In the Belly of the Elephant (29 page)

I peeled it away from her skin and flapped the material to air-dry her back. “I told you not to come until next month.”

Adiza turned away to look out the window. Jack cleared his throat and drummed his fingers on the front seat. Hamidou drove. Tricia had done it again—come to visit during the hottest time of the year. The first time was understandable—she had never experienced the heat before and didn’t know any better. But the second time only proved my long-held suspicion that my sister’s brain was disconnected from the rest of her body.

She hadn’t stopped complaining since she’d landed in Dori two weeks before.

“Are we almost there?” she whispered to me.

Adiza clicked her tongue.

To be fair, everyone was complaining. The
mar
had been empty since February. Fresh fish and eggs were a distant memory on the tongue. The grass was gone and the cattle had wasted into pitiful creatures. Their bones protruded their hides like poles propping up droopy tents. The water level of the wells had fallen so low, what came up in the buckets was gritty and stained red.

Everyone waited for the rain. But the clouds continued to bypass Dori. The curse, an impenetrable dome of dry air, pushed away the clouds and intensified the sun. I could hardly remember the taste of rain. My skin cried for it, for the luxury of sky-cooled water on my face.

The only patch of land still green was the oasis, fed by some miraculous stash of water below the surface. No bigger than a few acres, it shone like a tiny emerald held in the dry palm of the desert. Up ahead through the windshield, a watery vision of green wiggled in the heat waves.

“There it is. The oasis.”

Tricia squinted and sneezed.

We drew closer, parting the waves of heat, and the lines of the oasis solidified into thirty-foot palm and eucalyptus trees. Small figures moved from green shadows into sunlight.

Jack pointed. “The women are carrying water to their gardens from the well.”

Jack had made a valiant attempt to charm Tricia since her arrival, but was at the point of giving up. A small war had been silently declared between the two of them. Both wanted my time and attention, neither was getting very much.

Hamidou steered the truck off the road into a grove of palm trees. Relief fluttered through the car, a butterfly of a sigh that landed on each shoulder. We clamored out of the hot truck and into the verdant, wet perfume of the oasis, like stepping from death into life. As we walked toward the gardens, the shaded air cooled the sweat on my face and arms.

A row of sunflowers stood in a line like yellow-bonneted hostesses welcoming us to the lush gardens. The women of the nearby villages had been able to plant their gardens while the rest of the villages waited in vain for the first rains. At the center of the oasis, a green and brown checkerboard of plots spread across an open field.

“Wow,” Tricia breathed. “It’s a different world.”

I led Tricia to the edge of a plot where rows of green budded out of the ground. “That first row is
niebe
, black-eyed peas. Those are
arachides
, groundnuts, then
gombo
, okra,
petits pois
…”

“Peas,” Tricia said. “And corn.” She pointed to the last several rows of stalks.

“That’s millet,” I said. “The staple crop.”

Adiza walked among the women, and Jack crouched at the well to examine a pedal attached to the base of the new pump. A small boy pumped the pedal with a bare foot, and a steady stream of clear water flowed out of the spout. A little girl who was first in a long line of women held her bucket to catch the flow. As the water neared the top, the second woman in line placed her bucket beneath the girl’s to catch the water as the girl took her pail away.

The women chattered like a morning flock of rice birds as they stood in line and carried full buckets to different corners of the field. There, they carefully portioned out tin cans of water to each plant. Another young boy ran up to take his turn pumping the foot pedal.

Jack asked questions in French on how the pump was working and Hamidou translated. There was much nodding of heads and more chatter. My gut cramped and I felt lightheaded. I tugged Tricia’s arm and we walked to the edge of the gardens to sit in the shade of a palm tree.

“Be careful not to get overheated.” I settled myself against the trunk. “Drink lots of water.”

Tricia emptied the water bottle then watched Adiza, Hamidou, and Jack. “How’s it feel to be leaving soon?”

I rested my chin on my knees. “I’m ready. But I’ll miss a lot of people. Especially Hamidou and Laya.”

