Somebody's Heart Is Burning (30 page)

Several times throughout that long, achy night, as I lay curled in my sleeping bag on the lumpy sacks, I heard Touré imitating me to his cadre of rapt geezers.

“We could have saaaaved him! Oooooh, we could have done something!” Touré yowled in a weepy falsetto, while his audience howled with laughter.

Finally, as the sky began to gray, I’d had enough.

“What’s funny, Touré?” I shouted across the expanse of sleeping bodies. “What’s the joke? A man died. A human life.”

“You are right,” he said somberly. “Sorry.”

As I lay back down I heard him cooing, very softly, “a huuuuman liiiiiife.”

When I finally slept, I dreamed of the deaf man. I was wandering through an American supermarket when I heard his cry. Over and over it came. I tore through the aisles, frantically searching. The sound seemed to be coming from behind some cereal boxes. I ran to the shelf and began to pull the boxes off, trying to get to him. Uncooked grain spilled from the fallen boxes, littering the floor. But behind each brightly colored row there was another line of boxes in sleek primary colors, each a different brand. Santana was beside me, piling a cart high.

“You are wasting so much food,” she said, as I flung the boxes to the ground. Then I saw that they weren’t cereal boxes but brightly colored spiral notebooks.

The cry began to recede, and I ran down another aisle, trying to find its source. As I ran, the aisles of the supermarket became a maze of narrow dusty streets. With each passing moment, the cry grew fainter and more desperate. I knew that I had to find him, that time was running out. I kept tripping over piles of wet notebooks, catching myself, barreling on. Just when I thought I’d found him, I came smack up against a blank mud wall.

I woke to activity. All around me people were untying bundles and unpacking bags, draping clothing and papers across the tall grass to dry in the early morning sun. The air was still cool, but in direct sunlight the heat of the impending day was beginning to show its teeth. I went in search of my backpacks, which I’d dropped behind a low bush. When I finally found them, Touré was right there, standing guard. His own belongings were there, too, spread across the bush to dry. They included a shirt, a pair of pants, and his current “commerce”: three pairs of women’s shoes and twenty or thirty sample-size bottles of perfume.

“You’ve got to be more careful of your things,” he berated me. “You should have kept them next to you when you slept. Your
friend
should have advised you.”

“Oh come on, Touré. Who wants my soggy backpacks? No one’s gonna steal after this kind of tragedy.”

“Oh, please!”

Ignoring him, I opened my pack. I spread my belongings across the grass, shaking out clothes and fanning pages, opening pill bottles to see what had crumbled and what was intact. A picture of Michael was stuck face-to-face with one of my father. When I separated them, some color from my father’s clothes had stained Michael’s face. Freud would have had a field day.

A few dunes away, a hubbub arose. The sound of shouting and slaps broke the morning calm. Touré and I hurried over to see what was happening. We navigated the low dunes awkwardly, our sandals catching in the tangled shrubbery and sinking into the sand.

When we arrived on the scene, the whole population of the boat was there. Yaya stood at the edge of the group, shouting for order.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“They say that man stole clothing from people’s luggage. They want to beat him.”

At the center of the group stood a skinny old man in a threadbare
bou-bou.
Several women were holding his arms, shoving him roughly back and forth. They were wiry women in their thirties and forties with weathered, careworn faces. They shouted in piercing tones, shaking his shoulders with their stringy, muscular arms.

“I told them they must let me speak to the man first,” Yaya continued, “to find out why he did it.”

He tried again to speak to the women, but his voice got lost in the din.

“What makes them think he did it?” I shouted.

“The women noticed things were missing. They started opening bags to search. They found the missing items in his bag.”

“Then they are right!” yelled Touré. “He is a thief. We must beat him and throw him in the water.” He shoved his way toward the center of the group, shouting and waving his arms.

“No!” Yaya pushed through the crowd. Standing at the center, he gained the group’s attention with a piercing whistle, then dropped his voice and began to speak.

Touré interjected angrily. Some people cheered their support for Touré, but others shouted them down. When the noise subsided, Yaya continued. His dignified demeanor seemed to command respect.

The old man stood a bit to one side, his blue-gray turban half-unraveled and hanging down his back. As the argument continued, he stared at the ground. His face showed neither hope nor dread, but a kind of dull resignation, as though he were waiting in a soundproof chamber while a jury decided his fate.

Eventually Yaya prevailed. Holding the crowd at bay with sharp words and an outstretched hand, he led the old man over the crest of the dune and out of sight.

