? ? ?
As it began to get dark, Lamin entered the crowd to ask questions, becoming another Lamin altogether, not the monosyllabic whisperer he was with me but what must have been the real Lamin, serious and respected by everyone, funny and loquacious, seeming to know everybody, greeted with warm, fraternal affection by beautiful young people wherever we went. His “age mates,” he called them, and this could mean either that he had grown up in the village with them, or that they had been in the same class in school, or else in his year at the teachers’ college. It was a tiny country: age mates were everywhere. The girl who sold us cashews in the market was his age mate, also a security guard in the airport. Sometimes age mates turned out to be one of the young police or army cadets who stopped us at the checkpoints, and that always felt like a piece of luck, the tension dissipated, they took their hands off their guns, leaned in through the passenger window and happily indulged in nostalgia. Age mates gave you a better price, issued tickets more quickly, waved you through. And now here was another one, a bosomy girl in the ferry office, wearing a confounding combination of items I had seen on many local girls and looked forward to showing Aimee, with the superior knowledge of the traveler who has arrived a whole week earlier. Skin-tight, low-riding, studded jeans, the skimpiest of vests—revealing the neon edges of a lacy bra—and a scarlet-red hijab, wrapped modestly round the face and secured with a glittering pink pin. I watched Lamin and this girl talk for a long time, in one of the several local languages Lamin spoke, and I tried to imagine how the simple answers we were seeking to the questions “Is there another ferry? When will it come?” could possibly be turned into as involved a debate as the two of them seemed to be having. Across the bay I heard a honking sound and saw a great shadowy shape moving toward us in the water. I ran over to Lamin and gripped his elbow.
“Is that it? Lamin, is that it?”
The girl stopped her chattering and turned to look at me. She could tell I was no age mate. She examined the drab, utilitarian clothes I had bought especially for wearing in her country: olive cargo pants, long-sleeved wrinkled linen shirt, an ex-boyfriend’s battered old pair of Converse and a black scarf I’d felt silly and self-conscious wearing and so had slipped off my head and now wore round my neck.
“That is a container ship,” she said, with undisguised pity. “You miss the last ferry.”
We paid what Lamin considered an exorbitant amount for our narrowboat passage, despite fierce negotiations, and the moment my giant boy lowered me on to my seat a dozen young men appeared from nowhere and joined us, sitting on every viable piece of the boat’s frame and transforming us from private water taxi into public boat. But on the other side of the water, my network reappeared and we learned that Aimee had decided to stay in one of the beach hotels and set out for the village tomorrow. The giant boy was delighted: we paid him again and thus subsidized another trip for some local kids, sailing back the way we’d come. Once on shore, we made our way finally to the village, in a beat-up minibus. The idea of two boats and two cabs in a single day was excruciating to Lamin, even if I paid for the second ride, even if the price quoted—which made him wince—would not buy me a bottle of water on Broadway. He sat on the roof of the vehicle, with another boy who could not be squeezed in, and as my fellow passengers talked and slept and prayed and ate and fed babies and shouted at the driver to let them off at what appeared to me to be completely deserted intersections, I could hear Lamin beating out a rhythm on the roof, over my head, and for two hours it was the only language I understood. We reached the village after ten. I was staying with a local family, and had never been outside their compound at that hour, or realized the total darkness that surrounded us, through which Lamin walked now with complete confidence, as if it were floodlit. I scurried behind him through the many narrow, sandy, trash-strewn paths I could not see, past the corrugated-iron sheets that marked each breeze-block single-story compound from the next, until we reached the Al Kalo’s compound, no grander or taller than the rest, but with a large open wasteground in front of it, in which at least a hundred children, in the uniform of their school—the school we were here ultimately to replace—huddled under the canopy of a single mango tree. They’d waited six hours to do their dance for a woman called Aimee: now it fell to Lamin to explain why this lady would not be arriving today. But when Lamin had finished speaking the chief appeared to want it explained to him all over again. I waited as the two men discussed the matter, their hands moving in an animated way, while the children grew ever more bored and agitated, until the women lay aside the drums they would not now play and told the children finally to stand, and in dribs and drabs sent them running back to their homes. I held up my phone. It cast its artificial light over the Al Kalo. He was not, I thought, the great African chief Aimee had in her mind. Small, ashy, wrinkled and toothless, in a threadbare Man U T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and plastic Nike house slippers held together with gaffer tape. And how surprised the Al Kalo would be, in turn, to hear what a figure he had become for us all, in New York! It had started with an e-mail from Miriam—subject heading: Protocol—which outlined, in Miriam’s view, what any visitor to the village must present to its Al Kalo upon arrival, as a mark of respect. Scrolling through it, Judy released her seal-bark and put her phone in my face: “This a joke?”
I read the list:
Reading glasses
Paracetamol
Aspirin
Batteries
Body wash
Toothpaste
Antiseptic cream
“Don’t think so . . . Miriam doesn’t make jokes.”
Judy smiled fondly at her screen: “Well, I think we can swing that.”
Not many things charmed Judy, but that list did. It charmed Aimee even more, and for a few weeks afterward, whenever any good people of means visited us, in the Hudson Valley house, or in Washington Square, Aimee would repeat this list with mock-solemnity and then ask everybody present if they could even imagine, and everybody would confess they could hardly even imagine and seemed very moved and comforted by this failure to imagine, it was taken as a sign of purity, both in the Al Kalo and in themselves.
“But it’s just so challenging to make that translation,” commented a young man from Silicon Valley, on one of these nights—he was leaning over the dining table into a candle centerpiece and his face seemed lit from below with his own insight—“I mean, between one reality and the other. Like passing through the matrix.” Everybody at the table nodded and agreed that it was, and later I caught Aimee seamlessly adding this dinner-party line to her recitations of the Al Kalo’s now famous list, as if it were her own.
“What’s he saying?” I whispered to Lamin. I was tired of waiting. I lowered my phone.
Lamin put a hand gently on the chief’s shoulder, but the old man continued to make his endless, agitated address to the darkness.
“The Al Kalo is saying,” Lamin whispered, “that things are very difficult here.”