Three
It was an evil year, the year that took Binta.
The harmattan was harsh, the crops were shriveled, and rams lay dead on parched farmlands like rumpled cloth.
cooked namma with too much water to make it go round, small okra pieces floating to the top of the sad soup.
Clinics no longer gave free vaccines, or free malaria medicine.
Tantie Fanta said America and France had forced the government to stop free primary education and free medicine; it was the only way to become friends with America and France again, by not behaving like communists.
Yaaye’s grandson Lamin died of malaria.
When Mama and visited to pay condolences, Yaaye stared blankly at them and kept scratching at the dirt on her floor.
Death was everywhere, life vanishing at every turn, and when Bappa Moussa first mentioned their relative Saidou, thought he, too, had died.
She knew Saidou, vaguely, from before he left the village to work in a mine somewhere in the northwest.
“He is your husband,”
Bappa Moussa told .
“You see how difficult things are.
He will help us.”
“I do not want to disobey you, Bappa Moussa, but I will not marry a man who works in a mine.”
“His mining work is different.
He does not work in the small artisanal mines but a big one run by Whites,”
Bappa Moussa said.
started saying again, “I do not want to disobey you—”
but Bappa Moussa cut in and said, “My brother would have approved.”
Bringing up Papa upset .
Bappa Moussa knew that mentioning Papa would confuse her emotions.
Would Papa have approved of Saidou? Her memories were even more faded, like photos rinsed out in water, and Papa’s image was frozen in her childhood; she could imagine him singing the songs of folktales but not talking to her about a husband.
Would he have approved of a husband who worked in a mine? But what did she even have to lose? If she married Saidou and he died in a rock slide, then so be it.
Binta was dead.
Amadou was in America, as good as lost.
She might as well marry Saidou, who was much older than her, with thick veins running over his forehead.
He came wearing a watch with a big shiny face.
His uncle came with him, an elderly man who worked in Conakry, and he and Tantie Fanta talked about the situation in the country while Bappa Moussa listened, as if he understood what was being said.
Binta would have understood; didn’t understand, nor did she care to.
We produce bauxite that countries all over the world use for aluminum, but look at our suffering.
Austerity program this, austerity program that.
Why should we sacrifice education and health to pay debts that we know nothing about? Those French and Russian companies stealing our bauxite should be expelled immediately.
Tantie Fanta said that a Guinean Fula man had been killed in America.
An immigrant in America.
He was pulling out his wallet when policemen shot him forty times, leaving many bullets in his body, too many bullets for one body.
Terrible, Saidou said.
Tantie Fanta joked darkly that he was a Fula man, tightfisted, and was only trying to make sure they didn’t take his money.
Neither Saidou nor his uncle looked amused by the joke.
Saidou said he had heard that many American journalists were coming to Conakry to write about the case.
“None of them knew Guinea existed as a country until they killed this Amadou,”
Saidou’s uncle said.
Amadou? The dead man’s name was Amadou.
A chill spread through , her stomach heaved, about to come up to her throat.
“I hear he comes from the lineage of the famous Diallo traders,”
Tantie Fanta said.
And reeled, dizzy with relief.
It wasn’t Amadou, her Amadou.
“In America the police shoot people for no reason,”
Saidou said.
“At least they make noise about it.
Everybody in America is talking about it,”
Saidou’s uncle said.
“Here they kill you and everyone stays quiet,”
Bappa Moussa said, eagerly, finally able to join in.
could see that Tantie Fanta approved of Saidou, she smiled along as Saidou boasted of his nice two-bedroom flat in a compound of mine workers, and said the mine had a clinic for the workers and their families, with real doctors mending broken bones and not just treating malaria.
Bappa Moussa was nodding and trying not to look as impressed as he was.
His small eyes glittered with unexpected pleasure, as if he had managed to sell old goods at new prices.
He did not say how many cows Saidou’s family brought as taignai, mumbling only that it was good, very good.
He praised even the kola nuts they brought for the djamougal, saying they looked expensive, unscarred and fresh-skinned.
An aunty put one of those kola nuts in ’s mouth before they spun her around seven times, checking after each turn to see if she had spit it out.
She hadn’t, of course, but she wondered what would happen if she had.
Would they start all over again, with her in her sparkling veil, her embroidered dress, the imams’ prayers, the crush of singing aunties, urgent words of marriage advice, everybody entangled and happy for her, the dance and noise, and all the purifying rituals for her husband’s home? Finally, at the end, she drank the ceremonial sour milk, suddenly aware of an echo around her of absence.
