“I’m just telling you. I know you don’t have any more money. I want to do this for you,” she said.
She was looking at him, her eyes liquid with things unsaid, and she made him feel whole again, made him remember how starved he was for something simple and pure. He wanted to kiss her, her upper lip pinker and shinier with lip gloss than the lower, to hold her, to tell her how deeply, irrepressibly grateful he was. She would never stir his cauldron of worries, never wave her power in his face. One Eastern European woman, Iloba had told him, had asked the Nigerian man, an hour before their court wedding, to give her a thousand pounds extra or she would walk away. In panic, the man had begun to call all his friends, to raise the money.
“Man, we gave you a good deal” was all one of the Angolans said when Obinze asked how much they had given Cleotilde, in that tone of theirs, the tone of people who knew how much they were needed. It was they, after all, who took him to a lawyer’s office, a low-voiced Nigerian in a swivel chair, sliding backwards to reach a file cabinet as he said, “You can still get married even though your visa is expired. In fact, getting married is now your only choice.” It was they who provided water and gas bills, going back six months, with his name and a Newcastle address, they who found a man who would “sort out” his driving license, a man cryptically called Brown. Obinze met Brown at the train station in Barking; he stood near the gate as agreed, amid the bustle of people, looking around and waiting for his phone to ring because Brown had refused to give him a phone number.
“Are you waiting for somebody?” Brown stood there, a slight man, his winter hat pulled down to his eyebrows.
“Yes. I’m Obinze,” he said, feeling like a character in a spy novel who had to speak in silly code. Brown led him to a quiet corner, handed over an envelope, and there it was, his license, with his photo and the genuine, slightly worn look of something owned for a year. A slight plastic card, but it weighed down his pocket. A few days later, he walked with it into a London building which, from the outside, looked like a church, steepled and grave, but inside was shabby, harried, knotted with people. Signs were scrawled on whiteboards: BIRTHS AND DEATHS THIS WAY. MARRIAGE REGISTRATION THIS WAY. Obinze, his expression carefully frozen in neutrality, handed the license over to the registrar behind the desk.
A woman was walking towards the door, talking loudly to her companion. “Look how crowded this place is. It’s all sham marriages, all of them, now that Blunkett is after them.”
Perhaps she had come to register a death, and her words merely the lonely lashings-out of grief, but he felt the familiar tightening of panic in his chest. The registrar was examining his license, taking too long. The seconds lengthened and curdled. All sham marriages, all of them rang in Obinze’s head. Finally the registrar looked up and pushed across a form.
“Getting married, are we? Congratulations!” The words came out with the mechanical good cheer of frequent repetition.
“Thank you,” Obinze said, and tried to unfreeze his face.
Behind the desk, a whiteboard was propped on a wall, venues and dates of intended marriages written on it in blue; a name at the bottom caught his eye. Okoli Okafor and Crystal Smith. Okoli Okafor was his classmate from secondary school and university, a quiet boy who had been teased for having a surname for a first name, who later joined a vicious cult in university, and then left Nigeria during one of the long strikes. Now here he was, a ghost of a name, about to get married in England. Perhaps it was also a marriage for papers. Okoli Okafor. Everyone called him Okoli Paparazzi in university. On the day Princess Diana died, a group of students had gathered before a lecture, talking about what they had heard on the radio that morning, repeating “paparazzi” over and over, all sounding knowing and cocksure, until, in a lull, Okoli Okafor quietly asked, “But who exactly are the paparazzi? Are they motorcyclists?” and instantly earned himself the nickname Okoli Paparazzi.
