Somebody's Heart Is Burning (27 page)

I pushed him; I tickled him; I pulled him. No response. An old man just past Touré’s head sat up and glared at me like an angry ghost.

“Je m’excuse,”
I mouthed.

The water-bailer temporarily abandoned his task and came over to help, shaking Touré’s foot and calling to him in Bambara. I tried to move one of Touré’s arms, and that’s when I discovered something peculiar. At first the arm moved floppily, the way a sleeping arm should. Then it tensed and became steel. With all my strength I couldn’t budge it. Either he was faking, or his guard never came down, even in sleep.

In desperation, I placed my feet against his chest and tried to roll him over. I was making no headway at all, until my foot slipped loose and kicked him in the face. He sat up sharply.

“Eh!”
he shouted.

“Touré! You’ve got to give me just a little space to lie down.”

“A little space,” he repeated groggily.

“A little space,” I pleaded.

He lay back down, grumbling, shifting his body a teensy bit to the side. I nudged him again, afraid he’d drift back to sleep. He moved a little more, but still not enough. The water-bailer spoke to him sharply in Bambara. He sat up.

“Aahh,”
I groaned, spreading out.

He stayed sitting the rest of the night. I didn’t care.

“You beat me up last night. You tried to kill me!” Touré shouted at me the next morning.

“You said you didn’t sleep,” I countered defensively. “You said you wouldn’t sleep
here.
”

“And so you attack me?”

“I didn’t attack you,” I grumbled. “I was just trying to
move
you.”

“Is this how you treat your boyfriend in your bed?”

I paused for a moment. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“No wonder!”

It was 6 A.M. The day had dawned clear and breezy, with a pale yellow sky moving gradually toward blue. All around me people were chatting good-naturedly, leaning over the side of the boat to wash their hands and faces in the river. The sound of their laughter and the splashing of the water mingled with the chirping and warbling of countless birds.

Everyone on the boat chipped in a handful of rice, and the captain’s daughter prepared a rice-water breakfast. Dinner the night before had worked the same way, with everyone chipping in rice and the girl cooking it up with a mixture of shea oil, onion, tomato, and a bit of okra, which gave it a slimy texture that made me gag. It had a slight fish flavor as well, though no actual pieces of fish. Touré explained to me that they cooked the rice with the fish, then took the fish out, removed the bones, and crushed the rest to a pulp to flavor the whole dish.

I hadn’t been prepared to contribute rice, and the boat’s owner seemed unaware that I’d purchased a ticket with meals included, so I gave him some extra money for food. Instead of using the coal port, the girl lit a log fire in a large iron bowl in the sunken kitchen area, right in the middle of the
pinasse.
The smoke stung my eyes. To make matters worse, she’d positioned herself right next to me while chopping the onions.

Mornings are not my best time of day. I’ve never been sure whether my work in the theatre is a cause of this or vice versa. On this particular morning, my body ached from the cold night on the lumpy sacks, and Touré’s incessant energy was grating on my nerves. Was I stuck with him for the entire trip because of language? Then I remembered the man I’d met the night before, the one with the smooth voice and delicate hands.

“Hey, Touré,” I said. “Did you know there’s another guy on this boat who’s fluent in French?”

“Yes,” Touré said huffily. “I have seen him. He does not do the prayer. You should stay away from him, a man who betrays his own religion.” He leaned in closer. “I’ve heard he is meeting Christian missionaries in Timbuktu.”

Over the course of the morning, we saw an astounding array of birds. They dove and waded, hovered and floated. I recognized a few of them: heron, sandpiper, pelican, starling. Others were completely unfamiliar. Some had colorful plumage and large curving bills; others’ heads were adorned with feathery sprays. Some balanced near the shore on long, spindly legs, while others darted along the bank so quickly their short legs blurred to invisibility. Still others circled overhead, brightly garbed in yellow or red or black, each trilling its particular song.

Midday found us pulled up on the bank of the river. One of the steering cords had broken and was being repaired. The population of the boat made a mass exodus to the shore, teetering down a shaky plank, bare feet clamped to the slippery wood. Despite my best efforts at balance, I ended up ankle-deep in squishy mud. It was worth it, though, to relieve myself in the relative comfort of the great outdoors. We were passing through a series of lakes, and the shores of the river were marshy, filled with high grasses and reeds in brilliant shades of green.

Two hours later, we were back on the water.

