“See oranges here,” the man in line behind her said, offering her a plastic bag of six peeled oranges. She had not noticed him buy them.
She shook her head. “Thank you.”
“Take one. I noticed that you have not eaten anything since morning.”
She looked at him properly then, for the first time. A nondescript face with a dark complexion unusually smooth for a man. There was something aspirational about his crisp-ironed shirt and blue tie, about the careful way he spoke English as though he feared he would make a mistake. Perhaps he worked for one of the new-generation banks and was making a much better living than he had ever imagined possible.
“No, thank you,” she said. The woman in front turned to glance at her and then went back to talking to some people about a special church service called the American Visa Miracle Ministry.
“You should eat, oh,” the man behind her said, although he no longer held out the bag of oranges.
She shook her head again; the pain was still there, somewhere between her eyes. It was as if jumping from the balcony had dislodged some bits and pieces inside her head so that they now clattered painfully. Jumping had not been her only choice, she could have climbed onto the mango tree whose branch reached across the balcony, she could have dashed down the stairs. The men had been arguing, so loudly that they blocked out reality, and she believed for a moment that maybe that popping sound had not been a gun, maybe it was the kind of sneaky thunder that came at the beginning of harmattan, maybe the red splash really was palm oil, and Ugonna had gotten to the bottle somehow and was now playing a fainting game even though it was not a game he had ever played. Then their words pulled her back. You think she will tell people it was an accident? Is this what Oga asked us to do? A small child! We have to hit the mother. No, that is double trouble. Yes. No, let’s go, my friend!
She had dashed out to the balcony then, climbed over the railing, jumped down without thinking of the two storeys, and crawled into the dustbin by the gate. After she heard the roar of their car driving away, she went back to her flat, smelling of the rotten plantain peels in the dustbin. She held Ugonna’s body, placed her cheek to his quiet chest, and realized that she had never felt so ashamed. She had failed him.
“You are anxious about the visa interview,abi?” the man behind her asked.
She shrugged, gently, so as not to hurt her back, and forced a vacant smile.
“Just make sure that you look the interviewer straight in the eye as you answer the questions. Even if you make a mistake, don’t correct yourself, because they will assume you are lying. I have many friends they have refused, for small-small reasons. Me, I am applying for a visitor’s visa. My brother lives in Texas and I want to go for a holiday.”
He sounded like the voices that had been around her, people who had helped with her husband’s escape and with Ugonna’s funeral, who had brought her to the embassy. Don’t falter as you answer the questions, the voices had said. Tell them all about Ugonna, what he was like, but don’t overdo it, because every day people lie to them to get asylum visas, about dead relatives that were never even born. Make Ugonna real. Cry, but don’t cry too much.
“They don’t give our people immigrant visas anymore, unless the person is rich by American standards. But I hear people from European countries have no problems getting visas. Are you applying for an immigrant visa or a visitor’s?” the man asked.
“Asylum.” She did not look at his face; rather, she felt his surprise.
“Asylum? That will be very difficult to prove.”
She wondered if he read The New Nigeria, if he knew about her husband. He probably did. Everyone supportive of the pro-democracy press knew about her husband, especially because he was the first journalist to publicly call the coup plot a sham, to write a story accusing General Abacha of inventing a coup so that he could kill and jail his opponents. Soldiers had come to the newspaper office and carted away large numbers of that edition in a black truck; still, photocopies got out and circulated throughout Lagos — a neighbor had seen a copy pasted on the wall of a bridge next to posters announcing church crusades and new films. The soldiers had detained her husband for two weeks and broken the skin on his forehead, leaving a scar the shape of an L. Friends had gingerly touched the scar when they gathered at their flat to celebrate his release, bringing bottles of whiskey. She remembered somebody saying to him, Nigeria will be well because of you, and she remembered her husband’s expression, that look of the excited messiah, as he talked about the soldier who had given him a cigarette after beating him, all the while stammering in the way he did when he was in high spirits. She had found that stammer endearing years ago; she no longer did.
“Many people apply for asylum visa and don’t get it,” the man behind her said. Loudly. Perhaps he had been talking all the while.
“Do you read The New Nigeria?” she asked. She did not turn to face the man, instead she watched a couple ahead in the line buy packets of biscuits; the packets crackled as they opened them.
“Yes. Do you want it? The vendors may still have some copies.”
“No. I was just asking.”
“Very good paper. Those two editors, they are the kind of people Nigeria needs. They risk their lives to tell us the truth. Truly brave men. If only we had more people with that kind of courage.”
It was not courage, it was simply an exaggerated selfishness. A month ago, when her husband forgot about his cousin’s wedding even though they had agreed to be wedding sponsors, telling her he could not cancel his trip to Kaduna because his interview with the arrested journalist there was too important, she had looked at him, the distant, driven man she had married, and said, “You are not the only one who hates the government.” She went to the wedding alone and he went to Kaduna, and when he came back, they said little to each other; much of their conversation had become about Ugonna, anyway. You will not believe what this boy did today, she would say when he came home from work, and then go on to recount in detail how Ugonna had told her that there was pepper in his Quaker Oats and so he would no longer eat it, or how he had helped her draw the curtains.
