Authors: Anthony Doerr
What a risk she was taking—what a fabulous, miraculous risk. Even Ward could see that she was the one stepping off a cliff’s edge, plunging through the darkness. She looked over his head, at the stars rioting in the sky. Yes, she said.
The next Sunday they were married by a priest in Lushoto.
A week in her parents’ home: he slept in her room; they hardly spoke; they filled their frames of vision with each other. Ward could not bear to have her out of his sight: he wanted to follow her to the outhouse, wanted to help her dress. Naima found herself trembling nearly all the time. She threw herself into him; she was hurtling down the path she had chosen as quickly as her body would carry her. On the airplane they held hands. He watched the green and furrowed hills sliding far below and felt vaguely triumphant.
In her window seat Naima tried to imagine herself hurtling through the sky, not cramped into this tunnel with strangers but really flying, arms stretched out, rafts of clouds scrolling by. She clenched her eyes, balled her fists; the vision would not come.
When Naima was ten she invented a game and called it Mkondo. Mkondo was this: from the network of trails behind her parents’ home, she’d choose a path she’d never traveled and follow it until it ended. When she reached the end she had to take one step
farther. Sometimes this meant merely stepping over nettles or crawling through a net of vines. Other times paths edged their way into gorges and dropped to a river—the brown and quiet Pangani or some nameless creek slashing past—and she would hitch her khanga to her thighs and, trembling, wade in. Of if, in the final pinch of a ravine, a trail dead-ended in a grove of cedar trees, she’d clamber up twenty feet to a branch, then take her step forward.
Her favorites were the trails that climbed high into the mountains, winding through fields of giant heather and tussock to terminate at some crumbling pinnacle, and she would stand at the end of the trail and lift her foot. Far off, above the trees nodding their heads in the wind, above the flat and dusty plains, clumps of clouds would soar in from the horizon. She’d lean into the pulsing gulf of air, with her foot poised over nothing, and space would flood around her, a vertigo against which she held back in blissful panic, fighting an urge she had, always, to continue on, to throw herself forward.
She’d run until she couldn’t feel her legs moving beneath her, until past and future seemed to dissolve and there was only Naima—all the attention of the seething, tossing forest on her— and she’d feel a reckless urgency to accelerate, to run beneath the clouds and feel her core blaze into life; some rare nights, as she neared the end of a trail, she felt the shed of her body slip away, and for one electrifying moment she became a ray of light, speeding upward. It wasn’t dissatisfaction as much as curiosity; it wasn’t a fear of stasis as much as a need for movement. But those things—fear and dissatisfaction—were there too. She could not sit still; she hated picking tea; she dreaded school.
As Naima grew older she watched friends marry friends; young men assumed their father’s jobs; young women became versions of their mothers. No one, it seemed, left the places they lived, the roads they traveled. At nineteen, at twenty-two, she was still racing through the forests, crawling through brambles, scrambling up riverbanks. Children called her mwendawazimu;
the tea pickers treated her as an outsider. By then Mkondo had become more than a game; it was the one way she could be certain she was alive.
Then Ward had arrived. He was different, significant; he spoke of places she had only dreamed of, he carried himself with a delicacy she had not seen before. (Ward stepping out of his truck, staring shyly at his feet, scraping at a fleck of clay on his shirt with a fingernail.) The gifts, the attention, the promise of something different, something glamorous—all these things attracted her. But it was not until he had leapt after her into the river that she was convinced. It was dark; he easily might have turned back.
On the plane she opened her eyes. This, she thought, this marriage, this one-way ticket to another continent, was just another round of Mkondo; it was only a matter of steeling yourself and taking that extra, final step.
Ohio: bleak weather impended over the city like a shroud. Curtains of haze washed out the light; helicopters shuttled endlessly overhead; buses groaned through the streets like dying beasts. In Ward’s neighborhood the houses were built within a foot of each other—Naima could lift a screen and reach into the neighbors’ kitchen.
