The Camel Bookmobile: A Novel

FEBRUARY 1989—Mididima, North-Eastern Province, Kenya

Scar Boy

THE CHILD, WIDE-LEGGED ON THE GROUND, LICKED DUST off his fist and tried to pretend he was tasting camel milk. Nearby, his father spoke to a thorny acacia while his older brother hurled rocks at a termite mound. Neither paid him any attention, but this didn’t change the fact that for the child, the three of them existed as a single entity. It was as if he drank dust, beseeched a tree, and threw stones all at once. He took this oneness for granted. Separate was a concept he was too young to recognize. Nor did he know of change, or fear, or the punishment of drought. All of life still felt predictable, and forever, and safe.

Now, for instance, this child-father-brother unit was enveloped in the reliable collapse of day, when the breeze stiffened, color drained from the sky, and shadows tinted three sets of cheeks simultaneously. The child welcomed this phase. The texture of the graying light transformed faces. It made people, he would later think, resemble charcoal portraits.

Something disturbed this particular dusk, though, tugging his attention away from the intimate comfort of his tongue on his skin and the dust’s piquant flavor. Out of the gloom of nearby bushes rose a rigid, narrow object, standing frozen but quivering. This was odd. Everything in his experience either walked or dashed or flew or was blown by the wind or planted in the ground—in other words, it plainly moved or, less frequently, it didn’t. What could he make of this harsh immobile shuddering, this tense and stubborn suggestion of flexibility? He crawled closer, then sat back to look again.

From this perspective, he spotted another object, small and round against the other’s long narrowness. It was the color of a flame.

In fact, there were two.

Aha, he thought with satisfaction, the puzzle starting to shift into place. Eyes. Eyes, of course, moved and stayed still at once and could flicker like firelight. So the object must be human. Or maybe animal. Or maybe an ancestral ghost.

Whatever it was, he understood from somewhere, an inherited memory or intuition, that he needed all of himself to meet it. So he called to his other parts, his father-brother. Here I am, he said, a gentle reminder. Even as he spoke, he didn’t look away from the eyes and the rigid tail, and so he saw the object begin to grow larger. And then it lunged. It joined him, as if it too wanted to be part of the son-father-brother entity.

He was unaware of pain. Instead, the moment seemed unreal and confusing, like drifting off to sleep in the midst of one of his father’s sung tales and losing track of the story. What had already happened? What was happening still? He would have to ask his father in the morning.

Only one part remained distinct: the sound that would echo in his mind until death. The wet, high-pitched ripping of his three-year-old flesh as the spotted hyena, never a kind beast and now mad with hunger, dove onto his leg, chomped at his waist, and then reached his face and gnawed, grunting with pleasure.

Later he would hear how his father turned, killed the beast with a miraculously aimed knife, scooped his son into his arms, and began running, the child’s blood weeping down the father’s arms. He would learn that all this took less than five meditative breaths—but he would never quite believe it. In his memory, the crunching of bone and tearing of flesh stretched over a decade of sundowns and sunups, disrupting all patterns, making everything separate and fearful and dusty and fleeting forever.

Part One

Mosquitoes’ lives may be ephemeral, their deaths almost always brutal. But during their transitory span, absolutely nothing will stand in the way of their two formidable guiding desires: to soak up human lifeblood, and to reproduce.

—A Mosquito’s Life, J. R. Churin, 1929

DECEMBER 2002—Brooklyn, New York

The American

FIONA SWEENEY SHOVED A PAIR OF ROLLED-UP JEANS INTO THE corner of her purple duffel bag. Outside her bedroom window, a siren’s wail sliced through the white noise of a wet snowfall. Those eerie man-made moans were part of New York City’s wallpaper, a signal of trouble commonplace enough to pass unnoticed. But Fi registered this one, maybe because she knew she wouldn’t be hearing sirens for a while.

She turned her attention back to her bag, which still had space. What else should she take? Lifting a framed snapshot, she examined her mother as a young woman, wading into a stream, wearing rubber boots and carrying a fishing pole. Fi cherished the photograph; in real life, she’d never known her mother to be that carefree. The mother Fi had known wouldn’t want to go to Africa. In fact, she wouldn’t want Fi to go. Fi put the picture facedown and scanned the room, her attention drawn to a worn volume of Irish poetry by her bedside. She tucked it in.

How about the netting? Chris called from the living room where he sat with Devi.

Already in, Fi answered.

And repellent? asked Devi.

Yes, yes. Fi waved her hand as though shooing away a gnat—a gesture that Chris and Devi couldn’t see from the other room. Should have kept my mouth shut, she murmured.

