Somebody's Heart Is Burning (34 page)

We arrived at Kabara, the port of Timbuktu, as dusk was falling. We were still about an hour’s truck ride from the city itself. The port was unremarkable, with a long wooden dock and a familiar assortment of colorful, dilapidated boats.

As we made our way off the
pinasse
, I found myself directly behind the old man. He seemed weak on his feet, so I took his arm. Stepping off the ramp, he stumbled and fell to his knees in the shallow water, spilling some of his belongings.

“Oh no!” I cried, “Are you all right?”

He nodded, fumbling around in the water for his things. I tossed my bags onto the shore and crouched down to help. Some ceramic beads had come unstrung; they floated on the greenish brown surface of the water like tiny inner tubes. I fished them out and then spotted a dark lumpy object, partially submerged. It was a woman’s leather shoe.

Timbuktu was founded in the eleventh century by the nomadic Tuareg tribe, who used it as a seasonal camp. A hundred years later, the king of the vast Mali empire laid claim to it. By the fourteenth century, it had become the Port of Africa—the center of trade between northern and sub-Saharan Africa. It was also a center of Islamic education, with more than a hundred Koranic schools and a major university.

Most of the trade at that time was done by camel caravan. From the trading post of Timbuktu, gold and humans were transported north, while salt, cloth, and horses went south. The human slaves, I suspect, were unmoved by the city’s glory.

Ten days after my journey up the Niger began, I walked the streets of that mythical town. Having come with no real expectations, I wasn’t disappointed to find that the once-glittering trade mecca was now a sleepy desert village which was gradually being buried in sand. After all, I’d been forewarned about the extra crunch in the bread baked in the city’s dome-shaped mud ovens. I was even prepared for the guides, who swarmed all over me the moment I stepped outside my hotel room, as promised.

But those who told me there was nothing left of Timbuktu were wrong. Guides aside, the city’s more than 30,000 inhabitants moved noiselessly through the streets in their pale or colorful full-length garments, their faces shielded from the sand and sun by layers of cloth. Their lives took place in those streets, and in the flat-roofed mud houses with their intricately carved, ironstudded wooden doors. These individuals didn’t seem to know that they were living in a ghost town. Contrary to modern mythology, they were definitely not ghosts.

There is a mosque—one of three in Timbuktu—which the locals told me was the oldest in West Africa. It was the third place I’d visited that claimed to be the oldest mosque in West Africa, but the others shriveled in comparison. Originally built in the late thirteenth century and rebuilt many times since, it is located on the western outskirts of Timbuktu, its hulking cone-shaped tower looming above the city’s otherwise flat skyline. Since the mosque is no longer operational, I was permitted to enter. Walking among the pillars of its high-ceilinged chambers, I felt a growing sense of wonder. The silence itself felt old. Like everything else in Timbuktu, the mosque was made of mud, a product of the sand that surrounds it, the same sand which, in the not so distant future, will swallow it whole.

Stacy turned out to be a Bible-thumping blonde from Louisiana. The most endearing thing about her was the way she made the French language sound like a Tennessee Williams play. The least endearing was the condescending tone she took with Yaya. Her pet name for him was “Donkeyhead.”

The last time I saw Yaya was on my third day in Timbuktu. He and Stacy came by my hotel room, and the three of us went together for a camel ride out into the Sahara to visit a Tuareg camp. I’d often dreamed of crossing the Sahara on camel, but that ambition died about halfway into the galumphing forty-minute ride. Major saddle sores.

The desert landscape was less uniform than I’d imagined it. Instead of an unbroken expanse of sand, the rolling white dunes outside Timbuktu were dotted with thistles, patches of grass, and occasional scraggly trees. When we arrived at the camp, I sat on a small dune, writing in my journal, while hard-shelled scarab beetles tottered over and around me. Below me, dome-shaped tents with raffia walls hunkered low to the earth. Golden-skinned Tuareg children with crew cuts and mohawks sat below me in the sand, watching me with avid curiosity. Their knees and elbows were knobby, their bony scalps covered with scabs.

I looked up. Yaya and Stacy were playing in the sand, unrolling his long turban and holding it like a sail in the wind.

“Try not to move,” he said, but they couldn’t do it. Again and again they fell, laughing, to the ground.

I thought of him then, the deaf man. The light in his eyes, the questions he asked. He wanted to know why I traveled.

To see things,
I’d said at the time, but that wasn’t right. I should have said,
To see what else is possible.

I put down my notebook and began to sing, to the tune of “Clementine”:

Rode a camel, rode a camel, rode a camel on the dunes
On the dunes I rode a camel, rode a camel on the dunes.
Kissed a Tuareg, kissed a Tuareg, kissed a Tuareg on the
dunes . . .
Got a heatstroke, got a heatstroke . . .

Still singing, I lay down and flapped my arms and legs against the earth. Grains got in my eyes and mouth. My teeth crunched. My eyes teared. A few minutes later, Yaya came and sat down beside me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Making a sand angel. Where’s Stacy?”

