Sometimes It Snows In America

by Marisa Labozzetta

  “How was your trip?” Uncle Oliver asked in English, adding as Auntie cast a disapproving glance at him: “I’m sorry – as much as I’d like to, we don’t speak English in this house, Daniel. Part of a promise to Fatma’s birth mother long ago. We speak Swahili. Do you mind? The practice will do you good.”

  “The rain is not as bad here as in Katundu,” Daniel said in Swahili.

  “That’s bloody good!” Uncle Oliver burst out in English and led Daniel into the dining room.

  Daniel’s eyes roamed as though he might find Fatma behind a cupboard or in a corner, like a scorpion that had entered through a crack. His English had sounded different than Uncle Oliver’s.

  “You’ll get used to the weather,” Uncle Oliver said, reverting to Swahili.

  “I’ve been here almost two months already,” Daniel boasted. Uncle Oliver let out a hearty laugh.

  “But only in one season. Would you like to bathe?”

  Daniel must have felt uncomfortable at the prospect of climbing into a tub in a strange house, but Uncle Oliver’s impeccable appearance made it difficult for him to refuse. Oliver’s skin was scented with the green aftershave he kept on a marble shelf above the white pedestal sink in his bathroom. (Auntie had her own pink-tiled modern washroom.) His tawny hair, streaked with silver, was wet from his recent bath in the claw-foot Victorian tub and neatly parted. His crisp white shirtsleeves were rolled up to just below the elbow, signaling that he was ready – as a man should be at all times – to pitch in and work: change a flat tire in the mud, put up a fence, or load crates into his cargo ship.

  But as usual there was nothing for him to do in the house that night. He liked this. His wife and her two maids, Kiah and Lisha, had taken care of everything: the table was set; the meat had been roasting for hours. The pitcher of lemonade rested on the ornate mahogany sideboard, lemon slices floating on the surface.

  “Lisha,” Uncle Oliver called out towards the kitchen, his deep voice resonating through the house and up to the second floor where Fatma was hiding. “Prepare a bath for our guest.” He turned to Daniel. “I apologize for not having invited you sooner. I expected business to take me to Nairobi, where I thought we might meet, but the trip kept getting postponed.”

  “No problem.”

  During their conversation, Oliver Widdowson studied the young man’s face. He had anticipated meeting Daniel Kornmeyer for a long time – from before he was born.

  “Tell me, how is Walter? You certainly bear a strong resemblance to him.”

  “I’m not so sure you would say that if you saw him now,” Daniel replied in his halting Swahili. His father hadn’t weathered the years quite as well as Uncle Oliver.

  Oliver had met Walter Kornmeyer, a GI, during the Second World War. Stationed outside London, Walter had gone into the city on a long weekend pass and was leaving a pub with some buddies when the air raid siren sounded. They took off for the nearest shelter but along the way, stumbled over an English soldier writhing in pain on the pavement. Too tight to think straight, Walter’s companions refused to stop for the soldier. Walter, however, did. He managed to get the man off the street and stayed by his side throughout the bombing. Afterward, he took the Englishman to a hospital, keeping vigil over him during his recovery from a burst appendix. The rescue had forged a bond between two men who had nothing much in common and who, in an effort to fortify their relationship, whimsically promised their firstborns to one another in much the way schoolboys seal friendships with blood. During the postwar years they exchanged occasional holiday cards, but the worlds they now navigated were as far apart as the distance between them, except for the fact that both had achieved fatherhood later in life than most of their peers.

  Daniel was Walter’s only child, and Fatma Oliver’s only ward. Walter worried about his hippie son: he was too easygoing, too much of a do-gooder, and susceptible to the free sex and drugs of his rebellious times. Now he was about to serve two years in the Peace Corps, and Walter worried about the people he would encounter in his rural post; about the women he would sleep with, about the woman Daniel would be lured into marrying. Oliver, for his part, worried about his niece and her future in the unstable economy of Mombasa, and troubled Somalia, where Fatma’s parents and siblings perched on the brink of political and natural disaster. America could be her salvation, Oliver told Auntie. At first Oliver had promised only to look after Walter’s son during his stay in Kenya. Before long, however, the two men had had a lengthy phone conversation and had agreed that marriage might be beneficial to both their children as well as a fitting recognition of the pact they had made so many years before.