Early on in her research about Kenya, she’d discovered that the country’s annual death toll from malaria was in the tens of thousands. She had pills; she had repellents; logically, she knew she’d be fine. Still, a figure that high jolted her. She became slightly obsessed and—here’s the rub—discussed it with Chris and Devi. Mbu—mosquito—had been the first Swahili word she’d learned. Sometimes the insects even dive-bombed into her nightmares. Eventually, mosquitoes became a metaphor for everything she feared about this trip: all the stories she’d read about a violent and chaotic continent, plus the jitters that come with the unknown.

And what wasn’t unknown? All she knew for sure, in fact, was why she was going. Fi’s mom had never been a big talker, but she’d been a hero, raising four kids alone. Now it was Fi’s turn to do something worthwhile.

Fi. Chris, at the door of the bedroom, waved in the air the paper on which he’d written a list of all the items he thought she should bring and might forget. Money belt. Hat. Granola bars. Have you been using this? he asked half-mockingly in the tone of a teacher.

I hate lists, Fi said.

He studied her a second. OK, he said. Then, what do you say, take a break?

Yeah, c’mon, Fi. We don’t want to down all your wine by ourselves, Devi called from the living room, where an Enya CD played low.

Pulling back her dark, frizzy hair and securing it with a clip, Fi moved to the living room and plopped onto the floor across from Devi, who sprawled in a long skirt on the couch. Chris poured Fi a glass of cabernet and sat in the chair nearest her. If they reached out, the three of them could hold hands. Fi felt connected to them in many ways, but at the same time, she was already partly in another place and period. A soft light fell in from the window, dousing the room in a flattering glow and intensifying the sensation that everything around her was diaphanous, and that she herself was half here and half not.

"You know, there’s lots of illiteracy in this country," Devi said after a moment.

That’s why I’ve been volunteering after work, Fi said. But there, it’s different. They’ve never been exposed to libraries. Some have never held a book in their hands.

Not to mention that it’s more dangerous, which somehow makes it appealing to Fi, Chris said to Devi, shaking his head. Nai-robbery.

Though he spoke lightly, his words echoed those of Fi’s brother and two sisters—especially her brother. She was ready with a retort. I’ll mainly be in Garissa, not Nairobi, she said. It’s no more dangerous there than New York City. Anyway, I want to take some risks—different risks. Break out of my rut. Do something meaningful. Then she made her tone playful. The idealistic Irish. What can you do?

Sometimes idealism imposes, Chris said. What if all they want is food and medicine?

You know what I think. Books are their future. A link to the modern world. Fi grinned. "Besides, we want Huckleberry Finn to arrive before Sex in the City reruns, don’t we?"

Devi reached out to squeeze Fi’s shoulder. Just be home by March.

Home. Fi glanced around, trying to consciously take in her surroundings. She’d considered subletting, which would have been the most economical decision, but she’d gotten busy and let it slide. Now she noticed that Chris had stacked her magazines neatly and stored away the candles so they wouldn’t collect dust. After she left for Kenya, Chris had told her, he’d come back to wash any glasses or plates she’d left out, make sure the post office was holding her mail, and take her plants back to his apartment. He’d thought of that, not her. A nice gesture, she kept reminding herself. Still. She gave Chris a wicked grin as she reached out to mess up the magazines on the coffee table. It felt satisfying, even though she knew he would just restack them later.

Chris was deep into what his colleagues called ground-breaking research on the human brain—specifically the hippocampus—at NYU Medical Center. He wanted a shared home and, eventually, kids. Her siblings thought they were a well-suited couple, but that was hardly persuasive. Fi’s brother’s wife’s cousin was married to one of Fi’s sisters, and they all still lived within eight blocks of their childhood homes. They considered Fi a wanderer for moving from the Bronx all the way to Brooklyn. They wanted to see her settled, and she doubted that it mattered much to them who she settled with—or for.

But even Devi, who had arrived in Brooklyn via Iran, agreed about Chris. He’s a scientist who studies the part of the brain that processes memories, and you work for an institution that does the same, if you think about it, Devi said once. How perfect is that?

Remembering it, Fi took a gulp of wine. The assumptions people made about one another were invariably wrong, she’d found. Yes, she was a librarian; yes, he was a researcher. But Chris was disciplined and logical where she was—well, she liked to think of herself as whimsical. Eventually, she suspected, her spontaneity would start to drive him batty, and his take-charge confidence would curb her style. Sometimes Fi thought Chris had become a researcher to immerse himself in a world he could analyze and define. That’s not what she sought from her work. Books allowed her vicarious tastes of infinite variety, but they didn’t supplant the need to venture out into the big and the messy. In fact, just the opposite. Books convinced her that something more existed—something intuitive, beyond reason—and they whetted her appetite to find it.

