Garden of Eden (40 page)

I suppose the answer is too complicated for him to tell me, Iris thinks. I suppose I wouldn’t understand anyway, or it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Or he doesn’t dare tell me for fear of — she stops here, not knowing what: the police? the army? the government? Then she thinks, I’m a stranger — how can I judge? I can only refuse him or accept what he says.

She stares into his eyes as he looks gravely down at her, trying hard to see whatever it is there that contains the answers to her questions. No, she cannot read that darkness; she does not speak that language, she from a country created only yesterday, from a people who believe that by crossing a mere ocean, they’ve escaped the weight of history. She takes in a deep, slow breath.

“I will tell people you need food,” she says. “I’m going back today to Addis and I will tell the NGOs. And when I get home, soon, I will tell the people back in Canada.” She imagines the truckloads of grain
rushing up the winding mountain road, or maybe the NGOs will ship the food in using the new airstrip. Then she wonders whom in Canada she can tell and whether anyone will listen to her if she does. Lannie! she thinks. Lannie will know where to find the right people to tell. And I can call that woman in Addis who helped me find her — Mrs. Samuels.

He lifts his head abruptly, looking off in the distance before he brings his eyes back to meet hers. It’s as if he’s searching as deep inside her as he can go, looking perhaps for some promise he can trust. Then, he bows.

“Thank you, sister,” he says, and disappears around the corner.

While they’ve been talking, the sun has risen to bathe the countryside’s rough peaks and valleys, the flat-topped buttes Giyorgis says are called
ambas,
its dusty roads, its distant, dark-red, round, two-storey dwellings. Such a busy landscape, she thinks, with its ups and downs and ins and outs, its varied palette, it tires her this morning to look at it. She thinks of her own country with its long, gently sloping lines, unbroken for miles by buildings or people, its pale yellows and tans and dusty blue-greens, and its enormous sky that’s both a steady question and its own unreadable answer.

A motorized vehicle is roaring down the road on the far side of the hotel and Iris recognizes that the world is stirring at last. It occurs to her to wonder why, in a hotel full of tourists, this man has come to her, but she knows the answer. The other tourists travel with guides from their own countries and have the blessing of the government because of the money they bring. To disturb them would surely bring harsh penalties to the local people. And because she’s alone, travelling with an Ethiopian who isn’t an official guide, because she speaks English, not French or German, like the other tourists.

Thinking hard about what she will do, she goes back to her room, where she quickly packs her few things and takes her suitcase through the lobby to the desk to check out. People are about now, mostly hotel staff, but even though she studies the faces of the several men who are standing in the lobby or passing through, none of them is the stranger who spoke to her. She says hesitantly, carefully to the desk clerk, “I see you’re having a drought here.” He nods, handing
her back her passport, then speaks slowly, in a soft voice so that she has to strain to hear him. “Yes. There has been a crop failure. And there is no rain.”

He looks down at the stack of papers he’s filling out, no computers here — of course not, there’s no power — and Iris notices that his collar, the collar of the desk clerk in what was once a Hilton Hotel, is frayed almost through to the stiffening beneath the cloth. Whoever is paying him isn’t giving him enough money, she thinks. He shuffles his papers without looking at her while he waits for her to finish signing her traveller’s cheques, and she thinks it’s as if he’d like to say something more to her, but keeps changing his mind.

As she hands him the cheques, Iris sees Giyorgis coming across the lobby, carrying his bag.

“Are you well this morning?” he asks. His voice is gentle. There must be signs in her face of her sleepless night, nor has she bothered with makeup or teased her thick hair into a coiffure, just pulled it back and tied it with a scarf at the nape of her neck. She supposes she looks terrible; she finds she doesn’t care.

Giyorgis loads their bags, they drive slowly out of the hotel compound, waving to the guards whose faces Iris doesn’t recognize, and turn down the dusty road that will lead them to the Chinese Road, then to Weldiya, Dessie, Kombolcha, and, she hopes, to Lannie. Iris leaves the town with no regrets, and yet with an absence of relief.

