Gospel (116 page)

Lucy was drawn to this unsentimental woman. “You said you had a kid?”

The nurse looked blank a moment. “Jason. He's seven.”

“With your parents passed on, who baby-sits while you're, uh—”

“His father got custody,” she said matter-of-factly.

Lucy pondered how that could happen. This charitable soul, caring mother to the world's needy, somehow had had her child put in the father's care. But this is a present life. Maybe in some past life she was not so good. A drinker? Suicidal? A dark thought, but abusive or neglectful of her child? Was this time in the wilderness an atonement?

Lucy instinctively said, “You're a good person.”

The nurse, gathering up her light jacket before leaving, looked at Lucy oddly and said, “Not really. That's the funny thing.” She reached into her pocket. “Here.” She presented Lucy with a card with the American address for Médécins Sans Frontières, the French relief organization. “Here's another,” said the nurse, digging deeper. This card had an address for Catholic Relief Charities. “I pass 'em out to whoever will take them, journalists, U.N. observers, and I say ‘Do what you can.'”

The nurse gave Lucy a friendly, patient squeeze of the arm.

“Thanks,” said Lucy, blushing for some reason, staring hard at the addresses.

Lucy returned to the coffee pot, big rusted thing, circa World War Two, and filled her Styrofoam cup. This is the cup she had been given and told: don't lose it, it's the only one you get out here.

“There she is!”

Lucy turned to see O'Hanrahan, remarkably pressed and uncrumpled, smoking an American cigarette.

“God, doesn't it feel great,” he said. “We're back in the land where booze is legal! Civilization! Got this Winston from a nurse, what about that? Gimme that coffee,” he said, playfully taking it from Lucy's hand.

“That's my cup. Don't lose it.”

“You all packed up?”

Lucy faltered. “What? We're leaving already?”

O'Hanrahan sat at one of the long mess-hall benches at a table. “The guy from the U.S. Embassy is driving up and oughta be here by lunch.”

Lucy walked to the position at the table across from him, the long way around the long table. Oh no, she thought.

“I called David McCall yesterday, sir,” she confessed. “You know, just to see if he was nearby. He is. He's supposed to show up this morning.”

“Young McCall, huh? It'll be good to see that boy.”

Lucy frowned, thinking of O'Hanrahan inserting himself.

“Actually,” he said, “you call me when he shows up. I'm going to get Abba Selama to give me a crash course in Coushita. One dialect I don't speak, read, or know a damn thing about. I just
love
this,” enthused O'Hanrahan finally. “A new language. God, give me seventy more years and I'll know everything worth knowing in the world!”

And with that, he left.

Lucy looked into her cup to see O'Hanrahan had absently used it as an ashtray. “He could at least have given me a drag,” she said out loud, disgusted, though hankering for a cigarette.

But just as well, she thought. Not good for the baby.

She sighed. Lucy had gone ninety minutes this morning without remembering the baby-to-be. But, as on every other day, it caught up with her, tagging her from behind at a moment of calm and repose. Frankly, this morning the abortion forces within were winning all the arguments. I so much wanted to press that nurse, Lucy thought, for information on how to join Catholic Relief Charities for a summer, how does one apply, what qualifications one needs … But I'll need all the charity and aid I have to spare in about eight months. This child not only kills any chance of doing something with my life, but of doing something
good.

(Raising a child is a good thing.)

But I could do better things.

(Like that thesis of yours?)

No, I mean the down-and-dirty business of running a camp like this. Getting in there and doing what has to be done. The will to be of service in this world has always been strong but I wonder if I would feel so strongly if I hadn't been brought here to see it firsthand for myself. Maybe the plane going down near here was God's doing.

(Could be.)

But again, this is all empty talk. Ethiopia amid all the diseases is no place to have my child. She reflected dourly on the parade of emaciated women, their breasts shrunken and leathery, their faces haunted with an animal despair for their children, the hundreds, the thousands, the thousands more to come. Each woman would give her life so that her children could live—no, more than that: each woman would trade her life so that her children could eat for
a week.
And what am I considering? Having some doctor suck it out of me with a vacuum cleaner and toss whatever, whoever, on the pile. Of course, David might fall in love with me, marry me, and think it's his …

(Lucy.)

