In the Belly of the Elephant (21 page)

Just as Jack pulled back his head to look at me with those dark eyes, Rocky was suddenly whimpering at our feet.

“What’s wrong girl?”

Whining, she ran from me to the corner of the house and back to me.

“She’s about to have her puppies!”

I bolted from the patio and followed Rocky out the gate. We ran all the way home. Seconds after we got into my compound, Rocky dropped the first pup. I gathered up some towels and made her a nest inside the house. By midnight, she had birthed four. By morning, I was the proud grandmother of eight short-haired, yellow, wrinkly examples of the universal mutt.

Rocky had taken the fast track to motherhood. I helped the puppies wiggle into place at Rocky’s teats for their first meal and thought about my evening with Jack. I smiled. Seemed Jack and I were on the slow road to romance.

Chapter 19

Flood

June/Shabar

I awoke in the night to the pounding of heavy rain on the tin roof. It had rained the past three nights, chasing me off the patio and inside the house to sleep. Adapted to spending my nights out in the open, I had slept fitfully inside, dreaming that the walls closed in to crush me. I stared into the darkness until the fists of rain beating the roof lessened to the snapping of a thousand fingers, then I went back to sleep.

Someone shook me. Dim light through the window slats illuminated Jack’s face.

“Hurry! Get up! There’s been a flood!”

I sat up, confused. “Here?”

“No, Sambonaye. News just arrived. Wiped out the whole village. We’re heading out there now with relief supplies. You have five minutes to get dressed.”

“The whole village?” A noose tightened around my heart. “You mean everyone was drowned?”

“As far as we know, nobody was killed.”

We had just visited a few days ago—Emma and the women, the gardens, the stoves, the grain stores. My limbs wouldn’t move.

Jack went to my armoire, pulled out a pair of long pants and a shirt and tossed them to me. “Let’s go!”

Ten minutes later, Jack and I sat in the back of the Land Cruiser with Nouhoun. Hamidou, Nassuru, and Djelal sat in front. Luanne, Adiza, and Fati were staying behind because of their pregnancies. We were fourth in line of a relief caravan led by two
Voltaique
military trucks hauling soldiers, tents, and blankets. The FDC and U.S.AID trucks were loaded with sacks of millet and corn. Last in line, the ORD (the government Organization of Regional Development) truck carried four bariks of fresh water.

The trip to Sambonaye that normally took about an hour stretched into two as the trucks slid along the flooded roads. Halfway there, the ORD truck got stuck in mud up to its axle. A military truck stopped and soldiers dressed in beige camouflage got out with shovels.

Djelal turned toward the rest of us. “It’s good to have a few soldiers along in these situations.” He adjusted the sleeve of his
boubou
.

“Are floods common?” Jack asked.

The soldiers began to dig mud from around the ORD truck’s tires.

Nassuru nodded. “When the storms come one after the other.”

When Gueno bakes the land too hard, I thought, remembering when I had first arrived, when I had asked how the Sahel had come to be a desert.

“The rain falls too fast,” Hamidou said. “The ground cannot accept it.”

“The flood came in the middle of the night.” Djelal told us the rains had begun the previous Tuesday morning and had continued through Thursday night, just as in Dori. But northeast of Dori, where the mountains came together, rain had spread across the hills. Water had gathered into streams in the cleavage of those mountains. The streams had met and flowed into washes that snaked between and around the mountain bases down into the lowlands. In the valley west of Sambonaye, the washes had joined to become rivers, overflowed the shallow banks, and spread across the plain. Just past midnight, during the first hours of Friday, a three-foot wall of water had washed across the valley and through the village of Sambonaye.

I finally understood why the Fulani didn’t trust a river.

“
All’ham de l’Allah’ai
, no one died.”

The soldiers shouldered the ORD truck. The tires spun and mud flew in all directions, splattering the windshield. The truck finally popped out of the hole and slid onto firmer ground. The caravan moved forward again.

Not long afterward, we approached Sambonaye from the upper valley. Hamidou slowed as we entered the village, and our voices trailed away to silence. Where thatched-roof houses of mud brick had stood the week before, only wet mounds of mud remained. People stood in groups, their faces blank and hollow-eyed.

