Possessing the Secret of Joy Read Free Page A

village one of Tashi’s sisters had died. Her name was Dura, and she had bled to death. That was all Tashi had been told; all she knew. So that if, while we were playing, she pricked her finger on a thorn or scraped her knee and glimpsed the sight of her own blood, she fell into a panic, until, gradually, she played in such a way as to take no risks and even learned to sew in an exaggeratedly careful way, using two thimbles.
    But she forgot why the sight of her own blood terrified her. And this became one of the things the other children teased her about. And about which she would cry.
    Years later, in the United States, she would begin to remember some of the things she’d told me over the years of our growing up. That Dura had been her favorite sister. That she had been headstrong and boisterous and liked honey in her porridge so much she’d sometimes stolen a portion of Tashi’s share. That she had been very excited during the period leading up to her death. Suddenly she had become the center of everyone’s attention; every day there were gifts. Decorative items mainly: beads, bracelets, a bundle of dried henna for reddening hair and palms, but the odd pencil and tablet as well. Bright remnants of cloth for a headscarf and dress. The promise of shoes!

TASHI
    T HERE WAS A SCAR at the corner of her mouth. Oh, very small and faint, like a shadow. Shaped like a miniature plantain, or like the moon when it is new. A sickle shape with the points toward her ear; when she smiled, the little shadow seemed to slide back into her cheek, above her teeth, which were very white. While she was crawling, she’d picked up a burning twig that protruded from the fire and attempted to put it into her mouth.
    This was long before I was born, but I knew about it from the story that was often told: how bewildered Dura had looked, as the twig stuck to her lip, and how she, instead of knocking it away, cried piteously, her arms outstretched, looking about for help. No, they laughed, telling this story, not simply for help, for deliverance.
    Did anyone help her?
    This white witch doctor scribbles, only a little, behind his desk, on which there are small stone and clay figures of African gods and goddesses from Ancient Egypt. I noticed them before lying down on his couch, which is covered by a tribal rug.
    I think and think, but I can not think of the rest of the story. The sound of the laughter stops me before I can come to the part about the rescue of my sister Dura. I know that the twig, ashen, finally dropped away, having burned through the skin. But did my mother or a co-wife leap to gather the crying child in her arms? Was my father anywhere near? I am frustrated because I can not answer the doctor’s questions. And I feel him, there behind my head, pen poised to at last capture on paper an African woman’s psychosis for the greater glory of his profession. Olivia has brought me here. Not to the father of psychoanalysis, for he has died, a tired, persecuted man. But to one of his sons, whose imitation of him—including dark hair and beard, Egyptian statuettes on his desk, the tribal-rug-covered couch and the cigar, which smells of bitterness—will perhaps cure me.

OLIVIA
    Y OU HAVE TO KEEP US in mind, Tashi would say. And we would laugh, because it was so easy to forget Africa in America. What most people remembered was strange, because unlike the two of us, they had never been there.

ADAM
    P ERHAPS IT IS ODD, but I do not recall my first meeting with Tashi. But children don’t exactly “meet,” do they? Unless it is a formal occasion; which, to think of it, our arrival in Olinka certainly must have been. The villagers were smiling anxiously at us, when we arrived, and were dressed in their colorful and scanty best. There was food cooking in pots and roasting on spits. There was even a warmish melon-flavored drink that made me think, longingly, of lemonade. I noticed the small boys my own age, their knobby knees and shaved