Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

  The air was filled with birdsong, harsh and lyrical, legato and staccato—a polyphonic symphony. A hawk circled overhead. Earlier in the day we’d seen three hippos, bathing serenely in the middle of the river, their backs rising from the water like the mountains of a sunken land. Another couple sunned themselves on shore. Touré warned me to steer clear of them, both in and out of the water. They were very fast, he said, and they’d been known to chase people down and trample them to death.

  Great, I thought wryly, one more thing to worry about.

  But nothing was worrying me now. My broad-brimmed straw sunhat cast a half-circle of shade on my face. I kept taking my sunglasses off and putting them on again: off to experience the colors; on to cut the glare. I was singing: “I’m on the top of the world, looking down on creation and the only explanation I can find—”

  Suddenly the captain of the ship, who’d been standing a few feet in front of me, nose to the wind like a mascot, jumped off the roof to the deck below. The boat was heading straight for the swampy shore. He grabbed a pole and threw his weight against it, trying to deflect the nose from collision, but we were moving too fast—the pole jumped back at him. He sprang out of the boat as though someone had pushed an ejector button, and crashed into the water below.

  I stared at the water, paralyzed. Where had he gone? Was he hurt? Just as I was about to scream for help, he hopped out of the water onto the bank, shouting and waving his arms.

  At that moment, the nose hit the shore with a resounding crack. Wood splintered. Water began pouring in. A few scattered shouts from the deck below built quickly to a cacophony.

  Wow, I thought, with a kind of dull incredulity. This is really an accident.

  People started running off the boat. I suddenly realized my notebooks were still in the back of the boat, under the roof. One of them was loose, on my mat; two others were in my small daypack. There was over a month of writing there, precious detail I didn’t want to lose. I knew I should’ve mailed them home! I decided to wait until everyone was out of the way before jumping down. No fire-in-the-movie-house crush for this girl.

  When the flow of traffic stopped, I leaped lightly to the deck. The water was coming in slowly—only ankle-deep so far. Plenty of time to get my notebooks.

  To get to my things, I had to make the precarious climb over the sunken kitchen. When I got there, I found Touré, dragging my two packs and his own satchel toward the shore end of the boat.

  “Here, put these on your back,” he said, dropping them. I knelt to detach the daypack from the larger one. Touré had connected them the night before by interlinking the straps. He’d said they were less likely to be stolen that way.

  “What are you doing?” he yelled.

  “I’m detaching the small pack.”

  “There’s no time for that! Put the packs on your back!” He headed off, toting his bag.

  I tried to follow his instructions, but in my haste I got tangled in the straps. I couldn’t imagine negotiating the climb from the boat to the shore with that load on my back. I had the irrational notion that if I put on the heavy pack, my part of the boat would sink faster. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my current notebook—the red spiral one—sitting on my grass mat. I reached for it.

  Until that moment, I’d never really understood the way a boat sinks. I figured that with the water coming in so slowly, it would be a good half hour before the boat was really under. What I didn’t realize is that when the weight of the water hits critical mass, the boat just goes down.

  Suddenly water—at my chest and rising. I tossed the bags and dove. But did I dive? Or was I just suddenly in the water? My hat! The leather braid yanked my head back, choking me. Ripped it off, paddling wild, roof coming down, dark. Dark. Underwater—how long?—turning, flailing in slow-motion darkness. Which way is up? Thrashing, heartbeat, loud—Did I clear the roof? Then light, murky and green, and I popped up into it, gasping.

  The water was eerily calm. I looked around, confused.

  Any children in the water? Fuck it—get to shore. What a selfish ass-hole you are.

  I swam for the muddy bank, where children and adults were running down the shore, chasing after floating luggage.

  “La blanche! La blanche!” A man extended a scratchy hand. I almost pulled him in, trying to gain my balance in the slippery mud.

  Touré came running up the bank toward me.

