In the Belly of the Elephant (31 page)

We parted at the office. Laya headed toward the market to buy what little there was for that day’s meal. Our lunches consisted of whatever rice or millet remained to be sold, canned or dried fish, and dried beans. If we were lucky, Laya would find a few greens brought in from the oasis gardens. Lunch would be just me, Laya, and the kids.

Kate, in her infinite wisdom, had suggested that Tricia visit some of Kate’s friends in Kaya, a town halfway between Dori and Ouaga. Irritable and missing her husband, Tricia had agreed on a change of scenery and, to my considerable relief, gone south for an indefinite period.

Exchanging smiles, Nassuru and I hurried toward the noise of Adiza’s and Fati’s laughter. They were already teasing the poor American who had just arrived in Dori from the World Council of Credit Unions. At my request, WOCCU had sent a consultant to train staff how to restructure our loan programs into credit cooperatives. Our community cash boxes, revolving funds, and village committees were a good start but needed fine tuning and better monitoring. The women’s cotton spinning and garden seed loan projects had improved, but reimbursement was still spotty. Only the men’s artisan cooperative to loan out thread for blanket weaving had seen a marked improvement in reimbursement rates.

In the conference room, we greeted everyone at the table then sat for the morning session. The room was already stifling despite the open windows, and the consultant, a pale thin man in his early thirties, looked on the verge of collapse.

Jack sat at the opposite end of the table, chin in hand. He gave me a sleepy grin. The consultant crunched on another handful of granola, and Fati giggled. According to Jack, the guy had brought dozens of granola-filled zip-lock bags with him in his suitcase. Since the start of the training a few days before, the consultant had constantly eaten granola during the sessions, talking between mouthfuls. I figured it was his way of avoiding the local food or of keeping up his energy between the meals he ate at Jack’s house. At any rate, the staff found this an intriguing habit to which Fati added a note of hilarity. Djelal responded with his permanent frown and a disbelieving huff each time a new zip-lock bag was introduced.

The morning session seemed to last for days. Distant thunder rumbled around the edges of Dori as clouds built up their daily taunt. We had given up hope that they would ever fulfill their promises. We no longer ran out to the courtyard at the sound of thunder. Seeds had been loaned to the women’s garden committees in Sambonaye and the other villages, but would not be planted until the first rain fell. The rain that wouldn’t come. They waited.
Ensha’allah
, if Allah willed it, God’s time was the best. They had to blame it on somebody.

I sat and listened to the consultant define the various steps of institutional analysis in a head-fog of medication. Having finished a course of flagyl for the intestinal bugs, I was now taking antibiotics for the bladder infection. My gut hurt and my eyeballs weighed a ton. My period had finally started with a vengeance, dumping a ten-week buildup. I took an outhouse break and returned to my chair.

Trying to concentrate on the consultant’s granola-enhanced French, I looked around the table from face to face. Djelal’s frown, Nassuru’s smile, Nouhoun’s droopy eyelids, the corner of Fati’s mouth that was always twitching with suppressed laughter, Adiza’s latest hairdo, and Jack, twisting the end of his mustache as though he’d just tied someone to a railroad track. I’d been doing this for days—a kind of memorize the face game.

I did the same thing at lunch with Laya and the kids. Aissatou, Issa, Hama, and Ousmann—their fresh faces and happy chatter. Bittersweet melancholy took root behind my belly and tangled its limbs around my heart.

That evening after work, I walked to Laya’s street. Hama met me at the gate with his little devil’s smile, took my hand, and led me to Laya’s corner of the compound. Aissatou and little Issa shook my hand, touching their other hands to their forearms. Ousmann, now a toddler, sat banging on a pot with a stick. Hama brought over a stool and set it next to Laya, who sat on a mat, cleaning millet.

We chatted while Laya poured a gourd of millet into a tray made of woven reeds. She shook the grain in a circular motion then flipped it over itself with a swift out and up movement. The feather-like hulls blew away on the breeze, while the heavier kernels, little nuggets of food, fell back onto the mat. She continued the movement, out and up, out and up, until only the cleaned millet remained.

