Okay. I will wait here.
Then just like that, Okwu let go and was gone. I came back to myself and my eyes focused on the desert before me.
“Done?” my grandmother asked. She stood behind me and I turned to her.
“Yes. It knows.”
She nodded. “Well done,” she said, holding her hands up and moving them around. She walked away.
They pitched their elaborate goatskin tents facing the desert to give everyone the semblance of privacy. Two men built a fire in the center of the tents and some of the women began to use it to cook. The soft whoosh of capture stations from behind two of the tents and their cool breath further cooled the entire camp. Soon, the large empty jug one of the camels had been carrying was rolled to the center of the tents and filled with water.
“You’ll stay with me,” my grandmother said, pointing to the tent two men had just set up for her. She handed me a cup. “Drink heavily, your body needs hydration.” Inside, the tent was spacious and there were two bedrolls on opposite sides. For “dinner” there was flat bread with honey, a delicious strong-smelling hearty soup with dried fish, more dates, and mint tea. As the sun rose, everyone quickly disappeared into his or her tents to sleep.
I was pleasantly full and tired, but too restless to sleep just yet. So I sat on my mat, staring out at the desert, my grandmother snoring across from me. Since we’d walked into the desert, the flashbacks and day terrors I was used to having had disappeared. I inhaled the dry baking air and smiled. The healing properties of the desert had always been good for me. My eye fell on Mwinyi, who’d been watering the camels and now sat out on a sand dune facing the desert. His hands were working before him. I got up and walked over to him.
He looked at me as I approached, turned back to the desert, and continued working his hands. I paused, wondering if I was interrupting. I pushed on; I had to know. Plus, I’d seen several of them talking and laughing as they moved their hands like this, so I doubted it was like prayer or meditation.
“Hi,” I said, hoping he’d stop moving his hands. He didn’t.
“You should get some sleep,” he said.
I cocked my head as I watched him. He was frowning as he pushed his blue sleeves back, held up his arms, and moved his hands in graceful swooping jabbing motions.
“I will,” I said. I paused and took a breath. I wondered what would happen if I called up a current and connected it to his moving hands. Would the zap of it make him stop? “What is this that you’re doing?” I blurted. “With your hands? Can you control it?” I waited, cringing as I bit my lip. For a moment, he only worked his hands, his eyes staring into the desert.
Then he looked up at me. “I’m communicating.”
“But you do it when you… like now,” I said as he did a flourish with his hands. “You’re not talking to me right there. I don’t understand it, if you are. And I see people doing it while talking to other people, too.”
He looked at me for a long time and then glanced at the camp and then back at me.
“This is something your grandmother should tell you. Go ask her.”
“I’m asking you,” I said. “You all do it, so why can’t I ask anyone?”
He sighed and muttered, “Okay, sit down.”
I sat beside him, pulling my legs to my chest.
“Auntie Titi, your grandmother, is my grandfather’s best friend,” he said. “So I know all about your father and his shame. You have the same shame.”
I blinked for a moment as two separate worlds tangled in my mind. Back when I was on the ship with the Meduse, they had referred to my edan as “shame” and now here was that word again, but in a completely different context. “I don’t underst—”
“I saw how you looked at us,” he said. “Just like every Himba I have ever encountered, like we’re savages. You call us the ‘Desert People,’ mysterious uncivilized dark people of the sand.”
I wanted to deny my prejudice, but he was right.
“Despite the fact that you’re darker like us, have the crown like us, have our blood,” he said. “I wonder how surprised you were when you saw that we could speak your language as well as our three languages. ‘Desert People.’ Do you even know the actual name of our tribe?”
I shook my head, slowly.
“We’re the Enyi Zinariya,” he said. “No, I won’t translate that for you.” He looked directly at me, into my eyes, and I didn’t turn away. I wanted an answer to my initial question and I knew when I was being tested. There is nothing like being a harmonizer and looking directly into another harmonizer’s eyes. Nothing.
Everything around us dropped away and there was a sonorous melody that vibrated between my ears that was so perfectly aligned that I felt as if I were beginning to float.
“I only know what I am taught,” I whispered.
“That’s not true,” he said.
“I… I met one of you once,” I said.
“We know,” he said. “And was she a savage?”
“No.”
“So you knew that back then.”
“Okay,” I said, shutting my eyes and rubbing my forehead. “Okay.”
He chuckled. “When we heard about what you did, we all cheered.”
“Really?”
He turned away from me, finished talking. “You should go. Get some sleep.”
“Answer my question first,” I said. “Please.”
“I did. I said we are communicating.”
“With who?”
“Everyone.”
“As you speak to me, you’re speaking to others?”
“It’s the same with your astrolabe,” he said. “Can’t you use it while you talk to other people?”
“But no one is here.”
“I was talking to my mother back in the village,” he said. “She was asking about you.”
“Oh,” I said, frowning deeply. “So you can speak like how I speak to Okwu?”
He paused and moved his hands. Then he turned to me and flatly said, “Ask your grandmother.”
I was about to get up, but then I stopped and asked, “Crown? You said I have the crown like you?”
He grasped a handful of his bushy red-brown hair, “This is the crown.” Then he laughed. “Well, you used to have it. Before the Meduse took it and replaced it with tentacles.”
I wanted to be offended but the way he said it, in such a literal way, instead pulled a hard laugh out of me and suddenly we were both giggling. When I calmed down, the fatigue of the journey hit me and I slowly got up. “What was the name of your clan again?” I asked.
“You’re Himba, I’m Enyi Zinariya,” he said.
“Enyi Zinariya,” I repeated.
He nodded, smiling. “You pronounce it well.”
“Okay,” I said and went back to my grandmother’s tent, lay down, and was asleep within seconds.
“Get up, girl.”
I opened my eyes to my grandmother’s face and the sound of the tent walls flapping from the wind. I stared into her eyes, blinking away the last remnants of sleep. When I sat up, I felt amazingly well rested. The cooling breeze of evening smelled so fresh that I flared my nostrils and inhaled deeply. I’d slept for nearly six hours.
My grandmother smiled, the strong breeze blowing her bushy hair about. “Yes, it’s a good time to move across the desert.”
The desert looked absolutely stunning, bright moonlight and the soft travel of the sand blending to make the ground look otherworldly. I could hear the others talking, laughing and moving about, and the two camels roaring as they were made to stand up. The smell of flat bread made my stomach grumble.
“Grandma,” I said. “Please, tell me why the Enyi Zinariya speak with their hands.”