Walking with Abel (8 page)

“Where’d you get the white woman?”

“It’s my white woman.”

“Eh?”

“Get outta here!”

“Sly Fulani!”

“It’s true. She is staying with me.”

“Where are you from, white woman?”

What to say? “Home is too mystical for me,” says a character in a J. M. Coetzee novel. It never has been easy for me to identify mine. “Where are you from?” my hosts in an Afghan village would ask, my hosts on a farm in Iraq, in the velvet mountains of Indian Kashmir. Defenders of their ancestral homes from foreign armies, from their own abusive governments, from cataclysms and manmade devastations. What could I tell them? I had grown up an outcast in a country that no longer existed, in a city that had since changed its name. An underweight and sickly specimen of a despised minority, a Soviet Jew. I had moved away, and I would move again, and again. My point of departure was never the same. I was transient, in transit: the Wandering Jew. Ahasuerus. The defender of no claimed geography. It made for relatively effortless travel. It made for uncomfortable silences, odd hesitations.

Georges Perec, the relentless scrutinizer of alienation, the French orphan of immigrant Polish Jews killed in the slaughterhouse of the Second World War—he on the battlefield, she in a camp—suggested that we have two options: “to carve the place that will be yours out of space, and build, plant, appropriate, millimetre by millimetre, your ‘home’: to belong completely in your village . . . or else to own only the clothes you stand up in, to keep nothing . . . and change towns, and change countries . . . to feel at home nowhere, but at ease almost everywhere.” The latter was the Fulani alternative.

“They are regarded everywhere as ‘the other’ or ‘the stranger,’” wrote the Dutch anthropologist Mirjam de Bruijn. “They are always the people who come from far away.” The Fulani never asked me where my home was. They were hereditary outsiders who appropriated all the space their cows required at any given time but never more than that, and they had mastered the response.

“What’s your name?”

“Amadou.”

“Where are you from?”

“We are here now.”

—

“Eh, white woman? Can’t you talk? Can she talk? Where are you from?”

“She’s with me,” Fanta repeated. I had walked with her from near Doundéré, she said, yes, yes, absolutely, go ask anyone there, I was staying in her camp, I slept on a straw mat beneath a thorn tree hung with weavers’ nests, I was family. I was Anna Bâ, Fulani Bâ, I was a white Fulani woman who had traveled from somewhere on the other side of Mecca, wherever white people were, maybe France, so I could be with her. I was with her, I was hers, I was spoken for. Points of origin did not matter: I belonged.

W
e walked back along washboard fields. Lotus flowers shone waxlike in bright green swales. A pied kingfisher hovered in one spot over the water, hovered, hovered, hovered, hovered—then plunged, crested headfirst, and recovered a breath away from the surface with a disappointed squeal and banked on flecked wings into yellow waterside reeds. The harmattan blew a gale. The land was flat and endless and without shadow and somewhere upon it an invisible cowbell chimed. The sun took up the whole sky. It was very hot. Fanta swayed snakelike under her pyramid of grains and complained.

“I am so tired, Anna Bâ. Ay, ay, ay. My legs are tired. My neck is tired. My back is tired. My head is tired. My load is heavy.”

“Let me carry it.”

“It’s heavy, Anna Bâ.”

“Let me carry it.”

It was heavy. Fifteen pounds of rice and millet, maybe more, one covered calabash balanced upon the other. I pressed the lot to the crown of my head with both hands. They went numb in no time. I could not wipe the dust the wind drove into my eyes. I could not see the grooves in the path. I could no longer feel my hands upon the woven lids of my load. What if I tripped and dropped it? The family’s breakfasts and lunches and dinners for the next two days would strew the fields. Some maybe would take root in the dung-smeared glop of a marsh’s edge. Birds and goats would take the rest. There would be nothing to eat at the camp.

“Tired, Anna Bâ?”

I wasn’t tired. I was petrified. We kept walking.

Fanta bragged.

“I gave birth to six children and all of them are still alive. Three girls, three boys.”

She counted them off in the order of their age.

First came Mama, whose husband had divorced her because she was always sick, took another, healthy wife, took Mama’s eldest son to boot, and left. Because she no longer had a husband, Mama shuttled from one relative’s camp to another and could not impose upon these relatives her small children. That was why Oumarou and Fanta were raising Kajita and Amadou.

Then Bomel, the mother of Mayrama, a baby so tiny her nickname was Skinny Butt. Bomel the obliging one, with buck teeth, who was married to one of Oumarou’s nephews and lived in a village, not in the bush.

Then Drissa, the taciturn teenage boy who already had memorized the Koran and now was studying to be a marabout at a madrassa in San, a bigger city than Djenné that had paved streets and a football stadium with floodlights and that lay on the main bus route to Bamako. San was the biggest city Fanta ever had seen.

Hassan, the earnest seventeen-year-old who would drive Oumarou’s cattle during transhumance in the coming rainy season.

Hairatou, her youngest.

Mama, Bomel, Drissa, Hassan, Hairatou. I repeated the names. That’s five, I said. No, six, I have six living children. All right. I tried to focus on the blurred path, to ignore Fanta’s blurred arithmetic.

—

I could not have known about Allaye, who came after Bomel and before Drissa. Fanta had six children but she would not mention him by name. No one in the Diakayaté camp spoke about him at all. Oumarou’s prodigal son, his most cherished, his third, the first male child that Fanta had borne, the bright and beautiful boy who had gone to herd cattle one morning the previous autumn and kept going until he arrived in Côte d’Ivoire to work for money and was still gone.

