The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Even after Abuelo Damason had managed to convince her that he had not been mocking her country’s role in the war, Brigitte still refused to teach his daughters German. My aunt Tia Dayame refused to learn German. Tia Pilar refused to learn German, and so did Tia Caridad. They all said the same thing: ‘What’s the point of learning German?’ but each of them had different reasons. The sisters were not close.

  ‘German is the language of ideas,’ my abuelo repeated, in an attempt to persuade Brigitte and his daughters.

  ‘But not of reality,’ Brigitte said, and she was sad. Chabella took up Brigitte’s copy of Der Struwwelpeter and started reading aloud Heinrich Hoffmann’s dire warning to bad children. Her beginner’s accent was jaw dropping. (Chabella can still muster that accent now. When she puts it on she sounds like an adenoidal man morphing into a frog.) Brigitte looked at her blankly. Brigitte said, ‘Do you have any idea of the meaning of those words?’

  Chabella looked at an illustration; a giant in yellow trousers was dipping two squirming boys headfirst into a cauldron of ink. She said, ‘Not exactly.’

  Brigitte said calmly, ‘You’ll sound better if you elongate your vowels when you see those two little dots – they’re called umlauts.’ And so Chabella’s first German lesson began.

  That is the collection of things Chabella and I have decided about Brigitte. She is the only non-saintly white face in Chabella’s candle-lit display. Brigitte bought her place in Chabella’s altar with the gold-dust scarcity in Habana of red leather pumps. Brigitte put a pair under Chabella’s pillow the morning she finally left for America. And Chabella didn’t even find the pumps until she hid her face in the pillow to cry because she missed Brigitte. Brigitte had known that she would do that. When she left Chabella at the front door, Brigitte didn’t hug my Mami, but she touched her fingers to her own red lips and said, ‘This is a kiss.’ Chabella felt it the same as the gunshot. ‘Esto es un beso, moquenquen, dies ist ein Kuss,’ and then no word from Brigitte again.

  Not long after she left, Batista left too – he fled Cuba. The change that everyone had promised and threatened came, and it came in the form of a military junta, which meant that uniformed men toted guns and smiled celebratory peace and did not fire in places where they could be heard. Chabella didn’t break her routine of stumbling into the one pothole on her street that was her particular bane.

  When Mami speaks German she becomes wise. Glad crinkles frame her lips and eyes. Weltschmerzen, Dasein, Sitz im Leben, and so, and so, from web of thought to web of thought she departs from images and describes things unseen.

  I walk back to Aaron’s with my Walkman switched on. My favourite song is sung slowly, blues about a woman who is alone and still and doesn’t understand that she doesn’t like it that way. But because the woman is patient and because she has perfect hair and because she enchants her clothes with French perfume, she sometimes gets a visit from her man, and then, oh. Then the song is poison in your ear, music to seal you in. Because when her visitor comes, the shadow song begins. Nobody has reason to cry the way someone is crying inside this song, not alone. Nobody has it inside them to climb just that note and keep ascending, they couldn’t, not even if they were crazy.

  The song woman who curls her hair, she is white, I think. The singing woman, the one who makes me know that the song woman curls her hair, she is black, her voice is whisky dark. The screech in this song is bigger than either of them and it’s both of them doing it, both of them telling on each other until it seems that they fuse into one face and the piano player and his gentle backing notes are playing themselves out from a dangerous position on the screamer’s nose. But the piano player doesn’t fall into the mouth, of course. Screaming doesn’t do anything.

  I rewind and replay as I walk down streets and into walls of cloth and skin and people and ‘excuse me’s and late-afternoon confusions of pavement and sky.

  Once, when I was listening to this song at the bus stop, out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman staring at me, I saw a woman lift her hand to touch me, and when I looked at her it was Chabella. I pushed the headphones down and she smiled uncertainly and said, ‘I almost didn’t recognise you. But after all I thought, No, that girl looks like me.’

  Another time, when I arrived at band rehearsal listening to this favourite song of mine, I lifted off my earphones gingerly and cupped my hands to my ears, expecting blood.

