The Camel Bookmobile

by Masha Hamilton

  There were other issues. The tricky concept of borrowing something that must be returned two weeks later in the same condition, for one. No one could convince him that this policy had been sufficiently explained to these tribal warriors or their wives and children. And the requirement that the library-on-a-camel be available only to permanent, non-nomadic settlements. What did that concept mean, here in the bush? Permanent until the seasonal well ran dry. Permanent until the bandits threatened. Permanent until permanence felt like a chore rather than a choice, until the freedom of a new place proved irresistible to the men of the clan.

  These lines of reasoning he had outlined many times at many meetings with American and British do-gooders as they barreled ahead, devising a way to transport a library across rugged land devoid of modern infrastructure, lining up foreign funding, collecting books. He’d considered it his responsibility to raise these issues, and had expressed himself in a manner that impressed him, at least, as admirably articulate, though he’d tried to keep his pride from being too apparent. Then came the afternoon his boss from Nairobi, Mr. Munyes, bent to whisper in his ear.

  “No one wants to hear from the mouth of a librarian an argument against reading,” Mr. Munyes said. Though his tone was suitably restrained, Mr. Abasi understood that convincing these people to abandon this foolish project, to use the money for something more practical within the library system, would be as likely as teaching an elephant to sing. To continue the efforts might even cost him his job.

  He was not ignorant of the problem of perception that his boss mentioned. On the surface, he knew, his demeanor could seem snappish, his comments peevish. Counter that with Miss Sweeney, who appeared goodhearted and laughed a lot. Mr. Munyes had described her as “charmingly casual.” Mr. Abasi understood this as a reference to the fact that she attended meetings carrying a purple bag and rarely seemed to brush her frizzy hair. She wasn’t like the librarians he’d known in London. She was so much more outspoken and opinionated, and such a strange mix of casual and fervent.

  She’d told Mr. Abasi that she dreamed of “putting something together here that will be bigger than you or me, and that will keep on growing long after I’m gone.” By gone, she meant not dead, of course, but distant from the foul-tasting local food, the uncomfortable sleeping quarters, the lack of privacy. Back to her swimming pools and low-cut gowns and confusing rounds of love affairs—he’d seen the American television shows. Well, he supposed her motivation in leaving all that temporarily behind was admirable, although some days it simply seemed meddlesome.

  But he wouldn’t worry over this further, he decided as they drew into Mididima after a trip that had stretched to more than three hours. He’d insisted on implementing certain rules, and to that at least, they’d agreed. And he’d gone on record with his position regarding the entire scheme. Surely they wouldn’t hold him responsible when the “non-motorized mobile library”—or the Camel Bookmobile, as they dubbed it, the very words making them smile in appreciation of their own cleverness—began inevitably wilting under the midday sun.

  The American

  IT WAS NEARLY NOON WHEN THE CAMEL BRIGADE PULLED UP under Mididima’s acacia, the tallest tree within a mile, beautiful but severe like an elegant woman who’d become too thin. Each time they traveled this lonely route—and this was their ninth visit—Fi was struck by the moment of impact, when the stillness of the journey collided with the commotion of Mididima. Since Mr. Abasi routinely rebuffed her efforts to initiate conversation during these trips, the only sounds she’d heard for hours had been a wet drone of camels breathing and an occasional bird complaining limply of heat or half celebrating a sliver of shade. She’d imagined herself an ancient, isolated nomad, tossed back in time, traveling in a bubble of dust.

  Compare that with the motion and music that ran like a swell through the air as soon as they first caught sight of the acacia looming in the distance, and then a moment later, the settlement itself. Conical huts with thatched roofs sprouted like a cluster of mushrooms atop a table of green and a natural shallow water reservoir, a gift to the eyes after the desert hues of dried blood and wheat. Lemon-colored plastic containers that she knew held extra water stood lined up beneath a ramada. The people of Those Rooted in Dust were already gathering, pulled toward the acacia as if by an unseen puppeteer, followed by their animals—dozens of animals, more goats and camels, it seemed, than people. And cattle too, though most of the cows were raised in the higher lands.

