Somebody's Heart Is Burning (26 page)

I did the conversion in my head—a comforting trick when you know you’ve haggled terribly.
After all, it’s only twenty bucks.

“The trip will take two days,” said Mohammed as he handed me my ticket. “Maximum three.”

“I heard it could take a week.”

He looked offended. “A week, never!” he scoffed. “Four days if you have very bad luck. But no. Not even four. Three days. Not more than three.”

I was just getting settled on the boat, arranging my backpacks, oranges, and burlap-covered jerricans of water around me, when a burly African man appeared above me, blocking the sun.

“All these people are savages!” he boomed. With a grand sweep of his arm he took in all the other passengers on the boat. “They have never been to school. They live like animals. Me, I don’t like savages.”

“Hello?”

“
Bonjour
, I am Touré.
Comment ça va?
What is your name?”

“Tanya.”

“Excellent! I’d like to sit here with you, Tanya, to profit from your company.” He plunked his canvas satchel onto my grass mat. His French was rapid and murky—I strained to understand him.

“You are not sleeping here,” I said, alarmed.

“I don’t sleep,” he said impatiently, making himself comfortable beside his satchel. “I go days without sleeping. Where are you from?” He glanced at my bag. “America?”

I nodded, and his eyes lit up with a familiar gleam.

“I want to go there with you, Tanya, to your country. Can you help me to get a visa?”

“I don’t work for immigration.”

“You can sponsor me. Vouch for my character.”

“I—”

“I would like to go there and open a store for women’s shoes. They say that women in America will pay $200 for a pair of shoes. One can easily get rich with shoes.”

I sighed. “It’s actually not—”

“Very rich.”

“There are a lot of poor—”

“Ha!” He stretched out his legs, propped his head against his bag and said firmly, his tone brooking no argument, “The poor in your country would be rich here.”

The floor of the boat was piled high with sacks of grain, creating a treacherous, uneven surface. We spread our grass mats across it to stake out territory.

The
pinasse
was an oversized, pregnant canoe, with a roof over the middle and a motor in the back. Sitting in its covered center, I felt like Jonah in the belly of the whale, looking up at a sturdy rib cage of bamboo poles with woven raffia stretched across the top. Sheets of raffia rolled down over the sides at night to keep out the cold.

The boat was about thirty feet long and nine feet wide. The roof—which covered about two-thirds of the surface area of the boat, leaving the front and back open—was so low that a fivefoot-five-inch person such as myself had to bend over to walk in the covered area. In the center of the boat, there was a sharp drop in the floor where the sacks were cleared to create a kitchen. Down there, a stocky adolescent girl was busily arranging pots, coal ports, charcoal, and a collection of stubby logs. There, too, was where the water-bailer stood, already performing his endless task.

All around me, men, women, and children ran on and off the boat, carrying tied-up bundles and wedging them in between the sacks. They’d see me, do a kind of startled double take, then launch into what I call “the
ça va
dance,” a murmured stream of dialogue accompanied by hand gestures:
“Ça va? Ça va
bien? Ça va la santé? Ça va la famille? Ça va le déjeuner? Ça va le
Mali? Ça va le voyage?”
This continued on and on, with slight variations: “How are you? How’s your health? How’s your family? How was your lunch?” And you responded:
“Ça va. Ça va.
Ça va . . .”
It took me several days in the country before I learned that you end the exchange by saying,
“Ça va tout.”
Everything’s fine.

At first people left a wide margin around my mat, but eventually the boat got too full, and they had to move in closer. In the end, about thirty adults and fourteen children fit tightly atop the sacks, with about a foot of space between us.

“You people are educated,” Touré said to me. He was spreading out his things now, making himself ever more comfortable on my mat. “You know how to make things: telephones, computers, cars . . . And you all read. Not like these animals here. Me, I like to read.” He produced a dog-eared French novel from his bag.

“You know, not all whites read—”

“Well, I never met one who couldn’t. You and me, we are alike, Tanya.
Toi et moi.
”

I couldn’t shake Touré. Whenever I attempted to converse with another person on the boat, he placed himself in the middle, translating. When I misplaced things, which happened at least every half hour, Touré asked, “What are you looking for?” When I grudgingly named the item of the moment (water bottle, socks, sunscreen, etc.), he performed a vacuumlike search of the surrounding sacks, never hesitating to push other passengers out of the way or reach beneath the men’s legs. Within minutes he would hold the missing item aloft, proclaiming proudly, “It is here!”

He was a muscular man, with a sly, wise face that seemed to smirk in repose. He had a strong jaw and cheekbones, and his golden-brown eyes had an Asian slant. His movements were abrupt and impatient; he seemed combustible. He ranted incessantly about the ignorance and stupidity of the other passengers, but at the end of these tirades he always burst out laughing. His laugh was infectious. For all his abrasiveness, he could win a crowd.

