The Camel Bookmobile

by Masha Hamilton

  So convenient, this mention of the shifta, Fi thought. Downplayed most of the time, the desert thieves were brought up only when there was a chance that they might dissuade a foreigner from doing something a local found tiresome.

  “Shifta steal cattle, not books,” she said. She reached down to the pile of books stacked on the ground, picked one up—a biography of Napoleon—and placed it in Mr. Abasi’s right hand. “Just think, Mr. A.,” she said, attempting to sound like Mary Poppins, “books, books, everywhere.”

  Mr. Abasi stared at her skeptically. Then he set down the book, put his lunch bag on top, scratched his neck, and looked off searchingly into the saffron light, as though trying to discern, on the flat horizon, the makeshift, mirage-like gathering of souls—the settlement of Those Rooted in Dust—which was, to his obvious and immense regret, their day’s destination.

  The Grandmother

  NEEMA WATCHED HER GRANDDAUGHTER RISE AND SASHAY through the shadows of their hut, her body a long blade of grass that swayed in time to a private breeze. Kanika settled her necklace and earrings. “I’ll get your chai, Nyanya,” she murmured. “And take out the goats before I go to Matani. You can move a bit slower this morning.”

  Neema reached to smooth her granddaughter’s hair. “Up this early, with the air this dry, you’ll be a wilted leaf by evening.”

  “This evening? I’ll be like a fresh-fed calf,” Kanika said as she stepped outside, dismayingly cheerful.

  Neema shook her head. She still couldn’t quite fathom how Kanika’s demeanor had changed so radically over these last few months. Neema loved Kanika like a bowl of water at the end of a thirsty month, no matter what her disposition; after all, the girl had saved her life. But she couldn’t deny that she missed the days when Kanika had been as moody as a pregnant bush pig. There’d been power in the moodiness. It was for that girl of tough volatility that Neema had hopes. It was for that girl that she’d screamed at her dead husband’s brother Elim—may the wind eat him—when he, dreaming of the bride price, had pressed for Kanika to be married at age thirteen. “A hibiscus on a vine, a clam in a shell, and my granddaughter—all have nothing to do with you!” she’d said.

  And though she’d sounded brave, that had been a risk. Neema knew she held a unique position in Mididima. As a widow who had successfully managed her dead husband’s herds, she was often permitted to participate in discussions over grazing and resettlement decisions. Still, if Elim had chosen to fight her about Kanika’s future, tradition and the neighbors would have supported him.

  Neema spit on her palms and flattened the hair at her forehead, sighing. She’d told herself many times that she shouldn’t be anything but pleased to find Kanika adjusting to life’s expectations. At age fifty-six, she knew what it cost to spend years chafing against restraints others didn’t even seem to notice. The journey was always easier, after all, for the beast that wore blinders. That had been her own mother’s argument, though Neema had never been able to live by it.

  Kanika returned, bringing Neema a cup of chai. She was humming. Humming! This was too much. Her granddaughter of spicy temperament, who had resisted the idea of being tamed before ever being untamed: where in the name of a camel’s ass had that feisty spirit gone? Neema could feel something painful welling up within her. She didn’t want to raise another one who compromised too easily. She took the cup her granddaughter offered and motioned for her to sit. It was time for something radical.

  “I’ve never told you,” she said, “about my kutairi.”

  Kanika cringed and grinned at once. “Nyanya, circumcision doesn’t seem the topic for this morning—”

  “I kept it from you,” Neema spoke over Kanika, “but now you should know. It was my twelfth year. I’d heard of the custom before, of course. But I’d never thought of it in connection with myself. They came to me. Told me my time was two days away.”

  Neema felt hot just thinking of it. She dipped her fingers in a tin pot holding about two inches of water, and dampened her cheeks.

  “Maybe later we could—”

  “I want you to hear now,” Neema said firmly. “I remember looking to my mother, hoping for help. But do you know what it is to have lost the ability to imagine life differently? That was my mother. So I fled. What else could I do? On the other hand, I was still a child. I only went to my aunt’s home. From there, they dragged me back, though not before a cousin whispered of a certain rock that would change me into a boy if I sat atop it overnight.”

