The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 47
“Tutu!” she said, an ululation.
How many times had I thought about her while I was away? I had traded her language for friends who mispronounced my name, her stories for southern deference and suburban preteen angst. The smell of her foods, the way she pounded potato greens in that wooden pot, holding the pounding stick tightly with both hands at its crown, the dance of mothers come and gone, to make the harvest softer, easier to digest.
I held her hand. Would this heal the sourness of my dreams? Remember, she said, the sound of music, those songs about our childhood before the war, those romantic overtures, a reckoning. Remember, she said, you girls were like them, waving toward the children assembled for games in the open yard outside her gate. I was precocious, she said. I had run out into the field, she said. And while I cried, no matter how hard I cried, when she called my name I stopped, at once, because she said I seemed to know that tears were a way of letting the world know that the healing, the work, had already been done.
“Uhn wa meh lugn,” Ol’ Ma said in Vai, and an aunty called for her nurse.
“Take her. She will take her,” Papa said, gesturing my way to take my grandmother to her room.
“Oh. Okay,” I said nervously. I quickly glanced between him and Mam, only then remembering my parents’ warning, that the woman I remembered, so vibrant and young, our surrogate in my recollections of the war, could now barely walk on her own. I lifted her from her seat, and she gripped my wrists, firmly. She leaned backward, as if her body would collapse, or melt, and I pulled lightly. I drifted across the porch toward the front door, and my Ol’ Ma hobbled beside me, her body shrunken with years, her head tie dangling from her shoulders. She who once sold her inherited lappas to be traded in Junde during the war so we could eat. She who carried me across those fields and now relied on my direction, my pace. I felt her breathing in my hands, in her grasp, every step an introspection of those months of running.
When I was a girl, I wanted only for the dreams to stop. I wanted white space in my sleep so that I did not jump when shadows arose from the stirring sun. I wanted that medicine man to cut the demons out of my mind—remnants of a past of images now parasites of my imagination. When the sounds of the night, no matter how sweet, how familiar, intruded, I crawled sobbing across the hall and hid between Mam and Papa as they slept. They pulled me close to them and sometimes Mam wept with me. They laid their hands on my forehead and pleaded my case to God as Mam’s voice rifted and split open. Nothing worked.
One Sunday they told me the story of the beggar at the Siloam Pool—about how Jesus rubbed mud on his eyes and thereafter he could see. My teacher expressed concern about the stories I was writing in class—talking and running trees, houses with hands, singing dragons. Mam became afraid that year when she heard stories of American authorities taking children away from their homes if they were not cared for properly, and they could not afford therapy for me so sometimes while we played and she thought I was not looking, I saw her wipe her eyes during a deadlock gaze in my direction.
This blind beggar—it was his bath in the Siloam Pool that cleaned his eyes and restored his sight. I was just a girl, but I decided I would be baptized.
And Papa and Mam had gently pushed me to a pastor waiting in the water. I touched his hand as my bare feet got acquainted with the floor of the pool. The water was warm. It was the closest I had been to touching the cross behind the pulpit and I would have stretched out my hand but I knew that Papa would not be pleased.
“I now baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” the pastor said and sunk me into the pool.
Underneath the surface, my hands and feet extended to either side of me and I opened my eyes through the thick liquid haze. I came toward three ceiling lights in the distance and the water pushed against my skinny limbs and crept into me through hollows. That is the moment I should have thought of God and my healing, but instead I thought of my Ol’ Ma. Mam told me Ol’ Ma would never be baptized because she was Muslim, and as the pastor lifted me I was overwhelmed with sadness. I will never leave her behind, I thought.
“Never leave you behind,” I whispered that night on the porch to my Ol’ Ma as the iguanas cased Ol’ Ma’s steps and the laughter of Mam and her sisters resonated throughout Logan Town.
“What did you say?” Mam asked from across the porch, watching me still.
“Nothing,” I answered.
Another lizard revealed itself from behind the leg of Papa’s chair and scurried to the porch steps to the outlying yard.
“Another one!” I said. “Why are there so many? Geez.”
“They’re everywhere,” Papa said.
“You know,” Mam said, laughing, “one of my students told me the people here believe that the reason there are so many more lizards and iguanas now versus NormalDay is that they are the spirits of those lost during the war.”
They laughed at the thought and continued talking, kept eating those peppered dishes into the evening, while children were relentless in their games beyond the gate. And I watched those lizards more closely now, tried to catch their eyes in their beats of rest and inquisition, when their bodies