“She is — well?” he asks.
“The medicine will make a difference,” Iris says. “Thank you for your help. Without you —” She gestures helplessly. He smiles, a boy’s grin of shy pleasure at praise, and bows gravely.
“You will fly her back to Addis?” he asks. Surprised, Iris turns to Abubech.
“It is not a good idea,” Abubech replies. “The plane does not always leave on time. I have waited a full day for it. Better to drive, I think.”
It’s agreed they’ll leave in the morning as early as possible, that Abubech will follow in her small truck. Abubech speaks to Giyorgis in Amharic, ending with a smile. He sits down again and as Iris is about to join him, Abubech touches her arm and takes her to a table on the far side of the room.
“We will talk,” she says. Iris can only hope Giyorgis isn’t insulted. She thinks of him now as a friend, then realizes Abubech must have explained her intentions to him.
“Hagosa tells me you went to Lalibela,” Abubech says, as they wait for the small, silent boy who took their order to bring their food.
“Oh, yes, and it was wonderful — and terrible,” Iris says. She tells Abubech everything she saw, ending with the stranger who accosted her in the hotel corridor. “He said — I’m sure it’s what he said — ‘We can’t get government food.’ And yet I saw those trucks loaded with grain going north on the highway. Is there a drought in Tigray?”
“There may be, there often is. It is a very dry place.” There’s something in her manner that suggests to Iris she’s carefully formulating her thoughts before she says them out loud. Their food comes. When the boy is finished serving them and leaves, she turns back to Abubech and tries again.
“Did you know they’re building a new airport there? It’s for tourists, I suppose, although the strip that’s already there seems to work well enough. I saw a planeload of European tourists come in and land on the old one.” When Abubech still says nothing, she goes on. “It seems very strange to me to spend all that money on a new landing strip when the people in the area have no shoes, when they have nothing to eat.” Abubech shrugs.
“It gives people jobs for a while,” she points out. “Tourists bring money into the area. It helps a little.” She sighs. “And the government needs the foreign currency the tourists bring.” They are sitting close together and speaking softly, Iris is sure even Giyorgis can’t hear them. At this point he leaves his table, bows silently from across the room to them, and goes out, stifling a yawn with his hand.
“All the tourists at the hotel looked wealthy,” she admits. She remembers the row of ragged little girls standing in the dust and the couple photographing them. Iris has so far barely touched her food and now the sight of it makes her feel ill. Abubech is eating a mouthful of her spaghetti, chewing slowly, thoughtfully. “I have to know what’s going on there. I can’t stand not knowing and I can’t just forget what I saw. Why did that man come to me in secret if he had nothing to be afraid of? Why did he tell me what he did if it isn’t true? Won’t the government feed its own people?” Abubech chews doggedly, refusing to look at Iris. Iris waits. When it appears that she will not speak at all, she moves impatiently, intending to go on, but Abubech interrupts.
“Mrs. Christie.” She sets her fork down neatly, lifts her face to Iris’s. For the first time Iris sees there a cold formality. “I can tell you nothing.” She says this slowly, deliberately, looking straight into her eyes. “My project is everything to me. It is the only thing I can do that will eventually make a difference to the hunger my people endure. I will not jeopardize it.” Iris wants to take Abubech by the shoulders and shake the truth out of her.
“Are you telling me that if you tell me what the problem is, and I go away and tell my government, or the press, somebody — the government, maybe — will stop your project?” Abubech lifts her fork again. Just when Iris thinks she will not speak at all, she does.
“I know nothing about it.” She pauses. “However, you may be assured that the government knows the people have no food. Also, there are NGOs in the area. They will see that the people do not starve. As well, you should understand that in Ethiopia, when one locality has no food, the people traditionally walk to a locality where there is food. There, other Ethiopians will feed them. They will not starve. You are upset for nothing.” She begins to eat again, but Iris feels her exuding an unwilling restraint, a huge sorrow. Abubech keeps eating. The silence extends itself through the gloomy room with its uneven, discoloured plaster walls, its shabby tablecloths, its two bare light bulbs. The curtains stir in a breath of air, and out in the night behind compound walls the rooster crows again, an elongated, many-syllabled, minor-keyed cry.
