Chapter 17: The Tree with No Shade

For three days the house on the Abaradjou lane was the politest place in Mali.

Julian and Amina passed each other in the courtyard with small, correct nods. They shared the map table in the front room, at opposite ends, and said please and thank you over the tea with an elaborate neutrality that Hawa observed from the kitchen door with her lips pressed together. Julian wrote his signed statement for Colonel Baldi, rewrote it, and sealed it in an envelope with his hand not quite steady. Amina went through the family’s notebooks with the dogged thoroughness of a woman who needs to be doing something. Boubacar, who noticed everything and had decided to comment on none of it, mended a tire that did not need mending and went out for long walks in the evening.

Only the two old sisters were entirely at their ease. Fanta and Zeinabou had taken possession of the back room, where they sat side by side on a mat all day, arguing, with the single-mindedness of two people who had been apart for six years and had a great deal of disagreement to catch up on. They disagreed about the order of verses. They disagreed about whose grandmother had been the better singer. Once, they disagreed about a well, for the better part of an hour, and Amina, copying in the corner, did not interrupt, because she had learned that an argument between the two of them was the nearest thing her family had to a seminar.

It was on the fourth afternoon that Zeinabou said, in the middle of a quarrel about something else entirely: “And you never sing the last part. Of the Moussa song. You stop where the herder points.”

“There is nothing after,” said Fanta.

“There is the tree.”

“That is not part of Moussa. That is a different song.”

“It is the same song. You were always lazy about endings.”

Amina’s pen stopped.

“What tree?” she said.

Both sisters turned, with identical expressions of mild irritation, to look at her.

It was a short passage, and it had been there all along. Amina would turn it over in her mind for weeks afterward with a feeling like vertigo. She had recorded the first half of the Moussa account in her notebook in Paris, nine years before: the failed rains, the well that sulked, the old herder and the hill with the white belly. She had taken the final lines for a children’s coda, a rhyme tacked on for the camels. Zeinabou, who had learned the song from a different teacher, remembered it whole.

When the well sulked, the men of the three roads did not walk to the market.
The market came to them, to the tree that gives no shade.
The man who writes sat down. The jars were filled.
What was owed was weighed, and written, and kept where the three roads meet.

“It is not a hall,” Amina said slowly. She was kneeling in front of Zeinabou with the notebook open on her knees. “It is not a city. Do you see? I have been picturing the Ledger of the Sand as a building. Scribes at long tables. A thing out of a manuscript. But it is a tree. A meeting place. When the old road failed, they had to renegotiate who traded where, and with whom, and on what terms, and so the traders from three directions came to one place, and a man with a pen sat down and kept the accounts. And the accounts went into jars.”

“Jars,” said Julian.

He had come to the doorway at the sound of her voice. He stood there with his hand on the frame, and she looked up at him across the room and for a moment forgot to be careful.

“Five rings in the floor of a room,” she said. “At the Well of the Cousin.”

They laid it out at the map table that evening, the three of them, with the lamp turned up and Zeinabou installed at one end like a presiding judge.

“It would explain why they dug where they dug,” said Julian, pacing. He had stopped being careful too. “The pit was exactly over the room. Not a search. A retrieval. Five jars of the right size. You don’t send a team with a sieve to dig up a pile of copper fittings and then leave the copper. You go for the jars, because the jars are what you came for.” He stopped. “If they held records, tallies, contracts, accounts, written on paper or palm leaf or leather, and sealed with clay, then each jar is a list of names and places. They’d be worth more than any pot.”