by Taiye Selasi
When they stopped at the junction between Liberia Road and Independence Avenue, Kweku cleared his throat. “T-this is our N-national Theatre,” he began haltingly. He gestured through his window at the structure. Modern, white. “We have a National Symphony Orchestra and the National Theatre Players. They built it five years ago. A gift from the Chinese.”
“Interesting,” Olu said politely. “Five years ago.” Back when his father was part of their world.
Kweku rubbed his brow, sensing his error, falling silent. The stoplight turned green and he tried a new tack. “It’s changing, this city, not quickly, but changing. I think you might like it.”
“Seems nice,” Olu said.
“You wouldn’t remember your first trip to Ghana.”
“I don’t.”
“No, of course. But the place has transformed. The change is remarkable.”
Olu nodded, saying nothing, unsure if Kweku’s subject was his country or himself.
• • •
They turned into a side street off Independence Avenue and wound their way slowly through a maze of small streets to a clump of large houses set back from the road with chipped white stucco walls overgrown with dry blossoms. Stray dogs milled here and there nosing indifferently the small heaps of trash. Fruit skins, black plastic bags. A woman near the end of the road in a lappa and incongruous red Pop Warner Football T-shirt was turning meat on a grill like the black one they’d had at the first house in Boston, a half of a globe. Behind her the road stopped in overgrown weeds, a huge plot of dry grass with a lone mango tree.
Kweku stopped the car by the woman, engine idling. “I know you must be tired.” He leaned forward, looking out. “I just wanted you to see this before we go back to the house—to my house—to the place where I live.”
Olu peered out at the woman. “Who is she?”
“The land. I’d like to buy it. To build us a house.” He took off his glasses and wiped them off carefully as Olu sat frowning at the sound of this us. His father continued shyly, “It’s just for perspective. We’ll go now. I just thought we’d make that quick stop. The place that I’m living in now is quite humble. I’ve never believed, as you’ve noticed, in rent. I’d rather rent a modest place—some might say an ugly place—until I can purchase on the scale that I want. My father never rented, see, designed his own property. Quite striking—” He caught himself rambling and stopped.
But Olu turned, interest piqued, surprised at the mention of this father, whom Kweku had never discussed. Both of his parents were famously tight-lipped on the subject of who their own parents had been. “Died a long time ago,” was the general impression, to which Fola added only, “My mother died giving birth.” They didn’t have photos, such as Olu found lining the stairs of the homes of his classmates in school, faded, framed and important, generations of family, at which he’d stand staring until someone inquired, “You like our family pictures, ey?” Usually the father, who’d thump him on the shoulder blade, offer a tour (the fathers of friends rather loved to be near him, loved to thump him on the shoulder blade, eyes bright with awe, as if nothing in the world were more wondrous than Olu, a prodigiously intelligent athlete in dark chocolate skin). He’d tour their homes aching with longing, for lineage, for a sense of having descended from faces in frames. That his family was thin in the backbench was troubling; it seemed to suggest they were faking it, false. A legitimate family would have photos on the staircase. At the very least grandparents whose first names he knew. “What did he do?” Olu asked, suddenly hopeful.
But Kweku answered vaguely, “He did the same thing as me.” He put on his glasses and started the engine. “Come on then. Enough. You must be tired, and starved.” He bought them four pieces of chargrilled plantain wrapped in newsprint and served with small bags of smoked nuts, then drove back, past the junction, and parked by a row of low beige concrete buildings, most missing their doors.
“Is this where you live?” Olu asked as they entered, unable to mask his dismay at the stench: two parts deep-frying fish, four parts urine and mothballs intended to neutralize the smell of the urine.
“When one rents in Ghana, one has to pay twelve months upfront,” Kweku said, “and I’m saving for land. As you saw. It’s not much, but the rent is near nothing and no one disturbs me or knows that I’m here.”
