To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
A ONE LEGGED BOY in gray bermuda shorts is leaning on an aluminum crutch, his back to the desert. His single foot rests sturdily in a rubber flip flop. He is standing in the auto gare in Zinder, his hand stretched in front of him to receive the alms of travellers descending from the taxi brousses that jostle in and out all day, coming and going between Matameye, Nguigmi, Maradi, Agadez. He is nine years old, maybe ten, and is wearing a white cotton shirt printed with tiny blue and red flowers. His eyes are teasing, a little languid, those of a child who is not deceived by promises. A promise implies a future, and it looks as if he is concerned with now. Beside him is a girl of about his own age, but it is difficult to say. She is lying on one hip in the burning sand, her hands curled loosely around the blocks of wood she uses to pull her body, rocking, from here to there. Behind her are the tracks her legs have dragged in the sand, deep gulleys ringed in shadow. She, too, might stretch a hand in front of her, but someone would have to lean way down to leave a coin there or else drop it from a height.
The tip of the boy's hollow aluminum crutch is lodged securely in the hole it has made in the sand. It points toward the center of the earth, has sunk like the shaft of a well downwards. It points beneath the loose sand, beneath the ribbon of compressed sandstone sixty feet wide, to the water waiting there in darkness, stored during the Pleistocene when the Sahara was a garden lively with antelope and butterflies. The crutch holds the boy upright. But if, like the girl, he were stretched on the sand, he might lower his head to the murmur of retreating waters. Does he have any recollection of an early morning meadow under dew, of running there on two good legs to greet the sun? Does he ever wake from a dream of pomegranates hanging beside swift flowing streams? Perhaps the girl has her own ripples of memory. Perhaps she likes to make up songs about tadpoles and snails, of wheatfields gathering sun. But she probably sings them only to herself, matches her silence to the boy's. What are they to say to each other of such things?
The boy's black foot, resting in its rubber flip flop, is streaked white with the dust that sifts everywhere. Dark leather patches are fastened at the girl's knees to protect them from their daylong journey over burning sand. Could, then, the place where they are be called the desert?
No, it is the Sahel, the edge of the desert, its fringe. It is not the desert itself. There are struggling millet fields outside Zinder as there are across all of southern Niger and on into Burkina Faso and Mali. Farmers turn the soil, such as it is, with iron pronged hoes. They watch the sky. They save the best seed from any harvest for next year's planting. This is not a country of sand dunes and scree. Not far from Niamey, giraffes skim at dawn to the banks of the river Niger, where fishermen are already casting their nets.
That is, if it is not a season of drought, if the riverbed has not dried and cracked open, casting up bones and bits of stone and root. This is not the desert and yet the crops may fail, the granaries stand empty. The desert laps at the millet fields, draws back. For centuries, now, and in cycles, there has been drought: the gradual but unmistakable reluctance of the sky to fill with rain clouds, the hopeful plantings, the rueful harvests, the mortars empty at daybreak, the flattened breasts, the crying children, the weary laying of bones in sand. Is it true, what some say, that the slow seep of the desert cannot be stopped? Or is it rather an instance of neglect, of soil turning to sand for want of care? Whichever, the paved road running east out of Zinder, past the fort, past the abandoned airport, continues unchecked until, almost 500 kilometres away, it comes to an abrupt stop near the shrinking shores of Lake Chad.
There, close to windy white dunes, fishermen who have remained in villages once perched on the edge of the lake, now carry their pirogues a hard hot distance before lowering them into the water.
From where the children wait in the auto gare, they can lift their eyes to the dusty fort on its pile of rocks. The square tower of the fort points straight up, a finger raised to the unblinking sky. But the rocks, perhaps, remind the children of water. These are immense boulders of granite, worn smooth as the shells and flat stones that roll unresisting on the floor of the ocean. Poised lightly in a mound, daylight pouring between, they look as if they have been tossed in warm currents and left to settle in God's time. Or have broken from below, burst sky high from the dark waters buried beneath the sand. They tip and almost fall, do not. They teeter on the edge. Like the sand on which they float, the rocks are washed in changing light and color: fractured white at noon lapsing to orange and finally the quick purple shadows of night. The children, bound so close to the earth, must wonder at this carefree tumble. What would it be like to leap into the air and take a long long time coming down? To feel the lift of one's heart in one's feet? Perhaps they have wondered in the same way at other spills of rock, scattered here and there around the edges of the city: on the road coming in from the west, or up by the marketplace where camels are sold on Thursdays.
But there is no way they could know that to the traveller approaching Zinder for the first time, passing between the bounding rocks that rise like gates on either side of the road, the rocks seem a warning, an assurance, a promise, that in this part of the world gravity does not always hold.
* * *
My eldest daughter, Zara, and I, up from Matameye together to find the house we lived in seventeen years ago, step off the taxi brousse into the sand. The sky at noon is white. At this time of day no one who can help it is out in the open, walking in the sun. People sit with their knees drawn up in front of them in the slender shade of a mud wall, or huddle beneath a straw mat elevated on four sticks.
