Open City

by Teju Cole

  The bitterness was startling. It was an anger that, I couldn’t help feeling, was partly directed at me, the only other African in the room. The detail of my background, that I was Nigerian, made no difference, for Dr. Gupta had spoken of Africans, had sidestepped the specific and spoken in the general. But now, as I watched the film, I saw that Idi Amin himself hosted wonderful parties, told genuinely funny jokes, and spoke eloquently about the need for African self-determination. These nuances in his personality, as depicted here, would no doubt have brought a bad taste to the mouth of my host in Madison.

  I wished to believe that things were not as bad as they seemed. This was the part of me that wanted to be entertained, that preferred not to confront the horror. But that satisfaction did not come: things ended badly, as they usually do. I wondered, as Coetzee did in Elizabeth Costello, what the use was of going into these recesses of the human heart. Why show torture? Was it not enough to be told, in imprecise detail, that bad things happened? We wish to be spared, whether the story was about Idi Amin or Cornelis Van Tienhoven. It is a common wish, and a foolish one: no one is spared. Idi Amin’s young sons were named MacKenzie and Campbell—MacKenzie was epileptic—and these two Scots-Ugandans were caught in Idi Amin’s nightmare, and Obatala’s carelessness.

  I came out of the theater at midnight, into warm air. I had V.’s book with me, but after what I had just seen, I knew I would have to put it away for a while. At the almost empty subway station, there was a family of out-of-towners waiting for the train. A girl of thirteen sat on the bench next to me. Her ten-year-old brother came to join her. They were out of earshot of their parents who, save one or two unconcerned glances in our direction, were absorbed in their own conversation. Hey mister, she said, turning to me, wassup? She made signs with her fingers and, with her brother, started laughing. The little boy wore an imitation Chinese peasant’s hat. They had been mimicking slanted eyes and exaggerated bows before they came to where I was. They now both turned to me. Are you a gangster, mister? Are you a gangster? They both flashed gang signs, or their idea of gang signs. I looked at them. It was midnight, and I didn’t feel like giving public lectures. He’s black, said the girl, but he’s not dressed like a gangster. I bet he’s a gangster, her brother said, I bet he is. Hey mister, are you a gangster? They continued flicking their fingers at me for several minutes. Twenty yards away, their parents talked with each other, oblivious.

  I thought about walking home, an hour’s walk, but the uptown train arrived. I had a moment of illumination just then, a feeling that my oma (as I am accustomed to calling my maternal grandmother) should see me again, or that I should make the effort to see her, if she was still in this world, if she was in a nursing home somewhere in Brussels. Perhaps seeing me would be some sort of late blessing for her. How I might go about actually locating her, I really had no idea, but the notion seemed suddenly real to me, as did its promise of reunion, as I walked down the platform and entered a distant car.

  THREE

  On an afternoon of heavy rain when ginkgo leaves were piled ankle-deep across the sidewalk looking like thousands of little yellow creatures freshly fallen from the sky, I went out walking. I had been spending all the time that wasn’t with patients working with a professor, Dr. Martindale, on a paper for publication. The findings of our study were genuinely exciting: we had been able to show a strong correlation between strokes in the elderly and the onset of depression. But our writing of the paper had been complicated by our late realization that another laboratory had recently come to similar conclusions, using a different research protocol. Dr. Martindale was approaching retirement, and the bulk of the rewriting fell to me, as did any new assays that had to be run in the lab. The latter I did a little carelessly, breaking gels twice and having to begin again. I was at it for three arduous weeks. Then I did most of the rewrite over three intense days, and we sent off the paper, and awaited correspondence from the journals. I went out, umbrella in hand, with the idea that I might walk through Central Park, and on to the area just south of it, and as I entered the park, thoughts of my grandmother returned.

