The Camel Bookmobile (7 page)

Matani grinned. “The boys, you know, won’t take the easy ones anyway,” he said. “And I want them to learn English.”

“Miss Sweeney,” Mr. Abasi called. “We’re nearly ready.” The grass mat had been spread beneath the acacia, and the books lay in neat rows. Standing stiffly, Mr. Abasi held out the clipboard for her to record the titles that were returned and those to be checked out. A child brought a large pail turned upside down, and Fi sat, clipboard on her lap. Then Mr. Abasi nodded to Matani. As though invisible doors had swung open, the children pressed forward, adults close behind.

Mr. Abasi was speaking authoritatively—telling everyone, Fi imagined, to line up in an orderly fashion. No one listened. Excited voices rose and fused. Matani slipped among the children, translating titles, reading opening paragraphs, helping them make their choices.

Fi patiently marked off each returned book, checking its condition briefly under Mr. Abasi’s eye. He seemed to consider this chore beneath him. That amused Fi. She wasn’t the perfect candidate for this kind of task either—in many ways, she often thought, she had become a librarian against the odds, being neither as organized nor as detail-oriented as many of her colleagues. Nevertheless, she enjoyed this particular job in the tiny, scattered tribal communities. She liked knowing which books were being checked out most often, and which were being ignored. And she loved it when these new, unlikely library patrons held out their choices and she looked into their faces and then both her hand and theirs held the books for a breath while she recorded the titles and their names. Even if she was guilty of romanticizing it, the connection she felt to these people at that moment was a key part of what motivated her.

That, and a childhood memory of her mother and the starving Biafrans.

When Fi was in grammar school, her quick-tempered widowed mother possessed patience enough to endure only ten minutes of whining from any of her four children before issuing the sharp rebuke: “Saint Brigid of Faughart! What of the starving Biafrans, hey?” If the offending child continued to cry—sometimes, depending on her mother’s mood, if a bottom lip even dared tremble—a brusque pop on the backside could be expected. Fi’s mother always spoke the warning phrase in a slurred rush, with a touch of accent from her native Ireland. Fi knew about Brigid, her mother’s favorite saint—the beautiful daughter of a slave who, legend had it, could cure lepers and turn water to ale. But
starvenbeeoffrans
were mysterious to her. If she could only discover the meaning of that word, she might at last be able to understand her complicated, baffling mother—a woman who turned up her nose at Irish Catholic charity and worked instead as a “personal secretary” for a scholar in Manhattan about whom she spoke so seldom that he could have been entirely fictional for all Fi ever knew.

Fi could not find the inexplicable phrase in any dictionary, though—not the one in the classroom, or the one in the school library, nor in the home of her best friend, Lizzie McElroy, who lived down the street in their neighborhood in the Bronx. The only time she dared ask, “And, Mom, what are
starvenbeeoffrans
?” she received the pop that really should have gone to her little sister—the whiner on that occasion.

By the time she was in middle school, Fi had developed
a whimsical style at home, performing gymnastic tricks or telling corny jokes to try to make her straight-backed, overburdened mother smile. It sometimes worked. Her attempts at closeness, on the other hand, were routinely rebuffed: her mother refused to answer the few questions that her children dared to ask—about her childhood, for instance; or her work; or even their own father, who had died after being struck by a car while walking home late one night when Fi was a toddler. “May you never forget what is worth remembering,” her mother would say, “and never remember what is best forgotten.”

So Fi continued to wonder, intermittently, about
starvenbeeoffrans.

It took a high school social studies class to teach her who Biafrans were, and then she began hunting down their history at the big mid-Manhattan library branch. For weeks, she was a daily fixture on the fifth floor, round-shouldered at the library’s substantial wooden tables, concentrated as if the Biafrans were a secret she had to uncover to learn at last how to connect with her emotionally distant mother. She read about the Biafrans’ failed rebellion against Nigeria, the political indecision that led to four cities’ being named the capital, the 2 million dead, children roasted alive, young girls ripped in two by shrapnel, and of course the starving—everywhere the starving that her mother must have seen in the newspapers, that prompted her urgings to her own children to buck up.

