The Camel Bookmobile (15 page)

She looked down. “Hmm,” she said, mumbling.

With the sharpness of a bee sting, Matani understood. She shared his fears. She felt inadequate, afraid she would be unable to have a child. How ridiculous that he’d imagined her so different from himself, that he’d looked for some woman-symptom, when all along she suffered from qualms that matched his own.

He knelt before her. “Jwahir, you’ll be the best mother in all the desert. From Nairobi to Mogadishu. And I promise we will have a son. Many, in fact.”

She kept her gaze averted.

“My dearest, I have only now understood your worries. But they are premature. There are steps we can take. You know better than I.” He’d heard, vaguely, of ways to overcome infertility. A woman could bathe with the blood of a newborn camel. Or she could walk into the bush, return by a different route, and find the path to pregnancy unblocked. There were more methods, too; Jwahir must know them all.

“Matani?” she said.

He leaned closer, took her hand. “Yes?”

“Have you spoken to Abayomi yet?”

He brushed away a rush of irritation. “Jwahir, don’t think more of the books, not now. When we have our son, you’ll know why it’s important to be educated.” In the past, he’d even imagined Jwahir reading
The Cat in the Hat
to their son, though he didn’t mention that now.

“Matani.”

“When I look at you,” he said, “I see so clearly what our son will be. He’ll have your wide, beautiful eyes. And the calm spirit of my father. He’ll—”

“You must speak to Abayomi.”

“Of course, but why worry when…” He stopped, trying to interpret her. She used to be so transparent, before her face turned as bland and distant as a cloudless sky. As it now had become again.

“Jambo?
” A woman’s voice, in English.

Matani jumped to his feet and turned. “Miss Sweeney.”

“Fi. Please, Fi. I hope I’m not bothering you?”

“No, of course no,” Matani said. “This is my wife, Jwahir.”

Miss Sweeney reached to take her hand. “A pleasure to meet you. You have a wonderful husband. He’s done so much for Mididima.”

Matani translated, but only the first sentence.

Jwahir nodded, face downcast.

“Would you like to see the area around Mididima?” he asked.

“And perhaps the boy? But I don’t want to take you from anything.”

“You aren’t,” Matani said. Then he told Jwahir, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

As he followed Miss Sweeney from his home, he glanced back at Jwahir. She sat unmoving, head lowered, studying her hands. Soon, she would be smiling again, he told himself. Things between them had been settled. They were clearer, and they would move forward in new ways from this moment.

But something small, a doubt he didn’t have time to try to find a name for, niggled within, taunting.

Scar Boy

T
ABAN WAS SKETCHING WHEN HE HEARD THEM AT THE
door—sketching so intently that he’d become the soft scratch of the pencil; he’d vanished into curves and shadows, the shapes he wanted to make pop off the page. The curve of a cheek, a set of eyes, those lips. Maybe this time, he thought. Maybe this time he would succeed; he would pull life from a scrap of paper. He couldn’t give this obsession of his a name, even to himself; he didn’t know the words. He knew only that when he drew, he felt part of something.

“Hello, Teacher,” he heard his brother say in that way of his, respectful sarcasm.

“Hello, Badru.”

The sound of shuffling. Then Matani spoke again. “Miss Sweeney and I are here to see your brother.”
Of course
hung, unspoken, in the air. This was often how Matani spoke, Taban thought—as though he were surprised that he had to speak at all, that his intentions and commands weren’t automatically understood, and followed.

Taban bent more deeply over his paper, exhaling, trying to recapture concentration.

“My father,” said Badru, “says you are to save your talk for him.”

“Fine,” Matani said.

“So come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Matani said. “Why?”

Taban straightened, imagining Matani’s expression. Everything showed on Matani’s face, as though he were still a child. By the time boys grew up, they should have developed the skill of dropping a veil over their emotions. Why had this ability eluded the teacher? Every time Matani met Taban, for instance, his eyes still revealed his revulsion at Taban’s deformities.

Taban heard no reply to Matani’s question and knew his brother was shrugging. Even the thought of it made him smile. Badru’s shrug was peerless—a drawn-out, dismissive gesture, usually accompanied by a single cocked eyebrow. Taban hated it when Badru used that shrug against him, but had to admire it when it was aimed at others.