  My mother and I had become estranged from each other when I was seventeen, just before I left for America. I tend to connect this to my mother’s estrangement from her own mother. They might have fallen out for reasons as inchoate as the ones that separated my mother and me. My mother had not returned to Germany since she left in the 1970s. Nevertheless, in recent years I have thought of my oma more often. I usually dwell on the one time she came to visit us in Nigeria from Belgium, to which she had moved sometime after my grandfather’s death. The picture my mother had painted of her as a difficult and small-minded person was inaccurate; it was a picture that had nothing to do with my oma, and everything to do with my mother’s resentment of her. I was eleven when she came to visit, and I could see that both my parents were barely tolerating this strange old lady (my father sided with my mother). I also knew that part of what I was had come from her, and on this basis a sort of solidarity was established. Once during that visit, toward the end, as I recall, the whole family toured the interior of Yorubaland. Our journey took us no farther than four hours’ drive from Lagos. We visited the Deji’s Palace in Akure and the Ooni’s in Ife, both of them large traditional royal complexes built of mud brick and decorated with massive carved wooden pillars showing aspects of Yoruba cosmology: the world of the living, the world of the dead, the world of the unborn. My mother, deeply interested in the art, explained the iconography to her mother and to me. My father wandered around a little bored.

  We drove for hours on muddy, welted roads, through undulating landscape that was sere in parts and thickly forested in others. We stopped at the Ikogosi Warm Springs, and went to the sacred monoliths of Olumo Rock in Abeokuta, in and under which Egba people had taken refuge during the internecine wars of the nineteenth century. At Olumo Rock, Oma and I had stayed at the base while my parents went up with a guide. From where we stood, I could see my parents wending their way up the sheer slope, stopping at caves and outcroppings as the guide pointed out historic and religious features to them, then renewing their climb which, to us looking from below, appeared especially dangerous. That day, I treasured the silence I shared with Oma (her hand on my shoulder, kneading it); my parents were gone an hour, and in that hour we two communed almost wordlessly, simply waiting, sensitive to the wind in the trees nearby, watching the lizards scuttle over the smaller rock formations that pushed through the earth like prehistoric eggs, listening to the thrum of motorcycles on the narrow road some two hundred yards away. When my mother and father came back down, winded, flushed, pleased, they marveled about their experiences. About ours, Oma and I could say nothing, because what it was had been without words.

  Afterward, after Oma’s visit of a few weeks ended, my parents didn’t say much about her. Communication once again ceased between her and my mother, and it was as though she hadn’t ever come to Nigeria at all; the quiet, puzzled affection she had toward me faded into the past. As far as I could tell, she had returned to Belgium. And it was in Belgium that I imagined her now, though I could not say for sure if she was still alive. At the time of her visit to Nigeria, I had hoped a normal relationship between her and the rest of my family would begin. But it wasn’t meant to be; my guess is that there was a big argument between Oma and my mother just before she left. As things turned out, the only person who could tell me her present whereabouts, who could tell me if she had any present whereabouts, was the one person I couldn’t ask.

  I ENTERED THE PARK AT SEVENTY-SECOND STREET, AND BEGAN to walk south, on Sheep Meadow. The wind picked up, and water poured down into the sodden ground in fine, incessant needles, obscuring lindens, elms, and crab apples. The intensity of the rain blurred my sight, a phenomenon I had noticed before only with snowstorms, when a blizzard erased the most obvious signs of the times, leaving one unable to guess which century it was. The torrent had overlaid the park with a primeval feeling, as though a world-ending f
lood were coming on, and Manhattan looked just then like it must have in the 1920s or even, if one was far enough away from the taller buildings, much further in the past.

  The cluster of taxis at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South broke the illusion. After I had walked another quarter hour, by then thoroughly drenched, I stood under the eaves of a building on Fifty-third Street. When I turned around, I saw that I was at the entryway of the American Folk Art Museum. Never having visited before, I went in.

  The artifacts on display, most from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—weather vanes, ornaments, quilts, paintings—evoked the agrarian life of the new American country as well as the half-remembered traditions of the old European ones. It was the art of a country that had an aristocracy but did not have the patronage of courts: a simple, open-faced, and awkward art. At the landing of the first flight of stairs, I saw an oil portrait of a young girl in a starchy red dress holding a white cat. A dog peeked out from under her chair. The details were saccharine, but they could not obscure the force and beauty of the painting.

