No. I’m not pregnant. No. It was probably just a recurrence of the nasty bug I’d had before. Intestinal bugs could mess up the timing of your whole system. I thought of Tricia arriving, all the work I still had left to do, and the goodbyes I would need to say in less than eight weeks. But I was glad to be leaving. Who was I to still be there? To still be anywhere? My arms and legs felt like they were packed with rocks.
If death has come and not yet gone away; you don’t tell it, “I am still here.”
Rubbing my lower belly, I said good-bye to Luc’s house and trudged toward the town square and the office where my desk waited under my screenless window.
Ignoring the desire to sneak into my office unannounced, I made my way through the various offices to say good morning. Djelal was locked behind his door. Adiza, Fati, Nassuru, and Nouhoun grunted reluctant greetings with less than the usual chatter. Jack and Hamidou had already left for the villages.
Fati frowned and pulled at the skin under my upper arm. “You are too thin, Suzanne.”
I shrugged. My appetite gone, I had lost a few pounds. I crossed the courtyard to my office.
It hadn’t been very much fun around the office for the past few weeks. Julie, the VP who had come to evaluate us, had written a report indicating poor management practices in the Upper Volta Office. The director had pointed a finger at everybody else. Djelal was furious. Staff morale was at an all time low. Everybody was complaining. And, get this, after being a guest in my house while in Dori, the VP had reported that my kitchen was unsanitary and that she worried for my health.
“She’s got a lot of nerve,” I said to my fourth generation batlords (or fifth, or sixth, I’d lost count), who still hung in the corner of my office. “I’d like to see her live in the Sahel and keep a spotless kitchen.” I rubbed my abdomen again. “Or clean intestines.”
A copy of VITA News sat on the corner of my desk. VITA had liked my report and would be including a shortened version in their next issue. The edge of a telex peaked out from beneath the magazine. Home Office had yet to find the replacement I had requested several months before. Seemed Upper Volta wasn’t a place very many people wanted to come to. I sighed. The quarterly report was due. The last one I would write. I sighed again. What was the point?
I forced myself to scroll a piece of paper into the typewriter and hit a few keys. More women were using the new stove models, but it would take a long time before they would accept such a newfangled idea. The stoves kept cracking and needed constant repair. But all it took was a bit of mud mixed with water. We had planted over a hundred trees. Not many for a place so big, but a start. The idea to train Rimaybé women in oil production had never taken hold. This was the domain of the Mossi women and would stay that way. The Fulani and Rimaybé women in the villages would continue to travel to the Dori market to purchase peanut oil. Some ideas worked, a whole bunch of ideas didn’t. That, I punched the typewriter keys, was the way of the world.
*
After lunch and a hot, unrestful sieste, I returned around three to find Nassuru sitting in my office. He was smiling, the first smile I’d seen in a while.
“What?”
“I finished the report on our reimbursement rates for the thread loans.”
“And?”
“Eighty percent!”
We shook hands. “Let’s send that piece of good news to the VP.” I’d add that to my report.
We were both grousing about why the VP had focused so much on our problems instead of our accomplishments when a tree branch whipped against the window and the shutter slammed. My papers flew off the desk into Nassuru’s face and scattered across the floor.
“Sandstorm!” Adiza yelled from the courtyard.
Nassuru and I closed up the shutters and doors of our building as the light dimmed inside. When the wind hit, the eves moaned while the tin roof strained against its nails. I imagined myself carried away by the wind, sucked high up into the sky where I would break into a million pieces and fall to earth, my ashes mixing with the sand.
Dust filtered through the shutter slats, coating my papers, face, and hair. My eyes burned. Nassuru sneezed. It was hard to breathe. I thought of Tricia in the small plane, watching with alarm as a wall of sand the size of a ten-story building approached. She had a history of freaky plane incidences.
The wind worsened and the office gloom deepened until Nassuru, sitting a few feet from me, became a gray blob.
