The Camel Bookmobile

by Masha Hamilton

  He was wrong, Matani decided. The matter with Scar Boy would be resolved, and easily, in the morning. The infant in the story would recover. Matani himself would have a son, many sons. He would shed his superstitious side, so unbefitting a teacher.

  “Husband?” called Jwahir from inside the house, more formal than usual but in a tone rich with unexpected tenderness. He’d thought she was still angry about the bookmobile, but in her voice he heard only love. How much he still had to learn about this creature, his wife.

  “My dear?” he answered eagerly.

  “My father of mine is here to see you,” Jwahir said.

  My husband of mine. That’s what she used to call Matani, letting her voice slip into the charcoal range. It had always been a prelude to intimacy. But it had been many weeks since she’d used that lusty phrase with him.

  Matani cleared his throat, rose, and extended a hand as Jwahir and her father approached. Her father’s beard was dyed orange in honor of his age and position in Mididima. He’d only recently begun coloring it, and the sight of it still startled Matani. “Welcome,” he said. The two men shook hands for a full minute, the expression on Jwahir’s father’s face enduringly solemn.

  “News of the night?” asked Jwahir’s father

  They moved together into the hut. Jwahir left them alone there. “All is well,” said Matani. “And your news of many nights?”

  “My family is well, thank you,” said Jwahir’s father. “Although can you tell me of my daughter?”

  Of course, Jwahir spoke to her father every day, and perhaps, Matani realized uneasily, more frankly than she spoke to her husband, with whom she was so elusive. Nevertheless, custom required him to answer his father-in-law’s routine questions before the conversation could move forward. And forward it must go—Jwahir’s father never visited Matani simply to chat.

  “Jwahir is my home’s adornment,” Matani said. “I thank you for her.”

  Jwahir’s father nodded stern acknowledgment. “No dust storms have troubled you?” he asked.

  “Not one.”

  “And you are eating as needed?”

  How wearying, this old-fashioned, time-consuming practice of asking and answering to display a certain stiff decorum. During the six years Matani had spent in Nairobi, he had not once missed it. He managed—just—to keep his smile as he nodded at Jwahir’s father. “Thanks be for your concern,” he said, attempting a tone of polite finality.

  His father-in-law replied with another question, signaling that he was prepared to go on for some time yet. “How are the children learning?”

  Only a substantial bride-price had persuaded Jwahir’s father to agree to Matani’s marriage to his sole daughter. Jwahir’s father was a wealthy man by Mididima’s standards, but with two wives and eight children, he always needed more. He would be less formal, Matani knew, with a son-in-law he liked, one with whom he could identify. He viewed Matani as a man disappointingly trapped by his own brain and unable to contribute meaningfully to his people.

  Still, how much of this distantly polite conversation was necessary in order to make that point?

  “Please,” Matani said, gesturing decisively to the rug.

  “May you have many children of your own,” his father-in-law said—a bit pointedly, Matani thought. Then he sat at last, allowing Matani to do the same. “Forgive my rudeness if I come quickly to my topic,” he said.

  Matani couldn’t keep his eyebrows from rising.

  Jwahir’s father cleared his throat. “There once lived a family in our tribe,” he began, “who’d long been known as the best of hunters. They knew how to run in the night. They were respected, and brought much food.” He nodded solemnly and placed his hands on his lap, palms up. “This was long before you were born, or I, or even my grandfather, who told it to me, having heard it from his own grandfather. This is one of our stories, Matani,” he said, as though Matani might miss the point.

  “I probably know it, then,” Matani replied.

  “It would do you to hear it again,” Jwahir’s father said. He cleared his throat. “One spring day, into the family came a cross-eyed baby. A boy, as fate decreed, though a girl in such a condition would have been easier to embrace. The family, of course, feared the son would spoil their reputation, though no one spoke of it.”

  He looked expectantly at Matani, who shifted his weight from one side to the other rhythmically to try to demonstrate interest in the story being told so slowly by the father of his dear Jwahir.

