She sips her drink, and when she finishes it, goes off to look for the hotel restaurant. It turns out there are three of them and she picks the most informal where she refuses an Ethiopian meal in favour of North American-style chicken and pasta, which she finds quite good.
After dinner she goes to her room and, even though it’s early, goes to bed and falls asleep, and into her other world.
It is night and very dark — no moon or stars — it’s raining lightly, she’s hurrying down a city street trying to catch up with a small, dark-haired little girl who clacks down the cobbled surface, past puddles of black water, a half a city block ahead of her. The little girl holds a woman’s hand, her mother’s, and although they are walking steadily, purposefully, not hurrying, Iris can’t catch up to them. She hurries, slipping on the wet stones, but the little girl and her mother remain an even distance ahead of her. If she doesn’t hurry, she’ll lose them in the darkness, and she wants desperately to reach the little girl.
The dream shifts to the farm kitchen at home, and Barney is sitting at the table drinking coffee. Lannie, a small girl with her strawberry-blonde hair plaited in two shining braids, asks Barney to buy her a pony and Barney is saying, No, no, there’ll be no ponies on this farm. I have no pasture. Then Iris looks out the window that has appeared in the wall behind the table where there was no window a moment before. She sees open grassy yellow fields, and in the distance a herd of horses — greys, browns, blacks, roans — run, their golden manes and tails rippling.
She wakes then, it’s only three in the morning by her bedside clock. In the shadows, her head full of the long gentle fields of tawny grass, she can’t think where she is. When she remembers, she feels her heart will break with longing for home.
She falls back to sleep and the dreams tumbling through her head are of beggars and donkeys and streets so decayed they are hardly more than heaps of rubble. Soldiers march by carrying guns, tanks rumble past, fire leaps up from wooden shacks consuming them, and cars and trucks rush down the main road from the Addis Ababa airport, past crowds of plodding, white-gowned people, toward Maskal Square at the heart of this shabby, breathtaking city.
The next time she wakes it’s to someone rapping hard on her door. She stumbles out of bed, her heart pounding with fear and surprise, and seeing it’s noon, dismay at the lateness of the hour. Her dressing gown pulled tightly around her, she opens the door to find a maid standing there, her cleaning equipment on a cart behind her.
“I clean?” the woman asks. Trying to collect herself, Iris says, “Soon,” holding up a finger. She closes the door. It’s her second day in Ethiopia and she has accomplished nothing. This thought makes her rush to the bathroom, hurry through her ablutions, dress, and then she can’t decide whether to eat something first, she’s starving, or start phoning again. She decides to begin by phoning.
She repeats her calls to the two numbers where no one answered yesterday. Both voices on the other end of the line claim never to have heard of Lannie Stone. She’s about to retry the number where the young woman answered and Iris felt sure she simply didn’t want to be bothered with Iris, but the maid appears at her door again and Iris, although exasperated at a further delay, bows to the inevitable, leaving her to clean while she goes downstairs to find some breakfast.
It’s almost an hour later when she returns to her now pristine room. Although she’s beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t just go by taxi from agency to agency, consulting her piece of paper, she tries the number where she felt she’d been summarily treated the day before. The phone rings and rings before the same vague young woman answers again.
“May I speak to the director, please,” she says. There’s a silence, then, “One moment.” Nervously she waits.
“Alec Martin here,” a voice says. Iris lets her breath out slowly, then she starts in again with her story. “Lannie Stone,” the man says thoughtfully. “Maybe she’s not stationed in Addis,” he says. “Save the Children have compounds in several other towns. If she’s with them, she could be in Weldiya or — wherever.” Iris is fighting for composure. How can she go to strange towns when she doesn’t even have phone numbers or any contacts or — “Or it could just be I haven’t run into her. I’ve only been here about seven months. I came here from India,” he tells her.
“But what shall I do?” Iris asks, hearing panic creeping into her voice. He tells her he’ll get his assistant to give her more phone numbers. “And if she’s not at any Addis offices, we can find phone numbers for you in some of the towns where she might be.” She thanks him, but she’s thinking longingly of the airport, of her return ticket tucked safely away in her purse. “If she’s in the country, we’ll track her down. Which reminds me, you can try the Canadian Consulate too.” He gives her that number himself.
