She wasn’t hungry now. And as she left the shower room and ascended the stairs to the second level, where the lounge was, she was thinking that she just wanted to be in her corner, a newspaper in one hand, a glass of red wine in the other. Before going off to shower, she’d marked the spot as hers. Left her blazer on the back of the chair and a newspaper on the small round table headline-up (“May’s Brexit Deal Crushed by Commons”).
This was where she always sat. Right by the big panels of windows through which one could spy the glidings of aircraft and next to a host of beautiful and curious things: pots of white lilacs; other pots containing flowers that looked like wheat; the cool Heathrow light that pressed its soft hand in; the life-sized statues of several horses: Black and sinewed, tails swept to the right of their bodies. Focused. Unmoving. Like sentries standing guard.
She was surprised—shocked, to be precise—to find that her spot had been taken, annexed by a woman who was drinking tea and eating shortbread biscuits. The woman had folded Thandi’s newspaper and pushed it away so that one half was dangling off the side of the table and the other was being used as a tray.
Thandi, standing now behind the woman, tugged at the blazer and said, “Excuse me.”
The woman turned around slowly, unsurely, as though steeling herself to encounter something wild, then she launched her body off the chair and said, “Oh god. Did I take your place?”
The thief had the voice of a smoker. The yellowed teeth of one too. Thandi, who’d grabbed her blazer off the back of the chair as the woman stretched around, tossed her things onto the sofa behind them. Anyone watching would likely deduce that a dramatic affair was about to take place. The thought had crossed her mind, but it embarrassed Thandi—average of height, soft-bodied, tastefully modest in her beige attire of cigarette trousers and cashmere knit; a woman, these days, who prided herself on being well behaved. Neutral.
“I didn’t realize that someone was sitting here. Honestly. I’m a very absent-minded person. I’m so sorry,” said the woman.
“It’s fine,” Thandi said.
“No. You were here first. I’ll move.” The woman picked up her tea and biscuits and set them down on the square table by the sofa. Then she sat next to Thandi’s recaptured things. “It’s yours now,” she announced. “I have vacated your territory.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” Thandi said, sounding perfectly unoffended.
“Well, I’m not going back. So if you change your mind . . .” The woman laughed—a deep barbecued sound. Then she extended her hand and said, “I’m Flannery.”
She was tall, this Flannery. Blond, loose-skinned, astonishingly white. She wore a flowered top with long sleeves, a knee-length skirt, and slip-ons on her feet—an outfit that Thandi noted disapprovingly. But she accepted the hand nonetheless, shook it, and said, “I’m Thandiwe.”
“My god, you’re pretty, aren’t you?” Flannery said. “And what a wonderful name!”
“Thanks. Yours too.” Thandi truly felt this way. That a name like Flannery was noteworthy. But she imagined it had sounded insincere.
“Where is it from?” Flannery asked.
“Southern Africa somewhere.”
“Wonderful.” Flannery smiled. Said, “I used to have a friend from South Africa. Lovely girl. Itha Swanepoel. But I don’t think you’d know her, would you?” She paused, narrowing gray eyes at Thandi.
“Sorry. No. I don’t know any Ithas.”
“Of course. She’d be my age now. Which is old.” Flannery laughed.
“I’m from Uganda. We don’t have Ithas or Swanepoels,” Thandi said.
Flannery furrowed her brow. “Oh,” she said. Her voice dropped and she sounded disappointed when she said, “Well, I’m sorry. I don’t know anyone from Uganda. Although I guess now I do.”
Flannery—who’d been flipping through pages of The Mail on Sunday—returned to her reading. And Thandi thought how bizarre that exchange had been, though she couldn’t say why it was bizarre, only that it was. Kimani, the more articulate of the two, more quickly discerning, would’ve been able to pin it down. She pulled out her phone to text him, but just at that moment Flannery looked up and said, “Uganda? Is that the one where the president was a cannibal? Long ago, I mean, not now. Gosh, I should hope not now!”
“Rumored, yes. But I doubt it.”
“I can’t even begin to imagine it!”