“The men haven’t gone anywhere. The cattle still have water; we have food,” Matani said, as if running through a list in his mind.

“My father went alone,” Badru said.

“By himself?” Matani’s voice rose.

Matani’s surprise was understandable; even Taban had been taken aback. They were not a people given to solitary acts; nor did he think of his father as a violator of tradition. Abayomi blamed himself for the hyena’s attack on Taban and rarely left his sons alone at night; as the only parent, in fact, he carried so much responsibility that Taban expected him to eventually end up with a camel’s humped back.
Neither Taban nor Badru could guess why their father had gone, though Badru wouldn’t admit his ignorance to Matani.

“He said if you came,” Badru said, “I was to tell you to return after one moon.”

Taban heard another voice then, a woman’s, speaking words in that language he didn’t understand. The foreigner. It amazed him she’d come all this way. It was funny, and a little sad, that Matani thought he needed the white woman to get the books back. That he believed it would make a difference.

Taban dropped his pencil—a gift from Kanika, who’d taken it from Matani’s school—and let his back slump, giving up any pretense of working. Perhaps he would try again later; perhaps he would have to use a fresh sheet of torn paper. With one finger, he traced the lines he had drawn—the arc of a cheek, the stroke of a nose—as he listened.

“Does your brother know Miss Sweeney has come to help recover the books?” Matani asked after a moment.

“We’ve heard,” Badru said.

“So I needn’t speak to Abayomi at all if Sc—if your brother is ready to hand them over. I can also collect them from you.”

“Teacher,” Badru said. “My father’s instructions were so clear I could follow them in the darkest pitch of night.”

Matani sighed. He spoke to the woman in her language. “Fine,” he said to Badru after a moment. “We will come tomorrow morning. But we don’t want to take up too much of Miss Sweeney’s time with this nonsense.”

“Good-bye, Teacher,” Badru said.

Taban heard Matani and the woman move away from their stick-and-dung hut. As Badru came into the room. Taban picked up his pencil, rolled it between his palms, then looked up. The two brothers exchanged a glance. Taban couldn’t say who started laughing first—it seemed to him their laugher came simultaneously. It widened and stretched and filled the room, expanding beyond its original cause. It became powerful and loosened a tightness that had constricted Taban’s chest for days. He rarely laughed as unguardedly as this.

This degree of intimacy between the two brothers was rare. Usually Badru held himself aloof from his strange, deformed sibling. And Taban couldn’t blame him. What if he’d been the normal one, and Badru had the torn face that almost no one could look at without recoiling, that deformed his soul and mangled all his friendships save one? Wouldn’t Taban, too, have sought distance?

Badru stood over Taban’s shoulder, close enough for Taban to feel his warmth. Slowly his chuckle softened and died, and Taban’s died with it. “Kanika,” Badru said, looking down. “You’ve got every detail. I’ve never even noticed her before. But you—you really see everything. How do you do it? Make it so alive?”

This, Taban wasn’t ready to discuss. He didn’t want Badru’s reaction, even a positive one. He may have healed from the outward wounds inflicted by the hyena, but on this matter of his drawings, his protective scab was far too thin. He shielded his picture with one spread hand. Badru took a step away, acknowledging and quickly accepting the
distance between the two. In the dart of a lizard’s tongue, the moment was gone, and Taban found himself already nostalgic for it.

“Badru,” he said. His brother met his eyes—a receptive version of his brother, not yet the one of shrugs. “You’re driving him mad, our teacher,” Taban said, gesturing with his head toward the door.

“Me?” Badru grinned. “In truth, you are. You’ve always been a brave one.”

Badru’s words, their unexpected accuracy, thickened Taban’s throat. He didn’t think anyone had noticed the courage required to simply go on as he was. A wave of warmth gushed from his toes to his cheeks and settled, as water, directly behind his eyes. He didn’t reply, though. He couldn’t. He looked down at his hand stretched over the purloined paper, and waited until Badru turned away.

