The Milk of Birds

by Sylvia Whitman

  As soon as Dad got his own place, I thought he’d buy a puppy, but instead Sharon moved in, and she doesn’t want anything messier than tropical fish in her living room. Maybe she jumps up and down when Dad walks in the door.

  All of a sudden my eyes start to sting, and all I want to do is talk about those wishy-washy Byzantines.

  Dear Nawra,

  I would love to fly beside you! Really, if I were a kite, I’d sail over the ocean and swoop down in Sudan and bring you back here. And your mother and Adeeba. And Hassan and Zeinab. Anybody else? Of course, if I were a kite, Mom would be holding the string like a leash, which means I wouldn’t be allowed beyond the end of the block. I know, I know, if you’ve got a mother around, you don’t have to worry. Because she does enough worrying for the whole universe.

  True story. Todd was being nice for once, and as we were heading to the table, he told me that his friend Alfredo asked him, “How’s your dishy sister?” Mom had her antennae out, as usual, but she was emptying the dishwasher, so she overheard wrong. She didn’t say anything at first, but right in the middle of dinner, she burst out, “Tell Alfredo your sister isn’t ditzy!”

  It was sweet, right? She was holding a taco, and she was so upset that the taco shell shattered and all this meat and cheese and lettuce and tomato and corn-chippy stuff rained down in her lap.

  “Shit,” she said. Then, “You didn’t hear that.”

  Todd and I cracked up.

  “Dishy, Mom,” Todd said. “As in hot. Alfredo’s dad is from England. Which explains Alfredo’s strange taste in sausages and girls.”

  I kicked Todd under the table. I’m not sure that “dishy” made Mom feel any better because she’s always telling me to keep my belly button covered and not wear makeup to school, though I finally found some lipstick with sunscreen, SPF 15, so it’s medicine. But Mom’s worries don’t come out of nowhere. Sometimes I feel ditzy. Or maybe I act that way because ditzy is better than just plain dumb. I looked up “ditzy” in the dictionary for you and Adeeba, so you don’t have to ask one of those superserious khawaja; it means “silly or scatterbrained.”

  Last month Chloe invited me to go with her to a party at the country club her father joined so he can let his boss beat him at golf. I didn’t know most of the kids there. They sort of sniffed when I said I was going to summer school and not tennis camp or lacrosse camp or Europe.

  One guy actually said, “That’s what I miss about public school, having stupid people in your class. It helps the curve.”

  Usually when somebody says something mean, I can’t think of a comeback, except “asshole,” which I don’t say out loud because I might get beat up. But this time, I said, “Remember when you’re pointing at me, you’ve got four fingers pointing back in your own direction.” Thank you, Nawra.

  “Touché,” one of the kids said.

  Another said, “Right on, K. C.”

  I was the hero of the party. Someone even told the guy, “You are such an asshole, Will.” But Chloe and I left pretty soon after that.

  Truth is, I almost flunked summer school. Even after Mom made me get up every day before she left for work for a one-hour study hall at the dining room table and then another one at night after dinner.

  Now I can’t try out for cross-country in the fall—Mom’s rules. I’m really a sprinter, but last spring I ran a 1,600 meters and came in second. I thought I’d try 5Ks this fall, at least build some wind, but Mom says she doesn’t want my every afternoon and Saturday tied up in practice.

  She’d rather handcuff me to my desk. “Let’s get the academics on track first,” she says.

  Gotta go now.

  Nawra

  SEPTEMBER 2008

  I wake without chills, warmed by the sun through the plastic. My mother is sitting.

  “Good morning,” I say. “Latrine?”

  She shakes her head. She limps there on her own now. Still she does not speak. When people greet her, she bows slightly in their direction and draws her tobe more tightly around her head. In Umm Jamila such silence would have offended, but here we grow used to living among ghosts.

  The bell clangs softly from afar. I shake Adeeba. She sits up awake, like a khawaja umbrella when it opens. Just the opposite of Meriem, who loved her sleep so much she curled around it in the morning, refusing to let it go.

  “School,” Adeeba says. She grabs the cowbell Si-Ahmad has given her and leaves our shelter. She rattles her bell, as all the teachers do, so that none can escape the call to school. Some days she walks through our section shaking the bell hard by the shelters of parents who keep their children out of class. And by Halima, who complains of the noise.

