The Camel Bookmobile (24 page)

“It’s today,” she said. “I’ve been—”

But he wasn’t listening. He turned toward Miss Sweeney, who still lingered by the door. Kanika had practically forgotten her. “I will speak with her alone,” he said, lifting his chin.

“You can’t. You need me for that. You share no language,” Kanika said. She said it softly, as a mother might speak to a child she has punished too severely.
OK now. Let’s go on.

Scar Boy gestured to Miss Sweeney, urging her to come closer, to sit. “Leave us,” he said.

“This is foolish.” But Kanika knew he would not bend. Scar Boy had a powerful determination. She’d always known that about him.

Miss Sweeney, sitting now, looked at Kanika with a face full of questions. But Kanika couldn’t think of what words to use to explain in English—in any language, it occurred to her—so she said nothing. She raised her shoulders, let them fall, and left.

Scar Boy

T
HE MINUTE
K
ANIKA WAS GONE
, T
ABAN COULDN’T HELP
wondering at what he’d done. He, who had always avoided people, had insisted now on being alone with someone—a woman, and a stranger—who spoke a language he could not begin to understand. He stared at this foreigner without knowing what to do. He stared until the moment grew unbearably long, and then he stared more.

At last she reached into a bag that she’d worn in on her back, and she pulled out a book, and she held it up as if to show it to him. The cover was a wonderful color—red, but not a shade he knew, not rich as the earth could be, or raw like a cow’s severed flesh. It was a deep red, full of promises and unexpectedly shiny. He wondered if he could find a way to re-create that color. He could have uses for it.

And she was talking in a voice he didn’t mind. He could almost visualize it, dense and textured and a little hoarse. Of course, it lacked the light music of his Kanika’s voice—but here he corrected himself quickly, not
his
Kanika. And he was about to begin thinking of that, and of the pit in his chest that was flooded with his own bitterness, when she surprised him, this foreign woman, by opening the
book and extending it toward him, talking all the while.

She’d opened it to a page that showed a sketch of a humanlike figure clasping its chest. In pain, or in passion—he was left to wonder. It was a simple drawing, but like food for the starving. He wanted to stare at it, to study each line, see how it had been done.

But, too quickly, she pulled the book away again and opened to a page and began to read, her own hand at her neck. And as he watched her, following the movement of her voice, he began to understand that books meant to her what his drawings did to him. They were (he struggled to put it into words in his mind) an escape—no, more—a place to hold that mystifying rush of human emotions, from his gratitude at being alive to his frustration at the hardship of life—no, more—an expression of the need to separate from his own narrowness and join with the Hundred-Legged One, the rays of the sun.

And so he reached behind him and pushed aside a straw mat. He decided, and in a single second. He didn’t have the words to explain to this woman that it was wrong, what they’d done. How uncivilized it was to bring an unsolicited gift from their world and then dictate how it must or must not be used.

Lacking those words, he would instead reveal what he’d earlier intended to show only to Kanika. The pages and pages of precise and vivid images that had flowed from his center, through his limbs, out his fingertips and that had allowed him—a mutilated, solitary island of a boy—to speak of his dreams.

He’d show her what had become of the Camel Bookmobile’s overdue books.

The Teacher

M
ATANI WOKE TO THE SOUND OF BOYS LAUGHING
. N
OW HE
would never have a boy; that was his first thought. Not to cradle, not to guide, not to set on his father’s path of bringing the modern world, little by little, to Mididima. His ambitions had not been so grand, after all. But now it would end as badly for him as it had for the pearl diver in the book Miss Sweeney gave him. Without a son, he would be shamed before his people. Even more: he would never be remembered as a son remembers, never a particular man’s sacred ancestor. And so he would die more thoroughly than men with sons. He would pass more quickly into the void of nothingness.

But before that recognition could sicken him again, he had a second one. He shouldn’t be hearing boys laughing. It wasn’t midday yet—he could tell by the angle at which the sun shone through the gaps in the walls that enclosed him. Those boys should be in school. They weren’t, of course, because he was here. Lying within the
kilinge
in a heap, his tongue hairy and his head swollen.