Just kidding. But I am going to tell him. He's good and level-headed. I can't tell Dr. O'Hanrahan—the shame, the ridicule! No, really, even he would be good about it. He would, after the fireworks, be fatherly, authoritative. And I bet he'd cover for me, let me spend the last months hiding out with him or something, help me lie to my folks … but offsetting this avuncular fantasy, I would never in his eyes be the young bright scholar again, the girl who read Lampridius. I would be the craven little repressed Catholic girl, slattern at the first opportunity—

“Lucy Dantan?”

At the tent flap there was a mechanic she'd seen around the camp.

“There are some doctors here to see you.”

Lucy stood, surprised that David and his friends had made it so soon. She panicked! She scurried toward the coffee pot, which gave her a dim fun house–mirror reflection, and pathetically she attempted to arrange her hair and prettify herself … Hopeless! She then went to the tent flap and peeked out.

There he was.

David McCall in a pith helmet, accompanied by a long-haired youngish man in medical sweats, and a sunburned, officious-looking woman in a long white skirt like a 1920s tennis player. David was telling a story and had them both laughing. Lucy committed herself and walked to meet them, waiting for him to turn around, recognize her, and—what? Sweep her up in his arms, whirl her around?

“Lucy!” David shook his head in disbelief, not quite over the novelty of seeing her in Ethiopia. He did run to greet her. He did hug her and give her a slight lift off the ground. “Where's Patrick?”

“Somewhere nearby, chasing a bottle of Ethiopian moonshine,” she laughed, happier than she thought she'd be to see him. He was everything! A familiar face, a calming voice, now leaner and burnished by the sun.

“Aw damn, I wanted to lay me eyes on the man!”

“David, I'm
so
glad to see you. I have something to talk over with you…”

All smiles, he snatched the pith helmet from his head and temporarily put it on Lucy's. “Gotta getcha one of these, Lucy. It'll fry your brains out here, the sun will.”

“I hope I'm not staying long enough. You know—”

David interrupted her so as not to be rude to his traveling companions: “Ah, you must first meet me mates.”

Lucy was led by his strong hand to stand before the somewhat hippie-ish young man in an aquamarine orderly's shirt. David introduced him as, “This is Bobby O'Connell from Cork—a fact that we overlook.”

Bobby took a tube of stacked plastic cups in a plastic bag and bopped David on the head for revenge. “Lucy, pleased to meetcha,” he said. “Look, I'll catch you later, Davey. I've got to set out for Addis Zemen and fetch the supplies. Don't anyone go away now, ‘cause I wish to be around when you open the you-know-what.”

David explained he had an unopened bottle of Bushmills, previously saved for the farewell week, but this was special!

“He's told me lots about you,” said Bobby, pointing a finger at Lucy.

“I'm goin' to move in, back in Connecticut on her sofa,” said David.

“Chicago,” reminded Lucy. She noticed Bobby had a camera round his neck. “Going to see the castles in Gonder?” she asked.

“Ah yes, play tourist a wee bit,” he said, putting himself in the driver's seat of the Jeep. “Nothin' back in the camp fit to take a picture of, all the poor little buggers…” He didn't have to elaborate.

“I'm Georgie Shelton,” said the woman, putting out her hand, “since Davey can't bring hisself to own up to me.”

Lucy tried to place her accent. “English or…”

“Australian,” she supplied. “From Perth.”

David: “Oh, say
g'day
for Lucy, Georgie! Don't deny the lass.”

Relenting, she said an archetypical Aussie
g'day.

While Lucy laughed, David sidled up to Georgie and gave her a squeeze. “I guess Lucy here'll be the first in the outside world to know. Georgie and I are engaged!”

*   *   *

The driver of the 1988 Ford Tempo stopped for a shepherd and his flock of sheep spread across the dirt road to Addis Ababa.

“I promise,” said Mr. Conrad Thorn of the U.S. State Department and diplomatic mission to Ethiopia, a forty-year-old man, sandy hair, a cross lapel pin. “Promise, that once we get to Debra Markos the road gets better. Paved all the way to the capital.”