Then, silence. Nassuru stood and I followed him out the double doors into the courtyard. The rest of the staff hurried out of the second building.
Above us, the sun was a blood-red moon, the sky rusted over with clouds of sand. Only four in the afternoon, it was as dark as dusk. An eerie stillness settled around us, a muffled quiet as though our ears were plugged.
“The center of the storm.” Nassuru squinted at the sky.
Djelal joined us.
“What will happen to the plane?” I twisted the fabric of my skirt.
“They will turn back,” Djelal said. “As soon as they see a storm, they turn around and go back to Ouaga.”
We all looked up at the dull orange ball of the sun.
“Will it rain this time?” I scanned the horizon. There was nothing but red haze.
Nassuru shook his head. “Some are saying there is a curse on Dori.”
“Why a curse?”
Nassuru lifted his slender shoulders in a shrug. Djelal frowned.
“Maybe today it will rain,” I hoped aloud.
The eye of the storm passed and the wind whipped up again, forcing us all back into the buildings. Fifteen minutes later, it died. A rumble came from far away and I hurried out. The scent of rain ran on the edges of a breeze. But the thunderheads moved to the east, once again emptying over the lands outside of Dori.
I sat on the ground in the courtyard. Far out on the horizon, the clouds billowed out their tops while their flat underbellies fell in gray lines to the earth, as if spread by a giant comb.
“Damn.” I wanted to cry, disappointed beyond the loss of a rainstorm. “This land is cursed.” The people never got past minimal survival, the crops burned, the water dried up, babies died in the night.
I had come back to Dori one too many times.
Adiza hurried out the door, saw me, and came over. “The radio says the plane turned back. They’ll come tomorrow.”
The Land Cruiser came through the gate and into the courtyard. The market square reawakened with voices and bleating animals as Hamidou and Jack stepped out of the truck. A red film covered both of them, and sand trickled in small streams from the hood of the car down to the ledges below the doors.
Jack beat dust from his trousers. “One hell of a storm!”
Hamidou lifted the hood and bent into the bowels of the truck.
Jack came to crouch beside me. “Any news of the plane?”
“Tomorrow.”
He smiled. “Good. Come over for dinner. Moses is making mashed potatoes and meatballs.”
Meatballs and mashed potatoes and one more night with Jack before Tricia arrived. I said yes, forcing a smile of enthusiasm. Normally, the idea of eating Moses’s cooking cheered me right up. But my gut was heavy and I hadn’t shared my concern over my late period with Jack—kind of a damper on the idea of one more romantic evening together.
I asked Hamidou for a ride home.
He nodded and let the hood fall shut. A small avalanche of dust cascaded off the car.
We drove down the narrow street behind the office, past five blocks of compound walls, and skirted the edge of town.
“Hamidou?”
“Oui, Suzanne.”
“Nassuru told me there’s a curse on Dori.”
He nodded. “Some are saying so.”
We passed Gray’s house with its wide gate, turned the corner, and drove by the empty lot next to my compound. Six camels stood tethered against the high fence. Hamidou stopped the truck. I climbed out and walked around to the driver’s side wind
ow.
“Do you believe there’s a curse?”
Hamidou smiled at me. His sharp features were so familiar, the peaceful set of his face so comforting, as though he understood why life was so hard, why babies died. He accepted it and still found joy in life. The thought of saying goodbye to him emptied out my insides.
“Ne t’inquiet pas, Suzanne.” Don’t worry, he said. “It will rain tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the next day. Ensha’allah.”
I blinked hard. Hamidou smiled again, and, with a nod, backed up, then turned the corner toward town. I stood outside my gate and watched the dust settle into the street. I blinked again. A tear tickled the side of my cheek and under my chin. A sudden image came, an image so familiar it wrenched my heart. Dorothy stood on tiptoe, hugging Scarecrow goodbye and whispering, “I’ll miss you most of all.”
Another tear slipped out. I had watched that scene on TV a hundred times in my childhood; but it was only in that moment that I finally understood it.
