Somebody's Heart Is Burning (28 page)

At the center of each village was a mosque. These mosques were exquisite, wildly fanciful creations, like something out of Dr. Seuss. They, too, were built of mud, with turrets and towers of varying heights, and short pieces of wood sticking out all over at odd angles. Mud can be a shifty substance: I later learned that the wood was there at least in part to allow people to climb up and apply a fresh layer if a spot cracked or wore thin.

On the third morning of the trip, we were passing a village when the little man approached me again. Excited, he pointed to me, then to himself, then to the village. He repeated the sequence a couple of times.

“He wants you to visit him in his village,” said Touré.

“Is that it?” I asked, confused, pointing to the passing hamlet.

“No, no. In the desert. He will bring you there from Timbuktu.”

“Really? That would be fantastic.”

The man put his fingers to either side of his head like little horns, then made a lusty biting gesture at his arm, as though tearing away the flesh with his teeth.

“He says he will kill a goat for you,” said Touré.

“But I’m a vegetarian,” I said. A fish-etarian who sometimes eats chicken, actually, but I didn’t want to confuse things. Touré made the biting gesture, with less gusto, and shook his head sadly.

The man repeated the fierce gesture, and nodded.

“He says meat is good,” said Touré.

The man pointed then to a little boy standing on the shore. He nodded, smiling, and rubbed his belly.

“He says that boy would be very good to eat. He says you could get a lot of money for the head.”

I gaped in disbelief.

Touré burst out laughing. “He is joking with you! He has heard what the white people think of Africa.” He shook his head. “He is an interesting person, isn’t he?”

I laughed, and so did the little man, silently, beaming and rubbing his flat belly. He then launched rapid-fire into a new sequence of gestures.

“He says there is plenty of rice in his village for you to eat,” Touré translated. “This village is only a small camp, some distance into the desert. A car goes there twice a week from Timbuktu. Or you can take a camel.”

“What does he do there?”

The man moved his hands vigorously from side to side. I looked at Touré in bewilderment.

“Isn’t it obvious? He makes charcoal!”

“Obviously.” Charcoal, I’d been told, was made by burning wood in a deep underground pit, then applying pressure to compact it. How the gesture illustrated this wasn’t entirely clear to me, but I didn’t ask.

“He wants to know what you are doing on this boat.”

“Me? I’m just . . . traveling.” I walked the fingers of one hand across the back of the other. Now it was the little man’s turn to look bewildered. He spread out his hands and cocked his head inquisitively.

“Why?” I looked at Touré, who nodded. “Why,” I repeated aloud. I looked at the man. As usual, his wool cap covered his skull. It was impossible to gauge his age, though I guessed somewhere in his mid to late forties. The skin was stretched tight across the bones of his face. Deep smile lines had carved themselves beside his mouth. His eyes were so kind, his expression at once so innocent and penetrating, that I felt tears rise in my own eyes. I tried to imagine his life: sweltering days spent digging holes in the desert and pressing the charcoal into them, walking for miles in search of water, eating meals of rice and sauce with his family, sleeping curled up between siblings and cousins in a tent, then dragging his heavy sack on a bumpy camel ride to Timbuktu, where he would catch a
pinasse
and travel along the river, hawking the hard black lumps that were his livelihood to the people in the villages he passed—people who had known him all his life—always delivering a smile with his goods. How could I explain my strange life to him? How could I tell yet another person here that with everything that had been given to me, I was still restless and unsatisfied? That I felt driven to wander the earth in search of some elusive key that would unlock the chamber of my own happiness? How could I explain that I chose physical hardship: dysentery, heat rash, dizzying rides in crowded vehicles down bumpy, potholed roads—hardship he had no choice but to endure—that I
chose
all of this, because it was the only thing that made me feel truly alive?

“To see things . . . I guess,” I offered lamely.

The man pointed to my red spiral notebook, which was perched on the sack of grain beside me. He put his head down and hunched his shoulders, making a scribbling gesture on his hand. He looked up at me with an inquiring expression.

“How can I see when I’m always writing?” I shrugged. “Good question. Sometimes I feel that when I’m writing is the only time I can see.”

He looked at me in perplexity, and again I was at a loss.
Maybe it’s because my parents are academics,
I wanted to say,
but I feel
that no matter how big a mess I make of my life, if I write it all down
carefully, it’ll come out all right.

“Why don’t you write at home, in your own country?” asked Touré.

I shrugged, turning to him. “I guess I was just born restless. Wherever I am, I always want to be somewhere else.”

Touré gestured, translating my response. The little man shook his head sadly, looking at me with downturned mouth and mournful eyes.

“He says you are a very bad girl,” said Touré. “Your mother and father are so worried about you—they want you home. His mother too, she will be glad to see you, for his sister has gone far away, to work in Bamako.”

“Did he really say all that?”

“Of course!” said Touré, mock offended.

I laughed. “Well, I can’t wait to meet his mother. When do we go?”

“Aren’t you afraid, to go so far into the desert?” Touré looked at me curiously.

“With him? How can I be afraid with him?” I looked at the generously lined face, the warm, twinkling eyes. “What’s his name?” I asked.

The man gestured helplessly, spreading his hands wide, palms up. Straining his neck, he let out a high chirping sound.

“He cannot tell you,” said Touré. “He does not have letters.”

The man was deaf! All this time I’d thought he was gesturing because of the language barrier. I’d imagined he spoke a regional dialect so different from Touré’s that even they had to talk to each other in a kind of universal sign.

