The Bitter Side of Sweet

by Tara Sullivan

  “Wait! Amadou, it’s not like that!” she says, getting up and walking over to me, but I shake off her outstretched hands. In my head I can hear Moke’s voice grumbling about what a rude person his grandson has turned into, but I push that thought away. Why should I care what the wildcat does? Just because we’ve been looking out for each other for a while doesn’t mean that we owe each other anything. It’s not like she’s really my sister.

  “But what about Seydou?” she asks in a whisper.

  I whirl on her.

  “What about him?” I shout. My chest is heaving as I talk, and I feel like I can’t get enough air. “I can take care of Seydou. I did it for years before you showed up, so don’t pretend that you’re the one who knows what’s best for him! I’ll take the medicine with me and he’ll be fine! We don’t need you and your fancy city reading for me to give him the right pills. I don’t need you to make him better.”

  I stop talking and fist my hands against my face because my voice is breaking and I’m never going to win an argument if I’m weak. I have to be strong. I pull shuddering breaths in and out, trying to count them and failing, trying to loosen the metal bands that have been wrapped around my rib cage and are tightening, tightening as I consider leaving Khadija to fend for herself, and taking Seydou safely through the bush to Mali alone. Seydou, who can barely walk; Seydou, who is still spending way too much time sleeping; Seydou, who, in spite of the pills from the dark bottle with the chip at the bottom, is still too warm to the touch and has a swollen stump where an arm should be.

  I feel Khadija’s hand.

  “Don’t touch me!” I shout.

  But Khadija doesn’t listen. Instead, she wraps her arms around me.

  The medicine box is a hard lump between us, but she leans her head against my shoulder and says, “It’s okay, Amadou. Seydou’s going to be all right.”

  And I stand there stiffly, not reaching around her but not stepping away, and I let the tears fall from my chin onto the top of her head where they collect in the ridges of her frayed braids and sparkle up at me in the low light.

  16

  A few minutes later, I step away, still clutching the medicine box in a death grip, and wipe my face with my wrists. Khadija sinks onto her stool.

  I fall into a chair and put the medicine box on the table again. For a few moments, neither of us says anything. Then, in spite of how tired and drained I feel, my curiosity gets the better of me.

  “So,” I say. “You’re a city girl who ended up on a farm in the middle of nowhere working cacao with a bunch of boys from Mali. You’re an Ivorian . . . but your name isn’t Christian and you don’t speak French. You make no sense at all.”

  “Actually, I do speak French,” Khadija whispers unsteadily. “I just happen to speak Bambara too. My last name is Kablan, because my father is Ivorian and Christian, but my mother grew up in Bamako. I’m named after my Malian grandmother, which is why I have a Muslim first name. Growing up, my mama always spoke Bambara to me at home. It was our secret language.

  “And yes, I’m a city girl,” she goes on, looking at her small hands with their soft fingers that told me that anyway. “Mama is a journalist in Abidjan. I grew up in the city and I go to the international school there.”

  I bet it’s expensive, I think acidly, but I’m too tired to take another jab at her.

  “I’m not exactly sure what Mama was working on,” Khadija says, “but she was putting together information for a big report. I’d catch her having whispered conversations on the phone, and she’d leave late at night and wouldn’t tell me where she was going.”

  “What did your father say?” I ask, trying to imagine a world where a woman could sneak out at night and that wouldn’t be a problem. Khadija splays her soft fingers on the table, examining them.

  “My father doesn’t live with us. He lives in France.”

  I stare, sure now that we don’t live in anything near the same world. France? She may as well have said her father was living on the southern tip of the moon.

  “Anyway,” Khadija continues, “it’s Mama and me now, and I wanted to know what was going on. I would ask her again and again, but she wouldn’t tell me. She still treats me like I’m Seydou’s age. She would only say that it was important, and that important people were involved, and that I was safer if I didn’t know anything more. That was a lie.”

  I’m surprised by her sudden bitterness. Her hands are buried in the material of her skirt and her voice shakes when she goes on.

  “Then the phone calls started.”

  I know what phone calls are. The bosses had a mobile phone that they used every once in a while to talk to people who weren’t there, and I’ve seen some of the pisteurs talking on two-way radios. But there must have been something different about these calls because Khadija’s voice doesn’t sound angry anymore, it sounds scared, and she’s stopped twisting her hands in her skirt and is instead holding on to her arms, as if she’s cold.

  “Who were they from?” I ask.

  She looks at me and her eyes are glassy.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Mama started getting phone calls on her mobile that frightened her. Her phone would ring and she would hang up as soon as she heard what the person on the other end of the line was saying. She never said a word, just hung up. And in the mornings, when she would listen to the messages she got overnight, she would hold the phone so tightly I thought the plastic would break, and her lips would disappear, she was pressing them together so hard.

  “I tried to listen to find out what they said, but she would always push me away, and then she would delete the messages right after. I thought that was the worst.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “No. Then we started getting calls at the house.”

  I’m pulled out of her story for a moment while I try to understand why one person would need two phones. To call themselves when there’s no one else to talk to? Ridiculous.