O'Hanrahan, in the backseat with Lucy, was content. “I'm just happy to be in one piece after the plane went down.”

“That happens all the time,” said Thorn, beeping the horn lightly to scatter the sheep, inching the car forward. “Local planes land in Lake Tana, on the highways—seems everywhere but at the airports. By the grace of God, I think, these planes stay in one piece.”

O'Hanrahan laughed politely. He glanced at Lucy, who looked ill. “You all right?” he asked quietly.

“Something I ate,” she said huskily.

“I guess David can eat what the locals eat by this time, after five weeks, huh?”

“I guess.”

“Didn't he look good?”

Yep, thought Lucy.

Their State Department friend spoke again. “You two have a file on you
this
thick.”

This kind of thing fed O'Hanrahan's ego. “Really?”

“There's a special directive issued by a Colonel Westin—”

“Ah, good old Colonel Westin,” said O'Hanrahan, leaning forward. “He's not too happy with me, I'm sure.” Go on, O'Hanrahan seemed to be saying, tell me more of my own legend!

“It's my job … uh, this is awkward, I guess I better just come out and say it…”

“Please.”

“To obligate Miss Dantan to return at once to the United States and out of danger. And you, sir, to a predetermined location…”

“That's right. Go and set up a shop for you boys in Teheran.”

Mr. Thorn shook his head. “That's extraordinary, sir.”

It
was
really extraordinary when said out loud so simply. O'Hanrahan couldn't leave it alone! “I suspect I'm the first Westerner to be offered a post. Perhaps, in my way, I could help restore our diplomatic ties with our long-lost Persian friends.”

Lucy sneered to herself: what's this about a post in Teheran?

“You know I envy you, sir,” said Thorn, now back to full speed after the obstacle of the sheep. “We poor civil servants spend a lifetime in these places and never get an opportunity to really further our country's cause.”

O'Hanrahan was suffused with self-congratulation.

“What's this about Teheran, Dr. O'Hanrahan?”

He looked to the floor, managing a weak air of pleasantry. “Well. I've been recruited to go to Iran, it seems.”

Lucy turned away to the window. “And I'm to go home, huh?”

“Oh, I'm gonna join you right away, after I check out Teheran, you see. We'll get right back to the
Gospel of Matthias
like we'd planned. But they've got ‘Q,' Luce! I have to go check it out!”

She felt tears in her eyes. Of course, this was the ending. Anyone could have seen it coming, really. He's tired of this little dalliance with the scroll, and is moving on to some other adventure, and you, Lucy Dantan, have exhausted your usefulness. You were just someone to talk to, keep him from getting bored. But now it's time to shuffle on along, dump the dead weight.

“It'll just be a month or so,” he said, laughing insincerely the next minute, passing it off as nothing.

Lucy stared out her window feeling betrayed in every sense, no less by her talent for believing what she wanted to believe, about Stavros, about David, about Dr. O'Hanrahan, about her own life and future. She was not fit for this world where people lied and fooled you. Yes, others got the hang of living, but not her. She should never have left Kimbark Street, never have put before herself any more complex issue than what flavor yogurt Judy and she should have for dinner before they put on the aerobics video, fed the cats …

Soon the outskirts of Addis lay outside Lucy's window.

Shacks and fires and slums gave way to boarded-up shops, crumbling tenements, a city rotting from the top down. Troops were everywhere, 20,000 Cubans, according to Mr. Thorn. Most of the downtown was spread out illogically over a number of hills in no grid pattern, sort of an African Washington, D.C., with circles and monuments now torn down or defaced. There was a glimpse of the ravaged Presidential Palace, Haile Selassie's looted pleasure dome, and throughout, as in Eastern Europe or Maoist China or Iraq, the large five-story mural of People's Art: a smiling Mengistu beside a smiling Gorbachev beside a fierce, saintly Lenin happily waving to the adoring Africans over a tableau of tanks parading through the streets. Famine, natural disasters, endless civil wars, a ruined economy, over a quarter of a million killed by this regime, but never fear, Marxists of Ethiopia, your future has been assured: $12 billion in Cuban and Russian arms!