Switzerland, 1969
82. BONNIE IS SHAKEN awake by the dishwasher girl sitting at the foot of her bed, offering her a shawl and red prayer beads.
Out of bed and at the top of the staircase, Bonnie looks down on the living room, where the women chant in a loose circle, their bowed heads draped in similar fabric. The smell of fried fish is still trapped in the room, and it mixes with the incense roasting in the center of the floor. The combination makes Bonnie queasy. She doesn’t cover her head as they do. She puts the shawl around her shoulders and stands on the staircase with her arms crossed. Bonnie’s eyes are blurry and swollen from another day spent on her feet, tending to Mama’s guests. Something about the strong scents, about being summoned to pray to their God, is too much; it’s where she draws the line. Her mother had always insisted that God was private, personal, quietly inhabiting the unique shape of every individual’s form.
In the attic, confined since the bleeding made it impossible to travel and push forward in her search for him, she’s turned to praying, in her own way. She prays as she’d seen him pray, hands open, and as she’d seen her mother pray, on her knees. Please. Please. Send him home. But her god is drying up. She prays more and more over time, fiddling with the tears in her T-shirt, rubbing her dry eyes, opening them to look around the room where, as usual, nothing divine has happened. She prays on, broken, her voice swallowing itself until the prayers become a talk with her half-finished glasses of orange juice, the grime on the window. A thing without her heart, and so terribly unliving.
She drops the prayer beads on the steps and turns back toward her room.
Mama calls her out, breaking the chant.
“If you cared for Mansour, you would come! You want to call the police, but you won’t pray for his soul,” Mama retorts.
“His soul?” Bonnie stares down at Mama from the top step. “You think … you think he’s dead?”
Mama says nothing.
Bonnie looks next at Marie, who lies in Sokhna’s lap, her face buried. She takes in the looks of resignation on the women’s faces. Mansour has been gone for five months. They are beginning to mourn.
“It wasn’t him in Geneva,” Bonnie says, close to tears. “He’s not dead.”
“Come, come and pray with us,” Mama manages.
Bonnie shakes her head, walks slowly back to her room, holding her stomach, grabbing the wall to stay on her feet.
83. ANOTHER MOURNER’S MEAL must be prepared, another funeral without a body to bury. Life and its circles. Mama feels the comedy of it, the cruelty of living this a second time. It feels personal. Somebody up there has something serious against her. What lesson did she miss the first time, she wonders, as she stirs and stirs ngalakh until her arm is tired. The peanut drink will not become smooth. She stops stirring.
Someone is digging a hole in the backyard, and they keep hitting rock. She rushes to see who could possibly be in her garden. Since the storm, most of the neighborhood farms are still unattended, and thieves have been known to roam the land, snatching whatever mangled vegetables they can find.
At the window, she sees Bonnie in the yard. The girl has a stomach large enough to carry two babies. Eight months pregnant, and Mansour has been gone for nearly five of them. Mama watches the girl grunt as she digs up the yard of the estate. Mama just watches, saying nothing from the open window. The girl stops in a huff, resting her body on the shovel, weeping like a child just born.
It has all seemed dreamlike. Even as she discussed a memorial service with Sokhna, even as they made plans to invite neighbors who knew him, even as she went to the pay phone herself and called and called Liam, who was still not answering. Even as she stayed awake through the night, selecting photos of Mansour, compiling memorabilia, surahs, going as far as contacting her imam in Paris to discuss proceedings, Mama did not register the declaration of his death until this moment, until she sees Bonnie pulling each of his bracelets from her wrists and dropping them into the hole she’s dug in the ground. Last to go in the hole is the talisman necklace, and then Mama opens the kitchen’s back door.
The girl has crouched on the ground before the hole. Her long hair is matted, uncombed. Mama sees herself in the girl. She sees herself on the day of Kiné’s funeral, one woman attempting to hold faith in something that the world no longer believes.
“Bonnie,” Mama says, speaking her name for the first time. She feels the strangeness of it, the newness, in her mouth. She’s always called her “the girl,” worried that she would say her name wrong, never wanting to try. The girl doesn’t move from where she squats on the ground. Mama approaches, leans down, taking the bracelets back out from the hole as the girl watches in silence. Mama stops her from conceding his death. Seeing the strong girl break down is a sight Mama cannot bear, is too great a defeat to witness.
