Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

  “It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  “My topic was the six fundamentals. This is about how a person should eat? In fact, I am not observing them right now, because you are here, but they are certainly in my mind for the next time.”

  This guilty thought led to another: she leaned forward to whisper something to me, her irresistible face set in a half-smile.

  “Yesterday I went to the school TV room and we watched Esmeralda. I shouldn’t smile,” she said, and abruptly stopped, “but you especially know how I love Esmeralda, and I’m sure you would agree that nobody can rid themselves of all dunya things all in one go.” She looked down at her shapeless skirt. “Also my clothes will have to change, in the end, not just the skirt, everything from head to toe. But my sisters all agree it is hard at first because you get so hot and people stare, they call you ninja or Osama in the street. But I remembered what you said to me once when you first came here: “Who cares what other people think?” And this is a strong thought that I keep with me, because my reward will be in Heaven, where nobody will call me ninja because certainly those people will be on fire. I still love my Chris Brown, I can’t help it, and even Bakary still loves his Marley songs, I know because I heard him sing one the other day. But we will learn together, we are young. As I told you already, when we were on tour Bakary did all my chores for me, he went to the market for me, even when people laughed at him, he did this. He did my washing. I said to my grandmothers: did my grandfather ever wash even a sock for any of you in forty years?”

  “But Hawa, why can’t the men see you in the market?”

  She looked bored: I had asked the dullest question once again.

  “When men look at women who are not their wife that is the moment Shaytan is waiting to rush in, to fill them with sin. Shaytan is everywhere! But don’t you even know that?”

  I couldn’t listen to any more of it and made my excuses. But the only place I could go or knew how to get to in the darkness was the pink house. From some way down the road I could see all the lights were dead, and when I reached the door I found it hanging at an angle from a broken hinge.

  “You in there? Can I come in?”

  “My door is always open,” replied Fern from the shadows, in a sonorous voice, and we laughed at the same time. I came in, he made me tea, I regurgitated all the news from Hawa.

  Fern listened to me rant, his head cast further and further back until his head-torch shone on the ceiling.

  “I have to say it does not seem strange to me,” he said when I finished. “She works like a dog in that compound. She hardly leaves it. I imagine she is desperate, like any bright young person, to have her own life. Didn’t you want to get out of your parents’ house, at that age?”

  “When I was her age I wanted freedom!”

  “And you would consider her less free, I mean, touring Mauritania, preaching, than she is now, shut up at home?” He drew his sandal through the covering of red dust that had accumulated on the plastic flooring. “That’s interesting. It’s an interesting point of view.”

  “Oh, you’re just trying to annoy me.”

  “No, I never mean to do that.” He looked down at the pattern he had made on the floor. “Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning,” he said, speaking slowly. “This is what I mean to say. At least, this has been my experience.”

  We would argue if we carried on so I changed the subject and offered him one of the biscuits I had swiped from Hawa’s room. I remembered I had some podcasts saved on my iPod and, with one earbud each, we sat peaceably side by side, nibbling our biscuits and listening to accounts of these American lives, their minor dramas and satisfactions, their pleasures and irritations and tragicomic epiphanies, until it was time for me to go.

  • • •

  The next morning when I woke my first thought was Hawa, Hawa soon married, the babies that would surely follow, and I wanted to speak to someone who shared my sense of disappointment. I got dressed and went looking for Lamin. I found him in the schoolyard, going over a lesson plan under the mango tree. But disappointment was not his reaction to Hawa’s news, or not his first reaction—that was heartbreak. It wasn’t even nine in the morning and I had managed to break someone’s heart.

  “But where did you hear this?”

  “Hawa!”

  He struggled to gain control of his face.

  “Sometimes girls say they will marry someone and they do not. It’s common. There was a policeman . . .” He trailed off.

  “I’m sorry, Lamin. I know how you feel about her.”

  Lamin laughed stiffly and returned to his lesson plan.

  “Oh no, you are mistaken, we are brother and sister. We have always been. I said this to our friend Aimee: this is my little sister. She will remember me saying this, if you ask her. No, I am just sorry for Hawa’s family. They will be very sad.”