  “Once, I heard a man on the other end of the line,” Khadija continues. “When I said hello, he asked me what my name was.” I can see that her hands are trembling. “I wouldn’t tell him. He laughed and told me to tell my mother that she should be more careful. You know what happens to people who ask questions, he said. And you know what happens to people who answer them.”

  I frown, concerned.

  “Did you tell anyone?” I ask.

  “Awó. But even so, Mama wouldn’t tell me what she was doing. I said I was old enough to know, but she said, Age has nothing to do with it, and kept working in secret.

  “But I was really scared by then,” Khadija goes on. “We were getting phone calls every day, sometimes a couple times a day, or in the middle of the night. And when we’d answer there was just silence on the other end. I said hello, hello into the phone over and over again, and nobody said anything back. But I could hear them breathing, so I knew someone was there. Somehow, that was even more terrifying than when they were threatening us.”

  I know what she means. I was quiet at the farm a lot because quiet can be very scary, and being scary got people to do things if I needed them to. The comparison makes me pause and, with a shudder, I wonder whether my quiet menace ever made the other boys feel as frightened as Khadija felt with the man on the phone. I hope not. I don’t really want to have anything in common with the men she’s describing.

  “Mama decided it was too dangerous to stay in the capital. We packed some bags and rented a little house in San Pédro, a port town. She promised we would only stay there a little while. She said there were only a few more things she needed to find out and then we could be done with the whole project. Maybe we’d go to France, she said, and visit my father. That’s when I knew she was really scared. Mama doesn’t like to run away and she always said we’d never go to France because it’s too cold.”

  “France,” I mumble to myself, trying t
o picture it. I imagine a village like Daloa, but with everyone shivering.

  “I don’t think I would like to go to France,” Khadija says, picking at the rip in her dress. “I don’t have very many friends in Abidjan, but it’s the only place I’ve ever lived.

  “Mama worked like crazy those last few days in San Pédro. She would be typing late into the night, and was awake before dawn making whispered phone calls. She told me I’d be safe in the house with Stéphane and Sandrine, but I was never to go out alone. I sat there, day after day, with my schoolbooks, staring through my window at the garden wall. I didn’t see very much of her.”

  I wonder who Stéphane and Sandrine are. Cousins? Uncles and aunts? But I’m more worried by what she just said.

  “Those last few days before what?” I ask, hardly daring to breathe. I know what it’s like to lose a parent. My mother died birthing Seydou and I remember what it felt like to suddenly have the space she filled in the world be empty.

  “Before I was kidnapped,” says Khadija. And then everything finally makes sense. The ways she never fit in, her fiery determination to escape. She never looked for work here, never agreed to work for pay that wouldn’t come, was never fooled into going willingly. She had been taken by force. That’s why she was fighting so hard to get out.

  “It all happened very quickly. One night, a little after Mama left for one of her secret meetings, a group of men broke into our house. They had disconnected the phone line, and the electricity . . . but the power goes out all the time and I didn’t really think anything of it . . . they knocked out our guard. I tried to fight, and run, I really did . . .” Khadija trails off, and I’m horrified to see that she’s crying.

  “Don’t cry,” I say. I hate seeing people cry. “I’m sure you did. You’re a fighter.” I snort a bit of a laugh. “And a runner. I’m sure you did all you could.”

  Khadija gives me a weary smile.

  “It wasn’t enough. There were a bunch of them, and they were bigger and stronger than me, and they were able to tie me up, and gag me, and put a bag over my head.” She shudders. “It was so dark with the cloth bag on my head. It used to be a grain sack or a rice sack or something and it was full of little bits of grit that kept falling into my eyes and grinding against my face. But the worst part of it was that I had a gag in my mouth and so I had to breathe through my nose. And I could see the bits of rice or whatever it was clogging the holes and filling my nose with dust and it was so hard to breathe.” She pauses. “So hard to breathe,” she whispers again. Then she shakes the memory off and continues. “They threw me in a truck, and though I tried to scream and kick, it didn’t do any good. Nobody could hear me through the gag and kicking them just made them kick me. I finally lay quietly on the floor because I was scared I was going to suffocate.”

  I can barely imagine what that would feel like. I shudder.

  “We drove forever and the roads got worse and worse,” she goes on. “I was tossed around on the floor, and I kept hitting my head because my hands were tied and I couldn’t brace myself. A while later we stopped and I was dragged out and handed off to new men. They tied me, sitting up this time, in a van, and took the bag off my head. They left the gag in, though, so I still couldn’t scream for help, but I was so grateful to them for taking off the bag so I could breathe again that I didn’t even struggle.” She pauses and looks at me.

  “I hated myself for feeling grateful to them,” she says.

  I think over all the times I was grateful for the small mercies of life on the farm. How, deep inside, I knew that food or basic medical care or not getting beaten shouldn’t be a cause for celebration but I felt that way anyway. How I tried not to think about it, because, if I did, I would have hated myself too.

  “I understand,” I say.

