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quietly, as if a long lost member of our family had returned. Fofo Kpee stared at our faces, as if he had given us a puzzle and wanted to see the first sparks of our comprehension.
    “Nanfang!” Yewa exclaimed, breaking the spell. “Z
oke˙ke˙ . . . zoke˙ke˙!
”
    “Who owns it?” I gasped.
    “Us
o,
” Fofo said, and chuckled. “
Finalement,
we get
zoke˙ke˙!
”
    “Us?
Zoke˙ke˙?
” I said.
    “
Oui o,
Kotchikpa, my son.”
    Yewa began to circle the bike in silence, like a voodoo priest at his shrine, her hands held out but afraid to make contact. She had large brown eyes that now shone out from her lean face, as if the machine’s aura forbade them to blink. Her hair was short, like a boy’s, and she wore only pink underpants, her stomach bloated. Her legs stepped lightly, her feet in socks of dust. My palms, dirtied from stoking the cooking fire with wood and making sure the pot of Abakaliki rice didn’t fall off our stone tripod behind the house, began to sweat. I held my hands away from the bike and away from my shorts, rubbing my fingers against my palms.
    “We belong to you,” Yewa chanted in a whisper to the machine. “You belong to us, we belong to you.”
    “Yeah, daughter,” said Fofo, enjoying our bewilderment. “God done reward our faitfulness. . . .
Nous irons
to be rich, ha-ha!”
    The sudden merriment in his voice stopped Yewa. She looked at my face, then at Fofo’s, as if we had conspired to trick her. Fofo Kpee opened his portmanteau, which he carried to the border every day, and pulled out the invoice for the bike from Cotonou City. It was too much for us. I started clapping, but Fofo stopped me, saying he didn’t have enough drinks yet to offer people who might be attracted by the noise. I held my hands apart, palms facing each other as if they were of two opposing magnetic poles, my desire to clap repelled by Fofo’s warning. Then a wave of happiness rose within me, and I ran inside, washed my hands, and put on a shirt and my flip,-flops, as if an important visitor had descended on us. When I came out, Fofo had opened our door and pushed the thing into our parlor-cum-bedroom. He lit a kerosene lantern and put it on a stand near the door to the inner room. The lantern’s rays played above the Nanfang’s fuel tank, outshining its two-tone design like the glow of a setting sun over the waves of the Atlantic.
    To lock the front door, Fofo pulled out a plank of wood from under our bed and placed it snugly on the metal latches. Tonight, he tested the lock’s strength, putting his left shoulder on the bar and carefully applying his weight. He sighed and nodded, beaming contentedly at the bike.
    “We must buy new doors for de house,” Fofo Kpee said.
    “Windows also,” Yewa blurted out, her attention still wrapped around the Nanfang as if the windows were part of it.
    “Yeah,
pas du problem,
” he said, and started locking up the two little square wooden windows on either side of the door. “We go change
les choses lo˙pa lo˙pa,
many tings, I tell you.”
    There were two six-spring beds on either side of the room and a low wooden table in between. I slept with Yewa in one bed, while Fofo had the other bed to himself. Our clothes were in cartons under the beds, but Fofo’s important clothes hung at one corner of the room, from a
bambu
pole suspended from the rafters by two ropes. Because the room was small, the bike stood, poking its handlebars and front tire into the wardrobe, like a cow whose head is lost in the tall grass it’s eating. In the evenings, when we gazed into the roof, its rusty texture looked like stagnant brown clouds, no matter the brilliance of our lantern. On very hot days we could hear the roof expand with little knocking sounds.
    Now we drew closer and gawked, and smelled and felt the Nanfang’s body. Fofo had to shout at me twice to warn me about bringing the lantern too close to the machine. The smell of newness overpowered the stuffiness of the room.