The Camel Bookmobile Page 17

  Then he grew silent, and she waited a long time; she waited until she was afraid he had stopped on this topic for good. “Did you ever find out…” She let her words trail off.

  “It was my mother’s, but more than that, he never told me. I wanted more; I wanted a memory of my mother, since I had none of my own. But my father said memories made it harder.”

  “Harder,” she said, “but sweeter at the same time.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” She was thinking of her own mother and her father. Of the memories she had and the memories that, like Matani, she had been denied. She put her hand on the trunk of the monkey tree, which felt surprisingly cool despite the heat. “After today, I think I should carve ‘I was here.’” He looked puzzled. “It’s what people do sometimes. Graffiti, it’s called. They make their mark on a special place, and it’s the bridge that connects them to everyone else who comes by later.”

  “It’s a nice custom.”

  She laughed. “They don’t always think so in my country. There are laws against it.”

  He smoothed the tree trunk with his hand. “Come,” he said finally. “I’m going to show you a plant that repels mbu. Juice-drainers. What you call mosquitoes. Kanika told me you brought a net.”

  He led her just beyond the huts to a group of small, grayish plants that grew close to the ground. The leaves were the size of thumbs, and nearly as fat. He pinched off half a dozen. “Put out your arm,” he said, so she did, and he broke the leaves, one at a time, to release the liquid within, and stroked in long sweeps, his dark fingers moving from her shoulders to her wrists and back up again. She watched him while he worked, his concentrated face, the rhythm of his hands. The moisture from the leaves cooled her skin, made it tingle. He put some on her shoulders, and then her neck, moving her hair to one side.

  “I smell like onion,” she said, laughing.

  “But now you won’t need the net.”

  “I’ve learned something new.”

  “I’ve thought before,” he said, smiling, “that the teaching must go both ways.”

  They walked to Scar Boy’s hut, falling silent, a little awkwardly—the way people can, Fi thought, after they’ve shared some unexpected intimacy and aren’t sure how it’s changed them. But of course, this intimacy had changed nothing. Within an hour, Fi would have the books. Tomorrow morning she would watch Matani teach again, and maybe even help—she’d been imagining taking the kids through a rendition of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” Then the next day, she would leave.

  Matani called out as they reached Scar Boy’s hut. The man who greeted them at the door was surprisingly muscular; his arms were those of a laborer, and Fi realized she’d become accustomed to the typical lean Mididima body type.

  “Taban’s father, Abayomi,” Matani told her. And then she heard Matani pronounce her own name.

  As Matani spoke, Abayomi kept shifting, looking at his feet, then his hands, then up into Matani’s face, then away again. First thing, Fi decided, she would tell him not to worry, that it was no one’s fault, these things happened. That in America, patrons sometimes built up enormous fines before the library finally revoked their cards, only here the supply of books was so meager, the possibility of collecting fines so unlikely, that they’d decided on a stricter policy—too strict, in truth.

  But when Matani paused in his speech for a moment, Abayomi blurted out a few words in a rush. Matani shook his head and gestured toward her. Abayomi spoke again and Fi, without knowing the meaning, could hear the insistence.

  “He wants to speak with me alone a moment,” Matani said. “I’m sorry. Our people are not accustomed to strangers. I’ll be back quickly.”

  “Of course.” Fi watched the two men walk away. Taban’s older brother, the one who’d brought the news of the missing books on library day, stood just outside the door. She smiled, but got no response.

  “Oh. Well,” she said. She looked up at the darkening sky and then back to find the older brother still staring.

  Fi wished she had Kanika to help her because at that moment, her mind seemed drained of Swahili words, and in the local dialect she knew so little. She knew how to say “How are you?” so she said it, threw it into the conversation a little late, but the brother didn’t respond. She wished she could find a way for them to talk about the weather at least, or how quickly night fell once it made up its mind. Or the subtle scent of maize cooking around them. Or even the mosquitoes.