She’s on the phone another half-hour while the lackadaisical young woman bit by bit gives her the names and phone numbers for further possibilities, taking breaks every few minutes to have chats with other people who wander by her desk. Once, she sets the phone down and goes away. She’s gone so long Iris thinks the connection is broken and is about to hang up when she comes back on the line. Iris feels like asking to speak to the director again and telling him he should fire this incompetent, but of course, she doesn’t, and anyway, the girl isn’t exactly rude or even brusque, she just doesn’t seem to understand how thoroughly unbusinesslike she is.
When she finally gets off the line, Iris stares at the long list of phone numbers, some with notes she has written to herself — “Tuesdays only” “Everyone in field” “Employs only Ethiopians” — and thinks she’ll be at this the rest of her life, she’ll never find Lannie, she’ll never get out of this country. She almost tosses her new list into the wastepaper basket in her despair, but stops herself. Instead, she picks up her purse and walks back downstairs and out to the garden again where the white wrought-iron tables sit under the flowering trees. She’s looking for Betty Chamberlain. A few minutes of normal conversation, she’s telling herself, someone from home, and I’ll be all right.
But Betty isn’t seated at one of the tables, nor is she one of the heads bobbing in the swimming pool. She’s not in the hotel lounge either or in the lobby or in one of the gift shops that line the lobby’s mall. Iris gives up and goes back to her room. On the way up in the elevator it suddenly occurs to her that there was one more number at the bottom of her original list, the one she brought with her from Canada. She hadn’t called it yesterday because it had grown too late. She glances hurriedly at her wristwatch. It’s past four o’clock, closer to five really. This day has flown by, and she’s no further ahead than when she left Ottawa.
Back in her room she dials. It rings and rings and Iris would hang up but if nobody’s there what does it matter how long she lets it ring? She’s not even listening any more, when finally she hears the phone being picked up and a woman answers, first naming her agency and then saying gravely, “Mrs. Samuels here.” Her accent is British overlaid on some other, unidentifiable accent, but her voice is rich and warm and sounds as if she has all the time in the world. Iris takes a deep breath and explains again.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” Mrs. Samuels says without a moment’s hesitation, “she doesn’t really work for us. She’s a volunteer, she isn’t on our staff.” She pauses and Iris hears papers close to the phone. She’s holding the phone so tight her hand hurts, and she loosens her grip, waiting for the woman to go on. “And at the moment, I’m not sure if she’s here in Addis or if she’s out in the field with Dr. Abubech. That is, Dr. Abubech Tefera is out working in the Kombolcha area where we have some plots.” Plots? Oh, yes, this agency runs agricultural programs. “I’m not sure if Miss Stone is with her or not.” There’s a pause. “Although I expect she is. Wherever Dr. Abubech goes, Lannie is never far behind. Lannie adores Abubech. We all do.”
Iris has broken out in a sweat all over her body. She can’t hear what the woman on the other end of the line is saying.
“Are you there?” the woman says in a kindly way.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s a shock — I can’t thank you enough. I —”
“Nothing to thank me for,” the woman says. “I’m happy to help. I’m sure Lannie will be very glad to see you.”
“But,” Iris says, beginning to tremble again, “but — what shall I do? I mean —”
“You’ve just arrived?” she asks. Her nonchalance is replaced by a certain careful concern.
“Yes. And I’ve never been in a — a country like this before and I really want to see my niece. Her uncle died —”
The woman interrupts. “You’re at the Hilton?”
“Yes,” Iris says. She gives her room number.
“I’ll do some checking, see what I can find out, and I’ll call you back. Now the only problem is that it’s late, in fact, this office is closed — you’ve reached me by accident, I am not the usual telephone-answerer. I may not be able to find anything out before morning.”
“I can wait till morning,” Iris interrupts.
