by Zadie Smith
“No, dear, you don’t.”
• • •
My phone, which I had been trying, with all the will available to me, not to look at, buzzed again—it had buzzed a dozen times since I’d sat down—and now I took it out and tried to move quickly through the backlog, eating with my phone in one hand. Miriam brought up a dull administrative matter with my mother, often her way when she found herself caught up in some argument of ours, but in the middle of dealing with it my mother became visibly bored.
“You’re addicted to that phone. You do know that?”
I didn’t stop typing but made my face as calm as I could manage.
“It’s work, Mum. This is how people work now.”
“You mean: like slaves?”
She ripped a piece of bread in half and offered the smaller section to Miriam, something I’d seen her do before, it was her version of a diet.
“No, not like slaves. Mum, I have a nice life!”
She thought about this with her mouth full. She shook her head.
“No, that’s not right—you don’t have a life. She has a life. She has her men and her children and her career—she has the life. We read about it in the papers. You service her life. She’s a giant sucking thing, sucking your youth, taking up all your—”
To stop her talking I pushed my chair back and went to the bathroom, lingering at the mirrors for longer than I needed, sending more e-mails, but when I got back, the conversation continued uninterrupted, as if no time at all had passed. My mother was still complaining, but to Miriam: “—all your time. She distorts everything. She’s the reason I won’t be having any grandchildren.”
“Mum, my reproductive situation’s really got nothing—”
“You’re too close, you can’t see it. She’s made you suspicious of everybody.”
I denied it, but the arrow hit the target. Wasn’t I suspicious—always on guard? Primed for any sign of what Aimee and I called, between ourselves, “customers”? A customer: someone we judged to be using me in the hope of getting close to her. Sometimes, in the early years, if a relationship of mine did manage—despite all the obstacles of time and geography—to putter along for a few months, I would build up a bit of confidence and courage, and would introduce whoever it was to Aimee, and this was usually a bad idea. The moment he went to the bathroom or out for a cigarette, I’d ask Aimee the question: customer? And the answer would come: Oh, honey, I’m sorry, definitely a customer.
“Look at the way you treat old friends. Tracey. You two were practically sisters, grew up together—now you don’t even speak to her!”
“Mum, you always hated Tracey.”
“That’s not the point. People come from somewhere, they have roots—you’ve let this woman pull yours right out of the ground. You don’t live anywhere, you don’t have anything, you’re constantly on a plane. How long can you live like that? I don’t think she even wants you to be happy. Because then you might leave her. And then where would she be?”
I laughed, but the sound I made was ugly, even to me.
“She’d be fine! She’s Aimee! I’m only assistant number one, you know—there’re three others!”
“I see. So she can have any amount of people in her life but you can only have her.”
“No, you don’t see.” I looked up from my phone. “I’m actually going out with someone tonight? Who Aimee set me up with, so.”
“Well, that’s nice,” said Miriam. Her favorite thing in life was to see a conflict resolved, any conflict, and so my mother was a great resource for her: everywhere she went she made conflict, which Miriam then had to resolve.
My mother perked up: “Who is he?”
“You wouldn’t know him. He’s from New York.”
“Can’t I know his name? Is it a state secret?”
“Daniel Kramer. His name is Daniel Kramer.”
“Ah,” said my mother, smiling inscrutably at Miriam. An infuriating look of complicity passed between them. “Another nice Jewish boy.”
• • •
As the waiter came to clear our plates the sun appeared in the gunmetal sky. Rainbows passed through the wine glasses on to the wet silverware, through the backs of the Perspex chairs, spreading from Miriam’s commitment ring to a linen napkin that sat between the three of us. I refused dessert, said I had to get going, but as I moved to take my raincoat off the back of the chair my mother nodded at Miriam and Miriam passed me a folder, official-looking, ring-bound, with chapters and photographs, lists of contacts, architectural suggestions, a brief history of education in the region, an analysis of the likely “media impact,” plans for government partnership, and so on: a “viability study.” The sun crept through the gray, a mental fog cleared, I saw that the whole lunch had been for this purpose, really, and I was just a channel through which information was meant to pass, to Aimee. My mother, too, was a customer.
