Four
The Monsieur said he liked how quiet she was, doing her work and keeping out of his way.
He asked often for her fonde and namma, and he loved latchiri and kossan, like a proper Fula man, for he was Fula, after all, even if his ways were foreign and his Pular marred by French.
He had guests in the evenings, wealthy men like him, sometimes government men, who came in government cars, and she took plates of food out to their drivers and uniformed guards.
The Madame lived in Paris, the children were in school there, and they visited once while on holiday, walking with the donkey-like gait of people born abroad, sneering at the fonio served.
When the Madame brought a sophisticated Senegalese man, a restaurant chef, to teach her how to cook, concealed how offended she was.
“You yawn so loudly”
was the first thing the Senegalese chef said to her.
“Why do you make that sound when you yawn and why are you yawning?”
She had yawned only once.
Binta was unwell, feverish, her little body shuddering with coughs, and so she had held Binta through the night, and she was tired, but she had yawned only once.
“Excuse me, sorry,”
she said politely.
This Senegalese man merely wanted to belittle her; he was similar to Madame in pomposity.
She listened and watched as he simmered chicken in an onion sauce, mixed rice in a tomato sauce, mashed potatoes.
Poulet yassa and riz gras—and whatever else uninspired meal he was making.
He asked to set the table and said, “I will come and inspect it,”
and bristled silently.
Monsieur, just home from work, was stretched out on a sofa in the living room.
“I brought the head chef from Chez Simone to teach her,”
Madame said to Monsieur, as began setting the table.
“Oh, but is very good.
She doesn’t need teaching.
She should own a restaurant of her own in the future,”
Monsieur said.
kept calmly placing the cutlery down while her heart danced.
She could not resist glancing at Madame, who was looking at Monsieur with eyes full of arrows.
Monsieur ate the Senegalese chef’s food, but later, after Madame left with the children, he told , “Now you can start giving me good food again.”
lived in the servant’s quarters in the back, a large room with a fan and a nice linoleum floor.
She asked Monsieur if she could take some of the old children’s things piled in the store, and he said yes, with a vague wave of his hand.
She sent clothes and toys and two small bicycles to Mama, and then she began to take things without telling Monsieur, because she knew he would never notice and Madame, on her brief visits, never even looked in any of the rooms downstairs.
Mama had no idea what to do with the sewing machine she sent her, and said they could sell it.
Another time she sent old pairs of Monsieur’s shoes, and Mama said she would sell those, too, and did not show them to Bappa Moussa.
Each time Monsieur traveled to Paris, he asked her to stay and look after the house, but asked any visiting relatives to leave, saying he trusted her more than his own blood.
She felt content, grateful; maybe she was finally being allowed a measure of peace and for this she prayed in thanksgiving.
Monsieur was in Paris the morning soldiers barged into the compound.
It was as if blinked and there appeared a herd of soldiers, red berets on their heads, long black guns looking dull in the bright light.
It was like a film, men going to war, men whose legs stomped strong with the purpose to kill.
They had come to kill Monsieur.
Somebody in the government sent them to kill Monsieur, and since he was not here, what would they do to her? She clutched her baby, her legs trembling so much she feared she might fall.
One soldier opened the fridge and took a can of orange juice.
The others dispersed inside the house as if they had known it before.
They were in the living room, yanking cabinets open and leaving them open, ransacking Monsieur’s bedroom.
They pulled his mattress off his bed and shook the mattress.
They were insulting Monsieur, calling him a dog.
Binta was crying her high, screeching cry.
Their leader said, “Let’s go,”
and one of them said to her, “Follow us!”
But the leader snorted and said, “She’s just a maid.
What are you questioning her for? Let her go.”
packed her things as swiftly as she could and loaded a taxi to take her and Binta to Tantie Fanta’s.
—
Men lit up when they heard she was a widow.
They would have lit up even if she had a revolting face.
She was a widow and a widow walked trailing behind her the scent of defenseless availability.
She served at the beachside restaurant, enduring their leers, knowing they saw her as an opportunity, because men were men.
She began covering her hair, and she kept her expression pleasant with her eyes and not her lips; there was no smile that a man might misread.
She did not expect the owner, Francois, a busy, important man, to protect her, but he barked at the men who did more than leer: one who brushed her hip, and another who grasped her arm as she placed down a plate.
She was grateful that he deigned to protect her.
He owned other restaurants, and she would impress him with her work and then ask if she could work as a cook, not a waitress.
She had mentioned her cooking when she first got the job, but Francois said he already had two cooks.
The other day she heard him shouting at one of the cooks, about too much salt in the chips.
She would ask him to at least let her help the cooks.
She would say a Senegalese chef had trained her in cooking, which was not quite a lie but felt like a lie.
As she served and cleaned she imagined owning a restaurant, Monsieur’s words forever fresh in her mind.
Her dream lifted her spirits.
