Bakhita

by Veronique Olmi

  * * *

  —

  And the selling goes on, countless hours in the unrelenting heat, felled by exhaustion. The air is fraught with dread, El Obeid’s true name is dread. The burden of human suffering weighs down on the town, the place is cursed. The selling goes on, all day long, with slaves bought, slaves sold off cheap, slaves separated and pleading, pointlessly wailing. It never made any difference, Bakhita would say later. The screaming and weeping never made any difference. It was like a song no one even noticed, “the song of the separated.” The slaves were never free of their self-disgust. The longing to have a different body, different skin, a different life, and a modicum of hope. But hope in what?

  * * *

  —

  Evening is falling over El Obeid’s market, the white bird is now just a dot in a deadened sky, Bakhita is losing it, if she wants to survive she must find it, return to that in-between world, but her concentration is wearing thin, she is gagging with thirst, sweat streams down her chest and stomach, the buyers’ voices loom close, like their fingers, the bidding goes up, piastres change hands, there is shouting and laughter too, people call out to each other and taunt each other, brag and flatter, Bakhita keeps hearing the word djamila, she’s beautiful, but what point there might be in a little girl’s beauty, other than her own parents’ pride, Bakhita cannot think. And fear cranks up along with exhaustion, they all stand motionless and servile, as if facing cocked rifles.

  * * *

  —

  Bakhita suddenly hears Binah’s laugh. There is demented joy, almost panic in this laugh. She does not understand straightaway. Their chains are being removed. A man has just bought them. With no fuss or show, he bought them. He is a civilian, Arab, tall and broad, almost square, his eyes gleam as he studies the two of them, as if he has just made an amusing discovery. She feels Binah’s surreptitious hand in hers, hears her idiotic nervous laugh. She keeps saying, “Together! We’re together!” It is the end of the day. Those who have not been sold head back to the camp with the guards. Bakhita and Binah do not go with them.

  * * *

  —

  Bakhita does not immediately grasp what this means. What will they do for this man? Why did he buy both of them? Where’s he taking them? There are no answers, this is an unknown situation, and she convinces herself that Binah is right: They are together and must think of nothing else. She now surreptitiously puts a hand on her friend’s back. Binah’s little back arches in surprise, and she smiles. And then she sobs, briefly, loudly. Bakhita looks at her, and she loves her. She knows this is a danger. But she truly loves her. She looks at the sky and thanks the bird, who is now gliding so high, swallowed by the darkness of evening.

  Held by a guard, they come out of the market, leave the souks behind. How long is it since they have walked without being in a caravan? Space feels different, they almost seem to hover in its lack of density. A whole other life is starting, and Bakhita wonders whether her sister is waiting for her in this other life. Trembles with this newfound hope.

  * * *

  —

  They walk along a small beaten-earth path lined with puny eucalyptus and palm trees swaying in the evening wind. Spot the high red walls of a house, with unglazed windows from which the first candlelight glows. See the deserted terraces, and as they come closer the house looks like a mountain to them, towering and mysterious. They grasp that this is where they are heading. Not a hut. Not a sheepfold. This house in front of them. What will they be doing in all its enormity?

  * * *

  —

  The garden smells of stables, henhouses, and the clove fragrance of carnations. A skeletal cat runs over the roof of a building at the far end of the garden. There are two small houses there, at the end of the garden. It’s almost a village, then? Men and women sidle by, black in the evening light, like deep shadows. Will they be living with these people?

  * * *

  —

  At the front door a black man rushes to greet the man who bought them, bows deeply, Ia sidi, my master, his voice is hideous, high-pitched and childlike, he opens the front door wide, and following their new master, the girls enter. Enter this towering mountain.

  * * *

  —

  They follow him to the second floor, the preserve of the womenfolk. When their bare feet step onto that cool, flat, level floor, they take each other’s hand. It is difficult walking on this featureless surface, and when they have to climb the stairs, their heads spin, it is like walking upstream through a torrent, they think they will fall, and look up to avoid seeing their own reflections in the floor. On the upstairs landing a veiled woman hurries toward the master, kisses his hands, and disappears. He keeps walking, without a look, without a word, on he walks, he is master here, owner of this house. Bakhita and Binah follow him on and on through endless corridors. Bakhita thinks of snakes. “The snake house.” This is how she will always remember it, will always be afraid of it. They walk along corridors strewn with braided mats, past rooms with open doorways that have silk slippers left beside them. Here and there women stand waiting outside rooms, others walk past carrying trays, candelabras, those who are bare-breasted hastily snatch up their skirts before the master and cover their faces as he passes. Those who are veiled lower their eyes. The terrified world opens up before the master. Bakhita and Binah see huge unfamiliar objects in the half-light—divans, armchairs, stools, tapestries, mirrors—and Binah cries out when she has to walk past a desert fox baring its teeth. Its eyes are red, its jaws open wide, with teeth as sharp as small daggers. She will never pass this stuffed fox without worrying that it will come to life and tear her to pieces. The day she stops being afraid of him, he will wake, as offended spirits do.