“Your French is not so good, Tanya!” he crowed, as I strained to interpret his marble-mouthed dialect. He had a huge vocabulary, and seemed to enjoy employing a range of words I’d never heard.

“You don’t know the meaning of
that?
” he shouted with glee. “This is a word every schoolchild knows! It is too bad I don’t speak English. The rest of these animals speak no language at all,” he waved his hand in disdain at the other passengers, “no French, no English—only African dialects: Bambara, Songhaï . . . How is your Bambara, Tanya?” He barked with laughter.

The morning wore into afternoon. The announced departure time of the boat was 9 A.M., but by 3 P.M. it showed no sign of going anywhere. Some people got off the boat and browsed the market. Children ran up and down the shore. Ice water, peanut, and banana vendors came onto the boat, hawking their wares to those who’d stayed on board to guard their spaces. A dry breeze moved through the boat. Touré lay back against my backpack, gazing ahead in a zombielike trance.

“These people are all thieves,” he announced abruptly.

“Stop that,” I said, trying to shush him.

“I know them,” he insisted. “I have been in prison.”

“Really?” I paused to digest this new piece of information. “What for?”

“Commerce.”

“Commerce?”

“You know, commerce,” he shrugged impatiently, then made a series of illustrative gestures, pointing to his nose and sniffing, putting his thumb and forefinger to his lips and sucking in air, then tapping out a vein in his arm.

“I get the picture,” I said dryly.

“So you see,” he continued, “I know what it is like. There are thieves who ride these
pinasses
waiting for their chance. Sometimes the owners and their families are in on it.” He looked suspiciously at the chunky adolescent girl de-stoning a pot of rice in the sunken kitchen. “I will help you to keep an eye on your things.”

The irony that I should trust an ex-convict to guard my belongings seemed lost on him.

“Thanks,” I said. Shifting impatiently, I asked him when he thought the boat would leave.

“The boat will leave when it is completely full,” he said.

Buses operated under the same principle, but somehow I had never gotten used to it. I glanced around at the packed boat. “So you think about fifteen minutes?”

He laughed appreciatively. “You people,” he said, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “You live by the clock.”

Where had I heard that before?

At four o’clock that afternoon, we left Mopti for Timbuktu.

Going to the bathroom was a problem. I watched the other passengers for clues. A little boy was given a plastic bowl, which his mother then emptied over the side of the boat. Later, under cover of darkness, I noticed a woman sitting on the side wall, placing her body outside the rolled-down raffia shade, her hands clinging to one of the bamboo poles for support. For once I was grateful for dehydration.

When I finally had to go, I was in the uncovered front of the boat, huddled under a scratchy handwoven blanket. I’d come out to watch the stars. Men were stretched out all around me, but it was dark and half of them were asleep. I made my way to the side of the boat and then discovered the problem. Out here, there were no poles to hang on to. I giggled nervously.

“What’s the matter?”

I was surprised by a nearby voice speaking precise, European-accented French. I couldn’t make out the man’s face—just the pale outline of a slim body topped off by a turban, like a dandelion with an enormous, puffed head.

I giggled, put a hand to my bladder, indicated the edge of the boat.

“I see,” he said. “Here, hold my hand.”

His hand was slender, delicate almost, and unusually smooth. His voice, too, was gentle and soothing. There was something very comforting about him.

I started to climb onto the low wall, then balked. “Ooooh . . . I don’t know.”

“Everyone does it,” he said easily. “I will turn my head the other way.”

So it has come to this,
I thought as I leaned back, holding this stranger’s hand. I’d done holes in the ground, seething pits, rooms full of sand, buckets, even the group toilet in Apam, but here was something new. For the longest time nothing would come out.
Come on.
I wanted to kick my body like a horse. The stranger would wait silently, it seemed, for as long as it took. Eventually it came, and with the sound of the water all around me, I could barely tell when my own flow began and ended. When I pulled myself up, the end of my skirt was soaked from dangling in the river.

“Thank you.”

“Everyone does it,” he repeated cheerfully, and returned to his contemplation of the stars.

I headed back into the covered section, ready for sleep. In the warm glow of the kerosene lanterns, I found it transformed into a cozy house. I picked my way through a carpet of bodies sleeping sardine-style, head to toe. I was glad, now, that I’d paid for extra space. But where was my mat? I scanned the boat, disoriented, trying to locate a vacant spot.

Oh, no.

Touré was sprawled diagonally across my mat, snoring. Only a tiny triangle of space remained between his body and a bamboo pole. I looked around for another spot, but every inch of space was taken. Sighing, I tried to squeeze myself into the available space, pulling my knees to my chest and resting my head against the pole. I tried to sleep.

I couldn’t sleep.

“Touré!” I whispered, shaking him lightly, then harder. “Touré!”