The Milk of Birds (25 page)

Emily just called, but I told Todd and Mom that I'm not home, which is sort of true, because I'm rereading your letters and wishing we were both back in Umm Jamila in the good old days. I'm not cut out for the United States. I wish I could learn a family trade, but that was roofing, and Grampers isn't around to teach me. Shepherding sounds more fun. I'd love to wander around outside all day. Like your sister, I love to collect pretty stones. And seashells—that's what I do when I visit Granny in Florida. She has a glass lamp filled with all the shells we've collected, and she can tell you all the names. You've never told me what happened to Saha. I'm wishing that you just got separated, like Adeeba and her dad, and one day when you find her, I'll mail her a wentletrap. They're my favorite shell, pure white spirals, like soft-serve vanilla ice cream, with fat corduroy ribs.

Usually ice cream is an exception to Mom's generic rule, but tonight she bought store-brand Martian green mint chocolate
chip. All because she has to spend too much money to send me to a neuropsychologist—Dr. Redding—who's going to diagnose me with a learning disability. And then what? What's the point if there's no cure for stupidity?

Me and my dumb stories. Maybe you think I'm a leather bag with a little water that shakes frequently. Here we say “windbag,” but it's the same idea.

More later.

O
CTOBER
2008

“We will buy wood,” I tell Adeeba.

“With what?” she asks.

She lifts Muhammad from my side and nestles him along her arm, his head in the bend of her elbow. She clucks her tongue.

“Listen, My Eyes,” she says. “Listen to Tata Adeeba. Do not listen to that mother of yours, who thinks she is a goat who can eat straw and plastic. You are a lion. I have heard you roar in the night.”

“The
saidas
will come soon,
inshallah
,” I tell her.

“You buy meat. We need wood to cook it,” she says. Her voice softens as she talks to Muhammad. “Take Tata's advice,” she says. “Listen to your mother about livestock, but let your grandmother do the cooking.”

My mother laughs as once she did, her body swaying above her waist like a young tree stirred by the breeze. For that I forgive all of Adeeba's insults.

“Wait until I can go with you,” I say. “Firewood is my job.”

“Feed your son properly and discipline him,” Adeeba says. “That is your job.”

“You must teach,” I say.

“I have told Si-Ahmad that I cannot make the morning class.
Some women have promised to leave when the sun rises to gather wood, so we will return in time for me to teach in the afternoon.”

“Inshallah,”
my mother says.

“Inshallah,”
Adeeba says. She steps from side to side to soothe the baby.

Just then the plastic ripples, more than the wind. My mother invites in Zeinab. Her eyes carry unfinished sleep, but she can open them. I pat beside me, and she sits so that I may wipe away the crust with a damp cloth.

“You help Tata Nawra,” Adeeba says.

“Uncle says I must go with you,” Zeinab says. “He needs wood.”

“All knew of this plan but me!” I say.

“You will have to walk fast,” Adeeba says to Zeinab.

“You will have to show Tata how to carry wood on her head,” I say.

Adeeba and I scowl at each other. I brush Zeinab's hair and gather it with the holders that K. C. has sent.

“These butterflies have flown across an ocean,” I say.

Outside a voice calls, “Are you ready, sister?”

Adeeba passes Muhammad back into my arms. “Humiliate your skin; do not humiliate your offspring,” she says. “Do not wait in the water line with the baby. The sun is too strong.”

My mother fills the leather bag from our water can and passes it to Adeeba. I do not regret spending K. C.'s gift on that.

“Keep away from evil, and sing to it,” I say.

I feed Muhammad from my breast. Lying down, we sleep.

•   •   •

When I wake, all is light through the plastic. The sun has moved high in the sky. I did not even hear the bells for school. My mother is gone, as well as the two jerry cans. I must relieve her in the water line, but I do not move, for Muhammad sleeps still, his breath fluttering the edge of my
tobe
where it falls across my breast. I am like the second letter in K. C.'s name, curved around my son.

I do not tire of watching him. I remember how my mother's eyes followed Muhammad and Abdullah and Ishmael, lingering just a moment longer than the business of the day required. Once my brothers were this small, their eyelids quivering as they slept.

Adeeba says Muhammad is dreaming. We do not see the herds of antelope my mother remembers from her childhood, but they seem to thunder beneath his eyelids.

What does my son dream? Does he see what I have seen? Once I felt him within, I tried to turn my thoughts away from ugliness.

But the vultures still come, scavenging by the well.

Muhammad raises his hand, his fingers waving like grass in the wind. You are right, my son, to push those memories away. You cannot carry eggs and iron in the same bag.

•   •   •

My mother takes Muhammad, and I take her place in the water line. Soon I must sit, and so the woman before me does too. We talk of good things to eat. A hungry man dreams of bread.

I talk for a moment about K. C.'s gift and the cushion it provides us. I do not tell this to everyone, but I want to remind this
woman of the kindness remaining in this world. She knows enough of its evil.

The sun crosses the sky as I wait for water. My mother returns with Muhammad. Although I fan him as he sucks, sweat gathers on his nose.

“Adeeba has not returned?”

“Not yet,” my mother says.

I return to our shelter with Muhammad. I am so tired I must sleep again.

•   •   •

The afternoon bells wake me. Muhammad is fussing.

Where is Adeeba? Did she go directly to the schoolhouse?

I hurry to the latrine and pass Muhammad to the next in line while I use it. Then I head toward the tap stand. For a moment I stop to watch my mother making her way back, one jerry can on her shoulder, the other by her side. Most women move like a snake, but my mother walks like the beat of a drum,
pum, PUM
. Her foot has healed stiff. But she is walking.

