How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  Three songs on the Bilma CD spoke of Africa to me. I put that CD back in the stereo and listened to those songs again, just the ones that seemed little affected by a foreign musical idiom. It’s not that I don’t like jazz. I like good jazz. It just seemed to me that when Hamane Oumarou chose to adopt jazz, he lost a power in his music that spoke to me even as a boy. I could get jazz anywhere. What I couldn’t get was the music of Niger, and that was what I had wanted. There was evidently a reason I had stopped buying Hamane Oumarou records — they had stopped giving me Africa.

  Well, I had Africa now, I thought, and it was big and hot and dry — an Africa different from what I had imagined it to be as a boy. I took off my earphones, put the Bilma CD back in its jacket, and stood up to go. I put the CDs back in the Recordings box, and it occurred to me to wonder whether Hamane Oumarou and any of the other members of his group might still be alive and living in Niamey, or even anywhere in Niger. If I could find one of them, I could perhaps discover a way to listen again to the music of that first recording.

  I pulled down the box of correspondence and started thumbing through it, looking for the most recent letters and, perhaps, an address. The correspondence was arranged in chronological order: the first letters were from a recording studio in Paris that had heard of Hamane Oumarou and was interested in recording his music. There were letters Hamane had written from Paris to relatives in Niamey, and for years, it seemed, Hamane and his group had lived in Paris, and all of the correspondence went to addresses there. There were letters about the fire and the rerecordings — and then, interestingly enough, letters in which Hamane Oumarou steadfastly refused to consider rerecording Niger!, though why was not clear. After those, I found letters sent to Hamane Oumarou, then at an address back in Niger, in the city of Zinder — letters from the other members of Hamane’s group asking him to come back to Paris. The letters all seemed hurried and desperate, and it became clear that Hamane was somehow involved in the political upheavals between the fall of the last military dictatorship in Niamey and the going dry of the Niger River.

  Then I found a letter of appointment from the king of Zinder: Hamane Oumarou had been court music master. After the fall of the dictatorship, the Hausa had attempted to break away from Niger to form their own kingdom centered around Zinder. I knew that the Hausa movement had been a conservative one, and that the court music would very likely have been the kind of music I loved Hamane Oumarou for, not jazz. I wanted to hear that music — and I wondered what it would be like now, if Hamane Oumarou were indeed still alive. The Hausa kingdom had failed, of course, not so much for lack of battlefield skill as for lack of water. In the years of civil war, Hamane had received letters in Zinder from Paris — from old friends, royalty payments, and the like. They were all collected here. After the fall of Zinder, the Hausa king had been placed under house arrest in Niamey, and I had reason to believe that Hamane Oumarou was indeed in Niamey with his king and what was left of his court: the last letters in the collection were sent to Hamane Oumarou at an address in Niamey, and they were from the Hausa king thanking Hamane, among other things, for his efforts to preserve Hausa music — which had evidently been recently recorded under Hamane Oumarou’s direction, this time by anthropologists. I had to wonder, again, about Hamane Oumarou’s refusal to rerecord Niger! He had recorded authentic music again, just a few years before I had come to Niamey. So why not Niger! The last letter from the Hausa king was but one year old. I wrote down the address, put back the box of correspondence, turned out the light, and left the music room.

  On the way out, I stopped to look again at the Mungo Park engraving. I could see little of it now, in the darkness of the museum: only the broadest outlines of a wide river shaded by trees — a verdant past that gave some people hope of bringing about a verdant future. And it seemed that Hamane Oumarou had gone back to the musical beauty of Niger’s past to preserve it too for the future, and I liked him for that.

