by Zadie Smith
Dinner was brought to us, a feast really, and we ate outside, with the grandmothers forming a talkative circle at the other end of the verandah, looking over at us occasionally, but too busy with their own discussion to pay us much mind. We had a solar lamp at our feet that lit us from below: I could see my food and the lower parts of Lamin and Hawa’s brother’s faces, and then beyond there were the usual busy noises of domestic work and children laughing, crying, shouting, and people walking from the various outhouses back and forth across the yard. What you didn’t hear were men’s voices, but now I heard some very close at hand, and Lamin stood up suddenly and pointed at the compound wall, where, either side of the doorway, half a dozen men now sat, their legs facing toward the road. Lamin took a step toward them but Hawa’s brother caught him by the shoulder and sat him back down, approaching instead himself, with two of his grandmothers at his side. I saw one of the young men was smoking and now flicked his cigarette over into our yard, but when Hawa’s brother reached them it turned out to be a quick conversation: he said something, one boy laughed, a grandmother said something, he spoke again, more firmly, and six backsides slipped out of view. The grandmother who had spoken opened the door and watched them walk on, down the road. The moon came out from a cover of clouds and from where I stood I could see at least one of them had a gun on his back.
“They are not from here, they are from the other end of the country,” said Hawa’s brother, rejoining me. He still wore his bloodless conference-room smile, but behind his designer glasses I could see in his eyes how shaken he was. “We see it more and more. They hear the President wants to rule for a billion years. They are running out of patience. They begin listening to other voices. Foreign voices. Or the voice of God, if you believe this can be bought on a Casio tape for twenty-five dalasi in the market. Yes, they are out of patience and I do not blame them. Even our calm Lamin, our patient Lamin—he, too, has run out of patience.”
Lamin reached out for a slice of white bread but did not speak.
“And when do you leave?” asked Babu, of Lamin, his tone so full of judgment, of blame, that I assumed he referred to the back way, but they both chuckled at the panic that must have passed over my face: “No, no, no, he will have his official papers. It is all being arranged, thanks to you people who are here. We are already losing all our brightest young men, and now you take another. It is sad but this is the way things are.”
“You left,” said Lamin sullenly. He pulled a fish-bone from his mouth.
“That was a different time. I was not needed here.”
“I am not needed here.”
Babu did not answer and his sister was not there to fill up the spaces between us with chatter. When we had finished our quiet meal I preempted those many child-maids, gathered the plates together and walked in the direction I’d seen those girls go, toward the last room in the block, which turned out to be a bedroom. I stood in the dim light, unsure what to do next, when one of the half a dozen sleeping children in there raised his head from their single bed, saw the load in my arms and pointed me through a curtain. I found myself outside, in the yard again, but this was the back yard, and here were the grandmothers and some of the older girls, crouched around several tubs of water in which clothes were being washed with large bars of gray soap. A circle of solar lamps illuminated the scene. As I came upon them work paused to observe some live animal theater: a cockerel chasing a hen, overpowering her, putting his claw to her neck, driving her head into the dust, finally mounting her. This operation took only a minute, but throughout the hen looked bored, impatient to get on with her other tasks, so that the cockerel’s brutal sense of his power over her seemed somehow comic. “Big man! Big man!” cried one of the grandmothers, spotting me, pointing at the cockerel. The women laughed, the hen was released: she wandered around in a circle, once, twice, three times, apparently dazed, before returning to the henhouse and her sisters and her chicks. I put the plates where I was told to, on the ground, and came back to find that Lamin had already left. I understood it was a signal. I announced that I, too, was going to bed, but instead lay in my room in my clothes, waiting for the last sounds of human activity to fade. Just before midnight I took my head-torch, made my way quietly through the yard, out of the compound and through the village.
