Walking with Abel (36 page)

I
n early October Ousman and Bobo and their sons, Hashem and Afo, traveled through the arid wilderness to the border with Burkina Faso to pay a condolence visit: a distant relative had died, an old man, and the couple went to sit with his family in mourning and pray for his soul. The relative’s family lived about a day’s walk away. On the border Afo became ill with fever. Ousman took him to the doctor in the nearest town. The doctor prescribed some pills. After five days, in the night, Afo died. He was one year old.

—

Bobo returned to her in-laws’ camp hollow-eyed and mute, as if her heart were squeezed in ways no words could describe. She barely touched her food. She barely touched her surviving son, Hashem. She shrank into the shade of a jackalberry bush and wove calabash lids out of dead grass. Ousman ranged alone around the highlands all day and returned only at sunset, to milk. To show grief was to trespass against God. To withhold it was to trespass against love. The Fulani had been honing the equilibrium for centuries but it remained ever out of reach.

It became Bobo’s turn to receive the relatives who came to sit with her in mourning, to express to her their wish that God protect Afo’s soul. After a few days, no one came. And after that, the Diakayatés rarely spoke of Afo. “When God takes a child who is too young to know anything it means it was time for that child to go,” explained Oumarou. A snap of heavenly fingers, a racking flash, and poof. As if a child’s life was weightless. It was not. But nor did grief build up into some residue of loss until the heart cracked under its weight or turned wooden with lesions. Each loss stood distinct in its unique and awful wretchedness. Each new love and separation had to be lived alone and from scratch. Every time Oumarou walked to Konkorno he said a prayer for his daughter Salimata, who had died an infant right here at this campsite more than thirty years before.

And still the cattle streamed on the speckled horizon and milkmaids walked with their wares past the camp and past that grave and past all the graves of all the children who ever had died upon this tract of the Sahel, and each dawn still shone like porcelain, and egrets lifted into the October sky by the hundred as they always did.

T
hat month and the next I walked from the bush to Djenné and back every few days. In Djenné I transcribed my notes on the second floor of Gano’s house, five narrow alley blocks from the Grande Mosquée. Lizards clicked above my sleeping mat and in the porous clay wall above my door a rock pigeon had built a nest. A rural bird, with her scarlet eyeliner; wherever she nested in town was rare and lucky and sacred. To leave or enter my room I had to step through a white stripe of holy shit.

I walked alone. Fastpaced four-hour walks on the unmarked paths through the pointillist savannah. In forenoon sun the land was ash. I spooked rabbits, and bands of vervets that dragged their long pale tails through the dust trawling odd tracks, like cyclists arriving and leaving. I foraged for unripe wild persimmons that drew my mouth. I walked under a ringing blue sky so low it seemed unctuous, ozone on the move. Warplanes bored slowly toward the Sahara. From the ground and from the air French and Malian troops were searching the desert for the murderers of two French radio journalists whose bodies had been found in its sands, throats slit.

I walked into rimaibe girls with firewood on their heads and memorized their soccer t-shirts:
ALONSO 14.
GÖTZE 10
.
DROGBA 11
.
FORLÁN 9
. Wind flapped our pagnes to northward in synchrony. Preteen goatherds hit mimosa shrubs with their clubbed sticks to watch the responsive leaves fold and droop in retreat.
Mimosa pudica
: shy, bashful. “Woman,” they sang to the shrinking herb, “close your legs, your husband’s coming.” The adult Fulani I met on those walks stopped for chitchat:

“Anna Bâ! Where are you going?”

“Konkorno. And you?”

“Sin.”

“Is there grass there?”

“Some.”

“Well, go with God.”

“Amen, amen, amen.”

Elemental land. Its beveled horizons peeled me back until beauty and sorrow and a kind of long, gut-pulling love all came in waves along with the saccharine fragrance of lotuses and the stench of decomposing livestock. Walking through the bush offered not a solution but a reclamation of sorts: it sang back to me my dream-map, a songline of my own. A croak perhaps, a stutter even, but mine.

My hosts disapproved of my goings. “When you leave for Djenné,” Fanta told me one time, “it’s like a tree has been cut.” Because neither rigid codes of conduct nor a long life on the road conditioned us to constantly saying goodbye, and the beauty of movement was forever laced with longing.

Several weeks later, at the end of November, I left the Sahel. I shook left hands with my hosts so that we would see one another again and begged their forgiveness so that our long time apart would not rankle with resentment. When the turn came for me to say goodbye to Hairatou she spun away from me and wept. I stood at her back and embraced her and closed my eyes. I was very sad but I didn’t cry. For a frightening instant I imagined that each time I farewelled the people I loved my heart slivered thinner and thinner—except just then I felt so alive in my sorrow that it almost felt like joy.

