Bakayoko and N’Deye Touti were resting on the fine warm sand of the beach, between two long fishing boats hewn from great logs and propped up on lengths of smaller ones. The girl was sitting with her legs stretched out before her and her back against one of the boats, while the man, lying on his stomach with his head supported in his hands, was watching a group of children who were setting traps for sea birds. One of them, a sickly little creature, was running after a sand crab. When at last he had caught it, he crushed it with a blow of his heel, and Bakayoko smiled. N’Deye Touti could see nothing of him but the top of his head and his left ear and hand.
‘Will you be staying here for a while?’ she asked.
He did not reply. His attention had just been caught by a gray-winged bird moving with precise little hopping steps towards one of the traps. There was a sound like the creaking of a pulley, a brief flutter of wings, and the bird was caught up by one leg. The young hunters gathered in a circle around it, shouting aloud in triumph.
‘They are happy,’ Bakayoko said, turning over on his back and clasping his hands behind his neck.
N’Deye Touti looked down at him thoughtfully, studying the high, clear forehead, the close-cropped hair, and the scar, which always seemed to her to be so virile. For several days now she had basked in the warmth of this new intimacy. Sometimes she found herself counting on her fingers, as she had done in school, but now she was saying, ‘I’ll sleep with him, I won’t sleep with him, I’ll sleep …’ She knew that everyone at N’Diayène already regarded her association with him as the beginning of a liaison and considered it with indulgence. She was happy to have him near her and to be alone with him, but she could not help asking, in that gentle little voice that jealous women love to use, ‘If you leave, when will you come back?’
‘I don’t know; I’m waiting for that boat the fishermen told me about.’
‘A boat, as far as Bamako?’
‘No, I’ll get off at Kayes, and then I can go with the fishermen as far as Bapoulaba …’ He traced the route for her in the sand with the tip of his fingers. ‘From there, I’ll have to go by the rapids of the Félou …’
‘That doesn’t tell me when you will come back.’
‘I can’t tell you. I don’t know myself.’
*
They did not return to N’Diayène until after nightfall. The authorities had made no move to apprehend him, but Bakayoko thought it wise to remain out of sight as much as possible. The stars were beginning to come out. They could overhear the conversation of two sailors who were walking just ahead of them.
‘What do you think of that little slut? She told me to come, I took off without permission to get there, and then she had gone off with some civilian! I’ll smash that bastard’s face if I ever get my hands on him.’
‘If you haven’t got any money, you might as well get used to it. I’ve got one lined up for tonight, though – on credit. If this strike goes on, they’ll all come around to that…’
‘Don’t tell me about the bitches! And tomorrow we’ve got to be on guard at the station at the crack of dawn …’
N’Deye Touti slowed her pace until the sailors were a good distance ahead and then said, ‘Why don’t you ever talk to me about Penda?’
‘She’s dead. Did you know?’
‘Yes, I knew. Did you know her well?’
‘I knew her. Why do you ask?’
‘She was a whore.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘All the women in the compound know it. They say that the only thing that was never on top of her was the railroad. I just wondered how …?’
N’Deye Touti left her question unfinished, and Bakayoko did not reply at once.
‘You will probably never be worth as much as Penda,’ he said at last. ‘And I know what she was worth. She was a real friend, and she lost her life because of it. There are a great many ways of prostituting yourself, you know. There are those who do it because they are forced to – Alioune, Deune, Idrissa and myself all prostitute our work and our abilities to men who have no respect for us. And then there are others who sell themselves morally – the ones like Mabigué and Gaye and Beaugosse. And what about you?’
He stopped to light his pipe.
‘Let me do it,’ N’Deye Touti said, but at the first puff she coughed violently and spat. ‘It’s disgusting – how on earth can you smoke that?’
They walked on again in silence. To their left there was a long wall of hard, white clay, and on their right a field of guava trees.
‘Do you want me to tell you something?’ the girl asked suddenly. ‘I would like to be your second wife.’
‘What?’ Bakayoko stopped short, as if he had been struck on the head.
‘I’ve thought about it very seriously and asked myself a lot of questions; and I told myself that if you refused it would be because it would be difficult for you to reverse yourself now, after you have always said that you were against polygamy. And I know that you are really against it. I was, too; it was one of our customs that I could never understand, that I hated even. But it happens sometimes that you come to like something you thought you hated … And at least I can tell myself that since I was born a Moslem, my religion authorizes it. You told me once that these old feudal customs would only really disappear when Africa was reborn and free. In the meantime, while we are waiting for that time to come, I want to be your second wife. I know of another “emancipated” girl who has done it. Why shouldn’t I? … And I wouldn’t be jealous of Assitan.’
