A Small Thing Appears
The wind is blowing hard,” I say.
“Let it blow,” says Zahra Bayda, who doesn’t trust my anxious tendencies.
She’s brought me here so I can look out from the heights and fathom that I’ve reached the end of the world. I look around and I see nothing, or better put, I see nothingness.
“Keep your spirits up, young man, whatever your name is,” Zahra Bayda presses me. “Come on, move that six-foot frame of yours.”
“My name is Bos Mutas,” I remind her. I’ve already told her many times.
“Fine, Bos, or Mutas, whatever you’re called.”
We face the highest dune. The wind is so powerful it threatens to tear off my shirt. This must be the fiercest desert on the planet, the closest to God and the most plagued by demons, at least that’s how she tells it, assuring me that there are still hermits living around here, alone in caves. A gust of wind whisks off her turban, which cartwheels into the sky like a crazed and brightly colored bird.
“My turban! Catch it for me!” she orders.
“You catch it.”
“That damn wind,” she mutters.
“Let it blow.” I can’t help getting even.
Now Zahra Bayda battles her hair, which on breaking free has become a whirlwind. I’m in the clouds and I can’t find my way back to earth. I’m stunned by these immensities of all-devouring yellow sand. They must even devour their own edges, so that you’re always at the center no matter how far you go. My sense of direction is melting; I’ve already been warned that I’d see visions here, and I find myself disoriented by echoes.
Night is falling and at the same time doesn’t dare fall; flakes of darkness move slowly through the sky.
“Look,” I say to Zahra Bayda, gesturing toward a point of light that flickers and moves in the distance, a small reverberation in the land. “Look, something is rising toward us.”
“Let it rise.”
Farther down, in the expanse, an enormous stain spreads across the emptiness. It’s the refugee camp, with its hundreds of crowded brown tents.
Zahra Bayda offers me explanations, facts, numbers, dates. She tries to make me understand, to catch me up. She’s not wrong: It’s better for me to know. But my head spins; I haven’t recovered from the exhaustion of the long journey. I can only manage to focus on that climbing point of light.
“Wake up, whatever your name is!” Zahra Bayda snaps her fingers to get my attention.
That’s what she calls me: “whatever your name is.” I don’t blame her, I know my name isn’t easy. What about hers? Zahra Bayda. It sounds good, but according to her I’m pronouncing it wrong.
“I’m going to call you ‘whatever your name is’ too,” I say, and she replies that she doesn’t care.
Down below, in the camp, only a few tents emanate light, as if the residents of the other tents had accepted the impending darkness rather than done what it takes to light their oil lamps. They’re called “the invisible ones,” and they’re kept segregated. Zahra Bayda says they don’t trust the camps, that they prefer to place their destinies in God’s hands, because that’s better than crouching and cramming together while staring toward nowhere. From the camp, no smoke rises, nor any sound, not even a shout or the cry of a child. Nothing.
“It’s like a city of the dead,” I say.
“And yet over a hundred thousand people live there.”
Everything is motionless, except the stir of wind in her hair. People’s hair always startles me; it has a life of its own and rebels against its owner’s will. Zahra Bayda’s mane is moving wildly, whipping her face, getting in her mouth, covering her eyes.
I keep pointing out the little solitary light I see in the distance, determined to keep rising, like a floating reflection. Someone coming from the camp, with a flashlight? I wonder how they got past the wire fence. Maybe they took advantage of the hottest hour, when the guards doze in their booths.
This desert could be the center of the unstoppable drought that’s laying waste to the world and might make human beings lithophagous, so that we end up eating stones, like white lizards and yellow-crested cockatoos.
As Zahra Bayda speaks, her pain is palpable; she was born in this region, and it holds her heart. She studied abroad, but she cares deeply about the people here. She searches for the words to convey the tragedy to me. She herself can’t comprehend it, and she suspects that those who suffer its brunt can’t comprehend it either, that the only ones who understand it are those who provoke it, but they’re steering things from far away.
Zahra Bayda says that provisional camps like this one have turned permanent, becoming de facto prisons and vast, impoverished slums. They’re no longer places to pass through. Those who come seeking refuge end up trapped behind the wire fence.
“In the end, they give up, put down roots in thin air, and wait,” she says.
“Wait for what?”
“Something. The oil and flour of their weekly rations. A vaccination against disease, or a miracle cure.”
They wait for something that won’t come. A letter of safe conduct, or an impossible visa. A letter from an acquaintance, news from relatives—anything, really. A blanket, perhaps, or medicine, a liter of bottled water, some kind of sign.
