The Milk of Birds

by Sylvia Whitman

  Adeeba learned in school, from books of science and history. That is not the way to take camels to the water pool, I tell her. The only book most women believe is the Qur’an even though they cannot read it. The wisdom they trust is from their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. I am so glad that the sayings please you, K. C. Adeeba’s students do not believe tiny bugs can make a great illness, so she must say, A little shrub may grow into a tree. When these women complain they can do nothing, she must answer, You think you are too small to make a difference? Try sleeping in a closed hut with a mosquito.

  Adeeba does not like me to tell her what to do. I say, Listen to the one whose advice makes you cry, not to the one whose advice makes you laugh.

  How is your grandmother, K. C.? God spare her from the wet winds. With your grandfather gone, God’s mercy upon him, it must be difficult if your mother’s home village is many kilometers away from Richmond. My father did not like my mother to travel to visit her parents. After my grandfather died, he persuaded my mother’s mother to come to us. My grandmother loved cloth, and my father bought her the brightest cotton and even silk.

  Bribing became a game between them. After a few weeks, my grandmother said, My daughter’s husband, my back is sore. Let my daughter accompany me home so that she can fetch my water and my wood. Your children will take care of you now, as they will when you are old like me.

  Then my father knew she wanted another present.

  From my grandmothers, I learned many sayings and when to use them. Although my mother’s mother loved children, she had no patience for those who did not listen to their elders. Do not abandon your old belongings, she always told us. Even if it is only firewood, use it to keep warm.

  Adeeba is shaking her head.

  You know what my grandmother would say about such a disrespectful girl? Cows are born with ears; it is later they grow horns.

  But between those horns Adeeba has a mind, thanks be to God. Like her father. I have not met him, but we say, The son of a duck is a floater.

  Adeeba says I do not need to tell you all this, but here, in this letter, I am the boss. Her father is in jail, but he has been there before and come home, beaten, yes, but alive. Any day he may be released, inshallah, and then he will find Adeeba here. If God brings your murderer, he will bring your defender.

  I wish and you wish, but God does his will, Adeeba says.

  Can you believe this girl, K. C.? She hides her sayings like a sword beneath her skirt.

  She says, I had a village grandmother too. My mother did not listen to her, my father only pretended to listen to her, but I had no choice!

  Like you, K. C., I receive papers in two languages. Adeeba reads your letter aloud, many times, and what I do not understand, she makes Zaghawa. Then she puts the Arabic beside the English and tries to match the words. In this she reminds me of my sister Saha, who rubbed her thumb over a new stone clasped within her palm all day and then placed it carefully among her others at night, the speckled side by side with the speckled, the streaked by the streaked.

  With my permission, Adeeba carries your letter. Whenever she sees a khawaja between tasks, she pulls it out, puts her finger under one of your difficult words, and says it aloud. Often the khawaja do not understand, but they always stop and look where she is pointing on the page. Then they smile and say the word, and Adeeba repeats it, and they do this several times, with much laughter.

  How do I know? God is the great eye, but I am the little one.

  Saida Julie permitted her to keep a pen, which Adeeba guards so tightly I call it Little Sister. Now she and Little Sister scour the camp for empty paper. Even when paper has no place left for words, the khawaja rip it up to take with them to the latrines. But when Adeeba finds a bit too small for the khawaja to use, she brings it back and writes down her word in English, then in Arabic for the sound, then in Arabic for the meaning. She is making a dictionary.

  This evening we will read your letter again and again, and then Adeeba will fly like a bee from word to word.

  Professor Adeeba has evening students as well. I am one, with two children from our section, Zeinab and Hassan. When Hassan has written his word many times on the ground, Adeeba permits him to ink the letters on paper. Then he passes Little Sister to Zeinab, who makes a tiny picture in place of other words her brother does not know yet.

  Since your letter, K. C., I look for everyone’s gift, and for Zeinab it is drawing.

  For Adeeba it is ordering people around. We say, He who taught me one letter, I became his slave.

