Garden of Eden (46 page)

“Her system is most depleted,” he’d explained gravely to Iris. “She is fragile. You must care well for her.” Abubech had given Lannie’s landlord notice that Lannie was vacating and then had moved them both out of the grim, noisy little apartment, abandoning Lannie’s bits of furniture to the next tenant, and into her own home, a pleasant, fairly modern bungalow set in a garden behind its compound wall, with its own hired guard. They’d stayed there for the few days before their plane, which came only once a week, was to depart. Those few days are pretty much a faded dream. She’d slept most of the time, often in a chaise longue under a tree in the garden. She’s still so weak she has to be supported to walk more than a few feet.

She’s growing drowsy again. Below them now there is only velvety darkness as they fly swiftly on, droning their way across the Red Sea. She leans back from the window and closes her eyes.
Even two hours since it happened Iris’s heart is still beating fast. The taxi had dropped them at the narrow entrance to the airport compound with the sentry standing guard. Hanging clumsily on to their suitcases, their passports and tickets in their free hands, they’d joined the crowd of passengers squeezing one by one through the gate. In the poor light the sentry had scrutinized Lannie’s passport, looking from it to her face and back again several times. Iris had noticed how Lannie hadn’t glanced even once at him, just waited with the detached patience of somebody who has been through this a lot of times, until he let her through.

Iris was about to step forward when a woman, heavily swaddled in traditional garments and clutching several bags, pushed her way in ahead of her. The guard looked carefully at her face and passport, let her through, and then it was Iris’s turn. She moved forward, passport ready, when abruptly a khaki-uniformed policeman stepped from her right out of nowhere and, facing her but looking over her head, leaned past her to the sentry. Iris had barely time to register a prick of fear. She stopped, her hand holding the passport frozen in the air, the guard ignoring it.

She waited, it seemed interminably, but was less than a second, time only for the policeman to say one quick, unintelligible word in Amharic to the sentry before he bobbed back out of sight. Then the sentry took her passport, glanced at her picture or appeared to, it happened so quickly, but she’s pretty sure he didn’t even look at her, that she doesn’t see how he could have known if the passport was hers or not, handed it back to her, and let her pass. She doesn’t know if the policeman’s appearance had anything to do with her, although it was certainly strange how the guard didn’t really check her passport after that, when he’d checked everyone else’s with such care.

She believes that she has been saved from an ugly fate in this country. This is why she’d insisted on leaving the instant Lannie was well enough to go, despite the doctor’s warning and her own misgivings. Her only thought was to get out of Ethiopia as fast as she could, to get Lannie home to safety. Now her relief is great, even though she won’t tell anyone about the instant at the sentry box, as she doubts she’d be believed. She isn’t sure herself that anything happened.

Despite her concern for Lannie, the line-ups, the hours waiting in the crowded lounge after that were nothing. But it brings back to her with force the people at Lalibela and their plight, that she’d almost forgotten during her illness. She is about to correct herself, she means, Lannie’s illness, but the word is apt to describe what she has been through during those couple of weeks locked up in Lannie’s apartment. The memory of her own anguish, far deeper than she’d guessed or even imagined, amazes her and she approaches it as warily as a traveller approaching an abyss — astounded by its depth and wildness, respectful, even awed.

She keeps wondering what to do with what she saw at Lalibela, with what the people told her, and what she thinks is going on there. Should she call the United Nations? Amnesty International? Or someone else? Who? The manner of her finding this out — her, of all people — is so purely coincidental that she can’t help but view it as fate, maybe even as a test of her humanity, although she has the grace to be a bit embarrassed at the grandiosity of the thought.

Lannie has tucked a pillow against the window and Iris, seeing she’s going to sleep, takes the folded blanket from the seat beside her and drapes it over her. She’s wide awake herself, can’t imagine sleeping, thinks that she’ll sleep again when she’s safely home in her own bed in her own house.

“We meet again,” a woman’s voice says above her. Iris looks up and sees a tall handsome woman smiling down at her. It’s a face that’s familiar — this is the woman she met weeks ago in the garden of the Hilton Hotel, the woman who said she was the wife of an American working in Addis. “Betty Chamberlain,” the woman goes on. “We met in —”

“I remember,” Iris interrupts, pleased Betty has spoken to her. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

Betty says, “I saw you from a distance in the waiting area. I seem to be quite unable to sleep.” Observing Iris’s glance at Lannie, she lowers her voice. “There’s an empty seat beside me.” Iris unsnaps her seat belt, follows Betty up a few rows and sits beside her.

