‘Hezar,’ Arî corrected. ‘Now she is seventeen.’ He picked up the frame and handed it to me even though I had seen it several times before. I often thought she looked younger than her years – a child-woman in make-up and adult garb who knew little of the world, its joys, its disappointments. Perhaps she had faced hardships and had witnessed things I could barely imagine. I didn’t know.
Arî sat on the end of the bed with his legs outstretched, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, leaning back on one arm. I picked out a photograph of an old woman in a head-scarf through the viewfinder, above his head. I changed position so he had his back to the lens, with the bare room and the window and the opposite building in shot. We moved the lamps a hundred and eighty degrees to illuminate the other side of the apartment.
They were talking about excrement on television, how the government needed to clamp down before the pet problem became as hopeless as the situation in Paris. There were images of people dragging their Dobermans and schnauzers across the city, hunched poodles straining against the pavement, expelling faeces.
Arî laughed and said it was odd such high priority be given to pets. Then remembering something, he dropped his usual guard to tell me about an incident that had occurred where his family lived. One day, Turkish soldiers arrived and rounded up the men in the village they claimed were members of a resistance group responsible for terrorist activities. There were old men among them, Arî’s father included, and there were young men, no more than boys. They had no idea about the claims, Arî said. They were made to lie face down on the soil while the soldiers trampled over their bodies. Arî stood to illustrate their actions. It looked as if he were crushing grapes.
‘They think they play game,’ he said, ‘the way they play with us.’
The ZDF host was still talking about the subject of street hygiene. Her mouth was moving, but I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying.
‘They make them to eat shit, like this,’ Arî said. He pointed to the television set. He gathered together the fingers of his right hand and made a scooping motion to illustrate, then blew a vapour trail of smoke across the room. ‘To eat, like food.’
I didn’t understand, and yet I did, but I couldn’t comprehend it. He had said ‘them’, meaning ‘us’, for he had been present as well.
Heinrich Henkelmann – that was next on the agenda. There was the familiar photograph of the politician and then a reconstruction of the day he died. There was film footage of the rally in Kreuzberg – I spotted myself briefly, then Marie and Antje Kiesinger, and Oskar Vogel from the Tagesschau. They highlighted other locations where Henkelmann had been seen. Finally, the farm in Lübars was shown in great detail, the route his car had taken, the precise location of the attack. Guests had joined the presenter in the studio and a replica of a yellow wheel lock, discovered several yards from his body, was displayed on screen. This was presumed to be the instrument of murder.
Arî sat and I stood staring at the television set. He did not like to talk about his life, but now he had spoken. Was it a burden for him? A shameful thing? Being forced to eat excrement, the persecution? I didn’t know all that much about Arî, his people, what he had or had not done, though I had heard about the PKK.
‘You make picture of people.’ He turned to me. ‘Why?’
I inhaled. ‘I don’t know. It interests me, Arî. When you find something you like to do in life, you do it. What’s the point otherwise?’
He nodded and thought for a while. ‘Before you take picture, where are you, when you are a boy? In which place?’ He already knew where I was from, but I had never told him why I lived in Berlin.
‘I don’t have any stories like yours.’ I continued to make adjustments to the camera and the lights. ‘Where should we go now?’ I asked. ‘Outside? We could go to the Wall.’
‘No more picture,’ he said. ‘Too many picture.’ He stood up and took down a framed photograph and gathered a collection of others from around the apartment.
‘Here is mother,’ he said. He told me their names, their approximate ages, who worked on the farms, where they were in the world now: his grandparents, his brothers, the nieces and nephews, even a few of the neighbours in the village.
‘My grandmother lived in a village too,’ I told him. Arî nodded. It was like a trick he had played on me and now I couldn’t help myself.
