In the Belly of the Elephant (30 page)

Wagadu is seen only through the strength that lives in the hearts of men. She is sometimes visible because eyes see her and ears hear the clash of swords and the ring of shields. Wagadu becomes invisible when the indomitability of men overtires her, then she sleeps.

“Indomitability.”

There was no definition of indomitability within the framed diplomas that hung on the waiting room walls.

“Unconquerable.” That’s what Drabo had said. At the time, I had thought “unable to change” a more appropriate meaning, like stubborness. I jerked a little; my scalp tingled.

The door opened and I jumped. The doctor called me back into the alcohol smell of his office. I sat, facing his desk, like a truant student in front of the principal. The cold air or years of practiced indifference had frozen his face into an icy mask. I sat up very straight and returned his expression.

“It is not possible to know if you are pregnant by the physical exam.” He spoke in a flat, nasal voice. “You may very well have intestinal parasites. You could also be pregnant.” He adjusted his glasses. “The urine test will tell us if you are pregnant. The stool sample, if you have parasites.”

I pressed my hands against the tops of my thighs, my sweat gluing the material to my skin.
Tell me something I don’t already know.

“Of course, if you are pregnant, I can’t treat you for parasites. What do you plan to do if the pregnancy test is positive?”

It was as if he put his hands around my throat and squeezed. I looked from his face, to the walls, to the window, and back to his small brown eyes that said they could care less what I did.

“I’m considering an abortion.” My voice cracked, like winter ice on a river. I teared up and looked at the floor, furious that I was about to cry in front of this arrogant asshole of a man.

“If that’s what you choose to do, you will have to go to France for the procedure. You know, of course, it is not done here.”

Of course it was not done here. As far as I knew, it was not done anywhere in Africa, at least not in any clinic a villager could afford. In Liberia there had been girls so desperate, they had drank
Bluing,
a bleach that burned out their insides and aborted their fetus. The other alternative was a sharp stick. At least I had a choice. I had the money to go to Paris.

Gritting my teeth, I lifted my head. “How soon can I get the test results?”

“Come back tomorrow.” He dismissed me by looking down and sifting through a pile of papers on his desk.

I exited the office into a narrow hallway and ran into a wall of heat and noise. Exhaust, honking horns, and car engines assaulted me through an open square of window. Dirt clung to the sweat on my skin. My head pounded. At street level, I exited into the glare of afternoon. Cars and motorcycles raced past, kicking up dust.

Dodging taxis and mobylettes, I crossed the street heading north and turned into a wide alleyway. Wooden stalls flanked the alley on both sides, each one housing a man bent over a trundle sewing machine. The pulse of the machine wheels calmed my heartbeat. Tattered awnings hung above each stall, shading the workers inside. I wished to be one of those tailors, intent on their work, at peace in the simple task of cutting cloth or sewing the puzzle pieces of a suit together. But of course, they too had their troubles. Nobody’s life was without problems. You couldn’t walk through the world without bumping into something.

A newspaper stand at the corner blared the headlines in French. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Some general announced the United States would not bar first use of nuclear weapons. Iran and Iraq were still bombing each other, women and children crushed to death in the rubble of buildings.

Vanity, falsehood, greed, and dissension. How little my personal crises mattered to the world. How overwhelming they were to me.

The surrounding buildings muffled the noise from the street. I crouched down to sit on the dirt. A skinny dog ratty with mange trotted down the alleyway and paused to look my way. Rocky hadn’t come home the night she’d gone missing, nor the next day. I feared she had been shot again, this time unable to crawl home.

The dog, small and dun colored like Rocky, sniffed the air, then trotted south down the alley. That’s all it took, that on top of everything else—the proverbial straw. My eyes filled up. I blinked them empty, spilling tears down both cheeks. Africa was a wonderful place at times, but it was a hard place. Tiny tornadoes of sand swirled off the rooftops. Everything around me was withered into one of a thousand shades of brown. Grit crunched between my teeth. Dori’s
djinn
had followed me to Ouaga. Their swishing sounds fell like whispers into the alley with the same dusty quality of Drabo’s voice when he pronounced the Bida Dragon’s curse.

