The Camel Bookmobile (10 page)

They liked men who resembled them, men with unblemished skin and wide-bridged noses and eyes of polished
shona
stone. Men who shunned shade, not hovering indoors. They were suspicious of those who were even a little different—and maybe, after all, that trait didn’t belong only to those of Mididima; maybe that’s how all men were, even men of the Distant City or beyond. What did a boy like him know? To them, he was Scar Boy, the distorted. To them, he belonged in the dark, beyond the outskirts of the
kilinge
. So there he would stay and from there (he repeated
now an old vow), he would never ask for anything. He would do without, when he could. And what he needed, he would take.

He lowered his head, then, and focused, eyes narrowed, shutting out the drumbeat. Soon, all he heard was the sound of his pencil dipping and curving and circling across the page.

The Girl

K
ANIKA CURLED HER TOES INTO THE DIRT, WAITING FOR
her eyes to grow strong enough to thin the darkness. She inhaled the odors of the night: nearly dead fires spitting tendrils of smoke and the musty, sour scent of sleep. When her eyes found their way by the light from the moon and the spill of stars, she went to Scar Boy’s hut and stood outside the wall against which he slept. She felt the ground for a stick and then poked it through a gap between the twigs and dung, low in the wall. On very cold nights, Scar Boy plugged up the breach, but always in such a way that she could push the stick through and reach him. Tonight it was open to the air. She extended the stick until it touched something solid. His side, she knew, at his waist. She probed once, gently, and paused. She didn’t have to poke again. She felt the stick turn—his signal that he was awake.

She went to wait outside his door. When he came out, they began walking immediately, though slowly, to accommodate his limp. The quiet of the night felt large, and they didn’t break it until they’d eased past the thorn fence and put the huts at a distance. Then he stopped, turned, and faced her. Even in the dark, she could see the drag to his left
eye and the twisted, concave deformity of his left cheek, though the mottled purplish skin of his face was not visible. He wore a scarf over his face sometimes when he came outside, but never when he was alone with her.

“Where are they?” she asked.

“You don’t say ‘How are you?’”

“How are you?”

“You don’t take my hand?”

She took his hand. “Where are they?”

He smiled the only way he could, the right side of his mouth lifting. It made him look as if he were sneering, but Kanika knew he wasn’t. “They can’t be returned,” he said.

“Oh!” she said, dismayed. “You lost them? But how?”

He cocked his head to one side, looking at her. “I have them. Look at the moon,” he said.

Tension drained from the soles of her feet. “Good,” she said. “Good, good. Now give them back.”

“Feel the air,” he said. “The night air is so new, every night.”

“Do it tomorrow,” she said.

“They wouldn’t want them.”

“Of course they want them.” Sometimes he was totally clear, clearer and cleaner than rain. And then he could turn into a mysterious creature, speaking an exotic language filled with riddles. Those were the times she dreaded. “Listen to me. It’s more than the bookmobile I’m worried about. I didn’t have time to ask Miss Sweeney about leaving because your brother came and Mr. Abasi got angry and—Badru must have told you. And now, if you don’t
give back the books, they’re going to come and gather up everything and it will all be in a rush and I’ll be like the middle cow, I’ll be stuck. I won’t get to ask her and I won’t ever get out of here.”

He sank to a crouch and stared up at the moon. His feet were buried under shadows, but a fragile light softened his shoulders. They’d grown broad over the last year, Kanika saw. “That would be so bad?” he asked.

“If I have to stay my whole life here, without ever experiencing
there
, I’ll evaporate,” she said.

“Evaporate?”

She couldn’t help smiling a little at his gentle mocking. “So then don’t think of me; think of yourself,” she said. “Everyone’s angry with you. They say you’ve shamed the tribe. They say by shaming us, you’ve opened the door to evil spirits, and something bad will happen to us now.”

He looked over his shoulder as if to catch someone eavesdropping. But he did it in an exaggerated way, to tease her. No one was there, of course. All those in Mididima were safe within their homes or the
kilinge
. Most were nearly as terrified of the dark—and of the spirits that ran in the night and could bring drought and famine—as they were of Scar Boy.

