The Garden of Burning Sand (3 page)

Dr. Chulu looked at Joy. “If I give you the medicine, will you administer it?”

Joy nodded and helped the girl to sit, speaking softly in her ear. “I have some juice to give you. I need you to open your mouth. I know you can do it.”

When the doctor handed her the first medicine dropper, Joy showed it to the girl and then gently inserted it between her lips, squeezing out its contents. The child swallowed the liquid easily. Joy repeated the procedure with the remaining three droppers, all of which the child took without complaint.

She understands medicine
, Zoe thought, feeling a surge of affection for
the girl.

Dr. Chulu took Joseph aside and Zoe joined them. “I’ll contact Social Welfare in the morning,” he said. “I need you to find her family.”

Joseph nodded. “I’ll go to Kanyama tomorrow. Someone will know her.”

Zoe took a deep breath, debating with herself. “If it’s all the same to you,” she said, “I’d like to stay with her tonight.”

The doctor stared at her. “That’s not necessary. We can sedate her if we need to.”

“I understand,” she said. In truth, she had deep misgivings about spending hours in the sickness-laden air of the admissions ward, but she couldn’t imagine leaving the girl alone after the trauma she had suffered.

Dr. Chulu smiled wearily. “If you want to give up sleep, I’m not going to stop you.”

The hours of the night felt like days in the admissions ward, and Zoe never quite fell asleep. She sat on a metal chair beside the girl’s iron bed and rested her head against the wall, trying to ignore the cloying odor of the place. The girl slept fitfully, troubled by nightmares Zoe could scarcely imagine. The night nurse—a middle-aged Zambian—stopped by on occasion and brought Zoe a glass of water. She drank hesitantly, hoping the water had been boiled or taken from a borehole. Even after a year in Lusaka, her stomach had yet to conquer the witch’s brew of bacteria and parasites that thrived in the city’s water system.

At seven in the morning, Dr. Chulu reappeared holding a stuffed monkey. Zoe had been dozing when she heard his heavy footsteps.

“I bought this for my daughter,” he said. “It’s not much, but maybe she’ll take to it. I imagine you’d like to keep your ring.”

“I got it back,” Zoe said with a yawn, turning to look at the child. She was lying on her side, her eyes closed and her knees tucked under her arms. “She made sounds for a long time during the night. But an hour ago she fell into a deep sleep.”

Dr. Chulu stepped to the bedside and felt the girl’s carotid artery. “Her pulse is thready, but not weak enough to trouble me. She’s going to be uncomfortable for a while, but she’ll heal. She’s one of the lucky ones.”

Zoe looked at the doctor, and he answered her unspoken question.

“I had a child rape case last month,” he said. “The victim was an eight-year-old with mental retardation. She was severely underweight and had all kinds of complications from malnutrition. Her parents weren’t feeding her. I see it all the time. Eighty percent of kids with disabilities die before the age of five.” He pointed at the girl. “At least someone’s been taking care of her. And now she has you.”

Zoe nodded, feeling a bond with the child that she could not explain. “What about HIV?”

He shrugged. “It’s a possibility, assuming the perpetrator was positive. But the likelihood of infection is low. We’ll keep her on ARVs and test her again in six weeks.” He gave Zoe a compassionate look. “I bet you could use some sleep. Why don’t you go home?”

She stretched her arms and felt the ache of sleeplessness in every muscle. Still she hesitated.

“I’ll get my CD player,” he said, anticipating her concern. “She’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” Zoe conceded. “I’ll give you my mobile number in case anything happens.”

After giving the doctor her information, she took a last look at the child and slipped out of the hospital. She inhaled the dry Zambian air and smiled at the rising sun. Even after years of visiting Africa’s highland plateaus, she still found the near-perfect climate a gift.

She took out her phone and called Maurice Isaac, a driver for CILA who lived nearby. He dismissed her apology and promised to pick her up in ten minutes. She called Joseph next. He answered on the second ring.

“Did you sleep?” he asked, sounding groggy.

“Not a wink. What’s the plan for today?”

He hesitated. “The plan?”

“Your trip to Kanyama. I’d like to be part of the investigation.” When the silence lingered, she decided to press. “Look, I’m not Joy Herald, but I care about this girl. I can call Mariam if you like.”

“That’s not necessary,” he replied. “I’m just concerned about your safety. The compounds are unstable with the election coming up.” He took a breath and gave in. “All right. I’ll pick you up at fourteen hundred.”

With the shades drawn in her bedroom, Zoe managed to sleep until noon. She woke again to the ringtone on her iPhone—the chorus from U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” She shook her head and blinked a few times, seeing only the blur of her mosquito net. A curse of Fleming genetics, she had inherited her father’s near-sightedness. Without corrective lenses, she would have been legally blind.

