The Atlas

THE BEST WAY TO CHEW KAAT

She could open soda bottles with her teeth. Her plump and delicious lips, her nipples swollen from nursing babies, her succulent clitoris, these and other dainties enthralled her customers all night, until at last they must snatch greedy gobbets of sleep. She never let anyone fuck her up the ass because that would be trying to fool God.

When he asked her if she loved him, she opened her eyes wide in the bed and said: My God! How can you ask me that? I treat you like my own husband!

One night he was chewing khat with her and her sister, holding each one's hand in the theater's darkness. Her hand was hot and excitingly sweaty. The sister's was cool and getting colder, because the sister chewed khat too much. She said: When I chew khat, I can't stop. Just want to chew more!

He remembered the boy at the Twenty-Four-Hour Green Bar, fallen asleep with his head on the table, pale like riverbottom sand. — From smoking brown sugar, the sister whispered.

The sister caught the smooth red skin of a khat stalk between her teeth and pulled, ripping it away from the bad green flesh inside, like a hyena nuzzling the dirt sideways to snap rotten meat in his jaws.

The sister kept passing him fresh stalks of khat even after he'd had enough. She gave him chewing gum so that his mouth would not go numb and dry. Her hand got colder and colder. She laid her head down against his neck and watched the movie with a silent smile.

The other one, his love, burned his hand with her hand. She chewed khat in silence. He could not stop thinking about the way her thighs glistened with water after she had shaved her pussy. Her pubic hair had been lush like the black lump on a lion's neck, but not long-stranded like an American girl's, not like the bundle of leaves hung from street signs or tobacconist's signs to betoken khat, because the heat of Africa always made her crop it into a darling checkerboard. This time she had gone farther and shaved it all off with his razor. Now it itched. With her free hand she kept scratching herself and then stuffing khat into her mouth.

The two sisters had different mothers. Both mothers had been circumcised (they cut only the sweetest part, his love whispered). When the sisters had become women, they'd refused to let that happen to them. The sister's mother was a fat old lady in a blue and red kerchief who sat very slowly sifting the grit out of red beans in a wicker basket, picking out pebbles with one hand. The courtyard, bright with dripping laundry, smelled like piss.

The heat of his true love's hand drenched him with lust. Her hot wet fingers encircled his in just the same way as the black areolas ringed her nipples, not mere virginal speckles of some untested theory of circumnavigation, but solid disks from breast-feeding, sturdy like steel washers. Her hand was equally strong. Its grip came from work. Twice a week she washed her clothes and the baby's clothes, scrubbing and wringing them in her iron-hard palms. She was always bending over the baby (his bald round face slightly more orange than hers), always putting on his little shoes. She'd taught him to shit nicely on a scrap of paper bag on the bathroom floor. She cleaned him and carried him and spanked him a hundred times a day, striding tall and brown down the street with a ten-pound bag of rice under her other arm. The baby cried and she bounced him gently. (As for the man, he thought to himself: to mate with a widowed lioness, the lion first kills her cubs.) On her slender well-callused feet one toenail had been split by a stone years before. She had scarred knees. Her hair was always stiff and greasy with sweet oil.

The sister's hand was very cold now. Lovingly she popped a stalk of khat in his mouth.

There was a long pale green plain with dark green trees topped by flatfish elongations, and then far away a blade of sky-blue mountain, translucent like church-glass. The plain was stained with crawling emerald shadows by the clouds. Its grass was frosted with seedheads. Low green trees shone with white thorns. A leopard was in a tree like a mass of white stare in muscular darkness. — No, I fear to see a wildebeest, his love said. I fear the strange high shape. — His love said: I don't like Masai, because they don't fear animals. They live just like animals. They drink blood. — Near the leopard was a buffalo like a lump of burned wood, black-eyed, humped atop his skull like a coolie's hat. Almost in sight of the buffalo, a cheetah lay under a tree like a puddle of speckled milk. Then came dirt roads and shanties and the muddy place behind the wall where his love sat by the open door, cleaning rice. The low bubble of the camp stove was a loving voice. She had once been a girl with skinny chocolate knees who uncapped soda bottles with her teeth.

She was dicing a fresh steak, bending and laughing with her friend who'd just come in and was sitting on the bed. She chopped up onions and carrots and added giant spoonfuls of cooking fat.

When Kikuyu lady get married, they buy for her a cow, she said. When I get a cow, I sell it, buy a business.

There were happy Kikuyu songs on cassette outside and she sang, her mouth a circle. She was serious and stately, calm and happy, tall and brown; she said she was fat because she used to chew too much khat.

And me, I'm fat because you take such good care of me, he said.

