An Obvious Enchantment

by Tucker Malarkey

  “Maybe because free things often disappear quickly.”

  She turned to look up at him. “Will you take me to Kitali?”

  “No. Anyway, he’s not there.”

  “Still, I want to see it.”

  “You won’t be welcome.”

  “If you don’t take me, I’ll go by myself.”

  “Fine. You seem to like going by yourself.” Ingrid turned back to the water. “If you can find the strength to wait for a day,” Finn added after a while. “I will be on that side of the island. I will look for him.”

  Ingrid placed her hand over his. “Thank you.”

  “Finn!” Jonah exclaimed from the steering wheel. “Look who we have found.” Finn stood and smiled as Ingrid had never seen him smile. “It’s Boni,” Jonah announced proudly.

  What Ingrid saw bobbing in the waves was a pitiful little boat that looked barely seaworthy. As they neared it, she saw in its center a beautiful black man, gleaming in the sun. He stood with his legs splayed, balancing in his tiny boat, his kikoi wrapped like shorts around his thighs. Ingrid watched as Uma approached him. Her hand shot out in front of her to wave. Boni waved back, grinning.

  “Hello, everyone!”

  “Boni,” Finn said. “How long have you been out?”

  “I don’t know. The sea is alive with fish. It’s like a lusty woman that won’t let me go. And who is this pretty lady?”

  “This is Ingrid,” Finn said. “She purchased us for the day.”

  “I would like this job, to be sure,” Boni said, laughing.

  “What have you caught?” she asked.

  Boni motioned to the burlap-covered mound in the back of his boat. “Wonderful fish for eating. I would like to make one of them a present to you, Miss Ingrid, because I think you are fishing for sport today, not dinner.”

  “That’s okay, Boni, you keep your catch,” Finn said. “We’ll send her home with something.”

  “You promise? I think she needs a big fish.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Finn said with a laugh. “We’ll find her a big fish.”

  “We will celebrate later,” Boni said. “A big celebration!”

  “Celebrate what?”

  “I am going to break a record. Wicks is giving me a magical line made of wire.”

  “We should talk about that, Boni. Wire lines can be bad magic.”

  “At the bar over a Tusker!” Boni bent his knees until he was sitting. Finn pushed him off. Boni stayed sitting for a while, happily absorbing the changing scenery as his skiff turned slowly in circles.

  CHAPTER

  17

  The Second Village

  Fatima found Finn at the bar, in the clutches of evil. She took him by the hand and led him into town to the market, leaning him against a tree while she bargained for vegetables. Finn watched her go through her routine as he had since he was a boy.

  In the last half decade, Fatima’s face had acquired laws of its own, finally surrendering to the anarchy of age. Her mouth was hard with resolution. Her eyes could still be scornful. Her forehead was as wise and regular as the waves of the sea. Despite the warring elements of time, her features joined together in the rare instance of a smile. The miracle of her smile occurred in the marketplace, when she finally got her price. Finn smiled too, watching her. He carried her packages to her house and sat on the makute mat inside while she peeled potatoes outside, humming.

  At dinnertime, Fatima slit open the belly of a snapper, winding the intestines around her fingers and yanking them free. A slippery egg sack remained. She removed it carefully, tearing the delicate membrane open with her fingernail. The roe spilled onto a dish, which she brought out to Finn. “Eat,” she said. “You need the strength.” She cut the meat of the snapper into cubes for a curry, stirring coconut milk and herbs over the heat of a fire she controlled with long pieces of wood, pulling and pushing them out of the flames. When the curry was done, she set it at the edge of the fire and patted her chapati dough until it was flat and round. She fried four chapatis in her only pan. The smell of food revived him.

  They ate the curry with the flat bread, folding the stew inside like a package. Finn ate three. Fatima nodded in approval and looked pleased until he took out a cigarette and lit it. He avoided Fatima’s eyes and blew the smoke straight up into the air so she couldn’t wave her hands in front of her face. He knew the smoke didn’t really bother her. She objected to cigarettes because they made men feel and act like little gods with their smoke and fire.