The desert murmurs. It speaks in sibilant vibrations, and it thrills me to consider that I might be hearing the music of the dunes. I’ve heard that dunes sing the way whales do, the way flutes do, that they can roar like clashing swords or howl like wolves. I think I hear them . . . I feel the sand talking to me, but its message is cruel, like the last sigh of time.
“That’s no music of the dunes, it’s the hum of drones,” says Zahra Bayda.
Again, she’s right. According to the principle of Occam’s razor, if you hear a gallop behind you, don’t think of a zebra, but of a horse. And if you hear a humming, don’t go thinking it’s music:
They’re drones.
That little light climbing toward us is a person, flesh and bone, more bone than flesh. A nervous person, small and slight, moving quickly, appearing and disappearing along the curving slope. It’s a young woman, and she’s limping. Her left foot turns inward. Knock-kneed, some call it.
“Clubfoot,” clarifies Zahra Bayda, who knows about these things; after all, she’s the medical professional, a trained and seasoned midwife.
All right: clubfoot. The girl approaching us suffers from clubfoot. She’s very young, almost a child, so thin the gale could lift her. She must not have been born here, because she’s wearing multicolored cloth and her face isn’t covered. She’s dark-skinned, with fine features, and from her shoulders flows an improbable golden cape.
The golden cape flutters in the wind, shining in the last rays of sun, making the girl seem like a chimera. The glitter of her unlikely cape: That’s the flickering I saw coming toward us.
A girl with a golden cape in the heart of the desert—who would believe it? Like a mirage. A floating visibility, a small thing that appears . . . tempting and mysterious.1 I wonder whether she arrived here by sea, along with the boat people. Could have. Her face is caked with sand, her hair tangled, dark at the roots and red at the tips, as if dyed with henna or scorched by the sun.
Her gleaming cape transforms her into a fairy or princess, though it turns out not to be a cape at all, nor a golden fleece. Zahra Bayda explains to me that it’s only one of those six-foot sheets of thermal, waterproof plastic, the inside lined with foil, the outside golden. It holds in body heat. Rescue workers distribute them to hypothermic survivors of the sea.
So it’s no queen’s mantle draped over that skinny girl; you see, all that glitters is not gold. But it’s as if it were: She wraps herself in that thermal plastic with a royal arrogance. She’s agile with her leg, and restless too, an atomic ant in the midst of a paralyzed landscape. There’s bravado in her, and a proud demeanor, as if the misfortune surrounding her wouldn’t dare touch her.
Other women, emerging from who knows where, have also perceived our presence and started to arrive. They form a circle around us, waving handwritten notes. Zahra Bayda explains that they’re petitions for help. The displaced women write them on those stray sheets of paper in hopes of handing them to someone who can do something.
The girl in the golden cape doesn’t get along with the others, she elbows them away, gesturing and cursing.
“Cripple!” the others shout at her, stepping back. “Go away! Go back to your place.”
She isn’t intimidated. On the contrary, she doubles down like those Roma women in the Via del Corso, in Rome, who stalk you to pick your pocket. I’m unsettled by this bad-tempered kid who glares at me for no reason, with eyes that aren’t pleading, but demanding. As if that weren’t enough, there’s a feverish shine in her eyes and it’s hard to hold her gaze. Illuminate me, child, with the light of your eyes, I say without her understanding me, and she grimaces. With her clubfoot, she scrawls something in the sand that’s quickly erased by the wind. Eyes lit from within. Like a cat? The comparison is stale, but unavoidable.
And, speaking of cats, Zahra Bayda tells me that around here people have been killing them, believing they’re bearers of disease.
This disabled girl moves me. I lower my guard. I’m on her side, I want to protect her, why be so wary when she’s treacherous, sure, but also vulnerable, just one more victim of this great catastrophe, one more among the wretched of this earth?
My mistake. The girl behaves like a cornered spider, throwing fistfuls of sand in people’s faces. She’s wild, this apprentice of Imperator Furiosa. She breaks through the circle and hurtles at me, taking shelter behind my legs.
“You’re coming for me, you troublemaker?”
Since I laid eyes on her, I’ve known this maddening girl was going to be part of my destiny somehow. She grabs me by the shirt and won’t let go, jabbing my arm with a sharp-nailed finger. She’s haughty; her chin juts forward and her beautiful mouth twists with scorn. Her black-and-red-streaked tangle of curls flutters in the wind like an anarchist flag, the ones that mean no surrender. I’m half fascinated, half terrified by this girl, I don’t know what to do with her, she’s stuck to me like a leech. What does she want? What’s her deal?
“Hey! You—mini Cassius Clay—stop flapping around me like a damn butterfly,” I say, but this only gets her more riled up.
She’s demonically beautiful, this girl, pretty and dark like the stores of Q’Dar.
“Macchiato,” Zahra Bayda corrects me.
