Excepting the thick money belt, which pinched into her waist, Lucy was still bare, and because the sheets had twisted in her legs, when she opened her stiff eyes she saw herself from breast to toes, and that seeing was too much. She winced. She tried to pull the sheet out, bring it back around herself, but it was caught fast at the far end of the mattress. Oh, she didn’t like to see herself, just then, when something difficult had happened and she knew she would feel safest in her mind. She wanted no sight of her limbs, and wished, as her head turned, that she could not feel her hair. Her skin was cold. She hid her hands under her head. But such blankness is not easy to secure. Her mouth was dry, she wished to drink. She closed her eyes and made herself sit up. She almost looked, as she had done for two weeks upon waking, for her books, her bath bag, for a dress she would have set over a chair. But the morning’s theft, the beating, the hot walk beside the tout, it all came back to her, and she remembered she had nothing. She almost cried again, but—hearing Helen in her head, the brash one, saying, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”—didn’t. Thought instead, Stop it, stop it. Now.
Mr. Kershaw didn’t think much of it—he was Catholic, and didn’t hold with magic, as he put it—but Fiona always said one’s balance could be located through breath. “Our breath!” she liked to say. “The truest thing we have.” Lucy tried to breathe as she’d been shown, from the low part of her belly, in and out and out. Fiona said the breath contained the soul, bridged the past and future. Lucy thought about her trip, how long ago it seemed that she had told the girls and Mr. Kershaw that she wanted a real holiday, a place one had to fly to, not the Jersey Shore, Niagara Falls, or Amish country, which she’d all done as a girl, under supervision. That wasn’t what she wanted, not the sort of trip where someone else decided what she was to do, and hurried her, and told her to wash up. She was fully grown now, wanted something for herself, a thing she’d never done. “For me,” she’d said to Helen. “On my own.” Helen had congratulated her and Fiona had behaved as though Lucy were becoming interesting at last. And Mr. Kershaw had been proud.
It had been sweet, and good! She’d felt so brave at the airport! Helen and Fiona had surprised her there, found her just as she was heading to the gate. They’d brought her good luck charms. Helen, bright and laughing (“She’s all teeth and bosom,” Mr. Kershaw liked to say), had presented her with condoms, red ones wrapped in yellow cellophane and tied with silver string; Fiona brought a vial of bath oil. “Dragon’s Blood,” the label said, to keep evil at bay. The vial came in a purple velvet sack with a drawstring of gold braid. And they’d brought the nicest thing of all, a gift from Mr. Kershaw: a camera, an Instamatic that was not difficult to use. “He says he wants you to bring pictures.” He himself had sworn he’d never fly again. “I am in America,” he’d say. “And though it be a dream, in America I’ll stay.” But he liked to think about the globe; he was looking forward to Lucy coming back and showing them what it had been like. It did make a difference knowing there were people thinking of her while she was away. On the airplane she’d felt strong.
At the distant airport—where the air was yellow, hot, where she had shown her vaccination papers to a clerk before being allowed to cross the line into another country now and then moved to claim her luggage—she’d been fetched by a tour guide, a hefty man in spectacles with an impeccably white shirt. He held a sign with her name on it, and, in a moment of excitement, Lucy took out Mr. Kershaw’s camera and asked to take his picture. The man (who introduced himself as Jonah, said he had four kids) allowed her to, even smiled for her. She took a picture of the minivan as well, of the writing on its side: “Goliath Tours.” She’d been nervous and excited. They drove through the big city, just her and the guide, and she asked him if they’d stop there, if she could have a tour, but he told her that the city wasn’t nice, and when she asked him why, said, “Not nice for girls like you.” He’d slapped at a lone fly that had settled on the steering wheel and added, “Dirty. Criminals and thieves.” He’d laughed a bit, smiled at her in the mirror. “Not at all for you. You are going on safari.”