  The school bell rang. I visited classrooms all morning and for the first time got a feeling for what Fern had achieved here, in our absence, despite Aimee’s interference, and by working, in a sense, around her. The school office had all the new computers she had sent, and more reliable internet, which I could see, from their search histories, had been so far used exclusively by the teachers for two purposes: trawling Facebook and entering the President’s name into Google. Each classroom was scattered with mysterious—to me—3D logic puzzles and small handheld devices on which you could play chess. But these were not the innovations that impressed me. Just behind the main building, Fern had used some of Aimee’s money to create a garden in the yard, which I don’t remember him ever mentioning in our board meetings, and here all kinds of produce were growing, which belonged, he explained, to the parent body collectively, which—along with many other consequences—meant that when first period ended, half the school did not disappear to help their mothers on the farm, instead staying on site and tending to their seedlings. I learned that Fern, at the suggestion of the mothers in the PTA, had invited several teachers from the local majlis into our school, where they were given a room to teach Arabic and Koranic studies, for which they were paid a small fee directly, and this stopped another large portion of the school population disappearing at midday or spending a part of every afternoon doing domestic chores for these majli teachers, as they once had, in lieu of payment. I spent an hour in the new art room, where the youngest girls sat at their tables mixing colors and making hand prints—playing—while the laptops that Aimee had envisioned for them all had, Fern now confessed, disappeared en route to the village, no surprise, given that each one was worth twice any teacher’s yearly wage. All in all the Illuminated Academy for Girls was not that shining, radically new, unprecedented incubator-of-the-future I had heard so much about around Aimee’s dinner tables in New York and London. It was the “Loomy Academy,” as people called it locally, where many small but interesting things were happening, every day, which were then argued over and debated at the end of each week, in the village meetings, which led to further adaptations and changes, few of which I sensed Aimee ever knew or heard about, but to which Fern closely attended, listening to everyone in that strikingly open way of his, making his reams of notes. It was a functioning school, built by Aimee’s money but not contained by it, and whatever small part I had played in its creation, I now felt, like any minor member of the village, my own portion of pride in it. I was enjoying this warm feeling of achievement, walking back from the school garden to the headmaster’s office, when I spotted Lamin and Hawa under the mango tree, standing too close together, arguing.

  “I don’t listen to lectures from you,” I heard her say, as I approached, and when she spotted me, she turned and repeated the point: “I don’t take lectures from him. He wants me to be the last person remaining in this place. No.”

  Over by the headmaster’s office, thirty yards from us, a circle of curious teachers who had just finished l
unch stood in the shade of the doorway, washing their hands from a tin kettle filled with water and watching the debate.

  “We won’t speak now,” whispered Lamin, conscious of this audience, but Hawa in full flow was hard to stop.

  “You have been gone one month, is it? Do you know how many others have gone from here in this month? Look for Abdulaye. You won’t see him. Ahmed and Hakim? My nephew Joseph? He is seventeen. Gone! My Uncle Godfrey—no one has seen him. I have his children now. He is gone! He didn’t want to stay and rot here. Back way—all of them.”

  “Back way is crazy,” murmured Lamin, but then attempted to be bold: “Mashala are crazy, too.”

  Hawa took a step toward him: he shrank back into himself. As well as being in love with her, I thought, he is a little afraid of her. I understood that—I was a little afraid of her myself.

  “And when I go to teachers’ college in September,” she said, jabbing a finger into his chest, “will you still be here, Lamin? Or do you have somewhere else to be? Will you still be here?” Lamin looked over at me, a panicked, guilty glance, which Hawa took as confirmation: “No, I did not think so.”

  A wheedling tone entered Lamin’s whisper.

  “Why not just go to your father? He got your brother the visa. He could get you the same, if you asked. It is not impossible.”

  I’d had this thought myself, many times, but had never asked Hawa about it directly—she never seemed to want to speak of her father—and now, seeing her face alive with righteous fury, I was very glad I’d never asked. The circle of teachers burst into chatter like the crowd at a boxing match when a hard punch lands.

  “There’s no love between me and him, you should know that. He has his new wife, his new life. Some people can be bought, some people can smile in the face of other people they do not love, just to gain advantage. But I am not like you,” she said, the pronoun landing somewhere between Lamin and me, as she turned and walked away from us both, her long skirt swishing in the sand.

  • • •

  That afternoon I asked Lamin to come with me to Barra. He said yes but seemed overcome with humiliation. Our cab ride was silent, as was our ferry trip. I needed to change some money, but when we got to the little holes in the wall—where the men sat on high stools behind shutters, counting out huge towers of grubby notes held together by elastic bands—he left me. Lamin had never left me alone anywhere before, not even when I had most wanted him to, and now I discovered how panicked I was by the idea.

  “But where will I meet you? Where are you going?”

  “I have some errands to run myself, but I will be around, close by, near the ferry. It is fine, just call me. I will be forty minutes.”

