Dessert was a rarity for Adimu, and when the lightest, sweetest dessert she had ever had was set before her, generously sliced, she was over the moon. It was the same manna that was served at the clinic party. Is it possible that Mrs. Fielding remembers how I loved it, and she chose it just for me? A second big dish of the delicious dessert was laid out for her when she finished her first helping.
The delicate flavors of the tiramisu filled her senses, and she imagined how different her life would be if she really were a Fielding. After lunch, I would go to my bedroom where there would be real toys, even a whole doll. I would eat delicious food every day, and my bibi wouldn’t have to toil in the fields from sunrise to sunset. At that moment, Adimu couldn’t imagine there was any bad in the world.
After his initial irritation, a strange attraction pulled Charles toward the child. He found he could not behave indifferently to her. Charles served himself an enormous helping of tiramisu, piling the creamy sweetness onto his plate. Adimu giggled when he saw her maybe-baba was as fond of the creaminess as she and took the same portion she would have taken if she hadn’t been served. Charles dug in a spoon and lifted it, dripping, to his mouth. He turned and saw Adimu smiling at him with joy. He tasted the delicacy with the tip of his tongue. And she did too. For several moments he left the spoon in his mouth as he thought, I said to them I wanted a dead albino, under no circumstance one that was alive. He set down the heaping spoonful of cream and ladyfingers on his plate. After his attack of conscience passed, he quickly shoved it into his mouth. Adimu was certain both she and her maybe-baba were sharing exactly the same thoughts as the heavenly food swam down to their tummies.
After lunch, Charles pulled out Adimu’s chair for her and noticed several golden hairs clinging to it. He looked around, hesitating, and as soon as Sarah and the girl left the veranda to stroll between the flowerbeds, he twisted them around his finger and slipped them into his pants pocket beside his gold nugget. Everything would work out, he told himself. She returned my lucky charm. She is good-luck gold.
That evening, lying in bed, a high wall of barbed wire divided Sarah and Charles. When Sarah heard her husband’s even breathing—a sign he was asleep—she turned on her side and let her tears dampen her pillow. She wrote a note to herself to get Adimu a pair of eyeglasses.
Sleep eluded Adimu as well. After rifling through her mind for every clue that might prove that her father was Mr. Fielding and then interrogating her grandmother with a series of trick questions, she finally lay, exhausted, on her mat. Why was her bibi so vague about the mzungu? she asked herself. Adimu would make it her goal to get a father and a mother, natural or adoptive. In the end, what does it matter?
33.
One day, during her tenth rainy season, Adimu cleaned her sandals in a basin when she got home from school. With the arrival of storms, not one inhabitant on Ukerewe could walk without his feet shrouded in mud.
The school itself, made of mud bricks and stones and a corrugated metal roof, shivered with deafening clatter when water poured from Heaven. It seemed that a bothersome spirit was throwing wet pebbles from the sky.
And in the dry season, there was dust—it got everywhere, burned eyes and slid between teeth.
The single schoolroom could barely hold the desks, the mud walls threatening to burst out the children. So scant was the space that the students had to flatten themselves against one another to slip into their seats. Adimu was relegated to the last desk at the back of the room. Since no one wanted to sit near her, she had more space than the others.
After talking with the woman doctor who vaccinated Adimu, Nkamba had been emboldened and had approached the teacher about Adimu’s eye problem and how it was affecting her studies. The teacher, a mature woman who was excessively proud of her job, had listened to the older woman’s request with contempt.
“I have been teaching for forty years, and I know better than you what my pupils need.” The result of the conversation was that Adimu remained in the last row. The teacher explained that the little girl was an irritation and needed to be kept away from the other students so she wouldn’t distract them. So all these years later, though she was a hard-working and smart student, her inability to see the blackboard prevented her from being successful in her studies.
Adimu’s favorite subjects were English and Swahili. She also enjoyed geometry. While studying parallel lines, she considered how she fell under the same mathematical law: she and happiness were two lines that would never meet, not even if they traveled high up into the sky.