“Marie will braid your hair,” she says to Bonnie softly. “And then … and then you can come down. We will go to the police.”
Mama walks back inside, feeling the girl come to life behind her. She knows that as soon as she picks up the phone and calls the police chief, everything she’s built could quickly tumble. But Bonnie truly believes that she will see Mansour again, a belief that has never diminished over all these months, and this girl’s hope finally gives Mama the strength to risk everything. Maybe … maybe he’ll come home.
The Swiss police search the yard, the house, for clues. One of them interviews the women. Bonnie’s interview is the longest. Mama is surprised by her own nervousness but more so by her desire for the women to stay in the room with her. She considers, for the first time, that they are all she has. Some policemen leave, go off to begin interviewing neighbors. This makes Mama nervous; the neighbors are not exactly friends of hers. All the more reason to speak to them, one man says. The women sit still in the living room. They don’t know what else to do, so they prepare the policemen a big meal.
Two weeks after the police begin their search, Mansour still has not been found. Mama counts out Bonnie’s last wages by the light of the coals that are roasting incense and the flash of the muted evening news. Mama takes her time, the nub of a cigarette between her wide fingers. She slides the francs across the table to the girl. The money is damp and sticky from splashes of palm oil and dishwater. It is more than what she promised when Bonnie asked if she could have her last wages and stop working. Mama goes to the kitchen, and Bonnie looks out of the living room window. The evening looks pleasant enough. The walk to the train would be beautiful, the air warm.
Bonnie’s mind starts turning over, her thoughts a record of strange categorical things: colors, numbers, cities. She’s felt some fluttering before, but this is different. Her chest contracts, like her heart is being squeezed into a tight ball. And held. It takes opening her mouth wide to feel like air could reach her.
“Mama!” she calls, keeling over with a violent pain, the word escaping her mouth before she has time to think. She uses both hands to try to crawl to the staircase and hold on. Just get to the attic steps, her mind says. But her legs become useless, and before she can remember her pride, she waits for help.
Mama helps Bonnie to the couch and stands over her, rubbing her enormous stomach with shea butter.
“That’s the first time that’s happened to me,” Bonnie says, staring at her belly. Mama says nothing, keeps rubbing.
“Are there other twins in your family? Besides you and Kiné,” she asks Mama, a question she finally feels close enough to ask her.
The question startles Mama. Her sister’s name—a sacred thing she hasn’t heard spoken by anyone in fifteen years—rolls out of the girl’s mouth easily, like it’s a name she’s said before.
Mama looks down at her, haunted.
“What did Mansour tell you about my sister?” The nutty grease turns warm in Mama’s hands as she stretches out Bonnie’s skin and pushes her pulsing bones flat, making it easier to breathe.
“He has this dream about her drowning. He has it all the time.”
Mama spreads the balm across Bonnie’s chest and arms, her stomach and neck. Bonnie looks up at Mama. She has never been close enough to for Bonnie to really see her: to see the subtle scarifications on her cheekbones, the yellow tint to the whites of her eyes, the stark pinkness of her tongue, the unusual thickness and length of her eyelashes, the fact that she is missing a tooth.
“I thought that he’d forgotten her. He was so small …” Mama says.
“You don’t forget your mother,” Bonnie replies.
Mama leaves her to rest, to await further contractions, but they are still unpredictable, and nothing comes. Bonnie follows Mama to the kitchen and waits in the doorway, standing, saying nothing.
“You can come in, Bonnie.” Mama gestures for her to approach. She hands her a large spoon, tells her to spoon out the boiled fish from the large pot. Mama next puts the gund—the tall wooden mortar and pestle—between Bonnie’s feet and tells her to pound, to pound softly, while she drops in parsley, garlic, whole black peppercorns. Teaching her to make Kiné’s favorite meal: fishballs in tomato sauce. When the pounding has emulsified the herb mixture, Mama spoons it out and sits at the table, mixing it into the fish she’s skinned and separated from the bones.
Bonnie knows where the rice is kept. When she reaches, the pain returns, and she grips the doors to stay on her feet. “Whoo!”
Mama watches her carefully as Bonnie makes it to the table with the rice. She looks up at Mama with devilish eyes.
“I’m gonna kill him when he comes home,” she says, breathing through the pain. Mama chuckles; Bonnie laughs at herself too. The women sit across from each other at the table, sifting the rice for stones.