One of her brothers, not liking the company she was keeping, helped her be chosen.
Before she left, she went with her mother to a prophet, who told her that one day she would come back as First Lady all in white, but she already knew.
She knew that when she was born she was the only one of her siblings to be outdoored in the palace, in white lace and red velvet, and that it was because she had been born with the mark of greatness.
She knew, while she sold oranges on the street, and helped out in the homes of her older, wealthier brothers, that she would one day be the wealthiest, the grandest of them all.
And now a man who had been looking for her had found her.
Nii Tetteh, a friend of her brother’s, the former finance minister, was trying to gain access to all the money they, the founders of the nation, had put away for the country, and he needed her help.
They had been to the banks in Switzerland, were going to the Caymans; and very soon she would return home as the First Lady she was born to be.
‘And the ambassador?’ I interrupted her.
‘Oh-ho, you too.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘I’m going home.’
‘As First Lady?’
‘Not yet. We’re going to prepare.’
‘And us?’
‘You’ll stay at school. Kojo will go to your father and you’ll stay at boarding school here.’
‘Why here?’
‘You like it, don’t you? You have friends.’
I shrugged. ‘I guess I do.’
At school, I piled layer upon layer of paint onto card, adding silver, blue, green and bronze to the barks of trees; planted yellow-, violet-, ochre-hued soil.
‘Not quite there, is it?’ It was Miss Pettisome.
I put down my paintbrush.
‘Wash.’ Miss Pettisome was pointing at the brush.
I held it in my hand, wondering whether to fight. I went to the sink.
‘Helloooo.’ Anna, bouncing as she always did, just like she brayed when she laughed.
I looked at her, big-boned and good-natured. ‘Anna … I wanted to tell you something …’
‘Yes? Isn’t this class magic? I love what you’re doing, by the way; it’s so … thick.’
‘Thanks. Anna,’ I put the brush down, ‘you know how … how you sometimes invite yourself to things … even if someone’s having a deep meaningful, you just kind of come and sit with them…’ I looked at her; it was not registering. ‘The others, they don’t like it. They talk about it. I thought, maybe someone should tell you, so you know, so you don’t… Everyone really likes you, it’s just that…’ I stopped.
There had appeared on Anna’s face, so suddenly, a look I had not seen before, a look so distracted that I longed for her to hee-haw, or come and stand too close to me.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I thought you’d want to know. It’s just … I would…’
‘Thanks, that’s really sweet.’
‘I didn’t mean…’ I did not want to look at her any more. I took my paintbrushes half-washed of their yellow-blues, put them in the glass jar, and left the class.
By the time the bell rang for the next lesson and I went to the homeroom to get my books, the others were already there.
I opened my desk.
‘That was really mean, what you did to Anna,’ Josephine said, putting the lid of my desk down. ‘Who do you think you are?’
‘You think you’re special, don’t you? You think you’re someone?’ Lucinda’s face was tight and hard. ‘Well, you’re not. You’re not anything.’
I felt hot in my stomach, under my skin. ‘I thought … I thought…’
Her English-rose face came close to mine. ‘What did you think?’ I noticed how well she spat out the ‘th’ … when I still mixed up my s’s and th’s.
‘Maybe I should tell you something too… You know the only reason everyone likes you … is because you’re black.’
They walked away.
I sat down at the closed desk.
What if you managed to gather all you could, all your strength and sight, climbed out of the cave, and when you got out, all you wanted to do was lie down and die?
Lucinda’s cruelty. Charlotte’s smoking. Juliet’s ribaldry. The boys at Kojo’s school.
They could all afford to play the fool, because it was still the muted portraits of their ancestors that lined the oak-panelled walls of the great hall.
They would be all right.
They had been for centuries and would be so for centuries more.
But at least I knew, now Kojo was going back to Germany, I would go too.
PART THREE
15
My mother left for Ghana. Kojo and I were both sent to Catholic schools. Kojo to a monastery in the countryside. I, to a convent in town.
