournfully at her car window every time they pause, their hands outstretched. There is something very wrong with this boy who has thrust his hands too near to the closed window. They are huge, gargantuan, it’s as if for a joke some god stuck hands the size of Luke’s on the frail arms of this perhaps ten-year-old child. She turns
her head away from him quickly, but a wretchedly thin woman with a face that’s horribly twisted — an accident? a birth defect? is peering in the window with her hands cupped chest-high toward Iris. Iris begins to fumble in her purse, but the light has changed and the driver pulls away leaving the beggars behind in the traffic. She keeps staring out the window as they whiz past buildings and people and trees and animals.

They slow in a bottleneck and she sees that something is very wrong with that donkey standing against the wall. Its dull, shaggy, reddish-brown hair covers his thin ribs in patches, it’s falling out, his ears droop and his head hangs as he stands motionless in the midst of the people passing around him. The donkey is clearly dying and no one cares.

The taxi enters a large square with a long block of viewing stands down one side. The street, obviously a major thoroughfare, is lane-less and the cars and trucks advance in a clump, every which way, easing in front of each other or switching from one side of the street to the other by dint of honking, rushing, then slowing, then edging into the stream of vehicles in such a way that Iris is sure they should hit each other, although they never seem to. At least nobody’s driving too fast in this jumble. Apparently the light is red because the driver pulls to a stop in what seems to be the middle of the square.

He turns to her, “See? Over there?” She hadn’t realized he spoke English and responds eagerly to his pointing finger. “That is where Mengistu made his speeches.” One of her books had been published in the eighties and had a picture of Mengistu. The driver is pointing to a railed platform to their right, a sort of viewing stand painted a flat, military grey, with wide steps leading up each side. She sees above the stand the faded outline where a large star had once been. “He would stand there and all the people would fill the square and stand over there.” He points to the rows of bleachers on their left. “Used to be Revolutionary Square, but now is Maskal Square.”

“Maskal?” Iris tries out the word.

“It is — cross,” he says. “For the day the True Cross was found.”

The True Cross? Does this mean these people are Christians, as she is? Her eye is caught by a tall, strong-looking woman standing on the sidewalk only a few feet away. She’s wearing an ankle-length cloaklike
garment in a pattern too small for Iris to make out but that blurs into a hazy, attractive blue-orange design. As Iris watches, a man comes up to the woman who smiles broadly at him, yet with what seems to Iris to be a touch of deference or even shyness. As he stops to speak to her she lifts her head and Iris sees that all the skin of her neck from the underside of her chin to where the garment touches the base of her throat is covered with small blue tattoos. More, the woman is showing them off deliberately as if she thinks they’re beautiful. They seem wonderful to Iris, both the fact of them and the fact the woman is proud of them — this is the first she’s seen of the Africa of her imagination — they’re tribal markings, she guesses. No, she thinks, they’re adornment, that’s all. She winces at the thought of the pain the woman must have endured to acquire them.

This scene barely has time to register when the driver steps on the gas, jerking Iris back in the seat, and in a second the square is lost behind them in the uneven flow of Land Rovers, small trucks and cars, and blue and white vanlike vehicles that seem to be buses, all packed with three times the number of people they were built to hold, all spewing a smoky black fog from their exhausts. Everyone honks, everyone manoeuvres; it’s a miracle they aren’t all dead.

They arrive at the Hilton, although from the street outside it’s impossible to tell if the walls contain an embassy, a mansion, or a used-car lot. Inside the compound — she finds herself dredging up the word
compound
from forgotten depths of girlhood reading — she finds parked cars around the edges of a smoothly paved lot, no potholes here, and a doorman and a couple of traffic policemen, and palm trees slapping their fronds against each other lazily in a light wind that Iris hadn’t noticed before. It’s like a movie set, she thinks, and here I am: Iris Christie, world traveller. For a moment she’s forgotten why she has come. In her delight she has even forgotten the beggars and the woman with the blue tattoos and the dying donkey.

She’d changed some traveller’s cheques for birr before she left the airport as the nurse at the clinic told her to do. The nurse had warned her to be sure to get a government taxi and not one of the ones waiting in the parking lot outside the airport compound, so she knows in advance what the fare will be and how much to tip. Now he opens
the cab door for her, hands her her single suitcase, bows gravely when she pays him.