The Camel Bookmobile (3 page)

One herdsman spewed curses—Fi understood that much even without knowing the words. He picked up a book,
Practical Primary English,
and flung it down in frustration. She flinched as the book skidded on the ground. Still muttering, the herdsman grabbed a second book,
How the Pig Got His Snout
. Mr. Abasi stood immobile next to Fi. He was, Fi guessed, about forty-two or forty-three, but in his blue striped pants and pale pink button-down shirt with soccer-ball cufflinks, he looked like a boy playing dress-up. He stared dispassionately as the herdsman hurled one more book.

These were the moments when Fi, if she allowed herself, could regress to what she thought of as her early period: the days a dozen years ago when she’d been a new librarian and worked at the information desk in the children’s and teens’ section at the Bedford library branch. “Children! People are reading. Please, no roughhousing here. A library is not a playground—well, it
is
, actually, but not as you might think of it…” Trailing off, giving up, recognizing that she was particularly unsuited to make such reprimands because for them to be effective, one must be able to stick to black and white, while she always found herself slipping into intricate grays of “maybe” and “sometimes.”

Here, she’d approached the matter freshly. She’d learned to admonish the herdsmen in Swahili to be careful with the books: “
Vitunze vitabu!
” She’d tried longer lectures, too, with Mr. Abasi as translator. She’d mentioned the vulnerability of a book’s spine, the limited numbers of volumes, the trust of the benefactors. But then she found herself veering off, mentioning the first library of clay tablets collected in Mesopotamia; or the first horse-drawn bookmobile in 1905 in Hagerstown, Maryland; or even philosophical statements about books transcending time and space—and Mr. Abasi’s translations would fade away and the herdsmen would stand silent.

Talk wasn’t working. There had to—had to—be another way to infuse them with her own commitment to the bookmobile.

With both hands in front of him, Mr. Abasi held a brown bag that, she knew after these many trips, contained his lunch. He wasn’t married; she imagined him packing the
lunch for himself each evening, setting it next to the door. She reached over, smoothly took the bag from him, then raised her arm and threw it on the ground.

He opened his mouth as if gulping water. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m a visitor to your country, Mr. A.,” she said. “I want to fit in.”

“I—” He was actually sputtering. “I have grapes in there. Do you know how expensive grapes are here?”

She gestured toward the camels. “And books,” she said, “are expensive, too.”

“That,” Mr. Abasi said, waving a hand. “He’s frustrated.”

“Me too. The Camel Bookmobile was started so people living away from towns could learn to read. It can change lives. But if the books are ruined, the program fails.”

Their gazes locked for a full minute. Then Mr. Abasi rotated his long neck and spoke curtly to the herdsman, who, with exaggerated gestures, lifted the thrown books one by one and dusted them off, placing them carefully with the others.

“Thank you,” Fi said, bending to pick up the bag. “Your efforts will help our library survive.”

“Along with my lunch,” he muttered. But as he turned away, she thought she saw a glimmer of amusement in his eyes.

Light was seeping into the mushroom gray sky; the suspended wine-colored dust particles were becoming increasingly visible. Fi opened her mouth to take a bite of the grainy air, scented with animal dung, dust, and wood smoke. Nairobi had perpetually smelled of charcoal fires
and diesel fumes, but in Garissa, scents never seemed to linger—they vanished in the aridity. In her apartment in Brooklyn, above Fleishmann’s Coffee Shop, smells tended to seep up the stairs and plop in her living room like ornery houseguests refusing to leave: bitter coffee wrestling with steamed milk and burned sugar-dough.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Fi missed the scents of home. She calculated: in Brooklyn, it was late evening of the previous day. “Going to make a quick call,” she told Mr. Abasi, gesturing with her head toward the library building.

Inside, she used her calling card. The one luxury she permitted herself was weekly calls, usually to her brother or one of her sisters, sometimes to Chris or Devi, always made from the library because there was no phone in the nearby home where Fi had a room provided for by the Kenya National Library Service.

