Sometimes It Snows In America

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Sometimes It Snows In America Page 23

by Marisa Labozzetta


  She went directly to a travel agency, and after waiting two hours in an empty office, an agent named Tarana Wachira, who hit the keys of her computer with the tips of her inch-long, gold-glitter nails and who displayed little sympathy for Fatma’s plight, told Fatma she would take care of everything. It would take time, she warned, because they were shorthanded. Fatma was to fax from her hotel – if the power was working – and Miss Wachira would return the fax with a new ticket. Fatma doubted there would be a fax machine where she could afford to spend the night. However, she decided to worry about that later.

  At a kiosk she bought a Coke. After all the explaining she had done to Miss Wachira (who had displayed greater concern for the chip on her fingernail) and the dry heat, her throat was parched. She was paying for the drink when she caught sight of a small hand reaching up to the counter to snatch the soda. Fatma grabbed the sticklike wrist it was attached to and nearly broke it.

  “Kumamayo!” a little voice said, but Fatma held on and stared him in the eye. He was filthy – dressed in shorts and a tight-fitting undershirt – with a torso not much wider than the pathetic wrist. His eyes, an all too familiar sight, were dull, bloodshot, and glazed over. She knew that if she let go, he would run away. “Don’t! Don’t do this! Don’t!” she shouted down at him in Swahili, like a mother outraged over her child’s behavior, while he tried to wriggle free of her grasp and screamed obscenities.

  “Get lost!” the vendor told both of them. “Go away. You ruin my business.”

  “Fuck you!” Fatma yelled at him.

  “What’s going on?” a man in a gray sweatshirt asked in English. He was tall and white and old. Fatma released the boy’s wrist.

  “She tried to kidnap me,” the boy yelled in Swahili. “She tried to kill me.”

  “Sure she did,” the man said. He swept a lock of thinning snowy white hair from his forehead. “Come along,” he told the boy. “I’m sorry,” he said in English to Fatma.

  “He’s little drug addict,” Fatma blurted out. “Yes. Most of them are.”

  “Where you taking him?” Fatma asked, but they had already started up the street, the little hand now wrestling with the older man’s as the crowd swallowed them up.

  She didn’t know why she did what she did next. Perhaps she simply had nothing to do for the next two days in Nairobi, or maybe she felt responsible for getting the boy in trouble. More likely, she had seen too much of her conniving self in those eyes. But she caught up with them, and keeping two or three people as a screen between them, she followed them to a narrow rectangular building with a tin roof and blue plank walls. They were about to enter when the old man turned around and, as if he’d known she’d been there all along, asked her if she wanted to come in.

  He motioned for the boy to sit down on one of the benches in front of several long wooden tables.

  An African woman in a suit met them. “Who have we here?” “This is Kwesi,” the old man said.

  “Come with me, Kwesi,” she said, smiling and taking his hand, which no longer offered resistance.

  “I’m Brother Frisone,” the man said, extending his hand to

  Fatma. “Welcome to Imani Home.” “I’m Fatma. Fatma Kornmeyer.” He looked a bit confused.

  “My husband,” she said. “He was American. I’m American. And Somali. And Kenyan.”

  “I’m also American. From Buffalo.” “Cold,” she said.

  “Yes, very.”

  There was a silence, which appeared to bother only Fatma. “What is this place?” she asked.

  “It’s a drop-in-center for some, a home for others. It’s a stop for the weary. Can I offer you some lunch?”

  She was hungry; it was almost noon. And she was still thirsty, since she had left her Coke on the counter. Still, she declined.

  “Please,” Brother Frisone said. “Be our guest.”

  The woman, whose name was Alicia and who Fatma later learned was a social worker, returned with Kwesi. He was washed up and there were Band-Aids over the cuts on his bare feet. They had given him a worn but clean T-shirt that read GO CUBS.

  “A donation from America,” Brother Frisone said. “The rest of the boys are in school now. There are eighteen of them living here with us at the moment.”