She would serve Guinean food, not the chicken and chips everyone ate at restaurants, and she would make it beautiful, as that Senegalese chef had done with his food, cupping the rice into an elegant small hill, designing syrup over dessert like an artist.
If Francois agreed to let her work as a cook, she would learn how restaurants preserved their food, how much they bought when they shopped.
She was shy about asking Francois but she would; he already saw how hard she worked serving food, and he protected her from those men; maybe he would say yes.
Francois was light-skinned, his eyes light like marbles, his hair curly from his Lebanese mother; he was so handsome, like someone on television.
He would never notice her, of course, not like that.
She wished it but she did not dream it, because she dreamed only of achievable things.
Francois came by one evening as she was closing up the storage room where crates of soft drinks were stacked.
He stood at the door and said, “Well done, ,”
and she flushed with excitement, to be praised by Francois, to be here with Francois.
He came into the room.
He smelled of ginger.
He was always sucking something, a ginger sweet maybe, his mouth puckered to a kind of insolence.
She thought perhaps she should ask him now, but it didn’t feel right, it was late, they were closing, the room was stuffy and he had only stopped by briefly.
Maybe next week.
She thought he would leave after glancing at the crates but he didn’t leave.
She was done but stood there, respectfully, waiting for him to leave first.
He walked toward her.
The room was too small for the crates of drinks and her and him.
Usually when the other waitress came in here, waited outside until she was done.
Francois was now inches away from her and felt awkward, wanting to apologize, ask if there was something she could help him do.
He pushed her against the table, saying, “Just a little, just a little, be nice to me.”
Surprised, she looked at him.
Then came the stark startling clarity that he intended to hurt her.
“No sir, no sir,”
she said.
Not like this, she wanted to add.
Not like this.
The shock of his heavy alien weight.
He was so heavy, like a giant bag of cassava pressing and deflating the breath from her.
Why did he not ask her, why treat her as though she was not worth asking? It could have been different, he could have asked her, she could have gently touched that soft foreign hair.
When he was done, in a minute or two, he looked at her in the face and she thought for an incredulous moment that he would say he cared for her.
But his lips curled in disgust and he said, “Cover yourself.”
He was telling her to cover herself, but it was he who had yanked up her dress and pulled down her underwear.
He stood hulking over her, his disgust so palpable it turned the air rancid.
She heard the hatred in his voice.
He did not know her but he hated her, and he did not need to know her to hate her.
“Cover yourself,”
he said again, a threat in his tone.
Would he harm her again? He wanted her to cover her body and cover his crime, to look as she had before he walked into the store.
As if nothing had happened.
Shame, shame like hot water scalded through her.
And shock.
Shame and shock.
She pulled down her dress and wrapped her arms around herself.
Her legs were trembling but she stared at him, right in the eye, to make him know that she saw him, she saw that he was a monster and not a man.
He did not deserve to be a human being.
His heart was full of dead leaves.
He evaded her gaze and turned and left.
She stayed for a while to steady her breathing, staring at the crates of soft drinks stacked against the wall, the nest of cobwebs above.
Finally, as she opened the door, she tripped and nearly fell, catching herself, stumbling.
The room had spit her out.
She was now so worthless as to repel even a storage room.
She felt hemmed in by shame, a shame forced upon the innocent, glowing in unfairness.
She had done nothing wrong, it was she who had been harmed, and yet she felt shame as an acute rupture of her internal order.
She resolved then to reach the end of her life with this shame buried away.
Nobody would ever know.
She would tell Tantie Fanta and Mama that Francois fired her because she asked to be a cook and not a waitress.
—
Amadou appeared smiling at Tantie Fanta’s door, just like that, after all those years.
“How are you, my Kadi?”
he asked.
Her joke-cracking, light-footed, big-dreaming love.
He was still the old Amadou and yet also fresh with the dew of newness, fuller and fleshier; he walked with a foreign bounce in his step.
He begged her to forgive him for his silence, saying he was sorry, he was so sorry, he had problems, his papers were incomplete, he was hustling.
He said “hustling”
many times, and the English word filled with the enchantment of the unknown.
He hugged Binta so tightly her toddler body squirmed to free itself.
“She looks like Binta,”
he said, his face crumpling, his eyes growing glassy with tears.
“You are crying,”
Binta said, watching him curiously, and he said, “No, no, there is sand in my eye, can you help me blow it out?”
Eagerly, Binta blew at his eye, her small cheeks inflating and collapsing, before Amadou said his eyes were perfect now and asked if she could close her own eyes and open her hand.
A small pack of colorful gummy sweets appeared.
For , a bottle of perfume.
Amadou pulled out the stopper, and with his finger, dotted some behind her ears.
“Now you smell like jasmine,” he said.
She heard her own laughter as it faded away, and realized she had last laughed like that when her sister was alive.
