The Camel Bookmobile (17 page)

Jwahir knelt and put an arm around Juju. “And that is the end of your advice? After all, this is no small job you press on me.”

Jwahir’s father gently touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “There are none more beautiful than you, Jwahir.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Yes, you often say so. But what, at this moment, is the purpose of such flattery?”

“Use your influence,” he said meaningfully.

“Influence?”

“Yes,” he said, raising his voice as though he thought her deaf. “Yes, your…”

And then she understood what he meant, the power that he was too delicate to spell out, the power of a wife to give herself to or withhold herself from her husband. He didn’t know, of course, that she’d already been avoiding joining herself with Matani for weeks, that there was nothing further to withhold.

“He has turned gentle, your husband,” Jwahir’s father said, and the emphasis he put on the word
gentle
made it clear he did not consider this a compliment. “Persuade him to be less so in his efforts to reclaim the books from Scar Boy and Abayomi.”

At the mention of Abayomi, Jwahir felt her cheeks go hot, and her mind grow distracted. Her father noticed but misinterpreted this. “I’m sorry,” he said, “to be so blunt in regard to the use of your womanly gifts. I would not do it if another way occurred to me.”

Jwahir shook her head to clear it. “Why do you needle
me so?” she asked. “If the library stopped coming, that would suit your needs. So let the books go unfound, and the problem will be solved without my involvement.”

Jwahir’s father took both his daughter’s hands. “And that’s why I mentioned the coming drought,” he said. “Honor. It helped us survive the Great Disaster, when we needed not only our wits and our skills, but also the support of our brother tribes and the avoidance of ill-wishing spirits. We must keep our word, always, even to those who intrude without proper knowledge or respect for our people. We must return the books. And then, blameless, we can send them away.”

Jwahir fingered one of her beaded earrings silently.

“I know you understand,” her father said, turning to go. “Just as Matani is a product of his father, you are a product of me.”

Jwahir walked back to Leta, who sat with her baby in her lap, her head lowered. “He’s wrong, you know,” Leta said after a moment.

“Yes, I know,” Jwahir said with a smile. “But about what, precisely?”

“What the camels carry on their backs, we need. The contact with the outside world. The new ways.”

Jwahir stared at her friend, and then raised her hands to the sky. “You want the books to keep coming? I thought you agreed with me about this.” Her voice, she knew, was sharp. Jwahir was accustomed to differences between them, but this one irritated her severely.

Leta hesitated before meeting her friend’s eyes. “I did. Before.”

“And then, what? She gives you some book to explain the way other people take care of their babies, and suddenly–”

Leta interrupted her. “It’s not that, Jwahir.” She looked down at the baby she held in her lap, the little one reaching for her hair. “It’s her,” she said. “And her older sister. My girls need the bookmobile. They need the possibilities it brings.”

“You sound like Matani,” Jwahir said, more bitterly than she’d intended. “This is not a bad life, Leta.”

“Once, the land gave us more, so we owed it our loyalty,” Leta said. “Not now.”

“A couple of bad years,” Jwahir said, “and you act like it’s forever.”

“Everything changes, Jwahir,” Leta said. “Your father and mine won’t admit it, but they’re old men.”

Everything did change; Jwahir couldn’t dispute that. Everything had changed, in fact. That was how she’d explain herself to Leta, someday. When the time felt ripe. But now, Leta was still pressing her point.

“I look at her,” Leta said, pointing her chin toward her baby, “and I see it. I understand, and you will, later, too. Matani is right.”

“But you and my father argue as though the matter belongs to me.”

“Jwahir.” Leta rubbed her nose against her baby daughter’s cheek. “You know where you sit in Matani’s heart. But think, before you use your influence to try to change his mind. Consider mine. Consider the ones
you
will have,” Leta smiled, “someday soon.”

Jwahir felt a shudder, thinking of all that Leta did not know.

The Grandmother

T
HIS WAS
N
EEMA’S SPACE
. N
OT THE ROOM ITSELF, FOR
which she felt little attachment, but this mat woven of sisal fiber and covered with scraped cowhide on which she slept each night in the company of her granddaughter’s warmth and breath and scent. Over time, this bed had become molded to embrace Neema’s body. It smelled of cattle and earth, and was solid. And whenever she wanted, she could reach out to touch the daughter of her daughter. She’d heard of faraway people who slept in rooms alone, on cloth or feathers. What a sorrow; what a loss. Whosoever slept without others, and on such a bed, would not be blessed with the voyages she’d taken in her dreams, the places where the brushwood and cowhide led her. That person was destined to what she thought of as white sleep, blank and without insight.