  Before I had a chance to argue he was gone. I didn’t believe in his errands: he only wanted to be rid of me for a while. But my money-changing took all of two minutes. I wandered around the market, and then, to avoid people calling out to me, I walked beyond the ferry to an old military fort, once a museum, now abandoned, but you could still climb up its fortifications and see the river and the infuriating way the whole of this town had been built with its back to the water, ignoring the river, in a defensive crouch against it, as if the beautiful view of the opposite bank, of the sea and the leaping dolphins, was offensive somehow or surplus to requirements or simply carried the memory of too much pain. I climbed back down and lingered by the ferry, but I still had twenty minutes so I went to the internet café. It was the usual scene: boy after boy with his headset on, saying, “I love you” or “Yes, my baby girl,” while on the screens white women of a certain age waved and blew kisses, almost always British women—judging from their household interiors—and as I stood at the desk, about to pay my twenty-five dalasi for fifteen minutes, I could watch them all simultaneously coming out of their glass-brick showers, or eating at their breakfast bars, or walking around their rockeries or lounging in a swing chair in the conservatory, or just sitting on a sofa, watching telly, their phones or laptops in hand. There was nothing unusual in any of this, I’d seen it many times before, but this particular afternoon, as I put my money on the desk, a crazed, babbling man ran into the place and began weaving in and out of the computers, brandishing a long, carved stick, and the owner of the café abandoned our transaction to chase him round the terminals. The lunatic was incredibly beautiful and tall, like a Masai, and barefoot, wearing a traditional dashiki embroidered with gold thread, though it was torn and dirty, and on top of his dreaded hair perched a baseball cap from a Minnesota golf course. He tapped the young men on their shoulders, once on each side, like a king performing many knighthoods, until the owner managed to grab his cane from him and started beating him with it. And as he was being beaten, he kept talking, in a comically refined English accent, it reminded me of Chalky’s, from all those years ago. “Good sir, do you not know who I am? Do any of you fools know who I am? You poor, poor fools? Do you not even recognize me?”

  I left my money on the counter and headed back out to wait in the sun.

  Four

  When I got back to London I had dinner with my mother, she’d booked a table at Andrew Edmunds, downstairs—“my treat”—but I felt oppressed by the dark green walls and confused by the surreptitious glances of the other diners, and then she unclenched my right hand from its death grip on a phone and said: “Look at this. Look what she’s doing to you. No nails and bleeding fingers.” I wondered when my mother started eating in Soho, and why she looked so thin, and where Miriam was. Maybe I would have thought a little more deeply about all of these questions if there had been any space in which to seriously consider them, but that evening my mother was on a talking tear, and most of the meal was taken up with a monologue about London gentrification—addressed as much to the nearby tables as to me—stretching from the usual contemporary complaints back through the years until it became an impromptu history lesson. By the time the main course turned up we’d arrived at the early eighteenth century. The very row of townhouses in which we sat—a backbench MP and a pop star’s personal assistant, eating oysters together—was once the accommodation of joiners and sash makers, bricklayers and carpenters, all of whom had paid a monthly rent which, even when adjusted for inflation, would not presently cover the single oyster I was putting in my mouth. “Working people,” she explained, tipping a Loch Ryan down her throat. “Also radicals, Indians, Jews, runaway Caribbean slaves. Pamphleteers and agitators. Robert Wedderburn! The ‘Blackbirds.’ This was their spot too, right under Westminster’s nose . . . Nothing like that happens round here now—sometimes I wish it would. Give us all something to work with! Or toward! Or even against . . .” She reached out to the three-hundred-year-old wood paneling beside her head and gave it a wistful stroke. “The truth is most of my colleagues don’t even remember what the real Left is, and believe me they don’t want to remember. Oh, but once upon a time it was a real hotbed around here . . .” She went on in this vein, for a bit too long, as usual, but in thrilling full flow—nearby diners leaned in to catch the scraps of it—and none of it was barbed or directed at me, all her sharp corners had been filed off. The empty oyster shells were taken away. Out of habit I started in on the skin around my cuticles. As long as she is talking about the past, I thought, well then she isn’t asking me about the present or the future, when I’ll stop working for Aimee or have a baby, and avoiding this two-pronged attack had become my first priority whenever I saw her. But she didn’t ask me about Aimee, she didn’t ask me about anything. I thought: she’s reached the center at last, she’s “in power.” Yes, even if she likes to characterize herself as a “thorn in the party’s side,” the fact is she’s at the center of things, finally, and this must be the difference. She had now what she’d wanted and most needed all of her life: respect. Maybe it didn’t even matter to her any more what I did with my life. She didn’t have to take it as a judgment upon her any longer, or on the way she raised me. And though I noticed she wasn’t drinking, I chalke
d this up, too, to my new version of my mother: mature, sober, self-confident, no longer on the back foot, a success on her own terms.

  It was this train of thought that left me unprepared for what came next. She stopped talking, rested her head in a hand, and said: “Love, I have to ask for your help with something.”

  She winced as she said it. I steeled myself against some form of self-dramatization. Terrible to think back now and realize this grimace was most likely a real, involuntary reaction to a genuine physical pain.

  “And I wanted to deal with it myself,” she was saying, “not to bother you with it, I know you’re very busy, but I don’t know who else to turn to at this point.”