Blood and dung. The interweaving smells hit her when she ducked into the small earthen hut, pushed from behind by the woman without a tongue, as she was called down in the village.
Alba felt her stomach lurch: lying on the makeshift straw bed under the window, was a little girl staring at her out of shining, unmoving eyes that seemed to suck in the things around her like two enormous black holes where time flowed backwards and everything became its own opposite. Her tiny body was frozen in a foetal position under the rough wool blanket. She seemed never to have been born.
She kneeled beside the bed and moved the blanket gently. It was stained with blood, and her hand hesitated slightly. The child couldn’t have been any older than six. Her naked body, curled up into itself and unmoving, was thin and weak. A strange sort of mud was mixed with the straw at the height of her pelvis.
Gently, Alba turned the child over on her back and instinctively jumped back, as though someone had hit her hard in the stomach.
“My God, no!” Her voice broke inside her in a sort of suffocated weeping, a desperate prayer that what she was seeing was not true.
Between the thin, burning legs she saw what no woman in the world should ever see and what she was never to forget: the child’s genitals had been brutally mutilated. All the external parts had been roughly cut away by an inexpert hand.
A piece of glass, she thought, or else a dull razor-blade.
The cuts were still open. As if her body refused to close that absurd wound and wanted to leave it there, like a blind eye that insists on staying wide open. Someone had tried to stop the blood by covering it with brown earth. Mixed with the blood, it had produced that strange mud.
Alba understood at once that the child seemed to be tottering on the edge of a precipice, about to fall. She had ceased struggling and her gaze was fixed on something that was not longer of this world. The hope she could survive was as weak as her breath, but Alba was still unwilling to accept this.
“Not yet, not yet, my little one”, she kept on repeating, as though to exorcize the presence of the death she already felt in the air of the hut, which suddenly grew ice-cold. She took off her blouse and, slowly lifting the child slowly, wrapped it around her incredibly light body. Not until they got to hospital could she attempt anything more.
She felt her legs jerk nervously: she had to run, as fast as she could; she felt as though she was swimming against the current in the river of a preordained destiny. She hugged the body to her chest, felt it yield like a rag doll. She didn’t know if the child was still alive but she didn’t want to stop, as if her running could fool the death that was still back there in the hut, waiting for an appointment in the future.
When she arrived at her small, makeshift hospital, Alba lay the child’s body on a cot and finally found the courage to take her pulse. She was still breathing.
Her first concern was to clean out the wound. The soil had entered everywhere. Then, for what felt like an infinitely long time, she worked to take out the thorns that clumsy hands had used to close the back part, leaving only a small space kept open with a splinter of wood. The child’s tender skin was torn around her spine, creating small nodes where infection had set in. Alba’s heart was trembling, but there was no alternative: she had to open them all with her scalpel. With every cut she made, it seemed she could feel the stitch in her brain. She had no anaesthetics, only morphine, but she feared the child was too weak for that.
So she had to retrace the path of violence, trying to placate pain with more pain. The girl’s eyes stared into a vacuum. She didn’t have enough strength to resist, and the only sign she gave of her suffering were her tears. Alba watched over the crying anxiously.
As long as she can still cry, it means she’s alive, she thought.
When she’d finished she disinfected the wounds, sprinkling them with antibiotic powder, and covered it all with a clean bandage. She had to try to bring the fever down. If it went up too high in the next few hours, the child wouldn’t make it. She picked up a sponge dipped into warm water and passed it delicately over the shivering body. Then she covered her and, raising her head slowly, tried to get the child to drink some sweetened water. She was only able to get a few drops into her mouth. She sat down next to the bed, passing the wet sponge over her forehead.
Alba had tears in her throat. She felt a shudder of horror and anger on the tips of the fingers that had been sewing and disinfecting for over four hours, knowing only too well that nothing and no one would ever be able to close the deepest part of that wound.
She wanted to hold on to this creature, whose name she didn’t even know, nail her to this world and let her breath the air that had poisoned her. She wanted to keep alive the body that her people had mutilated and tormented.
She felt as she had many years before when, still a little girl herself, she’d wanted to save the life of a small blackbird whose wing had been broken with a sling by her schoolmates. She had taken it to her bedroom and for many days after had forced water and food down its mouth.
When you are well, I’ll let you go, she told it, trying to make it fly in the small space of her room. But despite the food, the water and the love she’d forced down its throat every day, her blackbird never flew again. One morning she found it motionless in the makeshift nest she’d made out of cardboard and paper tissues.
She could hardly keep her eyes open. She leaned her head on the small bed. Now the blackbird was there, she was tired and it didn’t want to fly, no, it lay still under the covers, tomorrow, yes, tomorrow it will fly…
When she woke up, her head felt like lead and all her bones ached. The child had not moved. Her heart tightened.
