The Girl in the Road Read online

  “You need more variety. When do you have your lunch?” she asks.

  “Around midnight,” I say, remembering my schedule. I long to return to my schedule. But I let her mother me. Because, having heard I have no mother, she thinks that this is the cure: to become mine, even if just for a time. It’s not for my sake that I let her go on. It’s for hers.

  Rana is still nowhere to be seen. I swallow down my vicious emasculating thoughts and tell Padma to say good-bye to him for me. I give her one of my extra tongue scrapers as a thank-you. She seems glad for it. She also makes sure I have their coordinates and aadhaars and cloud names, if I should need anything. I’m beginning to feel impatient but I remind myself that I’m in no position to refuse help of any kind. Suri and Sita dawdle at the mouth of their pod, watching me. We never got to know each other. I wave at them. Suri waves back but Sita crawls back into the pod as if she didn’t see me.

  Mariama

  Sweets

  During the day, I watched you.

  And I watched Francis watch you.

  You had a collection of four bright caftans that you wore over your jeans: cerulean, indigo, tangerine, violet. You were a peacock in the company of pigeons.

  One morning Francis asked you, So, Yemaya. What kind of name is that?

  You looked at him sharply. An African name, you said.

  Wolof? Fula?

  Yoruba.

  Yoruba!

  Yes.

  I could see Francis was trying not to laugh. Why do you have a Yoruba name?

  I chose it for myself, you said.

  Yemaya isn’t your birth name?

  No.

  I could tell that Francis wanted to ask you what your birth name was. But your tone was forbidding. So instead he pretended disaffection and said, Too bad we’re not stopping in Yorubaland. They’d seduce you right off the truck with all their woo-woo.

  Woo-woo? (Oh, no, there was that tone again. In my mind I warned Francis to stop it right there.)

  But he said, We have them in Ethiopia, too. Superstitious religions, not Christian, not Muslim, just worshipping nature.

  You turned on him and said: They came before Christ. They came before Muhammed. Yemaya is the goddess of the sea. The sea used to cover everything. She’s spread throughout the world. She’s in Senegal now. She’s in Brazil. She’s in the Pacific. She’s rising. She’s arriving. She’s coming onshore all over the world now.

  I was waiting for a witty comeback from Francis, but he had none. Instead he said, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend, mademoiselle Yemaya. It is a very beautiful name.

  His apology disarmed you. You sat back on your feet and straightened your caftan and said, Thank you, and then, with nowhere else to go on a moving truck, went up front to sit with Samson again, and slammed the window rather hard. Through the slats of a crate I could see you rest your chin on your elegant wrist and look out onto the desert.

  After I learned to write and sound out each letter, you and Francis took turns writing new words in my notebook, making me pronounce them, and teaching me their meanings. I still remember those early words: Sea, Sky, Moon. Soon we filled up the little notebook with the albino woman on the cover (you made me find her name on the inside cover, written in English, and sound it out—Sa-ra-swa-ti, who you said was from India, a country even farther away than Ethiopia). You had to buy me another notebook when we stopped in Bamako, a windy city sprawled on the banks of a river the color of steel.

  Now we slept together every night. My body could tell when we had come to a stop. I would wake up, turn beneath your arm, and look up at the stars. They were so near in the desert. They blazed close to my face. Then, when we were safely rumbling along again, I could fall back asleep.

  Whenever we stopped for any length of time, you took me looking for a shop that sold Indian sweets. It became our little tradition. If I could sound out the words on the label, you would buy it for me. The ladoos were still my favorite, even though you kept telling me that they weren’t fresh, they were the kind you find at a Lebanese truck stop instead of the fresh ones in Little India, et cetera. How you lamented! But they tasted wonderful to me.

  I began thinking about them all the time. Some days, when there were no sweets, after I was done with my reading, I just sat on a crate and stared out into the desert, imagining an infinite Lebanese store with aisles full of every kind of Indian sweet. Balls and bars and brittles. And I could just stay there and eat however much I wanted.