  She tosses the bell inside. “I must run to the schoolhouse,” she says. “No wood.”

  She looks at my mother. “Do not let her go,” Adeeba says.

  I get to my feet slowly. The fire has died, so we have no tea. I should have gone yesterday. Do not delay today’s work for tomorrow, my grandmother always said, God’s mercy upon her.

  I pull aside the cloth at the opening of our shelter and step over the puddle. It is a relief to have a break from rain.

  Many are moving in the sideways light of morning.

  My urge to make water is so strong I must hurry to the latrines. Zeinab and Hassan run by my side like little goats.

  The stink greets us before we leave the line of shelters. “Go elsewhere,” people say. They talk through cloth pulled over their faces. The latrines have overflowed in the night.

  I tell Hassan to bring Zeinab to our shelter. I cannot wait for elsewhere, so I wade behind the straw screen. There I squat, but not much, for I do not want to fall into the muck.

  The stink follows me like a shadow. Near our shelter, Hassan tips the jerry can so I may rinse my hands, and I ask him to splash my feet as well. I wet a small piece of demuria cloth and clean Zeinab’s eye.

  “The flies will have to go someplace else for their breakfast,” I say. “Where is your uncle?”

  “In the market,” Hassan says. “I must join him.”

  He draws a small, sharp breath. He does not like the work his uncle has given him, sharpening the knife and holding the legs of the animals while his uncle slits their throats. The hand suffers at work, but the mouth still must eat.

  “He told Zeinab that she must get us wood,” Hassan says. “I thought she could go with you.”

  I look to the sky. The rains will come again, but if we leave now, we will return before late, inshallah.

  “We will go together,” I say.

  Hassan hugs his sister and runs toward the market.

  Inside, I brush Zeinab’s hair. My mother watches us. I feel something rising in her, but it does not reach the top. She turns away.

  “Adeeba can get us water after her class,” I say as I wrap four dried figs in the end of my tobe.

  Adeeba can scold me about wood tonight while we drink tea.

  Dear Nawra,

  Mom hired me a tutor, the younger brother of Todd’s friend Gregory. I assumed Parker was going to be like Todd, so full of his own wonderfulness that it spills all over the floor just because he won a five-hundred-dollar prize for his essay about Civil War amputations. Not my type. To tell the truth, I didn’t really know what type Parker was, since I’d just seen him here and there when Gregory was getting picked up or dropped off. I knew he didn’t wear bow ties or read encyclopedias in the bathroom because Gregory used to complain that Parker was always borrowing his Star Wars stuff and beating him at Empire at War.

  I hate video games. Whose bright idea was it to make killing people fun?

  Parker turns out to be another smart person I like.

  He’s very quiet when you first meet him—the opposite of a nosey Parker. People who know his reputation probably think he’s computing the square root of a gazillion in his head. But really he’s shy and just wishing you would turn into a book. He even said, “A nice thing about a book is it shuts up when you close it.”

 
; Teasing him is so much fun. When he was trying to give me a dose of ancient Greece, I made up this story that we had lived in Athens for a year while Dad opened a SuperOffice franchise. Finally Parker figured out that was the year Todd and Gregory were drummed out of Boy Scouts for refusing to sell popcorn and spreading bad attitude. After that he looked at me kind of sideways, never sure when I might be telling him a whopper.

  This isn’t lying, Nawra; it’s fiction, when you make the truth a little more interesting.

  The downside of tutoring is that it’s one more afternoon a week that I can’t help Mrs. Clay. She said she doesn’t mind taking Wally to the pool, though no way is she waddling around in a bathing suit. “It’s bad enough I’ve got a medicine ball for a belly,” she said, “and these elephant legs . . .” She lifted the hem of her gypsy skirt to show me the popovers where her ankles used to be.

  “It all shrinks back, mostly,” Mom told me, but it made me a little more skeptical about the wonders of the uterus.

  More later.

  Nawra

  SEPTEMBER 2008

  Zeinab and I pass the brick makers. “We pay a good price!” one shouts at our back, for he knows we seek wood.