The words of the stranger in the hotel corridor continue to sound in her ears, and she is determined to act, although she is still not sure what she’ll do. If she tells people, she’s afraid no one will believe her. She expects she’ll be viewed as naive, as a silly tourist who, on seeing the standard poverty of the Third World for the first time, has mistaken the commonplace for a crisis. She can’t think how she’ll overcome that. Perhaps she can’t.

In any case, she thinks, she will at least try her very best to convey to someone in authority that the people here are desperate enough to have asked her for help. After a while she turns to Giyorgis and asks him bluntly, “Why won’t the government give them food?”

He starts to, then doesn’t reply, only shrugs and grasps the steering wheel more firmly. She would press him to get him to speak to
her, but she’s anxious not to put him in a bad position. But when she sees some country people walking up the mountain road to the town, she makes Giyorgis stop and ask them about the food situation, which he does without apparent reluctance.

“They say they have no food,” he tells her. “They say there was a crop failure last year, and a poor crop the year before that, and if the rains don’t come,” he gestures to the clear blue sky, “there’ll be another one this year and they will starve. They will have to go away to find food.”

Twice more, with several kilometres between each group, she makes him stop to ask the same question of different bands of people walking along the road or crossing the fields with loads of firewood on their backs. Each time Giyorgis tells her, “They have only firewood, they have no food.” The second group has also asked them to send the NGOs.

All the way as they head south from Weldiya to Dessie to Kombolcha they meet truck after truck loaded with grain and heading north. Now she and Giyorgis don’t even mention them, Giyorgis poker-faced, Iris staring grimly at them, knowing that none of these trucks are turning off at Weldiya to take grain to the hungry people at Lalibela.
A relatively stable government,
they’d said in Canada,
a step toward democracy.
Why would they say that if it isn’t true? They know things about this country you haven’t even dreamt of, she reminds herself.

It is late afternoon when they finally reach Kombolcha. Iris notices that the people here are thin too, although not as thin as those in Lalibela, and some of them laugh and talk as they walk along, which she didn’t notice people doing in or around Lalibela. There they were mostly silent and grim as they trudged along the road with their burdens or chased their animals, at least, that’s how she remembers it.

They drive through the gates of Afewerk’s Inn. How is it that nothing has changed here, the flowers are still blooming red and orange, the guard who opens the gate is the same impassive, tall man, swathed now as evening approaches in a thick wool
shamma.
In silence they
park, get out, and walk with stiffened joints, inside. Hagosa, still wearing her patterned cotton housedress over her bulky figure, her white
shamma
loosely draped over her black hair and sturdy shoulders, greets them at the door to the threadbare reception room.

“You return,” she says, beaming shyly at Iris. Then she directs her gaze to Iris’s rumpled, dusty clothing, her uncombed hair that’s escaping the scarf she’d tied around in the morning. “You have been travelling,” she remarks. She seems concerned.

Iris says, “Yes, to Lalibela.” She’d say more, but Hagosa claps her hands together and holds them under her chin.

“How very good!” she declares, her black eyes shining. “You like?”

“Oh, yes, very much. The churches were wonderful.” The door at the back of the room opens and Afewerk’s widow enters. Although she too wears a
shamma
over her head and shoulders, her straight gabardine skirt and neat flowered blouse are, as before, North American in style and in her way of wearing them. She and Giyorgis greet each other with stiff bows.

“You’re back,” she says, smiling down at Iris, although with less ardour than Hagosa had. Iris had forgotten how tall she is, and big-boned — a strong-looking woman. Behind her, Hagosa hurries silently out. “Two rooms?” the innkeeper asks in her slightly bored manner. Iris nods. Hagosa had apparently gone to get keys, because now she returns and hands a pair of them to the innkeeper who takes them, glancing at Iris who stands tiredly, waiting to be shown to her room. “You were out sightseeing?” she asks politely. Hagosa has vanished again.

“We went to Lalibela to see the rock churches.” Afewerk’s widow — how embarrassing it is not to be able to remember the woman’s name — literally takes a step back. Her clear brown eyes widen. Giyorgis moves back to lean against a narrow table set against the wall as if he’s tired or bored, or recognizes this conversation has nothing to do with him. Or is it something else?

