About the Author 2 page

After a while, my plans began to unravel. I realized that I would never be able to enlist Naema’s boyfriend. Naema herself would block the plan. In fact, until that night she had been taunting Maisha to move out, saying that if she were as old as Maisha she would have left home long ago. Besides, even if I fled to the Kibera slums, as soon as we touched the tourists, the police would come and arrest my parents and dismantle our shack. They would take away Maisha’s trunk and steal her treasures.

* * *

BABA STARTED AWAKE, AS if a loud noise had hit him.

“Is that Maisha?” he asked, closing his eyes again.

“No, Maisha is working,” Mama said. “My Maisha commands musungu and motorcars!” she said, her good mood returning.

“What? What musungu, tarling?” Baba asked, sitting up immediately, rubbing sleep and hunger from his eyes with the base of his palms.

“White tourists,” Mama said.

“Uh? They must to pay ma-dollar or euros. Me am family head. You hear me, woman?”

“Yes.”

“And no Honolulu business. What kind of motorcar were they driving?”

“Jaguar,” I answered. “With driver. Baba, we should not allow Maisha to leave—”

“Nobody is leaving, nobody. And shut up your animal mouth! You have wounded my wife! Until I break your teeth tomorrow, no opinion from you. No nothing. Did you thank the ma men for me?”

“No,” I said.

“Aiiee! Jigana, where are your manners? Did you ask where they were going? Motorcar number?”

“No, Baba.”

“So if they take her to Honolulu, what do I do? Maybe we should send you to a street gang. Boy, have you not learned to grab opportunities? Is this how you will waste school fees in January? Poor Maisha.”

He squinted incredulously, and lines of doubt kinked up his massive forehead. He pursed his lips, and anger quickened his breath. But that night I stood my ground.

“I don’t want school anymore, Baba,” I said.

“Coward, shut up. That one is a finished matter.”

“No.”

“What do you mean by no? You want to be a pocket thief like me, . . . my son? My first son? You can’t be useless as the gals. Wallai!”

“Me, I don’t want school.”

“Your mind is too young to think. As we say, ‘The teeth that come first are not used in chewing.’ As long as you live here, your Baba says school.”

“La hasha.”

“You telling me never? Jigana!” He looked at Mama. “He doesn’t want school? Saint Jude Thaddaeus!”

“Bwana, this boy has grown strong-head,” Mama said. “See how he is looking at our eyes. Insult!”

Baba stood up suddenly, his hands shaking. I didn’t cover my cheeks with my hands to protect myself from his slap or spittle, as I usually did when he was angry. I was ready for him to kill me. My family was breaking up because of me. He stood there, trembling with anger, confused.

Mama patted his shoulders to calm him down. He brushed her aside and went out to cool off. I monitored him through a hole in the wall. Soon he was cursing himself aloud for drinking too much and sleeping through Ex-mas Day and missing the chance to meet the tourists. As his mind turned to Maisha’s good fortune, he began to sing “A Jaguar is a Jaguar is a Jaguar” to the night, leaping from stone to stone, tracing the loose cobbles that studded the floodwater like the heads of stalking crocodiles in a river. In the sky, some of the tall city buildings were branded by lights left on by forgetful employees, and a few shopping centers wore the glitter of Ex-mas; flashing lights ascended and descended like angels on Jacob’s dream ladder. The long city buses, Baba’s hunting grounds, had stopped for the night. As the streets became emptier, cars drove faster through the floods, kicking up walls of water, which collapsed on our shack.

Back inside, Baba plucked his half-used miraa stick from the rafter and started chewing. He fixed his eyes on the trunk. A mysterious smile dribbled out of the corners of his mouth. Eventually, the long stick of miraa subsided into a formless sponge. His spitting was sharp and arced across the room and out the door. Suddenly, his face brightened. “Hakuna matata! ” he said. Then he dipped into the carton and came up with a roll of wire and started lashing the wheels of the trunk to the props of our shack. For a moment, it seemed he might be able to stop Maisha from going away.

Mama tried to discourage him from tying down the trunk. “Bwanaaa . . . stop it! She will leave if she finds you manga-mangaring with her things.”

“Woman, leave this business to me,” he said, rebuking her. “I’m not going to sit here and let any Honolulus run away with our daughter. They must marry her properly.”

“You should talk,” Mama said. “Did you come to my father’s house for my hand?”