  Sometimes you told me stories about your former life in Dakar, where you lived at home, but were an artist and dancer. You’d belonged to a troupe that performed dances about African rebirth. You asked me what I knew about African rebirth, but I didn’t know anything.

  You said, Well, in Ethiopia you’ll go to school. A good school, from what Muhammed tells me. The nuns know what they’re doing. You’ll get better at Amharic and English, and they may teach you Mandarin or Hindi, too. You’ll come to understand what’s happening in Africa. How the weather is changing, the seas are rising, the peoples are moving. How foreigners are coming in to steal our land and our resources. Did you know the Chinese and Indians have taken more land than exists in all of Sudan? None of Africa will belong to Africans anymore. But you’ll become educated and you’ll be one of the ones to fight back.

  What will you do? I asked.

  I’m going to fight back too.

  How?

  By being alive. By speaking out. By making art.

  You mean like drawing?

  No, I’m going to study dance, you said. The Ethiopians dance like this—

  And then you sat up and twitched your neck back and forth, like your jaw was tied to a string that people to your left and right were jerking on. I giggled.

  It looks crazy, you said, but it takes so much muscle control. I taught myself a little bit from videos. Addis has the best dance school in Africa, with teachers from Ghana and Benin. And there’s a new jazz institute that’s opened up right next to it. They host poetry slams at the cafés on Bole Road. There’s a special kind of poem in Amharic called a kinae, where the words themselves mean one thing, but a deeper meaning is hidden underneath—a golden meaning.

  Semena werk, said Francis, looking up from his sirius.

  What? you said.

  Semena werk is “golden meaning” in Amharic.

  But it refers to a kinae.

  Yes.

  You turned back to me and said, Do you understand what we mean?

  No.

  Well, if a boy says to you: The stars are reflected in your eyes, what do you think he means? That the stars are reflected in your eyes, yes? That’s true. But what he’s really trying to say is that he loves you. That’s the golden meaning.

  Will he open my legs, then?

  You slapped me on my arm so hard it stung.

  Where did you hear that? you said.

  I didn’t answer. I was about to cry because I didn’t understand why you’d slapped me.

  You looked at Francis and seemed to gather yourself. You said, It’s not proper for a little girl to talk about things like that.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  But you were upset. You sent me away to do my letters, even though I was well past doing letters now. I was reading whole sentences and understanding some of their meanings. So I sat in a corner and tried not to cry, and instead, to practice my English, sounded out whatever signs we passed. I focused hard so that I wouldn’t feel the kreen.

  HEINEKEN NAMASTE INDIA.

  SOLAIRE AFRIQUE.

  NUTELECOM.

  JUMBO.

  SM!LE.

  We started and stopped, stopped and started. I had been keeping careful count of every stop, but then one day I lost it and never got back on track.

  We spent a whole day at the Burkina Faso–Niger border and there was nothing to see for miles and so we just sat there doing nothing, and both you and Francis seemed moody and dispirited, and stared into your siriuses, and didn’t want to
play or help me with my reading. Those were my least favorite times. It seemed that you, me, and Francis—and even Samson, who had taken to playing Teddy Afro CDs on the old sound deck in the cab—were the most energized and high-spirited when we were on the move. So my favorite times were when the convoy was proceeding smoothly through the desert, and I could just kneel by the side with you both behind me, and the wind in my hair, and watch the country pass.

  Ouagadougou

  The easterly wind was blowing hard when we came to Ouagadougou. It drove dust into my eyes and I had to blink the crusts away. So at one of the gas stations, you got me a pair of tiny pink sunglasses with frames shaped like hearts. I loved those sunglasses. No one could see where my eyes were looking. I used them to look out at Ouagadougou, which seemed warm and cozy, less like a city than a very big village.

