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The Pedestal Magazine -Richard Peabody - The Rain in Eritrea
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Richard Peabody - The Rain in Eritrea |
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Tim was eating ice cream. He was talking plans. “So next weekend, how about a B&B; in Charlottesville? We can ride horses at my friend Nancy’s farm. Or maybe kayak some?"
Janet didn’t know how to break it to him. The ticket for Eritrea in her Polartec vest. The haunting photos of landmine victims. Kids. No eyes, no arms, no legs. There was widespread famine, hundreds of rape victims due to Ethiopian incursion, and a general sense that everything she'd seen being built during her years as a foreign correspondent was rapidly being torn asunder. She wanted to get back and see for herself. “I was kind of hoping—"
“Oh, don’t say it." He held the spoon upside down in his mouth, the chocolate sauce dripping, barely visible, sliding over his thin moustache. “We can’t just spend the entire weekend in bed. We have to get out and do something. The weather’s supposed to be phenomenal," and he rapped the spoon against her right knee.
He was protesting too much. Janet knew he’d like nothing better than an entire weekend in bed. And the chocolate sauce would play into his fantasies. How to tell him. Just do it.
“Look, Tim, I’ve made arrangements—"
“Work?"
Janet nodded, brushed some vanilla from her lap.
“You’re leaving?"
She nodded again.
“When?"
“Tomorrow. I’ll be gone two months."
She knew Tim was pissed. Another foreign assignment. More planes. More excuses. He was frustrated. So was she. In the past he’d have dragged her to bed and growled like a wild animal while marking every square inch of her body with love bites and hickeys. No longer. Tim stared at her for a second, licked his spoon, got up from the couch and went into the kitchen. The frequent trips, the trashing of his plans for the two of them, were all taking their toll, and she knew it. And the hardest part was not knowing whether she wanted out of the relationship or not.
The Land Rover was bumping along like an amusement park ride. A few years ago Janet had ridden with the rebel Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, watched them capture Russian tanks, rocket launchers, artillery pieces, trucks, and anti-aircraft guns, and imprison the Ethiopian soldiers of the Derg regime, who by daylight waged air strikes against this tiny country in the horn of Africa. Those were heady days and Janet had marveled then at how the little guy had won, had stood up to the bully. They’d gained their freedom only to get dragged into a prolonged series of border disputes with the new rulers of Ethiopia—their counterpart the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. Trenches on both sides now stretched from the Sudan to Djibouti, about the length of Pennsylvania, and to complicate matters they also had a Sudanese-backed Islamic guerilla force nipping at their heels. Ato, the driver at the wheel today, was new. Only fifteen, but with the hardened face and vigilant eyes of a war veteran. Janet watched the mountains fading on the horizon and remembered her first trip to North Africa. She’d assumed everything in the desert was flat. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every bump amplified by the lack of suspension. The Land Rover was going to own her kidneys before the week was out.
The hospital building in Mendefera had been rebuilt many times. Recent air raids had left nothing but rubble. Two kids in one of the surviving rooms were in amazing spirits considering the damage. They told their stories through Blatta, her interpreter on most of her previous visits to the country, on whom she depended for food and comfort and insulation against daily vicissitudes. And Janet took it all down with speedy dispatch and carefully detached emotions. Once a journalist always a journalist. Just like her father.
“I was walking with my cows," the boy said. “One of the cows stepped on a mine." The cow had been obliterated. Shrapnel from the anti-personnel mine taking the brother next to him, and ripping off one leg and forever darkening an eye. The other boy’s story was similar. Both waiting to be fitted for their artificial limbs. Both not even born when Eritrea fought Ethiopia for liberation.
Landmines. Perfectly patient killing machines. And Eritrea had one of the deadliest landmine infestations in the world.
How to explain? How to say, look Tim, I’ve watched these people struggle and suffer and succeed. They’ve beaten two super powers. They’re part of me now and I’m part of them. The eyes. The smiles. She’d been snapping photos of kids in Asmara. The sheer joy now that they were free to simply walk around. The U.N. Peacekeepers a visible presence in the capital city. They'd be patrolling the border with Ethiopia by the start of the new year.
"You know you could get killed, don't you?" Tim had driven her to the airport. He hadn't given her that kind of time lately. Janet thought it was because he was afraid he was contributing to what he regarded as her journalistic vice if he aided and abetted her. Tim had never traveled out of the country and it was becoming clear that he felt threatened any time she did.
"Yes, I know."
"You better be home by Christmas."
"I promise."
"Is it really worth it Janet?" He was squeezing the steering wheel so hard his hands were white claws.
How to explain to her lover why she is so moved by a country being born? How to get that across? Communication was her talent and yet with Tim she was incapable of communicating how much this meant to her. To go, to see, to witness. He’d accused her of being an ambulance chaser. She’d begun to wonder about that herself.