  “I thought you would.” Khadija pushes her hands over her face and smooths her braids. She sits up a little straighter. “Anyway, they handed me off once more, this time to a man in a truck, and that last time, they took off the gag. I screamed until I was hoarse, but I was tied up in the backseat and the driver was sitting in front and couldn’t care less. He turned the radio up loud and kept driving. We went deeper and deeper into the bush, away from everything I knew, and I kept wondering where he was taking me, whether he would kill me, and then, all of a sudden, we stop and he comes around and pulls me out of the truck, onto the ground, and I’m standing in a clearing in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by boys and this tall man, Moussa. And the man who had brought me is telling him that I have to be kept here because I’m a guarantee that someone will keep their mouth shut back in the city and he hands Moussa money and then he turns the truck around and leaves.”

  I remember that day. I remember her bruised face and her ferocious eyes. I remember looking away. I do so again.

  “And you know the rest, I guess,” she says softly. “I realized that I had been taken so they could frighten my mama into being quiet, into not publishing whatever it was that she was working on. And I decided that I wouldn’t let them use me that way, that I would escape and get home.”

  She looks at me again, and her eyes are bleak.

  “I thought I was valuable enough that they wouldn’t hurt me. I was wrong about that too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. My big hands are fists in my lap; the muscles of my forearms are standing out in ridges. But all my strength hasn’t been enough to help anyone when they really needed me. When I apologize to her, my voice is a broken thing. “I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?” she asks.

  I don’t meet her eyes.

  “I didn’t stop them. I was right there and I didn’t do anything.” I remember my hope, right as the men came back, that they might be too busy punishing her to come find me, and I feel so sickened with myself that I wish I could die.

  I feel a city-soft hand on my arm.

  “There was nothing you could have done, Amadou.” Tears hit my hands and I glance up at her. Her eyes are dry.

  “I could have tried,” I whisper.

  “You were there afterward,” she says finally. “You’ve been there for me ever since.”

  I shake my head, not quite able to let the guilt go. But still, it feels good to be forgiven. I loosen my fists and put one of my hands over hers and squeeze it.

  “You’ve helped me too,” I say, remembering her pulling Moussa off me so that Seydou and I could get away. “And you did escape,” I remind her. “After, what, only a week?” I do the math in my head. “Six days. They were only able to keep you there for six days. They kept me for two years. You’re pretty amazing for a soft little city girl.”

  This gets a small smile out of her. Then her smile fades.

  “My mama must be so worried, Amadou. I have to get home and let her know that I’m all right. I want you to come with me.”

  I feel ripped in half.

  “But Seydou and I need to go to Mali,” I whisper. “The closer we go to the coast with you, the more likely it is that we won’t get home. I have to get Seydou home.” I let out a breath. “You should definitely hitch a ride in Oumar’s truck. Have him take you to Daloa and then go south and be with your mother. But Seydou and I need to go north.”

  She looks small and lost.

  “But what do I do if those other men find me? What if I can’t make it home? What if Mama never knows what happened to me? I’m scared, Amadou.”

  I’m surprised by how closely her fears mirror my own. I too am worried about the bosses catching us. I too am worried about never making it home. I too don’t want to die invisible.

  I look over to where Seydou’s breath is coming rapid and shallow, then down at where our hands are overlapping. My gut twists.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I whisper without meaning to.

  Khadija puts her other hand on top of mine.

  “Come with me,” she says. “In the ci
ty we have access to a good doctor and good medicines. These moldy pills are so old that I don’t even know if they’re really helping Seydou at all. But my mother can call a real doctor and he can see that Seydou is all right. And then I’ll make sure that we find a way to get you home to Mali safely. Mother has connections with reporters, and organizations, and all kinds of people. Let’s stay together, please, Amadou. We’ll find a way to get you home once we’ve made Seydou better. I promise.”

  I promise.

  It echoes in my head and, without even wanting to do so, I find myself nodding.

  “Okay,” I whisper, and it’s done.

  We’re going south.

  17

  It’s not yet dawn when we wake up to the sound of Oumar singing loudly to himself in the next room. We take the hint.

  Khadija gathers our belongings and I lift the still-sleeping Seydou against my chest and haul him out to the truck, careful to hold him so that the hilt of my machete doesn’t dig into his side. This time we don’t have to rush, since we’re not afraid of getting caught, and I decide, what the heck, and flip open the tailgate to make it easier. I slide Seydou across. He mutters sleepily about being moved, but he’s not shrieking in pain like yesterday, so I pop a few more pills in his mouth and ignore his complaining.

  Khadija boosts herself into the truck and pulls Seydou into her lap. I jump in last and pull the tailgate shut behind me. A few minutes later, Oumar walks straight past us, whistling. True to his word, he drives to a petrol station, fills the tank and his spare container with diesel fuel, and gets on the road again, all without looking at us.

  Khadija grins, and I can’t help it, I grin back. It’s hard to believe that this time yesterday I was dragging Seydou around the bush trying to rescue her. Hard to believe it hasn’t even been a full day since I set the farm on fire and we got out. I decide that, for now, I will allow myself to be happy with how far we’ve come and I won’t let myself fear what will happen next. I settle beside the other two to watch la brosse blur past us as we speed our way southeast.