In the Belly of the Elephant
Page 6
What would happen to the mothers and babies, my students in Foequellie? How long before there was civil war? If such violence could surface so unexpectedly in Liberia, how could I trust it wouldn’t happen in Upper Volta? This was what my father feared. His fear curled into the pit of my stomach.
I had always been comfortable in the dark. Suddenly, the empty streets and shadowed corners were not so friendly. At the crossroad where I turned toward my own neighborhood, a man slept beneath a tree, wrapped in a blanket. I hurried on until I reached my gate. Issa had long ago folded up his kiosk and gone to bed. I entered my courtyard and sat on the edge of my patio.
Today had been my birthday. I was twenty-seven years old. My friends in Liberia were dying. My courtyard was empty and my house was dark.
Chapter 5
Dissension
September/Dhu-al-Qudah
The soft chirp of a cricket. Cool predawn air. I lay under my sheet not opening my eyes. Birds rustled the limbs of the neem tree. Voices passed by the gate, murmuring in the quiet sweetness of morning.
A motorcycle engine backfired in the street and my heart skipped into a gallop. There had been no gunshots in Dori, but I knew what they sounded like. During my last month in Liberia, I had lived in the capital city of Monrovia. The government had raised the price of rice, and the people had rioted, breaking store windows and looting food. Soldiers with rifles had patrolled the streets, shooting at anyone out past the 10 pm curfew. I would awaken in the dead of night to the sound of gunfire. Even then, the violence had been one-sided. The Liberian people stole food but they did not shoot back.
But things had changed in Liberia. Now, lots of people were shooting back. I had no way of knowing what was happening to my friends there.
A pencil ray of sun turned the inside of my eyelid red. 5:30 am. A cock-a-doodle-doo from Issa’s courtyard announced the rising sun and was answered in sequence by three other roosters across town. A donkey brayed, a guinea-hen screeched. My heart settled back into a steady pace at the familiar sounds of a new day. Dori was a long way from Liberia.
I opened an eye. Unhindered by houses or trees, I had a straight view from my bed under the tin roof of my patio, over the top of my courtyard wall, to the horizon. Sunlight spilled over the land. I pulled aside the mosquito net and swung my legs over the side.
At my feet, Anna Karenina lay dog-eared next to the kerosene lamp. I had stayed up past midnight until the final page. On the edge of the Sahara, a place without movies or TV, the expats passed books around like little boxes of gold coin. Western man had long ago lost the art of preserving stories by memorizing and telling. For us, it was the written word. But Africans still carried their literature in their heads and passed its flame through the art of storytelling.
In the beginning, Zambe, son of the supreme God, created a chimpanzee, a gorilla, an elephant, and two men—A European and an African. To these creatures, Zambe gave the tools of survival—fire, water, food, weapons, and a book.
Zambe came back later to see who was using which tools. The chimpanzee and the gorilla had discarded everything but the fruit; the elephant, to my disappointment, couldn’t remember what she’d done with her possessions.
The European kept the book but discarded the fire, while the African discarded the book but kept the fire.
Time would tell which was the wisest choice. They both seemed like a good idea to me. So, when someone like Old Issa or Hamidou told a story, I listened, and perusing Don’s books, I had found Tolstoy and taken him home.
I gathered the mosquito net into a twist, flipping the lower half upward to rest on its canopy-like top. The slap slap of my flip-flops accompanied me into the bathing room where I splashed cold water on my face. Anna Karenina, despairing over her lover, Prince Vronsky, had committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Seemed that uppity women who had the gall to follow their hearts and seek their freedom came to very bad ends. No doubt both Europeans and Africans had plenty of stories about that.
After 239 chapters, I had taken Tolstoy to heart and become somewhat of a social recluse. Or, had I used him as an excuse to become one? Either way, since the news of Liberia’s coup two months before, except for working in the villages and going to the office, I hadn’t ventured very far from the security of my courtyard. I had boxed myself up with my friends: J. S. Bach, Joni Mitchell, and Leo Tolstoy. Joni sang about me—a lonely painter, living in a box of paints.
