‘I saw a dog there one time. A lone dog. It was as if I was seeing myself. It didn’t have anywhere to go. It had not come from anywhere. You followed me there. And just now you were standing outside the bathroom door.’
‘I was worried that you weren’t feeling well.’
She looked at him incredulously. But then she picked up her story as if nothing had happened.
A few years later, when my mother had had another son that she had also named Mazda since she was certain that the woman with the blue hair had eaten him up, a man came to the village. His name was Tindo. He told us what had really happened. Tindo was tall and had a beautiful face. All the girls in the village immediately fell in love with him. He came to help us plant our crops in the fields. Mbe had died by then and we had a new chief by the name of Leme. In the evenings I would hide in the shadows and listen to the elders talking. That evening I was hiding behind Leme’s hut. The conversation turned to the woman who had called herself Brenda and who had collected children to take to the city.
‘She probably ate them,’ Leme said without trying to hide the fact that he was upset. ‘She gave us money. When one is poor even a little money is a lot.’
‘No one in this country eats children,’ Tindo said.
When Tindo spoke it was as if he was singing. Even when he told them about the pain that Mazda had endured. Tindo knew about the men without conscience who sent out women to collect children from the poorest and most desperate villages. They offered money and promises of schooling and an end to poverty. But no schools awaited the children who were taken to the city. There were simply dark containers where the air was as hot as fire, there were dark stinking cargo holds in rusty ships that left the harbour with the lights turned off. There were long marches where the children were whipped if they tried to run away.
‘Leme, I know how much what I am telling you will haunt you,’ Tindo said finally. ‘Especially the question if and how you should tell the parents that they will never see their children again. But nothing is ever improved by concealing the truth. These children were taken away in slave caravans. Long lines of frightened children were herded over the mountains to the lands on the other side where the delicate and most valuable crops grow. There they were locked in huts and kept under constant surveillance. They worked at night and received only one small meal a day. When they no longer had the energy to work they were thrown out onto the city streets to beg for subsistence. No one has ever heard of any one of these children returning. Ever.’
