Gospel (115 page)

The sun was setting and it began to be cool, a high-elevation mountainous cool that Lucy, walking back to the nurses' tent, found restorative after the excruciation of the Saharan heat. Sensing she was a burden the aid people didn't need, she found the nurse she had spoken to earlier and volunteered for chores, engendering the first smile she had seen on this difficult day. After an hour of sorting plates and cups in the aid-workers' mess, counting bags of flour, washing up in the remarkably well-equipped kitchen for mass production of bread and grain meal, Lucy felt better about being in Degoma.

You know, she lectured herself, you used to do things like this when you were at St. Eulalia's. Weekends at the St. Vincent de Paul store, sticking price tags on secondhand goods sold for charity, writing them on a sticker with a ballpoint pen while Sister … what was her name? Hispanic woman, Sister Assumpta—something like that. I could barely understand her English and I was sure that each Saturday she would discover I had copied down the wrong price and had bankrupted St. Vincent. Somewhere along the line I got the idea—wait, it was my sister Mary: “That's only for losers. Whyntcha get a life like normal people? Wanna hang around a bunch of nuns all your life?”

Wiping her brow, Lucy took a break by taking a brief stroll of the area. She passed by a tent where little children sat covered with flies in surreal motionlessness, staring up at her with big eyes in sunken faces. Lucy walked across the road to the defecation field, the stretch of desert designated as the refugees' latrines. Every few minutes several of the thousands gathered at Degoma would go to the field to excrete. This field was thought to be far enough out to lead the vermin away and not poison the water supply—when there was water in the creek.

There was a shotgun blast. In the fading twilight, Lucy saw that an emaciated man had fired a shot over the field and hundreds of crows, picking at the ordure for any scrap of nourishment, fluttered into the sky with aggrieved cries. It could be a mountain in Western America, the field could be a dustbowl field anywhere, the sky is the same violet blue of autumnal evenings in Illinois … and yet this is Ethiopia, she said, closing her eyes.

“You watch,” said O'Hanrahan, appearing at her side. “An Ethiopian won't kill a wild bird, not even to eat. Birds were all-important in the Christians defeating the Moslems early in this century.”

When Ras Tafari, Haile Selassie, was fighting the vicious Moslem regime for power after World War One, he got the Abun, Archbishop of Ethiopia, to excommunicate the other side, cursing them officially and promising them the reprobation of Judas. Then Moslem troops from North Africa joined to attack the Christians. They were able to get a messenger with essential information through Ras Tafari's lines to another battalion poised to crush the Christian forces … but then thousands of bees swarmed and stung the messenger to death before he could relay his information.

O'Hanrahan, recalling the fantastic history, noted, “He would have lost again except for the birds.”

“Haile Selassie controlled the birds too?”

“He was a god, remember? No, you're too young, you don't remember. Emperor, King of Kings, Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie, declared a god by Marcus Garvey and millions of Jamaicans.” O'Hanrahan chuckled. “In 1966 I almost went down for the department to attend the visit of Haile Selassie to Jamaica. This was supposed to be where the Black Messiah would show himself, and a number of militants were ready to heed his call to arms and take on the white world. Selassie ignored the Rastafarians, really, told them to get their own countries in order before coming back to Africa.”

“What about the birds?”

“Oh yeah. The enemy Moslem troops got in close to the Christian camp, and if they'd attacked they would have won. But the birds in the nearby swamp gathered and swooped and cawed and woke Ras Tafari up. The enemy was spotted and defeated.”

“This is documented?”

“Yep. Iyasu, the Moslem commander, was let to wander the desert for five years, then was sought for and led back to Addis Ababa in gold chains, where he spent the rest of his life locked in a prison. With his harem, however. The Ethiopians aren't savages, as you can see.”

O'Hanrahan led a leisurely amble toward the village.

“There are thousands of pothead Jamaicans waiting for Ras Tafari, Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, to come back, since his body was never shown after his 1977 assassination. And the Druse are waiting for al-Hakim to come back since he was never found; and the Sudanese the Mahdi to come back, and the Christians want Jesus to come back, and the Jews want Messiah any day now, and the Shi'ah want the Eighth Imam to return … a whole planet crying out for a rerun of God.” He looked down to kick at a clod of dirt. “The world awaits a Savior.”

