Garden of Eden

by Sharon Butala

  “Are you — are you talking about — genocide?” And when she says it, there’s a kind of rushing in her head, as if the word has come hurtling towards her out of some ancient place, a rocky darkness where dwells all that is terrible in the human heart accelerating through all the eons since Creation. She’s terrified she has hit on the truth.

  Betty starts, puts both slender, long-fingered hands to her face, covering it, rubs her eyes with her fingertips, then lowers her hands to rest loosely around the stem of her empty glass.

  “I would not say that word myself,” she says. “It is true though that the Tigrayans occupied Lalibela for a time during the war.” She pauses. “But, really — I know nothing about it.”

  Iris is silenced by this sudden change in Betty’s certainty.

  Finally she says, choosing her words carefully, “If it were true — just suppose that I had absolute proof of it — I don’t, but imagine that I did. What could I do about it?”

  “I suppose you could go back to Canada and tell people.”

  Iris is afraid no one will believe her. She is afraid she is wrong. She is about to ask Betty exactly whom she should tell, when Betty abruptly shifts in her seat so that her tray bounces and she has to rescue her glass. She says, sounding unwilling or exasperated, Iris can’t tell what exactly, “I’ll ask my husband when he phones. He’ll know what to do.”

  Relief floods through Iris.

  “I’m grateful to you,” she says.

  “It’s nothing,” Betty says sharply. “It’s less than nothing. First of all, you may be sure that if those people are hungry, the government is well aware of it.” She stops, as if thinking better of what she’s saying. “He’ll probably tell me to mind my own business. He’ll say that’s Ethiopian business, that we can’t know what has happened there, that someone else is looking after it, that the Tigrayan government is the best government the country has had in two thousand years and we mustn’t expect too much. Leave it with me. I’ll do what I can. The usual thing one does in such a situation is go to the press. But if you do that, you have to have photos, some kind of documents that constitute proof, and you don’t have any such thing. You could call an aid agency that’s in the area. But you said you didn’t see any? Right?” She doesn’t wait for Iris to answer. “But there are aid agencies working nearby, and if they know about it, they will do something. Obviously, the government isn’t going to want the rest of the world to know what they’re up to. There’s also Amnesty International. They have observers in the country. They’d be able to apply pressure — if they could get proof.”

  Iris rubs her temples with her fingertips. It’s all beginning to seem hopeless; no one will believe her.

  Sister, we have no food. His voice repeats itself in her ears, above the whisper of the motors, the murmur of voices, above the thudding of her pulse in her ears. Sister, help us.

  “I have to try,” she says.

  At Frankfurt there’s a long wait between planes. Iris and Lannie barely speak to each other; one or the other of them is slouched, asleep in her chair, or Lannie watches the hand luggage while Iris stretches her legs by strolling around the shops lining the waiting area, or Iris helps Lannie use the bathroom. Finally, they board the plane that will eventually land in Calgary. They both sleep through most of this flight too.

  Over thirty hours have passed by the time they land on a balmy, late summer morning at Calgary and whisk through Customs and into the luggage-retrieval area. Lannie hasn’t been out of Ethiopia for something like three years and in the shine of the bright lights on the smooth floors, the steady noise of the public address system, agents calling flights or passengers, the click and hum of the loaded escalator, muffled bells dinging out of synch here and there, the roar of air conditioners and other unseen machinery, in her weakened state she’s disoriented, faintly frightened.

  She is back in Canada. She tells herself this over and over again as if she’s in danger of forgetting, or maybe she’ll whirr off in bits and pieces into the noises and lights if she doesn’t hang on to something. Canada. Canada. But she can’t grasp its meaning. She feels sweat breaking out on her forehead and down her backbone, her breath is coming quick and hard, dizziness is making the shining, hard floor slant. Ahead of her the luggage conveyor belt clanks and jerk to a start. People mill around brushing against her. She is going to be sick or faint.

