Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

“Is that. . Russian?” I asked her.

She answered in words that left me stone cold. Russian, I presumed.

“Daphne!” It made her laugh, the way I was looking at her.

She winked. “Don’t worry, I’m not possessed. I said I’m just brushing up. I’ve been taking a correspondence course. You’ve got a lot to find out about me, my friend.”

She looked a little cold, so I put my jacket around her shoulders and we strolled down to wait at the post where the ferry came in. And she leaned against me, and it was all right.

Once, in Asyût, east of Cairo, a boy was born to a market trading family fallen on hard times, a family too poor to keep him unless he had somehow been born full-grown and ready to work. The boy’s tiny mother had given birth to five big, healthy, noisy boys before him. But the first thing this particular boy did when he was born was cough quietly, and turn a blind, bewildered glare on his brothers, who elbowed one another and watched him closely. This new boy was far too small. He had to be spanked six times before he proved his lungs to the midwife, and even then, his cry wasn’t lusty enough. He was limp and wouldn’t cling to a finger when it was placed in his palm. He refused his mother’s breast, wrinkling his nose at the knotty brown bud of her nipple with slow bafflement.

Yet his eyes said that he needed something.

The boy’s mother saw into the future. Her mind hunkered down in the midst of her tiredness and spread the dead circle of her nerves until it overlapped into her next life, her next fatigue.The boy’s mother saw that she wouldn’t be able to coax this son, to coddle him, to silently cherish him, to let him fall and find no help, to do all of the things that it would take for this boy to survive into his strength as a man.

(She looked into his eyes — they were like a famine. Seeing them sent hurt and light through her. His eyes kept asking, asking, and she knew that a person could die trying to love him.)

If it hadn’t been certain before, the decision not to keep the boy was now absolute.

“He will not be strong,” the boy’s father winced, when news of the birth was brought to him at his sand-blown stall. “He will not be of use.” He didn’t tell the other men whose threadbare robes jostled his at market because it was not a good thing to have to send a child away.

“He will not be strong,” the midwife said, averting her eyes from the child’s. She left as soon as she could, with promises that she would tell all the doctors she knew about the child, in the hope that they knew of some infertile couple.

Sunset on the outskirts of Asyût brought clarity.

Even from the narrow side streets where damp sand beads and breathes, any window can tell you why they say here the world began with a brother and sister locked in a beautiful circus trick. In Egypt, like everywhere, the land is made to fit the sky; but here it is more so. Here it is possible to say, “This is land,” and point, and “This is sky,” and point, but the eye can’t discover the dividing line. Nut cranes her neck over her long, lithe, blue back to kiss Geb, and Geb cradles her, careful, because she is nothing, less than nothing, but if he should drop her it would be the end of everything. The boy’s mother was comforted by sunset, and she closed the shutters and began preparing her new son’s cot.

The next day’s noon came like a blazing hoop, and the sun spat razor blades through it. People did what they had to to keep from wilting. Slim women waddled; fat women crept close to the ground, barely taking steps. Amongst them came a tall, ramrod-straight woman in pure black; she parted the jostling knots of people in bounding spurts, like a dark thought. She was accompanied by the boy’s midwife.

The woman took the market traders’ son away with her because, she said, she needed a seeker, and this boy was one.

The woman’s voice was soft and you had to listen hard for it, otherwise you thought she was trying to speak to you with her eyes alone. The atmosphere around this woman told of books and fine rugs. The boy’s mother cried and held herself, held her leaking breasts as the woman took her son away. But she didn’t change her mind.

A girl was born in Osogbo, in a small hospital a few feet away from a stone shrine to love. The girl was a heavy baby, with features that were pleasing because they were fluid and made her simple to look at, as if she was carved all of a piece. The girl was very quick learning to walk, to speak in both English and Yoruba, to eat solids, to use her potty, to smile in a certain way that brought maturity down like an axe on her face. At six years old, she prostrated herself before her elders unasked. She clambered over her milestones with unassailable, businesslike calm. No cute lisping, no unusual habits. It took the girl’s parents a long time to realise that their daughter’s docility and sweetness was in fact vacancy, a kind of sleepiness and an instinct for ease that translated itself to her entire body. The girl’s hair grew soft and light so that combs flashed through it without tangling, so that it sat well in plaits. Blemishes fell away from the girl’s skin with simple soap and water. The same question put to this girl two times in a row would yield two different answers, depending on who asked the girl the question, and in what tone. The day that he saw that it was enough, the girl’s father was chauffeuring a sweaty, bearded oil executive to the airport. The girl’s father looked away for a moment from the well-fed face, from the firm, confident mouth of his passenger in the rearview mirror, and saw his daughter following a street vendor home, nodding and smiling in the shade of the bush-lined thoroughfare, a sack of the street vendor’s rice piled across her shoulders with a sturdy, troubling grace. The girl’s father bundled her into the car without ceremony or apology to his passenger, and at home he thrashed her with a walking cane. He held her head down on the kitchen table as he beat her, and his fingers dug into her scalp, but he did not feel her neck tensing against him, and she didn’t make a sound. He kept on hitting her because he wasn’t sure whether she was feeling this or not. The neighbours came en masse, some with their fingers entwined in the fur at the scruff of their goats’ necks, and they remonstrated with him. Women pulled off their head wraps and wrung their hands. “It is too much,” everyone told him. The girl’s father stopped when he was tired of hammering on her bones. He watched her breathing; her shoulder blades rose and fell with her head turned away from him and into the table. When she lifted her head she said unsteadily, “Sorry, Daddy.” Blood welled from the space between her lips.

The boy grew up with a hard smile and a complicated manner that was at once condescending and eager. He developed a gait that made him seem arrogant. These were attempts to counteract his eyes and their treacherous tendency to ask. He wasn’t handsome, or talkative, but his adoptive mother made sure that he dressed well, in English tailoring and American denim. And his sadness was luminous. Girls his age gave him kisses and held his hand even when they shied away from other boys. Women offered him honeyed pastries, confidences, concern. He walked the markets and puffed pipe smoke in corner teahouses, breathed in the spice-pod musk of men and took their advice with throwaway thanks.

The woman who had adopted him was a widow, and it was possible that her bereavement had made her mad. The boy’s new home terrified him, because the downstairs was bright and softly pastel-coloured and air-conditioned, but the upstairs was cordoned off. If he looked hard enough, he could make out doors and bare floors, but that was all. At night he slept on a couch beside the woman who had adopted him. The woman herself slept on a boat-shaped chaise longue; it took to her body in a way that he would never see again, let her sleep with grace although her arms and legs were bunched up and her feet were hanging off the end of the couch. It didn’t seem to matter very much that the woman didn’t grow older as he grew older, either, though he suspected that something about the woman herself slowed him down, bathed his thoughts in perfume, set his dreams afloat so that his mind was abuzz with stranger things than her age, or her solitude, or the silent upstairs.