Tender : Stories

by Sofia Samatar

  I met the ghoul in 2008. She agreed to give me half an hour in the airport. We sat at the back of a restaurant where we could watch the planes take off. I was too wound up to feel like eating, but I ordered some onion rings for show. The ghoul had the Hungry Highflyer Special with curly fries and cream of mushroom soup.

  She also ordered a Coke, and I guess I gave her a look because she said: “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. She had eyes like illustrated pages, one larger than the other. There was a mark on her temple, probably made by one of God’s meteors, but she’d done a good job covering it with makeup.

  I asked her if it was easy for her to travel, if she ever got held up at customs or anything. She asked if I was a real reporter or just some small-time blogger. One of her ears was like a dead mine-shaft, the other like a window in some desolate bed-and-breakfast of the plains.

  “Look,” she said, “I go everywhere. You could say it’s in my blood.”

  I asked if she really had blood, and she picked up her fork like she was going to jam it into her arm.

  “Don’t!” I yelped.

  People looked at us then, and she put the fork down and laughed. She had a nice laugh, like an electric mixer making cake in a distant apartment.

  Our food came. I asked if she missed the desert. She said: “Where do you think you are?” She seemed to be having trouble fitting into her T-shirt. My guess is that this was a deliberate effect, like the whirl of her postage-stamp eyes. The T-shirt was red; I think it said something about Cancún.

  “What is your favorite book?” I asked.

  “Al-Maarri’s Epistle of Forgiveness.”

  “Favorite film?”

  “Titanic.”

  “Favorite food?”

  “Reporters. Kidding! I don’t know, maybe duck?”

  “Have you given many interviews?”

  “No. This is my very first. I chose you because you’re special, and I will never forget you.”

  She drank the last of her Coke and belched. Her hair grew all over the wall. She said she liked planes, she didn’t make many of them go down. Mostly she liked to look out the window. When everyone was asleep, she’d put her eye to the window and grow her eyeball until it covered the glass.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Other planes to wink at. Lightning. Lightning is useful, like string. And I look for things to remember later. Burnt cities. Ruins.”

  She admitted she also looked for her brother the Qutrub, a demon in the shape of a cat. She didn’t think she’d ever find him. For this reason, cats made her sad.

  To take her mind off it, and to make sure I got the question in before the end of the interview, I asked about Ta’abbata Sharran.

  “Sixty hells, not him again.”

  “My readers are interested.”

  She rolled her eyes. One escaped across her forehead, but she caught it.

  “What do you want to know? What exactly he meant by ‘lay upon her’?”

  “No,” I lied. “But can you tell me anything about his name?”

  Ta’abbata Sharran is a nickname; it means “He Carried Evil Under His Arm.” There are several stories explaining how he got the name, but no one knows for sure. The ghoul said it wasn’t her fault if I wanted to ask questions a ten-year-old could answer. “He stank, all right?”

  “The poet stank?”

  “To the moon and back.”

  She took out a pack of cigarettes, and I reminded her there was no smoking. I asked if her body functioned like that of a human being.

  “No,” she said. She ate one of her cigarettes.

  I asked if it was true that she existed mainly to cause harm to travelers.

  “Define ‘mainly.’”

  Afterward people asked me what she was like. When I said “I can’t say,” they called it a cop-out. So now I try to break her down and describe her in pieces. Her upper lip was like a broken roof, her lower lip like a beached canoe. It made me feel good when she took my onion rings.

  I asked her if modern development had made things harder for ghouls. She said there were more waste places in the world than ever before. I asked her if she was worried about climate change, and she said it was basically a ghoul’s dream. She was optimistic about the future.

  After a while her hair came down and curled up on her shoulder, and she picked up her bag and slid out of her seat while I paid for lunch. She wouldn’t let me walk her to her gate. I asked for her autograph and she said um no, she wasn’t born yesterday, but in a nice way.

  “Do you think you’d let me interview you again?”

