Harmattan (11 page)

Monsieur Youssef set three battered aluminium bowls, containing a thin, dark, steaming stew of goat meat, cow peas and peppers, in front of us.
‘Bon appetite, mes
amies,’
he said.

‘It looks good, Monsieur,’ said Sushie.

‘You came at the right time, Mademoiselle,’ he replied. ‘The
camion
will be full of hungry people, so I slaughtered this goat just yesterday.’ He smiled, broadly, revealing more space than teeth.

As we ate, the radio announcer declared that students in the capital were protesting at the delay in the payment of their allowances and that several mid-ranking military officers had been arrested, following rumours of plans to mutiny.

‘Mainassara has had his day!’ Abdelkrim said under his breath. He nodded towards a framed picture of our president at one end of Monsieur Youssef ’s building.

‘You really think so?’ Sushie said.

‘For sure. I know lots of
gendarmes
and soldiers who would dearly like him to stand down. He’s never been forgiven for scrapping the electoral commission. And who really trusts the so-called Union of Independents for Democratic Renewal?’

‘And yet you’ve applied to become a member of the Presidential Guard?’

Abdelkrim shrugged. ‘He’s the president. That’s just the way things are for now. We have a parliament – of sorts. Some of us may not like how it came about, but there you have it. One day we will be able to vote again. And vote we will.’

Abdel’s
camion
was indeed full, as Monsieur Youssef had predicted; not only with workers and travellers but with furniture, tyres, bundles of clothing, bedding, rugs, fuel canisters, water containers and food provisions, all coated in a veil of fine dust.

Anything that could not be piled into the groaning truck’s cargo hold was tied to the side of the vehicle. Any passenger who could not find a place on top of this cargo would cling instead to the roof of the cab.

It was not until Monsieur Youssef had fed and watered all of the passengers and they had prayed and toileted and begun to clamber back on board the creaking hulk, that I really began to believe my brother was leaving.

‘Who are all these people?’ Sushie said, as we stood next to the huge truck.

‘Where are they all going? Where have they been?’

‘All kinds of people,’ my brother said. ‘People like me, visiting their families. People giving up on rural life. Some of them will be illegal workers – returning from Algeria or Libya, perhaps. They’ll have no passports or papers and won’t have seen their families for a very long time. The
camions
travel right through the night, taking detours to avoid checkpoints.’

‘There is no room for you, Abdel!’ I said, staring up at the vehicle in amazement. It was the first time I had been so close to a
camion
.

‘There is always room on the
camion
,’ he said.

The French men came out of Youssef ’s shed and wove their way through the throng of travellers towards their Citroen. The bespectacled man nodded towards us as he passed.
‘A toute a l’heure,’
he said, cheekily.

Abdelkrim scratched the back of his neck, but said nothing.

‘Monsieur!’ someone called from the peak of the truck’s cargo. ‘Pass up your baggage.’ Sushie lifted the kitbag and passed it to Abdelkrim and seconds later it was disappearing over the tailgate.

Suddenly there was a spluttering from the vehicle’s engine. The truck shuddered as a great cloud of blue-black smoke belched from its skyward-pointing exhaust. There was a cheer from the top of the cargo and then, all too quickly, we were bidding Abdelkrim bon voyage.

I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye as Abdelkrim squeezed my shoulder and rubbed my back.

‘Soon, Little One.
Ça va?
’ He turned towards Sushie then and shook her hand.

‘Thank you, Mademoiselle… I…Thank you.’ Although the handshaking had stopped, they continued to hold on to each other. ‘You’re sure that you can find your way back to Wadata?’

Sushie nodded. ‘I’ll keep to the
piste
, don’t worry. And I have my compass – and Haoua here.’

Abdelkrim looked at me and grinned. There was the roar of another engine and the tooting of a horn as the French men’s Citroen pulled away from the
camion
post in a cloud of dust, its passengers saluting my brother and blowing kisses towards Sushie as they passed us. Abdelkrim sucked air in through his teeth but there was no time for words.

As if in reply, the
camion’s
great klaxon emitted a series of loud blasts.

