Somebody's Heart Is Burning by Tanya Shaffer Read Free Book Online

day, I’d overheard a Ghanaian volunteer telling one of the foreign men that if he himself had a sister whose husband beat her, he would not accept her back into the family. Her husband wouldn’t beat her for no reason, he explained; she’d had to have done something wrong.
    “I wish Essi would throw him out,” Hannah said. Tears stood in her eyes. “She and I, we can run the restaurant. For what does she need him? He takes her chop money and buys
apeteshi.
”
    I sighed. “She’d probably leave him if she could. Who knows what her options are? We can’t really see the full picture.”
    “I see her! She is afraid, that is all. But I will help her. I will stay with her and help to run the café.”
    “How long do you plan to be here, Hannah, really? Aren’t you going back to Holland, to school?”
    “No, no, no!” She started to cry. “For what do I go back to that place? I am Ghana woman now. That place has nothing that I need.”

    I left the next day to go to another camp, and didn’t see Hannah for almost a month. When I returned she was still staying with Essi, and she seemed more entrenched in her “Ghana woman” image than ever. She generally refused to speak English now, though she’d relent and engage in fragmentary conversation with me when pressed.
    “Our sistah from Holland is now more Ghana than we Ghanaians!” Gorbachev quipped.
    One Saturday night, Hannah, Gorby, and I went with a few other Ghanaian volunteers to Labadi Beach, on the outskirts of Accra, for a dance party. While a tight-knit interracial group danced beneath bright white spotlights and the disheveled silhouettes of palm trees, the three of us walked down the beach to a quiet place where we could smoke our extremely potent wee. Buoyed up by a giddy high, Hannah and I stripped off our skirts and charged into the water, which was scarcely cooler than the air. We stood holding hands, with the waves licking our waists, and looked out toward the horizon. There was no moon, and I could see no line between ocean and sky: just blackness, with sporadic zigzags of white that vanished as soon as they appeared. A thrill of danger raised goose bumps all over my body. I couldn’t see what was coming—I never knew the size of a wave until it broke around me. For all I knew, the next one would crash down on top of our heads and sweep us out to sea.
    It was three in the morning when we crammed into a shared taxi back into town with three other Europeans. We were sopping and exhausted, hangovers already on the way. Gorbachev and I walked Hannah down to the beach by the Last Stop, but when we got there we experienced a jolt of disorientation: Hannah’s tent was nowhere to be seen.
    “Did you move it?” I asked Hannah.
    “No.” She shook her head in bewilderment, looking around her in a kind of daze.
    “Thieves?” said Gorbachev.
    We walked toward the spot where the tent had been. I stepped on something squishy, and when I reached down I felt fabric, slick and synthetic, with feathers leaking out of it. Exploring further, I found a zipper.
    “Oh no,” I said softly. Taking another step I tripped on a slender plastic pole.
    “This . . . this is . . . someone has . . .” Gorbachev sputtered, as we discovered pieces of clothing, paper, and plastic, ripped and scattered around the beach. Down near the water I stumbled over a mass of nylon, sopping wet. It was Hannah’s tent.
    Hannah began to cry. Gorbachev was shouting, “Who . . . Who has . . .”
    A burst of light exploded from The Last Stop. A male figure leaped out into the night with a flaming torch in his hand.
    A torrent of abuse came from his mouth in Fanti, interspersed with sporadic words of English. Amid the torrent the words “spy,” “thief,” and “CIA” jumped out at me, and then, later, “white witch” and several times, “my wife.”
    “She’s not your wife!” Hannah shouted suddenly. “She doesn’t love you! She hates you! She loves me!”
    After that,