Harmattan

by Weston, Gavin

  Later. I will repair it later. There are other garments to see to also. A pile of laundry to smooth, another to scrub, food to prepare, animals to tend to, as well as all my other duties.

  I step out on to the veranda and then descend the steps to the yard, the afternoon sun hitting me immediately like a blast from a bread oven. A few metres to my left, Yola is pounding millet vigorously, rhythmically, humming as she works. She looks up and stops when she realises I am watching her.

  ‘Haoua,’ she whispers. ‘Why did you not just get on with cleaning Moussa’s room and look at your pictures later?’ Droplets of sweat cling to her brow, like jewels.I say nothing.

  ‘Are you all right, child?’ Her eyes show concern – and nervousness. They flit about, like the dragonfly inside, before it determined its true path.

  ‘I am all right.’

  ‘Toh.’ She goes back to her work.

  I wave my hand to attract her attention again. ‘Where is she?’ I say.

  Yola rests the pestle on the mortar and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘Doodi,’ I say. ‘Where is she?’

  Yola puts her finger to her plump lips to hush me. ‘She is resting,’ she hisses, urgently. ‘Be sure you don’t look for more trouble!’ She points towards the house.

  I look over my shoulder, half expecting to see her coming at me again. A sharp pain at the base of my neck surprises me and I flinch.

  Yola takes a step towards me, but I wave her away.

  I take a deep breath. ‘Why does she hate me so, Madame Yola?’

  She shrugs. ‘I have endured her cruelty for two years. You will learn to avoid her wrath – and she will become more tolerant of you.’

  ‘How can I do that?’ I say, indignantly, kicking a sandal off and ploughing my toes through hot sand. ‘What did I do wrong except stop for a moment to look at my treasures and ask if I could watch television at our neighbours’ house this evening? I have worked hard all day. I would have finished the room as she had bid me.’ Yola nods. ‘I know it.’

  ‘Doctor Kwao-Sarbah gave me a ride in his car yesterday when I was returning from the market. He said that I should ask Moussa if I could watch television with his daughter Candice again this evening. They are having many guests and neighbours to celebrate Eid al-Adha. He said that we are all welcome.’

  Yola nods again. ‘Yes. Doctor Kwao-Sarbah’s generosity is legendary in Yantala.’

  ‘So I asked Madame Doodi…’

  Yola lowers her head. Then she raises her nervous, reddened eyes again and whispers. ‘It is an excuse, Haoua. She is jealous of you – and me. You must be quiet and careful and patient. She cannot beat me now. I am with child. Moussa will not permit it. He wants many children, but their marriage did not take. Doodi is barren, dried up, wizened. She has failed to give her husband children. But even so, he will not lay a hand on her.’ She allows herself a little grin. ‘I think that even Moussa is frightened of Doodi!’

  My cheeks sting a little as I too smile, and the ringing in my ears rises a pitch. ‘I think she is a witch!’ I say. ‘I hate her – and I hate him too!’

  Yola at empts to wave my words away. ‘ Walayi! Keep your voice down, child! Do you want another beating so soon?’

  ‘It’s true!’ I say. ‘May God have mercy on me, but it’s true. Why does he beat me also? He promised my father that he would take good care of me. Be a good husband. These promises he breaks. What have I done to deserve these things, Madame Yola?’

  She spills her hand towards me and shrugs. I know these are questions that she cannot answer.

  Before me, Yola’s image bends and wavers as my eyes fill with tears. I blink them back, angrily, my face flush with heat and fury. ‘He hurts me at night time also,’ I say, without looking up.

  ‘I know it.’ She is staring at the ground again. ‘It is the way of things,’ she says, her voice barely audible. ‘We held the Marcanda for you. We invited all the married women in Yantala. Doodi and I exchanged insults.’ When she looks up her eyes are glazed and, I think, filled with memories, wishes, regrets.

  I stare at the bump in her belly. ‘Did he rape you too?’

  She sighs and reaches again for the pestle. ‘I am his wife. And so are you, Haoua. It is the way of things.’

