“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.
That afternoon I asked Lamin to come with me to Barra. He said yes but seemed overcome with humiliation. Our cab ride was silent, as was our ferry trip. I needed to change some money, but when we got to the little holes in the wall — where the men sat on high stools behind shutters, counting out huge towers of grubby notes held together by elastic bands — he left me. Lamin had never left me alone anywhere before, not even when I had most wanted him to, and now I discovered how panicked I was by the idea.
“But where will I meet you? Where are you going?”
“I have some errands to run myself, but I will be around, close by, near the ferry. It is fine, just call me. I will be forty minutes.”
Before I had a chance to argue he was gone. I didn’t believe in his errands: he only wanted to be rid of me for a while. But my money-changing took all of two minutes. I wandered around the market, and then, to avoid people calling out to me, I walked beyond the ferry to an old military fort, once a museum, now abandoned, but you could still climb up its fortifications and see the river and the infuriating way the whole of this town had been built with its back to the water, ignoring the river, in a defensive crouch against it, as if the beautiful view of the opposite bank, of the sea and the leaping dolphins, was offensive somehow or surplus to requirements or simply carried the memory of too much pain. I climbed back down and lingered by the ferry, but I still had twenty minutes so I went to the internet café. It was the usual scene: boy after boy with his headset on, saying, “I love you” or “Yes, my baby girl,” while on the screens white women of a certain age waved and blew kisses, almost always British women — judging from their household interiors — and as I stood at the desk, about to pay my twenty-five dalasi for fifteen minutes, I could watch them all simultaneously coming out of their glass-brick showers, or eating at their breakfast bars, or walking around their rockeries or lounging in a swing chair in the conservatory, or just sitting on a sofa, watching telly, their phones or laptops in hand. There was nothing unusual in any of this, I’d seen it many times before, but this particular afternoon, as I put my money on the desk, a crazed, babbling man ran into the place and began weaving in and out of the computers, brandishing a long, carved stick, and the owner of the café abandoned our transaction to chase him round the terminals. The lunatic was incredibly beautiful and tall, like a Masai, and barefoot, wearing a traditional dashiki embroidered with gold thread, though it was torn and dirty, and on top of his dreaded hair perched a baseball cap from a Minnesota golf course. He tapped the young men on their shoulders, once on each side, like a king performing many knighthoods, until the owner managed to grab his cane from him and started beating him with it. And as he was being beaten, he kept talking, in a comically refined English accent, it reminded me of Chalky’s, from all those years ago. “Good sir, do you not know who I am? Do any of you fools know who I am? You poor, poor fools? Do you not even recognize me?”