Lamin’s face creased into an irresistible, shamefaced smile—“I am only telling the truth when I say we have a similar bird but bigger. It is more impressive”—and Hawa put her hands either side of her tiny waist and gave Lamin the flirtatious side-eye: I saw how it delighted him. I should have seen it before. Of course he was in love with her. Who wouldn’t be? I liked the idea, and felt vindicated. I looked forward to telling Aimee she was barking up the wrong tree.
“Well, now you sound like an American,” announced Hawa. She looked out over her village. “I think every place has its share of beauty, thanks be to God. And right here is as beautiful as any place I know.” A beat later, though, a new emotion passed over her pretty face, and when I looked over to where she seemed to be looking I saw a young man standing by the UN fresh well-water project, washing his arms up to the elbow, and glancing over at us with an equally pensive look. It was clear that these two represented a kind of provocation to each other. As we got closer I recognized that he belonged to a type I’d seen before here and there, on the ferry, walking along the highways, often in the city but rarely in the village. He had a bushy beard and a white turban tied loosely round his head, he carried a raffia pack on his back and his trousers were oddly cut, several inches above the ankle. As Hawa ran ahead of us to greet him I asked Lamin who he was.
“It is her cousin Musa,” said Lamin, returning to his usual whisper, now laced with acid disapproval. “It is unfortunate we meet him here. You must not bother with him. He was a bumster and now he is a mashala, he is a trouble to his family, and you must not bother with him.” But when we reached Hawa and her cousin, Lamin greeted him with respect and even a little awkwardness, and I noticed Hawa, too, seemed shy of him—as if he were an elder rather than not much more than a boy—and remembering that her scarf had slipped to her neck she now lifted it back till it covered all of her hair. Hawa introduced me to Musa politely in English. We nodded at each other. He seemed to be struggling to stabilize a certain look on his face, of benign serenity, like a visiting king from a more enlightened nation. “How are you, Hawa?” he mumbled, and she, who always had a lot to say on that question, outdid herself in a nervous tumble of description: she was well, her grandmothers were well, various nephews and nieces were well, the Americans were here, and well, for the school was opening tomorrow afternoon, and there was to be a big celebration, DJ Khali was playing—did he remember that time on the beach dancing to Khali? Oh, man, that was fun!—and people were coming from upriver, from Senegal, from everywhere, because it was a wonderful thing that was happening, a new school for the girls, because education is a very important thing, especially for girls. This last part was for me and I smiled to approve it. Musa nodded, a little anxiously I thought, through all of it, but now that Hawa had at last stopped he turned a little, more toward me than his cousin, and said in English: “Unfortunately I will not be there. Music and dancing is Shaytan. Like many things done around here it is aadoo, custom, not religion. In this country we dance our lives away. Everything is an excuse for dancing. Anyway, I am leaving on khuruj today to Senegal.” He looked down at the simple leather sandals he wore on his feet as if to check they were prepared for the journey ahead. “I go there for Da’wah, to invite and to call.”
At this Lamin laughed, heavily sarcastic, and Hawa’s cousin replied sharply to Lamin in Wolof—or perhaps it was Mandinka—and Lamin back to Musa, and back again, while I stood there, smiling the awkward idiot grimace of the untranslated.
“Musa, we miss you at home!” cried Hawa suddenly in English, with real feeling, hugging her cousin’s skinny left arm as if this were as much of him as she dared hug, and he nodded many times again but did not answer. I thought he might leave us here—his and Lamin’s exchange had seemed to me of the kind where someone really should leave afterward—but instead we all walked on together toward the school. Musa put his hands behind his back and began talking, in a low, quiet, pleasant stream, it sounded to me like a lecture, to which Hawa listened respectfully but which Lamin kept interrupting, with increasing energy and volume, in a style I couldn’t recognize as his. With me he would wait till I finished each sentence, and leave long gaps of silence before he replied, silences I came to think of as conversational graveyards, where anything awkward or unpleasant I might have presented to him was sent to be buried. This angry, confrontational Lamin was so alien to me that I felt as if he, Lamin, would not want me to see him in action. I picked up my pace a little, and when I was several yards ahead of them all I turned round to see what was going on and saw that they, too, had stopped. Musa had Lamin’s wrist in his hand: he was pointing to his big broken watch and saying something very solemn. Lamin snatched his arm back, and seemed to sulk, and Musa smiled as if all this had been very pleasant, or at least necessary, shook Lamin’s hand despite their apparent dispute, accepted another hug of his arm from Hawa, nodded at me across the way, and turned back the way he had come.
“Musa, Musa, Musa . . .” said Hawa, shaking her head as she approached me. “Everything is nafs with Musa now—everything is a temptation—we are a temptation. It’s so strange, we were age mates, we played together always, he was like my brother. We loved him at home, and he loved us, but he couldn’t stay. We are too old-fashioned for him now. He wants to be modern. He wants to live in the city: just him, one wife, two babies and God. He is right anyway: when you are a young man, living all crazy with your family, it’s hard to be very pure. I like to live crazy—oh, I can’t help it, but maybe when I am older,” she said, looking down at her own body as her cousin had looked at his sandals, with curiosity, as if they belonged to someone else: “Maybe when I am older I will be wiser. We’ll see.”
She seemed half amused, considering the Hawa she was now and the Hawa she might become, but Lamin was worked up.
“That crazy boy is telling everyone, ‘Don’t pray like this, pray like that, cross your arms across your body, don’t put them by your sides!’ In his own family home he is calling people Sila keeba—he is criticizing his own grandmother! But what does it mean, ‘old Muslim,’ ‘new Muslim’? We are one people! He tells her: ‘No, you should not have a big naming ceremony, have a modest one, with no music, no dancing—but Musa’s grandmother is from Senegal, like me—when a baby comes, we dance!”
“Last month,” began Hawa, and I prepared myself for the long haul, “my cousin Fatu had her first baby, Mamadu, and you should have seen this place that day, we had five musicians, dancing everywhere, the food was so much—Oh! I could not eat everything, actually, I was in pain from all this food, and all the dancing, and my cousin Fatu was watching her brother dancing like—”
“And Musa is married now,” Lamin broke in. “And how did he marry? With hardly nobody there, no food—your grandmother was crying, crying for days!”
“It’s true . . . Our grandmothers love to cook.”
“‘Don’t wear charms, don’t go to the ?’ we call them marabouts—and in fact I don’t go to them,” he said, showing me, for some reason, his right hand and turning it round. “I am probably in some ways different than my father, than his father, but do I tell my elders what to do? And Musa told his own grandmother she cannot go?!”
Lamin was addressing me, and though I had no idea what a marabout was or why you would go to one I feigned outrage.