It was a difficult first day. We were glad to be back and there was unexpected pleasure in touring a village no longer so strange or alien to us, seeing familiar faces—in Fern’s case, people who had become intimate friends—and yet we were all also on edge because we knew that Aimee, though she attended to her duties, and smiled in the photographs Granger was tasked with taking, had a mind full of Lamin. Every few minutes she glared at Mary-Beth, who tried to call again but got only voicemail. In some compounds connected to Lamin through blood or friendship we asked for him but nobody seemed to know where he was, they’d seen him yesterday or earlier in the morning, perhaps he’d gone to Barra or Banjul, perhaps to Senegal to see family. By late afternoon Aimee was struggling to hide her irritation. We were meant to be asking people how they felt about the changes in the village, and what more they wanted to see, but Aimee glazed over if people spoke to her for any length of time and we began moving in and out of compounds with too much speed, causing offense. I wanted to linger: I wondered whether this would be our last visit and I felt some urgency to retain everything I saw, to imprint the village in memory, its unbroken light, the greens and the yellows, those white birds with their blood-red beaks, and the people, my people. But somewhere in these streets a young man was hiding from Aimee, a humiliating feeling, and a new one for her, she who had always been the person others ran toward. To avoid reflecting on this, I could see, she was determined to keep moving, and as much as her purposes frustrated my own, I still felt sorry for her. I was twelve years behind her but I, too, felt my age among all those scandalously young girls whom we met in every compound, too beautiful, confronting us both, that hot afternoon, with the one thing no amount of power or money can return to you once it’s gone.
Just before sunset we moved to the very east end of the village, on the border of where it stopped being the village and became the bush once more. There were no compounds here, only corrugated-iron huts, and it was in one of these we met the baby. All very tired, extremely hot, we didn’t notice at first that there was anyone else in the small space other than the woman whose hand Aimee was presently shaking, but as I stepped round to make space for Granger to get inside and out of the sun, I saw a baby laid out on a cloth on the floor, with another girl of about nine, at the baby’s side, stroking the infant’s face. We had seen many babies of course but none as young as this: it was three days old. The woman wrapped her up and passed the tiny package to Aimee, who accepted it into her arms and stood there staring at it, without making any of the usual comments people feel they should make when holding a newborn. Granger and I, feeling awkward, came close and made these comments ourselves: girl or boy, how beautiful, what smallness, such eyes, such lovely thick black tufts of hair. I was saying these things automatically—I’d said them many times before—until I looked at her. Her eyes were huge, wonderfully lashed, black-and-purple, unfocused. No matter how I tried to get her to look at me she wouldn’t. She was a little God refusing me grace, though I was on my knees. Aimee held the baby tighter, turned from me, and placed her own nose on the child’s bud-lips. Granger went outside to get some air. I moved close again to Aimee and craned over the baby. Time passed. The two of us, side by side, unpleasantly close, sweating on each other, but both unwilling to risk moving from the baby’s sightline. The mother was speaking, but I don’t think either of us really heard her. At last Aimee, very reluctantly, turned and placed the baby in my arms. It’s a chemical thing, maybe, like the dopamine that floods through people in love. For me it was a drowning. I have never experienced anything like it before or since.
“You like her? You like her?” said a jovial man, who had appeared from somewhere. “Take her to London! Ha ha! You like her?”
Somehow I passed her back to her mother. At the same time, in some place of alternative futures, I ran straight out of there with the baby in my arms, hailed a taxi to the airport, and flew home.
? ? ?
When the sun fell and nothing more could be done in the way of visiting, we decided to end the day and convene the next morning for the school tour and a village meeting. Aimee and the rest followed Fern to the pink house. I, curious about what had changed since my last visit, headed to Hawa’s. In the absolute darkness I made my way very slowly toward what I thought was the main crossing, reaching out for tree trunks like a blind person, and astonished at every turn by the many adults and children I felt passing by me, who walked quickly and efficiently, without torches, to wherever it was they were going. I made it to the crossing and was steps from Hawa’s door when Lamin appeared beside me. I hugged him and told him Aimee had been looking for him everywhere and expected to see him tomorrow.
“I am just here. I have not been anywhere.”
“Well, I’m going to see Hawa—will you come?”
“You won’t find her. She went two days ago to get married. She is back to visit tomorrow, she would like to see you.”
I wanted to commiserate, but there was no right phrase.
“You must come to the school tour tomorrow,” I repeated. “Aimee looked for you all day.”
He kicked at a stone in the ground.
“Aimee is a very nice lady, she is helping me and I am thankful, but—” He stopped at the line, like a man fluffing a long jump, but then suddenly jumped anyway: “She is an old woman! I am a young man. And a young man wants to have children!”
We stood outside Hawa’s door, looking at each other. We were so close, I felt his breath on my neck. I think I knew then that it would happen between us, that night, or the next, and that it would be a commiseration offered with the body, in the absence of any clearer or more articulate solution. We didn’t kiss, not in that moment, he didn’t even reach for my hand. There was no need. We both understood that it was already decided.
“Well, come in,” he said finally, opening Hawa’s door as if it were that to his own home. “You are here, it is late. You will eat here.”
Standing on the verandah looking out, in more or less exactly the same spot I had last seen him, was Hawa’s brother Babu. We greeted each other very warmly: like everyone I met he considered the fact that I had chosen to return once again as some kind of virtue in itself, or he pretended to find it so. To Lamin he gave only a nod, whether through familiarity or frostiness I couldn’t tell. But when I asked about Hawa his face definitively fell.
“I was there yesterday for the marriage, the only witness. For myself, I don’t care if there are singers or dresses or platters of food—none of it matters to me. But my grandmothers! Oh, she has started a war in this place! I will have to listen to women complaining until the end of my days!”
“Do you think she’s happy?”
He smiled as if I had been caught out somehow.
“Ah, yes—for Americans this is always the most important question!”
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.”