  Uncle Oliver offered Daniel a scotch before his bath. The young man accepted, but the way he nursed the drink as he surreptiously glanced around revealed that he was not a fan of hard liquor. “You cannot see her, you know,” Oliver said. “Custom.” “I know.”

  No, he could not see Fatma nor she him. But, crouched on all fours, an ear pressed to a floorboard in Lisha’s room above, Fatma could hear him, and through a hole left by a missing sliver of wood, she could vaguely make out his image.

  By the time the meal was over, the arrangement had been made. The deal Oliver Widdowson had agreed to on a lark years before became reality. Daniel and Fatma were engaged: he was nineteen, she eleven.

  *

  After a year of listening to Daniel’s voice when he came to visit, Fatma could still only hear him as they took their vows on the white beach. Separated this time by the traditional division of the sexes in Muslim rituals, they were hidden from each other by several rows of men on one side and women on the other.

  While the guests had partied for seven days prior to the ceremony – dancing to the musicians’ drumming, and stuffing themselves with roasted goat, camel stew, wedding loaf-cake, and sweet potato pie – Daniel remained hidden somewhere with Fatma’s brothers and she with the old women. Each night the midwife checked Fatma, the way she had checked her ever y Friday since the day of her first period, to confirm that her membrane was still intact and that she was worthy of a husband. If Daniel had been told that Fatma was no longer a virgin, he would have been given the option to cancel the wedding. It wasn’t until after the ceremony, after the gold-embroidered veil that Fatma could see through but through which no one could see her was removed, that Daniel first laid eyes on her round face and high cheekbones, her Moorish eyes and small Somali features.

  Daniel had been eager to marry. He was a “one-woman guy,” he always said, preferring the security of one female upon whom he could shower attention. She was a native of a land that fascinated him, and the act would please parents he seemed unable to satisfy. No, marriage was not at all difficult for him.

  Praise Allah, Fatma thought when she saw him face to face: at least he was handsome in his white collared dress shirt and khaki trousers. Marriage could never have been her decision to make. Neither the difference in age between Daniel and her, nor the fact that she was only twelve, was unusual in Mombasa. Still, Uncle Oliver had made an effort to persuade her: his business was faltering; Kenya was volatile; America offered a bright future. Nevertheless, she believed that she was being sent away, disposed of once more.

  Everyone was at the wedding except Daniel’s family and Fatma’s natural parents. Her father was off fighting to reclaim the Ogaden and other Somali-speaking regions of Ethiopia, and her mother had gone to visit Fatma’s grandfather in Saudi Arabia to boycott the ceremony. The fact that Daniel had converted to Islam had not impressed her: she knew he had merely gone through the motions (and without any formal study) for Fatma’s sake. According to Fatma’s mother, if you weren’t born into Islam, you could never be Muslim.

  Fatma’s mother had come to Mombasa when she heard of the engagement. For the first and last time she entered her sister’s home – a Christian man’s home. Concealed by the long black abaya and hijab, the Arabian Muslim robe and veil that exposed only her jet eyes and spidery lashes and that she would not remove even for h
er sister, it was as though she hadn’t entered her brother-in-law’s home at all. She planted herself in the living room and spoke fast in Arabic, so fast the words seemed to fly like sparks from a tongue that couldn’t keep up with the pace of her thoughts. Auntie’s face was creased by pain as she sat opposite her sister. Fatma couldn’t understand it then, as she peeked from behind a partially closed kitchen door, but Auntie’s greatest challenge was her desire to please her husband and at the same time the mother of her adopted child. The plainer of the two women spoke calmly and softly, defending her marriage to a Christian, but the shrouded, sharp-featured beauty cut her sister’s diplomacy to shreds. “What is it that you want?” Auntie finally pleaded. “I have raised her Muslim as you wished. I have not let her learn English.” Fatma longed to tell Auntie that her mother had no say in the matter; she had given Fatma away. Yet a part of Fatma wanted her mother to win because she hadn’t wanted to get married, to stop going to school, to belong to a man. Eventually her mother did accede to the marriage, but not before forcing Auntie to make one more promise, a concession that would remove her sister’s claws from Auntie’s skin but would sink them into Fatma’s for good.

