Open City (12 page)

Musibau motioned to me to undo the metal side fastener on my shorts. I bared my buttocks and bent over, using the blackboard for support. He caned me. It took effort, and he sweated from the exertion, methodically bringing the cane down on me. I flinched but held back tears as the welts rose in quick, sharp lines. I had assumed he would stop at six, but he only paused at six, and then continued, all the way to twelve. My classmates were silent. I was a popular boy, and they were genuinely sorry for me. I pulled my shorts back on. Sitting was difficult; my entire body burned. The technical drawing teacher continued his lecture without comment.

When that semester ended and I went home, I could say nothing about any of this to my mother. If I hadn’t forced myself back into the normal life of the school, I might have sunk. I learned not to be angry when the senior boys called me Daily Concord. The junior boys didn’t say anything to my face. I won some dignities back and, in fact, my performance under the cane became a little legend of its own. In some iterations, it was twenty-four strokes across the back; in others, blood had flowed freely, and I had told Musibau to go hang himself. I gained a reputation for fearlessness and, coincidentally or not, I also began to do well academically. By the fourth year, I was popular with the girls at some other schools in the town, and had developed a somewhat callous self-confidence. In my final year at NMS, I was named health prefect. Some of my mates said that, had it not been for the incident with Musibau, I might even have made head boy.

The end of my time at the school coincided with the end of my time in Nigeria. My mother knew I was taking the SAT, but she didn’t know about my applications to colleges in America; my purchase
of a post office box helped perfect the concealment. I used up my few savings on college application fees. I had no luck with Brooklyn College, Haverford, or Bard (names I had plucked out of a tattered volume at the library of the United States Information Service in Lagos). I got into Macalester, but was offered no money; but Maxwell accepted me, and gave me a full scholarship. My course had been charted. With borrowed money from my uncles, I bought a ticket to New York to begin life in the new country, fully on my own terms.

W
inter deepened without becoming appreciably colder. I had decided definitively to use up all my vacation time, which came to a little over three weeks, on a trip to Brussels. The days I had accumulated were too many to make a hotel, or even a hostel, a reasonable option, and so I went online, and found a short-term flat rental in a central district of the city. The apartment, as pictured, was rudimentary to the point of being spartan; it was, as such, ideal for my purposes. I exchanged a few emails with a woman named Mayken, and once the matter of housing was settled, I bought a ticket for departure the following weekend.

On the flight, I was seated next to an elderly lady. She was older than my mother, but perhaps not old enough to be my grandmother. We had taken our seats in silence, and her voice, when it first reached me, did so out of darkness. My eyes were closed: I was relieved to have ended the long day of preparing for the journey, having worked overnight the previous night. I was in a fatigued blur all
through the process of packing my bags, taking the subway to Kennedy Airport, confronting the disorder of holiday crowds, and controlling my anger at the inept boarding agents at Terminal Three. Finally, settling into my seat on the plane, I leaned back for a nap even before the other passengers had stowed their luggage or taken their seats.

Normally, I would have been curious about the person in the seat next to mine, a curiosity that was almost always disappointed. I would soon afterward find myself eager to get the small talk done with and, the absence of mutual interests firmly established, to return to the book I was reading. On this occasion, though, I was already asleep when my flight partner arrived. I had a sleeping mask on, and it was only when we were aloft, and I heard the jangle of the approaching refreshment cart, that I revived and took the mask off. I didn’t open my eyes right away; I was trying to decide whether to interrupt my sleep for airline food, and was poised on the indecision. That was when I heard her voice, the measured voice of an elderly woman. I envy people like you, she said. I wish I was the kind of person who had the ability to fall asleep in any situation.

What I saw when I opened my eyes was a person with a head of gray hair, hair so thin it was as though the very substance of it, and not merely the color, were fading away. The face underneath this fragile crown was narrow and wrinkled, and the skin was covered in fine liver spots. But there was a firmness around the mouth and jaw, a prominence in the forehead, and a sharpness in the eyes. Undoubtedly, for most of her life, she had been a great beauty. The first thing she did, as I put my sleeping mask away, was wink, which took me aback, but to which I responded with a smile. She was dressed simply, in a tan-colored wool sweater, plaid pants, and brown leather boating shoes. She wore a double string of tiny pearls, and had on pearl earrings. The book on her lap, bookmarked with her index finger, was
The Year of Magical Thinking
. I hadn’t read the book, but I knew it was Joan Didion’s memoir of coming to terms with the sudden
loss of her husband. Dr. Maillotte (she didn’t actually tell me her name until an hour or so later) wore a wedding ring.

I usually have great difficulty sleeping in noisy environments, I said, so it’s fair to say I envy such people, too. She brightened and said, Well, sometimes it’s an absolute necessity. By the way, do you prefer English or French? I recalled that the announcements on the intercom were already in three languages, as we flew over Long Island; I told her my French was poor. She asked where I was from. Oh, Nigeria, she said, Nigeria, Nigeria. Well, I know a great many Nigerians, and I really should tell you this, many of them are arrogant. I was struck by her manner of talking, the unapologetic directness of it, the risk of alienating the person she was talking to. She was at an age, I supposed, at which she had long ceased to care what other people thought. This directness could certainly be taken in the wrong way if it came from a younger person, but there was no such risk in this case.

