Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  ‘Alright, dude. I do believe you for sure. I believe every word you talk at all.’

  Before going our separate ways, each of us boys invented a story of how we ended up on the street. Rougou said he had sexual relations with his grandad and because they had too much sex his grandad had heart failure; Omo made himself out to be a thief, saying he had stolen his father’s second wife’s diamond earrings, which he was still hiding in the sole of his shoe; Bamako Dakar had jumped off a train and was always trying to get back on it; Doctor had beaten his teacher up over something stupid, while Express, well, Express came up with something different each time. His most bizarre story was that he was planning an armed robbery, or maybe that he was waiting to be discovered by Hollywood.

  ‘Will you give me for a beer?’ I said, my lips dry as bone; I had been watching Rougou guzzle down that sweet, thick liquid for what seemed an entire century, and besides, my initiation into adulthood might as well begin now, at this counter, with a bottle of beer. And to ensure that Rougou would not accidentally give me away, I added: ‘We are not like blood, but me, I have da B positive.’

  ‘Fuck shit, dude! If I have know your type, you no must have need to prostishoot yourself.’ He stood up and sat down again on the tall bar stool, switching legs on the rung – my recitation had obviously aroused him, even to the point where I noticed a bulge in the crotch of his trousers, or maybe it was just a roll of banknotes he had stuck down his pants in the hospital bathroom.

  I moved my face closer to him, my whole body in fact, thinking about that story of his with his grandad. ‘What say you buy me da beer and I go give you twenty per cent what all I get for da blood?’ I said, and lowered my hand until it was almost touching his knee, but I did not really think it was all that likely that Rougou had had sexual relations with his grandfather. It was just that Rougou, like all of us who survived on the street, could not renounce the charm of the stories we told.

  He wiped off the sweat that had collected above his lips, and when that trough was wiped, when it was like it had been before our meeting, I could see the beginnings of a moustache. ‘We start wit da blood, and later you go get back to da books. Okay well. Talk me some poetry. I like to listen to dat shit,’ he said, probably to make me stop staring at him and mainly to preserve some of the advantage he had acquired while I was guzzling powdered milk by the gallon at the ebony woman’s.

  I cleared my throat and hoped my body’s rhythm would not betray me. If I could do this, I could do everything else too. Get over the ebony woman. Fill my stomach. Endure the hot asphalt. Guzzle down even more letters – from the TV, the radio, the books I was given, it did not matter. And one day, if luck was kind, I would stand in front of an open window and ask permission to cross the sea. The half-retarded Rougou let out a big laugh, raised his heavy red arm, and was just about to give me another pat and wish me a pleasant, crisp tongue and not too much sun, when, in a half-grown-up voice, I started reciting words forgotten in a previous life. ‘We are not like blood, and besides, even blood has just lost its battle and, in the end, left no trace...’

  * * *

  Something else was simmering in my head as I rode in the cab from the mine back to the city with Ismael. We were the lucky ones; we could treat ourselves to a private car, while along the way I saw women and men on bicycles and then without bicycles. They were walking, were dragging their magical flip-flops or touching the red earth with naked feet. In fact, this is a fertile soil if you examine it close up, if you hold it in your fist and let it crumble through your fingers to the ground. There are incredible amounts of vermin swarming in it, and when there’s no vermin, mice and rats and lizards appear, and animals you can see only in your imagination, which only a writer could invent without ever seeing them with his own eyes: a panther and a tiger and a falcon and an elephant and monkeys and a snake. Africa, as the land of animals, the land of safaris, of people, is always mentioned in connection with broad smiles, big buttocks, and sex organs of enormous dimensions.

  What I saw through the window of the cab had nothing of that. The man walking on the straight, reddish road, which seemed to lead, not to some poetic house with a mouth for a door, a tin roof for a forehead, but to an irradiated hell, had nothing of that. Big buttocks were nowhere to be had, not for him, not even if he had been of the opposite sex; the sun, from his daily toil on the land, had beaten the laughter out of him; the only time he laughed was when he saw the enraged sky, which would bring rain, but even then he wiped his sweaty hands on his thighs, since he couldn’t be sure the downpour wouldn’t ruin the half-opened cotton blossoms; I didn’t get a look at his teeth, but if I had, there would probably be nothing there but a hollowed-out void.