  You took me by the hand and we walked through the alleys to a main thoroughfare, and on the corner there was a huge Lebanese supermarket, bigger than any I’d yet seen. The doors swooshed open and closed behind us, and frigid cold enveloped us. I’d never been that cold. I sneezed four times in a row.

  Cold in here, yeah? you said. Feels good though. Air conditioning comes to the Sahel. Masha’Allah.

  We got glucose biscuits, instant noodles, and packets of black chai. You took me to the sweets display and let me pick out what I wanted. They had ladoos and silver-foil pistachio bars and I said, I want one of each. But you said to the clerk, We’ll take two of each.

  Then we sat on a bench across from a big intersection with a metal sphere in an island in the center. You told me that the metal sphere was our planet. Yemaya, when I was that young I didn’t understand that you meant it was only a sculpture of the planet. I thought that somehow the soul of the planet was enshrined in that sphere. And that the sphere itself was enshrined at the exact center of the earth, which was symbolized by all the traffic swarming around it, minivans and trucks and bikes and motorbikes sling-shooting around the center and taking off in other directions. We were at the heart of the heart of the world. We watched the people in silence. I wondered where they were all coming from and where they were all going. I wondered where I was going too. I hoped it would be where you were going.

  So you really don’t remember your family? you said at last.

  My pistachio bar was melting faster than I could put it in my mouth. I concentrated on peeling the silver foil.

  Did you have any sisters? Or brothers?

  I shook my head.

  No other children your age?

  I shrugged.

  Who is your father?

  I didn’t answer.

  And you don’t have a chip?

  No. Do you have a chip? I asked, happy that I knew what a chip was.

  You pulled up the sleeve of your violet caftan and showed me a scar in your upper arm, the size and shape of an almond.

  So my father could keep track of me, you said. He works for oil. My mother works for … well, nothing. She serves on the board of an NGO. Which amounts to nothing. But she lives most of the time in Johannesburg. She gave me my name and not much more.

  What’s your real name? I asked.

  You were agitated. You said, My real name is Yemaya. It’s my real name because it’s the name I’ve chosen for myself. So it conquers my birth name—

  I was distracted and turned away from you.

  —and my parents’ friends in their bourgeois air-conditioned condos—

  I saw a line of cars coming from a long way off. You were getting louder and louder, a soundtrack to the vision.

  —would never believe me, because my father is a good man, all but abandoned by his addict of a wife—

  Yemaya, I heard everything you said but I was staring down the road at the line of shiny black cars.

  —and meanwhile he has one daughter, and how lucky she is to have such a good father, such a privileged education and a nice car, just one girl in the house—

  There were little flags waving from the front corners of the hood of each car. The cars turned one by one, and in every car that passed, a window rolled down and someone looked out at me in black sunglasses. I regarded them each in equal measure behind my pink sunglasses. Then they rolled up the windows again.

  —and every time it happened I wanted to run out into the desert and die, and I swore I’d never let myself feel that way again, and to live, I realized I had to leave. I finally had to leave. I had to decide to be free. Mariama, look at me. Do you understand what I’m talking about?

  Yes, I said, because I recognized my mother’s words.

  We were both running away, Yemaya.

  We returned to the trucks. All three of them were lined up, facing the desert, ready to go again. I was so happy to be there. So happy to have come. So happy to be leaving again. Here in this dusty city everything was perfect. We were between goodness and goodness, and I had my sweets, and we were to be on the road again by nightfall. I never wanted it to end!

  I didn’t tell you, but I began to fantasize about living with you when we reached Ethiopia. That we would live together in the white cotton dresses with crosses in stained-glass colors. I would have a special room just for them, where I’d close the door and just look at them.

  The green, I’d wear to dance.

  The blue, I’d wear to swim.

  The red, I’d wear to bed.

  Agadez

  Nothing compared to those days. Nothing before and nothing since. It’s the only time I ever remember the kreen disappearing altogether, and I felt like a normal child, instead of one with a tumor where the sea snake didn’t go down.

