“Not every malady is caused by a jinn, you know.” “You don’t think I have one?”
“I’m not sure.”
He remained so aloof that she wondered about his authenticity, and looked around for diplomas like those one sees in a doctor’s office.
“Where did you learn to heal?” she asked.
“The ability to heal is not learned. One is born with it.” “Have you cured many people?”
He nodded. “There are a lot of jinns in Lamu, because the people here believe in them. But,” he said sadly, “their numbers are decreasing. Electricity, you know – too much light. They have no place to hide.”
“Isn’t that good?”
“Good for evil jinns. Bad because good ones who protect are also leaving.”
“But the cure – it’s certain?” “Generally. Sometimes, however, the jinn is simply too strong.” “What happens?”
“The victim dies.” She gasped. “Not right away. A fatal evil jinn will make a person sick for a very long time before death comes.” Probably concerned that he might have frightened her into leaving, he spoke in a lighter tone. “But your evil jinn, if you do indeed have one – and I sense that it is only one – does not seem to be of that nature; a fatal jinn is usually the result of witchcraft. In any case, you must remember that even the most evil jinn enters a person with God’s blessing. Before a person can cast a jinn on another, God must agree or it cannot happen. God has reasons.”
“Can you help me?” “I will try.”
He went over to the side table and picked up a gold pendant the size of a silver dollar. Dangling it by its chain in front of her face, he instructed her to concentrate very hard on it. He began chanting in Arabic, and that is all she remembered, because he hypnotized her so that he could talk to her jinn and see what it wanted and what she had done to deserve it. She awoke to the sweet smell of burning incense. Abd-al-Rahman was still sitting across from her. He told her that he had read some verses of the Koran and burned the coriander because its scent was pleasing to inns.
“Did it work?” she asked.
“I think so. But only time will tell if your jinn has kept his word.” “What do I owe you?”
“Five thousand shillings will do.”
A bargain, she thought. She paid him and stood up. He stood too, but kept on staring at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Strange,” he said, “that you still believe in jinns.” She knew that he meant after having lived in America for so long. She did not know how to respond. She wasn’t sure she did believe in jinns. She was learning to take responsibility for her actions. Yet she was sure the devil existed: she had seen him, felt him, tasted him, made love with him. I am desperate, she wanted to say. And when one is desperate, one will try anything. That much she had proven in her life. But she only nodded, expecting him to lead her out. He stood there as though waiting for her to say or do something more. She became aware of the bedroom again. He was drawing her in, or so she thought. She felt a tightening in her chest as she had on the night Nick proposed marriage: her hands grew cold; it was difficult to breathe and swallow. She wanted to run for the door, but her legs threatened to give way.
“You need to sit a while longer?” he asked and, with his hand on her shoulder, he attempted to lead her back to the chair. She recoiled from him the way a dog cowers before a brutal master.
“Nakwenda,” she uttered sharply. I am going. Immediately he turned and began walking down the stairs. He had been polite, that was all. He had been waiting for her to leave first, instead of appearing rude by showing her the door.
“Asante,” she whispered, drawing in the cool evening air.
He accepted her thanks with a nod and a look of concern. “Perhaps it has not worked,” he said.
“Asante,” she repeated, and hurried away.
*
She stayed in Lamu for a week. That was almost as long as it took for the black Pico dye to wear off her hands and feet. The henna proved a bit more stubborn. She hadn’t had this done to her since she was a child, when Lisha painted her hands and feet before their summer feast. Auntie had been furious. In her eyes it was like putting heavy makeup on a little girl. Fatma loved it. Throughout the days of the feast she ran around and played, glancing down at her extremities every now and then to admire the artwork that made her feel as though she had leapt into the mysterious realm of adulthood overnight.
