It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know. 

—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Not long ago, I stopped at our neighborhood bookstore and there on a back table among scattered secondhand paperbacks I saw one I’d read many years before and since forgotten. It was called Catholics and was written by Brian Moore. Bree-an Moore, I said to myself, then wondered where I’d learned to pronounce the name that way. I couldn’t remember what the book was about or when I’d come across it. But walking home in the March afternoon sun, the light of the equinox sweeping both east and west, I remembered a time and place I hadn’t thought of for a long time: the summer of 1989 at Yaddo.   

I had gone to the artists’ colony for a stay of six weeks with a single hope: that during my time there I might find a voice to tell a story that had long eluded me. I’d tried one voice, then another. To my ear each attempt sounded false, contrived, as if in a language I barely recognized. For a year I worked doggedly and achieved nothing.

Years before, my husband, C., and I had traveled to Nigeria to teach at Igbobi College, a secondary school not far from Lagos on the Atlantic coast. We could scarcely believe our good fortune. The night skies above Igbobi were misty with stars, the rain-washed mornings scented with frangipani. Although we didn’t know how to pronounce their names, we immediately recognized that the schoolboys, who had come from all over Nigeria, were outstanding students. They were earnest, irreverent, curious. They memorized long speeches from Shakespeare without being asked. Nigeria had become independent only two years earlier and the English presence, though on its way out, was everywhere. I had a sense of being surrounded by immensities I was incapable of understanding. We had one child, then another. We made a trip to the north into savannah country and then closer to the desert. We promised each other we would return. 

And I promised myself that after leaving Africa, I would not speak in a facile way about what I was seeing and learning and hearing. I would not fill silences with the urgencies of talk. I didn’t begin to write till many years later, but I forbade myself to turn raw experience—the things inscribing themselves on my imagination—into an afternoon’s conversation. I would be silent. A promise not always kept.

Five years after our departure from Nigeria we returned to Africa, this time to French West Africa. We continued along our earlier path toward the desert, but further north this time, to Niger, in the Sahel. To a town called Zinder. Instead of the rich soil of an equatorial forest, in Zinder we encountered sandstorms. The heat was intense, the rainy season a matter of weeks. We’d had a third child, our last. And C., who’d become interested in African languages, had started collecting Hausa proverbs for a dissertation. The Hausa people were the most numerous of any in Zinder. Fulanis and Tuaregs and other groups speaking their own languages moved through town and on. 

In Zinder, our little girls seemed to have no trouble amusing themselves with nothing. It was I who had a difficult time finding my bearings. Everything seemed to be hiding behind empty space. I couldn’t find the edges. So in the mornings I watched the shadows instead, the dramatic sweep of the absence of light. I listened to the muezzin’s call to prayer five times a day. 

In the afternoons, following the sieste when all of Zinder was shuttered, the girls and I made excursions. We visited Garba’s atelier, where he and his apprentices worked with leather: sandals for feet that trod the grainy sand, wallets, book covers for the Qur’an, saddles and horse gear. And for Tuaregs, the saddlebags in red and green worn by their camels as they moved in a caravan across the desert to Agadez in search of salt. Garba drew the outline of the little girls’ feet on pieces of cardboard and told us to return later. Or we might make our way to the deserted hostel to listen there to a tape of Peter and the Wolf. As we passed from one place to another, I bowed to the old men in black turbans sitting on mats beneath neem trees, fingering their beads. 

But our favorite destination was the boucherie to see if we could stroke the kittens tended there by Michel, the butcher. On the way out, as on the way in, we greeted the blind beggar, Hamidu, who sat just outside the butcher’s door. He couldn’t see us. But then again, did we see him? It seemed an important question.

We spent a year in Zinder and then, after our return, moved to New York City. The girls grew up. I had started writing at last, had published a few stories. Zara, our eldest daughter, now twenty-one, joined the Peace Corps and was sent, improbably, to a village in Niger not far from Zinder. In Matameye she worked in a baby clinic. I missed her, missed Africa, and although C. was teaching and couldn’t travel with me, I decided to visit Matameye for a month. 

There, a privileged view of a third face of West Africa was given me, brought alive by Zara’s easy familiarity with her many neighbors and by her fluent Hausa. The crops were failing because of drought and during visits to the baby clinic I saw emaciated children treated for dehydration, fed water drop by drop, saw huge eyes staring out from skulls. I could scarcely believe Matameye’s generosity during a time of famine, the outpouring of gifts to Zara so she had enough to feed her mother. I listened for the muezzin’s call to prayer at dawn with its reminder that prayer is better than sleep. I observed the Qur’anic students who visited our compound each evening, extending a bowl. They were being taught to live by charity alone.