“So you think what those editors do is bravery?” She turned to face the man behind her.
“Yes, of course. Not all of us can do it. That is the real problem with us in this country, we don’t have enough brave people.” He gave her a long look, righteous and suspicious, as though he was wondering if she was a government apologist, one of those people who criticized the pro-democracy movements, who maintained that only a military government would work in Nigeria. In different circumstances, she might have told him of her own journalism, starting from university in Zaria, when she had organized a rally to protest General Buhari’s government’s decision to cut student subsidies. She might have told him how she wrote for the Evening News here in Lagos, how she did the story on the attempted murder of the publisher of The Guardian, how she had resigned when she finally got pregnant, because she and her husband had tried for four years and she had a womb full of fibroids.
She turned away from the man and watched the beggars make their rounds along the visa line. Rangy men in grimy long tunics who fingered prayer beads and quoted the Koran; women with jaundiced eyes who had sickly babies tied to their backs with threadbare cloth; a blind couple led by their daughter, blue medals of the Blessed Virgin Mary hanging around their necks below tattered collars. A newspaper vendor walked over, blowing his whistle. She could not see The New Nigeria among the papers balanced on his arm. Perhaps it had sold out. Her husband’s latest story, “The Abacha Years So Far: 1993 to 1997,” had not worried her at first, because he had written nothing new, only compiled killings and failed contracts and missing money. It was not as if Nigerians did not already know these things. She had not expected much trouble, or much attention, but only a day after the paper came out, BBC radio carried the story on the news and interviewed an exiled Nigerian professor of politics who said her husband deserved a Human Rights Award. He f
ights repression with the pen, he gives a voice to the voiceless, he makes the world know.
Her husband had tried to hide his nervousness from her. Then, after someone called him anonymously — he got anonymous calls all the time, he was that kind of journalist, the kind who cultivated friendships along the way — to say that the head of state was personally furious, he no longer hid his fear; he let her see his shaking hands. Soldiers were on their way to arrest him, the caller said. The word was, it would be his last arrest, he would never come back. He climbed into the boot of the car minutes after the call, so that if the soldiers asked, the gateman could honestly claim not to know when her husband had left. She took Ugonna down to a neighbor’s flat and then quickly sprinkled water in the boot, even though her husband told her to hurry, because she felt somehow that a wet boot would be cooler, that he would breathe better. She drove him to his coeditor’s house. The next day, he called her from Benin Republic; the coeditor had contacts who had sneaked him over the border. His visa to America, the one he got when he went for a training course in Atlanta, was still valid, and he would apply for asylum when he arrived in New York. She told him not to worry, she and Ugonna would be fine, she would apply for a visa at the end of the school term and they would join him in America. That night, Ugonna was restless and she let him stay up and play with his toy car while she read a book. When she saw the three men burst in through the kitchen door, she hated herself for not insisting that Ugonna go to bed. If only—“Ah, this sun is not gentle at all. These American Embassy people should at least build a shade for us. They can use some of the money they collect for visa fee,” the man behind her said.
Somebody behind him said the Americans were collecting the money for their own use. Another person said it was intentional to keep applicants waiting in the sun. Yet another laughed. She motioned to the blind begging couple and fumbled in her bag for a twenty-naira note. When she put it in the bowl, they chanted, “God bless you, you will have money, you will have good husband, you will have good job,” in Pidgin English and then in Igbo and Yoruba. She watched them walk away. They had not told her, “You will have many good children.” She had heard them tell that to the woman in front of her.
The embassy gates swung open and a man in a brown uniform shouted, “First fifty on the line, come in and fill out the forms. All the rest, come back another day. The embassy can attend to only fifty today.”
“We are lucky, abi?” the man behind her said.
She watched the visa interviewer behind the glass screen, the way her limp auburn hair grazed the folded neck, the way green eyes peered at her papers above silver frames as though the glasses were unnecessary.
“Can you go through your story again, ma’am? You haven’t given me any details,” the visa interviewer said with an encouraging smile. This, she knew, was her opportunity to talk about Ugonna.
She looked at the next window for a moment, at a man in a dark suit who was leaning close to the screen, reverently, as though praying to the visa interviewer behind. And she realized that she would die gladly at the hands of the man in the black hooded shirt or the one with the shiny bald head before she said a word about Ugonna to this interviewer, or to anybody at the American embassy. Before she hawked Ugonna for a visa to safety.
Her son had been killed, that was all she would say. Killed. Nothing about how his laughter started somehow above his head, high and tinkly. How he called sweets and biscuits “breadie-breadie.” How he grasped her neck tight when she held him. How her husband said that he would be an artist because he didn’t try to build with his LEGO blocks but instead he arranged them, side by side, alternating colors. They did not deserve to know.