“Nobody pays for trouble,” Baba said. “You’re trouble. If I just touch you, you get pregnant. If I even look at you—twins, just like that. Too, too ripe.”

“Me am always the problem,” Mama said, her voice rising.

“All me am saying is we must to treat the tourist well.”

Atieno was shivering; her hand was poking out of the shack. Baba yanked it back in and stuck her head through the biggest hole in the middle of our blanket. That was our way of ensuring that the family member who most needed warmth maintained his place in the center of the blanket. Baba grabbed Otieno’s legs and pushed them through two holes on the fringe. “Children of Jaguar,” he whispered into their ears. “Ex-mas ya Jag-uar.” He tried to tuck Atieno and Otieno properly into the blanket, turning them this way and that, without success. Then he became impatient and rolled them toward each other like a badly wrapped meat roll, their feet in each other’s face, their knees folded and tucked into each other’s body—a blanket womb.

Mama reminded him to wedge the door, but he refused. He wanted us to wait for Maisha. He winked at me as if I were the cosentry of our fortune. Mama handed Baby to me and lay down. I sat there sniffing kabire until I became drunk. My head swelled, and the roof relaxed and shook, then melted into the sky.

I was floating. My bones were inflammable. My thoughts went out like electric currents into the night, their counter-currents running into each other, and, in a flash of sparks, I was hanging on the door of the city bus, going to school. I hid my uniform in my bag so that I could ride free, like other street children. Numbers and letters of the alphabet jumped at me, scurrying across the page as if they had something to say. The flares came faster and faster, blackboards burned brighter and brighter. In the beams of sunlight leaking through the holes in the school roof, I saw the teacher writing around the cracks and patches on the blackboard like a skillful matatu driver threading his way through our pothole-ridden roads. Then I raced down our bald, lopsided field with an orange for a rugby ball, jumping the gullies and breaking tackles. I was already the oldest kid in my class.

Mama touched my shoulders and relieved me of the infant. She stripped Baby of the plastic rompers, cleaned him up, and put him in a nappy for the night. With a cushion wrested from Naema, who was sleeping, Mama padded the top of the carton into a cot. After placing Baby in it, she straightened the four corners of the carton and then folded up our mosquito net and hung it over them. It had been donated by an NGO, and Baba had not had a chance to pawn it yet. Then Mama wrapped her frame around the carton and slept.

* * *

I WOKE UP BABA when Maisha returned, before dawn. He had been stroking his rosary beads, dozing and tilting until his head upset the mosquito netting. Mama had to continually elbow or kick him off. And each time, he opened his eyes with a practiced smile, thinking the Jaguar hour had arrived. The rain had stopped, but clouds kept the night dark. The city had gorged itself on the floods, and its skin had swelled and burst in places. The makeshift tables and stalls of street markets littered the landscape, torn and broken, as if there had been a bar fight. Garbage had spread all over the road: dried fish, stationery, trinkets, wilted green vegetables, plastic plates, wood carvings, underwear. Without the usual press of people, the ill-lit streets sounded hollow, amplifying the smallest of sounds. Long after a police car had passed, it could be heard negotiating potholes, the officers extorting their bribes—their Ex-mas kitu kidogo—from the people who could not afford to go to their up-country villages for the holidays.

Maisha returned in an old Renault 16 taxi. She slouched in the back while the driver got out. Kneeling and applying pliers to open the back door, the driver let her out of the car. Baba’s sighs of disappointment were as loud as the muezzin who had begun to call Nairobi to prayer. My sister stepped out, then leaned on the car, exhausted. There were bags of food on the seat.

She gestured at Baba to go away. He ignored her.

“So where is our Jaguar and musungu?” Baba asked the taxi driver, peering into the shabby car as if it might be transformed at any moment.

“What Jaguar? What musungu?” the driver asked, monitoring Maisha’s movements.

“The nini Jaguar. . . . Where is my daughter coming from?” Baba asked him.

“Me, I can’t answer you that question,” he told Baba, and pointed to his passenger.

She bent in front of the only functioning headlamp to count out the fare. Her trousers were so tight that they had crinkled on her thighs and pockets; she struggled to get to the notes without breaking her artificial nails, which curved inward like talons. Yesterday, her hair had been low cut, gold, wavy, and crisp from a fresh perm. Now it stood up in places and lay flat in others, revealing patches of her scalp, which was bruised from the chemicals. It was hard to distinguish peeling face powder from damaged skin. To rid herself of an early outbreak of adolescent pimples, she had bleached her face into an uneven lightness. Her eyelids and the skin under her eyes had reacted the worst to the assorted creams she was applying, and tonight her fatigue seemed to have seeped under the burns, swelling her eyes.