Scar Boy should have been afraid, too, considering that the hyena’s attack came at the edge of night. He didn’t fear the blackness, though. He seemed, in fact, most comfortable with the sun out of sight. Kanika thought that was because the darkness masked his scars, made him almost whole. Kanika could talk to him anytime, noon or midnight, and sometimes she felt her voice going on and on,
like water pouring down a dry throat, longer than she even intended, because he listened so well. But for his part, he waited for the dark to talk.

She squatted next to him. “Please tell me,” she said. “Why do you want to keep the books?”

He lifted his shoulders and she thought he would answer, but he only kept staring at the moon.

She closed her eyes. She considered what it meant to hold a book in her arms and run an index finger along the pages, letting her mind tumble with the words. How it took her away from Mididima, and how, when she closed the book and came back, she felt bigger and smarter. Scar Boy knew how to read too, though not as well as Kanika. Matani’s father had taught him. Reading, in fact, had been the first thing Kanika and Scar Boy had talked about when they first spoke, years ago now.

“The books are like the night for you, aren’t they?” she said. “You can hide in the stories, and grow there, and come out different.” She turned toward him. “I’ll send you books from the Distant City. As many as I can afford. Only give these back, so I can leave.”

He didn’t even glance at her. She felt her cheeks grow warm, blood pulse in her throat and temples. She was the only one in the whole tribe, besides his brother and his father, who spent time with him. The only one who cared. She was his closest friend.

“Are you going to howl at the moon,” she asked, jumping to her feet, raising her voice, “or be human? Are you going to answer me?”

The fury in her tone made him look at her, then, full in
the face. He seemed to hold his breath for a moment. “Say my name,” he commanded. His voice trembled.

She looked at him, surprised. She opened her mouth and shut it again. “Taban,” she said. “Taban.”

He exhaled audibly and motioned for her to sit. He put his arm stiffly around her shoulder. He’d never done that before. He looked at her sidelong. His wide-eyed expression, the rigidity of his arm, quenched her anger, almost making her want to giggle.

How to understand this quiet, mysterious friend of hers? His gesture must mean that he would give back the books. After all, he wanted what was best for her. He wanted that more than anyone else she knew. This arm on her shoulders was, for Scar Boy, as good as making the promise aloud.

“I want what’s right for you too. You know that, don’t you?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, and his tone held no doubt at all.

“Good.” She was glad that they could be here together looking at the moon, and that he understood, and that he would give back the books so she could talk to Miss Sweeney and leave. She slumped against him then, resting her head against his left cheek. She felt him tremble for a moment. “Relax,” she said softly, though she knew that he couldn’t. “Relax.”

The Grandmother

T
HE TRIBE HAD SPENT YEARS ROAMING TOGETHER, UPROOTING
and settling and moving again. In the process, they’d become as intimate with one another’s moods as they were with the shifting wind, the drifting dust. And they felt each other’s habits as distinctly as they felt the weight of the midday sun or the pressure of a belly too long unfed. Even a break in routine they sensed in advance.

Thus Neema knew, without deliberation, that if she wished to speak to Matani that morning, she must be outside his home extra early. She slept weakly and was waiting when he emerged. Although they’d had no plan to meet and Neema had never before greeted him at such an hour, he nodded without surprise. “This morning, Neema, has as many sharp teeth as a hyena’s jaw,” he said. “Perhaps we could talk at evening?”

“The other teeth will have to wait,” she answered, taking him by the arm. “We will walk together. At this age, the tongue is more productive when the legs are going, too.”

She was too old, she knew, for anyone to raise eyebrows at her and Matani. Nevertheless, she waved and called loudly to the three men who stood talking near the camels so they
could see she had nothing to hide. “Let’s walk to the cassava shrubs,” she said. They passed the rows of maize, beans, and an experimental crop called sweet potato, all watered by the bucket irrigation kits Matani’s father brought to the clan years ago. Neema walked as far as the crops and the water pan every day, but she rarely walked farther. Beyond the crops stood a hut and a fire hole where the young sometimes danced, and at the same place, a second water pan the tribe had dug years ago. Sometimes the children took the animals there for the day. It was smaller, but had, so far, held water consistently.