  It was after ten when I walked back up to the front desk and paid the charge for using the light. The girl there handed me my plastic water bottles. I had forgotten my water. In my rekindled interest in the music of Niger I had forgotten my water! I hurried back to Sekondi Usala’s. The street around his house was a riot of hundreds of thirsty, sweating people crowding up for water, carrying tubs and buckets and empty bottles and skin bags. Women carried crying babies strapped to their backs, and everyone stomped dust up into the air. I waited in that chaos until eleven and got no water and never saw Sekondi Usala so I could show him the receipt from the museum and let him know that I had gone, and I washed my face in beer that night and before going to bed wrote Hamane Oumarou a letter asking him if I could meet him and talk to him about his music and sent it off to the address the Hausa king had used.

  On Monday of the following week, I had a reply. Hamane Oumarou would be pleased to receive me that very night at seven. I read the letter and went into a panic to get clean. Sekondi Usala would not sell water until after sundown, of course. I had made a couple of friends at the Canadian embassy, and one of them took me home with him and gave me a liter of water. I stoppered up his sink and managed to take a sponge bath and even wash my hair and shave. Afterward, it seemed good to walk down the street not smelling of beer.

  I walked to the house of Hamane Oumarou, which is on Yantala Street looking down over a series of dry bluffs into what had been the riverbed of the Niger River before it went dry. Hamane Oumarou was waiting for me. He was a short, thin man dressed in a white cotton abiyah and sandals. He had very little white hair left on the top of his head. We introduced ourselves and shook hands, and he blessed me in the name of Allah and invited me in. I had to stoop to walk into his house, but the ceilings inside were high. The house was built of stone and was cool, and I wondered if it was money from the Paris recordings that had built it or if it had been money from the Hausa king.

  Hamane led me to a small room that looked out over the dry Niger. The room seemed set up just to drink coffee in: it was furnished with two wood chairs, a small wood table, a stereo with CD player and turntable, along with a microwave coffee service against the far wall under a cabinet for cups and saucers. On the wall facing the dry Niger were framed reproductions of the Mungo Park engravings I admired — including, in the center, the one that had been on the jacket of Niger!

  But we could not talk about music then. As a guest, I was required to drink at least three cups of my Muslim host’s thick, black coffee and talk about anything but the business at hand, which was music. So we drank coffee and brushed flies away from our eyes and talked in French about water and the getting of it, the massacres in Mali and the growing refugee problem, the success or lack of it of the more humane population-control methods in Niger.

  “You will take more coffee?” Hamane asked after I finished my third cup.

  “With pleasure,” I said, and he filled my cup. This would be the cup I would not finish, I knew.

  Hamane filled his own cup, but did not touch it. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. “You are kind enough to know my music,” he said.

  I told him about the records I had had as a boy, and he smiled and seemed delighted that a boy in America had had two of his records, and that that boy had loved them.

  He told me about his work with the Hausa king, and then he played his copies of the anthropologists’ recordings of his court music. I listened until the sun had set and Hamane had lit candles in the walls. The music was all I had hoped for: the repeated chants I remembered, growing in complexity and rhythm and movement till I could hardly stop myself from joining in, but I smiled and Hamane smiled with me to see my obvious joy in the Hausa music.

  “There are many tapes,” he said, finally. “I will ask you back to hear them all.”

  “And I will gladly come,” I said. If his music had subconsciously influenced me to work in Africa, it was an influence I gladly accepted and acknowledged.

  He stood to put his tapes back in t
heir cases, and I looked beyond him at the engravings on the wall, flickering in the candlelight. I thought again of the record Niger!

  “May I ask you one question before I go?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Hamane said.

  “Why did you not rerecord Niger!?”

  He put down his tapes and looked at me. “Was it that music that you were trying to find again in the museum?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “It was like the music you heard and loved tonight.”

  “Yes, it was,” I said.

  “Wait here. I will find my copy of Niger! and play it for you,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to impose —”

  He held up his hand. “It is the only way for me to answer your question. When you hear the music again, you will understand why I could not rerecord it.”

  He crossed to the windows and opened them wide. “While I am gone to get the record, listen to what you can hear out of these windows,” he said, and he left the room.