  Over a lunch of vegetable soup, Brother Frisone told Fatma how he had come to Nairobi ten years before to work with a Catholic priest, who had since passed away, and with Alicia in their efforts with street children. “Father helped with food and education. Alicia offered her ser vices at the police stations and courts. With the aid of American sponsors, we have gone from a dilapidated mud house in the slums – with no electricity and running water, no toilets – to this three-room palace,” he said with pride.

  “I’m waiting for ticket back to Massachusetts,” she said, disassociating herself from Brother Frisone’s world. “Mine get stolen.”

  “Stay as long as you like.”

  “What happened to Nairobi?” she asked. “What happened to

  Kenya?”

  “A sad but familiar story. A leader who encouraged dissension and tribal bloodshed rather than concede defeat.”

  She didn’t understand.

  “The violence the dissension caused drove those who opposed his government away from their homes. In turn, they didn’t vote. The president won a disputed election and proceeded to run Kenya’s economy into the ground. Who would vacation here with the crime? The bombing of the U.S. embassy sealed its fate. There are other places for rich people to go on safari. Imagine a man willing to see his country nearly destroyed rather than give up power.”

  That night she stayed at Imani Home. The boys, who returned around three, first took her for another social worker and buzzed among themselves, darting glances at her. But her lack of interaction with anyone gave her away. It takes one to know one, they say in America, and it wasn’t long before she knew that they too had sized her up. She might have been older and neater and cleaner than most who came through the door, but she had more in common with them than appeared on the surface. Soon they ignored her and went about their chores much the same way the women at Haven House did. They did their homework, Brother Frisone and Alicia helping some with their English and Swahili lessons; they played soccer and card games; they cleaned up after dinner and then went to bed. Fatma slept on a cot in the dining room, the fingers of her right hand consoling the empty ring finger of her left. The diamond had been her last remaining tie to Nick, and the smoothness of her skin carved out a hollow in her gut. She had never been his wife, really. The thought still landed on her heart like one of his punches. A piece of shit like you? Never. You were never my wife, she heard him say.

  It cools down considerably at night in Nairobi. She wrapped the thin blanket around her, holding fast onto the edges to keep her fists occupied. Not tonight, she whispered. Not here. Not tonight. The daughter of Muhammad in a drop-in center for street rats in Nairobi. Well, she had been in worse places. She sensed a familiar comfort in the shelter for these juvenile delinquents. This was a part of her that could never be exorcised by magic chants. There was one Fatma – one fragile Fatma with a tendency to stray. And she would remain fragile. The demons would always be with her.

  Kwesi was eleven, a glue-sniffing orphan. Brother Frisone wasn’t sure if the boy would stay. “Imani, as you know, means

  ‘trust’,” he said. “We hope they come to trust us here and let us help them make a future. But one never knows. One only hopes.”

  “And if he leaves?” Fatma asked. “We’ll hope he returns.”

  *

  She had called Tarana Wachira earlier that evening and left the number for Imani Home on her answering machine. She waited all the next day. When the boys returned home, she helped them wash and hang laundry. Wachira never called. On Friday morning, the scheduled day of her departure, Fatma rose at 5:30 with the boys and ate breakfast. She slipped five hundred shillings underneath her plate before she said farewell to the good Brother Frisone, and set
off planning to sit on the travel agency doorstep and wait for Miss Wachira to open up. Surprised and irritated to encounter Fatma when she arrived, Wachira let her in, took a newly issued ticket from her desk drawer, and without an apology or a kind word, handed it to Fatma with those glistening claws. Kenya had gone mad, Fatma thought.

  Willowsville 2001

  40 KILLED AS SOMALIA RENEWS FIGHTING

  Mogadishu, Somalia, May 12 – The worst fighting in several years in Somalia’s battered capital left 40 people dead today, including 21 civilians, and 100 people wounded after a fierce 15-hour gun battle between rival militias.

