The Eternal Audience of One

by Rémy Ngamije

  You are probably tired of reading blah-blah-blah emails trying to make you feel better so I will just cut to the chase: you are the right person with the wrong papers. I think you knew that before you even applied. Also, I’m not sure if this is really for you. Don’t know why I got that impression but I just did.

  Good luck for what comes next, Séraphin. And what does not.

  Adrian

  The parting message had bounced through his head. Séraphin boarded the packed cross-country coach back to Windhoek with the words floating. Adrian was right. His heart was not really in law, but even so he could not stop himself from going through the motions of applying for his legal articles. It was expected of him, so he furnished effort in the process even if it led to disappointment. As the coach pulled out of Cape Town, heading northwards towards Windhoek, it carried with it the curiosity of first-time travellers, the relief of the homeward bound, and the sulking silence of one. Cloaked in the chagrin of his thwarted December plans, Séraphin remained glum as the bus crawled past freshly furrowed and ploughed Western Cape acreages. All the way through the bleak, rocky, and sun-blighted topography of the Northern Cape his mood became more concentrated in its rancour, preventing him from sleeping, reading, or listening to music. Ordinarily, Séraphin slept through most bus rides, fatiguing himself the night before by partying or binge-watching a television series. After checking his luggage in he would take his seat and sleep, only waking up at the South African border. His travelling patterns ensured he was never awake to see the monotonous, recycled Christian entertainment provided onboard. The disappointments of the past weeks, however, had connived to drive sleep away, leaving him tired but awake and being obliged to listen to pastors preach against evolution, offer post-apocalyptic condolences for man’s innumerable follies, and promote limited edition DVDs which, for a fee, could guarantee citizenship in the everlasting Kingdom of God.

  By the time the bus pulled out of Springbok, the last northern stop before a straight run to the South African border, his mood was poisonous enough to constrict his airways. The pastor on the cabin’s television screen asked the trapped congregation on the bus to give their life to Jesus. A hand shot up into the air at the front of the bus and Séraphin heard a voice say, “Praise Lord Jizzos Christs.”

  A night breeze did little to cool his pique when he disembarked to have his passport stamped by a disinterested border official on the South African side.The man flicked Séraphin’s passport open, scanned the study permit, and placed a departure stamp on a convenient page with a gap. Back aboard the bus Séraphin’s spirits plumbed their regular dark depths whenever he contemplated going through the Namibian border post, a port of entry which was porous for white tourists and semi-permeable for black African nationalities who needed to prostrate themselves before the mercurial stamp-wielding gods of the immigration and border control. Immigration officers would process the queuing travellers with haste, casting cursory glances at familiar passports and rubber-stamping them in a steady rhythm which permitted the passengers to board the bus and catnap all the way to Windhoek. Every so often a detailed search would be required by the border police that would make a stop longer by twenty or thirty minutes. The duration of such a police stop would be dependent on the presence of non-Namibian passport holders from countries of international disrepute. Nigerians, Angolans, Congolese, and Cameroonians – basically, anyone who said “Lord Jizzos Christs”. They were immediately flagged for invasive luggage searches. A bored dog would sniff at their bags while the unlucky passport holders were subjected to the indignity of having their neatly folded clothing and underwear unpacked from their suitcases and deposited on the dusty, interlocked pavement, and flicked through by a rude baton or a dirty boot.

  On such occasions an uncomfortable silence fell on all the travellers while the searches were conducted. Some would walk a short ways away to smoke or converse in low voices, hoping for the discovery of contraband or undeclared goods to warrant the unfolding scene. Others, and amongst them Séraphin, on days when his Rwandan passport wasn’t the lowest desirable denominator, would simply stand in silent solidarity, bemoaning the accidents of geography that determined fair treatment. Disappointingly for the guards and to the relief of the bus driver and the other travellers, the foreigners would soon be released from the injurious scrutiny and be permitted to go on their way. Suitcases would be hastily squashed back into the bus and the journey would resume. Over six years of travelling the same route to and from university, Séraphin had mastered the humble and polite demeanour of the voyaging black man: “Yes, sir” and No, sir” and “Thank you, sir, I will repack my suitcase now, sir” and “Rwandan, sir, permanent resident stamp is on page two, sir.”

