Walking with Abel (22 page)

Oumarou never struck his children or grandchildren. Sometimes he’d tell them, “You have let me down.” Or, “Don’t do this again.” Often he would say nothing at all and keep to himself for a minute or two of quiet displeasure.

Ousman said his father’s disappointed silences always shattered him the most.

T
he sky broke two days after Allaye’s return. Not a torrent at first: a steady silver drizzle. Enough to spot the campground dust, to pool in the shallow depressions of abandoned flipflops, to streak a wooden pestle. Wind shook leafless thorn trees that the sun had bleached to fishbone spines. It thundered.

Then all of a sudden it rained hard. Gusts harried dense gray diagonals across the gray plain. The rain gathered into large milky puddles in the clay and hammered out of them liquid crowns, staccato marks, temporary coronae. Amadou and Kajita stepped barefoot from puddle to puddle, curious, savoring the wet.

“Cold!” said Kajita.

“Cold!” mimicked Amadou, and laughed.

By midafternoon it was blowing a gale from the southeast. The women of the camp gathered inside Oumarou and Fanta’s hut and wove straw mats and grass calabash lids and kept the brazier going with charcoal and boiled endless pots of tea. Raindrops sprinkled into the hut and the hut’s reed frame rasped in the wind where the reeds were slung together with pagne strips and rope. From the horizontal loops of the frame hung curdling sticks, an unfinished sequined straw lid with a large sewing needle stuck in it, some ladles of wood and plastic, a couple of blue plastic cups, a king-size mosquito net, a black plastic bag holding something small, another bag with dry pepper flakes, a scouring mop, a kuffiyeh wrapped around a pouch with Oumarou’s cardboard tax document, a pair of turquoise flipflops, Allaye’s knockoff cologne. Bomel reached for the vial and sprayed the perfume at Hairatou’s drawings on the clay wainscot, at the palm of her left hand, at the reed pallet. She sniffed in wonder. The scent mixed oddly with the buttermilk smell of the hut. Young men and teenage boys walked in and shucked off wet sandals in a puddle by the door and leaned their staffs against the thatch and talked about the water and the grass it certainly would bring. Yaya invented tales of falling asleep on nightherd and being carried away bodily in his sleep by a mischief of mice; of harnessing a hippo in the Bani and riding it through the bourgou; of conversing with lions. Isiaka came wearing a faded pink L.L.Bean puffer jacket with ripped armpits over his bright boubou. He sat down on the earthen floor, sniffling.

“Are you healthy, Isiaka?”

“I have stomach problems.”

“Did you eat something bad?”

“Yes. I ate food and I should be eating milk instead.” The cowboy’s eternal refrain. Everyone snickered. Allaye teased his great-uncle:

“You’re sick because you’re older than all of Mali.”

“I’ll sell you,” Isiaka squeaked back. “For money, though you’re not worth much. I’ll sell you and buy milk for me.”

Mentou arrived, wrapped in something that looked like house insulation. Her skull had been newly tonsured and the remaining hair coiled in tight thin cornrows around the crown. She looked regal. In the dusk of the hut she sat down next to me on a bit of burlap sacking and then she touched the hem of my skirt and took my hand and held it. Then her mother came by and she let go instantly. She had cheated on her mother. I knew such treachery. I once had been a little girl who had believed in sudden escapes from tedium, a besotted child who had imagined that life with my mother’s friends would have been somehow more magical. I don’t know if my mother ever noticed, but to me such fantasies had felt sinful.

—

The Diakayatés watched the rain and watched the world in the rain. The downpour turned to drizzle and back to downpour. The sky was a gray and darker gray scape of multistratic clouds. In the clouds there were rifts and valleys and tall upside-down mountains and it thundered all the time and the light that fell through the clouds was the color of mercury. Somewhere above, pockets of low pressure were sucking in air, inhaling the Sahel’s hot breath. Shadows became faint and cast at unfamiliar angles, as if the atmospheric war had rearranged the very course of the planet’s journey. In the rain someone’s herds moved on transhumance in moaning and fuzzy dark lines. Three Dakabalal boys galloped their donkeys bareback across the measly fen to the west and through the multiple prisms of falling water they seemed like genii riding magical beasts loosed by the tempest. Gusts blew away wet slippers. Above it all a sole swallow struggled against the wind.

It rained all day. A group of bare-breasted teenage girls and two older men came out of Dakabalal to feel with their hands and toes for catfish in the muddied marsh. In the Diakayaté camp toddlers ran naked outside until they shivered with the cold. Their parents and older siblings toweled them off with pagnes and blankets.

Oumarou had gone in the morning to the district hospital in Djenné to visit a sick friend and returned to camp in the gloaming. He strode across the muck on his thin long legs shod in turquoise plastic Fulani shoes and he wore that day a boubou in blue and white stripes and he looked from a distance a peculiar windwhipped marshbird. His trip had been in vain. His friend had been released from the hospital the day before with pneumonia, for which he would receive a traditional treatment of chest massage with shea butter at his own campsite.

Oumarou shook off his shoes and sat on the sleeping pallet where his relatives had made room for him, and said:

“This isn’t the real rain.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

He said that while that particular day’s rain was plentiful it was no indicator of how the season would go or whether there would be enough grass for the cattle. He said it would have to rain this way every day for weeks on end for the rain to make a difference. That only when a cowboy driving cattle to camp for the evening milking saw no dust rise at the heels of his herd for weeks on end could it be said that it had rained enough.

