by Ekow Duker
Bullshit. Karabo had no interest in the woman’s childhood reminiscences, but she was looking at Karabo so earnestly it would have been churlish of her to refuse. She pried open the clasps of the violin case and lifted the cover so the woman could see inside.
The moment the light from the overhead console fell on the violin, it glowed as if someone had struck a match next to it. The polished wood smouldered as though there were swirling tongues of flame dancing beneath the strings. Karabo looked up at the woman. She was staring intently at Karabo. Her eyes, which moments before had been clear and guileless, were now clouded with suspicion. Karabo shut the case again and hurriedly fastened the clasps.
‘That is a really beautiful instrument,’ the woman said. ‘It must make a wonderful sound. Where did you get it?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Where did you get your violin?’ She placed her hand on the case as if she were laying claim to it.
‘A woman gave it to me in the parking lot of a supermarket,’ Karabo replied.
The woman pouted in confusion but her eyes never left Karabo’s face. They were grey, like Mrs Summerscales’, with green splinters that raced away from her pupils.
‘I don’t understand.’
Karabo laughed nervously. ‘I’m only joking. My father bought it for me. I’m studying music at Saint Anthony’s in London.’
‘But I thought you said you were studying architecture?’
‘Oh yes,’ Karabo said quickly. ‘I enrolled for a short course.’
‘In architecture or in music?’
The plane was emptying and the aisle had thinned out.
‘I’m sorry, but I really must be going,’ Karabo said. She clambered past the woman, holding the violin case in front of her like a shield. The woman looked bewildered and reached out to block Karabo’s path. Karabo slapped her hands away and grabbed the bow and her rucksack from the overhead compartment.
‘Wait!’ the woman cried. ‘Where are you travelling to? Are you staying in Amsterdam?’
Karabo didn’t know why she turned around. She should have pressed on and lost herself in the vastness of the airport terminal until it was time to board her connecting flight. But she really didn’t want to lie anymore. She just wanted to go home.
‘I’m going to see my father in Accra,’ she said.
On hearing this the woman started as if Karabo had said something remarkable. She was about to reply and the words were writhing, half-formed on her lips, when Karabo turned and hurried away.
There was an hour and fifteen minutes before Karabo’s flight. She went to the bathroom to freshen up before making her way to the gate. She splashed water over her face and tried to rub the tiredness out of her eyes. But rubbing her eyes only made them redder. She was exhausted and badly in need of sleep but the thought of Teacher made her spirits soar again. She longed to see the look on his face when she rang the bell of that fancy house he lived in. He’d pick her up and spin her around as they both giggled with delight. Karabo already knew Teacher’s address off by heart. She whispered it to herself now and remembered how he’d laughed at the way she said it.
‘It’s Labone with three syllables,’ Teacher had said. ‘La Bon Nee. Not La Bone.’
La Bon Nee. Karabo wondered how he looked now, if he’d put on weight, or lost the stubborn five kilograms he was always complaining about. Or if his hair had sprouted more flecks of grey. It had been only a few months since she’d last seen Teacher but it already felt much longer than that.
She left the bathroom and made her way towards the boarding gate. She should call Mrs Harrison and tell her she was leaving but what would she say? She couldn’t call her mother either because she’d tell Teacher and then it wouldn’t be a surprise. And what were Nigel and his mother doing right now? Probably leading a search party with torches, cudgels and pitchforks. She knew Teacher would make her send the violin back the moment she told him what she’d done. But Karabo had no plans of keeping the violin anyway. She just wanted to put the Summerscales’ noses out of joint for a little while. Perhaps Teacher might help her compose a note to go with it, one that would somehow shame Mrs Summerscales – Teacher had a way with words.