The two men were gone over an hour. At first people waited angrily, shouting and gesticulating with barely contained violence. One man grabbed another by the shoulders and shook him. I was convinced a fight would erupt, until they burst out laughing and fell into an embrace. After a while, people began to drift away. The women went first, returning to check on the children and prepare rice for the afternoon meal. Soon the men followed, wandering away in twos and threes, deep in conversation. By the time Yaya and the old man reappeared at the tufty crown of the dune, Touré and I were all that remained.

“Well?” said Touré, leaping to his feet.

“It will not happen again,” said Yaya. Touré was about to object, but Yaya continued rapidly, raising his hand as though fending off a blow. “The women have their clothing back,” he hissed. “Isn’t that enough? Or will you beat him now, by yourself ?”

They stared at each other for a moment, locked in a standoff. Then Touré turned abruptly toward the old man, who took a quick step backward in fear. Touré turned back to Yaya with disgust.

“I will be watching him closely,” he said. “And you too.” He poked a finger at Yaya’s face. “I think I have seen you somewhere before.” He stomped off across the dunes, giving the other passengers a wide berth. The old man slunk away, too, throwing Yaya a small, grateful smile.

“Would they really have beaten him?” I asked Yaya, as we watched Touré’s retreating back.

“People get very carried away when someone has been stealing,” he said slowly. “Often if a thief is caught in the market, he will be beaten to death before the police can even arrive. People work so hard for these things, for nothing. And they will give them to you. But for you to come and take them . . . No.”

I remembered a scene I’d witnessed at the market in Ségou, in which a group of about thirty women had surrounded a woman accused of stealing. They’d pulled off the outer layer of her garments, her body spinning helplessly as the cloth unwound. Then they’d taken off their rubber flip-flops and slapped her with them, the shoes blurring the air like a swarm of flapping wings until the police came and dragged the woman away. I shuddered.

“So why did he do it?” I asked.

“He said he could not help it. God made him do it. I told him God would never do such a thing; it must have been the devil. But he said no—it was God. God whispered in his ear and told him so.”

The day was hot and dry, the pale sun so relentless that even the marsh grass seemed to wilt beneath its gaze. Since there was no bush high enough to offer any real shade, Yaya and I made a tent of a blanket and four sticks and sat under it for several hours, talking. I drank thirstily from my water bottle, which I’d filled the night before with boiled river water. At this point it scarcely seemed worth the effort of purifying it, since I’d downed several glasses of lukewarm coffee which had probably never reached a boil. Still, I persisted. Yaya filled his cup directly from the river like the other passengers.

“I have drunk this water my whole life,” he said, chuckling. “If the creatures in my stomach have not killed me yet, it is unlikely they will do so now.”

Yaya told me that the devil had appeared to him as a teenager on the very day that a white man in Timbuktu had handed him a Bible. As he carried the Bible home through the desert, a man jumped out from behind an acacia bush and blocked his path. The man had red eyes, as if from drinking, and an enormous penis, far bigger than any human’s could possibly be. At first Yaya thought the man had attached something to it, to scare people. Yaya pulled out his curved Tuareg knife, to show the man he wasn’t afraid, but the man just laughed, and the penis darted toward Yaya, like a snake. Then, by some intuition that seemed to come from outside himself, Yaya held up the Bible and said, “Jesus Christ, bless and save me.” Hearing this, the man flew straight up and disappeared, leaving a trail of fire. From that day forward, Yaya was a Christian.

My digestive system was quick to protest the river water. I was squatting in the bush for the third time that day when a small child approached me.

“Ça va? Ça va?”
she murmured.

“Ça va,”
I sighed, putting my head in my hands. I could never get used to African children’s complete nonchalance about bodily functions.

I thought the child would leave now, having cheerfully humiliated me, but instead she tugged at my sleeve, pointing toward the shore. She drew a shape in the air with her hands.

“What?” I said with some irritation. “Another boat?”

Our hopes had been raised and dashed several times that day, as overcrowded
pinasses
passed us, heading back toward Mopti. I’d briefly considered boarding one of them, heading straight back to Mopti and the comfort of a phone line to the U.S., but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt allied with the community of the boat. The thought of carrying this experience back to Mopti alone felt unbearably lonely. Besides, I still wanted to see the fabled city, no matter what shape it was in, and to feel the Sahara’s hot sand between my toes.