The memory, clear as a light beam, took Obinze back to a time when he still believed the universe would bend according to his will. Melancholy descended on him as he left the building. Once, during his final year in the university, the year that people danced in the streets because General Abacha had died, his mother had said, “One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.” She had spoken wearily, as they sat in the living room, eating boiled corn and ube. He sensed, in her voice, the sadness of defeat, as though her friends who were leaving for teaching positions in Canada and America had confirmed to her a great personal failure. For a moment he felt as if he, too, had betrayed her by having his own plan: to get a postgraduate degree in America, to work in America, to live in America. It was a plan he had had for a long time. Of course he knew how unreasonable the American embassy could be—the vice chancellor, of all people, had once been refused a visa to attend a conference—but he had never doubted his plan. He would wonder, later, why he had been so sure. Perhaps it was because he had never simply wanted to go abroad, as many others did; some people were now going to South Africa, which amused him. It had always been America, only America. A longing nurtured and nursed over many years. The advertisement on NTA for Andrew Checking Out, which he had watched as a child, had given shape to his longings. “Men, I’m checkin’ out,” the character Andrew had said, staring cockily at the camera. “No good roads, no light, no water. Men, you can’t even get a bottle of soft drink!” While Andrew was checking out, General Buhari’s soldiers were flogging adults in the streets, lecturers were striking for better pay, and his mother had decided that he could no longer have Fanta whenever he wanted but only on Sundays, with permission. And so, America became a place where bottles and bottles of Fanta were to be had, without permission. He would stand in front of the mirror and repeat Andrew’s words: “Men, I’m checkin’ out!” Later, seeking out magazines and books and films and secondhand stories about America, his longing took on a minor mystical quality and America became where he was destined to be. He saw himself walking the streets of Harlem, discussing the merits of Mark Twain with his American friends, gazing at Mount Rushmore. Days after he graduated from university, bloated with knowledge about America, he applied for a visa at the American embassy in Lagos.
He already knew that the best interviewer was the blond-bearded man, and as he moved in the line, he hoped he would not be interviewed by the horror story, a pretty white woman famous for screaming into her microphone and insulting even grandmothers. Finally, it was his turn and the blond-bearded man said, “Next person!” Obinze walked up and slid his forms underneath the glass. The man glanced at the forms and said, kindly, “Sorry, you don’t qualify. Next person!” Obinze was stunned. He went three more times over the next few months. Each time he was told, without a glance at his documents, “Sorry, you don’t qualify,” and each time he emerged from the air-conditioned cool of the embassy building and into the harsh sunlight, stunned and unbelieving.
“It’s the terrorism fears,” his mother said. “The Americans are now averse to foreign young men.”
She told him to find a job and try again in a year. His job applications yielded nothing. He traveled to Lagos and to Port Harcourt and to Abuja to take assessment tests, which he found easy, and he attended interviews, answering questions fluidly, but then a long empty silence would follow. Some friends were getting jobs, people who did not have his second-class upper degree and did not speak as well as he did. He wondered whether employers could smell his America-pining on his breath, or sense how obsessively he still looked at the websites of American universities. He was living with his mother, driving her car, sleeping with impressionable young students, browsing overnight at Internet cafés with all-night specials, and sometimes spending days in his room reading and avoiding his mother. He disliked her calm good cheer, how hard she tried to be positive, telling him that now President Obasanjo was in power, things were changing, the mobile phone companies and banks were growing and recruiting, even giving young people car loans. Most of the time, though, she left him alone
. She did not knock on his door. She simply asked the house help, Agnes, to leave some food in the pot for him and to clear away dirty plates from his room. One day, she left him a note on the bathroom sink: I have been invited to an academic conference in London. We should speak. He was puzzled. When she came home from her lecture, he was in the living room waiting for her.
“Mummy, nno,” he said.
She acknowledged his greeting with a nod and put down her bag on the center table. “I’m going to put your name on my British visa application as my research assistant,” she said quietly. “That should get you a six-month visa. You can stay with Nicholas in London. See what you can do with your life. Maybe you can get to America from there. I know that your mind is no longer here.”
He stared at her.
