convinced that the respect and adoration she commanded from the Nubans, though it had been won by her alone, was now sustained by her position as his wife. To lose him would be to lose them. She would be an outcast, a woman without a country, cut off from the home of her birth by her own choice, from her adopted home by circumstance. Therefore, according to the addled logic bred by her fever, her whole future depended on her giving birth.
She grew emotionally demanding, seeking reassurances that she had exclusive claim to him. “Stop this!” he said one night, after another interrogation about the state of his feelings. “She is an ignorant, illiterate peasant girl, she knows nothing about the world outside these mountains. I wouldn’t want her even if I didn’t have you. What is the matter with you?”
“There is nothing the matter with me,” she answered with some bitterness. “You’re all I’ve got, that’s what the matter is. I’ve given up everything to be with you, my country, my job, my family, my friends, everything.”
Sitting at the big ammunition crate that served as their table, its ugliness masked by a woven mat, he rubbed his temples and said patiently, “Did I force you? You gave it up of your own free will. I think you were even eager to give it up. Why are you blaming me?”
She was and she wasn’t. Her own desires for him and a different, bigger life with him were to blame; but because it was he, by the mere fact of his existence, that had moved her to act on her desires, she blamed him as well. Having surrendered all, she was sensitive to any threat to what she did possess. There was something about Yamila that Quinette sensed intuitively—she was an implacable natural force, as unconscious as a lioness seeking a mate. Her ignorance was her strength. She couldn’t see that she wasn’t suitable for Michael and, with no family or clan to care for her, too desperate herself to take Michael’s choice as his final word. She wanted him, that was all, and it was everything.
The rains arrived in mid-April, and so did Quinette’s next menstruation, an unwelcome but persistent visitor. She confessed to Fancher and Handy her longing to get pregnant and asked for their prayers, figuring that if the Creator was deaf to hers, He might listen to theirs. Later she decided to give the Creator a hand. She went to Ulrika with a request for fertility pills. It was not an item the nurse kept on hand, but she promised to do what she could to obtain them.
AFTER AN AUSPICIOUS start, with downpours pounding the hills nearly every afternoon, the rains failed at a critical time, after the sowing of the early-blooming doura that fed the Nubans until the main harvest in November. A dry week passed, then two, and the dread of drought and famine spread like a contagion. The kujur reprised the rituals he’d performed earlier, but the spirits did not respond favorably. (Nor, it must be said, did Allah, beseeched in New Tourom’s small mosque; nor did the God prayed to in St. Andrew’s church.) The skies grayed but yielded only a few drops.
One morning, going to the tailor shop to check on the dressmaking project, Quinette noticed that three of the women did not join in the chorus of “Good day, Kinnet,” that always greeted her entrance. Sullen and silent, they pumped the treadles and averted their eyes when she inspected their work. She felt like the resented boss of a sweatshop. On another occasion, meeting the kujur’s wife on the road, she said hello and got the cold shoulder. This from the woman who had presided over her initiation and tattooing. She was not imagining things. She learned from Pearl that a kind of whisper campaign had begun against her. It made sense in its way. The Nubans might be involved in a twentieth-century war, but their minds remained in the ages of bronze and iron. Confronting a drought that was proving resistant to the prescribed ceremonies and magic, those minds sought an explanation, and someone gave it to them: the ancestors were offended because a pale-skinned stranger had married the commander, and they had signaled their anger by drying up the well of the heavens. Quinette’s flat stomach, after months of marriage, was further proof of their disapproval.
So her fears of losing the Nubans’ affection and acceptance were not entirely irrational.