THIS WAS NEEMA’S SPACE. NOT THE ROOM ITSELF, FOR which she felt little attachment, but this mat woven of sisal fiber and covered with scraped cowhide on which she slept each night in the company of her granddaughter’s warmth and breath and scent. Over time, this bed had become molded to embrace Neema’s body. It smelled of cattle and earth, and was solid. And whenever she wanted, she could reach out to touch the daughter of her daughter. She’d heard of faraway people who slept in rooms alone, on cloth or feathers. What a sorrow; what a loss. Whosoever slept without others, and on such a bed, would not be blessed with the voyages she’d taken in her dreams, the places where the brushwood and cowhide led her. That person was destined to what she thought of as white sleep, blank and without insight.
As much as she loved her bed, though, she couldn’t deny that tonight the hide felt implacable, tickling her right leg at the back of the knee. The twigs beneath her shoved against her left arm and jabbed at her back. So she tried tricks. She silently recited words from the Bible. She forbade herself to move. She imagined her mother sitting at her feet, rubbing them. She breathed in a pattern: three short gasps in, one long sigh out. That sounded like a cow in the rain with a cold; it did nothing to invite sleep.
The problem was not the bed, she knew. The space around it was the impediment. Normally, Neema lay between her granddaughter and the door. Sometimes she slipped close to her granddaughter, breathing with her, thinking of her own daughter—Dahira, Kanika’s mother, the one who linked them.
Now someone alien lay between her and Kanika, beneath a mosquito net hung on sticks. Miss Sweeney, with her own peculiar noises and smells. Miss Sweeney, who kept flinging a hand onto her forehead and clearing her throat. The people of Mididima had never had a foreigner of any color sleep in their midst. Now this pale woman was right within Neema’s hut.
It must be even stranger, Neema admitted, for Miss Sweeney. To talk and eat and drink among unknown people was one thing; to sleep next to them, another entirely.
Lying in the dark, eyes focused lightly on the ceiling above, Neema tried to imagine Miss Sweeney’s New York. Even with Matani’s descriptions of the Distant City, even with the descriptions she’d read in the library books, her visions of Miss Sweeney’s home were vague and confusing. She pictured one building precariously balanced atop another, people glancing up nervously as they rushed past on foot or sped by in cars that Neema had heard could move with the speed of gazelles. She tried to imagine the unlikely, invisible waves that performed jobs like running machines that cleaned clothes while people slept. And the water that poured out during any season with a turn of a wrist. Food of every imaginable color. Books everywhere. These seemed impossible stories; they could prove only that the teller had somehow been driven mad.
She turned to her side. She couldn’t see well through the net, but Miss Sweeney’s fidgeting indicated that she too was awake. As was Kanika.
Kanika was whispering. “Are you uncomfortable?”
“No, no,” Miss Sweeney answered. “I’m keeping you up. Sorry.”
“Miss Sweeney?”
“Fi,” said Miss Sweeney. “Call me Fi.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Neema’s granddaughter said.
Miss Sweeney rolled to her side and supported her head with her hand.
“I want to go to the Distant City,” Kanika said.
What was this? Neema, too, leaned on an elbow, trying to catch her granddaughter’s eye, but Kanika was concentrating too hard to notice.
“Wonderful,” Miss Sweeney said, with subdued enthusiasm—or perhaps she was just restrained because she thought Neema was sleeping. “You’d like it,” she said.
“Go there and teach,” Kanika said, emphasizing the last word.
Neema involuntarily put a hand to her mouth. To teach? To the Distant City to stay? From where had this dream come? Neema had known Kanika so well when she’d been little, had known every crease on Kanika’s skin and the texture of her sleeping breath and the sound of her cries right before they gave way to weary hiccups. How had Neema passed from that full knowledge to this ignorance?
“Teach,” Miss Sweeney repeated.
“I can do it here. Can’t I do it there?” Kanika’s voice held a touch of uncertainty, but it was barely discernible. The thrust of her tone was brave and determined, and that triggered in Neema a rush of love and admiration.
She understood with a sudden clarity rarely granted to her anymore. What she’d interpreted as a calm acceptance of Kanika’s female role had actually been an emerging plan to escape it. That both broke and warmed Neema’s heart at once. “You never told me,” she said to Kanika in their language.
“You’re awake,” Kanika said.
“Away from my eyes, you’ve been plotting.”
Miss Sweeney, who could not understand their words, poked her head out of the netting. She looked at the mesh web as if she’d never seen it before, as if she weren’t the one who had hung it before nightfall, searching for the sticks, pushing them into the ungiving ground, spreading it over the place she would lie. Now she flapped a dismissive hand at it, crawled out, and pulled it down.
“You kept this secret,” Neema said. “For how long?”