For seven years, seven months, and seven days, may Wagadu remain without its golden rain!

Dori was cursed and so was I. What had we done? Because Sia Jatta Bari had ridden away with Mamadi to escape the dragon, Wagadu became a wasteland. Because I had hopped on Jack’s horse to escape being lonely, I had arrived here. Monique had lost her only child, Tricia wanted a baby more than anything in the world, and I, the only one who didn’t want it, was pregnant and sitting in an alleyway in Wagadu.

I put my forehead to my knees and smelled the alcohol scent of the doctor’s office on my dress. Behind my eyes, I saw the woman with the baby in the Vermont parking lot. A sad laugh fell out of my mouth. I had found the dog, now maybe I was getting the baby. It was all backwards. In my fervent wishing, had I forgotten to be clear about the proper sequence of things?

You could have the baby and give it to me.

I sunk deeper into the sand. If I kept this pregnancy, I would have to go home, put my career…no, put my life on hold, and face my father and the rest of my family. I knocked my forehead against my knees—one, two, three, four—vanity, falsehood, greed, dissension. A mountain hung around my neck.

I couldn’t do it. If the pregnancy test came out positive, I would have to lie to Tricia, take a side trip to France instead of Somalia.

The nasal song of the imam cut through the noise of the streets—five o’clock prayer. Gray would be waiting for me. She was in town for a Peace Corps in-service training, and we had made plans to meet for dinner.

I dragged myself to my feet and continued down the alley. The street traffic slowed as men crowded the sidewalks. Some wore long robes, others, tailored suits of cotton pants and short sleeve shirts. All of them walked toward the mud-walled mosque at the center of town. I had a sudden urge to follow them, to find a church, get on my knees, to beg whatever god would listen to please make it so I wasn’t pregnant.

Instead, I walked on a few more blocks and turned east onto a street where several bars and restaurants did a booming business. Halfway down the street, I caught sight of Gray sitting out on the patio of the Caban Bamboo.

She smiled up at me. “How was your exam?”

I sat. “The doctor took a urine and stool sample, gave me a pelvic exam, and told me to come back tomorrow.” The lump in my throat grew.

“You still don’t know.”

I shook my head.

Gray waved at a waiter, mouthed “Sovobra,” and held up two fingers. A young man in tight pants and a Sunny Adé T-shirt nodded from across the patio.

“What will you do if it’s positive?”

I covered my eyes with my hand. “God, Gray! How did I let this happen? I feel so stupid, so irresponsible.” My head pounded and my throat hurt. “I can’t have a baby now. I’m not ready!”

“It’s not as though you weren’t careful.” Gray put her hand on my arm. “It happens to a lot of women. Some of us are lucky enough to control our own lives. We make a choice.”

I dropped my hand. “I keep thinking of Guy and Monique, when I visited them after Luc died. I couldn’t find any words for them. Monique had hugged me, had tried to comfort
me
.”

Monique had held onto me, her wounded heart beating against mine. All the plans, the hope of Luc, all that was left of him there inside the tiny space of that broken place that still lived, still pumped the blood through her body. I shivered at the numbing sorrow of that day.

“Susan.” Gray took my hand. “Look at me.”

I was staring into the street. I followed the sound of her voice to her face, to her wide-open eyes.

“Whether you continue this pregnancy or not has nothing to do with Luc’s death. Babies are born and babies die every day. Guy and Monique have their life and you have yours.”

I was crying now. “But Gray, don’t you think that what happens in people’s lives somehow connects them? Don’t you think it’s all somehow related? How else would we learn if not from the people around us, the things that happen to all of us?”

I rocked back and forth in the plastic chair on the patio of the Caban Bamboo. The city, the sandy streets, the dirt, all the brown—it was all cursed, all dead.

“Is it vanity?” I kept rocking, needing to move, unable to still myself. “Am I just too proud to go home pregnant? Am I lying to myself that I’m just not ready? My God, Gray! I’m twenty-eight years old! Is it greed? For my freedom, my own life, controlled by me instead of by something I haven’t planned?”