Occasionally, though, she felt a shock of fear that made her legs ache. She was thirty-six, after all, not a kid, and what she sought—this something more—seemed amorphous, even to her. She couldn’t say what she was looking for, precisely; she only hoped she’d know when she found it.

What if, through inertia and social pressure, she ended up with Chris, and children, and backyard barbecues, and everything except the loose housedresses, and then what if she woke up to find herself somewhere on the gentle slope past middle age, gazing over her shoulder at a life respectable and well organized but too narrowly lived? A life that didn’t fit her. Couldn’t that happen? Didn’t it happen to people all the time?

Well, here’s to the Camel Bookmobile. Devi raised her glass. Bringing literacy to the African bush.

Hear, hear, Fi agreed. It’s going to open up whole new worlds for those people. For me, too, she thought, though she didn’t say it. She felt light-headed with anticipation.

My little library evangelist, said Chris in an ironic tone, shaking his head.

Come on. Toast the project, Devi urged him.

OK, OK, Chris said. To Kenya. To the camels. From the end table, he picked up a book on camel husbandry—a joke gift from Fi’s colleagues—and lifted it with one hand, raising his wineglass with the other.

FEBRUARY 2003—Mididima, North-Eastern Province, Kenya

The Girl

THE SUN HAD NOT YET SPIT ITS FIRST SPRAY OF DUSTY GOLD into their home when Kanika woke to a vicious buzz. Mbu. Not just one—a whole swarm, thronging within her belly. She’d never heard of mosquitoes invading an abdomen before, but there was no other way to account for the vibrating drone coming from within. How in the name of her blessed ancestors had the mosquitoes gotten inside? She pictured the bloodsuckers breeding in her veins, dumping eggs along her rib cage, their heads drooping as they guzzled down her precious moisture at its source.

"Nyanya," she called, frightened, pressing a hand to her center, the curve of her flesh, to try to determine the numbers within. This was not the work of ten or twelve. There were a hundred twenty at least, plenty enough to rob her of life.

Her grandmother Neema, asleep next to her, opened her eyes a little, then wide, then sat up. She reached out for Kanika.

And in that moment, Kanika remembered. The hum came not from insects, but from an obscure emotion—one rare enough to frighten her. Anticipation. She rubbed her eyes and laughed at her own foolishness. Lie back down, she said.

Neema shook her head as though to clear it. You wake me to tell me to sleep?

A tickle inside scared me. But it’s only the books.

The books. The answer satisfied Neema enough to allow her to lower her head, but she kept her eyes open, watching Kanika.

This was Library Day. The day the books would arrive, borne in wooden boxes on either side of a camel’s hump. Soon Kanika would be fondling covers and running her fingers over random words before settling on the two volumes she was permitted to borrow. Then she would grasp them possessively, carry them home, put them in the center of the room, and delay opening them as long as possible to stretch out the delicious pleasure. Finally—sometime before nightfall, she knew—she wouldn’t be able to wait longer, so she would give up and dive in. Endless words in English or Swahili spilling one atop another, metamorphosing into sentences and paragraphs, leaping to life as Kanika deciphered them, revealing secrets that left her light-headed.

Kanika could read as fast as locusts devour, thanks to lessons from her grandmother, who had also grasped the gift as a girl. For years, though, Kanika’s sole book had been a tattered copy of the Bible in English that a British missionary once gave Neema’s mother—the first of Kanika’s family who had been taught to read. For Kanika, the book had nothing to do with religion; she believed, as did her neighbors, in the Hundred-Legged One and in the spirits that lived in everything. Nevertheless, by the age of nine, Kanika had reread the stories of Adam and Abraham and David more than fifty times. That was the year she realized she couldn’t stand to read them again—or the ones about Samson, or Joseph, or Cain and Abel, or any of the others. She’d had enough of abandoned sheep and feuding brothers and mythically flawed men. She thought she was finished with reading forever.

Now, five years and five months later, what unexpected wealth! True Stories of Grizzly Bear Attacks. A biography of Nelson Mandela. A history of Nigeria. And most recently, Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Man: A History. Still on her back, she flexed her feet and reached to touch the tome featuring on its cover a magnified mosquito, head hanging, body ballooned with blood. The cause, obviously, of her waking imagery. All right then. No more insect books. She could see the wisdom of that, as long as there were other words to read. The camels had been lumbering into Mididima not quite four months, and already their cache had become essential to her.