  She wavered in the air, and nausea filled me up like breathing. They are known by name, I thought in a daze, but not by shape. I tried to focus on her: it was like staring into an April dust-storm, electric blackness blotting out the sky. Buried cities whirled in the chaos, broken dishes, bones, syringes, words without meaning, fingernails, so much hair. More paper than you could cover in your life. All of it pulled in, animated, fierce and beating like a heart.

  I closed my eyes. Nothing is wasted.

  The ghoul heard my thought, and snorted. “Everything is wasted.” I opened my eyes, and she was stable again, her arms crossed. Her smile was vast and white and kind and a little bit detached, like the ceiling of a room where you have woken up with head trauma.

  “So I guess that’s a ‘no,’” I said. “About the interview.”

  She laughed her electric-mixer laugh. We didn’t shake hands. I watched her until she disappeared in the crowd. It didn’t take long: as she turned away, she was already changing shape, on her way to the next brief shelter, the next campsite, the next ruin.

  Those

  “. . . how is this nonsense possible, that the enemies of Kush are copies of the Kushite enemies of Pharaonic Egypt?”

  — L. Török, “Kush and the External World”

  Sarah sets the kettle on the hob. She bends and fans the fire, her face aglow for a moment, molten bronze. When she stands up, her color fades in the gloom of the little house with its high windows, that house built like a ship. Tight and trim as a yacht stands the little house, and the wind beats hard against the high windows, and Sarah’s father with a blanket over his knees, her father the old seafarer with a black-bordered card grasped tight in one hand, draws his chair to the fire and clears his throat.

  “Poor George, poor George! Well, he would keep his vow, he said; and so he has; we shall never meet again in this life. Poor fellow! Listen, my girl, when you go out, just stop by the Widow Cobb’s, you know the place, at the end of the lane, and see if she has any lilies. We’ll send them over to George’s poor wife. It’s kind of her to remember me after all these years—‘remember’ in a manner of speaking—we never met. George must have spoken of me to her, and kept my address among his papers . . . my God, Sally, but Man is a curious beast!

  “I’ll tell you a strange thing. The first time I was struck by the mystery that is Man, this same George Barnes, whose death has just been announced, was at my side. It was in the Sudan, at Meroe, and the two of us were making our way north to Cairo for a bit of a holiday. We were young and hardy then, but even so, our recent misadventures in the forests had brought us both down—George was so green about the gills, he was practically silver—and we longed for entertainment and pleasure. There was little of either in the dusty villages we passed on our way up the Nile, but the tombs of Meroe promised a diversion. At the time, I considered myself an amateur archaeologist, and it was with great excitement that I packed our Spartan picnic of bread and dried fish. There was also a jug of the native beer called merissa, which George wrapped in a towel as if it had been an infant. I can still see him astride his donkey, his long legs dangling comically on either side, his head swathed in a turban of blinding whiteness . . .

  “He was a child, you know. Little more than a child. His father, whom George described as a ‘holy terror,’ had sent him to sea at the age of twelve, and George, whose nose had been per
manently flattened by the fist of this same father, had set off gladly enough. The sea washed him to and fro for a number of years, with its cruelties and privations, the worst of them brought about by the men he served on ship after ship—for sea life is unkind to the small and weak, as I know from experience, though I was twenty when I left home for the waves. I was twenty, and tall, and broad, and George was a slip of a creature with gingery hair, and when we met years later in the Congo forest, natives of the same city, employees at the same plantation, I was thirty and solid as an anvil, and George, though the same age, was still a child. Was it because he’d been robbed of his childhood? Perhaps some men never grow old. What pleasure he took in our excursion to the tombs! He named his donkey Annabelle. He could whistle like a lark—it was his crooked teeth, he said. To think that George, even young George, is dead.”

