Switzerland, 1969
89. BONNIE AND MARIE brew ataya. A tea served in rounds. A dilution that progresses from bitter to sweet. They are pouring it from high up in the air, building the froth, when Bonnie tells Marie that for the past several nights, she has felt Mansour sleeping behind her, breathing on her back. Once or twice touching her. But he never speaks, and she awakes every time she turns to face him.
“It was so real,” she whispers, leaning on the pantry doorway with crossed arms.
“It’s just because the baby’s coming. The mind can do all kinds of crazy things,” Marie says.
Bonnie looks down at her stomach and molds it into another position, pushing down the part that is closest to her chest.
“You’re so wild in there,” she says. She takes a glass of tea for herself and waddles out of the kitchen’s back door, her back to Marie as she sits on the landing, taking in the mild breeze. Protective of her thoughts. Determined to believe that the dreams are more than dreams.
When Bonnie proposes preparing something for the women, they laugh her out of the kitchen, but Mama humors her.
“Vas y,” she says, “but if I get sick … I will punish your big-headed daughter,” she continues, shaking a spoon at Bonnie.
“How do you know it’s a girl?” Bonnie asks, touching her stomach. It has hardened in the last few weeks, a dark line running down the middle. Mama says nothing and smiles, just like Mansour would.
Bonnie comes back down to the kitchen the following morning before anyone is awake. She boils and mashes potatoes with heavy cream and butter and roasted chicken. The women wake up to the smell, crowding the kitchen door at sunrise. She serves the meal as they serve meals, on one platter, spreading the potatoes out from the center and placing the lemon-stuffed bird there in the middle.
Mama tastes first, unsure, chewing carefully. Bonnie avoids her eyes, pretends to be indifferent to her reaction. But Bonnie can tell that she’s pleased. It is in the slowness of the swallowing, the subtlest moan. All the women’s spoons get louder, racing into the dark meat and gravy. Bonnie sits between Mama and Marie around the platter—the only left arm reaching in for more.
The next morning, the full pot of mixed stock—lamb, vegetable, beef—breaks the middle tray in the old refrigerator. The hinges have been rusting for quite some time, and so, it seems, the shelf finally cracks. Bonnie hears it from the attic—not the thump, but the round, echoing note that the enormous iron pot makes when it hits the ground. She drops an arm of laundry onto her bed and runs downstairs to the kitchen, only to get stopped by the stream of golden liquid rushing down the hallway, wrapping itself around her bare feet. She mourns the perfect stock as she washes the peppery aroma from between her toes. She turns sullen when the white peppercorns and stems from thyme and parsley disappear into the yellowing fibers of the old mop. And then she knows that, in spite of herself, she’s developed a feeling for Mama’s kitchen.
She notices the quiet. There should be music at this hour. Fela these days, but the house instead is eerily silent.
Bonnie turns the corner to the women’s bedrooms. The doors are open, the rooms empty. The fans still whirl, spreading the curtains, swirling loose papers and pocket change paper and coins.
Hours pass and the women do not return, but she presses away her worries and starts to prepare for the evening’s dinner service. She sits on the edge of the counter, stopping every so often to stand or adjust her body. No position is comfortable. She seasons the fish, leaving it in a marinade of lemon, white vinegar, and pepper cloves, the way Mama taught her. She prepares the chickens, stuffs the lamb with parsley, and waits. She slices some onions and, unsure of what else to do, goes upstairs to change in case she has to welcome the first guests herself.
The doorbell rings while she’s in the bath. It’s still early enough that she assumes it’s one of the sisters, and she runs downstairs.
Before even a hello, the man asks how many women live in the house and tells her that he is looking for Eva Ndoye.
When she tells him that Mama isn’t home, he asks to be seated for lunch. She tells him that they are between services, that they will open for dinner in an hour or two. She gingerly asks him to wait elsewhere and watches from the kitchen’s back window as he wanders around the property. She keeps an eye on him as she starts the yassa.
Once the lemons are squeezed, the contractions begin. Her body conquers her, sliding her from the wooden stool into the bowl of sliced onions on the floor, spreading her leg out into the path of the oil vat. She gets on her knees, crawls until her body changes course. She gets on her back, staring up at the swinging pots, the pain emptying her mind of anything but a plan to cope.
90. IN ZURICH, Sokhna leaves flight school a little early. She’s been doing well on her course to get a Swiss pilot’s license, breezing through the classroom lessons, but then it came time to enter one of the small student planes. Her cohort was not flying yet, just getting used to the gears. Turning on the ignition. Things she’d done countless times in childhood and expected to be second nature. But as soon as she got inside the plane, the cockpit had felt confining, memories of Claude’s rich cologne so strong that she’d scrambled to open the door. And it took a while, with her feet hanging out, with her seat belt being off, for her heart rate to settle down.
She moved out a few weeks ago, finding life in Mama’s house suddenly unbearable, a constant reminder of Mansour. Now she only goes into Lausanne for work. She knows the other women have not forgotten Mansour, but, in her mind, they have surrendered him. She’d watched the women work in the kitchen all day and night and then turn, after hours, to care for Bonnie. The girl is having a noisy, disruptive pregnancy. She has stopped washing her own clothes and hair. Sokhna resents how the women take to her, fawning over her, pampering her now that Mansour is gone, as if the arrival of a healthy child can somehow replace him.
When Sokhna arrives at the restaurant, a barefoot neighbor is waving her arms, running down the estate’s steep hill toward her. The woman’s blonde hair obscures her face in the breeze, and it takes Sokhna a moment to process that it is the police chief’s wife. The woman takes Sokhna by both hands, catching her breath.
