Harmattan (41 page)

Gone now, but for fragments and a single image of Abdel and my mother, with Momi and Efrance, which I keep hidden in my storehouse.

These, then, are my physical refuges: my storehouse, my Whistling Mgunga tree, occasional visits to and glimpses of Candice Kwao-Sarbah’s world. My spiritual refuges have been my treasures
,
my memories and God Himself (I have long ago discarded my amulet). Doodi has taken away my treasures. God has abandoned me.

Now, only my memories remain, and these I must cling to.

I pull a heavily
-
laden offshoot towards me, drink in the thick scent of its flowers, then let it spring away from me again. I think about the baobabs at Wadata – ‘the upside down trees’ we called them: about climbing them, getting leg-ups to their gnarled boughs and reaching out to pull the next person up too; jeering boys spitting on us from above; warning each other never ever to pick the flowers.

Bunchie said that to do so invited bad luck, evil spirits, into one’s home. She said that, in Goteye, a niece of Madame Fatake had done so and that was why Madame Fatake had given birth to twins whose backs were stuck together. I picture Bunchie’s tired, sad, crumpled face, telling me that the babies had died and that we should not talk any more about such things. But sometimes, when our crops were poor or attacked by locusts, or the rains failed, or someone in our family took the sleeping sickness or
nagana
or was bitten by a
tse-tse,
or it seemed that the harmattan storm would never end, she reminded us that her own mother had also picked flowers from the upside down trees
.

I picture Abdelkrim, handsome in his uniform. I shake my head as the image of him with a bullet in his skull tries to fight its way into my mind. I picture my mother, slowly disappearing into herself. I try to imagine her two dead babies – my brothers – but no faces will come. I try to imagine Bunchie’s mother plucking flowers from the upside down trees and wonder why the old gods have sent such sorrows our way.

I think about Fatima. I wonder if my father has already promised her to another cousin, or uncle, or friend. I hope that she will instead have an education and be saved from a future like mine. I wonder if she will make friends with
anasara
children from the other side of the world. I think about Katie and Hope and their father’s father’s father who lived such a long life. I wonder if they miss my letters, as I miss theirs.

I think about Monsieur Boubacar, the surprised look on his broad, kind face as he recoiled from my father’s snarling features.
She could be a doctor, or a teacher, or
a great writer
, he had said.
A great writer.
I had hoped to read many books. I had hoped to travel to the places he showed me on his maps. To go far beyond L’arbre du Ténéré and gaze upon the ocean. I watch little pieces of Mgunga blossom fall away like my dreams.

I think about Adamou and pray that he will not follow the ways of our father. I wonder if he is now attending Koranic school. Again I try to imagine what it might have been like living here in Niamey with my sister and brothers. Being cared for by Abdelkrim. Perhaps becoming friends with Efrance and Momi.

I think about Miriam. See her in the classroom, eagerly raising her hand to answer a question. And about her mother on the evening before my marriage, trying to reassure me that I would, most likely, be eased into life with Moussa’s family. That he would leave me alone. Let me settle. Before…
that
. It did not happen. He took me on the first night. Yanked me by the wrist from the sanctuary of half-sleep, dragged me from my bedroll, my storehouse, across the compound and into his bedroom.

Doodi in the next room. Hurt me. Bloodied me. Left me shivering on the floor, afraid to cry out loud, while he retired to his raised sprung bed; grunting, snoring, farting.

I think about Mademoiselle Sushie. I see her bright smile. Hear her warm, cheeky voice taunting the elders, causing the womenfolk to double up with laughter. I wonder where she is now: if she has left Wadata, perhaps Niger itself; if VCI and the other agencies will ever return.

I think about Moussa Boureima. My husband. I have watched him in the dim light after he has fallen asleep, beside or on top of me. Watched the drool ooze from the corner of his slippery lips. Listened to the whistle of the wind through his nostrils.

His gurgling, bloated stomach fanfaring the night. I think about his great weight. His thick, heavy limbs thrown across my torso like the rubbery roots of the baobab tree.

Feared his wrath, if I disturbed his slumber, as I kicked away the cascading mosquito net and heaved my squashed, near breathless body away from his bulk. Feared his cruel tongue, the flat of his hands, the wooden paddle that he keeps on the shelf.