Don was keeping an eye on me but not asking any questions. Philip had stopped by once and knocked at my gate. I had hidden in my outhouse until he left.
In the out-kitchen, I lit the single-plate kerosene stove with a wooden match, filled the teakettle from the water filter and placed it on the blue flame. Reaching for the tin of Nescafé, I struck up a conversation with several inanimate objects. Something I was doing more and more.
“You miss Rob,” a spoon said to me. “Just admit it.” My promise to myself to forget Rob was proving difficult.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t. The guy was a jerk and I was too stupid to see it.” Just as Anna had been with Vronsky. If only I could stop dreaming about him.
I opened the refrigerator and stood staring at the tub of margarine. A sane person NEVER stood with the frigo door open in the Sahel, letting all that kerosene-cooled air escape, especially during September, the month between rainy season and cold season when the heat returned with a vengeance.
I had tried to follow Lily’s advice, imagining Rob in a hot air balloon, drifting away from memory, out of sight and mind. I tried it again. Just as he rose nearly out of sight, I hefted a shotgun out of nowhere and shot the balloon. My preoccupation with guns and violence was getting to me.
“I just miss being loved,” I said to the loaf of bread.
Some breakages cannot be replaced like a pot.
The teakettle whistled. I added it to the tray of Nescafé, a tin of sweetened condensed milk, bread, and jam, and walked the path to the table next to the hammock. The sky was porcelain blue and, for these few minutes, the temperature was tolerable.
“I’ll just have to find something better.”
Spooning freeze-dried crystals into my cup, I thought of Foequellie, and how James and Gnalima, the midwife, used to come to my house to drink coffee before clinic. I missed them, too. Francis and James, Gnalima and Francis’s wife, Martha. With a sigh, I wondered how they were doing under their new government, hoping they were still alive.
“I miss everybody.” I poured the hot water and stirred, then upended the can of condensed milk and watched the thick liquid drizzle into my mug. I’d even been homesick. With the return of the heat, I yearned for Idaho in the fall—the gentle warmth of Indian Summer, cool nights, crisp mornings, and leaves turning the color of rust. Then my sister, Tricia, had written, saying she hoped to come for a visit in the spring. Trish in Africa? She’d bring a suitcase full of my father’s fears with her.
There were once two great powers in the world: Elephant and Spirit Rain. Now Elephant, who as you know was proud and stubborn, was always arguing with Rain, trying to make him agree that, she, Elephant was the greater.
My father was just like Rain, always lording it over me, raining on my parade.
One day they were arguing as usual, when Spirit Rain said in his wet, gurgling voice, “How can you, Elephant, be greater than I, when it is I who nourishes you?”
When I’d told my father I was returning to Africa for the second time, he’d threatened to disown me. Now, he was most certainly sending my sister to bring me home; Tricia—my father’s own little black cloud.
The person I really wanted to see was Lily. Lily wasn’t afraid of anything. I picked up a week-old letter from her and read it again. It brimmed with health and happiness. She wrote of riding horses, working hard, and living in the present.
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment. Her angled script leaned across the page like a row of falling dominoes. It is to pay attention even at
unextraordinary times, to be of the present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
I sighed. Ordinary life. The morning cool was already succumbing to the sun. It was going to be another day of driving through one of the most exotic and isolated places on earth, sweltering in the truck and breathing dust. Another day of walking around the villages, a scene out of National Geographic, my skin burning, my head baking beneath my hat. And when I returned, another sunset over the Sahara, another evening to relax in the refuge of my hammock and my books.
A bird flew from the branches above me and landed on the mud wall. My books, my courtyard, the office, the villages, the desert—all had become my new ordinary world.
A breeze fluttered the blue paper of Lily’s letter. To pay attention even at unextraordinary times…To be anywhere else is to paint eyeballs on chaos.