Every week our history teacher picked three of us from class – Angelika, Zinaida and me, perhaps because we challenged him most often on the vagaries of history – to come to his house and stand at either end shouting out loud the lines of Goethe’s three Fates, Atropos, Lachesis and Clotho.
His plan, he told us, was for us to swing, clad in white sheets, from the chandeliers at school.
The house was large with tall ceilings.
I was alone in one of the rooms, empty except for a wooden chair and table.
From one of the other rooms, Angelika’s voice came, shouting, ‘Des Menschen Seele gleicht dem Wasser, Vom Himmel kommt es, Zum Himmel steigt es.’
‘Lauter,’ Herr Geissmann’s voice was shouting back from the other side of the house.
‘Und wieder nieder Zur Erde muß es! Ewig wechselnd!’
‘Zinaida…’ he summoned.
‘Seele des Menschen, Wie gleichst du dem Wasser!’ Zinaida’s voice, accented, replied.
‘Lauter!’
‘Schicksal des Menschen! Wie gleichst du dem Wind!’
I walked down the stone steps of the house. It would be my turn next, and I did not want to shout. I was not sure what broken thing would emerge from my depths along with my voice. I opened the heavy door and went out into the street. The autumn air hung dark, cloaking whatever hope summer had wrought. The house was in the old part of the town, the roads cobbled and uneven. I looked back to see if he had followed me out. People moved towards me, threatening to come too close, but Herr Geissmann was not among them. He was too tall and thin and ancient, too storybook-like to be overlooked, his thinning hair combed back in a way that was endearing rather than ridiculous, his yellowed false teeth jostling around in his mouth, baptising spit soaking the front row ceaselessly as he taught.
He spoke to us of Goethe’s idea of a Weltliteratur in which all the literatures of the world stood equally side by side.
I wanted to tell him it implied that all the stories of the world matched each other, and did not take into account that some were stopped in their tracks or usurped or deemed primitive; or that some were written and others told or drummed; or that sometimes the change across boundaries, of colour and tone and rhythm, affected how those stories were received once they arrived.
My kingdom’s story had been told largely through its objects; its narratives of performance, their meanings, distorted, neglected, lost along the way. It was up to us now, to Kojo and I, to restore them, to craft stories that could stand side by side with all the others.
I sat down on the stoop of a doorway. I had one hour before I was due to report back. Herr Geissmann would not tell them I had left early. He dreamt of a future for me as an ARD presenter, reading the news, in a Hochdeutsch even more enunciated than that of the Germans themselves, but I could not think of much that was more frightening than fitting into this pinched-in, sterile world.
I thought of the stories my mother told me of my birth into this pale-moon world: white-blonde nurses, white corridors, white walls, white floors in the children’s ward of the Marienkrankenhaus in Bad Godesberg. And amongst all the harsh
whiteness, the soft brown skin, dark brown hair and brown screams from my brown-pinkish mouth. The relief and happiness that shone through my father’s glass-framed eyes, as he held his newborn baby, as he handed it to the sweat-soaked blood-streaked woman lying on the bed who was laughing, always, despite all the pain.
I imagined how he walked to the bathroom through the white-tiled corridors, the dark brown man with a white smile between his lips. Past the German doctor, who later often visited our house, and who had a hospital in what he described as German Togoland, where they still spoke German. Into the bathroom where all too was white; my father, gripping the sides of the basin, wanting to go down on his knees, but afraid, always, of what the Germans would think of him.
I opened my rucksack and took out my uncle’s book. Kojo had finally let me have it.
The parts he had highlighted, the hard facts of things:
Our grandfather’s death, arrests, a court case, the war, a freedom-fighter friend called Felix, politics in London.
I skipped over these, like I did the war scenes in War and Peace, and opened to those that spoke of our family:
Of our grandmother, of my mother whom my uncle called Yaa, of my father whom he called Kwamena, and of Kojo’s mother Amba…
I looked at my watch. It was long past time. I would get in trouble. I put the book in the rucksack and ran. I got to the gate and stopped. There was someone outside. It was Zinaida.
