by Ishmael Beah
A waiter led them to a corner table with an excellent view and a little privacy. “So have you taken other girls here to impress them?” Khoudi said when they were seated.
“No, this is the first time,” he said. “I usually come here with my sister to meet my father for lunch.” It struck Khoudiemata that he must have asked Mahawa for more information about her and he must have gone to the salon looking for her. After all, where else did Mahawa know to send him? That was why Kadiatou had been so cryptic!
The waiter rushed to unfurl their cloth napkins for them. Frederick Cardew-Boston signaled that they wanted to be left alone for a moment.
“Does your family own this place or something?” Khoudi laughed, indicating the conspicuously attentive service and also trying to learn a little more about him but without asking direct questions.
“No,” he said seriously. “They just know who my father is.” He fidgeted in his chair and then unbuttoned his jacket and loosened his tie. Then he stood up and took the jacket off entirely, starting to hang it on the back of his chair until the waiter approached silently and whisked it away. Though he still seemed slightly nervous around Khoudi, there was a quiet ease to the way he wore a suit—or took it off. He turned back the cuffs of his sleeves and sat back down.
Khoudi felt something tighten in her belly. She forced a smile to hide it.
“Well, I am glad I don’t have to dance for that smile this time,” Frederick Cardew-Boston said softly.
“Don’t take that for granted,” she said. “I only give it when I want to.” She looked around the room. Seeing how beautifully the other women held themselves made her straighten up.
“I noticed,” he said. “But I like fooling myself that I have something to do with it.” Khoudi could feel his eyes on her face, studying her, but when she turned back toward him, he averted his gaze, as though meeting hers would do something to him that he wasn’t prepared for.
“So when do you think you will find the courage to look at me directly, Frederick Cardew-Boston?” Khoudi searched for his eyes, but he managed to evade her, signaling for the waiter he had shooed away. His phone rang again, and he picked it up and moved away from the table to speak. He was far enough away that Khoudi couldn’t hear him, but she could tell by his gestures and his pacing that he wasn’t having a pleasant conversation. The waiter hovered by the table with Khoudi.
“Apologies again. Something I had to handle,” Frederick Cardew-Boston said when he returned to the table, holding up his phone to indicate its insistence. “Please.” He gestured to the waiter to continue.
“Good to see you again, sir,” said the waiter. “And what will you be having today?”
“We will have jollof rice with fish. And two bottles of Heineken.” The waiter’s face registered surprise at the order, which wasn’t on the regular menu here either—nor, plainly, was it what Frederick Cardew-Boston usually ordered.
Khoudi was annoyed at his presumptuousness. “I do not want jollof rice. I would prefer groundnut soup, if you have that, and a Star beer. Thank you.” The waiter looked even more astonished and turned to Frederick Cardew-Boston for confirmation.
“You heard her,” he said. “She will have what she asked for.” When the waiter left, he said, “I am sorry. I thought I was being a gentleman by ordering for you.”
“There is a difference between being a gentleman and being controlling. I am perfectly capable of speaking for myself.”
It was obvious that this young man wasn’t used to being challenged, especially by women. But once again she was struck by the fact that her enjoyment of his company outweighed her annoyance. “Frederick Cardew-Boston,” she said, slowly and deliberately, and he looked up with an expression of chagrin, bracing himself to be set straight about something else. “We are just getting to know each other. You don’t know what I want yet. Okay? Now, let’s have that great conversation you promised me.” She tried to ease the tension between them.
“Khoudiemata,” he said, seriously. “Can I be honest? I was under the impression that girls—women—like a man who is in charge. That is what I am used to.” His phone rang, but this time he put it facedown on the table and silenced it. Then he picked it up, sent a text, and put it back, facedown. “So, what else can you teach me?” he asked. “I mean, about yourself.”
“Don’t be cheeky now,” said Khoudi. To her relief, the waiter arrived with their beers. She hoisted hers and proposed a toast. “To the boy with the longest-living colonial name.” She laughed.
“I am not to be blamed for my name, you know. My father gave it to me.” But he paused there, and it seemed he was not going to be much more forthcoming about the details of his background than she was about hers. Why was he dancing around the subject? Khoudi wondered. Most people threw their family names and histories around freely, especially when that family had so much as a piece of land and a pile of sand and some bags of cement ready to make into bricks to build a house. And this young fellow’s body language suggested that he had not tasted any of the bitterness of life with which she was familiar.
By the end of the meal plus several more beers, though, she had found out a few things about Frederick Cardew-Boston and his family. To begin with, their affinity for very long, very English names had started with his great-grandfather, who had changed the family name to Cummings. He did not mention what name he had changed it from, however.
“My father’s name is Wilberforce Granville Cummings,” he said, looking chagrined. “I used to send my résumé for job openings at banks or international companies, and just for a prank, I would list all sorts of achievements. Invariably they called me right away and offered me the job over the phone, without even meeting me or verifying the information. The power of my name was sufficient.” He laughed.
“I mean, with a name like that you cannot help but have an air of pomposity about you,” Khoudi teased him.
“Yeah, sure! I got to live up to it, you know.” He laughed. “We are businesspeople, though; we are a family of businesses.” He drank some water.
