Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  We did not stop until we were far enough away from the village. The man who looked like Baba bought a chicken along the way and divided it into four parts. Mama did not touch the meat; turning away, she whispered only that it would all be for the dead child. As an offering. I imagined that after she stood up – she could not have done that quartering while standing – and with her arms next to her body, entirely alone in the desert, looked at the blood smeared on the ground around her, she must have been more afraid of the revenge of the earth than any globs of spit from city people. Which is also why she wanted to be on concrete, and even later, after we had left Baba’s too, she avoided direct contact with asphalt surfaces. If it happened anyway, she would shut her eyes and then it was like she was not walking but floating. And that is why, too, she did not throw the body in a well or on a rubbish heap – that would be too much like an African novel, though maybe not really like Sozaboy, I am not sure – but instead she threw it into mixed concrete. In Ouaga, she kept an eye out for the workers on construction sites – they called her ugly names a few times – but when they looked away, she did what she thought was most right.

  I never forgave her; I could not. Nobody told me what had actually happened, but even so I knew it was not right. That little cement body I should have been playing with, climbing in the tree with, poking at clouds with, sticking it in the dog’s mouth with. Well, maybe I would not really have taught him that, but I would have at least told him it was not good to lick the earth off the ground. Because a big, hundred-legged worm will grow inside your belly. And after you excrete it, it promises to come back into your soft warm area. I had dreams about that worm, just as for many nights in the city I would dream about the white dog, how he was standing in the road with his hindquarters arched slightly toward the earth, watching as the cart disappeared into the distance.

  Despite everything that was said or not said between us, as it may be, I knew that Mama would remain cocooned in her secret, and I in mine, so when we jumped off that dream cart we were like two strangers. Baba patted the donkey’s head and said into the air that we could stay in his yard for a while and then we would see. I mumbled a sentence or two of thanks and ran off to the inner yard where the first thing I did was guzzle down as much water as I could, then mixed in with the other children. Mama, meanwhile, stood with the cotton bundle in her arms – I remember the batik had brown flowers drawn on it lengthways – and was whispering something to Baba. Then I saw Baba shake his head, as if to say, no, I am not the child’s father, if I were, he would be alive now but he died; then, moving a step or two away, he gave orders to both the adults and the children to start unloading the mangoes.

  Chapter 3

  In the lamplight the ice on the road

  is gleaming like lard.

  This is not Africa.

  This is not Europe.

  This is nowhere other than ‘here’.

  (Tomas Tranströmer, ‘Winter’s Formulae’, from Bells and Tracks)

  The ebony woman eventually took me home. On the street I helped her peel sweet potatoes and bananas by the fire until finally she told me to come home with her. I went; what else could I have done? Even by that time I was still not really one of the street kids. They called me pussy because I did not jump fast enough, aggressively enough, in front of car windscreens; on the other hand, I knew how to make an innocent face for potential benefactors.

  I suppose I also made one for the ebony woman and that’s why she not only fed me but even brought me into her house. The plan was for me to sleep in the extension in the back, but I sneaked into the kitchen. That is where she kept the stores: powdered milk, rice in big canvas sacks, sugar, and white flour. Sometimes at night, when the room was too dark for me to bear it, I would stick my hand under the bench I lay on and stuff my mouth with anything I could reach. I was a hungry child and the ebony woman did not reproach me for it. It was not until I had been living with her and her husband for about a year that she said she thought I must be drinking sauce through my nose, but even then she chided me only because she wished me good.

