The Camel Bookmobile

by Masha Hamilton

  Now, five years and five months later, what unexpected wealth! True Stories of Grizzly Bear Attacks. A biography of Nelson Mandela. A history of Nigeria. And most recently, Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Man: A History. Still on her back, she flexed her feet and reached to touch the tome featuring on its cover a magnified mosquito, head hanging, body ballooned with blood. The cause, obviously, of her waking imagery. All right then. No more insect books. She could see the wisdom of that, as long as there were other words to read. The camels had been lumbering into Mididima not quite four months, and already their cache had become essential to her.

  Of course, they’d delivered more than books to Kanika, more even than knowledge of the outside world. They’d elevated her status. As a child, she’d spent so much time with Neema’s Bible that her neighbors had dismissed her as a useless oddity. Words on a page were acceptable, barely, as an occasional idle distraction. But to be obsessed with them? If she wanted to read, the elders had told her many times, far better to learn to read animal scents on the breeze, or the coming weather in the clouds.

  The library’s arrival had made a leopard’s leap of a difference, marking the start of a real school. Matani had always called himself a teacher and tried to gather together the children to write letters in the sand. But how long could sticks and dirt hold their interest? Now, though, all the children were given books to explore, and being taught to chant the alphabet in Swahili and English and to translate squiggles on paper, and Kanika had become Matani’s helper. “The assistant teacher,” he called her. “With all these books, I cannot educate everyone at once, Kanika. Not even with help of the cane.”

  Kanika had never before been given a title, let alone thought to be someone who had valuable knowledge. Before, she’d been considered nearly as out of place, in her own way, as Scar Boy. Now, though, tiny bodies with sour-scented skin pressed close to her over open pages. Mothers watched with a mixture of envy and resentment as she shared some mysterious secret with their offspring. They didn’t respect her any more than ever. But they were afraid of her, she knew—afraid of the skill she possessed that they didn’t have.

  She yawned and stretched and thought, then, of Miss Sweeney, the American who would, by the ancestors’ blessings, arrive with the camels as she always did. Kanika extended a hand to pick up a flat, round object she kept next to her grass mat. Miss Sweeney’s gift. A miracle smaller than a clenched fist. A dry water puddle that could be carried around and gazed in whenever one wished. A mirror, Miss Sweeney called it. None of the girls of Mididima had ever seen one before. She shifted it so that she could examine, in the dim light, her eyes, her cheeks, her effusive mouth.

  “The sight of yourself pleases you,” her grandmother said with a generous chuckle.

  Kanika shook her head in protest. “What pleases is that I can see myself at any time. I won’t be left wondering who that is when I catch glimpse of myself in a splash of rainwater.”

  Neema nodded, serious now. “There’s magic beyond our world, it’s true.”

  Moved by something in her grandmother’s voice, Kanika turned, tempted to reveal her plan. But she stopped herself. Better to act before talking. And act she would, as soon as the camels arrived today.

  She would hurry to Miss Sweeney’s side and use the hem of her own kitenge to clean off each book. No matter that she personally found no offense in the sunset-colored dust that wasted little time in laying claim to everything that entered the bush. Unimportant if she, like her neighbors, believed it irresponsible to use up hours struggling against grains of earth. The powder bothered Miss Sweeney when it settled on the books, and that was enough. Kanika had watched Miss Sweeney stroke the books clean with her soft, pale palms. This time, Kanika would do that for her—quietly, yes, but ostentatiously enough to be noticed. The act of cleaning would be something more than an effort to ingratiate herself; it would be like a book’s prologue—not the story yet, but a suggestion of the story to come.

  Then afterward, she would approach Miss Sweeney, lead her apart from the others, take her hand, perhaps. Little by little—an elephant must be eaten a bite at a time—she would speak of her desires: no, her needs. A way to the Distant City. Or perhaps to even more distant Distant Cities. To leave the bush. To be an assistant teacher somewhere where shelves of books and walls of mirrors and other wonders were as commonplace as sand. If she could teach the children of Mididima to read, couldn’t she teach other children, in places of greater potential?