The driver could not easily roll up the window. He extended his arm to guard the food bags, his collateral. Baba brought out a six-inch nail and went for the worn tires. “What dawa have you given my daughter? She always comes home strong.”

The driver crumpled immediately, his pleas laden with fright. “Mzee, my name is Karume. Paul Kinyanjui wa Karume. . . . Me, I be an upright Kenyan. I fear God.”

“And you want to steal my daughter’s bags?”

“No. Please, take the bags. Please,” the man begged, trying to restrain Baba from bursting his tires.

“Aiie, Baba. You shame me. Shut up,” Maisha said weakly, pushing the money toward the driver.

Baba collected the bags and strolled from the road, his nose full of good smells, until he suddenly broke into a run, to untie the trunk before Maisha reached the shack.

The driver got into his car and was about to put the money into his breast pocket when he started frisking himself. Baba stood watching from the door of the shack. Soon it was as if the driver had soldier ants in his clothes. He unzipped his pockets, then zipped them again quickly, as if the thief were still lurking. He removed his coat, then his shirt, and searched them. He recounted his itinerary to the skies with eyes closed, his index finger wagging at invisible stars. He searched his socks, then he got down on all fours, scouring the wet ground. He dabbed at the sweat, or tears, running down his face. “Where is my money?” he said to Maisha, finally finding his voice. “Haki, it was in my pocket now, now.”

Maisha charged forward and screeched at Baba until his stern face crumbled into a sheepish grin. He returned the fat wad of notes, giggling like the twins. The driver thanked her curtly, brushing his clothes with trembling hands. As soon as he’d reconnected the ignition wires to start the car, he creaked off, his horn blaring, his headlamp pointing up and to the left like an unblinking eye.

* * *

MAISHA STAGGERED INTO THE shack, holding her perilously high heels over her shoulders. Mama had made room for her and the bags and had sprayed our home with insecticide to discourage mosquitoes. My siblings inside started to cough. As Maisha came in, Mama stood aside like a maid, wringing her hands. I could not look Maisha in the eye and did not know what to say.

“Good night, Maisha,” I blurted out.

She stopped, her tired body seized by shock. She searched my parents’ faces before tracing the voice to me.

“Who told you to talk?” she said.

“You leave full time, I run away. No school.”

“You are going to school,” Maisha said. “Tuition is ready.”

“Run away? Jigana, shut up,” Baba said. “You think you are family head now? ‘All are leaders’ causes riots. Stupid, mtu dufu! Nobody is leaving.”

Maisha glared at us, and we all turned our backs to her as she opened the trunk to take out a blanket. The sweet smell of her Jaguar adventures filled the shack, overpowering the heavy scent of insecticide. Though her arrivals always reminded us that life could be better, tonight I hated the perfume.

“Me and your mama don’t want full time, Maisha,” Baba said, picking his nails. “We refuse.”

“Our daughter, things will get better,” Mama said. “Thanks for canceling our debt!”

“You are welcome, Mama,” Maisha said.

Mama’s face lit up with surprise; she was so used to being ignored. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Finally, she sobbed the words “Asante, Maisha, asante for everything!” and bowed repeatedly, her hands held before her, as if in prayer. The women looked into each other’s eyes in a way I had never seen before. They hugged and held on as if their hands were ropes that tied their two bodies together. In spite of the cold, beads of sweat broke out on Mama’s forehead, and her fingers trembled as she helped Maisha undo her earrings and necklace. Mama gently laid her down.

I believed that Mama might have been able to persuade her to stay, but then Baba signaled to Mama to keep quiet so that he could be the negotiator.

“Our daughter,” Baba said, “you need to rest and think carefully. As our people say, north ama south, east ama west, home the best . . .”

“Maisha, no school for me!” I said. “I told Mama and Baba. They will return fee to you.”

“Jigana, please, please, don’t argue,” Maisha said. “Even you. You cannot even pity me this night? Just for a few hours?”

* * *

MY PARENTS SAT OUTSIDE, on the paint containers. I stood by the wall, away from them. I wanted to see Maisha one more time before she disappeared.

