Fisherman's Blues

by Anna Badkhen

  The sorceress motions for Sokhna to come close, arranges the whimpering girl between her heavy thighs, facing away, toward the bed. Ndongo sits at the foot of the mat, Khady and the baby in a chair across the hut. The sorceress spits a few times on a kerchief, takes off the girl’s blouse and undoes the ties of her skirt. She spits on her fingertips now and whispers something, pats the girl gently on the shoulders and on the back. Spits and pats again. Spits faster and pats, spits and pats, spits and pats Sokhna’s arms and sides and rubs the girl’s forehead and temples and her orderly cornrows, faster still, as if stamping the child with many benedictions, then slows down and stops spitting and draws her left forefinger down Sokhna’s nodulated spine, and, reaching the middle of the back, nods. The girl no longer whimpers. She looks stupefied. Her skirt has fallen around her and she sits with her legs splayed in those pink Pokèmon pajamas.

  Breathe.

  Sokhna inhales.

  With the dull end of a ram’s horn wrapped in green cloth Mère Khady pounds something in a calabash, then places the horn against Sokhna’s back, then against her chest, dull side to skin, like a stethoscope. Against the girl’s shoulder blade. Armpit. Lower back. Clavicle. Blows on the horn: now it is a shofar. The young man on the bed sits up and begins to pick his nose.

  Mère Khady puts down the horn and looks up. Her inhales and exhales laborious, exasperated.

  Why is this girl here?

  She has a stomachache.

  At this the sorceress laughs deeply, hugely.

  This? This is no stomachache! This looks like evil wind to me. This looks to me like Satan.

  She reaches for a plastic bottle of pale-brown liquid, gives it to Ndongo, helps the girl on her feet.

  Bathe her with this.

  * * *

  When Ndongo and Sokhna return from the washroom the girl slips lightly into Mère Khady’s vast embrace. She has perked up. She plays with the ties of her skirt, looks around, studies the dried plants that hang from the rafters. The medicine woman pats dry her bare shoulders with a rag and speaks to her parents.

  You have to take care of your children. You can’t tell small children not to run around in the street, but you can protect them. Trust me, I’m Muslim, I won’t lie to you. This one, it seems that her soul doesn’t work very well. I think you have no protection in your house. So you are letting people cast an evil eye on her.

  She points at Khady Diallo.

  Especially you. It’s a woman’s job to make sure her children are safe. And your husband wasted his time today. If it weren’t for this he would have gone to sea. Instead, he had to come here.

  You’re right, we don’t have any gris-gris at home, Khady says.

  That’s a mistake. You don’t give her herbal baths, you don’t have any gris-gris for her—

  She presses Sokhna’s stomach lightly.

  Does this hurt? No? Okay, God willing when you take the medicine I give you, you will feel better.

  The sorceress gives Khady Diallo a length of thin brown rope with many knots to wrap around Sokhna’s waist and instructs that the girl wear it always. She gives her two bottles of opaque liquid: one dark like coffee, the other pale with green flecks. On the first day Khady must mix a spoonful of the dark liquid with water, salt, sugar, and a whole baobab fruit, bring everything to a boil, take out the baobab seed, and have Sokhna drink the brew. On the second day she must substitute baobab fruit with tea. She must add the other liquid to Sokhna’s bathwater for three days straight. On the fourth day, she must bring Sokhna back for a checkup.

  Thank you, Mère Khady. How much?

  Give me what your heart tells you to give me. And when you return bring me four yards of any kind of fabric. What’s your name, child?

  Sokhna.

  The woman laughs her big laugh again.

  Okay, Sokhna. When you grow up and have a husband you will give me this very pretty dress you’re wearing.

  The sorceress stops me as we are filing out the door.

  I see you are writing things down. Write this: I am a very famous healer. Sometimes I make forty bottles of this potion and send it to France, to Spain, to Switzerland. People all over the world know me! At the airport in Dakar, people step off the plane and the first thing they ask the gendarmes is, Do you know Mère Khady?

  It is an honor to meet you, madame. Thank you for helping my friends’ daughter. If I get sick and I can’t figure out how to treat it I will come to you.

  The woman looks me in the eye. Then she laughs again.

  You won’t get sick.

  On the way out we pass two dozen men and women and a few children waiting in the blue shadow of the mango tree. More patients wait on the porch. Some will spend the night here to have their appointment with the sorceress.

  We were lucky we didn’t have to wait very long, says Khady Diallo. And Ndongo says:

  Next time I return from the sea I will come back to see this woman by myself. I need some good fishing gris-gris.

  * * *

  I’m not surprised, says Fatou Diop Diagne when I mention Sokhna’s illness and the trip to the sorceress. A few days ago that girl came here and she had an abscess on her head, so it became quite clear that Khady doesn’t take care of her.

  We are in Fatou’s spacious sitting room. She is entertaining Amadou’s new fourth wife from Kaolak, a voluptuous woman in careful makeup and many gold bangles who is visiting for a few days. She is sitting on a couch and flipping through television channels with a remote. An Indian soap opera. Hip-hop videos. A laamb wrestling match. Fatou says:

  I don’t understand what kind of a person this Khady Diallo is. She doesn’t talk to any of us. Her upbringing seems to be no good at all.

  Mm-hmm. Girl has no manners, the wife from Kaolak says without looking away from the screen, which she has tuned to a talk show about matrimonial jealousy.

  And Fatou says:

  I don’t know this healer personally but I’ve heard about her. And I’ll tell you something, Anna, my friend. I can’t rule out that because of the discord between Khady and our family, our family genii became upset.

