Garden of Eden (38 page)

She finds herself standing in the courtyard of — she has to ask Yared twice for it’s name — St. Mary’s Church, where a flight of steps leads upward to a large, deep stone pool.

“For baptism,” Yared says. “Although sometimes people go in for their health.”

“I see,” Iris says, although her attention has been caught by the beggars again. There must be a dozen there now, or is she mistaken, and there’ve been more for a while.

“Come,” Yared gestures to her as she pauses. There are more young men in this courtyard too.

As usual, a priest greets them as they enter, then retreats backward into the shadows and Iris half notices that, as with each of the other priests, he’s putting on liturgical robes over his cotton pants and shirt, and mounting his church’s bronze cross onto a shoulder-high processional staff. While he is doing this, Yared clicks on a flashlight to focus slowly over the remains of the rich decorations on the ceiling and walls: wall paintings and bas-reliefs which seem to have been originally colourfully painted.

He halts the light on the ceiling vaulting for some moments on a chipped and faded painting of what Iris slowly recognizes as the Virgin Mary being given the news that she is with child. The virgin is seated, spinning, and she draws the red thread upward with her left hand. She has large dark eyes, dark hair, and golden skin, and Iris is surprised. All the Madonnas she remembers have blue eyes and blonde hair. She stares up at the painting until her neck begins to hurt and she has to lower her head.

The flashlight catches a square pillar in the centre of the church wrapped tightly from top to bottom in a cotton cloth discoloured with age. She’s about to ask Yared for an explanation when the priest who has joined them begins to speak in Amharic. Yared listens respectfully, and when the priest is finished he bows and turns to Iris.

“It is the only pillar in Ethiopia like this,” he says. “It is called, ‘the Pillar of Unity in the Faith.’” His voice is filled with awe; it’s almost as if he’s afraid to say what he knows, but after a second he continues. “The priest says, no one may look. He says that God touched that pillar with his hand, and on this pillar is written,” he turns then to look straight at her, “‘All the past and all the future of the world.’”

Iris takes an involuntary step backward. The priest looks off into the distance, his black eyes catching what light there is and glittering, his tightly wound white turban emphasizing the deep lines in his golden-brown face. He is not so much stern as detached and patient. In the stillness it seems to Iris that she can hear her own heart beating, its steady tripping small hammers in her ears. She looks up to where the top of the pillar is lost in the shadows under the heavy stone ceiling. It looks as if it might go on forever, soaring all the way up to heaven.

She senses that she has flown out of time and into
now.
Every step of her way from her farm outside Chinook to this mountain village on the other side of the globe has been leading her out of her personal history, her family’s history, her country’s history — into this alien one that she has discovered as an explorer discovers a continent or a river. How little she has understood about anything. She feels as if she has been struck on the head — she’s losing track of things: Barney doesn’t matter, nor Jay’s leaving her, nor her mother, nor — any of that. And Lannie? Her search for Lannie has become a part of this labyrinthine world she has flown into. She stares at the pillar, her eyes following its length from where it rises out of the uneven stone floor upward, losing itself in darkness.

Beams of light break through the small windows carved high in the thick layers of stone, descending slantwise to the floor. There are angels dancing there, she thinks, fierce, bright flecks of God’s heart, whirling between the dust motes that sail down the shafts of light;
they are in the shadows too, under the vaulted ceiling and behind the stone altar, and waiting in the stiff, gleaming folds of the priest’s robe. I am breathing in angels, she thinks, and in the stillness she can almost hear them dancing through the rushing of blood in her ears.

She imagines herself reaching out to touch the pillar, knows they would stop her at once; if she tried to pull the cloth away they might kill her. Something like fear strikes her and she lowers her head and stands motionless, as if she’s praying.

After what feels like a very long time, but may have been only a moment, she shakes her head slowly and looks around. The three men say nothing, as if they’re used to this silence from visitors. She wants to see more, to ask more questions, but the darkness, the walls blackened and worn smooth in places from centuries of bodies brushing past, the overwhelming press of poverty outside the door, all of these prevent her. She leaves the priest an offering and Yared and Giyorgis lead her back outside into the courtyard at the far end of which the beggars stand quietly.

