Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

“Yes, I’ll take it, please,” said Katie, sighing.

  “But—” Mrs. Oppong began.

  “Please,” I said sharply, “give her the passport and let us go. We’ve spent enough time in this room.”

  Mrs. Oppong handed Katie her passport.

  “Safe journey,” she said angrily. Then she turned and disappeared through the door she’d come out of. She slid the wooden cover across the window with a bang.

  On the tro-tro back to the hostel, a man stood next to the driver selling an English ABC book for tots. He went through it laboriously, page by page, reading aloud each letter until he came to the last: “Zed, Zebra, a Zebra is a beautiful animal.”

  As a middle-aged man beside us leafed through his new acquisition (“For my granddaughter,” he told me, beaming), Katie suddenly doubled over, clutching her stomach.

  “What is it?” I said.

  She looked up at me, her face very pale.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A pain.”

  By the time we got off at the tro-tro park nearest the hostel, Katie could barely walk. She leaned on me for support.

  “I’m ill,” she whispered.

  “Let’s get a taxi to the hospital,” I said. She nodded. Her legs buckled and she collapsed there, at the side of the road. I commandeered a taxi, and we squeezed into the backseat with three women and two babies.

  “What is it, sweetie? What is it?” I crooned, holding her hand.

  “Terrible,” she murmured.

  Katie spent the night in a hospital cot on a crowded ward, an IV dripping into her arm. She was dehydrated, the nurse told me, dangerously weak. The next day the verdict was in. Typhoid . . . and malaria. I thought of the faces at the immigration bureau, one diabolically cheerful, the other haggard and withdrawn. I couldn’t help feeling there was some connection between our experience there and the sudden onset of Katie’s illness. If nothing else, it had weakened her defenses.

  I discussed the events with Elise, the irritating but insightful Frenchwoman who had recently arrived. She’d been to Ghana twice before, volunteering both times.

  “Why would the immigration people behave that way?” I asked her. “Wouldn’t it be to their advantage to cooperate, to be helpful to volunteers?”

  “Do you know what Ghanaians go through when they try to travel to Europe or America?” she asked.

  I thought of the U.S. Embassy, with its hordes of Ghanaians waiting in their best clothes, clutching all kinds of documentation, only to have their visa applications rejected, month after month, year after year.

  “This is the one way they have power over us,” she said. “A very small payback for all that humiliation.”

  “And Mr. Awitor?”

  “He’s tired of white volunteers treating him like a servant.”

  “But I never—”

  “Well,” she said, her eyes narrowing suspiciously, “maybe you never, but someone else did.”

  Katie was recovering, but slowly. She stayed in the hospital for four or five days. Afterwards, back in the hostel, she moved slowly, shuffling around in her socks. She borrowed paperbacks from the other volunteers and spent the long stuffy days lying on her bunk, reading. I waited ten days, half-impatient, half-fearful, to broach the subject of our departure for Mali. When I finally did, she shook her head.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m not up to it.”

  “Come on! You’re getting better every day! I don’t mind waiting another week or two.”

  “Can’t do it, Tanya. It’s not just my body—I feel afraid. I mean, what happens if we’re on that riverboat up the Niger that you’re so keen on taking, and I get sick out there, in the middle of nowhere? They told me flat out that if I hadn’t gotten treated I could’ve been dead within a couple of days.”

  “We don’t have to—” I began, but she cut me off.

  “I wasn’t as bold as you were to begin with. And now . . . I’d hold you back. What’s the good of that? We traveled together because it worked out; we wanted the same things. It’s not working out anymore.”

  A week later, about fifteen of us crowded into two taxis to take Katie to the airport. We stood in a circle in a far corner of the airport parking lot, holding hands. The sun was setting, and the western edge of the sky glowed a deep rose. At my suggestion, we went around the circle, voicing our hopes and wishes for Katie. (“How American,” she said dryly, but she smiled at me tenderly.) We wished her a safe journey, and that she wouldn’t forget what she’d found here, that she would always carry a part of Ghana in her heart.

