Harmattan (24 page)

‘Yes, yes. That’s all very well,’ Moussa nodded impatiently, snatching the key from the boy and then turning to address me. ‘You stay here and help this oaf. I have some business to attend to.’

‘When will you take me to my brother, Monsieur?’ I called after him, as he strode off in the direction of Avenue Nasser.

‘When I get back!’

I stood facing the young man, feeling awkward and unsure. After a few moments he shuffled towards me with his hand extended.

‘Mademoiselle. My name is Jacob.’ Despite the horrible gash which ran across his forehead and eyebrow, melding into his discoloured socket like the mouth of some offensive river, I thought that he had a gallant face.

‘I am Haoua,’ I said, taking his hand.

He smiled and then stood back to look me over. ‘This bothers you, Mademoiselle?’ he said, touching his face.

I shrugged. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Let’s just say I’m better at selling bicycles than riding them! – Not that your uncle would agree…’

We both laughed.

‘Moussa’s not my uncle. He’s my father’s cousin,’ I said.

‘I see.’

‘He doesn’t treat you fairly I think.’

‘He’s not so bad. I’ve worked for worse.’

‘Toh
.’ I looked again at Jacob’s wound. ‘Shouldn’t you have seen a doctor about that?’ I said.

He rolled his palm out towards me. ‘
Walayi!
Who can afford doctors? I will be fine. I still have my vision, praise God.’ He slapped his thigh. ‘And I thank Him that I didn’t lose my leg. Then I really would be in trouble.’ He disappeared back into the shop and re-emerged with another bicycle a few moments later; this time a shiny new model. ‘You know, Mademoiselle,’ he said, gesturing towards the Citibank building which towered over us, ‘I’ve seen many accidents out there. Often a cyclist or pedestrian with a broken limb or two has no option but amputation!’

I shuddered at the thought and then set to work, helping Jacob to wheel out and display the rest of Moussa’s stock. The shop itself was small, dark and cluttered. The unfamiliar smell of rubber was a welcome change from the stench of urine outside.

On every wall, shelves overflowed with saddles, tyres, pumps, cogs, chains and oil cans.

Jacob hauled a large folding wooden sign outside and stood it in front of the shop. When we had arranged everything to his satisfaction, ready for the day’s trade, he lit a little kerosene stove and offered me some sweet tea. We sat outside on two plastic crates and, although I had only just met this boy, I told him all about Wadata, my brother Abdelkrim and the plight of my poor mother.

He set down his plastic cup and looked at me, a serious frown on his battered face. ‘Mademoiselle,’ he said, ‘I will pray for you and your family.’

I thanked him and was about to ask him about his own family when Moussa appeared again, a cigarette hanging from his lip. Jacob jumped to his feet and frantically began polishing the handlebars of a green Hangzhou with the end of his torn tee shirt.

Moussa blew a great cloud of smoke into the air and sucked his teeth. ‘Hey!’ he said. Jacob looked up from his pointless and thankless task.

‘I’m taking the girl to the
Grand Marché
,’ Moussa said, nodding towards me. ‘You make sure that everything’s in order here. I just spoke to Monsieur Djennbe and he wants to collect his machine this morning.’

‘Toh,’
Jacob said. ‘I have it ready for him, Monsieur.’ He turned to face me then.

‘May God smile upon your family.
Kala a tonton
.’

I thanked him and followed Moussa back out on to Avenue Nasser.

The Boulevard de la Liberte is a fine, broad, straight road which passes in front of Niamey’s famous
Grand Marché
. I trudged along behind Moussa, staying close to him and feeling a little frightened, for we were now surrounded by hordes of people, all making their way towards the market. Hundreds of clay pots and dishes of all shapes and sizes lined the roadside. A vendor wobbled by on a bicycle, a clutch of live chickens, their feet lashed together with cord, dangling from his handlebars.

Another fellow ran alongside the bicycle, trying to keep up, on his head a tray with hunks of flayed meat laid out on brown paper. Groups of women, their heads piled high with baskets, gourds or bundles of fabric wove their way through the throng. A tall, thin man, wearing several pairs of dark glasses stacked up over his forehead, barred our way and thrust another armful of his wares towards us. Moussa pushed him aside and muttered under his breath. As he disappeared into the crowd, I heard the tall fellow’s laughter mingle with the vendors’ cries of
Solani
and
Coka
and wondered if it was at my expense.