• • •
Aimee had thought of this visit as a “fact-finding trip,” but the village committee considered everything a reason for celebration, and the next day, as we finished the school tour and entered the yard we found a drum circle awaiting us under the mango tree, twelve late-middle-aged women with drums between their thighs. Even Fern hadn’t been warned, and Aimee was agitated at this new delay to the schedule, but there was no way to avoid it: this was an ambush. The children streamed out and formed a second, huge circle around their drumming mothers, and we, “the Americans,” were asked to sit in the innermost circle on little chairs taken from the classrooms. The teachers went to get these, and among them, approaching from the very other end of the school, over by Lamin’s maths class, I spotted Lamin and Hawa walking together, carrying four little chairs each. But I did not, when I saw him, feel in any way self-conscious, nor was I ashamed: the events of the night before were so separated from my daytime life that it felt to me that they had happened to someone else, a shadow body who pursued separate aims and could not be forced into the light. I waved to them both—they showed no sign of seeing me. The drumming started. I couldn’t shout over it. I turned back toward the circle and took the seat offered to me, next to Aimee. The women began taking turns in the circle, laying their drum aside to dance in dramatic three-minute bursts, a kind of anti-performance, for despite the brilliance of their footwork, the genius in their hips, they did not turn outwards to their audience but instead remained facing their drumming sisters, their backs to us. As the second woman started, Hawa entered the circle and took the seat next to me that I’d been saving for her, but Lamin only nodded at Aimee before sitting himself on the other side of the circle, as far from her, and I suppose from me, as he could manage. I squeezed Hawa’s hand and offered my congratulations.
“I am very happy. It was not easy for me to be here today but I wanted to see you!”
“Is Bakary with you?”
“No! He thinks I am buying fish in Barra! He does not like dancing like this,” she said and moved her feet a little in echo of the woman stamping away a few yards from us. “But of course I won’t dance myself so no harm is done.”
I squeezed her hand again. There was something wonderful about being near her, she cut every situation to her own dimension, believed she could adapt anything until it suited, even as flexibility fell out of fashion. At the same time a paternalistic—or perhaps I should write here “maternalistic”—impulse surged through me: I kept hold of her hand, too tightly, in the hope, the irrational hope, that it would—like some cheap charm bought off a marabout—confer protection, keep her safe from evil spirits, whose existence in the world I no longer doubted. But when she turned and saw the creases in my forehead, she laughed at me and freed herself, clapping to welcome the arrival of Granger into the circle, who moved round it as if it were a break-dancer’s ring, showing off his heavy-footed moves, to the delight of the drumming mothers. After a suitable minute of reticence, Aimee joined him. To avoid watching her, I looked around the circle at all the adamant, inflexible love, sadly misdirected. I could feel Fern to my right, staring at me. I watched Lamin look up every now and then, his glances directed only at Hawa, her perfect face wrapped up tightly like a present. But in the end I could not evade the image of Aimee, dancing for Lamin, at Lamin, to Lamin. Like someone dancing for a rain that will not fall.
Eight drumming women later, even Mary-Beth had attempted a dance and it was my turn. I had a mother pulling each arm, dragging me up. Aimee had extemporized, Granger had historicized—moonwalk, the robot, the running man—but I still had no ideas about dance, only instincts. I watche
d them for a minute, the two women, as they danced at me, teasing me, and I listened carefully to the multiple beats, and knew that what they were doing I, too, could do. I stood between them and matched them step for step. The kids went crazy. There were so many voices screaming at me I stopped being able to hear the drums, and the only way I could carry on was to respond to the movements of the women themselves, who never lost the beat, who heard it through everything. Five minutes later I was done and more tired than if I’d run six miles.
I collapsed next to Hawa, and from some fold of her new hijab she produced a small piece of material with which I wiped some of the sweat from my face.
“Why are they saying ‘too bad’? Was I that bad?”
