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By Root 560 0

Suddenly, a child runs laugh-crying from a hut, arms outstretched, looking over his shoulder at his mother, who emerges just in time to see the child hit the motorbike side on. I am sent sprawling, the vehicle’s spinning wheels kicking up stinging sand into my eyes and face until it stalls. In the sudden, ringing silence, I scramble to my feet, spitting dirt from my mouth and wiping my eyes. I am dizzy with fright, but the child is still standing and unhurt. He is looking at me with astonishment, his arms still outstretched. His face trembles, his lip shakes, and then he starts to cry. His mother swoops up on us and scoops her son into her arms. She shifts a smaller sling of baby, a quiet bulge in a bright hammock of cloth, under her arm to make room for the bigger child. The baby bleats once and then is quiet again.

I stand up and pull the motorbike up. “Are you okay?”

She shrugs and smiles. The boy nestles into the soft crease of her neck and calms himself with soft, diminishing sobs.

“Pepani, pepani. I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t see him. Is he okay?”

The woman shrugs and smiles again and I realize that she does not speak English. I have only learned a few phrases of Chnyanja, none of which (“Thank you”; “How are you?”; “I am fine”; “What is the name of your father?”) seem appropriate for my current predicament.

I put my right hand to my heart and bob a curtsy, right knee tucked behind left knee, in the traditional way, to reinforce my apology. The woman looks uneasy; she pats her young son’s head almost as a reflex and glances, as if for help, into the shadows under the drying crop of tobacco hanging in a long, low shed next to her hut.

“It’s no problem, madam,” a man’s soft voice says from the shadows. I shade my eyes against the harsh, blanching sun. There, under the cool, damp leaves, lying on a reed mat, is a man lying almost naked, with a young boy of twelve or thirteen, also hardly clothed, by his side. For a moment I am too surprised to reply. The man, obviously the father of the toddler into whom I have just crashed, props himself up on one elbow and rubs his bare, pale-shining collar bone with the thick fingers of one hand. The boy at his side stirs, rolls over, and hangs an arm over the older man’s neck, his face stretched up in a grimace which is half-smile, half-yawn. The boy’s shorts have worn through at the crotch and his member is exposed, flaccid and long against his thigh.

The man begins to softly caress the boy’s arm, almost absentmindedly, as if the arm draped around his neck were a pet snake. I am suddenly aware of how softly quiet the hot afternoon is: a slight buzzing of insects, a crackle of heat from the drying thatch that covers the barn and house, the distant cry of a cockerel clearing his throat to warn of the coming of mid-afternoon when work will resume. My stomach growls, empty-acid. I feel the sun burning the back of my neck, my eyes stinging, my muscles aching. I pull the motorbike up and have begun to climb back onto it when the man suddenly pulls himself off the mat, the child still hanging from his neck.

The man is smiling. I see now that he is much older than I had first thought. I also see that the boy around his neck is disabled; he is a combination of helplessness (his arms and legs are as thin as bones and devoid of muscles) and of uncontrollable, rigid spasms, which send him backward against the softly restraining cradle of his father’s arms. His head rolls, his mouth sags open sideways, and saliva hangs to his chin. He makes soft, puppy noises. I have never seen this, an African child in this condition. It comes to me, in one sweep, that most children like this boy are probably allowed to die, or are unable to survive in the conditions into which they are born.

The man says, “Are you fine?”

I nod. “Thank you.”

He frowns and points at the sun with the flat of his hand, which also supports his son’s head. “You are out now? In this hot sun? You can see from the sun that it is time to rest.”

I nod again. “I was stuck.” I point to the motorbike. “I fell in a well.”