Then She Was Born

by Cristiano Gentili

  Charles took his eyes from Adimu to glance at the arm pointed toward the starry sky. He imagined it belonging to someone who was buried alive, searching for air by reaching one limb from the earth. He wasn’t sure if that tortured soul was his or Adimu’s.

  “I asked, should we off her or cut her up alive?” insisted Thomas, louder, the skin on his neck covered with reddish splotches.

  “Shut up! Leave her alone!” howled Charles.

  Adimu opened her eyes. Her gaze traveled up the arms that held her. The first face she saw was Charles’s. A weak smile formed on her lips, then disappeared when she saw the other men standing nearby.

  “You’ll be all right,” Charles said, keeping his eyes on her, his hand holding hers. “Forgive me.” His voice was muffled.

  Adimu lifted her eyebrows, the only part she could move. She pressed her body more tightly against Mr. Fielding’s, looking for protection, and hid her face in the bend of his arm. An excruciating pain electrified her. She arched her back, trying to resist the agony. Someone was tearing off another part of her body. She could feel it. Charles held her tighter. “I’m the one who wanted the arm of a zeru zeru to find more gold,” he stammered. “But I never wanted it to be you. I want to adopt you and love you like a daughter.”

  Adimu heard the words: “zeru zeru,” “you,” “daughter.”

  Charles continued to sputter apologies, but she had turned her head, could hear nothing over the electrocuting torment of her body. She felt herself give in, give up—her chest, her neck, her legs. The unbearable pain was diminishing.

  “The pocket of my dress, look,” Adimu managed to mumble.

  Charles took off his jacket, rolled it up, and set her head on the improvised cushion. Once she was as comfortable as he felt he could make her, he seized her discarded dress and fumbled with the fabric, pulling out her glasses, the photo of them together, and a folded piece of paper. He opened it. There was the dedication signed by him and his wife. For Adimu, we wish you all the best. We care deeply about you, like a daughter. The mud that had soiled the dress had soaked through to the pocket, and part of it had become damp, stained pulp. He knew Jackob was to have torn up that page from the encyclopedia a long time ago, but that isn’t important now. Nothing but Adimu’s life is important.

  With a weak movement of her head, Adimu gestured for him to come closer. Charles leaned down over her so he could hear her.

  “Did you do this to me?” she asked, using her last morsel of strength.

  She tried to pull her hand from Charles’s, but he held onto it and squeezed. Adimu resisted, though Charles wouldn’t give up. At last, she closed her hand into a fist and leaned her head back, giving in to the feeling of stupor she had been fighting for some time.

  Charles took Sarah’s engagement ring from his pocket and worked it onto Adimu’s middle finger. He pointed the gem inward toward her palm. She was still but for her weak breath.

  57.

  Ramadani was in his room, lying on a mat of woven palm leaves. He had returned from a walk in the forest, happy and full of hope. He extended his arm to pick up the copy of National Geographic, the one he had read so many times. The pages were folded and yellowed at the edges. He looked at the image of the albino lion cub marching next to the mother along with the rest of the litter. It had not been abandoned to predator birds or hyenas on the savannah but had been fed and protected like any cub. It wasn’t even dirtier than the others, despite its white fur. On the next page was an albino gorilla staring at the camera from between forest leaves. The caption explained how the gorilla, Snowflake, had been transferred to a zoo in Barcelona to protect it from poachers. Ramadani envied Josephat—he wanted to go to another part of the world, too, where albinos were protected, not killed. Where life was less cruel. And, above all, less difficult. He looked out the window of his room at the sky and the green trees. Soon a new rainy season would begin, and the vivid blue of the sky would be replaced by gray. The air smelled of blossoming clouds. He set the magazine down, took a book from the stack next to his mat, and leafed through it until he found the photograph he was looking for. He smiled at the image.