She threw aside the net and found her contact lens case on the bedside table. As soon as she could see, she checked her phone. She thought the caller might have been Dr. Chulu, but instead she saw Mariam’s name on the screen. The field-office director had left a voicemail.

“Good morning, Zoe,” Mariam said. “Joseph told me you plan to accompany him to Kanyama. Be careful, please. We’ll have a response team meeting in the morning.”

Zoe pulled back the curtains from her second-story window and admired the red leaves of the poinsettia tree in the courtyard. The poinsettia had been her mother’s favorite African plant, a symbol of the continent’s exoticism and fecundity. She took a fast shower—there was never enough hot water in the tank for a long one—and dressed in jeans and a lavender Oxford shirt.

Heading to the kitchen, she fixed herself a breakfast of eggs, toast,
and papaya and ate on the porch overlooking the gardens while rereading Proust’s
Swann’s Way
. It was a regular pilgrimage, the closest thing she had to religion after her years at Stanford. Like Proust’s narrator, she saw the past everywhere she looked, as if it were a layer of reality just beneath the present. In this, too, she was her father’s daughter. Along with his failing eyesight, she had inherited his extraordinary memory.

The text from Joseph came at quarter to two. She gathered her backpack off the dining-room table and crossed the courtyard to the gate. The guard—a recent recruit whose name she couldn’t recall—let her out onto the street. She saw the VSU officer behind the wheel of his truck, wearing aviator sunglasses and a jean jacket. As soon as she climbed in, Joseph pulled away from the curb, accelerating quickly down the tree-lined road. The sky was spotless, not a hint of cloud.

“How was your morning?” Zoe asked.

“Fine,” said Joseph.

“Do anything fun?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Why do you ask so many questions?”

She suppressed her annoyance. “I figured if we’re going to work together, we should be friendly. You seemed to have no trouble talking at the bar last night.”

He cleared his throat. “If you have to know, I spent the morning working on this truck. It is—what do you call it?—a money pit. I bought it from a cousin who’s a mechanic. I’m convinced he gave me a good deal because he knew it would be a steady source of income.”

She chuckled. “Glad to see you have a sense of humor.”

He gave her a sideways glance. “I have five siblings. You learn to laugh.”

She whistled. “Your mother must be a saint. What does your father do?”

“He owns a textile company.”

She frowned.
And you’ve spent the last ten years taking breadcrumbs from the government?
“Why did you become a police officer?”

His answer was cryptic. “One has to start somewhere.”

She sensed a deeper truth beneath his vagueness, but she decided to leave it alone. “Where are we going?”

“To talk to Abigail. She’s going to introduce us to her neighbors.”

They entered Cathedral Hill and took Independence Avenue toward Cairo Road. Sunday traffic was light, but pedestrians were everywhere on the jacaranda-lined shoulders of the road. Zoe sat back and watched Lusaka pass by. Designed as a garden city in colonial times, its leafy boulevards, stately Edwardian architecture, and quiet bungalows had in the decades after independence suffered the encroachment of grit and urban decay. The poor had come from the villages in droves, and the wealthy had responded by barricading themselves behind walls rimmed with glass shards and razor wire.

Crossing Cairo Road, they skirted the edge of the bustling City Market before entering the ramshackle sprawl of Kanyama. Vendors stood on both sides of the dusty thoroughfare, hawking tires and tarpaulin and talktime for mobile phones. More established merchants tended booths set back from the road. Everywhere Zoe saw signs of the presidential election: banners, flags, T-shirts, and posters, almost all of them green—the color of the Patriotic Front. The air, too, was clogged with electioneering. Bands of young men prowled the lane with makeshift bullhorns, castigating President Banda and the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy.

One of the young campaigners gave Zoe an angry look before shouting something in Nyanja. “What is he saying?” she asked, feeling a twinge of nerves.

“Roll up your window,” Joseph said, inching forward through the mob.

She complied quickly. “Was he talking about me?”

Joseph nodded. “He doesn’t like foreigners.”

Eventually, they turned left onto a tributary lane crowded with shabby cinderblock dwellings, their corrugated roofs scaled with the rust of many rainy seasons. Children of all ages scampered about, pointing at the truck and staring at Zoe. A few old people sat on chairs, watching the children. Missing from the street were young adults—the parents of the children. Some were working, no doubt, but Zoe knew their absence conveyed a darker truth: many of them were dead.

They rounded a bend and Joseph slammed on the brakes, barely avoiding a head-on collision with a pickup truck swarming with young Zambians in green T-shirts. The driver of the truck—a young man wearing a green bandana—honked loudly while his comrades beat the sides of the truck like drums. Zoe caught a hateful look from a lanky youth standing in the flatbed.

