by Zadie Smith
“Last month,” began Hawa, and I prepared myself for the long haul, “my cousin Fatu had her first baby, Mamadu, and you should have seen this place that day, we had five musicians, dancing everywhere, the food was so much—Oh! I could not eat everything, actually, I was in pain from all this food, and all the dancing, and my cousin Fatu was watching her brother dancing like—”
“And Musa is married now,” Lamin broke in. “And how did he marry? With hardly nobody there, no food—your grandmother was crying, crying for days!”
“It’s true . . . Our grandmothers love to cook.”
“‘Don’t wear charms, don’t go to the ‒’ we call them marabouts—and in fact I don’t go to them,” he said, showing me, for some reason, his right hand and turning it round. “I am probably in some ways different than my father, than his father, but do I tell my elders what to do? And Musa told his own grandmother she cannot go?!”
Lamin was addressing me, and though I had no idea what a marabout was or why you would go to one I feigned outrage.
“They go all the time—” confided Hawa, “our grandmothers. My grandmother got me this.” She held up her wrist and I admired a beautiful silver bracelet with a small charm hanging from it.
“Please show me where it says that to respect your elders is a sin?” demanded Lamin. “You cannot show it to me. Now he wants to take his new son to the ‘modern’ hospital instead of to the bush. That is his choice. But why can’t the boy have a coming-out ceremony? Musa will break his grandmother’s heart again with this, I promise you. But am I going to be told this and that by a ghetto boy who knows no Arabic? Aadoo, Shaytan—this is the only Arabic he knows! He went to a Catholic mission school! I can recite every hadith, every hadith. No, no.”
It was the longest, most sustained, most impassioned speech I had ever heard from Lamin, and even he seemed surprised by it, stopping for a second and wiping the sweat from his forehead with a white, folded handkerchief he kept for the purpose in his back pocket.
“I say people will always have their differences—” began Hawa, but Lamin interrupted her again: “And then he says to me”—Lamin pointed to his broken watch—“‘This life is nothing compared to eternity—this life you are in is only the half-second before midnight. I am not living for this half-second but for what comes after.’ But he thinks because he prays with his arms folded across his chest he is better than me? No. I said to him: ‘I read Arabic, Musa, do you?’ Believe me, Musa is a man in confusion.”
“Lamin . . .” said Hawa, “I think you are a bit unfair, Musa only wants to perform jihad, and there is nothing wrong with—”
My face must have done something startling: Hawa pointed at my nose and burst out laughing.
“Look at her! Oh, man! She thinks my cousin wants to go shoot up people—oh no, that’s funny—a mashala doesn’t even have a toothbrush, forget a gun—ha ha ha!”
Lamin, less amused, pointed to his own chest, and returned to whispers: “No more reggae, no more hanging out in the ghetto, no more smoking of marijuana. She means this. Musa used to have dreadlocks—you know what are these? OK, so dreadlocks down to here! But now he is in this spiritual jihad, inside. She means this.”
“I wish I was so pure!” announced Hawa, sighing sweetly. “Oh, oh . . . it’s good to be pure—probably!”
“Well, of course it is,” said Lamin, frowning. “We all try to perform jihad, every day in our own way, as much as we are able. But you don’t need to cut your trousers and insult your grandmother. Musa dresses like an Indian. We don’t need this foreign imam here—we have our own!”
We had come to the school gate. Hawa twisted her long skirt, dislodged by the walk, until it sat straight again on her hips.
“Why are his trousers like that?”
“Oh, you mean short?” said Hawa dully, with that gift she had for always making me feel I’d asked the most obvious question of all. “So his feet don’t burn in hell!”