The women laughed, regarding each other like two unacquainted animals, each sniffing the other out, Flannery expecting a response, Thandi denying her one, the moment finally scattered by an announcement from the front desk: Mr. Vikram Rao? Mr. Vikram Rao, could you make yourself known to a member of staff, please.
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, when Thandi was still new to travel, when she left Uganda for the first time—an unripened twenty-year-old accompanying her father, both of them laughably clothed for the Cape Town winter—airports made her anxious. Made her want to heave. This was a story that the Thandi of that time told often enough that it had become a shibboleth of her life. But it was not fully true. The problem wasn’t the airports themselves. Not really. Not on their own. Actually, her anxiety about travel had been activated long before she set foot in an airport. Before actual travel. As she stood in well-aired but penitential embassy rooms, providing answers to irksome questions: Do you have family here? In Uganda? (“Yes,” she’d say, “my parents. Two sisters and two brothers.”) Any close family ties? (And Thandi would wonder if Europeans and Americans had different definitions of “close family.” For what could be closer than your own blood?) A husband, for example? Children? (“Oh, no. I’m not ready for that,” Thandi would proclaim, laughing, misunderstanding the question to be one of mere curiosity.) Time and again, for several years, her visa applications were denied.
A year after her Cape Town trip, she’d graduated from Makerere with a degree in development studies and began working at a development agency in Kampala. It was run by a mix of white people: a Frenchman, an American from Maine, and a Rhodesian woman—the Uganda expert, as they called her—who’d lived in Kampala for a year. As a new recruit, Thandi was to be trained in America, so she spent a month in New York in July—her first time out of Africa. After three years at the agency, she achieved something unheard of for the locals and became a fairly prominent figure in the organization. Together with the Rhodesian, she was invited to a big international development conference in London—a sign of her growing currency.
At the British embassy (in the interview room), the interviewer had asked the same genus of questions. This was enough to annoy Thandi but not to alarm her. After all, he’d asked the same of the Rhodesian, and by then Thandi had been to America and returned and had the visa and stamps to prove it. But the same man, two weeks later, signed his initials to the bottom of a letter declaring that her application for a visa to the United Kingdom had been denied. He was not convinced, he wrote, that she had close enough family ties to her home country. The Rhodesian, with her green Zimbabwean passport, did not suffer the same fate.
Thandi appealed the decision on the basis that the interviewer’s fixation on her family ties (i.e., her marital status) was sexist and that she’d recently returned from a trip to America, evidence that she had no migratory intent. If I could leave America, Thandi wrote, the greatest country on earth, and return home to Uganda, the Pearl of Africa itself, why would I elect to remain in Britain—a country that looks at the shadow of its empire and does not yet recognize it as a shadow at all? That elegant savagery (which in the end was the death knell of Thandi’s appeal) belonged to her father, Robert: a university professor who did not believe that any country was great, let alone greatest; who was in fact convinced that America was an appalling force in the world; who had long ago stopped traveling outside of Africa; and who liked to say things like, Why should I leave Africa? I am from Africa. And from what I can tell, non-Africans don’t like to bathe. Why should I, a clean man, dispatch myself to the lands of the dirty?
&nbs
p; Even when she began to travel a little more, she wasn’t able to enjoy it. Wasn’t sure that the prospect of her-as-tourist had lost its repellent shimmer. She dreaded the long waits at Hamad International: the crowds, the unbearable toilets, the airport workers that tailed her in duty-free shops, afraid that she might steal a bottle of expensive lotion or a pair of high-end shoes. But it was Brussels—where they kept travelers to Africa quarantined in a faraway section of the airport—that had delivered the worst experiences.
Once, having been granted a scholarship by the Chinese government to do a master’s at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, she had a twelve-hour wait in Brussels before a flight out to Pudong Airport. Surprisingly, the Belgian officials in Kampala (a nasty bunch from an even nastier country, her father had pre-warned) granted her a transit visa. But once she arrived, the officer had refused to land her. He looked down at her papers (passport, tickets, SJTU admissions letter) and then, without stamping her passport, handed them back to her. She asked him why he hadn’t stamped the passport. “I need an entry stamp to go through,” she said.
