Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  Another man would not have taken a witch like Auntie under his roof; she would have threatened his authority with the ancient songs she sang while cooking or hanging the laundry, would have driven him crazy with her herbs hanging and soaking around the yard; would have wounded his masculinity. But for Baba, this had all gone away with his dead wife. When he dug her grave with his own hands, his penis, too, was left hanging. If he had known my sentence, We are like the snow, which always passes, he would certainly have embraced it, but in the period after the ebony woman I was talking less and less. I even had the feeling that I was cleansing myself, especially through the letters I was copying on paper. Everything Auntie said about the stars, about the coming dry or rainy season, was not worth half as much as those letters. I believed in them and they believed in me. Maybe this new-found arrogance was partly the reason why one day, across the table, which still smelled of onions and tomatoes and the entrails of a slaughtered sheep, I asked her if the Nigerian ever wrote to her. I had the gall to refer to him by his nationality. Auntie let the pencil fall from her hand and closed her eyes. Maybe she was trying to imagine the golden ground over which her man was walking, stuck in Europe, or maybe she was just thinking about the animals she moved during the day from one end of the yard to the other. So they would not suffocate from the sun, she explained with a kindly smile.

  ‘Nobody is perfect,’ she said. ‘Nobody is ever perfect.’ Then her hand picked up the pencil again and started drawing curlicues.

  That, I knew, was the only way she could make her peace with God and with herself. Besides, I had no reason to be mean; I do not remember my Mama ever being so tender with me, and not the ebony woman either. Only I suspected that my Auntie could afford this luxury because she did not see me as an image of her despair or a reminder of her failure. For her, I was just another child – however much I rebelled against that label and was trying to cross into adulthood – a child who needed to be taught how to write, who needed to be bathed after supper and rubbed with oil. If in the meantime his penis happens to stand up, that is no concern of hers.

  * * *

  I know it’s a little late but, all the same, I need to return to the beginning of this story. To that seat in the air, where I felt trapped. At the airline, I had selected a window seat, but I didn’t know that the package included a man, an old man in a long tunic, to be specific, who knew of no other way to eat except with his hands. He had come straight from the heart of the desert onto ‘my’ plane, ripped the plastic knife and fork out of their wrapping, and turned them around in the wind. We did not speak the same language and probably never would; otherwise, I would have put the napkin on his lap and together we’d have entered the world of civilization. He, my civilization; I, his. But the stewardess just kept giving us nasty looks. Was I enjoying the odour emanating from the Sahelian? Did I find the sight of his filthy hands exciting? He had dirtied them with the sauce and something else, too, that, to be honest, should have been tossed out the window. I ate nothing myself; I merely ordered a glass of white wine. The Sahelian looked at me as if to say, woman, alcohol is forbidden, it destroys the spirit’s concentration, makes your stomach gurgle, and gives you wind; then I clicked for the stewardess all the same. For a while she pretended she didn’t understand, didn’t see me, was too busy with other passengers, but eventually she brought over the perfumed tissues. The Sahelian opened the packet, this time with no trouble, pulled them out and placed them on his face. He stayed like that until we arrived in Niamey and he disembarked.

  With the glass glued to my lips, I gazed insistently out the round window. I pretended I was seeing not just clouds but also the face of my son. More than once I’d regretted not staying in England. I would have had better opportunities for my business, although it wasn’t just that. Brighton would surely have drained me, brief encounters with people of every skin colour and language would surely have drained me, but in the end I gave in to my father. Maybe the pivotal moment came that day at the train station. I pressed the phone to my ear and asked him, should I stay or come home? Of course he said to come home. What’s the point of you wandering around up there? You’ll always be alone there. When I returned to Ljubljana he even read me a letter he had never sent, where he wrote the words he said over the phone. Maybe it was that aloneness that frightened me, although it shouldn’t have. Millions upon millions of people were in the same situation; it was right when England was somehow becoming cynical; the urban vampire look was developing; after Sinatra and Parker, we were promised a third rock-and-roll revolution; people of all colours were arriving to construct their first world, and if I had stayed, I would probably have found it easier to accept the old man in the long tunic next to me. But because I left, we had problems.

  I can’t blame the English climate – that would be too banal – but England in those days was an infected region. Aloneness, as my father called it, was just another word for sending young people to die on distant battlefields; the young people’s response was to destroy themselves. By taking hallucinogenic drugs, by searching for something better – mysticism, alternative lifestyles, false gurus. It scared me when I saw a woman on the street in a thin, cut-out dress with dark, smeared circles under her eyes. It scared me when I was alone in front of the television on New Year’s Eve, shovelling pieces of cake in my mouth. But most of all it scared me when a woman in the loo touched my breast. I was bending over the sink pretending to wash my hands, taking so long and doing it so intently that she finally came up behind me and said I was someone she could make love to. By then I had no idea what was going on, so I bought a telephone card, stuck it in the slot in the phone in the booth and dialled the only number I knew by heart. When I look back, I see that my father was wrong. There was no greater aloneness than what I felt when I dragged Mama to the edge of the swimming pool and he called the paramedics so they could pull her out of the water. We didn’t know how to help her, either of us, except by repeating those words, that she left because that’s what she wanted.