Fog brought the dew down, thickening the darkness and turning the security lights into distant halos. We could hear Maisha twist and turn on the floor, cursing the limbs of her siblings and swatting at the mosquitoes. It was as if we were keeping a vigil of her last night with us. We were restless, the silence too heavy for us. Baba mumbled, blaming himself for not going more often to sweep the church premises. He agreed with Mama that if he had swept daily, instead of every other day, Saint Joseph the Worker would have bettered our lot. Mama snapped at him, because Baba had always told her that he was not interested in Saint Joseph’s favor but in a clean place for people to worship. Then Baba blamed her for no longer attending the KANU slum rallies to earn a few shillings.

The night degenerated into growls and hisses. I preferred the distraction of the quarrel to the sound of Maisha’s uneasy breathing. When Maisha clapped one more time and turned over, Mama couldn’t stand it anymore. She rushed inside, took the mosquito net off the carton, and tied it to the rafters so that my sister was inside it. She sprayed the place again and brought Baby out to breast-feed. The coughing got worse. Baba tore down some of the walls to let in air, but, since the wind had subsided, it was of no use. He picked up the door and used it as a big fan to whip air into the shack.

* * *

IN THE MORNING, ATIENO and Otieno came out first. They looked tired and were sniffling from the insecticide. They stood before us, spraying the morning with yellow urine, sneezing and whimpering.

The streets began to fill. The street kids were up and had scattered into the day, like chickens feeding. Some moved about groggily, already drunk on kabire. One recounted his dreams to others at the top of his voice, gesticulating maniacally. Another was kneeling and trembling with prayer, his eyes shut as if he would never open them again. One man screamed and pointed at two kids, who were holding his wallet. No one was interested. His pocket was ripped to the zipper, leaving a square hole in the front of his trousers. He pulled out his shirt to hide his nakedness, then hurried away, an awkward smile straining his face. There was no sun, only a slow ripening of the sky.

The twins started to wail and to attack Mama’s breasts. Baba spanked them hard. They sat on the ground with pent-up tears they were afraid to shed. Naema broke the spell. She came out and sat with me on the containers, grabbed my hands, and tried to cheer me up. “You are too sad, Jigana,” she said. “You want to marry the gal? Remember, it’s your turn to take Baby out.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Marry me, then—me am still here.” She stuck out her tongue at me. “I’m your sister too—more beautiful. Guy, do me photo trick . . . smile.” She was well rested and had slept off her initial shock at Maisha’s departure. Now she was herself again, taunting and talkative, her dimples deep and perfect. “You all must to let Maisha go.”

“And you?” I said. “You only listen to Maisha.”

“I’m big gal now, guy. Breadwinner. If you want school, I pay for you!”

She blew me a kiss in the wind. Maisha’s creams were already lightening her ebony face.

Before I could say anything, Naema erupted with mad laughter and ran into the shack. She almost knocked Baba down as she burst out with the bags of food we had forgotten. She placed them on the ground and tore into them, filling the morning with hope, beckoning all of us on. Baba bit into a chicken wing. Mama took a leg. The rest of us dug into the sour rice, mashed potatoes, salad, hamburgers, pizza, spaghetti, and sausages. We drank dead Coke and melted ice cream all mixed up. With her teeth, Naema opened bottles of Tusker and Castle beer. At first, we feasted in silence, on our knees, looking up frequently, like squirrels, to monitor one another’s intake. None of us thought to inflate the balloons or open the cards that Maisha had brought.

Then the twins fell over on their backs, laughing and vomiting. As soon as they were done, they went straight back to eating, their mouths pink and white and green from ice cream and beer. We could not get them to keep quiet. A taxi pulled up and Maisha came out of the shack, dragging her trunk behind her. Our parents paused as the driver helped her put it into the car. My mother began to cry. Baba shouted at the streets.

I sneaked inside and poured myself some fresh kabire and sniffed. I got my exercise book from the carton and ripped it into shreds. I brought my pen and pencil together and snapped them, the ink spurting into my palms like blue blood. I got out my only pair of trousers and two shirts and put them on, over my clothes.

I avoided the uniform package. Sitting where the trunk had been, I wept. It was like a newly dug grave. I sniffed hastily, tilting the bottle up and down until the kabire came close to my nostrils.

As the car pulled away with Maisha, our mourning attracted kids from the gangs. They circled the food, and I threw away the bottle and joined my family again. We struggled to stuff the food into our mouths, to stuff the bags back inside the shack, but the kids made off with the balloons and the cards.