“I understand this sort of thing is done nowadays,” she said, sitting down on the sofa beside him, trying to sound offhand, but he sensed her discomfort in the uncommon briskness of her words. She was from the generation of the bewildered, who did not understand what had happened to Nigeria but allowed themselves to be swept along. She was a woman who kept to herself and asked no favors, who would not lie, who would not accept even a Christmas card from her students because it might compromise her, who accounted for every single kobo spent on any committee she was on, and here she was, behaving as though truth telling had become a luxury that they could no longer afford. It went against everything she had taught him, yet he knew that truth had indeed, in their circumstance, become a luxury. She lied for him. If anybody else had lied for him, it would not have mattered as much or even at all, but she lied for him and he got the six-month visa to the United Kingdom and he felt, even before he left, like a failure. He did not contact her for months. He did not contact her because there was nothing to tell her and he wanted to wait until he had something to tell her. He was in England for three years and spoke to her only a few times, strained conversations during which he imagined she was wondering why he had made nothing of himself. But she never asked for details; she only waited to hear what he was willing to tell. Later, when he returned home, he would feel disgusted with his own entitlement, his blindness to her, and he spent a lot of time with her, determined to make amends, to return to their former relationship, but first to attempt to map the boundaries of their estrangement.
CHAPTER 24
Everyone joked about people who went abroad to clean toilets, and so Obinze approached his first job with irony: he was indeed abroad cleaning toilets, wearing rubber gloves and carrying a pail, in an estate agent’s office on the second floor of a London building. Each time he opened the swinging door of a stall, it seemed to sigh. The beautiful woman who cleaned the ladies’ toilet was Ghanaian, about his age, with the shiniest dark skin he had ever seen. He sensed, in the way she spoke and carried herself, a background similar to his, a childhood cushioned by family, by regular meals, by dreams in which there was no conception of cleaning toilets in London. She ignored his friendly gestures, saying only “Good evening” as formally as she could, but she was friendly with the white woman who cleaned the offices upstairs, and once he saw them in the deserted café, drinking tea and talking in low tones. He stood watching them for a while, a great grievance exploding in his mind. It was not that she did not want friendship, it was rather that she did not want his. Perhaps friendship in their present circumstances was impossible because she was Ghanaian and he, a Nigerian, was too close to what she was; he knew her nuances, while she was free to reinvent herself with the Polish woman, to be whoever she wanted to be.
The toilets were not bad, some urine outside the urinal, some unfinished flushing; cleaning them was much easier than it must have been for the cleaners of the campus toilets back in Nsukka, with the streaks of shit smeared on the walls that had always made him wonder why anybody would go to all that trouble. And so, he was shocked, one evening, to walk into a stall and discover a mound of shit on the toilet lid, solid, tapering, centered as though it had been carefully arranged and the exact spot had been measured. It looked like a puppy curled on a mat. It was a performance. He thought about the famed repression of the English. His cousin’s wife, Ojiugo, had once said, “English people will live next to you for years but they will never greet you. It is as if they have buttoned themselves up.” There was, in this performance, something of an unbuttoning. A person who had been fired? Denied a promotion? Obinze stared at that mound of shit for a long time, feeling smaller and smaller as he did so, until it became a personal affront, a punch on his jaw. And all for three quid an hour. He took off his gloves, placed them next to the mound of shit, and left the building. That evening, he received an e-mail from Ifemelu. Ceiling, I don’t even know how to start. I ran into Kayode today at the mall. Saying sorry for my silence sounds stupid even to me but I am so sorry and I feel so stupid. I will tell you everything that happened. I have missed you and I miss you.
He stared at the e-mail. This was what he had longed for, for so long. To hear from her. When she first stopped contacting him, he had worried himself into weeks of insomnia, roaming the house in the middle of the night, wondering what had happened to her. They had not fought, their love was as sparkling as always, their plan intact, and suddenly there was silence from her, a silence so brutal and complete. He had called and called until she changed her phone number, he had sent e-mails, he had contacted her mother, Aunty Uju, Ginika. Ginika’s tone, when she said, “Ifem needs some time, I think she has depression,” had felt like ice pressed against his body. Ifemelu was not crippled or blinded from an accident, not suddenly suffering amnesia. She was in touch with Ginika and other people but not with him. She did not want to keep in touch with him. He wrote her e-mails, asking that she at least tell him why, what had happened. Soon, his e-mails bounced back, undeliverable; she had closed the account. He missed her, a longing that tore deep into him. He resented her. He wondered endlessly what might have happened. He changed, curled more inwardly into himself. He was, by turns, inflamed by anger, twisted by confusion, withered by sadness.