  “The sweetness,” I said. “The exuberance, the dignity. Not the bureaucracy.”

  “Not the immigration office, please God,” she piped up. “But dignity, yes. I’ve seen Ghanaians respond to difficult situations with extraordinary grace. I wouldn’t mind catching a bit of that.”

  I hugged her, pressing her skinny body to mine. She had always been slender, but wiry, strong. Now, after a couple of weeks of illness, her body felt intensely fragile, a brittle cage of bones. I pulled back and looked into her hazel eyes. Their expression was wry, at once amused and embarrassed, with an unexpected glitter of tears.

  “Stop it,” she said, laughing. She ducked her head, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “I love you, Katie,” I said. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Prove it by writing me.” She flashed her impish grin.

  “I will.”

  We escorted Katie as far as the airport personnel would permit, all of us waving to her from the other side of a metal gate as she disappeared into the welter of bodies. Afterwards, our group drifted slowly back to the parking lot, where we stood talking amid the taxis and tro-tros, the carts loaded with luggage and the families clasping each other in greeting or farewell. The night air was cool and delicious, and we were in no hurry to get back to the hostel. The airport made us nostalgic; we were reluctant to part with the feeling of tender melancholy it evoked. For most of the foreigners, this nondescript expanse of asphalt was their first image of Ghana. They’d arrived here and would depart from here as well.

  We stood in a kind of group hug for many minutes, then someone started singing, “I Want Somebody to Carry Me Home,” a Ghanaian song we’d learned at camp. We all joined in, singing at the top of our lungs:

  Oh, to see my mothah once more, baby

  I want somebody to carry me home

  Oh to see my sistah once more, baby

  I want somebody to carry me home

  When we finished the song, we broke apart and began searching for a taxi. It was then that I saw the young American woman. It had been several weeks since the incident on the bus out of the Mole Game Reserve, but I recognized her immediately. She stood a few feet from our cluster, her body turned at a diffident angle, half toward us, half away. Although she was motionless, her presence had a hovering quality, a kind of leaning, as though our group were a fire that offered crucial warmth.

  Just then Gorbachev spotted her.

  “Eh! Sistah Laura!” he cried. “What are you doing here?” He pulled her next to him with one hand. She submitted, grinning shyly.

  “This is my friend Laura,” he said. “We met at the Wato Bar some two months ago. She had just arrived in Ghana, and we had such a fine conversation.”

  “Hi, you guys,” said Laura. Her eyes darted around the group. A timid smile played on her lips.

  I scanned her face intently, looking for signs of the hellion I’d seen on the bus. She was younger than I’d realized, barely out of her teens. Either she’d lost weight in the last few weeks, or I simply hadn’t looked at her closely before. She was all angles— shoulders and elbows sharp in her yellow cotton sundress, skin stretched tight over cheekbones and chin—much as Katie’s had been in these final days. Her nose and cheeks were burned and peeling beneath tufty reddish hair. Sunglasses had drawn wide circles around her pale eyes. She gave an impression of elaborate, almost melodramatic frailty, as though at any moment her
eyelids would flutter and she’d fall backward in a swoon.

  “What are you doing here?” Gorbachev inquired again.

  “I’m going home,” she said ruefully, indicating a large backpack propped against a pole.

  “I thought you were staying here for a full year. You were going to study Twi language in Kumasi, wasn’t that it?”

  “Yes, yes, I was, but . . . I got sick.” She coughed, as if to illustrate her point.

  “Oh!” said Gorbachev. “That is so unfortunate. The same thing has happened to our friend Katie. Is it malaria?”

  Laura shrugged slightly. “I actually don’t know what it is,” she said and began to cough again, her whole body shaking with the effort.

  In a few minutes she drifted away from Gorbachev. I moved toward her, my heart pounding. She turned her pale eyes on me without recognition.

  “We’ve met before,” I said.

  “We have?” She smiled uncertainly.

  I nodded. “On the bus out of the Mole Game Reserve.”