Hamidou parked next to the U.S.AID Land Rover and the two military trucks. ORD pulled up and parked in the line. Soldiers jumped from the backs of the military trucks and began to unload enormous squares of green canvas onto the ground.

Djelal and Nassuru left to find the village elders. Jack, Nouhoun, and I walked to the ridge of the hill that overlooked the village fields. I stopped. My mind froze up, like a deer in headlights.

Below, black water stretched from the base of the hill across what had been gardens of okra and beans and fields of millet and sorghum plants. Large round objects lay half submerged in the water. I couldn’t figure out what they were. Then the stench of dank hair and rotting flesh turned my stomach. They were the bloated carcasses of cattle, the Fulani’s most prized possession. I covered my nose with my hand.

“So much work, so many days, years, all gone.” Nouhoun gazed out at the devastation. “In one hour of one night.” He shook his head and his eyes filled with tears. He was young, in his late teens, and his face was that of a scared child.

A hollow cave opened up behind my belly, fear creeping along its walls like poison ivy, and I was suddenly six years old, hypnotized by the horror of a burning barn.

When the fire first appeared on the horizon, my father had put us all—me, my mother, brother, and sister—into the car. We had driven through the darkness along the country road toward the beacon of orange against the black sky. “I’m a doctor,” he had said to the policeman, who waved us through.

Wild arcs of flailing red and orange flames had encompassed the two-story building, roaring like an enraged monster. The heat had seared our faces from a hundred feet away.

I had seen a barn built before. It took weeks of sweat and toil by many people. Years to fill it with tools and tractors. A season’s worth of hay, months of planting, growing, harvesting, filled the barn. In a few minutes, fire destroyed it.

Nouhoun’s face blanched with the same question I had asked the night the barn burned. Why was it so much easier to destroy than to create? Why?

When the first man grew wicked, he became arrogant and did not want to worship God. He scorned him: “God is god, Man is man. Everyone in his house, everyone for himself!”

Furious, God called Nzalan, the thunder. Nzalan came running with great noise: boom, boom, boom! The fire of heaven fell on the forest. Foo, foo, foo!—everything in flames. The trees burned, the plants. Everything—animals, birds, fishes, all were destroyed.

I thought of Lily and the hollow space inside expanded. Twenty-seven years to grow Lily. Years of love and nurturing by her parents. Years of struggle, sweat, and pain to grow and learn, to build the gift of Lily. All gone in the few minutes it took a gas leak to put her to sleep and stop her heart.

And I understood why men created gods and all the stories that surrounded them: to explain destruction that made no sense; to accept undeserved tragedy, incomprehensible waste.

Piles of rubble and mud spread out on either side of the sloping road like fingers clawing their way out of the muck.

Chaos. We all lived just on the brink of chaos, the whim of gods. And it took so little to push us over the edge. We were just painting eyeballs on chaos, thinking we could keep it at bay; thinking we could chase away Death.

I turned. A few feet away lay the mangled feathers of a chicken, and next to it, a dead goat. Beyond that lay the carcass of a dog. It had yellow matted hair and its legs were rigid, frozen in the midst of running. I started to cry, more upset at the sight of the dog than the cattle. Ashamed, I turned away to wipe my eyes. In Africa, dogs were not pampered members of the family, they were used as guards, less valuable than chickens or goats. Cattle kept people alive.

Men, women, and children milled about with dazed and haggard faces, picking up broken pieces of clay pots, scattered millet thatch, and sodden bits of cloth.

“Chaos,” I whispered.

Jack nodded. “It’s a law of nature.”

Nouhoun lifted his eyebrows at Jack in question.

A ruined village, fields destroyed despite our efforts to grow more food, dig more wells, help organize co-ops.

“We’re just spitting into the wind,” I said.

Jack shrugged and smiled. “We just have to spit faster than the wind blows.”

We’d held plenty of spitting-into-the-wind contests when I was a kid, and I knew from personal experience that it was impossible to spit faster than the wind.

I shook my head. “It always comes back in your face.”

Djelal and Nassuru motioned for us to join them. We returned to the trucks to unload blankets and sacks of millet. Soldiers stretched out the canvas tents and secured the corners with stakes.