They strolled down into the ransacked, near-deserted village at the crossroads of the rough highways. A few boarded-up homes, a few occupied huts, a shiny, well-kept-up police station—of course—though no soldiers were in sight. The war was elsewhere this week. Lucy and O'Hanrahan stopped before a church.

“Oh, look at her,” whispered O'Hanrahan, as they watched a thin woman in a deep indigo-blue drapery emerge from the church, around her neck a polished silver Ethiopian cross, and a wrap of some kind, but on closer inspection as she shyly walked by, it was a sheepskin scroll with painting and words upon it.

“It's like a phylactery,” said O'Hanrahan, “but with more magic powers. I remember when I was last in Lalibela I saw an abba chastise a woman for wandering aimlessly around the marketplace. Her beauty so unguarded was sure to let one in for a
ganén.
An evil spirit.”

“This doesn't sound particularly Christian,” said Lucy.

“We don't sound Christian to them,” defended O'Hanrahan.

The
dabtara,
or unordained cleric associated with her church, instructed her to go to a
zartaenqway,
the cult specialist who goes into a trance over her problems. A
zar,
the good angel, will speak through his mouth and call out the name of the demon responsible for her mishaps. And then comes the prescription, the most holy words, the most Holy Name of God and the mystery of the written holy words. The
dabtara
will prepare a magic scroll with a picture of Michael and Gabriel, her guardian angel, and perhaps a favorite beloved saint. Maybe St. Liqanos, who in the 500s came to Tigre where the serpent Arway tyrannized over the people and was killed by the saint with Michael by lightning bolts. Maybe the Holy Alexander the Great, the long-remembered Emperor of the World, who bred an eagle with a horse and rode the wingéd offspring to the edge of the world where he met the Angel of Darkness, guardian of the end of each day, the blackest African one could ever meet, who deep within his robes hides the darkest of all nights. St. Alexander the Great, conqueror and patron of Abyssinia, there met Enoch who invented the Ethiopian script and was told of the One Who Would Come, Jesus Christ.

“What happened to the beautiful woman?” asked Lucy. “Did she get rid of her demon?”

O'Hanrahan explained that the woman must sacrifice a sheep on her own land, and the color of the sheep is important depending on what ill has befallen her. A pit she must dig behind her house and dance around it three times for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and the blood of the lamb must be poured over her in some cases, for the demons love the blood of the lamb, and as it flows over her nakedness, the demons exit from her body to taste the blood and they follow it into the hole, where the blood and bones are quickly buried, the exorcism complete. The meat must be cut into twelve pieces for the Twelve Disciples and eaten.

“The Western World has pounded the magic out of religion, hasn't it?” said Lucy, tired from her day of chores, leaving her open and unjudging.

“You know, Luce, that's going to be the misfortune of the 21st Century, maybe the central intellectual tragedy of postmodern man. Africa will one day be full of free-market Methodists and Episcopalians, and they'll get decent governments and VCRs and dubbed American sitcoms, and
this,
the disease and famine and ignorance and corruption, will lessen, and their quest will be complete: a proud, united continent of first- and second-world nations. But will it be Africa anymore?”

They walked the perimeter of the field. On the other side of the road the sprawling refugee camps teemed with activity; smoke began to rise from fireplaces for warmth, for the cooking of meager rations, the boiling of water.

“Ethiopian angels,” said O'Hanrahan in the tone of voice that warned something salacious was on the way, “have two eyes, two hands, two feet, and two penises.”

“They have two, do they?”

“A sacred mystery,” O'Hanrahan demurred, “too inscrutable for one such as myself. Other traditions hold that the angels have no genitalia. Demons not angels, most Ethiopians would agree, have penises. I saw an Ethiopian ikon once of a saint doing battle with this huge-membered demon. A demon's penis is always erect.”

Yep, thought Lucy, that's been my experience.

“Well,” said O'Hanrahan, calling it quits, “that's all the Abyssinian filth I know. I'll get working on it.”

Lucy and the professor circled back toward the dung field.

