* * *
—
Bakhita did her best. She wanted to be kept. To be kept because they were pleased with her. Because they liked having her. But she never mistook this for love. She knew what love was, had experienced it from her parents, it was a form of gratitude, a form of sharing, a force. The mistresses’ love for her was a whim. She lived in a state of apprehension and submission. The plan to find and escape with Kishmet was an antidote to despair, a secret goal. Something deep inside her that made her unique.
* * *
—
It was Zenab who prepared Bakhita and Binah for the young mistresses every morning. She tended to their hair, perfumed them, and dressed them. Zenab had been in the master’s service for forty years before being freed. She still thought of the master as her boss and had suggested that she prepare the two girls. She never mixed with free families, who were higher ranking than she was, she never left the house, spoke to no one, and spent all day in a corner of the garden, sucking on a long pipe, her tiny eyes half closed. She smelled of cold tobacco, the mint that she chewed between smoking sessions, and cat pee. When she put pearls in the little slave girls’ hair, copper bracelets on their wrists and ankles, her every movement released a dark hostile smell. Her face was expressionless. Her gestures abrupt. Bakhita and Binah never heard her speak. She was as wrinkled as Bakhita’s grandmother, and Bakhita would have liked her to tell the story of her wrinkles, as her grandmother used to, with a significant event for every one of them, a birth, a bereavement, a fight, her grandmother knew her whole family’s history, the stories of “those we see now, ancestors in the past, and those yet to come into the world,” as she used to say. Bakhita’s past was fading now, and the future belonged to other people. Every day was a day of suffering and toil. She had to please the young mistresses. Do everything they wanted. Everything their imaginations contrived. Their orders and counterorders, their impulses and fantasies. Living to obey and please. And getting up every morning with only one aim: to survive the day.
* * *
—
When Bakhita comes to live alongside the young mistresses, in this large room with its deep divans, its countless carpets and cushions, its silk chilla mattresses on the floor, its gilded side tables and trays in earthenware and silver, the room in which Sorahia and Radia sleep, eat, play, entertain their friends, when she starts living in the harem, she thinks her new name suits her well. Bakhita the lucky one. Bakhita who no longer walks over rocks. Is no longer shut away with ewes. No longer sleeps in trees. And, as Binah keeps saying with such astonishment, is no longer truly hungry or thirsty. She tries to be “gentle and good,” as her mother taught her, gentle and good, thanks to this, this distinguishing trait, she stands out and is alive in the first place. She wants to put joy into everything she does to show her young mistresses that she is happy to do it, to obey them, and that they are right to keep her. Most of the time they lie on mattresses, and she fans them. She thinks they invented this. Thinks they came up with the idea of this game: giving her the big fan to waft slowly over them. She thinks it a good idea, because it is very hot and she sweats a great deal, but she is never thirsty now, or not for long, and you couldn’t really call it thirst, just a slight discomfort. She fans them and does her best not to move, not to shake, and not to breathe too loudly. “Don’t puff like an elephant!” they say, laughing, and even though Zenab perfumes her every morning, she knows she smells bad because of all this sweat, but Sorahia says it’s because she’s very black, adding “and very pretty too.” Djamila! They are proud of her. When their friends come to visit, they show off everything their slave girls can do. Their favorite is playing the monkey. Bakhita gives loud shrill cries, scratches her armpits, and throws food in the air to catch in her mouth. Sometimes she plays the horse too, rearing and galloping, and their friends take turns riding on her back. She does everything asked of her. Everything they want. When she has not been a good girl, they stand her in the corner. When they want to impress their friends, they ask her to sing and dance as people do in her tribe, to do it very loudly and with all her heart. She does it, and does it with all her heart, but never sings her funny song “When children were born to the lioness.” That song is her secret, and she wants no one laughing at it, slapping their thighs and whooping. When they are very pleased with her, the young mistresses allow her to sit at their feet and sometimes they surreptitiously stroke her head, pleasing little pats. Bakhita dreads these moments, always afraid the girls’ pats will grow more insistent, as if on the taut skin of a drum, she pictures herself being driven into the ground by these repeated blows, falling into the hands of the mandara, into the world of men, the terrible stories that circulate about what happens to slaves on feast days. And what happens to them when the feast days are over. The torture. The murders. The sacks full of women stitched inside and thrown into the river. These pats on her head are caresses but full of threat.
