The Camel Bookmobile (2 page)

Chris was deep into what his colleagues called “ground-breaking” research on the human brain—specifically the hippocampus—at NYU Medical Center. He wanted a shared home and, eventually, kids. Her siblings thought they were a well-suited couple, but that was hardly persuasive. Fi’s brother’s wife’s cousin was married to one of Fi’s sisters, and they all still lived within eight blocks of their childhood homes. They considered Fi a wanderer for moving from the Bronx all the way to Brooklyn. They wanted to see her “settled,” and she doubted that it mattered much to them who she settled with—or for.

But even Devi, who had arrived in Brooklyn via Iran,
agreed about Chris. “He’s a scientist who studies the part of the brain that processes memories, and you work for an institution that does the same, if you think about it,” Devi said once. “How perfect is that?”

Remembering it, Fi took a gulp of wine. The assumptions people made about one another were invariably wrong, she’d found. Yes, she was a librarian; yes, he was a researcher. But Chris was disciplined and logical where she was—well, she liked to think of herself as whimsical. Eventually, she suspected, her spontaneity would start to drive him batty, and his take-charge confidence would curb her style. Sometimes Fi thought Chris had become a researcher to immerse himself in a world he could analyze and define. That’s not what she sought from her work. Books allowed her vicarious tastes of infinite variety, but they didn’t supplant the need to venture out into the big and the messy. In fact, just the opposite. Books convinced her that something more existed—something intuitive, beyond reason—and they whetted her appetite to find it.

Occasionally, though, she felt a shock of fear that made her legs ache. She was thirty-six, after all, not a kid, and what she sought—this “something more”—seemed amorphous, even to her. She couldn’t say what she was looking for, precisely; she only hoped she’d know when she found it.

What if, through inertia and social pressure, she ended up with Chris, and children, and backyard barbecues, and everything except the loose housedresses, and then what if she woke up to find herself somewhere on the gentle slope past middle age, gazing over her shoulder at a life respectable and well organized but too narrowly lived? A life that
didn’t fit her. Couldn’t that happen? Didn’t it happen to people all the time?

“Well, here’s to the Camel Bookmobile.” Devi raised her glass. “Bringing literacy to the African bush.”

“Hear, hear,” Fi agreed. “It’s going to open up whole new worlds for those people.”
For me, too
, she thought, though she didn’t say it. She felt light-headed with anticipation.

“My little library evangelist,” said Chris in an ironic tone, shaking his head.

“Come on. Toast the project,” Devi urged him.

“OK, OK,” Chris said. “To Kenya. To the camels.” From the end table, he picked up a book on camel husbandry—a joke gift from Fi’s colleagues—and lifted it with one hand, raising his wineglass with the other.

F
EBRUARY
2003—
Mididima, North-Eastern Province, Kenya

The Girl

T
HE SUN HAD NOT YET SPIT ITS FIRST SPRAY OF DUSTY GOLD
into their home when Kanika woke to a vicious buzz.
Mbu
. Not just one—a whole swarm, thronging within her belly. She’d never heard of mosquitoes invading an abdomen before, but there was no other way to account for the vibrating drone coming from within. How in the name of her blessed ancestors had the mosquitoes gotten inside? She pictured the bloodsuckers breeding in her veins, dumping eggs along her rib cage, their heads drooping as they guzzled down her precious moisture at its source.

“
Nyanya
,” she called, frightened, pressing a hand to her center, the curve of her flesh, to try to determine the numbers within. This was not the work of ten or twelve. There were a hundred twenty at least, plenty enough to rob her of life.

Her grandmother Neema, asleep next to her, opened her eyes a little, then wide, then sat up. She reached out for Kanika.

And in that moment, Kanika remembered. The hum came not from insects, but from an obscure emotion—one rare enough to frighten her. Anticipation. She rubbed her
eyes and laughed at her own foolishness. “Lie back down,” she said.

Neema shook her head as though to clear it. “You wake me to tell me to sleep?”

“A tickle inside scared me. But it’s only the books.”

“The books.” The answer satisfied Neema enough to allow her to lower her head, but she kept her eyes open, watching Kanika.

