Garden of Eden Read Online Free Page A

the people retreating inside their shelters to huddle together for warmth.
    Caroline, Teodoris, and Lannie split up and thrust their heads into tent after tent. Teodoris calls, “Caroline!” and comes to her where she’s paused down the alley beyond him. He’s carrying a tiny child in his arms. The child’s limbs and his head against Teodoris’s chest bob loosely with his long steps. Lannie comes up to them, the only one here with little Amharic, ready to take the child from Teodoris.
    “He is seven years, they say,” he explains to Caroline. The boy can’t weigh more than twenty-five pounds and is the length of a three-year-old. Lannie can’t contain a gasp. Caroline, peering at him, says nothing, although for an instant she stands perfectly still. “He came in last night,” Teodoris goes on. “His mother died in the night. They have taken her away.” Caroline feels the child’s pulse gently, lifts one of his eyelids, says, “Lannie, take him to the hospital. We’ll finish up here and I’ll check on him before I go home.” Lannie had initially looked away at the sight of the child in Teodoris’s arms, then made herself look back again, feeling for a second that her face is acquiring the set of Caroline’s when she studies suffering: grave, gentle, clear-eyed.
    Lannie takes the child from Teodoris and holds him carefully against her chest — a bundle of worn, chilled cloth. She shifts him so that his head rests against her neck as she walks carefully so as not to jostle him, down the row of shelters in the gathering darkness toward the lighted hospital. The child does not move or make a sound.
    As she walks she remembers the first camp in Sidamo province where, not trusting the government who said there was no drought, no famine there, she’d managed to get a travel pass and gone to see for herself if this was true. She remembers lying awake listening to the drums celebrating the third day after the birth of a son. Sons, always sons, she thinks distantly, securing the child more firmly to her. Didn’t Iris say she’d once had a brother? One who’d died as a baby? She stumbles over a small rock, catches herself before she falls, and in that instant, her short time in Sidamo rushes back in …
    When she’d seen blood pouring from the woman, her head lolling over the arm of the man carrying her, Lannie had instinctively run toward them, without remembering she wasn’t a nurse and couldn’t help. Abebe, the nurse on duty, appeared in the doorway of the examining room and shouted to her, “Here! Come!”
    She moved toward him through the noise and too-bright light to the blood-soaked bundle of rags lying now on the examination table. The woman’s relatives, four or five of them, crowded around the table, looking down at her, one woman keening softly. “She must not bleed so much!” Abebe said, turning his back to the woman on the table, pulling open the cupboard where instruments, bandages, andmedicines were kept. “Get her clothes off!” He handed her scissors over his shoulder and she began to straighten the limbs of the bundle on the table who she saw now was a thin girl of perhaps fifteen years, her eyes rolled back in her head. But as Lannie touched her ankles she felt warmth. She started to cut away the soggy fabric and saw, or already knew, the blood was pouring from the girl’s vagina, had already thought it a miscarriage, when she caught a glimpse of the flesh torn away, red and pulpy, and she would have fainted or vomited at that and the blood pouring out all over the table had not Abebe pushed her back, lifting the girl’s hips and sliding a sterile pad under her, and then the Swedish nurse Inge shouldering Lannie aside, taking in the situation at a glance.
    “Take them out!” she commanded Lannie. Lannie, clenching her teeth to keep from throwing up into the puddles of blood, removed the relatives from the room, going with them herself, closing the door behind them. She leaned