A Squatter's Tale, page 4
‘At night this can be a very dangerous area,’ Andrew said with visible revulsion, ‘that is when the drug dealers begin business, and then you have the shootings and the police sirens. I think they are all asleep during the day.’
The African immigrant sometimes exhibits as much bitterness towards his African-American cousins as the worst white racist. Confronted with scenes like those we saw during that drive through West Oakland and the terrible images of inner-city violence and despair on TV, the success-obsessed immigrant wants to get as far away as possible, psychically if not physically, from that horrible pit. He violently rejects any identification with what strikes him as irreversible disaster, the way one might disown and denounce a family member suffering from incurable alcoholism and kleptomania. It was that sort of rejection I saw on Andrew’s face, and that was perhaps why he took me on that tour of West Oakland—to teach me early on how to be revolted by the inner city and the African-Americans who, no matter how successful some of them may become, are in our minds chained to the inner city.
Andrew’s own place was on the second of five floors in an apartment block on Lee Street, off Grand Avenue. It was nicer than the other parts of the city we’d passed through. It was a hilly area with apartment blocks of many shapes and sizes on which the paint was generally not too weathered. Perhaps because it was so hilly there, some of the buildings looked from a distance as though they were supporting each other. Lee Street was a few blocks away from Lake Merritt, vast and radiant in the afternoon sun; standing outside the place where Andrew lived, you could see the tops of the tall office buildings of downtown Oakland.
His room was large and airy, but the crowd of religious posters on the wall and the room’s regimented tidiness made me a little claustrophobic. I took a seat by the wide window that looked out on to two rows of parked cars. Andrew handed me a glass of orange juice (the other option was Diet Pepsi), and he put my things away in the wardrobe with the cheerful efficiency of a professional servant. He offered to quickly warm a meal for me, but I declined: I was getting uncomfortable with Andrew’s excessive kindness. After the mandatory comments about how sick Nigeria currently was and the usual cries of horror, we began talking about our university days. Andrew had heard from someone that the Hook lived near Oakland, but had not met up with him; he had surprisingly pleasant memories of the Hook.
‘He was a very nice person. I think he wanted to be a born-again Christian, but he was confused and found it difficult to make up his mind. It was partly immaturity, I think. He couldn’t have been more than twenty in his final year.’
I didn’t say anything to that. As I remembered it the Hook, young though he was, had no difficulty in making up his mind that what he wanted was the incredibly desirable Franca, not the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Andrew remembered me as his good friend; he said I encouraged him a great deal when he was preparing for his final year exams. I had no such memory, but nodded in agreement.
‘You always stood by your friends,’ Andrew said, implying that he was one of such friends, and I nodded again. Not being as depraved as Bronzo, the Hook and the others, I hadn’t directly tormented Andrew, but I remembered with shame how loudly I had laughed at the lewd jokes made at his expense. His own recollections were entirely different, and I was amazed at how his mind had completely revised the past like a Stalinist historian, retroactively awarding himself the friendship of people who had never hidden from him their contempt for and derision of him, transforming cynical bastards into nice young men and loyal friends with clean hearts, only a little confused and slightly distracted by matters of the flesh.
Though it was a Saturday, Andrew soon had to leave for work after I had reassured him that I was comfortable and didn’t need anything other than to make a few phone calls and get some sleep. He told me later that he had two jobs—one at a kidney dialysis plant in a small town outside Oakland and another job he didn’t name—in addition to receiving training at a school for Africa-bound missionaries. All three kept him occupied sixteen hours a day Monday to Friday and ten hours on Saturdays.
I’d mentioned to him that I had to make calls to Nigeria and that I would pay for my calls when the bill came, but Andrew would not hear of my paying; after much wrangling we agreed that we’d split the bill in two. The day the phone bill came, about a month later, I was sitting on the chair by the window, which had become my favourite spot in the room, looking out at the street. Andrew was opening his mail when a gasp of horror escaped from his throat. I thought he’d received bad news from home. The bill hung from the suddenly lifeless fingers of his right hand. I took it from him and saw that it was for more than two hundred dollars. Apart from two local numbers, I’d made all the calls (seven long ones to Nigeria). Though I didn’t quite gasp like Andrew, the bill hit me very hard. I said I’d pay for every call I’d made and this time he didn’t argue.
I called Lagos as soon as Andrew had left for one of his two jobs. Robo, my girlfriend, sounded sleepy on the phone, then she recognised my voice and gave a heart-warming yell of delight.
As I write this, I’m struck by how different my experience of leaving Nigeria would have been if the telephone hadn’t been invented. The telephone simultaneously reduces the distance between the exile and the homeland and increases the pain of separation. A letter that would take weeks to arrive at its destination emphatically reminds the exile of distance, encourages coming to terms with separation, whereas the realisation that what has been left behind is only a phonecall away prolongs the embrace of the past. Because of the miracle of the telephone, it is easy to go on believing that what you have been separated from hasn’t been left behind at all, as a result of which the process of separation becomes confusing and messy, vulnerable to self-deception and the notorious frailties of the human heart.