“Yes, it’s only a matter of time till you speak to her face to face. You go have dinner, have a shower, get some sleep. I will call you promptly at ten tomorrow morning, sooner if I locate her here in Addis — although I think that’s unlikely,” she adds quickly.
Iris puts the phone down and then can’t remember if she’d thanked the woman or not. She puts her hands to her head and holds it, then slowly lowers them to her lap and sits that way gazing into space, barely breathing, her body filled with trembling.
The ringing of the phone wakes her from a deep sleep and Iris is startled to see that it’s ten o’clock — she isn’t over her jet lag yet. Fumbling in her haste, she picks up the receiver. Her heart is already pounding. It might even be Lannie herself.
“It seems that Miss Stone is in the field with Dr. Abubech,” Mrs. Samuels tells Iris. “They’ve gone to Kombolcha and aren’t expected back before the end of the week, although they could be delayed longer.” Her heart, which has begun to slow, now sinks. A whole week, if not longer! “You could go up to Kombolcha if you choose to. They always stay at Afewerk’s Inn. They come in every evening. You could meet your niece there,” she suggests.
“Is it far?” she asks. Mrs. Samuels explains it’s to the north and east of Addis, that Afewerk’s Inn is clean and comfortable, that Iris can fly to Kombolcha with Ethiopian Airlines if she wants to, or that she can hire a driver and a car, in which case it will take the better part of a day to get there.
“It isn’t far, but the roads aren’t good and there’s a lot of traffic. Seven or eight hours, I believe. But then,” she adds, her voice picking up enthusiasm, “if you go by car, you’ll see something of the country. Your niece won’t return to the inn from the countryside before evening.” She pauses. When Iris says nothing, her brain busy with all these alternatives, she goes on, “Or you could just wait in Addis until she returns.”
That settles it. Iris has already travelled too far, waited too long, gone through too much, to simply sit and wait some more. She will hire a car and a driver and go to Kombolcha, for indeed, when she has nothing to do but wait for Lannie, what would be the point of flying? If she’s lucky, by tonight she’ll be eating dinner with her. Her heart lurches, whether from joy or fear she can’t tell, because even while she finds she’s smiling like a fool into the receiver, one part of her is worrying suddenly that Lannie may refuse to see her, and yet another has faltered, crying out, Not yet!
By noon the next day, Iris is riding in the passenger seat of a fairly new Land Rover, driving north up a paved, but impossibly potholed road with a young Ethiopian male in the driver’s seat. Giyorgis is in his mid-twenties, and is courteous but warm, by turns boyish and grave, and she thinks she sees in his eyes a gentleness that reassures her.
She’d gone to the desk clerk to inquire about hiring someone to take her to Kombolcha. The clerk and the two other men working behind the counter had held a brief discussion in a language Iris knew must be Amharic; in fact, there seemed to be a brief, suppressed argument. The first man dialled the phone and spoke into it also in Amharic. In a moment he’d set the receiver down and said to her, “Your driver will be here in an hour.” When Iris had asked if he was with the Ethiopian Tourism Agency, or whatever it was called, he’d replied, “He is private. But he is very experienced. He was once a driver for the United Nations.” It had occurred to Iris to wonder if he was perhaps a relative of the desk clerk, but she hadn’t asked, concluding that it didn’t matter since the clerk had said that his rates were the same as the official agency. It flashed through her mind to wonder how safe she’d be with him if he wasn’t official, but couldn’t see, beyond thieves, what there was to be afraid of anyway. And surely having driven for the U.N. was credentials enough.
Giyorgis had arrived in under an hour, medium height, strong-looking instead of fine-boned and tall as most Ethiopians seem to be, freshly shaven, smelling faintly of soap and dressed in neatly pressed khaki trousers and a clean short-sleeved blue shirt with a beige wind-breaker over it. He had bowed over each of her shoulders when they were introduced in the way Iris now recognized as Ethiopian. How formal they are, she thought, shy at being the object of actual bowing.
