In the Belly of the Elephant (28 page)

No.
I ran out into the street and stopped in the darkness. The voices rose like a flock of birds and flew over the town, carrying the news of Luc’s death.

How could they know? Luc is in Ouaga.
But they knew. Somehow, someone had the news. I wrung my hands, stood staring into the sky, as if I could see their voices among the ghosts of night birds, their wings white mists against the stars. The lament filled the sky for five, ten minutes. It held me captive, rigid in the street, until my neck ached and I could no longer look up.

As the voices faded, my knees gave out, and I sank onto the sand. Fingers of dark fog seeped into my mind, pinching out the flame of thought. Cold brushed the hairs of my arms and chilled my skin until my limbs grew numb. Death had slipped into town in the middle of the night and stolen a child.

“Luc.”

My chest began to heave. I panted, trying to take in air. It was as though my body buckled in on itself. Heavy, convulsive sobs came from somewhere deeper than muscle, organs, and bone. I was being emptied out, crushed.

Time elapsed—an hour, a minute, a lifetime. The pressure inside my chest lessened, and I was able to breathe without choking. When I finally raised my head, faint light glowed in the eastern sky. Slowly, I got to my feet, feeling as though I had aged into an old woman. Back in my compound, I lay on my bed and waited for the dawn.

Chapter 26

The Curse

April/Jumada al-Akhira

Unable to sleep, I rose before dawn, dressed, and left for the office. Tricia was due to arrive on the afternoon plane, and I had way too much work to finish before then. I walked by Issa’s closed gate to the road at the south end of the street, the road that would take me past Guy and Monique’s house. I had walked it every day since Luc’s death five weeks before.

The sun rose low on the horizon through layers of dust-filled air left over from a string of hot nights and hotter days. Sweat beaded along my hairline and under my arms. I turned right, one foot in front of the other.

Three blocks on, I stopped in front of Guy and Monique’s compound. The wide gate closed off the courtyard. Past the porch, steel doors covered the screened front door like a pair of folded hands. A large padlock with a steel frown on its oval face fastened the doors together. Shuttered windows gave the house a look of sorrowful sleep. The porch and courtyard, empty of chairs and benches, sent a forlorn message to the street and surrounding houses.

I leaned against the wall opposite the house and wondered again why I was still there when Lily was gone, and now Luc. The wall cast a cool pillow of shadow over my head and shoulders. The morning after the women’s lament, I had taken the plane to Ouaga. Luc had died in the hospital the night his soul flew overhead with the ghosts of night birds.

In Ouaga, I searched out Guy and Monique and found them at a friend’s house. All I could do was hold onto them, unable to find the words except to admit that I didn’t know any. They flew with Luc’s body to Canada where they buried him next to family. There had been no word as to when or if Guy and Monique would come back.

Out on the horizon to the south, clouds gathered like a crowd waiting for a train. Their tops billowed pink and bright. Fat, dark bases sat on layers of brown air. The weather had been this way for weeks, ever since Luc’s death. The clouds circled the edges of Dori, promising rain, only to pass by and drop their precious cargo elsewhere. While the land greened to the south, east, and west, the northern region around Dori remained burnt and dead.

Another pain cramped my lower abdomen. For five weeks, I had waited for my period to start. It had yet to come. I was on the pill but had begun to think I’d been given an expired packet. Companies often sold their outdated medicines to developing countries for a bargain price.

No. I’m not pregnant. No.
It was probably just a recurrence of the nasty bug I’d had before. Intestinal bugs could mess up the timing of your whole system. I thought of Tricia arriving, all the work I still had left to do, and the goodbyes I would need to say in less than eight weeks. But I was glad to be leaving. Who was I to still be there? To still be anywhere? My arms and legs felt like they were packed with rocks.

If death has come and not yet gone away; you don’t tell it, “I am still here.”

Rubbing my lower belly, I said good-bye to Luc’s house and trudged toward the town square and the office where my desk waited under my screenless window.

Ignoring the desire to sneak into my office unannounced, I made my way through the various offices to say good morning. Djelal was locked behind his door. Adiza, Fati, Nassuru, and Nouhoun grunted reluctant greetings with less than the usual chatter. Jack and Hamidou had already left for the villages.