“No! You were so great! They are saying: Toobab—this means—” She traced her hand across the skin of my cheek. “So they are saying: ‘Even though you are a white girl, you dance like you are a black!’ I say it’s true: you and Aimee, both of you—you really dance like you are blacks. It is a big compliment, I would say. I never would have guessed this about you! My, my, you even dance as well as Granger!”
Aimee, overhearing, burst out laughing.
Seven
Some days before Christmas, I was sitting in the London house, at the desk in Aimee’s study, finalizing the list for the New Year Party, when I heard Estelle, somewhere upstairs, she was saying: “Dere, dere.” It was a Sunday, the second-floor office was closed. The children had not yet returned from their new boarding school and Judy and Aimee were in Iceland, for two nights, doing promotion. I had not seen or heard of Estelle since the children left and had presumed—if I even thought of her at all—that her services were no longer required. Now I heard that familiar lilt: “Dere, dere.” I ran up a floor and found her in Kara’s old room, in what we used to call the nursery. She stood by the sash windows, looking out on to the park, in her comfy crocs and a black sweater embroidered with gold thread, like tinsel, and a pair of sensible pleated navy trousers. Her back was to me, but when she heard my tread, she turned round, a swaddled baby in her arms. It was so tightly wrapped it looked unreal, like a prop. I approached quickly, reaching out—“You cyan just come up and touch the baby! Your hands got to be clean!”—and it took a great deal of self-control to take a step away from them both and put my hands behind my back.
“Estelle, whose baby is that?”
The baby yawned. Estelle looked down at it adoringly.
“Adopted tree weeks ago, I believe. You didn’t know? Seem to me everybody know! But she just arrive here last night. Her name is Sankofa—don’t arks me what kind of name is that because I could not tell you. Why anybody wan give a lovely little baby like this a name like that I must say I don’t know. I’m going to call her Sandra until somebody make me stop.”
The same purple, dark, unfocused gaze, sliding off me, fascinated by itself. I could hear in Estelle’s voice the delight she already took in the child—far more, it seemed to me, than she had ever taken in Jay and Kara, whom she had practically raised—and I tried to focus on the tale of this “lucky, lucky little girl” in her arms, rescued from the “back of beyond,” placed “in the lap of luxury.” Better not to wonder how it had possibly been managed: an international adoption in less than a month. I reached out again. My hands were shaking.
“If you wan hol’ her so bad, I’m about to wash her right now: come upstairs with me, you can clean your hands.”
We went to Aimee’s gigantic en suite, which had at some point been quietly made ready for a baby: a set of towels with rabbit ears, baby powders and oils, baby sponges and baby soaps, and half a dozen multicolored plastic ducks lined up along the edge of the bath.
“All this nonsense!” Estelle crouched to examine a kooky little device made of terrycloth with a metal frame that hooked to the side of the bath and looked like a sun-chair for a tiny old man. “All this equipment. Only way to wash a baby this small is in the sink.”
I knelt next to Estelle and helped unwrap the tiny package. Froggy limbs splayed, astonished.
“The shock,” explained Estelle, as the baby wailed. “She was warm and tight and now she’s cold and loose.”
I stood by as she lowered Sankofa, outraged and screaming, into a seven-thousand-pound hunk of Victorian porcelain I remembered ordering.
“Dere, dere,” said Estelle, wiping a cloth in the child’s many wrinkled crevices. After a minute or so she cupped Sankofa’s tiny backside in her hand, kissed her on her still-screaming face and told me to lay the swaddling blanket out in a triangle on the heated floor. I sat back on my heels and watched Estelle rub coconut butter all over the baby. To me, who had never so much as held a baby for more than a passing moment, the whole procedure looked masterful.
“Do you have children, Estelle?”
Eighteen, sixteen and fifteen—but her hands were greasy so she directed me to her back pocket and I drew out her phone. I swiped right. Saw, for a moment, the uncluttered image of a tall young man in a high-school graduate’s robe, flanked on both sides by his smiling younger sisters. She told me their names and special talents, their heights and temperaments, and how often or not each one Skyped or replied to her on Facebook. Not often enough. In the ten or so years we had both worked for Aimee, this was the longest and most intimate conversation we’d ever had.