  “Look what happened to me trying to find your luggage,” he shouted, showing me a gash on his arm. “And this one tried to kill me; she tried to strangle me!” He indicated a slim young woman standing nearby with a baby on her back. She held a naked, shivering little boy by the hand. “She grabbed me here,” indicating his turban. “Sauve moi! Sauve moi!” he yelped, affecting a shrill soprano.

  “She was probably afraid,” I said.

  “Is that a reason to strangle me?”

  Just then I heard a high-pitched sound, somewhere between a chirp and a scream. It came again and again, sharp and staccato, repeating at regular intervals like an alarm. I looked around, agitated, trying to locate where it was coming from. The brown surface of the water was smooth, undisturbed except for the end of the boat sticking up like a shark’s fin and the baggage drifting lazily downstream.

  “What’s that sound?” I asked Touré, but he was gone, chasing the bags. I began to scan the floating debris for my things. I was thinking, again, of my notebooks, wondering if they could possibly be saved.

  “Madame, your bag?” The captain’s adolescent daughter was beside me, panting with exertion, pulling me inland. Her chubby hand gripped my forearm too tightly. She parted the high grass and pointed to a soggy duffel bag.

  “No, that’s not mine,” I said distractedly, watching the river. “Have you seen a small gray daypack? Or a red notebook?”

  She shook her head, dragging me along the shore to where more retrieved items lay drying.

  “This?” she asked, pointing. “This?”

  “No, not mine,” I said. People were darting among the luggage in a panic. A fight seemed to have broken out over a cloth-tied bundle. Two women were pulling at it. Clothes went flying.

  “What is that sound?” I asked again. The shrill cries were coming at shorter intervals now, one after another.

  The girl shrugged. “A bird, maybe.” She pointed to a leather satchel. “Yours?”

  “No, no . . . There are two, a gray daypack and—”

  Just then I saw my red spiral notebook floating downstream.

  “Oh!” I ran down the bank, stripped off my skirt, and dove for it. When I got back to shore, holding my sopping notebook, the air seemed unnaturally still. The high-pitched sound, I realized, had stopped.

  Catching my breath, I turned inland to survey the landscape in which we were stranded. Shielding my eyes, I saw that the muddy bank and high grasses soon gave way to drier land. Sandy dunes capped the horizon, bare with spiky grass at the tip. Low shrubs were scattered around the base of the dunes. The scenery I’d found so beautiful a half-hour before now appeared bleak: shadeless and unforgiving.

  When the flow of luggage abated, the captain’s daughter returned, still in a tizzy. She showed me several more unclaimed bags, none of them mine.

  “I am so sorry we have not found it,” she said, shaking her head. Her hands flew despairingly to her face.

  “It’s okay.” I clutched my notebook, laid my other hand on her shoulder. My passport and travelers’ checks were in a money belt around my waist, soggy but intact. “At least no one was hurt,” I said soothingly.

  “Yes,” she nodded, eyes wide. “They say there was a man who died.”

  “Really?” A knot of anxiety formed in my chest. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Only, an old woman, she saw him, trying to swim.”

  I searched for Touré, the fear hardening, moving upward into my throat. I found him arguing with the husband of the young woman he’d “rescued.” Apparently this had caused some jealo
usy. I grabbed his arm and pulled him aside.

  “They say someone drowned.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said distractedly. “Your friend. He is dead.”

  “What?”

  He turned to face me. “The deaf mute. He was caught in the boat. He did not know how to swim.”

  “The . . . That man?” I imitated the hand gestures, and Touré nodded.

  “Are you sure?” My mind doubled back frantically. Hadn’t I seen him?

  He shrugged. “I did not see it, but that’s what they are saying.”

  “But—” I stopped suddenly. Oh God. That sound.

  But how? I thought. Those were not the cries of a person in the water. A person in the water couldn’t have kept up such a steady stream of sound! He’d have been splashing around, gulping, gasping, wouldn’t he? How could the sound go on so long?

  Unless he was in the boat. The back of the boat was sticking up; his head could’ve been just above—But I was staring right at the boat, how could I not—if he’d been in there I would have seen—But I wasn’t looking, was I? I was thinking of my notebooks. My notebooks—

  Oh no. No.