“Your younger sister is at the hospital.” The woman exhales, and Sokhna stares, confused. “The baby’s coming,” she says.
Sokhna sits beside her hospital bed, digesting the nurse’s report that Bonnie’s vitals are not strong and that the baby will be coming in the next few hours. There’s a knock at the door.
Mama is led in by a policeman. Alarmed, Sokhna stands.
“Please, leave us,” Sokhna says to the man. When he doesn’t move, she repeats, sternly, “Please.” He hesitates before leaving quietly, standing outside the door.
When they are alone, Mama says, “He scared Marie something terrible. I don’t know why they even pulled her into this.”
Mama returns Mansour’s bracelets to Bonnie’s wrists. Adds some of her own too. After watching her, Sokhna does the same.
Bonnie’s eyes are closed, a face like a statue: firm and full of tension. The shades are closed; the room is dim. One machine beeps and blinks in bright colors. The women listen to the girl’s breathing. Sokhna looks to Mama.
“Is there someone we should call in America?”
“I don’t think so,” Mama says.
“No one?” Sokhna whispers, stunned. Mama looks away, takes Bonnie’s hand into hers, wonders again if the girl has family. Is there anyone else in the world who loves her?
“This didn’t have to happen, Eva,” Sokhna whispers. “We didn’t have to lose everything.”
“We didn’t lose,” Mama says, exhausted.
“What about the house?”
“They don’t want the restaurant. They just want money. Money, or for me to go. I could pay it … but … I want to go home,” Mama says, rubbing Bonnie’s arm. “I forgot that was an option until they tried to threaten me with it. I’m tired, Sokhna. You manage the restaurant very well.” The first compliment to her after all these years. “It’s yours from now on.”
Sokhna is speechless.
“Just send me my money every first of the month,” Mama continues. “I’m going to build a house. Find a husband.”
“You? A man? My word,” Sokhna teases.
Mama sucks her teeth. “And call me when she finds him,” she says, fully joined with Bonnie’s fight. They hear it in her heavy breaths, a reminder of the life she also had to fight for.
“Mama …” Sokhna starts, then goes quiet. Afraid to say what she’s thinking.
“She will find him,” Mama says, firm. She still hasn’t taken her eyes off Bonnie. “And Sokhna, you will call me? Just to talk?”
91. THE CHILD IS BORN at 9:16 in the morning. By the time the Swiss midwife enters the room, the birth is already happening, the baby falling into a pile of upturned yellow palms. She is stained on contact with their turmeric-coated hands, worn things calloused by wooden mortars. The women wait for sound.
Falling into the world in pieces (gray baby, placenta, more still). A placenta the color of tamarind, thick as bad gravy, a baby smelling of smoke: the scent of something burning, equal parts earth and chemicals.
Then, finally, a weak wail, a soul that isn’t crazy about living in the flesh.
Mama alone on the floor. Hands still upturned, the afterbirth clinging to her fingers like dark egg whites, while the women coo and cry and approach the newborn. The child’s cry grows louder when they cry, a child like her mother and father—made of sound.
Mama remains there, hands upturned, silent. Feeling something new and brave within her. Within the body that’s never held a child but has given life. These hands that held Mansour in the days after he was born now drip with Bonnie’s afterbirth.
Mama looks to where the women she’s lived for are cuddled on the bed: Bonnie’s golden body, the gray one in her hands, blue and purple women all around. She closes her eyes. Her body moves, already on its way home.
92. WEEPING BREASTS WAKE her in the mornings, overflowing. After two weeks, she cannot nurse her child without screaming. A pain that is too much to bear. Her nipples have chafed and bled and scabbed and bled again. And with her breasts more and more engorged, each morning after birth sharper than the last, the air around her bed pokes her like pins. It is 4:00 a.m. and she’s stirring flour into goat’s milk—trying a little honey, this time, like Mama said, an alternative the child refuses.
They’ve found a surrogate in the village, a woman who’s just had her third baby and has been hearing Bonnie’s daughter scream from across the plain. A woman so pale that Bonnie stares in awe at the contrast when her dark daughter latches onto the woman’s nipple and settles into bliss. Mama encouraged Bonnie to use a surrogate. The day before she left, she told Bonnie of her two mothers, told her of the beauty there was in trying to love another woman’s child and letting her love yours.
Watch. Watch, says the surrogate. See how I am calm? So, she is calm. See how I am loving? So, she is loving. She can feel you. You are her mother.
You are her mother. It feels to Bonnie less a given thing and more like a thing that has to be slathered on, like she has to get up in the morning and reapply Mother each day, with will.
The women of the house hear Bonnie’s woes. And in it, they hear their own mothers. When Bonnie struggles with concoctions in the kitchen, Sokhna is reminded of her mother’s dough. Marie feels her mother in the ways that Bonnie seems trapped—the mark is still on Oumou’s ankle from the rope the villagers tied in preparation to sacrifice her for rain.
Bonnie squats now with her back against the wall in the dark room, letting her concoction burn. Deciding just to wait on the surrogate. To surrender to the woman’s help. To let her hungry child, in the meantime, cry itself to sleep. And as she watches the goat’s milk turn to smoke, she remembers what Mansour once said about compositions. How they are defiant, flighty, impossible to grasp. You could not hold them in your hand. You could never plot and plan a good composition. But still, you had to find a way to trust yourself, while you questioned everything. That is what has rung true about being a mother so far.