Abdelkrim touched my face and then clambered like a lizard up the vehicle’s tailgate. Moments later the truck moved off and my brother was gone; no more than a waving speck on top of that strange, groaning, rattling, creaking hulk, moving wearily across the sands.

‘Let’s get into the shade again,’ said Sushie. ‘We’ve got a long wait ahead of us.’ I followed her under the canopy, all the while peering southeast at the diminishing cloud of dust. She sat down and leaned back against the gable end of the building, patting the sand beside her. ‘Don’t be sad, Haoua,’ she said as I leaned against her shoulder.

I tried hard to be strong but, eventually, just like my mother earlier that morning, I sobbed. ‘It was such a short visit,’ I said through my tears.

Sushie put her arm around me and kissed the top of my head. ‘Hey,’ she said.

‘You’ll see him again soon.’

21st October, 1998

Haoua Boureima
Child Ref. NER2726651832
Vision Corps International
Tera Area Development Programme
C/O BP 11504 
Niamey
Republic of Niger
West Africa
Dear Haoua,

Sorry I haven’t written for quite a while. I have been thinking of you, though, and wondering how you are getting on at school. I’m so glad you liked the photographs and books we sent. They are in English, of course, but hopefully your friend Richard will be able to help you read them. This time we are sending a book in French, which our father bought when he was in Paris last month with some of his pupils.

Perhaps your teacher will want to read the story to your class. It is one of our favourite books – ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, by J. K. Rowling. It’s a bit weird at first, but funny too. I hope you like it. All our other friends think it’s great.

Love,

Katie. X

Dear Haoua,

How cool that your brother came to visit your family! He sounds nice. I think that having a brother must be great. I hope the rest of your family are doing well also. Our mother says that perhaps, one day, we might have a baby brother, but our father says that we girls are enough! Our parents are well, but our great grandfather (we call him ‘Papa’) has been quite sick. As you know, he is very, very old.

It would be lovely to hear from you again. Please give our regards to your family.

Oh yes – we put the little picture of you, which VCI sent us, in a frame. It sits on top of our TV, in the kitchen. So now you are really like one of our family! Your friend,

Hope. XOXO

***

My heart ached for weeks after Abdelkrim returned to the capital. It was obvious to everyone that my gentle mother felt the same way. It seemed to me that the gleam in her beautiful eyes began to fade, and she carried herself differently, so that with every new day she seemed to become more like her own mother and less like mine.

Each afternoon on the way home from school, I checked with Richard or Sushie to see if a letter had come from my brother, but none did. Katie and Hope continued to write to me, and of course I was glad to receive their letters, but I would have given up a year’s worth of their kind thoughts for just a line or two from Abdelkrim. Before his visit I had not worried about him much; now I could not get him out of my head. Perhaps I picked up on my mother’s anxiety - for anxious she certainly was - but, somehow, it was no longer possible for me to ignore occasional snippets of news from Niamey on Monsieur Letouye’s television or Sushie’s wind-up radio. Although Wadata was far removed from the unrest in the capital, we were all too aware that any upheaval there could crucially affect our village too. I had also been finding it difficult to concentrate at school too, but the prospect of reading Katie and Hope’s storybook with my class filled me with excitement. So I was greatly disappointed when Monsieur Boubacar, having read the book himself, announced that it was not suitable reading for us because it was largely about sorcery and witchcraft.

Furthermore, he did not offer the book back to me and I was too timid to request it from him, and so it was lost to me forever. The idea that my friends had sent me a book about such matters seemed very strange, but there was nothing I could do but try to forget about it and hope that they would send me another, different story soon.

I had also taken my little adding machine into school and this had caused great excitement also. Even Monsieur Boubacar was impressed.

‘Yes, I have seen these machines before,’ he said, ‘but never one so small!

You are a very fortunate young lady to have such a useful item – and such good friends. Unfortunately I cannot permit you to use it in counting class; you must use your own brain instead, Haoua!’ He said this as if he was angry with me, but the whole class laughed, knowing that he was not. ‘Can anyone tell me about an experience they’ve had when being able to count was useful?’