  But I admit I am grateful for the company. Where there was only my mother’s silence, we have now the scratch of sticks on the ground and the pen on paper and the recitation of the dressed-up words we are learning.

  More people arrive at this camp every day, K. C. Many arrive with nothing, as we did, and the khawaja give them soap, a cookpot, a plastic mat. Some bring their cows and donkeys, but those die quickly, for people have no strength left to look for grass.

  Adeeba thinks I care more about donkeys than people. That is not true. We live in a world created by people, not animals. Then I am glad to think of the place Richmond and K. C., who is a dark-eyed girl like me. When I close my eyes, I see two kites dancing across the sky on the breeze.

  Your sister, Nawra

  (This is my mark that goes in the register.)

  K.C.

  JULY 2008

  “Do not deceive your mother.” Mom looks up, her brown eyes spooky huge behind her Walmart reading glasses. “Anything you want to tell me?” she says.

  “I love you.” That makes her smile. “I guess my empty envelopes shocked Nawra,” I say.

  “They shocked me,” she says. “Sort of.”

  We laugh. Thank God she never caught a whiff of Jimmy Ladd. “Tell me when I ask too much of you,” she says.

  “Summer school is too much.”

  She pats her lap, and I lean across the sofa and lay my head there. She strokes my hair slowly, pushing it back from my forehead and curling it behind my ear. When I do that to Purrfect, it sounds like I have a cement mixer in my lap. I wish I could purr.

  Finally Mom says, “I don’t care a whit about your grades. Or school. Lots of education happens outside of school. But school is a means to an end. You graduate from high school, from college, you have a lot more choices. Diplomas are just pieces of paper, but they can help you be the person you want to be.”

  I purr silently. “Are you the person you want to be?”

  Mom doesn’t say anything for a bit.

  “I always wanted to be a mom, and I got two great kids,” she says. “But work . . . I guess I thought I’d be doing something . . . bigger.”

  “You help people get jobs,” I say.

  “Temp jobs,” she says.

  “Jobs are pretty important,” I say.

  “They are,” Mom says. “Especially these days. Paychecks are important.”

  “If you could have any job, what would it be?”

  Mom keeps stroking my hair. She half laughs and says, “Schoolmarm.”

  “You’d make a great teacher.”

  “Think so?” She sounds wistful.

  Better than picky Mr. Hathaway. The right way is the Hathaway, he always says.

  “Just do it, Mom.”

  “I’m not certified,” she says. She stands up. “The water must be boiling by now. Why don’t you write Nawra while I cook supper?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “We’re going into D.C., remember? And then you’re at your dad’s.”

  “I’ll do it in the morning.”

  “We’re getting up early. If you write Nawra tonight—”

  “Could I please have one night without homework? Just one night with no nagging. Please. One night.”

  Silence. Finally Mom says, “Okay,” but it’s all steeped with disappointment as usual. “Penne or spaghetti?”

  “Spaghetti,” I say, flumping down on the sofa cushion. It’s still warm from Mom’s
butt. Writing! It just never ends.

  Nawra

  JULY 2008

  A girl screams.

  • • •

  I remember Meriem screaming and kicking and slapping. My mother called me in because she and my grandmother and Kareema could not pin my sister’s thighs and arms and soothe her too. My mother had sent Saha to our neighbor, but I was pleased that my mother had chosen me to stay.

  “She must be still,” my mother said. Meriem was turning her face from side to side, so I held it between my hands and fixed her eyes on mine. That was how I calmed a frantic animal in the herd, hands on the body, my voice low and steady.

  “She will hurt me,” Meriem wailed.

  “The cut will hurt,” I said, “but soon it will be over, and the midwife will stitch you closed. Then you will be a girl with honor, and all the mothers with sons will keep their eyes on you.” I described the fine camels that families would offer for her dowry. For a moment Meriem laughed beneath her tears.

  • • •

  The girl screams again. I doubt my mother and Adeeba sleep. Yet we lie silent in the dark.