Of course, they’d delivered more than books to Kanika, more even than knowledge of the outside world. They’d elevated her status. As a child, she’d spent so much time with Neema’s Bible that her neighbors had dismissed her as a useless oddity. Words on a page were acceptable, barely, as an occasional idle distraction. But to be obsessed with them? If she wanted to read, the elders had told her many times, far better to learn to read animal scents on the breeze, or the coming weather in the clouds.

The library’s arrival had made a leopard’s leap of a difference, marking the start of a real school. Matani had always called himself a teacher and tried to gather together the children to write letters in the sand. But how long could sticks and dirt hold their interest? Now, though, all the children were given books to explore, and being taught to chant the alphabet in Swahili and English and to translate squiggles on paper, and Kanika had become Matani’s helper. The assistant teacher, he called her. With all these books, I cannot educate everyone at once, Kanika. Not even with help of the cane.

Kanika had never before been given a title, let alone thought to be someone who had valuable knowledge. Before, she’d been considered nearly as out of place, in her own way, as Scar Boy. Now, though, tiny bodies with sour-scented skin pressed close to her over open pages. Mothers watched with a mixture of envy and resentment as she shared some mysterious secret with their offspring. They didn’t respect her any more than ever. But they were afraid of her, she knew—afraid of the skill she possessed that they didn’t have.

She yawned and stretched and thought, then, of Miss Sweeney, the American who would, by the ancestors’ blessings, arrive with the camels as she always did. Kanika extended a hand to pick up a flat, round object she kept next to her grass mat. Miss Sweeney’s gift. A miracle smaller than a clenched fist. A dry water puddle that could be carried around and gazed in whenever one wished. A mirror, Miss Sweeney called it. None of the girls of Mididima had ever seen one before. She shifted it so that she could examine, in the dim light, her eyes, her cheeks, her effusive mouth.

The sight of yourself pleases you, her grandmother said with a generous chuckle.

Kanika shook her head in protest. What pleases is that I can see myself at any time. I won’t be left wondering who that is when I catch glimpse of myself in a splash of rainwater.

Neema nodded, serious now. There’s magic beyond our world, it’s true.

Moved by something in her grandmother’s voice, Kanika turned, tempted to reveal her plan. But she stopped herself. Better to act before talking. And act she would, as soon as the camels arrived today.

She would hurry to Miss Sweeney’s side and use the hem of her own kitenge to clean off each book. No matter that she personally found no offense in the sunset-colored dust that wasted little time in laying claim to everything that entered the bush. Unimportant if she, like her neighbors, believed it irresponsible to use up hours struggling against grains of earth. The powder bothered Miss Sweeney when it settled on the books, and that was enough. Kanika had watched Miss Sweeney stroke the books clean with her soft, pale palms. This time, Kanika would do that for her—quietly, yes, but ostentatiously enough to be noticed. The act of cleaning would be something more than an effort to ingratiate herself; it would be like a book’s prologue—not the story yet, but a suggestion of the story to come.

Then afterward, she would approach Miss Sweeney, lead her apart from the others, take her hand, perhaps. Little by little—an elephant must be eaten a bite at a time—she would speak of her desires: no, her needs. A way to the Distant City. Or perhaps to even more distant Distant Cities. To leave the bush. To be an assistant teacher somewhere where shelves of books and walls of mirrors and other wonders were as commonplace as sand. If she could teach the children of Mididima to read, couldn’t she teach other children, in places of greater potential?

Kanika knew her plan would sound, to most of her tribe, like a desert nomad’s dream of snow. That’s why she’d told only Scar Boy. He would repeat it to no one, of course; who talked to Scar Boy? And telling him had been enough. That had satisfied her need to press the words into another’s ears, to make her vision real. He’d listened with his whole being. Though he’d said nothing, she was sure he supported her plan. After all, forsaken as he was by his neighbors, with his slow limp and his poor distorted face, he understood about dreams.

Miss Sweeney—clearly a daring woman herself, clearly someone who’d seen snow, perhaps even walked through it—would listen too, and understand, and help. Miss Sweeney, after all, had squeezed Kanika’s shoulders. She’d leaned close enough for her hair to brush Kanika’s cheek, and for her odor—that complicated, ornate scent that some here found disgusting—to fill Kanika’s nostrils. She’d given Kanika the mirror.

Kanika vowed to find the courage to act today, before her great-uncle Elim or others began grumbling again, muttering that she was behind schedule to find a husband, that she must be married before the arrival of summer’s dry winds. Before they trapped her.

A spiraling cord of nerves in her stomach, as well as a morning pressure that needed to be relieved behind a bush, at last propelled Kanika to her feet. She glanced