  She truly felt like a mzungu now; that meant foreigner in Swahili, and she’d always liked the reckless sound of the word. I might as well recite poetry, she thought, and then she tried saying it aloud, directly to the older, phlegmatic brother, “I might as well recite poetry.” His face remained still, so she repeated it, experimenting, spreading her arms and stressing the final word in the sentence. He watched without expression.

  She lowered her voice and opened one hand. “I bring you, with reverent hands, the books of my numberless dreams.” She cleared her throat and decided to pretend she was on a podium in a recital hall, reading Yeats’s A Poet to His Beloved to an audience that was not impassive like this older brother, but instead hushed by the intensity of the lines. She widened her stance and raised her voice.

  “White woman that passion has worn,” she recited, “as the tide wears the dove-grey sands.” For a moment, she felt as if she were floating above, looking down at the scene: a woman in the African bush theatrically delivering poetry to an uncomprehending audience of one, and she began to giggle. But if Taban’s brother considered her behavior the slightest bit curious, he gave no sign. His look remained deadpan. She swallowed her laughter and went on. “White woman with numberless dreams,” she recited, “I bring you my passionate rhyme.”

  She glanced behind her and felt relieved to see Matani returning—no more relieved, probably, than this young man watching this stranger-woman wave and exclaim and laugh. Thank God for Matani. He would chuckle once she explained.

  But as he drew nearer, his expression quashed her gaiety for the second time that day. He looked deflated, shoulders sagging, eyes unfocused. Was this more about the drought? Or fear about the missing books? Immediately she thought, Don’t let it be the books that have caused this concern. That would be too much.

  Abayomi was not yet in sight. “Matani, what is it?” she asked.

  “I must get you home.” He sounded vague, ill, and he gestured with one hand for her to follow.

  She glanced back at Taban’s still indifferent older brother. “What’s happened?”

  Matani took about a dozen steps before he rushed away from the homes, pushing aside the thornbush fence the men stretched around Mididima each night. She followed to find him several feet away from the fence, bent over, throwing up.

  “Matani.” She put a hand on his forehead to support him, the way her mother used to do for them when they were sick—the one time all her brusqueness disappeared. His forehead felt clammy.

  He didn’t seem aware of her touch at first. He convulsed again. After a few minutes, he turned toward her slightly. He wore a look of surprise coupled with embarrassment. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “You should have ice chips.” She put an arm around his shoulders. “It’s the best when you’ve vomited. Of course, you can’t have that here. Have they ever had ice, the people here?” She was babbling, she knew.

  He nodded, then shook his head. “Sorry,” he said again.

  “Everyone gets sick,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll help you home, where your wife can take care of you. Tomorrow is soon enough to deal with the books.”

  He turned away from her, gagging. His chest was still heaving when he spoke. “Not home,” he said.

  “What?” she said, certain she’d misunderstood.

  He sank to the ground, knees to his chest, and she squatted next to him. “What?” she repeated.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. I’ll help you.”

  He lo
oked away, and she waited. “Abayomi,” he said after a moment, “says my wife, my wife—”

  She caught a glimpse of something desperate in his face. “Matani, if you’ve had some fight, it doesn’t matter now. When you’re sick, you need—”

  “Doesn’t want me,” Matani interrupted.

  “—to get home, get rest, talk about it later—”

  “Abayomi told me.”

  She didn’t understand. “Is this about the books?”

  “While the bookmobile was here, Abayomi and my wife…”

  She shook her head, still confused, and then it dawned on her. “You mean—?” She felt stupid. And naive. From the outside, life in Mididima had seemed so clean and uncomplicated.

  She touched his shoulder. “What did he say, exactly?”

  He rubbed his eyes, then looked down. “It’s a blur. I can’t remember.”

  “Maybe you misunderstood. You were only gone five minutes. Too short for anything important.”

  “He said he was sorry,” Matani began slowly, “and that he owed my father so much but that he’d always loved Jwahir and they’d been together during the bookmobile visits and she wanted to become mother to his two…” He broke off, looking ill again.

