The Camel Bookmobile Read online

  Matani had stuffed his fingers into his mouth and bitten down on them to keep from crying out as he ran witlessly from his home. He was afraid to run far with night coming on, afraid of whatever nameless horror had attacked a child, so once he got out of sight of the settlement, he turned and crept back, cowering like a child, and hid in the shadows of the kilinge. He stayed away from his hut for hours, precious hours when of course his father could have used his help in dealing with the injured boy and his stunned young father.

  Now Matani straightened, gently massaged his stomach, and took a deep breath, refocusing on his purpose. “I’ve come,” he said, “about the books.” Matani was not one who liked long speeches about important matters, so he wanted that to be enough for him to pronounce the sentence, and for Scar Boy to pull forth the overdue volumes.

  Scar Boy cradled the stone in one hand, then dropped it into the other.

  “They have to be returned each time the camels come, as you know,” Matani said. “The library gave us an extra two weeks in this case. But the tribe grows uneasy when it falls behind with its responsibilities.”

  Scar Boy did not answer even with his eyes.

  “So I’ve come to collect them now,” Matani said. “I’ll keep them until the library comes again.” He heaved a loud sigh to show that he was getting tired of stating the obvious.

  Badru, in one corner of the room, stirred slightly. Otherwise, everything was still.

  On that earlier day, although Matani could not imagine anything except fleeing, he had still been ashamed. He wished he’d stayed, not only to help, but to watch his father at work. His father always knew how to kindle a fire for himself, as the expression went; he was the most resourceful man Matani ever knew. An English anthropologist, David Barkin, had befriended him when he was a boy, seeing something unusual in his easy, enthusiastic manner. Barkin had paid to send Matani’s father away for an education. Three times, Matani’s father had gone to Nairobi to attend schools, and three times he had returned with new knowledge. But his neighbors grew wary when he told them he was learning how to prolong water and ration it to a thirsty earth. They believed the earth should be worshipped, not manipulated. They grew even more suspicious when he returned carrying pills that he said could ease a fever or cut pain. Tiny tablets stronger than the chilled heat that could overcome a body? It made no sense. But what, after all, could you expect from a man who thought he could control water?

  On that day, however, Abayomi would not be numbered among the skeptics.

  In fact, Matani’s father didn’t have much with which to treat the toddler; Matani understood that now. Antibiotic cream, a few large bandages, some sedatives, and other tablets intended more for aching muscles than torn ones. But somehow, with his meager supply, Matani’s father had sterilized and wrapped Scar Boy’s shredded wounds and softened the pain. He’d worked until the bleeding nearly stopped and the child’s cries quieted. Then Abayomi had carried the boy on to the medicine man for the next stage of treatment. But he always credited Matani’s father with saving the life of his son.

  When Matani had returned home, his father hadn’t criticized, or pointed out that he’d had to save the boy’s life alone. He was brushing away the bloody dirt on the floor of their home, but he stopped to look full into his son’s face. “The boy is alive,” he said. “And I think perhaps he will stay so.”

  From that day until his death three years ago, Matani’s father had taken a special interest in Scar Boy, teaching him things that once he’d only taught Matani. It was an interest that none among their neighbors shared, that even Matani did not fully understand, and that, frankly, Scar Boy had done nothing Matani could see to earn—unless one counted nearly dying.

  Now Scar Boy sat before him, stubbornly silent. Matani tried to summon up the patience for which his own father had been famous. “Though it’s not up to me,” Matani said, “I’ll do my best to make it possible for you to check out books in the future, if that’s your worry.” He hesitated, struck by the sense that the bond between them had grown so weak that Scar Boy could no longer even hear his words. “You understand, don’t you? The library will stop coming if they don’t get their books back. And you of all people know how we benefit from contact with the world beyond ours.”

  “Contact,” said Scar Boy, and his voice sounded raw, as though he hadn’t spoken for days. “The world beyond.”