Since she couldn’t read the blackboard, she often had to guess at the answers, which always earned reproach from the teacher.
“If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, the one lamb that remains behind will be eaten by hyenas,” the teacher said as she neared Adimu’s desk, looking her straight in the eyes. “At least have the intelligence to keep quiet if you don’t know the correct response.”
It didn’t take Adimu long to stop calling out answers for fear of being eaten by hyenas. And she raised her hand only if she needed further explanation. The teacher generally ignored the white arm in the air—the girl was just seeking attention, she was sure.
The afternoon of the last day of school, Adimu discovered she didn’t pass and wouldn’t be advanced a grade. Though she had been afraid she was going to be left back, she had hoped with all her heart for a miracle, but as usual, no miracle materialized.
The day she found out that she failed, she entered her hut with her head down. Nkamba was at the table, chatting with Adimu’s stepbrother. When Adimu walked into her home, her kaka[20] didn’t ask how she was. He tilted his head in response to Adimu’s “Karibu[21].”
When he stepped out of the hut to go to the latrine, Adimu asked her grandmother what they were discussing. Nkamba hesitated, which frightened Adimu. She leaned her body against her grandmother’s leg, like she did when she was little. She was afraid one of her parents had died or maybe one of her siblings, notwithstanding that her stepsisters were never nice to her; they represented hope that one day her family might love her. She was overjoyed when she learned her brother had come to announce his marriage.
“Bibi, do you think I can get a new dress?” she asked, excited, jumping in circles around the old woman. Adimu had begun to daydream about boys, of one day getting married, being carried away from her hateful village by a man who cherished and protected her. Maybe Antony? Attending the wedding offered a chance for the villagers to see her in a new way.
“I’m happy you’re getting married!” she exclaimed when her brother came back inside. “I can’t wait to see you dressed for the ceremony and to meet your wife.” Maybe Adimu might be an aunt to their children! Maybe a godmother?
He fixed a dark look on her. “You’re not coming.”
Adimu stiffened and, stretching her neck forward, asked, “Why not?”
Her grandmother said nothing, staring down at her bony hands. She lifted her eyes and looked for a long moment at her granddaughter, whose eyes were darting from one adult to the other.
“Why not?” she repeated even louder.
“You’re not invited,” said her brother.
Adimu felt a quiver through her chest and neck. Her blood had turned into ice water.
“Why am I not invited? Bibi told me you are my brother even if you live in another house.”
“You know why. You would harm my reputation and my clan’s.”
Adimu hiccupped out tears to Nkamba. “How can my brother behave this way when my friends are beginning to understand that I’m not a danger? Sometimes, you know, they take me out in their boats,” she said to the young man.
Nkamba covered her face to hide her embarrassment. Her grandson let escape a sarcastic smile.
“Why are you smiling, brother? I’m telling you the truth. I have gone out on the lake with my friends many times. I sit on the bow. Antony likes me.” Her voice trembled, and her lower lip shook. She was determined to hold back her tears.
>
“I’m smiling at your stupidity,” said the young man. “You think you’re there out of friendship? You want to know the real reason they take you with them? Then you’ll get it through your thick embulamaro head that everyone in the village thinks of you in exactly the same way. Me, your father, your mother, and your sisters, all the boys and girls in your class. Especially Antony. They take you fishing because if the boat turns over, you’re their float. Their blow-up life jacket. Even little kids know that a zeru zeru doesn’t sink. Now do you understand?”
In that instant, any snippet of confidence or hope that Adimu had was swept away like dust from the floor. And on the foundation, below, was the horrible truth. She was a nobody, and that’s all she’d ever be. She ran outside and threw herself on her grandfather’s burial place, crying for him to hold her.
After some minutes, Nkamba came to her and laid her cracked hand on her granddaughter’s back.
“Is it true, Bibi?”
She nodded. “It is.”
“Why did you keep it from me? Why?” Her words were broken by her sobs. “Why didn’t you tell me they were using me? I’ve been held back at school, my brother considers me invisible… What have I done to deserve this?” She tried to stifle her sobs in the folds of Nkamba’s dress. She held onto her grandmother with such force that Nkamba’s arm stung.