Nearby, a tall woman bent to pour a can of water onto a spindly plant. She gently pinched off a dead leaf and worked the soil around the bottom into a bowl shape to keep the water from trickling away. My eyes teared. That’s what Laya had done for me. She had taken care of me, kept me alive, pinched off my loneliness, and helped me grow. I never would have made it two years in Dori without Laya. And now I was about to leave her in a dried up place where her children’s future extended as far as the walls around Dori.

“She said she’d come with me to the States the other day.”

“She did?”

I nodded.

“What about her kids?”

“She said she’d take the two youngest and leave Aissatou and Issa with her husband.”

“You think she meant it?”

“Laya usually doesn’t say something unless she means it.” Unlike me, opening my mouth and saying stuff like I wish I could taker her home with me without thinking. “Though it’s hard for me to believe she’d leave any of her kids.”

“Will you?” Tricia looked at me.

“I don’t see how I can. I don’t even know what I’m going to do when I leave here.”

A bright colored bird flew from the top of one palm tree to another.

“What
are
you going to do?”

I lifted my head off my knees. “I just told you, I don’t know.”

“I thought you were coming home with me after we traveled.”

“I’m not sure I want to go home yet. I might have a chance at a job in Somalia.” I still hadn’t heard back from Don.

“Somalia!”

I sighed.

“Isn’t it kind of nasty there? I mean, wouldn’t that be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire?”

I shrugged. “If Don writes back and offers me a job, I’ll want to take a side trip to Mogadishu while we’re in Kenya.”

“What’ll I do if you do that?”

“When is Bob meeting us in Nairobi?”

“A week after we get there.”

“I’ll wait until he arrives. The two of you can have a little reunion honeymoon while I’m in Mogadishu.”

“Well,” she paused. We spoke the next few words in unison. “Dad won’t be happy about that.”

A cramp bit through my lower abdomen, and I sucked air through my teeth.

“What’s the matter?” Tricia frowned. The crease between her eyebrows had made a comeback and was now a permanent furrow on the landscape of her face. “You know, I haven’t wanted to mention this, but, you aren’t looking too good.”

“Something’s wrong with my gut.”

“Like what?”

I hesitated. “Cramps, nausea, constipation. And I’m a little tired.” I knew the next question was coming before it was out of her mouth.

“When was your last period?”

“Look, Tricia. I’m not pregnant. I’m on the pill. It’s just some kind of parasite or something.”

“Pills can fail. When was your last period?”

I shrugged. “Around four weeks or so.” Five weeks and six days to be exact.

“What if you’re pregnant?”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” I looked at her sideways, “I’d just know. Wouldn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t know.” She looked hard at me. “I’m the one who can’t get pregnant, remember?”

Crickets chirped in the shadows of the oasis. Two little girls chased each other between the rows, singing an up and down ditty. I wanted to be one of them.

Tricia put her hand on my arm. “What will you do if you are?” The heat from her fingers burned down to the bone.

Not wanting to consider the possibility, I had done little else for the past few weeks. If it came to that, I had pretty much decided I’d have to leave early and get an abortion somewhere. Tricia’s fingers pressed into my arm. I shrugged again.

Once you make up your mind to cross a river by walking through, you do not complain of getting your stomach wet.

She turned her eyes toward the gardens and out past the trees. “You could have the baby and give it to me.” She said it as though she were commenting on the color of the sky, or wondering what the weather would be the next day.

My throat closed. It was as if she had put a bag over my head and was suffocating me. Swallowing, I tasted bile. I laid my head on my arm.

“I know it’s asking a lot.”

Asking a lot?
I dug my nails into my arm and had the sudden feeling of being sucked into a pit of quicksand.

“Does Jack know?”

I raised my head. Pain pounded the inside of my skull. “No, and he doesn’t need to.”

Out across the field, Hamidou and Jack waved for us to come back to the truck.

“Look, Susan. I know I’m jumping ahead. It’s just that I want a child so badly and I’ve given up hope of being able to have one. A child of yours would be the closest to my own as I would ever get.”

