The Camel Bookmobile

by Masha Hamilton

  But before that recognition could sicken him again, he had a second one. He shouldn’t be hearing boys laughing. It wasn’t midday yet—he could tell by the angle at which the sun shone through the gaps in the walls that enclosed him. Those boys should be in school. They weren’t, of course, because he was here. Lying within the kilinge in a heap, his tongue hairy and his head swollen.

  He’d been here the previous night when the men began to gather, their voices surprised as they greeted him. The chanting started, and over the noise of the drums, someone—he couldn’t recall who right now—passed him leaves to chew. Although he generally had little use for khat, he took them. That first taste was so bitter he almost spit it out. He shifted the wad to one side of his mouth and put a cup to the other, drinking milk that has slept. Softening the bitterness. Slowly, he stopped noticing the flavor. The khat distracted him, for a while.

  Now he untwisted his tangled body. He rubbed his cheeks where the skin felt rough and dirty and massaged his scalp with both hands as if to return circulation to his brain. And he remembered Miss Sweeney: her cool hand as she’d held his forehead, her serious eyes as he tried to explain something he didn’t yet understand himself. He remembered her lips, definite as they touched his face. It had taken every bit of his willpower not to open his arms and fall into hers.

  But she came from such an unimaginable place. Who knew if her sympathy was only an act of kindness expected in her country? He didn’t want to guess about anything anymore. He was beginning to understand the fragility of the heart.

  The worst that had ever happened to him, before this, was his father’s death. It had come a week before his wedding to Jwahir, and he’d barely allowed himself to feel the punch to the chest, and the hollowness that followed. He told himself the timing was meant to make him and Jwahir love each other more. They’d share her father, she’d said; they’d be husband and wife and brother and sister at once. And he’d believed. How he wished he had that time back, to mourn the way he should have mourned, instead of rushing on with his life.

  He shook his hands as though to free himself from thinking of both Jwahir and Miss Sweeney in unexpected ways, ways that seemed all wrong. Miss Sweeney had come to get the books, only that, and enough ineffectual days had passed. She’d probably heard that he was sleeping it off in the kilinge when he should have been up and taking her to Scar Boy. He’d have to steel himself to do that, even if it meant looking past Abayomi.

  And what had Jwahir heard? He needed to go to her, but he didn’t want to go sad. He didn’t want to go while he still might cry.

  He pulled himself from the sacred enclosure and splashed water on his face. The two laughing boys were Nadif and his younger cousin.

  “Boys!” He coughed, trying to clear the hoarseness from his throat.

  They were crouched on the ground, playing a game with stones. Nadif lifted his head.

  “Round everyone up. We’ll have school, even if a little late.”

  “We had school,” Nadif said.

  “In your dreams, perhaps, but not this morning.”

  “No, we did. With Kanika and Miss Sweeney.”

  “With—” Matani looked away from the boys, toward the houses huddled beyond them. “What did you do?”

  “Miss Sweeney taught us some of her magic,” Nadif’s cousin said.

  “Not only that,” said Nadif. “We worked on reading, and then we taught Miss Sweeney.”

  “Taught Miss Sweeney?” Matani said. “Boys, Mididima is too small for fibbing.”

  “It’s true. We taught her how to say, ‘The leaves in the tree have driven the monkeys crazy,’” Nadif’s cousin said.

  Matani narrowed his eyes at the boys. “Where is she?”

  “She walked that way, Teacher,” Nadif said, pointing the direction.

  “Enough of your game for now,” he said. “Gather the others. Yes, I know you’ve read. But we have more to do.”

  He walked to where the crops grew, and then to the area where Miss Sweeney had seen the monkeys, but it wasn’t until he reached the first watering hole that he found her. He was glad to see she was alone, though girls and goats were within shouting distance.

  “Jambo,” he called. He felt undeniably better just seeing her, and he could hear it in his voice.

  She turned to him with her serious smile and waited for him to reach her. “I wanted to see how much water you have,” she said.