“My mudder take care of dem for me. They go to the very best school in Kingston. Next thing he’ll be heading to the University of the West Indies for engineering. He’s a wonderful young man. The girls they take him like a model. He’s the star. They look up to him so much.”
“I’m Jamaican,” I said, and Estelle nodded and smiled blandly at the baby. I had seen her do this many times, when gently humoring the children, or Aimee herself. Blushing, I corrected myself.
“I mean, my mother’s people are from St. Catherine.”
“Oh, yes. I see. You ever been dere?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Well, you’re still young.” She wrapped the child back up in its cocoon and held it to her breast. “Time’s on your side.”
• • •
Christmas came. The baby was presented to me, to all of us, as a fait accompli, a legal adoption, suggested and agreed upon by the parents, and nobody questioned this, or not out loud. No one asked what “agreement” could even mean in a situation of such deep imbalance. Aimee was in the throes of baby love, everyone else seemed happy for her—it was her Christmas miracle. All I had were suspicions and the fact that the whole process had been hidden from me until it was already over.
A few months later I went back to the village for the final time, making inquiries as best I could. Nobody would speak to me about it, or offer anything but happy platitudes. The birth parents were no longer living locally, no one seemed to know exactly where they had moved. If Fernando knew something about it, he wasn’t going to tell me, and Hawa had moved to Serrekunda with her Bakary. Lamin moped around the village, he was in mourning for her—maybe I was, too. Evenings in the compound, without Hawa, were long, dark, lonely and conducted entirely in languages I didn’t know. But though I told myself, as I headed out to Lamin’s place—five or six times in all, and always late in the night—that we two were acting on an uncontrollable physical desire, I think we both knew perfectly well that whatever passion existed between us was directed through the other person toward something else, toward Hawa, or toward the idea of being loved, or simply to prove to ourselves our own mutual independence from Aimee. She was really the person we were aiming at with all our loveless fucking, as much a part of the process as if she were in the room.
Creeping back from Lamin’s to Hawa’s compound, very early one morning, just before five, as the sun came up, I heard the call to prayer and knew I was already too late to pass unwitnessed—a woman pulling a recalcitrant donkey, a group of children waving from a doorway—and so changed direction, to make it look as if I were out for a walk for no
particular reason, as everyone knew the Americans sometimes did. Circling back round the mosque, I saw Fernando right in front of me, leaning against the next tree, smoking. I’d never seen him smoke before. I tried smiling casually in greeting but he fell in step with me and grabbed me painfully by the arm. He had beer on his breath. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all.
“What are you doing? Why do you do these things?”
“Fern, are you following me?”
He didn’t answer until we were the other side of the mosque, by the huge termite hill, where we stopped, obscured from view on three sides. He let go of me and started speaking as if we had been in the middle of a long discussion.
“And I have some good news for you: thanks to me, he will be with you very soon on a permanent basis, yes, thanks to me. I am going to the embassy today in fact. I am working very hard behind the scenes to unite the young and not-so-young lovers. All three of them.”
I began a denial but there was no point. Fern was always very hard to lie to.
“It must be a truly strong feeling you have for him, to risk so much. So much. Last time you were here, you know, I suspected it, and the time before—but somehow it is still a shock, to have it confirmed.”
“But I don’t have any feelings for him!”
All the fight went out of his face.
“You imagine this makes me feel better?”
Finally, shame. A suspicious emotion, so ancient. We were always advising the girls in the academy not to feel it, because it was antiquated and unhelpful and led to practices of which we didn’t approve. But I felt it at last.
“Please don’t say anything. Please. I’m leaving tomorrow and that’s it. It just started and it’s already over. Please, Fern—you have to help me.”
“I tried,” he said, and walked off, in the direction of the school.