My grandmother had only once made the journey by bus to visit us in Lagos before she had grown too old. Before that I had never seen where she lived. The first time I remember visiting her we drove to a rambling village outside Kaduna. It was dry and desolate and did not feature on any map. We stepped into a low, crumbling building and walked through a large open compound where a young girl sat pounding yam. My mother spoke to her in Yoruba. The girl left her work and guided us to another section of the building. I inspected the area: the laundry hung up to dry, the open fire, the stack of charred pots, the mortar for pounding yam, its giant wooden pestle wet and gleaming. The sun burned onto the square of compound. I was dismayed we had come here: an outdoor kitchen, no air conditioning, no cars, no television. It seemed an incongruous place for my mother’s mother to live.
Grandma spoke no English so Matty and I could not communicate directly with her. She took my face in her wrinkled, arthritic hands, her bony fingers, and attempted to read me as if I were Braille. She too was thin like Uncle Raymond, her eldest child, and I shrieked at her spider’s touch.
‘Fonny pickin,’ she cackled. ‘Heh, heh, heh.’ She sounded like a hyena, slowed down by age, but equally mischievous.
She looked at me for long moments and simply smiled. Whenever I glanced at her she was watching me. Matty seemed oblivious. She called out our Yoruba names – no one else ever used them – whenever the feeling took hold of her, like a spirited evangelist.
‘Demola!’
‘Yes, ma?’ I answered, startled.
She smiled again, the wrinkles on her face spreading like Plasticine, and stared at me a little longer. Now and then she tried out a few sentences to see if we could suddenly understand Yoruba.
‘Fonny pickin,’ she laughed when I couldn’t reply, as if the thought of her rotund and anxious six-year-old grandson was a source of infinite mirth. I began to understand that she did not want anything of me apart from my presence.
In the evening Grandma and her housegirl – the one who had been pounding yam – made fish stew with onion rice, and roasted plantains.
‘Eat all of it,’ my mother advised, ‘so she knows you like it.’
I gasped, the taste eluding me because of the pepper in the sauce.
‘Fonny pickin,’ Grandma giggled again when I began to cough.
‘Stop that nonsense!’ Papa warned.
‘Make sure you finish it all,’ Mama said.
I ate another spoonful, coughed again. Our grandmother laughed.
‘My throat hurts,’ I whimpered. I sipped water, but continued to cough. Then I began to dry retch.
Matty looked across at me dispassionately and frowned. Grandma stopped giggling. She spoke to my mother and called her housegirl. She took my hand and led me to the compound, my mother trailing behind. The sky was alive with stars. An open fire blazed in a corner.
The housegirl approached with a plastic container which she handed to my grandmother. In the other hand she held a glass of water. Grandma scooped a dollop of pounded yam with her fingers, smoothing it into a ball. She opened her mouth wide so I would mimic her. She pushed the yam into my mouth and even though it hurt to swallow, I followed her example. She took the glass from the girl and gave me a sip of water. Then she fashioned a second ball of yam and we continued the sequence another two times until she was satisfied.
‘How does that feel?’ my mother asked.
I hadn’t realized the fish bone had become dislodged until my mother’s question.
‘I think it’s gone now,’ I said, coughing again for sympathy.
Grandma could do no wrong in my eyes after that, despite the
mosquitoes that sang in my ears all night and the lack of air conditioning. She had saved me, after all. As we drove back to Lagos after the long weekend, it was as if we had known one another throughout our lives, rather than during our brief, intermittent visits. Even though we could not speak the same language, we had made ourselves understood. We had been strangers before, but now we were familiar. Family.
16
WHATEVER HAPPENS TO a person usually involves a degree of choice. It was Uncle Raymond’s choice to be so unlike my mother and grandmother. He was a mystery – an abyss I could never fathom. One moment he would be guffawing infectiously, the next, without warning, his wrath would billow out. I was rarely able to gauge his moods and I often assumed he was cheerful when he was in a foul temper, or he was not to be disturbed when he was in good humour.
‘Don’t trouble your uncle now,’ Aunt Ama would say, if she sensed a confrontation. I would stop immediately or leave the vicinity. With her things were very simple.