  * * *

  —

  And then they go into a bedroom, the room of the master’s daughters, Sorahia and Radia. Scarcely older than themselves. The sisters lie on an ottoman, languidly eating fruit, the room has large windows with no glazing or shutters, one looks out over the hill, the other over the marketplace where the last camel calls and horse whinnies can be heard. It is already a different world, that world below, that faraway hub with all its trafficking, here the candlelight is gentle, it flickers, and mosquitoes hover around it, there is a smell of lemons, slightly acidic, familiar. Through the other window come the last rosy beams of the sun, Bakhita thinks briefly of all those who are still chained while she, she is saved, but from what she cannot say.

  * * *

  —

  Seeing their father, Sorahia and Radia have gotten to their feet in a ripple of giggles and clinking bracelets, they come up to him and he seems to relax at last, his voice gentle, his voice happy.

  “Look what I brought you back from the market!” he says pointing to Bakhita and Binah.

  It always strikes a little blow to the heart. An assault that surprises every time. This way of talking about them, the tone that speaks louder than words, the disdain and relish, as if they were deaf. Completely brainless. Will they say djamila again, the word that always goes hand in hand with money?

  “Shukran, Baba!”

  Bakhita understands this word, she knows it and thinks it beautiful. Baba. A word you want to say. Over and over. A word so suited to evening. She looks up slightly, and through the window she sees the dark mountainside, a pale quarter moon has alighted just above it. A very peaceful sight, a contrast to the excitement in the room. The two girls are talking loudly, jumping up and down, clapping their hands.

  “They’re black! They’re so black!”

  They make Bakhita and Binah walk, turn around, they run a finger over their skin, scratch it, touch their frizzy hair, give little shrieks of terror, they want to have them right away. Their father curbs their impatience.

  “They need preparing. They’ve come straight from the market.”

  Bakhita will never forget that it is just as the sisters start their cajoling—“Baba, can�
��t we play for a bit! Babaaaa…please…”—it is at this moment that he comes in. He comes in and everything freezes, the air stops circulating, as if the windows have been blocked up. When the master sees his son, Samir, he stops laughing. His eyes darken and a scornful smirk twists his lips. Samir is fourteen. He is no longer allowed to be in the women’s quarters, but he sometimes sleeps in his sisters’ bed, or his mother’s, his girl cousins’. He is almost a man. Soon he will leave the harem and go downstairs to the mandara. His eyes are round, too big for him, bulging from his eyelids, his face is smattered with brown blotches and chicken-pox scars, a battlefield. In all the years he never vanished from Bakhita’s memories, nor did the smell of him, which could still terrify her, even in her old age, even in a different place, on another continent. A smell as if a dead animal and a bitter fruit had been burned together. The smell comes from his skin but seems to emanate from inside his stomach, like something stale and forgotten. They all stop talking, and this silence is telling. Sorahia is the eldest. She gives her father a meaningful look. Bakhita and Binah instinctively back away and keep their heads down. Samir comes over, circles them without a word, with an exasperated sigh. It is like being up for sale again. The terror of being appraised. Sorahia says surely her brother has a gift too.

  “Doesn’t he, Baba, Samir has a gift?”

  Bakhita cannot understand such boldness. That is not how you address your father. You don’t tell him what to do. She thinks a fight will erupt and is frightened. Is ashamed to be half naked, covered in sweat and dust from the market, ashamed that this family is airing its rivalries in front of two strangers. The silence is brutal. In a flash Sorahia grabs hold of her arm and shoves her toward Samir, she knocks against his flabby stomach, his cloying smell.

  “This one’s the prettiest,” she says.

  And she makes Bakhita twirl around on the spot, spouting long, hurried sentences that Bakhita does not fully understand. Bakhita circles like a mosquito in candlelight, sees the night closing in around the windows, all that darkness dancing about her, and this headache keeps on at her, making her want to throw up, and when Sorahia stops making her twirl, she is as dizzy as if she had danced for hours, danced a dance that never releases you, summons nothing and no one, the forced dance performed for masters. The smell of dead flesh and bitter fruit seeps from Samir’s forehead. Bakhita sees a trickle of sweat on that damaged face and looks away again. Sorahia will train her. This much she understands. Without really knowing what it means. Then she will give her to Samir, for his nights, before he is married. This too she understands. And what this means, she knows.

  This is how life in service began. And this was the first master. He was an Arab chief, a wealthy man who liked to buy and barter, knew everyone and every trick of the trade, had for many years had dealings with the Egyptian government in the days when slave raids helped him pay his duties and taxes, and now traded with corrupt governors, the very men involved in stopping the slave trade. He had first grown rich on ivory trading, proud to have trained boys stolen from their villages who went on to be the most barbaric of poachers. He never took part in any carnage, he had underlings for that, impassioned men who ordered his slaves to seize ivory, but also children, livestock, foodstuffs, anything they could steal they stole, backed up by rifles. The master knew the price of a billiard ball, a dagger handle, a necklace. Was acquainted with large-scale murder. He could convert a hut, a hamlet, a village, or a whole district into pounds of ivory, and would do this sometimes when his guests asked him to, but with details, all the details, time enough to establish the splendor and adventure of it.

