We do interviews together every Saturday after that, and at the house of the last Oromo midwife I interview, I marvel at Abdulhassan’s tenderness as he strokes the foreheads of two girls who have just undergone the operation. Their legs are tied together to prevent them from moving and to promote the formation of scar tissue. Their requests for water are denied because it’s best if they urinate as little as possible. Each has had her clitoris and labia minora removed with a razor blade, her labia majora scraped out and sewn together with a row of thorns. There is a match-stick held in place between her labia, so there will at least be a small hole out of which her urine, and eventually her menstrual blood can flow. On her wedding night, her husband will force himself through this barrier that has kept his bride a virgin. Abdulhassan tells the two girls they are brave and I feed them honey by the spoonful.
At his bercha’a the next day, he finds my hand in the dark. His hand is large and warm. He writes a note: I love you. I write back: I love you too. We cannot speak. In fact, we will not ever speak because we are not simply in love, we are in love with things far more complicated than each other.
And I am leaving soon. I’m taking lithium again, preparing for re-entry. Preparing to become my English self again. I’m snapping photos of people, wanting to take them with me. Many of them actually ask me to, say, “Take me with you. Sponsor me. Get me a visa.” I try not to make promises I cannot keep. Some people treat me as if I have already left; Biscutti, for instance, has stopped coming to visit. Her mother, Tulu, says it’s because she knows I’m leaving. But how can she know?
“Because you’re taking her photograph,” Tulu says. “Don’t leave her. Take her to England with you.”
When I tell Tulu that I can’t take her daughter from her, she responds with an accusation. “You don’t really love her,” she says.
“She’s being realistic,” Abdulhassan says later. “She wants a better life for her child. And you could give her that.”
Realistic? The only way I can imagine this reality is if we married and adopted Biscutti together. We could be black and white, Harari, African, Muslim, English, Canadian. Hybrids, hyphenated, our disparate worlds joined. I can think of no other way of holding all this together, containing Biscutti and you and me—both the veiled and unveiled—in one place.
In reality, the Canadian embassy says, “Not a chance. She has parents, both alive.” I lamely defer to government in order to sanction my relief, though my guilt will never be assuaged. I go home and sink into a swamp, perhaps in lieu of having to feel fractured and sad and nowhere while I wait in the vain hope that my heart and my happiness will follow me from Africa. What I am left with are these hands, hennaed for a wedding where I was a bridesmaid a week before returning home.
Biscutti remains a fixed image of sad eyes, and Abdulhassan never leaves Ethiopia. He doesn’t get the scholarship to study medicine in the United States. What he gets instead is very religious and very married. We continue to write, signing our letters with love, because there is no better word in either of our languages. It is as simple as that, and as complicated.
Camilla Gibb has lived in England, Canada, Egypt and Ethiopia, and has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, Mouthing the Words, has been published in fourteen countries and was the winner of the 2000 City of Toronto Book Award. Her second novel, The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life, was published in September 2002. She lives in Toronto and is currently at work on a novel set in North Africa.
006Destination: Italy
ON THE ROAD TO SAN ROCCO A PILLI
Michael Redhill
In the springtime of 1998, we were pregnant with our first child. Anne was in her second trimester, big but not giant, always hungry but an enemy of all foods shiny, flaky or smelly. Still, this wasn’t enough of a threat to make us hesitate about going to Italy, a country we’d romanticized for years, our imaginings hung with crusty bread, golden oil, old ladies in black dresses who waved sadly to us from stone windows, cookies so hard they could snap your front teeth. We had friends in Florence who were on an art exchange, and we met them there, hung out at their haunts with their worldly friends and ate their newly learned cuisine (ah, panna, I hardly knew ye). And in a tiny rented car, we all headed out for the Tuscan countryside for a week of exploring.
