Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

But I know that such things can be. My husband was a university professor. He spoke several languages, and he gave me books to read, and he read news from other countries and told me what’s possible. He should’ve been afraid of the world, should’ve stayed inside with the doors locked and the blinds drawn, but he didn’t do that, he went out. Our daughter is just like him. She is part of his immortality. I told him, when I was still carrying her, that that’s what I want, that that’s how I love him. I had always dreaded and feared pregnancy, for all the usual reasons that girls who daydream more than they live fear pregnancy. My body, with its pain and mess and hunger — if I could have bribed it to go away, I would have. Then I married my man, and I held fast to him. And my brain, the brain that had told me I would never bear a child for any man, no matter how nice he was, that brain began to tell me something else. Provided the world continues to exist, provided conditions remain favourable, or at least tolerable, our child will have a child, and that child will have a child, and so on, and with all those children of children come the inevitability that glimpses of my husband will resurface, in their features, in the way they use their bodies, a fearless swinging of the arms as they walk. Centuries from now some quality of a man’s gaze, smile, voice, or way of standing or sitting will please someone else in a way that they aren’t completely aware of, will be loved very hard for just a moment, without enquiry into where it came from. I ignore the women who say that my daughter does things that a girl shouldn’t do, and when I want to keep her near me, I let her go. But not too far; I don’t let her go too far from me.

The soldiers remind me of boys from here sometimes. The way our boys used to be. Especially when you catch them with their helmets off, three or four of them sitting on a wall at lunchtime, trying to enjoy their sandwiches and the sun but really too restless for both. Then you see the rifles beside their knapsacks and you remember that they aren’t our boys.

“Mother. . did you hear me? I said that I am now a racist.”

I was getting my daughter ready for school. She can’t tie knots, but she loves her shoelaces to make extravagant bows.

“Racist against whom, my daughter?”

“Racist against soldiers.”

“Soldiers aren’t a race.”

“Soldiers aren’t a race,” she mimicked. “Soldiers aren’t a race.”

“What do you want me to say?”

She didn’t have an answer, so she just went off in a big gang with her school friends. And I worried, because my daughter has always seen soldiers — in her lifetime she hasn’t known a time or place when the cedars stood against the blue sky without khaki canvas or crackling radio signals in the way.

An hour or so later Bilal came to visit. A great honour, I’m sure, a visit from that troublesome Bilal, who had done nothing but pester me since the day I came to this village. He sat down with us, and mother served him tea.

“Three times I have asked this daughter of yours to be my wife,” Bilal said to my mother. He shook a finger at her. As for me, it was as if I wasn’t there. “First wife,” he continued. “Not even second or third — first wife.”

“Don’t be angry, son,” my mother murmured. “She’s not ready. Only a shameless woman could be ready so soon after what happened.”

“True, true,” Bilal agreed. A fly landed just above my top lip, and I let it walk.

“Rather than ask a fourth time I will kidnap her. . ”

“Ah, don’t do that, son. Don’t take the light of an old woman’s eyes,” my mother murmured, and she fed him honey cake. Bilal laughed from his belly, and the fly fled. “I was only joking.”

The third time Bilal asked my mother for my hand in marriage I thought I was going to have to do it after all. But my daughter said I wasn’t allowed. I asked her why. Because his face is fat and his eyes are tiny? Because he chews with his mouth open?

“He has a tyrannical moustache,” my daughter said. “It would be impossible to live with.” I’m proud of her vocabulary. But it’s starting to look as if I think I’m too good for Bilal, who owns more cattle than any other man for miles around and could give my mother, daughter, and me everything we might reasonably expect from this life.

Please, God. You know I don’t seek worldly things (apart from shoes). If you want me to marry again, so be it. But please — not Bilal. After the love that I have had. .

My daughter came home for her lunch. After prayers we shared some cold karkedeh, two straws in a drinking glass, and she told me what she was learning, which wasn’t much. My mother was there, too, rattling her prayer beads and listening indulgently. She made faces when she thought my daughter talked too much. Then we heard the soldiers coming past as usual, and we went and looked at them through the window. I thought we’d make fun of them a bit, as usual. But my daughter ran out of the front door and into the path of the army truck, yelling, “You! You bloody soldiers!” Luckily the truck’s wheels crawled along the road, and the body of the truck itself was slumped on one side, resigned to myriad potholes. Still, it was a very big truck, and my daughter is a very small girl.

I was out after her before I knew what I was doing, shouting her name. It’s a good name — we chose a name that would grow with her, but she seemed determined not to make it to adulthood. I tried to trip her up, but she was too nimble for me. Everyone around was looking on from windows and the open gates of courtyards. The truck rolled to a stop. Someone inside it yelled, “Move, kid. We’ve got stuff to do.”

I tried to pull my daughter out of the way, but she wasn’t having any of it. My hands being empty, I wrung them. My daughter began to pelt the soldier’s vehicle with stones from her pockets. Her pockets were very deep that afternoon; her arms lashed the air like whips. Stone after stone bounced off metal and rattled glass, and I grabbed at her and she screamed, “This is my country! Get out of here!”

The people of the village began to applaud her. “Yes,” they cried out, from their seats in the audience, and they clapped. I tried again to seize her arm and failed again. The truck’s engine revved up, and I opened my arms as wide as they would go, inviting everyone to witness. Now I was screaming, too: “So you dare? You really dare?”

And there we were, mother and daughter, causing problems for the soldiers together.

Finally a scrawny soldier came out of the vehicle without his gun. He was the scrawniest fighting man I’ve ever seen — he was barely there, just a piece of wire, really. He walked towards my daughter, who had run out of stones. He stretched out a long arm, offering her chewing gum, and she swore at him, and I swore at her for swearing. He stopped about thirty centimetres away from us and said to my daughter, “You’re brave.”

My daughter put her hands on her hips and glared up at him.

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” the scrawny soldier told her.

Whispers and shouts: The soldiers are leaving tomorrow!

A soldier inside the truck yelled out, “Yeah, but more are coming to take our place,” and everyone piped low. My daughter reached for a stone that hadn’t fallen far. Who is this girl? Four feet tall and fighting something she knows nothing about. Even if I explained it to her, she wouldn’t get it. I don’t get it myself.

“Can I shake your hand?” the scrawny soldier asked her, before her hand met the stone. I thought my girl would refuse, but she said yes. “You’re okay,” she told him. “You came out to face me.”

“Her English is good,” the coward from within the truck remarked.