  Ramadani washed and dressed, putting on the only tie he owned. He took the photo with him as he left the house. He walked through the village, his chest puffed out and his shoulders back. People greeted him with respect and wondered where he was going, so elegantly dressed. When he arrived at the great baobab in the center of the village, where there was a village notice board, he removed two thumbtacks from an old, faded poster and attached his photo instead. Memories of that day at school in Mwanza flooded him. The teacher had asked, “What is the most important and reliable magazine that communicates the wonders of the world?”

  “National Geographic!” he’d shouted before two other classmates gave the same answer.

  The teacher had passed a copy of the magazine around the class and told each of them they were to write a three-thousand-word report about one of the articles. Ramadani was assigned a piece on albino animals. He had tried to hide the article from the boy who had become his desk mate that semester, the boy he initially treated cruelly.

  With Josephat at the desk next to his, Ramadani had been forced to face a reality that was different from what he had always known. The article demonstrated that in the natural world, there was no discrimination toward albino animals, and he had begun to question whether his zeru zeru classmate really did bring bad luck. He, after all, was on his soccer team and most often the team won. Thinking about that article had been Ramadani’s first step toward Josephat. How can we, humans, be more beastly than wild beasts? Over time, he and Josephat became friends, and Ramadani discovered they were the same, except for the color of their skin. And he understood that tradition conflicted with evolution. It was difficult to arrive at that realization. Our eyes look forward; they are not on the back of our heads, he’d say to himself. He would continue to move forward. To run, if necessary, toward his future, because that was where he wanted to live.

  Ramadani stepped away from the bulletin board, looking at the photo of himself embracing Josephat, both smiling in their soccer team uniforms. The image was a little out of focus as if it had come from the distant past. Ramadani knew that it represented his present and, above all, his future. He laughed as he thought about what the villagers and his father would do when they saw the photograph. Their opinions had no impact on the way that he would lead his life, he told himself, as he held out his money to the ticket seller at the ferry dock. “One way, please.”

  The driver of the bus that Adimu and Shida had taken to reach Dar es Salaam was on the road again after a day’s rest. That morning, when two albino kids got on board, the driver could hardly believe his eyes. Another pair of zeru zerus and so soon after the two girls! These were wearing green soccer uniforms with numbers printed in black on the backs of their shirts. They were talking about a girl they had seen at the soccer field where they played on Saturday evening.

  “She was there by herself, watching us. When we left, I wanted to wake her but decided to let her rest,” said the bigger of the two boys. “I went back to the field early on Sunday, but she was gone.”

  The driver looked in his mirror, chuckled to himself, and elbowed the second driver. He started to pass a slower vehicle, certain of his good luck. When he saw a truck coming in the opposite direction, he closed his eyes and never opened them again, nor did most of his passengers. Some days after the accident, the second driver, who survived, recalled the two zeru zeru girls who had taken the bus and the two zeru zeru boys on the day of the accident. He kept thinking about what had happened, though he never came up with a plausible explanation. The truth was, he didn’t even know what question to ask.

  Yunis sat in front of the physician.

  “The only way for you to become pregnant is to change husbands,” the doctor joked. “You’re healthy, and there is no impediment to having children. He’s the one who cannot.”

  Yunis’s jaw
relaxed.

  “There is, however, a therapy we can try,” said the gynecologist with a reassuring smile. “Most probably, your husband’s infertility can be treated. Though I cannot be sure until we’ve done more tests.”

  A sheen of calm embellished Yunis, now that she knew she wasn’t sterile. Maybe having children isn’t important, she thought. And if she wanted some, she could ask her sister-in-law for one or two: she’s always saying she has trouble feeding all of hers. How many times had Yunis’s husband suggested that option? It hadn’t interested her, but now that she knew she wasn’t at fault, she didn’t feel the need to get pregnant. I have spent most of my life miserable, lost my friendship with Juma, and for what? She remembered Adimu on that distant day in the forest. The baby was made of flesh and bone like all babies, and she’d known it the moment she held the infant in her arms. Her body and heart and gut knew it. She had almost been responsible for the death of two human beings: an innocent baby and an innocent woman. Yunis had been prepared to prey on the breasts and genitals of a soul with albinism. She didn’t deserve to have children. With her index finger, she wiped away a tear.

