The Camel Bookmobile (16 page)

“Bronx?”

“But they don’t get me, especially my brother—I’ve always seemed eccentric to him. Not settled enough. He feels sorry for me. And they do worry.” Fi paused. She was talking too much. “What I mean is, yes, they wish I’d stay home. But they know that ultimately, these decisions are mine.”

“Yours alone?” Matani looked at her closely.

“It’s not the same there,” Fi said, “in terms of family.”

Matani paused next to some dwarf bushes. He pulled off two thumbnail-size grayish leaves, began to chew one, and handed the other to her. “This is a loss, don’t you think?”

Instead of answering, Fi put the leaf into her mouth. It tasted surprisingly refreshing, and not unlike chewing gum. She wondered if Matani would swallow it, or spit it out.

“Why do people have this—what would be the word? To break something?” Matani shook his head. “Why don’t they stay with their families?”

“Dreams and ambitions take some of us far from home.”

“Like you coming here?”

“And you going away to study.”

He looked away then. “My questions are rude,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“No ruder than me asking you about the cane.” In fact, she liked him better for his questions. People had been curious about her from the start, but their curiosity was of the sort one might have about an exotic animal, possibly dangerous and definitely unpredictable, best observed from a distance. No one but Matani had been brave enough to try to get to know her.

He spit out the chewed leaf and said suddenly, looking directly at her: “I wish for a son.” The words seemed to emerge of their own volition, making his comment feel like the most personal thing anyone had ever told her. She could see that he had surprised himself by what he’d revealed.

“I can see you as a father,” she said softly.

He looked at his feet, then back up at her. “You’ve been married before?”

She shook her head.

“But you have someone who is yours?”

Such an antiquated way to put it. “Women get married much later in America,” she said. “Like your men do here. I’m thirty-six. It’s not young, but still I think—”

“It’s my age,” he said, grinning, reaching to touch her arm and then slapping his own chest.

His gesture made her laugh. The fact that they’d been born at the same time somehow made Matani seem more familiar. Fi started walking again, long strides that kept her a few steps ahead of him. “How long have you been married?” she asked after a moment, slowing her pace.

“Four years. Almost.”

“Your wife is a beautiful woman,” Fi said. “I’m sure she’s proud of you.”

Matani looked away.

Something was going on between the two of them, probably something simple, a marital spat that she’d interrupted. Fi couldn’t tell him to spill it out, get it off his chest; she hadn’t reached a point in their friendship where she could put a hand on his forearm and say, “Don’t worry, everything will be OK.” In fact—what was she thinking?—she’d never be able to say that. This was a fleeting acquaintance, a few days shared between an American librarian and an African teacher. Why should that recognition leave her feeling, suddenly, so bereft?

There were limitations to language, even when it was shared. Sometimes words were not sturdy enough to hold all the needed meaning. She’d discovered that as a child, when she sought to find her mother in the harried and unreachable widow, and she felt it again now.

“Hey,” she said. “Have you ever tried a cartwheel?” She felt odd asking; she knew it was an unexpected question. But cartwheels used to make her mother smile.

Matani looked at her quizzically. “I don’t know the word.”

She laughed and shook her head, mock-scolding. “A gap in your education.”

Actually, she didn’t even know if she could still do a cartwheel—it had been years. But she tried anyway, demonstrated twice, the bend in the wrist, one hand and then the other, the reach of the legs, the palms as dusty as bare feet, ending it with a yelp, and they weren’t perfect cartwheels but they were fine, and she told him to try. He resisted at first, but she kept calling out encouragement—“Only the giraffes will see”—and finally he plunged forward, his legs bent and raised no higher than his waist.

“Up, up, up to the sky with your feet,” she called.

“Watch me hurt myself,” he answered.

She shook her head and urged him on. “Be more free with it.” And so he did one more, his shirt slipping toward his head to reveal his coiled, muscular stomach—the sight of which caused her own stomach to make an unexpected flip. And then he rocked on his heels and looked at her, grinning sheepishly, but self-satisfied too, and it made her smile, amazed at the power of something so simple in Mididima. And she felt drawn to him at the same time, and she pulled her gaze away and turned her head toward the sky, which had gone dark while she wasn’t paying attention, and finally he spoke. “You are hungry?”