This was Library Day. The day the books would arrive, borne in wooden boxes on either side of a camel’s hump. Soon Kanika would be fondling covers and running her fingers over random words before settling on the two volumes she was permitted to borrow. Then she would grasp them possessively, carry them home, put them in the center of the room, and delay opening them as long as possible to stretch out the delicious pleasure. Finally—sometime before nightfall, she knew—she wouldn’t be able to wait longer, so she would give up and dive in. Endless words in English or Swahili spilling one atop another, metamorphosing into sentences and paragraphs, leaping to life as Kanika deciphered them, revealing secrets that left her light-headed.

Kanika could read as fast as locusts devour, thanks to lessons from her grandmother, who had also grasped the gift as a girl. For years, though, Kanika’s sole book had been a tattered copy of the Bible in English that a British missionary once gave Neema’s mother—the first of Kanika’s family who had been taught to read. For Kanika, the book had nothing to do with religion; she believed, as did her neighbors, in the Hundred-Legged One and in the spirits that lived in everything. Nevertheless, by the age of nine,
Kanika had reread the stories of Adam and Abraham and David more than fifty times. That was the year she realized she couldn’t stand to read them again—or the ones about Samson, or Joseph, or Cain and Abel, or any of the others. She’d had enough of abandoned sheep and feuding brothers and mythically flawed men. She thought she was finished with reading forever.

Now, five years and five months later, what unexpected wealth!
True Stories of Grizzly Bear Attacks
. A biography of Nelson Mandela. A history of Nigeria. And most recently,
Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Man: A History
. Still on her back, she flexed her feet and reached to touch the tome featuring on its cover a magnified mosquito, head hanging, body ballooned with blood. The cause, obviously, of her waking imagery. All right then. No more insect books. She could see the wisdom of that, as long as there were other words to read. The camels had been lumbering into Mididima not quite four months, and already their cache had become essential to her.

Of course, they’d delivered more than books to Kanika, more even than knowledge of the outside world. They’d elevated her status. As a child, she’d spent so much time with Neema’s Bible that her neighbors had dismissed her as a useless oddity. Words on a page were acceptable, barely, as an occasional idle distraction. But to be obsessed with them? If she wanted to read, the elders had told her many times, far better to learn to read animal scents on the breeze, or the coming weather in the clouds.

The library’s arrival had made a leopard’s leap of a difference, marking the start of a real school. Matani had always
called himself a teacher and tried to gather together the children to write letters in the sand. But how long could sticks and dirt hold their interest? Now, though, all the children were given books to explore, and being taught to chant the alphabet in Swahili and English and to translate squiggles on paper, and Kanika had become Matani’s helper. “The assistant teacher,” he called her. “With all these books, I cannot educate everyone at once, Kanika. Not even with help of the cane.”

Kanika had never before been given a title, let alone thought to be someone who had valuable knowledge. Before, she’d been considered nearly as out of place, in her own way, as Scar Boy. Now, though, tiny bodies with sour-scented skin pressed close to her over open pages. Mothers watched with a mixture of envy and resentment as she shared some mysterious secret with their offspring. They didn’t respect her any more than ever. But they were afraid of her, she knew—afraid of the skill she possessed that they didn’t have.

She yawned and stretched and thought, then, of Miss Sweeney, the American who would, by the ancestors’ blessings, arrive with the camels as she always did. Kanika extended a hand to pick up a flat, round object she kept next to her grass mat. Miss Sweeney’s gift. A miracle smaller than a clenched fist. A dry water puddle that could be carried around and gazed in whenever one wished. A mirror, Miss Sweeney called it. None of the girls of Mididima had ever seen one before. She shifted it so that she could examine, in the dim light, her eyes, her cheeks, her effusive mouth.

“The sight of yourself pleases you,” her grandmother said with a generous chuckle.

Kanika shook her head in protest. “What pleases is that I can see myself at any time. I won’t be left wondering who that is when I catch glimpse of myself in a splash of rainwater.”

Neema nodded, serious now. “There’s magic beyond our world, it’s true.”

Moved by something in her grandmother’s voice, Kanika turned, tempted to reveal her plan. But she stopped herself. Better to act before talking. And act she would, as soon as the camels arrived today.