  ‘Anthills – anthills by the monkey-bread tree,’ Ismael whispered, as if he too was surprised to be showing me something that only a day or two before he wouldn’t have mentioned, something he had always taken for granted; now, however, it suddenly became a discovery. I craned my neck toward the open window on his side of the car and, as I did, touched his thigh with my hand. He shifted out of the way, but with such tenderness I can only mention it. I returned to my side, as if he’d never shown me anything, never shared anything with me, then brought my legs up onto the seat and wrapped my arms around them. I hadn’t done this before; before, at home, in the studio, my hand was at the back of my neck, but now all this open space, even in the city, even in the dark hotel room, maybe especially in the dark hotel room, seemed to be taking something out of me. I was being atomized in a thousand and one pieces and, in the process, I was forgetting what I was doing to Ismael. From the timeless realm of the gods, from moral and natural certainties, if not the constants of gender and class, he was moving, because of me, into some other territory – where, he still didn’t know. But since he was able to see anthills next to a monkey-bread tree – almost tall, almost Gothic, cathedrals – and could probably tear them down without hurting himself, I suppose he could find the courage to glance into my world too.

  I rested my head on my knees and let a long, poetic letter to my father dissolve on my tongue. About how everything here was fine and good. How it’s taken for granted, even today, that women putter around the fire and men go into the jungle to hunt leopards, or lions – I’m not sure which; I haven’t seen any yet; mostly I see people, but nevertheless – and then they hang them from a branch and strip the skin off them. To protect my sources, I’d say I was told this by villagers from one of the villages not far from where I rented the house – although in fact the house I was renting was in the city. I shook my head and put my feet back on the floor as well. If anyone was watching – I suppose the cab driver was, in the rear-view mirror, but he didn’t count – if anyone was watching, then, they’d see that I looked exactly the way I did when I got into the cab, only now my hands, especially since Ismael had moved his thigh away, had nowhere to go. Maybe my father would want to hear some fairy tales, so he could whisper them late at night to his lady friend in bed. What a brave daughter he has. He would forget to mention, of course, the silence between us, why I left, who I was sleeping with; he’d forget, for example, to mention the lover’s age and, especially, his skin colour, why I didn’t want to come back, or at least why I didn’t want to right now. Before the woman on his left shut her eyes, he would also tell her I was planning to smuggle out a panther skin for him. Just five hundred euros, he’d say, and he would hang it on the wall in the front hall. But the woman, having turned onto her side, would no longer hear him. She couldn’t care less about my father’s wall-mounted hide; had she still been conscious, she’d tell him it was illegal, a panther skin at the bottom of a suitcase, but she was already deep in the remote wilderness of her own dreams.

  ‘Where have you wandered off to?’ Ismael tried again. His arm, it seemed, was even making its way to me and might somewhere have reached me if the driver hadn’t suddenly braked. The brakes rumbled as if the skies above had opened; next came the
sound of frenzied flip-flops, of ragged heels, sometimes and sometimes not, meeting the earth, but all I know for sure is that my face – not just my mouth as the entrance to a house, not just my forehead as the roof, but my whole face together – met the barrel of a rifle. Bandits, I told myself, bandits in broad daylight. They saw the car, the white woman in the car, and thought we were transporting gold. Or somebody who had seen Mr Eighteen Degrees holding that gold chain must have thought I had taken it after all. And wanted it back. One of them undid Ismael’s trousers with his open heel, while another, who had a bag over his head, lifted my T-shirt. After a quick, nervous inspection – I was sure the men were stoned, otherwise they would never have had the courage for such a thing – they ordered me to take off my panties. I started to obey; I tucked my hands into the elastic and, I guess, had already exposed the top of my pubic hair, when Ismael started talking to them. It was a poem from his belly; he was speaking almost like my English landlady’s cat, gutturally and miraculously, and because he was making sounds I had never heard before, which none of us had heard before, the bandits lowered their archaic rifles and, one after the other, retreated backwards into the thicket. I don’t know what Ismael’s poem was about, and I probably never will.