Olu didn’t ask him whether this was a good thing, to live without anybody knowing where you were, thinking, later, they’d get to the heart of it later, never suspecting that ten minutes later he’d leave. They climbed up the three flights of stairs to the flat, which was unexpectedly large, the whole uppermost floor. And clean, if monastic, bereft of decoration: a table, two chairs, velvet loveseat, the statue. He didn’t bother asking how his father had shipped it, just swallowed his laughter at seeing her here, this stone thing that they’d hated but could never get rid of. Like everything hated, she never disappeared.
He sat at the table and opened his backpack. He was rifling for his toothbrush at the bottom of the bag when he found the small tent he had squashed there last summer when hiking with Ling in New Hampshire. “My tent.”
“I thought we could share the one bed in the bedroom,” said Kweku, glancing over.
“No, I brought it by mistake.” Now Olu did laugh, and his father did also, a strange sound, much sadder than shouting or crying. He reached in again, found a gray Yale sweatshirt. “It’s graduation.” As he remembered it. “It’s graduation today.”
Kweku was running water into the kettle in the kitchenette. “You said?” He turned the tap off. “Couldn’t hear you. It’s what?”
“It’s Yale graduation. Today’s my graduation.”
The clatter of the metal kettle dropped in the sink.
Kweku turned, heaving. A realization, not a question. “I forgot your graduation.”
“Yes, you did,” Olu said.
“Why did you—how did you—how could you miss it?” He took off his glasses. “Why—why aren’t you there? Why are you here?” Wiped his eyes. “Graduation.”
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“How can you say that?”
Olu shrugged. “It didn’t seem worth it.”
“What do you mean?!” Kweku persisted. “You should be there in New Haven, not here—”
“So should you.”
Kweku fell silent. He started several answers with “I—” “You—” “We’re not—” and then settled on, “Look. They’re two separate issues and you know it, Olukayodé.” Olu frowned, recoiling at the use of the name. No one ever called him by his full name but Fola and only when angry, so practically never. “You can’t do that . . .” his father said, weakly now, faltering. “Give up when you’re hurt. Please. You get that from me. That’s what I do, what I’ve done. But you’re different. You’re different from me, son—”
“I’m just like—”
“You’re better.”
What was the thing that arose out of nowhere now? Pity? Shame? Longing to see the man whole, not to see him here standing in a barebones apartment, his trousers still ironed as if he were home, but not home, in this hellhole, a prison of his making, in exile, cut off from the family and worse: with this look on his face of a man without honor, at least of a man who feels this is my lot? He still couldn’t say what he thought he would find when he touched down in Ghana, but this wasn’t it, this hot, half-finished apartment, the half man here in it, now backing up, sitting down, too shamed to stand. How had his father come to wear this expression: defeated, and willing to accept the defeat, not resisting, not objecting, as if somewhere inside him lived someone who felt quite at home in this place, in these halls, dirty windows, bare bulbs, stink of urine, the concrete, chipped paint, never mind the pressed pants? It was he Olu hated, this man inside Kweku, with whom he felt anger, at whom he now shouted, “It’s you who is better, goddammit, not me, I’m no different. I
t’s you. You are better than this.”
To which Kweku, very softly, “This? This is what I come from.”
As if this were all that there was to be said.
As if twenty-two years, the whole kit and caboodle, were just a short stop on the way back to this; as if all one could hope for was closing the circle, was ending right back in the gray, in the ash.
“Not good enough, Olu!” shouted Olu. “Not good enough! That’s what you said when my answers were wrong. That’s not good enough, Olu! Lazy thinking! Think smarter! Not good enough, Kweku—” and would have gone on were it not for the sound of a door down the hall creaking open and footsteps approaching. High heels. Hard to say now where the pep talk was heading, or if it had worked where his father might be, whether Olu could really have spurred him to action, convinced him to come back to Boston. Who knows? There she was, suddenly, a shape in the doorway, some slim Other Woman with long tiny braids, rather sharp in her pantsuit—and that was that, really, his second trip to Ghana concluded.