And though she wasn’t, she felt it would be best to nod,
and to follow him away from the edge of the settlement, away from their shared giggles and soaring legs, back to the safety, the embrace, the company of so many others.

That night, sitting outside Neema and Kanika’s hut, Fi heard the music begin, the drumbeats scattered at first, then melding together into a trancelike throb that lunged through the darkness, then chanting added to the mix, creating a conversation so profound she couldn’t imagine it would ever be repeated.

She didn’t know the words, so she was left to make up a song, and she invented a summons to the insects of the bush: the fat yellow worms and the menacing long-legged mosquitoes and the flies that lingered on children’s cheeks. And to the animals: the cantankerous camel, the zebra full of longing, the hyena that had attacked Scar Boy. It was a summons, too, to the ancestor-spirits of the men who were making the music; and to the women who were their mothers, wives, and daughters; and even to the ancestor-spirits who gave birth to her: white Irishwoman drawn to an African tribe, a zebra among giraffes.

She thought of the words of Isak Dinesen in
Out of Africa
: “Here I am, where I ought to be.” She imagined herself for a moment, not an outsider as Dinesen was but living here with an African man; known perhaps as the Library Lady or, even better, the Cartwheel Queen; falling asleep every night with her body spooned in his; absorbed within Mididima’s ancient, chaotic, potent heartbeat.

The Teacher’s Wife

J
WAHIRAND
L
ETA
, L
ETAAND
J
WAHIR
. W
HEN SHE WAS A LITTLE
girl, Jwahir used to imagine that the night wind whispered their names, exactly like that, weaving them together, turning them into one. Jwahir and Leta had been friends for longer than either of them could remember, and by now they fit together, though they were vastly different physically and, certainly, temperamentally. Where Jwahir was slender, almost wispy, Leta was solid, her feet steady on the earth. When the mercurial Jwahir grew overly passionate, Leta would take her arm and wander with her across the bush until she calmed. When Leta, on the other hand, turned too serious or was drained of spontaneity, Jwahir—strong despite her slenderness—would wrestle her friend to the ground and tickle her. Their friendship was so intense that when they were younger and still unmarried, they had even talked in giggles about a shared future as co-wives, though secretly Jwahir knew that it could never be, because no one man could love them both equally—if he loved one, the other would not be right for him, since they seemed, to all but themselves, nearly opposites.

Few childhood intimacies, even ones as powerful as
theirs, survive the onset of adulthood. But Jwahir and Leta were close even now, with two female circumcisions and two husbands and two babies between them, though their friendship was altered by their female responsibilities. They had less time together. On the other hand, they knew each other so well that three words in conversation often took the place of twelve.

On this morning, Jwahir sat cross-legged next to the drab asabini bushes with her toes touching Leta’s leg, their goats around them, wondering how she could tell her friend what she felt for Abayomi. But that would involve revealing what she didn’t feel for Matani, and Leta liked Matani. Leta would defend him. Jwahir didn’t want anyone talking her out of anything—not now, not when she was so vulnerable, her mind full of the uncertainty of the recently decided.

Yet not telling felt wrong, too, and there seemed no easy solution, so she was preoccupied as she sat with Leta, letting Leta’s latest baby—a beauty, with its wide forehead and wise eyes—curl its fingers around one of hers.

“Jwahir!” Her father’s voice cut through the air. This habit of his, yelling out a summons as he approached, always annoyed her. Now, though, his interruption was welcome, relieving her of the need to decide whether or not to tell.

“I’ll go meet him,” she said, getting to her feet. One of the goats, Juju, blond with a brown spot on his ear, followed her, as he always did. Leta liked to joke that Juju believed Jwahir was his mother.

“You call to me as though I were a favored cow, Father,” Jwahir said curtly as he approached. She could get way with a bit of brusqueness because he adored her.

“You have some news for me?” he asked.