  Once at Mididima, Fi could not even dismount for the first few minutes. The ripple of excitement gave way to a flood that surrounded them and spiraled them into its center. This, she imagined, was what an athlete must feel on the shoulders of his teammates after the winning goal. The exhilaration, the thrill, the certainty that one would be young and strong forever.

  “Jambo,” she said in greeting to one after another as the men set up the three-walled tent, spread grass mats, and laid out the books. “How are you, how are you?” the four- and five-year-olds called in singsong voices, running up to take her hand. Their local dialect was an obscure language she’d never heard of before, but they practiced their English and she practiced her Swahili, which most of them knew.

  So thin, they were all so thin, and she noticed it still, but it didn’t scare her as it did at first. She used to think their hold on life must be as threadlike as their bodies, but she’d lost that sense, perhaps because they seemed so alive and because, here in Mididima at least, they never gave a sign of thirst or hunger, and they laughed more often than not.

  Kanika, the girl, was among the first to push close. Her smile claimed much of her narrow face. She braided her hair against her scalp and three necklaces corded her neck. Not far behind stood the girl’s grandmother, Neema, wearing a brilliant orange scarf, a sky-blue dress, and beaded earrings the size of a boxer’s fist. Fi didn’t immediately see the scarred young man who spoke with his eyes and long fingers. Of course, he was never among the first press of people.

  Mr. Abasi unloaded the lead camel, who seemed to glare at him from under her fringed lashes. The teacher, Matani, helped.

  “Matani! Jambo,” Fi said, and brushed the tips of his fingers with her own. It had become their form of greeting since they’d first met, when she’d reached to shake his hand and missed, touching his fingertips instead as he stretched to lift a box of books. He must have thought the gesture intentional, a strange custom particular to her region of America, because the next time he’d brushed her fingers first. The flare of his nostrils and the thickness of his lips gave Matani a firm and authoritative face. His eyes, in contrast, reminded her of warm cocoa. When he got close, she smelled something pleasantly spicy, something akin to pepper mixed with cinnamon. Now, he wore dark pants, a light shirt, and a metal bracelet around his left wrist.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “We’ve made good use of the books, Miss Sweeney,” Matani said.

  “Call me Fi,” she said, as she always did. “I’ve brought another stack of magazines, and a few more pens and pencils. Plus six books for you. How are they learning, your students?”

  Matani reached out to grab a boy by the arm and spoke to him rapidly before turning to Fi. “Let Nadif show you,” he said.

  Nadif, who looked eight but was probably twelve, held out a hand on which he’d written some numbers in ink. He spoke and Matani translated. “Eight cows,” he said. “Two die from drought. Then four calves come in spring. Next year, half of the remaining cows become mothers, so then you begin all over with fifteen cows.”

  “And, hopefully, lots of milk,” Fi added.

  “That is thanks to the mathematical primer,” Matani said.

  “Yes, thank you too much,” Nadif said.

  “Very much,” Matani corrected. “Too much is in excess, Nadif.” Then he growled playfully at the boy, drawing laughter from both Fi and Nadif.

  “And how is his reading?” Fi asked.

  “His English is coming along. Last time
, he got a book about the Ivory Coast,” Matani said, gesturing to the boy’s arms, where he held the book.

  “Can you read it?” Fi asked, leaning toward the boy. After a pause, Matani translated.

  “Many large words,” Nadif answered in slow English.

  “But we enjoyed the pictures,” Matani said quickly. “And we’re learning the words.”

  Fi shook her head. Most of the books had been donated, and they were not always appropriate. “We need simpler books, don’t we, Matani? And more in Swahili instead of English.”

  Matani grinned. “The boys, you know, won’t take the easy ones anyway,” he said. “And I want them to learn English.”