Certainly seventeen years ago Zara and I would not have been hesitating this way in the sun. She would have been at Mme. Renault's école maternelle, taking a drink of water from the blue plastic canteen that hung from her neck or learning the word in French for goat. Scratching the prickly heat on her shoulders, yanking the elastic from her ponytail. I would have been thinking about going to pick her up, wishing we had already eaten our couscous and sliced tomatoes so it would be time to close our eyes on a world too bright to look at: Mike, limbs flung wide in instant sleep, Zara and Lizzy, tossing, whispering, overcome at last, and Tulu, baby round as a pot, fingers twitching, sweat standing on her forehead. Time to wait, undistracted, for the shadows to tip, the sand to cool, the sky to appear in stars.
For this day to turn into the next. For the children to grow up.
Zara drops a coin in the one legged boy's palm and then, leaning down, places another in the little girl's. They look at the coins, murmur a thanks, and turn away.
"An gode Allah." Thanks be to Allah.
The gare is strewn with waiting taxis, vans whose doors will swing shut when each of their seventeen seats are filled with one passenger or more. Early this morning in Matameye, eighty seven kilometres away, where Zara is working in a clinic and where I have come to visit her for a month, we were among the first to take our places. We sat talking back and forth for an hour, looking up through the window of the van into the spiky branches of a gawo tree. This is the rainy season, such as it is, and storks are nesting. We could watch their descent, the long fragile legs pushed forward to break the flight, the feet closing round a branch, the leisurely folding of black wings. They stood on the sides of their nests, beaks opening and closing like shears. By the time the taxi was filled, the sun was hot. Nor did the gawo give any shade. During the dry season this tree, in a landscape of sand and thorns, ineffably breaks out in tiny green leaves. But during the rainy season it is dry as a stick.
In Zinder both gawo trees and storks are more scarce. Vultures are the preferred bird, vultures and black kites, seen wheeling in the blank face of the sky. Fifty miles north, fifty miles closer to the desert and to a lack of food and flourish.
More scarce, but not less distinct. That last month in Zinder seventeen years ago, when leaving had come to seem unendurable, when each evening had brought the close to one more day to which it would be impossible, ever, to return, there had been a pair of storks. The first rain had still not fallen. It was May, the seeds were in the ground, thirsting. We dragged our beds outside each night to escape the heat and slept on the sand in front of the house, faces raised to an immaculate sky. The day began while it was still dark with the name of Allah, with the call to wake and praise Him. By the time we had raised dreamy hands to brush away the first flies, men and women all over Zinder were kneeling on mats, dipping their foreheads to the sand, leaning back on their heels.
It was then the storks began their to and fro, their journeys directly above our heads to the gawo tree on the other side of the wall. From our beds we could see the beginnings of the nest at the top of the tree, wisps gathered in a crook between two branches. Above us, the slow flap flap of great black wings, the soft white underbelly, the preposterous beak with its dangling bit of string or straw. The three little girls got up and came to lie on our bed, throwing their arms and legs, sweet from sleep, in our faces. We all lay still, watching the storks build a safe and sturdy place for offspring we would never see.
But is it possible to become extravagantly attached to a place where you are entirely an onlooker? Where you have no job, no appointment to keep? No letter of introduction, no plan for tomorrow? A white woman, with very little knowledge of spoken Hausa, for a year I looked sideways at a world I didn't understand. While the children played in the sand with bits of wood and stone, and Mike gathered material for a dissertation, I sat in a wedge of shade and watched the time pass.
It began with the verandah spilled clean with morning light, the gleaming floor, early, before the day's heat had gotten under way. Ripples of shade on a wall already stroked with light. By mid morning all that had changed: the shadows ran along the floor in swift black channels, unstoppable. Noon, and there was only an abrupt pool, dark and very still, always in the same place in front of the ledge from which the wooden door had been swung back on its hinges and held against the wall with a stone. For at least an hour the shadows seemed not to move at all while the sun hung at the top of the sky; then, too slowly to be sure when, the pool in front of the open doorway tipped east. Again, the pause, the moment of stillness, before the pull back into darkness. By the time Zara and Lizzy, tired of lying in bed, had hauled Tulu out of her crib and fastened her into the stroller, the rush toward evening had begun. Bare feet flying, they raced her up and down the verandah, weaving through the alternating strips of shadow and sun.
Zinder was a case of unrequited love.
Altogether on the margin, unsure and unskilled, what did I offer in return? Desire was fed on glimpses and surmises, on bits of knowledge baffled and withdrawn. The wind that blows down across the Sahara during the winter months is the same wind that in France is called the mistral, in Italy the scirocco. From North Africa it sweeps across the desert and on southward to the coast where it funnels into the Bight of Benin, spending itself at last in the Gulf of Guinea. South of the Mediterranean this wind is called the harmattan and in Zinder fills the air with flying sand so pure that for a time everything is seen through a mist. You could be walking along a stretch of sand. In the distance, a shape, a shadow. At first, it is only that. Then something can be seen bubbling up from the surface of the horizon, a dark tangle rising to a narrow twist, like a cyclone, before erupting anew in some fever of impulse and delight. Where have you seen this before? Surely no place on earth. Then there it is, the great silver baobab, its roots exposed to the air and sky, its trunk flung wide in a spray of leaf and branch.