She reads my face of worry. “A man is a blessing in front of the house even if he is a vulture,” she says.

“Perhaps Khalid is at the spider,” I say.

“Try to find him,” my mother says.

As I walk, I talk to my son, who is a good listener. The first time Adeeba heard me telling him how to clean a hoof, she laughed.

I stopped, but she said, “Go on. You are your son's first and best school. This is what Si-Ahmad told me: We must raise a generation of men and women not afraid to learn from one another.”

Where is my friend?

Khalid is not working at the water platform. No one is.

I feel a heaviness. Adeeba will be angry with me if the bleeding starts again because I have walked too far. I lie down on the ground and let Muhammad nurse.

A strange voice says, “Are you troubled, sister?”

I sit up, drawing my son close. It is a
khawaja
. I tell him I am fine, but I am looking for Khalid.

His Arabic comes from another country, so we are like a horse and a donkey talking. He says the Sudanese working on the platform have gone to the other side of the camp where a pipe has burst, so precious water is spilling on the ground.

Ask your needs from those who have pretty faces,
my grandmother used to say. So I ask this
khawaja
if he can help me find my friend, gone too long gathering firewood.

Even before the words leave his mouth, I know the answer. There is nothing he can do.

As I walk back to our section, I cannot stop the tears.

Dear Nawra,

When I woke up this morning, it was raining, so I knew I wasn't going to be able to hide outside with my lunch at school. I told Mom I felt sick. I did—sick at heart.

“Does this have to do with Emily?” she asked.

I said my brain was separating from my body, like one of those detachable showerheads. She felt my forehead—no fever, of course. She said it sounded like I was coming down with something. So she stayed home from work!

At first I felt guilty. What if she loses her job and we can't pay off the home equity loan she took out to pay for my brain analysis and we lose our house? But we had a superfun day. We made eggplant parmigiana and brownies from scratch—take that, Sharon—and watched a DVD,
Heaven Can Wait
, an old movie about a quarterback who dies way too soon because of an angel's mistake, and then his body gets cremated. So they stick him in another body, and no one can figure out why this grumpy old millionaire suddenly becomes a nice guy who wants to play football.

Do you believe in angels, Nawra? I wish I did. When things got really bad in Darfur, an angel should have whisked you away and plunked you into a body somewhere safe. Maybe one
goofed and put me in the wrong body with the wrong brain. Maybe I should have been Linus Pauling. But your body helps make you who you are, don't you think? There's the obvious part; if you were a guy, you'd never have ended up pregnant. But look at you, carrying firewood and then your mom and now your baby. You are strong, and then being strong becomes a story you tell yourself about yourself, and so you become stronger. So people are kind of a combination of the body and the story, and while you can't change the body, you can change the story.

More later.

O
CTOBER
2008

I tell my mother of the broken pipe. All around we smell dinners cooking, so my mother lights our last fire. “Make extra,” I say. “Adeeba and Zeinab will be hungry.”

The days are long here. Too long. Idleness is the bug that breeds disease. In Umm Jamila, in the hungry hours before dinner, we could always tend a plant or an animal or visit an elder or a neighbor. Here I am grateful to wash my son's soiled cloths.

At last Hassan arrives. He is splattered with the blood of the animals his uncle has slaughtered. “Where is the wood?” he asks, but I know that is the uncle speaking.

“Adeeba and Zeinab are late,” I say. “Go wash up for dinner.”

Hassan returns with his uncle, who takes a plate but does not stay to eat. The uncle worries about Zeinab, but for the wrong reasons, I fear.

Not long ago he invited a man with gray in his beard to his shelter and ordered Zeinab to serve them tea. My mother did not like it, and she spoke to the elders in our section. We do not like to leave Zeinab with her uncle. Yet we do not like to separate sister from brother. My mother asked if Zeinab could sleep by our fire sometimes to help with the baby. When I see the uncle, I lean on Zeinab's shoulder. Adeeba has spoken to
the
khawaja
, who promise that soon they will teach some girls how to sew, so they can bring money to their families. We must not let Zeinab's uncle give her to an old husband first.

We eat in silence.

I am wiping the plates when Si-Ahmad comes to ask why Adeeba missed her afternoon class. I look at my mother, and in that look we agree that we cannot offer him the food we have saved. My mother pours water in a cup and tells Hassan to give it to Si-Ahmad. Fed, Hassan has become an agreeable boy again.

“Why is that smart young woman carrying grass and sticks?” Si-Ahmad thunders.

Hassan trembles. He does not yet know that anger is another face of care. “Tata Nawra could not go,” he says. “Last time she gathered wood she had a baby.”

Si-Ahmad marvels at God's greatness and asks my son's name.

“There is none better,” Si-Ahmad says.

“My sister went with Adeeba,” Hassan says.

“Why did you not go with them?”

“Gathering wood is women's work,” Hassan says.

“Women's work! How will Sudan ever rise again if half its people think only of cookfires?” Si-Ahmad says.

We promise to tell Adeeba to stop by his desk in the morning.

Before sunset, Khalid rides up to our shelter. He lays his bike in the sand and admires Hassan's writing. I have set Hassan to yesterday's words, for without Adeeba there are none new.

Khalid greets my mother first, then me. He is one who calls me Umm Muhammad. “Where is the teacher?” he asks at last.

My mother shows him the portions she has set aside for Adeeba and Zeinab. Before our eyes the light and humor drain from Khalid's face.

“I will scout the edge of camp,” Khalid says.