Mournful absence as tactile as a presence.
In the perfumed embrace of her aunties, she began to cry, tears that most believed were of joy.
—
The mining town was noise and dust.
woke to the unending rumble of machinery hacking and digging and extracting at the mine, trucks driving away and returning and driving away again.
The dust astounded her, dust everywhere, dust on scavenging chickens, dust coating the hair of playing children.
Her body complained only a day in, thousands of tiny bumps erupting on her skin, on her face, across her torso and legs.
She coughed and sneezed all day, and she was so itchy she longed to reach in and scratch at the center of her soul.
Tears trailed from her reddened eyes and on her tongue a constant grittiness accrued.
Saidou took her on a motorcycle ride, to show her around, and they rode out of the staff compound, past the mine and into the town.
They passed fields of sick-looking grain, young stalks already shriveling to straw.
The stream had become a muddy pudding on whose surface a few dead fish floated round-eyed.
stared in disbelief, turning from side to side.
She felt as if she had been dropped inside a world shorn of its feathers.
The air was soiled, the soil arid.
To look at the mine itself on their way back was to shudder at a vast harsh expanse of disemboweled earth, gaping helplessly, stark and stripped of life.
An urge seized her, to run to the motor park and return to her village where the grass still grew as grass should.
“Has this place always been so bad?”
she asked Saidou, who stared, surprised, at her.
“You’ll get used to it.
It’s just a little dust,” he said.
“The small children are always coughing.”
“You want the Whites to shut this place down and we lose our jobs?”
“The streams are dried up, the people here have no water.”
“Enough!”
Saidou’s expression was like Bappa Moussa’s used to be when he scolded Binta for speaking: anger, but also amazement that she had actually said what she said.
felt a sudden rush of pride, to have evoked the kind of response Binta did.
To be like Binta.
Maybe Binta’s spirit was there, guiding her to bravery.
Saidou changed the subject, and said his mother was asking if she was pregnant.
“But we have only just married,” she said.
“She is asking,”
Saidou said, and shrugged.
“It will happen by God’s grace,”
she said, and already her earlier bounce was deflating.
She missed the slow languor of home, her siblings and aunties, the majestic silhouettes of tall anthills on moonlit nights.
To weaken her homesickness, she folded fully into her duty, cooking, washing, sweeping, kneeling to serve Saidou’s food.
None of it was disagreeable, nor was Saidou, not always.
He praised her food and sometimes he praised her skin, which she kept supple with shea butter, her rashes gone, her itchiness reduced, her body attuned to breathing air burdened by the mine’s debris.
Saidou began teaching her French.
Nobody spoke Pular in that part of Guinea, and how would she talk to traders in the market where she shopped for food? A thin note of criticism ran through his words, that she could not speak even a little French like most people could.
He was right, she should have learned some words, she could have followed Binta’s lead.
She was determined now to acquire the new shift of tongue and lip that French demanded of her.
Saidou said they would speak no Pular during weekends and she agreed, fumbling and struggling her way through to comprehension.
Why everything, chairs and trees and even the earth itself, had to be male or female in this language, she did not understand.
Nor why a single person and a group of people needed different words for doing the same act.
Saidou asked her to repeat phrases from the radio and as she cleaned and cooked, she whispered French words to herself.
She understood them more and more, but they came out of her mouth sounding nothing like the radio.
Saidou said she must practice by speaking to the neighbors, but she saw the mockery in their pursed lips, as if they were struggling to hold back their laughter at the rural lilt of her broken French.
Once, she heard someone call her “Saidou’s village wife.”
The dust defeated her; she wiped the floor on her knees, reaching under the table, wringing out the wet rag, and moments later a new layer of dust settled—on floor, armchairs, television, everything, as if they had never been wiped at all.
She cleaned again, and again, scrubbing as tears fell, and she scolded herself for crying.
What was she crying for anyway? Imagine the foolishness of crying just because the room was dusty.
She thought of Amadou in America driving a big white car and she saw a glimpse of her own future, cleaning dust day after day, her knees scabbed from kneeling, her loneliness aching in her bones.
One day, Saidou came home and she could smell him even before he was inside the room.
“You drink alcohol!”
she said, horrified, backing away from him.
He lurched past her, then turned to pull her into his cursed breath.
She knew she should surrender because she was his wife.
She never refused him.
Mama’s words of marriage advice, “Never refuse him, never refuse him,”
always rang in her ears.
But she felt violated by the alcohol; that smell was the smell of pure evil.
