Aïsatou and the Old Man
by Brian Paul Cross
The Louisville Review
Volume 61 (Spring 2007)
Aïsatou sat on a woven plastic mat with her two young daughters. Soxna was curled up in her lap, and Dabba had stretched out nearby with her head hidden under a piece of cloth and her hands clamped over her ears. A short distance away, Aïsatou’s husband Aliou and three men just arrived from Touba were huddled in a circle, squatting on their hams and looking uncomfortable. The visitors stared down at the ground and said little. The sounds of pain emanating from the thatched hut a few feet away made conversation awkward. Aïsatou watched as they shook their heads in dismay, each one starting and stopping on his own, the individual rhythms alternately matching and diverging from each other, as though they were performing a silent, melancholy round.
“Aaaaah. Daay metti! Aaaaah. Daay metti!” The hut seemed to sag a bit more with each new call from the old man, threatening to collapse around his voice, as though it wished it could smother the hateful sound in a pile of millet stalks.
“Aaaaah. Ndox, mëy ma ndox.”
Aliou snapped his fingers at her from his position in the circle, but Aïsatou was already jumping up to get the old man his water. Gently disengaging Soxna’s small, anxious fingers from her wrap-around pagne, she handed her off to Dabba and went to fill a plastic cup with water from the cistern. Her feet taking small, quick steps and her lips forming a silent prayer, she approached the hut with cup in hand.
“Aaaaah. Ana Aïsatou? Mëy ma ndox.”
She jumped at the sound of her name in the old man’s raspy voice and hurried to comply before Aliou could scold her. Pushing aside the curtain, she stared into the dim interior of the hut. The old man lay on a foam mattress that was supported by a rusty metal bed frame. His shirt lay discarded on the sandy floor, and his black torso was bare except for the square leather gris-gris the healer had tied around his chest weeks before. Aïsatou approached him carefully, as though he were a wounded animal, one who might repay attempted kindness by snapping off her finger.
His abdomen was taut and distended, a grotesque bulge, the size of a small fat eggplant, protruding from the lower right side. This protrusion of flesh would swell and shrink as the old man shifted position, and it throbbed sickeningly with the beating of his heart. Both his hands and her eyes were drawn to it. She had seen it countless times before, but still she found herself holding her breath and staring at his fingers as they explored the tender flesh. This morbid reverie came to an end when a spasm of pain wracked his body. His face contorted in agony and his fingers withdrew suddenly as though burned. She looked quickly down, muttering incantations to her dusty feet.
When the fit had passed, he lifted his head off the mattress and weakly motioned for her to come closer. She handed him the plastic cup, and he drank in one long greedy draft, the water spilling out around the corners of his mouth and down through the scraggly white hair on his cheek. When he was done, he tossed the cup on the ground at her feet and laid his head back on the bed. Aïsatou retrieved the cup, brushed off the sand stuck to one side, and turned away from the sound of his renewed moaning and from the stale, musty smell of decay.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The idea had begun in her dreams—murdering the old man. It was always the same: She would drag him down the path that ran behind the compound and out through the fields to the baobab grove, his heels making two tracks in the sand. There was one baobab that was hollowed out and tipped over on its side, forming a tunnel whose opening was half buried in the ground. She would roll him into this cavity and leave him there to die where no one could hear his moaning and his hateful voice, where she couldn’t hear.
The old man had been bedridden for over six months and ailing for as long as Aïsatou could remember. There was nothing the case de santé could do for him. It was obvious that he had a hernia, but there was something else wrong as well, maybe cancer. The nurse didn’t have the tools to diagnose the illness with any certainty, so he had given Aliou some medication and advised him to take his father to the hospital in Diourbel. But that would cost money they didn’t have, and besides, the old man wouldn’t hear of it. He said that the hospital was where people went to die or to catch something worse than the disease they already had. What could the family do but keep him at home and hope for a quick end, for God to be merciful. Merciful to them and to him.
It all would have been easier to take if he were not so disagreeable and so quick-tempered. “Baayam, mungi mel ne xac. Dafa soxor,” she had been warned before marrying Aliou. “His father’s a miserable cur, as mean as they come.” But she had ignored these warnings and gone through with the wedding anyway.
