Читать книгу Butter Honey Pig Bread - Francesca Ekwuyasi - Страница 12

Kehinde

EXHAUSTION SHOULD BE STILL, spent, gently beckoning sleep—or better yet, just clocking out. Instead, it is churning inside me with unwelcome vigour. I know, I know, it is more than fatigue that is tugging at me.

The flight from Montreal to Lagos felt incredibly long. Stretched out even longer by the nine-and-a-half-hour layover in Frankfurt. Now I smell foul, like rotten onions or rotten eggs. Just general rot. And there’s this sharp throbbing in my temples that won’t go away, even though I’ve eaten a fistful of ibuprofen. I am not prepared for this, not prepared to see my sister, or our mother, for that matter. So much has gone unsaid for so long between us, Taiye and me, and Mami. We’ve been biting our tongues as if our silences will save us or freeze us in a time that required nothing more than just being. Together. More truthfully, I’ve been biting my tongue. Taiye tried, ever long-suffering. But even she gave up after enough time. Throughout our separation, daily calls turned biweekly, turned weekly, and then turned monthly. Eventually, the phone calls turned to monthly emails, turned to a letter now and then, turned to silence. Not that I blame her; I barely responded, and never honestly, and she knew.

We haven’t spoken properly in a very long time. Shit.

And there’s the box of letters.

Almost a year ago now Taiye sent me an orange shoebox filled with about ninety letters. Some date back as far as eleven years ago. Some are in sealed envelopes, some are on the backs of receipts and flyers, and others are folded pieces of loose-leaf paper. All handwritten. Her handwriting is the same as always: big looping lines and rounded letters. I started out by reading them slowly, one every few weeks. I haven’t gotten very far, and still, I feel apprehensive about delving into them.

The plane landed at noon Lagos time, and Taiye said she would collect us. After the slow wait for bags, and the even slower move through customs, I spot her among throngs of sweaty, expectant faces at Arrivals. Hers is my face, only narrower, peeking from between thin waist-length braids. Her skin is darker than I remember, burnt umber, shiny with oil and perspiration. I wave frantically to catch her attention, and her lips stretch into a smile that slightly calms the rapid thrumming in my chest. We tumble forward and catch each other in a fierce embrace. Her slim arms wind tightly around me. Her lean body is soft and hot against my own, and she has the same cocoa butter smell I remember. She pulls away, just as many smothered emotions begin to well up in my chest, so I cough to regain composure.

“Look at you,” Taiye says, and steps back. “You’re here.”

I’m here.

“And Farouq.” I pull at his arm. “He’s here, too.”

“I gathered.” She smiles. “You exist after all,” Taiye says, and hugs him.

The patch of sweat darkening the back of his grey T-shirt grows. The heat is thick.

“It’s good to finally meet you,” Taiye adds, looking him square in the face, no smile. I can sense Farouq’s uncertainty, but she means it. Intense and earnest as always.

“Likewise,” he responds, and looks at her with some type of restrained awe.

Taiye and I, we are identical. Almost. She’s always been thinner than me, even though as a child she ate and ate, everything, often. And she has this lure that draws people to her orbit; I don’t understand it. Our mother is the same. I am not jealous (anymore), and I am not worried—but only because I know where Taiye’s desires lie in that regard. I don’t want to feel threatened, because I trust Farouq. I do trust Farouq, but despite himself, he’s just a man.

We walk outside to find that the sky is too open; the sun pours down ferociously. Jesus Christ, I need ice water. I watch Farouq struggle to breathe in the humidity. The heat immediately coats him in a film of sweat that beads and rolls off his face and neck, catching in the beard he’s stubbornly refused to shave for weeks. I watch him decline help from the car hire driver and heave our suitcases into the boot of the silver Camry. It’s surreal to have him here; jarring to see him next to Taiye. Who is this man? Brown in Canada, oyimbo in Lagos. What is he doing here? And with me? I don’t want to think of my luck and spoil it.