“You have not done anything, my child,” she murmured, cradling Adimu against her gaunt chest. “Be patient, things will change. Things always change,” she added.
Adimu clung to her grandmother like a wounded puppy, unable to control her whimpering. As night fell, Adimu finally calmed down, her gentle tears wiped away by her grandmother’s fingers. Nkamba knew how to cure her pain. She knew that suffering is sometimes like a rainstorm: it doesn’t stop until all the drops have fallen from the clouds. The only remedy was to wait for her granddaughter’s emotional wound to stop bleeding. She waited in silence until Adimu, with a final shuddering sigh, stopped crying.
“Everything occurs in its own time, my child,” said Nkamba, rocking the girl. “Listen to this story about the San tribe, and you will understand. The San tribe lived in a distant time, when the sun was a man who lived among them…”
Adimu held still, except for her fingers that twirled a long blade of grass.
Nkamba told the story of the sun man who let his warm rays wash over the plants and animals or deprived them of light when he slept. “Finally, one day, the tribes people told him, ‘Sun man, it is time for you to shine above us. Travel in the sky, dry our rice, and protect us from the cold.’ And that’s what he did.”[22]
“Bibi,” said Adimu, rising from Nkamba’s lap, “why have you told me this story? Everyone loved the sun man. Instead, I’m not loved by anyone. Except by you.”
The old woman’s face was veiled with melancholy. “The sun man could not rise into the sky before his time,” she said, opening the door to their hut, encouraging Adimu with a tilt of her head to go inside. “Your time will come to shine bright, just like him. You must be patient.”
The next morning, when Adimu awoke with the first rays of sun that filtered through the roof thatches, she listened to her grandmother’s raucous breathing and touched the old woman’s rough palm. Nkamba roused with a start. “What’s wrong?”
“Do you remember the woman doctor who vaccinated me?”
Nkamba nodded in the dim room.
“The only way I can change my life is to become like her. I’ll never succeed at the village school. I must leave the island to attend a school that will teach me and return home only when I’ve learned how to help my clan. Once I can heal children and adults, I will be respected. Then I will be seen,” she said. “Bibi, please, find the lost numbers for the community in Tanga that will protect me. I’ll work by your side in the fields so we can save more money.”
34.
Nkamba could postpone it no longer. The following evening, accompanied by the light of a crescent moon, she walked to Kondo’s home. On her way to the chief’s hut, she prayed that the problem haunting Kondo when she had last approached him had been solved and her request would, this time, receive more attention.
The village chief was sitting near a small fire in front of his hut, a big black dog lying at his feet. As Nkamba closed in, the animal pricked its ears and lifted its head, though it did not move any other part of its body.
Kondo looked at Nkamba before returning his attention to the fire.
“I’m asking you to get me the telephone number of the protected community in Tanga,” she said with a firm voice. She refused Kondo’s invitation to sit and remained standing next to the fire, eyeing him.
“Even if I’m able to get you the number, what will you do with it if your son gives you neither permission nor money?” he asked.
“Sefu does not care about my granddaughter. He will let her go.”
Kondo made a clicking sound with his tongue. Where had the timorous, respectful woman he knew gone? He stood up and so did the dog, Kondo’s shadow, shaking the dust from its coat.
“I will let you know,” Kondo said, turning his back to her and entering his house.
Nkamba stood still, rigid.
The weak glow that came from inside the mud hut faded when Kondo closed the door behind him. Nkamba waited outside by the fire, rubbing her hands over her arms. Standing in the light of the moon and stars, she pictured herself forcing her way into the village chief’s home and demanding her request be met. They had once been friends. Didn’t he remember? Didn’t that matter? Kheri and he were of the same clan!
Nkamba padded home, prodded by the thought of Adimu alone and unprotected. She loathed herself for not having the courage to demand he give her the number, and she detested Kondo for making her beg.
