Nigerians in Space

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “But how?” Melissa asked. “I don’t have a job.”

  “There is money to be made in this country. You’ll find a way. Classes begin in the morning.”

  “What about the hospital? My father said I’d be going to the hospital.”

  “Not unless you can afford it.”

  “Mr. Bello can afford it.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Bello.”

  “I’m afraid that I have never heard of him.”

  “But—”

  “This way, Mademoiselle. To your room.”

  None of the other girls spoke English. Her flatmates were from Rwanda, the Central African Republic, and Niger. The rest were from Zaire. The girl from Niger wore a hijab headscarf that showed her face. She spoke a few words to Melissa until she said, “I’m not Muslim.” Then she stayed away. Madame Kaluanda’s rules meant that the oldest girl was in charge, but this didn’t work in practice because some were cleverer than others, and it became clear that night that a slender, gracious girl called Béatrice controlled the home. Melissa’s roommates gave her some food and talked to her for an hour, asking about her niqab, and chatting warmly as if she spoke their own language, then took their beds when Béatrice ordered the lights out. Melissa refused to take off her robe.

  “Papa?” one of them whispered. “Où se trouve ton Papa?” Melissa pretended not to hear her, but she kept on going: “Maman, Papa? Où se trouvent vos parents? Maman, Papa?”

  She knew the girl was asking about her parents, and the girl kept on repeating, ‘Maman, Papa’, for a few minutes, the other chiming in with a ‘maman’, and at one point they said it so often they began humming ‘maman, papa’ to a tune, like a nursery rhyme, Melissa curling the pillow over her ears. Why did they care about her father? What did they know about such things? They knew where their parents were living; they could talk to them. Papa, Papa, Maman, Maman, Papa, Papa, Papa, the girls went on until they fell asleep.

  As soon as her roommates stopped rustling, Melissa reached beneath her niqab and removed the manilla envelope that had been attached to the package for Mr. Bello. After she’d looked inside, she’d decided that her father must have wanted her to see it and she’d hidden it in her niqab. Why else would he close it with a simple clasp instead of glue like he normally did? The envelope contained a few papers. One listed names and telephone numbers:

  Nurudeen Bello. 33-1-45-23-35-25

  Obafemi Ferguson. 46-8-32-24-65-22

  Ogun Olesegun. 33-1-56-23-74-26

  Suzanne Ibibio. 49-69-24-72-83-20

  Adewale George Olufunmi. 281-766-5373

  Sheyi Obafemi. 81-75-93-28-12-24

  Jonathan Winston Soboyoja. 416-236-2024

  Mohammed Farai. 41-61-67-32-12-23

  She’d never seen the names before. Her father only worked with freedom fighters in South Africa and these names did not look South African. She also didn’t recognize the numbers. Then there was the money: a bundle of Francs, British pounds, and even dollars from the U.S.

  The money might have been for Mr. Bello himself or for Mr. Bello to spend on Melissa. Perhaps Mr. Bello would have given it to her after she had arrived—her father seemed to trust him. Still, she was glad she had looked inside the envelope, because Mr. Bello wasn’t coming to find her and she knew her father had looked after her. He would never have abandoned her the way that Mrs. Niyangabo had implied. And she felt emboldened by the money. The only question was, where had her father gone? Where could she find him?

  In the morning she blamed her sleepiness on jetlag, with Mrs. Kaluanda giving her the name for the term: décalage horaires. She was forced to go with the other girls to the lycée, and struggled through classes while trying to learn French. Madame Kaluanda would occasionally stop by the apartment and offer some rudimentals of French grammar, but beyond that the girls ruled themselves. The girls taught her enough Lingala, Swahili, and French to keep up, though she realized she couldn’t sustain their banter. They were afraid of her strange skin and the time she had spent alone over the past few years had left her incapable of chitter chatter.