  “When we see the bottom, we get worried,” Matani said. “Can you see it yet?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then no need to worry.” He reached spontaneously for her shoulder and squeezed it.

  “I’m glad to see you,” she said.

  He wished he knew how to understand comments like this. He touched his cheek where, last night, she had kissed him. Then he brushed her cheek with the back of one hand. “You’ve gotten burned while you’ve been here.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You are,” he said softly. And then he added: “You taught the children this morning. I’m sorry. I spent too long with the stars last night.”

  “I loved it. They’re so bright.” She reached down and dipped her fingers into the water. “How did your evening pass?”

  He didn’t want to tell her about the blur of his evening. He recalled now that at one point he rose and began to chant. “My love,” he’d sung, and the men had echoed him. “My love.”

  “Is a black-fronted purple-throated mosquito-eater,” he’d sung, and they’d echoed.

  “It’s fallen from the sky,” he’d continued. “And landed at my feet.”

  One or two, he was sure, had been laughing. And he couldn’t blame them. He would have laughed, too, if he weren’t in his own skin, his own wife about to be taken, not by death, which would be less shameful, but by her lack of love.

  Someone had grabbed him by the arm—though he couldn’t clearly recall who it had been. “This is what your books would take from us,” the man had said. “Our sacred chants. Our traditions.”

  Another man added: “See the bad spirits that enter Mididima because the white woman is here, where she doesn’t belong? She must go.”

  That angered him, he remembered. He’d said something about Miss Sweeney being good and pure, and then there had been some snickering and Jwahir’s father had stepped between him and the others and someone had called, “If you think that world is so much better, then go. Go, with your books and your white woman.”

  Now Miss Sweeney stood quietly waiting, her hands shoved into her jeans pockets.

  “Thank you,” he said, “for helping me last night. I’m sorry about it.”

  “I’m sorry about—” She broke off.

  He squatted, and she knelt too, and he looked into the water at their reflections, light and dark, and beyond them a pale sky. He thought about telling her that, in some ways, he’d never been as intimate or as open with a woman as he’d already been with her.

  “You know what Abayomi told me?” he said instead. “That his heart leaps up to the sky with Jwahir, and that hers does the same with him.” It hurt to say aloud, but it was also like washing out a wound. “He said because he honored my father, he would offer himself to me. He stretched himself on the ground and handed me a gun that he had taken from the kilinge.”

  Miss Sweeney lifted her eyebrows. “You can’t be serious?”

  He laughed at her tone and the way she put it. Seen through her eyes, it did seem crazy: Abayomi on the ground, Matani holding the gun in his drooping left hand, the barrel pointed at his own feet.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.” And he wished, for a moment, that he could touch Miss Sweeney, and talk to her whenever he wanted to about whatever he felt like, and he wondered what it would be like to be married to someone like her. But there were no women like her in his village. Maybe no women anywhere like her, who could so quickly become an indelible part of a foreign place.

  Then he touched his head, becau
se he remembered why Miss Sweeney actually was here. “The children are waiting for me now,” he said. “But afterward, I haven’t forgotten, we will go to Scar Boy.”

  “I’ve already been.”

  “You have?” He looked away from her, because he was ashamed that he’d let her down, and then he looked directly at her because he wanted to know. “You got them?”

  Some girls with goats were coming closer. Miss Sweeney stood and waved at them. “It’s complicated. Could we talk tonight, after dinner?”

  So Scar Boy was still holding out. Sitting in a corner of his hut, dizzy from his own moment of power, making Miss Sweeney wait, threatening the library’s future. A rush of anger surged through Matani’s arms, up his neck, and into his cheeks. “May the sand clog his windpipe,” he muttered.

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

  Matani knew the anger that his heart spilled on Scar Boy came from other places too, but he didn’t care to sort it out right now. “Yes,” he said. “It will.”

  “So we’ll talk tonight?”

  This was enough. Matani had let his father’s love for Scar Boy protect him too long.

  “Matani?”

