IN THE AFTERNOON, YOU pretended to be reading in your room so that you could watch Selam’s flat from behind your blinds, in spite of the dreams. You were sure she would not come onto the balcony. But you kept vigil because you wanted to see if Hadiya would visit her.
But suddenly, Selam tiptoed onto the balcony. Against the burned-out flats, she looked like a ghost. Her face was pale against the afternoon sun and seemed to have deep wrinkles, like the top of hambasha bread. She looked skinny and even shorter in the few days you hadn’t seen her. Her shama, a gauzelike white material covering her from head to foot, fluttered in the wind. Would she run back if you appeared? If you disobeyed Mommy and Daddy and spoke to her, would she disobey her mommy and daddy and respond? Or would she report you to her parents, who might come to your parents? Would she snub you, like in the dreams? Afraid, you hid and poured your gaze on her like the sun on a cold day. Selam stared at your flat, but you didn’t move. She grabbed the balcony rail and looked down into the streets, this way, that way, and you tried to follow her gaze, in case she was expecting Hadiya.
At dinner Mommy and Daddy told you to cheer up. They told you not to nibble your food. They chatted excitedly, like Selam and Hadiya did in your dreams, and poured you more and more Coke.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Mommy said, “we’ll travel to Addis, to see our relatives.”
“When are we coming back?”
“We’ve not even left yet!” Daddy said. “What’s wrong with you these days? You broke the remote the other day. Get over it.”
“Darling, it’s OK,” she said, calming him down. Then she turned to you: “We’ll be back in a week. Bahminya is too tense now. Kezeeh mewtat allebin—”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Hey, what language is that?” she said, tapping on the mesab, our handmade, wicker hourglass-shaped table. “And it’s rude to interrupt when another person is speaking!”
You closed your mouth so they would not scold you. You started eating up, since they were now waiting for you. You cut a big piece of injera and poured the meat sauce and a clot of vegetables onto it. You rolled it and turned up one end of the flat spongy bread so the vegetables and sauce wouldn’t leak, and began to chew from the other end, hurriedly. You drank the Coke, drank water, and thanked them. You returned to your room, while they talked about how the government had kept the complex thing from the news, and how it had done the same thing when Muslim radicals suddenly slaughtered Christians in Jimma churches two years back.
The next afternoon you came onto the balcony. Selam also appeared, on her balcony. You looked at each other without words. You followed each other’s gaze, to the coffee fields, to the hills, to the sun. The sky was cloudy. The streets emitted a low buzz below, and two donkeys brayed in the distance. The winds came in from the hills, fresh and steady. The birds lined the wires, some facing you and others facing her, in silence, as if they were awaiting the beginning of a race.
Slowly, Selam lifted her hand and waved to you as if the hand belonged to another person. You waved back slowly too. She opened her mouth slowly and mimed to you, and you mimed back, “I can’t hear you.” She waved with two hands, and you waved with two hands. She smiled at you. Her dimples were perfect, little dark cups in her cheeks. You opened your mouth and smiled, flashing all your teeth. “Hugzee, hugzee,” you mimed to her. There was a puzzled look on her face. You embraced the wind with both hands and gave an imaginary friend a peck. She immediately hugged herself, blowing you a kiss.
She looked back furtively, gave you a signal to disappear, and rushed inside herself. You retreated too, behind the blinds. Emaye Selam surfaced, her angry face framed by a scarf. She looked at your flat and scanned the streets, then went back in.
You smiled because you had discovered a new language. You went to Mommy and Daddy and asked them when you were leaving for Addis.
“Addis will be fun!” Mommy said, and continued packing. “You’ll make new friends there.”
“Yes, Mommy.”
Daddy paused from sipping his beer. “Good girl . . . I’ll buy a new remote.”
Luxurious Hearses
Argue not with the People of the Book unless it be in a better way, except with such of them as do wrong; and say: “We believe in that which has been revealed to us and revealed to you; our God and your God is One, and to God do we surrender.”
KORAN 29:46
It was late afternoon. It was before the new democratic government placed a ban on mass transportation of corpses from one end of the country to the other. Jubril had worked so hard to forget the previous two days that his mind was in turmoil as he waited to travel south with the crowd at the motor park on the outskirts of Lupa. He knew that even if people were stacked up like yam or cassava tubers in a basket, most would still be left behind. Fortunately, he had paid for a seat on the only bus left.
To the north, the road skipped over the low hills and flattened out, straight, in the savannah toward Khamfi, Jubril’s city, then into Niger. To the south, it turned a series of corners, slipping toward River Niger, toward Onyera and Port Harcourt, then into the Atlantic.
Though he was still a teenager, Jubril looked mature for his age. He was fair-skinned and wore a blue oversized long-sleeved shirt. His brown jean trousers were dirty and hung like curtains on his willowy frame. A worn Marian medal dangled from his neck, and his cowherd feet were crammed into undersized canvas shoes—their laces missing, their tongues jutting out like those of goats being roasted. Jubril had pulled down his baseball cap so that it covered most of his youthful face and hid the brilliance of his big eyes and his sharp nose. A Muslim, he had done a good job disguising himself as a Christian fleeing south. And, in any case, because of the religious conflict in the country, nobody would expect a northerner or Muslim to risk traveling with Christians to the south or the delta.
The bus was the type his compatriots simply called Luxurious Bus, a seventy-seat monster and secondhand import from Latin America that dominated the roads. In times of peace, these buses made cross-country travel easy. The hundreds of police checkpoints never stopped the buses to search them or to harass their drivers for money because the bus companies made enough to settle with the national police command monthly. The radio, television, and print media had a lot of ads about these buses. The fares were within the reach of many, and, with the country’s aviation industry being so unreliable, the best of the buses were gaining the confidence of the elite. When suddenly these vehicles started offering long-distance night travel, many jumped for it. Businesspeople went to sleep on the bus in the evening, then woke up and continued their business the next morning on the other side of the country.
Jubril had neither seen nor been in a Luxurious Bus before. The very conservative brand of Islam practiced in his neighborhood in multireligious Khamfi had made it impossible for him to listen to the radio or watch any form of TV or pay attention to newspapers. With his state of mind now, he had forgotten the only thing he had heard about these buses from his friends: they had a constant supply of electricity, unlike what NEPA was providing to the rest of the country. But now that peace had deserted the land, and Nigeria was on a war footing, the myth of the Luxurious Bus meant nothing to Jubril or the crowd at Lupa Motor Park.
Their only worry now was the disappearance of the bus driver into Lupa City, which was a couple of miles away. He had been gone the whole day, scouting for black-market fuel for the long journey ahead, and the conductors had kept the Luxurious Bus locked since morning. Fuel had become a scarce commodity in the country. Cars had to line up for days on end at the pumps.