“The men haven’t gone anywhere. The cattle still have water; we have food,” Matani said, as if running through a list in his mind.
“My father went alone,” Badru said.
“By himself?” Matani’s voice rose.
Matani’s surprise was understandable; even Taban had been taken aback. They were not a people given to solitary acts; nor did he think of his father as a violator of tradition. Abayomi blamed himself for the hyena’s attack on Taban and rarely left his sons alone at night; as the only parent, in fact, he carried so much responsibility that Taban expected him to eventually end up with a camel’s humped back. Neither Taban nor Badru could guess why their father had gone, though Badru wouldn’t admit his ignorance to Matani.
“He said if you came,” Badru said, “I was to tell you to return after one moon.”
Taban heard another voice then, a woman’s, speaking words in that language he didn’t understand. The foreigner. It amazed him she’d come all this way. It was funny, and a little sad, that Matani thought he needed the white woman to get the books back. That he believed it would make a difference.
Taban dropped his pencil—a gift from Kanika, who’d taken it from Matani’s school—and let his back slump, giving up any pretense of working. Perhaps he would try again later; perhaps he would have to use a fresh sheet of torn paper. With one finger, he traced the lines he had drawn—the arc of a cheek, the stroke of a nose—as he listened.
“Does your brother know Miss Sweeney has come to help recover the books?” Matani asked after a moment.
“We’ve heard,” Badru said.
“So I needn’t speak to Abayomi at all if Sc—if your brother is ready to hand them over. I can also collect them from you.”
“Teacher,” Badru said. “My father’s instructions were so clear I could follow them in the darkest pitch of night.”
Matani sighed. He spoke to the woman in her language. “Fine,” he said to Badru after a moment. “We will come tomorrow morning. But we don’t want to take up too much of Miss Sweeney’s time with this nonsense.”
“Good-bye, Teacher,” Badru said.
Taban heard Matani and the woman move away from their stick-and-dung hut. As Badru came into the room. Taban picked up his pencil, rolled it between his palms, then looked up. The two brothers exchanged a glance. Taban couldn’t say who started laughing first—it seemed to him their laugher came simultaneously. It widened and stretched and filled the room, expanding beyond its original cause. It became powerful and loosened a tightness that had constricted Taban’s chest for days. He rarely laughed as unguardedly as this.
This degree of intimacy between the two brothers was rare. Usually Badru held himself aloof from his strange, deformed sibling. And Taban couldn’t blame him. What if he’d been the normal one, and Badru had the torn face that almost no one could look at without recoiling, that deformed his soul and mangled all his friendships save one? Wouldn’t Taban, too, have sought distance?
Badru stood over Taban’s shoulder, close enough for Taban to feel his warmth. Slowly his chuckle softened and died, and Taban’s died with it. “Kanika,” Badru said, looking down. “You’ve got every detail. I’ve never even noticed her before. But you—you really see everything. How do you do it? Make it so alive?”
This, Taban wasn’t ready to discuss. He didn’t want Badru’s reaction, even a positive one. He may have healed from the outward wounds inflicted by the hyena, but on this matter of his drawings, his protective scab was far too thin. He shielded his picture with one spread hand. Badru took a step away, acknowledging and quickly accepting the distance between the two. In the dart of a lizard’s tongue, the moment was gone, and Taban found himself already nostalgic for it.
“Badru,” he said. His brother met his eyes—a receptive version of his brother, not yet the one of shrugs. “You’re driving him mad, our teacher,” Taban said, gesturing with his head toward the door.
“Me?” Badru grinned. “In truth, you are. You’ve always been a brave one.”
Badru’s words, their unexpected accuracy, thickened Taban’s throat. He didn’t think anyone had noticed the courage required to simply go on as he was. A wave of warmth gushed from his toes to his cheeks and settled, as water, directly behind his eyes. He didn’t reply, though. He couldn’t. He looked down at his hand stretched over the purloined paper, and waited until Badru turned away.