  “A rock?” Kanika’s eyes went merry.

  “There is magic in the earth, don’t doubt it.” Neema shook a finger.

  “But, Nyanya, it didn’t work,” Kanika said, her voice still teasing.

  Neema took a sip of warm chai, remembering how she’d found the boulder, perched on it, and begged to the moon as it rose. “In fact,” she said, “I became half man that night. Only it was the wrong half. Outwardly, I still looked a girl.” She scooted closer to Kanika, touching her knee. “The next day, they held me down and hewed away at my private flesh with a broad-bladed knife before covering the mangled mass with a leaf.”

  Kanika looked into her cup, shuddering slightly.

  “I had to be propped up to make it home,” Neema said. “My relatives began feasting on a slaughtered goat—such a celebration!—while I lay bleeding, half-delirious. Three days later, my wound filled with pus.”

  Kanika put a hand to her stomach. “Nyanya—”

  “My mother was a good woman,” Neema went on. “But she couldn’t see that we didn’t have to be cut like this. Or perhaps she lacked the courage to say no. Your mother—forgive me for saying it, but take it as a warning—lacked courage too.”

  Kanika stood and went to the door.

  “Kanika, I say it for your own good,” Neema said, rising too. “Dahira was my daughter, don’t forget. And you know I almost didn’t survive when she was killed. She was much sweeter than me; I’ve told you that too. But she married too soon, and became docile too soon. And what is hardest, she died without knowing more than”—Neema gestured out the door—“this.”

  “I know more. Already, I know more.”

  Neema touched the rim of her cup to her lower lip, sipped. They stood silently looking out the door. Soon, Neema knew, the strangers—or not quite strangers anymore, but at least not neighbors—would appear like distant dots, and slowly swell until they became three camels, three dark men of Africa, and one pale foreign woman. Heat rising from the cracked earth would blur their forms until they reached Mididima, where, finally in focus, they would spread grass mats onto a tiny spill of tree shade and unload their treasure. Then nearly everyone would toss aside the daily chores to gather. Perhaps even Abayomi’s son, poor, feared Scar Boy, would again venture out of his home long enough to wrap his arms around a book, although with him it was difficult to know.

  Neema’s brother-in-law Elim walked by, brushing his teeth with a stick from the miswak tree, his oversize head floating above scrawny shoulders. “Women,” he said. “Why do you linger at your door?”

  “Thinking,” Kanika answered boldly. “Of the books that come today.”

  “Books.” Elim spit out the side of his mouth. “Matani should have stayed away, instead of trying to drag the Distant City here. We don’t belong with that world. It will treat us like dung if we let it. It would wipe us out if it could. We don’t want it.”

  “I do,” Neema said.

  Elim glared harder at Neema. “Then you are unspeakably misguided,” he said. “If my brother were alive, he’d die to see you wasting good daylight peering at paper. You’re better off spending your time teaching your granddaughter how to build houses, or telling her our stories.”

  “I’m bored by the old stories, Elim,” Neema said. “They stick in my throat; so go ahead and put me to death. And please, do it this week, if I must squander the rest of my days on nothing more than helping girls learn to patch together twigs and camel dung.”

  She gave him, then,
what she knew the neighbors called her “corpse gaze,” mouth flat as the horizon, eyes distant and unfocused. This well-worn trick of hers, perfected at an early age, infuriated Elim, just as it had infuriated her husband, and her mother before him. Elim’s last comment came as spit from over his shoulder.

  “Lines and curves carved onto paper are meaningless to us,” he said. “Worse than meaningless. The hours you waste staring at pages—that, Neema, is a rotten sin.”

  “Yes, good morning, Uncle Elim,” Kanika muttered under her breath as he left. She reached for Neema’s empty cup, but Neema refused to release it.

  “You remember learning to read?” Neema asked.

  “Of course.”

  “The first sentence I taught you?”

  Kanika grinned at her grandmother as if she knew what was coming. Very well, then, let her hear it again. And again and again, until Neema could be sure it stuck.

  “A chicken’s prayer doesn’t touch the hawk,” Kanika recited.