  Even though we are late, we are not the only women crossing between the mounds in the Valley of the Kings. Months ago I would have overtaken many, but today the baby sits openmouthed beneath my breasts, stealing my breath before I have finished it.

  Each thorn is withdrawn through its own hole, we say. So it will be with this child. We are the mystery of God’s creation, vessels full of holes.

  These days my thoughts are strange but interesting to me. I believe this is the influence of the writing. He who has a pen in his hand will never write of himself as an unfortunate. But more than that, for when Adeeba directs us to mark our words in the earth, we see what before we only heard. We look at each word from many sides.

  As we walk, I think of Janjaweed, for what woman does not when she leaves the camp? I think of what to tell K. C. Some people say all nomads are Janjaweed, but that is not true. Many nomads came to buy my father’s camels and sheep, and they paid a fair price. Fur just dislike nomads, especially as many more migrated down from the north with their cattle. Fur say, A nomad would not be respected were it not for his herd.

  People call them Arabs, because of their wealth. But most look like us. Are they not Muslims too? A believer wants for his brother what he wants for himself. For all their wealth, they could not buy water, and it is a terrible thing to watch an animal die of thirst. Do we not all depend on the health of our livestock?

  Long we have lived side by side and sometimes married, Fur; Masalit; Beri; even Baggara, the Arab nomads. My family did not move to follow our herd, but my great-grandparents did. Even we Beri have come to be known by our Arab name, Zaghawa. What are these names but words for vessels of different colors and shapes?

  We made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other, not despise each other. Perhaps one day I will read these words in the Qur’an, as my brother did, God’s mercy upon him.

  As we walk, we talk of sheep. Zeinab’s uncle kills what he once raised.

  “Who cared for them?” I ask.

  “My mother,” she says.

  She has not spoken before of her mother. Hassan told us men came in cars to their village and set fire to the houses. He and his sister ran into the woods, but their mother and father and two younger brothers died in the fire.

  “Tell me what else your mother did,” I say.

  “She gathered honey,” Zeinab says.

  Together we remember bees, loud and lazy in the sun. I say, “Let us catch some honey.”

  I tilt my chin up and stick out my tongue.

  Zeinab giggles. “You are silly, Tata Nawra. That is rain, not honey.”

  “Are you sure? It tastes sweet to me.”

  For many paces, we walk like strange birds, our mouths open to the sky.

  “Why does your mother not speak?” Zeinab asks.

  • • •

  I remember the last day she sang. We gathered by our house with some of our cousins, dancing with hunger. The music was the aroma from my mother’s cookpot. Even my brother Abdullah had put down his Qur’an, and the little ones had gathered around him as he wrote their names in beautiful script in the sand with a stick. I had just brought a rope from the donkey pen, and Saha and I were turning it so Meriem and the girls could jump. Some of the boys were begging Muhammad for a game of anashel.

  “After dinner,” he said, “when we will have a bone to throw.” Well pleased, they began marking the goals.

  • • •

  Zeinab is not an impatient child, but she is waiting for an answer. Her stillness reminds me of my sister Saha, God have mercy upon her. Some children ask questions and then toss them aside as if they are plucking petals from a flower. Zeinab’s questions are rocks she holds inside a pocket, turning them in her hand.

  “There are many who do not speak in the camp,” I say.

  “Fayiza,” she says.

  “And some whose words make no sense.”

  “Did they take Fayiza’s arm?” Zeinab asks.

  “God is the one who knows,” I say. “They took my three brothers. When the last one died, my mother stopped speaking.”

  Zeinab nods.

  “From God we come, and to God we shall return,” I say.

  Ahead we see a group of women with twigs on their heads. We pause as they pass. “Is it far?” I ask.

  “Not far, sister,” one says. “But you see it is not the kind of wood that burns long.”

  After they go, I unwrap the figs. The pains are sharper today, and I breathe carefully between them.

  “I had two little sisters, God’s mercy upon them,” I say. “Now I have a third.”

  I smile at Zeinab, and she smiles back.

  “You are a big girl,” Adeeba and I tell her, although she is not, in size or age. She thinks she has lived ten years. We worry because her uncle has been talking in another section, looking for a husband. A girl’s marriage is a light in the house, we say, but where is this house? Zeinab is too young. Marriage is protection, but not in this place, this place of too many people who are not a village.