“No, my little one, no”, she shouted, bending over low enough to brush the girl’s face. She was breathing.
“Thank you, God” whispered Alba. But God could still change his mind. She couldn’t move away from that breathing, she wanted to hear it over and over again.
“That’s it, kitten, breathe,” she repeated over and over, all the while holding the small hand that wasn’t burning any more.
She was still bent over the cot stroking the child’s forehead when Suna, her old Kikuyu assistant, came in.
“Is she alive?” she asked, worried.
“She’s alive, Suna. What are you doing here so early? How did you find out?”
“Sheena, the woman without a tongue. She rushed into my house, banging on the door like a crazy woman. I thought the town was in flame. Then she told me the whole story”.
“Told you? I thought she couldn’t speak”.
“She can’t. But with a stick in the sand no one can tell a story better. So I ran here as fast as I could”.
“It was hell, Suna. I was sure she was going to die. But now it’s over”.
Alba noticed that the woman was staring down at the floor too fixedly, as though she could see something there.
“What is it, Suna?” she asked, feeling there was something wrong. “The child is going to make it”, she repeated, trying to relieve the worry on the woman’s face.
“I know, Alba. You did a fantastic job”.
“Then what is it?”
“You see, Alba” began the woman, taking her hand and smiling at her sadly. “We heal people’s bodies. If we are lucky, we can keep them alive. But there are things our scalpels and our medicines are powerless to help“.
She paused for a moment, suffocating a sigh.
“You know, when I learned what you had done, I understood you’d taken a path that would peter out into quicksand. Life follows strange directions here. That little girl sleeping on your bed is the daughter of Asha”.
“Who is Asha?”
“Asha was a prostitute. Six years ago she got pregnant with someone whose name she didn’t even know. The old women of the village offered to free her womb of the fruit of sin. She refused and wanted to keep it. So, after a few months Kari was born. There are creatures born with a curse in their blood. Asha died a few days later.
As divine punishment, sentenced the village. When I went there, I understood that the divine punishment had taken the form of a mush of dung and grasses that an old midwife had used to cover the delivery wounds. It was too late. Asha developed an infection that killed her a few days later.
Kari, nobody’s daughter, as they’d already named her when she was still in her mother’s womb, was handed over to an ancient woman who lived outside the village. After the rite of purification she would have been allowed back in the village. But now everything has changed.”
“Why?”
“You interfered in a sacred rite that would have “corrected” the impure inclinations the girl had inherited”.
“A rite that was killing her!”
“For them it would have been divine will”.
“If divine will is in the hands of the butcher that did this, I don’t dare imagine what the devil must look like in this place!”
“Look, for them you’re a kind of foreign witch. They think you sewed up what they had cut as purification. You have made her impure again, for them. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I do. And now what will happen?”
“Kari will never be accepted in this community. Her destiny is already sealed. It always has been …”
“What does it mean she won’t be accepted? She is only six! Where do they want her to go?”
“Nobody cares about the whereabouts of nobody’s daughter…..”
Alba went up to the bed where the little girl was sleeping peacefully. Between her half-closed lids her pupils could be seen moving slowly.
She’s dreaming, she thought, smiling.
“It’s this or death. They haven’t left you much choice, little one”.
Her hand brushed the ruffled hair away from the small forehead. She looked like an ebony doll left on a booth in a second-hand market.
She felt her heart trembling with a new emotion. Before dawn arrived through the dusty hospital windows, she had already made her decision.
When the worried Suna tried to pull her away from the bed, she turned around and staring straight into her eyes said:
“Kari isn’t nobody’s daughter any more. She is my daughter now”. She held the little girl’s hand with the same determination that, so many years before, had forced a broken wing to fly in the narrow space of her room.
ingrid beatrice coman was born in Romeniat in 1971. At the age of 23 she moved to Italy, where she continued her studies, dedicating herself to her passion for literature. She has attended fiction writing workshops, including one held by the writer Raul Montanari, as well as screenplay workshops, including ‘the Holden’ in Turin. In Italian she has published the stories "Evghenij che torna" (Ellin Selae 2001); "Il re della 54", found in an anthology edited by Raul Montanari; Onda lunga (Archivi del '900 2001); "La stanza degli ospiti", in Il laboratorio dei Segnalibro (Rome 2002); "Non ti aspettavo più" (Ellin Selae 2006); as well as a novel dedicated to the history of the Afghan people, La città dei tulipani (Luciana Tufani Ed. 2005). She is an active member of the staff of the online literary magazine "Sagaranaonline", and she is now working on a new novel, Tè al samovar, set in the Soviet concentration camps in the 1950s.