Allaye had left without bidding his parents farewell, without asking their blessing. He had pushed the borders of the imaginable, broken the compact the herders had with the world. The nomad who quit the bush for the city. Who portended that unthinkable end of the ten-thousand-year-old livestock economy that population experts forecast and that the globalized world espoused.

He had telephoned twice: first the day after he left, from Bamako, then a week later, from Abidjan. Because no one in Oumarou’s family had a cellphone that could receive calls, he called a family in a camp nearby. Calls were expensive, and Allaye kept his short. He did not ask to speak to his parents. He just asked the neighbors to relay to them where he was. There had been no word from the boy since November, the same month I had last spoken to my missing, missed lover.

Oumarou’s heartache for Allaye was so terrifying and so enormous it could not be uttered. He had excised the boy from the prayers he said five times daily for all his other children, dead and alive.

So there it was: the flaw in the hallowed code that championed acceptance of the transience of everything, that idealized stoicism—the hamartia that made us human. Acceptance went only so far. It did not account for love and came apart at loss, became metaphysics. Life shaped out of the friction between our eternal ambition to walk away from woe and our eternal concession that there always was some burden we would be carrying.

—

When we reached the campsite it was past noon and I told Fanta how afraid I had been of dropping the food. She studied me, frowned, uncomprehending. So what, she said. Things fall sometimes. Besides, they didn’t.

A
few hours later Fanta was on the move again. Now she had to go to Dakabalal. A fisherman in the village owned a chain-driven diesel mill that winnowed chaff from rice. Fanta took the unshucked rice she had bartered in Wono that morning to the mill in a yellow jerrycan.

The winter sun flooded the higher ground and deep ultramarine shadows reached far to the east. The angled orange light carried the distant yip of cowboys driving herds from pasture and Fanta walked toward the sound. Past the hut of Salimata, who came out to greet her aunt barebreasted and eerily thin. Past a hut where Oumarou’s nineteen-year-old grandnephew, Moussa, lay sick in a polyester t-shirt that proclaimed
BARACK OBAMA PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
and that had faded from white, red, blue, and black to shades of purple. Moussa had woven a comb of matching purple plastic into his afro for fashion and on his left index finger he wore a heart-shaped silver ring the size of a guineafowl egg. His eyes were closed, his skin ashy. What was wrong with Moussa? How would they know? They weren’t doctors. The nearest clinic, in Senossa, was not very far away—if you started to walk after the late-afternoon prayer you would be there by sundown—but it was no good, and the Djenné hospital was farther and expensive. Was the Djenné hospital good? What a dumb question. They weren’t doctors. How would they know?

Fanta walked past Moussa’s sickmat. Past the dead in their eucalyptus graveyard. Pied crows flew over pooled water in marshes large and small that shone with reflected sunset. Their shadows glided upon the land.

In Dakabalal a heavy woman on a straw mat nursed starveling twins with spooky bellies. Both had strangulated umbilical hernias the length of an adult thumb, as if something were trying to push itself free through their navels. Umbilical hernias were common in West Africa and many children in the bourgou were so afflicted. A handsome middle-aged man with a sickle on his shoulder smiled hello. A teenage girl stared. Fanta strode through the hamlet without acknowledging anyone. She walked into the miller’s yard, sat her jerrycan under a mango tree, and admonished something in Bozo at an open door behind which it was dark. Then she turned on her heels and strode out. When she left the village she spat a neat projectile of phlegm onto the ground and said, “Bozo are dirty people.”

Among themselves the Bozo described the Fulani as haughty and secretive. The sedentary peoples of the bourgou mistrusted both.

—

Bourgou legends tell that when the Fulani first arrived here with their cattle only the Bozo dwelled in the Niger’s soggy elbow. The Bozo kept the river, the Fulani kept the land. The Bozo would help the Fulani cross the water and the Fulani would give the Bozo manure for their cooking fires and small riverine gardens. They swapped milk for fish, although certain Fulani lineages had retained iterations of the fish taboos they had brought with them from the Horn of Africa, where most pastoralists, just as bone-thin and driving the same zebu cattle or goats, are forbidden to eat ichthyoids. Somali goatherds insult one another: “Speak not to me with a fish-eating mouth.” Fanta’s family, the Sankaris, had no proscription against fish of any kind, but all Diakayatés who ate catfish regularly would develop leprosy and eventually grow webs between their fingers.

Then some Fulani and Bozo settled, other peoples moved in, farms gridded the land, cattle destroyed precious crops. Acrimony leached into the wetlands. At the end of the previous rainy season, after Fulani cattle once again had crushed unharvested fields at the northern tip of the bourgou, Bozo fishermen helped Bambara farmers drive into the Niger River and drown nearly two hundred Fulani cows.

—

That afternoon three Bozo boys about ten years old rode two donkeys along a gully past the camp and hallooed the nomads in Bambara.
“Antié!”
They rode bareback on the croups of their donkeys, two of the boys doubled up, and they kept their legs hooked under the donkeys’ bellies. Little Amadou, naked by the hearth, became momentarily transfixed by the mounted power and grandeur of these demiurges, and he called a forlorn
“antié”
back and stood to watch them pass. The boys ignored him from their superior heights and age. Fanta yanked her grandson by the arm and ordered him to go into the hut and put on some underwear.