The grass in the area still grew tall, but already she could see the barren patches that were a precursor of the Big Hunger. They lived, her husband’s tribe, with an ache deep in the abdomen that they called the Small Hunger—that is, when they spoke of it at all, which was seldom. They accepted the Small Hunger as proof of life. It was the Big Hunger that pricked like a thousand thorns, and then split apart and at the end felt like nothing at all. It was the Big Hunger that worried them.

She wondered what the men would decide if the Millet Rains did not come again this year, if the buckets lost their usefulness and a sea of brown engulfed the land around their settlement. Already they were pleading with the Hundred-Legged One in their nighttime songs, begging for water. But He, seeing things they did not, would respond in His own impenetrable way. Last time, after the land grew dry and the rituals failed, the elders decided not to risk another Great Disaster, and they had taken the tribe to a feeding center. She knew it was a humiliation they
would not repeat. She wondered about the changes a long drought would bring this time.

“Is it Kanika?” Matani asked, intruding on her thoughts. “Some problem I don’t know of?”

Neema, already a few steps ahead, shortened her stride. She stood only as tall as Matani’s shoulders, but her gait had always been intentionally broad so that—though she would never acknowledge this aloud—all those in the tribe would feel they had to walk quickly to keep up with her. Now she reminded herself to slow her pace to the teacher’s. He must be able to hear her words.

“You were in the Distant City when Kanika’s mother was killed.” She stopped walking for a moment. Saying the words aloud hurt, even after all this time, and she hadn’t expected that.

“It’s an old sorrow,” Matani said softly, “but it belongs to us all.”

Neema inhaled silently, steadying herself. “Because you were gone, what you may not know is that before my daughter’s death, I was very ill,” she said. “I had a cough that would not vanish, that sometimes took over my body. Because of that, I was in my hut when they came to tell me what happened to Dahira, and to leave Kanika with me. She was only four then and needed attention, of course, but I—weakened by the cough and further by the news—couldn’t move. They didn’t think to help me—they didn’t even notice. Their minds were on revenge.” Her voice lost its trembling. “And that is fine; that is as it should be,” she said.

She stopped walking and turned to Matani, who halted too. “Here’s what happened next,” she said. “My grand
daughter and I stared at each other without speaking for a full day and a night. In the morning, she began to whimper.” Neema placed her hand gently on her own stomach. “Hungry, of course. Her crying brought me to life—a little. I managed to get up and ask one of the women to fetch camel milk. I gave it to Kanika, but she gestured that I must drink first. I had no desire, but she insisted, so I took the smallest of sips. Then she took a sip, and returned the glass to me. She wouldn’t drink more until I did. In this way, we had our first food since her mother’s death.”

Matani put his hand on Neema’s shoulder. “Neema,” he began. She cut him off.

“For a month, camel’s milk was all I consumed. As I drank it, my cough of many months disappeared, the edges of my sorrow softened, and I no longer wanted to die. I didn’t want the milk at first, not at all. Just as many here don’t want the library.” She tilted her head. “But thanks to Kanika, I drank. Our children’s children can pull behind them a joy as big as the moon, Matani. You will find that out yourself.”

Matani rubbed his forehead with the palm of one hand. “If you have something crucial to say, Neema, we must start.”

Neema had a single point of vanity—her strong, flexible back. It was, she knew, unusually supple, even for a much younger woman. She lengthened it now and let her eyes run over the horizon as she walked. She pressed her fingers against her cheekbones. “I am reading another book from your library,” she said after a minute.

“Not
my
library,” said Matani.

“The white woman’s, then.”

Matani opened his mouth as if to object again.

“We need not quarrel over this, Matani. It’s because of you that the librarian from Garissa even thinks of us, living as we do like the windblown bloom of the acacia tree. But what I want to speak of is this particular book.”

“And I do want to hear,” Matani said. “Though this morning, I say with all honor, may not be—”