Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘The only thing that will be important is that you met each other. Now go to sleep. Tomorrow you can help me with the goats.’ She turned on her side – I heard her pull the sheet over her head – and instantly fell asleep. I tried to follow her into her universe.

  * * *

  I have done lots of things – repaired cars, worked in a copy shop, collected scrap metal, begged – that was the worst, since you are at the mercy and cruelty of the side that employs you, so you have no rights at all, no way to complain, you either are or you aren’t – but I had never been a hunter, let alone a hunter of human heads. Malik called me, he said he needed me, just as I was coming back from town to Ana’s terrace. I was planning to sit on the steps, right next to the bougainvillea and, I don’t know, maybe even trim some of the branches that were sticking out, with my hands, with the USA knife, which I was carrying around tucked in my shoe, to kill the time while I waited. She had turned me down, had grabbed on to the bench with both her hands, rocked back and forth a little; I saw how she was rocking – even before that ‘you thought I’d be your ticket to Europe’ her body was saying it was not ready, was not used to me enough yet, that it felt ashamed when we touched shoulders at the hotel reception desk or when we sat next to each other at the restaurant, but that still does not mean that all that lying in bed together at night and touching shoulders during the day was a lie. Maybe I was just taking it a little too fast, that’s all. But since Malik was almost shouting into the phone that he needed me, that he had some excellent work for me – ‘Dude, we go to da sea! We wear da safari shirt and smoke plenty plenty da ganja so dat it peek out from our arse!’ – I did not go to Ana’s terrace. Although I had promised myself that I would not answer Malik’s phone calls, it had been a good while since I last saw him; I was totally captivated by Ana’s body, or captivated by what I had become with her, every day making love, every day caressing her no longer smooth thighs, every day stories about Sankara, about Auntie, and last but not least about my mama, but all the same, it was probably true that I missed Malik. It was probably also true that I answered his phone call because I needed money, or because – now this needs to stay between us; I would not want Ana to ever find out – I needed to go on a short trip. ‘Cotonou, dude! Cotonou, it wait dere just for us!’ Malik kept shouting down the phone, until I finally hung up.

  I had never gone anywhere. I did not know what the sea was, what a holiday was, I did not know, for example, that there was this thing in Paris called la tour Eiffel. Total darkness. And now, here was Malik suddenly promising me something Ana could not give. Maybe my body was to blame, which right from the beginning she said was hot, too hot; maybe the circulation of my blood was to blame for me going to Malik’s Black Street, although I never should have gone there.

  Women with painted eyebrows were loosening their bodies before the peak of night. The air was tense with a kind of mysterious uncertainty, a waiting, a prelude to the night, or maybe it was only me who felt this. I looked at their breasts and hands and mouths, which I suspect could consume fifteen, maybe twenty men a night. ‘Whores are good good money,’ Malik blurted out; he was wearing a black and white suit and shoes three sizes too big, which he had acquired since he quit the organized burglaries and went into the pimping business. ‘Basically, dere be notting dat you must to do. Only to come here in da evening and to go home in da morning.’ And in between? In-between is the night, soft and moist as a whore’s crotch. I shook my head and, as a sign of further refusal, lifted my hands. ‘You go find somebody else, and more dan dat, what is important is dat in da family one tree at least must to stay whole.’ Malik looked at me; he did not know whether to keep quiet or just send me to hell, which under normal circumstances he probably would have done, but now certain things were on the line and he needed somebody like me, a person he could trust and who could keep his mouth shut; I saw that from the way he looked at me, as if he was seeing me for the first time – so instead he just took off his glasses, wiped them with the silk handkerchief he kept in the pocket of his jacket, then slipped them on again and calmly put the handkerchief away.

  I did not go to Black Street that unfortunate afternoon so I could play a tree, a tall many-branched tree, which did not so much give shade as it was used to hang the whores’ lingerie on, although all those colourful thongs, garters, and bras also brought shade, but so I could check out ‘the business’. If the money was good, I would go home and think about it; if it was nothing but rotten eggs, I would give Malik a piece of my mind. Ana told me more than once that I should not let him take advantage of me – hanging around with Malik won’t get you anywhere, Ismael, and even the way she pronounced my name, with a soft, slightly hissing ‘s’, was enough to make me want to turn my back on him.