“Eyeballs on chaos.” I couldn’t quite wrap my brain all the way around that one, but it was so Lily. Her quote was from The Snow Leopard, a must read, she wrote, and was I coming to visit in October?
I’d been saving my meager intern’s salary, hoping to have enough by October to go to Tunisia. Lily and I would throw the I Ching again to see if I was still butting my head against a hedge.
I turned on the radio to the familiar refrain of the BBC six o’clock news. It rang slightly flat—a sure sign the batteries were running low. The British voice began with the news headlines:
“It is the three hundred twentieth day of captivity for the hostages in Teheran. The Ayatollah has spurned a peace proposal offered by Saddam Hussein. Iraqi jets have bombed Abadan, Iran’s oil refining center. In retaliation, Iran continues to bomb Iraq.”
I shuddered at the thought of being imprisoned in a room for three hundred twenty days and took in deep breaths of free air. I dressed and hurried out my courtyard for my trek to the office. At least my self-imposed walls had a gate I could walk out of.
Kitty-corner from my house, a bevy of women were leaving the courtyard of my neighbor, a Mossi woman from the Central Plateau. They all balanced head-pans filled with liter bottles of oil. Early every Monday morning, several Mossi women and their children joined my neighbor in her courtyard to produce their weekly batch of peanut oil to sell in the market. I greeted them, and the women waved as they turned and walked up the street toward the market.
Fifteen minutes later, I walked into the office compound. Hamidou, Fati, and Nassuru stood outside talking to a small boy and his mother. I recognized the boy as the one who had been sick with guinea worm. His leg had returned to normal size, and the sore where the worm had once hung was healing into a shiny scar.
We all clucked over the boy’s renewed health. He smiled up at us, showing a gap where a new front tooth peeked out from his pink gums. His mother thanked us again for the tetanus vaccine. Smiling at her, I thought of the little girl in Liberia. I wanted to pound my chest like Tarzan. We had won this time. We had chased away Death before it had gotten too close.
Hamidou started up the Land Cruiser and Fati, Adiza, Nassuru, and I piled in for a day of project visits to Sambonaye, Toukka, and Selbo.
Clouds skittered across the sky. A jet passed high overhead, probably slightly off course from Paris to Abidjan. Soon, if I were lucky, I’d be on a jet to Tunisia. I daydreamed about the cool interior of the plane, arriving at the Tunis airport, riding horses, and drinking beer with Lily.
We hit a pothole and my shoulder jammed against the door. Ahead, a woman and two little girls walked along the road. They stepped to the side and watched us as we passed. A gangly girl stood in the dirt, holding her little sister piggyback. Just the way Tricia, seven years bigger and older, had carried me up and down the sidewalks of our block with its brick houses and grassy lawns.
Would she really come in the spring? It had been a whole year since we’d driven home together after a weekend with our parents on the Blackfoot Reservoir. I smelled fish and saw cattle grazing along a stream bed.
“Dad just doesn’t understand why you have to go back to Africa.” One hand on the steering wheel, Tricia unrolled the window and hung her arm out the side.
Wild sage overpowered the fish. Sitting shotgun, I filled my lungs with dry air and exhaled slowly, counting to ten. We crested a hill and picked up speed on the downslope. Out the side window, past my sunburned arm, fence posts flickered by. Beyond the fields, a line of cottonwood trees shivered green and silver against a cliff face of lava rock.
“Why can’t he just trust me?”
“Because he’s afraid you won’t come back. You know Dad, he expects the worst and waits for it to happen.”
Just as I had been doing, boxed up in my courtyard, waiting for something bad to happen the way it had happened in Liberia.
The huts of Sambonaye came into view. We drove along the road, flanked on each side by the village fields. Stalks of millet nodded bushy heads of grain, promising a good harvest in November. Hamidou parked the truck.
The sun burned my shoulders through the cotton material of my dress as I walked with Fati and Adiza down the hill to the gardens. Women bent here and there, picking greens and digging up groundnuts. Produce from the garden project had helped them feed their families through August and September. This was hungry season in the Sahel, when the grain stores of the last harvest were depleted and the new crops were not yet ripe. People lived on fish from the mar, eggs from chickens that produced best during rainy season, and optimism that this year’s harvest would be plentiful.