The woman who sold dyes at the marketplace had handed her a piece of paper with her address written on it and offered to decorate Fatma. It would be like having a manicure, Fatma thought. Not wanting to appear too eager, she arrived at the woman’s home an hour later than she had said she would. Time was rather elastic in Kenya, and in Lamu, she was learning, it almost seemed to stand still. The woman’s home was similar to Abd-al-Rahman’s, only not nearly as elegantly decorated. The furnishings in the healer’s house had been few but fine; whereas, the house of “Auntie,” as she preferred to be called, was a hodgepodge of pieces. They sat on a couch with swirling turquoise, yellow, and tan upholstery, its carved wood frame scraped and worn. Beside it, a sink with ugly piping was attached to the whitewashed wall. After she had removed Fatma’s sandals, the woman produced a splintering wooden stepstool on which to rest Fatma’s feet.
She sat beside Fatma; the folds of her colorful and busy kanga fell over Fatma’s batik skirt. Yellow, mauve, and blue swatches of clothing contrasted with the heavily patterned couch and worn oriental carpet beneath them. Dipping her thick brush into the bottles of Pico, she painted the tips of Fatma’s toes and fingers black, and then, with a finer brush, painted designs on the tops and sides of her feet, all the way to her ankles. She filled in the outlines with orange-red henna, as if they were drawings in a coloring book. Fatma felt the same comforting tickling of the cool wet brush that had decorated her so long ago. And she became one with the woman from the marketplace and with the couch and the carpet. She became one with the colors and shapes and life forces of Lamu.
*
Fatma looked for Abd-al-Rahman everywhere in Lamu, but she never found him. Such a small place, so few people. Where was he? Once she thought she saw him at the marketplace. Her heart skipped, and she wrestled with how to approach him. First, she would apologize for her behavior. She would explain the attraction, then the fear of being cornered and attacked. When she finally decided that she would simply thank him again, he surprised her by heading her way. But a closer view proved that she had been mistaken; it was not Abd-al-Rahman. Her interest in him as a person frightened her, because she was not ready to trust her judgment about men. One has to be completely sure of oneself, and the desire from time to time for a glass of vodka told her she had not yet achieved this. After several days she wasn’t even sure she could identify the healer. His image – no longer clear in her mind – became distorted, and she believed she saw him in almost any handsome male citizen of Lamu between the ages of thirty-five and sixty. She began to doubt whether she had actually visited him at all. Had he been an alcoholic’s hallucination? A jinn himself?
She walked along the beach at sunset. The sky and water had turned shades of orange and brown as the foliage on the shore that cradled the water grew black. She stepped onto the wooden dock lined with dhows – exactly the kind she knew as a little girl. A fisherman was lying on the deck of one, staring up at the sky. In a few hours he would set out on a search for red snapper and yellowfin tuna. “Mshangao,” she called to him, but he didn’t respond. He must have been half deaf like most fishermen, and she was glad, because she could not contain her laughter. She was remembering the first night she had run away from Daniel, when Halima’s father, also deaf, hid her in his boat. She saw Auntie’s face as she sat beside Fatma on the airplane that took them from Tanzania back to Mombasa, the smile that told her Auntie thought she had been nervy, maybe even clever, in running away. The look that said she was not such a bad girl after all. Her life began to roll before her like a film at her o
wn private showing. Faster and faster the reel spun, and the more images she saw, the more she laughed. She was hunting in Serengeti with her father, riding the lion at the ranch in Mogadishu. Even the painful scenes with Nick forced a smile, because their reality was over. Her healing had begun long before she’d met Abd-al-Rahman. It had started with Sarah and Miss Wilma and Linda Stern. With the Luccheses. It had started with Auntie, and with her mother and the determination she had bequeathed her. Only her mother couldn’t do what Fatma was doing: she could never look in the mirror and laugh at herself. She could never be humble. That’s what had isolated her and made her brittle. Nick also lacked humility and used his physical strength to hide his weaknesses. The leader who survived her Uncle Ahmad was also a very powerful man, perhaps more powerful in the eyes of his subjects than her uncle had been. When the opposing clan killed him, his soldiers stuffed his body and for several days and pretended that he was still alive to prevent the enemy from storming the palace and to keep his supporters feeling secure and calm. That’s what power is: the illusion of greatness, larger than life and bolstered by fear. A man full of hot air.