  ‘Your old lady come by here; I run into your old lady,’ Malik said through his gold-rimmed glasses, obviously determined to use a different tactic against me. When he said this, his face struck me as somehow strangely alien, as if we were no longer on the same side, as if we did not come from the same yard. I pretended that I did not care, that his words meant nothing to me, and to cover up the dead space that appeared between us, I sat down on a bench next to a warm, moist woman, or maybe I just imagined she was, who was scooping a steaming powdered-milk porridge into her mouth with a metal spoon. ‘Your old lady...’

  ‘Yah, you have talk dat already...’

  Malik rubbed his bristles as if he could not believe that he was looking at this new Ismael, who every day was caressing the white thighs of an old woman, moving his hand along the inside of her, and marvelling, when it happened to them, that it was even happening to them, while she, for the most part, would close her eyes, mainly to keep the dream from passing too quickly, but Malik must all the same have been thinking, oh, come on! I am not so naive as to fall for this kitschy crap – two minutes ago this bloke was my boy, and now I’m supposed all of a sudden to think he is somebody else? He sat down next to me on the bench, lifting his legs almost nonchalantly – I could see the bulge of his balls in the brand new trousers – and because it was obvious that he usually did not do this, at least not when evening was approaching, when the women were loosening their bodies, licking the last bits of porridge from their enormous spoons and thinking about the invisible bodies they had yet to meet, almost all of them stood up at once, left their bowls half full on the table, and scattered like crows. As if following the gradual course of the sun, first they flew silently through the air, then began their descent, and at last disappeared somewhere beyond the horizon of the houses. I watched them leave and so missed most of the monologue. Malik was babbling something about the sea, beaches, and ganja. He had acquired a van, he said in a lowered voice, and it was only then that I realized it was serious. ‘We will go carry some fine fine stuff.’ As he said this, he adjusted his glasses with a finger. Maybe he thought they could conceal what he really was. An albino. Baba had a few times tried to send him to Bamako, where one of Mali’s most famous musicians had a centre, but Malik always resisted. ‘Salif Keita can go fuck himself in his own way, and me, I will in my way. Why instead my old man have no talk me dat you must no scratch your balls? Why he have never talk me at all dat you must to brush your teet wit dat stuff dat is like da milk? Why he have bring me up so dat I live like animal? Why do all us poor bastard live in big big dirt, big big muck?’

  At the time I had not heard him, but here at the table, with darkness falling, as I watched the longitudinal stripes on his gleaming suit, a sign of elegance or something, his questions began to echo in my head.

  ‘We split seventy–tirty,’ he shot out, and slapped my thigh with his hand. This was meant to tell me that he still had power over me, that with a single stroke he could demolish everything I had with Ana and turn me back into the old pointless Ismael. But at the same time he did not notice – his classic shirt, suit and tie only made the matter harder for him – that he was adopting
a fatherly role toward me. ‘You have became too plenty sentimental, especially since you have go wit Ana. Dat is what you call her, no?’ He did not wait for me to answer, and in fact it was not about him being interested in what I called my lover, or in anything at all related to her. ‘But dat romance of yours it do no surprise me at all in a way. Softies like you no have chance in Ouaga. Dey go get crushed.’

  ‘Sixty–forty,’ I blurted out, and a moment later regretted it. Before entering negotiations, I should have asked what we would transport in that van, what that ‘fine fine stuff’ was, though I doubt he would have told me. ‘You go wit me and you see,’ he would have growled, a little to the side, and stood up, just as he suddenly stood up now, almost dividing the air between us into two halves. Black and white, like his suit. Before I could get him seated again and insist on my commission, even pound on the table if necessary – and of course it would have been necessary, maybe on a different occasion, in a different life – he started staring in the direction of a light-skinned woman who was approaching with some black man.

  ‘Hey, look dere, da old lady from your novel.’ I could not help but look. ‘She have step out dat book of yours and come to my street here.’