“She’s in the Tuareg tent, shopping for jewelry.”

“I could tell her a thing or two about you,” I said slyly.

He smiled. “But you won’t.”

We looked at each other. I smiled back.

“I miss Touré,” I said, hugging my knees.

“You know,” he said with some surprise, “I miss him too.”

On my last day in Timbuktu, I climbed onto the rooftop of West Africa’s oldest mosque to watch a pale sun set over the Sahara. The rippling sand gleamed beneath it like an ocean of bones. The night air already held a chill.

Two weeks had passed since the day a devout man with cracked feet and glowing eyes had asked me for my shoes. I remembered the disappointment I’d felt when he asked. I’d taken him for an angel, and there he was behaving like a human being. I realized, suddenly, that I’d spent much of my time in Africa befuddled by the notion that if a friend asked me for something, it rendered our entire relationship suspect. But what friendship isn’t a balancing act, an ever-shifting dance of altruism and self-interest? How naïve I’d been, to imagine that
any
human exchange could take place in a vacuum, let alone one between a person with shoes and a person without.

It struck me, then, that the only changes we humans are capable of are small ones. You can beat yourself up for years, wishing you could be kinder, happier, more decisive and secure. And then one day you realize you’ve made a slight shift, moved your inner lens a fraction of an inch to this side or that. Not a whole new self, a remade identity, just a little change in perspective. A loosening, really, an out-breath, a drop of acceptance in the salty ocean of the soul. You haven’t solved everything, maybe you haven’t solved anything, but if you’re lucky, that small shift will be the difference between holding your life in grace and simply holding on.

I knelt and put my forehead to the dusty rooftop in honor of the passenger on our
pinasse
who never reached his earthly destination. I wanted him to know that he’d made a difference on this earth, that he’d touched someone, even if it was only a wandering white girl of questionable faith. He hadn’t gotten a proper send-off on his new journey, so I did my best to give him one now.

“Goodbye, my friend,” I whispered. “Go in peace.”

15

Malaria

If traveling has given me anything, it’s given me this: the ability to float
gently down the river of events—to relinquish control. In Africa, the
boat leaves when it’s full. You might wait an hour; you might wait two
weeks. If you spend that time tipping forward into the future, you sink.
The best thing to do is just to sit on the boat and look around at the
other humans who are sitting there with you. You might discover that
you like the view.

I’ve said it before: Mosquitoes don’t like me. Conversely, I don’t particularly mind them. The same goes for flies, gnats, and other small circling creatures. This simple fact always exasperated Michael.

“Relax into the bugs,” I’d counsel him as we hiked along in some damp, tropical place, a cloud of insects swarming around his head like a dark halo.

“Easy for you to say,” he’d snarl from deep within his swirling aura, his hands flailing angrily at the air.

In spite of Michael’s occasional flings, I never really doubted that he’d wait for me. In my brief romantic history, male partners, once hooked, had been exceedingly devoted, and none more so than Michael. The only question was whether I’d go back to him. In my mind, the equation was simple: Mosquitoes didn’t want me. Boyfriends did.

While working in Ghana, I watched with infinite compassion as one by one my fellow volunteers were laid low by malaria. Behind my compassion was only the smallest hint of triumph. To get malaria, you had to be bitten, and my blood was bitter horseradish to your average mosquito.

At first, I followed the precautions anyway, just to be on the safe side. I dutifully popped my chloroquine and Paludrine and covered up in the evenings, wearing long-sleeved T-shirts and lightweight pants, applying repellent, carefully checking my mosquito net for holes. But as time wore on I became increasingly careless. The repellent was the first thing to go. I hated the hot, sticky feeling of it, like an airtight layer of latex on my skin. Not to mention the smell. The long sleeves went next. Three weeks after my arrival in West Africa, I’d sat on the stone steps of the one-room schoolhouse that was our living quarters in the village of Afranguah, enjoying the delicious whisper of the night air on my bare arms, while my European co-workers sweltered in their long sleeves and jeans, reeking of toxic substances. And still they came down with it, sweating and shivering on their air mattresses in the stifling cement room while the rest of our brigade was out digging and carrying. I never gloated, at least not on the surface, but I considered myself supremely blessed.

After returning to Ghana from Mali, I flew across the continent to Nairobi, Kenya, still malaria-free. I’d gone to Kenya to join Debbie, my best friend since childhood, who’d flown out from the States to meet me for a month. She brought with her a letter from Michael, telling me that he was seeing someone. He still loved me, he said, but he was sick of waiting with no promises, and she was gentle and attentive and, well,
there.
What was he to me, anyway, he asked, a booby prize to come home to when the travels were done? He was tired of feeling like the lunkhead in the corner, staring at the wall while the free-spirited object of his affections danced her way across the globe.

