“Jwahir!” Her father’s voice cut through the air. This habit of his, yelling out a summons as he approached, always annoyed her. Now, though, his interruption was welcome, relieving her of the need to decide whether or not to tell.
“I’ll go meet him,” she said, getting to her feet. One of the goats, Juju, blond with a brown spot on his ear, followed her, as he always did. Leta liked to joke that Juju believed Jwahir was his mother.
“You call to me as though I were a favored cow, Father,” Jwahir said curtly as he approached. She could get way with a bit of brusqueness because he adored her.
“You have some news for me?” he asked.
News. The word hung in the air. Jwahir’s heart pushed into her neck. Had he somehow guessed about her and Abayomi? Had someone seen them together, deduced the truth, and told him? Might this be her only moment to save herself from the tribe’s punishment? She wished then, and urgently, that she had practiced by telling Leta. To confirm it to her father first would be more difficult than erecting a home in a windstorm.
A moment of silence sat between them. He looked at her appraisingly, frankly curious. “The books,” he finally said, impatiently. “The books. Has Matani recovered them?”
She giggled before she could stop herself. Why should she think what was in her heart was written on her face for all to see? She was relieved, of course, that he didn’t know. But she also noticed a small pit of disappointment. Her secret, she sometimes felt, weighed more than twin elephants.
She stopped smiling then, and looked to the sky. “Father, why do you bother me with this?”
“You’re his wife,” he said, drawing the last word out, giving it special emphasis “Matani, like his father before him, is too fond of a remote and dangerous world. He might sway the young, who don’t yet know that if we stand tall, it is because we stand on the backs of those who came before us. You must act to preserve our traditions. You have strength and ability, my daughter. That is one reason I arranged the union.”
Jwahir dipped her chin to hide another smile. Her father still did not know that he had arranged nothing. Matani had been Jwahir’s choice. Jwahir’s maneuvering, along with Matani’s hefty bride-price, was responsible for the match. It served her, though, to have her father think he’d made the decision.
“I expect more from you,” Jwahir’s father said.
“What, exactly?”
Jwahir’s father sighed in frustration. Jwahir knew that exhalation well; it was an exceptional sigh. It could fill an entire hut and last as long as a year. She reached down to scratch the ear of Juju the goat while waiting.
“The library is from another world,” he said at last, pointing off toward the horizon. “A world that does not serve us. In the Distant City, they’ve lost their connection to what is real. Nothing is as it seems.”
He took her arm and walked a few steps, his voice growing impassioned. “They inject their food with false flavors, Jwahir. They build monuments that do nothing more than spit water. They even capture wild birds, dip them in blue paint, and then set them free to make the sky appear more brilliant. This is the work of the educated?”
Please. Not the birds again. But Jwahir knew from experience that once he’d launched himself on this diatribe, it was best simply to let him finish. Juju the goat lifted his head to nibble at her hand, and she stroked his back.
Her father knelt down and picked up a handful of dirt. “The soil is turning pale,” he said, drama in his voice.
Jwahir knew what that meant. “You think it will be serious this time?” she asked.
Her father let the sand fall through his fingers without speaking. Then he nodded. “Don’t misunderstand,” he said. “We’ve made a place for ourselves on this land for two millennia. We are survivors of the Great Disaster. Few are as self-reliant as we. But we will need all our energy and all our virtue to withstand what is coming.”
“Some say the threat of drought and famine is reason enough to allow our young to learn to read, to find another way,” Jwahir said.
Jwahir’s father shook his head. “Those are words from your husband, not you. The issue is values. Ours are not theirs. We respect our ancestors’ lessons. I know the name of my father’s father’s father’s father. Do they in the city with their books know this?”
Here, Jwahir was tempted to interrupt, to ask whether he could recall the name of his mother’s mother’s mother’s mother. She knew the answer, though. She’d heard this litany before, along with the recitation of the endless list of male preceded by male preceded by male. As if the women did not exist, except as containers shaped by others’ visions, holders of the dreams of fathers, husbands, sons. She felt a surge of irritation coupled with resolve. Like her father, she was traditional. But her father’s words fed her conviction that she had to break with tradition on some matters at least. It was right to risk everything do to what she believed, what she desired and needed—as a woman.