News
. The word hung in the air. Jwahir’s heart pushed into her neck. Had he somehow guessed about her and Abayomi? Had someone seen them together, deduced the truth, and told him? Might this be her only moment to save herself from the tribe’s punishment? She wished then, and urgently, that she had practiced by telling Leta. To confirm it to her father first would be more difficult than erecting a home in a windstorm.

A moment of silence sat between them. He looked at her appraisingly, frankly curious. “The books,” he finally said, impatiently. “The books. Has Matani recovered them?”

She giggled before she could stop herself. Why should she think what was in her heart was written on her face for all to see? She was relieved, of course, that he didn’t know. But she also noticed a small pit of disappointment. Her secret, she sometimes felt, weighed more than twin elephants.

She stopped smiling then, and looked to the sky. “Father, why do you bother me with this?”

“You’re his wife,” he said, drawing the last word out, giving it special emphasis “Matani, like his father before him, is too fond of a remote and dangerous world. He might sway the young, who don’t yet know that if we stand tall, it is because we stand on the backs of those who came before us. You must act to preserve our traditions. You have strength and ability, my daughter. That is one reason I arranged the union.”

Jwahir dipped her chin to hide another smile. Her father still did not know that he had arranged nothing. Matani had been Jwahir’s choice. Jwahir’s maneuvering, along with
Matani’s hefty bride-price, was responsible for the match. It served her, though, to have her father think he’d made the decision.

“I expect more from you,” Jwahir’s father said.

“What, exactly?”

Jwahir’s father sighed in frustration. Jwahir knew that exhalation well; it was an exceptional sigh. It could fill an entire hut and last as long as a year. She reached down to scratch the ear of Juju the goat while waiting.

“The library is from another world,” he said at last, pointing off toward the horizon. “A world that does not serve us. In the Distant City, they’ve lost their connection to what is real. Nothing is as it seems.”

He took her arm and walked a few steps, his voice growing impassioned. “They inject their food with false flavors, Jwahir. They build monuments that do nothing more than spit water. They even capture wild birds, dip them in blue paint, and then set them free to make the sky appear more brilliant. This is the work of the educated?”

Please. Not the birds again. But Jwahir knew from experience that once he’d launched himself on this diatribe, it was best simply to let him finish. Juju the goat lifted his head to nibble at her hand, and she stroked his back.

Her father knelt down and picked up a handful of dirt. “The soil is turning pale,” he said, drama in his voice.

Jwahir knew what that meant. “You think it will be serious this time?” she asked.

Her father let the sand fall through his fingers without speaking. Then he nodded. “Don’t misunderstand,” he said. “We’ve made a place for ourselves on this land for two
millennia. We are survivors of the Great Disaster. Few are as self-reliant as we. But we will need all our energy and all our virtue to withstand what is coming.”

“Some say the threat of drought and famine is reason enough to allow our young to learn to read, to find another way,” Jwahir said.

Jwahir’s father shook his head. “Those are words from your husband, not you. The issue is values. Ours are not theirs.
We
respect our ancestors’ lessons.
I
know the name of my father’s father’s father’s father. Do they in the city with their books know this?”

Here, Jwahir was tempted to interrupt, to ask whether he could recall the name of his mother’s mother’s mother’s mother. She knew the answer, though. She’d heard this litany before, along with the recitation of the endless list of male preceded by male preceded by male. As if the women did not exist, except as containers shaped by others’ visions, holders of the dreams of fathers, husbands, sons. She felt a surge of irritation coupled with resolve. Like her father, she was traditional. But her father’s words fed her conviction that she had to break with tradition on some matters at least. It was right to risk everything do to what she believed, what she desired and needed—as a woman.

“What is it you want of me, Father?” she said coolly after a moment.

He shook his head. “Sometimes I wish I’d never chosen Matani for you,” he said. “Otherwise, I needn’t be so discreet in pressing for what is best.” He linked her arm through his. “But because I must be judicious where my son-in-law is concerned, your role is crucial. Two things must happen.
Matani must recover the books, immediately. And then he must tell the woman we do not wish her further visits.”