  I do not remember screaming at my circumcision. I remember watching Umm Ali unroll her cloth bundle of tools, a knife and scissors and thick pieces of brown glass. I wondered what had been in that brown bottle, if she had drunk it or poured the liquid on the ground before smashing the bottle on a rock.

  Meriem screamed when Umm Ali began her work, and all I could do was cluck and cradle her face, still soft and fat in the way of babies. The womanly smell of her blood startled me.

  • • •

  This girl’s scream stops suddenly, as on a wedding night.

  On wedding nights in Umm Jamila men laughed and women trilled their tongues. They said Umm Ali was a good midwife, for it was rare a husband had to summon her in his shame to cut the stitches on his bride.

  I used to wonder about the business between a man and a woman. One day I found my mother with a handful of frankincense and myrrh. “It is time for you to learn,” she said. She showed me how she tossed the incense in the fire and squatted naked beside it, her robe spread open behind her like a bird’s wings to trap the fragrant smoke against her skin.

  She smeared herself with fat until her skin glistened, smooth and sweetly smoky. “You will do this for your husband,” she said. “Inshallah.”

  “And after I have babies,” I said. “When the visitors come.”

  “Inshallah,” she said, smiling. She laid her hand on her belly. “I have another baby coming. A boy, inshallah. Give birth to male babies to support your house.”

  So I was the first in the family to hear of my brother Ishmael, though I had guessed it as my mother squatted by the fire.

  She showed me her jars, opening them one by one. I sniffed. “Sandalwood,” she said, “dipped in sugar. To burn for another scent. You must find what your husband likes. Make him happy, and he will do the same for you.”

  Another jar held grayish lumps. “Grind potato with sorghum,” my mother said. “If you do not have fat, mix it with oil. If you do not have oil, mix it with water.”

  She picked a lump between her fingers and laid it in my palm. From a tall, thin bottle she poured a drop of oil.

  “Rub it together,” she said. “Make it warm.” She smiled her teasing smile. “One hand is the wife, the other the husband.”

  The paste was thinner, smoother than I expected.

  “Good,” my mother said. “Now rub it in, on your arm.”

  My skin turned dark and moist, like the earth when a bucket spills.

  “It is time we found you a good husband,” my mother said. “He who is wise marries for his children. Your father does not want to lose your work, so he has been slow in this. But it is time.”

  • • •

  The girl screams again. She must be giving birth.

  I wonder which girl. I have seen others like me, with no husband. Is this one spoiled meat too?

  She has no midwife, for there is none. In the spring, the khawaja sometimes sent for one from the village. The midwife traveled and spent the day, seeing some of those who could walk to the clinic. But she comes no more, either because of the rains or the fear on the roads.

  Perhaps in the dark my mother is remembering my brother Ishmael’s birth. That day she sent Muhammad alone with the herd, and together we weeded, my mother, Kareema, my sisters, and I. In truth Meriem was no help, prattling on about Aisha, how beautiful she was, and why did our uncle Fareed marry her in the rainy season.

  My mother said to Kareema, “Fareed is no fool.”

  To Meriem she said, “Your uncle will get to spend many days inside with his new bride.”

  “How boring,” Meriem said.

  My mother started singing. Then she stopped.

  “Should I send Nawra for Umm Ali?” Kareema asked.

  “Not yet,” my mother said. She closed her eyes.

  “Are you sleepy?” Meriem asked.

  My mother did not answer. Finally she opened her eyes. “I am listening to the baby. He is knocking at the door.”

  Saha worked quietly. I loved to watch her do anything with her hands. With her long, thin fingers she scooped a circle around each weed, loosening the dirt, then pinched the leaves and plucked the weed straight from the ground, as if it were a hair.

  • • •

  Again the girl screams. I hear fear.

  In Umm Jamila, if a woman did cry out in pain, giving birth or holding one dear as he died, the cry was cushioned by many other sounds, voices of those giving comfort or drawing lessons, children and animals stirring and shushed. It was not this terrible sound, ripping the coarse fabric of the night.