  Fatima rearranged the sticks in the fire, muttering incomprehensibly. They sat for a while in silence. “Finn,” she said at last. “That man Wicks will get trouble with his new hotel.”

  “Trouble from whom?”

  “Trouble from the people who live on that side of the island.”

  “Ah.” Finn lit another cigarette. A cloud of smoke came between them. Fatima did not go into her usual coughing convulsions, and from this Finn guessed the subject mattered to her. “They say Wicks is building a hotel on a sacred site. Maybe an ancient burial place,” she said.

  “That’s nonsense. No one has ever lived there.”

  “Well,” Fatima conceded, “they don’t want the hotel.” She sat on her haunches in front of the fire and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. It was getting cooler. “Those people left here when your father’s hotel came. They wanted to escape its evil and now, in front of their eyes, is going to be another one. They feel trapped.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “I have heard, yes, it is that bad. They want to do something. They want to stop it. But Mohammad refuses.

  “Because he is unwilling to fight, his village will be ruined.”

  “There’s nothing he can do. Money is money. If Wicks wants to build something with it, he will.”

  “It’s their island, not Wicks’. You tell him that—he’s your friend.”

  “He’s not my friend, and it’s his money. He can do with it what he likes.”

  “Get pinkman Wicks to talk to them.”

  “He doesn’t speak Swahili.”

  “That’s why you must talk for him.”

  Finn dragged hard on his cigarette. “It’s not going to make any difference what I say.”

  “No, but they may not curse the hotel.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  Fatima grabbed a stick from the fire and shook it at him. “Do not ‘oh, Lord’ me.” She jammed the stick back into the coals. “If it isn’t your job, whose is it?”

  “All right, all right. I’ll think about it. I’m going to that side of the island anyway.”

  “Talk to Chief Mohammad,” she insisted.

  Finn flicked his cigarette into the fire. “After I think about it.”

  Fatima glared at him and then laughed. “You are still a boy.” The laugh turned into a hacking cough. Finn held her so she didn’t lurch forward. He patted her back. “I’m all right.” She waved him away like cigarette smoke and sat back in the dirt and hung her head. Her body looked deflated. “Inside the bread box,” she said finally. “I have some chocolate for you.” Finn watched her without moving until she nodded toward her house. “The kind with hazelnuts.”

  At the first prayer call, Finn set out for Kitali. The horizon was lightly streaked with the pale bands of dawn. By land, Kitali was eight miles away, but eight miles through soft beach sand was like sixteen on hard ground. Finn felt the muscle in his upper calves harden as he pushed his weight off the sunken balls of his feet. The tide was high when he set off and there was a breeze that, by late morning, would work itself into a wind. He stopped to watch the sunrise and thought about Wicks’ hotel and how he would speak to the people of Kitali. After all, one could only negotiate with people who wanted to negotiate.

  The villagers of Kitali were more stubborn than those they had split from. They had left because Mohammad, a former village chief, had sensed the unease felt by some of the villagers over the proximity of Salama and its corrupting influence. Moham
mad had organized those who gave off silent signals of distress at the changes taking place. He had helped them find one another. A mother and child from one family; a young man from another. As they gathered together, the silent signals sharpened into an alarm that soon coalesced into an active resistance.

  It had happened quickly. It was as if the earth had cleaved, dividing the two camps by an unbridgeable rift. Families were fractured; children were separated from fathers who refused to abandon their lucrative jobs at the hotel. It was only a matter of weeks before the resistance gained enough momentum to incite physical action. They left en masse, walking in a long procession, the women’s black bui-buis billowing in the offshore breeze, the children silent and somber with the weight of separation. The occasional howling of an infant was the only sound that pierced the trancelike determination of the pilgrims.

