The Milk of Birds

by Sylvia Whitman

  But I think they are more scared for themselves. Women and children walk many kilometers to find firewood, yet no man says, We will protect you by going in your place.

  News of America’s civil war gives me hope that one day Sudan will put aside fighting and become a great nation, inshallah. It will take many generations. As your tutor wrote for his prize, war is amputation. It cuts from us our hands and our hearts. Those of us who survive will never be whole, nor our children, nor our children’s children, for we will bear our wounds and our grief even into the time of peace. There will be scars no one can see.

  Only patience demolishes mountains. It is the key to relief.

  How is your wise mother, K. C.? When you have a child, you will understand her load. A child moves from a woman’s belly to her arms and eventually to his own legs, inshallah, but she is always carrying him. My baby’s eyes are open now and follow me wherever I go. My face is his full moon. When I am old, I will look to him the same way.

  Walida and some of the others call me Umm Muhammad now instead of Nawra. Umm means mother. Umm Jamila was Mother of the Beautiful.

  How is your brother? Study hard as he does, K. C. Whoever seeks exaltation spends his nights working. Do not be angry at your father for not providing all you desire. Those who are asleep when they receive their share do not know the value of it. It is the same in this camp. Some call the khawaja stingy. They say, Why do they give us classes when we are hungry? Luckily, these complainers are not many. As we say of children, Teach them. Do not bequeath them.

  If you were here, sister, I would take your hand in mine, and we would spend much time talking and laughing about what is small and pleasant before turning to what is more difficult to say. But I am learning that a letter is always in a hurry because it must leave.

  Saida Noor is my scribe today. She is very generous and writes very fast. She is my scribe, for Adeeba is not well.

  I should have gone to collect the firewood, but the nurses say I must wait longer. They do not want me to carry more than my boy. Health is a crown worn by those who are healthy and seen only by the sick.

  Adeeba went in my place.

  I should have gone. We say, If your friend becomes honey, do not eat it all up.

  My friend has rested long. But this is not the rest that satisfies like a drink of cool water for the thirsty. This is the rest of one who does not wish to face the day. Adeeba does not stand except to walk to the latrines. She does not open her mouth except to sip water. She ignores Little and Big Sister, for she has abandoned her dictionary. Many have come to wish her well, teachers and students and those who know us in our section, but she pulls her tobe over her face, so we whisper as if she were asleep.

  My mother says to these visitors, You know how illness marches through this camp, like ants from their hills. Wash your hands!

  I smile to hear my mother talk like a khawaja, but it is half a smile without Adeeba.

  There is no criticism of a sick person, so I am prepared to wait for my friend, as I waited for my mother. But I miss her.

  I went with the children to explain Adeeba’s absence to Si-Ahmad. He told me to teach her class.

  It is for the newest arrivals, who come some days and not others and do not know the ways of the camp. I am not a teacher, K. C., but in front of my students I become another person.

  Saida Julie is crying now, K. C. Saida Noor says they might not be able to come next month. Bandits stole one of the Save the Girls cars from a driver at gunpoint. Even the big trucks of food traveling in a line like elephants are not safe.

  Everything has an end, we say. Know that if this is our last word, K. C., we are well and we are strong, and we are wishing you the same. When Adeeba finds her feet, we will read your letters many more times, inshallah. We will write many words on your beautiful paper with Big Sister.

  We have a saying: No one likes to eat the crumbs from a feast. Everyone likes to sit at the table. The khawaja are very generous, but the plastic, the jerry cans, the candy they give us—these are crumbs. It is only your letters that make me feel that I am sitting at the feast, beside you.

  Your sister, Nawra

  Dear Nawra,

  I know your letter must be winging its way across the ocean, but my big news for you just can’t wait: The Darfur Club made it onto the official schedule of school activities!

