Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

  After ten minutes of small talk, I leaned over to Christy and whispered, “Please tell the forest manager why we’re here.”

  Back in Kaleo, we thanked the forest manager profusely. As we climbed out of his air-conditioned car, Christy leaned over and said to me, “Tomorrow you come for your haircut.”

  I was about to tell her that we had other plans, but before I could get the words out, Christy and the forest manager had disappeared in a puff of warm exhaust.

  When we didn’t appear in Wa the next afternoon, Christy made her way to Kaleo to find us. Against the wishes of Facts, who was still annoyed about our absence the previous day, she worked beside us all afternoon and spent the night stretched out on a grass mat beside Katie’s sleeping bag. The next day Facts insisted that she leave.

  “We cannot be housing the entire village,” he said huffily. It took a great deal of cajoling before he gave his permission for us to visit Christy on the weekend for my haircut.

  We met Christy at the taxi park. With a flock of appreciative children in tow, we walked to her sister’s house for the scissors and then to her mother’s compound to perform the operation. The distance seemed much shorter in daylight.

  I’d brought my theatrical headshot from the previous year, to show Christy the haircut I had in mind. My brother is a hairdresser, and back in the U.S. he always cuts my hair. This particular haircut was short and hip, with wispy bangs, a sprouting top like a cactus, and a zigzagged line shaved into the side. When I showed it to her, she smiled cheerfully and nodded.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Christy, whose manner up to this point had been sweet and self-effacing to the point of subservience, became a warrior goddess with scissors in hand. Brow furrowed in fierce concentration, she cut from all angles, moving up and down like a dancer, leaning over the top, barking at the children to stay out of her way. Grabbing chunks of hair, she chopped swiftly and decisively, while Katie gasped, “Oh!” and “Wait!” her hands flying to her mouth.

  “What?” I asked repeatedly, but Katie simply brought her hands back to her lap and smiled weakly.

  “Nothing,” she squeaked. “Never mind.”

  Finally a mirror was brought. Uneven tufts stuck out all over my head. Most alarmingly, a parade of very short bangs trooped across the top of my forehead in a severely straight line.

  Getting control of my breath, I took the scissors and showed Christy how to make the bangs “fringy,” as my brother would say. Then I pointed to various tufts and asked her to snip here and there.

  “Oh! You’ve made a bald spot!” Katie cried.

  I grabbed the mirror and inspected the damage. I demanded that Katie take an active role in the process, instead of heckling from the sidelines. Soon it became a group effort. The children screamed and pointed, making snipping motions with their fingers.

  By the end my entire head was buzzed close, like a Buddhist nun. Katie took a photo of Christy and her shorn client, with Christy holding up the scissors and the headshot. Her face wore a wide innocent grin.

  Christy claimed Katie and me as her own. She came to the camp almost every afternoon, and stayed until Facts kicked her out.

  “What does that girl want?” he asked repeatedly. “She should go home and stop loitering about.”

  Though Katie and I weren’t entirely sure we wanted Christy around, we felt compelled to defend her.

  “She’s not hurting anything,” I told Facts.

  “Well, she cannot stay overnight again,” he said. “For her own sake. If something goes missing, it is her they will blame.”

  What did Christy want? We couldn’t figure it out. She never asked Katie or me for anything, not money, not clothes, not to take her to our countries. She seemed simply to enjoy our company. She would sit near us for long stretches of time, watching us closely, scarcely participating in the conversation. At first we tried to include her, asking her about herself, but she never seemed to understand what we were asking and always turned the questions back to us. After a while, we almost forgot she was there.

  She was very solicitous of us and would do things like straighten our sleeping bags or bring us our food at dinnertime. This made me uncomfortable. When I asked her if she expected to be paid for her work, she just laughed.

  “Never, sistah.”

  “Then please don’t do it,” I said.

  The next day I caught her taking my laundry out to wash.

  “Stop, Christy,” I told her.

  “What, sistah?”

  “Don’t do my laundry for me. I can do my own laundry.”

  “Yes,” she said, and continued walking.

  “No!” I stopped her. “Please, I mean it.”

  With a dainty sigh, she put the laundry down.

  Christy was fascinated by Katie’s camera and my tape recorder. She was constantly pushing the buttons on the tape recorder and opening and closing the camera’s lens. When I asked her to stop, telling her she was wearing out my batteries, she always gave me the sweetest possible “yes,” but the next time I looked, she was at it again.

  Sometimes I wondered if she was mentally disabled, but looking into her eyes, I knew better.

  “She understands what she wants to understand,” I said to Katie one evening, after Christy had left.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean that she pretends not to follow what we’re saying in order to gain more information. Even that night, when she was leading us around. She knew we wanted to get in a taxi and head home, but she pretended not to grasp it.”

  “So who’s she gathering information for? The CIA?”

  “That, my friend, is the million dollar question.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Wake me when you’ve worked it out.”