Abubech speaks. It is as if her voice is part of the night that has fallen over the town, part of the wide, soft breeze that moves the curtains softly in and out; it’s as if she has always been speaking and Iris has just begun to hear her.
“Ethiopia is a very ancient country. Much goes on here — has gone on here in the past — that someone like you cannot hope to know or to understand. It is better that you take your niece and go home to North America.” Abubech has bent her head to toy with her fork and spoon and, watching her closely, Iris sees a faint sheen of sweat on the golden skin of her neck and the underside of her chin. She must dare the question again.
“Why won’t the government feed those people?”
Abubech lifts her eyes to the far wall. “In Ethiopia we do not have so good governments.”
“In Canada they told me this new government is good. They said it is closer to democracy. They said —”
Abubech interrupts.
“Mengistu dragged people off the streets in the daytime, from the middle of crowds, so everyone knew the evil he did. He killed my brother, he killed my father. But this government, it does it secretly, at night, so no one knows, no one believes —”
Iris is finally silenced. She wipes her damp cheeks again with her paper napkin. Her palms are damp and when she tries to pick up her fork, she fumbles, drops it, picks it up again.
“Forgive me. I’m sorry.”
“We will not talk of it. I beg you to forget what I have said. I was mistaken.”
Iris draws in a quivering breath, forces a smile. “With your education you could live in North America. You could teach at a university. You wouldn’t have to look at this terrible poverty every day of your life.”
“Yes, it is hard to go day after day into the field, into people’s houses and see how little they have. See the poverty, the disease. The women dying in childbirth, half the children dead before they are four years old.” Abubech’s eyes have clouded with tears. She turns to Iris, suddenly fierce, “You have to be strong.” Ashamed, Iris struggles to stop the moisture from welling up and running down her cheeks.
They finish their meal in silence, Abubech chewing each mouthful carefully, as if to remind herself that one should not spurn food if one is lucky enough to have it. Seeing this Iris tries to eat, but her stomach will not allow her. Abubech doesn’t look at Iris’s plate.
“Do you think she’ll be all right?” Iris asks. “I mean, how soon will she be able to —” She pauses because she has just realized that she has always taken it for granted that Lannie will return to Canada with her. “I mean, I’d like her to come home with me — if she wants to.”
“Lannie is free,” Abubech says. “She is not my employee. As far as her health is concerned — a week or so, and she should be well enough to travel. Now it is late. We must go to bed.” They rise together and go out of the dining room and down separate halls to their rooms.
Iris, intending to sleep in the second bed in Lannie’s room in case Lannie needs her in the night, goes first to her own room to get her nightgown and toiletries. As she comes down the hall she’s surprised to find her door slightly ajar. Thinking that Hagosa or Giyorgis must have failed to close it, she pushes it open. Someone is bending over her suitcase that’s open on the bed. It is the innkeeper, Afew
erk’s widow. Suddenly Iris remembers her name. It is Asegedetch.
The woman turns around, a flicker of guilt or shock crosses her face, then she smiles and says smoothly, “I thought you’d need your things.”
Iris hears herself say calmly, politely, “I was just coming for them.”
Without meeting her eyes or looking at her the woman comes to her, hands Iris her things, and slides past her out the open door. She pauses in the hall and says, “Call me if you need anything, or if your niece gets worse. I hope you don’t think I was … in this country hostesses serve their guests.”
“It is very kind of you,” Iris says.
“I am concerned that your niece is so ill. Malaria is very dangerous.” The woman is still standing there, as if she’s trying to think of what else she can say to reassure Iris that she wasn’t up to no good.
“I do very much appreciate your help. Really,” Iris says, trying to sound warm and natural.
The woman regards her for a moment more, then says, “So … excuse me,” and bustles off down the hall.