  “Miss Sweeney,” Mr. Abasi called. “We’re nearly ready.” The grass mat had been spread beneath the acacia, and the books lay in neat rows. Standing stiffly, Mr. Abasi held out the clipboard for her to record the titles that were returned and those to be checked out. A child brought a large pail turned upside down, and Fi sat, clipboard on her lap. Then Mr. Abasi nodded to Matani. As though invisible doors had swung open, the children pressed forward, adults close behind.

  Mr. Abasi was speaking authoritatively—telling everyone, Fi imagined, to line up in an orderly fashion. No one listened. Excited voices rose and fused. Matani slipped among the children, translating titles, reading opening paragraphs, helping them make their choices.

  Fi patiently marked off each returned book, checking its condition briefly under Mr. Abasi’s eye. He seemed to consider this chore beneath him. That amused Fi. She wasn’t the perfect candidate for this kind of task either—in many ways, she often thought, she had become a librarian against the odds, being neither as organized nor as detail-oriented as many of her colleagues. Nevertheless, she enjoyed this particular job in the tiny, scattered tribal communities. She liked knowing which books were being checked out most often, and which were being ignored. And she loved it when these new, unlikely library patrons held out their choices and she looked into their faces and then both her hand and theirs held the books for a breath while she recorded the titles and their names. Even if she was guilty of romanticizing it, the connection she felt to these people at that moment was a key part of what motivated her.

  That, and a childhood memory of her mother and the starving Biafrans.

  When Fi was in grammar school, her quick-tempered widowed mother possessed patience enough to endure only ten minutes of whining from any of her four children before issuing the sharp rebuke: “Saint Brigid of Faughart! What of the starving Biafrans, hey?” If the offending child continued to cry—sometimes, depending on her mother’s mood, if a bottom lip even dared tremble—a brusque pop on the backside could be expected. Fi’s mother always spoke the warning phrase in a slurred rush, with a touch of accent from her native Ireland. Fi knew about Brigid, her mother’s favorite saint—the beautiful daughter of a slave who, legend had it, could cure lepers and turn water to ale. But starvenbeeoffrans were mysterious to her. If she could only discover the meaning of that word, she might at last be able to understand her complicated, baffling mother—a woman who turned up her nose at Irish Catholic charity and worked instead as a “personal secretary” for a scholar in Manhattan about whom she spoke so seldom that he could have been entirely fictional for all Fi ever knew.

  Fi could not find the inexplicable phrase in any dictionary, though—not the one in the classroom, or the one in the school library, nor in the home of her best friend, Lizzie McElroy, who lived down the street in their neighborhood in the Bronx. The only time she dared ask, “And, Mom, what are starvenbeeoffrans?” she received the pop that really should have gone to her little sister—the whiner on that occasion.

  By the time she was in middle school, Fi had developed a whimsical style at home, performing gymnastic tricks or telling corny jokes to try to make her straight-backed, overburdened mother smile. It sometimes worked. Her attempts at closeness, on the other hand, were routinely rebuffed: her mother refused to answer the few questions that her children dared to ask—about her childhood, for instance; or her work; or even their own father, who had died after being struck by a car while walking home late one night when Fi was a toddler. “May you never forget what is worth remembering,” her mother would say, “and never remember what is best forgotten.”

  So Fi continued to wonder, intermittently, about starvenbeeoffrans.

  It took a high school social studies class to teach her who Biafrans were, and then she began hunting down their history at the big mid-Manhattan library branch. For weeks, she was a daily fixture on the fifth floor, round-shouldered at the library’s substantial wooden tables, concentrated as if the Biafrans were a secret she had to uncover to learn at last how to connect with her emotionally distant mother. She read about the Biafrans’ failed rebellion against Nigeria, the political indecision that led to four cities’ being named the capital, the 2 million dead, children roasted alive, young girls ripped in two by shrapnel, and of course the starving—everywhere the starving that her mother must have seen in the newspapers, that prompted her urgings to her own children to buck up.

