Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  Looking across the space between us, I saw her wrap her arms around her body. I knew she wanted at that moment to embrace somebody who was real, who existed, that she did not want only this empty, symbolic embrace, which said so many things and nothing at the same time, but she did not know how to do it. There was too much darkness in the kitchen, too many expectations, too much pain from all that she could not contain in her memory. What is more – I had seen it that day on the terrace, between her unbraided hair and the comb in her hand – she had entered a time of life that found her unprepared. It was her last chance for a child; in fact, it had taken her an infinity to get to this point, but now that she was here, she thought it worth trying. Even at the price of losing me, or maybe especially at the price of losing me.

  ‘If it gets too hard for you on the street, you can always come back here.’

  I got up from the bench. There was nothing I could take with me, and maybe that was another reason why it was so difficult. No matter how many names I knew for the dark, no matter how many children I had punched in the chops outside on the street, I was still just a child. I understand that now; I didn’t before. And just as the ebony woman had her time of fear that she would never again have any child at all, neither her own nor the one who sees spirits – although even her own child might have seen a man under the tree asking for water in the light of day – I also needed certainty, a hand on my forehead checking for fever, some badgering in the morning for me to get a move on, and a little bit of worry that I was okay. But this – this was not taken away from me by, say, the ebony woman. Not yet. Maybe I took it away from myself, by staring at her boobs, staring at the fabric catching between her thighs.

  ‘I will be all right.’

  I stepped into the darkness of the kitchen, now really for the last time, and kissed her. A light, timid kiss, as if I was verifying something, as if I was trying to say something to both of us, a kiss that could not last. And when I pulled back, when I let the black, unstoppable arrows flying through the infinity of time again come between us, the taste of salt was inside my mouth, but there was nothing more to be changed here. The only pain I felt was that the welder all this time was asleep on his back, drunk. That when the ebony woman would return to the bedroom, untie her dressing gown – a soft, silk robe that showed off the shape of her breasts and nipples, her slightly indented waist – and place it on a chair, then gently pull back the mosquito netting and crawl in next to him, he would not know that she had made yet one more sacrifice for him. Meanwhile, I and the man in white would take each other by the hand and stroll along the road of moonlight.

  * * *

  I realized during the cab ride why I had come here. Not to banish the silence around me, but to go down into a gold mine. Not the sea, not foamy water around my ankles, but mines from which people, children, emerge like spirits. A gram of gold costs thirteen thousand francs – that’s what they told me as soon as we entered. Twenty-five per cent belongs to the one who digs, or rather, to the chain of people who supervise the workers; the rest goes into the pocket of the owners of the land. When the spirits emerge in the open air, people inspect their anuses, open their mouths, shine light in their ears, although I am sure they still manage to put the gold dust somewhere. I imagine they sprinkle it in their hair or lightly soil their palms with it. What remains in the head lines or heart lines, remains; what is lost, is lost.

  About halfway to the mine in the northern part of Burkina – it’s best I don’t mention the name; the eyes of the owners betrayed an enormous fury and even greater greed – I turned toward Ismael. ‘How do I know you don’t have any children, or even a wife?...’

  Sunk deep in the leather seat, from which you could almost hear the sighs of the slaughtered cows which nomadic herders had been forced to sell to the slaughterers below cost because they couldn’t find enough fresh grass for them in the dry season, he looked at me in surprise (unfeigned): ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I said.’

  We were riding in silence and it was obvious the cab driver was glancing at us in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I fucked other women, but that does not mean that I also wanted to stay with them. If I made any of them a child, I am sure they would have told me.’