Fati frowned and pulled at the skin under my upper arm. “You are too thin, Suzanne.”

I shrugged. My appetite gone, I had lost a few pounds. I crossed the courtyard to my office.

It hadn’t been very much fun around the office for the past few weeks. Julie, the VP who had come to evaluate us, had written a report indicating poor management practices in the Upper Volta Office. The director had pointed a finger at everybody else. Djelal was furious. Staff morale was at an all time low. Everybody was complaining. And, get this, after being a guest in my house while in Dori, the VP had reported that my kitchen was unsanitary and that she worried for my health.

“She’s got a lot of nerve,” I said to my fourth generation batlords (or fifth, or sixth, I’d lost count), who still hung in the corner of my office. “I’d like to see her live in the Sahel and keep a spotless kitchen.” I rubbed my abdomen again. “Or clean intestines.”

A copy of
VITA News
sat on the corner of my desk. VITA had liked my report and would be including a shortened version in their next issue. The edge of a telex peaked out from beneath the magazine. Home Office had yet to find the replacement I had requested several months before. Seemed Upper Volta wasn’t a place very many people wanted to come to. I sighed. The quarterly report was due. The last one I would write. I sighed again. What was the point?

I forced myself to scroll a piece of paper into the typewriter and hit a few keys. More women were using the new stove models, but it would take a long time before they would accept such a newfangled idea. The stoves kept cracking and needed constant repair. But all it took was a bit of mud mixed with water. We had planted over a hundred trees. Not many for a place so big, but a start. The idea to train Rimaybé women in oil production had never taken hold. This was the domain of the Mossi women and would stay that way. The Fulani and Rimaybé women in the villages would continue to travel to the Dori market to purchase peanut oil. Some ideas worked, a whole bunch of ideas didn’t. That, I punched the typewriter keys, was the way of the world.

*

After lunch and a hot, unrestful
sieste
, I returned around three to find Nassuru sitting in my office. He was smiling, the first smile I’d seen in a while.

“What?”

“I finished the report on our reimbursement rates for the thread loans.”

“And?”

“Eighty percent!”

We shook hands. “Let’s send that piece of good news to the VP.” I’d add that to my report.

We were both grousing about why the VP had focused so much on our problems instead of our accomplishments when a tree branch whipped against the window and the shutter slammed. My papers flew off the desk into Nassuru’s face and scattered across the floor.

“Sandstorm!” Adiza yelled from the courtyard.

Nassuru and I closed up the shutters and doors of our building as the light dimmed inside. When the wind hit, the eves moaned while the tin roof strained against its nails. I imagined myself carried away by the wind, sucked high up into the sky where I would break into a million pieces and fall to earth, my ashes mixing with the sand.

Dust filtered through the shutter slats, coating my papers, face, and hair. My eyes burned. Nassuru sneezed. It was hard to breathe. I thought of Tricia in the small plane, watching with alarm as a wall of sand the size of a ten-story building approached. She had a history of freaky plane incidences.

The wind worsened and the office gloom deepened until Nassuru, sitting a few feet from me, became a gray blob.

Then, silence. Nassuru stood and I followed him out the double doors into the courtyard. The rest of the staff hurried out of the second building.

Above us, the sun was a blood-red moon, the sky rusted over with clouds of sand. Only four in the afternoon, it was as dark as dusk. An eerie stillness settled around us, a muffled quiet as though our ears were plugged.

“The center of the storm.” Nassuru squinted at the sky.

Djelal joined us.

“What will happen to the plane?” I twisted the fabric of my skirt.

“They will turn back,” Djelal said. “As soon as they see a storm, they turn around and go back to Ouaga.”

We all looked up at the dull orange ball of the sun.

“Will it rain this time?” I scanned the horizon. There was nothing but red haze.

Nassuru shook his head. “Some are saying there is a curse on Dori.”

“Why a curse?”

Nassuru lifted his slender shoulders in a shrug. Djelal frowned.

“Maybe today it will rain,” I hoped aloud.