“Ma’am? You say it was the government?” the visa interviewer asked.
“Government” was such a big label, it was freeing, it gave people room to maneuver and excuse and re-blame. Three men. Three men like her husband or her brother or the man behind her on the visa line. Three men.
“Yes. They were government agents,” she said.
“Can you prove it? Do you have any evidence to show that?”
“Yes. But I buried it yesterday. My son’s body.”
“Ma’am, I am sorry about your son,” the visa interviewer said. “But I need some evidence that you know it was the government. There is fighting going on between ethnic groups, there are private assassinations. I need some evidence of the government’s involvement and I need some evidence that you will be in danger if you stay on in Nigeria.”
She looked at the faded pink lips, moving to show tiny teeth. Faded pink lips in a freckled, insulated face. She had the urge to ask the visa interviewer if the stories in The New Nigeria were worth the life of a child. But she didn’t. She doubted that the visa interviewer knew about pro-democracy news papers or about the long, tired lines outside the embassy gates in cordoned-off areas with no shade where the furious sun caused friendships and headaches and despair.
“Ma’am? The United States offers a new life to victims of political persecution but there needs to be proof …”
A new life. It was Ugonna who had given her a new life, surprised her by how quickly she took to the new identity he gave her, the new person he made her. “I’m Ugonna’s mother,” she would say at his nursery school, to teachers, to parents of other children. At his funeral in Umunnachi, because her friends and family had been wearing dresses in the same Ankara print, somebody had asked, “Which one is the mother?” and she had looked up, alert for a moment, and said, “I’m Ugonna’s mother.” She wanted to go back to their ancestral hometown and plant ixora flowers, the kind whose needle-thin stalks she had sucked as a child. One plant would do, his plot was so small. When it bloomed, and the flowers welcomed bees, she wanted to pluck and suck at them while squatting in the dirt. And afterwards, she wanted to arrange the sucked flowers side by side, like Ugonna had done with his LEGO blocks. That, she realized, was the new life she wanted.
At the next window, the American visa interviewer was speaking too loudly into his microphone, “I’m not going to accept your lies, sir!”
The Nigerian visa applicant in the dark suit began to shout and to gesture, waving his see-through plastic file that bulged with documents. “This is wrong! How can you treat people like this? I will take this to Washington!” until a security guard came and led him away.
“Ma’am? Ma’am?”
Was she imagining it, or was the sympathy draining from the visa interviewer’s face? She saw the swift way the woman pushed her reddish-gold hair back even though it did not disturb her, it stayed quiet on her neck, framing a pale face. Her future rested on that face. The face of a person who did not understand her, who probably did not cook with palm oil, or know that palm oil when fresh was a bright, bright red and when not fresh, congealed to a lumpy orange.
She turned slowly and headed for the exit.
“Ma’am?” she heard the interviewer’s voice behind her.
She didn’t turn. She walked out of the American embassy, past the beggars who still made their rounds with enamel bowls held outstretched, and got into her car.
The Shivering
On the day a plane crashed in Nigeria, the same day the Nigerian first lady died, somebody knocked loudly on Ukamaka’s door in Princeton. The knock surprised her because nobody ever came to her door unannounced — this after all was America, where people called before they visited — except for the FedEx man, who never knocked that loudly; and it made her jumpy because since morning she had been on the Internet reading Nigerian news, refreshing pages too often, calling her parents and her friends in Nigeria, making cup after cup of Earl Grey that she allowed to get cold. She had minimized early pictures from the crash site. Each time she looked at them, she brightened her laptop screen, peering at what the news articles called “wreckage,” a blackened hulk with whitish bits scattered all about it like torn paper, an indifferent lump of char that had once been a plane filled with people — people who buckled their seat belts
and prayed, people who unfolded newspapers, people who waited for the flight attendant to roll down a cart and ask, “Sandwich or cake?” One of those people might have been her ex-boyfriend Udenna.
The knock sounded again, louder. She looked through the peephole: a pudgy, dark-skinned man who looked vaguely familiar though she could not remember where she had seen him before. Perhaps it was at the library or on the shuttle to the Princeton campus. She opened the door. He half-smiled and spoke without meeting her eye. “I am Nigerian. I live on the third floor. I came so that we can pray about what is happening in our country.”
She was surprised that he knew she, too, was Nigerian, that he knew which apartment was hers, that he had come to knock on her door; she still could not place where she had seen him before.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
She let him in. She let into her apartment a stranger wearing a slack Princeton sweatshirt who had come to pray about what was happening in Nigeria, and when he reached out to take her hands in his, she hesitated slightly before extending hers. They prayed. He prayed in that particularly Nigerian Pentecostal way that made her uneasy: he covered things with the blood of Jesus, he bound up demons and cast them in the sea, he battled evil spirits. She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, this bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened. But she did not say these words, because they would sound sanctimonious coming from her; she would not be able to give them that redeeming matter-of-fact dryness as Father Patrick so easily did.
The Thing Around Your Neck Page 13