It was still too early to board but her steps quickened as she approached the gate. She was eager to get to Teacher. Then Karabo looked up and saw her, the woman who’d sat next to her on the flight from Heathrow. She was scanning the throng of people and Karabo knew she was looking for her. She swore under her breath. This was the worst of foul luck. That of all the seats she could have been assigned from London, she’d had to sit next to someone with a latent obsession for violins. If her mother were here she’d sniff and say it was the spirits urging her back to the straight and narrow. Precious always said the spirits weren’t into dramatic interventions with rolling thunderclaps and jagged bolts of lightning. They gave us small, frequent nudges instead.
Karabo hung back and sat a distance away with her back to the gate. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the woman settle down as well and realised with a sinking heart that she was on the same flight to Accra. Karabo waited as long as she could until the gate was virtually deserted and the KLM boarding attendants began looking at their watches and talking into hand-held radios.
The woman saw Karabo the minute she walked onto the plane. She waved to Karabo from her seat which, thankfully, was several rows further back. Karabo raised a limp hand in greeting, then looked away. There were no empty seats in her row but, to her dismay, she’d been put in an aisle seat. And sure enough, the woman came up to Karabo the moment they were in the air and the seatbelt sign had been switched off.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ she said. ‘I wanted to tell you I was flying to Ghana too but you left so quickly I never had a chance.’
Karabo looked up and made a non-committal remark.
‘I’m visiting friends in Accra,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve never been to Ghana.’
‘It’s my first time too.’
Once more a look of bewilderment spread over the woman’s face. ‘But you’re from Ghana, no?’
‘I am,’ Karabo replied.
Karabo couldn’t help feeling sorry for the woman. Here she was, a black girl from Ghana, who’s never been to her home country, studies architecture or maybe music in London, carries an expensive violin and gives cagey answers to all the questions she’s asked. She felt compelled to explain.
‘My father’s from Ghana but my mother’s South African. I grew up in South Africa, in Mthatha.’
But this only seemed to confuse the woman further. She knitted her brow and squinted at Karabo. Under different circumstances, Karabo might have enjoyed talking to her. She had the sort of disarming candour that Karabo appreciated. But the Guadagnini was in the compartment above her head and it was making normal conversation impossible.
‘What about the violin?’ asked the woman.
‘What about it?’
‘Are you giving concerts in Ghana? I’d like to come and hear you play.’
‘I haven’t decided,’ Karabo said airily. ‘I’ll see once I get there.’
‘But you must!’
Karabo didn’t like her insistence. She reached for the in-flight magazine from the pouch in front of her and began to turn the pages.
‘Like I said, I’ll see when I get there.’
The woman smiled thinly and Karabo could tell she knew she was lying. She nodded at Karabo and sighed at the same time.
‘I’ll give you my number,’ she said. ‘If you do give a recital, please let me know.’
‘Of course.’
She took out a card from her back pocket and handed it to Karabo. It read, ‘Beate Neumann. Advocaat.’
Fuck! So she was a lawyer. And there Karabo had been thinking the reason the woman couldn’t let her situation go was because she had a Calvinist streak in her as broad as an airport runway. This wasn’t a subtle nudge from the spirits. It was a full-blooded shoulder charge from a celestial rugby prop.
CHAPTER 37
Beate Neumann came back two or three times during the flight but each time she did Karabo pretended to be asleep. After the second time, the man sitting next to her asked if the white woman was bothering her.
‘A little,’ Karabo said.
He was very dark, with heavy jowls and startlingly pink lips. He patted Karabo on the knee and squeezed her thigh reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in a voice that sounded eerily like Teacher’s. ‘I will handle her for you.’
Karabo wasn’t sure how to respond. Growing up, it had been drummed into her that Ghanaians were the friendliest people in the world. Perhaps patting women on the knee was normal over there. But the man turned out to be not much of a protector after all. He fell asleep shortly afterwards with his large head lolling against Karabo. She had to lean so far away from him, her head was practically in the aisle.
The plane began circling over Accra around eight in the evening. She could see the city spread out below in a sprinkling of golden lights with irregular black patches in between. It was like descending into a dark cave strewn with yellow sapphires and Karabo could hardly wait to be on her way. She grabbed her bag and the violin the moment the plane taxied to a halt. She was so impatient to see Teacher, she was practically trotting on the spot.