  Kanika knew her plan would sound, to most of her tribe, like a desert nomad’s dream of snow. That’s why she’d told only Scar Boy. He would repeat it to no one, of course; who talked to Scar Boy? And telling him had been enough. That had satisfied her need to press the words into another’s ears, to make her vision real. He’d listened with his whole being. Though he’d said nothing, she was sure he supported her plan. After all, forsaken as he was by his neighbors, with his slow limp and his poor distorted face, he understood about dreams.

  Miss Sweeney—clearly a daring woman herself, clearly someone who’d seen snow, perhaps even walked through it—would listen too, and understand, and help. Miss Sweeney, after all, had squeezed Kanika’s shoulders. She’d leaned close enough for her hair to brush Kanika’s cheek, and for her odor—that complicated, ornate scent that some here found disgusting—to fill Kanika’s nostrils. She’d given Kanika the mirror.

  Kanika vowed to find the courage to act today, before her great-uncle Elim or others began grumbling again, muttering that she was behind schedule to find a husband, that she must be married before the arrival of summer’s dry winds. Before they trapped her.

  A spiraling cord of nerves in her stomach, as well as a morning pressure that needed to be relieved behind a bush, at last propelled Kanika to her feet. She glanced through the open door, surprised to see the day still hovering. She was rising earlier and earlier now that she was an assistant teacher, now that she had books to read. It seemed to have satisfied Elim, who’d lately been complaining less. He used to protest that she remained wedded to the earth far too long each day, depending on the sun to pry open her eyes.

  “She’s as lazy as a dying man,” Elim told Neema once in a voice that boomed through Mididima, loud as a thunderstorm. It had not been laziness—even now, Kanika flushed at the public accusation. Sometimes, yes, there was a morning’s heaviness after a late night spent talking to Scar Boy while Mididima slept—talks no one else knew about, because all would disapprove. But primarily, her lack of enthusiasm for daylight had been born of days carrying too few possibilities. Since the library had arrived, all could surely see that she was far from lazy.

  She brushed her uncle’s old complaint aside by flinging her right hand through the air. Today, she would not be disturbed by thoughts of uncles whose minds resembled mud pools, or lurking husbands or pointless chores. She would begin the morning with the speed and joy of a well-aimed spear, and that would make the moments fly faster until the Camel Bookmobile and Miss Sweeney arrived.

  The American

  IN A VACANT LOT NEXT TO GARISSA’S PROVINCIAL LIBRARY some three hours south of Mididima, two herdsmen struggled to strap wooden boxes filled with books to a camel’s side. They’d been trying for fifteen minutes, and by now an audience of a dozen passersby had collected. Fi stood with Mr. Abasi. She saw the camel blink its long eyelashes against an arrow of early-morning light and then shift abruptly with uncanny timing. The boxes fell off. Again. Books thudded onto the ground, the sound reverberating. It was the fifth try and still no success. The camel’s lips turned up in what looked remarkably like a smirk.

  One herdsman spewed curses—Fi understood that much even without knowing the words. He picked up a book, Practical Primary English, and flung it down in frustration. She flinched as the book skidded on the ground. Still muttering, the herdsman grabbed a second book, How the Pig Got His Snout. Mr. Abasi stood immobile next to Fi. He was, Fi guessed, about forty-two or forty-three, but in his blue striped pants and pale
pink button-down shirt with soccer-ball cufflinks, he looked like a boy playing dress-up. He stared dispassionately as the herdsman hurled one more book.

  These were the moments when Fi, if she allowed herself, could regress to what she thought of as her early period: the days a dozen years ago when she’d been a new librarian and worked at the information desk in the children’s and teens’ section at the Bedford library branch. “Children! People are reading. Please, no roughhousing here. A library is not a playground—well, it is, actually, but not as you might think of it…” Trailing off, giving up, recognizing that she was particularly unsuited to make such reprimands because for them to be effective, one must be able to stick to black and white, while she always found herself slipping into intricate grays of “maybe” and “sometimes.”

