Swing Time Read online

  But now I felt defended, virtually surrounded. No, I didn’t feel like stopping. I kept refreshing and refreshing, waiting for new countries to wake up and see the images and form their own opinions or feed off opinions already voiced. In the wee hours I heard the front door squeak and Fern stumbling into the apartment, surely straight from the after-party. I didn’t move. And it must have been at about four in the morning, while scrolling through the fresh opinions and listening to the birds chirp in the dogwood, that I saw the handle “Tracey LeGon,” the subtitle “Truthteller.” My contact lenses were brittle in my eyes, it hurt to blink, but I wasn’t seeing things. I clicked. She’d posted the same photo I’d seen hundreds of times by then—Aimee, the dancers, Lamin, the children—all lined up at the front of the stage, wearing the adinkra cloth for which I’d seen them fitted: a rich cerulean blue printed with a pattern of black triangles, and in each triangle there was an eye. Tracey had taken this image, expanded it many times, cropped it, so only the triangle and the eye were still visible, and underneath this image she asked the question: LOOK FAMILIAR?

  Three

  Returning with Lamin, we took the jet, but without Aimee—who was in Paris, being awarded a medal by the French government—and so had to process through the main airport, just like everybody, into an arrival hall packed with returning sons and daughters. The men wore fancy jeans of heavy denim, stiff, patterned shirts with stockbroker collars, branded hooded tops, leather jackets, the latest sneakers. And the women were likewise determined to wear all of their best things at the same time. Hair beautifully done, nails freshly painted. Unlike us, they were all familiar with this hall, and quickly secured the services of the porters, to whom they handed their mammoth suitcases, instructing them to take care—though each bag was wrapped in layers of plastic—before leading these hot and harassed young baggage carriers through the crowds toward the exit, turning back every now and then to bark instructions like mountain climbers with their Sherpas. This way, this way! Smartphones held up above their heads, indicating the route. Looking at Lamin in this context, I realized his traveling outfit must be a deliberate choice: despite all the clothes and rings and chains and shoes Aimee had given him this past month, he was dressed exactly as he had been when he left. Same old white shirt, the chinos and a simple pair of leather sandals, black and worn thin at the heel. It made me think there were things about him I had not understood—maybe many things.

  We took a taxi and I sat with Lamin in the backseat. The car had three broken windows and a hole in the lower carriage through which I could see the road rolling beneath. Fern sat in the front, next to the driver: his new policy was to keep a cool distance from me at all times. On the jet he read his books and journals, in the airport he restricted himself to practical matters, get that trolley, join that queue. He was never mean, never said anything cruel, but the effect was isolating.

  “Want to stop to eat?” he asked me now, by way of the rearview mirror. “Or you can wait?”

  I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t mind skipping lunch, who could power through, like Fern often did, replicating the practice of the poorest families in the village by eating only once, in the late afternoon. But I was not that kind of person: I couldn’t miss a meal without getting aggravated. We drove for forty minutes and stopped at a roadside café opposite something called the American College Academy. It had bars on its windows and half the letters missing from the sign. Inside the café the menus depicted glistening American-style meals “with fries,” the prices of which Lamin read aloud, shaking his head gravely, as if encountering something deeply sacrilegious or offensive, and after a long conversation with the waitress three plates of chicken yassa arrived for a negotiated “local” rate.

  We were bent over our food, eating in silence, when we heard a booming voice coming from the very back of the café: “My boy Lamin! Little brother! It’s Bachir! Over here!”

  Fern waved. Lamin did not move: he had spotted this Bachir long ago and had been praying not to be spotted in return. I turned and saw a man sitting alone at the last table near the counter, in the shadows, the only other customer in the place. He was broad and muscular like a rugby player, and wore a dark blue suit with stripes, a tie, a tiepin, loafers without socks and a thick gold chain around his wrist. The suit was straining against his muscles and his face was running with sweat.

  “He is not my brother. He is my age mate. He is from the village.”

  “But aren’t you going to—”

  Bachir was already upon us. Up close, I saw he was wearing a headset, consisting of earpiece and microphone, not unlike the kind Aimee wore on stage, and in his arms carried a laptop, a tablet and a very large phone.

  “Gotta find a place to put all this stuff!” But he sat down with us still clasping it all to his chest. “Lamin! Little brother! Long time!”

  Lamin nodded at his lunch. Fern and I introduced ourselves and received firm, painful, damp handshakes.

  “Me and him grew up together, man! Village life!” Bachir grabbed Lamin’s head and put him in a sweaty headlock. “But then I had to go to the city, baby, know what I’m saying? I was chasing the money, baby! Working with the big banks. Show me the money! Babylon for real! But I’m still a village boy at heart.” He kissed Lamin and released him.

  “You sound American,” I said, but that was only one thread of the rich tapestry of his voice. Many different movies and adverts were in there, and a lot of hip-hop, Esmeralda and As the World Turns, the BBC news, CNN, Al Jazeera and something of the reggae that you heard all over the city, from every taxi, market stall, hairdresser. An old Yellowman tune was playing right now, from the tinny speakers above our heads.