  “Why didn’t someone save him?” I whispered.

  “They did not see him in time.”

  Most people’s things were recovered. The men cracked open the bamboo ribs of the roof, and things trapped within floated up, including my two packs. As they dove to dislodge stuck items, I held my breath, afraid I’d see a waterlogged body emerge, pale and softening. It never came. The current, swifter than it appeared, had long since carried him away.

  We scrambled to set up camp, scrounging among the shrubs for firewood, searching the recovered sacks for edible grain. Throughout this process, a toddler’s cries permeated the air. These were not a normal child’s cries, but raw, hair-raising sounds, as though she were suffering some excruciating physical pain. Her eyes were bleary with tears; mucus ran from her nose.

  This went on for hours. The young mother, edgy and embarrassed, alternated comfort and threats. Occasionally the crying stopped for a few moments. Each time it started up again, people groaned. It was as though the child were expressing, vocally, the private anguish of the entire boat. It was all I could do not to plug my ears.

  Once, as the mother lifted the child to her breast, the little dress rose, and I saw that it was not a girl, but a boy. I felt a complex pang, for the grief he would have to stow.

  “That boy is traumatized by the accident,” I said to Touré.

  “He’s spoiled,” he said. “He needs to be slapped.”

  Night fell. The darkness was alive with humming and whirring insects, punctuated by the occasional birdcall. Soggy and pathetic, we huddled around small fires at the foot of the dunes, holding clothing and blankets toward the flames to dry. I turned my bulky sleeping bag over and over, trying to dry it inside and out without burning a hole.

  The woman Touré had nearly come to blows over sat near me with her baby on her lap. Her little boy, still naked, shivered beside her on the log. Searching for a dry garment to give him, I came across my emergency blanket, a paper-thin sheet of something metallic—gold on one side, silver on the other. This blanket, I’d been told, could reflect back enough of your body’s heat, in a pinch, to save your life. I unrolled it, shielding my eyes from the reflected firelight, and wrapped it around the shaking child. He shrieked with delight and began to run from campfire to campfire with his arms outstretched, a superhero in a shining cape.

  As I returned to the task of drying my sleeping bag, I gradually became aware of a thin man standing beside me, watching my manipulations with amusement.

  “Are you feeling better?” he asked. His light, soothing voice and flawless French sounded oddly familiar.

  I shrugged, turning my face toward the flames.

  “You know,” he said, “when you cry, it brings everyone else down.”

  I looked at him in disbelief. “Well, they should be down. A man died.”

  “Men die every day.”

  “But it shouldn’t have happened. The river’s not wide; it’s not even very deep. We could have done something, if we hadn’t all been chasing our luggage. Including me with my notebook, God help me.”

  “That’s right!” he said, with sudden energy. “God helped you! It was our brother’s time.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said, wishing for once that he could convince me, that anyone could.

  “If you’d seen him,” he said, “would you have done something?”

  “Yes! I think so. I mean, God, I hope so. I mean—”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No, but I heard—”

  “But did you see him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Neither did I. And I promise you, if I had seen him, I would have gone in after him, even if I had died myself. But why do you think, with all these people, the only one who saw him was an old woman who could not swim?”

  I started to say that I’d like to believe him, but that I’d never seen any evidence that the universe was not completely, absurdly random—but my throat closed up. He looked in my eyes for a long time, searchingly, as though he might transfer some faith this way. I felt a sudden urge to grab his narrow shoulders and kiss him, so hard that our teeth knocked, to bite, to squeeze until we both lost breath. My throat ached as though a stone were lodged there, and my face went hot.

  “So you should not cry,” he said.

  “But we should remember,” I croaked, “so we learn from it.” My eyes welled up. I turned my head from the fire, and cool air bathed my face.

  He sighed. “People have lost shoes, identity papers, everything. Cakes and cloth they were going to sell are ruined. They have nothing to bring home to their families, not even money to get back to their villages. They must keep cheerful. No one has forgotten. Each person, alone, will think of it. And around these fires tonight, people will talk of it. They are talking of it already.”