  Fatma’s oldest sister, Ayasha, came from Mogadishu, and Fatma considered her a stand-in for their mother. There were enough years between Ayasha and Fatma that Ayasha cared for Fatma when she visited the house in Mogadishu. Ayasha knew how to coax Fatma out of hiding and often came looking for her. She would groom and play with her little sister as if Fatma were her very own and shower Fatma with the affection their mother never gave. Of all Fatma’s sisters, Ayasha most resembled their mother, and Fatma liked to pretend that she was her mother. Moreover, a recent event had brought Ayasha and Fatma even closer: Ayasha had married a Bantu, and their mother had disowned her.

  Parenting came naturally to Ayasha, but children did not. All her pregnancies had ended in miscarriage. On the day of Fatma’s wedding, she was once again carrying a child. “Ayasha, I’m frightened,” Fatma told her as they sat in the shade of a baobab tree.

  Ayasha laughed. “All girls are frightened on their wedding night.” “What if I get shot in the head like the bride in Somalia?” “Little sister, that was an unfortunate accident. She was the

  victim of overly excited well-wishers. No one here is shooting guns into the air.” She smiled and placed Fatma’s hand on a hard round belly that loomed like Kilimanjaro beneath her swollen breasts. “This is what makes it all worthwhile. This is the joy of what goes on between a man and a woman.”

  “I do not want to have any baby!” “Maybe not now. But you will.”

  *

  In Kenya, all the old women of the village watch the bride intently on her wedding night, since it is common for fearful girls to run away from arranged marriages, they are so young. The women escorted Fatma home from the celebration and waited in the hall, guarding the door, while she readied herself for Daniel. Afterward they would take her to the room where he was waiting and park themselves outside the door until the marriage was consummated and the midwife examined her one last time, for traces of blood – evidence of her lost innocence.

  “I will not live with a white man,” Fatma had boasted to friends, knowing that racial suspicion would make them more eager to help her escape. On her wedding night Fatma removed the white gown and crowned veil and put on men’s clothing. Her friend Halima had given her the garments and she had hidden them days before under her mattress. While the midwife prepared her bath, she parted the gauze curtains and climbed out the bedroom window, down an iron trellis abloom with red roses whose thorns caught on her clothing and scratched her. Halima’s father, a fisherman, waited for Fatma on the shore in his dhow and ferried her to Somalia in the night.

  The waters between Mombasa and Somalia are rough, the current strong. It was nine days later when they reached the house in Mogadishu. Three of Fatma’s older brothers, who had been in Mombasa for the wedding but who, after her disappearance, had flown back to Somalia, were expecting her. There was no welcome, no expression of surprise. They immediately began slapping and kicking her. Each time she fell, one of them picked her up and threw her back down on the floor. Even Hamal joined in the beating. They were careful not to touch her face; they didn’t want to give Daniel an excuse to reject her. Like the time she had to stifle her sobs when the soldiers came to her mother’s home in the middle of the night, she now concealed the pain she felt all over her body, the hurt in her heart. And she believed that, if her father had been in Mogadishu, her brothers would never have done what they did: while beatings were a part of the culture of Somali domestic life, her father had never laid a hand on her mother.

  After they finished with Fatma, Hamal accompanied her back to Mombasa by plane. During the journey Fatma refused to speak with him; years would pass before she did so again. One would have thought Allah himself had knocked at Auntie’s door for all the fuss made over Hamal for returning with Fatma. They celebrated with another feast. More determined than ever, that night Fatma escaped out the window again.

