Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

  My favorite part of each day became the early evenings, when I would walk over to Fern’s and have a simple dinner with him in the pink house, cooked for us by the same ladies who fed the school. A single tin bowl, full of rice, sometimes with just a green tomato or garden egg buried in it somewhere, other times with an abundance of fresh vegetables and a very skinny but delicious fish laid on top which Fern graciously let me tear at first. “We are kin now,” he told me, the first time we ate like this, two hands in the same bowl. “They seem to have decided we’re family.” Since our last visit the generator had broken down, but as we were the only ones to use it Fern considered this a “low priority”—for the same reason I considered it a high priority—and refused to lose a day traveling to the city in search of a replacement. So now, once the sun went down, we strapped on our little head-torches, making sure to wear them at an angle so as not to blind each other, and talked late into the night. He was good company. He had a subtle, compassionate, intricate mind. Like Hawa, he didn’t get depressed, but he managed this not by looking away but by looking closely, attending to each logical step in any particular problem, so that the problem itself filled all available mental space. A few nights before the party, while we sat considering the imminent arrival of Granger and Judy and the rest—and the end of a certain peaceful version of our life here—he began to tell me of a new problem, at the school: six children missing for two weeks from their classes. They were unrelated to each other. But their absences had all begun, the headmaster told him, on the day Fern and I arrived back in the village.

  “Since we arrived?”

  “Yes! And I thought: but this is odd, why is it? First, I ask around. Everybody says: ‘Oh, we don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Sometimes the children have to work at home.’ I go back to the headmaster and get the list of names. Then I go through the village to their compounds, one by one. Not easy. There’s no address, you have to follow your nose. But I find everybody. ‘Oh, she is sick,’ or, ‘Oh, he is visiting his cousin in town.’ I have the feeling no one tells me the truth. Then I am looking at the list today and I think: these names are familiar. I go back to my papers and I find this microfinance list—you remember?—this thing Granger did, independently. He is a sweet man, he reads a book on microfinance . . . Anyway, I look at this list and I find it is the same six families exactly! The mothers are all the same women Granger gave these thirty-dollar stakes, for their market stalls. Exactly the same. So I think: what is the connection between the thirty-dollar stake and these missing children? Now it’s obvious: their mothers, who could not repay their debt on whatever schedule Granger has arranged with them, they assume the money will be taken coin by coin, from their children’s school fees, and the children will be shamed! They see us back in the village, ‘the Americans,’ and they think: better keep these kids at home! It’s smart, it makes sense.”

  “Poor Granger. He’ll be disappointed. He meant well.”

  “No, no, no . . . it’s easily resolved. It’s just for me an interesting example of follow-through. Or of not following through. The financing is a good idea, I think, or not a bad idea. But we may have to change the repayment schedule.”

  Through one of the blown-out windows I saw a bush taxi rumble down the one good road in the moonlight. Kids hung from it even at this hour, and three young men lay on their bellies on its roof, holding down a mattress with the weight of their own bodies. I felt that wave of absurdity, of pointlessness, that usually caught me in the earliest hours, laying wide awake next to a deep-sleeping Hawa as the roosters went berserk on the other side of the wall.

  “I don’t know . . . Thirty dollars here, thirty dollars there . . .”

  “Yes?” said Fern brightly—he often failed to pick up on tone—and when I looked up I saw in his face so much optimism and interest in this small, new problem that it irritated me. I wanted to crush it.

  “No, I mean—look, you go into the city, to every other village around here, you see these Peace Corps kids, the missionaries, the NGOs, all these well-meaning white people busy worrying about a few trees—as if none of you see the forest!”

  “Now you are the one speaking in proverbs.”

  I stood up and began urgently burrowing through the pile of supplies in the corner, looking for the Calor gas stove and the teapot.

  “You wouldn’t accept these . . . microscopic solutions in your homes, in your countries—why should we accept them here?”

  “‘We’?” queried Fern and then began to smile. “Wait, wait.” He came over to where I was wrestling with the gas canister and bent down to help me attach it to the ring which in my bad temper I was managing badly. Our faces came very close to each other. “‘These well-meaning white people.’ You think far too much about race—did anyone ever tell you this? But wait: to you I am white?” I was so startled by the question I started to laugh. Fern drew back: “Well, it’s interesting for me. In Brazil we don’t understand ourselves as white, you understand. At least my family does not. But you’re laughing—this signifies yes, you think I am?”

  “Oh, Fern . . .” Who did we have out here except each other? I directed my torch away from where it had lit up the sweet concern in his face, which after all was not much paler than mine. “I don’t think it matters what I think, does it?”

  “Oh, no, it matters,” he said, returning to his chair, and despite the dead bulb above our heads I thought I saw him blush. I concentrated on looking for a small and exquisite pair of Moroccan glass tumblers with a green stain. He told me once that he carried them everywhere with him on his travels, and this admission was one of the few concessions I ever heard Fern make to personal pleasure, to comfort.

