“Yes.” She’s nervous about this tack, but it gets her taken immediately into his office.
He turns out to be in his mid-thirties, a stocky, well-muscled redhead, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled to his elbows, his striped tie loosened. He looks up from his computer screen and sneezes, snuffles into a tissue, and apologizes, “Sorry, excuse me.” His secretary goes out, closing the door behind her. Rob sneezes again, another apology, looks up inquiringly at her.
“You sound as if you should be at home in bed,” Iris tells him. He agrees glumly, then offers her a chair across from his cluttered desk, and asks her what he can do for her.
“I’m looking for my niece,” she says, and tells him the story briefly. “I understand you were there, in Ethiopia, during the famine of ‘84 and ‘85.”
“Yeah, I was,” he says, his voice is clogged, his tone heavy. “I was working for a relief agency doing engineering work — helping put up buildings, piping in water to the camps, that kind of thing. Got a picture of her?” Iris reaches into her purse, pulls out the snapshot Tim gave her, and hands it across the desk to him. He takes it, his swivel chair creaking loudly as he leans forward.
“Her name’s Lannie, Lannie Stone.” Before he even looks at the picture, his head jerks up, and a flush rushes across his face.
“Yeah,” he says heavily. “I saw her. I remember her. Lannie. Lannie Stone.” He tosses the picture back to Iris with a gesture of something: anger? dismissal?
“Where was she?” Iris asks. “Was she all right?”
“Harbu. And then I knew her in Addis and Korem and . . there-abouts.” Iris finds she has been holding her breath and lets it out quickly. “She moved around a bit,” he says and sighs deeply, shifting in his chair, making it creak again, swivelling to look out the big window behind him which overlooks the downtown core, the Parliament Buildings, the river. “I met her at Harbu. She was running around, doing this and that. Working hard.” He falls silent again, still looking out the window. After a moment, he lifts a tissue and blows his nose into it. “Sorry,” he says. “This damn cold. I can’t shake it. I’ve had it for weeks.”
“You knew her,” she says slowly, as if she isn’t quite convinced.
“She was a little spaced-out, as we used to say, but who wouldn’t be, after seeing what we both saw.” Iris reflects on this as Sargent sits sunk into some glumness she can’t read. “Her aunt, are you?” he asks finally. “She said her parents were dead, but I don’t remember her mentioning an aunt.” This startles Iris, but it could be he has just made a mistake about what Lannie said.
“Did she say where she was going? Was she coming home? Here, I mean?”
“Sometimes she’d be working on a story. We used to meet in Addis, after I left Harbu. I think she’d been in the south, too. I forget.” He stares sombrely at his lap, then rises slowly and goes to stand looking out the window. She takes the opportunity to look around the room and notices a picture resting on a filing cabinet in front of a drooping plant. Probably his wife, and their three young children.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “Working on a story? Is that what you said?”
“Yeah,” he says. “She worked sometimes for some church magazines here in Canada. I don’t remember their names. Doing stories and photos, you know?”
“But, I thought she went to do relief work.”
“You couldn’t just go there and help, you know, if you weren’t a nurse. And when the agencies hired non-medical people, they hired locals, for obvious reasons.” The reasons aren’t at all obvious to Iris, but she lets it go. “Apparently she made a deal with a string of small church papers in the West that she’d go at her own expense if they’d get her a press card. That’s how she got there. Then she just — made her opportunities. We … dated,” he tells her. “As much as you could in a country like that, at a time like that. We were working eighteen, twenty hours a day. Then I came home. The worst was over — at least, that’s how it looked — and I had a career to get started.” He turns back to her. “She was a strange girl,” he says. “Sorry, I forgot she’s your niece.” Iris says nothing. “There was a T-shirt people wore there then,” he goes on. “It said, ‘Check One: Missionary, Mercenary, Masochist, Misfit.’ I was number three: masochist. When I figured that out, I quit and came home.”
“And Lannie?” Iris asks.
“Oh, number four. I was pretty disillusioned with the job. You think you’re helping, but really — you’re just propping up a violent, repressive regime.”
“And Lannie? Did she come home too?” she asks.