  In Mombasa, if you asked someone to keep a secret, they would. All her friends were on her side. The first time she ran away, no one thought to look for her in a fishing dhow – fishermen were lower class, and she had been forbidden to associate with them, but for that very reason she was drawn to these people. This time Hamal went to every boat in the harbor, yachts and hiding dhows alike. By the time they came to the one in which Fatma had been hiding, the eighteen-wheeler food transporter she was on was headed for Uganda. There the driver met with another, who took her to Tanzania. “So, princess, you want a ride?” the drivers had said when she climbed into their trucks, because everyone knew and respected her. She was the granddaughter of a Somali king and the great-granddaughter of the king before him.

  After Fatma had spent a week at a friend’s house in Tanzania, the friend’s mother had called Auntie, who came and escorted Fatma back to Mombasa.

  “You’re angry with me, Mama?” Fatma asked as they sat on the airplane. Auntie liked it when she called her “Mama.”

  “What do you expect, Fatma? To show such disrespect to your uncle, who has given you his home.”

  “Is he cross with me, Mama?”

  “Quite.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Fatma waited for some admonishment; instead Auntie turned toward the window, but not before Fatma saw her fighting a smile. So Auntie was not that upset with the runaway bride after all, Fatma understood. Perhaps she was even enjoying their little trip, though Fatma’s behavior had been an insult to her husband, whose honor Auntie was bound to uphold.

  This time there were no festivities upon Fatma’s return to Mombasa. The old women were called back to wait by the door, and after their first night together, Daniel and Fatma left for Katundu.

  Katundu

  It rains nonstop for three months at a time in Kenya. Fatma and Daniel were married in late June – the end of the second wet season – when roads to small villages become too muddy or flooded to travel. They left Mombasa by train at eleven in the morning and reached Nairobi around seven in the evening. There they spent the night on a bench at the bus station because traffic to Katundu had been halted by the rains.

  Daniel wasn’t angry with her for running away. It seemed everyone but her brothers and uncle had found it amusing. Daniel had smiled a lot that day during the train ride and, while he was speaking Swahili quite well by now, she pretended his grammar wasn’t good enough to understand. Still, despite his silence, she could tell he was anxious to show her, a native, a place in Africa where she’d never been.

  While they waited for the buses to resume running, he laid out his sleeping bag on the bench, placed her duffle bag as a pillow, and urged her to lie down. He told her not to be afraid to sleep, that he would not leave her side. She wondered if he was guarding her to make sure she wouldn’t run away again. She closed her eyes but didn’t fall asleep, checking on him from time to time through her slitted eyes an
d, good to his word, always finding him on the floor, leaning against the backpack that cushioned the sharp edge of the bench seat.

  *

  By Kenyan standards, Katundu was a rich mountain village, where family farms grew coffee and tea, bananas and vegetables. It was the home of the Mau Mau warriors and of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, to whom everyone seemed to be related. Katundu was Kikuyu land and, since she spoke not a word of it, her tongue became paralyzed. Although Swahili is supposed to be taught in all Kenyan schools, only those from Mombasa learn it in the home; everyone else speaks their tribal language. They say that, if you drink the salt water of Mombasa, you will speak perfect Swahili. As far as Fatma could tell, no one in Katundu had ever sipped Mombasa water.

  Katundu was a rich village, but by Kenyan standards; the families might have owned their farms, but it was the companies they sold to that profited. The natives, long bound to the earth and the companies they served, seemed to have no desire for beauty and the comforts that progress could have brought them. Daniel admired this lack of materialism; Fatma found the Kikuyu mentality absurd. Why would anyone work hard for someone else if they didn’t have to? she asked herself. Why would they work for almost nothing? This was certainly not the business philosophy of her mother and grandfather. The Kikuyu were stupid, she concluded. And while Daniel was a teacher – and white – and therefore respected in Katundu, she was still Somali, and believed that the Kikuyu didn’t like her any more than other Africans did.

  At the sight of Daniel’s wooden frame two-room house which was attached to the one-room school where he taught English, she cried. “No running water? No electricity? No indoor plumbing? No maid?” She had never seen an outhouse, let alone used one at night, when she might run into snakes. And how it smelled!