  “At the same time, we fell upon a harsh year. A Little Hunger, not a large one. We could have survived it. This family still wanted to be known as exceptional hunters, but they came home each night without a kill. Finally, two of the family’s young men stole from another tribe and claimed the bounty was their own. The tribe gave the family thanks and ate the food without knowing it was tainted. We didn’t know until the other tribe’s elders came. We had to give three cows in compensation, although they were three we could hardly spare.”

  Jwahir’s father sighed. “You’ve already imagined the outcome,” he said, and Matani sank a little in relief to think an outcome was approaching. “It took only this for everything to change. In the next year, eight of our tribe died, including the cockeyed boy. When one is shamed, disaster follows. Always.” He pressed forward from the waist, his face close enough to Matani’s for them to drink from the same cup if they’d had one between them. “You understand my meaning?”

  There it was, the question Matani had hoped to avoid. He looked up to the ceiling and down at the floor, waiting.

  Jwahir’s father betrayed impatience in his tone. “The books,” he said, “must be returned,” he said.

  Matani sat straighter, now keenly interested. He had not expected Jwahir’s father to touch upon this topic of Scar Boy and the missing books. “You mean you want the library to keep coming?” he asked. This would be a change, and an important one.

  His father-in-law’s eyebrows knitted in impatience. “The threat to end the camels’ visits has nothing to do with my topic. This is a question of honor and survival. For all of Mididima. For you personally.”

  Matani rubbed his temples and took a deep breath. “So you mean to compare stolen meat to missing books?”

  “I am speaking of disgrace. And the fact that you are the husband of my daughter. She is not to be dishonored.”

  Matani studied his father-in-law for a breath—not too long, or it would be disrespectful. They were getting to the heart of the matter, he thought, but he had no wish to discuss it. “This is a simple misunderstanding,” he said, “that I will resolve with Scar Boy by midday tomorrow.”

  Jwahir’s father dismissed Matani’s words with a wave of his hand. “Scar Boy. He talks to evil spirits and, beyond that, opens his mouth only for eating.”

  “Evil spirits?” Matani could not completely stifle his scoffing tone.

  “In becoming civilized, you’ve lost touch with the basic forces of the world,” Jwahir’s father said. “The fact is, your father should never have helped save the mangled child.”

  “My father…” Matani felt blood beating beneath his eyes. “My father—”

  Jwahir’s father interrupted him. “Please, Matani. We’ve grown more heated than I wished. Your father was, in essence, a good man, and I don’t wish to dishonor him or discuss history now. It is the future that concerns me.”

  “My father—” Matani began again.

  “You can better understand it this way, perhaps,” Jwahir’s father said. “The luck of our tribe is like a stockpile of grain, a guard against future drought. In his unlikely survival, Scar Boy used up our store of good luck. That’s all. But we can’t let Scar Boy waste it again. It is better for you to speak to the boy’s father.”

  “Abayomi?” This was an unwelcome prospect, though Matani would have trouble explaining why, even to himself. Abayomi, seven years Matani’s senior, was quiet and deliberate, both in making the tribe’s drums and in living his life
. The exchanges between him and Matani had always been polite. Yet in Abayomi’s presence, Matani always had the sense that he was being evaluated, and coming up short.

  “It is really a matter to settle between the two of you,” his father-in-law continued. “After all, Abayomi is responsible for Scar Boy. And you are responsible for your library.”

  “I can see this through with Scar Boy himself,” Matani said. “Also, it is not my library. To hold me accountable for every book in every hand—it’s unreasonable.”

  Jwahir’s father frowned. “Recover the books,” he said. “Then, let us choose to send the library on its way.” He waved his hand as though to stop Matani from speaking. “Let us tell them that when an elder dies in Mididima, a dozen libraries are lost, each more valuable than the one that comes on camels’ backs.”

  “No one thinks to replace one with the other.”