Yared says, “I will go ahead to find the priest so he may unlock the door of the next church.” Before Iris can answer, he disappears around a corner. She turns to Giyorgis, but, unaccountably, he too seems to have vanished. She doesn’t like standing here by herself so she goes around the corner of the church intending to follow Yared, but on the far side of the church there is only a narrow passage from which other passages branch off, and she doesn’t know which one to choose.

How hot it is, how dry. She stops to rest and leans against a rough rock wall, regarding, without meaning to, the beggars who’ve followed her even here, into this maze. They stare silently back at her, their eyes following her every move, with what she reads as a mixture of shyness and curiosity. She tilts her head upward trying to catch a glimpse of the sky above this passageway she’s halted in, but stone blocks her way. What she sees instead is the sunlight on the beggars’ dirty rags, the gleam of their greyed-ebony skin.

She closes her eyes, but isn’t that the rustling of their garments she hears? their bare feet brushing over the stones? the hissing of their breaths? or are they whispering to her, trying to tell her something? Or is it the beating of the doves’ wings she hears around her head and
chest? She tries to stir herself to move away, but her body won’t respond.

And her mouth is full of dust, dust clogs her nostrils; she can’t breathe, black shadows are blossoming there behind her eyelids, growing larger, enveloping her, blotting her out. Here in this infinite darkness all is in motion, disintegrating. She’s a dust speck herself, she’s gone, become one with the rocks and the heat and the dust, whirling giddily through cavernous blackness.

A weight descends on her shoulder, bringing her rushing back from wherever it is she’s been. The beggars! Her eyes fly open — but it is Giyorgis, peering into her face, his heavy, warm hand firm on her shoulder, anchoring her, as if she has been falling and he has caught her.

“You are ill?” She rubs her hand across her face, squinting against the sudden brightness.

“I was just — resting a minute.” She looks about for the beggars, but they are gone.

“He will come soon,” Giyorgis says. Who? Iris wonders. Oh, their guide, Yared. They stand side by side in silence, Iris trying desperately to calm herself, Giyorgis facing her, but looking down at his shoes. “It is hot,” Giyorgis says.

It was only the heat, she supposes. As they wait, her heart slowing to its normal rhythm, her sense of herself settling back more firmly, she sees that her shoes are coated with a layer of fine pink dust. She hasn’t the energy to brush them off.

Yared appears suddenly in a passageway up ahead and beckons silently. She and Giyorgis move forward together. Without looking back, Iris knows that the beggars have returned, she can feel them back there, a solid, breathing band of bodies, shuffling noiselessly forward too.

Having been through seven or eight churches now — she long ago lost count or got confused what with the caves, chapels, ramps, and passageways — and also the cave where King Lalibela was supposed to have stabled his horses and sometimes slept himself, and the cave
where the beggars live, she is aware that her feet are sore, her back is aching, in fact, she’s so tired she can hardly move. She thinks, maybe it’s the altitude.

But the truth is, she’s as much exhausted by the effort to understand and absorb the continuing marvel of the churches, the
meaning
of all this, as she is by stooping her way through rock tunnels, climbing up ladders or precipitous stone stairs and down them, and stumbling across uneven stone floors. It is too much for any human to take in during one visit. She’s disoriented, in pain, almost angry at the churches for being more than she can deal with.

“I just can’t climb another set of stairs — I can’t stagger through another church — I’m completely exhausted,” she tells Giyorgis. Both Yared and Giyorgis try politely to persuade her to go on, they’re disappointed in her, or maybe Yared is afraid he’ll be paid less, but Iris pleads with them. “You’re both young men. You’re strong, but I’m old, I don’t have your strength.” She is amazed at herself, declaring herself old in this unexpected way.