Tuscany trumped our imaginings: our fantasies of old-world charm crumbled before its reality. It was sun-soaked, redolent of fruit and fields, and we wandered through it, struck numb with pleasure. Our friends indulged themselves in rock climbing and painting; we went for rambling walks in olive groves. We’d come up the incline of one such grove only to see the vista ahead of us: more hillside groves. More olives than there are stars in the heavens. We stayed at an agriturismo that had on its grounds a little customs house where Michelangelo once spent a night. Inside there were fading frescoes on stone walls, art no one would ever catalogue or preserve. And three parrots at large flying around the high walls.
We’d all read about Cortona, a hill town with two disconnected town squares that rose high above the Tuscan plain, and we headed out there early one morning and ended up spending most of the day wandering its alleys and cobblestone streets. An ancient, half-crumbling wall surrounded the town, a grey Etruscan wall meant to keep out the Romans. As we walked higher, into thinner air, the valley below receded into a landscape of churches and stone buildings, views that hadn’t changed very much since the Etruscans had taken them in. To be walking in that history, the clonking of cowbells below the ancient walls, put us all in a reverie. A man who looked older than the four of us put together walked past us at a clip and with a warm smile said something to the two women; a typical gesture of Italian amichevolezza. We wanted to wish him a good day as well, and asked our friend’s husband to say something to that effect in Italian, but since the old man had actually told the women they had great legs, our friend held his tongue.
Being together, under the bright spring sun, supping in hole-in-the-wall restaurants and drinking unlabelled wine: it couldn’t get much better than this.
Unfortunately, it was to end prematurely. Our friends, both felled by the flu, decided they’d better head home. We sadly bid them goodbye at the nearest train station and struck out for San Rocco a Pilli, where we’d stay and continue to tour the area. As we pulled away, the pathetic fallacy swooped in: the skies darkened and followed us west.
I’m remembering this now, so don’t quote me, although I can quote myself: “We started on our epic adventure to find San Rocco a Pilli—ten kilometres from Siena, but it might as well have been on the moon.” This is our diary—my physician-like handwriting alternating with Anne’s crisp, light script. There is no mention of how long we spent that afternoon trying to find San Rocco, nor is there even a word of the sight we came upon while lost on those Italian roads, a sight that now remains in my mind as one of the most beautiful I’ve ever encountered. After the word “moon,” Anne takes over: “We managed to avoid a fight by visiting the local co-op in god-knows-where for some fruit and mortadella, then we drove through a rain-soaked porch-green landscape.”
It had begun to rain, and what looked like just a few miles on the map opened out into a long drive through territory that didn’t agree with what the map showed. We drove, stubbornly, unwilling to believe we could get lost in such a minimalist landscape. The longer we drove, the steamier the car got. An incipient hunger was threatening to turn into a sugar crash for Anne: she couldn’t go long between meals because of the baby’s seeming ravenousness.
She’d finished off the last of the blood oranges (tiny fruits streaked with gory red that looked like they’d taste of grapefruit but were like honey on the tongue) and the hunger was building quickly. Rain pounded the little car. We began to fight: we were lost in the countryside under weather neither of us wanted to stop in, with a disaster in the making. For some reason the gods were angry at us. I dug in, “knowing” San Rocco was close by. She kept her eyes to the gre
y weather. Another ten minutes crept by. Finally, a little country town appeared off the road—Radi—the first we’d seen in quite some time. It squatted there amongst the fields like a mirage, dotted with playgrounds and laid out in black streets. A little mall with a grocery store. We got out and dashed inside, mingling with the wet-coated strangers there, the scent of dank wool and muddy boots filling the place. We grabbed bread and meat and more fruit. Our day was so different than the one everyone else there was having: in from the fields, breaking from work or bringing the kids home for lunch, this was just one stop (one made probably every day) in a set ritual of activities, like anywhere else in the world. Its familiarity was as comforting as it was odd. Yes, this was Italy, but it was also a place where people lived with no mind to the uniqueness of the place. Why this struck me I don’t know. At base it was probably a sentimental wonderment, a gee-whiz moment, but it made the place seem peculiarly layered. That it could be exotic to me but just home to others. We paid for our groceries. When we stepped outside, the rain had lifted, although the air was cool with it: mountain air. We got back into the car, rolled down the windows and left the parking lot without asking a soul where we could find San Rocco a Pilli.
