Somebody's Heart Is Burning (5 page)

“Where’s she going?” one volunteer or another would wonder aloud as we sat on the balcony of the Wato Bar, another favorite hangout, watching daylight turn to dusk. As the cloth wicks on the kerosene cans took flame one by one in the streets below, we’d crane our necks just in time to see Hannah slip quickly between the food stands and disappear.

As time went on, she became fluent in Fanti, which she practiced with Gorbachev and the other African volunteers while serving us our food at The Last Stop. There were over sixty languages spoken among Ghana’s eighteen million people. Fanti belonged to Akan, the dominant language group, which most Ghanaians understood. Hannah’s English, too, sounded increasingly Ghanaian, her accent, sentence structure, and turns of phrase growing more African with each passing day. Her relationship with the African men had changed, too. She no longer flirted the way she once had. She was friendly, even affectionate, but a distance remained.

“Why don’t you go out with Gorbachev?” I asked her once. “He’s such a sweet, gentle man, and you know he worships you.”

“Eh!”
she clucked. “Ghana men and me, we are finished. Ghana men are
weak
!” she shouted, echoing a common insult the African volunteers threw at each other on the camps. “Now I want only Ghana. Ghana here,” she pounded the table. “Ghana is sooo sweet. Amsterdam was never my place. Ghana here, this is my place.”

When the rains came, Hannah began spending nights in the small room attached to The Last Stop, with Sistah Essi and her two girls. Hannah and Essi had become very close, and often when Gorbachev and I went down there for a midday meal I could hear them giggling behind the kitchen partition while they chopped vegetables and stirred the stews. Sometimes I had to call out three or four times before Hannah would come out and greet us with a friendly, “
Eh!
Sistah Korkor, Brothah Gorbachev, you are welcome!”

Essi’s husband, Kweku, was in the army and came home every month or two for a few days. He was known around the hostel as an odd character and a heavy drinker; the Ghanaian volunteers were reluctant to visit The Last Stop when he was in town. Whenever he appeared, Hannah moved back to her tent and, as though by tacit agreement, her relations with Essi became stiff and formal. Kweku was suspicious of her motives for working at The Last Stop, and one night she heard him shouting through the walls, while the two little girls whimpered and wailed.

“They are so rich,” he shouted in Fanti, “to come here, from so far away, and stay for many months, doing nothing, buying whatever goods they please. Why then should she work like this, eating our food?”

Hannah could not make out Essi’s reply, but when she heard what sounded like a hand striking flesh, she put her head under her sleeping bag and counted to a thousand. She offered to leave the next day, but Essi begged her to stay.

“Sistah Korkor, Essi hates that man,” Hannah said. “If I were her, I would surely find a way to kill him.” We were sitting on one of The Last Stop’s uneven wooden benches at dusk, wiggling our toes in the cooling sand. A gentle breeze rose off the ocean, and a pale sunset tinted the foam pink.

“I know,” I said. “It’s awful. And I have the feeling it’s pretty widely tolerated, too.” The previous day, I’d overheard a Ghanaian volunteer telling one of the foreign men that if he himself had a sister whose husband beat her, he would not accept her back into the family. Her husband wouldn’t beat her for no reason, he explained; she’d had to have done something wrong.

“I wish Essi would throw him out,” Hannah said. Tears stood in her eyes. “She and I, we can run the restaurant. For what does she need him? He takes her chop money and buys
apeteshi.
”

I sighed. “She’d probably leave him if she could. Who knows what her options are? We can’t really see the full picture.”

“I see her! She is afraid, that is all. But I will help her. I will stay with her and help to run the café.”

“How long do you plan to be here, Hannah, really? Aren’t you going back to Holland, to school?”

“No, no, no!” She started to cry. “For what do I go back to that place? I am Ghana woman now. That place has nothing that I need.”

I left the next day to go to another camp, and didn’t see Hannah for almost a month. When I returned she was still staying with Essi, and she seemed more entrenched in her “Ghana woman” image than ever. She generally refused to speak English now, though she’d relent and engage in fragmentary conversation with me when pressed.

“Our sistah from Holland is now more Ghana than we Ghanaians!” Gorbachev quipped.

One Saturday night, Hannah, Gorby, and I went with a few other Ghanaian volunteers to Labadi Beach, on the outskirts of Accra, for a dance party. While a tight-knit interracial group danced beneath bright white spotlights and the disheveled silhouettes of palm trees, the three of us walked down the beach to a quiet place where we could smoke our extremely potent wee. Buoyed up by a giddy high, Hannah and I stripped off our skirts and charged into the water, which was scarcely cooler than the air. We stood holding hands, with the waves licking our waists, and looked out toward the horizon. There was no moon, and I could see no line between ocean and sky: just blackness, with sporadic zigzags of white that vanished as soon as they appeared. A thrill of danger raised goose bumps all over my body. I couldn’t see what was coming—I never knew the size of a wave until it broke around me. For all I knew, the next one would crash down on top of our heads and sweep us out to sea.