Giyorgis makes his way back slowly to the Land Rover while Iris stops with Yared to pay him. It is more of that touching Ethiopian courtesy on Giyorgis’s part she knows, not to embarrass his friend by watching him be paid. She hands him the agreed-upon ten birr, says, “Thank you,” and is about to add, “Goodbye,” but he touches her arm lightly, withdrawing his hand immediately and says, “Wait, please.” He rushes back into the church they’ve just emerged from. Iris stands uncertainly, shading her eyes with her hand, watching him go. Giyorgis has climbed out of sight. Beggars are again coming toward her; she isn’t sure if this is a different pack or the same one that’s been following them, but she doesn’t know whether to wait as Yared has requested or to abandon him and hurry after Giyorgis before she loses her purse containing her money, passport, and visa.

But here comes Yared trotting toward her, holding something small out in front of him. She sees that he means to give it to her, and she protests, “But I have no more small birr.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head vehemently. “I do not wish money. I wish to give you this —” He pauses as if he can’t think how to say what he wants to say, or perhaps is having trouble bringing
himself to say it. He lifts his chin and looks into her eyes with those dark, troubled eyes of his. In them she suddenly sees all the ages of Ethiopian history, the thousands of years of suffering and darkness and sorrow and tribulation. And also its beauty and the dignity of its people. She finds she can’t move, although she wants to but she can’t look away either. He says slowly and distinctly, “I am giving you this so that you will remember me.”

She accepts it then, touched. When he tries to bow over each of her shoulders, Iris resists and touches her cheek to his, which, by the look on his face, distresses him. She wonders if she’s made some sort of terrible blunder, touching him so informally. But he backs away, bowing, that look still in his eyes, saying, “Do not forget me.”

Iris hurries to catch up with Giyorgis, holding the object, which turns out to be an ornate cross carved out of wood and stained a dark brown, threaded onto a narrow brown thong.

“See?” she says to Giyorgis. “Yared gave me this.” Giyorgis is surprised. He examines it closely.

“Ahh,” he says. “The priests used to make these and sell them. What did he ask for this?”

“He wouldn’t take money. He said he gave it to me so I will remember him.” Iris watches him as he carefully masks his expression before she can interpret it.

When they return to the hotel so Iris can rest, Giyorgis tells her he’ll take her shopping to the two or three small souvenir shops in the town. Back in her room, Iris lies down on her bed. For a long time she lies motionless, too tired to move, staring at the ceiling. She closes her eyes and sees the white doves nesting in pink fissures in the rocks, sees the jumbled yellow bones of the mummified corpse, the glittering, fathomless eyes of priest after priest, as they stand motionless in the interior shadows of the stone churches.

All the past and all the future of the world.
She cannot imagine what this might be, she does not think she would know even if she’d been allowed to see what was under the cloth, she does not even know what such a concept might entail. Nor did she know if it was true in either sense — the Lucy sense or the Adam sense — that Ethiopians might be the oldest people in the world. They may be the same in the end —
both mysteries, both legends. Three and a half million years is older than the Old Testament, she thinks, but strange, the Old Testament seems older to her. Maybe because it is a length of time she can grasp, as the other is not. She thinks of the graveyard at Chinook. There isn’t a grave there before 1900. Her head won’t stop going around.

There is something very unsettling about this place, she thinks. There’s some dark secret here and everyone knows it, even maybe Giyorgis, but I don’t. The air is tainted with their unhappiness, their

— something — fear? Is it that those ancient churches drag them down? Or maybe it’s the mystery of the angels who helped build them, or of the great King Lalibela who was also a saint, who made the people build them. Or that pillar, there every day of your life, the knowledge it has kept a secret from you. Maybe at night when people are sleeping what it knows seeps into their dreams. Maybe these people know things no one else knows.

Or is it something simpler: their distance from the rest of the world here on their mountaintop, the sheer difficulty of getting from here to anywhere else. Or the drought right now. Or the war that went on for twenty or thirty years, and the Great Famine in which hundreds, maybe even thousands of their friends and families died — and all the famines before and since. Three thousand years of living under dictators. Is this what it does to a people? Makes them silent, gives them a grave courtesy, carrying around all those thousands of years in the darkness in the back of their eyes. Iris’s chest feels heavy with these thoughts; she feels suspended, as if what she knows now is too cumbrous for her body, as if her heart and her lungs can hardly work under the weight of them.