N’Deye Touti paused, a little breathlessly. She had been speaking very rapidly, in French. Bakayoko had no immediate answer, because as she spoke myriad thoughts and memories had been flashing through his mind, vanishing as quickly as they appeared. Traveling constantly, from one end of the line to the other, he had known a great many women, and he had approached them as a thirsty traveler will seize upon fresh water, but he had never attached much importance to the act of sex. For what else there was to marriage, there was Assitan, and that was enough.
He stopped, and N’Deye Touti turned to him and came back to where he stood. In spite of the darkness, he could see that her eyes were shining, and he could feel her breath on the naked flesh of his chest. With a familiar, almost brotherly, gesture, he took her head in his hands and tilted it gently to the side. N’Deye Touti lifted her head to his and closed her eyes.
‘Will you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
*
All the rest of the way, past the rows of straw huts and cabins, dotted now with flickering yellow lights, neither of them said a word. When they arrived in the courtyard of N’Diayène, they found Alioune waiting for them.
‘Ah, if it isn’t our great leader,’ Bakayoko said, laughing.
‘Don’t joke with me now! The news is very bad – from everywhere, it seems. At Thiès, Doudou is dead. A bad attack of the fever, from what Lahbib wrote me. And at Bamako, they have arrested Konaté and taken him to the camp where they are holding Fa Keïta and the others. About the only good thing is that your boat has arrived. It leaves again tomorrow at dawn, and it would be safer if you embarked tonight. Only …’
‘Only what?’
‘Someone will have to go to Doudou’s funeral.’
‘Me? Oh no, I’m not going to Thiès. Doudou may have died of the fever, but it was a fever brought on by hunger and overwork. Now if there had been doctors for the workers … In any case, you are in charge here; appoint someone. I’m leaving. There is no one at all in the Sudan.’
‘Sometimes I wonder,’ Alioune said, ‘if you don’t carry things a little too far …’
N’Deye Touti interrupted him. ‘He has no heart,’ she said, ‘and he wants everyone else to be like him – inhuman!’
She ran off into the house, leaving Bakayoko to say his good-byes to the women who had gathered in the courtyard and thank them for their hospitality.
‘We have done nothing,’ Ramatoulaye said, ‘and it is a sad thing that we could do so little for a man like you in such a time. There is nothing to thank us for.’
He rested his hand on the shoulder of the blind woman, who was nursing Strike. ‘Peace be with you, Maïmouna.’
‘Peace be with you, man, and with all of yours.’
After a last glance around the courtyard, Bakayoko strode rapidly into the house and went directly to the central room where he had left his things. Naked children were sleeping on the bed and on strips of matting unrolled across the floor. N’Deye Touti was waiting for him, holding his old straw hat and his walking stick in one hand and his pack in the other. The room was lit by a single candle set in a jug on the floor, and the light, striking upward, formed pools of shadow on the girl’s face. ‘She looks like the bronze masks of a goddess of Ife,’ Bakayoko thought, and it occurred to him that N’Deye Touti might have chosen her position carefully. Her eyelashes were fluttering nervously, and her lower lip trembled. As they stood there looking at each other in the half light, a tear glinted in the corner of one of her eyes, then rolled down her cheek, and, for an instant, hung sparkling at the tip of her chin.
The sight of a woman weeping was a thing to which Bakayoko was a stranger. He took his traveling gear from her hands, put on the straw hat, and tied the leather thong at his neck.
‘I wish …’ he began, but then he stopped abruptly, turned, and left the room. As he crossed the courtyard he said again, ‘Ramatoulaye, may peace be with this house.’ Then he disappeared into the night.
N’Deye Touti had followed him to the door, still hoping for some word or gesture. When he had gone, and the darkness had engulfed his figure, she muttered furiously, ‘The pig! The filthy pig!’ and now she made no effort to control her tears.
*
Bakayoko’s fleeting appearance in her life was destined to have consequences for the girl which she could have had no way of foreseeing on that last evening. As the earth hardens beneath the harsh suns of the dry season, the heart also hardens in the flames of unhappiness. For days after he had gone, she seemed completely indifferent to everything that happened around her. The great dark eyes, which once had sparkled wide at the slightest emotion, moved from one object to another, from one face to another, as if the outside world no longer existed, and everything now centered on some interior vision from which she drew a kind of morbid pleasure.