She felt the surge of memory, the return of fugitive emotions: love, trust, the willingness to be happy and the faith that she could be.
Amadou visited old friends and places, and he played football on the same pitch as he had before he left.
The clamor of his presence was unchanged, drawing people.
He exchanged some dollars for a large bag of Guinean francs, and he divided the cash into small piles on the bed, listing the names of many relatives, trying to make sure that each got some money, no matter how small.
There was a decency to him, a goodness gifted at birth.
He told everyone that he had come to take and Binta back with him, and she shushed him, saying he should not speak of what was uncertain.
It pleased her deeply, how casually he said “and Binta”; how easily his heart had opened; he understood that she no longer existed as a single being.
“Uncertain? Who says it’s uncertain? Kadi.
I am taking you both back with me,”
Amadou said.
He knew somebody, a man called Dee, who used to work at the American embassy.
“Dee says the only option we have is to apply for asylum,”
he told her, as if she knew what other options there were.
As he talked of his big plans for them, she smiled, sated, warm in his arms in the small room in his cousin’s house.
So many people got rejected at the embassy, educated people, people who spoke English well, and she didn’t see why she wouldn’t be rejected as well.
She didn’t mind Amadou living in America.
She knew of a couple, Tantie Fanta’s friends; the man lived in America and the woman here, and he visited twice a year.
She and Amadou could get married and she could try to have a baby right away.
As long as Amadou sent money and visited whenever he could, she would be content.
“No, no, no,”
Amadou said, when she told him.
“We will be together.”
He said they would buy a house in America, you could easily buy a house and pay little by little every month, a house with a playroom.
Imagine a room for Binta to play in, he said, a whole room just for playing.
thought it wasteful and lonely, a single child playing in one room.
Then Amadou talked of schools and began tasting the dream on her tongue.
“Binta will go to a very good school, for free, and she will learn science and music and she can even travel to other countries with her classmates and she can be anything she wants to be, anything,”
he said.
thought of her sister and knew that Amadou was thinking of her, too.
Suddenly she saw herself in America, where buying a house was as ordinary as a seashell on a beach, and she saw Binta, in full exuberant bloom.
“So how we do get this asylum?”
she asked.
“Dee says you must talk about FGM for the asylum,”
Amadou said.
“FGM?”
“Cutting,”
Amadou said.
“Cutting?”
asked, puzzled. “Why?”
“It is what the Americans like to hear.
If you tell them the truth that you want a better life, they will refuse you.
You’ll say they cut off everything and sewed you up and now you can’t pee well.”
He was laughing and his laughter rumbled warm and deep and she felt that sweetly strange shiver that comes with the body’s remembering.
“You’ll say you’re running away to protect Binta from suffering the same fate as you, even though we know you won’t cut her,” he said.
looked quizzically at him.
“But I will.”
“You will take Binta to be cut?”
Was that disappointment in his expression?
“Yes, of course.”
“Kadi, Kadi, no, you do not have to agree to that barbaric action.”
“But how will she become marriageable?”
“Kadi, many women don’t do that anymore and they marry.”
bit her lip.
America had seeped into his skin.
In some ways good but in others, like this, not so good, labeling the ways of their people as barbaric.
“Okay,”
she said, “I will tell them of my cutting.”
He was rich with plans, calling people, running around, and soon she had a passport, and a visa interview date at the American embassy.
Just days before her interview, he said, “Dee is saying he has a bad feeling about this, he says FGM is not enough because too many people are using it.
We will need more than that.
So now we’ll say you were raped.
That many men raped you.”
flinched, an instant headache splintering in her head.
“He gave me a tape for you to practice with,”
Amadou said.
“What is it?”
“A story about the rape.”
He slid the tape into a cassette player.
It was a woman’s voice, in the manner of a radio play.
They said I disobeyed the curfew.
They came into the restaurant already drunk…one of them said he would do his turn with his gun.
was in distress, chest so tight she feared the air was being squeezed out of her.
“I do not want to tell these lies, Amadou,” she said.
Amadou came to her, tenderly kissing her.
“It’s just a story, my love.
We need a good story that will get you to America.
You’re not lying.
It’s just a story.
Dee said they have been rejecting more and more asylum seekers and so we have to make our story better, to stand out.
He says you should first talk about your cutting, and how you want to protect Binta from being cut, before you tell them this rape story in the tape.”
They came into the restaurant already drunk…one of them said he would do his turn with his gun…I was bleeding from everywhere…
She practiced and memorized the words, but only on the surface, her inner self she kept apart, far away from it.
The last time she practiced for Amadou, she began to cry, because her barricades came crashing down and she saw herself in the storage room after Francois told her to cover up.
“My love, what is it? What is it?”
Amadou asked, holding her.
“Don’t cry.
It’s just a story.”
“But it happened to somebody,”
said.
“I heard what soldiers did during the curfew period.”
Amadou stayed silent, holding her.