  On his latest return to Namibia, his mood was toxic to dangerous proportions, making him forget border control etiquette. The passport control officer in the ramshackle office on the Namibian side paged through Séraphin’s passport, squinting at stamps, trying to find a discrepancy in his travel documents.

  “The permanent residence permit is on the second page,” Séraphin began, testily, as the official continued to leaf through his passport, “the study permit on the fifth, and there is space on the sixth for a stamp. Please don’t stamp on a new page unnecessarily. It doesn’t look nice.”

  The official stopped paging through the passport and fixed Séraphin with a baleful stare. Séraphin attempted to return it, failing to do so as his sanity finally pushed to the forefront of his being, making him realise that a cosmic travelling rule, which is to keep border and custom officials happy and stamping, had been violated and, worse, that it had been violated by a cocky Rwandan. The rest of the queue shuffled nervously behind him. Being flippant with a border official was an act as criminal as confessing to carrying a kilogram of heroin in a handbag.

  Séraphin muttered an apology, “Sorry, boss.”

  The official let Séraphin stew in his solecism for a few seconds longer. He reached for the re-entry stamp, tattooed Séraphin’s passport with the right of passage, and limply held it out to him. Séraphin reached for it. The official clung to it.

  “Chief,” he began, “you don’t make jokes like that here, you understand? Otherwise, I keep you here all night. The bus will leave you, you understand? You will have to call your people to come and get you here, you understand?”

  Séraphin, thankfully, had the good sense to mutter a quick “Yes, sir”, and make his way to the exit. As the official reached for the next passport Séraphin heard him say, “These foreigners, eh, they think they can just behave any way they want. Not in Namibia. Here we will show you.”

  Séraphin walked to the bus, took his seat, plugged in his earphones, and ignored the rest of the ride until the bus arrived in Windhoek, delivering him into his parents’ emphatic hugs, his brothers’ bored fist bumps, and a monotony of hot December days and nights ahead spent in frustrated solitude or squabbling with his family.

  On the sofa, Séraphin pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and saw there were no messages in any of the group chats he was in. Everyone, it seemed, was too busy with something, somewhere else. He looked around his family’s lounge.

  Like most lounges in immigrant family homes it was a shrine to diaspora. Every picture which showed some form of triumph against the humbled life most immigrants are forced to live abroad found its way to a frame or a mantlepiece. There was Séraphin’s father, Guillome, beaming as he leaned against his new Volkswagen Jetta; Therése, his mother, looking attentively at a computer screen in an office; Yves and Éric showed off gap-toothed smiles on their first day of school; and Séraphin, attempting to look regal in his prefect’s blazer and tie.

  The rest of the room was mostly taken up with furniture. Around the laminate wood coffee table were two black three-seater sofas, one of which he was slumped in, and two plump armchairs that were never sat in. Most of the family life happened in the kitchen and the television room: food, the English Premier League, and the Sunday blockbuste
r films were what really brought the household’s members together. When their quorum was not needed to keep Therése happy at laboriously prepared suppers, the family generally scattered around the house. Selected from a weekly flyer in a newspaper, and paid off in monthly instalments, the furniture set was like most others Séraphin had seen: uniform in their gaudy ugliness, weak in the way of structural integrity, and totally deficient when it came to comfort. Its only purpose, as far as Séraphin could determine, was to call attention to a family’s upward mobility. House guests lavished attention upon the set and enquired about its cost, only to be shushed by the proud owners—“to talk about the price of a thing is to cheapen it,” he had heard his mother say once. The sofas would be sat in once or twice by a family member when they were entertaining and then rarely thereafter lest their sheen and shine be worn out before a new set could be purchased.