She had an attack of fever which lasted for several days and left her very weak, but as soon as it had subsided she was seized with a fever for work. None of the things she had once disliked doing any longer repelled her; she cared for the children and washed their clothing and went on long errands in the heat of the day, in search of a handful of rice. Sometimes she would sit for hours bent over a schoolbook of geography, studying out every detail of her country in one map after another. And often the multi-colored lines on the page would seem to be drawing the face of a man.
One day, as she was wandering absently through the courtyard, carelessly dressed and wearing a pair of old sandals and a hat that had long since lost its brim, Mame Sofi said, ‘What are you looking for, mad’mizelle?’
‘I’m looking to see if there is still any water, Aunt.’
‘You’re not going to tell me that you’re going to the well for some, like the men?’
‘Why not?’
And she left, pushing an old barrel before her, watched with amusement by the other women, who lost no opportunity to make fun of her.
When she returned, several hours later, she was unrecognizable. Her face was haggard and drawn, her clothing was plastered to her body with sweat, and she had lost both the sandals and the hat. Ramatoulaye went out to help her.
‘No, Aunt! I got this far, and I can manage the rest of the way.’ Bracing her feet in the sand, she pushed the heavy cask into the courtyard.
‘I’ll go again tomorrow,’ she said.
‘I’ll come with you,’ the blind woman murmured.
And so, each day after that, accompanied by Maïmouna and little Anta, she rolled the big cask to the well, filled it, and brought it back to N’Diayène. Everyone still called her ‘mad’mizelle’, but now there was admiration and affection in their use of the word. One morning, when there was no paper to light the fires, she gave them all of her notebooks except one. That night, alone in the light of a candle, she took out the single one she had hidden and wrote a poem which might have been the swan song of her youth.
*
Bakayoko left the boat at Saint-Louis on the same day the strikers tore up a long stretch of track on the main line of the railroad. He had had nothing to do with this act of sabotage, but considering his reputation he decided that it would be best to take no chances and went on immediately into the interior. The fishermen put relays of boats at his disposal, and with them he went up the Sénégal and Bakoy rivers as far as Kati. There he bade farewell to his rowers and set out for the Sudan, traveling always on dirt paths and little-used roads.
One morning, as he was nearing home, he paused to rest, driving his walking stick into the ground and draping his hat on it. Then, having removed his outer tunic, he stretched out in the shade of a baobab tree and took a folded paper from his pocket. It was a letter from Lahbib which had been delivered to him when he left the boat. He wanted to re-read it.
My brother,
I am sure Alioune must have told you the news of Doudou’s death. There were a great many people at his funeral, but I was not surprised that you were not here. Do you know what has happened to Aziz, the Syrian? The police came and closed up his shop – because of the truck, I imagine. His father-in-law was ill, and his wife was weeping. It was not a pretty sight, and I felt a little ashamed. And you?
The women got a big welcome when they came back, of course, but now the men are having all sorts of trouble with them. At first they even pounced on me like tigresses – they wanted to start running everything! But things are a little calmer now – the children have not come back yet, and the women go out to the lake every day. In future, though, we will have to reckon with them in whatever we do.
The death of Samba N’Doulougou upset me terribly. And Penda’s, too. She was a brave girl. I know that you knew her better than I. I don’t know of anything we can do for her now, but if you should know of something I do not, tell me.
And now, come home. Bakary told me once that you had no heart, and sometimes I think he is right. I suppose there must be men like you at a time like this – it is very difficult to fight without being able to hate the person you are fighting. I have some time to read now, so try to bring me some books – novels, not too obvious, but not too difficult either – and especially some books about the lives of men in other countries.
Your family needs you, too, so come home soon.
Sidiame dome n’deye – peace be with you, my brother.
Lahbib.
Stretched out beneath his tree, Bakayoko felt very much alone, and he thought about Penda. He might have made her his second wife, and now he found himself wondering about the nature of the feelings that had drawn him to this girl. Could it have been the fact that she, like himself, was a traveler from one station to another? He was really only sure of one thing; his feelings for her had stemmed from what was best in himself.
A breeze crackled through the leaves of a bush, startling him, and he leaped to his feet and seized his walking stick. A few feet from where he stood a sparrow hawk had plummeted on a rat.
‘You bastard, you frightened me!’ he laughed.
He turned back to his resting place and saw that, in getting up so suddenly, he had dropped his tobacco pouch, and now the wind was scattering the shreds of leaf through the grass.
‘If I can’t smoke, I’ll die!’ he said aloud. ‘I guess I had better hurry and get home, hadn’t I?’
But only the bird was there to answer him, lifting its wings to carry its prey into the morning sky.