He’d been here the previous night when the men began to gather, their voices surprised as they greeted him. The chanting started, and over the noise of the drums, some
one—he couldn’t recall who right now—passed him leaves to chew. Although he generally had little use for
khat
, he took them. That first taste was so bitter he almost spit it out. He shifted the wad to one side of his mouth and put a cup to the other, drinking milk that has slept. Softening the bitterness. Slowly, he stopped noticing the flavor. The
khat
distracted him, for a while.

Now he untwisted his tangled body. He rubbed his cheeks where the skin felt rough and dirty and massaged his scalp with both hands as if to return circulation to his brain. And he remembered Miss Sweeney: her cool hand as she’d held his forehead, her serious eyes as he tried to explain something he didn’t yet understand himself. He remembered her lips, definite as they touched his face. It had taken every bit of his willpower not to open his arms and fall into hers.

But she came from such an unimaginable place. Who knew if her sympathy was only an act of kindness expected in her country? He didn’t want to guess about anything anymore. He was beginning to understand the fragility of the heart.

The worst that had ever happened to him, before this, was his father’s death. It had come a week before his wedding to Jwahir, and he’d barely allowed himself to feel the punch to the chest, and the hollowness that followed. He told himself the timing was meant to make him and Jwahir love each other more. They’d share her father, she’d said; they’d be husband and wife and brother and sister at once. And he’d believed. How he wished he had that time back, to mourn the way he should have mourned, instead of rushing on with his life.

He shook his hands as though to free himself from
thinking of both Jwahir and Miss Sweeney in unexpected ways, ways that seemed all wrong. Miss Sweeney had come to get the books, only that, and enough ineffectual days had passed. She’d probably heard that he was sleeping it off in the
kilinge
when he should have been up and taking her to Scar Boy. He’d have to steel himself to do that, even if it meant looking past Abayomi.

And what had Jwahir heard? He needed to go to her, but he didn’t want to go sad. He didn’t want to go while he still might cry.

He pulled himself from the sacred enclosure and splashed water on his face. The two laughing boys were Nadif and his younger cousin.

“Boys!” He coughed, trying to clear the hoarseness from his throat.

They were crouched on the ground, playing a game with stones. Nadif lifted his head.

“Round everyone up. We’ll have school, even if a little late.”

“We had school,” Nadif said.

“In your dreams, perhaps, but not this morning.”

“No, we did. With Kanika and Miss Sweeney.”

“With—” Matani looked away from the boys, toward the houses huddled beyond them. “What did you do?”

“Miss Sweeney taught us some of her magic,” Nadif’s cousin said.

“Not only that,” said Nadif. “We worked on reading, and then we taught Miss Sweeney.”

“Taught Miss Sweeney?” Matani said. “Boys, Mididima is too small for fibbing.”

“It’s true. We taught her how to say, ‘The leaves in the tree have driven the monkeys crazy,’” Nadif’s cousin said.

Matani narrowed his eyes at the boys. “Where is she?”

“She walked that way, Teacher,” Nadif said, pointing the direction.

“Enough of your game for now,” he said. “Gather the others. Yes, I know you’ve read. But we have more to do.”

He walked to where the crops grew, and then to the area where Miss Sweeney had seen the monkeys, but it wasn’t until he reached the first watering hole that he found her. He was glad to see she was alone, though girls and goats were within shouting distance.

“Jambo
,” he called. He felt undeniably better just seeing her, and he could hear it in his voice.

She turned to him with her serious smile and waited for him to reach her. “I wanted to see how much water you have,” she said.

“When we see the bottom, we get worried,” Matani said. “Can you see it yet?”

She shook her head.

“Then no need to worry.” He reached spontaneously for her shoulder and squeezed it.

“I’m glad to see you,” she said.

He wished he knew how to understand comments like this. He touched his cheek where, last night, she had kissed him. Then he brushed her cheek with the back of one hand. “You’ve gotten burned while you’ve been here.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You are,” he said softly. And then he added: “You taught
the children this morning. I’m sorry. I spent too long with the stars last night.”