  “For real, for real . . .” He rested his very large, square head on his fist in a thoughtful pose. “You know, I’ve not actually been to the US as yet, not as yet. Got a lot going on. It’s all happening. Talking, talking, gotta keep up with technology, gotta keep relevant. Look at this girl: she is ringing my number, baby, night and day, day and night!” He flashed me an image on his tablet, of a beautiful woman with a glossy weave and dramatic lips painted a deep purple. It looked to me to be a commercial image. “These big-city girls, they’re too crazy! Oh, little brother, I need an upriver girl, I want to start a nice family. But these girls don’t even want a family any more! They’re crazy! How old are you, though?”

  I told him.

  “And no babies? Not even married? No? OK! OK, OK . . . I feel you, sister, I feel you: Miss Independent, is it? That’s your way, OK. But for us, a woman without children is like a tree without fruit. Like a tree”—he raised his muscular backside half out of his chair in a squat, stretched his arms like branches and his fingers like twigs—“without fruit.” He sat back down and closed his hands back into fists. “Without fruit,” he repeated.

  For the first time in many weeks Fern managed a half-smile in my direction.

  “I think what he is saying is that you are like a tree—”

  “Yes, Fern, I got it, thank you.”

  Bachir spotted my flip-phone, my personal phone. He picked it up and turned it over in his palm with exaggerated wonder. His hands were so big it looked a child’s toy.

  “This is not yours. Serious? This is yours?! This is what they are using in London? HA HA HA. Oh man, we more fresh over here! Oh, man! Funny, funny. I would not have expected this. Globalization, right? Strange times, strange times!”

  “Which bank did you say you work for?” asked Fern.

  “Oh, I got a lot going on, man. Development, development. Land here, land there. Building. But I work for the bank here, yes, trading, trading. You know how it is, brother! Government makes life hard sometimes. But show me the money, right? You like Rihanna? You know her? She got her money! Illuminati, right? Living the dream, baby.”

  “We must go now to the ferry,” whispered Lamin.

  “Yeah, I guess I got a lot o
f trades these days—complicated business, man—gotta make those moves, moves, moves.” He demonstrated by moving his fingers over his three devices as if primed to use any one of them at any moment for something terrifically urgent. I noticed the screen on the laptop was black and cracked in several places. “See, some people gotta get to that farm life every day, shell those groundnuts, right? But I gotta make my moves. This is the new work‒life balance right here. You know about that? Yes, man! That’s the latest thing! But in this country we have our old-world mindset, right? A lot of people around here are behind the damn times. It takes these people a little while, OK? To get it into their minds.” With his fingers he drew a rectangle in the air: “The Future. Gotta get it into your mind. But listen: for you? Any time! I like your face, man, it’s beautiful, so clear and light. And I could come to London, we could talk business for real! Oh, you’re not in business? Charity? NGO? Missionary? I like the missionaries, man! I had a good friend, he was from South Bend, Indiana—Mikey. We spent a lot of time together. Mikey was cool, man, he was really cool, he was a Seventh-Day Adventist, but we’re all God’s children for sure, for sure . . .”

  “They are here doing some educational work, with our girls,” said Lamin, turning his back on us, trying to get the waitress’s attention.

  “Oh, sure, I hear about the changes up there. Big times, big times. Good for the village, right? Development.”

  “We hope so,” said Fern.

  “But little brother: are you getting a piece of that? Did you guys know little brother here is too good for money? He’s all about the next life. Me, no: I want this life! HA HA HA HA. Money, money, rolling. Ain’t that the truth. Oh man, oh man . . .”

  Lamin stood up: “Good-bye, Bachir.”

  “So serious, this one. But he loves me. You would love me, too. My oh my, you’re gonna be thirty-three, girl! We should talk! Time flies. Gotta live your life, right? Next time, in London, girl, in Babylon—let’s talk!”

  Walking back to the car, I heard Fern chuckling to himself, cheered by the episode.

  “This is what people call ‘a character,’” he said, and when we reached our waiting taxi and turned to get in we found Bachir the character standing in the doorway, still with his earpiece on, holding all his various technologies and waving at us. Seen standing up, his suit looked especially peculiar, the trousers too short at the ankles, like a mashala in pinstripes.

  “Bachir lost his job three months ago,” said Lamin quietly, as we got back into the car. “He is in that café every day.”

  • • •

  Yes, everything about that trip felt wrong from the start. Instead of my previous glorious competency, I couldn’t rid myself of a nagging sense of error, of having misread everything, beginning with Hawa, who opened the door of her compound wearing a new scarf, black, that covered her head and stopped halfway down her torso, and a long, shapeless shirt, the kind she had always ridiculed when we saw them in the market. She hugged me as firmly as ever, would only nod at Fern, and seemed annoyed by his presence. We all stood in the yard for a while, Hawa making polite, grating small talk—none of it addressed to Fern—and me hoping for some mention of dinner, which, I soon understood, would not come until Fern left. Finally he got the message: he was tired and would head back to the pink house. And as soon as the door closed behind him the old Hawa returned, grabbed my hand, kissed my face and cried: “Oh, sister—good news—I’m getting married!” I hugged her but felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face, the same one I wore in London and New York in the face of similar news, and I experienced the same acute sense of betrayal. I was ashamed to feel that way but couldn’t help it, a piece of my heart closed against her. She took my hand and led me into the house.