  “And that means—”

  “I’m to be a hawk, I guess, instead of that feebleminded chicken,” Kanika said, grinning.

  Neema rested her palm briefly on Kanika’s cheek and then let her leave. How lucky that her early reading lessons with Kanika had centered on wise sayings and the Bible. Of course it was only because she hadn’t known of anything more, in those days.

  She felt ashamed to admit that until the Camel Library came, she’d thought the Bible was the only book of stories in existence. Never in a lifetime of moons would she have imagined there were so many books, with firm outer skins of bright colors, and flexible innards so full of flavor that she liked to touch her lips to the pages as if to drink. Mr. Abasi, the librarian from the Distant City, told her in his tone of a man with a bug in his nose that of course there was a word to describe these objects. She surely had heard it before, he said. Vitabu.

  And she had. Vitabu. But she thought it stood only for the long, pretentious statements tribal leaders issued against one another, statements less important than the sand beneath her toes. Or perhaps the dull, studious tracts that she imagined Matani and his father read in the Distant City. She never knew vitabu could hold so much variety, so much beauty, so many made-up tales more real than her own life. And so many women. Women who revealed and confirmed and challenged and comforted at once. Women who were like her in some essential way, some even as old, though their outward circumstances were unimaginably different.

  In another moment, she knew, she had to go cultivate. She sat anyway, and opened the book she would have to return today in exchange for another. A story about a widow living near an ocean in America who is told she has only a few months left to her.

  No living soul knew it, but in the months before the book-bearing camels first materialized, jutting up from the desert floor like thirst-inspired hallucinations, Neema herself had begun to feel Old Woman Earth waiting to claim her. Her bones seemed to grow heavy beyond her years. Her memory became a frayed and dangling thread, often distorted. Moments from childhood seemed fresher than those from a week ago.

  One night she dreamed of floating above Mididima. It was a moving day, with the tribe packing up to resettle in another place. Animals were grumbling, tin pots clanging, beaded necklaces swinging; and she was above, her arms pointing down to the neighbors with whom she’d lived all her adult life. A group of women, some dead, others still living, walked one behind the other, chanting from a place deep in their throats. She’d watched a moment, and then glided on to the seaside where she’d been born and spent her childhood, where her mother had been buried. She sank to the circle of seashells she’d made to mark her mother’s grave and found them remarkably, impossibly, still in place.

  A woman approached, and though she looked paler and heavier, Neema knew it was her mother. First, the woman carried the same Bible her mother had given Neema shortly before she died. And second, when the woman got closer, she smiled, opened her mouth, and burped. It was scentless, virginal, resonating—exactly the sort of belch Neema’s mother always had been able to produce at will. When Neema was tiny, her mother had used this skill to amuse her. Later she’d told Neema her burps served a larger purpose. They were meant to demonstrate that grasping a thing too tightly, even something she loved, would crush the life from it.

  Later, after Dahira was killed, Neema remembered her mother’s words, and worried that, though with good intention, she’d tried to grasp her own daughter too tightly. As a child, though, and unburdened by such concerns, Neema, who always giggled when her mother belched, giggled even more at this attempt to justify and exalt that act. Even in the dream, Neema had chuckled, and her own laughter awakened her.

  But the laughter quickly faded. She understood the meaning of her dream right away, and felt something dry up inside like a root ripped from the ground. Not yet. Those two words swelled up from somewhere below her heart. She was too young. She wasn’t ready to join her mother and daughter. She had more to do, though she wasn’t sure what. And she couldn’t yet leave Kanika.

  A plea was pointless, though. The day a monkey is destined to die, Neema knew, all trees turn slippery.

  And then the camels came. Kanika saved her life first, but the books saved it the second time—that was certain. The library returned her to a last breath of youth, days ripe with hope and possibility. When she sank into a page and heard the others’ voices, music began within again, the tripping rhythm and beat that carried all life forward. No matter if her neighbors stirred and grunted and complained. The stories were her lifeblood—the stories and Kanika.

  As she closed the book and rubbed the callused feet she would be standing on all day, she made a private vow. She would tend the crops, yes, and gather and carry and cook and build. But then, with whatever time she had left, until life was taken from her, Neema would touch more pages; she would encounter there more of those far-flung sisters; she would listen to them whisper the unuttered words of her heart.