  “Sit here,” Iris says into her ear in a firm, sharp voice. She pushes Lannie down into a hard plastic chair in a row of backless chairs fastened to the wall. Behind her people lean over the chest-high barrier and wave or call to people gathering their luggage. Iris has vanished back into the crowd. Lannie gasps, leans forward, and puts her head over her knees, her hands over her ears.

  In the darkness and silence she has made for herself, her dizziness and nausea slowly retreat. She sits straight again, her eyes closed, her hands loose on her lap. She knows what this is: the suppressed urge to run. And run again. And again. She sees Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Greece, Ethiopia. She has run as far as she can go and all the time it has been a circle, bringing her back to where she started from. She opens her eyes and looks around the concourse where the crowd is slowly thinning as people find their luggage, locate their waiting relatives, and leave through the sliding-glass doors. But already the doors on the other side of the conveyor belts are sliding open to the entrance of another planeload of people. And when they’re gone, another plane will land. She takes what comfort she can from this, and waits, motionless, for Iris’s return.

  Iris is stunned by what she had once taken for granted: the splendour of the airport building, the casual wealth of the crowd — all these unwitting, smug travellers, wearing blue jeans she knows cost more than fifty dollars a pair, jackets that cost more than a hundred, the three-hundred-dollar shoes, the thousand-dollar suits. Now she sees it all for what it is: an abominable excess, a crime against those who have to scrabble every day to get enough to eat to carry them into the next.

  But she goes straight to the bank of pay phones where she calls Ramona, leaving a message with Ryan that she and Lannie will be home by nightfall. Then she phones the nursing home in Swift Current.

  “Your mother is much as usual,” the voice at the other end of the line tells her, and at this news Iris’s knees threaten to give way with relief. As she hangs up, the luggage conveyor belt for their flight begins to move, people are crowding forward, and she is trying to remember where in the parkade she left her car. Abubech had faxed a colleague at the university some time ago and asked him to call the airport parking authority to tell them she hadn’t abandoned it. She hopes they haven’t already towed it away.

  She turns and moves into the crowd, making her way past designer suitcases and shiny leather purses with gold-chain straps, through the odours of perfume, cosmetics, hairspray and aftershave lotion, past women with golden tans, elegant and thin with dieting, past young people wearing headphones, plastic tape players thrust in their pockets, and men carrying two-thousand-dollar miniature computers.

  She doesn’t know if she will be able to carry on with her old life; she knows she cannot. Pressed between well-fed strangers shoving toward their luggage, she cries inwardly: I must not forget; I will not forget.

  At a turn-off just past Medicine Hat, Lannie says, “Can we go home on the back roads?” It’s the country Lannie wants now, she has no energy for anything else. She needs to see her own countryside again, to find out if it still draws her as it used to. Because if it doesn’t … She doesn’t want to think about that possibility. She watches, frowning, out the side window as they head south, rising to the top of the road past the park, then beginning the long descent onto the plains below the southern slope of the hills.

  The Sweetgrass Hills come into view southeast of them, a short blue range that as they draw closer becomes three hills rising mistily against the sky. She keeps her eyes on the hills and the surrounding plains until, eventually, they turn west to cross the border into Sask
atchewan.

  At Mallard she asks Iris to go still farther south. She’s taking them at least thirty miles out of their way; Iris looks faintly perplexed as she glances at Lannie, but Lannie doesn’t care. At the high curve running around the edge of the Old Man on His Back Hills, Lannie says, loudly this time, “Stop here. Please.” Iris brakes, but the car is still not quite stopped when Lannie has the door open and is stepping shakily out onto the narrow, bumpy, asphalt-topped road. She stands still, looking out.

  Squares of farmland interspersed with rectangles of grass fall away to the west and south for thirty miles in each direction. She thinks of the tiny Ethiopian fields, of drought and hunger. But the clean hot wind whoops over the plain from the west, bending the yellow grass and the nearly ripened, golden crops, pushing, pushing all the way from the Rocky Mountains a hundred and fifty miles behind it to howl around the precipitous slope of the hill, rocking the car gently, blowing Lannie’s hair out straight behind her. It’s whipping away Ethiopia, the famine camps, the dead children, the poverty.