  First we had to find a faculty sponsor. Ms. DB’s already adviser to the newspaper. Emily suggested Mr. Thrasher, but I vetoed that pronto since he’d be expecting me to make eye contact in English class. Parker suggested Mr. Nguyen, his world history teacher. When Mr. Nguyen was five, his family escaped from Vietnam in a rickety boat and spent a few years in a refugee camp in Thailand while his dad made it to the States and worked as a janitor even though he’d been an engineer in Saigon. Mr. Nguyen asked Emily and me why we wanted to start this club, so I said, “Nawra.” While he listened, he put his long, thin hands together in front of his face with his thumbs hooked under his chin. He looked like a praying mantis.

  Mr. Nguyen asked what we wanted to do, so we told him, which sounded feeble in front of a teacher. I said, “Nawra says when you think you are too small to make a difference, you should try sleeping in a closed hut with a mosquito.” Mr. Nguyen laughed and agreed to sponsor us.

  Next we had to register the officers, and since Emily and I are freshmen, and you have to have a certain GPA, we had to wait for the end of the first marking period. I didn’t make the cut, of course. “Couldn’t we just average our grades?” I asked.

  We made Emily president and enlisted Parker as VP. He said, “I’ve always wanted to be a figurehead.”

  To make me feel better, they said, “That’s just on paper. Everybody knows you’re the driving force.”

  Still, it stung not to be president.

  To be continued.

  Nawra

  NOVEMBER 2008

  I place the poster against the wall and thank God that I have made it to the end of another class. I look for Zeinab, who hands me Muhammad. It calms my pounding heart to hold him in my arms.

  Then I hear the booming voice of Si-Ahmad. The women part to let him pass, but he does not stride past them as a headman might. He stops to ask if they are well and strong. He tells one where to ask for more plastic and warns another of the beetles. “Do not crush that one,” he says. “Its blood will raise a blister on the skin.” He advises all to keep their children in school.

  These times have changed our men. Some have fallen to their knees while others stand taller. Adeeba told me that in his village, Si-Ahmad was a teacher like any other, but here he has become an elder who counsels both his people and the khawaja. He who has good manners becomes a master, my grandmother always said, God’s mercy upon her.

  “Teacher Nawra, are you well?” Si-Ahmad asks. “And your son?”

  “Thanks to God, whatever our condition.”

  “Thanks to God,” he says. “You have a lively group.”

  “Many are better talkers than they are listeners,” I say.

  “But you have those talkers singing,” he says.

  I know then that he has observed my class. Perhaps we make too much noise. I had the women make up a song for the children because that is how I remember, when I sing. The song was silly, but we put in many movements to match the words.

  God made the good and the bad

  But taught us to know the difference.

  Bad bugs come from the toilet,

  So we must wash them off.

  Reach for the soap.

  Cup one hand over the other and turn, cup and turn.

  Soapy fingers come together like friends after a journey.

  Slip and slide under the water.

  Rinse, rinse, rinse, clap, clap, clap.

  Now we are ready to eat and play!

  “A young crocodile does not cry when he falls into the water,” Si-Ahmad says. “You are a born teacher.”

  He asks about my life before, and I tell him
about the herd. Muhammad is fussing, nosing against my robe.

  “Just one more minute, young man,” says Si-Ahmad. He clucks his tongue and tickles Muhammad’s feet.

  “Teachers need more than knowledge,” he says. “They need to know how to share it. I predict your friend Adeeba will be a scholar, making knowledge. But you will be a teacher, showing your students how to use it. Teachers show us how to live.”

  I bury my face in Muhammad’s head to hide my smile. In all my life no one has said such words to me.

  “Now for your hardest lesson,” he says. “Many people in this camp, when a scab forms on their wound, they pick it off, and it bleeds again. The sore can never heal. You must teach your friend Adeeba to leave that scab alone. You must tell her that it is time to return to work.”

  • • •

  Back at our shelter, Zeinab and I share the scrapings from last night’s pot. I mention Si-Ahmad’s praise to my mother.

  I do not mean to brag. “In the land of the blind,” I say, “the one-eyed man is swaggering.”

  While Zeinab and I rest, my mother swings Muhammad and sings about a mother bird who teaches her baby how to fly.

  If you can talk, you can sing.