“Hallooo!” A dense local accent very carefully strained through the sieve of affected inflections. “How ah you?” She stepped toward Olu. “Akwaaba. You ah welcome.”
“J-June,” stuttered Kweku. “I didn’t know you were home.”
Olu stood blinking, unable to see her, to take in her features, to move or to speak. The woman said something in Ga to his father, then blew them both kisses and breezed out the door. Kweku tried “I—” “You—” “We’re not—” before choosing, “It isn’t what it looks like. But I should have let you know.”
“Let me know what? That you live with this woman?”
“For now,” answered Kweku. “It’s only for now. She’s helping me set up a practice in Ghana. It’s hard to break into this market. Are you listening?”
Olu wasn’t listening. He was shouldering the backpack and marching, straps gripped, to the still-open door. Kweku reached out to detain him. “Don’t touch me!” he shouted, and left.
Down the stairs.
Into sun.
Then back to the airport, on foot to the junction, where the backpack made him look like a hitchhiking teen; an old jeep full of students, mostly German, stopped to get him, dropped him kindly on the airport road covered in dust; to the check-in desk, pleading to change his departure to fly out on standby that night. Back to Yale. The day after commencement, the campus half-dressed like a debutante stumbling back home from a ball.
To think of the smell (Jean Naté, fainter: mothball) fills Olu still now with the need for fresh air. He is attempting to yank up the window when someone caresses his back and “Don’t touch me!” bursts out.
“I’m sorry,” says Ling, taken aback, stepping backward. He turns to her, embarrassed, wipes his face with one hand. She frowns at him, worried, reaching up to embrace him, and he feels himself move, ever so slightly, away. “Why do you do that?” she asks. “When I touch you? You flinch when I touch you.” She crosses her arms. “It’s okay if you’re crying—”
“I’m not. I’m not crying.”
“Of course. You never cry.” She sits down on the bed.
He sighs. He can see that he needs to say something to fill in the distance he’s opened between them. “I switched with my sister,” he tells her. “With Taiwo. She’s sharing with Kehinde and I’m here with you.” He sits down beside her and touches her shoulder. She leans in against him, her arms at his waist. He kisses her head but, his own arms gone leaden, he can’t hold her back in the way that she’d like.
vii
Kehinde comes in and sees Olu there sleeping, then sees that the form is too small to be him. He gets into bed and lies waiting for something, a crack in the silence.
“I saw him,” they both say.
Kehinde turns over. He was going to tell Taiwo what he just shared with Sadie. Instead he says, “Who?”
“Uncle Femi,” she whispers, not turning to face him. “In Ovation magazine. There was one in the den.”
The name slices through, a clean line through his center. His lungs spit up air, split in half. “In this house?”
“In a picture with Niké . . . ,” she begins. “Just forget it.”
“I can’t ‘just forget it,’” he says.
“Yeah, well, try.”
“I have tried,” he says.
“Yeah, well, try a little harder.”
“Taiwo,” he says.
“What do you want me to say?”
Kehinde doesn’t know what he wants her to say. Has never known.
“Forget it,” she says. “We should sleep.”
He hears her readjusting her position in bed and is reminded of that other little bedroom they’d shared, of their first night in Lagos; can see them there, dumbstruck; can hear their sick uncle, “Show our twins to their rooms.” Can see Auntie Niké saying, “This one’s for Taiwo,” and pushing in his sister, her face as she turned, a wild pleading in her eyes as she looked at her brother with a look that seemed to say don’t leave me in here alone. But Auntie Niké pushed him forward, down the hall, to the next room, a much smaller bedroom with two little beds. “This is yours,” she said coldly. There was a crib in the corner. Auntie Niké saw him noticing. “We’ll have that removed.” He entered the room while she watched from the doorway. “Someone will bring up your things, ehn? Just wait. Sleep if you want to. We’ll call you for dinner.”