  Fatima was famous for reminding people that it had all been predicted by her sister, the white-haired mganga. Before life flickered out in her pale blue eyes, the mganga had whispered into Fatima’s ear, “The strong will leave, but you must stay with the weak. You must help them find their way. The boy will help you. The lion’s son will also grow to have sharp teeth, and the strength to kill. Teach him to use them wisely.”

  Unlike some of the others who stayed behind in the original village, Fatima was not afraid to live surrounded by the influences of the unfaithful. She had a God-given purpose, and she had already survived for years living close to the lion’s den.

  When she inherited Henrik Bergmann’s son, Fatima set about trying to undo the damage of some of his father’s Western thinking. “So,” she often said to young Finn, “Salama is your father’s village and my village is the real village. They are as different as the sun and the moon, but they are on the same island. Never think that life is simple, or that only one truth exists at one time. Do you see this chocolate bar? It is a gift from the new village to the old. I am going to eat it and think of your father, who brought us a few nice things.” Fatima was proud of the complex awareness she had fostered in Finn at such a young age. To understand one world was good fortune, but to understand two, this was the beginning of wisdom.

  Unhappily, Finn’s response was one of resignation rather than interest or privilege. Part of his wisdom was the knowledge that things happened for mysterious reasons. It was Allah’s will. To challenge this nebulous force was both dangerous and exhausting. To Finn, it seemed a full presence of mind was not necessary for most acts required of him. Unfortunately (Fatima thought), the resulting quality of otherworldliness intrigued those around him. Those who did not know him, primarily hotel guests, were piqued by his physical beauty, which was both uncultivated and remote. Women guests in particular were drawn to his calm, which they never rightly identified as absence.

  Mohammad was sitting in the center of his open hut. Finn knew him from a distance by his ears, which were as wide as a butterfly’s wings in mid-flutter. He stood outside the hut until Mohammad motioned for him to sit on the warm sand. His bald head glinted in the sun. “Finn,” he said, looking at him with both kindness and reservation. Finn returned his greeting with a bowed head. Mohammad sat in silence before he resumed. “You’ve been sent here.”

  Finn decided not to launch at once into the business at hand. “A girl has come for the professor,” he began.

  Mohammad tilted his head to the sky. “Is this our concern?”

  Finn paused. “Not yours. Mine.”

  “Would you like to speak to him?”

  “I probably should,” he said.

  Mohammad smiled. “You are not eager. Well, do not worry. He’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Finn dusted the sand with his fingers. It was finer on this side of the island, more like sugar. “When will he be back?”

  “Why don’t you come for the fast,” Mohammad suggested. “The next new moon.” Then he smiled and looked at the sky, as if listening. “Fatima sent you here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fatima, the peacemaker. She is still strong enough to make you walk all this way.”

  “She sends you her blessing.”

  “She is getting fat on chocolate, I hear.”

  “She is enjoying life.”

  “Tell her she should come see us. Both of you. Come together.”

  “Fatima won’t travel.”

  “She is getting old. She will want to come soon.” They continued on pleasantly, progressing to the inevitable topics of weather and fishing. The season at Kitali, Mohammad reported, had so far been good. “Of course we cannot compete with you, Finn,” he conceded. “Since you were a boy, you have been able to pull fish from the sea.”

  “Your new neighbor Wicks is giving me some competition.”

  “Yes, he is causing some disturbance here as well,” Mohammad agreed quietly. “God willing, it will pass.”

  “Will it?”

  Mohammad pressed his hands together as if in dismissal of both Finn and his question. “And now, something to eat before you go?”

  Finn ignored Mohammad’s urging. “If Wicks’ hotel is built, will you curse it?”

  “We have moved beyond that, Finn. Curses are for the broken. The hotel will go the way it must go.”

  Finn was uneasy with this answer. “What can I tell Fatima?”

  “Tell her not to worry so much.”