‘You are pressed, eh?’ her self-appointed protector said with a chuckle. He was wearing a blue flowing robe with elaborate embroidery around the neck. He looked like he’d borrowed one of his wife’s outfits and then slept in it.
‘I’m sorry?’ Karabo had never heard that particular phrase before and she didn’t know what he meant.
He pointed at the toilet sign in the distance. ‘You can go,’ he said magnanimously. It was as if toilet passes were uniquely in his gift. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Oh, no! I don’t need the bathroom.’
‘Oh!’ He sounded disappointed. ‘So you are excited to be home.’
‘Yes, I am.’
He chuckled again, then fished out a battered leather wallet from the depths of his robes and began hunting in its compartments. ‘I don’t seem to have a card,’ he said at last. ‘That secretary of mine …’ He shook his head in dismay. ‘I will ask her to print some more.’
Karabo nodded, not sure if she should be impressed that he had a secretary or business cards, or both. Then he thrust out his hand and demanded that Karabo give him her number. She gave him Beate Neumann’s card and he licked his lips appreciatively as he took it. ‘You should come and work for me,’ he said. ‘We need good lawyers in my company.’
Karabo nodded again and looked away. The queue was moving at last. But when she got to the door, it was as if a warm, wet blanket had been thrown over her. She stood at the top of the stairs gasping for breath until she felt a sharp nudge in her back.
‘Are you going or not?’ she heard someone say.
Karabo clattered down the stairs to where a welcoming party of men in white shirts and yellow bibs stood waiting. She hurried past them and found a spot at the back of the bus. It had a new factory smell and there was Chinese lettering on the windows. The bus filled up quickly and, as it pulled away, a second bus slid into the spot it had just vacated. On the tarmac, Beate Neumann was talking to the man who’d sat next to Karabo on the flight. He’d probably called the number on the card already. He looked like the sort of man who would.
The bus deposited the passengers in front of a narrow corridor with bright hand-painted murals along one wall. They looked pleasingly familiar because Teacher had shown Karabo similar paintings before. There were chiefs in full regalia with gold ornaments on their arms and heavy sandals on their feet. They were draped in brightly coloured cloth, a sort of ancient Roman toga but with a riotous exuberance a toga could never have. The air-conditioning was set to arctic and it drove away the sticky warmth Karabo had experienced outside on the tarmac. She pulled her jacket tight around her and shuffled forward. If Teacher was on the other side, then she could bear the mindless monotony of an immigration queue.
Karabo thought her turn would never come and when it did she placed her passport on the counter and smiled excitedly at the official. He looked very impressive in his olive-green khaki uniform.
‘Good evening,’ she said.
He glanced at Karabo and then back at her passport. He turned the pages as if it were a book in a bookstore and he was contemplating buying it. He looked at Karabo again and his eyelids drooped slowly like a camel’s.
‘Karabo Bentil,’ he said. ‘You are South African.’
It wasn’t a question so Karabo just stared back at him.
‘Is Karabo a South African name?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It’s Tswana but where I live most people speak Xhosa.’
He tried a few times to say Xhosa with the tongue click. He failed horribly and Karabo didn’t think she should correct him.
‘And Bentil?’ he asked. ‘Is that also South African?’
‘My father is Ghanaian. He’s Fante.’
The immigration officer let out a muffled exclamation as if to say this was what he’d been getting at all along.
‘Aha!’ He showed no inclination to stamp Karabo’s passport.
‘Wo papa fi Cape Coast?’
Karabo looked at him blankly, although she could guess at what he’d just asked. He looked at her through the glass pane, then shook his head as if she were somehow intellectually deficient.
‘Where are you staying?’
Karabo got the pronunciation right this time. ‘Labone.’
‘Labone, eh?’ he said. ‘I live in Madina.’
