The Paper House (2 page)

“Nine out of ten is good,” Safiyah told her. “Maybe you will get them all right next time.” The two girls linked arms and walked on together.

Safiyah was filled with relief when she saw Cucu asleep on her bench outside their shack. She always worried when she left her grandmother alone to run errands in the neighborhood. She dreaded coming home to find her dead, the way she had found her mother soon after they had come to Kibera. Safiyah had been washing their clothes in the nearby ditch when her mother died. They had come here for her mother to find work after the crops failed and there was no food in the village.

Now Cucu was all the family Safiyah had. She could never survive alone in this awful place if something happened to her grandmother.

Cucu's skin was ashen as she dozed against the wall. Sweat ran down her cheeks. She opened her eyes as Pendo and Safiyah hurried to her side. “My lovely girls.” She smiled.

“Can Pendo stay and play?” asked Safiyah.

“Go home and change first,” Cucu told Pendo. “Your mother would not want you to dirty your lovely uniform.”

“I've got chores,” said Pendo. “But I will see you later, Saffy.” As Pendo darted away, her schoolbag banged against her hip and her skirt whipped against her legs

“Obedient child,” said Cucu as Pendo dashed along the alley. The red of her sweater flickered in the distance like flame from a fire.

Safiyah put her magazines on Cucu's lap. “Look.”

“Something for me?” asked her grandmother. “Me and my old eyes.” She glanced at a bright cover of a woman wearing a yellow dress.

“They are for patching the walls,” said Safiyah. “But you can look at them first.”

Cucu stroked Safiyah's face. “What would I do without you?” She coughed harshly into a bunched rag.

Safiyah ran indoors and fetched a bowl. She held it for her grandmother to spit in until the coughing stopped. She stroked her cucu's shoulder as she slumped back against the wall with her eyes closed.

When she was sure the coughing fit was over, Safiyah ran across the alley to empty the bowl. Little flecks of blood floated on the surface. This was the second time Safiyah had seen blood after one of Cucu's coughing fits.

Safiyah wiped the bowl with her sleeve. If she told anyone, her grandmother might have to go to the hospital. Some people who ended up there never came home again.

Chapter Three

That evening, Safiyah turned the pages of the magazines she had found at the dump while her grandmother watched from under their thin blankets.

Cucu couldn't read. Nor could Safiyah. She had not been to school since they left their village, two day's bus ride away. School lessons were often free here in Kibera, thanks to rich people who donated money. But a student's family was responsible for their uniform and books, which cost money—money Safiyah and her grandmother would never have.

“Lovely shoes,” said Cucu. In the picture Safiyah held out to her, a man leaned back in his chair smoking a cigarette. His shoes, with little tassels in the middle, shone like polished wood. Cucu always wore a pair of old runners with holes cut away for her bunions. Safiyah sometimes wore a cracked pair of flip-flops. But she went barefoot most of the time.

Safiyah liked the pictures of ladies' clothes and fancy houses. And the ones of models with smooth makeup. But when she pressed her face against a picture of a bottle of perfume all she could smell was the stink of garbage.

The little boy at the dump was right. There were lots of pictures of cars. A green one with an open roof and a red one with silver in the middle of the wheels. There was even a row of white cars with pretty girls sitting on them, their yellow hair streaming behind.

In Safiyah's village, one man drove a noisy truck he had built himself. Here, she sometimes played in the skeletons of old cars abandoned beside the railroad tracks. She had never been in a car that worked.

Safiyah tore out the pictures she liked best. She put them in a pile. “I'm going to keep some to put on the walls after I fill all the cracks,” she told her grandmother. “But how can I make them stay?”

“Some maize flour and a little water will make a paste,” said Cucu as she fanned through a handful of pictures. She held them close to her face to study them in the dim light of the shack.

“We don't have flour.” Safiyah gathered all the pages that were just a gray muddle of writing. “But maybe this will work.” She tore the paper into small pieces, dipped each one in the bucket of water that was kept under the bed, and then twisted each scrap into a little roll.

Cucu watched as Safiyah climbed on the bed to stuff paper into the cracks in the walls. Safiyah moved their little stove and a basket of old clothes out of the way to reach into the corners. Cucu pointed out where to put the scraps of paper, guided by the light that showed through the gaps.

Later, when her grandmother fell asleep, Safiyah sat on the end of the bed listening to her wheezy breath. There were still lots more gaps in the walls, but if she used up all the magazines she'd found at the dump, she would no longer be able to look at the pictures of fancy clothes, nice houses and food.

“What are you doing?” Pendo stood in the doorway in her striped shorts and a green sweater with a hole in the elbow. She was barefoot now too.

“Shhh.” Safiyah gestured to her sleeping grand-mother and led Pendo outside.

Pendo took a picture from Safiyah's hand. “Look at all that blue water.” A glinting swimming pool was shaped like a big apple. “My uncle went to the ocean once,” she boasted. “The water stretches out forever, he said. Just like this.”

“These are the best pictures. I stuffed the others in the walls to fill the cracks,” Safiyah said. “If I can keep out the cold and smoke, maybe Cucu will get better.”

She wanted to tell Pendo how afraid she was that her grandmother might die. But the words were too hard to say aloud. Even to her best friend.

