“Tell your family hello for us.”
“I will, Adiza, thank you. You stay out of trouble and try to keep this new husband of yours.”
“If he deserves me, I will keep him!” Fati and Adiza did the laughter dance, slapping their thighs and leaning on each other’s shoulders. I smiled, grateful for their undying humor, the countless times their laughter had banished my frustration and despair. How I would miss it!
Then Djelal stepped out the double doors dressed in his best blue
boubou
. He did his thing of somehow frowning with the top of his face and smiling with the bottom. “You are leaving us.”
“Yes.”
I’m finally going. One less American for you to complain about.
Then his face softened and for the first and last time, I saw a Djelal I could have liked, but was never given the chance to know.
“
Merci
, Suzanne,” he said. “You have worked hard. We will miss you.”
My mouth dropped open as he shook my hand. Before I could find my voice, Hamidou started up the truck. Tricia, Jack, Luanne, and Laya were all inside, waiting for me.
“Goodbye, Djelal,” I said. I shook all their hands again—Fati, Nassuru, Adiza. Nouhoun ran out and said a quick goodbye.
Gray hugged me. “Have fun in Kenya. I’ll call you when I get home this Christmas!”
We drove through the gate and I waved out the window until the dust erased first their faces and waving arms, then the office buildings, then Dori. So much like the time three years before, when I had driven away from Foequellie, leaving yet another group of people who had become my family.
The Ouaga airport was a small, cement building on the southern edge of town. Near the glass doors that opened onto a vast space of fields and runway, I concentrated on the people in front of me—Hamidou, Laya, Ousmann, Jack, Luanne, Baby Lisa, etching the lines of their faces into my mind one more time.
“I hate good-byes,” I said.
Tricia fidgeted at my elbow. “I’d think you’d be used to it by now.” She looked out the windows to make sure the plane wasn’t leaving without us.
With a weak smile and a lump in my throat, I turned to Luanne. Baby Lisa on her hip, she gave me a quick hug and a laugh of mild hysteria. I kissed them both, then looked up to find Hamidou, quietly smiling down on me. My throat started to close. “Oh, dear.” My eyes filled up. I hugged him. The only hug I had ever given him.
“Goodbye, Hamidou.” My voice was barely a whisper. “Thank you.”
He laughed in his quiet way and shook his head at me for the last time.
Next was Laya, resplendent in a new dress made from the batik
pagnes
I had given to her as a departing gift. A bank account and a few pieces of cloth—such pitiful things for all she had done for me. I started to cry, having given up on any kind of dignified farewell. Ousmann wiggled in the sling that held him to Laya’s back. She reached around, pulled him from the cloth, and placed him in my arms. He wrapped his arms around my neck, and I embraced Laya, wishing I was taking her with me, knowing I would wish it for the rest of my life.
A woman’s voice echoed across the room with the last call,
“Air Afrique, vol six, soixante-deux, Ouagadougou-Abidjan, dernièr appel.”
Tricia tugged at my sleeve. “Come on, Susan, let’s not miss our plane.”
Jack stepped forward and folded me into his arms. Sweet Jack. We had said our goodbyes so he only smiled and kissed me.
Tricia shook hands all around, then raised her hand in salute. “Goodbye!”
She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me through the open door out into the heat and burnt smell of the blacktop runway. I turned away from the faces at the door and walked toward the plane, which rested in the middle of a wide airstrip. Three soldiers with machine guns stood guard around the plane. The asphalt burned through my sandals as I traversed the fifty yards toward the stair platform.
“These guys with guns give me the creeps,” Tricia said in a low voice. “Are they afraid we’re going to steal the plane?”
The soldiers were older, tough looking men. One of them reminded me of Drabo. How normal the presence of soldiers and guns had become.
Out in the field, a dust devil jumped in and out of millet stalks, making them bend and straighten, as though they were waving goodbye. Tricia started up the plane stairs. I followed, the last in line. At the top, I turned to look back toward the roof of the terminal building. A line of people stood against a railing that ran the length of the roof. I raised my arm in a wide arc. Four arms waved in response—Jack, Luanne, Laya, and Hamidou.