And now here was her e-mail. Her tone the same, as though she had not wounded him, left him bleeding for more than five years. Why was she writing him now? What was there to tell her, that he cleaned toilets and had only just today encountered a curled turd? How did she know he was still alive? He could have died during their silence and she would not have known. An angry sense of betrayal overwhelmed him. He clicked Delete and Empty Trash.
HIS COUSIN NICHOLAS HAD the jowly face of a bulldog, yet still somehow managed to be very attractive, or perhaps it was not his features but his aura that appealed, the tall, broad-shouldered, striding masculinity of him. In Nsukka, he had been the most popular student on campus; his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle parked outside a beer parlor lent the drinkers there an immediate cachet. Two Big Chicks once famously fought over him in Bello Hostel, tearing each other’s blouses, but he remained roguishly unattached until he met Ojiugo. She was Obinze’s mother’s favorite student, the only one good enough to be a research assistant, and had stopped by their house one Sunday to discuss a book. Nicholas had stopped by, too, on his weekly ritual, to eat Sunday rice. Ojiugo wore orange lipstick and ripped jeans, spoke bluntly, and smoked in public, provoking vicious gossip and dislike from other girls, not because she did these things but because she dared to without having lived abroad, or having a foreign parent, those qualities that would have made them forgive her lack of conformity. Obinze remembered how dismissive she first was of Nicholas, ignoring him while he, unused to a girl’s indifference, talked more and more loudly. But in the end, they left together in his Volkswagen. They would speed around campus in that Volkswagen, Ojiugo driving and Nicholas’s arm hanging from the front window, music blaring, bends taken sharply, and once with a friend lodged in the open front boot. They smoked and drank publicly together. They created glamorous myths. Once they were seen at a beer parlor, Ojiugo wearing Nicholas’s large white shirt and nothing below, and Nicholas wearing a pair of jeans and nothin
g above. “Things are hard, so we are sharing one outfit,” they said nonchalantly to friends.
That Nicholas had lost his youthful outrageousness did not surprise Obinze; what surprised him was the loss of even the smallest memory of it. Nicholas, husband and father, homeowner in England, spoke with a soberness so forbidding that it was almost comical. “If you come to England with a visa that does not allow you to work,” Nicholas told him, “the first thing to look for is not food or water, it is an NI number so you can work. Take all the jobs you can. Spend nothing. Marry an EU citizen and get your papers. Then your life can begin.” Nicholas seemed to feel that he had done his part, delivered words of wisdom, and in the following months, he hardly spoke to Obinze at all. It was as if he was no longer the big cousin who had offered Obinze, at fifteen, a cigarette to try, who had drawn diagrams on a piece of paper to show Obinze what to do when his fingers were between a girl’s legs. On weekends Nicholas walked around the house in a tense cloud of silence, nursing his worries. Only during Arsenal matches did he relax a little, a can of Stella Artois in hand, shouting “Go, Arsenal!” with Ojiugo and their children, Nna and Nne. After the game, his face would congeal once again. He would come home from work, hug his children and Ojiugo, and ask, “How are you? What did you people do today?” Ojiugo would list what they had done. Cello. Piano. Violin. Homework. Kumon. “Nne is really improving her sight reading,” she would add. Or “Nna was careless with his Kumon and he got two wrong.” Nicholas would praise or reprimand each child, Nna who had a chubby bulldog-like face and Nne who had her mother’s dark broad-faced beauty. He spoke to them only in English, careful English, as though he thought that the Igbo he shared with their mother would infect them, perhaps make them lose their precious British accents. Then he would say, “Ojiugo, well done. I’m hungry.”
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