A jolt went through me as I read his letter, but I squelched it. He adored me: hadn’t he said a thousand times that I was the love of his life? The world’s greatest miracle? When I first found out he was sleeping around in my absence, I was wild with jealousy, but I’d since learned not to take it too seriously. I had it from reliable sources that none of his dalliances had lasted more than a couple of weeks. By the time I got home, in a month or two, this one would surely be over, too.

“Enjoy yourself,” I wrote to Michael, struggling to maintain a playful tone, “but don’t commit yet. Your girl will return anon.”

Debbie and I had decided to meet in Kenya long before I left the U.S., at a time when I was hazy on the geography of the African continent. I’d told her that if she’d get herself to Africa, I’d meet her wherever she wanted. Being a visual artist and a nature lover, she chose East Africa: Kenya and Tanzania. A couple of months into my trip, when I’d come to understand that this would not mean a few days on a bus but rather another ultraexpensive plane ticket, I tried to persuade her to come to West Africa instead. No go; her heart was set. She might go to Africa only once in her life, she said. She wanted to see some animals.

Nairobi, with its sleek high-rises and traffic-ridden streets, felt more like New York City than Accra. The people were different too. Still friendly, but much more reserved. Tourism, I supposed, had had its effect. There were no roadside fires in the downtown area, no food stands even, except a lone woman selling pineapple chunks in plastic bags. Very few people wore traditional clothes on the streets, and no one carried anything on her head. Besides all that, there were a lot more white people around.

Nairobi was the first place in Africa where I felt unsafe. Everyone I met there, without exception, had been robbed. When Debbie and I went out for a walk on our first afternoon, the receptionist at our lodge told us to leave our watches and jewelry behind. People could grab them off our bodies as we walked down the street. No long dangling purses or money pouches in clear view, either—that was asking for trouble. Even with all these precautions, I was pickpocketed a few days later, when Debbie and I went to an outdoor market to purchase camping supplies for our safari. I bought a sweater, pocketed the change, walked to the next stand for a hat. When I reached into my pocket to make the purchase, my change was gone.

I couldn’t stop talking about West Africa, even after we got out of Nairobi and crossed the border into Tanzania. I missed my friends in Ghana and Mali, missed their exuberance, their openheartedness, their brash, unapologetic zest for life. While Debbie exulted in the colors of the earth, the brilliant greens and reds unlike any she’d seen before, I found fault with the food (bland), the people (cold), and the places we visited (touristy). In addition, I was worried about Michael. I tried to maintain my cavalier attitude, sending him cheerful postcards with no mention of his new friend, but I couldn’t help obsessing a bit. I asked Debbie if she thought I should go home right away. When she said it depended on what I wanted, I told her thanks a lot for the help. When she said maybe I should go back to work things out with him, I grew belligerent. Would it really make any difference? I demanded. If he liked this new woman, the die was already cast.

After two weeks, Debbie informed me that her time in Africa was half over. Could I do her a favor and let her enjoy it without constantly having to hear about how much better it was on the other side? And another thing. She was willing to listen to me talk about Michael—that’s what friends are for, after all— but she felt like no matter how she responded, she couldn’t win. Every word out of her mouth seemed to piss me off.

I got the message. I was spoiling both her time in East Africa and my own, doing the very thing I thought I’d learned not to do: looking at everything through the lens of expectation. Holding tight. I resolved, from that moment onward, to savor my moments there.

One thing in East Africa I could find no fault with was the landscape. As a native of Kansas, I’ve always been a sucker for wide open spaces. The vast planes of Tanzania, spotted with herds of elephants, zebra, and antelope, gave me a feeling of expansiveness that made me short of breath. Nothing glowed like those skies. The sunsets were spectacular, feasts of orange and gold, lilac and rose, amethyst and violet and deep, deep blue. The clouds piled upon each other in sharply defined layers like an otherworldly mountain range, the spaces between them glimmering lakes.

For a person who grew up seeing wild animals primarily on television or in zoos, the sight of large groups of them running free was a revelation. I had to keep reminding myself they were real. In the Ngorongoro Crater, we rode in our jeep in the center of a wildebeest migration. I stood with my upper body poking through the vehicle’s sunroof, while all around me a roiling sea of animals galloped, their thick bodies and enormous heads supported by thin legs, their glossy manes rippling in the sun as their pounding hooves flattened the grass. The furious drumming of their hooves exhilarated me.

“I’m a wildebeest! I’m a wildebeest!” I shouted, and my voice was lost in the madness, subsumed into the unrelenting symphony of hooves.

After our safari, we returned to Arusha, our jumping-off point, to plan the next leg of our trip. That night Debbie came down with malaria. We remained stranded for more than a week in that strange little town filled with desperate safari hawkers, while she lay on her bunk, throwing the covers on and off, going through the feverish dance I’d witnessed so many times. I cared for her as best I could, administering the appropriate doses of medication, bringing food and water, applying damp towels to her forehead, chasing the aggressive safari salesman from our door. Throughout all this, I marveled at my own continued health. By the time Debbie was safely on the plane and I’d set out alone for places unknown, I was convinced that my body was invincible, a fortress of immunity.