  “I will go for water,” my mother says.

  “I will go with you,” I say.

  “You and my grandchildren must rest,” she says.

  I hug Zeinab, as my mother’s words do.

  “Adeeba, my daughter, come with me,” my mother says. “I need your help.”

  Adeeba lies with her back to us, but we know she is awake. Yet she blocks one ear with mud and the other with paste. That which goes beyond its limit will turn to its opposite.

  “Life will never be paradise,” my mother says.

  Do not feel safe until you are buried. There is no tree that is not moved by wind. My friend does not want to hear what she already knows.

  “I will go with you, Grandmother,” Zeinab says.

  “The girl is the support of the house,” my mother says.

  Why is it that our Zeinuba carries on and Adeeba does not? I do not think the pain in their bodies is very different. Zeinab has put away what she cannot understand. One beating is as another, and she does not expect better.

  In the denial of Zeinab’s uncle, there is also relief.

  I smile as I hand Zeinab the jerry cans. She and my mother set out for the taps.

  I am left with the puzzle of Adeeba. If the heart goes, the body will be ruined.

  Muhammad makes his silly sounds, so I make them back. I sing to him softly of grinding grain. I sing of riding donkeys. I do not sing him the songs of my grandmother, the ones about bravery and cowardice that shamed men to fight. I sing a song that I have made from a saying. “Peace,” I sing, “is the milk of birds.”

  Then I lie beside Adeeba, back to back, until Muhammad sleeps. I turn toward her as I did the night she returned and hold her close. She does not pull away.

  I begin to talk, and what comes from my lips is the memory of the day Janjaweed came to Umm Jamila in open cars, many in each car.

  I am holding Adeeba, but now I am the one shaking.

  Dear Nawra,

  Emily and I made signs that said BE A MOSQUITO FOR DARFUR and put them up all over the school. Mr. Nguyen and Parker said we should just play it straight, but I thought the buzz—ha!—might make people interested. We did get this weird freshman named Milton Stanley, who wants to be an entomologist; he has a hissing Madagascar cockroach for a pet. Plus a brother and sister, Shaddy and Biruk, showed up at the first meeting because their dad was born next door to Sudan in Ethiopia, and they said they’re amazed how little people know and talk about Africa, even though you could fit the US, Europe, and China all inside the continent.

  One of Emily’s pals from honors English came, but the rest said they were working on the big paper due Friday. “Where’s the honor in that?” I said. On the other hand, half my remedial math class showed up to postpone doing the problem set; it also helped that I had mentioned our three bags of chips. I promised Todd that if he came to the first meeting with another junior, I would fold and put away his laundry for the rest of the year, but I drew the line at underwear. He brought Gregory, Parker’s brother, who carried a sign that said, IMPEACH THE VEEP. Florinda came with another girl. Now Florinda and I sit together a lot; I help her with English—ha!—and she looks over my Spanish. She lets me borrow her cell phone whenever I need it.

  Plus, Chloe showed up, dragging Nathan, who was wearing a wool shirt and a hunter’s cap with flaps, even though November’s not all that cold in Richmond. We got him to take off his hat to show us his new ear stud. It looks like someone shot a hockey puck into his earlobe. Mr. Nguyen cringed, but he didn’t say anything. He’s a very cool teacher.

  Parker gave a talk about Sudan, which I had no idea was the largest country in Africa by land, though probably I should have because I’m sure Save the Girls told us. The population is forty million, more or less. Even though Sudan just had a census in April 2008, everyone considers it a mess. What I want to know is, who’s counting Nawra? Emily read from a UN fact sheet: 4.2 million conflict-affected people, 2.2 million internally displaced, 236,000 Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad, 12,000 humanitarian workers, 13 UN agencies, 80 NGOs, a billion dollars of aid a year. I remember the numbers because I’m copying from the handout she made.

  It was all very informational, but I could see that we were halfway through the third bag of chips already, and pretty soon people were going to be saying they had to go. So I talked about you and Muhammad and Adeeba, and I read your description of Umm Jamila with Cloudy and the Praise-the-Lord wells and then the day Umar died in the camp.