But what I hadn’t anticipated was the rush of memory that overwhelmed me, as if Africa was giving back to me in all abundance what I’d lost. Sparked by the sight of so many infants at the clinic, images swarmed: the births of my daughters Zara and Lizzy in the Lagos Island Maternity Hospital, then Igbobi College and our old schoolboys, wherever they might be now, some certainly dead in Biafra. Recollections, too, of Zinder—only a short journey away—that had left a mysterious imprint I was still trying to decipher. We made a day trip by bus, Zara and I, to find the house where we’d lived so many years before. 

And then, just before leaving Matameye, I traveled alone to Zinder and spent the day there. Solitary for the first time in the beloved city, I wandered bereft from one spot to another, places I hadn’t visited during my recent trip with Zara. I made my way to the empty hostel where a trapped bird flew blindly from one wall to another as I sat alone in the stupefying heat. I couldn’t remember where Garba and his atelier was, but knew the boucherie was on the main stretch, a much simpler address.

Once I’d been well acquainted with the shop where the little girls and I had gone during many a long, empty afternoon. We had wanted a destination and there was much of interest at Michel’s. A blackboard, just as in Paris, hung in full sight with the merchandise written in chalk: gruyère, saucisson sec, lapin, all flown directly from Paris to Niamey, the capital of Niger, and then in a small aircraft east to Zinder. Also, short aisles of small grocery items: cans of Nestlé milk, jam from Poland, biscottes. We might wander up and down the aisles looking at everything for a while. Pick up a round box of La vache qui rit, each segment of cheese wrapped in silver paper with a picture of a red cow’s mouth wide open in a broad laugh. 

But before entering the shop we were sure to call out a greeting to Hamidu, the blind beggar with the pock-marked face sitting just outside Michel’s door, drop a coin in his bowl. 

We couldn’t forget the afternoon when Michel, wrapped in a blood-stained apron, emerged from his refrigerated closet as we entered and waved us through to his side of the counter. We followed him out into an open courtyard beyond, ablaze in the afternoon sun. There, huddled against a corner of the wall, a little gray kitten crouched, trembling. Three vultures sat above it, dark shadows stretched flat on the sand. “Ah non!” Michel exclaimed and carefully put the kitten into his hand, carried it back into his shop. He set it down beside a saucer of milk. Then, while Michel and I stood watching, the little girls squatted beside the lapping kitten, stroking its back.

Now, seventeen years older and solitary, I had no idea if Michel still lived in Zinder, if he still kept his shop. I had wondered, approaching, if Hamidu might be at the entrance and then saw someone standing there in prayer. The third prayer surely, Asr, said when your shadow is the same length as your upright body. But now the one praying was bent over, hands just above his knees, face hidden. So I passed by quietly and entered the shop.

At first I didn’t see Michel but heard a vigorous chorus of voices, saw a little cassette turning on a shelf behind the counter. And there was the blackboard with items written on it in white chalk, just as before. Then Michel emerged from his cold closet, but slighter, more wiry than I remembered, and I saw new lines in his face like those in my own. He was the single person I recognized from those days in Zinder. But of course I was a stranger to him, he had no memory of me. Did he have some gruyere, I asked, thinking I’d bring it to Zara on my return to Matameye that evening, and he took a wheel and held the knife over it. “De trop?” he asked. As I told him no, not too much, I remembered La vache qui rit and asked him for that too. And biscottes. 

I asked him, then, what they were singing, the chorus of voices. Dark hair falling over his forehead, Michel told me briefly he was listening to Chansons de la Résistance. I waited for him to say more but, as if in answering me he’d betrayed a confidence, he turned sharply away. Had his father joined the Maquis when Michel was a growing boy and the Nazis were abroad in occupied France? When they were rounding up their Jewish neighbors in order to transport them to the camps? Perhaps, I thought, Michel plays songs of the Resistance to remind himself of the dispossessed, the hunted. Remind himself of those who put their lives at risk to put an end to the horrors.

“De trop?” I heard Michel ask his next client as he was about to cut a wedge from a wheel of Port Salut. “De trop?” when his cleaver was poised to separate a cotellete from a lamb shank. Yes, I remembered that. He had always been afraid of overcharging his customers.