Sometimes, though, she lost track of the weekly schedule. Time felt elusive here, where the crocodile-laden Tana River eternally passed on its way to the Indian Ocean and flocks of ugly marabou storks perched atop acacia trees and men hauled carts along dirt roads as they had for generations. The battery on Fi’s wristwatch had run down two weeks after she arrived, and she’d taken that as a sign, stuffing the watch away instead of getting it fixed. Devi, hearing that, said Fi had better keep calling, because she clearly needed a link to the twenty-first century—what Devi called the “real world,” by which she meant Pilates, lattes, organic grocery stores, and, everywhere, clocks.

Fi dialed the number. “Hey,” she said when Devi answered. “You still awake?”

“Fi!” Devi said. “How are you? No malaria yet?”

Fi laughed and reached inside her bag for her water bottle. “I’m so done with worrying about that,” she said, because she was, mostly. “What’s happening there?”

“The sun is up and crime’s down,” Devi said. “Though some baseball star was suspended the other day for using a cork-filled bat. And Lulu the transvestite has the hottest off-Broadway show. Now tell me about you.”

“Mididima,” Fi said.

“’Scuse me?”

“Where we go today. My favorite stop.”

“You have a favorite now?”

Fi leaned her neck back into her free hand and rubbed. “The place rises up out of nothing,” she said. “The people are stunning, with their burnished skin. And they’re not as poor as the others. I mean, they’re poor—my God, everyone’s poor—but they created this irrigation system that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and they never beg, and when the Camel Bookmobile shows up, they’re eager. We’re going to bring them into the modern world, Devi. These are the people I’m here for.”

“They’re eager? That means not everyone you meet is so thrilled to see a white lady and her books?” Devi’s tone poked gentle fun.

“OK, not everyone,” Fi said. “I mean, the others aren’t unhappy to see us, just puzzled. In most places, they keep their distance, or stare with blank faces. I must seem so strange. And sometimes I do feel them thinking—with everything we need here, what craziness possessed this lady to come with a pile of books?”

“But I already know your answer,” Devi said. “Books, books everywhere. So tell me about Mi—whatever.”

“Mididima. In their tribal language, it means Those Rooted in Dust. I feel more connected to them than any of the others. Maybe because so many of them speak English—” Fi laughed at herself, “Well, three, anyway.” She thought of the girl Kanika, her straight-backed grandmother Neema, and the teacher Matani, whose sudden smiles startled and charmed her. “But all the children are learning, and they practice on me. And there’s one they call Scar Boy, who doesn’t speak at all but cradles books like they could save him. How can I resist that?” Fi reached into a plastic bag to pinch off a piece of peppery-sweet fried bread. It was powdered with soil, and dry enough to require infusions from the water bottle before crawling down her throat. “Mr. A., of course, hates Mididima,” she said.

“Mr. A. Isn’t he the one who thinks you’re a colonist, trying to homogenize the world? The one who hates everything about your project?”

“Especially Mididima, though. Mr. A. says it’s too primitive and too far away. It’s an isolated little pocket. Takes hours to get there.”

Fi had been surprised that Mr. Abasi had any doubts at all about the bookmobile project, and even more surprised to find that he had enough reservations to fill a small set of encyclopedias. She hadn’t anticipated objections from Garissa’s chief librarian when she’d applied for the consultant position. She’d thought everyone in Kenya, and especially the librarians, would be thrilled with the idea of camels ferrying books to the isolated northeast region.

But, just for starters, Mr. Abasi didn’t even seem to fully trust the seminomads. He had been educated briefly in London, and he sprinkled his speech with Briticisms like
bloke
and
lorry
and acted as if he preferred Europeans to either Africans or Americans. He’d spearheaded the imposition of a series of rules that seemed too rigid to Fi, but that he insisted were necessary. “We’ve got to follow a strict policy if we’re going to be balmy enough to take books this far into the bush,” he liked to say. She’d given way in exchange for a measure of his blessings.

“What are you doing in your spare time?” Devi asked now.

“Meeting with teachers, mostly,” Fi said. “I talked with a local government official a couple of days ago to discuss future funding.”

“But what about for fun?”

“Garissa is way off the tourist path,” Fi said. “I see giraffes all the time, though, and hippos at the Tana River the other day. I was invited to hear some drummers a few nights ago.” She heard a shout from outside. “I’ve got to go, Devi.”

“You going to call Chris?”

“No time now,” Fi said. “Just give him my best.”