  She hugged him awkwardly, patting him. “It doesn’t sound right,” she said helplessly. “Maybe it’s just a thing…temporary.” God, she sounded lame. But what should she say? She didn’t have magic tricks for this.

  Matani stood and walked unsteadily a little farther away from the thornbush fence, and she followed. She took his arm at the elbow to support him. She didn’t know if he would shake her off, but instead he leaned into her, seemingly unaware.

  “I knew it,” he said, and though he spoke in English, it was as if he spoke to himself. “Somewhere far inside, I knew it. That’s why he didn’t have to say much.”

  Fi felt a surge of anger. “Come. Stay at Kanika’s,” she said, though she knew he couldn’t stay in that hut with three women.

  He shook his head. He drew himself up. She could see what effort it took. “Let me walk you back,” he said.

  She took his hand at they walked. His palm was callused. His fingers were surprisingly long. She wondered what he would do now, tonight, but didn’t want to ask. Once they’d reached the edge of gathered huts, she pulled him to a stop, struck by a sudden intuition. “Don’t leave Mididima,” she said.

  Of course he wouldn’t leave, she thought as soon as she said it. How could he leave, by foot? And where would he go?

  But he didn’t dismiss her comment. He stood, hands at his sides. He didn’t answer at all.

  “Don’t leave,” she repeated. And she reached up to kiss his cheek, inhaling the scent of him. It was a chaste peck but still totally improper, as she intended—as if her indiscretion could prevent him from deserting his village.

  From deserting her.

  The confidence she’d been feeling in Mididima, she realized, stemmed from Matani. He’d made it easy. So now she was going to be presumptuous. She was going to make a plea. “Go where you need to tonight,” she said. “But be here tomorrow.”

  Part Five

  Drought smites mosquito populations—but only for a season. Then, studies show, they return in great force. They are, in fact, unstoppable. Consider that they have two hundred offspring at once, and that they carry diseases that kill someone every twenty seconds. No wonder Aristotle composed a treatise about them, the Greeks wrote them into funereal songs, and the Egyptians cursed them in hieroglyphics.

  —Professor Petri Jaaskela, lecture on mosquitoes

  University of Helsinki, Finland,

  Department of Forest Entomology

  The Teacher’s Wife

  JWAHIR’S SHOULDERS BEGAN TO ROLL, HER FEET TO SLIDE. SHE closed her eyes, extended her arms, tossed back her head, and shook. She twisted and shimmied and flexed her fingers. Her necklaces pounded on her chest. Her earrings leaped at either side of her face as she chanted.

  When I was born, I was warned—I will sing all night,

  By my mother and my father—I will sing all night,

  How the sun beats down—I will sing all night,

  I’ll survive the day—but I will sing all night,

  In the morning I will go home.

  Go home…

  She echoed the men who, not forty broad strides away, were singing these same words within the kilinge. She loved the beat of the nighttime drumming, its thrust of life and heat and lust and promise.

  At the same time, it infuriated her. It had become the sound of exclusion. She could dance and chant within her home, as she was doing now, or in Leta’s home, or with one of the other women. But only there. Most evenings, women of the age to be mothers—even if they hadn’t yet had their first child—were barred from the kilinge. Men, grandmothers, and children were allowed.

  “Why?” she’d asked her father years ago, when she—still a girl—first become aware of the rule that would later apply to her. “Why shouldn’t I be allowed to go?”

  “Don’t worry,” he’d said, laughing. “It won’t interest you then. The one who turns soil to food and dung to shelter needs sleep at night, not nectar. You’ll see.”

  But it wasn’t true. She needed nectar. And she still didn’t understand why she and her sisters and cousins should be required to make the harmonies of the daytime—clattering dishes and slashing brush and stacking wood—and forbidden the more intoxicating music of the night.

