Читать книгу Phobos & Deimos - John Moehl - Страница 10

She was called Jose, short for Josepha. She was eleven and in primary school. She went to school in Bankim, about twenty-five kilometers from her home village of Bankop. She would have liked to stay at home and go to school there, but her family was just too big; she had six sisters and seven brothers. There was no way her Mother and Father could feed a crew that large. Fortunately, the extended family system offered options and she was living with her Mother’s childless younger sister—Aunt Ndija.

In many ways this move to her Aunt’s house was a blessing in disguise. Although she missed her family and her home terribly, school in the mid-size city of Bankim was much better than that in the village. No self-respecting teacher wanted to live in the village with no electricity, running water, or health center. The village teachers tended to be either semi-retired educators who had returned to the village from the city or else they were the real failures who couldn’t find a job anywhere else. If you weren’t lucky, you could end up with a village grade school teacher who was a drunk or child molester, or both.

Ndija and her husband Amidou were truly wonderful people. They lived on a small hill about three kilometers north-west of the market, on the town’s outskirts. They were far enough out of town where they could have a small farm around the house. They had a stand of plantains as well as mixed crop fields; depending on the season, maize, cassava, yams, groundnuts, or beans. They also had a small hen house with ten hens and a rooster; these birds providing enough eggs for their own needs plus a few extra for sale in the market.

The house itself was small, made of mud blocks with a cement and sand plaster and a tin roof over a bamboo celling. There was a large living-dining room with big wooden double doors as well as three sets of large shuttered windows. There was one large bedroom and three smaller ones; each of the smaller bedrooms occupied by a girl from one of Ndija’s brothers or sisters. This was a real luxury for the girls, for they surely would not be able to have a room to themselves if they had stayed at home.

The house was spotless. The floor and some of the walls and cupboards were polished to a high shine with the sap of a local shrub. The windows had curtains, the end tables were doily-covered. The salon, whose floor was covered with a colorful woven reed mat, had a comfortable settee and sofa, along with a variety of other chairs and stools. There was a large and well organized detached kitchen along with a bathroom and privy in the back of the compound.

Although the town had both electricity and running water, they were far enough out not to be able to have either service. However, the house had a very effective cistern system which supplied stored rainwater throughout the year. There were also hurricane lamps on high stands that illuminated the house very well, even in the darkest night.

In addition to Jose, there were her older cousins Colette and Mary. Colette was the second daughter of Jose’s Mother’s big brother and Mary was the third daughter of her Mother’s eldest sister, the first born of the family. Collette was in secondary school, college, while Mary was an apprentice for a local couturier.

Jose was in the final years of her primary school education, going to school at the Mission Catholique on the other side of the market, about a forty-five-minute walk from Ndija’s home. She would take a short cut, a path that followed a small stream down the hill and passed by the slaughterhouse before joining the main dirt road just half a kilometer from the market.

In general, she loved her walk along the path. Although she would close her eyes and sometimes even plug her ears when she walked by the slaughterhouse, and pretended not to see the red rivulet that came from there to join the stream, her perambulations up and down the path were highlights of the day. School was fine and she was an average student, albeit all told her she was above average when it came to smarts. But school was boring. School was a job that had to be done. School was claustrophobic. The boys pestered her, the girls often teased her because she was already striking at such a young age. The teachers leered and imagined but, thankfully, kept their hands off. School was to be tolerated but was certainly not enjoyed.

In fact, it was more her sense of obligation to her family and not the idea of getting an education that kept her in school. Neither her Mother nor Father had gone to school and they both regretted this shortcoming. Her parents made great sacrifices to help with her upkeep at Ndija’s and she could not let them down. So each day she walked up and down the path, the trip much more pleasant than the destination.

When she would leave home, she would start her trip in the fields surrounding the town and would join the path already populated by women going early to the fields to weed a maize patch or dig a coco yam for the evening meal. The women would have a baby strapped to their back, a hoe hooked over their shoulder, and a small basket with some provisions balanced skillfully on their head. She would meet men and women going the other way, to further away farms or going home with bundles of wood for cooking the morning meal. There would also be other children going to school as well as people going to the market to open stalls or shop for necessities. Most often people moved along the path in small groups of two or three, chatting and laughing, but always greeting all they met. Different groups would even keep up animated conversations amongst themselves as they moved along the trail. The rich, resonant voices were morning melodies that accompanied the crowing of the roosters and the singing of birds in the surrounding eucalyptus plantations.

As they got closer to town the number of people going to farms decreased while the numbers going to school and market swelled. There were people on bicycles, with a few better-off shop keepers riding motorcycles or mobylettes along the narrow by-way. All seemed in a hurry, but none were in so much of a hurry not to be able to greet and even stop to chat about the night’s rain storm or the new District Officer’s wife.

As the town got closer, the path widened and there were more pedestrians and more produce. There were small children pushing hand-crafted wooden scooters, there were men pushing wheelbarrows with fertilizer, there were boys with rented pousse-pousses, taking these handcarts to market to look for customers. There were men and women with great bundles on their heads, taking their harvests and wares to market, while others drove small flocks of sheep or goats and the occasional pig. Sometimes there were even nomadic Foulanis with a small herd of cattle.

When the slaughterhouse was in sight, the path was nearly a lane, filled to the brim with all sorts of people and contraptions. Then, as it joined the main road it became a true flood of humanity. It seemed as though everyone from the town and the surrounding district was on the road going somewhere to do something important, moving with great purpose, but always having the time to meet and greet.

At this stage, Jose imagined herself as a canoe floating in a river of the masses. She went with the flow and absorbed the gaiety and congeniality. There was great excitement and joy in the air. In the dry season there were so many people that they raised little clouds of dust and in the rainy season they were so numerous that you could hear the mud gush from under their feet. She floated in this river until it deposited her at the school.

There, almost like a dog shaking off the rain, she had to let go of the high-energy outside world and refocus on reading, writing, and arithmetic. This was like penance for the pleasure of the journey to school and payment for the similar pleasures to be enjoyed on the return trip.

Jose was not just a spectator in these daily rituals. She was definitely an actor. She would be the first to greet and knew by name many of those she encountered, including often knowing enough to ask about a family member or friend. There was a subset of those with whom she shared the path for whom she would always stop, even if only for a minute, to talk and share a smile. She would also joyously hail all those who inhabited the margins of the path, with the exception of those at the slaughterhouse.

She would wave and greet the shopkeepers, the bar tenders, the cafe servers, the office workers, and the laborers. She felt she was one of them or they were one of hers. In some ill-defined way, they were all one. Not all one because they shared the path. Not one because they shared the town. Not even one because were, to a large part, the same ethnic group. It was not this analytical. She simply and purely felt they were all one and should respect, if not love, each other as being part of the one.

Years later Jose remembered the path. The years had been kind to her but they had inevitably changed her. The harmony was no more. With great sadness she had learned that the naivety of youth was all too sweet, if not too unreal. Were that we were all really one. What a difference that would make. But, most unfortunately, a smile along the path is not proof of a good heart. People are people, as she had painfully learned. She so wished she could walk that path again.