  5

  roots people

  One day in Habana, the day that would end in nochebuena

  (the good night, Christmas Eve)

  Yemaya, in love with Cuba, went walking in La Regla, repeating after the Columbus in her mind’s eye, ‘This is the most beautiful land I have ever seen.’

  The day was hot but gentle; beneath its healing steam lay granite, decrepit wood, rocks gloved in blanched sand. The harbour water caught sunlight in layered hoops of petrol-coloured dirt and tried to keep its clarity secret, but the divers told. Small, earth-brown boys kept bobbing up, their backbones hacking out of their skin, hair plastered to their heads, coin pouches around their waists rattling as they added new handfuls of slick bronze to their store.

  Aya gathered up her seven skirts – blue lacing silver lacing more blue – and raced herself. She ran past irregularly spaced palm trees, looming with their tops drying out. She ran past a woman clothed in a swarm of toddlers; the woman cooked corncobs on a charcoal-heated griddle with her skirt hitched up around her knees. With her other hand, she kept her children from cooking themselves on her pan.

  Yemaya didn’t even stop

  (though she felt a pull and a fuzzy, bite-sized happiness like a kiss on the nape of her neck)

  at the small household shrine, strung and nailed to a house’s doorway, that was meant for her. Ignored, Our Lady of Regla pouted sweet and pink from a ribboned cage of sea lavender and long-funnelled trout lilies, and cowrie shells with fluted mouths.

  Aya stopped at the watchmaker’s parlour – here, a man with hair dreadlocked like a powerful man, like a babalawo, made watches and clocks, squinted over tiny, intricate mechanisms with pincers and thin magnets and hammers the size of Aya’s little finger. His clocks were not ordinary, but he sold them at carelessly cheap prices out of his living room. This watchmaker, he spoke exactly like a Cuban – but he said he was not Cuban.

  Yemaya saw that, amongst old, knotted mahogany clocks with glazed faces, new clocks peeped out. Their faces were plain, mounted on block-like bases with hands of beaten brass that drove the minutes forward on their glint. Anyone who stood too close to see the time on one of these clocks felt a wafer-thin breeze from elsewhere, a colder place, a higher place. The watchmaker, a scattering of sawdust in his hair, waited for her at the counter with his fingers folded over some secret in his palm.

  ‘Hold out your hand,’ he said, smiling. He looked at her as if he thought her beautiful, and this was rare, and this made Yemaya trust him. She held out both her hands, cupping them to carry away sweetness, and he chided her: ‘Greedy. One hand is enough.’

  His gift was a loose knot of seeds. They looked like oval woodchips, but something green slept inside them. She wondered what a drop of her vanilla would do to them, and stowed them thoughtfully in the pocket of her top skirt before she remembered to say thank you.

  Her watchmaker said, ‘One day, not now, they’ll grow for you, and show you what it is that you most desire. Remember, won’t you?’

  She nodded, and he told her then that he was going home. ‘But you must keep those seeds safe. Another time, many years ago, I gave some seeds such as these to a woman as a gift. What this woman most wanted was children, but she was barren. When she spoke of children, I saw how much of her life these dream children had already taken. She knew so much about them, and so little about anything else. She had decided she wanted two boys and a gentle girl, the two boys to take care of the girl and keep each other company. And they would all love each other. I had some of these seeds, and –’

  ‘Where did you ge
t them from?’ Aya asked, eagerly.

  With a wounded stare, the watchmaker said simply, ‘They are mine.’

  She raised her hand in apology. He continued: ‘I told her to plant and water them, and to wait and see. She came back to me one month later, shaking. “Those seeds,” the woman said, “are growing.”

  ‘I said, “Of course.” Her face –

  ‘She said, “Children. Children are growing from the seeds.”

  ‘I said, “Of course.” Then I asked her, because she wanted me to ask, what kind of children. But she shook her head. She just shook her head. She couldn’t explain. How many are there? Three. Just as many as she’d wanted. I saw such fear in her . . . she asked me what to do, then answered herself. She would leave them buried, her children; maybe that way they would die before they could properly draw breath. A cruel thing – I told her so. But she kept saying, “It is better this way. It is better this way.” ’

  The watchmaker stopped speaking – Aya saw that he was lost. She pressed his hand.

