BIRDS DARTED OVERHEAD WITH A SURPLUS OF ENERGY AS though fueled by the undercurrent of excitement running through Mididima. Or perhaps tension was more accurate. Inside Matani’s house, his wife—her musical voice strained—was complaining again: the same old topic, the one that troubled the tribe’s elders as well. The Camel Bookmobile.
Even in the midst of her irritation, though, it could not be denied that she was a stunning woman, with breasts that smiled up at her face and legs of a panther and eyes as welcoming as water in the Kaisut Desert. Despite, or maybe because of, this beauty, Matani sometimes thought, though briefly, that she had not been the right choice for a teacher’s wife.
If only he could have wanted someone plainer who would not have felt so free to find fault. Or maybe someone with education who would have understood. Although what woman from Nairobi would have come back here with him? He did not deceive himself into believing that he was, after all, as good-looking or charming as that. He was lucky to have won Jwahir’s heart. She was twenty-seven years old, nine years younger than he. She had delayed marriage much longer than other girls of Mididima, but not because there hadn’t been offers. Many of his peers would have gladly wed her. He’d been the one to win her, and he still found that remarkable.
“These books of yours,” Jwahir was saying, “are too foolish, even for the children.” Matani managed—just—to stop himself from interrupting to clarify that the books were not actually his. “Kanika translated one for me.” Jwahir pronounced the next words in slow, stilted English. “A cat. On. A hat.” She shook her head, then switched back to her own language. “If such a book held facts for how to hunt a leopard, then perhaps—although even then, it’s better for the knowledge to pass from father to son. But a book about a creature who, what? Sits on a head covering?”
“In a hat,” Matani said absently, distracted by Jwahir’s mention of father and son, wondering if it was off-handed, or intentional, perhaps a subtle female way to show that her deepest desire matched his own. Too late, he realized that he had corrected his wife, so he leaned closer, reached for her shoulder, hesitated, and stroked the air above it. “It’s only because I am a teacher,” he said apologetically.
His beautiful Jwahir glared. An apology had never been enough to soothe her temper. And on this topic of the Camel Bookmobile, she routinely displayed more thorns than the acacia.
“On or in doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s a story from the space between one’s teeth,” Jwahir said. “But the true ones are yet worse. I saw a book with pictures of what they called food. Food? How can they call that food? It is we, Matani, who should be teaching them what is important—not the other way around. Even the colors were unimaginable. And the lists of ways to prepare them—pshhh!” She pursed her full lips, almost as though she were readying for a kiss, though her irritated wide-open eyes made it clear that love, unfortunately, was not on her mind.
“Recipes,” Matani said, using the English, since his tribe had no word for them.
Jwahir ignored him. “How many separate foods are wasted to make one?” she asked, and waited a moment to see if he would be foolish enough to try to answer. “Ten, sometimes fifteen. How much time is spent on such a project? A full morning? More?” She opened her palms to the ceiling, her shapely fingers extended. “What use is such a book, when maize mixed with camel blood and baked over an open fire is a treat for us?”
Wistfulness had slightly softened her indignant tone, and Matani slipped into that opening. “Perhaps the books’ gifts are in what they let us imagine,” he said.
He considered, then, telling her everything he believed about the sole topic besides her that made him passionate. How the Camel Bookmobile offered the only chance of survival for this collection of half-nomads with only one toehold in the future. How the children had to make friends of written words if they were ever to have prosperous grandchildren. How until the books came, he hadn’t really felt himself to be a teacher—his only supplies, after all, had been a few pencils, which quickly disappeared, and not even any paper. But now he knew he could do it; he could help create a generation in which, instead of one man going off to study in Nairobi—as his father had done first, and he second—there would be ten, or twenty, who would then return to help their people. He didn’t hope to be remembered as a father of his tribe, nothing so grandiose as that. He wanted to be thought of simply as one who helped shape the future and encouraged his people’s dreams, like a father who would teach his own sons. And for that, the traveling library was crucial.