Fi’s friends implored her to stop the daily research, but she couldn’t. Eventually, in fact, her interest took her far beyond her mother’s reprimands, driving her teenage
cynicism underground for a while and spawning a wild idea: that she should help these Biafrans. She didn’t know how, though. And she recognized, finally, that helping them wouldn’t get her any closer to her mother, who by then had fallen ill, and who in fact died during Fi’s second year of college. Her death marked the last time Fi had ever cried—tears of frustration as well as sorrow, she recognized even then.

As it turned out, Fi ventured only as far as Europe, in a trip taken one summer after college, and she became a librarian instead of an aid worker. It was the library, after all, that brought her the answer to at least one of the riddles of her childhood, her mother’s mysterious admonition. Besides, she felt embraced by those tall, narrow stacks; she felt nurtured in the library and supplied with information, as she might have felt in her childhood home if things had been different. If her mother hadn’t needed to work so hard, which made her taciturn. If her father had lived instead of being crushed beneath an oncoming car.

Nevertheless, she dreamed of traveling to Africa. When a posting appeared on a librarian website from a group of American companies seeking someone to work temporarily as a consultant and help start a camel-borne library in Kenya, she almost couldn’t believe it at first. Some god who knew her secret desire seemed to have created a job tailored for her. She applied immediately and would have gone even if her employer hadn’t agreed to give her a leave of absence.

Kanika was dusting off the books, an endless chore, and reading the back covers as she worked. Sometimes she
opened the inside to see if whoever donated the book had written a message—“Greetings from North Carolina” or “Hello from Mark Twain Elementary.” Once or twice, Fi had seen Kanika touch her finger to those written words, though Kanika surely didn’t know where North Carolina was and couldn’t imagine Mark Twain Elementary.

Kanika always checked out nonfiction and considered her selection carefully, unlike some who chose as though they were on a live game show and had only seconds to pick door number one, two, or three. They often didn’t pause over the title, or even flip through a book looking for pictures. Instead, they judged by color, size, or sometimes scent. Fi had watched them lift books to their noses, sniff loudly, open the pages, inhale again with their mouths open, and then either tuck the book beneath their arms with pleased smiles or return it to the straw mat with crinkled noses.

“Wilt thou take some
chai
?” It was Kanika’s grandmother. Neema spoke an odd stilted English influenced by the language of the Bible—
thee
and
thou
and verbs ending with
est
and
eth
. She extended a cup, which Fi took. In her other hand, she held a paperback novel called
Projects for Winter
. Fi had read the back cover earlier that week. She knew it was about a woman whose affair goes sour, whose husband divorces her and wins custody of the children. A modern version of
Anna Karenina
, apparently. Fi wondered how that story could possibly interest a woman like Neema, even given her fondness for fiction. Fi considered suggesting something else—but no. The ferocity with which the grandmother always made her selections forbade meddling.

Besides, Fi was convinced that instinct could determine a body’s literary needs, just as physical cravings pointed to dietary shortfalls. She’d experienced it herself more than once among the library’s dense shelves; not knowing what she should read next, she’d wandered, sniffing slightly, palms open. When intuition hit, she felt a sensation she couldn’t describe exactly: her hands seemed to know where to go. And when she reached, invariably she found exactly the book she needed at that moment—sometimes fiction, sometimes biography, sometimes a slim volume of obscure poetry.

Two young women stood to one side of the grass mat, trying hard to mask their interest in the bustle beneath the acacia. One was lean but well formed with strong arms, her neck and shoulders adorned with yellow and blue beads. The other was rounder, with the heavy, drooping breasts of a nursing mother. Both had a reddish dusty blush painted between their eyes, down their noses, and onto their cheeks, as well as tattoos on their chins—three dark straight lines—that indicated they were married.

The crowd around Fi was thinning a little, so she turned toward the two women. “Please,” she said, urging them closer to the books.

The women, aloof, gazed off toward the horizon.

Fi picked up a book called
Baby’s First Five Years
. “Help me,” she said to Mr. Abasi. “Tell them this is loaded with simple games for a child’s early development.”

“Miss Sweeney, these women have no-no interest in games.”