For the first few years, she had had no reason to regret this decision. The old man’s daughters were the ones primarily responsible for tending to him, and Aïsatou could safely keep her distance. But then, in the span of a few months, all of the daughters were married off, one after the other, and suddenly Aïsatou was the only grown woman in the compound. She found herself forced to wait on him and to bear the brunt of his unpleasant temperament.
The worst episodes were stamped indelibly on Aïsatou’s memory. One time, just after the last daughter was married off and just before his declining health made him an invalid, the old man had come after her with a switch. Fortunately, Aliou had been there to step in, and so she was spared his violence, if not his vitriolic words.
“That wife of yours is lazy,” he declared, peering around Aliou with his brow furrowed. “My hut is a mess.” He tried to step past his son to get at her, but Aliou moved quickly to keep himself between Aïsatou and the old man.
“Father, you don’t mean that,” he said, holding up his hands palms out and adopting a firm but conciliatory posture. “Aïsatou takes good care of you.”
“She’s insolent!”
“Father, please.”
“She’s lazy!”
“Father, that’s enough.”
“You should get a second wife. That always puts the first one in her place.” Sweat covered the old man’s brow, and his watery, yellow-tinted eyes were full of anger. She held her breath as Aliou continued to stare him down. After one long tense minute, the old man gave up, tossing aside his switch. He spat out an angry curse and then disappeared into his hut.
When his father was gone, Aliou turned to her uncertainly. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “He’s more bark than bite.”
“Amul solo, Aliou. It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly, keeping her face blank and her eyes averted. She wished that he would just let it drop, but knew that he wouldn’t.
“He doesn’t mean it,” Aliou persisted, his voice turning defensive. “He’s a good man, Aïsatou.”
“I know he is. It’s okay.” She tried to make her words sound convincing, but knew that she was failing. She could feel his frustration growing.
“His life’s been difficult. You don’t know how hard he’s worked, how much he’s suffered.” Aliou began to wave his hands about his head as he spoke, as though the truth about his father’s character were a swarm of insects that he could shoo away.
“Of course.”
“Who are you to judge him?” Aliou demanded. “What do you know about it anyway?” He turned away from her abruptly and stalked off. Aïsatou watched as he began to sort through a pile of his tools with no discernible purpose, picking each one up and then tossing it angrily aside. She could hear him muttering to himself and wanted to make things right, but she did not know the words that would appease him.
A short time later, the old man’s health began a steep decline, and in a matter of weeks, he could no longer stand easily without support. On bad days, he would stay in bed. On good days, they would help him into a low chair and he would sit outside in the compound beneath their one neem tree. But even as his ability to follow through on his threats of violence waned, his tendency to threaten only increased. It seemed that the one part of his body that continued to function well was his spleen. It thrived, bulging out from the underbelly of his personality, venting its poisonous humors into the air they breathed. He produced a seemingly constant barrage of belittlement and abuse, delivered from his chair or from his bed and almost always directed at Aïsatou. “Mënuloo dara. You can’t do anything right. When is dinner going to be ready? You wouldn’t think it would take so long to make food that tastes so bad. Stop making those eyes at me. I’ll take no insolence from you, woman. What you need is a good whipping.” And when he wasn’t criticizing or threatening her, he was filling the compound with the sound of his moaning. That sound was perhaps even worse than the steady stream of hectoring.
One of the hardest parts of it all was that he couldn’t make it to the latrine on his own. For the sake of modesty, Aliou usually helped him with this, but when Aliou was in the fields, the task fell to Aïsatou. And when the old man had accidents, it was she who cleaned up the soiled sheets and clothing. She was not squeamish about such things. She had two young children. But something about the old man turned her stomach more than any child’s stink.
When Aïsatou was eight years old, she had gone to visit relatives in Dakar with her sister Coumba. She had been feeling slightly feverish when they had left home that morning, but it was not until she was actually on the car rapide, jammed between her sister on one side and a sweaty fat woman on the other, with five rows of densely packed passengers between her and the door, that she had realized she must have malaria.
“Coumba, dama sibburu,” she told her sister, the clammy sweat on her brow testifying to the truth of her statement.
“Aaaah, tuc-tuc-tuc,” Coumba clucked in dismay, her eyes going wide. “You’ve just got to hold on, Aïsatou. We’ll be there soon.”