‘I was getting worried,’ Robo said. ‘I know we agreed you’d call first but when I hadn’t heard from you I called the Hook’s number yesterday morning and got the answering machine. I called again three hours later and still got the machine, and I really began to get worried. Of course I was just being silly—you guys could have gone out somewhere.’
I told her about the Hook not turning up at the airport and about the three days I spent in Uncle Happiness’s house, omitting the grimmer details, but it was impossible to leave out of my voice the weight of accumulated disappointments.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Robo said, ‘I can’t believe the Hook could be so rotten to make all those promises and not even show up at the airport. Even if he had to travel he should have had someone to pick you up.’
‘So, how are you?’ I asked, anxious to move on to other things.
‘What do you think? Miserable and missing you wretchedly already. America seems so far away, like another planet. My mum has been trying to cheer me up. Even my father’s noticed something’s wrong. “How’s your friend?” he asked me the other day and I knew he meant you, of course, since you are the only one he calls “my friend”. I imagine that calling your name would be too intimate for him so it’s a kind of code between us, but this time I pretended I didn’t have any idea who he was referring to. So he tried harder, “Your friend, you know, um … um … the boy, your friend,” and I asked him again, “Daddy, which boy?” And he finally had to mention the unmentionable. “I mean Obi, isn’t that the boy’s name?” I told him you’d gone to America and he looked at me strangely as if checking to see if I was lying, then he changed the subject.’
Though Robo and I had been together, with a few breaks, some short, some long, for thirteen years, her father had still not become adjusted to the idea of his precious, only daughter sleeping with a young man with an arrogant walk and defiant eyes, who sometimes even sat on his settee in his cosy living room and was served his brandy and ate his food and looked through his books and his collection of old jazz albums. He was a tall man with a wrinkled, bitter face; I thought it was me at first, but Robo assured me that even when receiving cheques from the clients of his accountancy firm the look on his face was one of implacable hatred. I suspect his bitter face was responsible for turning Robo’s mother, a pleasant enough woman, into a gloomy, nervous mound of incompetence. He had the opposite effect on Robo; it was her long and meandering laugh, like a pleasant cruise in lovely weather, and her wide-eyed smile of a naughty child that I fell for very badly. And also her smooth copper-burnished chocolate skin, with her slender face of understated beauty which you needed discernment to appreciate, and two small breasts, always in a state of agitation—Robo claimed they were too small for her to wear a bra so her nipples pushed out against her clothes, looking perennially erect. Even as I write this, that memory provokes a stirring in my underpants.
‘So, how is Lagos?’
‘More or less the way you left it. My father and I went to a meeting with clients in Ikoyi yesterday, and on our way out we got stuck on Awolowo Road because fuel queues had blocked the road in front of us and behind. We waited for two hours, and then we had to leave the driver there and walk all the way to Falomo where we took a taxi home. As usual, the place is full of rumours—you hear today the oil workers’ strike is going to be called off, that a deal has been made, then you hear it hasn’t. Please let’s forget about this country for now and talk of better things. So, what are your first impressions of America?’
‘I feel I haven’t arrived here yet; I’m still probing at the edges. However, I’ve seen the inner city with my own eyes, and though I didn’t see any actual violence, there was a sense in which I felt I was watching people die slowly before my eyes. The area of Oakland where Andrew lives isn’t bad at all, thank God. Have you seen my folks since I left?’
‘Not yet. You know, I slept in your house the night you left. Your mum broke down as soon as you went into the immigration area and we couldn’t follow any more. It was bad, Obi. Waxy and I tried to calm her down, but she just kept crying. She tried to stop but couldn’t, and after a while we both joined in with her. She pleaded with me to stay when we got to your place and anyway I was in no condition to drive all the way home so we went to a business centre and I called my house. I slept in your room and the next morning it was like we were all still in mourning! It was really ridiculous. Your mum says she’s going to get a phone for her shop even if she has to see the Head of State for it. Knowing her, you can be sure she’ll have one in a month or two; she says she has to hear your voice at least once every fortnight, no matter what the cost is. And speaking of cost, if I don’t stop all my gisting, this phone call will cost you a fortune.’
‘No, it’s not that expensive to call from America,’ I lied quickly, anxious to keep the conversation going.
‘Well, if you say so. I’ll go to your place as soon as I can, check how your mum is doing. She really looked bad that day. I didn’t know she could ever cry over anything so much though I’ve always known she loved you terribly.’
My mother had hovered around me while I checked in for the flight, guarded my passport and boarding pass jealously, eyeing the loafers who hung around the terminal building. She carefully examined the locks on my suitcase and the bag I was carrying on to the plane, interrogated me closely to make sure I’d not left anything behind, reminded me to take my Sunday-to-Sunday medicine in America regularly for the first few months—you know they don’t know how to treat malaria there—and warned me again and again about the evils that abounded in America: AIDS, random robbery and murder, etc. etc. If she could have, she’d have gone to the plane and opened it up to confirm that its engines were good enough to take her son safely to London, the first leg of my journey. And she would have demanded to see the pilot’s licence. Crying is as alien to my mother as rain is to the Sahara desert; she sniffed and rubbed her eyes with a dry handkerchief at funerals until they became a bit red so that people wouldn’t think her hard-hearted. The thought of her crying all night at my departure was heartbreaking.