  “Yes,” Matani said pointedly. “For our survival. We must end our isolation. The bookmobile will help with that.”

  “I want only this hut, and what is within it, and what I allow in.”

  The words were many, for Scar Boy, and spoken in a rush, as though he feared he would be unable to be allowed to say them unless he said them fast.

  “Don’t leave your hut, then,” Matani said, finally allowing a measure of disgust to creep into his tone. “Only give me the books.”

  Scar Boy looked at him scornfully, as if he’d missed the point. “Your father used to come to me,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “He never took anything back.”

  “This is different. This is a library. They’ve lent us the books. And now you’ve put it all at risk.”

  Scar Boy’s face grew dark. “They look different,” he said. “They eat different, talk and think different.” Each time he said the word different, he pounded his stone into the ground, gouging the dirt, obliterating his drawing.

  “If my father were here—”

  “I’m not the same as them.”

  Matani inhaled deeply and tried to make his voice as gentle as his father’s had been on that day long ago. “My father would tell you to give back the books,” he said.

  Scar Boy’s grip tightened around his stone, and Matani noticed the long muscles of his arm. It surprised him to realize Scar Boy was a young man now. “No,” Scar Boy said, his voice fierce.

  “It’s not a choice. These aren’t our—”

  “I’m done,” Scar Boy said in a piercing voice.

  “They belong—”

  “Done.”

  “You’d better go,” Badru said.

  Matani didn’t understand Scar Boy. But he didn’t care about that. He needed the books. The longer it took, the more difficult the issue of the library’s future would become.

  And the harder it became to quiet his superstitions, notions that he should have outgrown, but that clung to him like his very flesh. It wasn’t only the library. Books, birds, babies. What happened with one seemed to be a portent of what would happen with another.

  Scar Boy was right, though, Matani thought as he rubbed the ache in his stomach. It was clear that Matani was done. At least for the moment, he could hope for nothing further from this life that sat before him, angrily digging in the dirt—this life that his father, for better or worse, had saved.

  Part Three

  You have to hand it to the little buggers. They nibbled at the ankles of the earliest cavemen. They even knocked back dinosaur blood. That elevates them above most other insects. Their lives really count for something. Right up until the moment they’re crushed.

  —Interview with the scientist Rich Hutchins

  Entomologists’ Quarterly, Summer 2000

  The American

  FI HAD NEVER ACCEPTED MR. ABASI’S CLAIM THAT MIDIDIMA and settlements like it could disappear with a stiff breeze—that the next time the Camel Bookmobile came, there might be no sign that life had ever huddled there. She’d considered this assertion nothing more than another attempt to talk her out of making the trip he hated. It seemed to her, in fact, that the houses of Mididima were rooted directly in the earth’s subsurface, and that during the coming generations the settlement could only spread.

  But this time, as she approached Mididima, it looked transient as it never had before. Perhaps that was because no one expected her. No heap of people gathered beneath the tall acacia; no buzz of anticipation vibrated in the air. Mididima looked, in that moment, like a desert plant gone too lo
ng unwatered, preparing to shrivel.

  Books, it occurred to her now, were enduring, even immortal. Some, like the two she was going to recover, had been part of the world’s consciousness for so long that they were no longer singularly identifiable. The maxims of Zen masters and the stories of Homer had been tossed into the soup of human consciousness, blending and emerging at lunchtime as one’s own thoughts, as if they were original. And they would become the thoughts of one’s children, and eventually one’s grandchildren. Mididima, on the other hand, seemed a flimsy fancy once briefly considered and then abandoned. The plants were frosted with sand, the rays of the sun themselves dusty with neglect.

  Mr. Abasi had declined to accompany her, of course—“I’ll come to fetch you instead,” he’d said. That had seemed for the best at the time, but she wished for him now. With his loud, abrupt voice, he’d get someone’s attention. She thought of calling “Anybody home?” or “Yoo-hoo.” Neither seemed like proper etiquette for the circumstances. The two men who had traveled with her on a second camel scrutinized her curiously, waiting to see what she would do.