  Her husband was, in principle, stricter than his wife. One night when an attack of hunger came on me out of nowhere and I was just planning to slip my hand into the sack beneath me, he came storming in from the hallway and whacked me on the head with all his might. Fortunately, it was a wooden stick, so I only passed out, nothing worse. And besides, the next day the ebony woman demanded that he apologize to me. But when he was standing in front of me straight as a candle but still a little on edge and offering me his hand in reconciliation, I did not want to look him in the eye. Because if I had looked at him, he might have seen his dead son there and he would certainly have reported the vision to the ebony woman. Then I would be cooked, as they say, although the truth is I wanted to get out of that house. Mainly because of the child in the kitchen corner who was starting to get on my nerves. He was an albino, the same as Malik if not more so. White hair, white pitted skin, and red eyes. They were even redder because of his endless bawling. He would stare at me and point his hand at something, something in the direction of the room where the ebony woman and her husband slept, while I just kept telling him to go to hell.

  Clearly, nobody but me knew he was still there. For them he had died, from sickness or something. Judging by the photo they had hanging in the narrow hallway, he was black at the beginning but then turned white, like Michael Jackson. To keep people from noticing his bleached hands, which supposedly had something to do with a kaput liver, he had his whole body repainted. I mean Michael Jackson, not the boy; his parents, or his mother at least, felt completely helpless. One morning the ebony woman showed me his photo; I can still see her now, how she stood on tiptoe with her back toward me – her beautiful broad back, which her husband’s body could barely cover when they made love – then took the picture off the wall, eased herself down slowly, and asked me in a whisper, did I not think the boy in the picture looked happy? As she said this, she stroked his lips with her forefinger. Before I could look at the floor, tears were flowing from her eyes. In that silence between us I understood that she had brought me into the house because she thought that was a way to get her son back, but she did not know that all this time her albino child had been sitting in the kitchen corner watching us. But even if she had known that, what comfort would the dead child’s spirit be to her? She needed someone of flesh and blood, a boy like me, and if I am honest, I ought to have been grateful to her.

  And in a way I was – when I slept on the bench, or rather, shut my eyes against the albino’s gaze, when she fed me and bathed me in herbal water. To her, I was the child she had borne anew, but the more she tried to forget the things that happened before my arrival, the bigger the child in the corner became. He finally bloated up so much he occupied half the kitchen. When I walked past the gas burner, I would make a wide arc to avoid him, and when our shoulders touched, I would wrinkle my nose. His father started to suspect something but at first did not let on that he knew. I saw how he clenched his fist at such moments, when he was all by himself, and then continue on his way. He welded iron under a tree not far from the house. Sometimes he worked late into the night, and then the child would start glancing anxiously at the door. From spite or vindictiveness I would pick up a stick, not a wooden one but iron, and start poking him. He would shriek while I would be laughing my head off; I knew nobody could hear him, not even his mama, who at that very moment was heating water for me on the fire outside. The gas burner was only used for macaroni and things like that.

  But then one night the albino’s father came in with his face all burnt. The welding was gradually making his hair fall out and, looking so disfigured, with a gash running down the middle of his cheek, he seemed like an hallucination. I thought this would be the moment of recognition between the spirit in the corner and the spirit who was reaching heavy-handedly, almost in a kind of frenzy, beneath my bench. Maybe they did recognize each other
, I do not know, but in any case sacks of rice, white flour, powdered milk, and even sugar started travelling from the kitchen to the bedroom. The welder said I was too gluttonous and he did not intend to keep feeding me and wiping my arse at the same time. I had been eating enough for two and he was not going to allow it anymore. The ebony woman, meanwhile, stood in the doorway and at one point grabbed half her face with her hand. I knew what she must be thinking. That I would have to leave, but if I had to leave, then she would have lost both of us, me and the albino boy, who at that very moment was looking at her from the kitchen corner with so much tenderness I almost fell over.