When we get married, I must feed you in front of all, she said to him. I will give you big cake, very big cake, so that all know I take good care of you!

But her best friend said: I'd never stay with a white man without money.

The baby was upon him like a leopard leaping with meat in his mouth, his spots shimmering with his breath. The sister was in his eyes like the three dark stripes on an impala's backside. Only his love lived aloof; she was busy working; she was the only one who worked.

Water ran down the diagonal channel in the concrete, gray with oatmeal, flecks of wasted food in the bottom, while the yellow soles of her housegirl's feet flexed very slightly as she stood on the concrete riser, leaning against the long communal basin like a man standing at a bar, scrubbing pots slowly, expressionlessly and thoroughly, while his love, her skirt tucked above her knees, worked ten feet down the same channel, her bracelet shining, her wrists white with suds, her ankles flecked as if the baby had spat on them again, and she scrubbed the clothes one by one in the soaping basin and then scrubbed them again in the rinsing basin there in that courtyard with the bathroom smell; and then she wrung them out and pinned them on the wire. (The sister was asleep. Every day she slept until almost sundown. Then she put her earrings on and went out to chew khat and get drunk. She never paid rent. She was much happier than his love, whom he rarely heard laughing outside her home; he could remember only one time when the baby was on her lap and she was throwing litter out the window of a taxi.) The baby took the pushbroom and played with the water in the channel while inside one of the still-shut blue doors someone else's baby cried determinedly, and the lady beside his love bent over a plastic basin, twisting and scrubbing, and she and his love laughed gently together. The baby stood and peed into the gutter again, picking fretfully at his sneakers. Then he threw a passionfruit rind in and stepped on it. By now it was nine-o'-clock and she had been at it for two hours. She darkened the courtyard with her cool dripping clothes hanging from the wire, baffling the unpleasant sun. She cleaned out the gutter and scrubbed the floor with a brush. None of the other ladies ever did that; she'd taken it upon herself.

In the third hour she did the jeans and jackets, scrubbing them with a hard brush on the concrete floor she'd washed; she rubbed in soap powder with her hands; then she went about her folding and straining and rinsing; while in the darkened room the housegirl peeled garlic, considering deeply over each clove, making each as perfect as a white tooth.

In the smoldering forenoon the pot, bubbled continually, the women smoking cigarettes and gossipping with the bird-nodding of gazelles' heads. Whenever the baby was bad they grabbed him and made to cut his penis off with a big knife or burn it off with a lighted match, and when he screamed they laughed.

Now at last it was safely late, the house not too hot anymore but cool and blue inside; and after dinner the baby sat on the floor eating rice with a spoon. The soles of his feet were already thickly callused. He'd grow up to be what he had to be, just like her first husband, who'd beaten her. (She said: Every time a woman gives birth, the pain is so great that she wants to punch her husband!) She bathed the baby in the plastic washtub and let him splash and play. Then she rubbed his body with Vaseline. When he became fretful and bad, she gave him a capful of cough medicine and he fell asleep on the bed. Then she went out to do more washing, while the girl with the furrow-woven hair sat hunched over the pot, slowly chopping chard. Later, happily lying beside her white lover in the cubicle of the rich couple, who even had hot chocolate powder, she listened to her little radio. She said: If I get rich, I'll buy a nice house, buy my mother a car, buy my children everything. — Her hands and buttocks were more lovely than the dapplings on a giraffe leaning down to browse on a bush, the giraffe's flesh brownish-yellow with dark brown spots like a fresh buttermilk pancake. Her soft brown thigh was delicious with sweat.

The room was now cozy, lighter, cool because it was night. The neighbors told each other good night from one cubicle to the next. (Her sister was out whoring and chewing khat, never riding the zebras of sleep.) The music was low; bulbs glowed beautifully above the dirty white walls. Her delicious musk-mound floated him away from himself just as khat took him out of Kenya, past Moronie's low tree-balls bunched together under the broad cloud-cauldron of volcanoes; past the dark lady with the golden nosering and golden earrings (her head and shoulders wrapped in a cloth of blue and white stripes, blue and black sunbursts); past Moronie's bulk of hairy greenness, past the spittle between the hot black teeth of bays; and all the way to Madagascar's rivers the color of tomato soup, braiding broadly down between clouds and tree-destroyed places. She rolled on top of him, and he whirled westward to Somalia, where khat was qat and the sellers sat on a carven wooden chest beneath a green plastic awning. Ladies sat on the curb with double handfuls of qat, swishing flies away with the green stalks. A Somali in a station wagon pulled into the special parking lot, waving a plastic bag of qat, and began to chew and spit. He said: I don't need to eat anymore! My food is qat! —

He recited the roster of qat: gangete (the best kind), gese, lare, harere from Ethiopia. . Everyone was chewing qat. His head began to pull the rest of his body a little into the air; he discoursed with the others on all subjects of this world, his analysis complete and certain; she pulled him on top of her and was kissing his lips until she'd sucked him back into Kenya where qat was only khat and there were not four kinds; her sister lay drowsing half-naked against him all day making chewing sounds, dreaming of khat. It was night again, and his love was in his arms.

