In the Belly of the Elephant Read Online Free PDF Page B

left by the rain.
    Outside the office gate, I stood in the street. The moist air caressed my face. It smelled of wet earth and eucalyptus, and something new—a sweet, spicy scent I had never tasted before. The scent of awakening. I gulped lungfuls until I was drunk with it.
    Shopkeepers called to one another around the perimeter of the market square and built fires to roast meat and bake bread for the evening. Strolling down the wide street, I greeted a woman who carried a baby slung on her back in a pagne . Three children splashed in a puddle and skipped up to touch my hands. Tittering like little birds, they ran to catch up with the woman. Everyone I passed radiated a festive mood.
    I turned onto a side street, empty but for a few donkeys tethered outside gates. I lifted my face to the benign warmth of the setting sun, a cushion of sand beneath my sandals. Flocks of chirping birds flew in waves from tree to tree. Above me, the claustrophobic ceiling of white haze, which had hidden the sky the entire three months I had been there, had disappeared, replaced by a high dome of brilliant blue dotted with whiffs of cloud. I nearly cried for joy. Here was the big sky of my childhood. Here was room to breathe again.
    A goat ran out an open gate followed by a woman wielding a stick. She looked past the goat to me then back at the goat. She laughed and called, “ Jam Kiri! ” Good Evening!
    “ Jam Tan !” I replied. Peace, all is well, and meant it.
    Where four roads intersected, I turned onto a street with eucalyptus trees along one side. Laya, the woman I had hired as a cook, lived on this street. I had hired her a month before and she and her children had eaten the noon meal with me nearly every day since. She was teaching me Fulfuldé, and each day gave us permission to begin our meal with the word, “ Bismillah !” She was helping me begin.
    All this, and I had not yet visited her home. Her gate was first on the left. The thock thock of wood against wood, pestle against mortar, echoed into the street.
    I knocked, calling, “Bock, Bock!”
    Several small children ran to open the gate and took my hand. Laya stood off to the right near a one-room hut. Beaming, she put aside the long pestle, wiped her hands on her pagne , and came forward. Laya shared my height, five feet nine inches. Pencil-thin scars from a tribal rite of passage ran from the outer top of her cheekbones down across both cheeks, accentuating her slender nose and full lips. Black eyes shaped like almonds looked past my face and into my heart.
    “ Jam Kiri , Laya.”
    “You are welcome.” She smiled, took my hand with both of hers, and led me toward an older man who sat in a folding chair near a hut at the back of the compound. The walls were cracked and the roof needed mending. The man looked twenty years Laya’s senior, cheeks sunk into dark hollows below protruding cheekbones. He stood with slow, deliberate movements.
    “This is my husband,” she said, then turned to her husband and talked to him in Fulfuldé, ending with my name.
    The man smiled and shook my hand. I touched my right forearm with my left hand to show respect. He sat down again, and Laya motioned for me to follow. We walked back to her section of the courtyard where her four children worked on various chores near the fire.
    Aissatou, the eldest daughter, pounded millet in the wooden mortar. Issa, the older son, broke sticks into pieces, and a smaller boy with a devilish smile, Hama, swept the sand with a broom of millet stalks tied together with twine. The baby, Ousmann, pushed sand into piles at Aissatou’s feet.
    I sat on a low stool against the wall of Laya’s hut. Her hut was very small and I wondered how all five of them could sleep inside. Laya said something in Fulfuldé to Issa, who ran out of the courtyard and returned in a few moments with a bottle of orange soda. He opened the bottle, careful to leave the cap covering the top, and offered it to me. I had noticed they did