I hid among a group of retreating kids and slipped away. I ran through traffic, scaled the road divider, and disappeared into Nairobi. My last memory of my family was of the twins burping and giggling.

Fattening for Gabon

Selling your child or nephew could be more difficult than selling other kids. You had to keep a calm head or be as ruthless as the Badagry-Seme immigration people. If not, it could bring trouble to the family. What kept our family secret from the world in the three months Fofo Kpee planned to sell us were his sense of humor and the smuggler’s instinct he had developed as an agbero, a tout, at the border. My sister Yewa was five, and I was ten.

Fofo Kpee was a smallish, hardworking man. Before the Gabon deal, as a simple agbero, he made a living getting people across the border without papers or just roughing them up for money. He also hired himself out in the harmattan season to harvest coconuts in the many plantations along the coast. He had his fair share of misfortune over the years, falling from trees and getting into scuffles at the border. Yet the man was upbeat about life. He seemed to smile at everything, partly because of a facial wound sustained in a fight when he was learning to be an agbero. Ridged and glossy, the scar ran down his left cheek and stopped at his upper lip, which was constricted; his mouth never fully closed. Though he tried to cover the scar with a big mustache, it shone like a bulb on a Christmas tree. His left eye looked bigger than the right because the lower eyelid came up short, pinched by the scar. Because of all this, sometimes people called him Smiley Kpee.

A two-tone, blue silver 125cc Nanfang motorcycle was the last major purchase Fofo Kpee made that month when our lifestyle took an upswing and the Gabon plot thickened. He planned to use it to ferry people across the border between Benin and Nigeria to boost our family’s income.

I could never forget that windy Tuesday evening when a wiry man brought him back on the new bike to our two-room home that faced the sea. I rushed out from behind the house, where I was cooking Abakaliki rice, to greet Fofo Kpee. His laugh was louder than the soft hum of the new machine. Our house was set back from the busy dirt road; a narrow sandy path connected them. On either side of the path and around our home was a cassava farm, a low wedge in between the tall, thick bushes, clumps of banana and plantain trees, and our abode. Our nearest neighbors lived a half kilometer down the road.

I was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing the sea-green khaki shorts Fofo had just bought for me, and my feet were dusty from playing soccer. Yewa had been building sand castles under the mango tree in front of our house when the bike arrived.

“Smiley Kpee, only two?” the man who brought Fofo exclaimed, disappointed. “No way, iro o! Where oders?”

“Ah non, Big Guy, you go see oders . . . beaucoup,” said Fofo, a chuckle escaping his pinched mouth. He turned to us: “Mes enfants, hey, una no go greet Big Guy?”

“Good evening, monsieur!” we said, and prostrated ourselves on the ground.

The man turned away, ignoring us, his large eyes searching the road, his narrow forehead set in wrinkles. He had a small pointy nose. Although his head was clean shaven, his high cheekbones lay under a thin beard. He was in a tight pair of jeans, sandals, and an oversized, dirty-white corduroy shirt that hung on his lean frame like a furled sail, in spite of the wind. If not for his commanding height and presence, he could have been any other agbero at the border.

“My friend, make we go inside, abeg,” Fofo Kpee pleaded with him. “Sit down and drink someting. Heineken, Star, Guinness?” He turned to me: “Kotchikpa, va acheter him de drink.”

“Rien . . . notting!” Big Guy said slowly and firmly, barely audible above the sea murmuring in the distance.

Apart from the invitation to drink, we didn’t understand what they were talking about. But this didn’t worry us. Having an agbero as an uncle, we were used to people coming to harass him for various things at all hours of the day. So we knew he would laugh his way out of the man’s harassment now.

“We never said two, but five,” Big Guy said, waving his fingers, some of which ended in dead nails, before Fofo. “Where de oder children now?”

Fofo stepped away from the fingers, saying, “You know my arrangement wid your people?”

“Quel peuple?” Big Guy taunted.

“Your boss,” Fofo Kpee said.

“But tu dois deal wid me—directement!”

“Ah non, abeg, make we celebrate first. Gbòjé . . . relax.”

“No, I dey very serious. Just moi.”

“You? You want do me open eye?”

“I no want frighten or cheat you. We dey do dis kind business like dis. . . . I dey warn you o. Abi, you want play wid fire?”

“We dey dis deal togeder,” Fofo begged him. “No fear. Everyting go dey fine.”

