Back home she sat Yusuf down and gently told him that he was not a Deeper Lifer but a Catholic because of his infant baptism. She explained to him that, according to Catholic theology, baptism leaves an indelible mark on a person’s soul—and whatever religion a person may choose later can not affect that Catholic mark. She told him that, in that sense, his Islamic faith and recent Deeper Life faith were nullified. She explained that though the Catholic Church, unlike Islam, would not force anybody to be loyal, the belief was that wherever you went you remained Catholic. But Yusuf refused to honor the appointment she had set up for him with the priest and continued to express his Deeper Life evangelism. Not only did he carry a Bible around Meta Nadum and recite the verses aloud, he set about trying to proselytize his neighbors, à la a Jehovah’s Witness, insisting that it was the duty of every born-again Christian. In tears, his mother had turned to Jubril, pleading with him not to have anything to do with his brother’s blood. But he too said he had to protect the honor of his family, neighborhood, and Islamic faith.
It was not long after this that Yusuf was mobbed by some relatives and neighbors and stoned to death, like Saint Stephen, for apostasy. Though Jubril did not join in the killing of his brother, he was close enough to hear him pray in tongues as the stones rained down on him.
STANDING IN THE BUS, these were some of the thoughts that swamped Jubril’s mind. Losing material things—like the dozens of cows in his care, which his Khamfi attackers would have destroyed or claimed since his flight—did not bother him. And it was beyond him at this point to think about the national consequences of the crisis. He did not want to think about all his former friends who helped rout him out of Khamfi. He did not want to remember his childhood years of racing down the dusty unpaved streets of Meta Nadum, or the afternoons spent planting carrots and cabbage in the wide valley of the seasonal river that bordered one side of the neighborhood. It was best now to forget these things. He did not want to recall their conversations as they poured out of the mosque after Friday Jummat, all in long gowns, babarigas and jhalabias, the epitome of friendship in that celebratory throng, or how they stopped by each other’s houses to eat and drink zobo. He did not want to consider the years spent together in the outskirts of Khamfi tending cows, or the times they fretted together about the health of some calf and one of them had to carry it home on his shoulders, like a good shepherd, or the times they made forays into the Christian areas during riots to firebomb churches.
They had held Jubril as a true Muslim for not allowing family loyalties to come between him and his religion when Yusuf was given his just deserts, and Meta Nadum had rallied around him when he had readily submitted his hand to be chopped off as punishment for stealing someone’s goat. When a few hard-nosed journalists interviewed him later, he had exuded unparalleled confidence in his faith, although he did not allow them to take his picture. He even pleaded with them to tell the human-rights group that had taken his case to the supreme court not to bother. Somehow he had become a hero. A rich man even entrusted him with the care of his cows.
Now, he just wanted to cry for his mother, who had disappeared in this crisis, consoling himself that maybe she had been merely displaced, like him, not killed. He wanted to apologize to her for the enmity between him and Yusuf. For Jubril to begin thinking in depth about his brother’s death now, after his friends betrayed him, would have shattered him. So Jubril tried to think of Yusuf only in relation to his mother’s grief. He could not imagine life without her. He preferred to imagine her back home in the walled compound on the fringe of the neighborhood, where they lived with his maternal uncles. He imagined her moving from room to room, stroking her tasbih, prayer beads, and crying for him until her eyes became as red and dry as the mud walls of the local silos in the square courtyard. He could see her, her tall frame bent by the loss of a son, coming out into the courtyard as if her sorrow had filled the rooms and now overflowed.
Once the riots broke out, he imagined his cousins and uncles standing guard with guns and machetes, to forestall the maddening mob of almajeris—Koranic-school pupils, some of whom had turned wild from years of begging on the streets—from plundering their home. He could see the faces of some of these almajeris. He could see the streets swarming with mobs, and endless clouds of dust rising as high as the minarets that jutted out of many private mosques in the neighborhood. He could not feel anything for these Muslims, nor for the Christians with whom he was fleeing. He could not be sure whether his Khamfi relatives would defend him, nor was he ready to entrust his life to anyone as he had done in the past.
That fateful afternoon, when Khamfi exploded, Jubril was coming back from grazing his cows. He ambled along behind the beasts, which filled the dirt road that connected the fields to his home, and placed his stick on his shoulder. When he heard two sharp shouts coming from the direction of the city, he thought nothing of it.
The blue sky had been bleached by the harmattan dust. The strong desert wind whipped the landscape, filling his babariga and drying the day’s sweat. Being this close to home, he usually would have heard cars and trucks honking their horns on the major highway that passed near the town, but he heard nothing but the sound of the savannah sharpening the endless sough into a whistle.
When Jubril got to the corner, the beasts started trotting, anticipating a drink from the few pools in the valley. He jogged along with them, eager to take off his tire sandals and soak his feet in the pool while the cows drank. But as they turned to descend into the wide valley, the cows were startled by two people. Both carried leaves and were shouting to Jubril to pluck a branch from the bushes, but Jubril could not hear them clearly. Apart from the leaves, one carried a carton, the other a sack—their belongings. They ran as fast as they could into the savannah, as if they had stolen something and the owner was in hot pursuit. Jubril brought down his stick immediately and herded the animals to one side, positioning himself between them and possible danger.
When he got to the pools, it worried him that he did not find other herds and cowherds. Uncharacteristically for that time of day, the remnants of the river trickled into the pools clear and undisturbed. Even the farmers, who would normally be watering and tending their cabbage gardens at that hour, were absent. The place was deserted, and the gardens, green and fresh in the dead of the harmattan, looked like new wreaths in an old cemetery. Scouting around, Jubril discovered that the edges of the hoofprints left on the soft ground by herds that had returned before him were jagged and tilted to the front, and that cow droppings did not stand in little hills but had poured out in crooked lines. He surmised that the animals had galloped past the pools. Quickly, he whipped his cows, and they ran toward home, and he ran after them.
A CHANTING MOB THAT suddenly swung into Jubril’s path from a side road hesitated for a moment before going in the other direction. Though Jubril was far from the crossroad, the sight was so unusual that the cows panicked and stopped. They huddled together on one side of the road like schoolchildren around an akara seller. The mob kept pouring into the road, kicking up a haze of dust that moved like a low pillar of cloud. The people carried leaves, stones, knives, and sticks, and Jubril thought he recognized a few of them.