But her sister had been wrong. They were still more than an hour away from Dakar and the relative comfort of their uncle’s house. Aïsatou thought she was going to lose her mind. Her head ached, and her stomach churned with the greasy leftover rice she had eaten for breakfast. Outside of Rufisque, with the car rapide caught in traffic, trapped in a morass of steel just as tightly as she was trapped in a morass of flesh, the heat descending around them and the humid air ceasing to move, she had vomited on the floor in front of her and on the dress that her mother had made her for the trip. The sick, rotten smell of her stomach contents wafted throughout the car, and the other passengers began to exclaim in dismay. Trying to stay clear of the vomit, the fat woman to her left pressed herself against the old Pulaar man sitting next to the window. The two began to argue heatedly, but Aïsatou ignored the rapid ping-pong of their exchange. She leaned her miserably hot forehead against the metal frame of the seat in front of her, as Coumba used a corner of the already soiled dress to dab at the vomit trailing down her chin.
It was one of her worst childhood experiences, but it had been thankfully brief—a few miserable hours trapped in a car rapide. Now she felt trapped and miserable almost all of the time. It seemed that she did little but endure the old man’s degrading comments and listen to the sound of his groaning. There was precious little joy to be had as she gathered with her family around the bowl for meals or stretched out on a mat to take advantage of the cool evening breezes. The old man’s pain and vitriol pressed in on her from all sides, threatening to squeeze out all other thoughts and emotions. Laughter and joy survived only in the gaps left over, in the interstitial space between malignancies.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
That night, the three visitors from Touba held a vigil for the old man. They sat in a circle beneath the neem tree, chanting the Koran, their shrill voices largely drowning out the sound of moaning. Many of the neighbors gathered in the compound to listen to the chanting and to add their prayers for the old man’s health. When all of her chores were complete and the guests were taken care of, Aïsatou settled down on a cloth near the door of her hut with one child on each side. She rocked her children back and forth in time to the rhythm of the chanting, whispering her reassurances. The crowd of people around them had left little space to stretch out, and when first Soxna, and then Dabba, nodded off, both continued to sit up and to rest their heads against their mother.
With no duties to perform and her daughters asleep, Aïsatou’s thoughts turned to her dreams. As everyone else focused on prayers for the old man’s recovery, she meditated on his murder. This had been happening to her more and more, especially during periods of respite from her daily routine. It had begun to make her feel ashamed and anxious. What disturbed her most was the alarmingly practical bent that her thoughts would take. She would begin by recalling her dreams, but then she would pick these sleep-shrouded visions apart, methodically refining them into plans of action.
Tonight was no exception. The train of thought that began with a few hazy bits of dreamscape quickly turned more concrete and more detailed. In her dreams, it took only a few moments to reach the baobab grove, but as she began to reflect on this more, she realized that, in reality, it would take half an hour without any burden to slow her down. Dragging the old man with her, it would take much longer, assuming that she could make it at all. No, the baobab grove would not do.
But maybe she could just dump him in the fields. The rains had been good, and the crops were tall and thick. One could easily get lost in those fields of dugub and sorgho. Young lovers often used them for illicit rendezvous, the crops providing good protection from being seen, if not from getting pregnant. Maybe the crops that hid this adolescent rutting could hide something else altogether. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to haul him all that far.
Other problems presented themselves to her unbidden. She mulled over their solutions slowly, her eyes staring off into space and her fingers absentmindedly playing with Dabba’s hair. When would be the best time to do it? Almost certainly at night when Aliou and the kids would be asleep and the fields empty. How could she get him out into the fields? She could use Aliou’s wheelbarrow. How far should she take him? Out beyond the well to Babacar Diene’s field. It was away from the main paths and separated from the village by a salaan hedge. How could she keep him from making too much noise along the way? She could stuff a scrap of fabric in his mouth. How could she explain the old man’s absence? Was there any plausible explanation for how he could have gotten to the field on his own?
It was as she ruminated on this last question that Aïsatou finally fell asleep, her cheek resting against the top of Dabba’s head. The sounds of the Koran filled the compound, spilling out into the surrounding fields, joining the wind as it rustled through the crops and the stately acacia trees. Lulled by this ethereal music, Aïsatou and her daughters slept soundly amidst the crowd, temporarily immune to the press of humanity that surrounded them.
The next day, all of the guests left for home, and Aïsatou was back to her regular routine of cleaning, cooking, and mothering. But even as she went about these mundane tasks, her thoughts from the night before stayed with her. She couldn’t seem to control these dark fantasies, her mind returning to them unbidden whenever she heard the old man moaning or performed some menial task for him.
