“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 lunch 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.