TWTBACD Ch.82 - What Amara Made at the End

Chapter 82

What Amara Made at the End

2077

2077: Amara's last cloth. The full accounting complete.

[MUTOMBO FAMILY — Amara, 91]

Amara Mutombo was ninety-one years old in 2077. Her hands were slow. The loom had not been slow — the loom had never been slow, it was indifferent to time in the way of things that work the same regardless of who is operating them — but her hands were slow, and the slowness meant that the cloth she made now took four times as long as it had taken when she was forty.

She made it anyway.

The last cloth Amara made was three metres long. The pattern was one she had never made before and would never be made again — she knew this with the certainty of someone who understood that a pattern emerges from a specific confluence of knowledge and capacity and moment and purpose, and that the confluence does not repeat.

The pattern was for all of them. She had spent four months deciding what it should say. She had arrived, through the process she always used — which was to weave until the cloth told her — at something she could only describe afterwards, and only to Zuri, as: the full accounting.

'What is in it?' Zuri asked.

'All of us. What we found when we came. What we did with it. What we left.'

'Can you teach it to Amara-Céleste?'

'No. This pattern is mine. She will make her own. She already knows how.'

Amara died in November 2077. She died in the house she had lived in for sixty years, in the room where Zuri had been born, in the village where the spring ran clean and the trees were tall. Adaeze and Kwame and Zuri were there. Joseph had died four years earlier. He had been ready — it was the only way to describe it. He had finished his work and was ready.

The cloth was given to the National Museum of the DRC in Kinshasa, where it hung in the permanent collection under a placard that said: 'Amara Mutombo. Kuba cloth master weaver. Born 1983, died 2077. This cloth is called The Full Accounting. It was the last she made and the one she considered most important. It contains everything she knew about what it means to live in a time of change.'