ZINDER, PART I

Kathleen Hill

Continued ...

She looks back at him and we pass on, up to the street.       Zara is my own dear daughter. She has come to Zinder with me today to help find the house we lived in so long ago; but also to humor my wish. If it were left to her, she would probably let the whole thing go. She has already done her own foraging of the past. And after all, her past is not mine. In Zinder she was six years old. I brushed her hair the color of honey from her neck in the mornings, gathered it in a pony tail, sometimes tied it with a ribbon. I kissed her face, first one cheek, then the other. But what did I know?       "Oh yes," she tells me, "it all came back when I returned two years ago, everything, everything, waking up in the morning to the sound of pounding and roosters crowing, the sky at night. I remembered the rocks outside of Zinder, the corrugated gates scraping against the sand."       But what all this means to her I have no words to ask. The things she might say casually to a stranger about her childhood, I had this kind of a mother, this kind of a father, she cannot say to me. Again, the words stick in her throat; did you know how hurt I was that time, how afraid? I have only glimpses. A night of suffocating heat when she lay awake until dawn trembling in fear of mosquitoes and malaria: I have heard about that. How she lay there imagining her parents dead and herself alone with two younger sisters she had somehow to get on a plane and back to someone who would take care of them all. No more than a glimpse, but it opens to so much else.       And then there are the moments I know nothing whatever about. Moments when she must have thought, this is not my mother. Not this one.       Every now and then, during the two years she has lived in Matameye, working in the Centre Medical, Zara has made the trip to Zinder: to visit friends who live here and at the same time to buy cornflakes or perhaps a jar of strawberry jam. Occasionally, she has looked for the house. On one visit she found the gardien who still sat in front of what used to be the Peace Corps office but which is now, she tells me, a hostel for French volunteers. I remember it well, the squat cinder block building, the refrigerator empty except for measles and small pox serum. And except, now and then, for the ice cream Mike made for the children using tins of evaporated milk and a bottle of vanilla extract. The office was on a road that fed into the long stretch of sand on which we lived and sometimes, before we lay down for the sieste, he made the half mile trip up to the refrigerator, returning at a run through the midday glare, all for the sake of the instant when he could put this treat before us, white and cool and still firm. Or, but not very often, I would take the children there as a means of getting through an afternoon, take them to listen on the office machine to the Peter and the Wolf tape we had brought with us, to the cat gliding step by step toward the duck swimming round the pond.       When Zara spoke to the gardien who until a few months ago still sat in the same place, just outside the gate, he had said yes, he remembered an American family with three little girls — there had been two who were a little older and then a baby — and when she had told him who she was he had clapped his hands together as if everything was cause for wonder but nothing for surprise. No, he wasn't sure where the house was but thought it was somewhere near the hospital. But when he took her to it she had recognized nothing and thought he must have been mistaken.       Zara is wearing a pagne, a length of cloth wound tightly round her waist and reaching to her flip flops. On top, she is wearing a blouse cut from the same material, a wax print bought from the Lebanese cloth merchants here in Zinder, Nabil Edouard et fils. A black leather bag, made by Garba, is hanging from her shoulder. I am carrying one exactly like it, a gift she had waiting for me when I arrived from New York a few days ago to visit her here, a visit I am making alone because Mike is teaching at this time and could not come with me. She has bought these bags on one of her earlier trips to Zinder, along with the box of corn flakes.       Garba is a name I know. It is stamped inside the wallet I have carried with me for years, purchased with Zara looking on, head high as my elbow. Purchased, certainly, on a visit to Garba's atelier, like Peter and the Wolf, designed to fill a long afternoon.       At about four thirty, the little girls and I pushed open the gate of our house onto the broad stretch of sand that ran south past the Peace Corps office and up over a dune where an enormous gawo tree marked the site of the Muslim cemetery. But this time we were going in the other direction. We turned left, away from the scavaging goats and sheep and the donkeys trotting past with bags of millet on their backs, and for a moment, before turning quickly left again, looked toward the Catholic mission, half a mile away, its bell hanging black against the sky. The second left brought us up onto Zinder's paved road where the wheels of the stroller turned effortlessly. This road fell back into the sand soon after it reached Takieta, fifty kilometres away, but to us none of that mattered. We were going only a short way, past the Boissons Fraîches, to the old part of town where the corners of the houses rose in minarets, and the doorways, carved above with intertwining loops and parallel lines, opened on cool, darkened anterooms. Inside the doorsteps, waiting neatly in pairs, were brown leather sandals or green ones, tooled with red.       