Or this: on marketdays a caravan of Tuaregs moves through the center of town, camels emerging one by one, ragged knees adrift. And there, lofty in his saddle, bare feet riding a white swaying neck, is a man in an indigo turban, his mouth covered, his eyes looking down into yours. The caravan passes, it disappears in the yellow air, gone, the sloping back of the last beast moving into obscurity.
In a dream, you see the birds screaming over one dimpled place in the water, then the spray, the jet of mist, followed by the back rising from the deep, the creature emerging from the waves, up, up, until even the great blind face is bared dripping in the sun. The sense of having known it all from the beginning, from the other side of the womb.
Would you have fallen so hard if Zinder at first sight had appeared less monotonous, less grim? Something more than a windy scrap of sand where the heat made a nightmare of each new day and for relief the eye fell on a twist of thorny branch, a vulture hunched on a wall?
The streets were open stretches of sand, deserted during the long middle hours of the day except for an occasional donkey huddled against a wall for shade. By noon the sky had become a flat dim surface, an expanse of emptiness so dazzling the gaze reeled backward and away. Nor were we strangers to Africa and its sun. Both Zara and Lizzy had been born on the coast of Nigeria, a place where steam rises visibly from a rain soaked forest and where faces stream with sweat. But this was a different sun. In Zinder it blotted up every drop of moisture as soon as it hit the air, you had to drink, never forget to drink, if you didn't want to become ill with dehydration. Or take salt pills. There was no help for it, the sun absorbed sweat before you could lift a hand to wipe it away. What's more, sand settled in ears and nostrils, lips cracked and bled. At noon flies clustered on the bite of food lifting to your mouth, giant cockroaches scuttled at night. Nor did any of this change. On the contrary, there was more to come: toads in the shower, dysentery, scorpions.
Yet it was on Zinder, floating the seeds of life and death indifferently, that desire fastened. Little by little the outlines of a face emerged, maddening in its elusiveness. Impossible to summon at will, desired beyond reason, it would disappear for days, then swim suddenly into view. Visible at first only from a distance, it fascinated by its air of extreme mystery. But gradually, and much more dangerously, it startled at midday, rising from beneath a swarm of flies. Without the least warning, it would be staring out through the empty sockets of the skull of a goat half buried in the sand.
It was then you were reminded of the beginnings of passion: the terrible jolt of recognition, the bleak notice that what you had thought commonplace, even undesirable, has become as necessary to you as your breath and that without it you will die.
The lover never has any history, any past: no mother, no father, not to mention husband or wife. Not a single child. Nothing that will serve as identification or credential. Nothing by which anyone can say, "Didn't I see you once, a year ago, in the station waiting for a train?" No, all of that is spurned, rejected. It is the unleashed self, released from time and history, the lover offers in cupped hands. All the rest is an embarrassment, a source of confusion and lies. The child playing alone at twilight, the fifteen year old wandering in the rain, only these are of any use from the past. And in some sense, at least, the lover, waiting to be snatched wide and set adrift, is right: any attachment at all would only encumber and restrain, provide an intolerable impediment. The whole point is to stand again on the brink, to return to that moment before choice bound one to a slowly turning wheel of days; to fling oneself once and for all into eternity.
The traveller, rushing blindly to an assignation, is the same. Bag packed, everything left behind, the blaspheming hope is that one can be released from a self mired in history. Gone, the stupid face of the clock, fixed at seventeen minutes after three. Gone, the leaves yellowing on the tree outside the window. This time, if no other, myth will overtake one's own stumbling story and all the griefs and longings spilled so messily over the sad confusion of one's days will at last assume a noble shape, both tragic and anonymous: Orpheus, unable to resist the backward glance. Demeter, crying for her daughter.
Here we are, Zara and I, stepping off the taxi brousse onto the burning sand. She has dropped two coins: one into the hand of the boy leaning on the crutch and another into the little girl's. They have murmured their thanks and have turned away. We are off to get a drink at the Boissons Fraîches, anything to get out of this sun. We are tramping up the sandy incline to the street that runs through the center of the town. A bush Fulani, a Bororo, is striding down; his head is shaved clean from his forehead up to the crown of his head; in back, a line of delicately woven braids are hanging to his shoulders. Funky, that's the word Zara uses to describe him. He is wearing a leather skirt and white plastic shoes molded to include eyelets and a tongue. His long bare legs are moving like a fashion model's, bent far back at the knees, his feet are pointing slightly out. He looks straight at Zara, eyes ringed with blue. Around his neck are strings of amulets.
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Fiction from Web Del Sol