  “Yes, yes, tonight,” he said. Now he’d go directly to Jwahir’s father, and never mind the consequences. He wanted the whole of Mididima to know what Abayomi’s son was doing, how he’d refused to give back the books. “Tonight.”

  The Grandmother

  NEEMA DID NOT SEE HER GRANDDAUGHTER UNTIL WELL after the morning’s work. She’d given herself the job of making sure two small ones spent the afternoon at the crops, scaring birds away. Already, some of their precious plants had been pecked because of inattention, and they all knew it was not a year to lose even a mouthful of food.

  But small ones were not easy to find. Mididima’s children had vanished like Egyptians gulped into the Red Sea. The whole settlement, in fact, felt on the edge of disarray, as though a wind were about to gust, the kind that tears threads loose from fabric and sends flatbread flying. No one had followed the rules. The goats had been taken out late, and what happened with school? Women were scattered in the distance, their bright clothes like markers, as though none had maize to cook or mats to weave. Men’s voices seeped from the kilinge, normally left deserted during the day. She knew they had lit the fire and would keep it burning to appeal to the Hundred-Legged One to bring rain, and that the oldest among them had begun to gather themselves for a trek to the mountains to beg for water to fall from the sky.

  But the disquiet had another cause, too; she whispered a name to herself, and hoped Kanika had resolved it.

  She finally found two girls playing a game with sticks, and told them to come, and bring their library books. “Don’t spend the whole time chattering,” she said. “One can practice reading while the other watches for birds.”

  Then she began circling the settlement, searching with growing urgency for Kanika. No one seemed to know where her granddaughter was; and this only heightened her own sense of bubbling uneasiness.

  Kanika must have reclaimed the overdue books, Neema told herself. Not only was Kanika determined and persuasive, but Scar Boy would listen to her. Even if no one else noticed, Neema had seen what his face revealed, those few times he’d emerged into daylight to visit the Camel Bookmobile. She saw what he felt for her granddaughter.

  At last she spotted Kanika at a distance, laughing with Wakonyo and Thegoya. That was unusual—Kanika generally had little to do with those girls. They weren’t being raised as her granddaughter was. Wakonyo had even been circumcised.

  “Kanika,” she called. Kanika turned, waved, and bent her head close to the girls, talking one more minute before loping toward Neema.

  “Peace on you, Nyanya,” Kanika said cheerfully.

  So then, all was well. Neema stroked her granddaughter’s cheek. “You and Miss Sweeney got the books.”

  Kanika squatted and poured dried millet from a bowl onto a cloth.

  “You should let everyone know that the lion’s dry breath is no longer on our necks,” Neema said.

  Kanika didn’t answer, didn’t even look at Neema.

  “Was Scar Boy sorry? Did he say why he kept them?”

  Kanika used both hands to sift through the millet, removing pebbles as though it were a job that demanded full focus.

  “Kanika?”

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Sweeney has the books?” Neema put her hand to her stomach, feeling it contract now that she’d been forced to turn it into a question. “Doesn’t she?”

  Kanika didn’t reply.

  Neema put both hands to her head and sank down on her heels. “What did Scar Boy tell you?”

  “Sc—” Kanika broke off. “Taban sent me away,” she said. “He and Miss Sweeney talked alone.”

  “They can’t talk alone,” Neema said reasonably. “He can’t send you away.”

  Kanika shrugged—where had that shrug come from? Neema didn’t think she’d ever seen her granddaughter make that gesture before.

  “So she got the books,” Neema said.

  “I didn’t talk to Miss Sweeney about that. Matani was gone this morning, and when Miss Sweeney came back, she helped me teach.”

  “She didn’t say anything?”

  “She taught us songs—one about a spider, another about our ears hanging down, and tying them in a knot.” Kanika looked up at the sky and giggled.

  “But she would have told you, if she didn’t get the books,” Neema said. Kanika lowered her head back into her task. After a moment, Neema added, “Why would Scar Boy send you away?”

  Kanika threw aside a handful of pebbles and stood. “Nyanya, I will finish this later, with your blessing. I told Wakonyo I would help her gather firewood.”