As much as she loved her bed, though, she couldn’t deny that tonight the hide felt implacable, tickling her right leg at the back of the knee. The twigs beneath her shoved against her left arm and jabbed at her back. So she tried tricks. She silently recited words from the Bible. She forbade herself to move. She imagined her mother sitting at her feet, rubbing
them. She breathed in a pattern: three short gasps in, one long sigh out. That sounded like a cow in the rain with a cold; it did nothing to invite sleep.

The problem was not the bed, she knew. The space around it was the impediment. Normally, Neema lay between her granddaughter and the door. Sometimes she slipped close to her granddaughter, breathing with her, thinking of her own daughter—Dahira, Kanika’s mother, the one who linked them.

Now someone alien lay between her and Kanika, beneath a mosquito net hung on sticks. Miss Sweeney, with her own peculiar noises and smells. Miss Sweeney, who kept flinging a hand onto her forehead and clearing her throat. The people of Mididima had never had a foreigner of any color sleep in their midst. Now this pale woman was right within Neema’s hut.

It must be even stranger, Neema admitted, for Miss Sweeney. To talk and eat and drink among unknown people was one thing; to sleep next to them, another entirely.

Lying in the dark, eyes focused lightly on the ceiling above, Neema tried to imagine Miss Sweeney’s New York. Even with Matani’s descriptions of the Distant City, even with the descriptions she’d read in the library books, her visions of Miss Sweeney’s home were vague and confusing. She pictured one building precariously balanced atop another, people glancing up nervously as they rushed past on foot or sped by in cars that Neema had heard could move with the speed of gazelles. She tried to imagine the unlikely, invisible waves that performed jobs like running machines that cleaned clothes while people slept. And the
water that poured out during any season with a turn of a wrist. Food of every imaginable color. Books everywhere. These seemed impossible stories; they could prove only that the teller had somehow been driven mad.

She turned to her side. She couldn’t see well through the net, but Miss Sweeney’s fidgeting indicated that she too was awake. As was Kanika.

Kanika was whispering. “Are you uncomfortable?”

“No, no,” Miss Sweeney answered. “I’m keeping you up. Sorry.”

“Miss Sweeney?”

“Fi,” said Miss Sweeney. “Call me Fi.”

“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Neema’s granddaughter said.

Miss Sweeney rolled to her side and supported her head with her hand.

“I want to go to the Distant City,” Kanika said.

What was this? Neema, too, leaned on an elbow, trying to catch her granddaughter’s eye, but Kanika was concentrating too hard to notice.

“Wonderful,” Miss Sweeney said, with subdued enthusiasm—or perhaps she was just restrained because she thought Neema was sleeping. “You’d like it,” she said.

“Go there and teach,” Kanika said, emphasizing the last word.

Neema involuntarily put a hand to her mouth. To teach? To the Distant City to stay? From where had this dream come? Neema had known Kanika so well when she’d been little, had known every crease on Kanika’s skin and the texture of her sleeping breath and the sound of her cries right
before they gave way to weary hiccups. How had Neema passed from that full knowledge to this ignorance?

“Teach,” Miss Sweeney repeated.

“I can do it here. Can’t I do it there?” Kanika’s voice held a touch of uncertainty, but it was barely discernible. The thrust of her tone was brave and determined, and that triggered in Neema a rush of love and admiration.

She understood with a sudden clarity rarely granted to her anymore. What she’d interpreted as a calm acceptance of Kanika’s female role had actually been an emerging plan to escape it. That both broke and warmed Neema’s heart at once. “You never told me,” she said to Kanika in their language.

“You’re awake,” Kanika said.

“Away from my eyes, you’ve been plotting.”

Miss Sweeney, who could not understand their words, poked her head out of the netting. She looked at the mesh web as if she’d never seen it before, as if she weren’t the one who had hung it before nightfall, searching for the sticks, pushing them into the ungiving ground, spreading it over the place she would lie. Now she flapped a dismissive hand at it, crawled out, and pulled it down.