How could Saidou drink? How could he risk bringing a curse down on the family? Everyone knew the story of their relative Mammadou and his many businesses, so successful he built a mosque in the village, receiving baraka, God’s special blessings, for he who builds a mosque builds a house in heaven for himself.
Then he began to drink alcohol and his businesses crashed, one by one, they failed and he went bankrupt.
How could Saidou drink?
held her breath so that the smell of alcohol would not suffuse her body.
“Please bathe first, Saidou,”
she said.
Later, after he had bathed, smelling still of alcohol, but faintly now, she told him, “You will bring a curse down on us.”
—
She didn’t know she was pregnant until she had a miscarriage.
There were the two missed periods, yes, but she was always irregular.
One afternoon, while scrubbing the windows, she felt a gluey wetness between her legs, pain stabbing and spreading from her belly to her back, and she leaned against the wall, feeling helpless, faithless; there was nothing else she could do.
She held her breath, not moving for fear things would worsen, and maybe if she stayed as still as possible she could delay it, stop it even.
But delay what? Already she could feel more that was gluey, gelatinous, sliding down her inner thigh.
Her body was destroying what was precious to it.
She thought of Binta, bleeding, not waking up at the government hospital, and wondered if hers was the same kind of blood as Binta’s.
But it couldn’t be, of course.
Binta’s bleeding was from vengeful growths invading her womb, while hers was from a rejection happening in her body without her permission.
She lowered herself to the floor, gingerly, very gingerly, faint from pain, and waited for her body to complete its betrayal of her.
—
Saidou told her the miscarriage was her fault because she had washed his clothes bent over the bucket instead of standing upright.
She said nothing.
His drinking had caused the miscarriage.
He knew it.
He had brought a curse upon them, and to defend himself, he was saying such nonsensical things as washing clothes with her back bent.
“You’ll get pregnant again,”
he told her.
“But you have to be careful.”
She did get pregnant again, only weeks later, and even though she did not believe Saidou, she was still careful not to wash clothes bending down, until she gave birth to her son, in the mining hospital, in a white airy room so restful she did not want to go home afterwards.
Her son looked like Papa, the lean face and the forehead, and she felt acutely aware of how close and how large life’s mysteries were.
She wrapped him in a soft blanket Saidou brought to the hospital and held him to her breast, caressing the bald patch on his face where his brows were yet to grow.
His tiny body brought a delight she had never before known, trembling, overwhelming and yet so sublime.
She wanted to stay here, just her and her baby, in this air-conditioned hospital on top of a hill, away from the relentless, marauding dust.
But they went home, they had to go home, in a taxi with Saidou holding her bag.
That evening her baby had diarrhea, his belly gurgling through the night, and by morning he was dead, already stiffening on the mattress next to her.
A ghoulish blank-eyed doll lay next to her, and all she wanted was her son.
Saidou wept loudly like a woman.
As his colleagues carried away the small stiff body, she sat like a statue, rigidly asking for her son.
A cold wind had torn through her chest at night, and she knew now that it was not from breastfeeding; it was a spirit foretelling this horror, but why warn her of something she could not change? She felt such coldness in her heart, such freezing, numbing coldness, and her coldness chafed into a furious resentment of Saidou.
Sometimes, the resentment tipped over into hatred.
She looked at the back of his head as he watched television and she imagined raising a pan and smashing it down hard on his head.
The violence of her own thoughts felt normal to her.
Once she saw him sitting outside looking at some playing children with tears in his eyes.
“We didn’t even take a picture of him,”
he said of the baby.
His slump of sadness enraged her.
That he dared to feel a right to sorrow.
He knew what drinking alcohol would cause and yet he drank and now her son was gone, the image of her father, the baby sent by God to comfort her, the one true companion she might have had.
Saidou’s evil act had taken him away.
And Saidou smelled of alcohol, still, even after his curse had destroyed their lives.
She barely spoke to him, cooking and serving his food in silence.
When he tried to touch her at night, flinched, resisting at first, and then later she lay there and imagined herself dead too, or dying.
After two missed periods, she felt ravaged by fear.
Fear breathing through her.
She must shelter this delicate growing life from the claws of a curse, but how? She did not know.
She would wait until her belly began to push out and then tell Saidou she hadn’t known she was pregnant.
Men, of course, never knew these things.
She would avoid Saidou, avoid his touch, avoid eating any food he had also eaten; maybe the curse would remain solely on him.
It was Saidou who should have been taken instead of an innocent gift from God.