Farouq. He says he loves me, he marries me, he travels to Lagos with me, and I’m terrified. The first time we touched it was innocent enough; his arm brushed my bare shoulder when he reached past me to collect a salted caramel cone from the ice cream man. It was a hot day; it was our first date. His arm brushed my shoulder, and it seared. I felt a swell and a rush inside my belly. I grabbed the hem of his T-shirt to keep him close to me, and I thought fiercely: Kiss me, kiss me. The way he looked at me eh, the way he looked at me. He didn’t kiss me then.

On our second date, in response to a dry joke I made about godlessness becoming his undoing, he said, “I’m petrified of God. I just don’t know that religion will save me from Her inevitable wrath.” He identified as a “spiritually open agnostic.” At this, all my years of Catholic indoctrination rushed to the surface. I had to stop short of shouting, “Lake of fire!”

Perhaps it’s God’s wrath that comes down in harsh rays to burn us now. I’m grateful for the air conditioning in the car. I am also thankful not to be alone with Taiye yet.

“I like your hair like that,” she says. “It suits you.”

Instinctively, I reach my hand to touch my hair, the only feature of mine in which I fail to find fault. It is dyed a light brown that is almost orange, and I have it in loose twists that frame my face and graze my shoulders.

“Thank you.” I smile.

“How was the flight?” she asks, looking at Farouq, who has been staring out the window and trying to make sense of the voracious beast that is Lagos.

“It was good, thanks,” he says, lifting his round wire-rimmed glasses to rub his eyes, bloodshot with exhaustion. “We had a long layover in Frankfurt, but it wasn’t too bad. Well, except for the shitty company.” He jerks his head in my direction, and I flick his arm.

“He thought the cabin crew were especially rude on the flight to Lagos.” Taiye’s eyes widen and her eyebrows shoot up. “Right? So you noticed, yeah?”

Her voice is my voice, husky and dulcet at once. But hers has a sweeter lilt, and when she speaks to Farouq, she enunciates her words and clips them like our cousins in London.

They go on about the shitty treatment that Nigerians receive on international flights, and I close my eyes and let myself sink into the cold leather seat.

WE’VE JUST GONE OVER THIRD MAINLAND BRIDGE and are on the Island. The driver takes us into the neighbourhood that is so familiar; the fences are still as high as ever and topped with razor-edged rolls of barbed wire or taut strands of electrical cords. Here, the road is conspicuously void of hawkers, thin children with meticulously piled pyramids of guguru and epa or Agege bread or glass boxes of fist-sized puff-puff balanced on their heads; they’d swarmed the car in the standstill traffic on the mainland. Their sweaty, sun-battered faces and dirty clothes slapped me with shame at how easy my life has been, despite my many woes. In Lagos, there is no bubble thick enough to protect you from the truth of your privilege or your disadvantage; you see it everywhere, every day. Culture is a way of life. I learned that in social studies in primary four, when Taiye and I sat beside each other and would scream and thrash if the teachers tried to separate us. What’s our culture? I feel far removed. Untethered. Alone in my head. Alone in a way that is separate from Farouq. I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m embarrassed at how affected I feel by the children selling snacks on the road, mortified that I’ve been privileged enough to forget.

We drive into the compound, with its towering fences, just as high as everyone else’s. I am foolishly surprised that I do not recognize the gateman who drags the heavy metal gates open.

“Where is Mr Suleiman?” I ask Taiye.

“He left a while ago.” She shrugs. “I’m not really sure. This guy’s name is Hassan.”

The house stands three storeys tall. There is a wide balcony jutting out from the master bedroom on the second floor and two narrow ones on the third floor, like bulging square eyes and a straight line for a contemptuous mouth. The house rises above a bungalow used for storage and the security post. Swaying palm trees surround it, so many of them. And mango and pawpaw trees and plantain palms cluster behind it. It’s a large compound, a large house; I expected that being back as an adult, everything would seem smaller and less enchanting. The thrumming in my chest proves me wrong.