I thanked her for the folder and sat looking at its cover, closed in my lap.
“And how are you feeling,” asked Miriam, blinking anxiously behind her glasses, “about your father? The anniversary’s Tuesday, isn’t it?”
It was so unusual to be asked a personal question during a lunch with my mother—never mind having a date significant to me remembered—that at first I wasn’t sure it was addressed to me. My mother, too, looked alarmed. It was painful for us both to be reminded that the last time we’d seen each other had in fact been at the funeral, a full year earlier. Bizarre afternoon: the coffin met the flames, I sat next to my father’s children—now adults in their late thirties and forties—and experienced a replay of the only other time I’d met them: the daughter wept, the son sat back in his chair with his arms folded across his chest, skeptical of death itself. And I, who couldn’t cry, once again found them both to be far more convincing children of my father than I had ever been. And yet, in our family, we had never wanted to admit this unlikelihood, we always batted away what we considered to be the banal and prurient curiosity of strangers—“But won’t she grow up confused?” “How will she choose between your cultures?”—to the point that sometimes I felt the whole purpose of my childhood was to demonstrate to the less enlightened that I was not confused and had no trouble choosing. “Life is confusing!”—my mother’s imperious rebuff. But isn’t there also a deep expectation of sameness between parent and child? I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years, were perhaps only learning it fully at this very moment, as the flames ate the pinewood, whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face. But this was all my private drama: afterward, at the reception, I realized something larger than my loss had been going on the whole time, yes, wherever I walked in that crematorium I heard it, an ambient buzz, Aimee, Aimee, Aimee, louder than my father’s name and more frequent, as people tried to figure out if she was really in attendance, and then, later—when they decided she must have already come and gone—you could hear it again, in mournful echo, Aimee, Aimee, Aimee . . . I even heard my sister ask my brother if he’d seen her. She was there throughout, hiding in plain sight. A discreet, surprisingly short woman, make-up free, so pale as to be almost translucent, in a prim-tweed suit with blue veins running up her legs, wearing her own natural, straight, brown hair.
“I think I’m going to lay flowers,” I said, pointing vaguely across the river, toward North London. “Thanks for asking.”
“One day off work!” said my mother, turning back, joining the train of the conversation at an earlier stop. “The day of his funeral. One day!”
“Mum, one day was all I asked for.”
My mother affected a face of maternal woundedness.
“You used to be so close to your father. I know that I always encouraged you to be. I really don’t know what happened.”
For a moment I wanted to tell her. Instead I watched a pleasure boat churn up the Thames. A few people sat dotted among the rows of empty seats, looking out at the gray water. I went back to my e-mail.
“Those poor boys,” I heard my mother say, and when I raised my head from my phone I found her nodding at Hungerford Bridge as the boat passed under it. At once the same image that I knew was in her mind floated up in my own: two young men, thrown over the railing, into the water. The one who lived and the one who died. I shivered and pulled my cardigan more tightly across my chest.
“And there was a girl, too,” added my mother, tipping a fourth sugar into a frothy cappuccino. “I don’t think she was even sixteen. Practically children, all of them. Such a tragedy. They must still be in prison.”
“Of course they’re still in prison—they killed a man.” I drew a breadstick from a thin china vase and broke it into quarters. “He’s also still dead. Also a tragedy.”
“I understand that,” snapped my mother. “I was in the public gallery almost every day for that case, if you remember.”
I remembered. I was not long out of the flat and it had been my mother’s habit to call me each evening when she got home from the High Court, to tell me the stories—though I didn’t ask to hear them—each with its own grotesque sadness, but all somehow the same: children abandoned by mothers or fathers or both, raised by grandparents, or not raised at all, whole childhoods spent caring for sick relatives, in crumbling prison-like estates, all south of the river, teenagers kicked out of school, or home, or both, drug abuse, sexual abuse, on the rob, sleeping rough—the thousand and one ways a life can be sunk in misery almost before it’s begun. I remember one of them was a college drop-out. Another had a five-year-old daughter, killed in a car accident the day before. They were all already petty criminals. And my mother was fascinated by them, she had a vague idea to write something about the case, for what was, by that point, her Ph.D. She never did.