  Finn stood and looked around at what he could see of the village. It seemed to be deserted. “How is he?”

  “The professor? The last time I saw him, a happy man.”

  Over the years, Mohammad’s village had prospered. The simple purity of their existence unleashed a bizarre and productive energy. They had designed a hut suited to their new environment that, because of the shortage of mangroves, lacked solid walls. The huts consisted of a thatch roof supported by four mangrove poles. The roof was lashed onto the four poles with sisal and easily removed for repairs. Semipermanent walls could be hung for times of privacy.

  Open huts meant a heightened awareness of one another. With time, an almost effortless communication flowed like air between families. In the middle of their fourth year, communal sensitivity peaked into such a coherence that one day Mohammad stopped speaking altogether. A few others followed suit when they discovered that the faintest impulse of desire was picked up, identified and answered by someone else. Mohammad spoke now only to pray. Finn knew it was out of respect that he talked to him now. As he wove his way through the tranquil collective, he almost envied the life Mohammad was free to lead.

  Before he left, Finn walked the grounds of Wicks’ hotel. Templeton had also sent him a Christmas letter, though he had not mentioned it to Fatima or to Ingrid. The letter had warned him that, seeking water, Wicks’ construction would soon cross the property lines. Templeton maintained that this was unacceptable because Mohammad’s land and water were sacred. It was typical of him to foist such a burden onto Finn—to presume that Finn would be the go-between. He did not trust him any more than he trusted Fatima about the sacredness of the land; both had their own reasons for wanting to prevent construction.

  Wicks’ site was nestled into a protected enclave. The natural clearing in the trees and its placement on a rocky outcrop facing the sea made it seem possible that the hotel was not the first settlement on that location. But between that and an ancient burial ground was a considerable leap of faith. So what was Finn to do? After his brief excursion, he returned to Mohammad’s hut.

  “Mohammad, is the hotel to be built on sacred ground?” he asked.

  Mohammad lowered his head slightly. “Some say so.”

  “And you?”

  “I know it to be so.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  The Words of the Imam

  Ali took Ingrid to the Riyadh Mosque between the second and third prayers. Because she didn’t entirely trust him, she decided not to mention that her interest in the mosque had more to do with the Imam than with Habib Sal
ih. Ali did not need to know more than necessary.

  He had brought her one of his sister’s bui-buis to wear over her clothes. “This will help you mix in,” he said wryly.

  “Am I really going to mix in?”

  “Why not? It is a mosque for the people. Slaves are people. The lowbred are people. Women are people. This is the right mosque for you to visit.”

  “And is it a mosque for you to visit?”

  “I will come for you after the third prayer. I have some friends to see nearby. Business.”

  “You wouldn’t be caught dead in this mosque, would you, Ali?”

  “Dead, yes. It would be a good place to be dead in. The people there are very kind-spirited. The women stand on the left, or is it the right? Well, you’ll see where they stand. I think they move around in Riyadh. Stand wherever you like.”

  But inside they were sitting. A circle of women in bui-buis, sitting so close their black robes touched. Ingrid sat behind the circle, keeping her eyes on the sandy floor. A hand on her elbow pulled her gently forward, to a place they had made for her. Ingrid looked at the ceiling, where something was written in Swahili, a circle of words with no distinct beginning or end. While the walls arched toward the heavens, the roundness of the interior made it feel like the structure was hugging the earth. Ingrid allowed herself to feel liberated beneath her robes. She was looking around the room for the Imam when the music started. Across from her, a pair of dark eyes had locked onto hers as a drumbeat, low and steady, seemed to synchronize the movements of the gathering. A hypnotic swaying transformed the room, so it resembled a dark windblown field. Someone started to sing, a soft repetitive melody. Ingrid closed her eyes, allowing her mind to follow the notes. The song grew as more voices joined and crescendoed into a full pitched chorus that encouraged whoops and hollers, punctuations of joy.