“What is it you want of me, Father?” she said coolly after a moment.
He shook his head. “Sometimes I wish I’d never chosen Matani for you,” he said. “Otherwise, I needn’t be so discreet in pressing for what is best.” He linked her arm through his. “But because I must be judicious where my son-in-law is concerned, your role is crucial. Two things must happen. Matani must recover the books, immediately. And then he must tell the woman we do not wish her further visits.”
Jwahir knelt and put an arm around Juju. “And that is the end of your advice? After all, this is no small job you press on me.”
Jwahir’s father gently touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “There are none more beautiful than you, Jwahir.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Yes, you often say so. But what, at this moment, is the purpose of such flattery?”
“Use your influence,” he said meaningfully.
“Influence?”
“Yes,” he said, raising his voice as though he thought her deaf. “Yes, your…”
And then she understood what he meant, the power that he was too delicate to spell out, the power of a wife to give herself to or withhold herself from her husband. He didn’t know, of course, that she’d already been avoiding joining herself with Matani for weeks, that there was nothing further to withhold.
“He has turned gentle, your husband,” Jwahir’s father said, and the emphasis he put on the word gentle made it clear he did not consider this a compliment. “Persuade him to be less so in his efforts to reclaim the books from Scar Boy and Abayomi.”
At the mention of Abayomi, Jwahir felt her cheeks go hot, and her mind grow distracted. Her father noticed but misinterpreted this. “I’m sorry,” he said, “to be so blunt in regard to the use of your womanly gifts. I would not do it if another way occurred to me.”
Jwahir shook her head to clear it. “Why do you needle me so?” she asked. “If the library stopped coming, that would suit your needs. So let the books go unfound, and the problem will be solved without my involvement.”
Jwahir’s father took both his daughter’s hands. “And that’s why I mentioned the coming drought,” he said. “Honor. It helped us survive the Great Disaster, when we needed not only our wits and our skills, but also the support of our brother tribes and the avoidance of ill-wishing spirits. We must keep our word, always, even to those who intrude without proper knowledge or respect for our people. We must return the books. And then, blameless, we can send them away.”
Jwahir fingered one of her beaded earrings silently.
“I know you understand,” her father said, turning to go. “Just as Matani is a product of his father, you are a product of me.”
Jwahir walked back to Leta, who sat with her baby in her lap, her head lowered. “He’s wrong, you know,” Leta said after a moment.
“Yes, I know,” Jwahir said with a smile. “But about what, precisely?”
“What the camels carry on their backs, we need. The contact with the outside world. The new ways.”
; Jwahir stared at her friend, and then raised her hands to the sky. “You want the books to keep coming? I thought you agreed with me about this.” Her voice, she knew, was sharp. Jwahir was accustomed to differences between them, but this one irritated her severely.
Leta hesitated before meeting her friend’s eyes. “I did. Before.”
“And then, what? She gives you some book to explain the way other people take care of their babies, and suddenly–”
Leta interrupted her. “It’s not that, Jwahir.” She looked down at the baby she held in her lap, the little one reaching for her hair. “It’s her,” she said. “And her older sister. My girls need the bookmobile. They need the possibilities it brings.”
“You sound like Matani,” Jwahir said, more bitterly than she’d intended. “This is not a bad life, Leta.”
“Once, the land gave us more, so we owed it our loyalty,” Leta said. “Not now.”
“A couple of bad years,” Jwahir said, “and you act like it’s forever.”
“Everything changes, Jwahir,” Leta said. “Your father and mine won’t admit it, but they’re old men.”
Everything did change; Jwahir couldn’t dispute that. Everything had changed, in fact. That was how she’d explain herself to Leta, someday. When the time felt ripe. But now, Leta was still pressing her point.