“But we’re talking about the rest of your life!”

“All the more reason to pay attention, don’t you think?” I hugged myself around my middle, to hold myself in, to keep myself from breaking into a thousand pieces.

The waiter brought over two bottles of beer, smiled at Gray, took a look at me, and left quickly.

Gray crouched next to my chair and put her arms around me. “Stop, Sus. You’re beating yourself up over this and you don’t even know if you’re pregnant.” She rubbed my back.

I took a couple of deep breaths.

“Let it rest for now.”

After a while, I was able to stop rocking.

The next day, I went to the Ouaga FDC office and sat in a management meeting with the director and a few staff that took all morning, during which I watched people’s mouths move but heard nothing. When the doctor showed up at 3 pm, I was waiting in the hall.

The doctor nodded to me and unlocked the door. I followed him into the air-conditioning. He motioned me into his office where he sat behind his desk and ran his finger down a sheet of paper.

“It seems you have a very bad case of trichonomis intestinalis as well as amoebas.” He frowned. “You also have a bladder infection.” He sat back and took off his glasses. “Luckily, your pregnancy test was negative so I’ll be able to treat you.”

His mouth kept moving, but the relief that lifted me off my chair and through the ceiling stopped all sound. He was handing me bottles of pills and saying something about ten pills a day for the next x amount of weeks. He also handed me several blue plastic packets of birth control pills.

“These are current. Use them.”

I was nodding, tears running down my cheeks, smiling like an idiot. I wasn’t pregnant! Just sick as a dog. I was saved!

I left his office, skipped down the stairs and out into the street. My life was mine again. Gratitude ballooned inside my chest until I thought I would explode. I skipped down the street, clasping my hands to my chest, sending my thanks to the sky. Someone, somewhere, had listened. And at that moment, I believed in God as an energy force that absorbed our prayers. I needed that someone to send my thanks to. Someone who listened.

I stopped.

The noise in the street tunneled so that it sounded tinny and far away. That God who had ignored the pleas of Guy and Monique for the life of their only child, had granted me my one wish. A rush of heat from behind my heart collided with the balloon in my chest. Luc had died, but I was allowed to go on with my life as planned.

In the noise of the street, surrounded by the dust and heat of afternoon, amidst a throng of people, I turned my face, once to the north, once to the west, once to the east, and once to the south. Every direction was mine for the choosing—north, south, east, or west. But I wanted Before, to go back—to before Luc died, before Lily died, before the little girl in Foequellie died, before they had already left—and gather them so that I could make them stay, so that we could all go forward together. I knew of no god who could do that.

Instead, the next morning, I took the plane north to Dori for the last time.

Chapter 29

Laya

June/Shabar

Laya stood next to me, Ousmann in a sling on her back. We waited at the cement counter of the Dori branch of the BIHV,
Banque Internationale de Haute Volta
—a bank used by local military and a few businessmen. Wood smoke and the sweet incense of morning air off the desert drifted into the bank to mix with the musty smell of ledgers, typewriters, and rubber-banded bundles of paper money.

The bank manager, a man dressed in a pale blue leisure suit, came forward with a book for Laya to sign. She made an x on the line. The man gave her a handwritten slip of paper confirming the amount of money we had deposited to open an account for Laya under her own name. He then handed her a small booklet to manage her money. Next to us, Nassuru shifted from one foot to the other. He had agreed to keep track of the numbers for Laya; to write them into her book each time she came to the bank.

Laya’s salary would continue. Home Office had finally found someone willing to come to Upper Volta. She was a young American woman with dark hair, an infectious laugh, and a healthy dose of self-confidence who agreed to hire Laya as soon as I left. The plan was for Laya to deposit a small amount of each monthly salary into her account. This way, she would have a stash of money in case her husband died and she was left to raise her children on her own.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t enough, that she would never have enough.

Laya tied the booklet into the piece of cloth that held Ousmann. She smiled at me, her cheeks flushed, a nervous slant to her eyebrows, as though she were about to board a ship to another planet. I didn’t know if she would actually use the bank account, such a strange thing for a woman to do in Dori. But I hoped.