Our mother is waiting at the doorway, dwarfed by the comically oversized door frame that eats up most of the front wall of the first floor. Her hands are clasped in front of her. She’s beaming, rounder than I’ve ever seen her, round in her cheeks and her belly, and I think it is good because she is glowing. She is wearing an adire bubu with a wide neckline that slips off her shoulder.

We are in each other’s arms before I can decide how I feel. We are holding each other tightly, and I don’t realize it at first, but I am sobbing into the warmth of her perfumed neck.

“What’s going on with your hair?” she asks, as she pulls away from me.

I laugh and say, “Mami, this is Farouq.”

“Ehen, so this is the reason you haven’t come home since abi?” She clasps his face between her small palms, studying him after he plants kisses on both her cheeks.

“I hope the heat doesn’t kill you with this bush on your face,” she says to him, and to me, she teases, “He’s handsome sha, even though he is oyimbo.”

Farouq laughs and says, “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, ma.”

“Oya, you people, go and settle. Your sister and I will finish cooking.”

I am relieved that she seems lucid, and I choose not to be alarmed by the desperate thing flickering in her eyes. It is so subtle, but I recognize it well.

TAIYE AND ME, our bedrooms are next to each other on the third floor. Mine is a large room with a twin bed covered in brightly coloured tie-dye linens tucked in the corner farthest from the door. The polished wood vanity with an ornately framed four-foot mirror sits across the room from the bed exactly how I left it. On it are my old things: tubes of sticky fruit-flavoured lip gloss, stacks of Vogue and Time, half-empty bottles of nail polish—their shimmering contents long dried—and a tattered French-English dictionary, my initials written on its spine in thick black marker. On the floor, against the wooden base of the vanity, are stacks and stacks of books: novels and poetry collections; a mixture of secondary school–assigned literature by Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Wole Soyinka; and books that sixteen-year-old me read voluntarily, like Harry Potter and Purple Hibiscus and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. They are covered in a uniformly thin layer of dust. I devoured these books; every single one of them drew me in with its words until I was so deep in each world that any ending seemed too abrupt, and I would just sit with the closed book on my lap, the characters like old friends to whom I had just said good night. I would have to wait a while for the lingering aroma of one story to fade from my mind before diving into another.

I don’t think my things have been touched at all since I left. The floors have been swept, the bed made, and the worn red rugs that used to cover the white tile floors replaced with these woven multicoloured square ones, but aside from that nothing has changed. The framed posters of Bob Marley and Fela Kuti still hang above the headboard, and they rattle against the wall when Farouq throws himself onto the bed and moans into the pillow.

“Finally, finally,” he says. Then he looks at me with heavy-lidded eyes and asks, “Sleep or food?”

I laugh because I know that he will fall asleep before he chooses, but I suppose that is a choice. I open the windows and the sliding glass door leading out to the narrow balcony, and by the time I turn around he is asleep, with his hands tucked under the pillow and his feet hanging off the side of the bed. When I slip off his shoes and remove his socks, he stirs and mumbles something about being ticklish.

WHEN HE WAS FOURTEEN, Farouq left his mother’s tired one-bedroom flat in Aulnay-sous-Bois. She sent him to live in the fifteenth arrondissement with his father, a man she had fallen in love with during her first summer in Paris, a man whose last name Farouq bore but whom he barely knew.

The story goes that his mother, only a few months off a cramped flight from Tangier, met his father at her uncle’s café near Parc de Belleville in the twentieth arrondissement. An anti-xenophobia rally had been organized in the dimly lit tea shop. He was slightly older, a thin baby-faced activist with reluctant patches of wiry reddish hair on his face. It was a poor excuse for facial hair, but she found it adorable. She looked at him for a long time and found him beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that later during the same week, when they were alone in the small flat he shared with two other men, she slipped off her emerald-green hijab, unpinned her thick henna-reddened curls, and let them tumble softly down her round shoulders, so that he could see that she was beautiful, too.

