Walking with Abel (12 page)

A narrow room with no windows. Wallpaper of vinyl photomurals nailed onto mud walls: turquoise mountains coned with piercing white glaciers; technicolor green forests trimming cool blue lakes that faded into plastic blue sky, in duplicate; a manicured lawn before a mansion with white columns; a field of scarlet poppies. In the corner opposite the door a bamboo étagère heaped with faded pink plastic peonies. A plastic chair next to it. In another corner, a small printer.

“Yes?”

“I need a photograph for a document.”

“What kind of document?”

“A document. Government papers. With a photograph.”

“Fulani, Fulani, ay, Fulani. All right. Sit there. Take off your hat.”

He sat in the plastic chair by the étagère. He put his conical leather hat on the floor by his feet. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. At last he laid them on his knees. His hands were sweating. The photographer pulled down a curtain of dirty white cotton behind his back, blanked out the mountains and the lakes. The photographs were black-and-white and in them Ousman looked startled.

“Enough for today,” he said.

He paid the photographer with the money he had borrowed from Afo Bocoum the
diawando
and strode south through the market. The palmshaped sweat stains on his knees dried quickly. He squeezed past tailors, calabash menders, watch repairmen, bakers, jewelers, prayer rug salesmen, vendors of greasy omelet sandwiches. Young talib boys, who lived in communes of peers at madrassas and were sworn to walking only on foot and surviving exclusively on handouts for the duration of their studies, which often lasted many years, extended their empty plastic lunchpails, singing for alms. This was the life of his younger brother Drissa, a marabout apprentice in San, who shared a cinderblock shed with two dozen other boys and spent his days copying the Koran and begging and tending a neighbor’s garden in return for food. Ousman had studied in a madrassa himself once, though not for very long. He told the children, “Go with God.” He ducked past the crocodile heads and snakeskins and birdwings and herbs and lichen and mottled awful oddities of the fetish market and beside Sory Ibrahim Thiocary School he walked into the alley that every Monday became the center for commerce in small livestock. Fulani herders had been coming here to trade since at least the thirteenth century, before the alley itself ever was. Here they relaxed in their one-legged heron’s stance, gossiping, admiring one another’s animals, bargaining, chatting. The alley was blue with the flapping indigo and turquoise and sapphire of their boubous.

—

I bought a sachet of frozen hibiscus tea from a small child and elbowed my way back to the square and sat under the tarp awning of a teashop between the spice row and the tailors. The purple gobbet in my hand iced my fingers nicely. At the teashop young Djennénke men on two wooden benches slurped Nescafé mixed with sweet condensed milk and hot water and watched war porn on their cellphones.

A photograph: an amputated hand lying next to an open Koran on a table or a desk, fingers slightly bent. The cut just above the carpals so clean the whole thing seemed pretend, papier-mâché.

Two photographs shown sequentially: in one, a man with a short beard and shaved skull, buried chest-deep in ocher soil, his right arm raised, finger extended heavenward, in some last request—more time? a drink of water? In the other, that same man, his head and neck and chest limp and red, a circle of white stones blossoming around him like chrysanthemum petals, men in trousers and shirts and turbans pulling him out of the ground by slack arms.

A photograph: a young man on what looked like a hospital cot. Dirty bandages where his foot and hand had been. Peonies screen-printed on his yellow bedsheet. The peonies.

The men in the teashop spoke in French.

“See what they do?”

“Ay, ay, ay. They say it’s shariah to punish thieves and adulterers.”

“This is not shariah.”

“They are not Muslims.”

“No. They aren’t humans.”

“Beasts.”

“Animals.”

One of the men also had on his cellphone a video. Forty-six seconds, from Gao. A man’s body on the ground in a puddle of fresh blood. You couldn’t see the face. The body had been hacked in two, top and bottom. The two parts still in place, the sword-cut like a thin red belt. A robed man bent over the body, gesticulated with one hand, trained a cellphone camera on it with the other, recited something. A damnation, a lament, a prayer. Then something happened and the top half of the body, the torso, thrashed a little. Then a group of men were moving the two halves separately onto a blue tarp, maybe a body bag. Were they the men from the stoning picture? Some other men? Were there a lot of men like that in the world—death’s janitors?

“It’s one of the executioners, a famous butcher for al Qaeda from Gao,” said the owner of the cellphone with the video, and the men around him nodded and clicked their tongues and responded that this was a great video, that it demonstrated the mercy of God because the executioner from Gao had gotten his just deserts. They downloaded the video onto their own phones until each had a copy. Then they passed around a tin cup with water and one of the men dripped some for an agama lizard that had darted out of the shade. The lizard caught the drops in flight, before they could hit the dust and curdle like balls of mercury.

I stepped outside.

It was lunchtime and the market had quieted somewhat. I walked a little and came to the threshold of a lean-to that sold fake drugs from Nigeria. I sat there. Past me in a pall of dust and diesel smog and oil smoke from the fryers’ vats rolled pushcarts and motorcycles and bicycles and feet shuffled bare and in sandals and in soft leather shoes and sneakers and flipflops and plastic slippers. Some slippers had names: Anna, Ipanema. A man thrust my way a side of veal, tail still attached. My chest hurt. Even on its periphery war corrupted the threshold of dignity, reduced to mendicity the soul. I took out my notepad.