She, too, had never been able to back up, to admit to her mistakes and start again. And so she had stayed on the road, running faster and faster until she strayed too far and got lost.
It was peaceful in Lamu, but it could never be home. Mombasa was, to some extent, comforting, but it wasn’t home any longer either. Despite her years of protest she was American now. While she no longer fit perfectly in either place, she had to choose. And so she chose to keep to her plan and return to Mombasa and eventually to her anchors in Willowsville. Because she had taken that step back, and she was afraid of what she saw. It was only a matter of time before she’d begin to run blindly again, then trip and tumble down into that dark abyss. Still she needed to take one more side trip before she began her journey home.
*
She wore a green and orange and red kanga she had purchased at the marketplace. But she was scandalously naked beneath the cloth she had wrapped around her and fashioned into a skirt. Abandoning the upper piece of the kanga set, she paced the hot hotel room barebreasted and waited for the electricity to be turned on again. Your patience is becoming, the printing on the kanga read. She didn’t know why she had bought a kanga that said that. She hadn’t really paid much attention to what had been written on it; she had been drawn to the colors. There were rolling blackouts in Lamu to conser ve energy – power on one day, off another. Sometimes, they told her, it was three days on and three off. Electricity had become a big problem in Kenya, because it came from Uganda, and political disagreements caused the Ugandans to pull the plug, so to speak. Americans, her brother had told her, were planning to build massive generators for Kenya, but until then, power was at a premium, particularly on an island like Lamu. Even in Nairobi, anything electrical – for instance, the telephone system – had become undependable. The first two days of her visit she stayed at Petley’s, where generators kept the luxur y hotel’s power going all the time. Her money was running out, however – the income from the sale of the house on Poplar Street dwindling away. She still planned to leave ever y cent she could to her family. Moreover, she planned to go to Saudi Arabia, despite her auntie’s pleas and her sister’s rejection. Just to catch a glimpse of her son and, if she should be so fortunate, to speak with him. She moved to the Millimani her last night, hand-washed some garments in cold water, there being no hot, and woke up with bedbugs all over her. Time to return to Mombasa – as soon as her under wear dried.
Imani
Hamal shook his head as he eyed Fatma’s stained hands and feet. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I think so.”
“You should have. You stayed away long enough. You could have phoned, told us where you were. I was beginning to think you were kidnapped by bandits, or tried to cross the border, or stowed away in some dhow that got taken by pirates.”
“There was a power outage.”
“The entire time?” She smiled. “You find this funny? Is that what they do in America? Laugh at crime and danger? At respect for family?”
“I’m sorry. Thank you for worrying about me.”
It had been selfish of her not to phone, but she hadn’t even thought about calling. She had needed to separate herself from ever yone she knew, to test her own strength. She had been made whole with the help of others, but not wholly with their help.
“Has anything new happened in Somalia?” she asked.
“The representatives at the conference in Djibouti have elected a transitional government. The city, however, is still car ved up among clan-based faction leaders who were ignored at the conference. There’s little hope for long-term stability.” There was still annoyance in Hamal’s voice, as though he found her responsible for the atrocities. For the rest of her stay in Mombasa, all their attempts to phone the family in Somalia were futile.
“Hamal, I’m going to Saudi Arabia.”
He looked at her with pity as he shook his head. “But you promised Mama,” he said.
“No! I promised nothing. I only listened. But I need to try, Hamal. I’m so close.”
“And how will you do this? Your visit is almost over.” “I need to see him.”
“Like Lamu.” “Yes. Like Lamu.”
“Will you call Kamilah?” “No!”
