Walking with Abel (16 page)

“The rebels from the desert, some of them come south,” he said. “They rob the Fulani. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know where they are. We just know they are in the area somewhere.” He closed his eyes. “C’est la guerre, n’est-ce pas?”

—

Amfala Koïta, an out-of-work tour guide from Djenné, took me to Kouakourou and Moura on a borrowed motorscooter. Amfala was in his early twenties, tall and handsome and sweet. He smoked a lot of weed and volunteered unwanted backrubs and pouted at rejection. His friends in Djenné called him High Life. Kumba Koïta and her clan had descended from his family’s slaves.

Kumba’s grandparents had grown grain and vegetables and cotton to supplement the pastoralist economy of Amfala’s ancestors. Now the rimaibe were free by law and had a subsistence economy of their own, their own cattle and chickens and rice fields, but their deference toward the Fulani Koïtas remained. And it was hard to tell whether their emancipation, enshrined in Mali’s constitution, had been total. Some of the Fulani families in Djenné told me they owned slaves. In the second decade of the twenty-first century at least a quarter of a million Malians who were in bondage to Kel Tamashek had advocates championing their freedom in Mali and internationally. The rimaibe had none. Nor did anyone count the number of people who remained in Fulani servitude. Nor was there any punishment for slaveholding.

The instant Amfala rode into Moura the family began to cook, sweep, unroll mats in shady spots for him to lie on. Old men came by to shake his hand and bow and ask after his respected father and uncles. Teenage girls set to sharpening kitchen knives on concrete thresholds and boys ran to the fishmonger and returned with a Nile perch the size of a small goat for Amfala’s dinner.

Kumba allowed me to sleep on a mat outside her house. But first she led me by the hand to a roofless nook behind her kitchen. Afternoon sun leapt in a bucket of cool well water. She handed me a tin cup.
“Bismillah,”
she said: Welcome. She smiled and stepped out and lowered an oily burlap curtain over the doorway. I stripped and draped my headscarf and pagne and t-shirt over a shoulder-high adobe wall. There was a breeze. A procession of rainless clouds drew across the sky. A doum palm above the washroom fanned them on with its fronds. The light was magical and beyond the shadow of the lynching outside Kumba’s walls and beyond my own heartsickness I felt my wonder stir. I hummed a ranchera about an infanticidal madwoman and poured cupfuls of sunlit water over my head.

At dusk I took a walk through one of the wadis that ran past the livestock market. Its thalweg was ankle-deep dry sand. In a few months fish would jump here, spawning in water sixteen feet deep, and the only way to Moura would be by boat. Until then, anyone could come to the village. Bandits, thieves, halfbaked griots. I sat down in the sand upwind from a dead goat and watched stars appear in the openwork fleece of cloud. A crescent moon dipped and surfaced, dipped and surfaced, dipped and surfaced.

A
cliffside motorcycle ride east from Moura delivered Amfala and me to a sandy beach across the river from Kouakourou. The Niger was bright turquoise, warm, briny with the smell of fish. In a leaky redwood pirogue a latter-day Charon was poling twenty people and three motorbikes and two bicycles our way. We swam while we waited, then sat on the sand to dry. The boat beached. A young Fulani woman stepped ashore first. She wore a lowcut fitted brocade dress and she had cowries and gold coins woven into her braids. I salaamed her. She stopped and asked me where I was headed.

“Djenné.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“Moura.”

“What’s your surname?”

“Surname?”

“Your last name. What is it? Mine is Diallo.”

“Ah! Bâ. My last name is Bâ.”

“Eh? You eat beans, Bâ!”

“You eat beans yourself, Diallo.” Casual mockery mandated by
sanankuya
. We laughed.

“Okay, Bâ, go with God,” she said. She turned to labor through the sand away from the river and I took off my sandals and waded to the pirogue. Amfala and the scooter were already aboard.

The boat was drawing water through a gash by my feet. The boatman tried to suture it with a rag, then gave up. Everywhere the river sparkled and sweated and by the southern shore, below the neat hillside market rows of Kouakourou, town boys dove and splashed and beckoned like small mermen and when we approached they helped drag the boat to a sandy mooring where other pirogues rolled lightly in the current.