She would hurry to Miss Sweeney’s side and use the hem of her own
kitenge
to clean off each book. No matter that she personally found no offense in the sunset-colored dust that wasted little time in laying claim to everything that entered the bush. Unimportant if she, like her neighbors, believed it irresponsible to use up hours struggling against grains of earth. The powder bothered Miss Sweeney when it settled on the books, and that was enough. Kanika had watched Miss Sweeney stroke the books clean with her soft, pale palms. This time, Kanika would do that for her—quietly, yes, but ostentatiously enough to be noticed. The act of cleaning would be something more than an effort to ingratiate herself; it would be like a book’s prologue—not the story yet, but a suggestion of the story to come.

Then afterward, she would approach Miss Sweeney, lead her apart from the others, take her hand, perhaps. Little by little—an elephant must be eaten a bite at a time—she would speak of her desires: no, her needs. A way to the Dis
tant City. Or perhaps to even more distant Distant Cities. To leave the bush. To be an assistant teacher somewhere where shelves of books and walls of mirrors and other wonders were as commonplace as sand. If she could teach the children of Mididima to read, couldn’t she teach other children, in places of greater potential?

Kanika knew her plan would sound, to most of her tribe, like a desert nomad’s dream of snow. That’s why she’d told only Scar Boy. He would repeat it to no one, of course; who talked to Scar Boy? And telling him had been enough. That had satisfied her need to press the words into another’s ears, to make her vision real. He’d listened with his whole being. Though he’d said nothing, she was sure he supported her plan. After all, forsaken as he was by his neighbors, with his slow limp and his poor distorted face, he understood about dreams.

Miss Sweeney—clearly a daring woman herself, clearly someone who’d seen snow, perhaps even walked through it—would listen too, and understand, and help. Miss Sweeney, after all, had squeezed Kanika’s shoulders. She’d leaned close enough for her hair to brush Kanika’s cheek, and for her odor—that complicated, ornate scent that some here found disgusting—to fill Kanika’s nostrils. She’d given Kanika the mirror.

Kanika vowed to find the courage to act today, before her great-uncle Elim or others began grumbling again, muttering that she was behind schedule to find a husband, that she must be married before the arrival of summer’s dry winds. Before they trapped her.

A spiraling cord of nerves in her stomach, as well as a
morning pressure that needed to be relieved behind a bush, at last propelled Kanika to her feet. She glanced through the open door, surprised to see the day still hovering. She was rising earlier and earlier now that she was an assistant teacher, now that she had books to read. It seemed to have satisfied Elim, who’d lately been complaining less. He used to protest that she remained wedded to the earth far too long each day, depending on the sun to pry open her eyes.

“She’s as lazy as a dying man,” Elim told Neema once in a voice that boomed through Mididima, loud as a thunderstorm. It had not been laziness—even now, Kanika flushed at the public accusation. Sometimes, yes, there was a morning’s heaviness after a late night spent talking to Scar Boy while Mididima slept—talks no one else knew about, because all would disapprove. But primarily, her lack of enthusiasm for daylight had been born of days carrying too few possibilities. Since the library had arrived, all could surely see that she was far from lazy.

She brushed her uncle’s old complaint aside by flinging her right hand through the air. Today, she would not be disturbed by thoughts of uncles whose minds resembled mud pools, or lurking husbands or pointless chores. She would begin the morning with the speed and joy of a well-aimed spear, and that would make the moments fly faster until the Camel Bookmobile and Miss Sweeney arrived.

The American

I
N A VACANT LOT NEXT TO
G
ARISSA’S PROVINCIAL LIBRARY
some three hours south of Mididima, two herdsmen struggled to strap wooden boxes filled with books to a camel’s side. They’d been trying for fifteen minutes, and by now an audience of a dozen passersby had collected. Fi stood with Mr. Abasi. She saw the camel blink its long eyelashes against an arrow of early-morning light and then shift abruptly with uncanny timing. The boxes fell off. Again. Books thudded onto the ground, the sound reverberating. It was the fifth try and still no success. The camel’s lips turned up in what looked remarkably like a smirk.