She started the laundry hoping that the physical exertion would distract her. She set up her tubs of soapy water beneath the neem tree, sat on one of the larger roots, and began to scrub. For a while, her mind was lost in the monotony of the task, but when she came to the first of the old man’s shirts, she couldn’t help herself. As she gripped his soapy collar and rubbed it together between her knuckles, in her mind she was gripping his collar and dragging him out into the fields, his two heels making tracks in the sand.
“Aïsatou, what is wrong with you?” her husband asked, his handsome face wearing a broad grin.
She blushed and looked away from him. “What do you mean? I’m doing the laundry.” She had thought that he was already out in the fields.
“Yes, but has the laundry insulted you? Your jaw is set like a wrestler ready to enter the ring. Surely your opponent has already been vanquished.” He laughed, and she tried to laugh with him.
“I’m sorry. I guess I was just trying to finish. I need to get dinner started.”
“Well, there is no doubt you will have the strength to strangle our fish for the ceebudien.” Forgetting her dark thoughts, she slapped at him and laughed in genuine amusement. He jumped out of the way gracefully and slipped through the gate, the long pole of his gopp resting jauntily on one shoulder. She watched the pole as it bounced along above the fence.
When he had gone, Aïsatou felt deeply ashamed of herself. She was not worthy of her husband. He was such a good man, and he was stuck with a wife who had such awful thoughts. Had he ever failed to take care of her? Had he ever laid a hand on her in anger? Had he ever let anyone else do so? And here she was relishing the thought of his father’s murder, actually imagining herself as the murderess. What kind of woman could contemplate something so monstrous?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Aïsatou redoubled her efforts to banish the thoughts that plagued her. She tried to focus on Aliou and what his father meant to him, and she scolded herself harshly whenever she caught her mind drifting towards violence. But close contact with the old man made it hard to forget his offensive nature and the possibility of making him disappear forever. It was a constant struggle to keep her thoughts pure.
Late one morning, a few days after the vigil, Aïsatou stuck her head into the old man’s hut cautiously and peered over at his supine form. All morning, she had procrastinated about going into his hut, hoping that he would fall asleep and that she would thus be spared the misery of cleaning while he glared his disapproval at her from close range. She had checked on him periodically but had always found him awake and scowling. Now, with all of her other cleaning finished, she was relieved to find him asleep at last.
She stepped into the hut and looked around her, wondering how one sick old man could make such a mess. Rice was scattered everywhere on the sandy ground along with clothes, pictures, plastic bags, and other odds and ends. With a sigh, she began to straighten up. She removed his breakfast bowl and set it outside to be washed. Then, beside the bowl, she made a pile of all his dirty clothes. The pictures and other random items she stacked on the rickety wooden table that the old man used as a nightstand. With all of the major debris out of the way, she began to sweep, moving the bundle of stems that served as her broom across every inch of ground, shepherding the rice grains and other trash along in front of her.
As she reached the door with her flock of refuse, she heard the old man stirring behind her, muttering unintelligibly as he emerged from his fitful sleep. Still bent over, she turned to see him waving one arm at her carelessly. “Mëy ma ndox,” he said weakly. “Bring me some water.” She dropped the broom and fetched his water, delivering the cup to him with a small curtsy. He grabbed it from her with an angry, reproachful look, and then drank deeply. He tossed the cup at her when he had finished, and then struggled to sit up on the edge of the bed. “Dimbëlil ma. I need to go to the latrine.”
Trying to hide the wave of disgust and dismay sweeping over her, she held the old man’s arm and helped him to stand up off the bed. His stench was overpowering as she stood next to him. In his weakened state, baths were an ordeal, and he did not take them often. She gripped his upper arm with both hands and guided him towards the door. She tried to keep away from his chest and his swollen belly as much as possible, but then he stumbled, and she had to place a hand on his torso to keep him from falling.
“Careful, woman! I could have fallen. Is that what you want?” She studiously ignored his question and tried to steady him. When he had regained his balance, she started him moving forward once again. With much difficulty, she managed to get him through the door and safely out into the courtyard, although his gnarled old feet scattered her pile of sweepings in the process.
