What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  But the materials were extracted by that time, and the schools went up: four poles for each roof and thatch laid on top, sometimes with plastic sheeting when available. We built twelve schools in one week, named simply: School One, School Two, School Three, and so on. When we finished building the schools, we were called to the open field that became the parade grounds and site of major announcements. Two men spoke to us, one Sudanese and one Ethiopian, the joint educational directors for the camp.

  —Now you have schools! they said. We cheered.

  —Each day, first you will march. After you march, you will attend your classes. And after classes, you will work until your dinner.

  Again, our enthusiasm dampened.

  But other aspects of life at the camp were improving. With the advent of the UN came clothing, for example, and this development was greeted with great relief by all the boys, especially those too old to be naked, who had gone without since we had arrived in Ethiopia. Whenever there was a shipment, the older boys would retrieve the large bags, stuffed with garments and labeled Gift of the UK or Gift of the United Arab Emirates, and would bring them back to the smaller groups. When our first share arrived, it came down to me to distribute the clothing to the Eleven, and to prevent arguing we sat in a circle and I handed out the contents of the bag, one piece at a time, in a clockwise system. That the clothing rarely fit the recipient didn’t matter.

  I knew trading would ensue within the Eleven and elsewhere, and this was necessary, as half of our first shipment was women’s clothing. This would have been humorous if we had been less desperate to be looking again like we had been raised, with shirts and shoes and pants. Without clothes we could not hide our wounds, our protruding ribs. Our nakedness, our rags, spoke too bluntly about our sorry state.

  By the time school began, most of us had bartered successfully enough to have clothed ourselves, and when we sat down that first day, we really felt like students, and the school really seemed like a school. The classrooms were thatched rooms, roofs without walls, and on the first morning of classes, the fifty-one boys sat on the ground and waited. Finally a man strode in, and introduced himself as Mr. Kondit. He was a tall man, very thin, with an extraordinarily small skull. He wrote his name on the chalkboard and we were greatly impressed. Only a few among us could recognize any letters at all, but still we stared at the white marks on the board and blinked, happy to watch whatever might happen next.

  The first day’s lesson covered the alphabet. Mr. Kondit’s voice was loud and harsh, sounding impatient at having to explain these things to us. It felt that first day as if he wanted the lesson, all of the lessons of the alphabet and writing and language generally, to be finished in one sweeping hour. He wanted simply to gesture at the alphabet and be done with it.

  ABC

  He wrote the three letters and read them aloud, demonstrating the sounds they denoted. Because we had no pencils or paper, Mr. Kondit sent us outside. There, we copied the letters into the dirt with sticks or our fingers.

  —Make your letters neat! he barked from his chalkboard.—You have three minutes. If you make a mistake, erase your letter and draw it again. When you have three letters that are to your satisfaction, raise your hand and I will inspect your work. Hands were raised and Mr. Kondit began to make his rounds.

  I had never written before; the first time I tried to write a letter B in the dirt, Mr. Kondit came behind me and clucked disapprovingly. He leaned over and grabbed my finger roughly, then guided it through the dirt to make the proper B, pushing my forefinger so hard into the ground that my fingernail cracked and bled.

  —You must do better! he yelled to the crowns of our heads.—You have nothing now, nothing but education. Don’t you see this? Our country is in shambles, and the only way we can reclaim it is to learn! Our independence was stolen from us due to the ignorance of our ancestors, and only now can we correct it. Many of you no longer have mothers. You have lost your fathers. But you have education. Here, if you are smart enough to accept it, you will be educated. Education will be your mother. Education will be your father. While your older brothers fight this war with guns, when the bullets stop, you will fight the next war with your pens. Do you see what I’m telling you?

  He was hoarse by now and he grew quiet.—I want you to succeed, boys. If we are ever to have a new Sudan, you must succeed. If I’m ever impatient, it’s because I cannot wait for this godforsaken war to end, and for you to assume your role in the future of our ruined land.

  On our way back to our shelters, Mr. Kondit was the subject of fascination and debate.

  —Did you hear that crazy man? we said.

  —Education is your mother? we said.

  We laughed and did imitations. We thought Mr. Kondit, like more than a few of the men and boys who had crossed the desert to get to Ethiopia, had lost his mind along the way.

  Not long after the schools opened, another strange thing happened: they brought girls to class. There were very few girls at Pinyudo in general, and there were no girls in any of the schools at all, as far as I could tell. But one morning, as the fifty-one boys in Mr. Kondit’s class settled onto the ground before the blackboard, we noticed four new people, all of them female, sitting in the front row. Mr. Kondit was squatting before these new people, talking to them, placing his hands on their heads in a familiar way. I was baffled.

  —Class, Mr. Kondit said, rising to his full height,—we have four new students today. Their names are Agar, Akon, Agum, and Yar Akech. They should be treated with respect and courtesy, because they are all very good students. They are also my nieces, so I expect that you will be that much more careful about your behavior around them.