  The next day I decided to take the wooden and iron sticks to the woods and jab them into the ground. When I was doing this I felt the need to pray; I thought I would open my mouth and formulas in a foreign language, which despite the priest’s explanations I never really understood, would tumble out of me automatically. On my way back it started pouring rain, and as I was running at a slow, almost leisurely pace, I thought about how, for me, the rainy season was always a time of tenderness, despite the shivers I got, especially at night, despite the cold breath coming from the mouths of talkative people at that time of year. And when I stepped into the house, nobody was there. I mean, the ebony woman was there, and her husband too, but there was neither hide nor hair of the fat boy. I looked at the picture hanging in the hallway; it was still there. I looked under the table, under the bench – nothing. It was as if he had never existed. The welder, who had taken time off work and just brought his wife a present – cocoa lotion, which I too would rub on my knees when nobody was around – was chuckling slyly the whole time I was searching, and he was not clenching his fist or anything like that. His arm merely hung down by his body, and when he got tired of chuckling he went back under his tree.

  On days when the ebony woman sent me to the store, or to get karité butter, a small greasy ball I had to bring back untouched through half the neighbourhood, I would see him spraying metal shavings all around. They flew everywhere and lit up his bleached hands. It was on the inside, which is why the ebony woman could not see it.

  * * *

  I always had the feeling my parents were stuck. I won’t say that’s why I moved into the house of the government minister, but certainly it was one of the reasons. In the worst possible heat, I hauled a rug from the city, threw it down in the front hall and, leaning my back against the cool wall, lit a cigarette. Later I asked some children from the street to connect the electrical wires. They put their big heads together, which made them seem like old people, or at least not entirely like children, and when the work was done, one of them, a girl, asked me for some change. When she was standing apart from the other children, I asked her to help me trim the overgrown branches of the bougainvillea and gather them into a pile.

  As evening approached, she and I seated ourselves on the terrace; we sat in silence for a while, me more from fatigue than anything else, and sipped sugar water from battered ceramic cups. I could read in the girl’s face that she wanted something from me, something the other children had told her to ask for, or maybe she had come up with it herself. She seemed like a quiet child, was maybe even enveloped in that cloud of quiet loneliness which abandoned children have. But then she finally got up her courage and slowly turned to face me, leaning with one arm on the cold surface of the terrace and letting the other rest on her belly. Could she ask me something? she said. I nodded. I thought she was going to ask why, at my time of life, was I sitting here, in the yard of a borrowed house, with no husband – but what came from her lips was something entirely different. Don’t I have a child? I stared into the dark and, I suppose, my shoulders flinched. Then the girl added, don’t I have a family? This came from behind my back, since I had stood up and gone into the house to see if the electricity was working.

  My hand went up to the wall and found the switch, but there was little chance that pieces of light would spread through the room. Only the rug was glowing, and because I could discern its outline in the dark, I got down on my knees. The eternal position of my mama, or, indeed, of my father in front of another woman. I would have to tell the girl a story. That I did have a family, but it was the sort that came down from space in a silver coach. Sitting inside were tall, androgynous beings, and I had been painlessly squeezed out of ‘their’ belly button. I later squeezed my son out the same way, but he wasn’t here now.

  If I had had light, I would have looked out the window to see if the girl was still on the terrace, but then again, there was no point since the shutters were bolted. At any other time, I would have opened them the moment I stepped in the room, but now I left them as they were. I suppose because even in the doorway I knew Ismael was going to follow me in. Because even on the terrace, when I was staring into the dark, I felt his nearness. Your imaginary husband, the girl would say and not believe me. Let alone believe my story about the giant belly button. But even so, at least Ismael’s shadow seemed to come down from space. He approached me from behind, dropped his full weight forward against my back, which was already weak in any case, ran his open hand down my belly and, before saying that sentence, held it at the base of my pelvis. Not directly on the soft pink part but closer to the darkness of the pubic hair. Until at last he did say it: ‘Have your old lady and the black man in the novel had sex yet?’