It was Saidou who had spit at the laws of God.
She prayed and prayed in those early weeks, and she was wiping the table while praying when a woman called Salamata, the only other Fula person in the compound, came to her door with some workers from the mine.
When they come to your door with Salamata because she speaks Pular, the closest to a relative, you know it is to break not bad but terrible news.
Salamata said, “Something happened, , you have to come to the clinic,”
and , in her housedress and rubber slippers, mutely went with them to find Saidou’s body lying still, covered from head to toe with a flowered bedsheet, on a bed with the mattress now bare.
She staggered.
Shock rolled over her like heavy slaps.
She had been praying when Salamata knocked on her door but had she been praying for harm to come to Saidou? She had wished him ill, yes, but not this, not a hastening of his death.
Or had she prayed for this without knowing it? Her entreaties were to defang the curse, to guard the life growing in her body.
She did not mean that Saidou should die.
Saidou’s siblings had come to the hospital.
Some workers were telling them that Saidou touched something, or stepped on something.
wasn’t sure, the meanings of French words suddenly ungraspable in her brain.
She did not ask, she dared not ask, sitting exceedingly still, consumed by guilt.
Her hatred must have caused this.
It could not be Saidou’s fate to die like this.
“I did not mean that he should die,” said.
“What?”
his brother asked.
“What are you saying?”
“You poisoned him? You poisoned him?”
his sister screamed.
Salamata spoke to Saidou’s siblings, calming them, saying was a widow in shock, and did they not know that grief was a brief madness?
Did they not know of madness that erupted from the mouths of the bereaved? What did gain from killing the husband who clothed and fed her? Saidou’s sister seemed mollified but one of the brothers kept glaring at .
They wrapped Saidou’s body in white cloth.
They took away his motorcycle, the television and the stove.
And then his sister searched ’s bag and drawers, to make sure she had not stolen and hidden Saidou’s money.
“If only was pregnant, we would still have something of him,”
Saidou’s sister said, watching her after the funeral, and hurriedly moved away from the shrewd eyes of a woman who herself had many children.
If Saidou’s people knew, they would keep her, and she couldn’t survive living with his mother, bearing the burden of her guilt, and her fear of a curse.
—
Ten fingers and ten toes.
Her baby had ten fingers and ten toes.
She counted most mornings and nights, sometimes she woke up just to count, and it comforted her to know that there were ten fingers and ten toes.
A complete baby, and hers, all hers.
After she was freed from the mournful landscape of that mining town, her solace had been Conakry with Tantie Fanta, living quietly and watching her belly grow.
She laid her baby girl on the bed and slept on the floor, for fear of rolling over her in sleep, and woke through the night to gently touch the tiny chest and feel for her baby’s breath; so great was the terror at the center of her love.
She called her Binta.
She tied Binta on her back as she worked; sometimes she felt the spreading warmth of Binta’s fresh pee.
Tantie Fanta had helped her find this job, housekeeper for a rich family in Conakry, cleaning and cooking in the coolness of the marble mansion.
When she was free, she laid Binta by the tall water fountain in the front yard, the sound of the water restful, like eternity.
She sent a message to Saidou’s family, saying she would bring the baby soon, but not saying how soon.
Their anger was raw in the messages they sent back.
How dare she send a message about a baby when they knew nothing of her pregnancy? Relatives intervened, asking to see Binta, to take Binta to her father’s people.
never raised her voice, or her eyes, in disrespect.
Quietly she said she would bring Binta but just not yet.
She wanted Binta to get a little older, to be sure the curse no longer lingered, but she wouldn’t tell Saidou’s family about the curse.
She had already hastened his death without meaning to, and she would not further dishonor him by exposing his sin.
The village was swirling with rumors, and Mama believed Saidou’s people started it all; the baby was not Saidou’s, they said, or she would have since been brought to them.
“I will not let them soil my daughter’s name,”
Mama said and so she told the village gossip Aminatou that the baby was Saidou’s but there was the issue of a curse.
A curse had first to be drained of its power.
“What curse?”
Aminatou asked and Mama answered in a whisper, knowing the scandal of Saidou’s drinking would spread throughout the village before dusk.
It did, and his parents stopped speaking to Mama.
Sometimes wished Saidou would appear in her dream, so that she could beg his forgiveness, but he never appeared.
Nothing of him endured.
She did not miss him, or think of him, she blamed him with bitterness for losing her son, but she felt, too, that she had not done right by him.
Death was too final; she had wished for him a punishment with an ending.