  And with that, he began the lesson. I was three rows behind the girls and spent all of that day’s hours looking nowhere but at the backs of their heads. I studied their necks and their hair, as if the secrets of the world and history were discernible in the twists of their braids. I glanced around to see if the other boys were having a similar problem and found that I was not alone in this. Nothing academic was learned that day and yet we boys felt, cumulatively, that the focus of our lives and all earthly pursuits had changed. These four sisters, Agar, Akon, Agum, and Yar Akech, each of them graceful, well-dressed and so attractively aloof, were far more worthy of study than anything that could be written on a blackboard or in the dirt surrounding the classroom.

  We did not eat or sleep as we had before. Dinner was made and consumed but was not tasted. Sleep came when the morning light had already begun to leak from the other side of the earth. We had been awake all of those dark hours, discussing the sisters. At first, no one knew which sister was which; Mr. Kondit’s introduction was too quick and cursory. Only through much sharing of information did my Eleven come to remember all four names, and through the same system of information sharing we amassed a dossier on each of the four. Agar was the oldest, that seemed clear. She was very tall and wore her hair in braids; her dress was a striking pink with white flowers. Akon was the next oldest, her face round and her eyelashes very long; she wore a dress with red and blue stripes, with matching barrettes in her hair. Agum could be the same age as Akon, for she was the same height but much thinner. She appeared the least engaged in the goings-on at school, and seemed perpetually bored or frustrated, exasperated even, by everyone and everything. Yar Akech was the youngest, it was clear, a few years behind Agum and Akon, and perhaps one year younger than me and my Eleven. Nevertheless, she was taller than us, too, and this fact, that we were all shorter and far less mature than the nieces, rendered the girls far more fascinating and unattainable in every way.

  After the night had been filled with the dissection of every known detail of the sisters, one question lingered among us and seemed unanswerable: Would the girls really be there the next day? And the day after that? It seemed too good for me, for Moses and the Eleven, or for the fifty-one. Could we really be this fortunate? It would mean the complete upending of the school and world we knew.


  All of us, the Eleven and I, walked to school that morning in a fog. None of us had slept enough to facilitate effective thinking. We encountered the nieces as we walked in. The girls were seated in the back, on chairs. We took our seats in front.

  —Okay, Mr Kondit began.—It is obvious that you all are of an age that makes concentration difficult when in the presence of young women.

  We said nothing. How had he known? Mr. Kondit was a smart man! we thought.

  —I have made a few adjustments to the seating arrangements to help you all in your concentration. I trust that today the lesson will be more captivating to you students. Now, today we will continue with the consonants…

  We had no choice but to watch and listen to Mr. Kondit. But we had not planned to. We had, each boy, come to class with other plans. We had, in fact, already divided up the tasks, with two or three boys assigned to each of the girls, to obtain the maximum possible amount of information through close observation. Unless we wanted to turn entirely around, observing the sisters was now impossible. Fact-finding, thereafter, became possible only when we were all writing outside, before the lesson had begun or after it was finished.

  Through our reconnaissance before school, after school, and during our writing exercises in the dirt, by the end of the first week, more was known about the sisters’ clothes, their hair, their eyes and arms and legs, but they had spoken to no one. They did not speak in class and they made no conversation with any boy. What was known was that they were uniformly beautiful and very smart and dressed far better than the unaccompanied minors like me had any chance to. The nieces’ clothes were clean, without tears or holes. They wore the most brilliant reds and purples and blues, their hair always fixed with the utmost care. I had never had any particular interest in girls as playmates, because they cried too quickly and didn’t typically want to wrestle, but each night for many weeks, after the talk of the Eleven had faded to whispers and sleep had overtaken us, I lay in the shelter and found myself wondering why I should be so blessed, to have these spectacular royal sisters in my class. Why should I be so fortunate? It seemed, then, that God had had a plan. God had separated me from my home and family and had sent me to this wretched place, but now there seemed to be a reason for it all. There was suffering, I thought, and then there was light. There was suffering and then there was grace. I was placed in Pinyudo, it was clear now, to meet these magnificent girls, and the fact that there were four of them meant that God intended to make up for all the misfortune in my life. God was good and God was just.

  I found myself raising my hand more often. Usually my answers were correct. I was, improbably, smarter than I had been days earlier. I sat in the front. Though I was farther from the girls, I needed to be where I would be noticed by Mr. Kondit, and by extension, by his nieces. I answered every question asked of me, and I studied with great diligence at night. I had to get myself noticed by the girls, and if classtime was the only time I could see them—and it was, since they lived on the far side of the camp, where the more essential people lived—then that was when I would have to shine.

  Each time I was correct in my answers, Mr. Kondit would say ‘Good, Achak!’ and if I could do so undetected, I would glance back at the nieces, to see if they had noticed. But they rarely seemed to do so.

  The Eleven, though, had certainly noticed, and they hassled me without end or mercy. My new success at school was dulling the sheen on the rest of them, and this caused some concern. Would I, they wanted to know, always be this much of a pain?

  —Why are you suddenly so interested in school, Achak? they asked.

  —Is education your mother and father, Achak? Moses said. Their hounding forced me to admit my strategy.

  —I don’t give a goddamn about education is my father! I said. The Eleven fell down laughing.