The American
FROM THE SLIGHT RISE WHERE SHE STOOD, FI COULD SEE IN the thin, late-afternoon light the full panorama of Mididima, with its mushroomlike homes and its shallow reservoir, and the sight made her flush with a sense of awe. She felt herself a tiny speck, improbably carried by an Irish mother’s scolding and a library pilot program to this fistful of concentrated life. Men, women, and children were scattered like a hundred colorful handkerchiefs dropped in the grass, their cows and goats with them, untethered, as though favored companions. Where did they find the brilliant reds and yellows in which they wrapped themselves? In New York, fashion favored colors associated with soggy soil and clammy foods—blacks and browns and grays renamed as nutmeg, platinum, eggplant, midnight. Here, the tints were as if from tubs of kindergarten finger paints, the garments like a rap poem, or a shout to their primary god, the Hundred-Legged One—a reference to the sun with its rays as legs.
Fi and Matani stood next to the irrigation system, simple with buckets and hoses, but extraordinarily successful in channeling each drop of water. Matani had apologized repeatedly for the need to wait a day to speak to the one they called Scar Boy. Fi dismissed it as understandable. She knew deep currents had passed between Matani and Scar Boy’s brother, the meaning of which she could only guess. They would get the books back, she was certain. The father clearly wanted to make some particular point first, some issue that must be pressing to him but remained elusive to her.
Letting her eyes slide over the horizon, she spotted a zebra. Watching it, she noticed a movement and picked out a giraffe, and then two others. With their chestnut-colored patches, they were as effectively camouflaged as objects in a hidden-picture game. They were revealed only when they dipped their necks to munch from the top leaves of an acacia. The zebra circulated among them, then stood below like a sentry, front legs splayed, swaying slightly.
“He follows them everywhere,” said Matani, watching her.
“Dreaming of being a giraffe?”
“I imagine he lost his family somehow and he’s longing to find another one to fit into. The young girls, though, like to believe he’s fallen in love with a particular giraffe. They’ve named him the Pining One.”
Fi laughed, then gestured to the irrigation system. “Your father was foresighted. The people of Mididima must feel fortunate.”
Matani gave a small smile. “We have a saying: a donkey always says thank you with a kick.” He shrugged. “But by now, yes, they see that this lets us live better than most. More settled, with more food. Parents are willing to let their children learn during morning hours. In many other tribes, they need the children’s help all day.”
“Books instead of chores. The children must be grateful.”
“Sometimes they are,” Matani said. “Sometimes I use the cane.”
Fi couldn’t stop herself; she cringed. She’d seen the cane in Matani’s home, a deceptively narrow stick that she suspected would make a shrill scream as it whipped through the air. She’d read the human rights reports about children whose bones had been broken for not being able to answer a question, or even for fidgeting in class. She wondered if that had happened to any of Matani’s students.
Matani made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Do you want to walk?”
The sun was on its way down, leaving dark creases in the land. The people of Mididima were being drawn into the settlement’s core as Fi and Matani moved together in the opposite direction. Matani took gliding steps, his arms swaying so that to Fi, it seemed he was responding to music instead of simply walking.
“How of
ten do you use it?” Fi asked after a moment, willing neutrality into her tone.
“Hmm?”
“The cane.”
She felt Matani’s gaze. “Our children are unaccustomed to the demands of formal education. Sometimes they need to be reshaped.”
“Education liberates, but only after one puts on chains, is that it?” Fi asked. “Discipline civilizes, though its methods can be brutal.” She tried to keep her voice light. They walked in silence for a few moments.
“Perhaps, when we think to teach another people about what is right—even if those people don’t know how to read—we presume too much,” Matani said, his voice controlled.
“I didn’t mean—” Fi broke off. “Knowing how to read,” she said, “has nothing to do with this.”
“For us, for instance, it is remarkable that you travel alone.”