As she helped him towards the sacket-walled latrine, he continued to berate her. “I should have never let Aliou marry you. He could have done much better. Mënuloo dara. You can’t do anything right. You can’t even cook. Your ceebudien tastes like sand.”
He wrapped his left arm around her and leaned most of his weight on her shoulder. Thus, her cheek was pressed against the wrinkled skin of his chest, her nostrils full of his pungent smell. She felt herself growing weak as she struggled with him across the compound, the sandy ground yielding beneath their footsteps. “He should take a switch to you. If I had the strength, I would do it myself. That boy was always too squeamish.”
A nearby tree was full of the sound of weaverbirds. She tried to focus on this sound, to will the old man’s voice to disappear into their chattering. She felt rage roiling inside her, like the churning of her stomach on that trip to Dakar. She felt it surge up from within, weakening her hold on the old man.
She felt him begin to fall, and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stop him. He tried to cling to her neck, but his grip was too weak and his momentum too great. He called out pitiably just before his right leg folded beneath him and his torso spun around. He slid off her neck and collapsed in front of her, the back of his head thudding against a log close to the fire.
Aïsatou stood there looking down at him, her nostrils flaring and the tears trickling down her face. The old man just lay there on his back with his right arm thrown out to one side and his left arm tucked up against the log, his exposure and his immobility seeming somehow obscene. She did not know whether he was alive or dead, but she could not budge herself from that spot to check. She wished him dead but was terrified at the possibility that she had just gotten her wish.
“Yaay, why are you crying? What’s wrong with grandpa?” It was Dabba speaking, her voice alarmed, her eyes moving back and forth between her mother and her grandfather. Aïsatou did not immediately respond but continued to stare down at the old man. On some level, she became aware that Dabba was repeating her plaintive questions over and over again, that she was becoming more and more upset. But Aïsatou remained mute until she heard tears beginning to seep into Dabba’s voice. At that sound, she forced herself free of the trance and turned to face her daughter.
“Dabba, everything’s okay,” she said, affecting a motherly calm that she did not feel. “Go out to the fields and get your father. Tell him to come quickly. Tell him that grandpa has fallen.” Dabba nodded her assent and then ran purposefully to the gate, clearly relieved to have something to do and to have some evidence that her mother was still in control. Her bare feet kicked up the sand as she sprinted through the gate and headed towards the field where her father was weeding their crops.
Using one hand and then the other, Aïsatou rubbed the tears off her cheeks slowly and deliberately. Bending over the old man, she peered intently at his face and his chest, but she could not tell whether he was breathing. Her eyes locked onto the bulge in his abdomen, and she wondered whether it was really throbbing or whether she was just imagining it.
A sudden, sharp intake of breath inflated his chest, and she jumped back, distancing herself from the abruptly resurrected old man. He coughed, and then a low moan escaped from his mouth. She stared at him blankly without making any move to help. How could he still be alive? What could he be holding on to?
A few minutes later, Aliou rushed through the gate and down the incline to where his father lay on the ground moaning. Startled by the sight of them, he stared for a long moment without speaking. His eyes moved from his wife to his father and then back again. “What happened?” he said at last. “What are you doing?” But Aïsatou just looked at him in confusion. Perplexed by this lack of response, he brushed past her and began to tend to his father. He cast a reproachful glance in her direction before gathering him up in his arms.
It was only after he had disappeared into the hut, carrying his father, that Aïsatou looked down to see that, at some point, she had picked up a black metal bar from the old cooking grate. Her grip on it was so fierce that her knuckles ached and the sharp edge of the bar cut into her palm.
Aliou emerged from his father’s hut as she was stoking the fire in preparation for cooking their dinner. Dabba sat beneath the neem tree with her little sister on her lap, both of them silenced by the pervasive tension in the air. Aliou picked up the gopp that he had tossed aside upon his arrival and stored it behind his hut.
“How is your father?” she asked him when he had reappeared. She kept her eyes down and her hands busy as she spoke.
“Mangi sant. But he would be better had you not been so careless.”
“Aliou, baal ma. Forgive me. Your father, he is too heavy for me.”