“I forgot. You like to make surprise appearances.”
*
She handed the travel agent her plane tickets to America. She couldn’t afford to extend her stay, and needed to coordinate her itinerary with her existing connections. The young man told her if she left that evening, after long layovers in Nairobi and Jeddah, she would arrive in Riyadh in late afternoon of the following day. That would leave her twenty-four hours to meet Hussein, or at least catch a glimpse of him, before she had to be back in Nairobi in time for her return flights to London and Boston.
“Can I see your visa?” the agent asked. She produced her passport and the visa to Kenya.
“To Saudi Arabia,” he said.
She had never thought about getting that one. “How do I get it?”
“First things first. You are an American citizen. All visas require a sponsor. And, by the way, all women must be met at the airport by their sponsors.”
“I have family in Riyadh,” she said, knowing full well that
Kamilah would never agree to sponsor her.
“Even with a sponsor, securing a visa can take months.” “But I must go there today.”
“Well, you’ll just have to wait until your affairs are in order.” “I can’t wait.”
“There is nothing I can do for you,” he said, looking over her shoulder at the next person in line.
“It was not meant to be,” Hamal would say when she returned to their mother’s home. “Not wise to play with destiny.”
*
On her last day in Mombasa, she stopped at a marketplace for souvenirs, some small gifts to take back to Sarah and Miss Wilma. A man approached her as if to greet her. Suddenly, someone behind her pinned back her arms while the smiling man sliced the strap of her purse. “Kumamayo!” she screamed, waving her hands wildly like. “Fuck you!” There was so much noise and foot traffic around her that the incident went unnoticed – or ignored. The man who had grabbed her purse caught sight of her diamond gleaming in the midday sun and almost dislocated her finger as he yanked the ring off. The whole affair lasted only seconds. No one did anything. The police were nowhere to be found. When the officials at the station understood that she had only been robbed, they wanted no part of her. This was not how the Swahili people of her childhood behaved. She had to get to the travel agency in Nairobi as soon as possible to arrange for a new ticket to be issued, knowing that nothing was easy these days in Kenya. At least she had put her passport back in the hotel safe, but her plane tickets were still in the purse. On her way back to the hotel she fought the urge to punch someone – anyone. She wanted to claw at herself
for having let down her guard – at her vulnerability, her stupidity. But rage boiled over into tears. Kenya had stripped her of the bold façade she had arrived with and left her exposed for all to see. Despite her efforts to appear healthy and whole, she would leave Mombasa as herself – weakened and struggling, dependent on the help of others.
Everyone in the house contributed money for Fatma to take a bus to Nairobi; flying was out of the question. “You have enough for a modest hotel and food for your trip,” Hamal said. She thought of the bug bites from the Millimani.
The goodbyes were difficult. More than ever, her family walked that thin line between life and death, but the robbery had left her too anxious to secure another ticket home for her to become overly sentimental. Hamal and his wife were grateful for her having left them Auntie’s house. What was she going to do, take it to America? They said they would keep in touch. She knew they would keep in touch with their hearts. That was all. Life was too complicated to do more. Maybe there would be a letter or a call every now and then.
“Goodbye,” Hamal said in English, as if to prepare her for her reentry in America. He kissed her lightly on her sunken cheek.
*
Change is inevitable, and it had come to Kenya, but Kenya had held the door open a little too long and allowed much of the good to slip out while the bad had muscled in. Although Mombasa had undergone negative transformations, Nairobi had become insufferable: crowded with immigrants, crawling with idlers, beggars, and thieves. It was impossible to walk down the street without men rubbing their bodies against her (most of them young, with nothing to do) or being tugged at by dirty, pleading street children whose hands had just rummaged through garbage. Hamal had advised her to stay in after dark. “They rape women in broad daylight,” he warned. She had taken an overnight bus whose countless stops interrupted her sleep and made the trip interminable. She had survived the back streets of Rockfield, and then prison.
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