  When the camp ended, Katie and I planned to spend a few days in and around Wa, then a week traveling in the Western Region before we headed back to Accra. We’d just arrived in Wa with our backpacks when we ran into Christy. She was hovering outside the tro-tro park, as though she’d been waiting for us.

  “Please, you stay at my mother’s house,” she said.

  Katie and I had anticipated this offer and decided against it. Sweet as Christy was, her constant attention was beginning to creep us out.

  “Next thing you know she’ll be wiping your nose,” Katie had said on the tro-tro into Wa.

  And now, as if on cue, Christy stepped forward with a tissue.

  “Christy!” I was alarmed. “Don’t!”

  “Your face is dirty,” she said, spitting on the tissue as my mother always had.

  “Don’t!” I shouted, and moved back. Christy looked genuinely wounded. Curious passersby turned to see what was going on.

  “You are not kind, sistah,” said Christy.

  “I-I’m sorry. It’s just . . . you’re . . . invading my space.”

  “Invading?”

  “I . . . We . . . We need some privacy,” I said.

  “It’s been terrific spending time with you,” said Katie, “but Tanya and I would like to be on our own now.”

  Christy stood absolutely still for a long moment, looking at us. Then she turned around without a word and walked away.

  “Bye!” I called after her. “Thank you for everything!” But she didn’t look back.

  A few days later I was flipping through my journal, and I noticed that several pages at the back of the notebook were covered with penciled writing. As I began to read, a shock ran through me. The words were mine, but the handwriting was not. Someone had copied a series of pages from the front of the notebook, word for word, in a careful, even hand.

  Katie, too, discovered a number of drawings in the back of her sketchbook, close imitations of sketches she had made in the front.

  Other small messengers appeared over time. One of my books had pencil markings in the margins—certain words copied and recopied up and down the sides of the page.

  “The pencil goblin,” we said each time we found something ne
w, but we felt shaken, exposed. What did she want? we asked each other again and again. Was she, in fact, a being out of fairy tales, looking to steal not our possessions but our souls?

  I thought the blurry photos were the final breadcrumb on Christy’s trail, but I was wrong. It wasn’t until I was back in the U.S. that I discovered the tape. I’d recorded about fifteen cassettes over the course of my time in Ghana, mostly of music. Periodically I mailed a few of them home to lighten my pack. One day I was going through them, writing up labels. I popped one into the tape recorder and heard a high, thin voice with a heavy Ghanaian accent. It sounded like a young woman reading, forming each of the words slowly, mispronouncing some, occasionally going back and trying one again.

  “Michael said he holds me in his heart like the love that holds the stars in place. He believes the stars are held by love.”

  I sat down on the bed, my heart racing. The voice continued.

  “ ‘What else could hold them?’ he asks. ‘What else could keep them from jiggling wildly in their spheres, colliding like a mad game of asteroids?’ And what else holds me, keeps me from scattering, shattering . . .”

  A deep heat rose in my face. My words. My unconsidered, intimate words. Bad enough she’d copied them down as a penmanship exercise, but to speak them out loud, to broadcast them! When could she have done it? During the day, while we were at the construction site? I pressed the fast forward button. The voice continued, slowly, painfully, reading, reading.

  “. . . moving away from political work, simply because it affords so little hope in a day-to-day way . . .”

  Fast forward.

  “. . . Facts says he wants comments but when you make one he jumps on you . . .”

  Fast forward.

  “. . . from a stagnant pond, green and murky . . .”

  “. . . and Nadhiri—is this fucking high school?”

  “. . . crying dream: Michael and I were running through an empty . . .”

  “. . . graves, tributes to the ancestors . . .”

  Fast forward. Fast forward. Fast forward.

  “Christy is scaring me. I don’t know what she wants.”

  My breath caught. Would she react in some way? Comment? Respond? But no, the voice continued, struggling, picking its way through the thicket of words.

  And then the reading stopped. A long pause. Then the voice began to sing, sweet and high and pure. A familiar melody. Something I heard her humming once, as we walked through the streets of Wa. A song she said her mother had learned in school:

  I hear a robin singing, singing

  Up in the treetop high, high

  To me and you he’s singing, singing

  The clouds will soon roll by.

  Somebody’s heart is burning, burning

  Somebody’s heart is burning, burning

  Somebody’s heart is burning, burning

  Because he sees me happy.

  And then new words, finally, blessedly, words not mine, but her own. I held my breath. An answer now? But all she left me with was this:

  “Sweet sistahs, goodbye, I will miss you so. When you hear this record, remember Ghana here, remember me. Remember Christy, your special friend.”

  8

  The Man in the Cave

  It’s hard to reconcile the world I left with the one I find myself in now. I feel as if I cheated fate and got a whole other life in my allotted span. In my imagination two scenes unfurl, as if on a split screen. On one side, an experimental theatre troupe is performing a new piece. In the piece, onstage television monitors display video clips of prostitutes working the streets interspliced with congressional hearings, while actors speak Shakespearean text in bland, cheerful voices, and dancers shuffle across the stage, performing gestures both pedestrian and obscene.