“Your best? You want me to tell him that?”

“You know what I mean.”

“All right.” Devi drew the words out. “Be careful, Fi, OK?”

As she stepped outside, Fi saw one of the herdsmen talking with large gestures and in an agitated voice as his fellow camel-driver nodded. The cantankerous camel was on its knees but baring its teeth and complaining in a loud moan. “Still no books loaded?” Fi called.

Mr. Abasi shrugged. “The driver calls the beast a fool-brained lump of dung, but I think the camel and I actually agree. It would be wiser to stick our heads in the mouths of lions than to make this trip.”

Fi laughed. “Lighten up, Mr. A.,” she said. “We’re going to the village of Mididima, not hell.”

“It’s not a village, Miss Sweeney; it’s a collection of wanderers best left alone, and it’s too far into
shifta
territory. More than once, I’ve tried to point that out.”

So convenient, this mention of the
shifta
, Fi thought. Downplayed most of the time, the desert thieves were brought up only when there was a chance that they might dissuade a foreigner from doing something a local found tiresome.

“Shifta
steal cattle, not books,” she said. She reached down to the pile of books stacked on the ground, picked one up—a biography of Napoleon—and placed it in Mr. Abasi’s right hand. “Just think, Mr. A.,” she said, attempting to sound like Mary Poppins, “books, books, everywhere.”

Mr. Abasi stared at her skeptically. Then he set down the book, put his lunch bag on top, scratched his neck, and looked off searchingly into the saffron light, as though trying to discern, on the flat horizon, the makeshift, mirage-like gathering of souls—the settlement of Those Rooted in Dust—which was, to his obvious and immense regret, their day’s destination.

The Grandmother

N
EEMA WATCHED HER GRANDDAUGHTER RISE AND SASHAY
through the shadows of their hut, her body a long blade of grass that swayed in time to a private breeze. Kanika settled her necklace and earrings. “I’ll get your
chai
,
Nyanya
,” she murmured. “And take out the goats before I go to Matani. You can move a bit slower this morning.”

Neema reached to smooth her granddaughter’s hair. “Up this early, with the air this dry, you’ll be a wilted leaf by evening.”

“This evening? I’ll be like a fresh-fed calf,” Kanika said as she stepped outside, dismayingly cheerful.

Neema shook her head. She still couldn’t quite fathom how Kanika’s demeanor had changed so radically over these last few months. Neema loved Kanika like a bowl of water at the end of a thirsty month, no matter what her disposition; after all, the girl had saved her life. But she couldn’t deny that she missed the days when Kanika had been as moody as a pregnant bush pig. There’d been power in the moodiness. It was for that girl of tough volatility that Neema had hopes. It was for that girl that she’d screamed at her dead husband’s brother Elim—may the wind eat him—when he,
dreaming of the bride price, had pressed for Kanika to be married at age thirteen. “A hibiscus on a vine, a clam in a shell, and my granddaughter—all have nothing to do with you!” she’d said.

And though she’d sounded brave, that had been a risk. Neema knew she held a unique position in Mididima. As a widow who had successfully managed her dead husband’s herds, she was often permitted to participate in discussions over grazing and resettlement decisions. Still, if Elim had chosen to fight her about Kanika’s future, tradition and the neighbors would have supported him.

Neema spit on her palms and flattened the hair at her forehead, sighing. She’d told herself many times that she shouldn’t be anything but pleased to find Kanika adjusting to life’s expectations. At age fifty-six, she knew what it cost to spend years chafing against restraints others didn’t even seem to notice. The journey was always easier, after all, for the beast that wore blinders. That had been her own mother’s argument, though Neema had never been able to live by it.

Kanika returned, bringing Neema a cup of
chai
. She was humming. Humming! This was too much. Her granddaughter of spicy temperament, who had resisted the idea of being tamed before ever being untamed: where in the name of a camel’s ass had that feisty spirit gone? Neema could feel something painful welling up within her. She didn’t want to raise another one who compromised too easily. She took the cup her granddaughter offered and motioned for her to sit. It was time for something radical.

“I’ve never told you,” she said, “about my
kutairi
.”

Kanika cringed and grinned at once. “
Nyanya
, circumcision doesn’t seem the topic for this morning—”