  Here, she’d approached the matter freshly. She’d learned to admonish the herdsmen in Swahili to be careful with the books: “Vitunze vitabu!” She’d tried longer lectures, too, with Mr. Abasi as translator. She’d mentioned the vulnerability of a book’s spine, the limited numbers of volumes, the trust of the benefactors. But then she found herself veering off, mentioning the first library of clay tablets collected in Mesopotamia; or the first horse-drawn bookmobile in 1905 in Hagerstown, Maryland; or even philosophical statements about books transcending time and space—and Mr. Abasi’s translations would fade away and the herdsmen would stand silent.

  Talk wasn’t working. There had to—had to—be another way to infuse them with her own commitment to the bookmobile.

  With both hands in front of him, Mr. Abasi held a brown bag that, she knew after these many trips, contained his lunch. He wasn’t married; she imagined him packing the lunch for himself each evening, setting it next to the door. She reached over, smoothly took the bag from him, then raised her arm and threw it on the ground.

  He opened his mouth as if gulping water. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m a visitor to your country, Mr. A.,” she said. “I want to fit in.”

  “I—” He was actually sputtering. “I have grapes in there. Do you know how expensive grapes are here?”

  She gestured toward the camels. “And books,” she said, “are expensive, too.”

  “That,” Mr. Abasi said, waving a hand. “He’s frustrated.”

  “Me too. The Camel Bookmobile was started so people living away from towns could learn to read. It can change lives. But if the books are ruined, the program fails.”

  Their gazes locked for a full minute. Then Mr. Abasi rotated his long neck and spoke curtly to the herdsman, who, with exaggerated gestures, lifted the thrown books one by one and dusted them off, placing them carefully with the others.

  “Thank you,” Fi said, bending to pick up the bag. “Your efforts will help our library survive.”

  “Along with my lunch,” he muttered. But as he turned away, she thought she saw a glimmer of amusement in his eyes.

  Light was seeping into the mushroom gray sky; the suspended wine-colored dust particles were becoming increasingly visible. Fi opened her mouth to take a bite of the grainy air, scented with animal dung, dust, and wood smoke. Nairobi had perpetually smelled of charcoal fires and diesel fumes, but in Garissa, scents never seemed to linger—they vanished in the aridity. In her apartment in Brooklyn, above Fleishmann’s Coffee Shop, smells tended to seep up the stairs and plop in her living room like ornery houseguests refusing to leave: bitter coffee wrestling with steamed milk and burned sugar-dough.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, Fi missed the scents of home. She calculated: in Brooklyn, it was late evening of the previous day. “Going to make a quick call,” she told Mr. Abasi, gesturing with her head toward the library building.

  Inside, she used her calling card. The one luxury she permitted herself was weekly calls, usually to her brother or one of her sisters, sometimes to Chris or Devi, always made from the library because there was no phone in the nearby home where Fi had a room provided for by the Kenya National Library Service.

  Sometimes, though, she lost track of the weekly schedule. Time felt elusive here, where the crocodile-laden Tana River eternally passed on its way to the Indian Ocean and flocks of ugly marabou storks perched atop acacia trees and men hauled carts along dirt roads as they had for generations. The battery on Fi’s wristwatch had run down two weeks after she arrived, and she’d taken that as a sign, stuffing the watch away instead of getting it fixed. Devi, hearing that, said Fi had better keep calling, because she clearly needed a link to the twenty-first century—what Devi called the “real world,” by which she meant Pilates, lattes, organic grocery stores, and, everywhere, clocks.

  Fi dialed the number. “Hey,” she said when Devi answered. “You still awake?”

  “Fi!” Devi said. “How are you? No malaria yet?”

  Fi laughed and reached inside her bag for her water bottle. “I’m so done with worrying about that,” she said, because she was, mostly. “What’s happening there?”

  “The sun is up and crime’s down,” Devi said. “Though some baseball star was suspended the other day for using a cork-filled bat. And Lulu the transvestite has the hottest off-Broadway show. Now tell me about you.”

  “Mididima,” Fi said.

  “’Scuse me?”

  “Where we go today. My favorite stop.”

  “You have a favorite now?”