It was said on my wedding day that love would grow, but I know that it will not. Though I know that it is wrong, I hate this man. I will never love him. I am shocked to realise that I no longer have feelings for my father also. Now, after everything, there is only numbness. Here and now I decide that, if I become an adult, I will one day find my father and I will say to him:
This is me, Haoua Boureima, who
was your daughter. I am disgusted by you. I feel nothing else for you. I will not treat
you as my father.

I realise too that deep within me there is a burning sensation. An ache, a fire.

Not in my belly, like that caused by hunger or fouled water, but deeper still. From within my soul perhaps. Deeper than the hatred I feel for my husband or the numbness I feel towards my father.

It is anger. Rage. And panic, driven by fear and loneliness. And now, high above the compound, safely wedged between the branches of my Whistling Mgunga tree, where I have retreated many times before, closer to the spirits of Bunchie, Mother, Abdelkrim and all the
Shadow People
who have gone before them, and closer to God too, I realise that it is God Himself with Whom I am angry.

This is the moment that I lose my faith. The moment I truly realise and accept that I have been abandoned, not only by my flesh father but by my spiritual one. I have not prayed for days. I did not fast properly for Ramadan. Stealing crusts from the kitchen through the day. Guzzling water at the faucet when no one else was around to see.

As if to confirm this revelation, the constant pounding of Yola’s pestle ceases. I look down and watch her lean the wooden club, worn smooth by years of pounding millet, against the gable end of the house. I recall her – before
Eid ul-Fitr
– stooping to pick up a little clay spittoon, summoning a loud, raw, rasping, animal-like growl to clear her throat then, pointing her lips into a fine spout, to deposit a stringy residue expertly into the tiny clay pot.

All day she kept it by her side. She did not swallow so much as a morsel of food or a drop of water. Not even her own saliva. She did not do so between sunrise and sunset throughout Ramadan.

She took her spittoon, overflowing like a foul little pot of slimy glue, and flung its contents into the latrine and only when the sun went down did she replenish her body. But it is now
Eid al-Adha
, and tonight when the sun goes down, especially tonight, she will feast – with Doodi and the womenfolk of our neighbours’ compounds, all dressed in their finest clothes.

She will finish this work, then she will return to the house and help to prepare the food. There will be laughter and music and singing and dancing, all in the name of the God who has forsaken me.

This is our way. But I will not do it any more. I think again of Abdelkrim. Of his lack of belief. His alcohol drinking, failure to pray. The concern these things caused my mother, and how her fears were passed then to me.

Around my face, the scent of the Mgunga flowers mingles with the rising diesel fumes from the traffic thundering by our compound. I feel nauseous, dizzy. For a moment I think that I may vomit. I imagine emptying the contents of my rumbling belly in a vile cascade down the bark of the great tree, then quickly banish the thought. I take deep breaths of the heavy, tainted air and put my head in my hands.

Below me, to my left, lies Doctor Kwao-Sarbah’s compound. Today there is no sign of Candice, his daughter, who has become my only true friend here in Niamey’s Yantala district. Candice is fourteen – two years older than me. This morning she and her shy, handsome brother, Etienne, will have stepped outside the Kwao-Sarbah family’s fine home in their clean-smelling, freshly pressed, red and grey school uniforms. Candice will have skipped across the neat yard, scattering the chickens as they picked through the cracked earth, and waved to her kindly Egyptian mother. She and Etienne will have placed their fine satchels and lunch pails on the rear seat of their father’s car and climbed inside – just as I have seen them do many times before. Khalaf, their family’s Fulani guardian, will have swung back the great metal gates and Doctor Kwao-Sarbah’s clean, white Land Cruiser will have swept on to Rue de Kongou and roared off towards the heart of the city. Candice will have glanced back and up at my tree to see if I have been able to steal away from my duties, but she will not have seen me this morning.

I think of Doodi, ridiculing me for calling myself a friend of Candice’s.

Chiding me for protesting when she tells me that I cannot visit the Kwao-Sarbah’s compound this evening.

‘Remember your place, girl,’ she had said, before she had set upon me, teeth bared. ‘That child is the daughter of a rich man!’

Momentarily, I had risked looking the old witch in the eye. ‘And I am the wife of a successful merchant, am I not?’

