little girl by the hand, and together they made their way through the crowd. Saffa watched this strange little trio, pleased by the sale and yet reluctant to look away, curious as to what would become of them.
• • •
The woman who bought the chimpanzee was named Pearl Groves, and she was no idiot. She could smell the lies rolling off that poacher as strongly as his sweat, a nose for deceit that she’d acquired much too late in her marriage.
Pearl’s husband was a noted herpetologist who had visited western Cameroon in 1969 to research the Hairy Frog, Trichobatrachus robustus, whose males were not in fact hairy but covered with tiny, cilia-like extensions of skin, allowing them more surface area through which to breathe. His love affair with the Hairy Frog had lasted for months, permeating their breakfast conversation and even surfacing, embarrassingly, at some dinner parties. Pearl found it hard to be inquisitive on the subject. She had never shared her husband’s love for amphibians but contented herself with the idea that their marriage was like a frozen dinner, compartmentalized but complementary.
Six years after her husband ended his research trips, a letter followed. Pearl was gentle with the paper, torn along one corner, as fragile and baffling as a salvaged treasure map. The letter was written by an NGO worker in Sierra Leone, on behalf of an old woman whose daughter had died of malaria, leaving her with a granddaughter whose education and care she could not shoulder. Along with the letter came a small black-and-white photograph of a child with the eyes and dimples and mouth of Pearl’s husband. On the back of the photograph was written: Neneh, daughter of Mr. Groves.
Pearl was sixty years old, a retired schoolteacher who had never wanted children. Neither had her husband. People assumed that this was because Pearl considered her students her children, a pleasant lie to which she sometimes resorted, but in reality, she couldn’t see how children fit into the frozen dinner of her marriage. And as far as an extramarital affair was concerned, she had presumed that her husband had passed the window of foolish opportunity. A part of her eyed him with wonder, searching for the rogue within, the simmering of lust. But at sixty-four, he had a belly that sagged over his belt; he mumbled nonsense in his sleep. Sometimes, if he was especially riveted by The $10,000 Pyramid while brushing his teeth, he would continue to brush, like a machine, until the foam streamed down his chin as he yelled, “Things that bite! THINGS THAT BITE!” And now, reading and rereading the letter, she kept wondering if it all would have been different had she just gone to Cameroon with her husband, had she just pretended to love those disgusting frogs.
Maybe then he would have left his cleaning woman alone. The woman was originally from Bo, her husband admitted, haltingly. Sierra Leone. She had been new to Cameroon, like him, and lonely.
Everyone in Pearl’s family implored her to come to her senses; one did not leave her home in Canton, Ohio, to retrieve a girl from a hut in Africa. Send money their way and be done with it. This was her husband’s view as well, though he had lost most of his authority and his life had become a prolonged exercise in deference: submitting the TV remote to Pearl, making a tuna melt for Pearl, shuffling out of any room she entered. Pearl simply replied that adopting Neneh was the right thing to do, leaning upon the brand of Baptist conviction that had always sustained her. Behind that conviction was her intention to shame her husband every day, to raise the mirror to his face and show him she was not deceived; she knew exactly who he was.
Pearl’s husband thought her insane for going to Sierra Leone. He refused to accompany her or take her to the airport. She left him the number of the hotel in Bo where she and Neneh would be staying for a week, preparing for the flight back home. Whenever he tried to change the subject, Pearl switched it right back. Whenever he grudgingly referred to “the girl,” Pearl asserted her name—Neneh.
But when Pearl arrived in Bo to claim Neneh, all her stern conviction dissolved, displaced by the immediate necessities of the child made real. Because Neneh’s grandmother was too old to travel from her village, Neneh had come with a representative from the NGO, a plumpish woman wearing