“Lalibela?” the woman says. She’s thinking, her eyes fixed on Iris’s face. “How did you go there?” she asks. “Did you fly from here?” Iris shakes her head, no, they drove, she tells her, but the look on the woman’s face puzzles, even alarms her a little. It’s as if she and
Giyorgis had violated some rule by going there. Bewildered, Iris reminds herself that, after all, Ethiopia is not a free country in the way that Canada is free.

She hesitates, then says in a tone that she hopes sounds innocent, “I had to wait for my niece, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity to see a little of the country. And I did want to see the rock churches. They’re practically the eighth wonder of the world.” She doesn’t mention that she hadn’t heard of them herself until three days ago. Afewerk’s widow is still staring disconcertingly at Iris. She looks away, then asks slowly, “What are the churches like? I’ve never been there,” she adds as if it’s an afterthought, and Iris feels pretty sure the woman is lying, or else she wants to find something else out from Iris without Iris knowing she’s doing it. She must be careful not to mention the hunger of the people.

“Oh, really quite amazing,” she says brightly. “There are ten or eleven of them — I didn’t see them all because I just got too tired. It’s the altitude, I think. But —” The woman is staring at the floor, Iris sees worry in her face.

“What are they like?” she persists. “Tell me about them.” Is it that she wants to be sure that’s where Iris went? Maybe there was something along the way, in Lalibela itself, that she wasn’t supposed to see. So she tells her how the churches were carved from the top down and are forty feet or so deep and other details of their construction.

“And did you take pictures?” The question is so careful that Iris does her best not to show any hesitation.

“I wish I could have, but there’s no electricity so the churches are too dark inside for pictures. And anyway, I forgot to bring a camera.” Is she imagining it, or does Afewerk’s widow relax perceptibly? “I’m sorry that I don’t have one,” she adds. “I would have liked to take home pictures of them they’re so remarkable.”

“They are remarkable,” the woman agrees quickly, apparently forgetting she has just said she hasn’t seen them. There’s a brief silence during which Iris considers, then risks asking her about the situation in Lalibela. She’s thinking, I’m a Canadian, they wouldn’t dare do anything to me.

“Did you know,” she begins carefully, “that there’s been no rain
there? That there’s been a crop failure and now the fields are bare and it’s no use planting without moisture?” She waits.

Afewerk’s widow says angrily, “Hah! They are stupid up there! They don’t know anything about conservation, they farm all the wrong way. If they don’t have grain stored, it’s their own fault!” Her answer is so vehement, so full of contempt, that Iris is shaken. She does her best not to show it. Giyorgis changes his position against the table and yawns audibly. Is he trying to warn her? She glances back, but he’s studying his shoes, doesn’t appear to be listening at all. Still, Iris thinks, she’d be wise to pretend she’s satisfied.

“Oh, I see,” she says after a moment, her voice softer than she intended, and clears her throat. As if starvation were only what those people deserved because of their stupidity, their improvidence — which she doesn’t believe in anyway. Again she is assailed by the beggar child crying in the dirt, she hears the farmers saying they have nothing to eat, and the stranger saying, “We can’t get government food.”

“Oh, I see,” she says again, as if already the subject bores her. She will tell Lannie when she comes; after so many years in this country Lannie will know what to do. Or her agency will. Maybe it will send grain. “Well,” she says, turning away and passing a hand across her face. “I’m hungry and I’m dying for a shower.”

“Yes, it is a long way and the roads are not good. You must be very tired —” Her tone is soothing, but she’s interrupted by the door behind Iris opening, and Iris sees her break into a smile, as if she has forgotten what she has just been talking about. Giyorgis straightens and takes a step forward. Afewerk’s widow makes a gesture with her hand and nods her head toward the door. Puzzled, a bit apprehensive, Iris turns.

A rather beautiful, tall, stern-looking middle-aged Ethiopian woman is standing in the doorway, one arm around the shoulders of a second woman, as if she’s comforting or supporting her. The second woman is slender and very pale in the harsh light from the unshaded overhead bulb, which also makes her long, drab hair shine dully, and although she is warmly dressed in faded jeans and a bulky, dark red sweater, she’s shivering in the evening chill. It’s her niece, Lannie.