  It was then that I recognized his voice. The night he’d held my hand while I balanced on the boat’s edge seemed light-years ago now, an entirely other life.

  His name was Yaya, and he was studying to be a minister, a Christian convert from a prosperous Moslem trading family. He’d been a student activist and lived in exile in France for two years when the political climate got too hot, hence his impeccable French.

  “Do you know how you can tell that it is not yet your time to die?” he asked.

  “How?”

  “Because you are sitting here alive.”

  We pulled up a couple of sacks of damp grain and sat close to the low fire, occasionally feeding it twigs from a nearby pile. Above us a perfect half-moon had risen, dazzling and cold. My sleeping bag was almost dry.

  “Once I was in a car accident outside Bamako,” he continued. “Seventeen people in my van. Every person died, except me. I walked forty kilometers to my brother’s house in Bamako, covered all over in the blood of strangers. I did not know why I was alive. But now I know. God was saving me, to do his work.”

  “Why you?”

  He pondered this for a moment.

  “Because I am so handsome,” he said at last.

  I looked at him in astonishment. He kept a straight face for a few seconds, then burst into laughter: a high-pitched, goofy giggle.

  Touré strode over from a neighboring fire. For the last half-hour I’d heard him in the background, entertaining a group of elderly men with some dramatic yarn.

  “Tanya!” he shouted. “I have put together two sacks of grain over there for you to sleep on, so you do not have to lie on the earth, where it is wet.”

  “Oh thank you, Touré,” I said amiably, “but my friend Yaya here already found me some sacks.” I indicated the ones we were sitting on. “They’re pretty dry,” I added, smiling.

  Touré started, then thrust his face close to Yaya’s as though checking his skin for blemishes.

  “I see,” he said and strode haughtily away.


  Several times throughout that long, achy night, as I lay curled in my sleeping bag on the lumpy sacks, I heard Touré imitating me to his cadre of rapt geezers.

  “We could have saaaaved him! Oooooh, we could have done something!” Touré yowled in a weepy falsetto, while his audience howled with laughter.

  Finally, as the sky began to gray, I’d had enough.

  “What’s funny, Touré?” I shouted across the expanse of sleeping bodies. “What’s the joke? A man died. A human life.”

  “You are right,” he said somberly. “Sorry.”

  As I lay back down I heard him cooing, very softly, “a huuuuman liiiiiife.”

  When I finally slept, I dreamed of the deaf man. I was wandering through an American supermarket when I heard his cry. Over and over it came. I tore through the aisles, frantically searching. The sound seemed to be coming from behind some cereal boxes. I ran to the shelf and began to pull the boxes off, trying to get to him. Uncooked grain spilled from the fallen boxes, littering the floor. But behind each brightly colored row there was another line of boxes in sleek primary colors, each a different brand. Santana was beside me, piling a cart high.

  “You are wasting so much food,” she said, as I flung the boxes to the ground. Then I saw that they weren’t cereal boxes but brightly colored spiral notebooks.

  The cry began to recede, and I ran down another aisle, trying to find its source. As I ran, the aisles of the supermarket became a maze of narrow dusty streets. With each passing moment, the cry grew fainter and more desperate. I knew that I had to find him, that time was running out. I kept tripping over piles of wet notebooks, catching myself, barreling on. Just when I thought I’d found him, I came smack up against a blank mud wall.

  I woke to activity. All around me people were untying bundles and unpacking bags, draping clothing and papers across the tall grass to dry in the early morning sun. The air was still cool, but in direct sunlight the heat of the impending day was beginning to show its teeth. I went in search of my backpacks, which I’d dropped behind a low bush. When I finally found them, Touré was right there, standing guard. His own belongings were there, too, spread across the bush to dry. They included a shirt, a pair of pants, and his current “commerce”: three pairs of women’s shoes and twenty or thirty sample-size bottles of perfume.