“Why are you going to Timbuktu?” I asked Touré, after we’d finally gotten underway.

“Timbuktu? I am not going all the way to that place. Too much sand. I’m getting off in my hometown of Diré. I am going to see the marabout. Someone has cursed me.”

The marabout was a Moslem holy man believed to have supernatural powers, the Malian equivalent of the fetish priest.

“Look.” He pushed up his sleeve and showed me the inside of his arm. One patch was noticeably paler than the rest. The skin appeared to be peeling off in fine, uneven layers, like shale.

“Everything else in my body is fine,” he said. “I went to the hospital and did all kinds of tests, but they could not find anything.” He paused. “Shall I tell you how I know it’s a curse?” He leaned in confidentially, glancing around. “My flip-flops disappeared. Twice in a row. I left them outside my door at night, and the next morning they were gone. Then in the evening, they were back.”

I looked at him curiously.

“That’s how they do it!” he insisted. “They take a part of you to give to the spirits so they know how to find you.”

“Why would they give them back?” I asked.

“They got what they wanted! They aren’t thieves.”

Five times a day the call to prayer sounded, and the majority of passengers rose like a wave and faced Mecca. The sight of them in their blue, white, and lavender robes and turbans, rising and falling in near unison against the backdrop of the river, was graceful and unexpectedly moving. They knelt on their prayer mats, prostrating themselves, their mumbling forming a hypnotic chorus. I envied them this ritual, at once private and shared. My Moroccan friend Abdelati once said to me, “I look forward to the hour of prayer with eager anticipation.”
It must be a great comfort,
I thought,
to know that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing,
five times a day you—and everyone around you—will drop everything
and speak deeply with God . . . or even just with yourself.

One man kept drawing my eye. He was tiny—maybe five foot two—with small bones and delicate features. He wore the usual pale cotton
bou-bou
, but instead of a turban he wore a little wool cap, even in the heat of day. When he performed the prayer, bliss seemed to radiate outward from his entire body. His eyes turned upward in an expression of devotion more complete than any I had ever seen. He positively glowed with joy, from the tips of his fingers to the soles of his bare feet. I was transfixed.

On the second afternoon, after finishing the prayer, he turned suddenly and came toward me, pointing emphatically. His face was animated, eyes lit by an urgent question. He pointed at me and then pointed up. He tilted his head back, peering skyward. Then he looked at me, hands spread wide, eyebrows raised.

Confused, I looked around for help.

“He wants to know why you don’t do the prayer,” said Touré. He tapped the man on the shoulder, pointed at me, then made the sign of the cross. “I told him you are a Christian,” he said.

“But I’m not a Christian,” I protested. “I’m an agnostic-leaning-toward-atheist Jew.”

“What?”

“Just tell him I’m not a believer.”

Touré looked at the man. He pointed at me, crossed himself again, then shook his head sadly and moved his hands across each other in a negating gesture, like an umpire calling “out.” He then prostrated himself on the ground in the manner of the Moslem prayer, got up, and repeated the negating gesture. Then, in a final dramatic action, he pointed toward the sky, sweeping his arm as if to include anything that could possibly be up there. He shook his head again, vigorously, and once again moved his hands in the “out” symbol, as if to say, “Nothing there.”

The man looked at me in disbelief. He made a gesture as though gathering up a fistful of grain and throwing it over his head, then looked up again to heaven. His face wore the purest delight.

Touré shrugged at me. “He says you must believe. God is there.”

The man nodded at me, beaming. It was the same conversation I’d had a hundred times since arriving in Africa, but this man’s passion made it fresh.

I shook my head at him. “I’m sorry,” I said gently. “I wish I could believe, but I don’t.” I shrugged helplessly. “I can’t.”

The man simply nodded at me, beaming.

“He says you will,” said Touré.

The landscape settled into a kind of monotony, as we floated past broad stretches of grassy savanna dotted with low bushes and spiny trees. Here and there a baobab stood, squat and defiant, its prickly branches thrusting combatively into the air. Occasionally we passed villages—clusters of rectangular, flatroofed huts the same color as the earth. Some of these grew crops, their brilliant green, carefully tended plots like flashes of neon amid the surrounding drabness. From time to time we’d see sheep or goats grazing on the sparse savanna grass. Near the villages, men fished on the river in
pirogues
or
pinasses
, some with billowy sails, and women stood along the bank, smoking fish, bathing, or washing clothes.