“I look at her,” Leta said, pointing her chin toward her baby, “and I see it. I understand, and you will, later, too. Matani is right.”
“But you and my father argue as though the matter belongs to me.”
“Jwahir.” Leta rubbed her nose against her baby daughter’s cheek. “You know where you sit in Matani’s heart. But think, before you use your influence to try to change his mind. Consider mine. Consider the ones you will have,” Leta smiled, “someday soon.”
Jwahir felt a shudder, thinking of all that Leta did not know.
The Grandmother
THIS WAS NEEMA’S SPACE. NOT THE ROOM ITSELF, FOR which she felt little attachment, but this mat woven of sisal fiber and covered with scraped cowhide on which she slept each night in the company of her granddaughter’s warmth and breath and scent. Over time, this bed had become molded to embrace Neema’s body. It smelled of cattle and earth, and was solid. And whenever she wanted, she could reach out to touch the daughter of her daughter. She’d heard of faraway people who slept in rooms alone, on cloth or feathers. What a sorrow; what a loss. Whosoever slept without others, and on such a bed, would not be blessed with the voyages she’d taken in her dreams, the places where the brushwood and cowhide led her. That person was destined to what she thought of as white sleep, blank and without insight.
As much as she loved her bed, though, she couldn’t deny that tonight the hide felt implacable, tickling her right leg at the back of the knee. The twigs beneath her shoved against her left arm and jabbed at her back. So she tried tricks. She silently recited words from the Bible. She forbade herself to move. She imagined her mother sitting at her feet, rubbing them. She breathed in a pattern: three short gasps in, one long sigh out. That sounded like a cow in the rain with a cold; it did nothing to invite sleep.
The problem was not the bed, she knew. The space around it was the impediment. Normally, Neema lay between her granddaughter and the door. Sometimes she slipped close to her granddaughter, breathing with her, thinking of her own daughter—Dahira, Kanika’s mother, the one who linked them.
Now someone alien lay between her and Kanika, beneath a mosquito net hung on sticks. Miss Sweeney, with her own peculiar noises and smells. Miss Sweeney, who kept flinging a hand onto her forehead and clearing her throat. The people of Mididima had never had a foreigner of any color sleep in their midst. Now this pale woman was right within Neema’s hut.
It must be even stranger, Neema admitted, for Miss Sweeney. To talk and eat and drink among unknown people was one thing; to sleep next to them, another entirely.
Lying in the dark, eyes focused lightly on the ceiling above, Neema tried to imagine Miss Sweeney’s New York. Even with Matani’s descriptions of the Distant City, even with the descriptions she’d read in the library books, her visions of Miss Sweeney’s home were vague and confusing. She pictured one building precariously balanced atop another, people glancing up nervously as they rushed past on foot or sped by in cars that Neema had heard could move with the speed of gazelles. She tried to imagine the unlikely, invisible waves that performed jobs like running machines that cleaned clothes while people slept. And the water that poured out during any season with a turn of a wrist. Food of every imaginable color. Books everywhere. These seemed impossible stories; they could prove only that the teller had somehow been driven mad.
She turned to her side. She couldn’t see well through the net, but Miss Sweeney’s fidgeting indicated that she too was awake. As was Kanika.
Kanika was whispering. “Are you uncomfortable?”
“No, no,” Miss Sweeney answered. “I’m keeping you up. Sorry.”
“Miss Sweeney?”
“Fi,” said Miss Sweeney. “Call me Fi.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Neema’s granddaughter said.
Miss Sweeney rolled to her side and supported her head with her hand.
“I want to go to the Distant City,” Kanika said.
What was this? Neema, too, leaned on an elbow, trying to catch her granddaughter’s eye, but Kanika was concentrating too hard to notice.
“Wonderful,” Miss Sweeney said, with subdued enthusiasm—or perhaps she was just restrained because she thought Neema was sleeping. “You’d like it,” she said.
“Go there and teach,” Kanika said, emphasizing the last word.