MORE OLIVES THAN THERE ARE STARS IN HEAVEN. WE STAYED AT AN AGRITURISMO THAT HAD ON ITS GROUNDS A LITTLE CUSTOMS HOUSE WHERE MICHELANGELO ONCE SPENT A NIGHT.
We had the good sense to feel silly for getting so worked up over nothing, although it’s always nothing with its barbs and poisons that threatens us. Anne speedily built a sandwich of fresh bread and mortadella and bolted it down to the baby and then settled back against the seat, sated and relieved. I continued to drive as if I knew where I was going. We had figured out, at least, that we had allowed a vaguely slanting road to mislead us west rather than north. We traced this road back to the fatal turnoff, reversing the mood mercifully back to square one. We then took the other vaguely slanting road, the one I’d confidently rejected, and immediately saw the signs for San Rocco a Pilli. Still ten kilometres. To the east and west, the last of the Tuscan hillsides were giving way to flatter topography, opening into long vistas.
The rain and the after-rain light had turned the fields an almost unnatural green. Stretching away from the road were rows of watercress the colour of childhood’s unmown grass, a green that would smell of chlorophyll even if you were only looking at a picture of it. We’d seen fields like this before, of course; both of us had been to Ireland in the height of summer. But it was the context of these fields, their peacefulness after the storm, how the deluge had been nourishment, not a threat. And then, at a distance, but not so far away that it was swallowed up in the landscape, we saw a lone tree. Decidedly deciduous, vegetal as perfectly cooked broccoli, the trunk slightly tilted, a moment of lush imperfection in the midst of all this green order, and the sky above it suddenly harrowed like the fields below, light pouring down. Why the appearance of a single tree should have riveted us the way this did, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain. But after driving past it, we stopped the car, did a three-pointer and, in silent agreement, drove back.
What it takes us to stop and actually see something is made of circumstances we cannot prepare in advance. Perhaps it’s the moments that stand out of the welter of official history and landscape that become totemic. This tree was in no book, there had been no signs that pointed us to it. If any one of those shoppers back in Radi had driven along that road at that moment, it quite possibly would have meant something to them: a clear memory of home or childhood or harvest. For myself, I think it was simply its quiet resonance: this riot of life with the archetype of its beauty and power growing in the midst of it. And us in the car, in the middle of a place we didn’t belong to no matter how much we admired it, with the unnamed future unfolding in Anne’s body. Somehow, this unadorned tableau expressed the connection between all these things for me. But only in that moment. Only after our sick friends had to go home, only after a rainstorm and an argument, only after a narrow escape from dangerous hunger. At any other moment, it would have just been a tree in a field.
We stood outside of the car in the rain-cooled air and stared at it. I still don’t know what kind of tree it was. When we finally got back in and continued driving, it took us only ten more minutes to reach San Rocco a Pilli. It was where it had always been. That night, we drifted off to the sounds of the village bells. They floated out over the fields and joined the carillons in other towns, in Siena, in Radi, in Cortona, these peals presiding over the whole countryside, linking the three of us to everyone else in their soundings.
Michael Redhill is a poet, playwright and novelist. His first novel, Martin Sloane, was published in 2001 and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada/Caribbean). His collection of short stories, Fidelity, will be published in spring 2003. He lives in Toronto with his partner and two sons.
The symbol for a church—the cross-on-ball.
007Destination: Greece
LOOKING FOR DEMETRIUS
Myrna Kostash
Chania, Crete
I sit in the quiet little bar of the Kriti Hotel, sipping an ouzo, baptizing this trip. Up in my room, my travelling icon sits propped up against an east wall. When I commissioned it from the iconographer in Edmonton, she laid out her art books in her studio, showing several different versions of St. Demetrius, and instructed me to choose one. What did I know? I liked the one where he didn’t seem so much of a soldier and looked more like a saint, sweet-faced and mild of gesture.
