Chapter 15: The Gap in the Ridges

Zeinabou arrived at dawn, as promised, in the cab of her nephew’s truck, with a stick across her knees and a canvas bag in her lap and the expression of a woman who has been kidnapped by relatives and means to make them regret it.

She was very small. Julian, watching from the roof as the truck backed into the lane, thought at first that a child had climbed out of the cab. Then the figure straightened, in a black wrapper faded to charcoal, and tilted her head to the right to bring her good ear toward the courtyard door, and he understood that this was a person who had spent eighty years making the world come to her.

Amina was already in the doorway. She had not slept. She stood with her hands pressed flat against her robe, a woman who had rehearsed a speech through the night and lost every word of it.

“Zeinabou,” she said.

The old woman looked her up and down, slowly, from the head wrap to the dust on her sandals. “You have got thin,” she said. “They did not feed you in the desert.”

“They fed me.”

“With what? Dates?” She sniffed. “Come here where I can see you. I cannot hear you from there.”

Amina crossed the courtyard and bent. Zeinabou took her chin in a hand like a bundle of dry twigs and turned her face to the light. Nobody moved. Hawa, at the kitchen door, stopped with a pot against her hip.

“I have to tell you something,” said Amina. Her voice was not quite steady. “Before anyone else does. The songs. Yours, the ones you taught my grandmother, the ones you sang to me when I was small. I wrote them down. In notebooks, in my own hand. Years ago, in Paris, and here. I did it without asking you.” She swallowed. “Men have found out that they exist. That is why you were taken from Ber. It is because of me.”

Zeinabou said nothing for a long moment. A cock crowed somewhere beyond the wall.

“I know you wrote them,” she said. “Your grandmother told me. She wrote me a letter, six years ago, dictated to a neighbor’s boy, three pages long. The girl writes everything, she said. She is a terrible nuisance, and she is the only one of them with any sense.” She released Amina’s chin and tapped it, once, with a finger. “A song in a notebook is a seed in a jar. It is not dead. It waits for someone to plant it. I was never afraid of the jar, child. I was afraid that nobody would be left who knew what to do with the seed.”

Amina made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else, and knelt on the packed earth and put her forehead against the old woman’s knee. Zeinabou let her. She looked over Amina’s bent head, with her sharp black eyes, directly at Julian on the roof.

“Is that the Italian?”

“That is the Italian,” said Boubacar, from somewhere behind her.

“He is very tall,” said Zeinabou, in a tone that suggested this was not a point in his favor. “Does he eat?”

Fanta Traoré, summoned from the back room, came out on her granddaughter’s arm and stopped dead in the courtyard. The two sisters regarded each other across ten paces of beaten earth, one very small and one very upright, with the pitiless frankness of women who had known each other for eighty years.

“You have got fat,” said Fanta.

“You have got old,” said Zeinabou.

They embraced, with a great deal of mutual criticism, and were seen to be holding on to each other rather longer than the argument required. Julian, who had come down from the roof, found that he had to look at the sky.

It was in the middle of that morning, in the cool room off the courtyard where the sample cases were stacked, that he sat down and wrote the letter he had been avoiding for two days.

He wrote to Dottor Alberto Ferrante, the secretary of the family trust in Milan that had funded his fieldwork for three years and asked for nothing in return except a published report. He did not mention the corridor. He did not mention the wells, or the Cousin, or the hill. He said only that he had reason to believe the trust’s name had appeared on a list compiled by an unknown party in connection with foreign research in northern Mali, that he could not at present say why, and that the trust might wish to take precautions: to hold its correspondence, to consult counsel, to treat any unsolicited approach on his behalf as suspect.

He showed it to Amina before he sent it. She read it twice, and struck out one sentence, and wrote a different one in the margin, in her upright script. The sentence he had written had said the danger is real. Hers said we do not yet know how real, and we are acting as if it is.

“It is more honest,” she said.

“It is,” said Julian. He sent it.

The reply came within the hour, brief and courteous and entirely steady. Dear Dottor Marchetti, thank you for the warning. We will take counsel. Please confirm that you are safe. The trust has never asked for a report so much as it has asked that you come back. He read the last line twice and did not know what to do with it.

They left before dawn on the following day, two vehicles with their lights doused, by the southern lanes, with Zeinabou and Fanta standing in the courtyard door in the grey like two small dark pillars.

The plan was Boubacar’s, and he had defended it for a full day. They would not go for Hassi Tarfa by the eastern track. They would go by the western edge of the white pan, along the old caravan band that Amina had found, and cross the ridges by a gap that Boubacar had used six years earlier and had marked on his map with a small, careful cross. It was three days in and three days out. The fuel drum had been replaced. A third spare tire rode on the roof. The distance to the Greco weight’s findspot, to the collapsed well that Sofia’s late professor had written down in 2009, was exactly the distance that Colonel Baldi had said the case would need: photographs of the place, taken by a competent hand, with the chain intact. The weight on the market had a scraped word. The ground it had come from would have no word at all unless someone stood on it and recorded what was missing.