The eye of the storm passed and the wind whipped up again, forcing us all back into the buildings. Fifteen minutes later, it died. A rumble came from far away and I hurried out. The scent of rain ran on the edges of a breeze. But the thunderheads moved to the east, once again emptying over the lands outside of Dori.

I sat on the ground in the courtyard. Far out on the horizon, the clouds billowed out their tops while their flat underbellies fell in gray lines to the earth, as if spread by a giant comb.

“Damn.” I wanted to cry, disappointed beyond the loss of a rainstorm. “This land
is
cursed.” The people never got past minimal survival, the crops burned, the water dried up, babies died in the night.

I had come back to Dori one too many times.

Adiza hurried out the door, saw me, and came over. “The radio says the plane turned back. They’ll come tomorrow.”

The Land Cruiser came through the gate and into the courtyard. The market square reawakened with voices and bleating animals as Hamidou and Jack stepped out of the truck. A red film covered both of them, and sand trickled in small streams from the hood of the car down to the ledges below the doors.

Jack beat dust from his trousers. “One hell of a storm!”

Hamidou lifted the hood and bent into the bowels of the truck.

Jack came to crouch beside me. “Any news of the plane?”

“Tomorrow.”

He smiled. “Good. Come over for dinner. Moses is making mashed potatoes and meatballs.”

Meatballs and mashed potatoes and one more night with Jack before Tricia arrived. I said yes, forcing a smile of enthusiasm. Normally, the idea of eating Moses’s cooking cheered me right up. But my gut was heavy and I hadn’t shared my concern over my late period with Jack—kind of a damper on the idea of one more romantic evening together.

I asked Hamidou for a ride home.

He nodded and let the hood fall shut. A small avalanche of dust cascaded off the car.

We drove down the narrow street behind the office, past five blocks of compound walls, and skirted the edge of town.

“Hamidou?”

“
Oui,
Suzanne
.”

“Nassuru told me there’s a curse on Dori.”

He nodded. “Some are saying so.”

We passed Gray’s house with its wide gate, turned the corner, and drove by the empty lot next to my compound. Six camels stood tethered against the high fence. Hamidou stopped the truck. I climbed out and walked around to the driver’s side window.

“Do
you
believe there’s a curse?”

Hamidou smiled at me. His sharp features were so familiar, the peaceful set of his face so comforting, as though he understood why life was so hard, why babies died. He accepted it and still found joy in life. The thought of saying goodbye to him emptied out my insides.

“
Ne t’inquiet pas, Suzanne.”
Don’t worry, he said. “It will rain tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the next day.
Ensha’allah.
”

I blinked hard. Hamidou smiled again, and, with a nod, backed up, then turned the corner toward town. I stood outside my gate and watched the dust settle into the street. I blinked again. A tear tickled the side of my cheek and under my chin. A sudden image came, an image so familiar it wrenched my heart. Dorothy stood on tiptoe, hugging Scarecrow goodbye and whispering, “I’ll miss you most of all.”

Another tear slipped out. I had watched that scene on TV a hundred times in my childhood; but it was only in that moment that I finally understood it.

Chapter 27

The Oasis

May/Jumada al-Akhira

Morning sun seared my arm through the car window and spilled hard-edged light across the laps of Tricia and Adiza. Jack rode shotgun, his arm draped across the back of the front seat. Floods from eight months before had carved the road into a washboard that shook my intestines and rattled my teeth. I closed my eyes, exhausted from a hot night of little sleep, and hoped the bumps would shake my period loose.

Out beyond the plain, there was no horizon to delineate heaven from earth, only a slight shift in hue from brown haze to beige. Gueno had sucked the earth so dry the top soil had baked into cracker-sized squares of hard dirt. They lay across the plain like God’s own trillion-piece jigsaw puzzle.

When Mamadi rescued Sia Jatta Bari from
Bida Bida, the dragon cursed the people and their land. For seven years, seven months, and seven days Wagadu remained without its golden rain.

Tricia squirmed next to me. “Sweat is literally pouring down my back.” She leaned forward and, sure enough, a wet line ran from the top of her T-shirt to the base of her spine.