Nassuru talked to the men about constructing grain stores—large, egg-shaped mud shells set up on wooden legs that would protect the harvested grain from insects and rodents.
Fati, Adiza, and I found Emma, who took us to see several of the new mud stoves the village masons had constructed in different courtyards. The women liked the chimneys that carried away the smoke, but the mud plaster around the cook holes was cracking. One woman wasn’t using her stove, preferring the familiarity of her three-rock fire. She promised to test it before our next visit.
Our next stop was Toukka, then on to Selbo. Visiting three villages in one day was unusual and didn’t allow for a lot of time in any one place. But we wanted to evaluate as many of the new stove models as possible, and Nassuru needed to begin planning for grain store construction.
We left Selbo late in the afternoon. Tired from the heat, I rested my head against the window frame until the pot holes made it too uncomfortable. We had looked at so many stoves the whole day was a blur. Lily would have shaken her head at me, saying I was definitely not being mindful of unextraordinary times.
Out on the plain, a mud hut with remnants of a thatched roof stood abandoned, surrounded by a broken fence of thorny branches. Dried up millet stalks stuck up out of a field like broken scarecrows. And I was back in Idaho, Tricia steering the truck instead of Hamidou.
An old cabin with a caved-in roof appeared between the trunks of an aspen grove as we sped by. Over a hundred years ago, about the time my great-great-grandparents were following Brigham Young across the plains, a pioneer had quit the hardships of the Oregon Trail to build that cabin on the banks of Willow Creek. To build his own place.
The memory of my voice echoed inside my head. “I just want to go someplace where I can live my own life.”
Tricia slowed to ease the Jeep across the steel poles of a cattle grate. “That’s what worries him.”
“What?”
“He’s afraid you’ll marry an African, or worse, get pregnant.”
I pounded my fist against the side of the car and Tricia jumped. “God, I can’t wait to get out of here.”
We skirted the banks of the creek and rounded a bend in strained silence. The valley opened up before us and fields fanned out on all sides. Wheat flowed like liquid gold over the slopes and around the base of the hills. A balloon expanded inside my chest until I felt it would break. This was the land my great-grandfather had homesteaded, the wide open spaces that had forged the diamond in my soul.
“We will only stay a few minutes.” Hamidou was talking to me.
I looked around. Where we normally turned left toward Dori, Hamidou took a hard right. Something squawked. I twisted around to see a chicken lying in the back with its legs bound. We drove until we found the baobab where the marabou, the old man who had given Hamidou the string back in March, sat in the shade of the same thorn bush. Two vultures raised their wrinkled heads from the remnants of the goat carcass. Disturbed by our arrival, they flew up into the branches of the baobab. Taking the chicken and a burlap sack tied with rope, Hamidou shook the old man’s hand, and, while talking, handed him the sack and chicken.
“It’s a gift,” I said.
Fati nodded.
“What’s in the sack?”
“Millet,” Adiza said. “Hamidou is thanking the old man for the health of his nephew.”
A sack of millet during hungry season was a truly valuable gift. Who knew if the little boy had survived because of the tetanus vaccine or the marabou’s medicine? Probably both.
As we drove away, the vultures settled back onto the ground, their sharp beaks picking at leather and bones.
Around five, Dori’s tin and thatch roofs came into view. Entering town on the south road, we drove toward the office in silence, everyone half-dozing. Hamidou slowed. Nassuru took in a quick breath of air and I snapped awake.
The market square, usually bustling with late day commerce, was empty. The shops that lined the perimeter of the square were all closed, their fronts covered with tin awnings that dropped down to block doors and windows.
Everyone started talking at once about la grève. Fati and Nassuru switched from French to rapid Fulfuldé.
“The workers have gone on strike!” Adiza peered out the windows at the empty market.