  I know that there is more work to be done. Always there is more work to be done. But I turn away from Yola and limp to the farthest corner of the compound where, listing behind the latrine, the Whistling Mgunga tree stands.

  ‘Haoua! Haoua!’ Yola calls, but I do not answer her.

  I lean against the trunk and run my fingers over its scaly bark, its dappled shadow still in the breathless air as if painted on to the dust, the wall, the side of the latrine house. Its heady scent a welcome relief from the stink of human faeces. I find my footing, as I have many times since coming to this house and, despite my aching limbs, manage to pull myself up the great tree, high above the stench and the raging knots of gorged flies. Here, lodged into the v-shape formed by two great boughs, I can feel safe, calm – at least for a little while. This is where I go to think. Not when Moussa is around, or if Doodi is awake, of course. But when the time is right.

  I settle into my place, my buttocks wedged uncomfortably between the branches. One long, thick bough stretches above the roof of the little house which Moussa has had built for Yola. Carefully avoiding the jagged thorns, I reach out, to stroke the small white and yellow flowers, their honeyed perfume enveloping me, making my head dizzy. I shuffle to make myself more comfortable and feel my pagne stick to the gummy sap at my back. From here I can look out over both Moussa’s compound and Doctor Kwao-Sarbah’s. Across the rooftops I can see the glittering dome of the Mosque du Gao. In the mornings, when I wake up in my little storehouse, I can hear the call of the Imam’s devotions. Soon after I arrived in Niamey Yola helped me clear the garbage from this building where Moussa had left me amongst the oilcans and bicycle parts and plastic bags the night before I learned about the death of my mother. We swept the floor and stacked Moussa’s tools and clutter on a bench at one end of the little structure. I found a place to keep my thin bedroll and an empty Solani container in which to keep my few belongings: my beads, a bracelet given to me by Madame Kantao, my plastic comb. My treasures I used to keep with me at my hip, safely bundled together. My letters, postcards, photographs. My life.

  Gone now, but for fragments and a single image of Abdel and my mother, with Momi and Efrance, which I keep hidden in my storehouse.

  These, then, are my physical refuges: my storehouse, my Whistling Mgunga tree, occasional visits to and glimpses of Candice Kwao-Sarbah’s world. My spiritual refuges have been my treasures , my memories and God Himself (I have long ago discarded my amulet). Doodi has taken away my treasures. God has abandoned me.

  Now, only my memories remain, and these I must cling to.

  I pull a heavily-laden offshoot towards me, drink in the thick scent of its flowers, then let it spring away from me again. I think about the baobabs at Wadata – ‘the upside down trees’ we called them: about climbing them, getting leg-ups to their gnarled boughs and reaching out to pull the next person up too; jeering boys spitting on us from above; warning each other never ever to pick the flowers.

  Bunchie said that to do so invited bad luck, evil spirits, into one’s home. She said that, in Goteye, a niece of Madame Fatake had done so and that was why Madame Fatake had given birth to twins whose backs were stuck together. I picture Bunchie’s tired, sad, crumpled face, telling me that the babies had died and that we should not talk any more about such things. But sometimes, when our crops were poor or attacked by locusts, or the rains failed, or someone in our family took the sleeping sickness or nagana or was bitten by a tse-tse, or it seemed that the harmattan storm would never end, she reminded us that her own mother had also picked flowers from the upside down trees .

  I picture Abdelkrim, handsome in his uniform. I shake my head as the image of him with a bullet in his skull tries to fight its way into
my mind. I picture my mother, slowly disappearing into herself. I try to imagine her two dead babies – my brothers – but no faces will come. I try to imagine Bunchie’s mother plucking flowers from the upside down trees and wonder why the old gods have sent such sorrows our way.

  I think about Fatima. I wonder if my father has already promised her to another cousin, or uncle, or friend. I hope that she will instead have an education and be saved from a future like mine. I wonder if she will make friends with anasara children from the other side of the world. I think about Katie and Hope and their father’s father’s father who lived such a long life. I wonder if they miss my letters, as I miss theirs.