The old man had been in a sour mood for days. He had been studying the land as if he had to decide what to do with it, though he had no jurisdiction over it whatsoever. Nor over the rain, nor over the farmers’ planting schedule. Not even over the itinerary of his own cattle, now that Hassan had obstinately taken it to the next camp.

If one were to truly accept and embrace uncertainty, as the canon of transhumance enjoined—if one were to give up the very human urge to govern the ungovernable—then perhaps within such an acceptance one could discover control of a higher order, a triumphant subjugation of wanting and attachment. And since greed and desire and fear lay at the root of sin one could, conceivably, conquer all sin, become the most enlightened and powerful marabout. But Oumarou’s journey to such a level of serenity remained asymptotic. Sometimes it worked. For the most part it was an aspiration, a splendid theory. Right now he was terribly worried. He also was irritated after his wasted five-hour roundtrip to Djenné, half of it on rain-slicked clay. He ordered the noisy younger children out of the hut and announced that his family would break camp and head toward his cattle outside Ballé in six days, the following Tuesday.

By nightfall the wind died down and the sky settled into long hoar-colored streaks, like an echo of the rainstreaked and pulpy Sahel below. Sita’s cattle lowed in a crowded semicircle at his calf rope. Where Oumarou’s cows once had stayed there was a sodden gap. A fine calm mist fell upon the bourgou and then stopped, and the pink lightning of the receding storm flashed along the horizon to the north. At the very last minute of the day the clouds in the west parted and for a few heartbeats a barely pink strip of sunset lay doubled in the narrow remains of the marsh, like a parting caress. Then pale blue, then gone. Dark earth steamed into the dark. I made my bed in the mud from a sheet of blue tarpaulin. Fits and starts of frog song. Bedtime whispers. The rapping of a goat’s ears. Thunder somewhere. Quietude of the soul.

T
hat night crickets fell from the sky and the next morning steam rose in the slanted dawn and all the winged termites hatched at once and glittered blind and disoriented like fragile spalls of fool’s gold. Goldrimmed mare’s tails squeegeed the bright blue sky. The rain had pushed snakes out of their hiding places in the ground and saw-scaled vipers traced looped infinities in the damp ash of farmers’ fires with their pale bellies.

The termites drifted in windblown columns and settled on my skin. The land smelled like doused-out fire. Bomel woke on a mat next to me and walked a few paces away and there squatted and looked up smiling at the sunrise as she peed. In the distance everywhere cattle flowed in endless groaning herds.

Her husband’s cattle gone and with it the manure for her breakfast fire, Fanta was left to gather sticks. She wandered around the camp looking for deadwood and talking to her granddaughter Mayrama, whom she had strapped to her back with the strawberry-print pagne.

“Life in the bush is hard, Mayrama,” she cooed. “No manure, no wood.”

Oumarou heard that.

“There are some people who don’t want to live in the bush. They stay in villages or in towns. We migrate. If someone doesn’t like to migrate, they should stay.”

Where did it come from, this obdurate devotion to movement? “The romantic image of nomads as aimless wanderers, free spirits, is a fantasy,” wrote Thurston Clarke in
The Last Caravan
, his melancholy ode to the Kel Tamashek camel herders of Niger. He called his nomads prisoners “of a seasonal rhythm determined by the monsoon” who moved “to escape threats and seize opportunities.” Yet migration itself was a daunting obstacle course, not relief itself but rather a search for relief, an anticipation of something better—taller grass, fuller udders, larger humps. Oumarou’s transhumance was not mindful meditation, wasn’t Wordsworth’s blessedness. It was hard work.

“Even though the bush is difficult,” he said, “people who grew up here prefer it because this is what they’ve learned from their fathers and grandfathers.”

A toil prescribed by the dead. The indigenous Australians in Bruce Chatwin’s book
The Songlines
came to my mind, travelers who followed a geographical score sung into being by their totemic ancestors at the era of creation they called the Dreamtime. Chatwin theorized that the first humans had sung their way across the world, that the poetry of their songs was the original
poïesis
, creation. The Diakayatés, according to such a theory, followed the paths chanted into existence by the early nomads. This meant that I, crossing borders and cultures and continents, was trespassing, eavesdropping. I felt like a cuckoo, left to try on other people’s routes and from such wandering, from the multiple scores of the world, to piece together my own song-map, forever poking for some ancestral Dreaming track that had been lost to me in advance of my own birth, when my migrant forefathers finally settled in shtetlach on the Black Sea. Settled and kept on singing in place, those stubborn badkhens.

For an instant the thought—the notion that I somehow needed to affix my traveling lifestyle to some overarching, grander, older meaningfulness—made me feel exceedingly solitary. Then it felt like a conceit. Because here we were, warming our bones on mats soggy from the year’s first rain, and Fanta had found enough firewood to heat up a runny
sombi
porridge of rice and goat milk and the chili flakes I had pounded in her wooden mortar, and little Kajita was lacing her thin fingers through mine, and in the thatch by the entryway to Oumarou’s hut a busy potter wasp was sculpting a clay nest, unaware that in a few days that thatch and that hut would be gone. Simply, it was morning, I was with friends, and it was good.