The girls peeked through the doorway at Cucu. The light from the flickering lamp made the hollows in her cheeks look deeper. All the sadness of their hard life showed in Cucu's face, thought Safiyah.

What did her own sleeping face look like? she wondered. Especially when she had nightmares all night. She wanted to tell Pendo about the blood she'd seen in the bowl earlier. But Pendo would tell a grownup, and Cucu would end up in hospital.

And then what will happen to me? thought Safiyah. She swallowed hard. “Let's look at the other pictures,” she said. She blew out the lamp and tightened the thin blanket around Cucu's shoulder. She pulled the frayed curtain across the doorway and went outside again, so they wouldn't wake her grandmother.

Chapter Four

While Cucu slept indoors, the two girls spread the pictures on the ground close to the house, out of the way of passing feet and bicycles.

Evening was a busy time in Kibera. The streets filled up with people coming home from jobs as maids or drivers or from tending their market stalls. They gathered to discuss the day's news. They strolled along arm-in-arm in laughing groups or ducked into the tea shop to visit with friends.

Back in Safiyah's village, everyone had gathered in the shade after a long day of work. Babies who had spent the day tucked into their mothers' shawls played in the dry earth. Women cooked the evening meal under the branches of the plane trees. And every night Safiyah fell asleep to the comforting sounds of village life.

There, Safiyah had been surrounded by family and villagers. People she had known all her life. Here, there was just her and Cucu, with strangers—some of them dangerous and frightening—everywhere.

Everything was so different in Kibera. The noises were louder and the smells stronger. Flies hovered above trenches of mucky water. Garbage lay everywhere. Packs of dogs roamed the alleys, barking and howling, rooting for food and getting in snarling fights. Flocks of birds scavenged through the garbage dump and sat in noisy rows on the power lines above the railroad tracks. Fires sometimes destroyed whole rows of shacks. Gangs threatened old people and women and little kids.

Safiyah was often woken in the middle of the night by shouting, crying and terrible screams. “Go to sleep,” Cucu would say as she stroked her back. “It's none of our business.” But still Safiyah lay wide awake for hours, weeping quietly into her blankets as she remembered how safe she had felt back in their village, when her mother was still alive.

“These would look good on the walls,” said Pendo as she flipped through the pile of pictures. She sat on Cucu's bench, swinging her legs. “My mother only lets us put up pictures of Jesus.”

Pendo's family attended the church that met every Sunday morning in a warehouse near the railroad tracks. Sometimes Safiyah stood in the back and sang along with the hymns. But she always ran home as soon as the collection bowl was passed around.

It was too far for Cucu to walk. Instead, she stayed on her bench and listened to the hymns drifting down the lanes.

As Safiyah watched Pendo leafing through the colored papers, pictures started to form in her head. The bright patterns of the ladies' hats and shawls and the glowing red robes of the choir when everyone crammed into church on Sundays. In her mind she saw the glorious mix of shapes and colors that changed the dark and smelly warehouse church into a garden full of light.

Even if it was just for one day a week.

Safiyah stepped into the lane to look back at her shack. “I'm going to put these pictures on the walls,” she told Pendo “That was my idea!”

“I'm going to put them outside,” Safiyah said. “So everyone can see.”

Pendo stood beside Safiyah and studied the shack. “How?”

“I need scissors,” Safiyah told her. “To cut out the best pictures. Can you get some from school?”

“Maybe,” said Pendo.

“Can you get paste too?”

“We have big jars of it.” As Pendo nodded, her tiny braids danced up and down. “Mr. Littlejohn will give me some if I tell him it is for an art project. He says everyone needs to be creative.” She held up the picture of the swimming pool. “Can I keep this one?” She folded it up and put it in her pocket before Safiyah could answer. “Where did you get all the pictures anyway?” she asked.

“From the dump,” Safiyah told her. “Guess who was there?”

“Who?” asked Pendo.

“Blade. That big boy with the yellow pants and the marks down his face.”

Pendo frowned. “He and his gang strut around like they are the bosses of Kibera.” She shuddered. “You better stay away from him.”

“He broke up the fight between me and another kid.”

“Did he hurt you?” asked Pendo.

“He told me to go home,” Safiyah told her. “He knows about Cucu.” “How do you know?”

“He told me to hurry home to her,” Safiyah said.

Pendo shrugged. “That was just a good guess. Lots of kids live with their grandmothers.” She folded another picture and stuffed it her pocket. “Don't go near him again, Saffy. I've heard awful things about his gang.”

The alley was filling with shadows. Smoke from the neighbors' supper fires drifted between the shacks. Through some doorways, Safiyah could see people eating their meals in pools of flickering light. Others shared a cot while they played cards or mancala.

Soon after they had arrived, Mr. Zuma had told Cucu and Safiyah that about half a million people lived in Kibera. Even though her own neighborhood was crammed with people, half a million was more than she could imagine in one place!

“I have to go,” Pendo said. She handed the stack of pictures back to Safiyah. “See you tomorrow.”

“Don't forget to ask about the scissors and paste,” Safiyah told her.

“I won't.”

Safiyah watched her friend trot home. How nice it must be to go home to a warm house where your parents and brother waited for you, perhaps with a nice supper, steaming hot, smelling lovely. Neither she nor Cucu had eaten since morning. But there was only enough soup for one meal. They would share it for tomorrow's breakfast.