  On the other side of my imagined screen, a Ghanaian woman pounds fufu in a village with neither running water nor electricity. Beside her, two little girls sit on the packed earth, shelling groundnuts. One of the girls has a baby strapped to her back. The baby starts to cry, and the woman interrupts her pounding to nurse it. The girls start singing, their clear sopranos mingling with the baby’s cries and the faint percussion of the splintering shells.

  “You ladies have some small gift for the chief?” asked the chief’s interpreter. He was a young man, tall and skinny, dressed in a blue-and-white woven dashiki top with white pajama pants beneath. He stood beside the chief’s bench, beaming and fidgeting. The skin of his face bore a grid of razor-thin scars, as though a burning spiderweb had been laid across his face. Facial scarring was common in this region. It was a form of familial and tribal identification, done in infancy.

  Katie and I were on our way to visit the Tongo Hills shrine in the Upper East Region, one of Ghana’s leading tourist attractions. When the host at our guesthouse in Bolgatanga told us we’d need to offer gifts to a couple of local chiefs in order to gain permission to visit the famous shrine, I knew just the thing.

  Before coming to Africa, I’d read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and learned about the ceremonial role of the bitter kola nut in West African culture. Ever since, I’d longed for an opportunity to make use of this knowledge. Katie and I finally located the pyramids of glistening nuts hidden behind a sea of tiny red chili peppers in Bolga’s chaotic marketplace. We wrapped them carefully in banana leaves, tying them with a slim rope of braided vines.

  “Some small gift?” the interpreter repeated, a look of concern crossing his face.

  I stepped forward. “Kola nuts,” I proclaimed, loosening the knot, and the leaf opened outward like a flower.

  We were in the village of Tongo, at the base of the hills. The shrine we intended to visit was located high above us, among the Whispering Rocks. These bleached boulders were said to be visually stunning, piled atop each other by a mighty unseen hand into formations that resembled every element of creation, from trees to human bodies to birds in flight. The rocks got their name from the shushing sound you heard while walking in their midst, as though the creator himself were whispering in your ear. This whispering was said to be most audible between the months of November and March, when the strong dry wind called the harmattan blew in from the Sahara, carrying with it a fine coating of pale dust. Lodged in a cave on a rocky pinnacle was the fetish priest, an oracle whose job was to communicate praise, pleas, and concerns to the powerful ancestral spirits that watched over the surrounding villages.

  The walls of the chief’s hut were lined with animal bones and skins. A framed photo of the chief shaking hands with then Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings graced the wall behind the low bench where the chief sat, draped from head to toe in indigo fabric. Heavy tribal scarring marked his wizened, papery cheeks, and his lively eyes danced with mischief. Two little boys about four years old sat on either side of the bench.

  When I proffered the kola nuts, the boys snickered, hiding their mouths with their hands. The interpreter chuckled uneasily.

  “Nobody brings the chief kola nuts,” he said in a low voice. “Even Jerry Rawlings,” he indicated the photo, “brought some small money for the chief. It is not the chief himself. It is the elders. They will expect the chief to buy some pito to share. Otherwise they will say he has been greedy, and kept all for himself.” Pito was the preferred beverage of the region—a weak, sweet wine made from fermented corn or millet.

  “American dollars are fine,” he continued, very low. Then, glancing at Katie’s pale face and bermuda shorts, “Or pounds sterling.”

  “How much in cedis?” I whispered.

  He pursed his lips. “Whatever you want to give.”

  I pulled out a crumpled 500-cedi note and handed it to the interpreter, who smoothed it and presented it to the chief.

  The chief mumbled a few words.

  “The chief wishes you a safe journey.”

  Outside the hut, our guide crouched in the shade of the thatched roof. He was a skinny man of about sixty with rotten teeth, baleful eyes with pouchy skin beneath, and
ragged pants with a bright floral patch on the seat. He wore a teepee-shaped straw hat, the top half of which was covered in leather, with a leather tassel hanging from the tip. He carried a walking stick. The huts in this region were round, with conical thatched roofs that mirrored the shape of our guide’s hat. Clustered together beneath the giant baobab trees, they looked like fat brown mushrooms.

  “We never agreed on a price with this guy,” I muttered to Katie as we trudged along.

  She shrugged, “I’m sure he’ll let us know what he’d like in due time.”

  The heat pressed down on us like an iron as we followed his bobbing hat through the sleepy town. I felt flattened beneath it, drained of all moisture. Every day Katie and I vowed to start our adventures at dawn, to avoid the midday heat, but when the time came, we never managed to get ourselves out of bed.

  “We’re just bone idle,” Katie often said, with a laugh.

  We plodded through pale, dry hills, the grass and shrubs prickly as the quills of giant porcupines. Occasional piles of stones blocked our path, like trail markers left by overzealous Girl Scouts.

  Suddenly our guide turned to us.

  “You dash me two thousand,” he said.

  “Two thousand!” said Katie.

  “I am an old man. The sun is hot.”

  We stared at him.