But Jwahir was speaking again, and wouldn’t want to be interrupted. Besides, she would deem his explanations as lofty as the clouds, and end up only angrier. He patted her hand instead. She shrugged him off.
“They come here thinking that because we can’t read these silly books, we are mabardhuli,” she said.
“No, they don’t think we’re stupid,” Matani said, though he felt a twinge in his chest as it occurred to him that Jwahir might be right.
“Not you. You can read. That’s all they care about,” Jwahir said, and then she launched into a discussion of another book she’d inspected. It seemed that, even in her disdain, she had looked at most of the volumes in Mididima. And she, like all the tribe, believed the library’s arrival in their midst was Matani’s doing. He himself was not sure how Mididima had been chosen; and he had never asked, considering the question immodest. But he suspected in fact that library officials in Garissa discovered somehow there was a man who lived in this tiny spill of houses and spoke English and had been educated as a teacher—courtesy of his father’s connections, and in keeping with his father’s wishes. This indeed made Matani responsible for the bookmobile’s visits, or more accurately in Jwahir’s view, blameworthy.
He tried to pay attention as she continued speaking, but found himself idly studying the nape of her neck, the shine of her hair, her eyes so alive with passion. He had married late, by Mididima’s standards, and it was his dearest hope that Jwahir would become pregnant soon, and with a son. His deepest fear was that somehow it would not be possible.
There’d been an omen. A bird tumbled from the sky while he strolled in the hum of early evening two weeks ago. A black-fronted mosquito-eater. It spun through the air before crashing, splayed, two large steps in front of him. Though it bore no sign of violence, it was undeniably dead, its wings extended as if in objection, the purple ring around its neck bent back in final protest. A sign, clearly, though of what? He feared it had to do with the images that had been dancing through his mind the moment before the bird plummeted: him striding through the bush on a future evening, his own devoted son beside him, Jwahir waiting back in Mididima with their meal prepared. He hadn’t mentioned the mosquito-eater to his wife. He was ashamed of his own superstitions, so unsuitable for an educated man.
Now he shook the bird’s image from his head. Jwahir’s voice still spiked the air. He lowered his chin, slipping into what he hoped she might mistake for a listening pose, and took a moment, as he did each library day, to form a silent prayer: Let them all bring their books today; let all the books be whole. Mr. Abasi was clearly an unforgiving man. Each visit, just before he departed, Mr. Abasi clapped his hands and announced in a voice full of capital letters, “Please be advised that under library rules, any settlement which loses or ruins a book will no longer be visited by the Camel Bookmobile.” Unfortunately, Mr. Abasi’s tone was reminiscent of rancid meat, so Matani feared that no one except him listened to the librarian’s warning. Then again, Matani knew the warning was really meant for him anyway.
Matani wanted—in fact, he always intended—to remind Mr. Abasi that in the bush, there were many threats to a man’s possessions, even to a man’s life. Neglect, wild animals, fierce weather—one would be enough to account for a book’s ruin, but all three made it an eventual certainty. This was too big, this responsibility. That’s what Matani wanted to say, what he’d wanted to say for months.
Each time as he opened his mouth to make this short speech to Mr. Abasi, he noticed the foreign woman, Miss Sweeney, smiling at him with the innocent confidence of the doe who has not yet seen the spear. Somehow, that smile defused his energy to object. He let Mr. Abasi conclude, and then he vaguely nodded his head in reply. He wondered about that nod, about what sort of contract it implied between him and Mr. Abasi. So the joy that hung over him every library day was coupled with trepidation, fueled further this morning by the memory of the poor dead mosquito-eater, and by his wife’s disappointment in his fondness for objects as vaporous and imprecise as words.
Babies, birds, books. All three were becoming braided together in his mind. He rubbed his forehead as though to put his mind in order. Only let them all return what they’ve borrowed, he silently intoned to the dirt floor, his head still lowered. For now, only that.