  Mostly she thought of her father and the envelope he’d left her. She was afraid of asking too much about the people on the list because she knew she couldn’t talk to Madame Kaluanda. From a payphone, she dialed Mr. Bello’s house phone number several times but the number had been disconnected. She decided to try the phone number of Ogun Olesegun, which she realized was also in France. The operator said he was not disponible but at least the phone number was not disconneted. And she found his name in the phonebook:

  Ogun Olesegun, 14 Rue de Béarne, 3eme, Paris.

  It was the best news she had heard since she arrived in France. She would finally meet someone who knew her father.

  Pollsmoor Prison

  Present day

  South Africa

  Brother Leon held fast on his bunk when the cell door slid open, never showing, giving away little. He observed but did not focus, and heard without appearing to register the words. The guard threw in a prisoner. Leon expressed no more interest than he would in a piece of rubbish on the ground. The other cellmates, eager for excitement, began to harangue the new arrival.

  The cell contained thirty men in orange jumpsuits. It was about ten meters by six meters deep, with four sets of bunk beds built to accommodate eight people. There was a single toilet and two barred windows that overlooked, through an electrified fence coated with razor wire, the golf course across the road and the taillights of the cars that would snake up the mountain pass to Nordhoek Beach. Men could go crazy watching the stream of cars continually escaping the prison of the valley. Or seeing the businessmen stroll freely to whack a golf ball into the lush green driving range. Leon had learned to gaze, to unfocus his vision until all about him at Pollsmoor prison blurred into a mass of meaningless, energetic movement. Anything else would be used against him.

  The guard had pushed in a young Xhosa boy, maybe eighteen, whose wide eyes instantly betrayed a need for protection. The boy scanned the cell for other people from his neighborhood block, then his township, then his tribe. If he was lucky he would be claimed for sex. But the boy was too slight to be a fighter and his face had been scoured by malnutrition. He was so ugly that no one would want him. This meant he would be taken by several men at once.

  Leon had joined the twenty-seven gang to sell drugs, unwilling to become involved with the sex trade, and he’d enlisted to stave off the rape and to buy time for Thursday to bail him out of prison. The guards had shaved the locks from his head, to prevent lice they said, but he knew it was to break him, to begin the rapid dismantling of the real Leon, Brother Leon, and he let them cut them as if he didn’t care, tucking one into his jumpsuit. At first he had vowed to beat Thursday to a pulp when he got out of prison but now he felt differently, that he might hug him nearly to death instead. The gang had ordered Leon to pick four fights, two easy targets and two equals, and he’d won each fight handily, pummeling his opponents with vicious poetry to gain respect. After lights out, Leon would remove his lock and finger it like a rosary, sometimes smell it too.

  The shoving began. The cell gang leaders had ignored the boy, so their minions, used to being pushed around, slid off their sleeping mats. They insulted him in Afrikaans, slurred at him in bad Xhosa. They pushed him in the shoulder, while another circled around, preparing to trap him in the corner. The boy stumbled back over a mat as others began to hoot. A fist cracked into his jaw and he blinked stupidly. Leon, unfocused, almost turned away, but held himself from displaying any weakness. It would be cowardly to participate, more cowardly still to disapprove. The boy was so sheepish that the rape would be violent—he might not even survive it. If he fell to the floor he would be finished.

  Then the boy’s hand snapped out. The first man fell back, clutching at his arm. The others surged forward. The boy kicked one in the knee and slashed at another with what looked like a slice of paper. He waited for the last to charge, wound tight. Then h
e kicked himself out of the corner before whipping the paper down on the man’s calf. There were howls of pain. His innocent face had changed to one of detached, controlled purposefulness, inviting the others to come at him. He began egging them on, holding the paper above his open mouth like a fang.

  Come, he challenged with his eyes. Come.

  He hadn’t said a word.

  Leon focused his gaze. The boy had not acted out of desperation, a feat of luck that could save you for a night or maybe a week, but a strategy that would fail as the groves of iron bars and putrid food sapped your energy. The boy had also somehow known how the men would behave. But Leon didn’t recognize him. The gang members in the cell seemed equally puzzled, trying to determine his allegiance. Was he a tsotsi? A transfer from Block B? A twenty-six? If he was an insider no one seemed to know him. His arms were bare of tatoos. Leon hated allegiance and knew an opportunity to break free when he saw one.