“Why should I let you through?” he asked. “I see no reason for you to come into Belgium. I can see you’re continuing on to China later today. In a few hours in fact.”
“No, not in a few hours. In half a day! It says so on my ticket, didn’t you read it?”
The officer looked at her keenly through his small brown eyes. “And why should I believe that you’d come back?” he asked.
“Why shouldn’t you?” she countered.
The officer regarded her for a long moment, and Thandi tried but failed to imagine what thoughts accompanied that rampant gaze.
Finally, blinking out of his silent reverie, he said, “You have an onward flight to Pudong Airport. I suggest you walk to your terminal and wait for your flight. I’m sorry, but I cannot land you.”
“But I have a valid transit visa!” Thandi protested. She had not yet learned that immigration officers were authorities in the same way that policemen were authorities, that they expected immediate deference.
“And what do you plan on doing with it?”
“I am supposed to meet a friend for lunch at a place called the Lobster House. Afterward, we will go shopping in Les Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert and then she will drive me back to the airport.” None of this was true. Those places existed, but far above Thandi’s fiscal capacity. But a week before she was due to travel, a friend (a Murundi girl who’d lived in Belgium and now lived in Kampala with her Muganda boyfriend) had advised her to name real places so as to appear less suspicious. In reality, Thandi planned to just walk around the city, get some fresh air, take some photos of Belgian landmarks, and then find a cheap café to have lunch at. But her friend had said the posher the itinerary, the better. She’d even made Thandi practice the words, so that her French (a language she’d relinquished in primary school) sounded as close to native as possible.
The officer cocked his head to the side, as though he were examining her afresh. From a new angle. Thandi began to have the sense that she had triumphed, but then his head lifted back up and his shoulders started to jig up and down and she realized that he was laughing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I cannot take the risk of landing you. You expect me to believe that you will come back? We have had a large number of people like you in recent years. Trying to settle here and being less than honest about it.”
“I’m not trying to settle. I just don’t want to be stuck here for twelve hours! It’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University! Do you think I would throw away that opportunity to stay here in Brussels? And do what exactly? Be a house girl?”
“I have never heard of this university,” the man said. “And I am beginning to lose my patience.”
“I have a valid transit visa!” Thandi cried and her face was astonished, her eyes welling up and her shoulders shaking with fury. “This is so bloody unfair!”
The Belgian (who was only slightly lighter than her, who Thandi deduced was probably Arab) didn’t enjoy this kind of thing—women coming apart at the seams. He wagged a menacing finger at her and said, “Would you prefer that I send you back to your country? Hmm? Just be grateful that I haven’t done that. I could do it very easily. Believe me. Now go to your terminal. Go. Go!” He called on the couple behind her to step forward, then looked at her one last time and made the shoo motion with his hand. Thandi obeyed.
An older Thandi, whenever she looked back on this, would cringe at this moment. The admission of impotence, the compliance with an irrational pecking order. Even now she wished it away—a reminder that she had once been weak. But of course it was too late. The moment had already pressed into the clay of her, become a part of the ceramics of who she was. By the time she boarded the plane, twelve hours later, it was a hard and permanent thing.
What was not permanent, what years of frequent travel had by now worn away, was her anxiety. Nine years ago, when success and marriage came (to William Kimani of landed Kikuyu stock), Thandi shed her old self for a new one: better clothed, better cared-for; a life propelled by the force of a Kipling decree: Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it. She discovered how to travel well. How to defend herself against indignity. Now, Thandi didn’t have the kinds of struggles she’d once had. Almost always, she and Kimani traveled in Business (and occasionally, if they were feeling indulgent, First). Ten-year visas—a thing unheard of by the old Thandi—were bequeathed to them without fear. With ease. For this was what the Kimanis had demanded of the world—a life unencumbered by inconvenience. And this was what the world had granted.
