“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.