Uncle Raymond claimed I looked exactly like Papa and as far as I could gather, he had never approved of him. He always felt his sister had chosen unwisely, had married beneath her status. I don’t know the history of it, where my uncle’s anger came from, but Mama was cool and pleasant, so very different from her older brother, the adored Raymond of her youth.
I often felt I was the only one who experienced Uncle Raymond’s anger. I don’t know whether or not this was true. I don’t know how others brushed against his life, but it perplexed people how rarely we got along. I seemed to be a constant source of irritation to him. It made Aunt Ama wary of situations, say a dinner party or a family outing. She was always struggling to keep us apart.
Uncle Raymond was always on the move, forever changing his place in the world. Whether this was due to a love of adventure or simply an inability to settle, I cannot say. He grew restless if he was in one place for too long, and he was always relieved to be moving elsewhere. It was like starting all over again for him. Living life from a clean slate. He worked for an oil company that sent him all round the globe. It was, for him, the ideal occupation. I don’t remember being aware of my uncle until I was five or six years old, after he returned from Venezuela.
When Matty and I arrived in Uncle Raymond’s world, it was unexpected. It had never been part of his plan to take us anywhere, for us to become a chapter in his life. But when our parents died he had no choice. He was the only relative familiar enough to look after us. We did not know our father’s side of the family and my mother had only Raymond.
The news that he was being sent to Barbados seemed to lift something in me. We had lived with his family for almost a year and I hoped the strangeness of our altered lives would now bring some recompense. Matty and I had never travelled abroad.
My youngest cousin Kayode and I spent hours poring over the pages of my brother’s atlas, charting the imaginary progress of the flight across the Atlantic. We made detours, stopping for fuel and additional passengers in various countries. We took the circuitous route to the Caribbean, flying over the Indian Ocean. As the time drew near to our departure, we must have diverted the plane to nearly every area on the globe, filling the aircraft with everyone from Icelanders to Argentinians, Indonesians to Senegalese. My altercations with Uncle Raymond subsided; my attention had been channelled in another direction.
I began to sort through my belongings, separating essential items from those I could afford to live without. I soon realized I would need more than one suitcase to transport half of what I owned. I reduced the essential pile infinitesimally only to stare longingly at what remained. I snatched back a favourite pair of shorts, a beloved T-shirt, familiar plimsolls I had cast aside the day before. Now and then I sat back and regarded the two heaps of clothes. I thought of Grandma. Would she fit into my suitcase? The prospect of leaving her behind induced pangs of guilt in me. Could I sacrifice everything I owned in order to smuggle her on board with us? I attempted to allay my feelings of guilt with the prospect of life in Barbados. Grandma invariably lost out.
No one minded about the chaos in my room, and this surprised me. Matty came and went and sometimes helped me come to a decision, but his heart wasn’t in it. I asked him, was he not excited about the move? But he only shrugged and murmured and seemed preoccupied.
‘What are you doing?’ Aunt Ama asked one day. She gazed at me in the centre of my belongings, strewn across the bedroom floor.
‘That’s going to Barbados.’ I indicated the larger pile.
‘And that?’ she pointed to the other.
I sighed and threw my hands up in the air. ‘Grandma can keep it.’
She gave a brittle smile and left the room.
It was disappointing to have Aunt Ama walk out without comment. I had hoped for some encouragement, from her at least. Perhaps I had become so distracted, so drawn by the allure of the Caribbean, I had failed to notice developments around me. There was no charged atmosphere in the house. Old suitcases were eventually pulled out and items were placed in storage. Uncle Raymond, Roli and Kunle would travel ahead, while Aunt Ama and the rest of us would shut up house and follow two weeks later. Apart from me, no one else rushed around, frantic with expectation. Even Kayode now seemed relaxed about the move. No one else had learned the names of the major towns, the beaches, neighbouring islands. They were already used to upheaval, I reasoned, and I was not.