  I think about Monsieur Boubacar, the surprised look on his broad, kind face as he recoiled from my father’s snarling features. She could be a doctor, or a teacher, or a great writer, he had said. A great writer. I had hoped to read many books. I had hoped to travel to the places he showed me on his maps. To go far beyond L’arbre du Ténéré and gaze upon the ocean. I watch little pieces of Mgunga blossom fall away like my dreams.

  I think about Adamou and pray that he will not follow the ways of our father. I wonder if he is now attending Koranic school. Again I try to imagine what it might have been like living here in Niamey with my sister and brothers. Being cared for by Abdelkrim. Perhaps becoming friends with Efrance and Momi.

  I think about Miriam. See her in the classroom, eagerly raising her hand to answer a question. And about her mother on the evening before my marriage, trying to reassure me that I would, most likely, be eased into life with Moussa’s family. That he would leave me alone. Let me settle. Before… that. It did not happen. He took me on the first night. Yanked me by the wrist from the sanctuary of half-sleep, dragged me from my bedroll, my storehouse, across the compound and into his bedroom.

  Doodi in the next room. Hurt me. Bloodied me. Left me shivering on the floor, afraid to cry out loud, while he retired to his raised sprung bed; grunting, snoring, farting.

  I think about Mademoiselle Sushie. I see her bright smile. Hear her warm, cheeky voice taunting the elders, causing the womenfolk to double up with laughter. I wonder where she is now: if she has left Wadata, perhaps Niger itself; if VCI and the other agencies will ever return.

  I think about Moussa Boureima. My husband. I have watched him in the dim light after he has fallen asleep, beside or on top of me. Watched the drool ooze from the corner of his slippery lips. Listened to the whistle of the wind through his nostrils.

  His gurgling, bloated stomach fanfaring the night. I think about his great weight. His thick, heavy limbs thrown across my torso like the rubbery roots of the baobab tree.

  Feared his wrath, if I disturbed his slumber, as I kicked away the cascading mosquito net and heaved my squashed, near breathless body away from his bulk. Feared his cruel tongue, the flat of his hands, the wooden paddle that he keeps on the shelf.

  It was said on my wedding day that love would grow, but I know that it will not. Though I know that it is wrong, I hate this man. I will never love him. I am shocked to realise that I no longer have feelings for my father also. Now, after everything, there is only numbness. Here and now I decide that, if I become an adult, I will one day find my father and I will say to him: This is me, Haoua Boureima, who was your daughter. I am disgusted by you. I feel nothing else for you. I will not treat you as my father.

  I realise too that deep within me there is a burning sensation. An ache, a fire.

  Not in my belly, like that caused by hunger or fouled water, but deeper still. From within my soul perhaps. Deeper than the hatred I feel for my husband or the numbness I feel towards my father.

  It is anger. Rage. And panic, driven by fear and loneliness. And now, high above the compound, safely wedged between the branches of my Whistling Mgunga tree, where I have retreated many times before, closer to the spirits of Bunchie, Mother, Abdelkrim and all the Shadow People who have gone before them, and closer to God too, I realise that it is God Himself with Whom I am angry.

  This is the moment that I lose my faith. The moment I truly realise and accept that I have been abandoned, not only by my flesh father but by my spiritual one. I have not prayed for days. I did not fast properly for Ramadan. Stealing crusts from the kitchen through the day. Guzzling water at the faucet when no one else was around to see.

  As if to confirm this revelation, the constant pounding of Yola’s pestle ceases. I look down and watch her lean the wooden club, worn smooth by years of pounding millet, against the gable end of the house. I recall her – before Eid ul-Fitr – stooping to pick up a little clay spittoon, summoning a loud, raw, rasping, animal-like growl to clear her throat then, pointing her lips into a fine spout, to deposit a stringy residue expertly into the tiny clay pot.

  All day she kept it by her side. She did not swallow so much as a morsel of food or a drop of water. Not even her own saliva. She did not do so between sunrise and sunset throughout Ramadan.

  She took her spittoon, overflowing like a foul little pot of slimy glue, and flung its contents into the latrine and only when the sun went down did she replenish her body. But it is now Eid al-Adha, and tonight when the sun goes down, especially tonight, she will feast – with Doodi and the womenfolk of our neighbours’ compounds, all dressed in their finest clothes.