“I remember you said you’d soon be leaving for good.”

“Indeed. My husband is due to follow in a few weeks. Is that your
niece with you?” Iris nods. “Pretty girl,” Betty says. “I take it it’s been a successful trip?”

“What a time I’ve had since I met you,” Iris says. “I swear you wouldn’t believe it.” Iris notices that her tan has faded and, this close, she sees by the fine lines around her eyes and mouth that she’s Iris’s age. The flight attendant bends over them, asking if they’d like something to drink. Betty takes a glass of white wine from her tray and Iris, following her lead, does the same. When she’s gone, Betty says, “What happened to you that was so extraordinary?”

“I hope you’ve got time for this,” Iris says. “It’s a long story.” The lights have been lowered in the cabin and all around them is the drowsy murmur of voices broken now and then by quiet laughter or a muted cough.

“My dear, I’m a captive audience,” Betty says, and there’s a note in her voice that makes Iris wonder suddenly if she has been drinking. She hesitates, then decides it doesn’t matter. Betty knows the country; maybe she’ll be able to explain things.

She takes a deep breath and begins: “After I left you, I found my niece had gone with her employer to Kombolcha, so I hired a car and a driver to follow her there.” She goes on, not looking at Betty. As she speaks she loses herself in her own story, sees the herd of pack camels sauntering down the road ahead of her, a pair of red birds like over-grown swallows swooping past the windshield, the barren yellow hills, conical in shape instead of the long, sloping silhouettes she’s used to, and behind them low mountains appear and behind them another ridge of blue mountains and then another all the way back to the sky. Men walk past her carrying tall wooden staffs, driving donkeys, goats, and thin zibou, calling cheerfully to each other. The red rock churches rise up around her again, the beggar child cries in the dust, and the strange man in the hotel corridor bends toward her with desperate courtesy. She stops talking because she feels strange, as if there’s something in the air like a thunderstorm about to break, or the rising rumble of the earth before a quake.

She breathes deeply again, passengers’ voices rise up around her. She turns to Betty, but Betty is leaning back against her seat, looking off into the distance as if she has forgotten Iris is there. But the look
in her eyes — her eyes have changed colour, grown from that faded blue-grey to a more intense blue.

“They are Amharas, those hungry people,” she says quietly.

“What? What does that mean?” Iris asks. Betty stirs, pulls herself into a more upright sitting position, and turns to Iris.

“You know the Tigrayans won the war? That Mengistu was an Amhara?” Iris nods. “It is a Tigrayan-led government now ruling the country.”

“I thought everyone was happy with the new government, that it wasn’t a dictatorship any more.” Betty shrugs.

“They’ve suppressed some dissension. They fired all the Amhara university professors, replaced them with Egyptians. Not just at the university — they replaced certain newspaper journalists with Tigrayans. Other positions of importance too.”

“But why?” Iris asks. “What difference does it make?”

“Let me give you some background. The ancient kingdom of Aksum, the true heart of old Ethiopia, the founding region, is in Tigray. Those obelisks the woman told you about, they lie in the ancient capital of that kingdom. They record the earliest history of what became Ethiopia. Ullendorff, he wrote a classic book called
The Ethiopians,
says that the people who speak Tigrinya are the authentic carriers of the historic and cultural traditions of ancient Abyssinia. But they — the Aksumite kingdom — the true descendants of Menelik, the son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon who became the first king, lost power somewhere in the sixth century A.D. or so to a usurper dynasty called the Zagwe dynasty — your king Lalibela was one of them, not of the Solomonic line — and they didn’t regain power until the thirteenth century. The new king, Yekuno Amalak —”

“Wait,” Iris says. “How do you know all this?” A woman, a housewife. Uneasily, she remembers abandoning university and coming home, her father’s indifference, the look on her mother’s face, as if Iris were a stranger, or someone she didn’t like much, although she’d said nothing. She feels vaguely ashamed, but Betty laughs.

“I have a master’s degree in American history,” she says, “acquired before my marriage. When I came here I had no job, my children
were grown and living in California and France. I had nothing to do. So I took to drinking wine to pass the time. And I read Ethiopian history.” She pauses. “Am I boring you?”

“Never!” Iris says. “I’m beginning to see that I need to know what happened in the past to understand what I saw.” Satisfied, Betty goes on. The lines of her face grow cleaner and more taut with the effort of her thought and the obvious pleasure it gives her. Iris is humbled.

