Abubech sat down then, raised her eyes to Lannie’s with a look so fixed, so clear-eyed, that in the face of it Lannie’s mouth went dry. She wanted more desperately than she’d realized to be a part of this, if only because she wanted to be with this woman, to gain strength from her, or to float for a while in the steady wake of Abubech’s fortitude.
“I’m tired out,” she heard herself say. She would, bit by bit, when she knew Abubech better, tell her about her years as a relief worker doing whatever needed doing, checking out rumours, mixing batches of feed, weighing children; about watching people die of starvation, especially the children; about how angry the endless, hopeless poverty of the rural people made her, in a nation rich with mostly undeveloped resources; about her former disgust at the arrogance of the ruling class and their cruelty and their corruption and their negligence.
Knowing all the while that her deepest reason was that she needed to do something that, at the very least, would not add to her burden of shame, that would not waste what little strength she had left in worry over whether she was doing something to justify her very existence, her privileged, screwed-up, selfish existence. And Abubech and her agency had found something that seemed to Lannie to make clear, inarguable sense. Not that, in the beginning, there hadn’t been plenty of arguments with government officials until they began to turn from dubious toward it to supporters of the project. The results already were speaking for themselves. And always, at back of all this, she did not want to leave Africa. She was in love with Africa.
“Yours is the only project I’ve ever heard about that makes any kind of long-term sense to me. I want to help. Please let me help.” Abubech at first looked faintly surprised, then amused. She looked down at the papers in neat piles on her desk. After a moment, during which Lannie cursed herself for letting her own desperation leak into view, at the same time wondering if Abubech had a husband, children, a real life somewhere out in the ragged, tumultuous city around them, Abubech began speaking again as if Lannie hadn’t said what she’d said.
“You know that Global 2000 is also present in this country?”
“I’m not sure what that is,” Lannie said.
“It is an American initiative, with the backing of the World Bank. Introducing hybrid seeds and high technology, high input farming techniques like the ones you use in North America, here in Africa, because they get such high yields, as an answer to the problem of food shortages and famine. Former president Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center is behind it. I do not know who else.”
“Like the Green Revolution?”
“It appears to be.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lannie said. “The Green Revolution got high yields at the expense of every single small farmer wherever it was introduced.” At this, she saw new interest appear in Abubech’s eyes.
Fatima has begun to roast the coffee beans and a rich, heavy scent, one that normally Lannie savours, is rising from them. Today it makes her sick. If she tells Abubech how she’s feeling these days, Abubech will make her take a holiday. A holiday! The word makes her think of a Canadian family heading out in their overloaded minivan for Banff or the Pacific, of the hordes of tourists she saw in Greece, Crete especially.
Crete — the warm blue Aegean, the welcome heat so strong it could melt muscle and bone, of Dimitri, his jealousy, his pride in her as if she were a racehorse he owned or a new sportscar. Sitting side by side in a taverna by the sea drinking the tawny Cretan wine, listening to musicians playing wild Greek music, the dancers snapping their fingers, their gleaming black boots — even dancing themselves sometimes. And Dimitri’s friends with them, rich men like himself, with their gorgeous, long-limbed European girlfriends, their cultivated, wilful vapidity.
She shudders, and then she’s lying, her palely freckled white limbs tangled with Dimitri’s golden ones, in his big, square bed, the moonlight pouring in through the open terrace doors, spilling across the dark tiled floor, bathing them in its cool light. It’s true that even as she hated him, she’d been in love with him; she’d stayed as long as she did for those endless nights in his moonlight-flushed bed.
And the long lazy days she spent on the terrace in the shade, lifting her head from her book now and then to stare out over the roofs of the whitewashed resort town clinging to the precipitous, rocky slopes of the island, running down its sides to meet the sun-sparkled Sea of Crete. She thinks now perhaps she had been happy then, steeping herself in The Iliad and The Odyssey and whatever other versions of the Greek myths she’d been able to find in translation.
