They slow in a bottleneck and she sees that something is very wrong with that donkey standing against the wall. Its dull, shaggy, reddish-brown hair covers his thin ribs in patches, it’s falling out, his ears droop and his head hangs as he stands motionless in the midst of the people passing around him. The donkey is clearly dying and no one cares.
The taxi enters a large square with a long block of viewing stands down one side. The street, obviously a major thoroughfare, is lane-less and the cars and trucks advance in a clump, every which way, easing in front of each other or switching from one side of the street to the other by dint of honking, rushing, then slowing, then edging into the stream of vehicles in such a way that Iris is sure they should hit each other, although they never seem to. At least nobody’s driving too fast in this jumble. Apparently the light is red because the driver pulls to a stop in what seems to be the middle of the square.
He turns to her, “See? Over there?” She hadn’t realized he spoke English and responds eagerly to his pointing finger. “That is where Mengistu made his speeches.” One of her books had been published in the eighties and had a picture of Mengistu. The driver is pointing to a railed platform to their right, a sort of viewing stand painted a flat, military grey, with wide steps leading up each side. She sees above the stand the faded outline where a large star had once been. “He would stand there and all the people would fill the square and stand over there.” He points to the rows of bleachers on their left. “Used to be Revolutionary Square, but now is Maskal Square.”
“Maskal?” Iris tries out the word.
“It is — cross,” he says. “For the day the True Cross was found.”
The True Cross? Does this mean these people are Christians, as she is? Her eye is caught by a tall, strong-looking woman standing on the sidewalk only a few feet away. She’s wearing an ankle-length cloaklike garment in a pattern too small for Iris to make out but that blurs into a hazy, attractive blue-orange design. As Iris watches, a man comes up to the woman who smiles broadly at him, yet with what seems to Iris to be a touch of deference or even shyness. As he stops to speak to her she lifts her head and Iris sees that all the skin of her neck from the underside of her chin to where the garment touches the base of her throat is covered with small blue tattoos. More, the woman is showing them off deliberately as if she thinks they’re beautiful. They seem wonderful to Iris, both the fact of them and the fact the woman is proud of them — this is the first she’s seen of the Africa of her imagination — they’re tribal markings, she guesses. No, she thinks, they’re adornment, that’s all. She winces at the thought of the pain the woman must have endured to acquire them.
This scene barely has time to register when the driver steps on the gas, jerking Iris back in the seat, and in a second the square is lost behind them in the uneven flow of Land Rovers, small trucks and cars, and blue and white vanlike vehicles that seem to be buses, all packed with three times the number of people they were built to hold, all spewing a smoky black fog from their exhausts. Everyone honks, everyone manoeuvres; it’s a miracle they aren’t all dead.
They arrive at the Hilton, although from the street outside it’s impossible to tell if the walls contain an embassy, a mansion, or a used-car lot. Inside the compound — she finds herself dredging up the word compound from forgotten depths of girlhood reading — she finds parked cars around the edges of a smoothly paved lot, no potholes here, and a doorman and a couple of traffic policemen, and palm trees slapping their fronds against each other lazily in a light wind that Iris hadn’t noticed before. It’s like a movie set, she thinks, and here I am: Iris Christie, world traveller. For a moment she’s forgotten why she has come. In her delight she has even forgotten the beggars and the woman with the blue tattoos and the dying donkey.
She’d changed some traveller’s cheques for birr before she left the airport as the nurse at the clinic told her to do. The nurse had warned her to be sure to get a government taxi and not one of the ones waiting in the parking lot outside the airport compound, so she knows in advance what the fare will be and how much to tip. Now he opens the cab door for her, hands her her single suitcase, bows gravely when she pays him.
Inside the hotel Iris gets herself a room from the clerk, an Ethiopian male who also bows, but with such grace she feels her cheeks heating up with surprise at such an extreme degree of etiquette. He inquires as to whether she would like to check her valuables in the hotel safe, but all she has in the way of valuables beside her passport is her money and she decides to keep it with her. He is so pleasant and gracious that she has an impulse to ask him for advice on her search for Lannie, but she is too shy.
She thanks the clerk and makes her way out of the lobby through a horde of tourists, all speaking loudly in German, cameras hanging from straps around their necks or carrying video cameras in the crooks of their arms, guidebooks in their hands, waistpacks securely fastened around their ample middles. She skirts an Arab man and his wife whose abundant, heavy gold jewellery and gold-trimmed, white robes speak of wealth so vast she can’t comprehend it. She finds her room. She’s sure she’s far too excited and exhausted by her two-day trip and too eager to find Lannie, who can’t be far away now, to sleep, but she lies down on her bed anyway.
Stretched out on the rust-coloured bedspread, propped against her pillows, she’s more than a little surprised that, despite the elegant lobby, even the Hilton isn’t particularly new or luxurious. There’s an air-conditioning unit against the wall, but the room isn’t hot. Otherwise, it’s anonymous: bed, desk, single chair, bureau, lamp, bedside table — she could be anywhere. Staring at the slightly grimy ceiling she tries to marshal her thoughts.