Big Guy shrugged and surveyed our surroundings, his eyes as suspicious as those of a traveler who has been duped at the border. He cast a disgusted glance at me and my sister and looked away. In the distance, the sun was a ball of gold in the foliage of the coconut plantation that guarded the approach to the Atlantic Ocean. The water that could take us abroad frothed gray and wild, resisting the sun’s gold brushes, and on this canvas of water, the coconut vistas cast their swaying grids. The wind from the sea blew at the land in a mild, endless breath.

“Big Guy, calm down, look at me, o jare . . . you worry too much.”

Big Guy shrugged and said, “No, Big Guy no dey worry. Na you dey worry.”

We could tell that Big Guy was disappointed. He pursed his lips so hard that we saw a bit of the red of his nostrils, embers of the anger he was fighting to control. As I said, I didn’t worry because I had seen Fofo in more difficult situations, and I was confident he would calm the man.

“What about de house?” Fofo Kpee said, gesturing at our house.

“What about it?” Big Guy said, without even giving our house a look, though Fofo continued to encourage him.

Its zinc roof was completely covered with rust, and the two rooms had no ceilings. The walls were made of mud and plastered with cement, and in the narrow veranda, there were mounds on either side of the door, for sitting, which is where Fofo wanted Big Guy to be if he didn’t want to enter the house. The eaves were supported by pillars made of coconut wood.

“You like it?” Fofo asked.

“Your house dey OK for de business for now,” Big Guy said. “I want leave.”

“You see, you see,” Fofo told him, chuckling. “At least I do one ting well.”

“Well, after, we go build de one wey better pass dis one . . . bigger.”

“Ça ira, ça ira . . . Tings go work out.”

Big Guy walked away, the disappointment still in his eyes.

“Of course, only dead people dey owe us!” he said. “Only dead people.”

“I sure say nobody go die. . . . Well, as de Annang people dey say, de dead no dey block de way, de killer no dey live forever,” Fofo Kpee called out to him, laughing. “See you tomorrow, á demain o. And make you greet ta famille pour me o.”

* * *

WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT to make of the motorcycle when Big Guy left. We stood around it quietly, as if a long lost member of our family had returned. Fofo Kpee stared at our faces, as if he had given us a puzzle and wanted to see the first sparks of our comprehension.

“Nanfang!” Yewa exclaimed, breaking the spell. “ZokeÙkeÙ . . . zokeÙkeÙ!”

“Who owns it?” I gasped.

“Us o,” Fofo said, and chuckled. “Finalement, we get zokeÙkeÙ!”

“Us? ZokeÙkeÙ?” I said.

“Oui o, Kotchikpa, my son.”

Yewa began to circle the bike in silence, like a voodoo priest at his shrine, her hands held out but afraid to make contact. She had large brown eyes that now shone out from her lean face, as if the machine’s aura forbade them to blink. Her hair was short, like a boy’s, and she wore only pink underpants, her stomach bloated. Her legs stepped lightly, her feet in socks of dust. My palms, dirtied from stoking the cooking fire with wood and making sure the pot of Abakaliki rice didn’t fall off our stone tripod behind the house, began to sweat. I held my hands away from the bike and away from my shorts, rubbing my fingers against my palms.

“We belong to you,” Yewa chanted in a whisper to the machine. “You belong to us, we belong to you.”

“Yeah, daughter,” said Fofo, enjoying our bewilderment. “God done reward our faitfulness. . . . Nous irons to be rich, ha-ha!”

The sudden merriment in his voice stopped Yewa. She looked at my face, then at Fofo’s, as if we had conspired to trick her. Fofo Kpee opened his portmanteau, which he carried to the border every day, and pulled out the invoice for the bike from Cotonou City. It was too much for us. I started clapping, but Fofo stopped me, saying he didn’t have enough drinks yet to offer people who might be attracted by the noise. I held my hands apart, palms facing each other as if they were of two opposing magnetic poles, my desire to clap repelled by Fofo’s warning. Then a wave of happiness rose within me, and I ran inside, washed my hands, and put on a shirt and my flip,-flops, as if an important visitor had descended on us. When I came out, Fofo had opened our door and pushed the thing into our parlor-cum-bedroom. He lit a kerosene lantern and put it on a stand near the door to the inner room. The lantern’s rays played above the Nanfang’s fuel tank, outshining its two-tone design like the glow of a setting sun over the waves of the Atlantic.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 805