  I looked out the window, not completely reassured but, fine, it was an honest answer. I could return to the mine and consider how it was possible that in one of the world’s poorest nations you could at a moment’s notice buy land where gold deposits had already been discovered and dig up every inch of it. Seventy-five per cent went not to the State, and certainly not to the ethnic group that lived on the purchased land, but to a single individual. This was usually some bloke dressed in a big colourful boubou, who, to preserve his ample body, kept the air conditioning running at eighteen degrees Celsius. But I needed that bloke if I wanted to descend into a thirty-, maybe fifty-metre hole on a narrow ladder that seemed to absorb all the light into some kind of series of concentric circles. Ismael, during my descent, stood on the circle’s outer edge, and because I knew that he was afraid, that he even thought I had succumbed to madness, I sent a kiss back up to him.

  I don’t know if it was about being under the ground he usually walked on, or checking to see if he had made some woman a child – who at that moment was stuck in the middle of a yard, in a plastic tub cracked down the middle, waiting for somebody to wash his bony body – or if what I really wanted was to see how the dust clings to your hair, to your skin, gets beneath your nails.

  I went down exactly twenty-five rungs and was already gasping for air. They had given me nothing to take along, not water, not a mask, not a basket. I told them I wanted to check something out, that I was writing a news feature – the reporter’s pen, the voice that gets the word out about you, still counts for something here – but I don’t think they believed me. The bloke with the aura of cold air around his body kept shaking his head. What if something happened? Who would be responsible? Him? Obviously, a bribe was inevitable, so I tossed some banknotes on his desk, enough for about fifteen grams of gold. He let out a snort and his whole body lurched toward the desk; I was already thinking the weight of that belly would pull him to the floor – he kept his feet in place, his body insistently gravitating earthward – but then he flawlessly caught his balance and, as if it were nothing, as if that scene had never happened, covered the banknotes with an open hand and slipped them inside his clothing. Now there was no doubt about my safety; it was only in doubt for Ismael, and even that I wasn’t entirely sure about. If I had given him the choice between a cotton field and the mines, he would certainly have chosen the cotton, but then I would never have learned what it’s like to look up at the world from below.

  Especially if your eyelids, your nostrils, are coated, if what collects in your eyebrows aren’t clumps of gold but dust. After I cried out that I’d had enough, that I wanted out of there, Ismael called to two other men, who helped him pull me out of that hell, where others, mostly children, spend entire days and nights. Outside, I kept my eyes shut for quite some time, as if the gush of light might blind me, might take something from me, and it was only with Ismael’s coaxing and caressing – I still get goose bumps when I think of the way his hand stroked my bones – that I turned my head mechanically toward the artificial lake, where they were rinsing baskets of excavated sand. The area was enclosed by barbed wire (how did I not notice that before?) and next to it, armed soldiers were walking in circles. Mr Eighteen Degrees, too, was walking in a circle and nervously shouting something into a mobile phone. Just as we reached the exit, with me leaning on Ismael like some wounded animal, or maybe Ismael just wanted me to lean on him, he waved for us to come closer. We knew there was really no choice. When we were three steps away from him, he held the telephone away from his ear and tossed a shiny little chain in the air, which one of the children beside him nimbly caught and held out to me on an open palm.

  Later, as we
rode back to the city with the cab driver eyeing us no less attentively in the rear-view mirror, I kept looking at Ismael; he whispered to me that he had made love – now he said ‘made love’, not ‘fucked’, and it was no accident that the tone of his voice had also changed because of the gold dust in my palm lines – not only with women, but men too.

  ‘Why do you make love with men, but fuck women?’ I said, returning the cab driver’s stare. ‘Because it’s better with them?’

  ‘Than with you?’

  He raised himself from his half-reclining position – as the cows let out a deep sigh and, maybe for one last time, remembered their pasture-lands, which were never green enough – and leaned his arms on his thighs. I had noticed him sitting like that more than once, as if he was supporting his body, as if he didn’t want to lose the ground beneath his feet. I wanted to ask him what sign he was born under (Pisces? Cancer?) but at the last minute decided not to, since he probably wouldn’t have been able, or wouldn’t have wanted, to answer me – Africans almost never ascribe more than minimal significance to birthdays – and so instead I moved closer to him. I suppose I also wanted to get a rise out of the cab driver, like at the mining camp when I scornfully returned the gold chain, which wasn’t for your neck, but your loins and, moreover, was an invitation into bed – Ismael, after all, didn’t exist for that A.C.-radiated bloke, although he must have seen him pacing back and forth next to the hole I descended into; some filthy northerner dreaming that this crazy old lady reporter would get him to Europe, that’s what he must have thought – but even more than provoking the cab driver, there was something I wanted to show Ismael.