Nearby, a woman I recognized from our many meetings circled several piles of debris, all that remained of her home. Two small children followed her, holding onto her skirts. She squatted and picked up the pieces of a ceramic pot, broken in half, the hand-painted treasure that had held her water and kept it cool. Her new stove was a lump of mud. The grain store behind the house lay on its side like a great cracked egg. The few precious pieces of her home that kept her and her family alive were all gone.

The smallest of her children gave a soft cry. He reached little hands into a puddle and pulled out a square bundle of wire, bent into the shape of a toy car with wheels, roof, and windshield. His face broke into a smile that said everything that was important had been found. The little boys played with their one toy of wire and rubber as their mother salvaged spoons, cups, and pans.

At the base of the hill, soldiers collected carcasses into piles on higher ground and set them on fire. Greasy yellow smoke rose into a sodden sky. The smell of burnt hair and charred flesh soured every breath. Older men organized groups of boys who ran about collecting intact mud bricks. The boys stacked the bricks in piles at fifty-foot intervals along the main street. More green tents popped up like monstrous mushrooms out of the damp earth.

Over the next six hours, we worked with the soldiers to mete out millet and corn, powdered milk, cans of fish, and one blanket per family. Emma and the women of the garden cooperative filed past, the smooth skin of their familiar faces drawn and ashen. We touched their hands in sympathy and handed them temporary food and warmth. Ninety-six families—716 people—would be housed in the green canvas tents until they could rebuild their lives.

By the end of the day, we had managed to chase chaos just beyond the door. But it still loitered in the probability of a typhoid outbreak or another heavy rain. We were not foolish enough to think we could chase it very far.

We pulled into Dori just after dark. Jack said he was going to see Guy and did I want to join him? We bought bread and roasted meat and walked to Guy and Monique’s house.

Monique greeted us on the porch with Luc. I held out my hands, and Luc opened his chubby arms.

Monique laughed. “He’s such a lady’s man.” She gave him over to me and went back into the house to call Guy.

I sat with Luc on my lap. He flexed his little legs up and down, his face alight. Guy came out onto the porch. He leaned down to kiss Luc, then touched his cheek to each of mine in greeting, his ever-present stubble scratching my skin. They joined us for a dinner of bread, meat, and beer. We described our day in Sambonaye, and Jack and Guy discussed the problem of flooded wells and what it would take to reestablish a clean source of drinking water.

The kerosene lamps shed golden light across the now familiar faces of Guy, Monique, and Jack. Luc dozed in my lap. A heavy little lump of humanity. I lay my cheek against the warm fuzz of his hair, and the hard edges of the day softened. We were all, the people of Sambonaye and my small expatriate family, safe for at least that night.

We said goodnight to Guy and Monique and rounded the corner toward my house. Jack slowed his pace. I turned. He took my hand and gently drew me to him.

“Stay with me tonight.”

His embrace chased away the remnants of fear that had clung to my insides the way a vine will grip a wall even after its leaves have withered and fallen away. We walked to his house under a moon that lit the streets and threw shadows.

In the early hours just before dawn, I awoke encircled in Jack’s arms. As I listened to the rhythm of his sleep, I remembered his girlfriend in North Carolina. Sighing, I snuggled closer. North Carolina was farther from Dori than the moon.

Chapter 20

Night of Forgiveness

July/Sabaan

“So, they’re going to have a royals party, you know, wear paper crowns and stuff, and actually get up at four in the morning to watch the wedding live.” Gray rubbed wet globs of henna into my hair.

Her friends back in Detroit had big plans to celebrate Charles and Diana’s wedding on the 29th of July. That Saturday morning’s BBC program was going bonkers over the upcoming event.

“Why is she marrying him?” I said, hanging my head upside down. “He’s such a dweeb.”

“Well, she’s a virgin. He’s a prince. Maybe it’s a relationship of convenience.” She rubbed my scalp until it tingled. “Kind of like you and Jack.”

Humming “God Save the Queen,” Gray rinsed my hair. Cool water trickled over my scalp and face. Humidity from July’s rains had turned the days so muggy, it felt like walking around in hot, wet wool.