  He called to the boy in Xhosa. The boy approached slowly, muscles taut.

  “Let’s see that weapon, bru.”

  The boy scanned Leon up and down. Then he nodded. It was a thin white plastic ruler, its edge sharpened to perfection. He must have hidden it in the lining of his jumpsuit. Still, Leon was impressed that the guard hadn’t caught it. Weapons usually came in through the windows or were fashioned from the frames of the beds, sometimes even a thick chip of plaster from the wall. The guards would strip you before you entered, probe your ass.

  “Not bad, laatie,” Leon said. “What’s the name?”

  “Lebo.”

  “I’ve been looking for a partner, Lebo.”

  “Lebo works alone.”

  “Izzit?” Leon said, handing the ruler back. “I do, too. But in Pollsmoor I think exceptions are in order. Don’t you?” He ran his hand over his shaved head, his fingers groping blindly for his locks. Then he reached into the pocket of his jumpsuit, remembering, and gave his lock a caress. He smiled. “I’m Leon.”

  The boy’s eyes suddenly flashed white. He took a step forward, peering down at Leon with intensity.

  A pale of doubt drifted through Leon like a ghost. Maybe this was not a boy he could harness, he thought. He tried to hold his gaze, watching the boy’s scarred face. The other cell mates began moving away.

  “Lebo does not make exceptions, Leon,” the boy said. “Lebo does what the Chinaman says.” He gripped the ruler in his palm then coiled his arm to strike.

  I Heard Nothing

  1993

  France

  It took a public holiday for Melissa to get to Paris, which did not take that long, as they seemed to happen more in France than she remembered in a whole year in Zimbabwe. Madame Kaluanda arrived with an armful of baguettes and cold cuts and ordered the girls to make sandwiches. They boarded a double-level commuter train and the girls giggled the entire trip into the city. Melissa hoped they’d go to the Third Quarter but instead they went to a Congolese party at Cité Universite. The girls chatted with the boys and Madame Kaluanda found a man with whom she cuddled for hours. During a lively song, Melissa saw her chance. She excused herself to go to the bathroom of the apartment building and left through another exit.

  By this time she had memorized the entire métro system and neighborhood maps of the Marais, but when she exited at the Marais she turned twice and became completely disoriented. A man at a kebab shop told her to go to La Place des Vosges, and she found her way to the cobbled square with its red brick and peaked roofs. After cutting through the line of tourists at the Maison Victor Hugo she learned that the street was not inside the plaza itself, but connected through an archway.

  14 Rue de Béarne was a six-story building with nothing approaching a doorbell. There wasn’t a knocker or any sign of how to get in, and she had not thought to learn an apartment number. There was also, she noticed nervously, a police gendarmerie across the street. She waited and tried to think of the next step when the door opened and a thirty-something man stepped out. She brushed past him into the foyer with a ‘merci’ and began walking up the worn stairs, deciding she would go straight to the top and work her way down. At the top door there was a knocker, but no one answered. Instead the apartment across the hall opened and she found herself looking at a soft-shouldered white woman with smiling eyes and a toothy grin. She had blond eyebrows that looked odd because her hair was jet black.

  “Bonjour,” she said.

  “Bonjour, Madame.”

  “Est-ce que tu cherches à Ogun?”

  “Oui,” Melissa said. “I’m looking for my friend, Ogun Olusegun.”

  The woman gave a pert nod and she let out a string of passionate words. Melissa could not follow her, and they stood there staring at each other, Melissa wondering if she’d been ordered to do something or not to do something. “I’m sorry,” Melissa said in English. “Désolée. Plus lentement, s’il vous plaît.”

  At this the woman relaxed.

  “It’s about time you came. Where are you from?”

  “Malawi,” Melissa lied.