Neema involuntarily put a hand to her mouth. To teach? To the Distant City to stay? From where had this dream come? Neema had known Kanika so well when she’d been little, had known every crease on Kanika’s skin and the texture of her sleeping breath and the sound of her cries right before they gave way to weary hiccups. How had Neema passed from that full knowledge to this ignorance?
“Teach,” Miss Sweeney repeated.
“I can do it here. Can’t I do it there?” Kanika’s voice held a touch of uncertainty, but it was barely discernible. The thrust of her tone was brave and determined, and that triggered in Neema a rush of love and admiration.
She understood with a sudden clarity rarely granted to her anymore. What she’d interpreted as a calm acceptance of Kanika’s female role had actually been an emerging plan to escape it. That both broke and warmed Neema’s heart at once. “You never told me,” she said to Kanika in their language.
“You’re awake,” Kanika said.
“Away from my eyes, you’ve been plotting.”
Miss Sweeney, who could not understand their words, poked her head out of the netting. She looked at the mesh web as if she’d never seen it before, as if she weren’t the one who had hung it before nightfall, searching for the sticks, pushing them into the ungiving ground, spreading it over the place she would lie. Now she flapped a dismissive hand at it, crawled out, and pulled it down.
“You kept this secret,” Neema said. “For how long?”
“Nyanya, I have to go.”
Miss Sweeney sat cross-legged on the edge of the hide, out of the line of sight between Kanika and Neema as though to permit conversation to flow between them unimpeded. But for a second, Neema didn’t know what to say. Yes, she’d wanted Kanika to be strong and self-reliant. But why in a different place, why away from her grandmother?
“It’s hard there, too,” she said. “Harder than you think. When we ask for rain, we must expect mud as well.”
“I don’t want this to be my whole life.”
The words sat baldly between them. Neema’s insides contracted. Miss Sweeney reached into her bag and pulled out something dark and hard, which she broke into three pieces, offering one to Neema and another to Kanika. “Chocolate,” she murmured. Kanika popped hers into her mouth immediately. Proof, Neema thought, that she was
far too trusting for the Distant City.
“I lost my daughter all at once,” Neema said. “I cannot lose you.”
“If I stay, I’ll grow angry,” Kanika warned.
“Like me, you mean.”
Kanika shook her head. “You’re strong, not angry.”
Neema wasn’t so easily hoodwinked by a compliment. She waved away her granddaughter’s words. As she made the gesture, though, she heard, unbidden, her mother’s voice. “Hold, but do not grasp,” it said.
When Neema was young, there’d been no Camel Bookmobile, with its whiffs of another, larger world. Her “dead look” had been her only outlet for frustration. What would she have done, if she’d had the chance?
She sniffed at Miss Sweeney’s chocolate. She would suffer through Kanika’s absence, then. At least there would be, thank the Hundred-Legged One, one thing to look forward to: throwing the news of Kanika’s departure in the face of her annoying brother-in-law, whose voice would hit the clouds as his chances of claiming Kanika’s bride-price slipped away.
Before she could reconsider or change her mind, Neema spoke in English. “It comes to pass that I give my permission for her to go, Miss Sweeney.”
That, however, apparently was not what Miss Sweeney had been waiting for. She tucked the crumpled mosquito netting beneath her like a pillow. “Kanika,” she said, “you would have to go to a special school for a teaching certificate.”
“Yes.”
“It would take some time—a couple of years.”
“I’m willing.”
Miss Sweeney was quiet for a moment. She tugged on the back of her hair. To try to hold it away from her face, she’d tied a bandanna around her head. But it still flew in many directions; Neema decided she would offer to braid it in the morning.
“OK. Let me see what I can find out,” Miss Sweeney finally said, and Neema was relieved that she did not offer yet another objection. Three would seem too many. “First, I’ve got to get the books back,” she went on. “If I don’t, Mr. A….” She hesitated, and then gave a half-laugh. “Mr. A. might kick us all out of the country.”
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