  “Let’s go straight to Zuberi and withdraw our request. I don’t care if he keeps our money!” she said to her husband.

  58.

  Adimu awoke in the hospital. Three days had passed since her arm had been amputated.

  She opened her eyes to find Sarah stroking her hair. Adimu adjusted her gaze to see if others were present. No, she and Mrs. Fielding were alone. Shifting her eyes to the right, to her horror she saw she had not been dreaming. She moved that arm and could feel it. She just couldn’t see it. The ring Charles had slipped on the finger of her left hand reminded her of that nightmarish evening. A slow moan issued from her lips. Sarah tried to comfort her.

  “Where is he?”

  Sarah didn’t have the courage to answer the child or ask her to recount her memories. The woman had found the daughter she’d always wanted and had lost the only man she’d ever loved. I have not behaved much better than Charles, she told herself. I’ve been blind and cowardly. She had lived her life in denial, refusing to see the full portrait of the man with whom she shared her bed. She chose, rather, to believe that Charles was her paternal superior, a replacement of the father she had never stopped mourning. Now she understood that she couldn’t blindly follow another. That overdependence leads to affliction. Now she understood that awareness, acceptance, and courage were the medicine for pain. Some things are best faced alone. Charles had been her refuge. Love, though, she finally understood, was not something to hide behind. The innocent girl lying in the hospital bed had paid the price for her learning this lesson.

  Sarah stepped out of the room and leaned against the corridor wall. “Oh, God, why did she have to be the one?” she whispered, thinking of the fateful phone call that she received the morning after Adimu’s sacrifice. The officer had told her that her husband had been stopped shortly before sunrise by a patrol car. He’d been driving to the Mwanza hospital at an excessive speed and in a state of shock with a wounded albino girl in the car. He had confessed at the police station. “I did it, all alone. It was my macabre fantasy,” he had told them.

  “The girl?” Sarah had asked the officer, her voice low. “How old is she?”

  “Around thirteen. She’s in intensive care.”

  Upon hearing the girl’s age, Sarah rushed to the hospital and found the attending doctor. “A popular belief was responsible for saving the girl,” he had said.

  “What do you mean?” Sarah had asked.

  “Common folklore maintains that albinos vanish when killed. The wound was stanched with kerosene so she wouldn’t bleed to death. And it’s a good thing some man got her here and fast; it saved her life.”

  A wave of abhorrence crashed over Sarah. Her eyes closed. She slowly lifted her right hand to her forehead, to her diaphragm, left shoulder, and finally, her right shoulder, making the cross she had rejected since her father’s death.

  It was three days before Adimu could receive visitors. At first, Sarah thought of going to Murutanga to speak with the girl’s parents about adopting her. When she reached the port, though, she changed her mind. She wouldn’t negotiate with those who had driven out their daughter, nearly to her death. She’d gotten into the Rolls Royce and, when digging through her handbag to find the car key, her fingers felt Charles’s lucky nugget. Charles. Her husband. The man who mined for gold and hunted people. She had believed he changed when she gave him her jewels to find Adimu, when he vowed he’d bring her back. She wanted to believe he changed. She wanted to forgive him. After what he did, how could she ever forgive him? But, she considered, the doctor had suggested it was Charles who saved the girl.

  Charles had called two days earlier. She’d come home exhausted from waiting all day on an uncomfortable wooden bench to see Adimu, who was still too weak for visitors. Sarah flopped on her cushioned armchair in her living room, staring at the wall. The phone on the side table rang. Her eyes shifted, and she looked at it with panic until it stopped. It began to ring again. Then silence. And more persistent ringing. No voice-mail message. It could only be Charles, she was sure. She set her hand on the receiver, considered whether she had the mettle to lift it to her mouth and have her voice face his, the one who did this to her daughter, the man who stole her dreams. She closed her eyes and let the phone ring. It stopped. Her hand continued to rest on the receiver.