  She will finish this work, then she will return to the house and help to prepare the food. There will be laughter and music and singing and dancing, all in the name of the God who has forsaken me.

  This is our way. But I will not do it any more. I think again of Abdelkrim. Of his lack of belief. His alcohol drinking, failure to pray. The concern these things caused my mother, and how her fears were passed then to me.

  Around my face, the scent of the Mgunga flowers mingles with the rising diesel fumes from the traffic thundering by our compound. I feel nauseous, dizzy. For a moment I think that I may vomit. I imagine emptying the contents of my rumbling belly in a vile cascade down the bark of the great tree, then quickly banish the thought. I take deep breaths of the heavy, tainted air and put my head in my hands.

  Below me, to my left, lies Doctor Kwao-Sarbah’s compound. Today there is no sign of Candice, his daughter, who has become my only true friend here in Niamey’s Yantala district. Candice is fourteen – two years older than me. This morning she and her shy, handsome brother, Etienne, will have stepped outside the Kwao-Sarbah family’s fine home in their clean-smelling, freshly pressed, red and grey school uniforms. Candice will have skipped across the neat yard, scattering the chickens as they picked through the cracked earth, and waved to her kindly Egyptian mother. She and Etienne will have placed their fine satchels and lunch pails on the rear seat of their father’s car and climbed inside – just as I have seen them do many times before. Khalaf, their family’s Fulani guardian, will have swung back the great metal gates and Doctor Kwao-Sarbah’s clean, white Land Cruiser will have swept on to Rue de Kongou and roared off towards the heart of the city. Candice will have glanced back and up at my tree to see if I have been able to steal away from my duties, but she will not have seen me this morning.

  I think of Doodi, ridiculing me for calling myself a friend of Candice’s.

  Chiding me for protesting when she tells me that I cannot visit the Kwao-Sarbah’s compound this evening.

  ‘Remember your place, girl,’ she had said, before she had set upon me, teeth bared. ‘That child is the daughter of a rich man!’

  Momentarily, I had risked looking the old witch in the eye. ‘And I am the wife of a successful merchant, am I not?’

  That was when she had begun to flail all around her. ‘You are nothing but a little whore and an errand girl!’ she had screamed at me.

  I scan the compound again, searching for a glimpse of Khalaf. He is nowhere to be seen. A fly lights on my lower lip, hooking a thin, tickling leg over its upper curve, so that its spindly foot lightly touches the moist, inner part of my mouth. I spit, violently, shaking my head with irritation.

  Yola rubs her
eyes and peers up into the branches. ‘You’d better come down now, child,’ she says, staggering a little, steadying herself with her pestle. ‘ He will be back soon!’ She waggles her drained head towards the entrance of the compound as she speaks.

  I peer down at her tiny figure. Sweat drips from her brow. Her eyes look wrung dry. Suddenly I feel defiant, powerful. I do not answer. I peer down, through the thin branches and foliage and scent. I hold my hand out so that it masks Yola’s gently bulging figure entirely. I bear no malice towards this woman yet, for a brief, terrifying moment I imagine what it would feel like to crush her in my hand, like a helpless insect. I think, What if God simply allows these things because He is not, in fact, a just God, as the Holy Koran teaches? What if He is malicious, or jealous or bored? And although the thought chills me, it stays with me, just the same.

  * * *

  I am on my knees, sifting pounded millet, when the clanking of bicycle parts announces Moussa’s arrival home. Yola gathers up her utensils and walks towards the house as he enters the compound.

  ‘Bring the grain to me as soon as you are finished,’ she says. Her eyes flit momentarily towards Moussa, then back to me.

  In that brief exchange, I read a signal and venture a glance in Moussa’s direction. We both know that he has consumed alcohol.

  He scowls at us and then lets go of the bicycle. It falls to the ground and lies twisted, useless, spent in the settling dust like a felled gazelle.

  As Moussa follows Yola, I resist the urge to get to my feet and go to the bicycle. Lift it up. Dust it down. Soothe it. Lean it against the wall of my storehouse.