  The woman introduced herself as Stéphanie and Melissa called herself Isabelle. The woman looked behind her into the apartment. “Please, let me get the keys.”

  There was no invitation to follow her, so Melissa waited at the door. Finally, the woman arrived with a key ring. She shut the door behind her and used the keys to open the apartment across the corridor. The apartment had a low roof and a couch that must have been able to turn into a bed because there was no other spot for one. It was very dark. There was a broad desk and an old-fashioned telephone, and tin pots hanging in a small antechamber over a tiny gas stove. To Melissa’s relief the woman opened some glass doors that led to the terrace where there was sunlight and bunches of gladiolas and orange poppies. The sunlight silhouetted the blond hair on her arms, so Melissa guessed that her black hair was died.

  “How do you know Ogun? You are young, non? Are you a niece? I am sorry but it is difficult to see beneath your niqab.”

  Melissa decided the easiest thing was to go right on lying. “I am seventeen.”

  “Seventeen? And they force you to wear that niqab like a prisoner. It’s shameful. If I could talk to your father, I would give him a piece of my mind!”

  “No, I wear it by choice. He wanted me to take it off.”

  “Ah—I see.” She seemed puzzled, and frowned as if Melissa had misspoken. “Where is he?”

  “In Évry. He wanted to invite Ogun to our horse party.”

  “Horse party? What is a horse party?”

  “You see, we bought a new horse and he always has a party. We’ve got a hundred.” She wondered if it was excessive.

  Her host didn’t seem surprised by it, though, and sighed: “I suppose Ogun has missed many obligations. I’ve tended to the flowers and kept the apartment clean. The owner wishes to throw all his things away but I received permission to wait until the end of the month. There will be new tenants then. Franchement, I expected more of his family to come.” Melissa again had the feeling that something was expected of her, but stood still. “But your people are never fond of PDs, are they?”

  “What is a PD?”

  “Gays. Homosexuals. Did your father tell you what of Ogun’s he wanted you to get?”

  “No. He is a friend.”

  The woman explained that the furniture and practical affairs had been disposed of as she led Melissa, her back hugging the wall, to a vinyl record collection. “He was very fond of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. I am told many of the records would be of value.”

  “I can just take them?”

  “Mais, bien sûr! He can do nothing more with them.”

  Stéphanie made it seem so obvious that Melissa was too embarrassed to ask why not. But she could never sneak in records to her bedroom in Évry because Madame Kaluanda would find out. She made an excuse.

  “How about some photos for your father? Perhaps there is one of the two of them together?”

  Melissa flipped through the stack of framed photos, but
found none with her father in it. Ogun had a very round head, glasses, and a considered look about him, as if he was observing all of the locations with discernment—a fishing boat, a mountain chalet, a bride and a groom, a group of men wearing bright robes about the same age, a conference with formal delegates. He had a lot of friends and most of them were black. There was an attractive man that seemed to be in a lot of photos and in one of them they were holding hands. She placed one of the photos in her backpack in order to keep Stéphanie from asking questions.

  “You’re sure you don’t want any others?”

  “Yes.”

  They walked back towards the kitchen, and Melissa checked to see if there were any clues, any telltale signs that her father had been there. She didn’t see any. The apartment felt eerily similar to Mr. Bello’s; if it weren’t for the flowers, the stale air would be the same. As they walked back and forth through the apartment, sifting through trinkets and things Stéphanie considered of interest, Melissa noticed she didn’t once step in center of the floor. It looked like another ordinary oak floorboard.

  “Why don’t you step there?”

  “Where?” Stéphanie said, continuing on.

  “On that spot.”

  Stéphanie reluctantly turned. “Ah. Because that is where it happened.”

  “Where what happened?”

  “Where he was murdered.”

  Melissa stiffened. Had she heard murder? Maybe she was mistaken. She became aware of the sound of car doors closing in front of the gendarmerie below.

  “Such a tragédie. The police are investigating but they have made no discoveries. Ogun was a good man and a goodvoisin. Like a fragrance. A good neighbor.”