As the day of her departure for Ethiopia approached, she’d found herself thinking about the moment, finally, when she and Lannie would meet face to face. She’d tried out various scenarios: throwing their arms around each other and crying with joy; careful handshakes and the brushing of cheeks; a quarrel — Why not? Would she be able to stop herself from accusing Lannie of neglecting her family and friends in Canada, who were worrying and wondering what had become of her? Would Lannie be angry Iris had come chasing after her? Angry about whatever it was that made her stop writing to them? Or will she be indifferent, not caring that Iris has come so far, not interested in seeing her?
When she’d told the nurse she didn’t know where to start looking when she arrived in Ethiopia, she had given her the name of a woman at CIDA — “Canadian International Development Agency,” she explained. “She still goes there to oversee projects and she was there in 1985, and she knows everybody. Talk to her.”
Iris phoned the woman at once, Celia was her name. When Iris arrived at her Ottawa office it turned out she’d already located the phone numbers in Addis Ababa of the agencies she’d thought were the best bets to locate Lannie.
“And if they don’t know her themselves, they’ll know where to send you to find her — if she’s still in the country.” Iris asked for street addresses, but Celia warned her, “Addis has no street addresses. For the most part the streets aren’t even named. One finds one’s way about using landmarks.” When Iris asked why, Celia explained grimly that the people had taken the signs down during the Red Terror, to make it harder for the soldiers and police to find anyone. And now, here she is in the maze of Addis Ababa.
She searches through her new leather folder that contains her money, traveller’s cheques, passport, and visa. There the numbers are, tucked away in a small compartment. Agitated, she goes to her window and looks out over the hotel grounds without seeing a thing. If she hadn’t had the imperative of the phone calls hovering over her, she would succumb to the wave of homesickness now engulfing her. But she forces herself back around the bed to the phone, the slip of paper on which Celia scrawled the agency names and phone numbers quivering in her hand, and dials the first number. When a man answers in a peremptory tone, she takes a deep breath and explains who she is and what she wants.
“I do not know
her,” he says roughly, and then is silent. She can hear paper rustling. She wavers between anxiety and slamming the phone down at his rudeness, but in the end merely says, “Thank you,” and hangs up. This encounter emboldens rather than weakens her, and when she consults her paper for the next number, it doesn’t tremble in her fingers any more.
But no one answers at the second number, and her third call is answered by a young-sounding woman speaking in a bored, vague manner, as if she has other, more important things on her mind than this conversation. Iris has to tell her twice what it is she wants.
“No, I think not so,” the voice says. “No, this person, I do not know. She is not here.” Iris suspects the young woman of just not wanting to be bothered, so she puts a tick beside that number too, as she has with the second one where no one answered, meaning, call again tomorrow.
She has two numbers left. She dials the first carefully, consulting her paper twice to make sure she gets it right. The phone rings and rings and nobody answers. Puzzled, Iris looks at her watch which she’s been carefully adjusting as she passes through time zone after time zone. It’s past five o’clock. All the offices must be closed. What if I never find her? She has to give herself a pep talk: How upset would you be if you were in Canada? You’d just wait till morning and try then.
She thinks again that she should try to sleep, but it seems to her that every nerve in her body, every sense receptor has been on full alert from the moment she left Ottawa two days before and she’s utterly, totally exhausted at the same time as she feels herself wound up to such a pitch that rest is unimaginable. She goes back to the window where this time the view comes into focus and she sees the clear azure water of a swimming pool in which a couple of heads bob, and people, Europeans, sitting with drinks at poolside tables. All of this is surrounded by palms and trees flowering in vivid colours, it’s as if she’s flown out of the world and landed in some impossible paradise. She decides to go down for a quiet drink before she looks for the hotel restaurant.
She makes her way downstairs and out the lobby doors to the garden where between a wall of greenery and the pool a cluster of glass-topped, white wrought-iron tables and chairs sit under colourful umbrellas. She sits down at a table, orders a gin and tonic, and takes a good look around. How peaceful and beautiful it is here, so quiet after the din of the city outside the garden walls.
Now she notices a woman sitting by herself at the table next to hers. The woman’s blonde hair is swept up and tucked into an elegant roll at the back of her head. She’s dressed in a long, full-skirted white cotton sundress, with a matching jacket thrown over her shoulders. An empty carafe and wineglass sit in front of her. She has a book in one hand, but she’s not reading it, she’s looking straight at Iris in a frank, friendly way out of large grey-blue eyes. Startled at being stared at — so she’s not invisible after all — Iris says awkwardly, “Hi.”
“Hi there,” the woman says. “Just arrived?” Iris nods, feeling a bit shy, but glad to speak at last to anyone who isn’t a taxi driver, customs agent, clerk, or other functionary. This woman is middle-aged too, although it’s hard to be sure since her tan is so dark that from the distance of a few feet it hides what might be wrinkles.
“Your husband still making arrangements?” the woman asks, with an ironic hint in her voice that Iris doesn’t understand.