She had arrived only a few months ago, dropped off by her mother who wore tight leather trousers, a red bolero jacket and a short dark-blonde bob the mirror of Zinaida’s. She looked younger than the rest of us, so frail and thin that I wondered if she would be anorexic like Mariana, chew only on gum, occasionally eat soup, and grow hair all over her face and body, but she was not; it was the nervous energy inside her that seemed to consume everything that went in. Her constant painful laugh pulled on my sinews and in her high-pitched vulnerability, in the edge on which she balanced, sharply, precariously, she held something singular, something that did not close itself to life. She had wondered about me too, she told me later; had heard from someone that my father was a plastic surgeon, that I had had surgery to perfect my skin and cheeks.
‘And you believed that?’ I asked her, laughing.
‘Come on,’ she said now, ‘I’ve been waiting almost twenty minutes.’ She told me Angelika hadn’t wanted to wait, but that she had not wanted to go in without me.
I took her hand and pressed it.
We went past the nun at the Pforte, holding hands; past one of the nuns, less fierce-looking than Schwester Maria Amabilis, our housemistress who, in her black habit, patched white and pink skin and stomping sandals, led us all, eighteen of us boarders, single file every morning into prayer, while we fingered our rosary beads – Heilige Maria, Mutter Gottes, bitte für uns Sünder, jetzt und in der Stunde unseres Todes – prayed for our sins, prayed for forgiveness, prayed for the filth that coated us even before we were born.
I closed my eyes, and every morning tried to feel myself into my sin, but instead felt empty and bored, by the lack of sanctity, of beauty, of mystery; by the nuns, the other girls who, though still skilled choreographers of food, lacked the imagination of their counterparts in England.
The next morning was Saturday. We were allowed out into the main streets of the town. We stopped in the only shop where the clothes did not look like they were made exclusively for women in their fifties. The eyes of the sales assistants travelled us up and down. We pulled out clothes and held them against each other. Zinaida wanted to try one on, but the woman told her its price and she put it back.
Outside, she showed me the leather bracelet she had hidden in her hand. In the next shop, she nudged me as she slipped a thin necklace up her sleeve.
I tried to walk slowly as we left the shop, but we both skip-ran as we got further down the street. We turned the corner into another shop, tried on T-shirts and jeans, piled our own clothes on top of them. My legs and hands felt bloodless as we went up and down the escalators, holding up items, nodding or shaking our heads, finding more and more brazen ways of hiding things we did not need: a writing pad, a letter opener for my father, a bracelet for my mother, playing cards for Kojo.
Back at school, we stripped off to our jeans, and ran up to the bathrooms. We locked ourselves in the only cubicle with a tub, sat face to face in the hot water, and waited for our jeans to shrink to our size.
There was a knock on the door.
Then Schwester Maria Amabilis’s voice with a shriek in it: ‘Ich weiss was ihr dadrin macht. Ich weiss es.’
We let out the bathwater, holding the plug in place so it would seep away quietly. We stripped off our wet jeans and put on our dry clothes, laughing silently, as if gasping for air, until our stomachs hurt with anxiety.
But she kept knocking.
We waited, listening, until all was quiet, then signalled each other. I would go out first. We opened the door slowly, no creaking.
Her wide ugly black sandal was in at once, jamming the door. Her veiny pink hands, like octopi, reached for our arms. She pinched each one of us hard, and the pain was like being punched.
‘Aua,’ Zinaida said, telling her she could not do that, spitting vengeance high-pitched in her face.
Still she held us, and told us in a voice which slapped that we were wicked dirty girls for what we were doing, and despite our unshrunken jeans lying sodden in the corner, I felt ashamed.