  Two young boys came out of one of the huts and stared. “Jambo,” she said, waving. They giggled and dashed away. She dismounted. One of the men sharing the other camel handed her the duffel bag, then climbed onto the camel she’d ridden. She took a few steps toward the nearest hut and turned back to see her traveling companions with their eyes fastened on her movements. She needed to say good-bye, to release them to make the return journey. Yet she felt uncertain and unable to send them away yet. She hovered clumsily at the edge of Mididima.

  The two boys emerged again, this time with four other children and Matani in tow, Kanika right behind. “How are you? How are you?” the children began calling in English, laughing and running to her.

  “How are you?” Fi answered, smiling. Then she caught sight of Matani’s face. He looked surprised, maybe even a little horrified. “Jambo,” she said to him, trying on a tone that held more confidence than she felt.

  “You have just come? You’ve come for Scar Boy’s books already?” he asked, glancing uneasily behind her. “Where is Mr. Abasi?”

  “You’ve found them?” How stupid she’d been not to consider the possibility that the whole visit was no longer necessary. But his face quickly told her they’d not yet been recovered, and she was flooded with relief—the irony of which was not lost on her. “I’ve come…” And here she wavered, wondering how to express why she’d come. To help Africa toward literacy? Too grandiose. To help some spit of a place find a couple of books? Too insignificant.

  Both her argument with Mr. Abasi and her decision to show up in Mididima with little more than six bottles of water, a toothbrush, and mosquito netting had been fueled by a confidence that had since fled.

  She took a deep breath, waiting for the end of that dangling sentence to occur to her. She felt the stares of the children, who were inching closer to her. This time, she’d come with no payload of books. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a pencil. “See?” she said in Swahili to the children, holding the pencil up between her thumb and her index finger. She reached out and took the hand of one of the little girls, and smoothed open the palm. “Now, watch.” She tapped the pencil once, gently, onto the girl’s palm, and then lifted it high and brought it down, tapping a second time. Improvising, she twirled around, holding the pencil above her head, waving it, winking at them, and calling “Woo!” She knew she looked a bit mad, but a sense of flair was critical. She blew on the pencil, demonstrating, urging the girl, without words, to do the same. The child did so, hesitatingly. Then Fi tapped the pencil for the third time on the girl’s palm, raised both hands, and lowered them to show that the pencil had vanished. “Where’s it gone?” she asked, sweeping her arms in front of her like a vaudeville player. Even without their understanding those words, the children’s eyes widened appreciatively.

  Fi gestured to the sky, then to the ground, and reached behind the ear of little Nadif, the boy who’d had numbers scrawled on his palm. “Voilà!” They had no idea what that word meant either, but the way she exclaimed it as she held out the pencil sounded impressive, she knew.

  Magic Tricks 101, learned the summer before she started high school, seldom used after that. This act wouldn’t hold the attention of most eight-year-olds in New York, but the audience in Mididima was easy. Little faces stared at her as the children soaked up every move. Behind them, by now, a few young women lingered, more skeptical but still curious.

  Matani watched silently, hesitant, with a half-smile, probably wondering if she’d come all this way just to do the trick with the pencil, maybe thinking it was another strange custom from her country. “Whispers of the flames,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s the literal translation for what we call magic.”

  “Whispers of the flames,” she repeated slowly, willing herself not to forget the phrase—the first of the five she had to learn. The children hovered nearby. One took her hand and squeezed. She leaned conspiratorially toward Matani. “That wasn’t real magic,” she said in a stage whisper. “But I am good at finding missing books. So I thought…Well, that’s why I’m here.”

  He looked her full in the face as if to see whether she was joking. Then he broke into a grin that stretched so wide she felt a moment of pure gratitude, and he took her bag from her hand.

  “It’s all right?” she asked.

