Cold Fire

We walked up a quiet boulevard where men were sewing companionably under cloth awnings. The streets were paved with smooth-fitting stone swept clean of debris, and posted with gas lamps for the coming of evening. Past every gate opened a courtyard where more people, of all ages, lounged under shaded shelters or busied themselves at some manner of work. Women carried baskets of vegetables and fruit on their heads. More than one smiled at Vai with a friendly—or over-friendly—greeting, only to notice me with surprise or disbelief. He was polite to everyone, but he plowed forward without stopping.



We turned a corner onto a dusty lane shaded by trees. He led me in through an open gate to a sprawling courtyard with a cistern, a tree, and a two-story wing abutting the back. About a third of the space was taken up by tables and benches set out beneath a vine-swept latticed roof. Behind the tables stretched a counter like a bar in a tavern. To the left lay an open-air kitchen. In its shade, two girls were grating tubers into moist pulp.



A healthily stout woman of middle age stood at a stone hearth, cooking on a griddle. Seeing Vai, she smiled as might an aunt who spots her favorite nephew come to visit. Seeing me, she abandoned the griddle to a girl and, wiping her hands on a cloth tied over her pagne and blouse, walked over to us.



“Never tell me!” she said with a laugh.



“Yes, this is Catherine.” He turned to me. “Catherine, this is Aunty Djeneba. She owns this lodging house.”



“Peace to you, Aunty,” I said, in the village way, because she reminded me of the women of the Tarrant countryside and Adurnam’s markets for whom a long exchange of greetings was the measure of politeness. “Do you have peace?”



“Good morning, Cat’reen,” she answered. “’Tis pleasing to make yee acquaintance.”



“Cat is fine.”



“Cat it shall be, then.”



I wasn’t sure how to go on, so I glanced at Vai for help.



“Catherine, I’m sure you’re hungry. Rice and peas, or fish?”



I had never in my life been too stunned to eat. “Might I have both?”



Aunty Djeneba smiled as if I had called her children the best-mannered in the city. “’Tis good when a gal likes to eat,” she said with a knowing glance at Vai as if to congratulate him.



I blushed, although I am sure I did not know why.



“Things is still cooking, for it is early yet,” she added. “Yee like a bath first? Yee look a bit mucked. The gals shall fetch clean cloth, and yee shall wash and hang that yee have on.”



“Yes, please,” I said with a reflexive courtesy, dipping my knees.



Two girls somewhat younger than me hurried over giggling, and I wasn’t sure if it was me and my muck and my foreign manners they were giggling over or the fact that Vai had not yet let go of my hand.



“Lad,” Aunty said as she patted flour dust off her hands, “yee run down to the harbor and get pargo from Baba. Cat shall still be here when yee get back.”



“Will you?” he asked, looking at me as if he expected me to vanish in a puff of smoke.



“Where else would I go?”



The girls giggled. Aunty swatted them on the arms. His expression got more rigid. With an exhalation that could have been no more pained if he had been pulling a nail from his flesh, he released my hand. For an instant I thought he was going to grab it back, but Aunty nudged him.



“Go on,” she said. All the folk in the compound—at this time of day five women, the two girls, an older man and a lad at the counter, plus two old men lounging in sling-backed chairs and an ancient crone likewise, and several toddling children—were watching with evident pleasure.



He walked to the gate. There he halted to look back at me.



“Go on, maku!” There was nothing insulting in her tone, despite what Drake had said about the word. She sounded positively affectionate.



Still, he hesitated.



“I will still be here when you come back,” I said, not adding: Where else do I have to go?



With a grimace, he left.



The girls led me past the big tree. In its shade two women were washing dishes in a trough fed by a pipe and drained by a ditch lined with ceramic. They greeted me with what appeared to be genuine kindness. Yet the lilt in their speech and the number of unknown words made them difficult to understand. Everything was so strange, and my head was beginning to hurt.



Oh, glorious! A brick-paved platform behind screens made a washhouse. After I set aside my cane, the locket, and the stone, the girls took away all my clothing except for my jacket, which I draped over my arm to hide the bite. By a cunning mechanism with pipes, pumps, a big cistern below and a small one on the roof of the two-storied wing, water flowed through a sieve to create a waterfall of refreshingly cool water. In this shower, I scrubbed away salt and spume and grime with sweet-smelling soap.