  The artists featured at the museum were, in almost every case, working outside the elite tradition. They lacked formal training, but their work had soul. The sense of having wandered into the past was complete once I reached the third floor of the museum. The gallery had a row of slender white columns running through its middle, and the floors were polished cherrywood. These two elements echoed the colonial architecture of the New England and Middle Colonies.

  That floor, as well as the one just below it, was given over to a special exhibition of the paintings of John Brewster. Brewster, the son of a New England doctor of the same name, had modest facility, but the scale of the exhibition made it clear that he had been much in demand as an artist. The gallery was quiet and calm and, save for the guard who stood in a corner, I was the only person there. This heightened the feeling of quietness I got from almost all the portraits. The stillness of the people depicted was certainly part of it, as was the sober color palette of each panel, but there was something more, something harder to define: an air of hermeticism. Each of the portraits was a sealed-away world, visible from without, but impossible to enter. This was truest of Brewster’s many portraits of children, all of them self-possessed in their infantile bodies, and often with whimsical elements in their outfits, but with the faces, without exception, serious, more serious even than those of the adults, a gravity all out of keeping with their tender ages. Each child stood in a doll-like pose, and was brought to life by an incisive gaze. The effect was unsettling. The key, as I found out, was that John Brewster was profoundly deaf, and the same was true of many of the children he portrayed. Some of them were pupils at the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, which had been founded in 1817 as the country’s first school for the deaf. Brewster was enrolled for three years there as an adult student, and it was while he was there that what later became known as American Sign Language was developed.

  As I contemplated the silent world before me, I thought of the many romantic ideas attached to blindness. Ideas of unusual sensitivity and genius were evoked by the names of Milton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Borges, Ray Charles; to lose physical sight, it is thought, is to gain second sight. One door closes and another, greater one, opens. Homer’s blindness, many believe, is a kind of spiritual channel, a shortcut to the gifts of memory and of prophecy. When I was a child in Lagos, there was a blind, wandering bard, a man who was held in the greatest awe for his spiritual gifts. When he sang his songs, he left each person with the feeling that, in hearing him, they had somehow touched the numinous, or been touched by it. Once, in a crowded market at Ojuelegba, sometime in the early eighties, I saw him. It was from quite a distance, but I remember (or imagine that I remember) his large yellow eyes, calcified to a gray color at the pupils, his frightening mien, and the big, dirty mantle he wore. He sang in a plaintive and high-pitched voice, in deep, proverbial Yoruba that was impossible for me to follow. Afterward, I imagined that I had seen something like an aura around him, a spiritual apartness that moved all his hearers to reach into their purses and put something in the bowl his assistant boy carried.

  Such is the narrative around blindness. Not so with deafness which, as in the case of one of my great-uncles, was often seen as merely unfortunate. Many deaf people, it occurred to me just then, were treated as if they were mentally retarded; even the expression “deaf and dumb,” far from being a simple description of a physiological condition, had a pejorative sense.

  Standing before Brewster’s portraits, my mind quiet, I saw the paintings as records of a silent transaction between artist and subject. A laden brush, in depositing paint on the panel or canvas, hardly registers a sound, and how great is the peace palpable in those great artists of stillness: Vermeer, Chardin, Hammershøi. The silence was even more profound, I thought, as I stood alone in that gallery, when the private world of the artist was total in its quietness. Unlike those other painters, Brewster hadn’t resorted to indirect gazes or chiaroscuro to communicate the silence of his world. The faces were well-lit and frontal, and yet they were quiet.