Other times, while Dimitri slept or went off to do business in Athens, she took his car and drove to the ancient ruins which were everywhere on Crete, mixed in with bronze plaques telling of the horrors of the Second World War, whole villages of women, in preference to being raped and killed by the Germans, grasping hands and leaping off cliffs just as they had done three thousand years earlier. She could not imagine the women of Chinook joining hands and singing as they leaped off Chinook’s clay cliffs to their deaths. Lying there on her blue-and-white canvas deck chair, she thought that without a history fraught with war, murder, blood, sacrifices, with gods and goddesses replete with human desires and passions, it was impossible to imagine any of these things except as insanity. She wondered if the people of Chinook, placid and smug as she remembers them, were better off without them or not. They were wealthier, but they were not better off.
Day after sweltering, dry day she parked Dimitri’s car on the hard-packed dirt lots, paid her entrance fee and wandered through the palace at Knossos, the ruins of the ancient city of Gortyn, the wonders of the palace at Mali, the palace-city of Phaistos, the long-buried town of Gournia, and a dozen other sites whose names she’d forgotten. A whole universe of human desire and its fulfilment or failure existing before her own world had been dreamt of. It seemed to her then that if she could only sink into that city’s or palace’s life as it was three thousand years earlier, she would come to feel at home, because of all the things that counted, what could possibly be different?
She walked the ruins in the baking heat, her guidebook in one hand, her bottle of water in the crook of her arm, sliding slowly back into the Minoan world, then, hours later pulling herself out of it to get in Dimitri’s car and drive herself back to the whitewashed villa set on the rocky cliff overlooking Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” And she would ponder what it all meant — she from a country without a past, at least not for her people, cut off irrevocably from her European ancestry. Not able to make a new world, try as they might, and the United States always with them, overshadowing their own possibilities even while sinking further and further into greed, violence, and corruption.
And yet the clean sweep of the prairie; it spoke to her sometimes in her dreams, whispering to her of its purity, of its power to sweep away history, to outlast all histories, to be stronger than the mightiest king, stronger even than any god — or perhaps, as the Native people said, it was itself a god. She thought that she had somehow fallen into the dreams of the pioneers, her own grandparents and great-grandparents who imagined the land as much as they saw it, and then set about creating that dream. Then her heart ached and she longed for the wind rushing through the grass, for its sweet and pungent fragrance in spring, for the liquid call of the meadowlark on a summer morning, for the lonesome melodics of a band of coyotes carolling from a windswept grassy hill to the star-ridden sky.
She thought — she thought a lot of things: that only land is more powerful than history, but only if it is not wholly transformed by the hands of human beings; that maybe some day she would be able to go home, followed, always, by the fear that the home she dreamt of was no longer there, the grass had been ploughed up, the buffalo were dead, there were fences everywhere, and the stink of diesel fuel and oil wells tainted the once-clean air.
Abubech is speaking to her. She comes to herself with a start, looks questioningly toward her, but Abubech has turned back to Fatima, they’re laughing toge
ther. Pulled into her fatigue, she knows some kind of respite is needed, but she isn’t sure what would help. With her money almost gone, she won’t squander what’s left on a holiday. When she has only enough left for a plane ticket home, will she buy one and go? Nausea grips her again.
“I have no past,” she’d said to Rob Sargent as they sat together on the terrace of the café all the workers frequented in the town near their camp. “I renounce my personal history.” And when he’d been angry with her, had shouted at her, causing the local men sitting against the back wall to swivel their heads and stare, she’d said, “In a country like Ethiopia what is the use of a personal history? A personal history is meaningless in Ethiopia.” She had meant much more than merely that cut off from one’s own country it became meaningless, or there was no one to share it with, but that was the significance Rob decided to take.
“Share it with me,” he’d said. “I’ll tell you mine.” But she didn’t want to hear Rob’s history, it was too intimate, it would be more than she could bear. Nor did she want to know why he’d come to Ethiopia. If he told her, she was sure she would be able to read his weakness in what he said, and she didn’t want to know in what way he was weak. It took all her energy to deal with her own, she had none left for anybody else’s. It seemed to her that his red hair shot sparks in the light falling from the bulbs strung up against the back wall, his blue eyes darkened, boring into hers, searching, trying to fasten themselves to her.
“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 s
o 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.”
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