I left the museum disappointed. I told myself it was unrealistic to hope to find Suleiyá’s bracelets, or something like them, but even so I felt more and more certain that I had seen something like them in Niamey. I just could not remember where.
I’d become acquainted with a woman named Mariam Yacoub and her three sons, Abdullah, Nasir, and Idrees, who import fruit from Gabon. Mariam had promised me mangoes on Saturday, so on Saturday morning, early, I walked to her stall. I wanted to buy the mangoes first, before they sold out, then wander through the jewelers’ stalls searching for something that looked like the bracelets Adams had described.
The mangoes had come. They were set out in wooden crates stamped with the bright red ink of the Ministre d’Agricole du Gabon and the many black and red inks stamped officiously on the crates at all the borders they had crossed on their way to us. Mariam stood and held ripe mangoes for me to see as I walked toward her, but what made me stare were the bracelets she wore: two narrow, copper bands, one with a large, yellow stone, the other with a small red jewel. She had surely worn them before. It was here that I had seen bracelets like those Adams had described.
“Where did you get those bracelets?” I asked her in French.
“I thought you were coming for mangoes,” she said.
“I am!” I said. I explained about Robert Adams’s journal and its description of the bracelets a Sultan’s wife had worn, telling her that he had described four copper bands, not just two, one of them with a blue jewel.
Mariam stared at me, then called her youngest son. “Idrees,” she said. “Idrees!” She walked off, looking, evidently, for Idrees.
“Monsieur,” Abdullah, her oldest son, said from behind his fruit stand. “The mangoes.”
I purchased six, and Abdullah packed them carefully in the cloth bag I’d brought to the market. Mariam returned then, Idrees at her side. “Please come with me,” she said. “I have something to show you.”
We walked through the market to the jewelers’ stalls and stopped at one, where Mariam embraced another woman. “My sister Ghadda,” she said, introducing us—and, behind Ghadda, among her displays of jewelry, were three sets of bracelets that matched Robert Adams’s description of Suleiyá’s. I smiled and bowed to Ghadda.
“Show my American friend the bracelets on your wrist,” Mariam said.
Ghadda hesitated, then held out her left wrist. On it were two copper bands, one with a small red jewel, the other with a tiny blue one.
“Ghadda’s two and my two are the originals,” Mariam told me. “Our mother gave them to us. These others are copies.”
“Do you wish to buy a set?” Ghadda asked me. “They are beautiful, though simple. The jewels are rubies and a sapphire.” She handed me a set. “The yellow stone is from Eritrea.”
“Kevin tells me he has read about these bracelets, that the wife of a sultan once wore them,” Mariam said.
The copies had Arabic writing around the base of the yellow stone. “Is there any writing on the originals?” I asked.
“On this one, yes,” Mariam said. She took off the bracelet with the yellow stone and handed it to me. Faintly, around the base of the stone, I made out Arabic letters. That disappointed me. I’d hoped, if there were any script at all, for it to be unintelligible.
“It is a verse from the Koran,” Mariam said. “My grandmother had it engraved there, ‘This eases the afflicted heart,’ from the story of the death of Ibrahim, the prophet’s little son, and how caring for a grave does not benefit the dead but comforts the living. It is also what Ghadda engraves on the copies she makes.”
I looked at her. “This bracelet had no writing before then?”
“Grandmother told me when I was a little girl that there had been writing on it, but that no one could read it. She had it replaced with this verse.”
I compared the originals with the copy. The copy appeared to be exact, and beautiful, as Ghadda claimed. I bargained with Ghadda for the copy, but not very hard, and ended up paying too much for it. “How did the originals come into your family?” I asked Mariam, while Ghadda made change.
“They were a gift to our great-great-great-grandfather, who came from Morocco to this land.”
“And who gave them to him?”
“No one ever told us the wife of a sultan,” Ghadda said, handing me a few coins.
“Did your ancestor come here guiding an English explorer?” I asked.
“Surely he was French,” Mariam said.
Of course they were from Bilma.
Brissot discounted the bracelets as coincidence. “Some old North African fashion,” he claimed, but I wonder. I’ve asked Brissot to watch for anything else from the Bilma archives, hoping that perhaps some written account of Abdullah’s has survived, but as I continue to volunteer in the chaos of the archives, surrounded by piles of trampled and torn books and papers and manuscripts, many burned for heat while the Nigerians camped here, I have little hope. If such a manuscript ever existed, and if it somehow survived the occupation, it may be years before Brissot and his staff find it.
But I feel convinced that Abdullah, at least, survived the “mad journey.” Mariam and Ghadda knew little else about their ancestor, the guide from Morocco. But they promised to ask their mother, who is crippled with arthritis and spends her days in a tent in the camps that ring Niamey, whether she knows anything else.
“You must come with me to my mother, Kevin,” Mariam said. “She claims to have been waiting for someone to ask about our ancestor.”
Ghadda stood there, with Mariam’s three sons, and after they had closed their stall, we all walked to the camps and the tent of their mother and grandmother, Hanna Abdullah. She reached up her hands to me and pulled me down beside her onto a worn carpet.
“You are a Christian?” she asked.
I nodded, a Christian by birth, at least.
“I thought it would be a Christian who would come asking about my great, great-grandfather. A mahdi would have cut out his tongue for blasphemy if he had kept telling his story, so he stopped telling it generally, but he told his children, saying that someday someone would ask, and that then they could tell it. They told their children, who told my mother and uncle, and I have told my children, since death seems near for me and no one had come asking for the story before you.”
“You surprised us, that day in the market,” Mariam said. “We counseled with mother before we decided to let you hear the story.”
Hanna told me her story, then. What she recounted matches, in general detail, Robert Adams’s narrative, down to the description of Suleiyá, except that she believed Robert had been French and Suleiyá an angel. Allah, she believed, had sent Robert to Agadez to bring out Ibn Faleiha’s household before the plague of 1819, and to settle Abdullah in this land, where he eventually married Ibn Faleiha’s youngest daughter.
“The angel took the Frenchman,” Hanna said. “She gave Abdullah her bracelets as a benediction, and he stood on a mountain ledge to watch her take the Frenchman into the sky. It was for saying that—that an angel had taken a Christian to heaven—that the mahdi would have cut out his tongue. But all of us, Abdullah and Ibn Faleiha’s descendants, see Allah’s hand in this. What do you make of it? Why have you come asking?”
How could I tell her? I was simply curious, while this story had become part of her faith. I had wondered, of course, whether here we might find evidence for something almost too good to hope for, something almost like Hanna’s angel. I suppose the story can mean many things. I thanked Hanna for telling it to me, and told her that Allah must have wanted her family to do a special work in this land, if he had brought Abdullah here and saved Ibn Faleiha’s household, even if to do all that had meant calling someone not of their faith to help bring it to pass. Hanna smiled at me then.