“I am not aware of your family name, and I read the newspapers,” said Khoudi, certain that she would have heard it from Elimane in his endless digesting and discussion of the news. Business in their country was, after all, ultimately controlled by a very few clans.
“Maybe we only use our colonial names for certain things, eh? Good morning, sir, I am Frederick Cardew-Boston Granville Cummings.” He sighed.
“Really, you got the ‘Granville’ as well?”
He looked pained. “My grandfather—my father’s father—wanted our family to be perceived as sophisticated. This is at least what my mother’s mother thought. She used to say that he was ‘a clever spineless fool.’” He laughed and shook his head. “My family on my grandmother’s side was the opposite. They embraced their traditions, so we had this constant bickering about all matters relating to etiquette and identity.”
“Are fools with spines better than the ones without?” Khoudi asked, trying to be funny.
“Yes, says my grandmother. Because fools with spines can from time to time remember the truth within them even if they do not act on it as often as they should.” He sighed, and they were silent for a while, drinking more beer.
Despite herself, Khoudi was beginning to feel sorry for him. She had set out to mock him, and to keep the attention on his story so that he didn’t ask too much about hers, but she could see he felt truly burdened by his legacy.
“Our library at home, in the city here, is filled with books about the Europeans we are named after,” he said. “Stories of the heroism of these men were my bedtime stories as a child. I preferred the stories that my grandmother told me, from ‘the countryside,’ as my father would say. Many of them were fables, about cunning spiders or foxes or speaking birds. Or fish that walked on land, and houses flying into the night. Strange as they were, I could see myself
in those stories. They showed me possibilities, taught me how to imagine. There were serious ones about learning from mistakes, and even with practical information in them, like how certain plants can cure you or kill you. The whole world was alive in those stories. My father didn’t want me to hear them, because he believed they were the products of ‘backward imaginations.’ Somehow, I sensed that he was passing on a fabricated truth that he had made himself believe. How can imagination be backward? My grandmother didn’t care what my father thought, and kept telling me the stories anyway. But as I got older, my father took my education more and more in hand. We made fewer trips to the village, and what was read to me now became more powerful than the stories my grandmother had told me.” Frederick Cardew-Boston hailed the waiter and ordered another round of drinks, taking care to ask Khoudi if she wanted more of the same or something else.
“And who wrote those books, the ones that your father read to you?” Khoudi pushed on.
“The same people all the men in my family are named after. In our house, we read only books written about us by others. My father prided himself on his intelligence, and he is very intelligent, but you could drive a bulldozer into his blind spots. And he is very stubborn and very strict.” He sighed again.
“Why do you sigh so much when you speak of a house filled with books?” Khoudiemata asked him. Such a life couldn’t have been all that bad, she thought. And the fact that he was even questioning it meant that his rebellious childhood mind was alive.
“I told my father once that I noticed how quickly a newly arrived missionary whose book about our country I was reading had formed negative opinions about our way of life, just because it was different from what he knew. My father told me I was not educated enough to understand what had been written.” He laughed.
“So somehow you knew there was another side to the story,” Khoudi said.
“Yes, I did. I remember reading a description of blacks as ‘savages in every aspect of their lives,’ even the way they chased down livestock with spears and cut the animals’ throats with knives or clubbed them to death without any remorse, and then moved on to another activity. I laughed when I read this, and my teacher reported my behavior to my father, who reprimanded me.” He paused. “But I had been to Europe, and I suspected that their chickens, goats, and cows did not walk to the supermarket and ask to be packaged for consumption. I mean, after all, they do call their own places that perform such tasks ‘slaughterhouses,’ and the people who perform them ‘butchers.’ If they have figured out a way to coax animals that they must die for our sustenance, I have not heard of it!”
By now, Khoudi was laughing loudly and uncontrollably, and he caught the contagion of it too. They laughed so long and hard that they cried, banging on the table. When Khoudi noticed others at nearby tables glancing at them, annoyed, she stopped and sat up straight again.
“Don’t stop because of them,” he said, loudly enough that they could hear. “Who cares what they think?”
Khoudiemata was again impressed at the character Frederick Cardew-Boston was beginning to reveal to her. Which was truer, though, this one or the one he displayed around the beautiful people? She wondered if she dared bring him to see Shadrach the Messiah, who could tell him a thing or two about his colonial namesake.
“Thank you, Khoudi,” he said, looking at her with gratitude. “I have not been able to speak about such things in a while. No one my own age seems to think or care about such matters. And I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that.” His face was relaxed, and now he met her gaze easily.
“You are welcome, my young African friend with the heavy colonial burden,” she said, and they both laughed.
“To be fair, you have encouraged my curiosities and answered my many questions,” she said. “What are yours, Frederick of the British Empire?”
He hesitated, as if there was something important he wanted to tell her, but what came out was, “Are you going with someone?” As soon as he had said it, he looked aghast, whether because of the answer he anticipated or because of the question itself, she could not tell.
“That is not a classy thing to ask a young woman,” she reprimanded him, “especially for someone who has read all those books. And you were doing so well!” But he looked so deflated by her mockery that she added, more gently, “No. I am not with anyone. I am by myself, and I like it just fine.”