  The Teacher

  BIRDS DARTED OVERHEAD WITH A SURPLUS OF ENERGY AS though fueled by the undercurrent of excitement running through Mididima. Or perhaps tension was more accurate. Inside Matani’s house, his wife—her musical voice strained—was complaining again: the same old topic, the one that troubled the tribe’s elders as well. The Camel Bookmobile.

  Even in the midst of her irritation, though, it could not be denied that she was a stunning woman, with breasts that smiled up at her face and legs of a panther and eyes as welcoming as water in the Kaisut Desert. Despite, or maybe because of, this beauty, Matani sometimes thought, though briefly, that she had not been the right choice for a teacher’s wife.

  If only he could have wanted someone plainer who would not have felt so free to find fault. Or maybe someone with education who would have understood. Although what woman from Nairobi would have come back here with him? He did not deceive himself into believing that he was, after all, as good-looking or charming as that. He was lucky to have won Jwahir’s heart. She was twenty-seven years old, nine years younger than he. She had delayed marriage much longer than other girls of Mididima, but not because there hadn’t been offers. Many of his peers would have gladly wed her. He’d been the one to win her, and he still found that remarkable.

  “These books of yours,” Jwahir was saying, “are too foolish, even for the children.” Matani managed—just—to stop himself from interrupting to clarify that the books were not actually his. “Kanika translated one for me.” Jwahir pronounced the next words in slow, stilted English. “A cat. On. A hat.” She shook her head, then switched back to her own language. “If such a book held facts for how to hunt a leopard, then perhaps—although even then, it’s better for the knowledge to pass from father to son. But a book about a creature who, what? Sits on a head covering?”

  “In a hat,” Matani said absently, distracted by Jwahir’s mention of father and son, wondering if it was off-handed, or intentional, perhaps a subtle female way to show that her deepest desire matched his o
wn. Too late, he realized that he had corrected his wife, so he leaned closer, reached for her shoulder, hesitated, and stroked the air above it. “It’s only because I am a teacher,” he said apologetically.

  His beautiful Jwahir glared. An apology had never been enough to soothe her temper. And on this topic of the Camel Bookmobile, she routinely displayed more thorns than the acacia.

  “On or in doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s a story from the space between one’s teeth,” Jwahir said. “But the true ones are yet worse. I saw a book with pictures of what they called food. Food? How can they call that food? It is we, Matani, who should be teaching them what is important—not the other way around. Even the colors were unimaginable. And the lists of ways to prepare them—pshhh!” She pursed her full lips, almost as though she were readying for a kiss, though her irritated wide-open eyes made it clear that love, unfortunately, was not on her mind.

  “Recipes,” Matani said, using the English, since his tribe had no word for them.

  Jwahir ignored him. “How many separate foods are wasted to make one?” she asked, and waited a moment to see if he would be foolish enough to try to answer. “Ten, sometimes fifteen. How much time is spent on such a project? A full morning? More?” She opened her palms to the ceiling, her shapely fingers extended. “What use is such a book, when maize mixed with camel blood and baked over an open fire is a treat for us?”

  Wistfulness had slightly softened her indignant tone, and Matani slipped into that opening. “Perhaps the books’ gifts are in what they let us imagine,” he said.

  He considered, then, telling her everything he believed about the sole topic besides her that made him passionate. How the Camel Bookmobile offered the only chance of survival for this collection of half-nomads with only one toehold in the future. How the children had to make friends of written words if they were ever to have prosperous grandchildren. How until the books came, he hadn’t really felt himself to be a teacher—his only supplies, after all, had been a few pencils, which quickly disappeared, and not even any paper. But now he knew he could do it; he could help create a generation in which, instead of one man going off to study in Nairobi—as his father had done first, and he second—there would be ten, or twenty, who would then return to help their people. He didn’t hope to be remembered as a father of his tribe, nothing so grandiose as that. He wanted to be thought of simply as one who helped shape the future and encouraged his people’s dreams, like a father who would teach his own sons. And for that, the traveling library was crucial.