She explained to him that President Moi was a devil-worshipper because on the twenty-shilling note was a picture of him with a snake around his neck. — To be a devil-worshipper you must kill someone in your own family, the one you love the most, she whispered. You must do it in front of the other devil-worshippers. If you get rich from devil-worship and then leave that church, your riches will leave you. — President Moi's bodyguard had seen the snake and thought that it was hurting the President, so he killed it. President Moi got very angry and had him murdered.

She said that Moi had killed so many people. She knew that he was a devil-worshipper because her rent had doubled in one year to eight hundred shillings a month.*

She was sleepy now. She yawned and scratched her cunt. After he went away he found that she was still with him, because in the hair below his belly tiny black scabs appeared, itching more every day, and finally when he caught one between his fingers he saw that it was not a scab at all, that it had writhing legs. Then he knew why she had really shaved her pussy; and he remembered how she used to scratch between her legs without saying anything. She was in his arms.

* In 1993, this was about U.S. $40.

Now it was dark, and crowds stood in the streets. Someone had tied a bundle of leaves to the sign for Taveta Road. The night was cobalt violet with pale gray swirls of cloud. A woman smiled and said: jambo,* and he knew that he would never be lonely again. The buildings pulsed with shouts. The whores stood in the darkness, their sun a single strip of orange windows above.

Past the alley where men stood pissing against a dark wall, his love's sister disappeared, sinking without sight or sound. The police had caught her.

They waited an hour to be sure. Sitting at one of the restaurant's scuffed and mismatched tables, they ordered the cheapest dish, which was mutton stew and passionfruit juice. Heavy chain grated squeaking on the echoing floor. Parade music momentarily drowned the bus horns outside as a guard came in between the tables, swinging his truncheon.

I give him one hundred shillings, his love said. He find out for me.

She went over to the man and they spoke for awhile. When she came back, her face was almost the same. Only someone who knew her very well could have told that she was almost in tears.

He say, you a cripple and you fuck me up the anus. Sometimes I want to cry, I tell you. I tell him, maybe he know that because you fuck him up the anus!

While the police laughed over a newspaper behind the tall booking desk, a sergeant came in with a beggar whose face was a black drowned lady-mask in a ruffled collar of dead grass, and she carried a skinny child of indeterminate morbidity which did not brush away the flies from its mouth and the mother was wailing in grief and terror so extreme that it was a wonder they did not begin crying instead of laughing at the booking desk; of course at the booking desk they never noticed. The sergeant kept his hand on the beggar's shoulders so professionally that it almost seemed he was comforting her. Really, of course, he incarnated the foul-smelling sandy sprawl of a lion snarling over the meat between his paws.

They catch her without a home, his love said in a whisper. That's why she is crying. Now they put her in the cell for three months or six months.

The sergeant took the beggar through a door, and almost immediately they heard the rhythmic screams. He could not keep himself from looking at the booking desk where they smiled back at him behind all their riches of contemptuous knowledge. He could see that they knew him. They knew him just as well as the beggar-boys who if they weren't given money started shouting: White man, why you take our African lady? — They knew his love, too. She didn't want to visit her sister in prison because if she did they'd stare her down in exactly the same way, saying nothing, and then if they ever caught her they'd shout: It's your turn now! Where's your husband now?

* Hello.

But every day she took the bus into town, searched the prisons, paid out bribes, until at last they let her sister go.

She put on a faded yellow dress, picked up the clothes her sister had thrown about in drunkenness, took off her shoes and scrubbed the concrete floor. The room smelled like the sister's unwashed body. There was a single bed where the two of them slept with the baby, a roof of corrugated metal held in place by two crossed two-by-fours from which a bare bulb hung. Every wall was in touching distance of the bed. The view outside was a concrete wall. She opened the door, and knelt outside on the sunny concrete, leaning in to scrub the floor. So strong she was, so able in this world of pain. The police had shot her father; her two mothers could not help her; she rented her body to live, and she lived. She nourished her baby and her sister. Nothing could crush her until death. She was pure and her name was Rose.

There she was, tall and brown, sweeping.