  If I had stayed in England, if I had returned the advances of the woman in the loo or had at least once in a while shut the radio off, stepped outside my orange kitchen into the street, and joined one of the witches, I wouldn’t have been pretending now to see the contorted face of my son through the aeroplane window. He was saying I had gone to Africa without telling him goodbye. Thoughtlessly, without giving him one last hug or staging some other form of tenderness. One day in the land of imported tea, but also the land of war, when I did in fact venture into one of those goth stores – which was drenched inside out with forbidden substances, as was also true of the owners, women draped in a combination of velvet and lace, in black, of course – it was possible in the dim light to make out an old woman who was cradling in her lap the heads of, probably, her two sons and putting sweets in their mouths. The sons seemed fully grown, although she was pretending, or they were pretending, I’m not sure, that they were something else. When they saw that I was watching them in horror, one of the sons slammed the door with his foot. I wasn’t meant to understand their game, but still I understood they were playing children and grown-ups. She was prolonging their childhood, their powerlessness, their dependence, while they were consenting to her dramatic, drastic, all-embracing dominance.

  On the train to Ljubljana – oh, how predictable! – I promised myself I didn’t want any of it. My imagined tapestries, the eucalyptus leaves on sofas, the gold leaf on ancient armoires – these would be the expression of my resistance to any form of extremism. They had clear outlines, just as I had a clear goal. When at the table my father was reading me his unsent letter and Mama was looking at me with a sheepish expression on her face – as if to say, despite everything, they did make the right decision; despite everything, it wasn’t such a mistake that they went and took me from the orphanage – I too, for a moment, believed this was the best thing I could have done. Eternal gratitude, I know. The unfinished story of what might have ha
ppened if it hadn’t happened. In any case, I would never have been watching the rise and fall of the perfumed tissue on the old man’s face if I had stayed in front of my English television set gorging myself to death on cake. All sensitivity, I expect, would have been beaten out of me, all consideration for people who speak and think differently from me. The provinciality I come from – to that alone I owe my naivety. Africa would have been just another squandered continent which it would be best to drop a nuclear bomb on, as my Brighton teacher said, waving his arm in the air like an orchestra conductor. I turned from the window to the old man and, before he stepped off the plane, raised my glass to him. This is my last one, I said, more to myself than him, and it’s more for courage anyway. I think he understood, beyond language, beyond narrative, why I was going to a place I had never been.

  * * *

  There was a point when Baba was politically active. I think things were happening with him around the time Mama and I came to the city. In the last days of the Sankara government, in other words. He did not believe socialism would solve all our problems, as they promised on the radio. Even if they sold off the government cars, that did not mean they were going to feed hungry mouths, he said. But neither did he support the right-wing option, which would bring rice to our mouths on spoons of gold. The sceptic was developing in him, and that severed boob probably was not the only reason he wanted to go to Europe. When he participated in a few demonstrations supporting Compaoré, threatening letters began to arrive at our house. His wife, a truly beautiful, long woman, came out to the terrace and bit her lip. I hope you are satisfied; I hope this has soothed your male lust. Then she took his hand and brought it to her breast. He put the other hand around her waist, tenderly stroking the area just above her backside, which probably meant, do not worry, and after a while led her into the house, where they probably made love.

  Mama and I watched, watched and listened, but we did not understand their relationship. Or at least I didn’t. Just as I did not understand why one afternoon gendarmes came into the yard. I thought they were looking for Baba, but they weren’t. It was the Nigerian. He had supposedly had sexual relations with an under-age girl. The officers spoke in scornful, offensive tones; one of them was chewing on a kola nut. Then Baba fearlessly walked into the middle of the yard and, his hands placed firmly on his waist, asked why they were looking for Emmanuel at his house. One of the gendarmes, a short man in high leather boots – the combination, I remember, seemed almost absurd to me – said they had heard that Emmanuel was hiding out with us. Baba turned toward the terrace; he probably hoped to see his wife there, a thin, gentle figure who instilled peace in all of us, and the light-skinned child who was always clinging to her diaphanous scarf, but the terrace was empty. The only thing on it was Baba’s recliner, and not far away, a cock was sleeping in a tree. Baba shrugged his shoulders and even let a hand drop from his waist, as if he wanted to say, see? nobody is here, and then rotated his head to the right, where all he could see were Mama and me. The gendarmes did not greet us; they probably did not think we deserved it. Mama, with a calabash of water in her hands and her dusty, dishevelled hair, gave the impression of being a crazy woman, and as for me, I was just a child, who even then was drawing letters in the sand and, mainly, missing his dog.

