Emenike had told Obinze this story before and he was struck now by how differently Emenike told it. He did not mention the rage he had felt standing on that street and looking at the cab. He was shaking, he had told Obinze, his hands trembling for a long time, a little frightened by his own feelings. But now, sipping the last of his red wine, flowers floating in front of him, he spoke in a tone cleansed of anger, thick only with a kind of superior amusement, while Georgina interjected to clarify: Can you believe that?
Alexa, flush with red wine, her eyes red below her scarlet hair, changed the subject. “Blunkett must be sensible and make sure this country remains a refuge. People who have survived frightful wars must absolutely be allowed in!” She turned to Obinze. “Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” he said, and felt alienation run through him like a shiver.
Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.
CHAPTER 30
Nicholas gave Obinze a suit for the wedding. “It’s a good Italian suit,” he said. “It’s small for me so it should fit you.” The trousers were big and bunched up when Obinze tightened his belt, but the jacket, also big, shielded this unsightly pleat of cloth at his waist. Not that he minded. So focused was he on getting through the day, on finally beginning his life, that he would have swaddled his lower parts in a baby’s diaper if that were required. He and Iloba met Cleotilde near Civic Center. She was standing under a tree with her friends, her hair pushed back with a white band, her eyes boldly lined in black; she looked like an older, sexier person. Her ivory dress was tight at her hips. He had paid for the dress. “I haven’t got any proper going-out dress,” she had said in apology when she called to tell him that she had nothing that looked convincingly bridal. She hugged him. She looked nervous, and he tried to deflect his own nervousness by thinking about them together after this, how in less than an hour, he would be free to walk with surer steps on Britain’s streets, and free to kiss her.
“You have the rings?” Iloba asked her.
“Yes,” Cleotilde said.
She and Obinze had bought them the week before, plain matching cheap rings from a side-street shop, and she had looked so delighted, laughingly slipping different rings on and then off her finger, that he wondered if she wished it were a real wedding.
“Fifteen minutes to go,” Iloba said. He had appointed himself the organizer. He took pictures, his digital camera held away from his face, saying, “Move closer! Okay, one more!” His sprightly good spirits annoyed Obinze. On the train up to Newcastle the previous day, while Obinze had spent his time looking out of the window, unable even to read, Iloba had talked and talked, until his voice became a distant murmur, perhaps because he was trying to keep Obinze from worrying too much. Now, he talked to Cleotilde’s friends with an easy friendliness, about the new Chelsea coach, about Big Brother, as if they were all there for something ordinary and normal.
“Time to go,” Iloba said. They walked towards the civic center. The afternoon was bright with sunshine. Obinze opened the door and stood aside for the others to go ahead, into the sterile hallway, where they paused to get their bearings, to be sure which way to go towards the register office. Two policemen stood behind the door, watching them with stony eyes. Obinze quieted his panic. There was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, he told himself, the civic center probably had policemen present as a matter of routine; but he sensed in the sudden smallness of the hallway, the sudden thickening of doom in the air, that something was wrong, before he noticed another man approaching him, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his cheeks so red he looked as though he was wearing terrible makeup.
“Are you Obinze Maduewesi?” the red-cheeked man asked. In his hands was a sheaf of papers and Obinze could see a photocopy of his passport page.
“Yes,” Obinze said quietly, and that word, yes, was an acknowledgment to the red-cheeked immigration officer, to Iloba and to Cleotilde, and to himself that it was over.
“Your visa is expired and you are not allowed to be present in the UK,” the red-cheeked man said.
A policeman clamped handcuffs around his wrists. He felt himself watching the scene from far away, watching himself walk to the police car outside, and sink into the too-soft seat in the back. There had been so many times in the past when he had feared that this would happen, so many moments that had become one single blur of panic, and now it felt like the dull echo of an aftermath. Cleotilde had flung herself on the ground and begun to cry. She might never have visited her father’s country, but he was convinced at that moment of her Africanness; how else would she be able to fling herself to the ground with that perfect dramatic flourish? He wondered if her tears were for him or for herself or for what might have been between them. She had no need to worry, though, since she was a European citizen; the policemen barely glanced at her. It was he who felt the heaviness of the handcuffs during the drive to the police station, who silently handed over his watch and his belt and his wallet, and watched the policeman take his phone and switch it off. Nicholas’s large trousers were slipping down his hips.
“Your shoes too. Take off your shoes,” the policeman said.
He took off his shoes. He was led to a cell. It was small, with brown walls, and the metal bars, so thick his hand could not go around one, reminded him of the chimpanzee’s cage at Nsukka’s dismal, forgotten zoo. From the very high ceilings, a single bulb burned. There was an emptying, echoing vastness in that tiny cell.
“Were you aware that your visa had expired?”
“Yes,” Obinze said.
“Were you about to have a sham marriage?”
“No. Cleotilde and I have been dating for a while.”
“I can arrange for a lawyer for you, but it’s obvious you’ll be deported,” the immigration officer said evenly.