I had watched her do this a thousand times. But that day, the rain sound of the grain as it rose and fell, and the patient repetition of Laya’s movements silenced me and sent a ripple across my scalp.

This was the way she had been with me. Patiently watching over me and listening, sifting my words and actions out and up, out and up, letting the wind blow away my complaints and my foibles, accepting only the best of me. Out and up, the grain fell. Laya had shown me the meaning of unconditional love.

We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.

What did human mean? Kind, loving, compassionate? If so, the people I had met in Africa—James, Hamidou, Laya—were among the most human I had ever known.

Smiling at me, Laya scooped the grain into a bowl and carried it to the stove where she poured it into a pot of boiling water. She bent and fed a few twigs into the firebox.

“I’m sorry I can’t take you with me, Laya.”

She laughed, as though it had just been an ongoing joke between us. As though what she had dared to dream, like so many things in life, had turned out to be wishes thrown around in the air, hopes that never came down to earth.

“I might get a job offer in Somalia. If I take it, I’ll be in Mogadishu. If I don’t and I go back to the States, I’m not going home to my family. I’ll need to go to a big city to get a job.”

Washington DC? New York? They were a thousand times bigger than Dori. How could she survive there? How would I?

“I don’t even have a place to live, Laya.”

She sat on a low stool next to me. “Dori is my home. I belong here with my husband and my children.”

I nodded, knowing it to be true. If she came with me, she would be uprooted, wandering from place to place. Here was her home, her family, a community of people whose beliefs and culture bound them. A much better place than anyplace I could take her. A much safer place despite the Harmatton plagues and the lack of water. But still, why did I feel like such a coward?

In his book,
A Bend in the River
, V. S. Naipaul had written, “A wall taller than a man is a high wall.”

Laya could not come to stay forever in my world any more than I could stay forever in hers.

Then, a thousand hands clapped at once. The children squealed and I looked up. The clouds had moved in over Dori as though they’d finally found their tickets and boarded the train. Another crack split open the sky. We all stood, frozen, expectant.

A drop of rain hit the dirt with a splat, spitting a puff of dust. Then another, and another. The clouds opened up and the rain finally fell, just as Hamidou said it would. Issa and Hama peeled off their shirts and ran with the other children into the streets where they twirled, jumped, and danced. Their laughter blended with the roar of the rain. The gift of water.

I lifted my face and opened my mouth. It tasted cold and sweet. Water washed over my outstretched arms, over my face, plastering my hair against my head. It ran in streams down my neck and over my feet. I took Laya’s hands and we smiled at each other. The curse was broken.

When the rain stopped, I left Laya’s to walk home. The sun dipped behind the horizon and painted the sky a hundred flaming shades of red and orange. Three camels in the lot next to my house raised their heads to watch me pass. A chat with Old Issa at his kiosk, and through my gate, I entered my courtyard and stopped. The leaves of the eucalyptus sparkled with hundreds of pink diamonds—captured drops of rain that mirrored the last rays of the sun. The walls that framed my courtyard, their chinks and crumbled edges now so familiar to me, were washed a rich, dark brown. High walls I used in the beginning to hide behind, but that Gray, Laya, Kate, and Drabo had broken down. Walls not so tall as a man.

The eucalyptus trees waved their branches in the breeze, scattering their droplets, whispering the same secrets that put me to sleep each night and woke me each morning. My hammock hung between the two neem trees, the place I had passed so many
siestes
and read so many books. The out-kitchen, the patio and table where I had eaten countless meals with Laya and the kids. The bathroom with its open ceiling, bucket of sun-warmed water, the tin cup hanging on a nail, the batik cloth door.

Rocky’s dish sat under the clothesline, empty. She had never come home. My dog had been my friend, kept me company, and left just when I was about to go.

I sighed. No relationship, no baby, no dog.

“Am I back where I started?”

I sat in my hammock, looked around. No, not even close. True, I had no committed relationship, but I’d had a crash course in love, and found a good friend in Jack. I had no baby, thank God! I obviously wasn’t ready for a baby. Rocky was gone, but I would have had to leave her soon. Dogs needed people who stayed put. True, I still didn’t know where I belonged or where I was going. That damn no ticket/lost luggage dream kept reminding me of that. Though the night before, the dream had changed somewhat. Out the airport window, I had noticed someone standing on the boat, next to the dock, on the lake. It was my old boyfriend, Steve, the good guy I had left, just standing there, watching. I hadn’t heard from Steve in three years. He was probably married by now.