  I stood at the window on the third floor and looked outside. The air had shifted from gray to dark blue, and afternoon had become late afternoon. One image drew me back in, a painting of a child holding a bird on a blue thread. The palette, as was usual for Brewster, was dominated by muted colors; the two exceptions were the electric blue of the thread, which coursed across the face of the painting like a bolt of electricity, and the child’s black shoes, which were deeper and blacker than almost anything else in the gallery. The bird represented the child’s soul, as it had in Goya’s portrait of the ill-fated three-year-old Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga. The child in the Brewster painting looked out with a serene and ethereal expression from the year 1805. He, unlike many of the others painted by Brewster, had his hearing intact. Was this portrait a talisman against death? One child in three at the time died before the age of twenty. Was it a magical wish that the child would hold on to life, as he held on to the string? Francis O. Watts, the subject of the painting, did live. He entered Harvard at fifteen and became a lawyer, married Caroline Goddard, who was from his hometown of Kennebunkport, Maine, and went on to become president of the Young Men’s Christian Association. He eventually died in 1860, fifty-five years after the portrait was made. But, for the moment of the painting, and, therefore, for all time, he is a little boy holding a bird by a blue string, clad in a white chemise with a carefully observed lace frill.

  Brewster, born some ten years before the Declaration of Independence, lived his life as an itinerant artist, working all the way from Maine to his native Connecticut and to Eastern New York. He was almost ninety when he died. The elite Federalist milieu of his background had given him access to wealthy, serious-minded patrons (his own ancestors had been on the Mayflower in 1620), but his deafness made him an outsider, and his images were imbued with what that long silence had taught him: concentration, the suspension of time, an unobtrusive wit. In a painting titled One Shoe Off, which held me transfixed the moment I came before it, the neatly tied bow of a shoe on a little girl’s right foot echoed the asterisks of the floor pattern. The other shoe was in her hand, and red pentimenti were visible around the heel and the toes of the now unshod left foot. The child, as secure within her own being as were all Brewster’s children, had an expression that dared the observer to be amused.

  I lost all track of time before these images, fell deep into their world, as if all the time between them and me had somehow vanished, so that when the guard came up to me to say the museum was closing, I forgot how to speak and simply looked at him. When I eventually walked down the stairs and out of the museum, it was with the feeling of someone who had returned to the earth from a great distance.

  The traffic on Sixth Avenue, with its rush-hour gladiators testing each other’s limits, contrasted violently with where I had just been. The rain had begun again, now like a grea
t torrent of mirrors sweeping down the sheer sides of the glass buildings; it took me some time to find a cab. When I finally hailed one, a woman suddenly stepped in front of me and said she was in a hurry and would I mind letting her take it? Yes, I said, almost shouting (the sound of my own voice surprised me), I would mind. I had been standing in the rain for ten minutes and wasn’t inclined to chivalry. I got in the car and immediately the driver said, Where? I must have looked lost. I tried to remember my home address. My folded umbrella pooled its water on the mat, and I thought of Brewster’s portrait of the deaf teenager Sarah Prince at the pianoforte, an instrument that neither artist nor sitter would have heard: the quietest piano in the world. I imagined her running her hand along the keys but refusing to press down on them. When my address filtered its way back to me, I gave it to the cabdriver and said to him: So, how are you doing, my brother? The driver stiffened and looked at me in the mirror.

  Not good, not good at all, you know, the way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad. Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this? He kept me in his sights in the mirror. I was confused. I said, I’m so sorry about it, my mind was elsewhere, don’t be offended, ehn, my brother, how are you doing? He said nothing, and faced the road. I wasn’t sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me. The cab was silent, and as we drove north along the Hudson on the West Side, the river and the sky were a single darkly misted sheet and the horizon had vanished. We came off the highway, and were stuck in traffic at Broadway and Ninety-seventh Street. The driver switched on a talk-radio show: people arguing loudly about things I didn’t care about. Anger had welled up within me, unhinging me, the anger of a shattered repose. The traffic finally eased, but the radio continued to blare inanities. The driver took me to the wrong address, several blocks from my apartment. I asked him to correct the error, but he idled the car, switched off the meter, and said, No, that’s it. I paid him, adding the standard tip, and walked home in the rain.