When the lawyer came, puffy-faced, darkened arcs under his eyes, Obinze remembered all the films in which the state lawyer is distracted and exhausted. He came with a bag but did not open it, and he sat across from Obinze, holding nothing, no file, no paper, no pen. His demeanor was pleasant and sympathetic.
“The government has a strong case and we can appeal but to be honest it will only delay the case and you will eventually be removed from the UK,” he said, with the air of a man who had said those same words, in that same tone, more times than he wished to, or could, remember.
“I’m willing to go back to Nigeria,” Obinze said. The last shard of his dignity was like a wrapper slipping off that he was desperate to retie.
The lawyer looked surprised. “Okay, then,” he said, and got up a little too hastily, as though grateful that his job had been made easier. Obinze watched him leave. He was going to tick on a form that his client was willing to be removed. “Removed.” That word made Obinze feel inanimate. A thing to be removed. A thing without breath and mind. A thing.
HE HATED the cold heaviness of the handcuffs, the mark he imagined they left on his wrists, the glint of the interlinking circles of metal that robbed him of movement. There he was, in handcuffs, being led through the hall of Manchester Airport, and in the coolness and din of that airport, men and women and children, travelers and cleaners and security guards, watched him, wondering what evil he had done. He kept his gaze on a tall white woman hurrying ahead, hair flying behind her, knapsack hunched on her back. She would not understand his story, why he was now walking through the airport with metal clamped around his wrists, because people like her did not approach travel
with anxiety about visas. She might worry about money, about a place to stay, about safety, perhaps even about visas, but never with an anxiety that wrenched at her spine.
He was led into a room, bunk beds pushed forlornly against the walls. Three men were already there. One, from Djibouti, said little, lying and staring at the ceiling as though retracing the journey of how he had ended up at a holding facility in Manchester Airport. Two were Nigerian. The younger sat up on his bed eternally cracking his fingers. The older paced the small room and would not stop talking.
“Bros, how did they get you?” he asked Obinze, with an instant familiarity that Obinze resented. Something about him reminded Obinze of Vincent. Obinze shrugged and said nothing to him; there was no need for courtesies simply because they shared a cell.
“Is there anything I could have to read, please?” Obinze asked an immigration officer when she came to lead the man from Djibouti out to see a visitor.
“Read,” she repeated, eyebrows raised.
“Yes. A book or a magazine or a newspaper,” Obinze said.
“You want to read,” she said, and on her face, a contemptuous amusement. “Sorry. But we’ve got a TV room and you’re allowed to go there and watch telly after lunchtime.”
In the TV room, there was a group of men, many of them Nigerians, talking loudly. The other men sat around slumped into their own sorrows, listening to the Nigerians trade their stories, sometimes laughing, sometimes self-pitying.
“Ah this na my second time. The first time I come with different passport,” one of them said.
“Na for work wey they get me o.”
“E get one guy wey they deport, him don come back get him paper. Na him wey go help me,” another said.
Obinze envied them for what they were, men who casually changed names and passports, who would plan and come back and do it over again because they had nothing to lose. He didn’t have their savoir faire; he was soft, a boy who had grown up eating corn flakes and reading books, raised by a mother during a time when truth telling was not yet a luxury. He was ashamed to be with them, among them. They did not have his shame and even this, too, he envied.
IN DETENTION, he felt raw, skinned, the outer layers of himself stripped off. His mother’s voice on the phone was almost unfamiliar, a woman speaking a crisp Nigerian English, telling him, calmly, to be strong, that she would be in Lagos to receive him, and he remembered how, years ago, when General Buhari’s government stopped giving essential commodities, and she no longer came home with free tins of milk, she had begun to grind soybeans at home to make milk. She said soy milk was more nutritious than cow milk and although he refused to drink the grainy fluid in the morning, he watched her do so with an uncomplaining common sense. It was what she showed now, over the phone, telling him she would come and pick him up, as though she had always nursed the possibility of this, her son in detention, waiting to be removed from a country overseas.
He thought a lot about Ifemelu, imagining what she was doing, how her life had changed. She had once told him, in university, “You know what I admired most about you in secondary school? That you never had a problem saying ‘I don’t know.’ Other boys pretended to know what they didn’t know. But you just had this confidence and you could always admit that you didn’t know something.” He had thought it an unsual compliment, and had cherished this image of himself, perhaps because he knew it was not entirely true. He wondered what she would think if she knew where he was now. She would be sympathetic, he was sure, but would she also, in a small way, be disappointed? He almost asked Iloba to contact her. It would not be difficult to find her; he already knew she lived in Baltimore. But he did not ask Iloba. When Iloba visited him, he talked about lawyers. They both knew that there was no point, but still Iloba talked about lawyers. He would sit across from Obinze, rest his head on his hand, and talk about lawyers. Obinze wondered if some of the lawyers existed only in Iloba’s mind. “I know one lawyer in London, a Ghanaian, he represented this man with no papers, the man was almost on a plane home, and the next thing we knew, the man was free. He now works in IT.” Other times, Iloba took comfort in stating what was obvious. “If only the marriage was just done before they came,” he said. “You know if they had come even one second after you were pronounced man and wife, they would not touch you?” Obinze nodded. He knew, and Iloba knew that he knew. On Iloba’s last visit, after Obinze told him that he was being moved to Dover the next day, Iloba began to cry. “Zed, this was not supposed to happen like this.”