“
Adieu!
” I yelled as loud as I could, throwing both arms up in farewell. My chest tightened. “Goodbye my friends!” I called.
Goodbye my family
. The wind carried their answers back to me.
I turned to enter the plane, but stopped to scan the horizon one more time. Far out, a baobab tree stood alone, reaching out like a scarecrow with a hundred arms.
“Goodbye, Sahel,” I whispered. “Till we meet again.”
A ghost herd of elephants materialized in the heat waves and raised their trunks in farewell. I inhaled the scent of the desert, held my breath, and walked into the cool darkness of the plane.
Inside the plane’s belly, corked, taped, and packed between two towels in my backpack, lay a champagne bottle full of golden-red sand.
Unanana-Bosele and her children grew hungry inside the elephant. She asked her children, “What have you eaten?”
They replied, “Nothing.”
So, taking her knife, Unanana-Bosele cut the liver and through the ribs, eating the strength of the Great Elephant and freeing herself and her children.
As all of the people and animals left the belly of the elephant, they cried, “At length, we see the country!”
They made Unanana-Bosele many fine gifts of cattle, goats, and sheep. She returned to her village and her house in the middle of the road, rich with many treasures and her two fine children.
Part III
Through the Ribs and Out
Chapter 31
Lagos to Nairobi
July
Rain pummeled the plane window as the 727 took off. The lights of Lagos fell away into an ocean of mist. Across the aisle, a Nigerian in a voluminous
boubou
slurped as he sucked the marrow from a chicken bone brought aboard in a grease-stained cloth. A woman, even larger in girth than the man, overflowed the seat next to him. She chewed on chunks of bread torn from a baguette. The plane smelled of too many bodies, yeast, and fried chicken.
My stomach rumbled. I couldn’t decide which I was more of, tired or hungry. Tricia and I had snacked on peanuts during the flight from Ouaga to Abidjan, then grabbed a soda in the Abidjan airport between planes.
“When do you think they’ll serve dinner?” Tricia eyed the chicken leg across the aisle. “I’m starved.”
“Probably somewhere over Cameroon.”
The plane rumbled as the landing gear ground up into the belly. Exhaustion spread like warm sand down my arms and into my legs and feet. I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes.
Someone kept poking my arm. At the first turn of my head it was Adiza, the second time it was Fati, pulling at my sleeve. I opened my eyes.
“Susan, wake up! I think we’re about to get hit by a plane!” Tricia pointed out the window to a red light that blinked and wavered through the rain coursing across the double pane.
My heart skipped into triple time.
Son of a bitch!
What had ever possessed me to get on an airplane with Tricia!? She was a magnet for the weird and harrowing. Like the time a flasher zeroed in on her in a remote corner of the library and opened his trench coat. Like the sandstorm the day she tried to fly to Dori. Perverts, storms, and errant airplanes saw Tricia and came running.
My stomach did a double backflip. The red light blinked.
“Wait a minute.” I squinted and reached across Tricia to rub the grease off the window. “Isn’t that the light at the end of our wing?”
Tricia peered out the window. “Oh. Maybe you’re right.”
“Goddamn it, Tricia!”
“Sorry, it looked like a small plane.”
I fell back against the seat and rubbed my stomach. “I think I’m gonna’ throw up.”
Tricia ruffled through the seat pocket in front of her. “Rats. No airsick bags.”
“I’m all right.” I blew out a long breath then sat forward. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
She started to laugh. “I said I was sorry. Oh, look. They’re starting to serve dinner.”
I stared at her. This, my sister, was going to be my travel buddy through Kenya, Egypt, and Greece over the next few months. Travel buddies were supposed to watch out for each other, not hand out heart attacks.
Two flight attendants wearing blue caps pushed a food cart down the center aisle. The aroma of overcooked rice joined the chicken smell. Conversation ebbed as bodies shifted and table trays clicked free from seat backs. The sound rustled through the cabin like grasshoppers flying in the heat of midday.
A young woman with perfect skin and hoop earrings placed a plate of food on each of our trays. We ordered wine and were given two mini-bottles of French chardonnay.