  ‘Well, she anyway come here every day to you,’ I snarled sarcastically, and turned to the table with a jerk, almost upsetting one of the half-full bowls. The now-cold porridge gave a heavy wobble. My belly started rumbling, and yah, why didn’t my father ever tell me not to scratch my balls? Why did he leave me behind in the village and then on the street? Why did he climb up on a crazy woman like my Mama in the first place? A possible answer: the circulation of the blood. But still, why do we do something and not do something else? Why am I here on this street pretending to be the tree for some insane birds, when I should be with Ana? She had probably returned to the terrace a long time ago and, from her disappointment at not finding me there, not on the steps, not among the bougainvillea branches – maybe she even moved one of the branches aside with her hand – was already thinking about going home, if not to her sick son then at least to her sick father, was thinking that our relationship had finished ripening and would drop at any moment on the crumbling ground.

  Once more, covertly, I looked at that fleeting woman. From behind she really did look like Ana – hair pinned high on her head, slender back, slow walk. But what was the story behind her that brought her all the way here? ‘Listen!’ I shouted to Malik, so that he turned to me in surprise, away from the woman and the black man next to the woman, so that even the loosened women stuck their heads through the upstairs windows of the houses and I caught their painted eyebrows in the air.

  ‘Give me forty–sixty from da entire deal and I am in; if no, den you go fuck yourself!’

  At that moment nobody would have dared to speak like that to Malik. I was putting his authority on the line, authority he fought hard to win since he became the lord of Black Street, but it also had to do with the life Ana and I had together. Although later I learned that it mainly had to do with the lives of the children. Malik and I travelled so far, to Cotonou, I mean, because nobody knew us there, especially not the children in their knee-high stockings – the schoolchildren. When we were driving north from the coast in the van – my job was simply to guard them, to sit and watch them shaking in terror and peeing on the floor – Malik said the Lebanese wanted things clean. Apparently, some charlatans had been cutting them up any old way, hands, legs, heads, and the result was rubbish, so now they wanted to have the children intact.

  When Malik and I were actually sitting by the sea beneath the palm trees and toking ganja – after our arrival in Cotonou we had to wait in the fresh air, for just a few days until the end of school; that way, supposedly, the children’s heads would be fuller and worth more – he confessed to me that he had got one of the whores, or crows, if you like, pregnant. ‘Can you believe it? I will be da very same like my old man!’ He gave a big laugh, displaying his violet gums, and I thought, apart from those gums there is nothing beautiful about him; then he jumped to his feet and started running along the beach. I really wished then that Baba had stuck him in some centre for albinos, or at least that it was not the USA knife I was carrying in my pocket but a gun. I would have shot him dead then and there and left the body lying in the sand, and the children we later carted in the van like animals, the fine fine children, whose parents taught them not to scratch their balls and to brush their teeth with milky foam, they would have simply gone on their holidays when school ended.

  And me? I would have understood what the sea was and then returned to Ana. One afternoon on the terrace – she was wearing my shirt, which revealed more than covered the whiteness of her thighs, along which, with the tips of my fingers, my whole hand first but then just the tips of my fingers, as she closes her eyes and opens her mouth, I will journey, all the way up to her overgrown forest, but even so, I should have known earlier what this journey meant, but obviously, I wanted to understand it only literally, and mainly in a way that excluded Ana; she too, since her arrival in Africa, had gone through a change; I was not the only one people did not recognize anymore – so then, one afternoon on the terrace, when she leaned away from the wall, stood up, and gazed seriously in front of her, I saw her shoulders droop. A barely noticeable, almost invisible droop. ‘It’s all already there somewhere,’ she said, not looking at me, ‘before it ever enters your mind.’ It was only as I was running, trying to catch up with Malik, whose skin was already half fried by the sun, with dark scars sprinkled across his face, that it began to dawn on me what she meant.

