Dave Eggers - What Is The What

The first day's lesson covered the alphabet. Mr. Kondit's voice was loud and harsh, sounding impatient at having to explain these things to us. It felt that first day as if he wanted the lesson, all of the lessons of the alphabet and writing and language generally, to be finished in one sweeping hour. He wanted simply to gesture at the alphabet and be done with it.

ABC

He wrote the three letters and read them aloud, demonstrating the sounds they denoted. Because we had no pencils or paper, Mr. Kondit sent us outside. There, we copied the letters into the dirt with sticks or our fingers.

— Make your letters neat! he barked from his chalkboard.-You have three minutes. If you make a mistake, erase your letter and draw it again. When you have three letters that are to your satisfaction, raise your hand and I will inspect your work. Hands were raised and Mr. Kondit began to make his rounds.

I had never written before; the first time I tried to write a letter B in the dirt, Mr. Kondit came behind me and clucked disapprovingly. He leaned over and grabbed my finger roughly, then guided it through the dirt to make the proper B, pushing my forefinger so hard into the ground that my fingernail cracked and bled.

— You must do better! he yelled to the crowns of our heads.-You have nothing now, nothing but education. Don't you see this? Our country is in shambles, and the only way we can reclaim it is to learn! Our independence was stolen from us due to the ignorance of our ancestors, and only now can we correct it. Many of you no longer have mothers. You have lost your fathers. But you have education. Here, if you are smart enough to accept it, you will be educated. Education will be your mother. Education will be your father. While your older brothers fight this war with guns, when the bullets stop, you will fight the next war with your pens. Do you see what I'm telling you?

He was hoarse by now and he grew quiet.-I want you to succeed, boys. If we are ever to have a new Sudan, you must succeed. If I'm ever impatient, it's because I cannot wait for this godforsaken war to end, and for you to assume your role in the future of our ruined land.

On our way back to our shelters, Mr. Kondit was the subject of fascination and debate.

— Did you hear that crazy man? we said.

— Education is your mother? we said.

We laughed and did imitations. We thought Mr. Kondit, like more than a few of the men and boys who had crossed the desert to get to Ethiopia, had lost his mind along the way.

Not long after the schools opened, another strange thing happened: they brought girls to class. There were very few girls at Pinyudo in general, and there were no girls in any of the schools at all, as far as I could tell. But one morning, as the fifty-one boys in Mr. Kondit's class settled onto the ground before the blackboard, we noticed four new people, all of them female, sitting in the front row. Mr. Kondit was squatting before these new people, talking to them, placing his hands on their heads in a familiar way. I was baffled.

— Class, Mr. Kondit said, rising to his full height, — we have four new students today. Their names are Agar, Akon, Agum, and Yar Akech. They should be treated with respect and courtesy, because they are all very good students. They are also my nieces, so I expect that you will be that much more careful about your behavior around them.

And with that, he began the lesson. I was three rows behind the girls and spent all of that day's hours looking nowhere but at the backs of their heads. I studied their necks and their hair, as if the secrets of the world and history were discernible in the twists of their braids. I glanced around to see if the other boys were having a similar problem and found that I was not alone in this. Nothing academic was learned that day and yet we boys felt, cumulatively, that the focus of our lives and all earthly pursuits had changed. These four sisters, Agar, Akon, Agum, and Yar Akech, each of them graceful, well-dressed and so attractively aloof, were far more worthy of study than anything that could be written on a blackboard or in the dirt surrounding the classroom.

We did not eat or sleep as we had before. Dinner was made and consumed but was not tasted. Sleep came when the morning light had already begun to leak from the other side of the earth. We had been awake all of those dark hours, discussing the sisters. At first, no one knew which sister was which; Mr. Kondit's introduction was too quick and cursory. Only through much sharing of information did my Eleven come to remember all four names, and through the same system of information sharing we amassed a dossier on each of the four. Agar was the oldest, that seemed clear. She was very tall and wore her hair in braids; her dress was a striking pink with white flowers. Akon was the next oldest, her face round and her eyelashes very long; she wore a dress with red and blue stripes, with matching barrettes in her hair. Agum could be the same age as Akon, for she was the same height but much thinner. She appeared the least engaged in the goings-on at school, and seemed perpetually bored or frustrated, exasperated even, by everyone and everything. Yar Akech was the youngest, it was clear, a few years behind Agum and Akon, and perhaps one year younger than me and my Eleven. Nevertheless, she was taller than us, too, and this fact, that we were all shorter and far less mature than the nieces, rendered the girls far more fascinating and unattainable in every way.

After the night had been filled with the dissection of every known detail of the sisters, one question lingered among us and seemed unanswerable: Would the girls really be there the next day? And the day after that? It seemed too good for me, for Moses and the Eleven, or for the fifty-one. Could we really be this fortunate? It would mean the complete upending of the school and world we knew.

All of us, the Eleven and I, walked to school that morning in a fog. None of us had slept enough to facilitate effective thinking. We encountered the nieces as we walked in. The girls were seated in the back, on chairs. We took our seats in front.

— Okay, Mr Kondit began.-It is obvious that you all are of an age that makes concentration difficult when in the presence of young women.

We said nothing. How had he known? Mr. Kondit was a smart man! we thought.

— I have made a few adjustments to the seating arrangements to help you all in your concentration. I trust that today the lesson will be more captivating to you students. Now, today we will continue with the consonants…

We had no choice but to watch and listen to Mr. Kondit. But we had not planned to. We had, each boy, come to class with other plans. We had, in fact, already divided up the tasks, with two or three boys assigned to each of the girls, to obtain the maximum possible amount of information through close observation. Unless we wanted to turn entirely around, observing the sisters was now impossible. Fact-finding, thereafter, became possible only when we were all writing outside, before the lesson had begun or after it was finished.

Through our reconnaissance before school, after school, and during our writing exercises in the dirt, by the end of the first week, more was known about the sisters' clothes, their hair, their eyes and arms and legs, but they had spoken to no one. They did not speak in class and they made no conversation with any boy. What was known was that they were uniformly beautiful and very smart and dressed far better than the unaccompanied minors like me had any chance to. The nieces' clothes were clean, without tears or holes. They wore the most brilliant reds and purples and blues, their hair always fixed with the utmost care. I had never had any particular interest in girls as playmates, because they cried too quickly and didn't typically want to wrestle, but each night for many weeks, after the talk of the Eleven had faded to whispers and sleep had overtaken us, I lay in the shelter and found myself wondering why I should be so blessed, to have these spectacular royal sisters in my class. Why should I be so fortunate? It seemed, then, that God had had a plan. God had separated me from my home and family and had sent me to this wretched place, but now there seemed to be a reason for it all. There was suffering, I thought, and then there was light. There was suffering and then there was grace. I was placed in Pinyudo, it was clear now, to meet these magnificent girls, and the fact that there were four of them meant that God intended to make up for all the misfortune in my life. God was good and God was just.