  She started slightly. A deep flush rose in her sunburned cheeks.

  “I was embarrassed,” I said.

  “You know,” she said, “I thought I’d paid the man. I really did. Only later that day, I realized I hadn’t.” She shrugged her shoulders and began to back away.

  I felt a surge of adrenaline. I needed to tell her, needed to get it out of myself.

  “I was so embarrassed,” I repeated, more loudly, “humiliated, in fact.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She shook her head once, sharply, as if to clear it. Then she laughed nervously, cocking her head like a bird. “It’s not your problem.”

  “Yes, it is—” I began, but at that moment she started coughing again. Her face darkened even further, turning almost purple as she hawked. Finally she conjured something thick and slimy from her throat, spitting it onto the pavement in front of her.

  “Leave me alone,” she moaned, looking at the ground. “What’s it got to do with you, anyway?” She rocked back and forth, eyes closed, arms wrapped around her bony body as if to keep it from breaking apart.

  12

  Genie

  Crying dream last night. Third one this trip. Always about Michael. Fear of losing him, loneliness, wanting it both ways. In this one I’m kissing and hugging and touching him, even as we’re breaking up. When he realizes what’s going on, he turns icy. “I don’t love you anymore,” he says. “How can you say that?” I plead. “We promised we’d love each other always. That no matter what happened, we’d be best friends.” I reach for his hand, but he yanks it away and begins to turn, spinning into a smoky blur. I get stuck in a loop and this reaching and pulling and spinning and blurring repeat themselves again and again until I awaken in bed with a pounding heart, tears and sweat in the morning cool.

  A few days after Katie’s departure, I was back on the road. The journey felt lonely without her. I missed her sarcastic commentary and dry English wit. At the same time, I felt a touch of exhilaration. It was wonderful to have someone with whom to share the humor and hardship of the journey, but I definitely connected more with others when I was alone. As traveling companions, two people form a closed unit. A solo traveler is open to the world.

  The world, that is, and all its men. The biggest problem with being a solo woman traveler is that every horny Tom, Dick, and Kwesi gloms onto you like a blood-hungry tick and won’t let go. “Vous êtes SEULE?” they ask, “You’re alone?” and then, with growing excitement, “Vous êtes AMÉRICAINE?” There’s an instantly recognizable look to the eyes of men who are about to give you a sleazy come-on—a hooded, dozy look intended to draw you in with the promise of candles, stringed instruments, expanding time, expansive beds.

  But as annoying as the men’s incessant overtures were, even more annoying was the inexplicable fact that I always felt guilty when I rejected them. Several years before, while traveling in Germany, I’d met an Italian guy at a youth hostel who wanted to go hiking with me. I said no, because he was already getting touchy-feely, and I knew I’d be fighting off his advances before we rounded the block. He reproached me with, “You must take risks when you are in a foreign country. Otherwise you miss it all.”

  Clearly this feeble attempt at persuasion was a garden variety example of the depths the male species could sink to in its tireless quest to self-perpetuate. We know this, right? And yet, in spite of this knowledge, I tormented myself for days, wondering whether I was cheating myself out of too much life. In another instance, a Swedish man whom I’d rebuffed asked me why I was creating artificial barriers between body and mind. We liked each other, why shouldn’t we make love? And although I knew he was a New Age clone whose recycled arguments went all the way back to John Donne and “The Flea,” I had to endure the nattering of my own mind for days, wondering whether there was something wrong with me, whether I was an ice empress, incapable of spontaneous passion.

  These things and more make a shaved head and robes sound like a blessed relief.

  After all my years of solo travel, I was convinced there was no tactic known to the Y chromosome that could surprise me. Then I met Jimmy Brahima.

  “You are very interesting,” he told me after less than five minutes’ acquaintance. “Très très intéressante. Please, can I take you to bed?”