Iris thinks, I did see something I wasn’t supposed to see. Suddenly she’s genuinely frightened.
But she doesn’t have any paper in her suitcase, she hasn’t written anything down anyway, and she was telling the truth when she said she had no camera. That must have been what the woman was looking for: for a camera and film that might have recorded the images she wasn’t supposed to see, or a piece of paper that has written on it what she saw, a letter maybe, or a report to a newspaper, or a foreign government. Thinking back over their few, brief conversations, Iris is sure she gave no hint of her concerns, just a traveller’s observations, as if she didn’t understand their implications. She’s safe, if she’s just very careful until she leaves this inn.
Lying in the narrow bed across from Lannie asleep, the child she’d lived with all those years comes back in easy, vivid pictures: cooking her breakfast egg just the way she liked it, walking her to the driveway to wait for the school bus, handing her her shiny yellow lunch kit with the sandwiches in it she’d so lovingly made, sitting in her classroom admiring her childish paintings and her neat schoolbooks while the teacher spoke of Lannie’s successes, waiting eagerly for her as Lannie walked across the schoolgrounds to the car. She remembers how quickly she had grown to love her, and how deeply. She remembers her now. And she feels the first uneasy stirring of some new emotion that she can’t quite identify, that she’s afraid might be, but hopes is not, anger.
The Underworld
The baby in her arms is so thin she can count each tiny rib, his yellow-brown arms and legs are twigs, his abdomen round and hard, his face a ghastly triangle with no flesh between the skin and the delicate bones of his skull. She feeds him, spooning in something that looks like pablum, but it dribbles out of his mouth again, or runs out his ears and nose, or from his rectum, and he wails in that high-pitched, hopeless voice, hideous music rising up out of darkness, a discordant jangle. She spoons in the food desperately, but the child is dying in her arms, withering to a tiny yellow bird with eyes that are two small black holes in his head. It hops away, chittering, out of her horrified grasp, then turns to shriek at her raucously, crowlike: Caw! Caw! Caw! She’s to blame for the trouble; it’s all her fault; and the harsh cries so strident that they fill her head, the pain is so bad —
“Drink this, Lannie. You must drink this.”
“I’m cold,” Lannie whispers. “I’m freezing. Get me some blankets, please, Auntie. Cover me.” Her eyes are closed, the words, forced as they are through cracked, quivering lips, are hard to make out.
“Sshh, dear, yes, here are more blankets,” Iris says, although she isn’t moving from Lannie’s bedside, because there’s nothing left in the small apartment to add to the pile of blankets that she’s already buried under. Still Lannie’s teeth are knocking together, her body shivering violently. Iris has never in her life seen anybody so ill in such a strange, frightening way.
Once in a while Lannie stops shaking and drifts into sleep that can last for hours, giving Iris respite that at first she welcomes. But then Lannie throws off the blankets, pulls herself to a sitting position with the unexpected strength of the delirious, sweat gleaming on her face and neck, to stare wild-eyed and unseeing, muttering frantically. Now that she’s seen Lalibela Iris has an inkling of what it is that causes Lannie’s panic. How many children have died in her arms? How many bodies has she laid out for burial? Or God knows, maybe even buried herself?
“A recurrence of malaria,” the doctor Abubech brought has agreed, instructing Iris to keep her warm, to make her drink fluids against the serious danger of dehydration, and to give her the several kinds of pills he has brought. “In these cases, nursing care is everything.” He is a short, thin man, with narrow bones, wrists like a girl’s, and large, dark Ethiopian eyes, but there’s a hard, penetrating glint in them as he tells her, “There is no cure for this scourge,” and leaves, shaking his head, promising to return if Lannie doesn’t improve. But Iris thinks he was not unduly alarmed by Lannie’s condition, and she vows that if nursing care is everything, Lannie will be well soon, and she’ll take her home.