Leaving the boucherie I silently bade him goodbye for always. “Never again in this life,” I whispered to myself. But as I passed into the sunlight I saw that it had indeed been Hamidu who was praying earlier. He was sitting in his usual place at the entrance, sunken eyes straining toward the sun. Ina gajiya, I remembered suddenly—how is your work going, a greeting for the afternoon—and said the words aloud. 

He inclined his head toward me, listening for more. As if pronouncing those two words of Hausa released others, I looked at his cap, his dusty circular cap, and as if by magic knew the word for it. Hulu. But I could scarcely extend our conversation by giving him the name for what he wore on his head. Then, before I could think, I heard myself calling out the words Sai anjima, I’ll see you later. Again he bowed his head in my direction, smiling a little. He neither assented nor disagreed. 

Thinking that his work of the afternoon might be to create an occasion for charity, I dropped a coin in his bowl. As I made my way to the bus station to travel back to Matameye, I bade farewell to the deities that haunt Zinder, city of baffled desire. 

Shortly before leaving Zara and Matameye, during the stillness of a long silent afternoon, I watched a vulture tossed by vast currents of air in a hot white sky and again promised myself as I had years before in Nigeria that I would say nothing of what I’d seen to anyone. I would instead try to write it down.

But back in New York City, it seemed the promise did me no good. I couldn’t find the voice I needed to say what had happened. And if I couldn’t say anything about Zinder, then all my stored silences had been for nothing. My broken attempts filled me with a despair I called to myself “the taste of lead.”

I arrived at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, in mid-July. A kind man helped me carry my bags and computer out of my car and through to a room in what they called the Mansion. He set my computer on a desk. It was a large room looking down on a stone patio and further below to a lawn framed by tall evergreens. I thanked him and he left. I plugged in the computer and started to unpack, deciding that after all I was too unsteady to try to work anytime soon. Then I thought I’d better lie down on the bed provided and rest for a while. But once on the bed I decided I’d rest for the full six weeks. I had hoped to try once more to write but could see I wasn’t fit. I wondered if anyone who had stayed in this room had ever thought of throwing themselves out the window onto the stones below. I tried to sleep but it was useless; I had entered a void. I knew nobody here and had no idea about schedules or meals or anything, so there was nothing to think about. I tried deliberately to think of nothing. But my head filled up with the attempt to think of nothing. I gave up.

Then out of the chaos a sentence came to me and with it an image of two children whom I’d met on my solitary visit to Zinder but since forgotten. After leaving the boucherie, after telling Hamidu I’d see him again soon, I’d encountered a one-legged boy with a crutch accompanied by a little girl who pulled herself along in the sand on blocks of wood, afflicted legs trailing behind. Lying on my bed, I saw the children again, but as icons, the gates of Zinder. I saw them as the gates through which I’d arrived, I saw the boy raising his hand in farewell as my bus pulled out at last at the end of the day. And so without thinking anything more I got off my bed and sat down at the computer and began. The children were there with me, my own children, too, the three little girls, as well as the boy and girl I’d left behind in Zinder, to whom I’d given the gruyère and biscottes I’d bought from Michel for Zara. I saw the beginning, I saw the end. I wept as I wrote, and continued to write that day and the next and the next.

My room was on a short corridor off a large hall. There was a sofa in that hall and when I passed through at night someone was lying on the sofa writing on a pad of yellow legal paper. He wore a blue bandana above shoulder-length honey-brown hair. He wrote steadily, did not lift his eyes. I saw him then and I also saw him at meals. One morning at a little table, he and I and two others had breakfast. He was cross, contradicted something someone was saying. I could see the others were offended. I was too young to be his mother, but not by much, and I readily excused him. In fact I liked him as well as I liked them. I silently took his side. 

I don’t know if it was that day or another not long after that we sat and talked. It was in the room with the chairs and sofas just off the open side porch, the room where people came and went with their mail and their lunches and talked casually. Or not. Why was he there? Why was I? In the late morning, people moving around us, we spoke. He told me he was going to Harvard in September to study philosophy. I said I knew someone who was going to Harvard to do the same, and told him his name. He told me his own name, David Wallace. Where had he come from? He said he’d grown up in Illinois, that his father taught at Urbana. He said he sometimes missed the Midwest. He said sometimes he wanted to return.

Then he remarked out of the blue that it seemed to him I was working hard. I wanted to reply, “So are you,” but held my tongue. When the talk at dinners turned to people inquiring of each other about their work, I said nothing. I was writing something, that was it. I walked around in a kind of ecstatic, grief-struck, long moment of everything sweeping up and filling the afternoons. 

