What the Ax Forgets the Tree Remembers

I

The first hint of trouble came early in the morning. The telephone rang on Gabrielle’s desk in the lobby—her glass-topped, strategically-placed desk: she could see everyone, anyone could see her.

“It’s Selene,” lisping through buckteeth. “I have flu.”

“Oh my dear … you’ve called the clinic?”

“The doctor forbids me to leave my home.” Home indeed: a heap of brown shingles in an alley in a town forty miles north of Godolphin. Three children and a once-in-a-while man … “My friend Minata will give testimony in my place. From Somalia too, and now she lives on the next avenue. She knows the fee, and that she will stay overnight in the inn. She agrees to come, and tell.”

“And she has … things to tell?” Gabrielle softened her voice. “Was her experience like yours?”

“Ah, worse. Thorns were applied. And only palm oil for the mending. She will take the same bus …”

Thorns and palm oil and two fullback matriarchs, each with the heels of her hands on the young girl’s shoulders as if kneading recalcitrant dough. Someone forces the knees apart. Horrifying tales; Gabrielle knew plenty of them. But would this Minata touch the heart like Selene? I am happy to be in this town Godolphin, in this state Massachusetts, in this country USA, Selene always concluded with humble sibilance. I am happy to be here this night.

Would the unknown Minata also be happy to be here this night, testifying to the Society Against Female Mutilation, local chapter? Would she walk from podium to chair in a gingerly fashion, remembered thorns pricking her vulva like cloves in a ham?

Gabrielle had first heard Selene three years earlier, at the invitation of a Dutch physician whose significant protruding bosom looked like an outsized wedge of cheese. Gabrielle privately called her Dr. Gouda. Dr. Gouda was staying at Devlin’s Hotel where Gabrielle was Concierge Extraordinary—Mr. Devlin’s own words. Gabrielle said yes to guests whenever she could. She’d said yes to Dr. Gouda. She’d accompanied the solid woman to an empty basement room in a nearby church. After a while twelve people straggled in. Then photographs were shown—there was an old-fashioned projector, and a screen, and slides that stuttered forward on a carousel. A voice issued from the darkness beside the projector—the doctor’s accented narration. The slide show—the Follies, Dr. Henry Ellison would later name it—featured terrified twelve-year-olds in a hut. Behind the girls was a shelf of handmade dolls.

The brutality practiced in the photographs—shamefully it made Gabrielle feel desirable. She was glad that she and her stylist had at last found a rich oxblood shade for her hair; and glad that her hair’s silky straightness conformed to her head in such a Parisian way, complementing the Parisian name that her Pittsburgh parents had snatched from the newspaper the day she was born. She knew that at fifty-two she was still pretty, even if her nose was a millimeter too long and there was a gap between a bicuspid and a molar due to extraction: how foolish not to repair that, and now it was too late, the teeth on either side had already made half-hearted journeys toward each other. Still, the gap was not disfiguring. And her body was as narrow and supple as a pubescent boy’s. She was five feet tall without her high-heeled shoes, but she was without her high-heeled shoes only in the bath—even her satin bedslippers provided an extra three inches.

In the basement room of the church there was no podium, just a makeshift platform. After the slide show a white-haired gentleman unfolded a card table onto the platform and fanned laminated newspaper articles across it. Dr. Gouda then stationed herself in front of the screen now cleansed of enormities. She wore a navy skirt and a pale blouse and she had removed her jacket, idly revealing her commanding bosom. The...