Because her family was devoutly Muslim, they asked her not to see him. Because she was strong-willed and in love—or merely intoxicated by the idea that someone she wanted also wanted her—she saw him anyway. After many secret evenings full of ripe fruit, music, and cheap wine, she became pregnant. I can only imagine the fear that must have gripped her gut when she found out, how difficult it must have been to come clean to her family. She was only nineteen years old. They never married, and apparently, Farouq’s father outgrew his activism and settled back into his life as an upper-middle-class white boy.

Farouq traces his interest in racialization and critical race studies to his fifteenth birthday—the year he moved in with his father, who ceaselessly tried to hammer whiteness into him. He couldn’t be Farouq and Étienne—the name his father had chosen for him. He had to be one or the other. Maghrebian or French—that is, white. His obsession is the force behind his doctoral research. Three months ago it took him back to Paris, where he spent weeks holed up in the special collections reading room of the Sorbonne Library, wielding his keen intellect in an attempt to sort out the angst that his family stirs up in him. He Skyped me at four a.m. once, drunkenly ranting about growing up Moroccan in Paris without ever having been to Morocco: the absurdity of the prejudice he endured, the fucked-up way that white supremacy slyly slips a chip on your shoulder, only to turn around and innocently question its position there. A few times, he moved into French and spoke too quickly for me to follow, pausing and smiling sweetly at my interjection of “English, please.” This, his obsession, brought him here with me, as part of an agreement we half-jokingly made between glasses of wine on his thirty-sixth birthday: he comes to Lagos with me now, and I’ll go to Tangier with him in a few weeks.

I watch Farouq’s chest rise and fall in tune with his audible breath, his snores in ragged inhales and silent exhales. Let me tell you a secret: sometimes I scheme, I keep myself scarce from Farouq, but only to stoke his longing. No other reason, I swear. My mother, in dramatically different ways, kept herself scarce from my father, and I have never seen any human being adore another as thoroughly as my father did my mother. I want that so bad, you don’t know.

AFTER A QUICK BATH I DRESS AS QUIETLY AS I CAN, walking on the tips of my toes so that I don’t disturb Farouq, who has twisted his body into a shape that will undoubtedly leave him hurting when he wakes. I am incredibly tired, but I want to stay awake until nighttime and counter any jet lag. I put on a baggy white T-shirt over shorts and walk past Taiye’s room on my way downstairs. I look inside to see two open suitcases with clothes spilling out of them onto the white tiled floor. There is a crumpled orange towel on the red and blue paisley rug at the foot of her bed. She is still so messy. She’s been home for months and doesn’t seem to have fully unpacked.

A delicious aroma floats up the stairs and pierces the air around me. Downstairs, besides the sizzle and sigh of wet food on heat, the only sound in the kitchen is a melody that our mother is humming. I don’t recognize it.

Taiye is at the stove pouring cooked white rice out of a bright green plastic colander into a large stainless-steel pot of bubbling stew.

She looks at me with a smile. “How far?”

“I dey, I bathed, and Farouq is asleep.”

Sitting on the counter by the window, our mother looks me up and down, her smile sweet. “My darling, how are you?” she asks. Before I can answer, she adds, “Your sister is preparing a feast—there’s even cake!”

“Nice! What kind?”

“Chocolate,” our mother says.

“And salted caramel,” Taiye adds.

“Fancy,” I say.

“Is Farouq allergic to anything, or like, is there stuff that he won’t eat?” Taiye asks, a wooden spoon stained dark red in her right hand, her head cocked to the left.

“At all,” I scoff. “He eats everything.”

Taiye nods.

“I want to help. What can I do?” I ask.

“Uhhh.” Taiye absentmindedly rubs her thumb over the finger-length scar that runs from the indent of her right dimple to the faint cleft of her chin. “Yeah, you can fry some plantains.” She gestures toward a red plastic basket sitting on top of the fridge.

“Sounds good.” I reach up to collect the basket, inside of which are half a dozen large plantains that have ripened to near complete blackness.

“Actually,” Taiye says, her eyebrows shooting up in excitement, “we can make mosa!”

“Mosa!”