  I said, “I don’t want our club to be much noise and no flour. We are here to do something for survivors in the camps, even if it’s just a little, like educating people in Richmond and buying donkeys.” Everyone liked your sayings. We’ll have to see who shows up for meeting number two. We’ll figure out how we’re going to raise money, and then we’ll break into committees about how to spend it. Todd’s already told me he and Gregory want to head up stoves, though really they belong with the asses.

  Parker, Emily, and I were so high after the meeting we wanted to go celebrate somewhere. Parker suggested coffee as usual, but it felt traitorous somehow to talk about Darfur and then spend twenty dollars we didn’t have at Starbucks, so we went to Emily’s and had chicory root tea and homemade rice cakes, which honestly were terrible except for the company. When Emily’s mom blew in, Parker walked me home. We were laughing about who hogged the chips at the meeting and Milton Stanley’s cockroach, and then our arms bumped, and suddenly Parker was holding my hand and not letting go.

  It got deeply quiet fast, but we kept walking, only hand in hand, which I really, really liked, but at the same time I was thinking about my deficits.

  I haven’t told Parker about Dr. Redding. It’s like I want to make a list of all the bad stuff about me and post it somewhere so Parker can read it top to bottom and then walk away before my hand gets too attached to his.

  I’m not good at this. In a weird way, I felt more in control being backed up against the wall by this boy named Jimmy Ladd than holding hands with Parker with nothing but air all around us.

  When we reached my block, our hands fell apart. Parker rolled up his fingers and stacked his fists and blew into them, which is what he does when he’s cold. Maybe he just needed a mitten, and I was the closest thing handy.

  If you’ve got any sayings about boyfriends, please tell me because I am more clueless in this area than even in world history.

  Gotta run.

  Nawra

  NOVEMBER 2008

  I thought never to speak of my shame, but I have made Adeeba my confidante, as K. C. would say.

  “I wondered,” she whispers, “but I did not know. Go on.”

  • • •

  To my father I was spoiled meat, but the animals welcomed me. Gunfire, wailing—they di
d not understand. They came to me, and I reassured them. “Let us find grass,” I said, and it comforted me, too, the land that God has given us.

  Muhammad said we should ride to cover more ground, but riding pained me, so I walked beside Cloudy. When I stopped to rest, she lay her head on my shoulder and nuzzled my cheek.

  Muhammad rode far ahead of us, but I was glad, for I was ashamed. He was not cold like my father, but something had changed between us. Late in the afternoon he rode back and told me to pass the night under the acacia bent like a grandmother. He would sleep nearby.

  So I stopped and ate my food alone, sharing a mango with Cloudy. We traveled thus for several days. Sometimes tears ran down my cheeks, but I dried them on Cloudy. It felt good to be alone with my thoughts and feelings. I decided that in his kindness God had spared Abdullah the disgrace of what had happened.

  I saw Muhammad once, sometimes twice, each day. We spoke with eyes on the ground. Once when we were filling our water bags, I said that perhaps I should ride away with Cloudy.

  “I have thought of that too,” he said. “If we find our khal, perhaps he will come and persuade our father to move.”

  “Perhaps I should ride away and disappear,” I said.

  It was then that my brother looked me in the eyes. “You are my sister,” he said. “A sandalwood tree perfumes its ax.”

  That was all Muhammad ever said of my dishonor, but it was enough to know that he could still smell the sweet scent of sandalwood in me. Just for a moment, I felt the lightness that comes when you lay down a heavy load of firewood after a walk of many hours.

  Muhammad and I turned back toward Umm Jamila. The sheep and goats were full and playful. Perhaps the elders had found a solution to our problems. Perhaps we did not have to leave; perhaps we could just share our water. Or perhaps those families with livestock could pay the Arabs to stay away. We did not meet any Arabs. Perhaps they had already gone.

  The third day we rose before the sun. As my father directed, we left the animals in the enclosure by the wadi. We were riding toward the village when Muhammad said, “Listen.”