Adé: A Love Story by Rebecca Walker Read Free Book Online

across them in her left-handed script bloomed from its edges.
    “I met a guy with a glass factory near Lake Turkana in the north,” she said, unsnapping the hair band holding the notebook together. “It’s supposed to be amazing. There’s an overnight train through the blue hills, and then a twenty-four-hour bus ride north. From there we can go west to Uganda. There is a ferry across Lake Victoria.”
    She was still pacing.
    The idea of a twenty-four-hour bus ride followed by a ferry to anywhere made me want to run screaming from the room. I did not want to move again, I did not want another place to slip through my fingers. I did not want to get back on the never-ending train of my life. For once I longed to arrive, not depart.
    After a few more moments of listening to her plans, I finally stopped her. “Is the man you met from Turkana more real than the men here?” She stopped, midstride. “What is the differencebetween here and there, really?” I said. “Why run from this place? There is time. It is safe.”
    Her eyes—hazel, green, blue, they changed with the sun—stared into me, screaming astonishment and heartbreak. We were supposed to travel the continent, to pass through places, not become part of them. I was breaking the covenant, betraying the map.
    “Well, to start,” she said, her voice now tinged with sarcasm, “there are no tourists, and only a hundred or so people in the whole village. He invited us to stay at his mother’s house.”
    I waited for her to continue.
    “Oh, and it’s not a beach town full of boy prostitutes looking for sugar mommies.”
    The blow. She was talking about Adé, and she was talking about her idea of the “real Africa.” My stomach jumped in rebellion, but I found I didn’t have the words or energy to explain. I wanted to tell her that she was chasing a myth from the pages of
National Geographic,
that she had read too much Paul Bowles, that she believed in some kind of impossible contrivance of purity. I wanted to tell her I had never subscribed to the idea of a “real Africa” to begin with. I wanted to tell her I was sorry that I wanted to stay, that I had found a place and it was becoming a part of my history.
    Perhaps I should have said all of that, but at the moment I did not have what it would take to build that bridge; the burden of crossing the divide was, even for her, for us, too much to bear. How to tell the entirety of my life in a way she could understand?
    A glimpse of the future passed wordlessly between us.
    “I don’t want to go to Lake Turkana,” I said gently. “I want to stay here and read the African novels I’ve been lugging everywhere.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
is as long as
Anna Karenina.
I want to read it in one place, sink into it. I want to write. I want to learn how to cook coconut rice. Here.”
    And then I said what we both already knew. “I want to stay with Adé.”
    She looked up at me, reaching for common ground, but I saw jealousy in her eyes. She was usually the one to meet a boy. Wherever we went, men wanted her. Her breasts were large, her mouth willing. Even I had wanted her, but that part was over between us. We had moved on from our infatuation to the meat of things: men.
    As I listened to her plead, and talk about the smell of sewage in the street and donkey shit on the sidewalk, I saw the balance of power shifting. I had always followed her, but here, now, it was becoming clear: I would not be seduced by her pursuit. I had become the beacon of my own desire.
    Perhaps the seed of our separation had been planted weeks earlier, I thought then, in Sharm el-Sheikh, in Mustafa’s glimmer of recognition.
“Ah, you look like my sister, you know?”
Miriam, the Israeli, and I, the Egyptian. We did not know how to talk about it, but we felt it, and now there was this, this bush between us that could, at any moment, go up in flames. In her room, I felt the shrub beginning to burn, I could feel the heat, and I took