There was a tension in this for Thandi—the kind one would expect in a woman who was born in the midseventies into a young and precarious middle class, one whose brilliant academic of a father was underpaid, whose mother’s pride as one of the first African dukawallas was for decades chafed by the modest reality of her sales. Before meeting Kimani (at Shanghai Jiao Tong) Thandi knew, abstractly, that there were people like this. People like her living lives of immense privilege and access. But that world had seemed sealed off. And even though she was in it, even though the seal had been broken open, she still sometimes felt like an interloper. Not in places like these—foreign lands where no one knew her—but at home in Karen when Kimani would speak to the children of his ancestors, a gilded tail of memory that stretched back to touch the seventeenth century. And when the question inevitably came—“What about your people, Mummy?”—what could she say? She knew of her grandfathers—one a tradesman, one a lay church preacher—and their fathers, simple Kiga peasants both. But that was where the line ended.
OUTSIDE AS AFTERNOON waned, the light began its dying, its soft-handed retreat. But inside the lounge, which in Thandi’s mind fell under the mediation of airport time, and which had little correspondence to normal time—children zipping around at midnight, adults getting spa treatments or conducting business over phones at 2:00 a.m.—the day had picked up. Brought with it an invasion of travelers. Sitting now by the pot of white lilacs, on the opposite end of Thandi and Flannery, was a family of four—a highly Scandinavian middle-aged couple and their blond boys. Thandi’s chair—empty in the wake of Flannery’s evacuation—was now occupied by a pixie-haired white woman, clad in a black hoodie and matching joggers. And in the adjacent seat, a gentleman in a blue Kaunda suit.
Thandi was scrolling through emails on her computer when a loud exchange broke out at reception. It was the Vikram Rao from before and the blue-suited woman at the front desk. The reasons were unclear, and Thandi wouldn’t have ordinarily taken heed, but she was close enough to the entrance that she caught the end of Mr. Rao’s attack: “You people are fucking useless! And you’re supposedly the ones that brought us civilization! You wonder why the Asians and the Arabs are so far ahead of you in hospitality—and in nearly everything else these days? This! Is! Why!” He walked away, making for the exit, but then turned back around and continued at the receptionist: “I should have known not to use these mildewed European airli
nes and airports. I should have flown out of Abu Dhabi!” Thandi laughed at the dramatics, then returned to her emails.
“Then why didn’t you?” Flannery said, head craned back. She turned to Thandi. “These rich people! These bloody rich people! And they wonder why the whole world hates them.” She shook her head, face scrunched in great disgust, then, feeling the need to explain herself to Thandi, put her hands on her chest and added, “I’m only here because I’m Silver, like most of these people, I’d assume. I tried to get an upgrade. They say if you dress nicely, you’re more likely to get one. I shouldn’t have believed it. One has to be rich to get even the tiniest sliver these days. Well, I am not rich. And I tell you what else? At moments like these, I’m glad not to be one of them.” She pointed a finger at the empty space that Mr. Rao, only moments ago, had wrathfully occupied.
“Yes. That was unnecessary,” Thandi said, though this was more for Flannery, whose fulmination had caught her off guard.
“I’m glad we’re of one mind. For a moment I wondered if you were . . . you know . . . a part of that particular species. I would have told Mr. Raul right off if that was me. Why didn’t she tell him off?” she inquired, palms and shoulders raised high.
“I think it was Rao,” Thandi said.
“It’s a matter of manners,” Flannery pressed.
“Maybe we give him the benefit of the doubt. You never know in these situations.” This—Thandi’s sympathy offer—was met with a bruised stare. And Thandi thought, then, that she saw something move through Flannery.
Coil; then uncoil.
“Well, I suppose I can’t argue with that.” Flannery stood. “I’m going to get myself another cup. Do you want one?”
“Oh. Thanks. A glass of dry red would be nice.”
Briefly, Thandi’s gaze followed Flannery as she moved toward the bar, the hard sandals on her feet clacking loudly against the floor, the hard muscular legs which hadn’t been oiled, the slow gait, slower than Thandi was used to from white people who were always, it seemed to her, in a great carnivorous rush. (Kimani’s favorite edict in the middle of the busy streets of Marylebone: “Walk fast. This is London.”)
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