  Fi leaned her neck back into her free hand and rubbed. “The place rises up out of nothing,” she said. “The people are stunning, with their burnished skin. And they’re not as poor as the others. I mean, they’re poor—my God, everyone’s poor—but they created this irrigation system that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and they never beg, and when the Camel Bookmobile shows up, they’re eager. We’re going to bring them into the modern world, Devi. These are the people I’m here for.”

  “They’re eager? That means not everyone you meet is so thrilled to see a white lady and her books?” Devi’s tone poked gentle fun.

  “OK, not everyone,” Fi said. “I mean, the others aren’t unhappy to see us, just puzzled. In most places, they keep their distance, or stare with blank faces. I must seem so strange. And sometimes I do feel them thinking—with everything we need here, what craziness possessed this lady to come with a pile of books?”

  “But I already know your answer,” Devi said. “Books, books everywhere. So tell me about Mi—whatever.”

  “Mididima. In their tribal language, it means Those Rooted in Dust. I feel more connected to them than any of the others. Maybe because so many of them speak English—” Fi laughed at herself, “Well, three, anyway.” She thought of the girl Kanika, her straight-backed grandmother Neema, and the teacher Matani, whose sudden smiles startled and charmed her. “But all the children are learning, and they practice on me. And there’s one they call Scar Boy, who doesn’t speak at all but cradles books like they could save him. How can I resist that?” Fi reached into a plastic bag to pinch off a piece of peppery-sweet fried bread. It was powdered with soil, and dry enough to require infusions from the water bottle before crawling down her throat. “Mr. A., of course, hates Mididima,” she said.

  “Mr. A. Isn’t he the one who thinks you’re a colonist, trying to homogenize the world? The one who hates everything about your project?”

  “Especially Mididima, though. Mr. A. says it’s too primitive and too far away. It’s an isolated little pocket. Takes hours to get there.”

  Fi had been surprised that Mr. Abasi had any doubts at all about the bookmobile project, and even more surprised to find that he had enough reservations to fill a small set of encyclopedias. She hadn’t anticipated objections from Garissa’s chief librarian when she’d applied for the consultant position. She’d thought everyone in Kenya, and especially the librarians, would be thrilled with the idea of camels ferrying books to the isolated northeast region.

  But, just for starters, Mr. Abasi didn’t even seem to fully trust the seminomads. He had been educated briefly in London, and he sprinkled his speech wi
th Briticisms like bloke and lorry and acted as if he preferred Europeans to either Africans or Americans. He’d spearheaded the imposition of a series of rules that seemed too rigid to Fi, but that he insisted were necessary. “We’ve got to follow a strict policy if we’re going to be balmy enough to take books this far into the bush,” he liked to say. She’d given way in exchange for a measure of his blessings.

  “What are you doing in your spare time?” Devi asked now.

  “Meeting with teachers, mostly,” Fi said. “I talked with a local government official a couple of days ago to discuss future funding.”

  “But what about for fun?”

  “Garissa is way off the tourist path,” Fi said. “I see giraffes all the time, though, and hippos at the Tana River the other day. I was invited to hear some drummers a few nights ago.” She heard a shout from outside. “I’ve got to go, Devi.”

  “You going to call Chris?”

  “No time now,” Fi said. “Just give him my best.”

  “Your best? You want me to tell him that?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “All right.” Devi drew the words out. “Be careful, Fi, OK?”

  As she stepped outside, Fi saw one of the herdsmen talking with large gestures and in an agitated voice as his fellow camel-driver nodded. The cantankerous camel was on its knees but baring its teeth and complaining in a loud moan. “Still no books loaded?” Fi called.

  Mr. Abasi shrugged. “The driver calls the beast a fool-brained lump of dung, but I think the camel and I actually agree. It would be wiser to stick our heads in the mouths of lions than to make this trip.”

  Fi laughed. “Lighten up, Mr. A.,” she said. “We’re going to the village of Mididima, not hell.”

  “It’s not a village, Miss Sweeney; it’s a collection of wanderers best left alone, and it’s too far into shifta territory. More than once, I’ve tried to point that out.”