  I listened and could hear a truck on a road back in Niamey. I heard a dog barking south of us, in the Gaoueye district. I heard the wind blow along the dry course of the Niger.

  Hamane returned with his record. He handed me the jacket after he took the record out and put it on the turntable: the Mungo Park engraving was as I remembered it, and I felt again like a boy, except that now I was with the man who made the music I loved.

  He put the needle down, and the music started, scratchy. “What do you hear?” he asked me, right away.

  “Your voice,” I said. “A drum.”

  “What else?”

  I listened. “Another voice.”

  “What else?”

  I listened, but could hear only the two voices and drums.

  “What do you hear behind the music?”

  Then I realized. “Water?” I asked.

  He picked up the needle and put it back down in another song. “What do you hear now?” he asked.

  This time I was listening for the water, and I heard it in the background. “Water again,” I said.

  “What here?” he asked, putting the needle in a different place.

  “Water.”

  “And here?”

  “Water.”

  He let the music play after that, but walked to the windows and looked out. “The water you hear,” he said, “was the water of the Niger River.”

  We were both quiet for a time, and I listened now, not so much to the music as to the sound of the water behind it.

  “We taped hours of the sound of the river and dubbed it in on a track behind our music when we recorded it in Paris,” Hamane said. “We wanted the river with us in our music when we began because the river was our country. Those tapes of the river were lost in the fire, too.”

  And I understood. “You could have reproduced the music,” I said, “but not the sound of the river.”

  He did not look at me. “What did you hear out of these windows when I left you here to listen?” he asked.

  I told him what I had heard. He turned off his music and had me stand at the windows with him, looking out at the dry Niger. We listened to the wind in the riverbed till the candles guttered down and one had gone out. Hamane Oumarou led me to his door then, and I walked back to my hot rooms that had no running water. I had three beers hidden under my bed, and I drank one of them alone in my room, then took off my clothes and lay down on my bed, but my windows were open and the wind made the windows rattle and I could not sleep for a very long time. All the sounds that night were harsh and dry.

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  BANGKOK

  I woke and did not open my eyes. I kept my breathing steady. I had heard two Chin whispering unintelligible words near my feet. The three women keeping watch did nothing. Were their backs all turned away? I shouted, threw off the furs, grabbed my gun, and crouched down, barefoot on the rampart in the falling snow.

  Chin soldiers. Two of them, and on the walls of Bangkok. Sirikit, Nuam, and Amphan stumbled up behind me. “Narai!” Amphan shouted.

  The Chin laughed and drew their swords and swung them above their heads. I shot the Chin again and again — But hit only the stone battlement, spattering red sparks on the snow. The light from the gun crackled in the cold air.

  Sirikit knocked the gun from my hands. “Ghosts again, Narai?” she asked.

  The women could not hold me back from kicking through the snow where the Chin had stood. There were no Chin.

  Nuam threw me my coat. I pulled it on. Sirikit brushed the snow from my gun and handed it to me, butt forward. I strapped it against my right leg. “I won’t let you sleep with the gun anymore,” she said. “What if you shot one of us coming up with wood?”

  I sat down to rub my feet dry and pull on my boots. The women, dressed like men, huddled back down around the fire. The fire kept only our pot of oil hot. But I did not allow my body to feel the cold, and I did not listen to the women. “I will go to the wat and get you bread,” I said. The women looked at me. I hurried down the stairs and did not look back. I did not want the women to ask me why I thought the monks would have bread to give us, today.

  I had seen Chin on the wall, Chin who were not there, and it was not the first time. I did not want to lose my mind.

  The monks had no bread, and they had no time for me. They were preparing for Chettha Dhanarat, the high monk, to go to the Chin to offer them lands the sea had left us. Chettha had dreamed of doing this, “of letting peace go into the warm world that will come in a thousand years.”

  “Go to the gardens,” one monk said. “Chettha is there. You did not get his blessing before you left us. Get it now.”

