FI HAD NEVER ACCEPTED MR. ABASI’S CLAIM THAT MIDIDIMA and settlements like it could disappear with a stiff breeze—that the next time the Camel Bookmobile came, there might be no sign that life had ever huddled there. She’d considered this assertion nothing more than another attempt to talk her out of making the trip he hated. It seemed to her, in fact, that the houses of Mididima were rooted directly in the earth’s subsurface, and that during the coming generations the settlement could only spread.
But this time, as she approached Mididima, it looked transient as it never had before. Perhaps that was because no one expected her. No heap of people gathered beneath the tall acacia; no buzz of anticipation vibrated in the air. Mididima looked, in that moment, like a desert plant gone too long unwatered, preparing to shrivel.
Books, it occurred to her now, were enduring, even immortal. Some, like the two she was going to recover, had been part of the world’s consciousness for so long that they were no longer singularly identifiable. The maxims of Zen masters and the stories of Homer had been tossed into the soup of human consciousness, blending and emerging at lunchtime as one’s own thoughts, as if they were original. And they would become the thoughts of one’s children, and eventually one’s grandchildren. Mididima, on the other hand, seemed a flimsy fancy once briefly considered and then abandoned. The plants were frosted with sand, the rays of the sun themselves dusty with neglect.
Mr. Abasi had declined to accompany her, of course—“I’ll come to fetch you instead,” he’d said. That had seemed for the best at the time, but she wished for him now. With his loud, abrupt voice, he’d get someone’s attention. She thought of calling “Anybody home?” or “Yoo-hoo.” Neither seemed like proper etiquette for the circumstances. The two men who had traveled with her on a second camel scrutinized her curiously, waiting to see what she would do.
Two young boys came out of one of the huts and stared. “Jambo,” she said, waving. They giggled and dashed away. She dismounted. One of the men sharing the other camel handed her the duffel bag, then climbed onto the camel she’d ridden. She took a few steps toward the nearest hut and turned back to see her traveling companions with their eyes fastened on her movements. She needed to say good-bye, to release them to make the return journey. Yet she felt uncertain and unable to send them away yet. She hovered clumsily at the edge of Mididima.
The two boys emerged again, this time with four other children and Matani in tow, Kanika right behind. “How are you? How are you?” the children began calling in English, laughing and running to her.
“How are you?” Fi answered, smiling. Then she caught sight of Matani’s face. He looked surprised, maybe even a little horrified. “Jambo,” she said to him, trying on a tone that held more confidence than she felt.
“You have just come? You’ve come for Scar Boy’s books already?” he asked, glancing uneasily behind her. “Where is Mr. Abasi?”
“You’ve found them?” How stupid she’d been not to consider the possibility that the whole visit was no longer necessary. But his face quickly told her they’d not yet been recovered, and she was flooded with relief—the irony of which was not lost on her. “I’ve come…” And here she wavered, wondering how to express why she’d come. To help Africa toward literacy? Too grandiose. To help some spit of a place find a couple of books? Too insignificant.
Both her argument with Mr. Abasi and her decision to show up in Mididima with little more than six bottles of water, a toothbrush, and mosquito netting had been fueled by a confidence that had since fled.
She took a deep breath, waiting for the end of that dangling sentence to occur to her. She felt the stares of the children, who were inching closer to her. This time, she’d come with no payload of books. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a pencil. “See?” she said in Swahili to the children, holding the pencil up between her thumb and her index finger. She reached out and took the hand of one of the little girls, and smoothed open the palm. “Now, watch.” She tapped the pencil once, gently, onto the girl’s palm, and then lifted it high and brought it down, tapping a second time. Improvising, she twirled around, holding the pencil above her head, waving it, winking at them, and calling “Woo!” She knew she looked a bit mad, but a sense of flair was critical. She blew on the pencil, demonstrating, urging the girl, without words, to do the same. The child did so, hesitatingly. Then Fi tapped the pencil for the third time on the girl’s palm, raised both hands, and lowered them to show that the pencil had vanished. “Where’s it gone?” she asked, sweeping her arms in front of her like a vaudeville player. Even without their understanding those words, the children’s eyes widened appreciatively.