At the junction of Avenue Ouezzin-Coulibaly and Boulevard de la Liberte, traffic had slowed almost to a standstill, as whole families struggled from taxis and trucks, wrestling their goods onto the dust before lugging them up the gentle incline towards the
Grand Marché
. Furious car drivers honked their horns, pedestrians swore at cyclists, animals brayed and squawked and bellowed unheeded.

We followed a boy towards the heart of the market, on his head a huge, vibrantly coloured assortment of buckets and basins, kettles and cups, all tied together with string. An old woman stopped him to purchase an item, and I stared as the boy lifted this great jumble off his head and set it on the ground. As he stretched across to cut free a blue pail, I realised that, together, his goods stood as tall as his chin. We passed stalls of chillies, beans, peppers and millet. There were sacks of rice stamped with the letters ‘UN’, tabletops strewn with boxes of baby milk, Nescafe, Lipton’s tea, women deftly fingering freshly mashed peanut butter into jars, blue-grey slabs of meat, busy with fat, black flies, groups of tiny, scruffy children begging for
cadeaux
.

A one-legged cyclist propped himself up on a crutch, while peddling cigarettes and matches. An agitated gendarme pushed through the crowd, flailing his baton to clear a path: ahead of him a boy around my age, wide-eyed with terror, zig-zagging to escape.‘Stop that thief!’ the gendarme shouted, as the boy dashed across our path, the sour odours of both pursuer and pursued mingling with all the aromas of the
Grand
Marché
and the overpowering reek of urine, and lingering in the air for a brief moment. Suddenly I recalled my poor, dead grandmother telling me that it was possible to smell fear. She was right.

‘He is taking a great risk,’ Moussa said. ‘If he’s caught they’ll chop his hands off!’ Theft was not a huge problem in Wadata–perhaps because my village had too many other problems, and because everyone knew everyone else, as well as a great deal of their business – but all my life I had heard such things said about crime and punishment in our cities. I was unsure whether or not they were true. It struck me that for a place brimming with the wealth of a fine city, there seemed to be a great deal of poverty here also. Perhaps the boy had stolen simply because he and his family were going hungry. I knew this did not make his actions right but, as I watched him weave through the crowd and disappear behind the gleaming French
supermarché
on the west side of the market place, a flurry of dust churning up around the bleached soles of his bare feet, I hoped, secretly, that he would not be caught.

We continued our slow progress through the hubbub until we came to a long, pockmarked table laid out with plastic beakers, glass tumblers and large metal flasks decorated with floral designs. Hitched to a white enamelled box trailer, a dilapidated three-wheeled cycle had been parked next to the table. Nearby, a large, black kettle bubbled and spat over an open fire. A small, stooped man with an ancient, creased face was busily lifting more utensils out of the box trailer and arranging them on the table. The thick white mat of hair on his head – as white as the snow in Katie and Hope’s photograph – seemed somehow at odds with his crumpled, leathery face.

Moussa stopped and nudged my shoulder. ‘Just wait ‘til you meet this old goat!’ he said. ‘No-one in Niamey can spin a yarn like old Nourradin.’

The man with the creased face looked up and nodded at us. There was a warmth about this face, in spite of its deep furrows and the fact that the eyes were glazed with a thin, watery film; the whites yellow with age and dust. It squeezed itself into a great, broad smile and opened a toothless mouth. ‘Hello, hello, my friends,’ the old man said, pulling back a wooden bench and indicating that we should sit.

Moussa took the extended hand and the two men exchanged their greetings.

‘Monsieur Nourradin.’

‘You have returned from Tera, Monsieur!’ the older man said, continuing to pump Moussa’s hand.

‘I have.’

‘And, God willing, you found your family well?’

‘I did,’ Moussa said.

I wondered if he had forgotten about my poor mother, or if perhaps he did not actually think of her as part of
his
family.

‘Praise be to God!’ the older man said. ‘God is merciful! God is great!’ His fixed smile seemed to unnerve my cousin as it beamed up at him.

‘God is great,’ Moussa repeated, his eyes flitting back and forward from the old man’s face to his feet.

‘Uhuh. Uhuh.’ The leathery hand remained clamped around Moussa’s. He did not let go until Moussa had, more or less, steered him in my direction. ‘And who is this fine young woman?’

‘This is my cousin, Haoua, from the village of Wadata in Tera,’ Moussa said.