  Later, at home, Ismael said he recognized some of the bandits, or rather, they recognized him. From where or when, I don’t know that either; I imagine it was the village he and his Mama ran away from. The only other thing he told me was that they didn’t intend to rob us – if they had, they would have taken my bag, my clothes, maybe even the car – they only wanted to scare us.

  ‘Because of the article they thought I was writing?’ I asked across the top of the car; I was standing now.

  Ismael, on the other side of the car, leaned his arm against the faded metal as if he felt nothing, as if this was nothing compared to what he was planning to say. But before he said it, my memory flashed back to the cab driver, who had disappeared among the tree trunks with the bandits. If I had been paying more attention, if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with that imaginary letter, with talking about my father’s mistress, I might have foreseen the whole thing. The cabby’s constant glances, his constant checking in the rear-view mirror, and, right before the place of the attack, his nervous braking.

  ‘Ana, look. I do not want problems. Most people come here, rent a jeep, arm themselves with cameras, extra film, I don’t know, maybe load the jeep with gallons of water and tinned food, and spend fourteen days looking at animals. Panthers, tigers, jackals, elephants, monkeys, snakes, all that bullshit. From far away, the animals seem terrifying, too terrifying for them to take in with their own eyes – if you notice, safari people always look through their cameras, never through their own eyes, but that is not important now...’ I was surprised by the order in which he listed his animals, and maybe it surprised him too, since otherwise he wouldn’t have been so hard on himself. ‘It was a stupid thing I did, even taking you there! Stupid! You should have sat in your house and written to your father. That everything is fine and good. That you are basking in the shade of palm trees, enjoying the smiles of the black folks, getting laid now and then – okay, you would not have to write him that...’

  I placed a finger on my lips to tell him to stop. He stopped. Although I didn’t know exactly what I was intending or how I should thank him for that guttural poem, I walked over to the other side of the car anyway, to where he was standing, or maybe he had already vanished into the sky from the heat, I don’t know. What I said, in fact, was completely different from what I wanted to say. I was wrong about you, Ismael. I thought you were a quiet, withdrawn fellow, who still walks in a world of timelessness, of gods, of moral certainties and natural laws, and even such constants as religion and gender, but now I see that you are one of them, one of the bandits. It’s not true, Ismael was answering me, I am not what you think. I am a man who walks on a reddish road, the man you saw from the cab. I saw you seeing him. You thought, how backward they are, poor things, they learn on the ground, make love on the ground, eat off the ground, but that ground, that earth, which you take in your hand and let crumble through your fingers, it is all we have. Come, I will show it to you.

  I followed him. Not into hell but only into the cool house. Before he turned on the bathroom tap and the water began to flow out of it – he had already bent down a little and was sticking out his burning tongue – I nevertheless stammered out, ‘Thank you. Thank you for that life-saving poem.’

  He didn’t look at me, didn’t turn around and say, it was nothing, I did what anybody would have done in that situation; instead, he placed his lips next to the tap. I turned around and was about to go into the front hall and then to the terrace, when behind me I heard a voice. So tender, I can only mention it.

  * * *

  It is not entirely true that when I lost Mama and when I lost the ebony woman I had no place to go. Baba’s yard was still there, despite the fact that in my absence a tragedy had occurred in it. Malik’s mama had died. But even if she had not died, if she had still been alive, for me her image would have remained wrapped in mist. Always inside the house, always dressed in a long dark tunic. And when I think about it, Malik, too, was merely her shadow. I remember how he would always cling to the hem of her dress or the gauzy scarf with which she covered herself. That is another reason why what happened to Malik later is almost beyond belief. If she had not died, or if Baba had to predict their child’s future, he would never have looked in the direction where that light-skinned, too light-skinned, boy was headed. We were not close, that boy and me. Only later did we become close, after I returned from the ebony woman.