  She wants to fly out over the prairie like an eagle, like a hawk. She wants to scream into the wind out of joy at all this empty land laid out before her all the way south to the purple line of the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana. She turns a half circle and sees the square fields of growing grain, more of it than grass, although even she, young as she is, can remember when to the west it was almost all grass. Now she picks out the motionless black dots that are grazing cattle.

  Spread out before her is the New World, and she thinks she’s feeling what the first settlers must have felt looking out over it for the first time, seeing all that grass, all that sky, and believing it was theirs, a new land that matched the size of their desire — knowing, but not caring that they were driving out the true owners.

  She thinks that what they wanted was to embrace this vast landscape, to become one with it. But the only thing they knew to do to satisfy their longing was to plough it up, seed it to grains, wrest it into the shape of their own choosing, trying to make it theirs that way. She knows this, because she wants the same thing. She wants to be a hawk soaring over it, a rabbit burrowing into it, a sage hen nesting in its woolly grass, a stone resting on a hillside, growing, slowly, over the centuries, a russet coat of lichen. She thinks of Caroline, all those years ago, in a moment of despair telling her to go home before she had no home to go to. I am a westerner, she thinks, a prairie girl. I belong here. And now she knows one thing about the shape of her own soul.

  The fiery sun beats down on her head, the hot wind blows harder, nearly lifts her off her feet and whirls her away into that vast wilderness of sky. But Iris is calling in her ear, “Lannie! You’ll make yourself sick again.” She comes back to herself with a start and obediently, shivering although it must be ninety degrees, gets back into the car.

  “Is it good to be back?” Iris asks.

  Lannie nods, murmurs a faint, “Yes.” After a moment she asks, “How did you find me?” Until now she has never been curious.

  “I saw Tim in Toronto. He told me you might be in Africa.”

  “How was he?” she asks, keeping her voice neutral, although her heart is tripping a little faster.

  “He seemed fine. He had a roommate. I forget his name.” Lannie looks at Iris, a little surprised by this, but she says nothing. “He said they edit a poetry journal.”

  “How did you track me down to Ethiopia?”

  “In Ottawa I found somebody who knew you when he worked in Ethiopia.”

  “Who?”

  “Rob Sargent.” Lannie closes her eyes.

  Iris sees something she reads as dismay cross Lannie’s face and she remembers what she’d forgotten, how it always is with Lannie, how careful you have to be with what you say — not to pry, not to upset her, that secret, subterranean life of Lannie’s that no one was allowed to trespass. And her own inability to understand it, her frustration with it. Finally, she is angry. Through clenched teeth she says, “I swear if you are going to be like that again, you can just turn around and go right back to Africa, because I will not stand for it any more. I will not.”

  The air in the car is thick with Iris’s fury and Lannie’s shock. But she isn’t done yet. “Ten years!” Iris says. “Ten bloody years and you hadn’t the grace, the courtesy, the gratitude, to even keep in touch with us. Not me, not even your grandmother, not even Misty. I am so angry with you.” Her chest is painful from the effort of not shouting, of squeezing this speech out, her tongue feeling like a viper in her mouth: quick and precise. She doesn’t care.

  Lannie, trying not to cry, feels more as if she’s waking up from a long sleep. As Iris watches her, she turns her head away for a moment and brings it back again to stare at her as if she hasn’t noticed before what she looks like, and there is some terrible darkness in her eyes that Iris can barely look at.

  “You want me to tell you what’s inside me?” Iris doesn’t speak or turn away. “You don’t want to know,” Lannie says. “You do not want to know.”

  “Why not?” Iris cries. “Why the hell not? I lived every day with it — How do you think that felt? How do you think it felt to love you and look after you and never, not once, have you say one word except thank you in that tiny little voice of yours that I knew wasn’t your real voice at all! Where the hell were you all those years? Where were you?” In her frustration Iris hits the steering wheel with her fist.

  Lannie opens her mouth; she is trying to speak, she makes a noise, tries again, and says, “I don’t know.” The words tumble out, slowing gradually as Lannie finds she can speak after all, “The world seemed so fragile to me. So easy to lose everything. I was afraid if I moved too fast or spoke too loud the world — would crack apart and — kill us all.”