  ‘What kind of children are better left buried?’ he asked her.

  She tried to guess the end of his tale, the moral of it. ‘Did you dig the children up?’

  He did not.

  ‘Did she take pity?’

  ‘She dug them up in their ninth month, and they fled her. They must have known that she never wanted them to draw breath. Children know, and when they know. . . it is terrible.’

  ‘They fled her? How do you know?’

  The watchmaker gagged, gaped, put his hand over his mouth, then seemed to recover himself and pretended to wipe dust from his face. ‘I saw them.’

  Aya’s vanilla didn’t make the watchmaker’s seeds grow, and neither did plain water. When she dug up the seeds and pocketed them, she wondered whether it was because she didn’t yet know what she wanted.

  Dominique and I were good friends until we lost interest in each other. We had only really been friends because she lived two doors away. Then she moved, and nothing. Chabella was disappointed in us both: ‘You’re black girls, as good as sisters!’

  Chabella made me phone Dominique a couple of times. I wasn’t allowed to mention that I had phoned against my will. Dominique phoned me a couple of times as well. It was excruciating for us both, and then we were allowed to stop. Even after I stopped, it was awkward for a little bit.

  Dominique was in my class from primary school right up until we left sixth form for university. Either I had never looked at her properly, or her face receded beneath the swathes of her hair until I forgot it. Dominique is from Trinidad and she had beautiful hair, soft and thick, which her mother, like mine, banned her from straightening and helped her comb out into a fan. People teased her about it all the time and called her ‘picky head’. Dominique took the name calmly, without offering any insults of her own, which I couldn’t understand. But then some people give off a strange sense of preoccupation, as if there is something in their lives so important to them that they have to keep it silent, and close. And to keep this thing close, they make sacrifices.

  Of course, Mami loved Dominique’s hair. And she loved Dominique, who ate everything Mami served at dinner with genuine relish. Dominique tried to teach me some of her sunny, rolling patois. I couldn’t pick it up, but I offered to teach her Spanish. She said, ‘No thanks.’

  Dominique’s mum, Cedelka, was a cleaner; she became good friends with Chabella, and her stories about the everyday filthiness of the people she cleaned for racked Mami with guilt. Their conversations always ended with Cedelka assuring Chabella that Chabella worked just as hard as she did, taking care of her family and doing ‘all that language stuff’, and Chabella rhapsodising on Cedelka’s natural wisdom.

  Cedelka wore dreadlocks and she was all soulful eyes and beautiful lips. When I played or ate dinner at Dominique’s, or when Cedelka came to collect Dominique from my house, she would reveal an instinct for freezing gracefully, a way of turning her face to the light when she stepped outside.

  I always knew when Chabella had been talking to Dominique’s mum because she would start to mutter, ‘I don’t work hard enough, I’m not useful, all this paper and scribbling is making me soft.’ Chabella would take out her sponges and scrubbers and bleach and get on her hands and knees to clean the kitchen and bathroom from corner to corner. Papi didn’t like that. He especially hated it if I helped her, which I did to stop her from crying. ‘I don’t want to see my wife scrubbing away like that,’ he would say. ‘I write textbooks! Chabella, use a mop, or we’ll get a cleaner. And please, my daughter is not your assistant. Maja, go and have a bath and read a book or something.’

  ‘Get a cleaner! And you just equated this hypothetical cleaning woman with a mop!’ Chabella’s eyes filled with tears.

  Papi kissed her, sweat and soap suds and all. ‘I was joking. Forget it.’

  He didn’t know that mostly the cleaning was fun once we’d started; it was only the idea of it that made me sigh and drag my feet. We were never very thorough and it was more like play-acting, down on the floor with soapy rags and cleaner rags on our heads as we mimed to The Supremes and The Drifters and Melanie Safka’s ‘Brand New Key’.

  Cedelka said to me, half-jokingly, ‘Please don’t try and teach my daughter Spanish! Black people ain’t meant to speak Spanish!’

  ‘Black people ain’t meant to speak English, neither, then. Or French Creole,’ I said, using exactly the same tone.

  Cedelka swatted at my head. ‘You must get that big brain from your big-brain parents.’