“It’s very hard,” Fanta had said. “Very hard, Anna Bâ. Some don’t cry, some cry—that depends on the heart. But all of us miss one another.” When I had last said goodbye to my lover I had been so delirious with shock, with disbelief, my soul so riven, that when I walked away from him into the cold Philadelphia night I was laughing. A year had passed since, and I still missed him fiercely, every day anew.

We walk into one another’s lives, we change them and are changed deeply and forever, we part ways. Each time a part of our hearts seems to shrivel and die, it doesn’t. Simply, our hearts learn to beat a different way. We mourn, we break down, then we stand up, and we keep going. Two thousand footsteps per mile. Twenty to forty thousand footsteps per day. Every footfall brings the walkers closer to a reunion. Every footfall begets a separation. Our forward movement, erratic, fragile, relentless, is a quest: for comfort, for deliverance, for squaring the ideal of endurance with the practice of love.

I
n the last days of Ash Shaulah, the Raised Tail of the Scorpion, the nomads who had summered in Hayré began the journey to the Inner Niger Delta. Boys drove their fathers’ cattle to the periphery of the forbidden grasslands, and families loaded onto carts and rattled closer to the bourgou. With his father’s blessing Hassan slung over his shoulder the black milking calabash, a stoppered gourd with millet couscous his mother had prepared, a blue tarp wrapped with lengths of rope that could double as lassoes, and took the cows west.

The cows set out with an incredible lowing. Hooves clinked on plutonic rock like hail. Hooves sucked into sand. Flanks swished against dry reeds, against the hot and dusty hides of other cows. They walked slowly, jerkily, stopped to eat, to rest. Hassan flowed among them, ululating, sucking his teeth, grunting in warning, throwing his clubbed stick and fetching it and throwing it again.

Jot jot jot!
Hassan drove the herd past an abandoned millet field, the stalks knee-high and broken, aborted. Across a shallow dip where stale green water plumed in a bed of chalk, skeletons of sea creatures that lived here two billion years ago when the planet was still wet. He passed a cornfield where a white horse stood like a ghost, and he passed thornbrush cattle pens in which villagers impounded the cows that trespassed on their unharvested farmland.

At the first paved road on his route he stopped the cows to let a silver SUV whiz southwest toward Bamako. It had a bullet hole in the trunk door. The air quivered in the car’s wake, the scent of hot tar billowed, stilled once more. The cows lowered their heads as they crossed. Hooves clacked unfamiliarly on asphalt, like so many beans spilling. Dragonflies zipped between shanks.

He walked. He let the animals fall in with other herds that belonged to the Sankaris, the Sidibés, the Sows, the Barris, herds he recognized by their shape from a mile away, and he walked stretches of the savannah with boys his age who told him jokes and told him also about the meager rain in other parts of Hayre. Then he walked alone again, seeking out the highest routes where no rice grew and little forage, taking no shortcuts and instead choosing detours many hours long under the pewter sun. Not merely protecting the cattle from village cow jails but also protecting his own stature as a cowboy skilled and wise enough to keep the animals out of trouble, because he accepted as an indisputable and only truth what his father had taught him: that the cows in his care were not his cows nor were they Oumarou’s or Oumarou’s father’s cows but that they were the very first cows of his very first ancestors who drove them from Ethiopia, and that the integrity of such a herd and his integrity as its herder were one. His integrity as a herder and his identity as a Fulani were one.

Already the odds were against him. In the nomad tradition a cowboy’s proficiency hinged on how fat and erect were the humps of his cows after the rainy season, on how many new additions there were to his herd. But this had been a lean and thirsty year. True, one new calf had been born during the rainy season, but in addition to the sick cow that had to be slaughtered and nearly killed Oumarou during Ramadan, a yearling bull, Swayback, had disappeared on Hassan’s watch in Hayré. Ousman would find its carcass on his solitary wanderings days later, after Hassan had left. It had been born with a deformity and in its hungry exhaustion it fell and couldn’t get up. It died of hunger, or thirst, or pain. A horsecart full of Bwa would fetch it from the bush and butcher it and eat it, because Bwa ate anything, even carrion.

“Some of them will even eat a human,” said Ousman.

Hassan drove the cows on gravel and on the crazed webbing of dry dirt and on sand that accommodated the shape of the feet that last trod on it. By nightfall he and the herd arrived at a drowned swale outside Sin, an hour from Ballé. Here he would wait for the
dioro
’s permission to approach the river. Some boys he knew took their herds closer to the bourgou. “All the rice fields are ruined this year anyway,” they said. “If the farms don’t have a harvest, why not just allow cows to go in and eat?” A foolhardy relative ended up having to pay the price of two bulls in fines after trying to sneak his father’s cows through an unharvested rice field. Hassan was taking no risks. He was learning the hardest and most crucial art of cowboying in the Sahel, of life: the art of patience. Perhaps he could reclaim his standing as a great cowherd in a week, when it was his turn to swim at the head of the herd across the fast and rain-swollen Bani River.