  An instant follows without movement or sound. Then she looks at Iris and gives a faint, mirthless laugh before she turns away.

  Iris is sobered and humbled and ashamed.

  “Forgive me,” she mutters into the steering wheel.

  Lannie sighs, a heavy, shuddering sound. Nobody could tell her what it was she had done to deserve to be abandoned by her own parents. Nobody knew. Maybe even God didn’t know.

  “No, forgive me,” she says at last, bowing her head. And when, after an instant, Iris reaches for and clasps her hand, Lannie moves and finds herself gratefully pressing her forehead against Iris’s warm shoulder.

  They drive the last thirty miles to Chinook in silence. The closer they get to the town the farther Lannie’s thoughts retreat from it — avoidance, she knows it, but still, she keeps thinking of Iraklion. How she loved that city, its clutter, its noise. Dimitri insisting she wear the cream-coloured linen dress, or the pink he’d bought for her instead of jeans, whenever they went into the city. Sitting in the outdoor café across from him, tall and handsome in his linen slacks and pale linen shirt, his gold necklace gleaming against his dark skin, knowing everyone around them saw them as the idle rich, the jet-setters who stayed in the private villas and the expensive hotels on Mirambelo Bay. Hating Dimitri for his wealth bought at the expense of Ethiopian peasants, knowing he got all the profit from the coffee plantations they worked, hating herself more for living off their labour too.

  But there Chinook is, spread out below them, looking barely different from what it was ten years before. Crete vanishes. She stares and stares as they descend the last curving hill, cross the railway tracks, and reach the first small frame buildings — houses, shops. After Ethiopia they seem less shabby and banal than she remembers. And the familiar, tall old poplars, planted by the settlers seventy years earlier, still spread their branches protectively above the streets and buildings. But now she finds these neat, freshly painted little boxes with their white picket fences and their squares of flower-bordered, immaculate, cropped green lawns insular, unbearably smug.

  Hysteria strikes, and for an instant she almost leaps from the moving car to run screaming back down the road they’ve arrived on, that all those years of her absence
this hideous little town was still sitting here, people walking around in it, remembering things. She puts a clenched fist up against her forehead, her eyes shut tight against the sight, then quickly lowers it and opens her eyes.

  “Drive past the house, Iris.” She trembles to ask it. Iris points the car to the west side of town where it still sits, shingles missing from the roof, the screen door hanging from one hinge, the boards covering the windows splitting with the weather and coming away to reveal the brooding darkness behind them. The yard is untended, full of weeds and other people’s garbage. Lannie gazes at it, remembering how for years she had avoided even driving down this street, as if by never seeing it, the house where she was raised might be erased from history. Now, as she stares at it, the world settles down with a crash that makes her vision shift.

  They drive past one of the town’s oldest houses, a two-storey, rambling frame house. It sits on a corner lot bordered by ancient poplars, some with their upper branches sawed off to accommodate power lines. The house has been freshly painted pale blue with white trim, and she recognizes it as having belonged to James and Aurora Springer. Children’s toys litter the big, grassy yard and an overturned tricycle blocks the path to the house.

  “Angela and Orland bought it,” Iris says, not looking at Lannie, as if she divines what Lannie is thinking. “They live there now.”

  “Oh,” Lannie says, in as noncommittal a tone as she can muster, but she’s remembering picking up James’s vial of sleeping pills from the table by his bed when she was supposed to be helping Iris clean, slipping them into her pocket.

  God, she’s weary. Weary right through her bones. But the small wooden house of her childhood sits right there, and with it come voices, pictures, smells, and sounds. She can hardly believe how much she has pushed aside, buried, not forgotten exactly, but managed not to think about for such a long time. She’d almost succeeded in convincing herself of what she’d claimed to Rob, that she had no history. Now it’s settling on her; weightless for years, she feels herself growing denser, heavier, by the second. She makes an effort to fight it, but she can’t, not anymore.