“Yes, of course,” he responded. Neither one looked at the other, and neither one mentioned the way he had found her, the way she had been standing over the old man. Aliou turned his back to her and pulled his sweat soaked shirt over his head. He began to fill a blue plastic tub with water from the cistern, and Aïsatou returned to tending the fire.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
After that day, Aliou’s behavior towards her grew uncomfortably cold. He did not tease her or flirt with her, and she would catch him looking at her oddly. She knew that his father was constantly speaking poison about her. He would tell Aliou that she had pushed him, or at least had not stopped him from falling, that she hated him. But it was not her father-in-law’s words that most troubled her. He had always spoken about her with venom. What disturbed her now was the lack of a response from Aliou. He did not defend her as he always had in the past. Neither his words nor his expression contradicted the old man’s hateful accusations.
She wanted to speak to Aliou openly, to explain how it had happened, but she was afraid that she might only confirm the old man’s account. As she replayed the accident in her mind, the thing she remembered most was a sort of shudder that had passed through her body as the old man had slipped off of her. It was as though he had been a bad dream that she were shaking off. And then she had just stood there until Dabba had brought Aliou from the fields. And why had she picked up that metal bar? She wasn’t sure she could defend her behavior any better than she could her murderous thoughts. So, she tried to stay out of her husband’s way and to tend to her father-in-law in good faith, to atone for her sins by being a conscientious wife.
She would sit by the old man and attend to him whenever she was free of her other duties. She hated being there, but her feelings of guilt along with everyone else’s expectations pressed in on her, keeping her seated on the mat beside his bed. She would fetch him water or mop his brow with a damp cloth, all the while absorbing his offensive ramblings or, more often, the sound of his agony. The old man’s condition continued to worsen, his pain growing towards a crescendo as his mind faded into incoherence. Sometimes she would imagine pressing a scrap of cloth over his face and holding it there, hastening his end. But then this idea would be quickly chased away by thoughts of Aliou, and she would pray earnestly for the old man’s life. The longer he lived, the longer she had to prove her worthiness to her husband.
She spent long, slow hours looking over at the old man, staring at that grotesque bulge, inhaling the unwashed stench of his diseased body, listening to his seemingly incessant moaning and ranting. The sounds seemed to fill her ears to overflowing, to drip off her earlobes and run down her shoulder to gather in a pool on her lap, until she could do little but lean her head against the hard metal bed frame and wait for the misery to end.
It was difficult to keep up with an invalid, her children, and her household chores all at the same time. Even with her sister Coumba stopping by to help out on occasion, there never seemed to be enough time to get it all done. The cooking in particular was overwhelming. It seemed that every day she would get started late and then everyone would have to wait for the food, and then Aliou would be sitting there impatiently on the bench with his bare back to her.
One day, she was rushing around the compound, tending to the cooking and to Dabba and Soxna who were both crying, and she ended up burning the fish badly. Not knowing what else to do, she served it anyway and hoped for the best. Aliou put the first piece of fish in his mouth and wrinkled his face in disgust. He spat it angrily on the ground beside the bowl. “Mënuloo dara. Can’t you do anything right?” he demanded.
She stared at him in shock for a moment, her mouth open, her hand cradling a ball of rice, and then looked quickly down at the bowl, afraid she would cry in front of everyone. “Baal ma,” she said quietly. Dabba and Soxna huddled close and looked up at her anxiously, unnerved by their father’s strange outburst and by their mother’s distress.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Aïsatou sat inside the old man’s hut on the mat beside his bed. For once, his groaning was subdued. He had fallen into a fitful sleep, and the sound of his pain came through as though muted by a heavy curtain. The wind blew through the door occasionally, but these gusts of hot air did little to relieve the oppressive feeling of being trapped in an oven. Soxna was playing on the ground nearby, lifting up great handfuls of sand and passing them through her fingers. The three-year-old’s only clothing was a pair of lime green panties, and she was rapidly developing a fine coating of sand wherever her sweaty skin was exposed. Aïsatou kept thinking about the bath that would be needed before too long, but she didn’t have the energy to move.
She stirred in response to the gentle tug of Dabba’s fingers on her pagne. “Yaay, when are you going to the market? Can I get a crème glace? It’s so hot.”
“I know, dear,” Aïsatou said groggily. “But I’m not going to the market today. I’ve got to watch your grandpa. Coumba is shopping for me.”
Dabba looked around in consternation. She hadn’t anticipated her mother not going to the market. “Maybe I could go on my own. You could give me 50 francs, and I could get one for Soxna too.”
“Dabba, I said no. You’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.”
