Garden of Eden Read Online Free PDF Page A

here with all of them trying to eat while Rob waits. She isn’t really hungry anyway, would rather have a plate of
injera wat
in town.
    “I’m ready whenever you are,” Rob says. “Thanks for the conversation,” he says to Maggie, smiling at her. Maggie smiles back, brightly. She wants to make an impression.
    “Don’t forget curfew,” Caroline sticks her head out of the kitchen to warn them. Rob says, “They kept Todd and Larry in jail overnight a couple of nights ago when they didn’t make it back to the camp before curfew. Our director had to get them out. He was pretty mad.”
    “Wars!” Caroline exclaims, a mixture of disgust and acceptance. She should know, she’s seen enough of them, Lannie thinks, in northern India, in Guatemala, in Angola, and elsewhere. But just this, the famine and the war in Ethiopia, are enough — more than enough — for Lannie.
    She and Rob go out, shutting the door carefully behind them; if they leave it ajar, rats and snakes get in. Rob steps away from her, then comes back quickly. She sees with gratitude that he’s carrying a long, heavy stick.
    “A man came into the hospital today with a hand half-eaten by a hyena,” she says. “I didn’t see him, but Lucy said he was trying to save his son. Some other men came along and drove the pack off.”
    “We found a body,” Rob says in a low voice. “Or what was left of one. Not here, out of Dire Dawa. I was working on a water project there. She was collapsed from starvation, we think, that was how they got her. It was pretty awful.” They walk along in silence for a minute. She shivers and Rob draws close to her, puts his arm over her shoulders. “Are you cold?”
    “A little,” she responds. Her impulse is to shake his arm off, it’s heavy, and allowing it to stay says too much about the possibilities ofthe relationship, possibilities she doesn’t want to contemplate. But its very heaviness is comforting. His Canadianness, the world they’ve both come from that they know exists solid and stable back there — that, like it or not, must surely be what gives them the courage to stay here — is implicit in the warm weight she feels across her back, stilling her. It’s shaking down the day’s horrors, steadying her, loosening her stride. After a while he drops his arm and takes her hand in a light, casual grasp. Again, she’s glad it’s dark. And she wonders, too, which of the kitchen or the camp staff is the government informant who will report that she and Rob have walked to town together.
    Now, from the round thatched houses on the edge of the town, they can hear the sound of drumming. Voices, impossible to tell if male or female, rise mournfully in singing, sounding more Asian or Arabic than African. The voices fall away slowly, but the drums go on. Lannie and Rob walk, listening without wanting to.
    “The army came into town today,” Rob says. “They were looking for boys.” Lannie doesn’t say anything, although this would be what the drumming is about. “They went straight for the school. The story is that the teacher’s helper held them up at the door while the teacher dropped the boys out the window so they could run away.” He laughs a little at the audacity of it.
    Lannie draws in her breath quickly. “Did they take the teacher away?”
    “No,” he says, “but they got two of the boys for cannon fodder. Twelve-year-olds. Their parents are devastated.” They listen again, in spite of themselves, to the elaborate rhythms of the drums. A single voice rises eerily, discordantly to Lannie’s ears, full of woe.
    “What a country,” she says. Surprisingly, her brother, Dillon, comes to mind. Of how she’d feel if she knew he’d been conscripted. But I hardly know him, she thinks, and anyway, by now he’d be old enough to go on his own. Still, she’s glad there’s no war back in Canada.
    The group of workers crowded around a long table on the deck of the café is too boisterous for Lannie’s