That was when she had begun to flail all around her. ‘You are nothing but a little whore and an errand girl!’ she had screamed at me.

I scan the compound again, searching for a glimpse of Khalaf. He is nowhere to be seen. A fly lights on my lower lip, hooking a thin, tickling leg over its upper curve, so that its spindly foot lightly touches the moist, inner part of my mouth. I spit, violently, shaking my head with irritation.

Yola rubs her eyes and peers up into the branches. ‘You’d better come down now, child,’ she says, staggering a little, steadying herself with her pestle. ‘
He
will be back soon!’ She waggles her drained head towards the entrance of the compound as she speaks.

I peer down at her tiny figure. Sweat drips from her brow. Her eyes look wrung dry. Suddenly I feel defiant, powerful. I do not answer. I peer down, through the thin branches and foliage and scent. I hold my hand out so that it masks Yola’s gently bulging figure entirely. I bear no malice towards this woman yet, for a brief, terrifying moment I imagine what it would feel like to crush her in my hand, like a helpless insect. I think,
What if God simply allows these things because He is not, in
fact, a just God, as the Holy Koran teaches? What if He is malicious, or jealous or
bored?
And although the thought chills me, it stays with me, just the same.

* * *

I am on my knees, sifting pounded millet, when the clanking of bicycle parts announces Moussa’s arrival home. Yola gathers up her utensils and walks towards the house as he enters the compound.

‘Bring the grain to me as soon as you are finished,’ she says. Her eyes flit momentarily towards Moussa, then back to me.

In that brief exchange, I read a signal and venture a glance in Moussa’s direction. We both know that he has consumed alcohol.

He scowls at us and then lets go of the bicycle. It falls to the ground and lies twisted, useless, spent in the settling dust like a felled gazelle.

As Moussa follows Yola, I resist the urge to get to my feet and go to the bicycle. Lift it up. Dust it down. Soothe it. Lean it against the wall of my storehouse.

To do so would be to invite Moussa’s wrath. I have little doubt that part of the reason he treats the machine with such carelessness is to aggravate me, but mainly he does it because he can – and because he is a pig. Several times I have asked him for the use of a bicycle. He has many: gleaming new ones in his shop: tatty old ones in pieces; both in the shop and lying in a jumbled heap in and behind my storehouse. A bicycle would make my life so much easier; carrying goods from the market would be so much quicker, so much less exhausting. But each time, Moussa snorts and laughs at my requests.

‘Do you think that I am made of money?’ he says, shaking his head. He has forbidden me to waste his money on taxi fares also. Every centime must be accounted for. I think of Djibo, a boyback in Wadata, whose father had brought a fine, black bicycle back after a trip to the city. For a moment I wonder if he might have purchased it from Moussa. With this machine, Djibo was able to ride to the river, draw two buckets of water and return to our village before we were even half way there on foot. Perhaps he spilled more than we did, our buckets and jars balanced expertly on our heads – his swinging precariously on the handlebars – but it hardly mattered because he could make another trip so easily.

‘You’re not in Wadata now, girl!’ Moussa snaps, when I tell him about Djibo.

‘We live a civilised life in Niamey. How many other households do you know with running water?’

‘But the walk from the market!’ I say. ‘The purchases are so very heavy! If I could…’ Sometimes the look in his eye is enough to stop my protestations. At other times, when I am feeling more reckless, it takes the flat of his hand.

On occasion, I have even heard Doodi chastise Moussa for the misuse of his machine. ‘A man in your position ought to take care of such things; show others that you are a dignified businessman!’ Though he might grumble, he never lays a hand on his senior wife.

Later, I am scrubbing clothes, head down, lost in thought, sweat dripping from my brow, when I see his gnarled, yellowed toenails before me. I look up at his face, shield my eyes from the afternoon sun. ‘Husband?’ I say.

‘Come with me,’ he says, without explanation. He turns his back and walks towards the storehouse. Cautiously, I look around the compound. Yola and Doodi are indoors, preparing food for this evening’s celebrations. I dust down my
pagne
and stretch my aching neck from side to side. As I follow Moussa, the pain in my side catches me unawares and I let out a slight gasp. Moussa stops and turns towards me. He removes a chew stick from his mouth and sucks his teeth irritably. ‘Get a move on, girl,’ he says.