“What?”
“That’s what her skin tone is called around here.”
“Macchiato, like the coffee? The Italian word?”
Zahra Bayda explains something about the Italian army, which came here, colonized, and split, leaving behind a legacy of intensified hate, mountains of broken weapons, and a smattering of words like macchiato.
And the bags under this girl’s eyes, her ostrich eyelashes, the scar on her forehead, do they have a name in Italian or any other tongue? What to call her devilish agility and her wild mass of hair? Or the biblical air about her, or the spell she casts over me? How to name any of that? Because she’s gorgeous, this girl, gorgeous and formidable, an unsettling, bony thing who’s ducked behind me and won’t let go, who’s using me as a shield to protect herself from the others as they shout their threats. She smells of smoke, and incense, and the sea.
It’s quite notable, her scent: strong, secret. A smell banished from the West by deodorants, detergents, and toothpaste. The smell of people who live and make their way in spite of everything, who sacrifice the last camel to roast its meat, or go hungry and walk great distances and burn little incense sticks, and urinate and shit and bleed, who groom with lavender oil, shiver in the cold, huddle by the fire, milk a goat and drink its milk and sacrifice the goat when there’s nothing else left to eat. Women who brush their hair until it shines and hide it so no one can see. And who steal apples and pomegranates from strangers’ orchards. And who copulate or sleep on mats that keep their bodies’ heat, and who endure the night however they can to reach the dawn. All of this is in the scent of this small queen of the resplendent mantle, how much better . . . the smell of thine ointments than all spices.2 All of this I think, perhaps not in the moment, but later I do, and in any case I don’t say it aloud.
Faced with her, I grapple with a range of feelings: pity, compassion, fascination, annoyance. Meanwhile, she takes to pestering me. I’m older than her, and taller, and have more dignity; I’m a Goliath next to her, and yet she’s got the upper hand. Zahra Bayda has already told me about that common trait among victims, all survivors of tragedy: When the rest of us are getting started, they’re already rounding the finish. It’s probably because they possess what some call the courage of despair. Or, akin to that, nec spe, nec metu, a bit of Latin I like so much it’s tattooed on my forearm: neither hope nor fear. But enough, girl, go away, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t find a way to get her off me, and at the same time I shiver at the graze of her skin.
“Money? Is that what she wants?” I ask Zahra Bayda, who exchanges a few words with the girl.
“She says she was born in Erigabo,” Zahra Bayda translates.
“What else did she say?” I ask, because I watched the girl let loose a torrent of words.
Erigabo, across the gulf. I’ve read about it: an inhospitable, barren land from which everyone flees to escape slaughter and famine. In the mythical past, Erigabo was likely part of the prosperous realm of Sheba, but in these surreal times it’s sown with terrors.
“Ask her name,” I say to Zahra Bayda. “Ask how old she is. Fourteen? Fifteen?”
“I already did. She wouldn’t tell me. Too many questions make them wary, it makes them think you’re the enemy.”
It’s clear this reticent girl won’t respond, and I won’t know. To be expected. All the startling things that come into my life arrive this way, nameless and sudden. To appease her, I give her a coin. She grabs it and pulls away to examine it where nobody can take it. She inspects it with the thoroughness of a merchant calculating the day’s profits. She bites it to make sure it’s real.
There we go. Just what the doctor ordered. I think I’ve freed myself of the girl. But no. She throws herself at me with even more grit, pulling on the scarf tied around my neck.
“She wants you to give it to her,” Zahra Bayda tells me.
“This?” I ask, untying the bright blue Tuareg cloth with three black stripes that I take with me everywhere and that’s come to feel like part of me; they say I don’t even take it off to bathe. “You want my scarf, child? So much fuss over such a small thing? If I give it to you, can we make peace? Okay. You like this little gift? Take it. A souvenir from me.”
I let go of my old Tuareg wrap, regretfully, and the girl immediately uses it to tie her hair. She looks funny with that intensely blue cloth on her head. She seems to accept that she’s accomplished her mission on this hill, and losing all interest in me, she runs back the way she came, taking my scarf with her. An apparition, gone.
Against a darkening sky streaked with black, orange, and maroon, I watch the girl go without letting her legs’ asymmetry slow her down. The golden cape flashes like the blazing tail of a small comet.
Alumbrar: “to illumine.” A potent verb that comes from ab umbra: “to come out of the shadows.” It shares a root with the verb asombrar: “to astonish.” The girl from Erigabo illumines and astonishes, weaving in and out of shadows as she leaps her way down the slope, as svelte and fierce as those dorcas gazelles that populate the land she comes from.
“Hey!” I shout when she’s too far to hear me. “Any chance you might be the Queen of Sheba?” ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