“No. She didn’t agree with me. She said no matter what, you can’t let people starve.” She sees the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth, as if he’s remembering the way Lannie spoke. Then he sighs. “She didn’t say she was coming home. She said Africa was her home.” Iris waits. It’s as if he knows much more than he’s saying, if only she could wrest it out of him.
At last she says, “I’m going to go there, to find her.”
“Oh? It’s funny, but I don’t know how she got out of Addis. Maybe she stole a ride with a food convoy or something. They travelled at night, to avoid the bombing. She could have hidden in one. She never told me how she did that.”
“Bombing! What do you mean — She had a passport, didn’t she?”
“There was a war on,” he says, surprised, lifting his head to look at her. “Didn’t you know that? It was at its worst right about the time you’re talking about. You could still get into the country, but you had to get a travel permit to move around and that could be pretty hard to do.”
“I want to know about the war.” He has been fiddling with a pen and at her question he swivels back toward her, tosses the pen down and tells her about the Emperor Haile Selassie.
“He wasn’t any bigger than you are. Smaller, in fact. He was deposed in 1974 by the Dergue, that’s Amharic for ‘committee,’ really the army. That happened because there was a major drought going on and thousands were starving, especially in the north, and the magnificent emperor — who later was strangled in his bed, there were rumours that in his last years he was sacrificing virgins — said there wasn’t, and didn’t help and didn’t let anybody else help either. When word got out, he was finished. The Dergue took over the country.”
He pauses, then, when he sees how intently she’s listening, continues. “The Dergue was Marxist, allied with the Soviet Union. It nationalized all the land in the country, set up collective farms, and there was the Red Terror —”
“What?” Iris asks, but Rob only wipes his nose and stares at his desktop in silence for a minute, before he goes on.
“It was to stamp out all resistance. People were torn from their beds and never seen again. They were shot in the streets. They were tortured hideously.” He pauses. “Mengistu’s regime was harsh, terribly harsh, there were people who said they were better off under the emperor. Guerrilla movements began in separate parts of the country: Eritrea, Tigray, the Ogaden, and so on. That was the war.” She nods, not taking her eyes off his face. “In 1991, Mengistu was overthrown and a new government took over the land, was promptly unnationalized, the province of Eritrea separated to become its own country, and the war was over.”
“All those years she was living in the middle of war?”
“There was danger,” he admits. “Early on some relief workers were killed, but on the whole, as long as you did what you were told, you were reasonably safe.”
“The war is over?”
“More or less,” he says. “The new government is pretty stable.” She reflects.
“I don’t speak Ethiopian. How will I find her?”
“You mean Amharic. It’s the official language — or was, until the new government took over. It’s probably Tigrayan now. Anyway, a lot of people speak a little English. They learn it in school. If they go to school.” At this last he turns his head away from her in a quick movement that fails to hide — anger, she thinks. “Maybe you shoul
d let her be.” Iris isn’t sure she has heard him correctly, she’s about to ask when he says, “Not everybody can be saved.” A deathly silence envelops them as Iris understands his remark. “Not everybody deserves to be saved,” he says, and the unexpected passion in his voice brings Iris to her feet.
“You’re wrong,” she says quietly, firmly. “She deserves a normal, happy life as much as you or I. I am going to bring her home.”
Addis Ababa
In years to come she will never be able to say what was going on with her during the month she spent in Ottawa waiting for her passport and visa and having her immunizations, for when she should have been full of grief, when she should have been dying with loneliness, and eaten up with fear, she wasn’t. She didn’t worry about Barney’s or even Jay’s abrupt departure except distantly, as if she were the one who had died and crossed an impermeable border from them, and although she could see them in the distance, their shapes were muted, she felt little when she thought of them.
Her hotel room was not beautiful, but it was large and comfortable, and when she went inside and locked the door she was safe from all demands on her; she could be purely herself. She hadn’t known she wanted to be free of demands, or maybe it was only that she’d never before been alone and a complete stranger in a strange place, and she experienced it as oddly pleasurable, a kind of surprising, agreeable suspension in time and space.
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.
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