Somebody's Heart Is Burning (31 page)

The girl continued to tug at my sleeve. Sighing, I yanked up my underwear, let down my skirt, and accompanied her back to the shore.

Three
pirogues
had arrived from a nearby fisher camp, offering to transport us to their camp for the night, then onward tomorrow to the village of Aka, where we could catch a new
pinasse.
Word had been sent back to Mopti to send us a replacement boat, but no one knew how long it would take to arrive. The men argued strenuously over what to do. As usual, Yaya and Touré were on opposing sides.

“These men would divide the group,” Yaya explained when he saw me approach. “They say that those who can afford passage on a new
pinasse
should go forward in the
pirogues
, while the rest stay behind and wait for the replacement. I tell them it is not right that some of us should go forward leaving others here alone to suffer. We must remain united. A small group, alone in this place, will be vulnerable to bandits.”

“And I tell him,” blustered Touré, “that it is not right that you, Tanya, must get sick from the river water and burn your skin waiting many long days in the sun!”

“Oh no, please don’t make this about me,” I said quickly.

“You be quiet!” snapped Touré.

Touré’s group won out. As the sun set, I sheepishly loaded my bags into one of two long, narrow
pirogues
, along with sixteen of the boat’s more prosperous passengers. The river glowed rosy orange in the failing light. Several young men from the Bozo fisher camp waited on the shore, jousting amiably with the long poles they used to propel the
pirogues.

Touré pointed at a couple of stout, middle-aged men. “Those two are afraid to go in these
pirogues
,” he chortled. “They’ve never ridden in such small boats, without motors. It is because of them we must take two boats. We could have paid less and all gone in one.”

I was surprised to see the old man who’d been accused of stealing among those who could afford to leave. No one commented on his presence, but I noticed that he made sure not to ride in the same boat as Touré.

Touré climbed into the front of one of the canoes, and I squeezed in behind him. I saw no possible way that all the passengers could have fit into a single
pirogue.

Yaya and I had shared an emotional goodbye, with prolonged hugs and promises to write. I was therefore startled to see him dragging his duffel over the dunes toward the water, just as we were about to push off. As he approached the boat he slipped and fell, covering his hands and knees with mud.

“What’s this?” shouted Touré when he saw him. “You will leave the very poor to suffer alone?”

“I will go forward to Aka and send word to their villages, so that their families will not worry,” said Yaya primly, attempting to brush off his pants with his muddy hands.

“Oh,
please,
” groaned Touré.

Yaya pushed his way onto the seat behind me. The two stout men, who were sitting in the back, grumbled uneasily at the rocking of the boat.

We poled along in silence as the sky slid smoothly toward darkness. My feet sat in freezing water. I slapped them against each other, wiggling my toes to keep them from going numb.

The other
pirogue
glided a few feet ahead of us, its silhouette graceful as a newborn moon. The actual moon hovered pale and plump on the horizon, coating the black water with a silver sheen. Each time I looked up, there were more stars. Touré sat in front of me. Tentatively, I touched his arm.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“What?”

“The stars.”

“Don’t you see them over there, in your place?”

“Not so much in the city,” I told him, “with all the lights.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I heard there aren’t many trees there, either.”

Hours later, I saw eight makeshift shelters glowing pale in the moonlight.

“Tanya,” said Yaya, tapping me from behind. “This is the Bozo fisher camp.”

The shelters were lean-tos, with wooden poles spaced unevenly along the sides, grass mats spread between them, and straw thatch across the top. In the moonlight they looked terribly fragile, as though they’d topple like dominoes if you leaned on one of the poles. In front of each shelter was a circular mud structure with a grate on the top.

“For smoking fish,” said Yaya.

The Bozos had built a bonfire in anticipation of our arrival. After we dragged our
pirogues
from the freezing water, the chief came down to the shore to greet us. He was a middle-aged man, tall and thin, with a deeply lined face and gentle eyes. There was something regal in his presence, an effortless stillness that commanded respect. We stood before him in a ragged, shivering clump, while he spoke a few words of the Bozo language in a formal tone and presented us with an armload of blackened fish. One of the portly men stepped forward, thanked him on behalf of our group, and accepted the fish in the folds of his
bou-bou.
The chief smiled then, looking in my direction.

“Bonjour,”
he said. He asked me, in careful, precise French, where I came from and what I was doing there. Then he turned to Touré and spoke a few quick words of Bambara.

“He says you must eat plenty of fish, because you are a stranger here,” said Touré, “and you do not look well.”

We huddled around the fire, eating delicious fish: crackling outside, succulent within. Touré took enormous bites, shoving almost an entire fish into his mouth at a time. Yaya and I raised our eyebrows at each other.

“Savage,” whispered Yaya, and we giggled conspiratorially.