Oduntan, a boy two years younger than Miriam and me, raised his hand.

‘Yes, Oduntan.’

‘Please, Sir, when I am doing my homework, Sir.’

There was a titter around the room.

‘Toh
,’ Monsieur Boubacar said. ‘But what about
besides
school and school work?’Oduntan looked blankly at our teacher.

‘He’s so stupid!’ Miriam whispered – unkindly, I thought.

Monsieur Boubacar shook his head and looked around the class. ‘Anyone else?’ A boy named Samuel, who walked eight kilometres to and from home each day to attend class, shot his hand up eagerly.

‘Yes, Samuel?’

‘Please, Sir, when I have to check the goats for my father!’

‘Good. Right. Now,’ said Monsieur Boubacar. ‘Moving on…’

And, as usual, we sat on our mats with our exercise books on our laps, pencils at the ready, eager to learn.

I liked Mathematics very much, and I was good at it, but Miriam and I were especially fond of reading. Certainly we were disappointed that our teacher considered the Harry book inappropriate for us, but I was somewhat relieved; for I had looked through it and felt a little daunted by the number of words that I did not recognise. Besides, the VCI people had provided Monsieur Boubabcar with a small selection of beautiful picture books and I had read only half of these. And Monsieur Boubacar was an excellent and engaging storyteller; we all listened, enthralled, when he read to us or made up a story from his own head. I often imagined myself in front of a classroom full of boys and girls, and I prayed for the day when I too would actually be a fine teacher and make my mother and Abdelkrim proud.

Miriam put her hand up to attract Monsieur Boubacar’s attention. ‘May we read
The Story of the River Island People
again please, Sir?’ she said.

‘Not today, Miriam,’ he answered.

More hands shot up. ‘
The Hunter and the Ebony Tree
, please, Sir!’

‘The
Tale of Harakoye Dicko
!’

‘Perhaps later.’ Monsieur Boubacar shrugged, apologetically, and then turned to the rickety blackboard and scrawled the words
Personal
and
Project
in big, chalk letters.

‘For now I want each one of you to consider this: in one week’s time I shall expect you all to do a little presentation to the rest of the class – to talk, for a short while, about a subject that really interests you.’

A wave of murmurs and groans rippled through the classroom. Miriam looked at me with a scowl on her face, but I felt quite excited at the thought of this project.

My classmates had been intrigued with Katie and Hope’s letters and gifts to me (even those of them who had their own sponsors) and I was often asked about them outside the classroom also. I knew that, like me, they were fascinated by the fact that my sponsor’s daughters were twins, but I was sure that it was the gifts in particular that interested them. (I had shared my candies around the class on a number of occasions).

Still, I was already planning my presentation and couldn’t wait to speak to Richard about the ideas that were bouncing around inside my head.

As I walked home with Miriam later that day, we met ‘Aunt’ Alassane walking towards us. I recognised the dress she was wearing as being an old one of Sushie’s: plain, blue, much too short for a Wadata woman – and it made her belly look lumpy. She was carrying a bag made of red netting, full of supplies from Monsieur Letouye’s shop.

‘I’ll bet she didn’t have to pay for those!’ said Miriam under her breath.

‘Hush!’ I said. ‘She’ll hear you!’

We stopped and exchanged greetings, politely. I knew that this was a mere formality; she had very little time for me or my friends, really. When one spoke to Aunt Alassane one always sensed that she was anxious to be elsewhere.

Aunt Alassane was not married. Nor, in fact, was she my aunt. She lived in a large, brick house on the edge of the village with her two younger sisters – Flo and Hamidou. They were not originally from Wadata. It was said that their late parents had been nomads who had settled in the village after losing their livestock to persistent drought. Even so, their household had more goats, sheep and chickens than any other in Wadata, with the exception of Monsieur Letouye’s. It could not have been said that these women were liked in our village. In fact, we children took great delight in concocting outrageous tales about them. Yet, all over Wadata and as far away as Goteye and Konni, there were men beholden to Alassane and her sisters, and when they snapped their fingers, a man would always come running.