  The kettle sings. Sarah takes it off the fire and brews the tea. Soft steam, delicate fragrance, while the wind blows. She fetches her father’s pipe from the shelf and helps him to light it. He grunts his thanks, a hollow rumble deep in his wintry throat. She takes the black-bordered card from his hand and reads it beneath a window. If there are lilies, she will take them to this address. She knows the street, a poor but respectable street much like her own. She’ll wear her large bonnet. She will knock at the tradesman’s door.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. Lilies. For the funeral.”

  For a moment, she will look into the woman’s face. Perhaps she will catch it before the expression twists, before it becomes like all the others, molded by the same stamp, indistinguishable. Every day, every hour, this fog.

  “Thank you, my dear. Would you help—just a little closer—yes, now I feel the warmth at last. I shan’t scorch my beard, don’t worry! Now George, as I was telling you . . . George who’s laid in a box, God rest him! I suppose it ought to make us grateful we can still feel the nip of this blasted autumn . . . George was a merry lad, for all he’d been kicked about the globe like a stone in an alley. Down where we worked, at the teak plantation, the natives gave him a name I can’t pronounce—your poor mother could tell you, if she weren’t in Heaven—but it meant, as far as I understood it, a type of squirrel. And he was just like that, a gingery leaping squirrel with keen black eyes. I remember once at Christmas, when we were invited to dine with the plantation owner, Vermeiren, a bloodless Belgian with fangs like a mastiff, he had a bit of fun with George over that nickname. ‘You do realize,’ he drawled, ‘that the natives eat these squirrels?’

  “‘Ha, ha! They are funny fellows,’ laughed George.

  “I laughed too, as would any man who had lived all year on millet porridge, and now found himself at the Belgian’s table facing a guinea fowl poached in French wine. I laughed, I tell you; I opened my mouth and howled.

  “Vermeiren showed his fangs. ‘Oh yes,’ he went on softly (and George and I both cut our laughter off short, so as not to drown him out), ‘that little animal is quite popular with our dusky friends. Its stomach, I have been told, is full of oil. They prick the stomach—so!—collect the oil, and serve it to the chief.’

  “When he said ‘So!’, he poked his finger in the air, toward George’s midriff. His nail was long and yellow, his hand elegant and, for the tropics, marvelously clean. I noticed George turn pale, and felt a little unsteady myself.

  “‘They eat all sorts of disgusting things,’ said George, with an effort. ‘Monkeys. Grubs.’

  “‘So they do!’ answered Vermeiren, with ghastly cheer. He addressed himself to his fowl, sawing his knife against the plate, red wine sauce mingling bloodily with the cassava that served us for potatoes. ‘And men, of course!’ he went on. ‘You will have noticed how they file their teeth. Personally I would find it perturbing to have the name of a squirrel. I would find it most unlucky to have this name. As for me, they call me One Gun. Because of my Juliette. This satisfies me.’

  “He pricked up a quivering, reddish bit of meat with his fork, and motioned with his eyes toward the rifle hanging on the wall. This was his hunting gun, called Juliette after his wife, who resided at Marseilles, where, to judge from his furnishings, she embroidered quantities of tablecloths.

  “I do not know why the Belgian chose to rattle George in this manner. Perhaps he was trying, in his rough way, to put some backbone into the lad: for George was Vermeiren’s overseer, charged with ensuring the productivity of the farm, and meting out punishment as required. In the early days of our employment, Vermeiren had often grumbled that George was too soft. On one occasion, I recall, the Belgian had actually brought forward, as evidence, a recently disciplined native called Francisco, and, exposing the native’s back crisscrossed with small welts, demanded if this was what George called lashes? George protested that he had lashed the black soundly, as anyone could see, and Vermeiren retorted that a native’s back was as insensible as teak, certainly impervious to George’s paltry strokes, and that if George dared shirk again, he would be taught a lesson in lashing upon his own person. So perhaps Vermeiren’s mockery that Christmas was meant to strengthen George’s arm. If so, it was hardly necessary, for George had taken his first lesson to heart, and routinely exhausted himself in his exertions with the whip, even putting the same Francisco—apparently an habitual malingerer—into the infirmary at the Catholic Mission.