“But I want one today! Please! Begg naa ko, waay!” Dabba started to bounce up and down on the balls of her feet, developing the steady begging rhythm that Aïsatou knew all too well. She clutched at her mother’s hands and bobbed her head with the persistence and vigor of a baby chick in the nest. Soon, Soxna took notice of her older sister and began clapping her hands and shouting along with her.
“Dabba, noppil! Danga reew torop! Torop, torop, torop! You’re being a spoiled brat,” she declared, shaking her hand loose from her daughter’s grasp. “You’re going to wake your grandpa.” Dabba did not respond to her mother directly, but she did look over anxiously at the old man on the bed. Her attention remained fixed on him for a long moment, and then her mother’s fingers drew her attention back Aïsatou began to unknot her little bundle of coins, and Dabba grinned broadly, forgetting the old man entirely. “Here, now be careful and stay away from the main road,” Aïsatou warned her before pressing two brass colored coins into the palm of her hand.
Dabba ran from the hut dragging her little sister behind her. Aïsatou stared after them for a moment before turning her gaze on the old man and sighing with resignation.
It was then that she noticed a slackness in the old man that hadn’t been there before. She leaned over and reached out to touch his arm. It was still warm, but he didn’t respond in any way to her touch. He usually stirred in response to any contact, but now there was a horrible stillness about his whole body. She stood close by, her knees pressed against the metal bed frame, and leaned in with her ear next to his mouth. She could not detect the slightest wisp of breath. Reluctantly, she pressed her ear against his chest just above the leather gris-gris and listened for his heartbeat, but there was only silence in the old man’s deflated chest.
She muttered a silent prayer, and then sat down in her chair. What was she to do? She could wait for Dabba to return and send her to get Aliou. But then what if her husband came back from the fields and found her waiting calmly next to his father’s body. That wouldn’t look good at all. She would have to go herself and go now.
Without touching the old man, she covered his body with a sheet and headed out to find her husband. It took her only a few minutes to reach his fields, but when she arrived, she could not immediately find him. She wandered among the dugub and sorgho, pushing her way through the green stalks and calling out his name. The long trailing leaves scratched her arms, and the closeness of the air made her sweat.
She heard the sound of someone moving down the path and headed quickly for the nearest edge of the field. She emerged to find one of their neighbors, an old woman dressed in a red and white boubou, passing by with a flock of goats in front of her. Each goat had an empty plastic container strapped over its muzzle.
“Mariam, have you seen my husband?” she asked the old woman.
“Waaw, weesu naa ko. Daay ñibbi. He’s heading home. I just passed him.”
Without pausing to respond, Aïsatou slipped past her and hurried down the path, hiking her pagne up with her hands. Mariam stood in the path, looking after her and chewing thoughtfully on the end of a small stick.
When Aïsatou arrived at the compound she found her husband standing over his father in the hut, his head bowed. “Where did you go?” he demanded accusingly. “He’s dead.”
“Aliou, I . . .I was coming to get you. I went out to the fields, but you weren’t there.”
“Yes, of course, you were coming to get me,” he said, turning to look at her, his watery, yellow-tinted eyes judging her. “Obviously, you are overcome with grief. That much is clear,” he said bitterly.
“Aliou, why are you saying this?”
He ignored her question and continued to stare at his father. “You should start preparing the meal. People will be coming.”
“Yes, of course.” She looked at him desperately, searching for some point of contact, some gateway into his thoughts.
“And try not to burn it today. There will be many important people coming. My father was a good man.”
“Yes, I know,” she said quietly, looking at her fingers.
“I know you didn’t think so. The way you were always disrespecting him with your insolence, with your carelessness.”
“Aliou, I didn’t mean to . . .”
“Bul fenn! Don’t lie to me!” he shouted, turning on her suddenly, his expression resolving itself into one taut, angry mouth and two dark eyes ringed in yellow-white. She felt little flecks of spittle as they landed on her face. He gripped her upper arm roughly and propelled her out the door. “I will have no more lies from you! No more insolence!”
Aïsatou rubbed her arm and walked slowly over to the fire, refusing to look back at her husband. Soxna and Dabba sat on the ground nearby, watching her anxiously and sniffling, their newly purchased treats forgotten in their hands. The compound seemed to press in around Aïsatou, making it difficult to breathe. She stooped over the wood and began to build the fire, the backs of her hands washed by her tears.