It was here, among the neighborhood mosques and the booths where tailors sat at sewing machines and goldsmiths worked with tiny anvils, hammers and scales, that Garba had his atelier. An unmarked door in a narrow street. Two or three craftsmen sat crosslegged on the floor with him, barefoot, stretching and smoothing skins on wooden boards, cutting and tooling leather, sewing up seams with narrow strips of leather, their fingers closed on the handle of an awl or a knife. Sometimes they would call out to a boy passing in the street and send him for a calabash of hura, the milky millet drink sold everywhere, or maybe a couple of Gauloises. The smell of skins piled against the walls, the shadowy cool of the room, the quiet talk and laughter of the men as they sat working, elegant in loose cotton trousers, all this made the atelier a pleasant place to visit.       We came with an order for sandals.       Garba rose from his place by the door, his embroidered hula tidy on his head. Striking his chest lightly with his fist, he greeted me on the afternoon, on the little girls, the yara. I greeted him on his work and then on his fatigue, back and forth, the prescribed questions followed by the sliding reassurances that the children were well, that Allah be praised for the gift of work, each response ending in a hum in the throat, a low murmur of consolation. Then the small bare foot was placed on a piece of cardboard and Garba traced its outline with a blunt pencil. Afterwards, he gave the cardboard to one of the men sitting on the floor who slid it into a corner to wait its day.       By six o'clock in the afternoon the walls of the banco houses, facing each other across narrow passages of sand, floated in the clarifying light that ends each day. The old men had come out of their rooms and were sitting on straw mats in the long shadows, fingering their prayer beads and talking. Children were rolling hoops made from the metal rims of bicycle wheels or chasing each other in circles or carrying firewood home on their backs. And somewhere nearby the boy in the brown tunic was cleaning the open gutter with a long handled hoe, trying over and over to scrape it clean. He was said to be mahaukaci, a crazy one. When he saw us he hopped from foot to foot, grinning, teeth askew in his head. He waved to us until we finally turned the corner into the paved street where the fort, at noon lost in a white blaze of light, hovered dreamily above the town, flushed bronze like the boulders on which it sat.       Inside Zara's black bag is a blue plastic canteen containing iodized water. Each morning in Matameye she squeezes five drops of iodine into a gin bottle filled with water so that I can drink without getting sick. When she first arrived in Matameye she tells me she did the same for herself, but now she drinks water straight from the tap. She is at home here. Her Hausa is rapid and idiomatic and she readily translates what I don't understand. As we walk along, she throws out greetings.       "Sannu, Malam," she calls to a blind man sitting on a straw mat by the side of the road, his bowl in front of him. His face is deeply pocked and his eyes have all but disappeared behind straining lids. He murmurs a response and inclines his head thoughtfully, as if listening for more.       A boy is coming toward us through the shimmering heat. His knees, frank beneath the cut of his shorts, are no longer those of a child and the hands hanging at his sides are large. On his head, drawn down firmly over his ears, is a knitted red woolen hat, flaps hanging below his chin.       "But aren't you too hot in that?" Zara asks, astonished.       "I'm from the bush," he says, explaining, and they both throw back their heads and shout with laughter. Zara is leading us through the streets, directing our path. As for me, my eyes are fastened on the sand, on the two pair of white feet in flip flops, keeping time.       When we last walked down this street together, it was I who carried the canteen of filtered water so that she could have a swallow if she needed one. I would have been pushing the stroller with Tulu sitting in it, plowing it through the sand, and she and Lizzy would have been holding on to either side, kicking along in sandals made by Garba. Or one of them would have taken a turn pushing the stroller and the hand of the other would be lying sweetly in my own.       A walk down this street would have made a third outing for an empty afternoon, certainly a more frequent choice than Peter and the Wolf or Garba's. We might stop at SCOA's for a bottle of orange sirop or a bag of toasted biscottes for Tulu to sharpen her new teeth on. We could while away a good half hour there, wandering up and down between the shelves of tomato paste and petit pois, lingering beneath the slowly turning overhead fans. We said Bon Soir to M. Nasser, ready after his sieste in a freshly ironed shirt, who was manager not only of SCOA but of the hotel as well. In a curt, deep voice he would be directing young men who were unpacking boxes of jam from Poland, tubes of mayonnaise from Spain.       M. Nasser drove the single Mercedes in town and had a plump daughter, seldom seen at all, who occasionally appeared alone at a far table in the garden of the hotel. Did she have a mother, somewhere, longing for her return? An aunt? A sister? And what could her days have been, the air conditioned rooms, the rugs on the cement floors, the empty coke bottles collecting on a table? It seemed, always, she must be waiting for something to happen that would release her at last to Beirut and the mountains slipping down to the sea: for her father to decide he'd had enough of this strip of sand, for SCOA to go bankrupt, the Mercedes to fall apart.       For someone to walk into the garden of the hotel and to recognize behind the languid, tired flesh a self standing at attention.       