“Humor me, Mr. A.”

Mr. Abasi pursed his lips a long minute before he trans
lated—at least, Fi hoped he did—as she pressed the book into the hands of the young mother.

The woman took the book, but didn’t glance at it.

“There are more,” Fi said. She reached for another book that showed photographs of homes built by craftsmen in America and Europe, and handed it to the second woman. She knew wives and daughters here built the houses, so she wasn’t surprised to see the woman look at the pictures with some interest.

She turned back to the mother, who was still holding the book on child-rearing. “What’s your name?” Fi asked in her rudimentary Swahili.

The woman looked shyly to the ground and then glanced up again, smiling slightly. “Leta.”

“Give this a try,” Fi urged, tapping the baby book. “Matani can help you.” Fi wasn’t sure the woman understood. She looked around and saw Kanika, holding two books. “Tell her, will you, Kanika?” Fi asked.

Kanika said something to Leta while Fi smiled encouragingly. The young mother stared into Fi’s eyes, as though the two of them were making a pact, before nodding and moving away with the book.

“What do you think of this one?” Kanika asked, offering a book for inspection as Fi jotted down the title taken by the young mother. Fi glanced over.
Snow Sense: Staying Alive in an Avalanche
. She bit her lower lip. Some of these titles they were carting around by camel were beyond absurd.

“Interesting topic,” she managed, making her tone neutral. “You know that word,
avalanche
?”

Kanika shook her head.

“You remember snow?” Fi asked. “Well, an avalanche means a large rush of snow and ice and rocks sliding down a mountain.” Fi used both arms to demonstrate the movement of a landslide.

Kanika tipped her head, considering, and then held out the other book, a biography of Gertrude Bell. “And this?”

“She was a woman from England who became powerful in the Middle East,” Fi said. “She helped settle arguments between men.”

Kanika set down the book on avalanches but kept the other.

“By the way, Kanika,” Fi said, “I’ve got something for you.” From her bag next to the overturned pail, she extracted a copy of a glossy American magazine for girls. “Some of it will seem silly,” she said. “But I thought, maybe…”

Kanika smiled broadly, showing all her teeth. “
Asante
,” she said. Then she leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Miss Sweeney. Can we speak together?”

Fi bent toward Kanika. The girl wanted to confide something, perhaps? Or sought some advice? Fi felt pleased out of all proportion.

Before Kanika could speak, though, Mr. Abasi’s voice came between them. “Miss Sweeney,” he said, gesturing her back to her clipboard. “A dawdling sun would never rise, and then what?”

Fi never understood how he managed to speak like that, entirely through his nose. “I’m headed your way, Mr. A.,” she answered, tossing a smile at him over her shoulder. She touched Kanika’s arm lightly. “We’ll talk soon,” she said.

The Teacher

M
ATANI FELT A LOW RUMBLE OF APPREHENSION AS HE
saw Scar Boy’s older brother Badru approaching. Badru’s expression was that of one carrying news of death or drought. But then, Matani reminded himself, Badru often looked foreboding. He had a way of holding his head—chin thrust forward, forehead back—that hooded his intense eyes and left his cheekbones bold above the fierce line of his mouth. At the same time, there was something commanding about him, a bold quality that attracted attention.

“You are here to chose a book?” Matani shaped his tone so it would not betray his doubt.

“Taban sent me,” Badru said, using his brother’s given name. “He is not well today.”

Scar Boy unwell was not news. There had to be more. “And what else?” Matani asked.

Badru didn’t reply at first. He seemed to absorb the scene beneath the tan tent, where his neighbors knelt before volumes spread on a piece of burlap. “I do not find his books,” he said laconically after a moment. “The ones that came from the backs of these camels.”

Matani moved closer. “So ask him where they are.”

“He was not able to tell me, Teacher.” Badru added the title with heavy politeness.

Matani opened his mouth, but nothing emerged. He didn’t know whether to yell or strike the young man or turn his back. He couldn’t tell whether Badru was simply obtuse or outright defiant. Badru so feared being pitied as the older brother of Scar Boy that he always seemed guarded, as impenetrable as parched earth.