  * * *

  I do not know how long Malik and I were in Cotonou – a week, two weeks, a month, a year – for me it is as if that time has been erased. While waiting for the school to end we lived with a Frenchwoman named Julie Amado. She might have been the fleeting woman from Black Street, with her hair pinned high on her head, her slender back, which opened to the inside of her body in the shape of the letter S, and her slow walk, too slow even for her age; it was this walk that gave her away; it told of her hazy past or at least of an exaggerated tendency for melancholy – but after thinking about it a while, I decided it was not the same person. Malik could not have had so much control over things, and besides, Julie herself seemed half crazy. At night, for example, she did not sleep, but her giant bed was taken over by cats; she would sit in a chair and place her legs on the bed, and all those cats – there must have been more than twenty of them – would sleep by her legs among plates of half-rotten fish.

  I did not ask Malik where he met Julie or even what we were doing living with her. All I understood was we were waiting. Malik introduced me to Julie as a friend who knew how to make sentences and was therefore writing a novel. He even came up with a title for it: Again the Sea, or something like that, and Julie was delighted. She offered me a typewriter, a big, black, antediluvian beast, which made a menacing sound when you typed and sometimes devoured the paper; dozens of trees went into its longitudinal throat; at such stressful moments I would jump up from behind the table and start pulling on the paper with my hands, carefully at first, then more and more furiously, until ragged scraps were flying through the air like snowflakes – We are like the snow, which always passes, I muttered to myself; I still do not know where I picked up that sentence – but after a few days the machine stopped doing that and the tropical forests were saved, the landscape unfrozen, while for me it was all just beginning. Julie, in various parts of the house, started recounting her memories to me. Apparently, they were so interesting I should knock a book together out of them. I declined, saying that in fact I had no idea how to make sentences, that Malik had only said that for the hell of it, but she went on leaning her back against the wall, nibbling on holey cheese and baguettes and telling her story. That is how I learned she had come to Cotonou years before as a volunteer teacher. But because things did not work out – she said it like that, I remember clearly – she quit the job.

>   ‘Don’t misunderstand me; I’m still a humanitarian at heart; I help the children as much as I can; I make the journey easier for them; if it were not for me, their suffering would be even greater; but if you think you can get out of this business once you are in it, you are wrong.’

  The more she talked, the less I understood. Children, eight to sixteen years old, their hands tied; somebody needed to go with them. The official explanation: the transport of minors who were being adopted by white people (my thoughts: maybe they are being sold into slavery, maybe prostitution, because, I ask you, what sort of white couple wants to adopt a little nigger?). And who else was involved in the business? People high up, colonels, bureaucrats, ministers?

  Here I could not help but laugh: ‘Julie, with all due respect, where am I on this bordello assembly line?’

  She picked up one of the cats weaving between our legs, cradled it in her arms, and began to pet it. ‘So you still don’t get it? Well, maybe you’re not a real writer.’

  She had meant to offend me, although I was more offended when she sent me to the market to get fish for the cats. I stood there in the sticky, crucifying sun, in endless queues (we are not quite at the bottom of the civilization ladder, after all!), and when I got back to the house and started complaining to Malik that I could not take it anymore, he slapped my shoulder and told me to be patient, just until tomorrow. Tomorrow, which he was forever putting off.

  How can I describe what it was like in that house? Everything was a total shambles: you open a drawer to get a towel and instead of a towel a mewing cat jumps out; some of the cats would leap over the balcony; maybe they wanted to commit suicide, but Julie did not let them; screaming horribly, she would run down and bring the cat back into the house. She even took in all the cats from the street and there were more than fifty of them in the end. The good part of being in that house was that I had a view of the sea from the kitchen window and, especially, that I learned to type. When the typewriter and I came to an understanding, when the beast inside it relented, or maybe I relented, or the snow inside me, which was mixed with blood, I would sit in front of it for days on end hunting for letters. Let me put it another way: for days on end, I tried to remember who I was, the way I was when I woke up next to Ana. I would think about the smell of her armpits, of her soft, pink core. Sometimes I would watch Julie from behind, her painful curving spine, her bare arms covered in scratches, the tongue in her half-open mouth with its gentle fringe of teeth – her teeth were perhaps the best part of her – and then I would close my eyes and imagine that the woman in this house was actually Ana. Ana, who in the meantime had probably gone back to her city, gone back to her table with the view of the garden.