  I remembered what Cedelka said when I was in Year 9, when the most popular girls in my and Amy Eleni’s form were those with African parents; girls with perfectly straightened hair and mellow gospel voices that changed the sound of the sung school Mass; girls who had (or pretended to have) Igbo, Ewe, Yoruba, Chiga, Ganda, Swahili. They built a kind of slang that was composed of slightly anglicised words borrowed from their pool of languages. The code sounded impossibly cool if you had the right turn of the tongue for it, which I didn’t, although some of the white girls did. Lucy, who started up the slang, was Ugandan; she had a pretty heart-shaped face and a rabidly intent method of marking her netball opponent.

  At school a lot of the other girls brought flags out on their countries’ independence days. With permission from the teachers, they tied them around their upper arms or waists and tied their hair up with ribbons in their flags’ colours. On Nigerian Independence Day, one girl did a special assembly on her country and passed around an overwhelming amount of fried Nigerian snacks. Amy Eleni and I were at the back. Amy Eleni put her hand up and said, ‘Can I just ask you what you think of this idea: if your parents taught you to be so proud of Nigeria, how come they’re over here?’

  The girl stammered and fiddled with her tie-dyed head wrap. People started hissing disagreement with Amy Eleni. Amy Eleni and I hissed back. Isn’t living in your country the best way to show that you think it worthy of love? You choose to live in a country because there’s something there that makes it better than anywhere else. You set your daily life down regardless of the restrictive conditions. It’s the same sort of thing Clarence talks about in True Romance – he says real love is remaining loyal when it’s easier, even excusable, not to.

  The talk about Nigerian independence continued. Amy Eleni sighed and wrote a long note in small letters on her hand. The note was so long that she had to take my hand to write on, too, and we could only read her note to me by placing our biro-splotched palms alongside each other. The note said:

  You know what, if you want to talk about your original country, if you want to be serious about it, fine. But you don’t need to pretend that you love the place. People need to stop using love of some country that they don’t live in as an excuse for their inability to shut up about it.

  We kept the note on our hands all day, smiling enigmatically and turning our hands palms-down when other girls wheedled, ‘Let me see.’

  Dominique was at home sick the day Lucy
came up to me at registration, peeped at me through heavy lashes and said, ‘You know, a lot of the others have been saying that out of you and Dominique, we like you better. You’re all right. You’re roots.’

  I must have seemed stupid to her. I said, ‘Huh?’ I thought a black girl was a black girl. Why did it come down to a choice between me and Dominique, and not any of the other girls? Then I got it; we were both black without coming from the right place. We were the slave girls from Trinidad and Cuba; not supposed to speak Spanish, not supposed to speak English either. I wanted to curse Lucy Cuban-style, but I was afraid she’d understand; she was predicted an A star for GCSE Spanish.

  Tonight I am singing a set at a café whose poetry-night theme is ‘Solitude’. They’ve asked me to start with my three least-favourite songs: ‘In my Solitude’, ‘Black Coffee’ and ‘Misty Blue’. When Michael from the band called to tell me about it last week, he anticipated my response, chanting ‘Oh, whine, whine, whine,’ along with me. ‘Don’t worry about it – next week it’s Ronnie Scott’s, with our own songs . . .’

  I hastily assemble my things so that they’re in the general vicinity of the full-length bedroom mirror – make-up bag, a selection of black stiletto heels, armfuls of dresses on hangers, hair tongs tangled in their own plug lead, sheer tights that are to the best of my knowledge unladdered. Aaron’s side of our dresser is analytically tidy: a small city of glass-bottled gift colognes and sable-backed hairbrushes, mostly unused, alongside a depleted bundle of the tough, dried-wood chewing sticks he swears by – my teeth ache just looking at them. The only things on his bedside table are a water glass and a photograph of him and his best friend, aged ten. In the picture Geoffrey is cola-dark, with astonishing, vine-like sideburns. Aaron is defiantly pale and chubby-cheeked; his hair is slicked into some attempt at a Jheri curl. They both have carelessly gappy smiles; they stand together in a heaving Accra sidestreet swept with umber dust, against a battered blue backdrop that says ‘PepsiCo’.