  Here girls scream surrounded by people and yet all alone.

  My mother did not scream. In Umm Jamila, most women did not scream, for though they say man is the molar tooth, really it is women who tolerate the sweet and the bitter. Finally she had me fetch Umm Ali, who came with her rope. Sometimes Umm Ali tied it under a woman’s arms and pulled her back, away from the baby. But for my mother, Umm Ali tied her rope to the roof, a rope so long my mother could hold it while she kneeled. It was not long before my mother pushed Ishmael into Umm Ali’s hands. By then my aunts had arrived, Aisha and Selma and Raja. When Umm Ali caught the afterbirth, my aunts planted it by the door, with some seeds of millet and watermelon. From those plants they made medicine for stomach pains or flux.

  My mother rested for forty days, but the household did not. My aunts and grandmother were cooking, ordering us, “Bring this, stir that.” I did not go back to the herd for more than a week, until after Ishmael’s naming. Aunt Raja was in charge of the kissra, for all said she made the pancakes so thin and light they could float on a breeze like a feather.

  She brought her own spatula of date palm leaves. “This one is three months old,” she said, “but it stays supple because I leave it in a little batter. We will use that batter to start another batch.”

  We prepared a huge bowl, and by the morning the sorghum smelled like yogurt, sweet in its sourness. We heated oil on the iron, and the batter sizzled as Aunt Raja spread it with her spatula, one, two, rounding strokes, the edges crisping brown. The first pancake she gave to Abdullah, for all knew she had her eye on him for her daughter Laila.

  “If your relative eats your meat,” she said, “he will never break your bone.”

  “Too hot,” Abdullah cried, tossing the kissra from hand to hand.

  My aunt laughed at his tenderness.

  • • •

  Again the girl screams, from a place deep inside. But her voice breaks. She is tiring.

  Perhaps she has a husband. Perhaps he is running now, searching for a midwife.

  I dreamed once to have a husband.

  The mother of Tahar came to call. She drank tea and talked long into the afternoon with my mother. But that night my mother told my father, “Say he is too young. That boy is like his mother, much noise and no flour. He is not good enough
for Nawra.”

  My khal mentioned another boy, but my mother said to her brother, “That family finds bones in butter!”

  It felt good then to be a girl too good for idle and unlucky boys.

  It felt good to have aunts and uncles looking and a mother choosing, to have a shade to pull over my head.

  I dreamed of squatting by a fire burning sugar-coated sandalwood. Often I smelled the spices on my mother and saw my father leave her shelter, and for many days something existed between them. On those days, my father became a teaser.

  “Do not keep your stick away from these three: a woman, a drum, and a female donkey,” he said.

  “If you hit me, Papa, I make tears,” Meriem said. “But if you hit a drum, it makes music. Wouldn’t you rather dance?”

  My mother clapped at that and started singing. Then she stood and did a few steps. That was a happy afternoon, as my father drank his sweet tea and my mother danced to her own song. Meriem was not so silly as she often played.

  “A she-camel will kill you if you hit her,” Muhammad said. “She will carry her grudge, and then one day when you are sleeping, she will crush you beneath her breastplate.”

  Abdullah told a hadith about the Prophet, God’s blessing upon him, who saw the fires of hell crowded with women. People asked if the women were unbelievers, but the Prophet said they were ungrateful to their husbands and ungrateful for the favors they had received. Even if you do many good things for a woman, she will remember only the one bad.

  But I wondered then, as my mother danced, what if the one bad thing is very bad? I do not think the Prophet would say a woman should be grateful for a man’s beating.

  • • •

  Panic edges the girl’s scream. Something is not right.

  “Put a stick in her mouth!” someone shouts.

  “Put a stick in yours,” Adeeba mutters.

  I laugh, even here. What if I had not met this girl?

  “Remember the night the unlucky and the hopeless got together?” I whisper.