  ‘Look at me,’ I said, ignoring his earlier question. ‘Look at my eyebrows.’

  ‘Ana, that time on the avenue, Malik and I wanted to rob you, but I do not have any children. I swear it.’

  I tilted my forehead toward him. Now I was sorry I’d asked him anything. He was too serious and too respectful to lie to me. And yes, there were better places than the one we had just left, maybe the coast and the sea, which hides the soles of your feet in a foamy arc and spills across your ankles, but there was certainly no better place than this one now. Here, next to Ismael’s warm, too warm, body.

  ‘Touch them,’ I repeated, almost as an order now, ‘and see if I have any gold there.’

  He brought his face to my eyebrows but instead of stopping there kissed my forehead. Gratefully, I shut my eyes and laid my hand between his thighs. I knew I had bound him to me, if not by the chain I’d refused, then at least by the fact that for five long minutes I had sunk beneath his feet and for five long minutes we both forgot to breathe. Finally, at the exit, I had waved to the telephone pressed to the bloke’s ear, but he pretended not to see me. Pivoting on his heel, he turned to some Indian man, his business partner. One dug, the other exported. That bastard thinks I’m going to write an article about his colourful boubou, I said, more to myself than Ismael, who nevertheless put a finger to his lips and nodded in the direction of an armed soldier. It wasn’t that he was afraid, but so we’d have a chance in the future to visit a cotton field, too. I opened the cab door – the man inside was just adjusting the mirror – dipped my head, and lost myself in the sighs of slaughtered cows.

  * * *

  It was not easy going back to the street, although I had told the ebony woman something different. But that life with her was a different life, and this one now was something else again. I prayed I would not meet the idiots I had left behind, the idiots I had washed cars with on the street, slept with, ate with, fucked with – yes, also fucked – so naturally they were the first people I ran into. That’s how things circulate in Ouaga. But if I give it some thought, where else should they have gone? Back to their villages? Only a crazy person would do something like that. Abroad? I mean, to America or France? Ha! You have got to get up early to do that, and even if you get up in the middle of the night and stand in a long queue, they will almost certainly turn you down. I knew people who had been turned down more than thirty times, and each time they had a different story, but still they kept trying. Some claimed they had somebody in the world beyond – mistresses, wives, children, brothers, sisters – but the bureaucrats just shut the window in their faces.

  Rougou was one of the rare ones who did not create illusions for himself. I do not know if his large head, which he would rest on a counter by the road, could encompass that world beyond or if he was simply grateful to be staying alive in Ouaga. Whatever it was, when I was wandering around the city aimlessly, I spotted him at a nearby bar, slurping his thick, dark beer. His eyes were boring into me – we must have noticed each other at the same time, but it took him an eternity to realize that the bloke staring so intently at the ground might be me. I guess he recognized me by my walk. A walk like a poem, like the rhythm of the body, like your name, like the mark of your self-assurance, or maybe not, but Rougou did not know any of that. Smart or stupid, as the case may be, he had brains enough to learn to survive, no question about that, but as for letters on paper, he said he had forgotten them in a previous life.

  We called him Rougou because of his light, slightly reddish complexion, and probably there was another reason too, but I do not remember it right now. Leaning on the counter and almost losing my patience with him patting my shoulder, as if he was already standing on a shore I still needed to reach, I compared the image of Rougou the child, which I carried in my head, with that of the nearly grown-up Rougou, who was standing in front of me. The beer he was drinking, to give him better blood he said, made him seem even more adult. That was not a joke. He sold his blood for money. His first question, then, was not, how have I been, what was I doing, or maybe, where was I going, but what type of blood did I have. ‘A, B, C, D?’