“Have I annoyed you?” she asked, placing a hand over mine.
“Two innocent boys walking across a fucking bridge!”
As I spoke I rapped my free fist on the table, without meaning to—an old habit of my mother’s. She looked concernedly at me and righted the toppled salt-cellar.
“But darling, who’s arguing with that?”
“We can’t all be innocent.” Out of a corner of my eye I saw a waiter, who’d just come out to check on the bill, tactfully withdraw. “Somebody has to be guilty!”
“Agreed,” murmured Miriam, twisting a napkin fretfully in her hands. “I don’t think anybody’s disagreeing, are they?”
“They didn’t have a chance,” said my mother quietly, but firmly, and only later, walking back across the bridge, when my bad temper had passed, did I see that it was a sentence moving in two directions.
PART FOUR
Middle Passage
One
The greatest dancer I ever saw was the kankurang. But in the moment I didn’t know who or what it was: a wildly swaying orange shape, of a man’s height but without a man’s face, covered in many swishing, overlapping leaves. Like a tree in the blaze of a New York fall that uproots itself and now dances down the street. A large gang of boys trailed behind it in the red dust, and a phalanx of women, with palm leaves in their hands—their mothers, I assumed. The women sang and stepped heavily, beating the air with the palms, walking and dancing both. I was squeezed into a taxi, a beat-up yellow Mercedes with a green stripe running down its middle. Lamin was next to me, in the backseat, alongside somebody’s grandfather, a woman feeding a squalling baby, two teenage girls in their uniforms, and one of the Koranic teachers from the school. It was a scene of chaos that Lamin met calmly, ever conscious of his status, as a trainee teacher, his hands folded priest-like on his lap, looking as always—with his long, flat nose and broad nostrils, and sad, slightly yellowed eyes—like a big cat in repose. The car stereo played reggae from my mother’s island, turned up to a crazy volume. But whatever was coming toward us was dancing to rhythms reggae never approaches. Beats so fast, so complex, that you had to think about them—or see them expressed through the body of a dancer—to understand what you were hearing. Otherwise you might mistake it for one rumbling bass note. You might think it was the sound of thunder overhead.
Who was drumming? I looked out of my window and spotted three men, their instruments gripped between their knees, walking like crabs, and when they scuttled in front of our car the whole traveling dance party paused in its forward momentum, took root in the middle of the road, forcing us to stop. It made a change from the checkpoints, the sullen, baby-faced soldiers, their machine guns held loosely at the hip. When we stopped for soldiers—often a dozen times in a single day—we would fall silent. But now the cab exploded in talk and whistles and laughter and the schoolgirls reached out of the window and jimmied the broken handle until the passenger door opened and everyone except the breastfeeding woman tumbled out.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
I was asking Lamin, he was supposed to be my guide, but he seemed barely to remember I existed, much less that we were meant to be heading for the ferry, to cross the river into the city, and on to the airport, to greet Aimee. None of that mattered now. There was only the present moment, only the dance. And Lamin, as it turned out, was a dancer. I spotted it in him that day, before Aimee had even met him, long before she saw the dancer in him. I saw it in every hip swivel, each nod of his head. But I couldn’t see the orange apparition any more, there was such a crowd between me and it that I could only hear it: what must have been its feet pounding the ground, and the raw clang of metal on metal, and a piercing shriek, otherworldly, to which the women replied in song, as they, too, danced. I was dancing involuntarily myself, pressed up close to so many moving bodies. I kept asking my questions—“What is it? What’s happening?”—but English, the “official language,” that heavy formal coat people only put on in my presence, and even then with obvious boredom and difficulty, had been thrown to the ground, everyone was dancing on it, and I thought, not for the first time in that first week, of the adjustment Aimee would have to make when she finally arrived and discovered, as I already had, the chasm between a “viability study” and life as it appears before you on the road and the ferry, in the village and the city, within the people and in a half-dozen languages, in the food and the faces and the sea and the moon and the stars.