But his observation had left space for something else. I responded in a way I can scarcely imagine at this late date. Did he say something more, something I’ve forgotten that would explain it? I told him that I’d lived in Africa and was writing about that, that I’d lived in the Sahel on the edge of the desert where people were Muslim and that I’d found their faith moving. The calls to prayer five times a day, the communal fasting at Ramadan. The gifts of a coin or two that even the poorest could afford to give a beggar. I told him about the bus I’d been traveling on when, at a time of prayer, we rolled to a stop and everyone except myself had gotten off the bus with their prayer rug or goatskin and prayed together in a sandy field. That I, alone on the bus, had looked out at them all from a distance, remotely. 

Because he listened with perfect attention, I told him something I’d kept a secret almost from myself. I told him I’d grown up Catholic and had put all that behind me but that after my return from Niger I’d begun, very tentatively, going to Mass again. But I said I didn’t know really what I thought or felt. Didn’t know one way or another what I believed or didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter to me anymore. 

He told me that his parents went to a Protestant church and that he respected their faith. His mother was what he would call devout. He said he was missing that, faith in his life. 

Yes, I could understand that, I replied. 

He said he wanted to give me a book. It was by Brian Moore, and he pronounced the first name Bree-an. He said he’d give it to me, he had it with him in his room upstairs. 

The book was called Catholics. It’s a short novel about a confrontation in some unspecified future. The confrontation is between a Vatican that now enforces a thoroughly secularized Church in which naming things as miracles is forbidden and the abbot of a community of monks off the coast of Ireland where the Latin Mass is still said, attracting crowds. More recently, the abbot has allowed a Mass to be said in the open air on the Mass Rock altar on Mt. Coom, as was done clandestinely in Penal times when Catholicism was outlawed by Cromwell. It’s only in the last pages of the novel that the reader learns the abbot has long ago lost his faith. At the very end, he agrees to obey the Vatican’s orders and is seen shepherding his rebellious monks into the abbey church. “Prayer is the only miracle,” he says. “We pray. If our words become prayer, God will come.”

I returned it to David but don’t remember whether or not we talked about it. I think we did, a little. In September, after we’d all left Yaddo, he sent me a book of his that had just come out, Girl with the Curious Hair. He’d inscribed it nicely. I don’t remember with what words, exactly, because I loaned it to someone and then forgot who.

I eventually finished the work I’d started at Yaddo and my first book came out, Still Waters in Niger. When I thought of David afterwards, I thought of him as a young man from a Dostoevsky novel. In what way? Intense, full of complicated longing, perhaps a little afraid of seeming sentimental—could that be it? I read his work as it was published under the name David Foster Wallace. Later on, when a story appeared in the New Yorker called “Good People,” it seemed to me I was hearing the voice I’d remembered from our conversation. Oh, there you are, I thought. I know you.   

Years went by and then one day C. and I received a letter from someone we’d known in Zinder named Guy Romano. We corresponded very infrequently but none of us seemed willing to let our friendship fade entirely. I saw the name on the envelope and saw him sitting cross-legged with us one night on a cotton blanket on a high rock just outside Zinder. He was a priest and the only guest at our party. It was our little daughter Elizabeth’s fifth birthday, and we were celebrating. Her hair was drawn back in two ponytails, one on either side of her head to allow a passing breeze to cool her bare neck. Her sisters were there too, one a year older, one a little toddling person. We arrived while it was still light, but at that latitude dusk swiftly translates into darkness. It was nighttime now, but there in the desert a rock holds the heat hours after dark. We’d brought candles to light the night. We had with us a baguette and some hard-boiled eggs. And of course La vache qui rit. Water. A little birthday cake. When we lit the candles, they burned a moment or two before Elizabeth blew them out. We sang “Happy Birthday.” Her rapt face was illuminated in the night. 

Guy Romano told us he was born on the border near Nice and spoke French and Italian equally. Together we spoke some mishmash of French and English, snatching whatever word was available. And Hausa, too, which both Guy and C. spoke easily. Guy told us that one day he would like to say Mass where we were sitting now, on this rock. The rock as altar would accommodate anyone who wanted to come. Guy hoped to send up his prayer surrounded by his Muslim neighbors, maybe in communion with them during the last prayer of the day, after the sun had disappeared. Or, who knows, maybe the first! He had seen the crowds bow to the ground repeatedly, had seen the ripples of kneeling people bow with their heads touching not the sand but their prayer rug. We had seen them, too. He had heard the call that shatters dreams just before dawn, listened to the clank of buckets as people around us rose for their ablutions. We told him we would like to be there on the rock with him when the moment arrived. This seemed unlikely as our time in Zinder would soon come to an end. But before we gathered our things to go down the little path off the rock, Guy Romano remarked, as an afterthought, that spending time here had changed his understanding of things. He didn’t know how, one only felt it in the moment. The prayers of his neighbors bore witness. His own prayers bore witness. The prayers rose and mingled as one. 