  * * *

  You don’t go to sea if someone is sick at home, fishermen say. In a taxi from Mère Khady’s, Ndongo says he will postpone the Gambia tour. But he is obsessed. Two hours later my phone rings. The Sakhari Soiré sails in an hour. Ndongo wants me to come to see him off, say goodbye. Also, if I no longer need my drybag, he really could use it.

  Last hours ashore, those hours before the insatiable charge of the hunt, are a slough: there is still time. Boys and men board pirogues slowly, as if in a daze. They check flashlight batteries, buy baggies of dry dates, of peanuts, buy extra cellphone credit. They call their girlfriends, lovers, wives. They hold in their hands their flipflops, fuel lines, cellphones, rubberized overalls, provisions wrapped in newspaper or plastic. They do not talk to one another much. They do not smile, these penitents. They watch the sea, toe the surf’s soft fluttering lip. Generations straddle this unsubstantiated faultline, this entry point to the mysterious and vast waterworld, the site of many rites of passage, a point of departure and a port of return.

  * * *

  Hot sticky sun. Tide coming in. Terrycloth clouds on the horizon. Three little oupa boys squat just above the surfline. They are building two sandcastles.

  These are mosques, says one.

  No, these are palaces, says another.

  Whose palaces are these? I ask.

  This one belongs to the president of Senegal.

  No, this one is Yékini’s!

  And this other one is Balla Gaye’s!

  They are beautiful.

  You like them?

  Yes, very much.

  Look, look at this one. This one is for Eumeu Sène!

  Twenty minutes later nothing remains of the sandcastles and the boys are luggi
ng five-gallon jerrycans with water and fuel aboard three different pirogues, getting ready to cast off, heading to sea.

  * * *

  Ndongo is waiting for me on a midship thwart of a beached nine-foot trapsetter. He is wearing gray sweatpants and a flamingo-pink tee shirt, a sweatshirt, a sweater tied crosswise on his chest, blue flipflops on bare feet. He is swinging his legs. Little Sokhna is really feeling much better, he says. She will be fine, inshallah. Did you bring your drybag?

  The Sakhari Soiré’s complement assembles on the shore. Boys will crew the boat on this trip: Ousmane, Ousmane’s friend Ndiaga Kane, Ndongo’s nephew Ibrahima, five other teenagers. Captain Ndongo will be the only adult aboard.

  Ousmane, lips purulent and awful, in blue shorts and a striped gray sweater several sizes too small, is pushing the boat off to sea from the shallows alone. Seagulls shriek.

  Well.

  Well.

  Ndongo and I shake left hands, to warrant fair winds and following seas, to ensure that we meet again in this life. A fisherman’s life, like an itinerant storyteller’s, brims with goodbyes. I watch him and his boys wade aboard the Sakhari Soiré, watch a horsecart back up into the sea and unload the pirogue’s outboard and a spare. I have an impulse to wade in, too, and climb aboard the pirogue one last time and set out even for just a few breaths and then jump off her stern inscribed with my name, splash to shore in dripping skirts. But it would make no difference, cross no real lines, realign no boundaries. It would become a story men eventually would tell at the mbaar, like everything else.

  * * *

  Late afternoon ashore, spring, an hour to high tide. The sun almost directly overhead, boat shadows sharp and short. The sea a boundless incandescence.

  Watch the sea form and reform with each heave, rearrange itself into a sea deceptively new though nothing moving on Earth is older. A traceless wholeness that seems unadulterated, sealed upon itself no matter how much you take out of it, abundant in plentitude and paucity, awash in memory and promise.

  A group of men lounge inside a mbaar, flat silhouettes against the glare. One walks off, kneels by the wrackline facing the water. Why? Why not? I would be praying, too. In a way, I am. The man stands up and turns around and walks back toward his friends, still zipping up his fly. On the ocean, each of us is a mystic and a jester, and nothing ever is what we imagine it to be.

  Acknowledgments

  The generosity and candor of my captains, hosts, and fellow voyagers in Senegal and across the world made possible my research. A casita on a friend’s ranch in the northern Chihuahuan Desert, at the bottom of an ancient sea, made possible the quiet solitude of writing.

  Conversations with my parents, my sister, and my son, Fyodor; sessions with my counselor; and the rise and pitch of my most intimate friendships helped shape and reshape my thoughts about boundaries. Verónica, Thorne, Shenid, Sally, Nicol, Mattie, Lori, Kael, Jim, Gözde, Dominic, Carlos, Basil, Azza.

  Boris Boubacar Diop, Dominic Duval-Diop, Gaoussou Gueye, El Hadji Faye, Bob Jones, Krista Larson, Jori Lewis, Gabi Matthews, and Abdou Karim Sall offered indispensable oceanic advice. My comrades Ben Fountain and David Searcy were early listeners. Thank you, Geri Thoma, for the necessary life preservers.

  Charles Digges, my first reader always, and Becky Saletan, Katie Freeman, Michelle Koufopoulos, Anna Jardine, Maureen Klier, and the rest of the Riverhead crew: your magnanimous attention honors my work.

  Every word in this book is a word of gratitude.

  About the Author

  © Kael Alford

  Anna Badkhen has spent most of her life in the Global South. Her immersive investigations of the world’s iniquities have yielded six books of nonfiction, most recently The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village and Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah. Badkhen contributes to The New York Times, Granta, The New Republic, and Foreign Policy.

  annabadkhen.com/

  AnnaBadkhen

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