16
I climbed out of the window of the apartment and lowered myself onto the ground below. I walked in the dark the steps I had walked many times by myself, but only occasionally at night, and always then with my father or Kojo. Even though I felt afraid, I walked head up, staring defiantly back at the Germans who stared at me, as if a young Ghanaian girl out alone at night, in the streets of this Kuhdorf, this small semi-urban town on the border of industrial heartlands, were a perfectly normal sight. I stood at the bus stop in the market square – in front of the pizza van that sold powdery Italian pizza; next to the chicken joint that roasted sweaty whole chickens on a rotisserie; opposite the bakery that sold seed-strewn breads, sugar-coated Berliner, icing-glazed Amerikaner – and waited.
The bus was almost empty. My heart beat fast as it now did constantly, as if the pulse of life itself had become irregular.
I thought of the version of my father that Kojo’s father had described in the book and could not reconcile him with the man I knew, the one whose promise of light had dimmed into shadow. I got off the bus, followed Zinaida’s instructions, through the dark empty streets of meticulously manicured gardens framing meticulously structured houses, towards the sure arrogance of Jamie, as he sat under trees, reading books, while the other boys played ball.
At the end of the cul-de-sac stood a white-bricked house, the kind you used as the facade, waved goodbye in front of when your friends dropped you off, praying their parents would drive away before you reached the door.
Downstairs French music played from the film La Boum. I knew the boys and girls would be dancing what they called the blues, in an approximation of French sophistication and laxity.
I pushed open the door and walked down the darkened staircase looking through the bodies for the safety of Zinaida’s form.
She was there on a chair leaning over Sebastian, whom she liked, but who, whenever I was around, made it clear that he liked me. It was usually Zinaida, with her light-coloured bob, complexion, her already ripened experience of the other sex, whom boys yearned for. I did not know where outside or within myself to place his affection.
I looked for Jamie, blue-eyed, Aryan poet-prince, who had the familiar assurance, the nonchalance I knew from Kojo’s friends that allowed him to say, as we sat outside the ice-skating rink, which on Sundays was a daytime disco, that when he was older he would never employ black people in his company.
Zinaida looked at me. ‘Maya’s black,’ she said.
‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘My fathe
r doesn’t employ black people either.’
Sebastian was next to me and bumped his shoulder against mine. ‘Would you like to dance the blues?’ he asked.
‘No, thank you,’ I said, walking towards the gap he had left beside Zinaida.
She put her mouth close to my ear. ‘He asked for my number.’
I looked at her, wanted to ask, ‘Sebastian?’ but was too surprised.
‘We’re both going to Mallorca, for the holidays.’ She put her arm through mine.
I looked at her. Who was she talking about?
She nodded in Jamie’s direction.
I made my arm go lax, so she would no longer have anything to hold.
Sebastian was walking towards us, his mouth a wide, uncomfortable smile.
I felt Zinaida’s energy move in his direction.
I willed myself up the stairs, onto the street, towards the bus stop I had walked from earlier with an expectation of some kind of release, trying all the time not to burst the capacity of my constricted lungs.
The apartment was quiet. When I unlocked the door, slowly, noiselessly, my father stood, as if he had been waiting, in the darkened corridor.
‘I told you not to go out. You still went,’ he said. There was no shout in his reprieve.
I said nothing, turned and walked into the bedroom, stood behind the closed door, holding in my stomach, my arms, my fists.
I lay down on the bed, reached under the mattress for my uncle’s book and opened one of the pages I had marked, looked for clues of how to survive.
He did not know.
I got up to go to the living room. It was not yet light. My father had left for the clinic. I turned on the television.
There was a film of a group of French men, bon viveurs and gluttons. They had shut themselves up in a large house in order to eat and copulate themselves to death. I turned the volume down; the noises of their perversion, excess and physical combustion threatened to escape the boundaries of the television.
I switched channels.
On ZDF, a group of very straight-looking German men showcased their inclinations; a man in his fifties, dressed in a baby’s all-in-one, sat in a giant cot, sucking his thumb, wailing, until he was spanked.
The God Child Page 8