“Touché,” she said. “What a quick turn of the tables.”
“What do they think of this—your husband, your parents, your brothers?”
Fi took a deep breath. “I’m not married,” she said. “My parents are dead. I have two sisters and a brother, but they don’t care—or, it’s not exactly that,” she corrected herself. “They do care. My brother, especially, hated it when I moved out of the Bronx, a subway ride away.”
“Bronx?”
“But they don’t get me, especially my brother—I’ve always seemed eccentric to him. Not settled enough. He feels sorry for me. And they do worry.” Fi paused. She was talking too much. “What I mean is, yes, they wish I’d stay home. But they know that ultimately, these decisions are mine.”
“Yours alone?” Matani looked at her closely.
“It’s not the same there,” Fi said, “in terms of family.”
Matani paused next to some dwarf bushes. He pulled off two thumbnail-size grayish leaves, began to chew one, and handed the other to her. “This is a loss, don’t you think?”
Instead of answering, Fi put the leaf into her mouth. It tasted surprisingly refreshing, and not unlike chewing gum. She wondered if Matani would swallow it, or spit it out.
“Why do people have this—what would be the word? To break something?” Matani shook his head. “Why don’t they stay with their families?”
“Dreams and ambitions take some of us far from home.”
“Like you coming here?”
“And you going away to study.”
He looked away then. “My questions are rude,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No ruder than me asking you about the cane.” In fact, she liked him better for his questions. People had been curious about her from the start, but their curiosity was of the sort one might have about an exotic animal, possibly dangerous and definitely unpredictable, best observed from a distance. No one but Matani had been brave enough to try to get to know her.
He spit out the chewed leaf and said suddenly, looking directly at her: “I wish for a son.” The words seemed to emerge of their own volition, making his comment feel like the most personal thing anyone had ever told her. She could see that he had surprised himself by what he’d revealed.
“I can see you as a father,” she said softly.
He looked at his feet, then back up at her. “You’ve been married before?”
She shook her head.
“But you have someone who is yours?”
Such an antiquated way to put it. “Women get married much later in America,” she said. “Like your men do here. I’m thirty-six. It’s not young, but still I think—”
“It’s my age,” he said, grinning, reaching to touch her arm and then slapping his own chest.
His gesture made her laugh. The fact that they’d been born at the same time somehow made Matani seem more familiar. Fi started walking again, long strides that kept her a few steps ahead of him. “How long have you been married?” she asked after a moment, slowing her pace.
“Four years. Almost.”
“Your wife is a beautiful woman,” Fi said. “I’m sure she’s proud of you.”
Matani looked away.
Something was going on between the two of them, probably something simple, a marital spat that she’d interrupted. Fi couldn’t tell him to spill it out, get it off his chest; she hadn’t reached a point in their friendship where she could put a hand on his forearm and say, “Don’t worry, everything will be OK.” In fact—what was she thinking?—she’d never be able to say that. This was a fleeting acquaintance, a few days shared between an American librarian and an African teacher. Why should that recognition leave her feeling, suddenly, so bereft?
There were limitations to language, even when it was shared. Sometimes words were not sturdy enough to hold all the needed meaning. She’d discovered that as a child, when she sought to find her mother in the harried and unreachable widow, and she felt it again now.
“Hey,” she said. “Have you ever tried a cartwheel?” She felt odd asking; she knew it was an unexpected question. But cartwheels used to make her mother smile.
Matani looked at her quizzically. “I don’t know the word.”
She laughed and shook her head, mock-scolding. “A gap in your education.”
Actually, she didn’t even know if she could still do a cartwheel—it had been years. But she tried anyway, demonstrated twice, the bend in the wrist, one hand and then the other, the reach of the legs, the palms as dusty as bare feet, ending it with a yelp, and they weren’t perfect cartwheels but they were fine, and she told him to try. He resisted at first, but she kept calling out encouragement—“Only the giraffes will see”—and finally he plunged forward, his legs bent and raised no higher than his waist.