Before we left Kouakourou I met an oracle. His name was Moussa Bâ. He was an old man in a soiled boubou and an indigo turban that did not cover his hennaed beard, and he lived in town fulltime while his sons herded his cattle. He sat me down on a bale of fabric in his friend’s shop and told me he knew nothing. Then he raised a hand for me to wait and closed his eyes and recited to me the list of the constellations that formed the matrix of the Sahelian year. It took him more than an hour to list all twenty-six and explain which weather each brought to the bourgou and how the bourgou had to respond. Coming up: al Butayn, al Sirrah, Aldebaran. The Little Belly, the Bellybutton of a Female Horse, the Chaser of the Pleiades. Hunger, heat, desiccation . . . Al Han’ah and al Haq’ah, the Brand and the White Spot, when it still rains very little . . . Al Izrah, the Loincloth, when it must be raining all the time . . . Al Jabhah, the Forehead, a lock in Leo’s mane, the only star of the twenty-six that lingers in the sky fourteen days instead of thirteen, the last star that allows farmers to plant . . . Dhat al Kursi, Cassiopeia, her hair drizzles some water on the ripening fields . . . Al Kalb al Akrab, the Heart of the Scorpion, when cows begin to return to the half-harvested bourgou and trample farmers’ rice . . . Sadalachbia, the Lucky Star of the Tents, Gamma Aquarii, when the Fulani pitch their grass huts in the dry-season pasture . . . A small crowd of men had gathered around us. They were impressed, and waited for more. When he was done with the stars Moussa Bâ asked my first name and the first name of my mother—“Marina! Beautiful!”—and closed his eyes again, and after a quiet moment announced that I was born in a time that was very windy but very dry, under Sadalachbia.

He was wrong. I was born in autumn, under Aljabana, Denib Algenubi, when fall ticks stop bothering cattle. In my land it had been the time of heavy rains, and on my birthday there was a deluge. All of Leningrad’s ninety-three rivers and canals flooded their solemn granite embankments. It was my sister who had been born in the time of high winds—in a hurricane, in fact, which had ripped out centennial trees and carried away tin roofs—but that was in July, and then, too, it rained. I was almost thirteen, and while the wind lashed the birches and oaks outside our summer cottage I wrote my newborn sister a letter full of answers to be read when she was older, but later I misplaced the letter and forgot the answers, or even to which hypothetical questions they had rejoined. But I did not tell any of that to Moussa Bâ. I bowed to him, and hit the road.

L
aryngitis, runny nose, achy bones. The fetish market in Djenné had treatment: crocodile heads, skin of wild dog, cow femurs, tinctures of lichen. I stayed in the bush. Unparsed horizon, sketchbooks, sticky shotglasses of strong green tea. My eyes were running. I went walking and stumbled into a cow.

A fever was sweeping through the camp.

Salimata was laid up with some malaise on the reed pallet in her hut and a tawny week-old goat pranced around and chased its tail and upturned her calabashes, uncaught. In Sita Louchéré’s hut young Mentou lay in her mother’s lap, sick again, her breath hot, her sinuses congested, her eyes dull. Fanta and Mama were suffering from migraines. Ousman was gray and thinner than ever and suspected he had malaria. Hairatou was hawking a frightening, deep cough. She coughed when she stood half awake in the doorway of her parents’ hut to squint at the first morning light and she coughed when she walked to the marsh with a water bucket and coughed when she filled it and coughed when she carried it back. She coughed when she pounded millet for the morning milk porridge, her father’s favorite, and she coughed when she spat onto her palms the better to grip the pestle. She coughed when she stood sideways to the wind and poured rice from one calabash into another over and over, her arms far apart to let the wind winnow chaff and dust from the falling stream of grain. Rocks would remain. We would taste them on our teeth for lunch. She coughed at the hearth where she squatted to cook family meals. Rice millet rice millet rice. When we would slot together on mats after dinner for storytelling and tea I would feel with my palm her small lungs gurgle through her ribs. Her parents said her cough was nothing special.

“Hairatou?” The millet cream was boiling over. “You take that thing off the stove
right now!
”

Pygmée came to visit with a busted tire and a splitting headache and Fanta made him cover his head with a green turban, swept bits of straw and dry leaves with the side of her right hand from the ground in front of his mat, dropped some hot coals in the middle of that space, sprinkled a pinch of dried leaves from a black plastic bag, and ordered him to inhale the smoke. The leaves were gigilé,
Boscia senegalensis
, a caper Fanta had picked on a Thursday during the rainy season by the Burkina border. Gigilé was good medicine, and it grew in abundance in the highlands near the border, but it worked only if you picked the leaves on a Thursday. Thursday was the day of the spirits.

The rest of us shared my bottle of ibuprofen. What was a painkiller against malaria, against pneumonia? A placebo. A kind of helplessness returned to me, an acute sense of inefficacy before the suffering of others. I recognized it from years of tramping through the Old World, through wars. But it really was an expression of my own self-pity, my vanity, because no one in the camp was looking to me for help.

In fact, Isiaka declared that all of us were sick because there was not enough milk. He, too, was not feeling well. He sniffled and refused to eat. He was a stick figure under his absurd bright green boubou, an unreal modern blot in this oldest setting, skin taut over bones, and he ranted in his squawking voice.