People were clambering on to the car for a better view. I looked for Lamin and found him, too, scrambling up, on to the front bonnet. The crowd was dispersing—laughing, screaming, running—and I thought at first that a firecracker must have gone off. A group of the women fled leftwards, and now I saw why: the kankurang wielded two machetes, long as arms. “Come!” cried Lamin, reaching a hand down for me, and I pulled myself up to him, clinging to his white shirt as he danced, trying to keep my balance. I looked down at the frenzy below. I thought: here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life.
Directly above me an old woman sat decorously on the roof of our car, eating a bag of peanuts, looking like a Jamaican lady at Lord’s, following a day’s cricket. She spotted me and waved: “Good morning, how is your morning?” The same courteous, automatic greeting that followed me round the village—no matter what I wore, no matter who I was with—and which by now I understood as a nod to my foreignness, which was obvious to everyone everywhere. She smiled mildly at the machetes as they spun, at the boys who kept daring each other to approach the dancing tree and match its frenetic moves—while steering clear of its circling knives—imitating in their own narrow bodies the convulsive stamps and twists and crouches and high kicks and general rhythmic euphoria that radiated from the figure to all points on the horizon, through the women, through Lamin, through me, through everyone I could see, as beneath u
s the car shook and rolled. She pointed at the kankurang. “It is a dancer,” she explained.
A dancer who comes for the boys. Taking them to the bush, where they are circumcised, initiated into their culture, told the rules and the limits, the sacred traditions of the world in which they will live, the names of the plants to help with this or that illness and how to use them. Who acts as threshold, between youth and maturity, wards off evil spirits and is the guarantor of order and justice and continuity between and within his people. He is a guide who leads the young through their difficult middle passage, from childhood to adolescence, and he is also, simply, a young man himself, anonymous, chosen in great secrecy by the elders, covered in the leaves of the fara tree and stained with vegetable dyes. But I learned all this on my phone, back in New York. I did try to ask my guide about it, at the time, what it all meant, how it fitted into or diverged from local Islamic practice, but he couldn’t hear me over the music. Or did not want to hear me. I tried again, a little later, after the kankurang had moved on elsewhere, and we were all squeezed back into the cab, along with two of the young dancing boys, they lay across our laps, sticky with the sweat of their efforts. But I could see my questions were annoying to everybody and by then the euphoria was over. Lamin’s depressing formality, which he brought to all his dealings with me, had returned. “A Mandinka tradition,” he said and then turned back to the driver and the rest of the passengers to laugh and argue and discuss things I couldn’t guess in a language I didn’t know. We drove on. I wondered about the girls. Who comes for the girls? If not the kankurang, who? Their mothers? Their grandmothers? A friend?
Two
When Tracey’s time came there was no one to guide her over the threshold, to advise her or even tell her that this was a threshold she was crossing. But her body was developing quicker than anybody else’s and so she had to improvise, to make her own arrangements. Her first idea was to dress wildly. Her mother was blamed—mothers usually are—but I’m sure her mother barely saw or knew the half of it. She was still asleep when Tracey left for school and not home when she got back. She’d found some work finally, I think she was cleaning an office block somewhere, but my mother and the other mothers disapproved of her employment almost as much as they had disapproved of her unemployment. Before she had been a “bad influence,” now she was “never home.” Both her presence and her lack of presence were no good somehow, and the way they began to speak of Tracey took on a tragic dimension, for isn’t it only tragic heroes who have no choices before them, no alternative routes, only unavoidable fates? In a few years Tracey would be pregnant, according to my mother, and so would drop out of school, and the “cycle of poverty” would complete itself, ending, most probably, in prison. Prison ran in the family. Of course, prison ran in my family, too, but somehow I was linked to a different star: I would be and do none of these things. My mother’s certainty about all this worried me. If she was right it meant her dominion over other people’s lives extended far beyond anything I had up till now imagined. And yet if anyone might defy fate—as presented in the form of my mother—surely Tracey could manage it?