  Three glass-fronted cabinets were positioned in three of the room’s four corners. They held ornamental china dogs and the plates that were brought out only on special occasions like the New Year’s party planned for this evening. For the rest of the time their shelves were the abode of misplaced keys and half-read newspapers. A voluminous Webster’s English Dictionary occupied a whole shelf by itself. Its impressive mass was kept company by a Good News Bible on an adjacent self. The embellishing Bible was a curiosity for Séraphin, who had never seen his parents or brothers open it despite their Catholic upbringing. Like many Roman Catholics who practised their faith on a part-time basis, or when an airplane experienced a violent dip in the middle of turbulence, Séraphin opted to show his piety through waning mass attendance and, eventually, as he told his mother when she woke him up on Sundays, via distance-based faith. “Like distance learning, Mamma. God is everywhere, anyway, right?” he had told her the Sunday after he was confirmed. The Webster’s English Dictionary, unlike the Bible, brought the good words to the family. It delivered swift, cross-referenced justice to anyone who spread falsities of vocabulary.

  The glass cabinets and their contents were the subject of many a beating when Séraphin and his brothers were younger. With the rest of the house being sufficiently used for a specific purpose like cooking, eating, or sleeping, it had seemed prudent to Séraphin and his brothers for the lounge, with its fragile cabinets and vases, to be the room in which boys could practise their athleticism with the aid of various projectiles. Only later did the sanctity of the lounge as a museum of middle-class prosperity come to be respected.

  Carefully spaced out on the walls around the room were pictures from former and present lives. While the average immigrant family will diligently collect the trappings of their surroundings to fit in and to impress – the language, a house, a car, a dog – it is on the walls containing faded and recent photographs where they really try to outdo each other, for few things matter more to an immigrant family than winning the war of memories.

  A frame held his father’s graduation photograph from the University of Brussels in the seventies. Tall and well built, Séraphin’s father had dark skin and his hair was a black halo around his head. His eyes bristled with the kind of intellectual curiosity that was all the rage when Africa sent young men from villages to former colonial capitals to learn about engineering and medicine and commerce and bring their knowledge and polished accents back home to their fellow countrymen. His father’s broad frame relegated his suit’s shoulder padding to irrelevancy. In other frames on the walls were pictures of Séraphin’s father and his uncles standing in poses which looked like The Jackson Five were touring Rwanda. In each photograph Séraphin’s father could be easily spotted by his height and his stare, which seemed to dare the camera to make him look anything less than handsome.

  Next to his father’s portrait was a picture of his mother. She had the look of a woman who might once have commanded a hefty dowry. In the portrait she was standing in front of a small brick house with a blue door. Her hands were clasped in front of her and she wore a well-cut, grey pants-suit ensemble. Séraphin had been told that the house in the picture had been her elder brother’s; she had lived there after completing her secretarial studies at L’École Parisienne. The portrait had been taken on the day she had secured her first job as an office administrator at the local United Nations office. In this picture, and in all of her pictures, Séraphin’s mother was captured smiling or laughing genially.

  A faux-wood frame which contained more wrinkle than man housed the only picture of Séraphin’s grandfather from his father’s side. Another frame showed a young girl surrounded by what could only be called a tribe of boys, their numbers and close resemblances seriously driving home the point that in the bygone Rwandan days parenthood was a numbers game; the more offspring one fielded the better the odds were of defeating the horrific child mortality rate. Séraphin’s grandmother, from his mother’s side, looked shyly at the camera. Surrounded by her brothers, she stood out only because she wore a yellow pinafore dress. Barring that, she could have disappeared into the mass of round heads, shaven bald to combat lice, mistaken for a boy in an oversized flowery shirt.