Oh, she had liked that very much! The hut! It looked from the outside like something from a movie or museum, but on the inside there had been a lightbulb and white walls, a cane chair and a desk, a bed with a mosquito net, which had made her feel that she was in a different, distant, and romantic place. In the afternoon, Jonah came to call. With the other guests, they drove out to a riverbank and watched hippos in the sunset. They ate on a big deck, where citronella candles kept the bugs away. Tilapia, she’d been told. And yellow juice called bungo. The other guests had been a blur. She didn’t speak with anyone, and didn’t want to. I am with myself, she thought, and this, coupled with the safety of the tour, the itinerary she had chosen and been granted, gave her a cool and private, precious feeling of achievement. They did other things: I have seen giraffes (these had struck her very much, how gentle those beasts looked! one of them reminded her, with its interminable neck, the way its eyes looked painted black, of Fiona, her strange head in the clouds) and warthogs. A sodality of lions (these did not look real, too many of them, nestled in a tree and at its base, as if on display, but she snapped the camera anyway, was secretly amazed—perhaps they looked unreal because she’d never seen a real one, didn’t know how to compare). The ostriches had also pleased her, galloping—I didn’t know they were so fast!—and she never saw a single one with its head buried in sand, wondered where that came from. Ostriches are fierce! she thought, and this made her stouthearted in the night when bush babies snuck in under the thatch and their wild eyes glowed at her before they shot off with a scream. Ostrich, riches, riches, she had thought. How nice that had all been!
And afterwards, the beach, where she had stayed almost a whole week. This sea was unfathomably wonderful, a horizon full of blue she could not have explained to anyone—a blue that made her feel her eyes were drinking, and her heart. She spent hours at a time immobile on the shore feeling splendor, though her bathing suit, which had pleased her when she bought it, was not as right as it had been when she’d tried it in the shop. She felt angular and strange in it, too pale, aware of eyes on her when local men and women passed by to sell trinkets. But she did not shrink from them. She bought a string of wooden beads to give to Helen, and, for Fiona, the carved head of a woman; Helen liked adornment, and Fiona talked of goddesses and energies, collected Pharaoh’s cats. For Mr. Kershaw she acquired postcards showing what she’d seen, and some (because he wished, after all, to be informed about the globe) of places she had chosen not to go—the lake full of flamingos, and the mountains, and a desert that the card called “Emerald,” though she couldn’t quite see why. The pictures she could show them, but the postcards he could keep. She’d amassed them in a paper sack that had a drawing of an elephant on it, a huge one, stepping from a tiny map of Africa. Helen’s necklace she had wrapped up with the yellow cellophane (she’d thrown the condoms out, What had Helen been thinking?) and replaced the Dragon’s Blood oil (no baths to take here) with the woman’s head, drawn the gold string tight.
At night, by the light of a Dietz lamp that hissed nicely in the breeze, she had read two books: a novel about three girls growing on a farm, their cruel father, and one girl’s inconstant lover, fooling her with that girl’s youngest sister; and another in which a blind man crossed the whole of Europe, touching everyone he met with all his fingers so he’d remember who they were. They had not been very special books, but she had bought them at the airport when she left, after Helen and Fiona had waved her off and she had crossed the barriers and had nowhere else to go as she waited for the plane. She had written her name neatly on the inner side of the front flaps, and sometimes thought: These are the books I took with me to Africa. A blushing in her chest, a happiness.
It had all gone very well until the final day, which should not have been her last. She’d come back from a swim, hair wet, freckled from the sun, to find the manager outside her room, a big couple in
tow, a man and a woman from Chicago whose voices were too sharp, and sharpening, and loud. “I’m very sorry, Miss,” he said. “But you were to check out today, or not?” She hadn’t. No, she hadn’t been. She’d made her reservation firm until the following day, when she would be driven by Goliath Tours into the city, directly to the airport, arriving in the evening in time for her flight. She did try to say so, but the couple wouldn’t stop, and the manager, who’d seemed so kind at first, who’d seemed so glad to see her, suddenly behaved as though he didn’t care at all. She’d felt everything inside her stiffen, crack. Afraid. Hadn’t she planned right? Hadn’t she been perfect? Reservation. Preservation.