‘Haoua, this is Monsieur Nourradin.’

‘Fofo.
Hello, young missie.’ Monsieur Nourradin said.

‘Monsieur.
Foyaney
.’

The thick white mat on his head bobbed furiously as he considered me, and his smile did not falter. ‘A pretty girl. A pretty girl, indeed!’

We sat down at Monsieur Nourradin’s deeply scarred table while he busied himself around us.

Moussa ordered a Nescafe for himself, placed a packet of cigarettes and some matches on the table and then fumbled in his shirt pocket, withdrawing a beautiful cell phone. (I had only ever glimpsed such a fine thing once before; when the
Sous-Prefét
had visited Wadata with his entourage, strutting around our village, shaking hands with our griot and the other elders, nodding and making promises and important announcements after an infestation of locusts had destroyed our millet and sorghum crops.) Moussa struck a match and inhaled deeply, then nodded towards Monsieur Nourradin. ‘He’s an artist, that one. Here from dawn ‘til midnight, come what may.’

I watched as the old man dipped a glass into the hot water without scalding his fingers. ‘Some tea for the little lady, perhaps?’ he called from his fireside.

My throat was indeed dry, but Moussa spoke up before I had a chance to answer for myself.

‘She’s all right,’ he said. ‘We’re just waiting here for her brother.’

‘Toh.’

‘Abdelkrim will be here directly?’ I said.

‘Perhaps.’

‘You spoke to him?’

‘He’s coming here, girl!’ His tone was abrupt.

I considered silence, but only for a moment. ‘Did my brother mention my mother, Monsieur?’

‘Walayi!’
he snapped, through a puff of blue smoke. ‘He’s coming! I told you!’ He poked at the cell phone on the table, so that it spun several times, like a donkey cartwheel. Then he sighed. ‘I spoke to him, yes. I don’t know about your mother.’

Monsieur Nourradin was standing upright now – insofar as he was able – the glass raised high above his head. From this he began to pour the hot water into another tumbler which he held at waist height. With all the ceremony of the performers at the
Cure Sal
é
e
, whom I had watched with interest on television, he carried out this procedure several times, transferring the hot liquid from one vessel to the other in great precise arcs; his aim true every time. When he was satisfied that the liquid had cooled sufficiently, he slammed the empty glass on to the table, spooned in a measure of Nescafé, some thick, syrupy milk from a little red tin can, added the water and then stirred the mixture vigorously.

‘
Voila
!’ he said, placing the steaming coffee in front of Moussa. He gave a little bow and then turned his attention to the needs of some new customers.

As Moussa picked up the glass, his sleeve brushed across the cell phone on the table. It wobbled gently for a moment and then lay still and silent, as before. I watched him sip at his Nescafe. I watched him suck at his cigarette. I watched Mousieur Nourradin preparing mint tea for the two fellows who were seated at the other end of the battered table. Beyond the French
supermarché
I could just make out a rickety row of tailors’ shops, their proprietors seated outside, feet frantically pedalling their ancient Singers. I was minded again of my mother, and her dream of owning a sewing machine.

I kicked my feet out of my plastic sandals and gouged my toes into the warm, gritty sand. I drummed a djembe rhythm on the tabletop. I considered the phone as it wobbled again. I sighed. I fidgeted. Suddenly, before I could stop myself, the words were out of my mouth. ‘Perhaps you ought to call my brother again?’

‘I can’t!’ Moussa snapped loudly, as if he had been waiting for me to make the mistake of uttering these words.

Monsieur Nourradin and his customers turned their heads towards us before resuming their conversation.

I bowed my head and worked my fingers into the folds of my
pagne
.

‘I can’t!’ Moussa leaned towards me and hissed again, his words agitated, still, but his voice more controlled. ‘Do you hear me, child? Look at me when I’m talking to you!’I raised my head to meet his cold gaze.

‘I have no time left on my phone,’ he said.

I was not sure what this statement meant exactly, but I knew not to ask about the cell phone again.

He drained the dregs of his Nescafe and belched loudly.

The attentive Monsieur Nourradin was by his side in a moment. ‘Another, Monsieur?’ he said, gesturing towards the table. It was only then that I noticed the mangled fingers of his left hand. I tried hard not to stare at the buckled claw and the stumpy, nail-less fingers, but by the time I had forced my gaze towards my feet he had noticed and now let out a loud, bellowing laugh.