The letter read:

Chers Amis, 

We are not often in touch but I thought you would want to hear a word from Zinder. As it happens, it falls to me to give you melancholy news. But first I must ask about the three little girls, little girls no longer. They will not remember me but please give them my fondest remembrances, regardless. 

Have we ever spoken together of Michel, who had the boucherie, you will remember, and whose presence in Zinder always seemed a little obscure? At least to myself. How did he find himself here on the edge of the desert? And why had he never left as did most Europeans? I knew he was married to a beautiful Fulani woman, that they had three children, métisses. She came and went with the children, sometimes for weeks at a time. She moved about with her people who are nomads, you will remember, moving from one place to another with their cattle, with their calabashes and milk. But then, after a time, it seemed she didn’t return at all, I was told by a friend. She sent word that she would not. 

What can I say? I did not see Michel often but then one day he sent word asking me to join him and some others for dinner. He had prepared a feast. Garba, the sandal maker was there, and the deaf young man who sometimes helped in his atelier, as was Larisse, the Frenchman from Lille who was married to a Hausa woman and whose father-in-law called him “camel’s eye.” The Syrian, too, Ahmed, who owned the little hotel where his daughter spent her days and nights in one of the only air-conditioned rooms in Zinder. All men. And how could I forget to mention the beggar who sat in front of the boucherie who was also given a place at the table, the blind man with the sunken eyes who seemed always to be straining to see? I think his name is Hamidu. 

We sat behind Michel’s shop in the courtyard at a table he’d set up, the walls strung with little white lights. Nothing was spared, there were wines, yes, that went untouched by the Muslims among us, there were tender lamb cotelettes that everyone consumed with delight! They were braised on a grill à point, turned and turned again till glazed on the surface, but meltingly savoureux within. Forgive me if I dwell on this delicacy so fondly remembered from my own happy Mediterranean childhood. 

After dinner, after we’d sat long over our dates and cheeses and teas, after the full moon reached its zenith in the sky, we reluctantly bid each other goodbye. I remember quite distinctly Michel telling us, as he pressed one of our hands after the other, that he hoped we would all meet soon again. I had understood his words to mean that in his loneliness he hoped we would remember him. And then, you know, apparently when the last of us had gone, he went behind into his rooms and had taken his own life. He’d evidently stored some medicaments. 

Do we not see here an example of true generosity, a person who on the very point of departure desires to make his friends happy, to give them a moment they will remember? A kind of Last Supper? I shall always think of him as a martyr, of sorts. He loved and then cast himself into the arms of his friends. Before returning to our merciful God, to Allah the Compassionate.

After his death, trying to make peace with what had happened, I inquired and learned a little more about our poor Michel. I don’t know from what part of France he came, but it seems he’d been with the French militaires in Algerie at the time of the struggle for independence. But then, as you must know yourselves, the brutalities, the torture, visited on the poor Algeriens were terrible. At some point, I was told, our Michel abandoned his post. He could not return to France after his desertion so had crossed the desert one way or another and when he reached Zinder, stopped. 

I thought afterwards how we pass each other coming and going and know so little of the hidden anguish that waits in each of us. And it has proven true, since Michel’s death, that when one of us who was present at the farewell dinner meets another who was also there, whether in the street or the market or even at Garba’s atelier, we embrace, we look into each other’s eyes, we inquire after each other with brotherly concern. 

But before I leave you now I must tell you one thing more. I do not forget confiding in you my desire to one day say Mass on the rock where we made friends with the darkness. I have been waiting for the occasion and I believe now the moment is here. I have an earnest desire to say Mass one day for the intentions of our friend Michel in that same spot that holds the sacred memory of your little daughter’s birthday. But I assure you I will begin just before dawn, as I have hoped for so long, when my voice will join the voices of our Muslim neighbors as they lift their hands and voices to Allah. 