The American

F
ROM THE SLIGHT RISE WHERE SHE STOOD
, F
I COULD SEE IN
the thin, late-afternoon light the full panorama of Mididima, with its mushroomlike homes and its shallow reservoir, and the sight made her flush with a sense of awe. She felt herself a tiny speck, improbably carried by an Irish mother’s scolding and a library pilot program to this fistful of concentrated life. Men, women, and children were scattered like a hundred colorful handkerchiefs dropped in the grass, their cows and goats with them, untethered, as though favored companions. Where did they find the brilliant reds and yellows in which they wrapped themselves? In New York, fashion favored colors associated with soggy soil and clammy foods—blacks and browns and grays renamed as nutmeg, platinum, eggplant, midnight. Here, the tints were as if from tubs of kindergarten finger paints, the garments like a rap poem, or a shout to their primary god, the Hundred-Legged One—a reference to the sun with its rays as legs.

Fi and Matani stood next to the irrigation system, simple with buckets and hoses, but extraordinarily successful in channeling each drop of water. Matani had apologized re
peatedly for the need to wait a day to speak to the one they called Scar Boy. Fi dismissed it as understandable. She knew deep currents had passed between Matani and Scar Boy’s brother, the meaning of which she could only guess. They would get the books back, she was certain. The father clearly wanted to make some particular point first, some issue that must be pressing to him but remained elusive to her.

Letting her eyes slide over the horizon, she spotted a zebra. Watching it, she noticed a movement and picked out a giraffe, and then two others. With their chestnut-colored patches, they were as effectively camouflaged as objects in a hidden-picture game. They were revealed only when they dipped their necks to munch from the top leaves of an acacia. The zebra circulated among them, then stood below like a sentry, front legs splayed, swaying slightly.

“He follows them everywhere,” said Matani, watching her.

“Dreaming of being a giraffe?”

“I imagine he lost his family somehow and he’s longing to find another one to fit into. The young girls, though, like to believe he’s fallen in love with a particular giraffe. They’ve named him the Pining One.”

Fi laughed, then gestured to the irrigation system. “Your father was foresighted. The people of Mididima must feel fortunate.”

Matani gave a small smile. “We have a saying: a donkey always says thank you with a kick.” He shrugged. “But by now, yes, they see that this lets us live better than most. More settled, with more food. Parents are willing to let
their children learn during morning hours. In many other tribes, they need the children’s help all day.”

“Books instead of chores. The children must be grateful.”

“Sometimes they are,” Matani said. “Sometimes I use the cane.”

Fi couldn’t stop herself; she cringed. She’d seen the cane in Matani’s home, a deceptively narrow stick that she suspected would make a shrill scream as it whipped through the air. She’d read the human rights reports about children whose bones had been broken for not being able to answer a question, or even for fidgeting in class. She wondered if that had happened to any of Matani’s students.

Matani made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Do you want to walk?”

The sun was on its way down, leaving dark creases in the land. The people of Mididima were being drawn into the settlement’s core as Fi and Matani moved together in the opposite direction. Matani took gliding steps, his arms swaying so that to Fi, it seemed he was responding to music instead of simply walking.

“How often do you use it?” Fi asked after a moment, willing neutrality into her tone.

“Hmm?”

“The cane.”

She felt Matani’s gaze. “Our children are unaccustomed to the demands of formal education. Sometimes they need to be reshaped.”

“Education liberates, but only after one puts on chains, is that it?” Fi asked. “Discipline civilizes, though its meth
ods can be brutal.” She tried to keep her voice light. They walked in silence for a few moments.

“Perhaps, when we think to teach another people about what is right—even if those people don’t know how to read—we presume too much,” Matani said, his voice controlled.

“I didn’t mean—” Fi broke off. “Knowing how to read,” she said, “has nothing to do with this.”

“For us, for instance, it is remarkable that you travel alone.”

“Touché,” she said. “What a quick turn of the tables.”

“What do they think of this—your husband, your parents, your brothers?”

Fi took a deep breath. “I’m not married,” she said. “My parents are dead. I have two sisters and a brother, but they don’t care—or, it’s not exactly that,” she corrected herself. “They do care. My brother, especially, hated it when I moved out of the Bronx, a subway ride away.”