  So much to tell. His name was Bakary, he was a Tablighi, a friend of Musa’s, and she would not lie and say he was handsome, because in fact he was quite the opposite, she wanted me to understand that right away, pulling out her phone as evidence.

  “See? He looks like a bullfrog! Honestly I wish he would not wear the black stuff on his eyes or use henna that way, in the beard . . . and sometimes he even wears the lungi! My grandmothers think he looks like a woman in make-up! But they must be wrong because the Prophet himself wore kohl, it is good for eye infections, and there’s really so much I don’t know that I have to learn. Oh, my grandmothers are weeping day and night, night and day! But Bakary is kind and patient. He says nobody cries for ever—and don’t you think that’s true?”

  Hawa’s twin nieces brought in our dinner: rice for Hawa, oven fries for me. I listened in a kind of daze as Hawa told me funny stories about her recent masturat to Mauritania, the furthest she had ever traveled, where she had often fallen asleep in the lecture sessions (“The man who is talking, you can’t see him, because he is not allowed to look at us, so he speaks from behind a curtain, and all us women are sitting on the floor and the lecture is very long, so sometimes we just want to sleep”) and had thought to sew a pocket into the inside of her waistcoat so as to hide her phone and surreptitiously text her Bakary during the duller recitations. But she always concluded these stories with some pious-sounding phrase: “The important thing is the love I bear for my new sisters.” “It is not for me to ask.” “It is in the hands of God.”

  “In the end,” she said, as two more young girls brought us our tin mugs of Lipton’s, heavily sweetened, “all that matters is praising God and leaving dunya things behind. I tell you in this compound dunya business is all you ever hear. Who went to market, who has a new watch, who is going ‘back way,’ who has money, who has not, I want this, I want that! But when you are traveling, bringing people the truth of the Prophet, there is no time for any of these dunya things at all.”

  I wondered why she was still in the compound if life here now annoyed her so much.

  “Well, Bakary is good but he is very poor. As soon as we can we will marry and move, but for now he sleeps in the markaz, close to God, while I am here, close to the chickens and the goats. But we will save a lot of money because my wedding will be very, very small, like the wedding of a mouse, and only Musa and his wife will be there and there will no music or dancing or feasts and I will not even need to get a new dress,” she said with practiced brightness, and I felt so sad suddenly, for if I knew anything at all about Hawa it was how much she loved weddings and wedding dresses and wedding feasts and wedding parties.

  “So, you see, a lot of money will be saved there, for sure,” she said, and folded her hands in her lap to formally mark the end of this thought, and I did not contest her. But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over. Without me asking another question she began to speak, first tentatively and then with increasing energy, of her fiancé. What seemed to impress her most about this Bakary was his sensitivity. He was boring and ugly but he was sensitive.

  “Boring how?”

  “Oh, I should not say ‘boring,’ but I mean, you should see him and Musa together, they listen to these holy tapes all day long, they are very holy tapes, Musa is trying now to learn more Arabic, and I am also learning to appreciate them fully, at the moment they are still very boring for me—but when Bakary listens to them he weeps! He weeps and holds Musa in his arms! Sometimes I go to the market and come back and they are still hugging each other and crying! I never saw a bumster weep! Unless somebody stole his drugs! No, no, Bakary is very sensitive. It is really a heart matter. At first I thought: my mother is a learned woman, she taught me a lot of Arabic, I will be ahead of Bakary in my iman, but that is so wrong! Because it’s not what you read, it’s what you feel. And I have a long way to go before my heart is as full of iman as Bakary’s. I think a sensitive man makes a good husband, don’t you? And our mashala men—I should not call them that, Tablighi is the proper word—but they are so kind to their women! I didn’t know
that. My grandmother always said: they are half big, they are crazy, don’t talk to these girly-men, they don’t even have jobs. Oh boy, she’s weeping every day. But she doesn’t understand, she’s so old-fashioned. Bakary is always saying, ‘There is a hadith that goes: “The best man is the one who helps his wife and children and has mercy on them.”’ And that’s how it is. So, if we go on these tours, on masturat, well, to avoid other men seeing us in the market, our men go themselves and do the shopping for us, they buy the vegetables. I laughed when I heard this, I thought: it can’t be true—but it’s true! My grandfather did not even know where the market was! This is what I try to explain to my grandmothers, but they are old-fashioned. They are weeping every day because he is a mashala—I mean, Tablighi. According to me, they are jealous in secret. Oh, I wish I could leave this place right now. When I went to be with my sisters I was so happy! We prayed together. We walked together. After lunch, one of us had to lead the prayer, you know, and one of the sisters said to me: ‘You do it!’ And so I was the Imam for the day, you know? But I wasn’t shy. Many of my sisters are shy, they say, ‘It is not for me to speak,’ but I really found out on this tour that I am not at all a shy person. And everybody listened to me—oh! People even asked me questions afterward. Can you believe it?”