I have often thought the desert is like the sea. The wind stirs the sand before our eyes and refines and simplifies whatever it passes over. In drawing back it leaves behind fossils of all sorts, including the snails that are found in Zinder’s marketplace where camels are bought and sold on Thursdays. The tumbling rocks of Zinder in our own corner of the earth are almost all that is left of the sea that once covered the Sahara, the rocks that remind us that the waters may recede but the enduring mercies of God, of Allah, flow around us everlastingly and await us in the hour of our death. 

It was not long afterwards that I heard David Foster Wallace had died. And by his own hand, as Guy Romano would say. When I heard about his death, I grieved. For days I grieved. I found myself whispering to him as if he had indeed been my child, that it was all right, now he’d be all right. I wrote to Guy Romano asking him to include a name as Michel’s confrere when he said his Mass on the rock. I remembered Brian Moore’s book David had thought I might want to read and for the first time imagined what interest he might have taken himself in the story of the humane and doubting abbot. “Prayer is the only miracle,” the abbot says. “We pray. If our words become prayer, God will come.” During those long solitary nights of vigil on the sofa, David may have hoped the yellow legal pad was sometimes recording words that had become prayer. That we’d read them and each of us know, in solitude and wonder, a miracle.

I thanked him in my grief. It was he, the first one of all, who’d given me something that had sustained my anguished writing. “It seems to me you’re working hard,” he’d said. He’d given me his blessing and with the loan of the book sent me on my way. He’d alerted me to the possibility of the miraculous hovering somewhere nearby. What did I know of David, in truth? And what did I know of the Africa I’d inhabited for so short a time? But perhaps I’d felt that he’d reassured me, without words, that making it all up out of nothing was okay, that our struggles to recreate what was there only fleetingly are the best we can do and fictional worlds sometimes stumble on realities despite themselves. That some trick of a lost detail or the rhythm of a sentence sweep us into forgotten territories we’d been searching for. Bring us to the knowledge we’d despaired of. And many years later, as now, to the burden of an unpaid debt put down.

And so, even now, a final gift, a memory from who knows where. Something that happened that same day I traveled alone to Zinder, after my encounter with Michel and his chansons, after my tentative greeting to Hamidu, after the one-legged boy had held up his hand in farewell as our small bus drew out of the station and was winding along between the rocks of Zinder into the night.

It had come suddenly, the night, as it always did, and the heat was at last gathering in. But as we left behind the rocks and struck out on the open road to Takieta, a wind sprang up in the east and in the distance the dust suddenly rose in a cloud. Then it was raining, the heavens had opened, a deluge. In a matter of seconds, a flood was swirling around us. The bus had come to a complete stop, and for a time we sat silently, the twelve of us, listening to the rain thundering on the roof. Through holes in the floor we could faintly see the rush of waters rising beneath. Would the flood sweep us away? Everyone had heard stories of people drowning in the desert.

Then the rain seemed to have passed over our heads and it was much cooler. The waters drew back and it was time to go on. But when the driver turned the ignition key the engine didn’t start. He got out and opened the roof, unscrewed a plug and wiped it dry with a piece of cloth. Two or three people stepped down and clustered round him and consulted. More parts were removed. But when everything was dried and reassembled and the driver again turned the key, the engine still didn’t start. He waited a while and tried again, without success.

Then those of us sitting inside were directed to climb outside with the others. We were all going to push. There was only one door on either side of the bus and the strongest among us stood with hands against the opening. There was a shout and we gave a push, each of us and then all together, and the bus began moving and then moving faster while the driver tried once again and this time, with the momentum from outside, the engine kicked in.

It had been exhilarating, all of us under the night sky running along beside the bus. But when it started moving and some people began jumping inside, it seemed to me I wasn’t running as fast as the others. Suddenly I was mortally afraid of being abandoned in the desert while the bus with its other passengers sped off and away. What had seemed an adventure turned terrifying. I remembered I was lost and alone, a stranger. 

Then someone I couldn’t see put down an arm to me from the open door of the bus and I took hold and he hauled me up and inside. The door slammed shut, we were on our way. In Takieta, where the road turns south to Matameye, a few people got off. Then once or twice along the road someone would suddenly call out in the silence and the bus would roll to a stop and a passenger leave us, striking out in a vast landscape beneath the stars toward a village no one could see. We approached another bus going in the opposite direction and stopped for greetings, the drivers speaking with each other for a few minutes while I worried the bus wouldn’t start again. But I needn’t have. When we entered Matameye there were only three or four of us remaining. The streets of sand were dark, but it seemed the bus was not taking us to the station as I’d expected but following a route I didn’t recognize. It was only at the last minute I understood I was outside Zara’s compound, the driver had brought me directly to her gate. I was home.