“I loved it. They’re so bright.” She reached down and dipped her fingers into the water. “How did your evening pass?”

He didn’t want to tell her about the blur of his evening. He recalled now that at one point he rose and began to chant. “My love,” he’d sung, and the men had echoed him. “My love.”

“Is a black-fronted purple-throated mosquito-eater,” he’d sung, and they’d echoed.

“It’s fallen from the sky,” he’d continued. “And landed at my feet.”

One or two, he was sure, had been laughing. And he couldn’t blame them. He would have laughed, too, if he weren’t in his own skin, his own wife about to be taken, not by death, which would be less shameful, but by her lack of love.

Someone had grabbed him by the arm—though he couldn’t clearly recall who it had been. “This is what your books would take from us,” the man had said. “Our sacred chants. Our traditions.”

Another man added: “See the bad spirits that enter Mididima because the white woman is here, where she doesn’t belong? She must go.”

That angered him, he remembered. He’d said something about Miss Sweeney being good and pure, and then there had been some snickering and Jwahir’s father had stepped between him and the others and someone had called, “If you think that world is so much better, then go. Go, with your books and your white woman.”

Now Miss Sweeney stood quietly waiting, her hands shoved into her jeans pockets.

“Thank you,” he said, “for helping me last night. I’m sorry about it.”

“I’m sorry about—” She broke off.

He squatted, and she knelt too, and he looked into the water at their reflections, light and dark, and beyond them a pale sky. He thought about telling her that, in some ways, he’d never been as intimate or as open with a woman as he’d already been with her.

“You know what Abayomi told me?” he said instead. “That his heart leaps up to the sky with Jwahir, and that hers does the same with him.” It hurt to say aloud, but it was also like washing out a wound. “He said because he honored my father, he would offer himself to me. He stretched himself on the ground and handed me a gun that he had taken from the
kilinge
.”

Miss Sweeney lifted her eyebrows. “You can’t be serious?”

He laughed at her tone and the way she put it. Seen through her eyes, it did seem crazy: Abayomi on the ground, Matani holding the gun in his drooping left hand, the barrel pointed at his own feet.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.” And he wished, for a moment, that he could touch Miss Sweeney, and talk to her whenever he wanted to about whatever he felt like, and he wondered what it would be like to be married to someone like her. But there were no women like her in his village. Maybe no women anywhere like her, who could so quickly become an indelible part of a foreign place.

Then he touched his head, because he remembered why Miss Sweeney actually was here. “The children are waiting for me now,” he said. “But afterward, I haven’t forgotten, we will go to Scar Boy.”

“I’ve already been.”

“You have?” He looked away from her, because he was ashamed that he’d let her down, and then he looked directly at her because he wanted to know. “You got them?”

Some girls with goats were coming closer. Miss Sweeney stood and waved at them. “It’s complicated. Could we talk tonight, after dinner?”

So Scar Boy was still holding out. Sitting in a corner of his hut, dizzy from his own moment of power, making Miss Sweeney wait, threatening the library’s future. A rush of anger surged through Matani’s arms, up his neck, and into his cheeks. “May the sand clog his windpipe,” he muttered.

“Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

Matani knew the anger that his heart spilled on Scar Boy came from other places too, but he didn’t care to sort it out right now. “Yes,” he said. “It will.”

“So we’ll talk tonight?”

This was enough. Matani had let his father’s love for Scar Boy protect him too long.

“Matani?”

“Yes, yes, tonight,” he said. Now he’d go directly to Jwahir’s father, and never mind the consequences. He wanted the whole of Mididima to know what Abayomi’s son was doing, how he’d refused to give back the books. “Tonight.”

The Grandmother

N
EEMA DID NOT SEE HER GRANDDAUGHTER UNTIL WELL
after the morning’s work. She’d given herself the job of making sure two small ones spent the afternoon at the crops, scaring birds away. Already, some of their precious plants had been pecked because of inattention, and they all knew it was not a year to lose even a mouthful of food.