William Vollmann - The Atlas

In the third hour she did the jeans and jackets, scrubbing them with a hard brush on the concrete floor she'd washed; she rubbed in soap powder with her hands; then she went about her folding and straining and rinsing; while in the darkened room the housegirl peeled garlic, considering deeply over each clove, making each as perfect as a white tooth.

In the smoldering forenoon the pot, bubbled continually, the women smoking cigarettes and gossipping with the bird-nodding of gazelles' heads. Whenever the baby was bad they grabbed him and made to cut his penis off with a big knife or burn it off with a lighted match, and when he screamed they laughed.

Now at last it was safely late, the house not too hot anymore but cool and blue inside; and after dinner the baby sat on the floor eating rice with a spoon. The soles of his feet were already thickly callused. He'd grow up to be what he had to be, just like her first husband, who'd beaten her. (She said: Every time a woman gives birth, the pain is so great that she wants to punch her husband!) She bathed the baby in the plastic washtub and let him splash and play. Then she rubbed his body with Vaseline. When he became fretful and bad, she gave him a capful of cough medicine and he fell asleep on the bed. Then she went out to do more washing, while the girl with the furrow-woven hair sat hunched over the pot, slowly chopping chard. Later, happily lying beside her white lover in the cubicle of the rich couple, who even had hot chocolate powder, she listened to her little radio. She said: If I get rich, I'll buy a nice house, buy my mother a car, buy my children everything. — Her hands and buttocks were more lovely than the dapplings on a giraffe leaning down to browse on a bush, the giraffe's flesh brownish-yellow with dark brown spots like a fresh buttermilk pancake. Her soft brown thigh was delicious with sweat.

The room was now cozy, lighter, cool because it was night. The neighbors told each other good night from one cubicle to the next. (Her sister was out whoring and chewing khat, never riding the zebras of sleep.) The music was low; bulbs glowed beautifully above the dirty white walls. Her delicious musk-mound floated him away from himself just as khat took him out of Kenya, past Moronie's low tree-balls bunched together under the broad cloud-cauldron of volcanoes; past the dark lady with the golden nosering and golden earrings (her head and shoulders wrapped in a cloth of blue and white stripes, blue and black sunbursts); past Moronie's bulk of hairy greenness, past the spittle between the hot black teeth of bays; and all the way to Madagascar's rivers the color of tomato soup, braiding broadly down between clouds and tree-destroyed places. She rolled on top of him, and he whirled westward to Somalia, where khat was qat and the sellers sat on a carven wooden chest beneath a green plastic awning. Ladies sat on the curb with double handfuls of qat, swishing flies away with the green stalks. A Somali in a station wagon pulled into the special parking lot, waving a plastic bag of qat, and began to chew and spit. He said: I don't need to eat anymore! My food is qat! —

He recited the roster of qat: gangete (the best kind), gese, lare, harere from Ethiopia. . Everyone was chewing qat. His head began to pull the rest of his body a little into the air; he discoursed with the others on all subjects of this world, his analysis complete and certain; she pulled him on top of her and was kissing his lips until she'd sucked him back into Kenya where qat was only khat and there were not four kinds; her sister lay drowsing half-naked against him all day making chewing sounds, dreaming of khat. It was night again, and his love was in his arms.

She explained to him that President Moi was a devil-worshipper because on the twenty-shilling note was a picture of him with a snake around his neck. — To be a devil-worshipper you must kill someone in your own family, the one you love the most, she whispered. You must do it in front of the other devil-worshippers. If you get rich from devil-worship and then leave that church, your riches will leave you. — President Moi's bodyguard had seen the snake and thought that it was hurting the President, so he killed it. President Moi got very angry and had him murdered.

She said that Moi had killed so many people. She knew that he was a devil-worshipper because her rent had doubled in one year to eight hundred shillings a month.*

She was sleepy now. She yawned and scratched her cunt. After he went away he found that she was still with him, because in the hair below his belly tiny black scabs appeared, itching more every day, and finally when he caught one between his fingers he saw that it was not a scab at all, that it had writhing legs. Then he knew why she had really shaved her pussy; and he remembered how she used to scratch between her legs without saying anything. She was in his arms.

* In 1993, this was about U.S. $40.

Now it was dark, and crowds stood in the streets. Someone had tied a bundle of leaves to the sign for Taveta Road. The night was cobalt violet with pale gray swirls of cloud. A woman smiled and said: jambo,* and he knew that he would never be lonely again. The buildings pulsed with shouts. The whores stood in the darkness, their sun a single strip of orange windows above.

Past the alley where men stood pissing against a dark wall, his love's sister disappeared, sinking without sight or sound. The police had caught her.

They waited an hour to be sure. Sitting at one of the restaurant's scuffed and mismatched tables, they ordered the cheapest dish, which was mutton stew and passionfruit juice. Heavy chain grated squeaking on the echoing floor. Parade music momentarily drowned the bus horns outside as a guard came in between the tables, swinging his truncheon.

I give him one hundred shillings, his love said. He find out for me.

She went over to the man and they spoke for awhile. When she came back, her face was almost the same. Only someone who knew her very well could have told that she was almost in tears.

He say, you a cripple and you fuck me up the anus. Sometimes I want to cry, I tell you. I tell him, maybe he know that because you fuck him up the anus!

While the police laughed over a newspaper behind the tall booking desk, a sergeant came in with a beggar whose face was a black drowned lady-mask in a ruffled collar of dead grass, and she carried a skinny child of indeterminate morbidity which did not brush away the flies from its mouth and the mother was wailing in grief and terror so extreme that it was a wonder they did not begin crying instead of laughing at the booking desk; of course at the booking desk they never noticed. The sergeant kept his hand on the beggar's shoulders so professionally that it almost seemed he was comforting her. Really, of course, he incarnated the foul-smelling sandy sprawl of a lion snarling over the meat between his paws.

They catch her without a home, his love said in a whisper. That's why she is crying. Now they put her in the cell for three months or six months.

The sergeant took the beggar through a door, and almost immediately they heard the rhythmic screams. He could not keep himself from looking at the booking desk where they smiled back at him behind all their riches of contemptuous knowledge. He could see that they knew him. They knew him just as well as the beggar-boys who if they weren't given money started shouting: White man, why you take our African lady? — They knew his love, too. She didn't want to visit her sister in prison because if she did they'd stare her down in exactly the same way, saying nothing, and then if they ever caught her they'd shout: It's your turn now! Where's your husband now?