It took almost three weeks to finish the paper house. Safiyah and Pendo worked into the early evenings, while the neighborhood filled with the bustle of people on their way home from work. The smell of fires and cooking suppers wove through the alleyways, and stray dogs curled up in the shadows with their noses twitching.
The girls used two more jars of Mr. Littlejohn’s paste. But Safiyah did not need to go back to the garbage dump to find more pictures.
One morning, a woman in a maid’s uniform stopped to admire the mural. On her way home that night she gave Safiyah a plastic bag full of old magazines. “My boss never throws anything out. He said I could have these,” she said. The man who collected cans often perched on his cart to watch them work. One day he brought a bundle of magazines tied up in string.
Sometimes people left so much paper on her bench that there was hardly room for Cucu to sit down.
During the day while Pendo was at school, Safiyah chose the pictures she wanted and cut them out. She moved them into piles, made new piles, then moved them again. Then she laid them out to figure out how to piece them together.
Each afternoon, Pendo came to help after she had changed out of her school uniform and finished her chores. But now she waited for Safiyah to tell her where to put the pictures before she helped paste up any of them.
At last all four walls were covered, even places so low down that they had to crawl along the dirty ground to reach them or so high they had to stand on the rickety chair.
That evening, Safiyah led her grandmother along the mural. Cucu was stronger now. She didn’t need to lean on her stick as she stopped to look at her favorite pictures.
“Now come around again,” said Safiyah. “But stand farther back. What do you see?” She held her breath as she waited. What if her grandmother couldn’t see the stories she had tried to create? What if they were just in her own head, and all she had done was make a patchwork of pretty colors?
As they went round the second time, Cucu used her stick to point. “This is the long road we walked along after we left our home.” She waved higher. “Here is our village.” She leaned closer. “And the people whose faces we cannot see…” She spoke softly to herself. “These are the ones we left behind. Our friends, and others who are no longer with us… your mother, my only daughter, perhaps?”
Safiyah nodded silently as her grandmother gazed up at the place that was too far to reach, as they both thought of the people who were now part of their old life.
Cucu moved on until she came to a heap of mixed-up shapes and colors. “That is the garbage dump, I think. Where you spend so much time when you are not home with your old cucu.”
Safiyah nodded, her eye on the gray clouds that hovered above it.
Cucu turned the corner of the house. “And here is our street.” She giggled as she pointed at the wall. “The water vendor’s stand here. And Mr. Zuma’s bicycle shop, filled with all his bits and pieces!” She grasped Safiyah’s arm as her gaze swept farther along. “The fire!” She stared at the flames of red and yellow that licked up the wall.
She led Safiyah quickly on, as if she wished to leave behind the fire, and its bad memories. “Ah. Here is the clinic,” she said. “All those white walls. Weren’t they wonderful. And what is that…?”
“It is called a stethoscope,” said Safiyah. She had cut it from a page filled with shining medical instruments. “The doctor let me wear his when you were sick.”
“And here we are home again,” said Cucu. She didn’t just mean her bench beside the doorway. She was looking at Safiyah’s mural of their house as it once was, just broken boards and sheets of rusted metal. Before Safiyah made it into a home full of color and life. “Pendo’s Mr. Littlejohn is right.” Cucu pulled Safiyah close and stroked her hair. “Such a clever girl. Talented, as he said. And just as he said, you are indeed a gift.”