Lannie’s apartment is small for two. Besides the bedroom, it has a walk-through kitchen with a little window at the end facing the street, a bathroom with the first bathtub Iris has seen since she left the hotel in Lalibela where there’d been no water with which to fill it, and a living room with glass doors that keep the room well lit during the daylight hours, opening onto a small balcony from which it’s possible to watch the busy road below.
There isn’t a personal item of Lannie’s — a comb, keys, cosmetics, a wallet, a scarf, an open paperback — to be seen on any of the surfaces where people normally leave such things. It’s as if she has spent no time here or else, Iris thinks, perplexed, she had no personal existence. There’s a shortage of furniture too. The several small, sturdy tables are tightly woven out of straw dyed red and yellow, and the bookcase is built of the standard college-student bricks and unpainted boards. Instead of a sofa there are a half-dozen large floor cushions covered in brightly printed cotton that Iris is forced to use for a bed. She doesn’t find them easy to get up out of, although they’re comfortable enough once she arranges them.
Everything is covered with a layer of dust, spiders have made cobwebs in all the corners, but the electricity is reasonably steady, and water runs from the taps even though Iris has to boil and cool it before she dares to drink it. She’s comforted to find that Lannie has been living reasonably well, at least, when she’s in Addis.
She spends much of the first couple of days cleaning up vomit that Lannie can’t always contain until she reaches the bathroom or the bowl Iris holds out for her. And her diarrhoea, in the first day or two before the medication begins to ease it and before Abubech brings a bedpan, is so violent she doesn’t always make it to the toilet either. Not only does Iris have to bathe Lannie almost hourly to wash away the sweat, vomit, and excrement, and the bathroom floor and toilet, she also has to change the soiled sheets and wash them by hand. It’s like caring for an infant, all spit-up and faeces. All the while she’s cleaning, she’s listening for the slightest sound from Lannie that will bring her from her knees, running, to her bedside.
It reminds her of the times when Lannie was sick as a child. Iris would sit by her bed and play endless games of Go Fish or checkers with her, or read stories to her. And that makes her think of other times: waiting with the mothers at the rink while Lannie and the other little girls had figure-skating lessons, or at poolside while the lifeguard taught them swimming, and Iris feeling proudly one of them, like a true parent. It surprises her that she didn’t realize then that she was happy.
After the first two days the medication begins to take effect; Lannie stops vomiting and her diarrhoea lessens considerably. Iris occupies herself, when she’s not nursing Lannie, with cleaning the apartment. She washes all the dishes, even the clean ones from inside the cupboard; she sc
rubs the bedroom, kitchen and bathroom floors; she stands on a chair to knock down cobwebs and to polish the cheap plastic light fixtures; she picks by hand every speck of lint off the living-room carpets and, sweating and puffing, drags them out to hang them over the balcony railing to hit the dust out of them with a broom. Then she uses a damp cloth to clean the wooden floor under the carpets. She scrubs the windows and polishes them until the world outside grows brighter and more distinct. She washes walls, paying minute attention to the smudges and fingerprints, and then she washes the doors too.
Standing in the hall outside the open apartment door, wiping the exterior while Lannie lies quietly in the bedroom, she notices that the apartment door across the hall is ajar an inch. She can’t see anyone, or hear a voice anywhere in the building, but she has the uncanny feeling that someone is standing just on the other side of it watching her. The feeling is so strong that the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. She reminds herself, I’m a Canadian, they can’t do anything to me. She doesn’t know who “they” are or what “anything” means, but she does a cursory job of cleaning, the sooner to be able to step back into the apartment and lock the door.
She knows there’s not a lot of sense to all this cleaning, as they’ll leave as soon as Lannie is well enough to travel, in a few days. But it gives her a peculiar satisfaction to leave a shiny, blank place where before her vigorous wiping there were grimy smudges, dead insects, and cobwebs. She scrubs harder, rinses twice, scrubs again. Her hands have grown rough and red from constant immersion in hot water and the strong cleaning fluids she found under the sink, and her nails are broken and ragged. At last there’s nothing left to clean.
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