My limbs grew heavy as though the marrow in my bones were hardening into cement. I dragged my hand across my forehead and kept it there, wanting to crawl into my palm and hide.

“Just think about it,” Tricia said. She stood and extended her hand. “We need to go.”

I let her pull me to my feet. We left the shade of the tree and walked across the field to the truck.

Around 7:30 that evening, I came home from work to find Tricia asleep in the hammock. Rocky was out and about. Since I had given the puppies away to various neighbors, Rocky had taken to disappearing for the day but was always back by bedtime.

Tricia and I watched the sunset and ate dinner in silence, listening to the voices pass outside the gate. Before bed, we sat out under a hazy sky. The blunted light of a star shone here and there.

“I saw a picture in
Time
a while back,” I said, breaking the tension. “It was a cloudy mass of white framed in black. I remember thinking it was a star system and wondering what part of the universe it inhabited.” I scanned the sky from horizon to horizon.

“You need to find out.” Tricia’s voice was quiet, careful.

I nodded in the darkness. “I’ll go to Ouaga on the next plane.”

“I’ll stay here with Laya and the kids.”

Neither of us said anything as we made our beds out on the porch. Rocky’s dinner of leftover rice and bits of fish sat untouched near the tree. She’d been late before.

I crawled under the mosquito net and tucked it in. Under the thin sheet, I closed my eyes and thought of the mass of stars I had seen in
Time
. What I hadn’t told Tricia was that when I’d read the caption, I had discovered that what I’d thought was a star system in some corner of the universe had been, in fact, a single celled organism inside a human body. After a while, I drifted off to sleep.

*

I am full of disease, sitting in the back of a canoe, Adiza in front. Both of us plunge paddles into the roar of a raging current. The water swirls, lifts, and reaches into the boat like hands trying to pull us under. I beat at the water with the paddle, rowing until the muscles of my arms and back burn. But no matter how hard we row, the current keeps us in place. Water drips off my face and arms, soaking my dress, legs, and feet. Past the surging river, people crowd along the muddy banks. They move their mouths and wave their arms, but the white noise of the water erases their words. A bloated carcass floats by on the current, crawling with maggots. I wretch over the side. Adiza turns and, in slow motion, reaches out to steady me.

Then, on the shore, my father appears, one white visage among a sea of black faces. His features twist with fear. “Come home!” he calls to me. “Come home!”

I stop rowing and we are swept downstream.

Chapter 28

Ouagadougou

May/Rajab

Four times Wagadu changed her name. First she was called Dierra, then Agada, then Ganna, then Silla.
Four times
Wagadu turned her face. Once to the north, once to the west, once to the east, and once to the south. For Wagadu, whenever men have seen her, has always had four gates: north, west, east, and south.

The waiting room of the doctor’s office was the size of a jail cell. It was on the top floor of a three-story building on the main road leading west out of Ouagadougou. An air conditioner hummed from its perch in a window, masking the street noise below. Thirty minutes before, I had gritted my teeth through an examination by a middle-aged French doctor whose bedside manner was as cold as his air-conditioned hands.

Fully dressed again, my heart pounding way too fast to be good for me, I waited for him to call me back into his office.

Shit. Hellfire. How did I come to this?

Since my first encounter with the realm of the flesh at nineteen, I had been meticulously careful when it came to safe sex. My father’s warning in high school not to come home if I got pregnant had cemented a deep fear of accidental pregnancy. I had been careful with Jack.

Shit.

I tried to think of anything but the possibility of being pregnant. Drabo came to mind. I often thought of him when I visited Ouaga, wondering where he was. I pictured his face, his lopsided grin, and recalled his stories of Wagadu.

Wagadu disappeared four times from the sight of men. The first time because of vanity, the second because of falsehood, the third because of greed, and the fourth because of dissension.

“Vanity, falsehood, greed, and dissension,” I said to a row of empty chairs. My cheeks warmed in the forced air of the noisy machine in the window. Shame was a strange emotion. By its very nature, it snuck up on you, unexpected, unwanted. I wiped my sweaty palms on the lap of my dress.