Fi gestured to the sky, then to the ground, and reached behind the ear of little Nadif, the boy who’d had numbers scrawled on his palm. “Voilà!” They had no idea what that word meant either, but the way she exclaimed it as she held out the pencil sounded impressive, she knew.
Magic Tricks 101, learned the summer before she started high school, seldom used after that. This act wouldn’t hold the attention of most eight-year-olds in New York, but the audience in Mididima was easy. Little faces stared at her as the children soaked up every move. Behind them, by now, a few young women lingered, more skeptical but still curious.
Matani watched silently, hesitant, with a half-smile, probably wondering if she’d come all this way just to do the trick with the pencil, maybe thinking it was another strange custom from her country. “Whispers of the flames,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s the literal translation for what we call magic.”
“Whispers of the flames,” she repeated slowly, willing herself not to forget the phrase—the first of the five she had to learn. The children hovered nearby. One took her hand and squeezed. She leaned conspiratorially toward Matani. “That wasn’t real magic,” she said in a stage whisper. “But I am good at finding missing books. So I thought…Well, that’s why I’m here.”
He looked her full in the face as if to see whether she was joking. Then he broke into a grin that stretched so wide she felt a moment of pure gratitude, and he took her bag from her hand.
“It’s all right?” she asked.
He glanced at the two men who had accompanied her. “When should they return for you?”
“They can’t until Friday. Four days. Is it too long?”
Matani spread his arms. “It’s a gift for our tribe, Miss Sweeney,” he said.
Fi wanted to kiss him; he’d made so easy what could have been agonizingly awkward. “Thank you,” she said, reaching forward to brush his fingers.
He spoke quickly to the two men on the camels, more authoritative than he usually was around Mr. Abasi. They smiled with visible relief, turned their beasts, and were gone.
By now a larger audience had gathered, still mainly children. “You will stay with Kanika and her grandmother,” Matani said. “That’s fine?”
Kanika gave that full smile of hers, the one that took over her face.
“Thank you,” Fi said.
“They’ll get you something to drink and you can rest,” Matani said.
“But I’m not tired. I’ll put my things down, and go see the young man.”
Matani’s grin shrank slightly. “You have four days,” he said. “We’ll talk first. And then, perhaps, go together? Now I’m teaching, and—”
“Of course,” Fi said. “I don’t mean to rush you. Maybe I can watch you teach?”
Matani gave a small shrug as he ran his fingers over one eyebrow, smoothing it. His shyness was appealing.
“The books,” she said, sweeping her arm in an arc. “I’d like to watch how you use them.”
“Of course, then,” Matani said.
“Come, Miss Sweeney,” Kanika said. “Let’s put your bag away.”
Kanika took her by the hand. Despite the exoticness of Mididima and the age difference between Kanika and Fi, the gesture made Fi think of her own elementary school in the 1970s, with its promise of untainted friendship: soothing secrets and notes passed in class and simple rhyming poems and all the pure earnestness of those years.
“Fi. Call me Fi,” she said.
As if by real magic, Mididima had become inhabited again. Laughing children were fiddling with one another’s ears as if they hoped to find other pencils there. Men’s voices poured from one of the huts, three goats rambled by, women were bent over work in the nearby fields, and Fi felt a breeze that carried the scent of bread baking.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” Kanika said.
“Me too.” As she said it, Fi felt a rush of renewed confidence in her decision. It wasn’t silly; it was right to be in Mididima. She’d find the books; she’d ensure that the bookmobile would keep calling on Mididima for years to come. And this visit—it was more than a hope; it was an intuition now, or maybe a vow—would be the pinnacle of her trip.