  “Intended or not, it will happen. The young will begin to think the words of the books are more important than the words of elders. And then we will slide into a world that you would say holds greater learning, but that I would say holds less.”

  “Before the library, our young had already started—”

  “And we are fighting to discourage that, not embrace it.”

  “If we are to survive as a tribe, we must gauge the wind’s direction,” Matani said.

  “Or shield ourselves from it.” Jwahir’s father cleared his throat. “This slim disease that sucks the body dry—it is worse than drought. Even in places where they can read, they cannot find a cure. We have been spared. Why? Because we remain apart. And what of these children you are teaching? Do you want them to live among the girls you described to my daughter—what are they called?—the Coca-Cola girls? Do you want them to become that?”

  Matani felt himself flush. He regretted sharply ever telling Jwahir about the girls, as young as nine years old, in the dusty, destitute towns on the way to Nairobi. Men bought them a cool drink that no one but he had tasted in Mididima—Coca-Cola—and got sex in return.

  “Books have nothing to do with that,” he said.

  “They are all of the same distorted world.” Jwahir’s father waved both hands in clear frustration, his voice raised. “And they think to teach us?” He took a deep breath. “But let’s not discuss this further now. Get the books back quickly from Scar Boy, so we don’t have to act against the boy ourselves. Reestablish Mididima’s honor. On the importance of this, we can agree?”

  Matani hesitated before answering. “As far as that bird flies, yes.”

  Jwahir’s father rose. “May the sun shine warm on your left shoulder, cool on your right, until we meet again,” he said, moving quickly toward the door now as though he couldn’t wait to get away. “And may my daughter be well.”

  Matani sank down, conscious of a throbbing behind the bone on the outside corner of his left eye. He felt a flash of anger at Scar Boy. He’d hoped to postpone a debate about the future of the bookmobile until after the camels and their load had become a force of nature, more difficult to stop than to accept. Now, Scar Boy’s stubbornness had caused the issue to be raised too soon. Even after Matani had recovered the books, he feared he couldn’t defer this argument further.

  He was roused from his thoughts by the pressure of Jwahir’s stare. She stood at the door. Her eyes held something intangible. He wondered if she wanted to lie with him this night, create a child. He reached for her.

  “You will talk to Abayomi tomorrow?” she asked as she turned, deftly slipping away from his grasp.

  Though she eluded him, her gaze seemed seductive and her tone undeniably held an undercurrent of risk, excitement, and anticipation. This sort of foreplay was unfamiliar to him. But, praise the ancestors, he would jump at it.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “If that’s what your father suggests, then I’ll do it,” he said, making up his mind then, a private bargain of sorts, the father’s will in exchange for the daughter’s intimacy. “Now, come to me, my Jwahir.”

  But she shook her head. “Read your book,” she said. “I will go to Leta. Come there for dinner when your stomach protests.”

  And before he could think of a reply, he was left staring at the empty place where she’d stood.

  His Jwahir wanted to visit Leta. That was not bad, he reminded himself. That should be comforting, in fact. He could imagine the two friends together. Jwahir would bounce one of Leta’s little ones on her lap, and they would discuss motherly emotions, mother love. Leta would fan that nurturing fire within his Jwahir.

  So this chill that ran down his body was insignificant, caused by the vanishing of the sun—or, more likely, by the book Miss Sweeney had given him. It was not superstition—who, after all, would not be made anxious by the desperation of a baby puffed and feverish from an insect’s sting? That was not a story for evening. He found the novel and hid it in a corner beneath a spare blanket. Then he went out to pace alone around the inner circle of Mididima, just inside the thorn fence.

  Scar Boy

  A MAN’S VOICE SLICED THROUGH THE SEEPING DARKNESS, beckoning like a bent finger. “The daa-aay,” he sang, “the day is turning its corner.”

  Half a dozen others answered him. “Its corner turns.”

  Taban stopped drawing to listen to the sound swell.