“You kept this secret,” Neema said. “For how long?”

“
Nyanya
, I have to go.”

Miss Sweeney sat cross-legged on the edge of the hide, out of the line of sight between Kanika and Neema as though to permit conversation to flow between them unimpeded. But for a second, Neema didn’t know what to say. Yes, she’d wanted Kanika to be strong and self-reliant. But why in a different place, why away from her grandmother?

“It’s hard there, too,” she said. “Harder than you think. When we ask for rain, we must expect mud as well.”

“I don’t want
this
to be my whole life.”

The words sat baldly between them. Neema’s insides contracted. Miss Sweeney reached into her bag and pulled out something dark and hard, which she broke into three pieces, offering one to Neema and another to Kanika. “Chocolate,” she murmured. Kanika popped hers into her mouth immediately. Proof, Neema thought, that she was far too trusting for the Distant City.

“I lost my daughter all at once,” Neema said. “I cannot lose you.”

“If I stay, I’ll grow angry,” Kanika warned.

“Like me, you mean.”

Kanika shook her head. “You’re strong, not angry.”

Neema wasn’t so easily hoodwinked by a compliment. She waved away her granddaughter’s words. As she made the gesture, though, she heard, unbidden, her mother’s voice. “Hold, but do not grasp,” it said.

When Neema was young, there’d been no Camel Bookmobile, with its whiffs of another, larger world. Her “dead look” had been her only outlet for frustration. What would she have done, if she’d had the chance?

She sniffed at Miss Sweeney’s chocolate. She would suffer through Kanika’s absence, then. At least there would be, thank the Hundred-Legged One, one thing to look forward to: throwing the news of Kanika’s departure in the face of her annoying brother-in-law, whose voice would hit the clouds as his chances of claiming Kanika’s bride-price slipped away.

Before she could reconsider or change her mind, Neema spoke in English. “It comes to pass that I give my permission for her to go, Miss Sweeney.”

That, however, apparently was not what Miss Sweeney had been waiting for. She tucked the crumpled mosquito netting beneath her like a pillow. “Kanika,” she said, “you would have to go to a special school for a teaching certificate.”

“Yes.”

“It would take some time—a couple of years.”

“I’m willing.”

Miss Sweeney was quiet for a moment. She tugged on the back of her hair. To try to hold it away from her face, she’d tied a bandanna around her head. But it still flew in many directions; Neema decided she would offer to braid it in the morning.

“OK. Let me see what I can find out,” Miss Sweeney finally said, and Neema was relieved that she did not offer yet another objection. Three would seem too many. “First, I’ve got to get the books back,” she went on. “If I don’t, Mr. A….” She hesitated, and then gave a half-laugh. “Mr. A. might kick us all out of the country.”

Surely this was a joke. Surely Mr. Abasi did not have that authority, or if he did, he would not exercise it just because of Mididima’s missing books. But Neema wasn’t certain. She’d heard of the Mau Mau rebellion, when people were beaten and jailed and sent away for mistakes smaller than missing books. And she knew that men often wielded unconscionable power over women.

“I’m sure you’ll get the books,” Kanika said.

Miss Sweeney lay back on her mat. “Kanika,” she said, “what’s Scar Boy’s real name?”

“Taban,” Kanika said.

Taban. How long had it been since Neema had heard that pronounced aloud? But it was right, she realized, that they should begin to call him Taban. After all, he was not a boy anymore. He was seventeen years old, a young man, and one who wielded a surprising amount of influence. Taban, once mauled by a hyena, yes, but now with an identity forged by other events. Keeper of the secret of overdue library books. Decider of his tribe’s fate.

“Taban,” Miss Sweeney repeated slowly. “Can you tell me about him?”

Kanika rolled on her back. “He’s…” She hesitated. “He listens. He doesn’t like to talk, though. You have to pay close attention to understand him.”

“Does he want something?” Miss Sweeney asked. “Is that why he keeps the books? So we’ll listen to him?”

Kanika turned to stare at her. The girl seemed to be considering. Then she held both hands, palms up, toward the ceiling. “He will return them.”

Miss Sweeney reached over and squeezed Kanika’s hand. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course he will. And even if they’re misplaced, we’ll find them. Of course. You’re right.” She nodded as if to herself, stretched, and yawned.