Chapter 1: The Foundation
After the dawn call to prayer, the first sound of the village was the sharp, dry clack of Ibrahim’s loom.
Since Talib’s mother had died, it had been the only voice in the house before sunrise. Ibrahim used to sing at the loom. He did not sing any more. He only wove, and the clack did the talking for both of them.
Talib sat at his own smaller loom, back held rigid. The wood was rough and splintered under his palms. He tried to copy his father’s movements: the smooth passage of the shuttle, the firm, rhythmic thud of the beater.
His hands would not follow. The shuttle snagged on a brittle warp thread and, with a small, loud snap, the thread broke.
Ibrahim sighed from the other side of the room, a dry rustle of a sigh. He did not stop. The clack-clack-clack of his loom went on.
“Your hands are not here, Talib,” Ibrahim said, his voice barely rising above the loom. “A weaver’s craft is in his hands.”
“The thread is broken,” Talib muttered.
He hated the smell of the house: the oily, gamey scent of goatskin, the acrid bite of dye, the film of dust that lived on his tongue.
“Then you must re-tie it,” Ibrahim said. “That is the work. This thread of ours fed me, and it feeds you. It asks only for your hands.”
Talib looked down at his hands. They were calloused from the hoe and useless on the loom.
“I’m going to check the well,” he lied, and rose, and slipped out of the dark house into the white glare of morning.
The heat struck him.
He skirted the landmarks of Madina. The meeting tree, where the elders were already sitting in the thin shade with their worries about the rain. The well, where the rope came up slower every month. The millet beyond the last compounds, standing knee-high in a season when it should have reached his chest.
“The rain has forgotten the road to Madina,” Samba was saying under the tree as Talib passed. He farmed that millet, and he said it as though the rain were a relative who owed him money.
“Then someone should go and remind it,” said another elder.
“Someone should. Not me. My knees remember the road even if the rain does not.”
Nobody laughed much. There had been three bad seasons, and this was the hungry time again, when last year’s grain was gone and this year’s was not yet ready.
Under a skeletal acacia whose shadow was barely wide enough to sit in, Talib crouched on his haunches and reached into his shirt for what he considered his real work.
It was a notebook, frayed and brittle, its cover stained dark with sweat. He opened it with care.
The pages were full of lines drawn in blunt pencil. Circuit diagrams. The workings of the groaning diesel pump down by the river. Gear trains for the creaking millet grinder. A wind vane he had built in his head and never in the world.
Years ago, in a ditch beside the Bakoro road, he had found a radio schematic dropped from a passing aid convoy—rain-soaked, mud-caked, one corner torn away. He had dried it on a rock and spent a whole dry season teaching himself what its lines and symbols meant. A line went somewhere. A symbol meant one thing. Nobody sighed at him.
From his pocket he took his sister’s latest letter, folded small and soft with handling. A cousin had carried it up from the city two weeks before. Hawa was in her first year at the nursing school behind the General Hospital in Bakoro. She was the first of their family to go past the village school, and everyone had sold something to send her.
Talib had finished the village school too, and could read and write in Nabari and French, and get by in English, but there had not been money to send them both. He unfolded the paper and traced her name with a finger before reading the lines he already knew.
...the qualifying examination is next month. The fee must be paid before the day, or they will not let me sit, and if I do not sit I lose the year. Talib, I am afraid. The city eats money. The money you sent... it was not enough. Please...
The cold came into his stomach again.
He had sold carved ironwood birds to the lorry drivers for two years. He knew the sums by heart. Fifty more birds might pay one fee. Hawa did not have time for fifty birds.
Behind him, far off, his father’s loom clacked on.
He looked from her thin, careful handwriting to the neat lines of the diagram.