• • •
That night, under an exquisitely clear sky, I helped Fern and a team of local volunteers lay out three hundred chairs and erect white canopies to go over them, to send flags up poles and paint “WELCOME, AIMEE” on a wall. Aimee herself, Judy, Granger and the PR girl were all asleep in the hotel in Banjul, exhausted from their journey, or at the thought of the pink house, who knew. All around us the talk was of the President. We endured the same jokes over and over: how much we knew, or were claiming not to know, or who between the two of us knew more. No one mentioned Aimee. What I couldn’t work out among all this frenetic rumor and counter-rumor was whether a visit from the President was longed for or dreaded. It’s the same when you hear of a storm that’s coming to town, explained Fern, as we drove the tin legs of the folding chairs into the sand. Even if you fear it you’re curious to see it.
Four
I was at King’s Cross station with my father in the early morning, on one of our last-minute trips to view a university. We’d just missed our train, not because we were late but because the price of a ticket was twice what I’d warned my father it might be, and during the argument about what to do next—one of us go now, the other later, or both not go or both go another afternoon, outside the peak-fare period—the train had pulled away from the platform without us. We were still snapping testily at each other in front of the announcement board when we spotted Tracey coming up the escalator from the tube. What a vision! Spotless white jeans and little high-heeled ankle boots and a black leather jacket cut close to her body and zipped up right to her chin: it looked like a kind of body armor. My father’s mood transformed. He lifted both his arms like an air-traffic controller signaling in a plane. I watched Tracey walk toward us in a weirdly formal way, a formality my father missed altogether, hugging her as he had done in the old days, without noting the rigidity of her body next to his or the ram-rod stillness of her arms. He pulled back and asked after her parents, how her summer was going. Tracey gave a series of bloodless replies that contained, to my ear, no real information. I saw his face cloud over. Not at what she was saying, exactly, but at the manner in which it was being said, a brand-new style of hers that seemed to have nothing to do with the wild, funny, courageous girl he thought he had known. It belonged to a different girl altogether, from a different neighborhood, a different world. “What they giving you in that crazy place,” he asked, “elocution lessons?” “Yes,” said Tracey primly and stuck her nose in the air, and it was clear she wanted to end the subject here, but my father, never very good at hints, wouldn’t let it go. He kept teasing her, and to defend herself against his ridicule Tracey now began listing the many skills she was developing in her summer singing and fencing lessons, her ballroom dancing and drama lessons, skills not necessary in the neighborhood but which a person needed to perform on what she was now calling the “West End stage.” I wondered, but did not ask, how she was paying for it all. As she rambled on to me, my father stood staring at her and then suddenly interrupted. “But you’re not serious, are you, Trace? Stop it with all that—it’s just us here! No need to talk fancy with us. We know you, we’ve known you since you were this high, you don’t have to pretend to be Lady Muck with us!” But Tracey became agitated, she spoke faster and faster, in this funny new voice of hers that perhaps she had thought would impress my father instead of repel him, and which did not quite have control over itself and veered unnaturally every other sentence back to our shared past and jaggedly forward into her mysterious present, until my father lost control of himself entirely and giggled at her, in the middle of King’s Cross station, in front of all those rush-hour commuters. He meant no harm—he was only bemused—but I saw how it hurt her. To her credit, though, Tracey didn’t lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use. She excused herself politely and said she had to get to a class.
• • •
&
nbsp; In July, Miss Isabel called my mother to ask if Tracey and I would be volunteers at her end-of-summer show. I was flattered: when we were kids ex-students had seemed like gods to us, long-legged and independent, giggling with each other and speaking their whispered adolescent currency as they took our tickets, ran the tombola, served snacks, handed out prizes. But that painful morning in King’s Cross was still fresh in my mind. I knew that Miss Isabel’s vision of our friendship was stuck in time, but I couldn’t stand to break her image of it. I said yes via my mother and waited to hear about Tracey. The next day Miss Isabel called again: Tracey had agreed. But neither of us phoned the other or made any attempt at contact. I didn’t see her till the morning of the concert itself, when I decided I’d be the bigger person and go over to her place. I pressed the doorbell twice. After a strangely long pause Louie answered. I was surprised: we seemed to have surprised each other. He wiped some sweat from above his mustache and asked me gruffly what I wanted. Before I could answer I heard Tracey, in a funny sort of voice—I almost didn’t recognize it—shouting at her father to let me in, and Louie nodded and let me pass, but walked the other way, straight out of the door and along the corridor. I watched him hurry down the stairs, across the lawn and away. I turned back into the flat, but Tracey was not in the hall, and then not in the living room and then not in the kitchen: I had the feeling she was leaving each room a moment before I reached it. I found her in the bathroom. I would have said she had been recently crying, but I can’t be sure. I said hello. At the same moment she looked quickly down at herself, at the same spot I was looking at, straightening her crop top until it once again fully covered her bra.