It was three in the morning when we crammed into a shared taxi back into town with three other Europeans. We were sopping and exhausted, hangovers already on the way. Gorbachev and I walked Hannah down to the beach by the Last Stop, but when we got there we experienced a jolt of disorientation: Hannah’s tent was nowhere to be seen.

“Did you move it?” I asked Hannah.

“No.” She shook her head in bewilderment, looking around her in a kind of daze.

“Thieves?” said Gorbachev.

We walked toward the spot where the tent had been. I stepped on something squishy, and when I reached down I felt fabric, slick and synthetic, with feathers leaking out of it. Exploring further, I found a zipper.

“Oh no,” I said softly. Taking another step I tripped on a slender plastic pole.

“This . . . this is . . . someone has . . .” Gorbachev sputtered, as we discovered pieces of clothing, paper, and plastic, ripped and scattered around the beach. Down near the water I stumbled over a mass of nylon, sopping wet. It was Hannah’s tent.

Hannah began to cry. Gorbachev was shouting, “Who . . . Who has . . .”

A burst of light exploded from The Last Stop. A male figure leaped out into the night with a flaming torch in his hand.

A torrent of abuse came from his mouth in Fanti, interspersed with sporadic words of English. Amid the torrent the words “spy,” “thief,” and “CIA” jumped out at me, and then, later, “white witch” and several times, “my wife.”

“She’s not your wife!” Hannah shouted suddenly. “She doesn’t love you! She hates you! She loves me!”

After that, everything blurs together. Kweku lunged toward us with the torch, and then Gorbachev was holding my hand and the three of us were running blind along the beach. At some point we turned uphill, staggering toward the porch light of the hostel, which glimmered feebly on the horizon. Hannah, on Gorbachev’s other side, screamed a string of Fanti words into the wind as we ran, stumbling and gasping, toward the light.

The next morning, Hannah was gone. At my panicked insistence, Mr. Awitor made inquiries and learned that she had called her parents in Amsterdam, who had arranged for a ticket home the same day. By the time I awoke, she was already at the airport. I don’t know whether she got up at dawn and went to the beach to salvage her possessions. Some volunteers went down there to search, but they found nothing. She would at least have needed her money and passport, I pointed out, but Gorbachev said that Hannah always carried those things with her, in a money belt worn under her dress, “like a foreigner.”

For me she left no note, nothing. And I never found out whether she’d said goodbye to her beloved Essi. I didn’t go back to The Last Stop for many months. When I finally did, Essi chattered cheerfully, avoiding my eyes, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

“She loved Ghana so much,” said Gorbachev sorrowfully. “And this horrible man, he must drive everything to ruin.”

“But why would she just leave like that?” I asked for the hundredth time. “She could have found another place to live. And she could have visited Essi when Kweku was away.”

“Sistah Korkor,” said Gorbachev, looking at me sadly. “Our Sistah Abena, you know, she was a very kind girl, but she was not strong like you. It is very good fortune that she was born in this world to parents who were able to send for her.”

Later, when I was back in the States, I got a letter from Hannah. The tone was exuberant, filled with exclamation points. It sounded more like the girl I’d first seen on the hostel steps than the woman run off the beach by a friend’s irate husband. She was now in nursing school, she said. One day, she’d gone for a long walk in a part of Amsterdam that was unfamiliar to her and stumbled onto a Ghanaian restaurant. She went inside and was amazed to find all her favorite foods:
fufu
and pepper sauce,
kenke
, garden egg stew, groundnut soup, even
apeteshi
to drink. Imagine the waiters’ surprise and delight when she began speaking to them in Fanti! Soon she was going there every day. They invited her to parties, and she discovered a whole community— a little Ghana in Amsterdam. For the first time in her life, she felt almost at home in her hometown. And that feeling reminded her of what she’d nearly forgotten: how right it all was before it all went wrong.

“Oh, Sistah Korkor!” she wrote, and I could hear her voice as clearly as if she were standing before me, flushed and tremulous and filled with hope.

“I remember now how very sweet Ghana was! How tender the air, the nighttime smell of ocean. Also Essi, her laughter too loud at my ear. Now I know what I must do, and school is no longer boring! I want to study and learn, so I can take my degree quickly and soon, so soon, I can leave this place forever and go home.”