Suddenly the man pointed at my feet. He began stroking his own pale soles with a doleful expression.

“He wants you to give him your shoes,” said Touré.

What? Here I am thinking this guy is some kind of guru, and it
turns out he’s just after my shoes?
My enthusiasm evaporated like a teardrop in the Sahara.

“I need them,” I said, my lips tight.

He wagged a finger at me. Smiling craftily, he pointed to my backpack. With infinite care, he built a boot in the air around his foot.

He knew the sandals were not my only shoes. He’d spotted a pair of boots in my backpack, practically new. He touched his heart, then repeated a gesture I’d seen him make before, flinging an invisible handful of grain into the air.

“He says when you give, you are in the heart of God,” said Touré.

“Is he still trying to convert me, or does he just want the shoes?” I snapped.

Touré considered this. “I will ask him,” he said.

“No . . . Don’t.”

What the hell was wrong with me? The man’s feet were dry and cracked, covered with yellowing calluses. When had I become so hard?

But what good would it do anyway, one pair of shoes to one person,
in a year they’d wear out and—

Stop it. Look at this man.

I looked. The woolen skullcap, the slight body swathed in its cotton robe, the crinkled face and glowing eyes, the hopeful smile, the bare feet. I stood there for a long moment, suspended in indecision.

Just take the sandals off and give them to him.

I didn’t.

Afternoon found me on the roof of the
pinasse
, basking in the sunshine, the wind tousling my hair. It was a perfect day, the sun warm but not oppressive, the breeze delicious on my skin. The Niger spread brown and languid before me. The sky was a pure, deep blue, the marsh grass to the left a vibrant green. To the right, spectacular red rock formations rose above the equally red earth.

Whenever we passed a village, children materialized out of nowhere and tore down the shore, pointing and shouting, waving wildly at the strange white creature perched on the boat. I waved back at them, feeling like the homecoming queen on her float.

The air was filled with birdsong, harsh and lyrical, legato and staccato—a polyphonic symphony. A hawk circled overhead. Earlier in the day we’d seen three hippos, bathing serenely in the middle of the river, their backs rising from the water like the mountains of a sunken land. Another couple sunned themselves on shore. Touré warned me to steer clear of them, both in and out of the water. They were very fast, he said, and they’d been known to chase people down and trample them to death.

Great,
I thought wryly,
one more thing to worry about.

But nothing was worrying me now. My broad-brimmed straw sunhat cast a half-circle of shade on my face. I kept taking my sunglasses off and putting them on again: off to experience the colors; on to cut the glare. I was singing:
“I’m on the top of the
world, looking down on creation and the only explanation I can find—”

Suddenly the captain of the ship, who’d been standing a few feet in front of me, nose to the wind like a mascot, jumped off the roof to the deck below. The boat was heading straight for the swampy shore. He grabbed a pole and threw his weight against it, trying to deflect the nose from collision, but we were moving too fast—the pole jumped back at him. He sprang out of the boat as though someone had pushed an ejector button, and crashed into the water below.

I stared at the water, paralyzed. Where had he gone? Was he hurt? Just as I was about to scream for help, he hopped out of the water onto the bank, shouting and waving his arms.

At that moment, the nose hit the shore with a resounding crack. Wood splintered. Water began pouring in. A few scattered shouts from the deck below built quickly to a cacophony.

Wow,
I thought, with a kind of dull incredulity.
This is really
an accident.

People started running off the boat. I suddenly realized my notebooks were still in the back of the boat, under the roof. One of them was loose, on my mat; two others were in my small daypack. There was over a month of writing there, precious detail I didn’t want to lose.
I knew I should’ve mailed them home!
I decided to wait until everyone was out of the way before jumping down. No fire-in-the-movie-house crush for this girl.

When the flow of traffic stopped, I leaped lightly to the deck. The water was coming in slowly—only ankle-deep so far. Plenty of time to get my notebooks.

To get to my things, I had to make the precarious climb over the sunken kitchen. When I got there, I found Touré, dragging my two packs and his own satchel toward the shore end of the boat.

“Here, put these on your back,” he said, dropping them. I knelt to detach the daypack from the larger one. Touré had connected them the night before by interlinking the straps. He’d said they were less likely to be stolen that way.

“What are you doing?” he yelled.

“I’m detaching the small pack.”

“There’s no time for that! Put the packs on your back!” He headed off, toting his bag.

I tried to follow his instructions, but in my haste I got tangled in the straps. I couldn’t imagine negotiating the climb from the boat to the shore with that load on my back. I had the irrational notion that if I put on the heavy pack, my part of the boat would sink faster. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my current notebook—the red spiral one—sitting on my grass mat. I reached for it.

Until that moment, I’d never really understood the way a boat sinks. I figured that with the water coming in so slowly, it would be a good half hour before the boat was really under. What I didn’t realize is that when the weight of the water hits critical mass, the boat just goes down.

Suddenly water—at my chest and rising. I tossed the bags and dove. But did I dive? Or was I just suddenly in the water?
My
hat!
The leather braid yanked my head back, choking me. Ripped it off, paddling wild, roof coming down, dark.
Dark.
Underwater—how long?—turning, flailing in slow-motion darkness.
Which way is up?
Thrashing, heartbeat, loud
—Did I clear the
roof? Then light, murky and green, and I popped up into it, gasping.

The water was eerily calm. I looked around, confused.

Any children in the water? Fuck it—get to shore. What a selfish ass-hole you are.

I swam for the muddy bank, where children and adults were running down the shore, chasing after floating luggage.