We walked back out and down the stairs. I couldn’t speak but Tracey was never tongue-tied, not even in extreme situations, and chatted now in a bright, comical style, about all the “skinny bitches” she was up against in her auditions, the new moves she had to learn, the problem of projecting your voice beyond the footlights. She spoke quickly and constantly, to ensure no gap or pause in which I might ask a question, and in this way she got us both safely out of the estate and to the church door, where we met Miss Isabel. We were given matching keys, shown how to lock the cashbox and where to store it, how to close and open up the church before and after, and other small, practical things. As we walked around the space Miss Isabel asked a lot of questions about Tracey’s new life, about the small roles she was already getting within her school and the big roles outside of it she hoped one day to get. There was something beautiful and innocent in these questions. I could see Tracey wanted to be the girl Miss Isabel had in her mind, the kind whose life is uncluttered and straightforward, who has nothing but goals in front of her, bright and clear and nothing standing in her way. Taking on the role of this girl, she walked through this familiar space of our girlhood, reminiscing, remembering to shorten her vowels, her hands behind her back, like a tourist wandering through a museum, looking over the exhibits of a painful history, the kind of tourist who has no personal attachment to what she sees. When we came to the back of a church, where the children were queuing up for their juice and biscuits, they all looked up at Tracey with a wild admiration. She had her hair in a dancer’s bun and a Pineapple Studios bag slung over her shoulder, she turned her feet out as she walked, she was the dream we’d both had, a decade before, when we’d queued up for juice here, little girls ourselves. No one paid much attention to me—even the children could see I wasn’t a dancer any longer—and Tracey seemed happy to be surrounded by all these little admirers. To them she was beautiful and grown-up, enviably talented, free. And by looking at her this way, too, it was easy to tell myself I’d been imagining things.
I made my way across the room, and back in time, until I got to Mr. Booth. He was still sitting on his battered piano seat, a little older, but to me unchanged, and playing an unseasonable tune: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” And here that seamless thing happened, which, in its very unreality, makes people hate musicals, or so people tell me when I say I like them: we began making music together, without discussion or rehearsal. He knew the music, I knew the words. I sang about faithful friends. Tracey turned my way, and smiled, a melancholy but affectionate smile, or maybe it only carried the memory of affection. I saw the seven-, eight-, nine- and ten-year-old in her, the teenager, the little woman. All of these versions of Tracey were reaching across the years of the church hall to ask me a question: What are you going to do? To which we both already knew the answer. Nothing.