  “Gather,” the chanter sang, “against its turning.”

  “Its corner turns,” the men answered again, their numbers already growing, a dozen now, maybe two, more on the way, assembling to meet the moment of day’s collapse. This was the time when camels and cows that normally disdained human company fervently sought it. It was when the earth was turned over to creatures not only stronger of eyesight and hearing, but bolder and more cunning than their daytime brethren. This was when tame was revealed to mean weak.

  Taban savored the shift in the quality of light that came with this boundary, and he welcomed the cover of night. But the men, like the domesticated animals, feared it. For the next hours, those in the kilinge would keep the tribe safe with their drumming and stories and recollections, their praises to the ancestors. Already, the drums—a barrier against nothingness—thumped faster than a frightened heart.

  Taban knew things about the men in the kilinge, even though he’d never been among them there. He knew that the flames burnished their cheeks, making them glow as if from within. And that the fire distorted the shadows so that outside the circle, everything was exposed as alien and undesirable. And that beyond those shadows, absolute darkness gathered like a force and everything that fell within this darkness was deemed irrevocably apart, the other.

  His father, Abayomi, was at the fire now; and so was his brother, Badru. He could be there too, raising his voice with that of the other men, perhaps even playing the drums that spoke so many stories.

  But he could imagine what would happen if he appeared there. They would turn to him, expressions hooded. They would step back to allow him his own space instead of stepping forward to meet him. They would lower their eyes to avoid his gaze, as though it could infect them. And later they would whisper, words like horror and evil and cursed.

  They liked men who resembled them, men with unblemished skin and wide-bridged noses and eyes of polished shona stone. Men who shunned shade, not hovering indoors. They were suspicious of those who were even a little different—and maybe, after all, that trait didn’t belong only to those of Mididima; maybe that’s how all men were, even men of the Distant City or beyond. What did a boy like him know? To them, he was Scar Boy, the distorted. To them, he belonged in the dark, beyond the outskirts of the kilinge. So there he would stay and from there (he repeated now an old vow), he would never ask for anything. He would do without, when he could. And what he needed, he would take.

  He lowered his head, then, and focused, eyes narrowed, shutting out the drumbeat. Soon, all he heard was the sound of his pencil dipping and curving and circling across the page.

  The Girl

  KANIKA CURLED HER TOES
INTO THE DIRT, WAITING FOR her eyes to grow strong enough to thin the darkness. She inhaled the odors of the night: nearly dead fires spitting tendrils of smoke and the musty, sour scent of sleep. When her eyes found their way by the light from the moon and the spill of stars, she went to Scar Boy’s hut and stood outside the wall against which he slept. She felt the ground for a stick and then poked it through a gap between the twigs and dung, low in the wall. On very cold nights, Scar Boy plugged up the breach, but always in such a way that she could push the stick through and reach him. Tonight it was open to the air. She extended the stick until it touched something solid. His side, she knew, at his waist. She probed once, gently, and paused. She didn’t have to poke again. She felt the stick turn—his signal that he was awake.

  She went to wait outside his door. When he came out, they began walking immediately, though slowly, to accommodate his limp. The quiet of the night felt large, and they didn’t break it until they’d eased past the thorn fence and put the huts at a distance. Then he stopped, turned, and faced her. Even in the dark, she could see the drag to his left eye and the twisted, concave deformity of his left cheek, though the mottled purplish skin of his face was not visible. He wore a scarf over his face sometimes when he came outside, but never when he was alone with her.

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  “You don’t say ‘How are you?’”

  “How are you?”

  “You don’t take my hand?”

  She took his hand. “Where are they?”

  He smiled the only way he could, the right side of his mouth lifting. It made him look as if he were sneering, but Kanika knew he wasn’t. “They can’t be returned,” he said.

  “Oh!” she said, dismayed. “You lost them? But how?”

  He cocked his head to one side, looking at her. “I have them. Look at the moon,” he said.