Perhaps I hadn’t noticed how oddly people were behaving. They seemed kinder now, gentler. Even Uncle Raymond. Especially Uncle Raymond. I envisioned a time in the new country when we would be like a family, Aunt Ama and her husband the perfect surrogate parents. I knew I would try hard to please them both. I would strive to be quiet and well behaved.
But as we drove to the airport – Uncle Raymond, Matty and I – my method of blocking out the unthinkable had begun to crumble. I knew what was coming and I had only smothered it. Vague words and sentences had survived, although I had tried to strangle them: warm clothes, England, boarding school. I did not want to understand what it meant. I couldn’t manage a second separation. Everything inside me had frozen somehow. Wherever Uncle Raymond was sending us would lie behind the pane of a window. I could see it, but it would never touch me. It would all pass by and I would see, not believing it, making it somehow unreal.
I carried Matty’s atlas in my hand luggage. On the plane to London I touched my finger against Bridgetown, Barbados, guessing what the temperature would be at that precise moment.
17
IMISSED HER. LUCILLE. I didn’t know what we were doing, not seeing one another, not even speaking. Things were vague between us and the business with Claudia was ill-defined. Claudia had struck me as a woman without scruples, a good-time girl; exactly what I needed. Now she seemed to be withholding from me – her body and parts of herself that were hidden.
I phoned Matty in London. He seemed surprised I should want to visit, but said he would expect me at the weekend.
I promised Marie I would deliver the prints of the Andreas Grob exhibition the next day. She laughed and said I was becoming conscientious at last, meeting deadlines before they were due. I explained about the trip to London.
‘Pity,’ she said. ‘Kid Creole is in town next week. I was going to ask you to cover.’
I sighed. ‘I don’t know when I’m coming back. If I’m here, I’ll do it. You’ll probably have to pick someone else.’
B dropped by when I was working. He didn’t mind that I was locked away. Each time I emerged from the darkroom, he was reading the newspaper or listening to the radio or standing at the window peering out at the activity on the street below. It was overcast and humid. I wondered if a storm was imminent. I couldn’t remember the last time it had rained.
‘It says here two men were arrested in Mannheim …In connection with Henkelmann’s death,’ B read from the paper.
‘Mannheim? Why Mannheim? What’s the connection?’
‘It doesn’t say …Taken into custody yesterday … They’re
being questioned … Mid-twenties … The other is past forty. That’s all it says.’
I pulled two beers from the fridge and we drank as I worked. At one point I sat back to front on a dining chair and watched him as he spoke absentmindedly.
‘Listen to this …Two children …Drowned … A lake outside Munich.’ He scanned the article, but didn’t look up to see if I was listening. ‘Boys …Twins. Imagine, man.’
‘How’s Angelika?’ I asked.
‘Fine, fine,’ he said breezily. ‘Something’s not right here. How can two children be drowned in one go? One perhaps, but two. It doesn’t make sense.’
I sighed and got up to examine the prints. There was a photograph of the artists, Alessandro and Ettore, against the backdrop of the Old Mother Hubbard shoe. Ettore was smiling, but his eyes were half closed. I hoped the other prints would be an improvement. Claudia was sitting with the boy at the grand piano in her summer dress, their backs to the camera. The soles of the child’s feet dangled far above the floor. I put it to one side. I knew Marie would like it.
I took a handful of prints to show B, but he didn’t comment until he came to a photograph of Claudia and Jochen in conversation.
‘When was this?’ he asked. ‘I thought you didn’t like her?’
‘She’s okay,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’
He nodded, but he was trying to puzzle something out.
‘So, what’s happening with Lucille?’
I took the prints back and flicked through them and paused at the image of the blind boy I had carried. ‘I don’t know. She’s not speaking to me. I’m going to see her this weekend, if I can.’
‘Ah, that’s good. If you try, these things will sort themselves out.’ He didn’t seem as concerned as I thought he might be. ‘Angelika wants me to live with her …Twenty-four hours a day.’ He drew a circle in the air, then repeated it slowly.
I smiled and took a swig of beer. ‘I thought she was living with you anyway?’
Goodbye Lucille Page 14