Waxy was the nickname for my younger sister, Nwaka. I never called her that, for it represented in my mind her astonishing grownupness, which had begun to frighten me in the last few years, and most acutely since she’d gone to the University of Lagos to study medicine. From the age of fifteen, her body had begun to explode dangerously in all directions, drawing battalions of lecherous admirers who haunted our house and, at least in my troubled mind, filled her room every evening at the hostel of the College of Medicine. She always carried herself with such maturity and grace that it seemed silly to worry about her, but in a city with armies of predators, ranging from student secret fraternity louts to sixty-year-old playboys who bought first class return tickets to Europe for their girlfriends as though they were buying bottles of Coke, a girl with a body like that was always in mortal danger. Nwaka was, like our mother, not a crying person. But we’d all been together in Lagos all our lives, in the same house or, since my elder sister, Adaku, got married, within a few miles of each other, and to them my going to America to live must have seemed like stepping into a void in the centre of the earth.
‘I feel so alone,’ Robo said in a voice that had suddenly gone from lively chattiness to quiet agony. ‘Why did you have to go? Why couldn’t you have just stayed with me?’
I felt like a farmer whose entire herd of cattle has gone berserk and bolted away into a surrounding forest. We’d gone over this for months and agreed that my going to America was the best thing for us (or I thought we’d agreed). She would visit after one year, when I had settled down a little, and then we’d jointly make plans for the future. The progress I thought we’d made in so many hours of painful, repetitive discussion had been erased by that agonised tone, the labour of many months had turned to dust in seconds.
I began to recite the arguments: Nigeria was certain to continue along a path of steady decline, blundering from one ridiculous crisis to another, and could at any time explode into ethnic or religious warfare or some combination of both. We needed to sink our roots as a family, in a stable, functioning, dynamic place; we needed to make a fresh start in ‘a land of opportunity’. There was nothing for me in Nigeria, and the longer I remained there, the unhappier I would become, and it would, with time, begin to take a toll on our relationship. As it was now we would be apart for a while, but we would bear it knowing it was unavoidable; we would always keep in touch, always support each other.
‘I know,’ Robo said, her voice still soaked in pain, ‘I’m just being stupid and soppy. Forgive me, I should try and reduce the things you have to bother about not increase them. I’m so sorry. It’s just that I feel so alone. I can’t remember the last time I couldn’t see you every day.’
‘It’s going to be all right, darling,’ I said, desperately believing myself. ‘We’re going to be fine.’
Burgess (the novelist, not the spy) wrote: ‘Love [is] only a durable fire if the man [is] there to fill the coal-scuttle.’ I strove to fill my own coal-scuttle from thousands of miles away. In long phone conversations with Robo about old friends, new crises and scandals, I pledged my love as often as I could, endlessly explaining why I had had to move to America, like a desperate salesman. In the process I savagely robbed my lean pockets to add to AT&T’s overflowing cash vaults, but all my efforts ended in dismal failure.
*
I was so tired, not having slept properly in five days, that I passed out immediately after the call, sprawled thoughtlessly across the bed. I was gently woken up by Andrew, who had slept on a spare mattress on the floor. He apologised profusely for rousing me, saying he only did so because I’d been sleeping since about noon the day before and he thought I might like to get up and have breakfast and maybe go to church. I was ravenously hungry and agreed to breakfast and, to show my gratitude to Andrew for taking me in, to church.
The church was in a small town about twenty-five miles from Oakland. On the way we passed beautiful rolling hills and valleys covered alternately by golden brown carpets of grass and luxuriant forests of cypress and eucalyptus. Small picturesque cottages huddled on hilltops, and office buildings nestled in seductively leafy landscapes, so perfectly realised you thought they were architect’s models, not real functional structures. In minutes we went from urban exhaustion to idyllic parkland. Cars, jeeps, pick-ups and huge trucks sped past us on Highway 24. Andrew kept his old Volvo in the slow lane, gripping the steering wheel as though he were afraid someone would snatch it away from him.
The church was a simple, circular, cream-coloured building, topped by an elaborate roof of weathered, reddish-brown tiles which rose steeply from all sides and ended in a tall, narrow crest, pointing towards heaven. We were the only black people in the church. Andrew led the way to two seats at the back even though there were rows of vacant seats in front, which made me think of the infamously segregated buses of the old Deep South. Our fellow worshippers were laundered, starched and ironed to a spotless, unwrinkled cleanliness and familiness—father, mother, child or two, sometimes a grandmother, seated together in visible righteousness. These, I thought, looked like people incapable of even thinking of sin or the merest indiscretion. The light seats of stainless steel and black leather, like in an office reception room, took away some of the church’s holiness: for me a church without pews is like an army general out of uniform.