“The new king’s family had been south, in Shoa, for generations and so his language had become Amharic. He moved his capital from Aksum to Shoa and it is said he made Amharic the official language of the realm.” She turns to Iris. “Tigrayans speak their own languages.” Iris nods mutely. “In the first part of the sixteenth century the Muslims under Gran overran Aksum and destroyed it. As far as I know, Tigray was never powerful again, until today.” She turns to Iris questioningly. “I suppose the Tigrayans feel that at last they’ve recovered what was always rightfully theirs. I don’t know. I’m only guessing.”

“I think it’s wonderful that you know so much.” Betty laughs.

“You could do it too,” she tells Iris.

“I did go to university for a year,” Iris says. “I just — all I could think about was this boy —” This boy, Barney, who is dead now. Betty makes a noise, a delicate snort.

“Sorry,” she says. “I know all about it.”

“But you got an education.”

“My boyfriend couldn’t have an uneducated wife for the career he’d picked out for himself. He encouraged me to get my master’s. But not my doctorate. That wasn’t necessary. That was overdoing it.” The attendant appears and refills Betty’s glass. Iris stands, looks back to where Lannie sits, eyes closed, head lolling against the window, and sits again.

“Go on, please. I want to hear it all.”

Betty sets her already half-empty wineglass down on her tray.

“For the last hundred and fifty or more years Amharas have ruled Ethiopia. Of course, they made enemies. And now the Tigrayans are in control. Maybe they’re getting even for things we don’t even know about. Things that maybe aren’t even recorded anywhere, that are
remembered by word of mouth alone, in councils where no
ferenjis
are allowed to go.” She pauses to sip her wine.

“But would the Tigrayans deliberately starve Amharas?” Betty snorts again, less delicately.

“If my research is right, the Amharas starved a few Tigrayans in their day. Oh, don’t quote me. I’m not sure that’s true.” Iris wonders why Betty is suddenly backtracking. But if what she thinks she knows does indeed add up to a deliberate policy — and what little information she has points directly to this and to no place else — What if a strong people has the means, but refuses to feed another, weaker people? The reason must be to further weaken them, maybe to displace them — land again — or to make them die.

“Are you — are you talking about — genocide?” And when she says it, there’s a kind of rushing in her head, as if the word has come hurtling towards her out of some ancient place, a rocky darkness where dwells all that is terrible in the human heart accelerating through all the eons since Creation. She’s terrified she has hit on the truth.

Betty starts, puts both slender, long-fingered hands to her face, covering it, rubs her eyes with her fingertips, then lowers her hands to rest loosely around the stem of her empty glass.

“I would not say that word myself,” she says. “It is true though that the Tigrayans occupied Lalibela for a time during the war.” She pauses. “But, really — I know nothing about it.”

Iris is silenced by this sudden change in Betty’s certainty.

Finally she says, choosing her words carefully, “If it were true — just suppose that I had absolute proof of it — I don’t, but imagine that I did. What could I do about it?”

“I suppose you could go back to Canada and tell people.”

Iris is afraid no one will believe her. She is afraid she is wrong. She is about to ask Betty exactly whom she should tell, when Betty abruptly shifts in her seat so that her tray bounces and she has to rescue her glass. She says, sounding unwilling or exasperated, Iris can’t tell what exactly, “I’ll ask my husband when he phones. He’ll know what to do.”

Relief floods through Iris.

“I’m grateful to you,” she says.

“It’s nothing,” Betty says sharply. “It’s less than nothing. First of all, you may be sure that if those people are hungry, the government is well aware of it.” She stops, as if thinking better of what she’s saying. “He’ll probably tell me to mind my own business. He’ll say that’s Ethiopian business, that we can’t know what has happened there, that someone else is looking after it, that the Tigrayan government is the best government the country has had in two thousand years and we mustn’t expect too much. Leave it with me. I’ll do what I can. The usual thing one does in such a situation is go to the press. But if you do that, you have to have photos, some kind of documents that constitute proof, and you don’t have any such thing. You could call an aid agency that’s in the area. But you said you didn’t see any? Right?” She doesn’t wait for Iris to answer. “But there are aid agencies working nearby, and if they know about it, they will do something. Obviously, the government isn’t going to want the rest of the world to know what they’re up to. There’s also Amnesty International. They have observers in the country. They’d be able to apply pressure — if they could get proof.”