  The intense fighting underscored the tenuous hold on power of the year-old transitional government in a city still fragmented among clan-based faction leaders. The government was elected a year ago in neighboring Djibouti in an effort to end the state of anarchy Somalia has endured since the overthrow of Siad Adan.

  Doctors at Al Hayat hospital, where many of the dead and wounded were taken, said most of the civilian victims had been killed by random mortar and anti-aircraft shells that fell on their homes ...

  A newspaper lay on the mat in the hallway, covering the bold black letters that spelled WELCOME, when Fatma opened the door of her efficiency apartment. According to the paper it was Monday morning; she had slept through an entire day. She didn’t know why they kept delivering the paper anyway. She never asked for it, she never paid for it, and she never read it. Lately it was too hard to focus – unless, of course, she saw something that had to do with Somalia on the front page like this morning. The nighttime attacks on herself returned after her visit to Lamu. If a jinn had possessed her, the cure performed by Abd-al-Rahman had failed or, more likely, as Hamal would have said, there had never been a jinn. The loss of her wedding ring had also failed to sever her connection to Nick’s ghost. As had her visit to the house in Hamilton.

  Sarah had taken her to Hamilton four months after her return from Africa, right around Christmastime. She had just moved out of Haven House and into a one-room place in a newly renovated welfare-housing unit in downtown Willowsville: a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room with a sink, dishwasher, and kitchen cabinets on one side and a bed, bathroom, and wardrobe on the other. Sarah had helped her fix it up with new lace curtains for its lone window, bedding, a red metal café-style table and two chairs, a small TV, a coffeemaker, and a microwave. Most important was that she was on her own.

  The landmarks they passed on their way out to the house brought back that familiar queasiness. Linda Stern had suggested the trip as a way to provide closure to a part of her life and to put an end to the nightmares.

  “Are you all right?” Sarah asked as she drove.

  Fatma nodded, forcing Sarah to take her eyes off the road to read her face.

  “You’re sure this is your day off?”

  Fatma nodded again. At least she thought it was her day off. She was working at Sundry Undies three full days a week now. Some days she was late for work or didn’t show up at all because she had overslept or lost track of the date. The problem was the drugs. There were pills that her doctor prescribed to take away the back pain that flared up from time to time. Pills to help her sleep deeper, to quiet the voices. Pills that left her groggy and headache-y and unable to speak coherently, that made her lose track of time. Sarah had given her a wall calendar on which she noted everything in order to become better organized. Yet sometimes, like this past weekend, she just couldn’t wake up enough to get out of bed. The pills were necessary, the doctor said, or she might end up killing herself. He verified that she was at risk when he arranged for her to receive Social Security payments. The first of every month she sat at the kitchen table with Sarah and they paid bills, allotting so much for food and not much for anything else, except the tiny portion of her salary from Sundry Undies, that she set aside each week for her family in Africa.

  They had started out early for Hamilton that Friday morning in December. Snow had begun to fall in Willowsville, cleansing it as one would a dingy kitchen with a fresh coat of paint. It was a wash of purification that forgave the town all its sins, the final touch to Main Street’s holiday decorations.

  “Are you sure you’re up to this?” Sarah asked again. “We can do it another time.” She was growing concerned about Fatma’s silence.

  “It’s okay,” Fatma forced out.

  They pulled into the driveway and Fatma began to tremble. “Shall we go back?” Sara asked.

  “I’m just cold,” Fatma lied, knowing she wasn’t fooling Sarah. The snowfall was heavier out there than in Willowsville and accumulating quickly. They stepped out. Soundlessly, their boots sank into the softness. Abandoned in the white woods, the house seemed to have been frozen in time. Fatma supposed that Nick’s children and his “companion” were still fighting over ownership.

  “So quiet here,” Sarah said.

  But not to Fatma. Despite the insulating snow that muffled sound, she could hear them: heels being dragged on gravel, floorboards vibrating, thrashing and crashing, yells and screams.

  Slowly she circled it, drawing closer and closer until she could see inside the palladian windows and atrium doors, the panes of the conversatory. He was still there, larger than life, and as usual bellowing through the halls, his feet heavy on the marble floors. At least she feared she would see him – feel him – if they went any closer. Sarah was surprised to find the door unlocked.