  I shrugged. ‘I no have no idea at all. Why you ask?’

  ‘You have just come for sure from sucking da tit if you no know dat people pay good good for blood. But dat no can last. I tink too plenty folk go into dat business. Soon for da blood you will no get notting but da bread roll, but, dude, by den I will already do someting different at all.’ Here he picked up the bottle, put it to his lips, and in slow, measured gulps started guzzling it down, which made his already prominent Adam’s apple bounce like a ball on a tennis court.

  I looked at him, at his trousers, shirt, shoes, his combed hair parted in the middle, and thought that in a way he was right. I really was out of it; I could not have been more out of it. The nightly fistfuls of powdered milk had softened me, the welder’s toys had infantilized me, and although Rougou and I were about the same age, I looked at least five years younger. You could have put a baby in my arms and there would not be any difference at all between us. When Rougou, putting the bottle down, saw that I was not interested in the darkness of blood, or at least pretended not to be, and when I even wrinkled my nose at the mention of injections and transfusions, he moved on to talking about former street kids. Who was doing what. Bamako Dakar was not a train driver yet, he had not made it that far; Omo was delivering water in portable tanks; Doctor specialized in car-washing; Express was working for some Chinese blokes, developing photos, and so on. ‘And you, Pussy, what is it you do now?’ He stared at me. With the kind of idiotic stare that shakes the ground under your feet because you simply cannot believe that somebody is that stupid. ‘You have start to go to da school already?’

  The question caught me off guard. ‘Yah, sure.’

  ‘What class you in?’

  ‘Da last.’

  Then I went quiet again. The ebony woman could probably have found enough money, but only for the Qur’an school, and I did not want to go there. Most of the children, excuse me, young men, that Rougou had mentioned actually came from that school. I mean, their parents sent them there to learn to read the Qur’an, but it ended with them going car to car with tomato cans, begging. Whatever money they got from begging, the imam, the supposed Qur’an expert, would take from them, co
nfiscate it, steal it; whatever food they got, they put in their stomachs. Most of these kids eventually went their own way, washing cars, pulling portable water tanks around, developing film in darkrooms, or even wooing white women who, in exchange for sex, might somehow get them visas.

  Partly, I guess, because of my silence – from the way he shifted on his seat and kept on babbling, it was obvious he was not all that used to somebody looking at him without saying anything – Rougou divulged that Omo had found some humanitarians who were sponsoring him. For school and whatnot. Every month they sent him twenty euros, plus or minus, and Omo would bury it under a tree. ‘If you no have notting,’ Rougou said, looking down at his well-polished shoes as if checking to see if maybe he had got them dirty guzzling the beer, that is, if he looked enough like a grown-up – in front of me, of course, since obviously the position we found ourselves in, me still a kid and him almost totally an adult, was extremely flattering to him – ‘I can get da contact for you. To sponsor da brats, dude, dat is almost da same as to sell da blood. You know what dey talk about us niggers, dat you must to teach dem how to catch da fish and shit like dat.’ He was looking at me from the side with that stupid look of his, which was now mixed with pity – the worst possible combination you can imagine – and since he was not getting any response from me, at least not what he expected, he lifted the nearly empty bottle one more time and sucked the last drops out of it. Now not just his skin was reddish, his eyes were too.

  ‘We are not like blood,’ I finally blurted out, probably to dispel any doubt Rougou might have about my being educated, but also to throw a little dirt on those shoes of his and those trouser legs, which shielded his spotless laces. ‘We are like the snow, which always passes.’ I must have heard that sentence on the radio, or maybe read it in one of the books cluttering the dashboards of the lorry drivers, which they would give me in exchange for services rendered – I do not know anymore, but it does not matter really; the words were said and now they hung over us like a storm cloud, since if Rougou asked me to explain what I meant, I would probably have looked at him with as much surprise as he was looking at me now.