As we ate, an animated conversation took place between the men. The women and children had bedded down early, a slight distance away. I thought briefly, regretfully, of how disconnected I was from these women. Language limitations and mutual shyness locked me into the company of men. Turning toward the fire, I asked Yaya what the men were talking about.

“He says it is because of God that we are suffering like this,” Yaya translated for me, indicating the plump man who’d accepted the fish for us. “And
he
says no,” he indicated an older gentleman in a deep purple turban. “God gave us the world and free will; we bring about our own suffering.”

In the pale yellow dawn, a very fat, very black woman stood over me, hands on her hips, shouting repeated greetings in the Bozo language.

“Ils sont les vrais Bozos,”
Touré said, “the real Bozos.”

“Les vrais Bozos,”
the woman repeated proudly, a broad smile on her face.

I sat up. In the watery morning light, I looked more closely at the small cluster of huts. Most of them had only three walls. Looking through the open fourth wall, I saw that they contained nothing at all, just grass mats and a few pots piled in the corner. I was used to the essential nature of African homes, but it seemed to me there was usually
something—
a table, a stool, a few clothes on a peg.

“They are nomads, like the Tuaregs,” said Yaya. “Wherever the fish go, that is where they live.”

In spite of myself, a small thrill went through me. This was exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped to see.

The men and older children had taken out the
pirogues
and nets for the day. Women were smoking fish on the round grates. They arranged the fish, then placed reed mats over them until the skin was black and crisp. An adolescent girl was repairing one of the ovens, slapping a layer of wet mud over a layer of dried mud mixed with sawdust, then smoothing it down with her hands. Younger children stood near the shore, fishing. Their homemade poles consisted of sticks with strings and hooks attached.

“I know fishing!” Touré boasted. He approached a toddler and grabbed her stick. “Just watch!” he said to me.

The little girl looked at Touré and then at me. She started giggling, hiding her face in her hands. Touré danced the hook along the surface of the water, repeating, “I know fishing!”

Within moments he had a bite.

“See!” he cried. “I told you I knew fishing!” He yanked the fish from the water.

Touré threw the fish to the little girl. She pulled the hook from its mouth mechanically, never taking her eyes off Touré as the bloody gills popped out. She tossed the fish into a basket where it flopped slowly to its death.

Before we set off again, Touré and Yaya each pulled me aside.

“You know that man you’ve been talking to?” said Touré, dragging me behind one of the shelters. “That
Ya-ya?
I knew his face looked familiar, but I could not place it. Then when he said he lived in Bamako, I realized. My cousin works for the Bamako police. He showed me a picture of a man who lures tourists to his home by acting friendly, then steals their luggage and disappears. It was him! I
know
it was him.”

“Oh, come on, Touré.”

“Come on, what?”

“That is just too paranoid.”

“Was I paranoid about the thieves on the boat? Was I paranoid?”

“You know, Tanya, many Moslems pray to the devil,” Yaya whispered to me as we carried our belongings down the narrow rocky beach to the
pirogues.
“They know God is stronger, but the devil can help them out with small things. Your friend over there, Touré, you see those beads he always carries? He uses those beads to pray to the devil. He told me that when he was in prison, it was the devil who saved him. He said it is because of those beads that he got out.”

“You cannot trust that man. He will steal from you!” said Touré.

“You must be careful of a man who will make a friend of darkness,” said Yaya.

It was the fifth day of our three-day trip.

Late that afternoon we arrived in the village of Aka. White sand beaches gleamed; sun-bleached mud walls hid a maze of narrow streets and houses that seemed to grow seamlessly out of the earth. The town was bookended by two fantastic mosques. Silhouetted against the bright sky, they looked like elaborate sand castles, with their fantastic jumble of coneheaded towers and their wooden pegs sticking out in every direction like the sculpted hairstyles of the women in Accra.

Within a half-hour of our arrival, Touré was in a shouting match with an elderly woman selling firewood from a shack above the beach. The woman, who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, stood surrounded by piles of thick, gnarled branches. Hands on her hips, she answered Touré’s bullying shouts with some shrill scolding of her own. Finally Touré threw up his hands in a gesture of defeat, shaking his head.

“She’s mean,” he said to me. “She doesn’t want to sell the wood at a decent price because she says she can get more from the bigger ships.”

“Well, if that’s her livelihood . . .”

The woman spoke to me in Songhaï, shaking her head.

“She says your husband is mean, but you are nice,” said Touré. “She thinks I’m your husband.”

I smiled at her, pointing to Touré and making a mean face. Her nose appeared to have been ripped open in some sort of accident. It had healed with heavy scarring, leaving the nostril enlarged and oddly shaped. She was striking all the same, with wide cheekbones that made a “V” to a narrow chin, and vivid, sparkling eyes. She reached out and grasped my hand, pulling me to her side.