A breeze blew and scattered more drops of water off the trees. I shook my head. I wasn’t back where I started. I’d come a long way. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew where I’d been. Maybe my path had been a little circular, but it had spiraled me to a different place—a higher altitude, a better view.

The sky was a dome of clean blue air, the curse was broken, and where I’d been was a chest full of treasure. That was reason enough to be happy for now.

A motorcycle roared up outside the gate. A quick knock as the gate opened and Jack came in. He looked around. “Your sister?”

“Still in Kaya for another couple of days.”

“Good.” He pulled two chairs out into the middle of the courtyard and I opened a bottle of Sovobra.

When I sat, he handed me a tiny cloth bag closed with a drawstring.

“What’s this?”

“Well, your birthday is pretty soon, and I know these last few weeks will be crazy for you.” He shrugged. “Happy birthday.”

The bag rested in my hand, the material soft against my palm. I opened it and pulled out a long gold chain. Halfway down the chain, an ivory crescent moon was linked so that it hung at an angle to a gold star. The last of the waning moon and Venus as the Morning Star—a golden reminder of a place where we told time from the moon and stars, and the symbol of Islam in a town where Allah was a kind and tolerant god. I stared at it. Tears made it blurry, made the star twinkle in the last light, the way the raindrops had turned the leaves to diamonds.

“I had it made in Ouaga.”

I nodded and held it up against my chest. Jack hooked the clasp.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “How about this. Let’s promise we’ll keep in touch. And if by the time we’re both, say, thirty-five, and we’re still not married…”

I nodded. “We’ll find each other and go from there.”

We hugged and clinked glasses. I smiled at the gifts Jack had given me. As up and down as our relationship had been, Jack had managed to sew my heart back together. I would be forever grateful. Love born of friendship—a slow warming that was so much truer than the thunderbolt of mythical love that fired your loins but fried your brain. That’s exactly what mythical love was—a myth.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Jack leaned forward and pulled a square of blue paper out of his back pocket. “This came in with the plane after you left.” He handed me the aerogramme.

It was postmarked from Somalia and had taken over a month to arrive. Don wrote that he was still in Mogadishu, the work was good, and they had an opening. A job in Somalia was mine if I wanted it. He offered to fly me to Mogadishu to check it out.

The next day I sent a telex to Don. I was on my way.

Chapter 30

A Bottle Full of Sand

July/Ramadan

On a clear morning after a night of short rains, I said goodbye to Old Issa. He came out from behind his kiosk and nodded and smiled, but his eyes were sad. A twinge started in my chest, that by the end of the next day would grow into a sharp-edged pain. It would settle into my heart, and over the years become a soft melancholy.

At the office courtyard, Fati, Nassuru, Adiza, and Gray stood outside the double doors while Hamidou loaded baggage into the truck. Fati came forward in a new outfit printed with lime green millet stalks and purple garden hoes and kissed me on both cheeks. “
Au revoir
, Suzanne,” she said, taking my hand with a smile that reminded me of all the laughter we had shared during so many trips to and from the villages. “I will take care of Jack for you.” She winked, giggled, and passed my hand to Nassuru.

Nassuru tried to smile and my heart sank at the look on his face. He stood mute, his eyebrows furrowed in a way that accused me of abandoning them. At the same time, there was a yearning in his eyes, to be able to go as I was going, to see the world. But he was a Fulani prince responsible for the welfare of his people. His destiny was to stay.

“Forgive me for leaving, Nassuru, but it is my time to go.” I searched the depths of his eyes for some glimmer of forgiveness as the tears I had been holding in for a month escaped down my cheeks.

He ducked his head and nodded. I wiped my eyes with a short laugh. They laughed with me—small, weak noises that eased the anxiety of farewell.

Adiza grabbed my shoulders and hugged the air out of my lungs. Nassuru backed away.