The manager pulled her into what had been her room and touched her on the arm. “We’ll pay for your bus fare, miss. But please. These people—they are not on a tour, like you. Full price, you see, I’ll get from them. But you, you’re no help to me. Please. You understand me, yes?” He’d tried to press some bills into her hand, but these she’d pushed away. She did not like anyone to touch her. Even Helen couldn’t, and certainly she always kept three feet away from Mr. Kershaw, who was fat and breathy, and who made her feel too small. Once, Fiona had tried to read her palm, but she had not been able to withstand the probing of strange fingers in the dampness of her hand. The manager gave up at last, tossed the bills onto the bed, and left her, saying, “The van goes to the bus stand in an hour. In one hour. Believe me, you’ll be out.” Once he’d gone, she’d felt all ashake. She’d packed all of her things—the books, the dresses, the rubber thongs she’d bought for walking on the beach, the presents, the seven rolls of film, and the camera in the purse. She’d tried to smile at these. She kept her passport and her ticket and the money and she tied these to her waist. She pulled herself together. She stopped herself from crying, and she tried believing she’d be all right on her own. I am with myself, she’d told herself, over, over, on the way.
When she’d climbed onto the bus, when the grim driver with the beard and narrow eyes said, “You are going to the city?” and the bus tout, who was thin and did not seem unkind, took her case from her and pushed it gently in the hold, she hadn’t felt too bad. She’d looked out of the window at the landscapes, and she’d thought about her things, how at least she’d gotten presents and how the moment she got home she’d take the rolls of film down to the pharmacy, and ask for them express. Everything would be all right, and it didn’t matter what the manager had done. She heard Fiona saying, “It all happens for a reason,” and she stopped trying to find one. Once she found a place to stay, she could wait there until evening and take a taxi to the plane. It couldn’t be too hard, she told herself. But it had been hard, and wrong. And now at Abuu’s Guest and Rest she was alone in a white room, without even a toothbrush—and how dirty her mouth felt!—without any soap or other underwear to use, and it would be the same dress on the plane. My holiday, she thought. See how it turned out. How terribly unfair things were. To be like this, with nothing.
Lucy passed her hands over her face. Aware of her own skin, now clammy, damp, she realized she did not know the time. The only thought, the one thing that kept her, Lucy understood, from screaming, was an image of the airport, and the plane. She would wash her face. She had towels, after all. She would manage all of this, somehow. Crying wouldn’t help. She remembered Jonah then, how gentle he had been, and how he would have smiled at her and told her he was sorry for how everything turned out. She got up and put her dress back on. The woman at the counter would have to know how it was done. It couldn’t be too hard, not after all this. A taxi, Lucy thought. I’ll need to find a taxi.
Ezra’s uncle was all right. When the bulldozers had come, he’d been outside for a shit. Their setup wasn’t ready yet for that, and he didn’t like to do his business too close to the house. He’d been squatting in the bush in the dawn light, distracted by the ants. He could very nearly see them, traveling in a line beside a heap of maize husks and the carcass of a bird. Because his ears were no longer what they’d been, he hadn’t heard the sudden cracking sound of it—which was in some ways the worst part, the inexplicable and unpredicted crash and break of things—and although he was soon ready to stand up, he hadn’t. Standing up meant a twisting in his knees, hip pain, and he couldn’t brave it yet.
A chicken flapped into the trees. He watched it wind and smack its little wings as if it could really fly. While his own house walls were falling down, he thought about this place, the animals that lived here. It wasn’t easy knowing what belonged to whom, and the uncle thought the owner would be looking for that chicken, but how like as not a child would steal it and take it home to parents who might look on such a theft as only what was due. And his mind had gone a little blank, then, slow. Just as Gideon Juma dove for refuge underneath his counter, and the dozer rolled over his hand, just as Tillat ran disheveled and enraged from her own crumbling place, he’d started thinking of the village and his wife and how he missed the kids. He’d forgotten one old village neighbor’s name—a big-faced man who had played checkers with great style and had a little yellow dog—and this failure on his part had stopped him. Why could he not recall it? Then, a half name on his tongue, he’d risen very slowly, wishing that a person could know always, all at once, everything they’d loved. No, he had not realized what had taken place until it was all over, when he came back, surprised, to find the house half-gone.