It’s taking them a good half-hour to make their way from the Hilton’s parking lot with its Mercedes, new Land Rovers, and other expensive cars, along the busy city streets, always climbing, it seems to her, until they finally reach the outskirts, the road levels out, and they slowly leave the jumble of Addis Ababa behind. At first she and Giyorgis make polite conversation. She asks him how long he has been a driver, and from what part of Ethiopia he has come.
“I am from here, Addis,” he tells her. “As my father, too. I began to be a driver after I finished school.” She wonders if this means university, and decides if he had meant that, he would have said so. She remembers there has been a long war, and thinks how it must surely have disrupted lives even here in Addis. He asks her how long has she been in Ethiopia, is it her first trip, what does she think of it?
“It’s a very beautiful landscape, what I’ve seen of it,” Iris says, a careful reply to his last question. The landscape they are travelling through is a relatively flat plain, but every once in a while far off to the east they catch glimpses of a great, deep, blue-shadowed valley dotted with those flat-topped African trees, the valley lined with low mountains, and the bottom and terraced sides divided into small, square fields. “It’s very different from Canada.”
“Canada is a new country,” he remarks. Abruptly he turns the wheel to hug the edge of the road as a huge truck pulling a box behind it as big as the first one squeezes past them, going north, the same direction they are. She thinks the truck with its double load is what Barney would have called a “B-train.”
“I know Ethiopia is old,” Iris says, “but not how old.”
“Ah,” Giyorgis says, “I will tell you. Is book Kebra Nagast. It means ‘Glory of Kings.’ In it is told the story about how old is Ethiopia.” He pauses and by the eagerness of his expression she knows he’s dying to tell her the story. Out of politeness, she asks him to tell her what Kebra Nagast says.
“The Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian woman,” he begins, taking his eyes from the road for a second to gauge her reaction to this news.
“Her name Makeda. She went to Jerusalem to visit King Solomon. There she became pregnant. She gave birth to son named Menelik who became,” here his voice rises, grows emphatic, “the first Ethiopian king — Menelik I. That was a thousand years before Christos. So Ethiopia is three thousand years. Is one of oldest countries in world.” He turns to her, his eyes lit up with wonder at his own story. “There is more?” he says. She sees that he means, does she want to hear the rest?
In fact, the story does interest her, and she feels sure, by his soberness and the care with which he’s telling it, that this is more than some tale concocted for tourists.
“What else?”
�
��Menelik was born here — in Ethiopia, but when he was twenty years he went to Jerusalem to meet his father, King Solomon. He stayed there for a little while,” his pronounciation of “little” is deliciously precise, “but when he came back to Ethiopia, he and his friends brought back —” he pauses dramatically, “the Ark of the Covenant! And it is here in Ethiopia now!” Iris looks at him in some surprise, remembering vaguely that it was a box that Moses built, that — that God was in it? That worked miracles. Something very holy and powerful. She can feel him waiting for her reaction. By the look on his face, she knows Giyorgis believes this utterly.
“Yes, here!” he says, nodding his head vigorously as if she has commented. “At Aksum. But no one may see it.” Iris exhales noisily expressing wonder, since she can think of absolutely nothing to say, and she knows better than to voice doubt.
“Amazing!” she says finally.
“All Ethiopians know this,” Giyorgis says calmly.
In a kind of weary awe, Iris begins to see how much there is to learn about Ethiopia. It’s more than she can hope to deal with, and she knows there’s no story in all of Canada that could even begin to be held up against this one. If a thousand years pass and Canada remains a country, will some national story explaining its existence have sprung up? She can’t imagine what it would be.
“What crops will they plant?” she asks, taking refuge in the view out the window, pointing to the farmers’ fields they’re passing.
“Sorghum,” Giyorgis says. “You know sorghum?”
“We don’t grow it in Saskatchewan — where I come from. Too short a growing season or too cold or not enough moisture or — something.” And people everywhere, walking down the side of the road, working in the fields, riding donkeys or driving them, herding cattle or ponies or sheep and goats. The people wear leather-thong sandals or no shoes at all, and their clothes are at best nondescript, at worst, rags. Suddenly she thinks of the crowds of people she saw on the streets of Addis Ababa; at least half, maybe even more, had been young men.
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