  But before I explain things in connection with Malik, I need to say a word or two about my Auntie. Again, not literally a relation. She was from the same village, or the same part of the country. One evening, though I am not sure it was the same evening I came back to Baba’s yard, she also brought her things. I suppose she just could not live alone anymore. She had a tiny little house almost right in the centre of town and sold tomatoes, mangoes, boiled eggs and similar small goods in front of it. ‘I can just as well put it all in front of your house. And I would sell mine,’ she whispered to Baba on the terrace. When I appeared in front of them, caked in dust, wearing tattered clothes, half-drunk from thick beer, and pricked all over from having my blood taken, Baba just nodded and pointed toward the bathroom. I understood that I had to clean myself up first and then we would talk.

  ‘But only your husband can sell the house.’

  ‘Ehh, if I wait for him, I will die first.’

  The Nigerian was still not back, and in a way my Auntie was right. He had settled in, wherever he was. If you spend years waiting in a queue thinking up stories, when you finally step on that golden ground, you are not likely to leave it anytime soon. So Auntie made excuses for his absence, tried to find the sense of it, but her belly kept rejecting every argument. She needed him inside her. The Nigerian, I mean, and nobody else, and she never pretended otherwise, but because he was nowhere to be seen, and had not been for years, she decided to move completely to Baba’s. She had been coming to his yard before this, mainly to help care for his sick wife. And in the evening she found time to lather up Malik and me so our penises stood up hard. But probably none of us still remembered that small detail.

  Now washed and stretched out on a plastic mat, I heard Auntie say she was going to bring her goats to Baba’s place too, with everything else, and lease out the house in the centre. ‘That way I can get the boys into a school,’ she said and stood up from the chair.

  Baba turned off the radio. ‘As far as Malik’s concerned, there’s no point. As for the other, I do not know yet. He just showed up.’

  That was enough for this woman with the lost husband in Europe to sit me down every evening at the big, battered table – where the meat was cut up during the day and which she herself covered in sacking and laid her merchandise on – to write long sente
nces on it in her gentle handwriting, as I copied them out in my crude letters.

  Thus over time I discovered that Auntie’s world was much more complicated than Mama’s, even more complicated than the world of the ebony woman. She believed in God; then she realized God had been swindling her. Each night I would hear her quiet whispering; the curtain dividing our beds was too thin for me not to see her tears, and when more questions than answers were piling up, she would rise and go out to pet her goats. Sometimes I got up too and followed her in silence. Then, with her hand in the rough fur of a goat, she would tell me stories about the spirits, about people who walk around with their head under their arms, about treasures guarded by the dead whose hiding place people are always looking for. Of course, she also believed in witches, although she never let them come into the yard; the witches would arrive at night in tears or curse and swear and sit down on the roof of the house.

  ‘What did those women up there come here for?’ I asked my Auntie and pointed my chin at the roof of the house, pretending that I really did believe every word she said. From gratitude, mainly, for the gentle, long sentences. By then I had long outgrown the world of the spirits, although, clearly, that Auntie could still see them in me.

  ‘I don’t know, but whatever they came for we have to give them.’ There was no longer the slightest doubt that the night remained under Auntie’s protection. In the hours and days that followed, she revealed to me the position of certain stars and called them by their familiar names, hardly the same as the ones the astronomers use: she called them, for instance, the May Cross, the Plough, the Seven Little Goats... There they were, in the boundless night, shining down on Auntie, who was showing them to me. Not only did she tell me their names, of course, but from their position and brightness she could predict the sort of weather we would have in the future – whether it would rain the next day or not, whether in two or three months the farmers would have a good crop, whether hail would fall, whether there would be a devastating cyclone or not.