Chapter 27
The Oasis
May/Jumada al-Akhira
Morning sun seared my arm through the car window and spilled hard-edged light across the laps of Tricia and Adiza. Jack rode shotgun, his arm draped across the back of the front seat. Floods from eight months before had carved the road into a washboard that shook my intestines and rattled my teeth. I closed my eyes, exhausted from a hot night of little sleep, and hoped the bumps would shake my period loose.
Out beyond the plain, there was no horizon to delineate heaven from earth, only a slight shift in hue from brown haze to beige. Gueno had sucked the earth so dry the top soil had baked into cracker-sized squares of hard dirt. They lay across the plain like God’s own trillion-piece jigsaw puzzle.
When Mamadi rescued Sia Jatta Bari from Bida Bida, the dragon cursed the people and their land. For seven years, seven months, and seven days Wagadu remained without its golden rain.
Tricia squirmed next to me. “Sweat is literally pouring down my back.” She leaned forward and, sure enough, a wet line ran from the top of her T-shirt to the base of her spine.
I peeled it away from her skin and flapped the material to air-dry her back. “I told you not to come until next month.”
Adiza turned away to look out the window. Jack cleared his throat and drummed his fingers on the front seat. Hamidou drove. Tricia had done it again—come to visit during the hottest time of the year. The first time was understandable—she had never experienced the heat before and didn’t know any better. But the second time only proved my long-held suspicion that my sister’s brain was disconnected from the rest of her body.
She hadn’t stopped complaining since she’d landed in Dori two weeks before.
“Are we almost there?” she whispered to me.
Adiza clicked her tongue.
To be fair, everyone was complaining. The mar had been empty since February. Fresh fish and eggs were a distant memory on the tongue. The grass was gone and the cattle had wasted into pitiful creatures. Their bones protruded their hides like poles propping up droopy tents. The water level of the wells had fallen so low, what came up in the buckets was gritty and stained red.
Everyone waited for the rain. But the clouds continued to bypass Dori. The curse, an impenetrable dome of dry air, pushed away the clouds and intensified the sun. I could hardly remember the taste of rain. My skin cried for it, for the luxury of sky-cooled water on my face.
The only patch of land still green was the oasis, fed by some miraculous stash of water below the surface. No bigger than a few acres, it shone like a tiny emerald held in the dry palm of the desert. Up ahead through the windshield, a watery vision of green wiggled in the heat waves.
“There it is. The oasis.”
Tricia squinted and sneezed.
We drew closer, parting the waves of heat, and the lines of the oasis solidified into thirty-foot palm and eucalyptus trees. Small figures moved from green shadows into sunlight.
Jack pointed. “The women are carrying water to their gardens from the well.”
Jack had made a valiant attempt to charm Tricia since her arrival, but was at the point of giving up. A small war had been silently declared between the two of them. Both wanted my time and attention, neither was getting very much.
Hamidou steered the truck off the road into a grove of palm trees. Relief fluttered through the car, a butterfly of a sigh that landed on each shoulder. We clamored out of the hot truck and into the verdant, wet perfume of the oasis, like stepping from death into life. As we walked toward the gardens, the shaded air cooled the sweat on my face and arms.
A row of sunflowers stood in a line like yellow-bonneted hostesses welcoming us to the lush gardens. The women of the nearby villages had been able to plant their gardens while the rest of the villages waited in vain for the first rains. At the center of the oasis, a green and brown checkerboard of plots spread across an open field.
“Wow,” Tricia breathed. “It’s a different world.”
I led Tricia to the edge of a plot where rows of green budded out of the ground. “That first row is niebe, black-eyed peas. Those are arachides, groundnuts, then gombo, okra, petits pois…”
“Peas,” Tricia said. “And corn.” She pointed to the last several rows of stalks.
“That’s millet,” I said. “The staple crop.”