“Thank you,” he mumbled.
“Thank you, Auntie.” She left.
He sat for some moments looking around the little bedroom, the veined marble floor, barred-in windows, large crib. He looked out the window at the back of the building, a large well-kept garden and huge swimming pool. A gardener was working here, trimming the hedges. Reminded of Fola, he turned back around. A houseboy was standing at the door with his suitcase.
“Good evening, sa,” the boy said.
“I’m Kehinde,” he replied.
“Kehinde, sa,” the boy said. Bowed slightly. “Your suitcase.” Before Kehinde could respond, he walked quickly away. The apartment was like that: people appearing in doorways, bowing slightly with their eyes down, then hurrying away, a huge staff, twenty people at least, for the four of them: chefs, gardeners, houseboys, guards, all of them male. All of them dressed in white pants and white shirts, without shoes, slender boys, without names, in their teens, the one blurring into the other, slipping in and out of doorways bearing food and drink and whatever else, then hurrying away.
He lies, stiff, unspeaking, and thinks of his sister a shape in the doorway that first endless night, appearing suddenly in moonlight, her voice like a lifeboat. “Can I sleep here, Kehinde?” He should have said no. “It’s too cold in my bedroom,” she said. “I can’t sleep.” “Yeah, me either,” he said, and she climbed into bed. The other, by the doorway, too far from the window, too hot in the night with the broken A/C. He’d wake one week later to find that she’d slipped in with him in his bed, with her feet by his pillow: a girl and a boy in thin Disney World nightclothes, a version of themselves that he hasn’t seen since.
viii
Fola lies staring through the darkness at Sadie, who snores as if sighing across the huge bed with her hands in small fists as they are when she’s sleeping, a habit she’s had since the day she was born. Alive if not well, Fola thinks, with a frown, suddenly wondering whether this is enough after all? One of six dead, the five left all unwell? For she feels this, she sees it, she knows they’re not well.
A single sensation overwhelms her, a new one, not dissimilar to panic, or the feeling of drowning, as if she’d been floating in flat lukewarm water—her face to the sky, and her arms and legs out—and abruptly began sinking, unexpectedly, irreversibly, too weary to stop herself, drifting down, down.
She sits up, alarmed, trying to steady her breathing, trying not to wake Sadie, but can’t catch her breath. She slips from the
bed, rushing quietly to the bathroom, where she doesn’t turn the light on. Just stands, until calm. She turns on the tap, a little trickle of water to splash on her face, dabs her cheeks with a towel. As she lowers this, she glimpses her reflection in the mirror in the moonlight, and stops, leaning forward to look.
At her face.
Rather shocked by the large, chiseled features, somehow foreign after years of not looking in the mirror—merely rubbing rose lipstick across as she leaves in the morning or patting her hair down, top, back. How long has it been since she’s looked at these features, the angular shapes of the mouth and the nose, the fair skin, still unwrinkled, the wide eyes familiar—yet different. She leans in to peer at her eyes.
The shade and the shape are the same as her father’s (and Olu’s), but something has changed over time; they are more like her father’s than she’s previously noticed, or more like her father’s than they previously were. She thinks of him less frequently than she looks in the mirror, so rarely has occasion to remember his face, to compare it to hers, as she does in this moment. His eyes on her face, where her own used to be. His eyes, with their faint sheen of grief and their laugh lines, the soft brown made softer by sorrow, by aching: these are the eyes Fola finds in the mirror. She stares, disbelieving. She touches the glass. Her father’s eyes glisten in the light from the window behind her, aglow with the gathering tears. One slides down her cheek and she touches the droplet, as one lifts a finger to just-starting rain.
She returns to the bed from the bathroom on tiptoe. She slips back the cover and lies on her back. She touches her stomach but doesn’t feel movement. She weeps until dawn without making a sound.