Walking with Abel (27 page)

Months later I emailed the number to the museum in Stockholm. “We gratefully acknowledge your report of our bird ring with this number,” the museum wrote back. “Osprey
Pandion haliaetus
. Age: Nestling, 2 young in brood. Date: 2003-07-04. Place:
SWEDEN, NÄRKE, STORA MELLÖSA, EKHAGEN
.” For centuries, Närke, a wooded and landlocked province in south-central Sweden, had raised oxen. Until the middle of the twentieth century, its most important industry was shoemaking. It lies at the fifty-ninth parallel. From its cold forests the raptor had flown thirty-three hundred miles to become the most memorable dinner Kotimi had ever had.

The wind rose and the river’s surface quivered. Ousman stood on end two rolled-up thatch mats that the morning previous had been the walls of his father’s hut, and threw over them a large blue tarp. A pop-up storm shelter. Allaye, Gano, and I walked back west to Ballé to buy from a man who ran a mercantile out of the anteroom of his compound some sugar, tea, and hardboiled guineafowl eggs for lunch, and to pick up their cellphones, which they had left with the man overnight to charge for ten cents apiece. But the mercantile owner said his motorcycle battery had died in the night and the phones were not charged. He said it was my friends’ cellphones that had drained the battery of its last juice and so refused to give the men their coins back. For a few minutes we stood in his messy yard. From the corners shaggy goats and mucoid children and two women watched us in a silence that underscored the impasse. We left. On our return walk we passed, on the eastern outskirts of the village, three or four women stringing neverending threads of homespun cotton around a eucalyptus grove. Later, their husbands would weave the threads into expensive blankets with traditional Fulani black and white geometric designs.

The storm never arrived. While we were gone, the rest of the family had piled their possessions next to the water, and from there Ousman and Boucary were loading two boats, and Oumarou and Sita were bargaining for the boat rental with Kotimi’s husband, a stocky gray-haired man in ripped green slacks and a dark-blue-striped boubou that barely came down to his knees, a cellphone in a camouflage pouch on a lanyard around his neck. On his forehead and on the tip of his nose were circles of dirt, unwashed since his last prayer. The Diakayaté women and children would cross the river first, with the mats and the calabashes, then Gano’s motorscooter and the remainder of the baggage, then Oumarou and Sita and Sita’s two carts. The young men would help the women unload on the east bank, then return and wade or swim across with the goats and donkeys in the shallows upstream. The women with their bundles squatted by the water.

“Are you afraid, Anna Bâ?” asked Hairatou.

“No. Are you?”

“Of course. The Bozo are people of the river. We Fulani are cowherds. We are people of the bush. The river is no place for us. Of course we are afraid of crossing it.”

But in the next few weeks Hairatou would ford the river many times and splash around in the water to beat down Ramadan thirst. She swam like a mermaid.

—

On the east bank of the Bani Oumarou sat on the knee roots of a thorn tree and waited for his animals to cross. The women lugged everything but the heavy bags of rice and millet onto the bluff, scrambling up the sandy talus of the cutbank in their skirts.

“Bobo?”

The daughter-in-law stopped midbreath, a mortar on her head.

“Have you already been to the camp Hassan made?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Did you see if the calf rope is there?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Okay. Then once you have carried everything onto the bluff you may start moving stuff there. Set up your kitchen.”

On the other side of the river Ousman and Allaye and Boucary were rounding up the goats, pushing them into the water. The goats bleated wildly. Some ran out of the water and the men hove them back in. Some swam in circles. The river on the far bank frothed white, filled with the shrieks of animals, with the cowboys’ oaths. Hassan arrived, greeted us politely, stripped out of his boubou, plunged into the river to help out. Oumarou reminisced.

“Here is where we come every year to cross. Here I buried my father. And two children from my first wife, the boy Adama, who was two years old, and the girl Fanta, who was seven. Here, too, when I was as young as Hassan is now, three white people came to my father’s camp and spent a night with us. It was incredible, Anna Bâ—that white people would come to stay with the Fulani! Can you believe it? Amazing! It never had happened before, and it never has happened since.”