Five
It looked less like the opening of a school than the announcement of the end of an old regime. A troop of young soldiers dressed in dark blue uniforms stood in the middle, holding their brass instruments, brutally sweating. There was no shade out there and they’d been in position for an hour already. I was sitting a hundred yards from them, under the canopy, with the great and good of the whole upper-river region, some local and international press, Granger and Judy, but not the President, and not Aimee, not yet. Fern was to bring her over, when everything was set and all were in place: a long process. Lamin and Hawa, who were neither great nor good, had been relegated to some far-off spot, distant from us, for the hierarchy of the seating was absolute. Every fifteen minutes or so Judy, or sometimes Granger, or sometimes me, would suggest that someone should really get those poor musical soldiers some water, but none of us did, and no one else did either. Meanwhile the nursery schools trooped in, each school in its distinctive uniform, pinafores, shirts and shorts in striking combinations of colors—orange and gray, or purple and yellow—led by small groups of women, their teachers, who had pulled out all the stops in terms of glamour. The teachers of Kunkujang Keitaya Nursery School wore tight red T-shirts and black jeans with rhinestone pockets and their hair in elaborate braids. The teachers of Tujereng Nursery School wore wrappers and headscarves of matching red-and-orange design and identical white platform sandals. Each team took a different approach from the next but like the Supremes maintained a perfect uniformity within their group. They entered through the main gate, sashayed across the yard, trailing children, poker-faced—as if they didn’t hear us all cheering—and when they reached their assigned spot two of the women would then unsmilingly unfurl a homemade banner with the name of the school upon it and stand holding it, shifting their weight from hip to hip as the wait continued. I don’t think I ever saw so many outrageously beautiful women in one place. I’d been dressed up too—Hawa told me firmly that my usual khakis and crumpled linen would not do—borrowing a white-and-yellow wrapper and top from my host, which, being far too narrow for me, I could not close at the back and so had to disguise the open seam with a wide red scarf casually thrown over my shoulders, although it was at least 102 degrees.
Finally, almost two hours after we’d sat down, all who were to be in the yard were in the yard, and Aimee, surrounded by a jostling crowd of well-wishers, was led by Fern to her central seat. Camera bulbs flared. And the first thing she turned to ask me was: “Where’s Lamin?” I didn’t have a chance to tell her: horns blew, the main event was upon us, and sitting back in my chair, I wondered if I might in fact have misunderstood everything I’d been so sure I’d understood in the previous two weeks. For now a parade of children walked into the square in costume, all of about seven or eight years old, dressed as the leaders of African nations. They came in kente-cloth and dashikis and Nehru collars and safari suits, and each had their own entourage, made up of other children who’d been done up as security guards: dark suits and dark glasses, speaking into fake walkie-talkies. Many of the little leaders had little wives by their side, dangling little handbags, though Lady Liberia walked alone, and South Africa came with three wives, who linked arms with each other as they walked behind him. To look at the crowd you would think nothing funnier had been seen by anyone in their lives, and Aimee, who also found it hilarious, wiped tears from her eyes as she reached out to hug the President of Senegal or squeeze the cheek of the President of Côte d’Ivoire. The lea
ders paraded past the desperate, sweating soldiers, and then in front of our seats, where they waved and posed for pictures but would not smile or speak. Then the band stopped blaring welcome horns and began a very loud brass rendition of the national anthem. Our chairs vibrated. I turned and saw two massive vehicles rumbling into the yard over the sandy ground: the first an SUV like the one in which we’d traveled four months before, and the second a real police jeep, so heavily armored it looked like a tank. Maybe a hundred children and teenagers from the village ran alongside these vehicles, behind, sometimes in front, but always dangerously close to the wheels, cheering and whooping. In the first car, standing up through the sun-roof, was an eight-year-old version of the President himself, in his white grand boubou and white kufi cap, holding his cane. A real stab at verisimilitude had been attempted: he was as dark as the President and had the same frog face. Next to him stood an eight-year-old glamour-girl, of about my shade, in a wig and a slinky red dress, throwing handfuls of Monopoly money into the crowd. Clinging to the sides of the car were more of these little security guards, with little sunglasses and little guns, which they pointed at the children, some of whom opened their arms in delight to expose their little chests to the aim of their peers. Two adult versions of these security types, in the same outfit, but with no gun, or not as far as I could see, ran beside the car, filming all this on the latest video cameras. In the police jeep bringing up the rear the little policemen with their toy guns shared space with real policemen with real Kalashnikovs. Both the little and big policemen held their guns in the air, to the delight of the children, who ran behind and tried to clamber into the back of the jeep themselves, to get to where the power was. The adults I sat among seemed torn between smiling cheers—whenever the cameras swung round to catch them—and crying out in terror as the vehicles threatened every moment to collide with their running children. “Move on over,” I heard a real policeman shout, to a persistent boy at his right axel, who was pleading for sweets. “Or we’ll move on over you!”