“Muzungu! Muzungu!”
he shouted.

She felt a surge of fear. “What are you going to do?”

Joseph nosed his truck to the side of the road. “If I were alone, I might teach them a lesson. But I’m not alone.”

As the vehicles edged past one another, the young hooligans pounded the roof of Joseph’s truck. Time dragged on amid the thunder of hands and shouts. Zoe felt the urge to yell at them, to put them in their place, but she knew it would only exacerbate the situation. At last, the other truck accelerated up the lane, leaving them in a cloud of dust.

“Bastards!”
Zoe exclaimed. “Who do they think they are?”

Joseph glanced at her but didn’t respond. He made another turn and took them deeper into the labyrinth of unmarked lanes. Most of the homes they passed had no doors or windows, and many of the alleys
were piled high with burning trash. After a few minutes, Zoe lost all sense of direction. The undifferentiated mass of slum-like buildings was dizzying. Joseph, however, seemed to know exactly where he was going.

In time, he pulled the truck into an alley not far from a weather-beaten house graced with a flame tree in the front yard. Grabbing her backpack, Zoe stepped out of the truck and was instantly mobbed by bright-eyed children. They pulled at her shirt, begged her for kwacha, and asked her to take pictures of them. She patted their heads and greeted them in Nyanja.
“Muli bwange? Muli bwange?”
It wasn’t long before she forgot about the troublemakers in the pickup.

She followed Joseph down a breezeway lined with flowerpots toward the door of the house. Abigail was waiting for them behind a curtain of lace. She invited them in and gestured for them to take seats on a couch covered with a sheet. Abigail sat opposite them on a worn recliner. She spoke hesitantly in English, pronouncing the words with care.

“How is the child?”

“She’s recovering,” Zoe said simply. “We need to find her family.”

Joseph took a digital camera out of his pocket and showed her the screen. “I have a picture of her. Perhaps it will help with the neighbors.”

Abigail stood, wrapping a shawl around her. “Come,” she said. She led them out the door and down the road to a shanty dwelling that barely resembled a house. “Agnes,” she called out.

An old woman appeared. Her skin was heavily wrinkled and most of her teeth were missing. She and Abigail exchanged words in Nyanja, and Joseph showed her the photograph of the girl. Agnes shook her head. She looked at Zoe and asked about the
“muzungu”
—foreigner.

Joseph chuckled. “She says your hair looks like gold. She wants to know if it’s real.”

Zoe smiled. In a country where almost all women wore wigs or hair extensions, she had been asked that question countless times. “Tell her I was born with it,” she said, leaning down so the old woman could touch it. “Does she know anything?”

He shook his head. “She’s never seen the girl before.”

Abigail bid Agnes goodbye and led them to the next house. A rotund woman was hanging clothes on a line. She smiled at Abigail but eyed Zoe with suspicion. The exchange between the women ended almost as quickly as it began.

“Her family was asleep at midnight,” Joseph explained.

Zoe thrust her hands in her pockets and took in her surroundings, trying to imagine the street as the girl had seen it.
I bet it was almost deserted
, she thought. In the compounds night was the handmaiden of violence. Those who were wise stayed indoors.

In the next half-hour, they spoke to two widows, a young mother nursing an infant, and a group of adolescent boys lounging under a tree. All of them denied having seen the child, and a couple of the youths made wisecracks about the girl’s appearance.

Zoe turned away, angered by their callousness. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

Suddenly, a boy spoke up. “Hey,
muzungu
, why do you care what happens in Kanyama?”

She stared at him. “Where were you at midnight last night?”

He shrugged. “I was watching TV.”

“So you were awake?”

He elbowed one of his friends. “Do
muzungus
watch TV in their sleep?”

The joke elicited a chorus of guffaws.

She ignored them. “Did you see anything unusual? A person, a car you didn’t know?”

The boy glanced down the street, then crossed his arms. “I saw a truck.”

She caught her breath. “What color was it?”

“Silver. Like this.” He reached in his pocket and produced a foreign coin, no doubt the largesse of a tourist or an aid worker.

“Was it parked or driving?”

The boy flipped the coin in the air and caught it. “It was driving.”

She traded a look with Joseph. “Will you show us where you saw it?”

The boy considered this. “What’s it worth to you?”

She didn’t blink. In Africa everything had a price. “Fifty pin. But only after you tell me everything you know.”

The boy’s eyes lit up. Fifty thousand kwacha was the equivalent of ten dollars. He stood up and his friends joined him, their banter gone.
“Bwera,”
he said. “This way.”