“I am just here. I have not been anywhere.”
“Well, I’m going to see Hawa — will you come?”
“You won’t find her. She went two days ago to get married. She is back to visit tomorrow, she would like to see you.”
I wanted to commiserate, but there was no right phrase.
“You must come to the school tour tomorrow,” I repeated. “Aimee looked for you all day.”
He kicked at a stone in the ground.
“Aimee is a very nice lady, she is helping me and I am thankful, but—” He stopped at the line, like a man fluffing a long jump, but then suddenly jumped anyway: “She is an old woman! I am a young man. And a young man wants to have children!”
We stood outside Hawa’s door, looking at each other. We were so close, I felt his breath on my neck. I think I knew then that it would happen between us, that night, or the next, and that it would be a commiseration offered with the body, in the absence of any clearer or more articulate solution. We didn’t kiss, not in that moment, he didn’t even reach for my hand. There was no need. We both understood that it was already decided.
“Well, come in,” he said finally, opening Hawa’s door as if it were that to his own home. “You are here, it is late. You will eat here.”
Standing on the verandah looking out, in more or less exactly the same spot I had last seen him, was Hawa’s brother Babu. We greeted each other very warmly: like everyone I met he considered the fact that I had chosen to return once again as some kind of virtue in itself, or he pretended to find it so. To Lamin he gave only a nod, whether through familiarity or frostiness I couldn’t tell. But when I asked about Hawa his face definitively fell.
“I was there yesterday for the marriage, the only witness. For myself, I don’t care if there are singers or dresses or platters of food — none of it matters to me. But my grandmothers! Oh, she has started a war in this place! I will have to listen to women complaining until the end of my days!”
“Do you think she’s happy?”
He smiled as if I had been caught out somehow.
“Ah, yes — for Americans this is always the most important question!”
Dinner was brought to us, a feast really, and we ate outside, with the grandmothers forming a talkative circle at the other end of the verandah, looking over at us occasionally, but too busy with their own discussion to pay us much mind. We had a solar lamp at our feet that lit us from below: I could see my food and the lower parts of Lamin and Hawa’s brother’s faces, and then beyond there were the usual busy noises of domestic work and children laughing, crying, shouting, and people walking from the various outhouses back and forth across the yard. What you didn’t hear were men’s voices, but now I heard some very close at hand, and Lamin stood up suddenly and pointed at the compound wall, where, either side of the doorway, half a dozen men now sat, their legs facing toward the road. Lamin took a step toward them but Hawa’s brother caught him by the shoulder and sat him back down, approaching instead himself, with two of his grandmothers at his side. I saw one of the young men was smoking and now flicked his cigarette over into our yard, but when Hawa’s brother reached them it turned out to be a quick conversation: he said something, one boy laughed, a grandmother said something, he spoke again, more firmly, and six backsides slipped out of view. The grandmother who had spoken opened the door and watched them walk on, down the road. The moon came out from a cover of clouds and from where I stood I could see at least one of them had a gun on his back.
“They are not from here, they are from the other end of the country,” said Hawa’s brother, rejoining me. He still wore his bloodless conference-room smile, but behind his designer glasses I could see in his eyes how shaken he was. “We see it more and more. They hear the President wants to rule for a billion years. They are running out of patience. They begin listening to other voices. Foreign voices. Or the voice of God, if you believe this can be bought on a Casio tape for twenty-five dalasi in the market. Yes, they are out of patience and I do not blame them. Even our calm Lamin, our patient Lamin — he, too, has run out of patience.”
Lamin reached out for a slice of white bread but did not speak.
“And when do you leave?” asked Babu, of Lamin, his tone so full of judgment, of blame, that I assumed he referred to the back way, but they both chuckled at the panic that must have passed over my face: “No, no, no, he will have his official papers. It is all being arranged, thanks to you people who are here. We are already losing all our brightest young men, and now you take another. It is sad but this is the way things are.”
“You left,” said Lamin sullenly. He pulled a fish-bone from his mouth.
“That was a different time. I was not needed here.”
“I am not needed here.”
Babu did not answer and his sister was not there to fill up the spaces between us with chatter. When we had finished our quiet meal I preempted those many child-maids, gathered the plates together and walked in the direction I’d seen those girls go, toward the last room in the block, which turned out to be a bedroom. I stood in the dim light, unsure what to do next, when one of the half a dozen sleeping children in there raised his head from their single bed, saw the load in my arms and pointed me through a curtain. I found myself outside, in the yard again, but this was the back yard, and here were the grandmothers and some of the older girls, crouched around several tubs of water in which clothes were being washed with large bars of gray soap. A circle of solar lamps illuminated the scene. As I came upon them work paused to observe some live animal theater: a cockerel chasing a hen, overpowering her, putting his claw to her neck, driving her head into the dust, finally mounting her. This operation took only a minute, but throughout the hen looked bored, impatient to get on with her other tasks, so that the cockerel’s brutal sense of his power over her seemed somehow comic. “Big man! Big man!” cried one of the grandmothers, spotting me, pointing at the cockerel. The women laughed, the hen was released: she wandered around in a circle, once, twice, three times, apparently dazed, before returning to the henhouse and her sisters and her chicks. I put the plates where I was told to, on the ground, and came back to find that Lamin had already left. I understood it was a signal. I announced that I, too, was going to bed, but instead lay in my room in my clothes, waiting for the last sounds of human activity to fade. Just before midnight I took my head-torch, made my way quietly through the yard, out of the compound and through the village.
Aimee had thought of this visit as a “fact-finding trip,” but the village committee considered everything a reason for celebration, and the next day, as we finished the school tour and entered the yard we found a drum circle awaiting us under the mango tree, twelve late-middle-aged women with drums between their thighs. Even Fern hadn’t been warned, and Aimee was agitated at this new delay to the schedule, but there was no way to avoid it: this was an ambush. The children streamed out and formed a second, huge circle around their drumming mothers, and we, “the Americans,” were asked to sit in the innermost circle on little chairs taken from the classrooms. The teachers went to get these, and among them, approaching from the very other end of the school, over by Lamin’s maths class, I spotted Lamin and Hawa walking together, carrying four little chairs each. But I did not, when I saw him, feel in any way self-conscious, nor was I ashamed: the events of the night before were so separated from my daytime life that it felt to me that they had happened to someone else, a shadow body who pursued separate aims and could not be forced into the light. I waved to them both — they showed no sign of seeing me. The drumming started. I couldn’t shout over it. I turned back toward the circle and took the seat offered to me, next to Aimee. The women began taking turns in the circle, laying their drum aside to dance in dramatic three-minute bursts, a kind of anti-performance, for despite the brilliance of their footwork, the genius in their hips, they did not turn outwards to their audience but instead remained facing their drumming sisters, their backs to us. As the second woman started, Hawa entered the circle and took the seat next to me that I’d been saving for her, but Lamin only nodded at Aimee before sitting himself on the other side of the circle, as far from her, and I suppose from me, as he could manage. I squeezed Hawa’s hand and offered my congratulations.