And who was I? I watched the river.

From the side pocket of his canvas pants Gano produced three hardboiled guinea eggs. Their pink-brown speckled shells were so dense he had to bang them against the metal handlebar of his bike to crack them. He offered one to Oumarou.

“Ah!” The old man took the egg, peeled it, bit into it delicately. “Ah! Just what the doctor ordered. Guinea eggs are very good for your blood.”

“What about egret eggs?” A cattle egret stood at the river’s edge and studied with one yellow eye the screaming mottle of goats.

“No one eats those eggs. No one eats egret meat.”

Egret meat was black and not good for anything—not even for magic. The Fulani did not eat egrets. The Fulani also did not eat foxes, because foxes were like dogs, and dogs were unclean animals, like pigs. But Gano said he would eat any meat. He would eat donkey. He would eat dog. He
had
eaten dog. He even would eat pork. What he would not eat was anything cooked with Maggi seasoning, because Maggi seasoning made men blind and impotent. With that Oumarou agreed.

“That’s true. You take two or three of those Maggi cubes, dissolve them in a little water, give them to a bull and the bull will become sterile. I’ve never done it to any of my bulls but I’ve heard people tell it so.”

After all the goats had crossed, Oumarou’s sons and nephews stood wet and shining on the shore and considered the heavy bags the women had left behind. They stood there for a long time. Hauling heavy things was not the job of a cowboy. Such a job was contemptible, ignoble. It was the job of a slave, of rimaibe, but all the rimaibe were on the other side of the river, in Ballé. The men stood around. Someone produced a plastic bag of soggy raw peanuts. Raw peanuts were good for virility. The men ate. Perhaps they were waiting for the loads to magic themselves up the bluff.

At last Gano walked over and offered his help. One by one they hoisted the bags upon the translator’s back. One by one he carried them up the steep bank. Then he pushed his motorcycle up the cliff. Then, one by one also, he loaded the bags onto his bike and drove them over to the campsite where the women were setting up their hearth.

—

But for a man in love, Gano would have been a slave.

His grandmother Djidi was born into a nomadic family of Fulani nobles who lived in the bourgou. The name of that family has since been forgotten. One day when Djidi was a girl she and her older sister walked from their parents’ camp to the Bani to fetch some water for their mother’s cooking. A group of men rowed up in a pirogue, grabbed the girls, forced them aboard, and took them to slave markets—Djidi to Djenné, her sister to Tie, south of Bamako. One market day in Djenné a young Fulani man spotted Djidi among the slaves for sale. The family tradition went that he instantly knew from her uncommon beauty and stateliness that she was not a slave. Maybe he simply fancied her. He bought her and married her, restoring her to nobility through marriage. He was Gano’s paternal grandfather. Years later, the sisters found each other. Gano knew he had relatives in Tie, but he had never met that side of the family.

While Djidi was in captivity her kidnappers refused to give her milk. For weeks she had not tasted it. After that she never drank it. Nor did her son, Gano’s father. Why? Gano didn’t know, and there was no one left to ask.

Gano’s last name was not a traditional Fulani name like Sankari or Diakayaté or Bâ. It was a stand-in for the one that had been somehow forgotten, or misplaced, the one that would have helped griots trace his family roots to Ethiopia. A muddled legacy, a history unremembered. Gano meant “here.” As in: we are here now.

—

The sick skewbald kid goat that had ridden to Ballé in Hairatou’s lap had made it across the river. But the swim had exhausted it and when it reached the eastern shore it fell down. Now it lay amid oyster shells and chamomiles in the muddy grass next to Sita’s empty cart. Blood was drying around its eyes and nose and horns. Pied crows had pecked it to death.