  “But perhaps Vermeiren had other reasons. Perhaps he was simply possessed by that devil which leads men to tear at each other in a small space. I have often encountered this devil on board a ship; and in that house, the only white men for miles, were we not as three sailors launched on a Stygian sea? The darkness, Sally, the closeness of the place! I can scarce describe it. The windows were sheathed in white netting against the mosquitoes, and not a breath of air came through: the flames of the candles on the table stood up as straight and motionless as pikes. After dinner, George attempted to lighten the atmosphere with a carol. His voice faltered reedily into the massy night. I joined him for a few bars, but soon stopped from depression of the spirits, and he went on alone. I gave my love a cherry.

  “The suffocating loneliness, the density of the forest. You couldn’t see more than five yards in any direction. It weighed on you. It’s the reason we felt so lighthearted on that trip up the Nile, the trip I was telling you about, to Meroe . . . But the forest, my God: sickness and heat and work. I kept the accounts in an office with a tin roof, so hot I’d feel my brains boiling by ten o’clock. That heat! And George stood in it all day. It took its toll on him. His fevers were terrible, enough to break your heart.

  “‘Get back, get it away.’ That’s what he said the night your mother came to see us. She wasn’t your mother then, of course, just a nurse from up the river. I’d sent word to the nuns at the Mission to rush somebody down to us, for I was sure George could not live another day. ‘Easy, George,’ I told him. ‘This is a nurse from the Catholics come to make you well.’ All the same I had to hold him down on the bed. Weak as he was, he thrashed in my arms like a seal. ‘Get it away, oh God,’ he moaned. And your mother bent over him in her white dress.”

  White, like a lily.

  Sarah fingers the silver crucifix at her throat. This is her inheritance from her mother, who died when she was three years old. This, and a few dresses, and two pairs of shoes. She has let out the dresses, but she cannot wear the shoes, which are too small. She keeps them lined up underneath her bed. When she was very young, she used to bring them into bed with her. She gave them names: one was called “Maiyebo.” To remember this now, this naming of the shoes, causes the heat of shame to slip up her neck.

  She can no longer recall her mother’s face.

  Her father gestures with his pipe, and she fills it. He has told her the sweet smoke does him good. She helps him light the pipe, then tucks the blanket more snugly around his wasted legs. She remembers a dream, a song.

  If only it were possible to control one’s dreams!

  If it were, she would dream the same dream every night. A dream that has only come to h
er a few times. Fragments of glittering color and a dry, delicate scent. A dream of swinging. A dream of a structure of light.

  Light. Sharp pieces of radiance. No fog. A snatch of song in a lost language. Maiyebo. The name of a mushroom? A comical song. Someone bounces a baby on her knee. Mi a bi nga ro berewe te. “I’ll never see you again.”

  “You’re not . . . you’re not too lonely, are you, Sal? Well, I know, but I can’t help worrying. I think sometimes that we ought to have stayed in the forest. That I ought to have raised you there, among . . . But after we lost your mother, it was too difficult for me, taking care of a child alone. I didn’t know what to do with you, and there was your aunt, too, writing to me about my Christian duty, and the life you might have here. And, of course, there was George. Passing me like a stranger, day after day. Three years like that. Without a word. I suppose a part of me thought that after your mother was gone . . . but no. He kept his vow. ‘If you do this thing,’ he told me, the night before my wedding, ‘if you enter into—that—you’re dead to me.” He was trembling, white, as if in the grip of one of his fevers. I thought he’d get over it.

  “I thought he was still shaken up from the scare we’d had on the farm that year, and that he’d soften and come around in time. It must have affected him more deeply than I thought. I should have known, now that I think of it. I should have recognized the signs. The way he pounded on my door that night. ‘Come out, come out!’ That high-pitched scream. I tell you, I thought the house was on fire. I rolled out of bed and stumbled across the room, and when I opened the door he practically fell into my arms.