  “But I am not offended, no, all of this it is interesting to me,” he said, sitting back in his chair and stretching out his legs like a professor in his study. “What are we doing here, what is our effect, what will be left behind as legacy, and so on. It all has to be thought about, of course. Step by step. This house is a good example.” He reached to his left and patted a patch of exposed wiring in the wall. “Maybe they paid off the owner or maybe he has no idea we are in it. Who knows? But now we are in it and all of the village sees we are in it, and so now they know that it belongs, in essence, to nobody, or to anybody the state on a whim decides to give it to. So what will happen when we leave, when the new school is up and running and we don’t visit here much any more—or at all? Maybe several families will move in, maybe it will become a community place. Maybe. My guess is it will be taken apart, brick by brick.” He took off his glasses and massaged them with the hem of his T-shirt. “Yes, first someone will take the wires, then the sheeting, then the tiles, but eventually every stone will be repurposed. This is my bet . . . I may be wrong, we will have to wait and see. I am not as ingenious as these people. No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.”

  “I don’t see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don’t see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can’t afford one.”

  Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly.

  “Children can be a kind of wealth,” he said.

  We were silent for a while. I thought—though I really didn’t want to—of a shiny red remote-control car, bought from New York for a young boy in the compound of whom I was especially fond, but it had come with the unforeseen problem of batteries—unforeseen by me—batteries for which there was sometimes money, most of the time not, and so the car was destined for a shelf I had noticed Hawa kept in the living room, filled with decorative but fundamentally useless objects, brought by clueless visitors, to keep company with several dead radios, a Bible from a library in Wisconsin and the picture of the President in a broken frame.

  “I see my job this way,” said Fern firmly, as the kettle began to whistle. “I am
not of her world, that’s clear. But I am here so that if she gets bored—”

  “When she gets bored—”

  “My job is to make sure something of use is left here, on the ground, whatever happens, whenever she leaves.”

  “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean.”

  “Another proverb! You said you hated them, but see how you’ve caught the local habit!”

  “Are we having tea or what?”

  “Actually, it’s easier,” he said, pouring the dark liquid into my glass. “I respect the person who can think of the ocean. My mind no longer works that way. When I was young like you, maybe, not now.”

  I couldn’t tell any more if we were talking of the whole world, of the continent in general, of the village in particular, or simply of Aimee, who, for all our good intentions, all our proverbs, neither of us seemed able to think of very clearly.

  • • •

  Woken at five most days by the roosters and the call to prayer, I got into the habit of going back to sleep till ten or later, getting to the school in time for the second period or the third. The morning of Aimee’s arrival, though, I felt a fresh determination to see the whole day while it was still mine to enjoy. I surprised myself—and Hawa, Lamin and Fern—by appearing at eight o’clock, outside the mosque, where I knew they met each morning without me and walked together to school. The beauty of the morning was another surprise: it reminded me of my earliest experiences of America. New York was my first introduction to the possibilities of light, crashing through gaps in curtains, transforming people and sidewalks and buildings into golden icons, or black shadows, depending on where they stood in relation to the sun. But the light in front of the mosque—the light I stood in as I was greeted like a local hero, simply for rising from my bed three hours after most of the women and children I lived with—this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination.

  “What do you call those birds?” I asked Lamin. “The little white ones with the blood-red beaks? They’re beautiful.”

  Lamin tipped his head back and frowned.

  “Those? They are just birds, not special. You think they’re beautiful? We have much more beautiful birds than that in Senegal.”

  Hawa laughed: “Lamin, you begin to sound like a Nigerian! ‘You like that river? We have a much more beautiful river in Lagos.’”

  Lamin’s face creased into an irresistible, shamefaced smile—“I am only telling the truth when I say we have a similar bird but bigger. It is more impressive”—and Hawa put her hands either side of her tiny waist and gave Lamin the flirtatious side-eye: I saw how it delighted him. I should have seen it before. Of course he was in love with her. Who wouldn’t be? I liked the idea, and felt vindicated. I looked forward to telling Aimee she was barking up the wrong tree.

  “Well, now you sound like an American,” announced Hawa. She looked out over her village. “I think every place has its share of beauty, thanks be to God. And right here is as beautiful as any place I know.” A beat later, though, a new emotion passed over her pretty face, and when I looked over to where she seemed to be looking I saw a young man standing by the UN fresh well-water project, washing his arms up to the elbow, and glancing over at us with an equally pensive look. It was clear that these two represented a kind of provocation to each other. As we got closer I recognized that he belonged to a type I’d seen before here and there, on the ferry, walking along the highways, often in the city but rarely in the village. He had a bushy beard and a white turban tied loosely round his head, he carried a raffia pack on his back and his trousers were oddly cut, several inches above the ankle. As Hawa ran ahead of us to greet him I asked Lamin who he was.