  Fi’s friends implored her to stop the daily research, but she couldn’t. Eventually, in fact, her interest took her far beyond her mother’s reprimands, driving her teenage cynicism underground for a while and spawning a wild idea: that she should help these Biafrans. She didn’t know how, though. And she recognized, finally, that helping them wouldn’t get her any closer to her mother, who by then had fallen ill, and who in fact died during Fi’s second year of college. Her death marked the last time Fi had ever cried—tears of frustration as well as sorrow, she recognized even then.

  As it turned out, Fi ventured only as far as Europe, in a trip taken one summer after college, and she became a librarian instead of an aid worker. It was the library, after all, that brought her the answer to at least one of the riddles of her childhood, her mother’s mysterious admonition. Besides, she felt embraced by those tall, narrow stacks; she felt nurtured in the library and supplied with information, as she might have felt in her childhood home if things had been different. If her mother hadn’t needed to work so hard, which made her taciturn. If her father had lived instead of being crushed beneath an oncoming car.

  Nevertheless, she dreamed of traveling to Africa. When a posting appeared on a librarian website from a group of American companies seeking someone to work temporarily as a consultant and help start a camel-borne library in Kenya, she almost couldn’t believe it at first. Some god who knew her secret desire seemed to have created a job tailored for her. She applied immediately and would have gone even if her employer hadn’t agreed to give her a leave of absence.

  Kanika was dusting off the books, an endless chore, and reading the back covers as she worked. Sometimes she opened the inside to see if whoever donated the book had written a message—“Greetings from North Carolina” or “Hello from Mark Twain Elementary.” Once or twice, Fi had seen Kanika touch her finger to those written words, though Kanika surely didn’t know where North Carolina was and couldn’t imagine Mark Twain Elementary.

  Kanika always checked out nonfiction and considered her selection carefully, unlike some who chose as though they were on a live game show and had only seconds to pick door number one, two, or three. They often didn’t pause over the title, or even flip through a book looking for pictures. Instead, they judged by color, size, or sometimes scent. Fi had watched them lift books to their noses, sniff loudly, open the pages, inhale again with their mouths open, and then either tuck the book beneath their arms with pleased smiles or return it to the straw mat with crinkled noses.

  “Wilt thou take some chai?” It was Kanika’s grandmother. Neema spoke an odd stilted English influenced by the language of the Bible—thee and thou and verbs ending with est and eth. She extended a cup, which Fi took. In her other hand, she held a paperback novel called Projects for Winter. Fi had read the back cover earlier that week. She knew it was about a woman whose affair goes sour, whose husband divorces
her and wins custody of the children. A modern version of Anna Karenina, apparently. Fi wondered how that story could possibly interest a woman like Neema, even given her fondness for fiction. Fi considered suggesting something else—but no. The ferocity with which the grandmother always made her selections forbade meddling.

  Besides, Fi was convinced that instinct could determine a body’s literary needs, just as physical cravings pointed to dietary shortfalls. She’d experienced it herself more than once among the library’s dense shelves; not knowing what she should read next, she’d wandered, sniffing slightly, palms open. When intuition hit, she felt a sensation she couldn’t describe exactly: her hands seemed to know where to go. And when she reached, invariably she found exactly the book she needed at that moment—sometimes fiction, sometimes biography, sometimes a slim volume of obscure poetry.

  Two young women stood to one side of the grass mat, trying hard to mask their interest in the bustle beneath the acacia. One was lean but well formed with strong arms, her neck and shoulders adorned with yellow and blue beads. The other was rounder, with the heavy, drooping breasts of a nursing mother. Both had a reddish dusty blush painted between their eyes, down their noses, and onto their cheeks, as well as tattoos on their chins—three dark straight lines—that indicated they were married.

  The crowd around Fi was thinning a little, so she turned toward the two women. “Please,” she said, urging them closer to the books.

  The women, aloof, gazed off toward the horizon.

  Fi picked up a book called Baby’s First Five Years. “Help me,” she said to Mr. Abasi. “Tell them this is loaded with simple games for a child’s early development.”