“Nyanya, I have to go.”
Miss Sweeney sat cross-legged on the edge of the hide, out of the line of sight between Kanika and Neema as though to permit conversation to flow between them unimpeded. But for a second, Neema didn’t know what to say. Yes, she’d wanted Kanika to be strong and self-reliant. But why in a different place, why away from her grandmother?
“It’s hard there, too,” she said. “Harder than you think. When we ask for rain, we must expect mud as well.”
“I don’t want this to be my whole life.”
The words sat baldly between them. Neema’s insides contracted. Miss Sweeney reached into her bag and pulled out something dark and hard, which she broke into three pieces, offering one to Neema and another to Kanika. “Chocolate,” she murmured. Kanika popped hers into her mouth immediately. Proof, Neema thought, that she was far too trusting for the Distant City.
“I lost my daughter all at once,” Neema said. “I cannot lose you.”
“If I stay, I’ll grow angry,” Kanika warned.
“Like me, you mean.”
Kanika shook her head. “You’re strong, not angry.”
Neema wasn’t so easily hoodwinked by a compliment. She waved away her granddaughter’s words. As she made the gesture, though, she heard, unbidden, her mother’s voice. “Hold, but do not grasp,” it said.
When Neema was young, there’d been no Camel Bookmobile, with its whiffs of another, larger world. Her “dead look” had been her only outlet for frustration. What would she have done, if she’d had the chance?
She sniffed at Miss Sweeney’s chocolate. She would suffer through Kanika’s absence, then. At least there would be, thank the Hundred-Legged One, one thing to look forward to: throwing the news of Kanika’s departure in the face of her annoying brother-in-law, whose voice would hit the clouds as his chances of claiming Kanika’s bride-price slipped away.
Before she could reconsider or change her mind, Neema spoke in English. “It comes to pass that I give my permission for her to go, Miss Sweeney.”
That, however, apparently was not what Miss Sweeney had been waiting for. She tucked the crumpled mosquito netting beneath her like a pillow. “Kanika,” she said, “you would have to go to a special school for a teaching certificate.”
“Yes.”
“It would take some time—a couple of years.”
“I’m willing.”
Miss Sweeney was quiet for a moment. She tugged on the back of her hair. To try to hold it away from her face, she’d tied a bandanna around her head. But it still flew in many directions; Neema decided she would offer to braid it in the morning.
“OK. Let me see what I can find out,” Miss Sweeney finally said, and Neema was relieved that she did not offer yet another objection. Three would seem too many. “First, I’ve got to get the books back,” she went on. “If I don’t, Mr. A….” She hesitated, and then gave a half-laugh. “Mr. A. might kick us all out of the country.”
Surely this was a joke. Surely Mr. Abasi did not have that authority, or if he did, he would not exercise it just because of Mididima’s missing books. But Neema wasn’t certain. She’d heard of the Mau Mau rebellion, when people were beaten and jailed and sent away for mistakes smaller than missing books. And she knew that men often wielded unconscionable power over women.
“I’m sure you’ll get the books,” Kanika said.
Miss Sweeney lay back on her mat. “Kanika,” she said, “what’s Scar Boy’s real name?”
“Taban,” Kanika said.
Taban. How long had it been since Neema had heard that pronounced aloud? But it was right, she realized, that they should begin to call him Taban. After all, he was not a boy anymore. He was seventeen years old, a young man, and one who wielded a surprising amount of influence. Taban, once mauled by a hyena, yes, but now with an identity forged by other events. Keeper of the secret of overdue library books. Decider of his tribe’s fate.
“Taban,” Miss Sweeney repeated slowly. “Can you tell me about him?”
Kanika rolled on her back. “He’s…” She hesitated. “He listens. He doesn’t like to talk, though. You have to pay close attention to understand him.”
“Does he want something?” Miss Sweeney asked. “Is that why he keeps the books? So we’ll listen to him?”
Kanika turned to stare at her. The girl seemed to be considering. Then she held both hands, palms up, toward the ceiling. “He will return them.”
Miss Sweeney reached over and squeezed Kanika’s hand. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course he will. And even if they’re misplaced, we’ll find them. Of course. You’re right.” She nodded as if to herself, stretched, and yawned.
“He must return them,” Kanika said again, quietly.
Miss Sweeney did not reply. Her breathing had at last become regular. Lulled by Kanika’s apparent confidence, the foreigner was falling asleep. Now maybe they all could sleep.
Neema lay back, thinking how much she admired Kanika—for her clear desires and brave plans, for her way of appearing so self-assured before this foreign woman, and for her ability to hide misgivings. She’d sounded so confident about Scar Boy returning the books, in fact, that Neema was sure only she could detect the note of doubt in her granddaughter’s voice.