“Up, up, up to the sky with your feet,” she called.
“Watch me hurt myself,” he answered.
She shook her head and urged him on. “Be more free with it.” And so he did one more, his shirt slipping toward his head to reveal his coiled, muscular stomach—the sight of which caused her own stomach to make an unexpected flip. And then he rocked on his heels and looked at her, grinning sheepishly, but self-satisfied too, and it made her smile, amazed at the power of something so simple in Mididima. And she felt drawn to him at the same time, and she pulled her gaze away and turned her head toward the sky, which had gone dark while she wasn’t paying attention, and finally he spoke. “You are hungry?”
And though she wasn’t, she felt it would be best to nod, and to follow him away from the edge of the settlement, away from their shared giggles and soaring legs, back to the safety, the embrace, the company of so many others.
That night, sitting outside Neema and Kanika’s hut, Fi heard the music begin, the drumbeats scattered at first, then melding together into a trancelike throb that lunged through the darkness, then chanting added to the mix, creating a conversation so profound she couldn’t imagine it would ever be repeated.
She didn’t know the words, so she was left to make up a song, and she invented a summons to the insects of the bush: the fat yellow worms and the menacing long-legged mosquitoes and the flies that lingered on children’s cheeks. And to the animals: the cantankerous camel, the zebra full of longing, the hyena that had attacked Scar Boy. It was a summons, too, to the ancestor-spirits of the men who were making the music; and to the women who were their mothers, wives, and daughters; and even to the ancestor-spirits who gave birth to her: white Irishwoman drawn to an African tribe, a zebra among giraffes.
She thought of the words of Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa: “Here I am, where I ought to be.” She imagined herself for a moment, not an outsider as Dinesen was but living here with an African man; known perhaps as the Library Lady or, even better, the Cartwheel Queen; falling asleep every night with her body spooned in his; absorbed within Mididima’s ancient, chaotic, potent heartbeat.
The Teacher’s Wife
JWAHIRAND LETA, LETAANDJWAHIR. WHEN SHE WAS A LITTLE girl, Jwahir used to imagine that the night wind whispered their names, exactly like that, weaving them together, turning them into one. Jwa
hir and Leta had been friends for longer than either of them could remember, and by now they fit together, though they were vastly different physically and, certainly, temperamentally. Where Jwahir was slender, almost wispy, Leta was solid, her feet steady on the earth. When the mercurial Jwahir grew overly passionate, Leta would take her arm and wander with her across the bush until she calmed. When Leta, on the other hand, turned too serious or was drained of spontaneity, Jwahir—strong despite her slenderness—would wrestle her friend to the ground and tickle her. Their friendship was so intense that when they were younger and still unmarried, they had even talked in giggles about a shared future as co-wives, though secretly Jwahir knew that it could never be, because no one man could love them both equally—if he loved one, the other would not be right for him, since they seemed, to all but themselves, nearly opposites.
Few childhood intimacies, even ones as powerful as theirs, survive the onset of adulthood. But Jwahir and Leta were close even now, with two female circumcisions and two husbands and two babies between them, though their friendship was altered by their female responsibilities. They had less time together. On the other hand, they knew each other so well that three words in conversation often took the place of twelve.
On this morning, Jwahir sat cross-legged next to the drab asabini bushes with her toes touching Leta’s leg, their goats around them, wondering how she could tell her friend what she felt for Abayomi. But that would involve revealing what she didn’t feel for Matani, and Leta liked Matani. Leta would defend him. Jwahir didn’t want anyone talking her out of anything—not now, not when she was so vulnerable, her mind full of the uncertainty of the recently decided.
Yet not telling felt wrong, too, and there seemed no easy solution, so she was preoccupied as she sat with Leta, letting Leta’s latest baby—a beauty, with its wide forehead and wise eyes—curl its fingers around one of hers.
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