Switzerland, 1969
62. BY THE TENS, the hundreds. Mama knows by how the room sounds. The chaotic chirps quieting down to a gentle purr. The dishwasher girl blames the neighborhood children she’d chased out of the barn a few times: their dirty nails grating at the fur of the chicks. It wasn’t the foxes; she promised Mama that she’d locked the barn door. But one could never be certain. Viruses came all the time, with the weather or the air or from nowhere at all. Today, Mama ties her face with an old T-shirt and gathers the dead chicks.
The first time this happened it seemed sacrilegious, heartless, to not gather them one by one, but today she scoops them up with the shovel, dumping them all into the old metal can. As she empties her shovel, Mama notices one that is still alive. He chirps, wobbling into her hand. She pets him with her thumb, his slender dark eyes narrowing at her touch. But she can tell from his dreamy disposition that he is sick. To send him peacefully, she squeezes him, and he does not even resist her. Nestling into the warmth of her palm, surrendering his life for her touch.
There will come a time when even our children will have gray hair and will lose most of their power. This September dawn, from the time she showers, tasting metal in the cold water, to the time she walks through the barn, injecting the surviving chicks with antibiotics, she thinks of brokenhearted Olu’s words. Perhaps she’d let him go too easily.
She’d once thought of children indifferently, trusting life to bring them about, the way she trusted a harvest to arrive in season. She’d once thought of men that way too: a thing available in excess, a thing that came from life itself. But with Mansour’s child arriving soon, she is beginning to see time, to feel the years that she lost raising him. When she’d first arrived in Paris, she wanted nothing more than to have him with her, but by the time he arrived, he shifted her life’s balance, changing her momentum—pushing them in the direction of another path.
She knows now that something is wrong, that he should be home. But she is holding fast to her belief in his strength. She is still trying, and failing, to conceive of a way to take action, a way of finding him that won’t pull the trigger on her whole life. Too much has been built. Too many wars have been won.
She gets into her car to take a ride across her land, to gather the modest harvest of herbs and cassavas.
Out on the land, as Mama pulls up vegetables and weeds, she stops for a moment and watches her own shadow, stretched across several rows of infant cabbages. You lie about him being safe, same way you lied about Kiné being alive. Still can’t say it, can you? Still can’t say she’s dead.
She is startled by her silhouette. It looks like it should belong to someone else. Her body is beautiful, far firmer and stronger than it has become in her mind. She is newly forty, has never married, and feels sometimes that her life still hasn’t begun. If she were to die overnight, the restaurant would be the only evidence that she’d existed, the one thing on earth that had truly been hers. And if she succumbs to her fears for Mansour, and risks everything in search of him, will the time ever truly come, for her own life to begin?