T
he plateau was colossal. It toyed with the perception of distance: the thick low thorn stubble that seemed to be a few hundred paces off became a sparse grove of century-old fissured acacia trees where the Earth curved out of sight three miles away, and from among those trees more savannah unwound in endless lion-hide splendor. It dwarfed all upon it, man and cow. You could picture mammoths on it. It had been there for more than two billion years. Red, dry, and spare, it was a thing entirely apart from the fertile leas of the Bani’s west bank, as if an abrupt desiccation were a necessary preamble to the highland kopjes of Hayré that lay another day’s walk from the river.

Nomads already had begun arriving here, on foot, on donkeys, on motorcycles, in carts, driving before them cattle and goats and sheep, carrying all of their earthly possessions, carrying expectations of fodder and rain and reunions. Some built huts. Most squatted in the lath shade of the sparse thorn trees or reclined under their upturned carts, ready to move on once it began to rain steadily. Any day now, they said. Any day now.

By lunchtime a small deputation of men and women and children clustered around Oumarou’s calf rope. Sita and Salimata and their children and grandchildren. Oumarou’s younger brother al Hajj Saadou, as tall and thin as Oumarou and in clothes as threadbare. Their youngest living brother and Bomel’s father-in-law, Allaye, visiting from Gagna, with a new leather hat and the smooth skin of a rich man who drank plenty of milk twice daily. Saadou’s wife, Kumba, with a weeping, pustular wound on her right cheek; in the months I knew her it would not heal. Their two grown sons and their daughter-in-law Djamba, the same age as Hairatou, with silver coins woven into her cornrows. Their youngest son, Adama, who was thirteen and always wore the same black denim leggings and a short green boubou basted with black thread and who, after shaking my hand, whispered to Gano:

“Is that a man or a woman?”

“Can’t you tell by the skirt?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Imagine me exactly the way I am now,” I suggested, “but with darker skin. What do I look like to you?”

Adama studied me awhile.

“A Fulani.”

“Man or woman?”

“A Fulani woman.”

—

The relatives clasped hands. They sat on mats and stood and walked around in pairs, in groups of three. They asked after the rain in the parts of the bourgou from which their kin had come, and offered guesses as to whether it would rain in two days, on the first day of al Nashira. They asked after one another’s cattle and after relatives not present. The young men compared new frippery and gossiped and the girls prepared a large reunion lunch of rice and thumb-size fresh fish and peanut sauce and laughed and teased one another about beaus real and imagined. Hassan gave his father the full account of the cattle drive and the days following: all here, all healthy,
al ham du lillah
, all hungry. It had not rained thoroughly in Ballé and there was not enough grass—there was barely any grass at all. He would be going out to fetch the cows after lunch.

“Did you miss your family while you were by yourself?” I asked the boy.

“No. Because my cows were with me.”

The Diakayatés were taking their lunch beneath a thorn tree when they heard the low drone of engines. Persistent, close, closer. They rested their sauce-stained right hands palms-up on their knees and lifted their heads to search in the overcast sky. Where? Where? Then someone pointed directly west.

The warplane rose out of the horizon not two dozen feet above the tree crowns. A heavy belly with no windows, like the belly of a whale. Swept wing, no insignia. The whirr of its four engines deceptively quiet as if it were a mile away. Its hulk was so huge it took up all the western sky, shrank the landscape below. Suddenly we were toy people, toy cattle, toy goats, toy trees. It seemed to move in slow motion, sweeping its gigantic mass in a wide circle around the plateau. You could throw a stone at it and hit it. No one did.

Who were the pilots? What were they looking for? Were they following up on military intelligence that Islamist fighters from the north had chosen the migratory staging area at Ballé to hide, to blend in with other men on the move? What if that intelligence was true, and there were among the nomads mercenaries who wanted to plunge the bourgou into a new jihad? Or was it a misinterpretation, a guess by some remote Western data analyst who saw the satellite images of a movement and assembly she knew nothing about? Was it possible that somewhere—in Bamako? France? the United States?—uniformed men and women strained their eyes at pixelated images of us eating lunch? What did the pilots see? Motionless diners, stacks of gunnysacks, long bundles of matting. Animals. The plane was low enough for them to see the uncomprehending fear on our faces.