For those first months she threw herself so ardently into Ward that she managed to outrun her disappointment. It was love, the most desperate kind. She spent her afternoons glancing at the clock once a minute, waiting for the moment his bus would let him off at the end of the block, the sound of his keys at the door. Evenings they ran through the streets, dodging lampposts, hurdling newspaper boxes. Sometimes they stayed up until dawn talking; when Monday morning came—too soon—Naima wanted to hammer the door shut, bury his keys, pin him against the hallway floor.
Although the museum was not what she expected—cracked granite staircases, mounted mammals and bones on display, dioramas where plastic-eyed cavemen bent over plaster cookfires— she could see why Ward had such ambition for it. It was a musty, wistful place; a vision of what that country must once have been. They sat on the roof at night and watched traffic slug through the streets; they picnicked inside the fossilized rib cage of a brontosaur. In a marble hall the walls were covered with almost fifty thousand pinned butterflies, species from every region on earth. The colors on their wings took her breath away: dazzling blue halos, tiger stripes, false eyes. Ward beamed, named them one by one. It was his favorite place. Even later, after he had been promoted several times, he would return to the hall of butterflies to dust them off, straighten their labels, inspect new additions.
But the more time she spent there the more the museum unnerved her. Nothing grew, nothing lived. Even the light seemed dead, falling from naked bulbs screwed into the ceilings. The people there obsessed over names and classifications of things, as if the first orange-winged butterfly had emerged from its cocoon named
Anthocharis cardamines,
as if the essence of ferns was explained by a dried specimen tacked to posterboard and labeled
Dennstaedtiaceae.
The curators had taken Ward’s prehistoric bird, taped an index card to it, and locked it in a glass cube. What kind of natural history was that? She wanted to haul in barrows of earth and dump them on the floor. See this grub? she’d announce, shaking one at the old guard, at the visiting class of first-graders. See these slugs?
This
is natural history. This is what you come from.
Traffic, billboards, sirens, a stranger’s unwillingness to look directly at her: these were not things she had expected, not things she could have prepared herself for. The leaves of trees—the few trees she could find—were stained with soot from the mills. The markets were lifeless and sterile: meat came packaged in plastic and she had to tear it open in the aisle to smell it. The neighbors pretended not to stare when she did laundry in the yard. You need
something, she told herself, wringing Ward’s shirts over the lawn. You need something or you are not going to make it here.
Ward watched Naima drift through the house as if searching for something she’d lost; sometimes she complained of strange illnesses: invisible clamps around her throat, thick-headedness, rubbery insides. Once he brought her to dinner at an acquaintance’s house, a Kenyan professor at the university. It will do you good, Ward told her. The professor’s wife cooked chapatis, murmured hymns in Swahili. But Naima sat sullenly at the table and gazed outside. After dinner, when they took tea in the parlor, she stayed in the kitchen and sat on the floor, whispering to the housecat.
At night Ward tossed in self-loathing: how, he wondered, can you want something so badly, finally get it, and yet wind up discontented? And how can it happen so quickly? When he finally could sink into sleep his dreams boiled with faceless devils; he woke—gasping—with their talons on his windpipe.
Ward was changing too, or perhaps just reverting to something he had been before, easing back to a more familiar road. After only six months in Ohio, Naima could see the flush in his neck fade, the definition of his muscles wilt. She watched him tangle himself in the trappings of work: he’d return home at eight or nine, sheepish and apologetic. He brought paperwork home on weekends; he was placed in charge of museum publications, then membership management. I love you, Naima, he’d say, standing in the doorway to his study. But already he was not the same person who had arrived at her parents’ door like a stag in rut, breathing hard, trembling with life.
They made love carefully, and in silence. Nothing ever came of it. Are you okay? he’d say afterward, panting, suddenly afraid to touch her, as if she were a flower he’d torn the petals from—an accident, too late. Are you okay?
Her first February the weather stayed overcast every day all day. She felt the dead weight of snow on the roof; she rolled over each morning, lifted the curtain and groaned to see it gray again, never any sun, never any movement to the air. A mile away the flat and dismal towers of downtown stood against the sky like huge prisons. Buses roared through the slush.