  “No!” I shouted, furious and bored and disgusted. “No, no, no, no!” We were on a darkened street behind the stadium in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, a small city with tree-lined streets, lively markets, a couple of museums, and a famous mosque. I’d arrived that day from Ghana, after a long bumpy ride in a packed minivan. Burkina Faso was once a French colony, and the official language was still French. Fortunately, I was equipped for this, having studied for three years in high school and honed my skills during my month in Morocco.

  Since Burkina Faso is known for its culture, I’d made my way to the stadium to see a youth choir concert I’d seen advertised, only to find that there was no concert. I’d gotten the time wrong, or the day, or the year, I couldn’t figure out which. Tired, headachy, and near the breaking point, I’d been walking around in circles for almost an hour now, trying to find my way back to a hotel whose name I had forgotten. Along the way this irritating companion had attached himself to me, like something unseemly sticking to my shoe.

  “Shhhh. . . .” He looked around, embarrassed, but there was no one to hear. He leaned in for a kiss. I sidestepped him so quickly he almost fell.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said between gritted teeth. I was about to follow it up with a command to get the hell out of here, when he startled me by suddenly backing up about ten yards. He did it so quickly, bouncing backward in tiny Charlie Chaplin steps, that I giggled with surprise. From that distance he shouted the following pronouncement:

  “If a woman tells me not to touch her, I don’t touch her, because I don’t know what she is.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, mildly intrigued.

  “She could be a genie.”

  “Really?” I took a step toward him. He backed up. “A genie?”

  “Oh yes. There are so many genies walking around. They appear to be human, but when they want to, they can grow huge.”

  “Are they all women?” I asked.

  “No, there are males too, but the males don’t show themselves to men.” He looked at me speculatively, then continued. “If a genie is angry, it goes like this.” He made a powerful sucking sound through his teeth, lips parting slightly to let the air sing through.

  I tried to imitate him, but instead sputtered and drooled like a geriatric camel. I struggled to look forbidding, but laughter twitched the corners of my mouth uncontrollably, and soon I was cackling so hard I could barely breathe. After a moment Jimmy joined the escalating gigglefest until we were both bent over and gasping for air. Jimmy moved closer again now—I guess he figured I couldn’t possibly be a genie with such a wimpy capacity for hissing. He demonstrated the sound a few more times, and with some practice I got it.<
br />
  “Please,” he said now, “let us go to the bar for some beers. Afterward I will help you to find your hotel.”

  Riding the wave of goodwill, I accepted.

  “If you ever need to threaten a man, make that sound and he will run,” Jimmy counseled me as I followed his lead through the labyrinth of darkened streets.

  I promised to keep that in mind.

  “I worry for you, une petite fille, traveling alone.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” I said heartily. “I can take care of myself.” We’d reached the bar, which had an outdoor courtyard with several wooden tables where African men in both Western and traditional clothes sat drinking, laughing, and shouting. I slid onto a wooden bench.

  “But I do worry. Such a little girl. You need protection.” Jimmy himself was dressed in spanking new blue jeans and a silky black shirt with the top two buttons undone. I half-expected to see a thick gold chain around his neck. His face, seen for the first time in the light, was striking in a sleek, chiseled way, long and narrow with high cheekbones and gorgeous thick-lashed eyes. The combination of his disco-age clothes and movie-star features produced an effect at once sleazy and seductive. I already regretted having agreed to a drink.

  “Spare me the ‘little girl’ stuff,” I said testily. “ Je suis très forte. I’m very strong. Not to worry.”

  “I knew it.” Jimmy leaned forward, his eyes wide and eager. “I could see it. Please, will you tell me your secret?”

  I laughed, “There is no secret.”

  “You should tell your brother. Tell your friend. Teach me.”

  “No secret. I’m trained in self-defense,” I said.

  “Self-defense?” He lowered his voice to an excited whisper. “You mean you can . . . disappear?”

  “Disappear? No. I wish. Self-defense—I can defend myself. Use my hands and feet to disable someone, knock him out.”

  He looked at me reproachfully. “I wish you’d tell me the secret. Don’t be annoyed. You frighten me. I don’t know what you are.”