In a room adjacent to his bedroom, Kondo opened the only drawer of the peeling cabinet and rummaged around for a green notebook. He turned the pages, yellowed at the edges, until he found what he was looking for. He returned the book to the drawer.
He had formed a plan to save his son—his foremost concern since Ramadani’s positive AIDS test result—but in order for it to work, Adimu had to stay on the island. At least for a while longer. He knew Zuberi was self-obsessed, and he wasn’t going to trust him with his son’s life. And Zuberi still hadn’t agreed to allow Ramadani to join the headhunters.
Ramadani watched his father from the doorway. When the old woman arrived, he had been behind the house, observing two small owls he’d never before seen or read about. On hearing the tense conversation, unusual for his father, he edged his way to the corner of the house to listen to the elders.
When Kondo returned to the main room, Ramadani crept into his father’s private study to look in the green notebook. On the third page, written in large shaky letters, he saw a phone number. Next to it was written “Community in Tanga.” He was sure it was the number Nkamba was looking for. Ramadani could not understand why his father refused to help Adimu’s grandmother, why he refused to help the sweet child who was so gentle and dependable with goats.
* * *
Upon returning home, Nkamba found her granddaughter utterly absorbed in the newspaper she was reading by the light of the kerosene lamp. The girl was sitting beside the wall on which the numbers were engraved, and she was bent over the ink on paper. The broken telephone number, illuminated by the glow of the lamp, was one more condemnation that bore down on the child, the grandmother thought. Adimu looked up. Nkamba was disappointed by her visit with Kondo. The old woman glanced at the mattress in the corner. “Turn off the light. It’s time to sleep.”
That night, Nkamba tossed and turned, beset by a deafening anger. Her hard work in the fields had been insufficient, not enough for the ferry ticket, not enough for the ten-times-her-fingers’ worth of phone calls. Not enough for the trip from Mwanza to Tanga. The distance that separated the two cities was immeasurable. The cost of a bus ticket would eat up all her resources. Why am I being denied what I need to save my chil
d? she wondered. It is a simple request.
Ramadani shared Nkamba’s thoughts. If one phone number could lift the painful burden from the poor woman, why displease her? Shielded by the deep sleep that pervaded the home, the young man snuck out of his room by candlelight. In the darkness, the cabinet in the study took on a human shape. He opened the drawer and copied the number onto a slip of paper. For a fistful of seconds, Ramadani thought about how he was acting against his father’s wishes. He froze when he heard a creak and then realized it was only a woodworm. He put the notebook back in the drawer, exactly as he had found it, and returned to bed.
The next day, when the sun was high in the sky, Ramadani slinked toward Nkamba’s hut. At that hour, he conjectured, neither grandmother nor girl would be at home—the former in the fields, the latter grazing the animals. He stood before the closed door and, after making sure he wasn’t seen, he pushed the slip of paper through a hole that had been bored into the mud walls of the hut. If you live, so do I, he thought, as the phone number disappeared into the brown peephole.
* * *
The soil was harder and the hoe heavier—at least that was how it seemed to Nkamba. She returned home, exhausted from work, dragging her tools, the hem of her traditional dress dirtied and ragged. Opening the door to her hut, she saw a piece of white paper on the beaten-earth floor.
It must be Adimu’s, she thought. Only after picking it up and putting it on the stool did she recognize the symbols. She went to the wall with the paper in her hand and, with her trembling earth-stained fingers, she compared the marks written in pen with those carved into the hardened mud. They were identical! Except for the last two missing ones that appeared on the paper. Nkamba brought her hands together and held them close to her chest as she did when attending Mass. She tilted her head upward, and her eyes traveled beyond the thatched roof. The phone number had fallen like a ripe fruit from the mango tree whose roots were nourished by the spirit of her husband. It is a miracle that can only have come from Kheri, she thought. He must have talked with Father Andrew’s God and the Spirits of the Lake. Adimu can go far from this wretched place. Her prayers will no longer bounce off the ceiling of this prison of a hut and fall to the ground like guano. They will be heard and answered.
Then She Was Born Page 17