She had come to Ohio; she had taken that final, extra step. Now what? she thought. Now what am I supposed to do? Turn back? By August—she had been there a year—she was sobbing at night. The Ohio sky had become a tangible weight, bending the stalk of her neck, loading down her shoulders. She slumped through the hours. Ward, anxious to try anything, drove her out of the city: barns on hills, threshers in fields. They sat on a friend’s porch and ate fresh corn slathered in butter and pepper. She asked, What are those white boxes over there?
Bees. So all winter she hammered together frames in the basement and in April bought a queen and a three-pound package of workers from a farm supply store and set up a hive in Ward’s backyard. Each evening, with a canvas veil over her head, lulling the bees with smoke from smoldering bunches of grass, she’d stand over the hive and watch it in all its industry, all its wildness. And she was happy. But the neighbors complained—they had kids, they said, and some of the kids were allergic. The bees were infesting their forsythia bushes, their potted geraniums. A woman had bees coming through her air conditioner. The neighbors began leaving notes under Ward’s wiper blades, rude messages on the answering machine. Then: a threat of sabotage—
How would your bees take to some DDT?
—taped to a glass paperweight and hurled through the living room window. Two cops stood on the porch with their hats behind their backs. City ordinance, they said, no bees.
Ward offered to help her get rid of them but she refused. She
had never driven a car. She stopped and started, nearly leveled two children on tricycles. Finally she stalled in a field off the interstate, opened the trunk and watched the bees spiral out, angry, confused, swarming. A dozen stung her: on the arms, a knee, an ear. She wept, hated herself for it.
She stuck bird feeders to the bedroom windows with suction cups, lured squirrels into the kitchen with tea biscuits. She studied ants as they navigated the front walk, watched them heave the desiccated bodies of beetles onto their shoulders and freight them through the forest of the lawn. But it was not enough—it was not wilderness, not exactly, not at all. Chickadees and pigeons, mice and chipmunks. Houseflies. Trips to the zoo to watch a pair of dirty zebras eat hay. This was a life, this was how people chose to live? Somewhere inside she could feel winds dying, the gales of her youth stifled. She was learning that in her life everything— health, happiness, even love—was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul. There were doldrums in her arteries, gray skies in her lungs. She heard a pulse inside her ear, a swishing cadence of blood and it was time, the steady marking of every moment as it sailed past, unrecoverable, lost forever. She mourned each one.
Winter—her third in Ohio—she crossed to Pennsylvania in Ward’s Buick and returned with a pair of immature red-tailed hawks, orphans bought from a chicken farmer who had shot their mother and advertised them in the paper. They were fully fledged, hot and bristling, with hooked beaks and sharp black talons and fire-colored eyes. She lashed leather rufters over their heads and tied them to a wooden block in the basement. Each
morning she fed them cubes of raw chicken. As a kind of training she carried them around the house, hooded, perched on a heavily gloved wrist, stroking their wings with a feather and talking to them.
The hawks were full of hate. At night wild cries reverberated from the basement. Naima would wake and experience the strange sensation that the world had inverted—the sky arched beneath her, the hawks were circling in the basement, shouting up. She lay in bed and listened. Then, all too familiar, the phone would ring: the neighbors wondered why it sounded like children were shrieking in Ward’s cellar.
She was learning: wildness was not something she could make or something she could bring to her, it had to be there on its own, a miracle she had to be lucky enough to happen across, traveling one day along a path and arriving at its end. She went to the birds each night. She carried them to opposite ends of the basement, stroked them with the feather and talked to them in Swahili, in Chagga. But still they squalled. Can’t you just muzzle them? Ward would shout from his study. Until they outgrow this? But hatred was not something they would outgrow, it was in them; she could see it brimming behind their eyes.
After a week of this, the neighbors calling and the police summoned twice to the front step, Ward sat her down. Naima, he said, the police are going to take the hawks away. I’m sorry.
Let them come, she said. But that night she carried one of the birds to the backyard, removed its hood, and set it free. It flapped clumsily into the air, trying its wings, and settled onto the gable. There it began to screech, sharply and regularly, like a siren. It hammered at the roof with its beak, sending scraps of shingle into the air; it dropped to the front porch and threw itself at the front window. Then it perched on the mailbox and resumed screaming. Naima ran around to the front, thrilled, breathless.