  She remembered the first time her father took her to the kilinge. She’d been five, perhaps six. She’d stood by her father’s side, balancing on one foot, then the other, mesmerized by the singers’ faces. They were people she knew, people she saw all day long, but at night, within the sacred enclosure, they’d turned profound. The men, who often seemed so stony-faced, became at once wise ancients penetrating the dusk and young hunters proudly carting home their first kills.

  She quickly forgot, however, the shine in their eyes, the proud swelling of their chests. She forgot their presence entirely as she lost herself to the rhythm that wrapped around her like the dark. She felt the animal heartbeats, knew their animal sorrows. She felt herself joined even with creatures she’d never seen: colorful birds that flew above swollen rain clouds and big-eyed mice that drank from rivers below the earth’s surface.

  As she stood there, transformed, she began to dance. But she wasn’t aware that she was dancing. No one had ever shown her how to dance; she didn’t even know the word. Had she tried to express it, she would have said that she became the music. Her feet, her waist, her legs, her head were all in motion. She would have twirled directly into the middle of the sacred hut, right next to the fire, if her father hadn’t grabbed her arm.

  “You are part of the circle,” he’d said. “Not its center.”

  “But it’s where I belong.” Her feet were still stomping, still pulling her inward.

  “Jwahir.”

  His voice allowed no room for argument. So she obeyed him then; she stuck to the edges, because she didn’t want to lose the right to come again. What happened within the kilinge was nothing less than the truest part of a life; she realized that right away. It gave her a chance to convey what she normally held close. The drums, the chants, the flying bodies within the enclosure all combined to create a coupling of those now alive with those who’d come before. And when she joined in, she became larger than herself. She became part of that which would live forever.

  She began to dream, that very evening, of being an old woman, old enough to lead the others in singing and swaying. Old enough so that all her brothers and sisters could hear her chanting and say, “Oh, yes,” and, through her words and the beat of the drum, better understand the essence of their own lives.

  If she were Matani, she would spend every night within the kilinge. The days, then, would leap forward like a jaguar instead of a crawling like a tortoise. But Matani was made of different cloth. Though his walk had a swing and a rhythm that struck her as a pr
elude to dance, he didn’t hear the music calling his name. He always slipped away from the circle to return to her. In the first months of their marriage, his devotion had filled her with pride. She’d wedded an exceptional Mididima man. And then, in a reversal—she’d experienced so many reversals with Matani—she became embarrassed by the ways in which he differed from his neighbors.

  Jwahir thought of all this as, alone in their home, she danced. The evening stretched on and Matani didn’t return, and in this way she knew that Abayomi had spoken to him. She tried, still dancing, to imagine the conversation, what phrases Abayomi must have used, how Matani might have answered. She swung and jiggled and quaked until her legs trembled and her chest ached and sweat trickled down between her breasts. She heard the drumbeat growing faster, more insistent, and the sound of trilling emerge from the kilinge and she imagined a struggle, maybe even a murder. But that vision was fleeting. She knew Matani was too civilized to kill Abayomi for loving his wife. Matani was too much a part of the Distant City. This was, in fact, Jwahir’s main complaint. “My main complaint,” she chanted aloud as her hair and feet flew in time with the beat. Someday, she decided, she would make a song about Matani and Abayomi. Later, after it all was settled.

  Jwahir danced until she was so tired that the pull of the earth taunted her, until she collapsed to her mat, until she could pull a skin over her body and sleep with no thought of the future. She slept hard and dreamless.

  A noise outside the door awoke her. She pushed herself up, thinking perhaps it was Abayomi, whom she’d half expected all night; or Matani, who surely wouldn’t simply give up. For a second, she didn’t know which man she would rather it be.

  “Jwa-jwa,” a woman’s voice called. “You ready?”

  It was Leta, who nearly always came for Jwahir in the morning. But could it really be morning already?

  Leta peeked her head around the door, her sleeping baby daughter strapped to her chest. “Matani’s already busy?” she said. “You are lucky, my friend. None of the other men has risen yet. They were late last night at the kilinge.”