  “Wakonyo?” For the first time, Neema wondered if Kanika spoke the truth. She remembered her daughter Dahira slipping away to meet the man who would later become her husband, using some story about fetching water. Neema hadn’t doubted Dahira for a moment because she’d always been so obedient. More obedient than Kanika.

  But Kanika didn’t want these boys. Hadn’t she said that, not two nights ago? And Neema wanted Kanika to be out in that larger world; she knew it was right despite the ache she felt in her own chest when she thought of growing nearer to death in the void left by Kanika’s absence.

  “You and Wakonyo are friends now?”

  Kanika shrugged again. “We’re getting firewood.”

  As she strode away, Neema noticed her granddaughter’s legs—they had become so long that the span of her steps might already equal Neema’s. In another year, Kanika would be the age that Dahira was when she’d married. Time couldn’t be restrained. Nothing should be hastened; nothing ever could be slowed.

  Neema sat and picked up Kanika’s job with the millet. She liked the feel of the warm grains shifting in her palms, and the pebbles, irregular and slightly cooler. Usually she could sort millet with her eyes closed—in fact, that’s how she preferred to do it.

  Now, though, she couldn’t settle her mind. It leaped from one worry to the next. She covered the millet and rose.

  A white woman should not be so difficult to find in Mididima; she should stick out like a pile of glowing beach sand. But Neema wandered everywhere unsuccessfully. When she asked about Miss Sweeney, many gave her odd looks that made her uneasy and left her certain that the people of Mididima were running out of patience—but not with Scar Boy, as it should be. With the bookmobile. With Miss Sweeney.

  “The white woman should leave,” one woman, Chicha, said outright. Neema waved her hand to dismiss the remark, but finally gave up the search and returned home. And there in front of the hut was Miss Sweeney, leaning back on the bag she’d brought, eyes closed.

  That wouldn’t do. Neema had already stretched her patience farther than it would go, waiting to find out what happened with the books. She picked up a tin bowl and spooned ugali into it, allowing the spoon to bang noisily against the metal. When she turned
back, Miss Sweeney’s eyes were open. “Eat now.” She handed Miss Sweeney the bowl. “Food skirted your mouth this morning.”

  Miss Sweeney took the bowl without speaking and sat up. Neema squatted across from her. She waited for as long as she could. Miss Sweeney still had not taken a bite. But Neema had to speak. “The books,” she said.

  Miss Sweeney looked into the bowl, then set it on the ground.

  “I’ll go to him,” Neema said, suddenly loud, unable to contain her frustration. “He is not a handful of water that can’t be grasped.”

  “It won’t help.”

  There were words Neema knew in English, but didn’t quite understand as they came from Miss Sweeney’s lips. So the camels wouldn’t come again? Even with Scar Boy’s books returned? No more of the books that had saved her life, that would advance her granddaughter to another, more modern place?

  But why?

  “Maybe the council of elders can find a way to show Mr. Abasi that we are a people of light and not darkness,” Neema said, knowing the elders would not stoop to try to persuade Mr. Abasi of anything.

  “Or maybe I can convince him.”

  To doubt Miss Sweeney would be rude. But Miss Sweeney had already told them that Mr. Abasi had more power than she. Mididima’s fate would lie with the librarian from Garissa, and he didn’t strike Neema as merciful.

  Miss Sweeney lifted her water bottle and held it against the blue sky. She took a long sip before speaking. “Don’t worry, Neema,” she said.

  More words that didn’t quite make sense.

  Perhaps, at least, Neema could ease the way for her granddaughter before it was too late. “You and Kanika taught today,” she began tentatively. “You can see that she will have much to offer in the Distant City.”

  Miss Sweeney said nothing. Her eyes were closed and she looked pale. She was useless right now.

  “Eat,” Neema said, gently shaking Miss Sweeney’s arm. “Eat while I watch.”

  Miss Sweeney opened her eyes. Neema waited until Miss Sweeney took a bite. She watched the white woman hold the pasty mixture in her mouth and then swallow it.