A skeletal woman rose from her squat and rewrapped her dress about her. Moments later crows flew to the spot and began to pick at her leavings, competing with the rodents and the ever-circling vultures for this wretched sustenance. Again, a man set off his shotgun aimed at the air to scatter the birds. The shotgun's report echoed about the violet-shadowed mountains.

O'Hanrahan remarked, “Abba Selama told me that some birds are eternal because they actually rested on the Cross itself.”

The man in the field fired another shotgun blast.

“As I said, an Ethiopian won't kill a bird lightly.”

Lucy smiled faintly, “But they could eat it and feed their families.”

O'Hanrahan looked at her and then at the darkening blue of the sky. “What would that be worth if you believed you had killed a magic bird that had alighted on the Cross of the Savior? What if you could believe, in this land abandoned by God, in such things?”

A
UGUST
25
TH

Lucy spent the morning talking to her friend the nurse over cups of coffee. They had introduced themselves yesterday but Lucy had forgotten her name and was fearful of giving offense by asking so late in their acquaintance.

A young woman, around thirty. A white woman, with strong black eyebrows and short cropped hair—so nothing can live in it, she joked—with her khaki clothes from military surplus hanging loosely on her, Lucy assumed, from loss of weight.

“The Ethiopians,” the woman laughed, “keep mistaking me for a man. They're not good on white people.” The nurse could be mistaken for a man because she was broad-shouldered and muscular from lots of crate-carrying, but inspection showed she was a woman with delicate hands actually, with nail polish. She was divorced, one kid. She had worked a year at the local hospital back in Minneapolis, and then her mother died, the last of her living parents. So, with their sure objection out of the way, she indulged a whim and called up the American Refugee Committee, which ran camps in the Sudan and Ethiopia.

“I'd sent checks, you know,” she said, spraying her hands with mosquito repellant at the tent's edge, careful not to breathe it. “And I knew someone who had come here for three months and I always told myself I ought to do it, just for a summer. Then I've come back again and again.”

Lucy felt unvirtuous. “I know … but you actually
did
come over here, and few people do
that
much.” Again, how often Lucy had planned on this type of summer activity, collected brochures from the Union, talked to people who had done it, and it always came to nothing, dead from her damn laziness and passivity …

“I think you're pretty heroic,” Lucy blurted out.

Lucy watched the nurse as she put up the spray, locking it in the cabinet, interrupting herself to explain how the men will steal anything that's not tied down—to sell, of course, for their families. The Ethiopians are not ordinarily criminal. Said the nurse, “The work to do here is bottomless. Your three months are absolutely nothing, half of a drop in the bucket.”

Lucy wouldn't stand for it. “It's three months more than most people give.”

“No, any thoughts you might have of all the good you're doing are eaten up by the enormity of it. What are they saying? Seven million people starving in this country. The Tigrean rebels captured a convoy of U.N. medical and food supplies and destroyed everything but what they could sell to the Sudanese government…” She sighed. “And the Sudanese, who are looking at a famine of twenty million, refuse to admit there's a problem. They think the CIA is behind every bag of oatmeal.”

There were hundreds of stories. It was truly a case of demons running governments, agents of some immense, incontrovertible evil hijacking food, cheering the famine on for the other side; nations with nothing fighting over next-to-nothing. Ethiopia's 28-year-old civil war. In 1985 Mengistu's men lined up children in one village near Gonder and shot every other one according to height. Such random evil, such whimsy. In one Tigrean town, the Ethiopians bade the women and children lie down before a Soviet tank, which ran back and forth over them, making a human pavement. Add to this the ignorance. The locals cured cholera and malaria by scores of tiny cuts, leeches, and bleeding—which aided death. In the west, the nurse heard that they thought demons caused illness and one had to burn them out. She told Lucy in cold, realistic terms the tale of a nine-year-old being forced by his parents to swallow a burning coal.

“No,” the nurse concluded, “you always know you can get on a plane and then that's
it
for you, it's all over. It all goes away, and you can get back to your hot shower and run down to the Safeway whenever you're hungry. Then late at night, just as you're on the edge of sleep you see a face, a child's face. With those flies that can burrow under an eyelid, a child looking up at you, holding out a little black hand for food. That's your reward,” she said flatly. “Those weekly, sometimes daily reminders that millions of people you've met are probably dying. Or are dead by now.”