* * *
—
On the women’s floor there are also very young boys, and Samir. At first he makes no demands, simply prowls silently, barely looks at her, apparently more drawn to Binah whom he enjoys reducing to tears every day. It is a ritual challenge that amuses him. She must cry in front of him every day. Waiting for this performance is a constant strain, Bakhita’s nerves are raw, she wishes she could take Binah’s place when Samir beats her or humiliates her, shows everyone her missing teeth, her faltering voice, and her fear of stuffed animals. He pecks at her with a stuffed eagle, forces her to sit astride a stuffed crocodile, she pleads with him and sometimes wets herself. And then she cries. How did Samir discover this fear of Binah’s? Did Zenab tell him she was afraid of passing the desert fox every morning? Through her or one of the others, everything gets out. Everything is passed on. Everyone listens and everyone spies. It passes the time. Slaves, be they women or eunuchs, servants, freed slaves, mistresses, they all live in a closed world, a prison without bars. There are so many slave women in the young mistresses’ room, serving meals, circulating with jugs of drinks, lighting candles, and singing and dancing for the mistresses out on the terrace in the evenings, those long nights when everyone is bored, when the master’s wives, his children and concubines tell stories and drink coffee. The days and nights go on forever. Many slaves sleep right outside their mistresses’ bedrooms, which are never locked, they sleep in corridors, on the bare floor, ready to serve at all times. When Bakhita and Binah are finally allowed to go to bed, in the building at the end of the garden, they enter another hostile world. The women who work in the kitchens or in the master’s fields do not like the two girls. The girls are in a comparatively privileged position and the women are poised, waiting for this to end. Because end it will. And then the girls will understand what it really means to be a slave: They are whipped every day, their bodies are nothing but open wounds, permanently giving off the heat of their searing injuries. Pain crackles beneath their skin day and night. Madness lies in wait for them. Bakhita is frightened of one called Mariam who constantly calls for her children, chases after them and scolds them tenderly, wants to feed them the whole time and give them drinks, and never realizes that all she is talking to and chasing is a couple of ducks. Her children were sold, both of them together, a single lot for the master when he lost a bet. Bakhita thinks of Kishmet. Does she miss her child? He would be more than two now. Has she had others? Has she been allowed to keep them? Did she beg, did she sing the lament of the separated, which never does any good? When Bakhita’s fears are too unbearable, she thinks of the warm hand that rested deep inside her that night when they escaped into the forest. She does not know whether it was an ancestor, a spirit, or a ghost, she does not know how to describe it, it would be impossible to explain. But she begs for this hand to return. Occasionally it does. It carries her away at night, lifts her above her fears. Above life in the harem, above El Obeid, perhaps even above Sudan and the whole of Africa. To a place of clemency and rest. There she feels gent
le and good once more. As her mother saw her.
A couple of years after Bakhita came to the young mistresses, two major events take place at a time that she will come to call “the time of great sorrow,” two comparable nightmares. The first of these events is a long-anticipated outing to the slave market with the young mistresses. The second, the preparations for Samir’s wedding.
* * *
—
Bakhita is nine years old and she is terrified. The market and the wedding fill the masters with the same violent excitement and they all seem to be in a permanently frenzied state. Samir has grown. He is to leave the harem. And to marry Aïcha, who was betrothed to him six years ago and whom he has never seen. His mother bemoans her fate, clutching her son to her with shamelessly loud wails. He meanwhile is proud, disappointed, and impatient in equal measure. One minute he whines like a baby, the next he is as cruel as an aging king.
