He closed his eyes and imagined that he was in a desert where black people were gathered around him for prayer. He had a white pith helmet on his head and he was very young.
Daniel ran from the church to the hill behind the house. When he got there Sanna was sitting and digging in the mud. He was happy to see her.
‘I saw you. You were at the church. What were you doing there?’
‘I asked the pastor about the water.’
‘What water?’
‘The water Jesus walked on.’
Sanna stopped digging. Her fingers were caked with dried mud. Daniel couldn’t tell whether she had heard what he said. She took his hands and ran her finger over the back of one of them. She cautiously scraped at his skin.
‘You’re black. I can’t scrape it off. Wasn’t he afraid?’
‘Who?’
‘The pastor! He must have thought you were a real devil who had climbed down from the wall.’
Her hands were rough with clay, but Daniel liked the way she held his hands. She didn’t want anything from him, like everyone else who held his hands. She just wanted to hold them. For the first time since he had found Kiko and Be dead in the sand he had discovered something that really made him elated. Father had betrayed him, leaving him as far from the sea as he could, but maybe the girl named Sanna would help him find it again.
She kept examining his hands. She searched in the lines of his palm, flicked at his fingernails, squeezed hard.
‘If we had children they would be grey,’ said Daniel.
She gave a loud, shrill laugh. ‘We can’t have children,’ she shrieked. ‘You’re only a child and I’m crazy.’
She leaned in close to him. She smelled of sweat, but there was also something sweet that reminded him of honey.
‘I hear voices in the mud,’ she said. ‘All those people down there are whispering. I can’t help it. I hear them. Only me. Do you hear anything?’
Daniel listened.
‘You have to put your head to the ground.’
Daniel pressed his cheek and ear to the ground.
‘Not your ear,’ she whispered. ‘You can only hear the people down there if you listen with your mouth or your nose.’
Daniel pressed his face to the ground. But he could only hear through his ears. The wind was whining and the birds shrieking.
‘You’ll have to teach me,’ he said.
‘I’m too stupid to teach anything.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Everybody.’
Daniel wondered what stupidity actually meant. The girl who sat holding his hands made him feel quite calm. Even though he still couldn’t see the sea, her eyes seemed to glisten with seawater. Maybe she could tell him what direction to go in to find the sea. A person like that couldn’t be stupid.
‘Actually I’m not supposed to be here,’ she said all of a sudden.
‘Why not?’
‘I might get lost.’
Daniel didn’t understand the word lost.
‘I don’t know what that is.’
She laughed harshly again.
‘Then you’re even stupider than me. If you go away and can’t find your way home, you sit out in the dark and scream for help but nobody hears. Then you freeze to death. When they find you, you’re so stiff that they’d have to break off your legs to get you into the coffin.’
Daniel sat silently pondering what she had said. Finally he had found a word for what he felt. What she was describing applied to him. He didn’t know where to go. Even though it wasn’t dark and he hadn’t frozen to death, he was still lost.
He decided to memorise that word. Some day, when he was old and moved away from the others in the desert, he would remember it. Everything that had happened the time he got lost. Everything that by then might have fallen away and become a mysterious memory.
‘I like being quiet,’ said Sanna.
She still hadn’t let go of his hands. Daniel was starting to get chilly because the ground he was sitting on was cold, but he didn’t want to move. He didn’t want Sanna to let go.
‘I do too,’ Daniel said.
‘There are so many kinds of quiet. When you’re just about to fall asleep. Or when you’re running so fast that all you can hear is your own heart.’
She leaned her head against his chest and closed her eyes.
‘Do you have a heart too?’ she said in surprise. ‘I didn’t think the Devil did. Damn! I thought there was only a sooty chimney inside the chest of Satan.’
Daniel gave a start. She had said the word that Father always used when he was angry or impatient. He didn’t like it. The word scared him.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’
She let go of his hands and began to slap him in the face. When he tried to protect himself she stopped.
‘I don’t like people who lie. You lied. You were thinking of something. ’
‘I was wondering where the sea is.’
‘What do you want with the sea?’
‘I want to go home.’
‘You can’t walk on the sea like it was a road. You’d sink, you’d drown. And float back up with eels swimming out of your eyes.’
Daniel could tell that Sanna was starting to get restless. She looked around, kicked at the dirt and spat. He thought that she too was a stranger, who came from somewhere far away, even though she wasn’t black. She didn’t look like any of the people he had met when he was with Father. Maybe she was on her way somewhere too, even though she didn’t know that it was possible to walk on water.
Suddenly she pulled up her dress. She was naked underneath. There was thick black hair between her legs. She pulled down her dress again.
‘Now it’s your turn,’ she said.
Daniel stood up and pulled down his trousers. Since he was cold, his member had shrunk. He pulled on it.
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ Sanna shrieked. ‘You shouldn’t touch yourself or it will fall off. On me it would turn into a big wound.’
Daniel quickly pulled his trousers back up. Sanna stared at him. Then she turned round and ran off. Daniel ran after her. Sanna stopped, picked up a rock and threw it at him.
‘You can’t come with me,’ she shouted. ‘Or I’ll get a beating.’
The rock hit Daniel on the cheek and made a cut that bled. She was holding another bigger rock in her hand.
‘I’ll throw it,’ she yelled. ‘Don’t follow me.’
She turned and kept running. Daniel stood looking after her. He didn’t know what had happened. If Father had thrown a rock at him, he would have been afraid, but he wasn’t now. She wasn’t angry with him. She was angry with somebody else.
The next day the wind was blowing hard across the brown fields. During the night he had had a dream about the oxen who had pulled him and Father through the desert towards the city where the ship was waiting. The animals were buried in sand. Only their heads were visible. They had bellowed in terror and then the sand had slowly covered their heads too. He stood looking at the animals. He wanted to help them, dig away the sand with his hands, but his hands were gone. His arms were like dry branches hanging down from his shoulders.
The dream had yanked him out of sleep. At first he didn’t know where he was. Then he heard the milkmaids sniffling and the hired hand muttering and passing wind. He lay utterly still in the darkness and tried to understand what the oxen buried in the sand were trying to tell him. Without being able to explain why, he knew that Be was behind the dream. She was the one who had sent it to him. But he couldn’t understand it. Restlessness drove him out of bed. The floor was cold. He stood carefully on one of the milkmaids’ dresses that had fallen from the end of the bed. For an instant he thought he was surrounded by all the people who had lain dead in the sand when Kiko and Be had left him. Their whispering voices were still there, with someone laughing quietly and the smell of freshly slaughtered meat. He tried to grab their bodies. But it was impossible — there was only the darkness and the voices.