Karabo had no idea where Madina was but from the rueful inflection in the immigration officer’s voice, she guessed it wasn’t very nice. She felt as though he’d placed a tin cup on the counter and expected her to drop a few coins in it to make up for the fact that he lived in Madina.
‘Can I come and visit you?’ he asked.
There was a mocking laugh in his eyes but it sounded like a threat all the same. Karabo gave him a thin smile but it only served to encourage him.
‘Your mother is white, not so?’
She should have gone to the toilet in the plane because now she really did need to pee. That must have been what made her speak so sharply to him.
‘No, she’s as black as you are.’ Then she added a word she’d learned from Teacher. ‘Tuntum.’
The officer recoiled as if he’d sat on a drawing-pin and his look of idle lechery grew dark and troubling. He opened Karabo’s passport and slapped each page with undisguised annoyance. Then he stamped it and tossed it across to her so hard that it skidded across the narrow counter and fell onto the floor. He didn’t apologise and their eyes met across the glass pane. His lips turned up scornfully and he dismissed Karabo with an imperious flick of his hand.
It wasn’t enough to dampen Karabo’s excitement. She ran to the baggage claim area and groaned when she saw the carousel was still stationary. It started up after a few minutes with a wheeze and a loud clanking, inching its way forward like a sheet of black treacle. Karabo’s bag was one of the first to appear. She grabbed it and followed the signs towards the exit. She steered her trolley down a narrow ramp and found herself in a brightly lit hall with uniformed officers standing next to low wooden tables. She guessed it must be the customs hall and marched confidently ahead. She half-expected one of the officers to pull her aside but none of them did. Ahead of her were a pair of sliding doors and beyond them a throng of dark, expectant faces. Karabo began to run. She didn’t quite know what she’d find on the other side but she didn’t care. Teacher was out there somewhere. And that was the only thing that mattered.
A blast of warm chatter engulfed Karabo the moment the glass doors parted. A clutch of white-shirted hotel drivers brandished placards at her. She couldn’t help reading the names written on some of them. Steenbergh. Doris Chan. Mr and Mrs Groenwald. Then, out of nowhere, an animated throng of taxi drivers surrounded her and began to a
rgue furiously amongst themselves as to which of them had seen her first. Karabo laughed happily to be the cause of so much gesticulation. She was wondering how to separate them when she heard someone call out her name.
She turned to see the immigration officer, the one whose clumsy advances she’d spurned less than fifteen minutes ago. Freed from the confines of his booth, he looked much older. As he waddled towards her, a roll of fat sloshed ponderously around his middle. Beate Neumann, the Dutch lawyer, strode alongside him. And she was pointing straight at Karabo.
‘There she is!’ Beate Neumann cried.
At first Karabo thought she’d left something on the plane or perhaps that she’d taken something that belonged to the Dutch woman. She looked at Beate Neumann and then at the officer. His face was loose with gloating but hers was tight with worry.
‘Is anything the matter?’ Karabo asked.
The taxi drivers faded away like wisps of smoke but made sure to stay in earshot.
‘There’s the violin I told you about,’ Beate Neumann said to the officer. She lifted the violin case off the trolley and held it out to him. Then she turned to Karabo with a look of genuine regret.
‘Your story bothered me all the way from Schiphol. Then I saw the news on the internet just now when we landed. This isn’t your violin, is it? I don’t believe you even know how to play.’
Karabo snatched at the violin case but the officer held it just out of her reach.
‘Do you have papers for this?’ he asked. He smelled bad, as if he’d been locked up in his booth all day.
‘It’s mine!’ Karabo retorted. ‘Do you travel with papers for everything you own?’
He let out a nasty chuckle and a ball of foamy spittle appeared at the corner of his mouth.
‘You can show her,’ he said and Beate Neumann took out her phone and held the glowing screen in front of Karabo’s face. There she was with a capitalised banner above her head. ‘Rare Violin Stolen From South Kensington Home’. She recognised the picture. Nigel had taken it the day they’d gone to the Afghan restaurant in Islington.