On my icon, he is young and pretty, beardless, with thick hair tucked behind his ears. He wears the tunic and cloak of a Byzantine army officer and holds a round shield and long-armed cross. He died young, speared through his right breast, in the basement of the Roman baths in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica, for the crime of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This was in the year 304, and he was going to become one of the most powerful saints in all of Christendom.
I found him in a book. I was reading about Byzantium, the civilization that radiated for a thousand years from its home in Constantinople throughout the eastern Mediterranean world, including God-guarded Thessalonica, the glory of the northern Aegean.
In Thessalonica, Demetrius was martyred and hastily buried in the red earth of the baths. Gradually the little shrine marking the spot fell into ruin, the relics disappeared and, after a time, the details of his life and death vanished from living memory. In the early seventh century, Greece was invaded by wave upon wave of barbarians, mainly Slavs, who didn’t stop until they got all the way to the Peloponnese. But there was one prize they never did take: the city of Thessalonica. They besieged and assaulted its walls and gates to no avail.
This way to the Archangel.
The city was impregnable: the Great Martyr and Holy Warrior Demetrius had come back, riding his red horse on the ramparts, his green cloak billowing in a heavenly breeze, to perform the miracle of the defence of the city. They say he is still there, at rest in a magnificent silver casket, in the nave of a grand basilica on one of the busiest avenues of the city, still performing his miracles for the faithful.
I was moved by the story, even aroused. In the 1980s I travelled repeatedly in eastern and central Europe, locating within those still-Communist countries heartbreaking stories of dissident artists and political rebels, mainly young men, whose desperate defiance of brute authority evoked in me a swooning kind of solidarity with their struggle. Communism, and their sacrifices, passed out of history. But now here was another of their beautiful and doomed company, a saint of the Orthodox Church. As a third-generation Ukrainian Canadian in Alberta, I spent an entire childhood and youth in and out of St. John’s Ukrainian Orthodox church in Edmonton. Now, in my travels, wherever there is an Orthodox church in the remnants of Byzantine Europe—Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia—I find myself in it, taking a kind of rest in the homely peace that settles over me as I sniff the phantom whiffs of incense and beeswax, gazing at the icons who gaze back at m
e, and mumbling the few lines of text I know from the hymns and prayers of the liturgy.
So if Demetrius is a saint venerated by Orthodox Christians, he is a saint for me too. In November 2000, I decided to look for him in his homeland among the Greeks.
I began in Chania, wondering if Demetrius could possibly be a forerunner of these Greeks, of these Cretans, of the mustachioed men smoking furiously at the baggage carousel, of the travellers inserting phone cards—“Sofia! I am at the airport!”—of the policeman blowing his whistle regularly and inconsequentially at the airport traffic, of the worker painting “impressions of Knossos” on panels in the hotel lobby, tuning into Harry Belafonte on the hotel radio.
They once were Byzantines, these Cretans, and some of their towns and villages, Lissos, Souya, Anopoli, Leutro, Hora Sfakion, Kantanos, are sites of ecclesiastical and archaeological treasures from the spread of Christianity. This much I learn at the Byzantine museum into which I have slipped on a somnolent Sunday. There are bits and pieces of frescoes rescued from disintegrating churches, and on one panel I can make out two military figures in chain-mail vests, blue cloaks clipped at the throat. St. Theodore, holding a spear in his right hand, is the better preserved; all that is visible of St. Demetrius is his bare head, his brown hair curling at the neck, framed by the golden halo of his distinction. I am relieved that his small, well-formed ears are intact: the ears—or at least the earlobes—of saints on icons must always be showing, Marianna, the iconographer, had told me. “The whole purpose is for the saints to hear our prayers and take them to heaven.”
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