  * * *

  —

  Bakhita and Binah lived in the slave-women’s building at the end of the garden. Behind it was a tiny building in which married slaves lived. Bakhita never forgot the couple whose third son she watched come into the world, the child of Idris the slave and Mina the slave woman. In keeping with Islamic law, the master had authorized this marriage, and the children belonged to him. Mina was an ugly woman and worked in the kitchens. Idris’s choice of her as a wife was the subject of ribbing, and he often muttered that he would soon have another. But Idris never did have a second wife, and what bound them together remained a mystery and a source of amusement. Bakhita watched them live their lives as if they were out for a stroll in a place where life was worthy of humans, even if there was the constant fear that the master would come someday for one of their children and they would never see him again. They would sometimes be alone together in the evenings, would eat together, feed their boys, and Mina must have sung lullabies to send her children to sleep. This life existed. And Bakhita remembered knowing a life like this. The third building, next to the women’s quarters, was for the slave men, and Bakhita never set foot near it. She sometimes heard fights, violent arguments, there would be altercations, scores to settle on several consecutive evenings and then nothing for weeks. The fights often took place during Ramadan, which was so hard. Bakhita remembers hearing a man’s cry, once or twice every night, he cried out, perhaps in his sleep, a cry of despair coming from far away, calling to her. No one replied to him or reprimanded him. He cried out and then came the stillness of the night once more.

  * * *

  —

  When they enter the slave quarters on the first evening, into its gloom and its damp smell of filth, boiled vegetables, and tobacco, Bakhita immediately looks for Kishmet. Penetrating this cavernous silence filled with women is like swimming in the depths of a river. A secret tight-lipped world, populated by different species. Even before they see the two girls, the other women all know that the master has brought them home from the market for his daughters. They have few illusions but always the same persistent hope, curious to see the newcomers. These girls might be their sisters, daughters, or granddaughters. And if they are not, they may have known them, may have heard talk of them. The women come up to the newcomers, touch them, try to recognize them, understand their dialect, decipher markings on their skin, they ask where they are from, which villages they have traveled through, which masters they have served, in which zarebas, and have they seen Awut, with the eagle marks on her cheeks, or Amel, a tiny little girl with her sister who sings like a trilling skylark, or Kuol, the baby from the Zande region, who must have been taken with his mother, who was very young; and old Aneh, from Maba, a wise man with long arms and gnarled hands, have they seen him? Words in different dialects, words in Arabic, unfamiliar names, the women’s eagerness, enough to make nonsense of it all, make them confuse everything. Perhaps they have seen Awut, Amel, the babies, and the old man, but they do not remember and, even though they have never fully understood these questions, they have heard them all before while they walked with caravans, and in the camp at Taweisha, and in every village through which they walked, these are not questions, they are a litany of hope and despair, of lives stolen, lives flown away, children who have no trace of childhood left, a collapse of any chronology or normality, so how can anyone recognize anyone else, given that they are all lost the moment they belong to masters? Bakhita has no answers for the women, but she keeps saying her sister’s name and tries, in a dialect the women do not understand, to say that her sister is sixteen, she is from Olgossa in Darfur, she is a Daju and her name is, or at least was, Kishmet. The women shrug and drift away. This girl has traveled a great distance and has nothing but her own ignorance to offer. Bakhita remembers the mother and her baby boy crushed against the rocks. Was his name Kuol? Where was he from? She will never tell this story to anyone. And that angry young man who had no anger left, she will never let any woman believe he may have been her son.

  * * *

  —

  Binah is so frightened that she has retreated to a corner of the room and sits with her head down. She wants to see no one and desperately wants no one to touch her in the hopes of finding a beloved child. Bakhita joins her, Binah rests her head on her lap, and Bakhita gently strokes her hair and allows he
r own thoughts to wander. She believes Kishmet is here in this town. Knows it, feels it right down to the depths of her stomach, there are no questions to ask, no doubts at all, it is self-evident. Her older sister’s presence gives meaning to her being here, in the first master’s house. That whole journey was to bring her closer to Kishmet. Nothing was pointless or haphazard. She walked well, obeyed well, and has come to the right place. She will find her sister and return to Olgossa with her. Binah has fallen asleep against her, she lifts her gently and lies her down on a mat that one of the women has brought them. She settles on her own mat, closes her eyes, and sings “When children were born to the lioness” deep inside herself, in the words and rhythms of her mother tongue, so as not to forget them and to keep herself as far removed as possible from what she has seen this evening, and what she has understood, Samir, his furious face, Samir against whom she was shoved by Sorahia. Djamila. Her beauty, the curse of it.

  Bakhita stayed in service to her young mistresses for three years. After physical violence, the endless walking, imprisonment, thirst, and hunger, she would almost give thanks for living in a harem. It was a closed world, peopled with mistresses and slave women, all living together and all captive. No mistress could be seen by a man, no mistress could go out alone and never after sundown. The wives accepted polygamy, accepted the concubines, the other children, and the umm walad, slave women married to and impregnated by their husbands and therefore mothers to his children, granting them half-free, half-slave status. Life was a carnival of deceptive masks and false happiness, a party that could so quickly fall apart.