“I’m alone,” Iris says. She looks out to the swimming pool where now no one is swimming. The water laps gently against its blue concrete sides and a woman who has been lounging in a deck chair rises, gathers her things, and goes slowly away between the trees that burst with red, coral, and orange blossoms. Iris can’t name them — bougainvillea? The woman sitting across from her says, “Never been here before?” Iris shakes her head no and smiles with lips that unexpectedly wobble a little. She drops her head to hide this.
“Oh, dear,” the woman says. She stands, takes a step, overbalances slightly so that she has to put her hand on the back of the chair kitty-corner from Iris at Iris’s table to catch herself, and says, “May I?”
“Please,” Iris says, wondering at the stumble, then thinking of the empty carafe sitting on the woman’s table.
“Betty Chamberlain.” They touch hands politely. “I’m American,” she says. “My husband works here — he’s in the diplomatic community — so I live here. Have for two years now.” She says this last failing to hide a flash of something that might be anger. “I hope you don’t think it too forward of me to speak to you. I thought I detected distress, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.”
“No, no, you’re right,” Iris says. “I’m just tired from the flight.” As she reaches the end of her brief recitation, her search for Lannie, she manages to smile in a way that she hopes is something like her normal self. “So for the time being, all I can do is wait, but I’m hoping to track her down first thing in the morning.” The waiter arrives with her drink, bows, and goes away.
Betty Chamberlain, who is Iris’s physical opposite — tall, angular, and sinewy — puts out a slender, tanned arm on which a narrow gold bracelet shines discreetly and lets it rest on the table by her book, which Iris sees has “Ethiopia” in its title and is by someone named Pankhurst.
“It’s an interesting country,” Betty says. Her tone is weighted with knowledge that appears to trouble her. She looks off across the pool to the hotel’s huge blank windows, on the other side of which Iris knows are comfortable sofas and low tables where hotel guests are lounging or chatting quietly. She sighs, in a way that’s somewhere between weary and irritated, then turns back to Iris, smiles briefly, as if she’s just remembered that smiling is required here, pauses a moment, then says brightly, “Too bad to be alone your first night. I’ll soon have to run. My driver’s probably waiting already. But you’re better off resting anyway. This city hits you like a blow in the face the first time you see it — if you haven’t been in a Third World country before. You must understand that this is one of the very poorest countries in the world. You are not likely to see worse than you will see here.”
“The roads,” Iris says, wanting to say more, “and people everywhere walking! Everybody’s walking! And the beggars!”
It’s not that she hasn’t seen such poverty on television; it’s only that its living, breathing texture — its true enormity — cannot, she sees now, begin to be conveyed by television. Yet, when she thinks of the beggars, what she feels isn’t chiefly pity, it is instead a kind of active suspension in her mind, as if, if she just thinks hard enough she will find a comfortable place for them in a scheme of things which would relieve the burden of being upset about them. Forgetting Betty, gazing out over the pool’s turquoise water, she thinks that just maybe this is only her inability, or worse, her refusal, to accept that people do suffer like this, not just for an hour or a day, but for their entire lives. The realization makes her ashamed.
“Well, Addis isn’t Ethiopia,” Betty says. “You should try to get out into the countryside, see some of the antiquities while you’re here. They’re really magnificent, you know. Absolutely unexpected, and completely … unspoiled,” and gives a short laugh as if the word “unspoiled” in the context of Ethiopia is a bit of a sour joke. “You see those people over there?” She nods toward a middle-aged couple seated on the far side of the pool. “Brits,” the woman says. “They’ve hired a Land Rover and a driver and they’re off to the hot springs at Sodere tomorrow. Then they’re going on to Awash National Park for a couple of days of looking at the wildlife. Cars and drivers are always available for a price. You’d be safe with one of them.”
“If it turns out I have to wait for Lannie,” Iris says, “maybe I’ll take your advice,” not that she can imagine herself doing any such thing. And what does she mean, safe? In the taxi Iris had felt perfectly safe, indeed, knew no reason not to. Safe from what? she wonders, but doesn’t ask.
“I’m here for part of most days. It’s about the only escape possible in this city from all that ferenji stuff.” She e
xplains — foreigner. “You probably haven’t been here long enough to see how people stare at you, think you’re rich, ask things of you.” She sighs. “People are always at you. I used to come only when I couldn’t stand it any more, but now” — she shrugs — “now that our tour is close to ending, I give myself a couple of hours here almost every day. It keeps me sane.” She stands awkwardly, smoothing down her skirt, and picks up her book from the table. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. If you need any advice or help, you know where to find me.”
As she walks stiffly away between the trees and through the glass doors into the lobby, Iris feels a brief pang of longing for a driver and a home and a husband waiting for her somewhere not far away. But tomorrow, surely, she will see Lannie again, and in the meantime, now that she has talked to someone who lives comfortably here, her nervousness is allayed. And she’s perfectly safe here in this walled compound, doesn’t have to leave it until she hears from Lannie.
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