  “It is her cousin Musa,” said Lamin, returning to his usual whisper, now laced with acid disapproval. “It is unfortunate we meet him here. You must not bother with him. He was a bumster and now he is a mashala, he is a trouble to his family, and you must not bother with him.” But when we reached Hawa and her cousin, Lamin greeted him with respect and even a little awkwardness, and I noticed Hawa, too, seemed shy of him—as if he were an elder rather than not much more than a boy—and remembering that her scarf had slipped to her neck she now lifted it back till it covered all of her hair. Hawa introduced me to Musa politely in English. We nodded at each other. He seemed to be struggling to stabilize a certain look on his face, of benign serenity, like a visiting king from a more enlightened nation. “How are you, Hawa?” he mumbled, and she, who always had a lot to say on that question, outdid herself in a nervous tumble of description: she was well, her grandmothers were well, various nephews and nieces were well, the Americans were here, and well, for the school was opening tomorrow afternoon, and there was to be a big celebration, DJ Khali was playing—did he remember that time on the beach dancing to Khali? Oh, man, that was fun!—and people were coming from upriver, from Senegal, from everywhere, because it was a wonderful thing that was happening, a new school for the girls, because education is a very important thing, especially for girls. This last part was for me and I smiled to approve it. Musa nodded, a little anxiously I thought, through all of it, but now that Hawa had at last stopped he turned a little, more toward me than his cousin, and said in English: “Unfortunately I will not be there. Music and dancing is Shaytan. Like many things done around here it is aadoo, custom, not religion. In this country we dance our lives away. Everything is an excuse for dancing. Anyway, I am leaving on khuruj today to Senegal.” He looked down at the simple leather sandals he wore on his feet as if to check they were prepared for the journey ahead. “I go there for Da’wah, to invite and to call.”

  At this Lamin laughed, heavily sarcastic, and Hawa’s cousin replied sharply to Lamin in Wolof—or perhaps it was Mandinka—and Lamin back to Musa, and back again, while I stood there, smiling the awkward idiot grimace of the untranslated.

  “Musa, we miss you at home!” cried Hawa suddenly in English, with real feeling, hugging her cousin’s skinny left arm as if this were as much of him as she dared hug, and he nodded many times again but did not answer. I thought he might leave us here—his and Lamin’s exchange had seemed to me of the kind where someone really should leave afterward—but instead we all walked on together toward the school. Musa put his hands behind his back and began talking, in a low, quiet, pleasant stream, it sounded to me like a lecture, to which Hawa listened respectfully but which Lamin kept interrupting, with increasing energy and volume, in a style I couldn’t recognize as his. With me he would wait till I finished each sentence, and leave long gaps of silence before he replied, silences I came to think of as conversational graveyards, where anything awkward or unpleasant I might have presented to him was sent to be buried. This angry, confrontational Lamin was so alien to me that I felt as if he, Lamin, would not want me to see him in action. I picked up my pace a little, and when I was several yards ahead of them all I turned round to see what was going on and saw that they, too, had stopped. Musa had Lamin’s wrist in his hand: he was pointing to his big broken watch and saying something very solemn. Lamin snatched his arm back, and seemed to sulk, and Musa smiled as if all this had been very pleasant, or at least necessary, shook Lamin’s hand despite their apparent dispute, accepted another hug of his arm from Hawa, nodded at me across the way, and turned back the way he had come.

  “Musa, Musa, Musa . . .” said Hawa, shaking her head as she approached me. “Everything is nafs with Musa now—everything is a temptation—we are a temptation. It’s so strange, we were age mates, we played together always, he was like my brother. We loved him at home, and he loved us, but he couldn’t stay. We are too old-fashioned for him now. He wants to be modern. He w
ants to live in the city: just him, one wife, two babies and God. He is right anyway: when you are a young man, living all crazy with your family, it’s hard to be very pure. I like to live crazy—oh, I can’t help it, but maybe when I am older,” she said, looking down at her own body as her cousin had looked at his sandals, with curiosity, as if they belonged to someone else: “Maybe when I am older I will be wiser. We’ll see.”

  She seemed half amused, considering the Hawa she was now and the Hawa she might become, but Lamin was worked up.

  “That crazy boy is telling everyone, ‘Don’t pray like this, pray like that, cross your arms across your body, don’t put them by your sides!’ In his own family home he is calling people Sila keeba—he is criticizing his own grandmother! But what does it mean, ‘old Muslim,’ ‘new Muslim’? We are one people! He tells her: ‘No, you should not have a big naming ceremony, have a modest one, with no music, no dancing—but Musa’s grandmother is from Senegal, like me—when a baby comes, we dance!”