They sat in companionable silence for a while, and then Khoudi said, “I am tired of pronouncing your whole name. Can we pick something shorter?”
He took her hand from the table and placed it inside his. “What do you have in mind?” he said.
“How about FCB?” she said.
He laughed. “It sounds like a bank. Or a football club.”
His phone rang. This time, as soon as it stopped, it began again. The mood was broken. He stood up and answered. “I will call you in a minute,” he said into it, a hard edge returning to his voice. Then he put his jacket back on and straightened his tie.
For the first time since they had sat down, Khoudi wondered how much time had passed. Suddenly she missed her little family and longed to get back to them. She picked up her handbag and said, “Young boy, the conversation was as good as you promised.”
“Young boy?” he said. “We have to come up with a better name than that!”
He put his hand lightly on her back as they exited the restaurant, but at the door she turned. “We are forgetting to pay.”
“I took care of it,” he said.
“When?” she said. “I didn’t see it.”
“It was a way to say thank you for a wonderful conversation and afternoon. For me, at any rate! If it wasn’t truly wonderful for you, then I should pay for torturing you with my presence and my words.”
On the street, several serious-looking men were standing in front of the restaurant, waiting. Security guards, obviously, though Khoudi was certain no one had been there when they’d arrived.
“Your people?” Khoudi joked.
“I am afraid so,” he said ruefully. “It comes with being a member of a properly colonized family.”
She laughed, and said lightly, “I don’t think anyone wants to steal your colonial burden.” But she was wondering why even a well-to-do young man from a business family needed this much protection. How much damage had they done to others to require it? Even children of politicians didn’t have this much protection.
“Young master,” said one of them, “we have to go. Orders from your father.”
Frederick Cardew-Boston’s phone rang again, and this time he answered it with a sharp and angry tone. “You wait for me there. Tell them to wait. Now.” He hung up, and the guards who had been shadowing them walked toward a luxury sedan with its engine running. One of them opened the door for Frederick Cardew-Boston, and another hesitated on the other side of the vehicle, looking at Khoudiemata. But she stepped back, to indicate the parting of their worlds for now.
Frederick Cardew-Boston turned to her. “Take my number,” he said. She hesitated, then pulled out her cheap phone and typed it in. If he thought anything of it, he didn’t show it. He also didn’t ask her if she needed a lift. Perhaps he assumed, correctly, that she would refuse. He went to the sedan and lowered himself into the backseat. The car flashed its lights as it sped away, led by a Land Rover that didn’t stop for traffic. Or perhaps he hadn’t offered her a lift because wherever he was going, he couldn’t bring her.
She looked up to see a few women nearby eyeing her, with jealousy, she thought. Did they think she was a fool or a loser for not doing whatever it took to go along with someone so clearly wealthy and important? Khoudi understood what desperation could make you do, but something in her resisted going down this particular path blindly.
“A Njamete, eh?” one of the women muttered. “Pretty ambitious for a girl with a flip phone.”
Khoudi start
ed. Njamete! That was the name he had been keeping from her. Where had she heard it before? The women went on gossiping about the family, plainly aware that she could hear them, but Khoudi was no longer listening. The name had conjured a host of associations, drilled into her from long rainy afternoons hearing from Elimane about the doings of the rich and powerful. The telecommunication monopoly. A supermarket chain as well, she thought. And some sort of embezzlement charge? She was hazy about that—there had been so many such charges. She recalled the waiter’s extreme deference, the magical settling of the bill, the muscular bodyguards, and so many of them. She was almost tempted to call Frederick Cardew-Boston that minute to tell him she had figured it out, but she needed to sit with this information a bit. Did she really want to be involved even in friendship with someone from a family like that?
She walked away as quickly as she could, trying to shake off what she imagined were the judgmental stares that followed her. She needed to speak with Mahawa about this, but she had to be careful not to betray too much of her own reaction. No one in Mahawa’s circle would see anything disturbing in a background like his.
She was walking so fast that before long, she found herself in a more run-down neighborhood. She commanded an attention that eluded her when she was in her hoodie and beanie, but she noticed that her new assertiveness remained with her, and it seemed to keep some of the calls and whistles at bay. She was far from home, and thinking of the long walk ahead and the money in her bag, she contemplated calling Manga Sewa. When she saw an empty taxi, she hailed it. Even if other passengers got in along the route, she would be able to claim her space. She gave the driver the address and climbed in.
Approaching the first roundabout, the taxi slowed in traffic, and she spotted them, making their way along the road in formation. Elimane was on the right side, in the lead. He was taking his time, so his pace alarmed no one, but his eyes darted here and there, searching for what might need guarding against, what might be corrupted. Slightly behind him strolled Ndevui, his long hands swinging with an apparent nonchalance that was its own distraction. Near him was Namsa, her hands crossed behind her back as she kept close to a woman who held the hands of her two small children. Namsa kept enough distance so as not to waken the woman’s suspicion but stayed near enough to make it credible to others that she was traveling with them. Kpindi brought up the rear, in the same sort of proximity to some schoolboys.