  “We never locked door here,” Fatma said. “Even loan sharks rang bell before they came in.”

  The ache in her lower back made her uncomfortable; she leaned against the doorjamb. When she tried to walk again, the pain intensified and shot down her leg.

  Sarah offered to help her to the car, but she refused. There was something she needed to get from the house, something she wanted badly.

  She went directly to the black lacquered credenza in the great room. Like a safety net, Sarah followed ready to catch her if she fell. She couldn’t remember exactly which drawer it was in, but she knew it was there somewhere. And it was, at the bottom of the third drawer she rummaged through: the tablecloth Pia had given her for a wedding present. They had never used it. Nick hadn’t liked it.

  *

  Fatma didn’t speak on the ride home; she tried not to wince or moan. She could tell that Sarah was thinking the whole idea had been a huge mistake. They drove directly to the hospital, where a young ER doctor gave her an epidural for the pain radiating from the bulging disk that compressed a nerve. After a week in bed at home without any other medication, which the ER doctor suggested she stop for a while, her body became fair game once again, the site of a free-for-all between her ego and Nick’s spirit. Nick had early on found the chink in her armor, the defect in her personality that she had been born with that allowed him to speak to her when he wasn’t really speaking, to berate and destroy her. And he had put a chink in her body that would never let her forget him. Even after death his spirit, like a bat in the dark, zoomed in through those cracks and made itself known. Now her days turned as monstrous as the nights. She found herself afraid to leave the apartment even to go to work, for fear that the house in Hamilton would be there on every corner in Willowsville. However, almost miraculously, after a week or two the images faded, along with any illusions she might have had about Nick. She no longer loved him and probably hadn’t for some time, but she’d had to convince herself that she did, to justify having stayed with him for so long. Iblis too, in time, seemed to grow weary within her – but not weary enough, and so some evenings she resorted to the pills that dulled her pain, and stole her time, and put the demon to rest.

  *

  That Monday morning she drank a cup of strong black coffee. Sitting at the table she and Sarah had bought at Big Lots and covered with the tablecloth that had waited for her in the Hamilton house like a faithful dog, she smoked a cigarette and tried to read the newspaper article about Somalia through blurry eyes. She pictured her mother’s house leveled to the ground, her sisters and brothers
, nieces and nephews, and her father – her eldest uncle – roaming the devastated city without shelter. Perhaps they were all dead. She telephoned Sarah and explained in a slow, determined voice that she had to find out something about them.

  Mondays were their time together, so together they went to the Red Cross in Rockfield. Fatma filled out lots of papers, one for each member of her family. Two months later a Red Cross official phoned: no success. There was something, however. During their search, the office in Washington, D.C., had sent them a copy of a letter they had received nine years ago from Fatma’s sister Ayasha. She had been looking for Fatma all that time, but the Red Cross hadn’t been able to find Fatma. The letter in Somali was short and merely Ayasha’s attempt to reconnect with Fatma. “I am thinking of you, sister. We all do. Times are getting very bad here, and I must speak to you. Please write to me and tell me where and how you are. Perhaps you can help us.”

  How ironic! Fatma had been in need of Ayasha just when Ayasha had been in need of Fatma. Would the letter from her have made a difference in Fatma’s life had it fallen into her hands on time? She would never know. A month after getting it, another unanticipated letter came into her possession.

  *

  “They tried to trick you,” Miss Wilma had said when Fatma first returned from Africa.

  “Who?” Fatma had asked.

  “Your father’s enemies in Somalia. They tried to get you to go there so they could kill you.”

  Miss Wilma proceeded to tell Fatma about the phone call Mary Ellen had taken from the young man in Somalia, the one who claimed to be Fatma’s son. “At first we thought your son was in Somalia, but when you told me over the phone that he was still with your sister in Saudi Arabia, we figured it out,” she said proudly.

 

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