  The monks of Chettha’s wat had cared for me when I was sent wounded to Bangkok. But when the Chin army had surrounded the city, I would not wait to heal or to be blessed. I had dressed and left the wat.

  Now I needed Chettha’s blessing.

  The Chin had shot so many holes in the acrylic roof over the gardens that the roof could not be mended. As I entered, snow was falling on trees and on ground that had never known snow. Dry leaves crackled under my feet. Birds that needed warmth lay dead in branches and on the yellow grass. I passed monks in boots and heavy coats collecting the last silk harvest. Far off, I saw the rice paddies brown and dry and wondered what the monks would cook on holy days.

  Chettha knelt by the pool across from the reclining Buddha of the gardens. In the Buddha’s upturned hand lay a rare bird, dead. Its right wing had been crushed, and it had crept into the hand after the bombing, to die there. Its body was covered with green and blue feathers, and its tail spread into a fan of many colors: gold, red, blue, white, green. There were no more birds like that, unless they had them in Ayutthaya-by-the-Sea.

  I knelt a little ways off, to wait for Chettha to notice me. Chettha’s head was shaved. He wore only a loose yellow robe but did not shiver. The reflecting pool was freezing. A thin ice had formed around the stone banks and was creeping to the brown lilies in the center.

  Chettha said nothing for half an hour. I could not sit in one position that long and moved my legs twice. Finally Chettha looked at me and pointed at the bird in Buddha’s hand. “Take that bird to the poor,” he said. “It will make a fine meal.” He stood to leave.

  “I need your blessing,” I said.

  He stopped and looked down at me.

  “I see Chin on the walls. I’m afraid of going insane. The monks told me I might ask for your blessing.”

  “But I’ve seen dead Chin, too,” he said.

  I stared at him. He called what I had seen dead Chin — ghosts — not lunacy. He stepped forward and put his hands on the sides of my head. “Keep your mind. And may you always find food to give,” he said, and was gone.

  I gave the bird to a little boy dressed in rags. “The monks had no bread,” I told the women. I did not look at them. I stood on the wall and watched Chettha and three of his monks leave Bangkok. They walked through the north gate, away from the w
alls, toward the Chin camps. The monks were chanting mantras, holding their palms open in front of them, their yellow robes fluttering in the wind and the snow. I called the women to watch, but they soon sat back down around the fire.

  I watched an hour on the walls, looking north into the falling snow, hoping for peace. When the snow eventually thinned, I could see far up the Chao Phyra. When the Chao Phyra froze over, the Chin would walk up it into Bangkok, if Chettha failed, laughing at the oil we’d try to throw on them from the walls. Nothing moved on the white plains. Snow hissed and popped on the oil.

  I smelled meat. The women were cooking.

  “The boy looks away for food,” Nuam said. She handed me a spit with a rabbit breast. The meat was black, cooked through, salty.

  “More,” I said, handing back the spit. The women laughed. “We’ll cook more if you kill more.” I wanted more food. I wanted a rabbit to burrow out from under the drifts so I could kill it with the light and then try to beat the snowy owls and the gyrfalcons to the red spot on the snow. I unstrapped the gun. The metal stuck to my fingers.

  Nothing moved in the snow. The women uncoiled the rope. Sirikit tied it around her waist so I could hurry over the battlements and down the wall if I shot something. It would be safer to hunt with Chettha bargaining with the Chin. The generals had not let us hunt over the walls. The Chin wore the white furs of bears and wolves. We could jump from the walls and be killed by Chin we had not seen. But now our generals — and our captains and lieutenants — were dead, and I fed the women of my watch. The women could not watch with patience, hungry.

  Wind blew snow off the drifts. Above Bangkok, the clouds were breaking. Without clouds, the night would be cold. The rabbits would not burrow out. Birds were circling the river and the plains, watching us, watching for the rabbits we wanted. “Will you cook a bird, Nuam?”