  Elsewhere, a chubby, one-year-old Yves crawled on a mattress; three boys with too many knees among them stood together in matching soccer uniforms; a small, round face in a blue shirt smiled at the world as though the fourth grade of primary school was the promised utopia; and, further along the wall, a much older version of the boy looked past the camera hesitantly, his graduation robes billowing around him. Séraphin frowned with displeasure at his graduation photograph. In it he could see the fear and uncertainty of the undergraduate he had appeased by securing parent-pleasing postgraduate study.

  Séraphin, to his disappointment and his parents’ relief, had found out that an English degree was only a precursor to law school and not to the fabled life of the travelling intellectual and writer. Pursuing the English degree had been a negotiated and protracted affair. The normal cabal of qualifications which offered a safe and predictable income had been arrayed before him after completing his secondary school education. Something in finance or, better yet, accounting, anything in engineering, or medicine, and law. None of the four had held much appeal to him, even though he could already see the pride that would mist his parents’ eyes if he chose any one of the careers on offer. He had slanted strongly towards law from the start, deciding it was the least constricting.

  Quite by chance, he had won an essay writing competition, which secured a scholarship to study English. He had jumped at the opportunity. A paid undergraduate was a rare thing to come by. He promised his parents he would pursue the law degree after he’d completed the English one. His parents, temporarily appeased, allowed him to enjoy three years of bunked lectures and cavorting in the arts before collecting their pound of flesh and making him enrol in law school. There were impending retirements to be thought about, futures to be planned, and roots to be anchored.

  His English degree had not brought much praise from his parents, its duration seemingly a purgatorial test of their patience and a countdown to the prestige of law school. Now, with his final year of studies awaiting him in the new year, doubts about practising law grew within him. Adrian of the law firm rejection was right. Séraphin would need luck for what came next. And what did not.

  The lounge had been vacuumed and dusted, prepared to receive the invited families for New Year’s Eve. Some wooden garden chairs and cushions would be brought in from the backyard later when the numbers swelled beyond what the lounge’s furniture could accommodate. Séraphin would scuttle to and from the kitchen, bringing the guests their drinks. After the fresh fruit juices and water would come the cold Heineken beer, followed by red wine along with its propensity to unknot tongues and inflame gossip. He would have to smile, shake hands, accept hugs, and utter polite phrases in broken Kinyarwanda. He would have to accept compliments about how tall he had grown, and then answer some questions about being a law student and the mapped out future of being a lawyer.

  Séraphin grimaced when he thou
ght about the questions. If the Spanish Inquisition was deemed to be barbaric, it was only because nobody had ever written about conversations between East African parents and their university-going children. The questions would be detailed. Whatever answers he gave would be more than promises; they would be noted, filed away, and gossiped about in the event he failed to deliver on them.

  As Séraphin slumped further into the sofa he caught a glimpse of his mother walking out of the kitchen and into the dining room, calling out orders in Kinyarwanda to Éric. She shouted for a batch of chips to be taken out of the pot. “Ni ugu kuramo amafiriti!”

  His mother was never still for a moment. Séraphin reckoned if she were to die today she would be up the next day, bright and early, preparing her own funeral. Her brown forehead was shiny with sweat and her new braids were in a net to protect them from absorbing the oily vapours in the kitchen air. At the moment she wore light, black trousers and a stained cream-coloured blouse she would change out of when it was time for the guests to arrive. Therése would never be seen by her guests in anything but her finest livery. As soon as the house bell rang she would disappear into the main bedroom and reappear looking radiant, dressed in flowing, flowery kitenges, trailing whiffs of expensive perfume behind her. No trace of the day’s efforts would show on her face. She would beam and hug each guest, cheeks touching twice, and then usher them into the lounge to have a seat and share some conversation.

  As she walked back to the kitchen she saw Séraphin in the lounge.

  “Séra, you cannot come and help Yves with lighting the fire?” she asked. “We need to start with the meat soon.” Her hands were on her hips. She sounded stern, but Séraphin sensed it was not genuine.