Bakhita remembers the annual fights held in her village to celebrate the harvest. Boys reaching the age of manhood wrestled with adolescents from other villages, brotherly wrestling, like a dance. The whole village stood behind them, filled with pride, and then her brother became more than just himself, he was, in her grandmother’s words, “our ancestors, those we see before us, and those yet to come into the world.” The women put on their finery and dressed up their children, it was as if a single powerful and venerable person had been multiplied into hundreds of others, with the same intense indefatigable intentions. But in the snake house, celebrations and preparations for the wedding are like the preparations for the great market. There is the same fierce joy, the same anxious organization, orders and accusations from morning till night. Everything is tense, as if the household were waiting for some vengeance, and everyone lives in a state of panic and fear. The master wants to buy, sell, and make profits in the great market, he goes looking for merchandise, for men and animals, ivory and gold, he is gone all day, returns and shuts himself away to do his accounts, flits from the most vociferous excitement to the most abject despondency. Punishes and chastises his slaves, ascends to the harem and pesters his wives. He wants unsurpassable sweetmeats for his son’s wedding, and glorious riches as magnetic as the flames of a fire. And again he does his accounts and again his mood soars and plummets, uncontrollable and volatile, he is absolute master, but in the end he has no notion of what it is he masters. Marrying off his son amid great splendor or coming home from the market richer than ever is the same victory in his eyes. But before being victorious he must fight, and so he no longer knows any rest.
* * *
—
In Bakhita’s memory the two events are confused but what came first was the great market. From the slave quarters and the young mistresses’ room they can hear the sound of travelers gathering day and night, travelers passing through El Obeid before going on to Khartoum, hundreds of ethnic groups, men with their flocks who have walked for days and nights, months on end, to exchange, sell, and buy. Bakhita knows that these men come weighed down with goods, she knows some will have “ebony” and among them, the most precious of the precious, will be her sister. She knows it, quite simply. A certainty that makes her want to scream. The waiting becomes physical, overwhelming. In the evening, when she lies down to sleep, she imagines their reunion, she tells herself the story of seeing Kishmet again, this rediscovered love to give life meaning.
* * *
—
Of course, she has been out in El Obeid before the great market, to accompany the young mistresses and the eunuchs. Going out with a few slaves is a sign of wealth, the prettiest are chosen, and Bakhita is a beautiful ornament. Of course, she has already looked for her sister in the crowd, outside houses, in the backstreets, the bazaar, at the corner of high walls, on the way to the cypress-lined cemetery, she has already hoped but never with this certainty. What she discovered was the life of a small town that once seemed huge to her. The world took shape, and she did not always have the words to understand what she saw, destitution right next to swaggering displays of wealth, she sensed the peculiar fatality of it, beggars and slaves showing no signs of rebellion, girls waiting on the doorsteps of seedy cafés, water bearers, and countless pitiful little shops. She walked by with her veiled mistresses and their eunuchs, like colorful birds, chirping and whisking away, like butterflies in all that filth. She saw sick, disabled, and abandoned children who would soon die, and no one would remember them. Except her. She does not yet know it, but she will not forget these children in the streets of El Obeid, and she will find them again in other places, living other childhoods, in other streets, in universal destitution.
* * *
—
Sorahia and Radia have been planning to take her with them to the great market. They will go with their mother, three eunuchs, and few servants. Bakhita has been waiting for this morning as if for a planned reunion with Kishmet, a reunion she announces to Zenab, murmuring one morning, “My sister will be at the market.” She says it in Arabic, goes to this effort, and announcing it in Arabic makes it official. Okhti. My sister. My older sister. My sister, Kishmet. She will be there. Does Zenab understand? Bakhita has a family of her own too. Someone who loves her and is not far away. That is a fact, certified by the use of Arabic. She has an older sister, who has a two-year-old child, yes, and she has a twin too, and her father is brother to the village chief, it is a big family and her grandmother knows its entire history and, oh, if she only knew enough of Zenab’s language, the things she could tell her, while Zenab adorns her and perfumes her, she would tell her everything, because as the great market draws near, she has lost all caution and all sorrow, and the hope she carries within her is so powerful that it radiates in spite of her, even if she wanted to hide it she could not.