  —You know why I’m raising my damned hand. Now shut up.

  But I had not finished what I had begun. The more I tried, and the longer the nieces seemed unimpressed, the more extreme my efforts became. I helped after class, wiping the board clean and organizing Mr. Kondit’s papers and books. I took attendance at the beginning of class, which was both boon and curse. As I called out the names, I had to face the knowing stares of the Eleven, each of them grinning maniacally at me, some batting their lashes in mock-flirtation. When I was done with them, though, I was able to call out the names Agar, Akon, Agum, and Yar Akech, and in this way, I became the only boy the girls looked directly at, the only boy to whom they spoke. Here, the sisters said. Here, here, here.

  They were the Royal Nieces of Pinyudo. One of my roommates named them and the girls were immediately known this way—or alternately as the Royal Girls—in the class of fifty-one and elsewhere in the camp, too. There were other families, other sets of sisters, yes, but none so uniformly exceptional. It was unlikely that these four girls were unaware of their nickname, and no one doubted that they found it agreeable. They were aware of the reverence we had for them, but still, they seemed oblivious to me in particular.

  As the semester wore on, I began to doubt my strategy. I was the best student in the class, but they paid me no mind. I began to worry that they didn’t care much about the academic achievement of me or any boy. It was likely that they wanted nothing to do with someone of my status, an unaccompanied minor. It was very different than being the niece of Mr. Kondit. The unaccompanied minors were the lowest rung of the ladder at Pinyudo, and we were reminded of it constantly. Our clothes were few and tattered and our homes looked like they had been built by boys, which of course they had. When I arrived here in the U.S., one of my old friends from the camps bought me a gift, a set of Tinker Toys. The thin dowels were so like the sticks we used to construct our first shelters in Pinyudo that I had to laugh. Achor Achor and I built a facsimile of our Group Twelve home on our coffee table and then we laughed some more. It was so similar it stunned us both.

  It took the entire semester, but finally my efforts toward the Royal Girls bore fruit. With one week left before classes let out for a month, as I was leaving school one day, Agum positioned herself in front of me and said something. It seemed impossible and I treated it as such; I said nothing, for I did not believe that she was really speaking to me. But was it possible? And if so, what had she said? I had to piece the words together; I had been looking at her eyes, her lashes, her mouth that was so close to mine. It was all so sudden, the changing of one life into another.

  —Achak, my sister has something to ask you, she had said. Agar, the eldest and tallest, was suddenly next to her.

  Her sister stomped on her foot and was punched in return. I didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed good so far.

  —Do you want to come to lunch at our house? Agar asked. I realized at that moment that I had been standing on my tiptoes. I righted myself, hoping they had not noticed.

  —Today? I asked.

  —Yes, today.

  I thought a moment. I thought long enough to think of the wrong thing to say.

  —I cannot accept, I said.

  I could not believe I said that. Can you believe this is what I said? I had refused the Royal Nieces of Pinyudo. Why? Because I had been taught that a gentleman refuses invitations. The lesson had been explained by my father, one warm night as I was helping him close the shop, but the context was not applicable here, I would later learn. My father had been talking about adultery, about a man’s honor, about respect for women, about the sanctity of marriage. He was not, I would later remember, talking about the refusal of an invitation to lunch. But at this moment, I thought I was acting like a gentleman, and I refused.

  The sunny faces of Agum and Agar clouded over.

  —You cannot accept? they said.

  —I am sorry. I cannot accept, I said, and backed away.

  I backed away until I walked into one of the poles that held up the classroom. It threatened to collapse on me, but I spun from it, righted the pole, and then ran home. For an hour I was happy with myself, by my unerring gras
p of my emotions, my impulses. I was a model of restraint, a true Dinka gentleman! And I was certain the Royal Nieces now knew this. But after my hour of reflection, the reality of it struck me. I had refused a lunch invitation from the very girls I had spent the semester trying to impress. I had been offered everything I wanted: to spend time with them alone; to hear them speak casually, to know what they thought of me and of school and Pinyudo and why they were here; to eat a meal cooked by their mother—to eat a meal, a real meal, cooked by a Dinka woman! I was a fool.

  I went about trying to recover. What could I do? I had to take the invitation, now dust, and somehow reconstruct it. I would make fun of myself. Could I act as if I had been kidding? Would they believe that for a moment?

  The end of the semester was upon us, and with it final exams. When school let out there would be a month without school, and if I did not salvage the situation, I would not see them until school began again in the spring. I found the youngest, Yar, under a tree, reading her textbook.

  —Hello Yar, I said.

  She said nothing. She stared at me as if I’d stolen her lunch.

  —Do you know where your sisters are?

  Without a word, she pointed to Agar, who was walking toward us. I straightened myself and presented her a smile that begged forgiveness.

  —I shouldn’t have said no, I said.—I wanted to go to lunch.

  —Then why did you say no? Agar said.

  —Because…

  As we spoke, as I hesitated, Agum joined us. And under that sort of pressure, I had a blessed and fortuitous thought. In a week of obsession I could not come up with a suitable excuse but here, in a desperate moment, I came up with the perfect solution.