  He glanced at the two men who had accompanied her. “When should they return for you?”

  “They can’t until Friday. Four days. Is it too long?”

  Matani spread his arms. “It’s a gift for our tribe, Miss Sweeney,” he said.

  Fi wanted to kiss him; he’d made so easy what could have been agonizingly awkward. “Thank you,” she said, reaching forward to brush his fingers.

  He spoke quickly to the two men on the camels, more authoritative than he usually was around Mr. Abasi. They smiled with visible relief, turned their beasts, and were gone.

  By now a larger audience had gathered, still mainly children. “You will stay with Kanika and her grandmother,” Matani said. “That’s fine?”

  Kanika gave that full smile of hers, the one that took over her face.

  “Thank you,” Fi said.

  “They’ll get you something to drink and you can rest,” Matani said.

  “But I’m not tired. I’ll put my things down, and go see the young man.”

  Matani’s grin shrank slightly. “You have four days,” he said. “We’ll talk first. And then, perhaps, go together? Now I’m teaching, and—”

  “Of course,” Fi said. “I don’t mean to rush you. Maybe I can watch you teach?”

  Matani gave a small shrug as he ran his fingers over one eyebrow, smoothing it. His shyness was appealing.

  “The books,” she said, sweeping her arm in an arc. “I’d like to watch how you use them.”

  “Of course, then,” Matani said.

  “Come, Miss Sweeney,” Kanika said. “Let’s put your bag away.”

  Kanika took her by the hand. Despite the exoticness of Mididima and the age difference between Kanika and Fi, the gesture made Fi think of her own elementary school in the 1970s, with its promise of untainted friendship: soothing secrets and notes passed in class and simple rhyming poems and all the pure earnestness of those years.

  “Fi. Call me Fi,” she said.

  As if by real magic, Mididima had become inhabited again. Laughing children were fiddling with one another’s ears as if they hoped to find other pencils there. Men’s voices poured from one of the huts, three goats rambled by, women were bent over work in the nearby fields, and Fi felt a breeze that carried the scent of bread baking.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” Kanika said.

  “Me too.” As she said it, Fi felt a rush of renewed confidence in her decision. It wasn’t silly; it was right to be in Mididima. She’d find the books; she’d ensure that the bookmobile would keep calling on Mididima for
years to come. And this visit—it was more than a hope; it was an intuition now, or maybe a vow—would be the pinnacle of her trip.

  The Teacher’s Wife

  JWAHIR BENT AT THE WAIST, LEANING OVER THE HOSES that ran from the buckets and lay on the ground in twelve straight rows, the buckets Matani’s father had brought them years ago. It was her job to inspect each one for signs of wear, discoloration in the rubber, hints of holes that might leak even a single drop of water somewhere a plant was not. An easy job, normally. Today concentration eluded her.

  All around, cousins and aunts and neighbors were hoeing, or kneeling to tend young plants, or uprooting unwelcome weeds that sought to steal the moisture. But the presence of the other women generally did not distract her—they always worked together on the crops, and quickly, as a rule, so they could move on to other chores.

  Usually, though, the laboring women were silent. Even she and Leta saved their conversation for later. Sometimes a chant would emerge, of course—a song about a child, or a marriage, or the work itself. It was brief and passing, like a shared gulp of water to quench a sharp thirst.

  Today there was no chanting, and still the voices of the women worked far harder than their hands, with less pleasant results. An unnatural commotion grew from them like a desert plant obscene with bloom after an out-of-season shower.

  “Why has she come, this colorless woman?” Chicha, one of the young mothers, asked Jwahir, her voice sharp.

  These days, Jwahir didn’t like Chicha, who seemed to feel superior ever since she’d given birth to twin boys. In any case, Jwahir shouldn’t have to face this interrogation. The white woman had nothing to do with her. Only because she was married to Matani did Chicha and the others treat her as if she were somehow responsible for the visitor, as well as the bookmobile.