* * *
—
Her inclusion in the outing to the market is canceled at the last minute. Without any explanation, of course, perhaps there is no reason, a careless mistake or a trick, she will never know. The young mistresses leave, and Bakhita stays in the harem all day, standing at the window of their room, she waits on the terrace in the crushing heat and looks down into the town, and she is not in that town nor in the great market where her sister will appear and will not be reunited with her.
* * *
—
She waits. From when the sun is brutal to when it declines, in fierce heat and in darkening air, she waits. She watches the vast crowds, people meeting, swathed in so many colors, amid shouts and dust, she scours the faces, watching and singling out Kishmet from those who are not Kishmet, she stands ready and attentive all day, with the heat and her thirst and her spinning head, and after hours of patience and hope, she sees her. In that crowd of teeming miniature figures is Kishmet. A few seconds of disbelief, a savage realization, an explosion of light. She is there, down there, outside the house or nearly, in that group of slaves heading to market. Bakhita cries out her name, and in that cry she recognizes the cries of the womenfolk of Olgossa in flames, she hears her voice as she has never heard it before, this cry is her voice that has been asleep and is now waking and taking hold of her, as if in a trance. Kishmet turns around. And Bakhita sees everything she thought she had forgotten. Her figure, her eyes, her mouth, the way she turned around, lively, alert, it’s her, Kishmet bringing to life her childhood, her tribe, her former existence. Kishmet has turned around and has now been beaten by a guard. She falls to her knees, gets up, turns around toward the voice again, but chained to the others, trapped and dragged along by the others, she moves away, is swallowed up, no longer exists. Bakhita wants to call to someone in the crowd, signal to someone, ask for help. She watches Kishmet disappear and stays there, frozen in terror, and then she comes to the very edge of the terrace, opens her arms, stripped of all fear and caution, and throws herself toward the great market like a powerful bird. A hand grabs her, slaps her violently, and she faints into this hand. The slave woman who saves her does not want to be accused of negligence or
laziness by the mistresses, so she simply snatches her back from death then leaves her there on the bedroom floor, unconscious.
* * *
—
She is absent from herself, not there, for a long time. Samir senses it immediately. The young slave girl has lost some of her vitality. He wants to get a reaction from her, to test his virile powers on this lifeless little girl. Before taking a wife, he wants to try out his strength, the strength that will be his weapon as a man and the law by which he lives.
* * *
—
Bakhita is almost ten years old. Her life in the harem is to come to an end, but she does not know this yet. Samir calls her one evening and the young mistresses allow her to go to him, she puts down the big fan and goes into the room where he is waiting for her.
* * *
—
He tells her to come closer. From his tone of voice, she thinks he is about to beat her for some blunder she has made, she cannot think what it is but there’s bound to be something, there always is. She throws herself at his feet, prostrating herself and saying, Asfa. Sorry. Please don’t beat me. Asfa. It makes him laugh. He kicks her away, and she falls again. He orders her to stand up, she stands up and can smell his smell, like sour fruit and dead animals. She starts to cry softly. He slaps her to stop her crying or to make her cry more, she doesn’t know. He slaps her to knock some sense into her or knock the sense out of her. He slaps her out of habit. Her teeth smack together, her temples hurt, she keeps her head lowered, as is expected, and sees the design on the carpet, reds and yellows, birds and moons, she thinks it strange that there should be moons rather than suns, she takes the slaps and tries to think about this, why moons and not suns, Samir’s breath comes closer, she steps back, then his slap is so powerful she falls onto the carpet, onto those birds and moons. He roars that she is an idiot, then throws himself on her. He takes her head in his hand and knocks it against the floor, as if wanting to shatter it, break it in two, he is on top of her, like a mountain, full of stones and with snakes under the stones, brimming with loathing, he wants to kill her.
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