Of course he’d been upset. Of course he’d run towards it, sore legs notwithstanding, gone to look, and he had looked and looked and filled his eyes and for a long, hard moment tried to keep his heart from breaking and his liver from rising up to kill him. It hurt him, yes, of course it did. How hard they had worked! How much money they had spent! Beside this, other people’s tiny pains were nothing. He’d sold twenty cows for this, and Ezra, too, had given money for cement, and helped him build the walls. It wasn’t good. He wasn’t grateful. This was no easy thing. But Ezra’s uncle was a church man, and a good one, and he understood that things like this did happen. More than this, he was old enough to know that if you just stayed alive, something else could come about to make things a little better, before something altogether different and more awful rose to make you start again. And the quicker you could think so, the better it would be, or you might die from it. You very well might die.
He knew, too, that certain things could force you to be close to people whom you did not like. He did not care at all for Habib Pawpaw. He never had. He felt distaste for men who were like women. They disgusted him, indeed. He did not like his voice. He knew that Habib burned imported incense in his clothes, and that whenever Habib passed, the smell of roses hung thick in the night air; he knew the man kept cats—Aziza and Kitoto—and thought how wasteful that care was. He had no doubt as well that Habib wished to play in Ezra’s pants. But he also recognized sometimes, and now, that things like this were nothing in a pinch. He’d turned around and seen Habib Pawpaw come out of his house—which stood, which stood! The young man shaking at the sight of all the rubble, the potted plants that had been crushed, the walls he’d meant for vegetables. And Ezra’s uncle had gone over to him, said, “Habib, are you all right?” He was not really without feeling, no, he didn’t like the man, but he did not wish him dead. And then he’d said, “Thank God, thank God.” And here he did not lie. “It’s good to see you whole.”
A singer’s ears are sharp. Habib heard fallen Gideon first, wailing from the site of his disaster, but they went to him together. It was Ezra’s uncle who took Gideon to the clinic, two long miles behind the houses, across a brook and up the steep hill by the slaughterhouse, where goat legs all on end inside of buckets lined the road, and the earth was thick with blood. It wasn’t all bad being nearly deaf; he didn’t have to hear how Gideon keened over his hand. He didn’t have to hear too much of other people shouting, telling what they’d seen. It allowed him to be calm. The clinic halls were overrun, but he left Gideon there and returned very slowly. The uncle wasn’t very old, but he was over sixty
, and in the heat and all that dust, and with his brittle knees, four miles was quite a way. When he came back he didn’t have the strength to go inside his house and really look at how shattered it all was. You took help where you could get it. Habib’s vegetable and plants stand had been crushed. A mess. But the house he kept so neat, which he had painted blue, had not even bruised.
Habib Pawpaw could be very tender and solicitous with men who did not like him. He had invited Ezra’s uncle in, and they had shared some tea. Habib did wonder about lineage, how Ezra let a person be themselves, yet his father’s brother was so sour. But he knew, too, that neighbors have to help. Ezra’s uncle looked done in, and Habib brought out his yellow plastic mat, the finest one, with a pineapple design, and told the man to sleep.
Ezra’s uncle did not hear them come in, did not see the blood on Ezra’s face and chest, or the way the boy was bent almost in half and could not move his arm. Habib was grateful for the silence. Ezra couldn’t know how bad he looked, better he be cleaned before the uncle saw. Habib held on to Ezra’s arm and took him to the taps and, while the uncle dreamed, began to care for him.
Habib often thought of men he liked as boys. Boys were cleaner in their hearts than men. Sometimes he felt like a boy. How wounded this one was! Ezra murmured softly when Habib plucked the shirt up from his chest, where blood had dried and stuck, and pulled the sleeves down from his arms. Habib poured water over Ezra, made suds with the black soap. When Habib pressed with two long fingers at the crust of Ezra’s lip, Ezra winced and pulled away. The courtyard floor went pink. Habib found old cloths in his trunk, cloths he wore at night when he was going as Habiba, and he was glad his house contained some silken women’s things. He tore one into strips. As Habib bandaged him, Ezra didn’t speak. Habib said, “I’ve seen worse than this, much worse. You’re going to be all right.” Ezra mewled a little then, and Habib stroked his ear. Ezra’s one eye closed.
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