Usually, moving with the stroller through the sand, we had a particular errand in mind, often thought up as we went.       For a little box of La Vache qui Rit, with its six wedges of cheese each wrapped in silver paper, we left the sand on one side and crossed the narrow ledge of tarred road to the sand on the other. We were going to Michel's, the French butcher's, who along with cuts of meat sold cheese and butter sent down from Normandy, but we passed the Hotel Central on the way. Almost always, some vehicle or other was parked in front: a Land Rover or a Deux Chevaux, the Sabena van up from Kano. The garden was a pleasant place to sit, neem trees stirring patches of shade where you could rest and drink an icy beer or coke. In the evening the branches were strung with tiny white lights and people sat beneath them talking quietly and eating the biftek, pommes frites and salad that was served every night along with a carafe of red wine. Sitting in a low chair with your hand resting on the cool sand, you could look up through the neem leaves into the starry night and reflect that here you were, alone and yourself, in this place of all others. That your entire past had brought you unsuspecting to this moment of perfect peace.       Travellers of all sorts stopped here: Italian engineers on their way up to the Aïr Mountains to mine deposits of uranium, Swedish photographers making documentaries of the Tuaregs, someone from Oxfam. But all of them, sipping their cool drinks, had one thing in common: the means to pay. Outside the hotel was a different group altogether, the beggars of Zinder. Or those beggars young or strong enough to endure the sun, the wait, the slow coming and going between the auto gare and the hotel. There you did not find the three blind old women, led by a child, whose song could be heard early in the morning outside our gate. Or the dwarf, rolling back and forth, face averted, never any place for long.       The hotel was not a place we stopped. The children and I, moving through the sand, were on our way next door, to Michel's. Soon after arriving in Zinder, the first time we entered his shop, something happened we could not forget.       We had ordered our meat. Behind the counter, hanging on the wall as in a boucherie in Paris, was a blackboard with the names of all the cuts written on it: saucisson sec, cote porc frais, lapin. These came down from Paris on the Air France flight to Niamey, then were flown out to Zinder in a plane that brought mail as well, once a week on Fridays. On this particular afternoon we had asked for our cotelettes and had watched Michel place the raw meat on a wooden block. He measured it with his knife, looked up before he cut, black hair falling across his forehead. "De trop?" he asked, then sliced two, three times. Yes, he said in answer to my question, he had been in Zinder a long time, since the end of the guerre d'Algerie. Had never returned to Paris, had kept moving south across the desert and come to a stop here. After he had wrapped the meat in a piece of paper and I had paid him, he looked over the counter at Tulu sitting in her stroller, at Lizzy and Zara standing there fingering the edge of the block, and told us to come, he had something to show us.       We followed him to a door that opened onto a sun baked court surrounded by a low wall. In the doorway he had stopped short.       "Ah non!" he said. From behind his apron, blood stained and tied in back with string, we could see into a shaded corner where a gray kitten crouched beside a saucer of milk. On the wall opposite, dark against the sun, sat five or six vultures. The butcher had cupped the trembling kitten in his hands and carried it past us inside. Then, on the floor behind the counter, while the kitten lapped the milk, the little girls had squatted next to it and stroked its back.       Before we buy the round of cheese we have to lift the wooden cover of the box and look inside: there he is, six times, the cow laughing with his mouth full of teeth.       Too many days to remember, days cold out of season and days when I would have given my soul for a chill. Days, one after another, so charged with falling light and grainy shadow I took little account of what was nearest of all. So now there's only the remembered press of Zara's hand in mine, now, when it is too late. She is gone, altogether lost, the Zara who walked beside me then, who I might have swept suddenly into a hug, the embrace that might have, oh might have, spared her some sad night, some dim sorrow at noon.       Zara and I are walking through the sand, and she is looking at me, dark eyes alert, asking if this is what I remembered.       I cannot say that the print of her six year old hand in mine has left a hollow, a sweet declivity, that does not fill. Her hair, still the color of honey, is brushed straight back and held in place by a folded blue scarf tied at the base of her neck. She tied it on early this morning. She was up before I was, putting iodine in the water, making powdered milk to put on our corn flakes. By the time I was dressed, she had already put two bowls on the table and a spoon beside each one. The table was covered, as always, with a green cloth, and on the wall above it, facing us as we ate our corn flakes, was a map of Africa with its brave recovered names: Benin, Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Zaire. We drank our coffee from two large plastic turquoise mugs.       The brute fact of it is I recognize nothing. Zinder is a barren place, windswept, so hot I think I better be careful in this sun.       Did I ever go to the Boissons Fraîches with Zara?       No, I went only once when we were living in Zinder. And that was without her.

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