  The rain comes hard.

  At last we see shrubs, picked clean, so all that remains is a woody stem with a few leaves. Eventually someone will pull that out, leaving a small hole soon filled with dust. The land of Darfur is also a vessel full of holes. When the plants leave, the desert takes their place.

  We knew this in Umm Jamila, and the khawaja repeat it to all the people in the camp, those who know and those who do not know and those who choose to forget. But empty stomachs have no ears.

  “We must wait for a tree,” I say to Zeinab, “a tree that has shed what it does not need.”

  We walk, and Zeinab asks, “Adeeba has a mother?”

  Just then pain tightens across my belly, as if it were in the grip of an angry man.

  “What is the matter, Tata?”

  “God is pure, God is pure, God is pure,” I say. In my head I hear Abdullah reciting, “Subhan’allah,” God is void of evil.

  “Is the baby coming?” Zeinab asks.

  As suddenly as it started, the squeeze stops. Unlike the angry man, it leaves no burn upon my skin.

  “Not yet,” I say. “The baby is just knocking at the door. We must gather our wood and then go home.”

  With small, quick steps, Zeinab pulls ahead, looking one side to another, then quickly back at me.

  Beyond some naked trees, we find others and the sticks we need. Rain dances on our backs as we pick them up.

  On the way back, the pain grips me again, so I must stop and repeat subhan’allah as Zeinab circles.

  “Man has only to think and God will take care of him,” I say.

  “We must hurry, Tata,” she says.

  Dear Nawra,

  Cilla was born August 2, Priscilla Wheelright Clay. We’re both Leos, generous and l
oyal and maybe a tad melodramatic. She looked squished, but so delicate, fingers thin as matchsticks with nails (sharp!) and hair black as a goth, who are these kids who wear dog collars around their wrists and dress like Halloween every day. Of course, Cilla wears the daintiest pink and yellow outfits with matching headbands, about four a day.

  Mr. Clay and I brought Wally to the hospital when Cilla was one day old. Wally was totally unimpressed, except by the room, which had a big TV over the bed and little shampoo and body wash bottles in the bathroom, like a hotel.

  Do you even have hotels in Darfur? They’re like the opposite of an IDP camp. You might think I’m crazy (lots of people do), but I feel like whatever I say, you’ll understand, at least the important parts.

  Anyway, I asked Mrs. Clay if labor hurt, and she said, “Not for long,” since she had an epidural and read People magazine until it was time to push. My mom didn’t have any drugs with Todd and me because she was into the whole natural childbirth thing, but she says everybody has to figure out what’s right for herself. Mom’s against scheduling a C-section so you don’t miss your hair appointment. I’m sort of torn: I like the idea of letting nature run the show—we’re animals after all—but in the moment I might turn out to be like the lady in the movie who screams at her husband, “If you ever want to have sex again, get me drugs!”

  Ugh. I can wait.

  Anyway, we brought an ice cream cake with us that said, HAPPY 0TH BIRTHDAY, CILLA. Once the sugar buzz kicked in, I grabbed one of the “It’s a Girl!” balloons and took Wally to the courtyard to play balloon bop until Mr. Clay was ready to go.

  Now that Cilla’s home, I take Wally outside a lot since he always wants to play Priscilla bop. We explain that she’s too little. Mrs. Clay coats him with hand sanitizer since she’s paranoid about germs, and we prop him up to hold her, which he finds interesting for about 2.2 seconds.

  Tell Adeeba—well, she’s reading this, I guess—that germs are enemy number one around here, too, especially with advertisers trying to sell antibacterial everything. My mom buys regular soap because she’s scared decontaminants are going to breed superbugs; she says everybody needs a little dirt in their life to give their immune system a workout. It’s also her way of de-stressing about undone housework. When Todd and I were little, she always let us run around barefoot and dig for worms as long as we washed our hands before dinner. But if Mrs. Clay catches Wally without shoes or slippers, he’s in big trouble. She hates dirt, but she hates chemicals, too, so she buys organic cleaning products out of an expensive catalog.