"Is it?"
"We've been over all of this before Tim, I'm scared of course. I don't want to die. But I'm well aware it could happen." Her friend and mentor Larry Shapiro had been killed in Kosovo. Janet knew death was sometimes par for the course. "I'm not suicidal if that's what you're getting at." And she was amazed just how angry and defensive she was becoming. But in a blink they were at the airport and Tim was embracing her and helping her with her black duffel and then she was in the terminal and the beat-up blue Toyota was no longer at the curb when she turned around. And it was at times like this, standing alone among a host of strangers, that the prospect of living together under one roof, having wills and life insurance and a family, looked particularly comfortable.
Nothing ever prepared her for the flies. They were simply everywhere. Blatta, Janet's interpreter, told her that the Land Rover had been delayed. But she tried to listen over the buzzing while he elaborated between bites of Birsin, the veggie stew he cadged for her whenever they actually found time to eat, about his sister who'd moved to Seattle. The famine and the war had cut down on the availability of the beef and lamb dishes that made up most of the country's cuisine. And God only knew where Ato had actually gone after dropping them off. Half-tracks and soldiers had surrounded a shed. In the shed a stack of landmines. Brightly colored square boxes. Janet realized that they bore an eerie resemblance to her laptop. The writing on the landmines claimed them for the EIS, the Sudanese-backed Eritrean Islamic Salvation bandits. So that was true. Janet had no reason to doubt. A civil war raged in the Sudan between the Arab-Muslims in the north and the black Christians in the south. But this spillover of additional death-dealing Islamic hardware into Eritrea was hard to stomach. In Eritrea, miraculously, the half-Muslim, half-Christian country made up of nine ethnic groups, simply got along. She took photos of the landmines. How many were there? She lost count at one hundred.
The broiling hot sun and lack of sleep blurred the days together. They were on a rutted track to Barentu and the sky had turned gray and menacing. Janet was half asleep, her head bouncing against the window frame, almost in tune to the roaring engine and the shaking vehicle, and she oddly found herself daydreaming about Tim decorating his bookshop for the holiday season. Why wasn't Tim’s domesticity enough for her? She thought about her father, how he’d been gone for weeks at a time, how he’d missed her birthday, her graduation. The explosion pounded her awake. They weren't moving. The Land Rover’s engine was silent. What was going on? Janet jumped down, her boots sinking into the ferruginous sand. Goats bleating. Animal gore on the hood. Goat innards littered all over the landscape. Landmines. And the remaining animals could easily trip another one or two. Ato, the driver, was helping somebody up just a few yards off the dirt track. Blood everywhere. It was Blatta. She grabbed a towel and a canteen and in a completely adrenaline-fueled lapse of common sense raced over in time to see her friend collapse and breathe his last before she could touch him, make eye contact. Thousands of bloody pinpricks in his chest, his face, his arms. Janet didn't know how long she cried in Ato’s arms. She couldn't tell whose keening was the loudest.
Rain was falling and Janet sat under the tin roof of a ruined Tukul, a mud/wood/stone hut, listening as the drops rattled and pinged. Ato was in the half-track smoking with a friend. She could see the two men through the open door. And she wondered who had originally planted the landmine that killed Blatta. Could have been Eritrean, Ethiopian, even Sudanese. Hell, it could have been Rommel or Mussolini. Leave it to the Italians to name the place Eritrea, Classical Greek meaning Red Sea. A sea of blood, Janet thought. And every single drop shed was due to the imposition of colonial borders, imaginary lines on paper, lines between ethnic peoples who had been at war for generations.
The rain felt good mixed with her tears. Janet couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually seen it rain in Eritrea. She rarely ventured along the Red Sea coast. The water ran in eddies and currents around the wheels of the Land Rover and the half-track, picking up speed down the incline toward the ocher plains, rolling on to the Sudanese border, and into the endless desert sand.
En route home from Dulles airport, Janet drew the first cab in the queue. The driver’s features were chiseled. He was from the horn of Africa for certain. Was he Oromo blood?
“Are you Eritrean?" Janet asked the man, making eye contact for a moment in the rearview mirror. The Redskins game was playing on the radio, a surprise in itself.
“There is no such country," the Ethiopian driver said, his eyes two icy tunnels meeting Janet’s in the mirror.
Richard Peabody wears many literary hats. He is editor of Gargoyle Magazine (founded in 1976) and has published a novella, two books of short stories, six books of poems, plus an e-book, and co-edited six anthologies with Lucinda Ebersole, including Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn, Mondo James Dean, Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion, and Conversations with Gore Vidal. He has also edited A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation and Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women. Peabody teaches fiction writing for the Johns Hopkins Advanced Studies Program. He lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife and two daughters. For additional information visit: http://www.gargoylemagazine.com.
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