Coming Round

Shekaru ba su fa’di k’asa sai a jiki.
The years do not fall on the ground but on the body.

Matameye, during the rainy season, is full of birds. Storks fly back and forth above the walls of the village, canny beaks pointing straight ahead. After a rain, they step to the edge of a pool, lower their necks, then throw back their heads. Or carry a few drops to the nest in the gawo tree where their babies wait with open beaks, straining blindly. The gawo, all thorns at this time of year, is also the home of the weavers. Their nests, round like hives, hang twenty, thirty, from the silvery limbs of a single tree. The weavers tip upside down at their nests, tiny feet clinging to the hole at the bottom, yellow breasts flashing. Anyone standing underneath can look up and see the storks lift out of the tree and, with a tidy collapse of wings, sink back into it. From top to bottom, the branches are flecked gold with nervous underbellies.

Now and then the shadow of a stork glides across our path. Vast and ragged at wingspread, the dark figure on the sand sharpens at either end to a fleeting point. My daughter Zara and I are on our way to visit Hadiza, passing from beneath the odd tree out into a view of unbroken sky. It is late afternoon and the sun is still very hot. Hadiza, who works with Zara at the Centre Medical, lives in what Zara calls the suburbs of Matameye, a sloping field of sand on the far side of the paved road. According to a sign we pass, the road runs 87 kilometers north to Zinder. Zinder is a name I know well. Seventeen years ago, when Zara was five, we had lived there for a time: myself and Mike, who was working on a dissertation, Zara and her younger sister Lizzy. Following the path of her childhood, Zara has returned to Niger and has been living in Matameye for almost two years. In my turn following Zara, I have left New York for a few weeks where Mike and I now live and come back to Africa to visit her. But it is as if I am seeing everything for the first time. Where I had hoped, even expected, to find a world I knew, people who were familiar to me, I follow Zara around as if we are both aware that my own past, my own young moment, has long ago sunk into the depths of oblivion. There is no one to remember, no one with whom to measure the years between, no one to wonder or reminisce with.