  People had been talking about Emmanuel for a long time, saying he really did not know how to keep his sex under control. It was the girl’s father who reported him, but because it turned out later that the girl had had sexual relations with other men before my uncle (if I called his wife my Auntie, then he was my uncle), he was released. Do not ask me how, after that, he faced his wife, the witch, or what the others had that she did not have. That, it seems, is no longer a political question. Baba, of course, gave him hell: a man like him, who was ‘ugly as a hyena baby’, should be licking his wife’s toes, but instead here he was, incapable of providing for his own family or even for himself, going around with young girls. Emmanuel, meanwhile, just sat there looking devastated and gazed into the distance. A month or two later we heard he had left. At first people said he went to the United States, then that he had gone to Europe. All this time Auntie said nothing. I suppose it was during this first period of emptiness, of abandonment, that she started listening to novels on the radio; everything she heard, she then told Baba’s wife. She would show up, sit on the terrace, and give her a summary of the romantic adventures of the woman in the novel they were broadcasting at noon, which was called The Divorcée. Neither of them were in a similar situation but terrible things had happened to them both. Auntie had lost her husband – about this there actually was not the slightest doubt, especially when Emmanuel sent her a photograph with him driving some fancy boat, and that was all, not a line to say he missed her or would be back soon – while Baba’s wife was on the verge of losing her very self and giving her husband and child over to dead absence.

  For she must have sensed her approaching death. I would sit on Auntie’s knee while she told Baba’s wife about the love scenes she heard on the radio; Auntie’s legs would tremble, and I could feel the sexual responses of the woman I was resting my weight on, while the other woman, who the story was meant for, only stared mutely in front of herself. The way my Mama used to stare. She was not part of these stories, although she too probably knew when danger was approaching, especially in the form of death.

  The only thing Baba later managed to do – politically, I mean, not in some other sense – was to join the MBDHPT, which, translated into the language of normal people, was the Burkinabe Movement for Human Rights. He attended their meetings even after Sankara was shot; it was not right that they shot him, he said, but the man thought he could change the world, when it is only the world that can change you. Listening to his sentences, I carried pictures of slain commanders around in my head, although they were never published anywhere. They ended on the rubbish heap, like pigs, but that no longer came from Baba’s mouth, but Mama’s. ‘We have to go. It is not good for us here anymore,’ she kept saying. I knew Mama wanted to be on the street. She had already been there a few times, first to cement the dead child, then to see if begging would be worth her while. And it was not until we were actually there, I mean near the rubbish heap where they buried Sankara, that it dawned on me that the only thing she had been waiting for was his death. The former Burkinabe president had been locking up beggars in special centres and Mama had heard too many stories from runaways, or maybe she just remembered the dark oral cavity of the gendarme who walked into Baba’s yard, I do not know; in any case, she had seen lots of things, even the trembling of my Auntie’s knees, which expressed a desire to give in to sexuality, even the photograph with my uncle driving a cardboard boat on a cardboard sea at full speed with perfectly combed hair; she had seen and probably sensed even that Baba was going to the MDBHPT because he wanted to belong, to be in a crowd of warm, if not ardent, bodies and wave his fist in the air, as if he could change something, as if the future belonged to him alone.

  This was one of the things she threw in his face when we left the yard and Baba pleaded with her to let me stay with him. ‘This one is mine, that other one is yours,’ she hissed and turned her back on him. She did not fully say how he had wronged her, or wronged his wife, who was dying in front of everybody’s eyes; she simply left and never came back. I followed her, slowly, hesitantly, a little stooped, but all the same I followed her. That is when I first realized that Malik had not been around for a few days, that he was not clinging to his mama’s scarf anymore, and that the underage girl who had accused Emmanuel of rape might have been lying. That he might be her victim, that is, and not the other way around. But for my Auntie’s fiancé things were set in place long before that, even before he decided to drive a motor boat in foreign lands, and maybe Auntie too decided that rather than surrender to a man as ugly as a hyena, she would surrender to daydreaming through the radio receiver.

  * * *

  No matter what it costs me, I n
eed to clarify once and for all the issue about my son’s deflated figure. Not just for Ismael, who is losing patience with my mental lapses, but for the narrative itself. Things need to be put somewhere even if they go over the edge in actual life. As when I drew sprawling veins on a white leaf and painted them in watercolours. I added blue just for nuance, but it bled into the other colours so in the end the picture didn’t look like anything.

  The fear of things going wrong also came true in my son. Countless times in the morning he pretended that he’d gone off somewhere, that he wasn’t there anymore. But when his lungs started hurting him, behind a door or wardrobe, he let out a great big laugh. Or when we were going home after a visit. He would hide in a ripened cornfield and wait to see our reaction. He’s gone, he’s been swallowed up by the earth, my husband would say angrily and then get in the car and slam the door. As we were about to drive away, he would show himself. Looking devious, with ears of grain stuck in his hair, as if he’d come from far away. I didn’t strike him, I couldn’t pull his hair, but it would probably have been better if I had. In fact, when he was burning photographs in his room, he screamed that he needed someone in authority, that this was the problem – the sense of freedom crushes you. At first I responded conservatively, mumbling quietly under my breath that setting rules ought to be the father’s job but it had fallen on me, but when I got a CD of melancholy music between my temples – it sailed from my son’s room to the kitchen – I finally gave up.