“Iloba, why are you talking rubbish? Stop crying, my friend,” Obinze said, pleased to be in a position to pretend strength.
And yet when Nicholas and Ojiugo visited, he disliked how strenuously they tried to be positive, to pretend, almost, as though he was merely ill in hospital and they had come to visit him. They sat across from him, the bare cold table between them, and talked about the mundane, Ojiugo speaking a little too quickly, and Nicholas saying more in an hour than Obinze had heard him say in weeks: Nne had been accepted into the National Children’s Orchestra, Nna had won yet another prize. They brought him money, novels, a bag of clothes. Nicholas had shopped for him, and most of the clothes were new and in his size. Ojiugo often asked, “But are they treating you well? Are they treating you well?” as though the treatment was what mattered, rather than the blighted reality of it all, that he was in a holding center, about to be deported. Nobody behaved normally. They were all under the spell of his misfortune.
“They are waiting for seats on a flight to Lagos,” Obinze said. “They’ll keep me in Dover until there’s a seat available.”
Obinze had read about Dover in a newspaper. A former prison. It felt surreal, to be driven past the electronic gates, the high walls, the wires. His cell was smaller, colder, than the cell in Manchester and his cellmate, another Nigerian, told him that he was not going to allow himself to be deported. He had a hardened, fleshless face. “I will take off my shirt and my shoes when they try to board me. I will seek asylum,” he told Obinze. “If you take off your shirt and your shoes, they will not board you.” He repeated this often, like a mantra. From time to time he farted loudly, wordlessly, and from time to time he sank to his knees in the middle of their tiny cell, hands raised up to the heavens, and prayed. “Father Lord, I praise your name! Nothing is too much for you! I bless your name!” His palms were deeply etched with lines. Obinze wondered what atrocities those hands had seen. He felt suffocated in that cell, let out only to exercise and to eat, food that brought to mind a bowl of boiled worms. He could not eat; he felt his body slackening, his flesh disappearing. By the day he was led into a van one early morning, a fuzz of hair, like carpet grass, had covered his entire jaw. It was not yet dawn. He was with two women and five men, all handcuffed, all bound for Nigeria, and they were marched, at Heathrow Airport, through security and immigration and onto the plane, while other passengers stared. They were seated at the very back, in the last row of seats, closest to the toilet. Obinze sat unmoving throughout the flight. He did not want his tray of food. “No, thank you,” he said to the flight attendant.
The woman next to him said eagerly, “Can I have his own?” She had been at Dover too. She had very dark lips and a buoyant, undefeated manner. She would, he was sure, get another passport with another name and try again.
As the plane began its descent into Lagos, a flight attendant stood above them and said loudly, “You cannot leave. An immigration officer will come to take charge of you.” Her face tight with disgust, as though they were all criminals bringing shame on upright Nigerians like her. The plane emptied out. Obinze looked through the window at an old jet standing in the mild late afternoon sun, until a uniformed man came walking down the aisle. His belly was large; it must have been a struggle to button up his shirt.
“Yes, yes, I have come to take charge of you! Welcome home!” he said humorously, and he reminded Obinze of that Nigerian ability to laugh, to so easily reach for amusement. He had missed that. “We laugh t
oo much,” his mother once said. “Maybe we should laugh less and solve our problems more.”
The uniformed man led them to an office, and handed out forms. Name. Age. Country you have come from.
“Did they treat you well?” the man asked Obinze.
“Yes,” Obinze said.
“So do you have anything for the boys?”
Obinze looked at him for a moment, his open face, his simple view of the world; deportations happened every day and the living went on living. Obinze brought from his pocket a ten-pound note, part of the money Nicholas had given him. The man took it with a smile.
Outside, it was like breathing steam; he felt light-headed. A new sadness blanketed him, the sadness of his coming days, when he would feel the world slightly off-kilter, his vision unfocused. At the cordoned-off area near Arrivals, standing apart from the other expectant people, his mother was waiting for him.
Part 4
CHAPTER 31
After Ifemelu broke up with Curt, she told Ginika, “There was a feeling I wanted to feel that I did not feel.”
“What are you talking about? You cheated on him!” Ginika shook her head as though Ifemelu were mad. “Ifem, honestly, sometimes I don’t understand you.”
It was true, she had cheated on Curt with a younger man who lived in her apartment building in Charles Village and played in a band. But it was also true that she had longed, with Curt, to hold emotions in her hand that she never could. She had not entirely believed herself while with him—happy, handsome Curt, with his ability to twist life into the shapes he wanted. She loved him, and the spirited easy life he gave her, and yet she often fought the urge to create rough edges, to squash his sunniness, even if just a little.
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