‘He didn’t change your mind?’
‘He didn’t change my mind, no,’ Sister Alexandra said. ‘But he gave me a ring.’
I looked at her fingers: no ring. That was understandable, for a nun had to turn her back on the world of materialism and secularity and become a bride of Christ.
‘My fiancé went away. For nine years he lamented,’ Sister Alexandra said.
Now we were entering the heart of the highlands — very dry, rubbly, chilly, windblown, the brown block-like houses, the robed people walking on skinny legs or else squatting in front of mats selling withered vegetables. I cracked open the window and sniffed the cool air.
‘He found a woman and married her and had two children. I did not even get in touch with him. I thought about him — of course, I thought about him a great deal. But I knew he had his life and I had my life.’ She reflected on this. ‘From time to time I heard about him. Well, Malta — you have been there …’
‘Just an island. I know islands a bit.’
‘Malta is a small place. No secrets, much talk,’ she said.
We were high enough in the highlands to feel the chill. The people here wore billowing clothes and were wrapped up well, with scarves and cloaks and headgear, pressing into the wind.
‘Last May, I had a phone call — a woman’s voice,’ Sister Alexandra went on, and melodramatic in her mimicry of a distant voice, said, “ ‘I know who you are. I think you should know that he has died. Thank you for respecting us.” That was all.’
The windblown dust whirled around us, slashing and buffeting the Land-Rover. I did not know what to say about the dead man except to inquire as to whether he had had a long illness.
‘It was lung cancer — he never smoked or drank. He was only forty-seven,’ Sister Alexandra said.
There was no commiseration I could offer. I might have said: I too have experienced the death of loved ones, but what consolation was that to someone suffering the peculiar pain of loss? I just made noises but as I did so I realized that she was protesting.
‘No, no — he is not dead,’ she said. ‘He is still alive for me. I live with the memory of him. I even speak to him, and he guides me. Can you imagine how important it is to have been loved?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘There’s a nice poem about that by an English poet.’ I partly recited and partly paraphrased the Larkin lines from ‘Faith Healing’:
In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
‘Recently, I heard that the woman is going to marry again,’ she said. ‘No one understood him or loved him as I did. That is why he is still alive to me.’
‘It’s true, the dead don’t seem to die, and the people we love seem to go on living within us,’ I said. ‘Or maybe that’s just how we deal with grieving.’
‘You are a writer?’ she said. ‘Maybe this is a story you can write.’
But I said what I always say to people who offer such stories as grist for my milclass="underline" you must write it yourself, because there is more to it than you’ve told me, and since you know everything it is your story not mine.
She didn’t object, she said she might, and she added, ‘I am a bit of a poetess. I have written some poems.’ She smiled the enigmatic smile of He is not dead, and said, ‘But I am a nun. If I published what I wrote it might seem strange, coming from a nun.’
‘I’d love to read your poems,’ I said, imagining something steamy and ecstatic, more John Donne than Thomas Merton, both of whom (for being poets and clergymen) I mentioned to her.
If the stereotype of the missionary is of a strong, dull, smiling person with endless patience and no libido, possessed by a conversion mania, Sister Alexandra was the opposite: tenacious, certainly, but also temperamental, opinionated, open-minded and passionate. And after I got to know her better I discovered that she was a gourmet cook. She was much loved at the convent and school but it struck me that she would have made a wonderful wife and mother. She didn’t use the word sin. Perhaps that was why she was such a success in Harar, the only faranji woman in the province.
‘These people are all horribly rich,’ she said as we passed Aweyde. ‘Pay no attention to their houses. They save their money, they don’t spend it on clothes or houses.’
The grubby qât-producing town on both sides of the road had a teeming market with one product on sale, the bunches of green leaves. The hills were thick with it, hedges and bushes of it; everyone grew it, sold it, chewed it. The particular conditions there in Aweyde were perfect. The local price per bunch was $1.20. It was three times this in Addis Ababa; much more in Yemen and Oman and the Emirates, where it was shipped from Dire Dawa in small planes. The qât flights were more reliable than the passenger flights, because the stuff lost its potency so quickly and had to be sped to the qât chewers.
‘The quality comes down within a day,’ a trader told me.
Harar was not much farther. Small houses were more numerous, the road widened, there was a stadium, a church, a mosque, and more mosques, and ahead a walled city, the gates gaping open.
Burton wrote of Harar being a forbidden city, attempted by many travelers in vain. ‘The bigoted ruler and barbarous people threatened death to the Infidel who ventured within their walls; some negro Merlin having, it is said, read Decline and Fall in the first footsteps of the Frank.’ He went on to say that the English were the most reviled because ‘at Harar slavery still holds its headquarters, and the old Dragon well knows what to expect from the hand of St George.’
There was also a superstition among the people of Harar ‘that the prosperity of their city depends upon the exclusion of all travelers not of the Moslem faith.’
Burton set off in 1854 and after an eventful trip from Zayla (present-day Zeila on the Somali coast, near the border of Djibouti) he saw the city on the hill, not a lovely place at all, but a walled hill town, a ‘pile of stones,’ and entered the eastern gate of Harar, palavered with various officials and was at last admitted to an audience with the Emir (who called himself Sultan), who extended his hand ‘bony and yellow as a kite’s claw’ and invited Burton to kiss it. Burton refused, ‘being naturally averse to performing that operation on any but a woman’s hand.’
Burton stayed in Harar for ten days (but unwillingly — for six of those days he was trying to leave). My stay was slightly less but only because I was headed for Cape Town by road, rail, ferry, whatever, and figured upon months more of travel. People all over Ethiopia regarded Harar still as a bastion of fanaticism and rural poverty, where proud war-like Muslims, handsome Hararis who would not dream of marrying anyone but a Harari, lived uneasily with Copts. In addition, there were the groups of hungry Somalis who attached themselves to the town; and camel herders, beggars from the hills, and a fairly good-sized leper colony at the back of the town, not to mention the hyenas, wild and ravenous, for which Harar was famous. All this had compelled my attention and people in Addis trying to worry me with images of Harari savagery merely roused my curiosity. I would happily have stayed in Harar longer.
The beggars were numerous because the Muslim Hajj period was ending, and the Muslim faith enjoins its believers to give generously to the poor on such occasions. Mosques are magnets for beggars, and such a festival as this had throngs of people looking for alms. I had never seen so many derelict people with their skinny hands out, demanding charity.