  Despite the minimal distance separating our bodies, I had the impression Ismael was still trying to verify something, that there were certain things he obviously still didn’t know about me. For example, that my parents never went anywhere, not even to the seaside. As a teenager I desperately wanted to dip my head in that salty infinitude, but the only thing I did in the summer was sit on a barren sofa. A medium-sized sofa covered in an ancient blanket, where I would curl up and weep. The rumble of Mama’s sewing machine could be heard from faraway; of my father, all that remained were invisible footsteps. He was visiting somebody; he didn’t say who. Only the drowned housekeeper, who at the time still hadn’t drowned, would glance at me with worried eyes. When one evening I finally bought a train ticket, when the time had come for me to leave my parents, although they were the ones who left first, she merely inclined her head a little, stared at me, stared past me, but in the end said nothing.

  For a moment I wished Ismael and I could be back in my house, on my drawn-over, printed quilted pillows, and not here, in this high-­ceiling, cool house. I rented it partly because it was cool, and for the bougainvillea, of course. The terrace looked on to the road, which was the only thing I didn’t like about the house. People could see inside from the terrace. Especially if the shutters were open, but they weren’t. Besides, a little earlier – not now, all I was doing now, after turning to face Ismael, with my belly pressed against his belly, my arms around his skinny hips, his penis deep inside me, was losing my memory – I noticed that somebody, I don’t know who, maybe one of minister’s many clerks, had covered them in a thick coat of paint. And this same paint was now flaking onto our naked thighs and naked feet and tousled hair.

  Even before I came, I grabbed at the rug, and when Ismael came, he grabbed at my arse. Vulgarly, roughly, like some not thoroughly thoroughbred horse. I let him. I had been waiting too long for it to happen, almost half a novel, to climb on a ship, sail to the ends of the world, to Africa perhaps, leaving behind the faces of my absent parents, and now that it had happened, I wasn’t about to let it slip from my hands, to let Ismael slip from my hands.

  How can I explain? I had been expecting it to happen and not expecting it. A sort of cinematic version of the moment, although we didn’t want to convey any message; or maybe just the message that Ismael needed my body and I needed his. It made me feel good when he entered me, even if it wasn’t the embrace of two people in love who after a long separation finally become one, but only the rubbing together of two bodies, lonely and abandoned. Almost the same abandonment I saw in the face of the girl on the terrace, especially in the way she turned sl
owly to face me, one hand right above her sex, the other in an even arc supporting the weight of her ripening body. I suppose this is why – it probably won’t make any difference if I admit it – I moved into this house and the first thing I did in it, before anything else, was light a cigarette.

  He was still inside me when there was a sudden knocking at the door, which was slightly open anyway. I thought it must be the girl. To tell me she was going, but again I was mistaken. It was the children with the big heads, old people in fact, or at least not quite children. They stood there with their mouths open – I could tell this from their moist, glistening tongues; they had probably just been drinking water outside – and a moment later started giggling. At least the ones at the back did; the ones in front were retreating backwards. No one could possibly be afraid of me; they must have been frightened by Ismael’s penis, which he had just pulled out. But he didn’t seem embarrassed by it, even less did it seem he wanted to hide. The problem wasn’t him; it was my spread-open legs. I don’t know, it didn’t occur to me to close them and thus spare the children this scandalous sight.

  Until Ismael threw me my trousers and I felt the metal buckle hit me. That moment, I suppose, erased my dream that we would one day be fully joined, fully lovers. I was aware that we existed merely as images of emptiness, which somebody, maybe the person who reads this, will try to erase from memory. Turning the page they will say that the man and woman in the novel never existed, that their meeting was never real.

  Ismael, however, later blamed the girl. I shouldn’t have allowed her to help me with the bougainvillea, let alone sit with her on the terrace and answer her questions. If you let them get too close, he said, passing his hand over his close-cropped skull, they’ll try to peek in your underwear. That’s why he smacked one of the children in the face – it’s not important which, but it was only one of them. The hollow sound rang through the room, but instead of the others running away, they kept gawking at us, at the glow of the rug where we had been intertwined. It was clear from their contorted faces that, among other things, they accepted the blame for their curiosity. They had seen Ismael enter the yard and then the house; maybe they even saw me in the doorway pondering, and then moving my fingers over the light switch.