  Charles had begged the prison guard and made promises he knew he couldn’t keep for permission to call her.

  “Five minutes, no more,” the guard had agreed.

  He had held the receiver to his ear. It rang and rang, no answer. He hung up. Again he placed the coin in the slot, again the phone rang and rang.

  Please answer, Charles repeated in his head after he dialed the number at their house in Mwanza for the third time on the grimy telephone hanging on the jail wall.

  Again the phone rang and rang. And then he heard, “Hello?”

  At the sound of her voice, he began to weep. Words piled up in his throat and got stuck in that small dark place. With the palm of his hand, he covered the receiver so she wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t know. She cannot, she must not, I cannot let her hear me cry. He was about to hang up the phone when a salty stream gushed forth, and he let out a wail that would soften the hardest, most obdurate heart.

  Sarah’s face was marked by tears. Her body was limp. The phone sat on her lap and was cradled in her hands. She listened to the grief of her husband emanate from the receiver while her soft sobs shredded any resolve she had.

  “Mr. Fielding, it’s time to go back to your cell,” said the guard, his voice subdued.

  Charles waved his hand at the man and wiped his tears with the sleeve of his shirt. Leaning his forehead against the wall, he sucked in his pain and spit out, “I love you beyond reason. Let me have nothing else in life but you and Adimu, and I will be the most favored man on this whole Earth.” He hung up the phone and slammed his fist against the plaster.

  “Did you talk to her?” his cellmate asked when he returned.

  Charles curled up on his cot, face to the wall.

  The following morning Sarah took the yellow nugget between her fingers and walked to the lake and onto a small wooden pier that extended a few yards. The sky was clear, the sun vibrant. She looked at the depths below her and picked up a flat rock, which she threw. The surface of the lake rippled, making concentric circles. She held her hand out over the water and let the stone on its chain fall between tiny waves. Charles’s good-luck charm sank, leaving behind a glittering wake that lasted only an instant before it vanished.

  Over the next three days, whenever her husband came to mind, she’d slam the door shut on his image, barricading him in a faraway prison. At night, she dreamed of his grief. One early evening, she dreamed he had finally metamorphosed into a butterfly of a man who could embrace wife and daughter. When she opened her eyes, she remembered she had fallen asleep at the
hospital, awaiting a nurse to tell her that Adimu was out of intensive care and ready for visitors. Now, finally, she was looking at the child’s gaunt face, wiping away tears.

  “Do you know where my best friend, Shida, is?” asked Adimu, sniffling.

  “No, sweetie, I don’t. But don’t worry, we’ll find her as soon as you’re better,” replied Sarah, although she did not yet know who they were talking about.

  Adimu looked at her missing right arm. “How can I study and become a doctor?” she asked.

  Sarah laid her hand on Adimu’s cheek. “Is it your arm that studies and becomes a doctor?”

  Adimu looked at the ceiling and after several seconds said, “No, but I need it to write.”

  “You can use your left hand,” said Sarah.

  Adimu turned to Sarah and, holding her eyes at chest level, said, “People who use their left hand are bad.”

  “Who says so?”

  “People on Ukerewe.”

  “Are the people who did bad things to you left-handed?” Sarah raised her eyebrows.

  Adimu’s eyes darted around the room as she thought about Roman, Martha, Sefu, and the others.

  Sarah saw the terrified expression on the little patient’s face, hadn’t intended to bring Adimu’s painful memories to the surface. “I’m left-handed,” said Sarah. She picked up her handbag and rummaged inside. “Look.” She took a pen with her left hand and wrote in a little notebook.

  “Can I see what you’ve written?”

  Sarah showed her the page. In perfect Swahili she had written, “Am I a bad person?”

  Adimu’s face shone. Then, as if a passing cloud covered the sun, her expression changed. “With only one arm I can’t become a doctor,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “All the doctors I’ve ever seen have two legs and two arms.”