Perec: “To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.” To scrape the page with the sharp raw edges of what’s broken, to scratch sense into skin.

On the other side of the thinned stream of shoppers an old bearded man in rags knelt next to the wall of a mercantile and with a straw traced something in the dirt between his knees. Poems, maybe. Trigonometric equations. Some madness deciphered by him alone and to him alone meaningful. I continued to trace my own glyphs in the notepad, his mirror image.

F
or a loss to be monumental, complete, there first must exist a promise of harmony, of some sublime and preordained kinship. My beloved and I had been comrade voyagers before we became lovers, footloose storytellers who shared a supreme reverence for wordsmanship. We filled our notebooks with the beauty and the iniquity with which the world branded and buoyed us. We wished our stories to bring it to some accountability, some reckoning.

We traveled on similar orbits. We met in the spring-green killing fields of Iraq. We passed each other in the minefields of Afghanistan. In the seamy ignominy of hurricane-drowned Louisiana we shared a colleague’s kitchen to sleep in. I slept on the floor. He folded his long narrow body onto the obtuse angle of the corner breakfast nook. Years later, after we had fallen in love, we once slept side by side in the lair of a mountain lion, and tall soft grass wove through the stars.

We struck sparks off each other’s work. We read out loud: our own writing, the writing of others. When we weren’t on the road we were reclusive, and I relished our quietudes, the long physical distances between us. I baked sweets and mailed them in his name to post office boxes time zones away. He sent me books. When we did see each other—sometimes as lovers, usually as friends—we took long walks and held our breath before the same beauty. One time in winter a gale blew sand and sleet along an ocean beach and he shielded my eyes with one hand and with the other led me, blind, out of the wind. One time in summer he collected a bucket of desert rainwater for my bath. “You’ll like the suds,” he said. He regarded the world magnanimously, from the hip, and when he loved me that was how.

A promise of harmony betokens nothing. He was married. How painful for him were the years of hesitation between me and his wife? I never asked. There were chambers in his heart that were obscure to me because I elected them to be so. He would rush toward me and then pull away, and in my rapture of magical thinking I willed myself to believe his oscillations between intimacy and distance a necessary restraint, a friction integral to the alkahest of our particular love. Such was my desire. Such was my choice. Perhaps it was this very tiptoeing around the fear of loss that destroyed any possibility of a true and viable union.

He chose his wife. Such things happen all the time. He told me we would not speak again. It was late evening, after rush hour, at a trolley stop in West Philadelphia. We strained our eyes into the rheumy dark together one last time, to see the trolley that would take him away. It wouldn’t come. Cellophane wrappers blew at our feet, holding nothing anymore: emptiness, emptiness. I touched his sleeve in farewell and left the shelter.

My grief struck me aphasic for months. I knew how to chronicle other people’s pain, how to externalize their heartbreak and document loss the way Fulani nomads seared their identity into something else, something apart, the hide of their cattle. I did not know how to contend with my own.

There I sat with it, in the middle of a market square in the heart of the Sahel.

—

Monsieur Touré, a bitter man warped by arthritis and old age, shambled toward my shelter in disoriented near-blindness. He brandished his walking cane and cursed all the men he saw. They taunted him in response, mocked his doddering walk, his impotent fury. A small crowd encircled him. Someone yanked a cellphone from the chest pocket of his starched skyblue boubou. The prankster held the phone high, out of reach. Monsieur Touré grabbed the air for it, he kicked the ground, he pouted and spat and swore until the thief gave it back and he feinted at the snickering spectators with his cane and they parted and waved him away, the town lunatic, and he walked on, still cursing and mumbling threats. When he came to where I was sitting he stopped. He squinted at the shopkeeper and shook the cane at him:

“Imbécile.”

“Coucou,” the man responded amicably, and turned away to count money.

Monsieur Touré saw me.

“Madame?” He took my hand in both of his stiff and deformed palms and introduced himself and gave a slight and formal bow. He held my hand very firmly and worried it with his unbending, pained fingers. A keen loneliness passed between us, a pining: his or mine? He wished me a good life. He wished me to be loved. Months of silence had passed since my beloved had left me, and the shock of loss, the anesthesia of it, had begun to wear off, and with my hand in Monsieur Touré’s kneading grip I recognized the limitless ache of not knowing whether I had been loved at all. My own love had morphed into an exquisite sorrow and I did not know how to let it go. I began to cry. Monsieur Touré released my hand and walked away and I stayed under the pseudopharma’s awning for a long time.

Cuckoo your footprints

never were used

for writing

—Y
OSA
B
USON

B
y dusk the market was gone. Men draped in white and blue lace filed into the mosque for prayer. Children swept the alleys and teenagers pulled out old foosball tables to play in the orange cones of street lamplight and lizards chased one another in spirals up and down clay walls. The last bus left town with coolers and suitcases and canvas sacks lashed to the rooftop and rimaibe women piled leftover firewood onto their heads and began their return procession to the pirogues that would cross them over to the bush. In their place boys in plastic sandals started a game of soccer. The floor of the square hovered above itself in the lavender dust the market had left behind, and shop owners poured buckets of dirty water on the ground to tamp the dust down. A crescent moon sailed off a minaret and dipped toward the horizon, to grace some other land.