Tricia rubbed her hands together. “Let’s celebrate.”
We twisted off the caps and poured wine into our plastic glasses.
Tricia raised her cup. “To Ethiopian Airlines, flight 823, Lagos to Nairobi. May we arrive in one piece!”
I clicked my glass with hers. “To the end of one adventure and the beginning of another.”
“Now, eat.” Tricia pointed her fork at my food. “You’re too skinny.”
Before leaving Ouaga, I had stood on the scale at the embassy and discovered I’d lost ten pounds. Months of overwork and intestinal trauma will do that. At just over five feet, nine inches, I weighed 120 pounds. When you took the condition of my hair and the state of my clothes into account, I was a veritable scarecrow.
The wine was cold and the chicken surprisingly tasty. Tricia flagged down the stewardess and ordered two more mini-bottles.
“So, your job is finished. How do you feel?”
My stomach was full, my head fuzzy. “I’m so tired, I can hardly feel anything.”
“You did a good job.”
“Yeah, I think I did.” And I was done. The realization seeped into my bloodstream along with the wine. I was flying away from two and a half years of intense work in a grueling climate on the edge of the world. Relief opened up a little door at the end of my big toes, and all the angst and frustration I had stored up spilled out.
Out the window, the rain finally stopped.
Sometime past midnight, I closed my book and yawned. After reading
The Snow Leopard
, I had searched out more Peter Matthiessen and found
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
on somebody’s shelf. It was a story about the loss of innocence, or the path
to
innocence, depending on one’s courage. I had always thought of innocence as the simple lack of experience. But I had confused innocence with being naïve.
Philip’s favorite pastime had been to tell me how naïve I was. Me and every other American he had ever met. In many ways, he was right. Naiveté was expecting the rest of the world to see things the way you did and being surprised when they didn’t. Innocence was purity of heart, even in the presence of experience.
Events of the past three years had pummeled much (though certainly not all) of my naiveté. But I could not say that I was innocent in the face of all that I had experienced in Africa. Along with all the adventure, friendships, and love, there had been fear, loneliness, sorrow, and regret. They had all pitched tents at one time or another in the campground of my heart. And they had left a lot of litter behind. But I was moving on.
Who ever knew what the next phase of life was going to be? Like Mohammed ascending the seven levels of heaven on his Night Journey, I, too, was climbing. Maybe Tricia was my Angel Gabriel.
I laughed to myself, then sighed, a shaky exhale over the fatigue and relief that jumbled my insides.
Tricia slept with her head propped on a pillow wedged between her shoulder and ear. I tucked Matthiessen into my basket, though one particular passage stayed in my head.
In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night…they flew toward the full moon…the idea of the moths in the high darkness, straining upward, filled him with longing, and at these times he would know that he had not found what he was looking for, nor come closer to discovering what it was.
I turned out my light. Darkness muted the cabin’s interior save for a dim line of tiny lights along the aisle. The hush of people sleeping moved back and forth in the recirculated air.
Out the window, a full moon played hide and seek among canyons of thick, shifting clouds. Stars littered the blue-black sky. I rested my forehead against the pane. How to describe longing? A pang, a rush of melancholy that drained you until you were empty. A yearning that made you want to cry.
I had followed Rob back to Africa, hoping to find a lasting relationship and my place in the world, thinking I could make a difference, needing to finish all I had left undone in Liberia. Things hadn’t quite turned out the way I’d imagined. I had come looking for a cause, for love, and a feeling of belonging; but hidden within that longing had been vanity, falsehood, greed, and dissension.
When vanity and greed are sought above all else, Wagadu, the goddess of compassion and true life, forever eludes the seeker.
The one true thing I had found—a family of friends—I had left behind, again.
I saw the faces I’d said goodbye to eight hours before. I saw Drabo, who had left before I did, the faces of Lily and Luc. Six years ago, I’d said goodbye to my family in Idaho. Two years of gathering family in Liberia, then I’d said goodbye to them, too. Now, I had just left another. I moved away, moved toward, moved away again, like a moth to a lamp.