Adiza walked among the women, and Jack crouched at the well to examine a pedal attached to the base of the new pump. A small boy pumped the pedal with a bare foot, and a steady stream of clear water flowed out of the spout. A little girl who was first in a long line of women held her bucket to catch the flow. As the water neared the top, the second woman in line placed her bucket beneath the girl’s to catch the water as the girl took her pail away.
The women chattered like a morning flock of rice birds as they stood in line and carried full buckets to different corners of the field. There, they carefully portioned out tin cans of water to each plant. Another young boy ran up to take his turn pumping the foot pedal.
Jack asked questions in French on how the pump was working and Hamidou translated. There was much nodding of heads and more chatter. My gut cramped and I felt lightheaded. I tugged Tricia’s arm and we walked to the edge of the gardens to sit in the shade of a palm tree.
“Be careful not to get overheated.” I settled myself against the trunk. “Drink lots of water.”
Tricia emptied the water bottle then watched Adiza, Hamidou, and Jack. “How’s it feel to be leaving soon?”
I rested my chin on my knees. “I’m ready. But I’ll miss a lot of people. Especially Hamidou and Laya.”
Nearby, a tall woman bent to pour a can of water onto a spindly plant. She gently pinched off a dead leaf and worked the soil around the bottom into a bowl shape to keep the water from trickling away. My eyes teared. That’s what Laya had done for me. She had taken care of me, kept me alive, pinched off my loneliness, and helped me grow. I never would have made it two years in Dori without Laya. And now I was about to leave her in a dried up place where her children’s future extended as far as the walls around Dori.
“She said she’d come with me to the States the other day.”
“She did?”
I nodded.
“What about her kids?”
“She said she’d take the two youngest and leave Aissatou and Issa with her husband.”
“You think she meant it?”
“Laya usually doesn’t say something unless she means it.” Unlike me, opening my mouth and saying stuff like I wish I could taker her home with me without thinking. “Though it’s hard for me to believe she’d leave any of her kids.”
“Will you?” Tricia looked at me.
“I don’t see how I can. I don’t even know what I’m going to do when I leave here.”
A bright colored bird flew from the top of one palm tree to another.
“What are you going to do?”
I lifted my head off my knees. “I just told you, I don’t
know.”
“I thought you were coming home with me after we traveled.”
“I’m not sure I want to go home yet. I might have a chance at a job in Somalia.” I still hadn’t heard back from Don.
“Somalia!”
I sighed.
“Isn’t it kind of nasty there? I mean, wouldn’t that be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire?”
I shrugged. “If Don writes back and offers me a job, I’ll want to take a side trip to Mogadishu while we’re in Kenya.”
“What’ll I do if you do that?”
“When is Bob meeting us in Nairobi?”
“A week after we get there.”
“I’ll wait until he arrives. The two of you can have a little reunion honeymoon while I’m in Mogadishu.”
“Well,” she paused. We spoke the next few words in unison. “Dad won’t be happy about that.”
A cramp bit through my lower abdomen, and I sucked air through my teeth.
“What’s the matter?” Tricia frowned. The crease between her eyebrows had made a comeback and was now a permanent furrow on the landscape of her face. “You know, I haven’t wanted to mention this, but, you aren’t looking too good.”
“Something’s wrong with my gut.”
“Like what?”
I hesitated. “Cramps, nausea, constipation. And I’m a little tired.” I knew the next question was coming before it was out of her mouth.
“When was your last period?”
“Look, Tricia. I’m not pregnant. I’m on the pill. It’s just some kind of parasite or something.”
“Pills can fail. When was your last period?”
I shrugged. “Around four weeks or so.” Five weeks and six days to be exact.
“What if you’re pregnant?”
“I’m not pregnant.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” I looked at her sideways, “I’d just know. Wouldn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t know.” She looked hard at me. “I’m the one who can’t get pregnant, remember?”
Crickets chirped in the shadows of the oasis. Two little girls chased each other between the rows, singing an up and down ditty. I wanted to be one of them.
In the Belly of the Elephant Page 22