  A few days after we left Ouagadougou, you started agitating to go north. Just one truck out of the three, you said. Francis fetched Muhammed to discuss the matter.

  The second truck is half-empty, you said. You can transfer the cargo on the third truck, and we’ll take it north to Agadez, and then rejoin you in Kano.

  Who’s “we,” mademoiselle?

  You turned to Francis. Can you drive this truck?

  He snorted. He couldn’t believe how bold you were, just marching into a situation and giving orders! But he said yes.

  I’ll pay, you said to Muhammed. I’ll pay Francis for his work, I’ll pay for the gas, I’ll pay you for rental of the truck, and I’ll pay you a sizable honorarium for your generosity.

  Mohammed looked pleased. But he asked, What in Agadez is so important?

  Beauty, you said.

  Beauty, mademoiselle?

  You’ve heard of the Wodaabe. (It was not a question.)

  They’re herders.

  Yes. They hold a festival at the end of the rainy season. It includes dancing and a contest of beauty.

  Yes, I’ve heard of it.

  I would like to attend.

  Surely you would win.

  It’s not a contest for women, Mr. Getachew, it’s a contest for men.

  Whereupon Francis proclaimed, I will only drive you there if I can enter to compete and win your love!

  Oh, Yemaya, you gave him such a withering look. But once you turned back to Muhammed, Francis gave me a wink. I saw that some game was going on whose rules I didn’t understand.

  How long do you plan to take? said Muhammed.

  You plan to be in Kano when?

  The thirty-first.

  Then we will plan to meet you in Kano on the thirty-first.

  Muhammed held out his hand, and you shook it.

  I was delighted that there was no discussion at all of where I would go. Of course I was going with you and Francis, to Agadez, to see the beauty.

  What a desolate country we passed through! There was no beauty anywhere that I could see—not compared to what I’d seen before. The land was flat, crumbly, and all one color, and the people we passed seemed tired. The sky wasn’t even blue. It was whitish, like an albino’s skin.

  But our mood could not have been more spirited. We were the color in the landscape! Francis drove, and you and I took turns sitting u
p in the cab, or leaving him alone to sing along loudly and passionately to the one Teddy Afro CD he persuaded Samson to leave behind. When we stopped, he wrote down the lyrics in Amharic and made me sound them out. When I could pronounce each word, he told me what they meant: Tey fit atenshigne eferalehu: Don’t turn your back, I am afraid. When I pronounced it correctly he rubbed my head and said, See, you’re already speaking your new mother tongue.

  How many languages do you speak? I asked.

  Amharic, Arabic, French, some English, and some Oromo. So that’s how many?

  Five.

  Answer me in Amharic.

  Amist!

  Very good.

  I want to speak ten languages.

  You can. With enough education.

  Or maybe twenty?

  Well, the languages are getting all mixed up now anyway, so who knows. How long will Amharic last before it becomes Amhindi? And the Indians don’t even speak Hindi, they speak a half-English hybrid. So it’ll be Amhinglish before very long.

  I giggled. What other languages? I said.

  Oh, and then the Chinese will come along and say, Hey, we own half of Africa, we deserve to be part of the new world language, so it’ll be Amhinglimandarin.

  And then?

  And then the Somalis will say, We’re right next door to you, what about us?—and it’ll be Somamhinglimandarin!

  And then?! (By this point I was shrieking.)

  And then the Arabs will come along and say, None of you have the least bit of culture!—here’s an oud—and so it’ll be Somamhinglimandarabic!

  Then you shoved open the window to the cab. What is going on up here? you asked.

  I’m telling Mariama about the new world order, said Francis. In fifty years everybody will all be speaking a language called Somamhinglimandarabic.

  What idiocy, you said to me. But I could tell you were just the littlest bit amused. You closed the window to the cab, a bit more softly this time.