Ghanaians, on the other hand, Dr. Maillotte went on, are much calmer, easier to work with. They don’t have such a big concept of their place in the world. Well, I suppose it’s true, I said, we are a bit aggressive, but I think the reason is that we like to get ahead, make our presence felt. We think of ourselves as the Japanese of Africa, without the technological brilliance. She laughed. She put her book away, and when the dinner cart came by, we both selected the fish option on the menu—microwaved salmon, potatoes, dry bread—and ate in silence. Then I asked what she did. I’m a surgeon, she said, retired now, but I did gastrointestinal surgery in Philadelphia for the last forty-five years. I told her about my residency, and she mentioned the name of a psychiatrist. Well, he used to be there, maybe he’s gone now. This is all so long ago, anyway. Did you have any rotations at Harlem Hospital? I shook my head and told her I’d gone to medical school outside the state. I only mention it because I consulted there a few times recently, she said, I’m retired, but I wanted to participate in a voluntary thing, so I’ve been in Harlem. I was a
little unfair earlier, she added, I should say the Nigerian residents are excellent. Oh, don’t worry about it, I said, I’ve heard much worse. But tell me, there aren’t many American residents at Harlem Hospital, are there? Oh, they have a few, but yes, a lot of Africans, Indians, Filipinos, and really, it’s a good environment. Some of these foreign graduates are a lot better trained than people who went through the American system; for one thing, they tend to have outstanding diagnostic skills.

Her diction was precise, and the accent only vaguely European. She told me that she had done her training in Louvain. But you must be a Catholic to be a professor there, she said with a chuckle. Not so easy for an atheist like me: I’ve always been one, I’ll always be one. Anyway, it’s better than Université Libre de Bruxelles, where no one can achieve anything professionally without being a Mason. I’m serious: it was founded by Masons, and it’s still a kind of Masonic mafia. But I like Brussels, it is still home, after all these years. It has its advantages. For one thing, it’s color-blind in a way the U.S. is not. I have been spending three months each year there since I retired. I have an apartment, yes, but I prefer to stay with my friends. They have a big house, it’s in the southern part of the city, in Uccle. Where will you be staying? Ah, right, well it’s not far from there, you just go south from Parc Léopold, and that’s the neighborhood. If you had a map, I would show you.

Then, as if the talk of Brussels had gently pushed a door in her memory ajar, she said: Belgium was stupid during the war. The Second World War, I mean, not the First, I was born much too late for the First. That was my father’s war. But I was just about to enter my teens during the Second World War, and these damned Germans, I remember them coming into the city. The blame really is on Leopold III; he made the wrong alliances or, I should say, he refused to make alliances, he thought it would be easy to defend the country. He was an old fool. There was a canal from Antwerp to Maastricht, you see, and a line of concrete fortifications, and this was supposed
to be the perfect defense, this line. The idea was that the water would be too difficult to bring a large army across. Of course, the Germans had planes and paratroopers! All it took was eighteen days, and the Nazis marched in, and stayed, like parasites. The day they finally left, the day the war ended for Belgium, was the happiest day of my life. I was fifteen, and I remember that day perfectly, I will never forget that day as long as I live, and I’ll never be happier than I was that day. And here she paused, extended her hand, and said, I suppose I should introduce myself. Annette Maillotte.

Then she went on, falling deeper, it seemed, into her memory, telling me about her days as a young girl, how difficult things had been during the war, how Leopold III had bargained with Hitler for better rations, the devastation of the countryside afterward, when straggling figures covered the landscape and went from house to house begging for food and shelter, her decision to go into medicine, then her subsequent training in surgery, which was unusual for women at the time. Somehow, as she spoke, I could still see in her that resolute girl.

You must have been determined, I said. Well, no, no, you don’t think of it like that, she said, you just find what you must do, and you do it. There’s really no opportunity to stop and praise yourself, so I won’t say determined. I nodded. Listening to her, I felt as if the objective fact of her age—if she was fifteen when the war ended, it meant she had been born in 1929—stood in an indirect relationship with the fact of her mental and physical vitality. At that moment, the flight attendants came to take our trays away, and Dr. Maillotte took up her book again. I lowered the light above my seat and, closing my eyes, imagined the frigid nighttime Atlantic racing by below us.

Although I was tired, I managed to sleep only fitfully, and woke again after a few hours, with a sore neck. Dr. Maillotte must have slept as well, but by the time I woke, she was again reading. I asked her how the book was. Yes, it’s good, she said, nodding, and went back to reading. I signaled that I had to go to the bathroom and
apologized for disturbing her. She stood up in the aisle, and was still standing when I came back. I have to keep the circulation moving, she said, especially important when you’re as old as I am. When we sat down again, she said: Do you know Heliopolis? It’s in Egypt, just outside Cairo. Helio-Polis, it means city of the sun, sun city. Well, I told you I was going to stay with a friend of mine in Brussels. His name is Grégoire Empain, and we’ve been friends since we were young, maybe when we were both twenty, and it was his grandfather who built Heliopolis.

If you ever get a chance to go there, you should. It’s a fantastical place, and Édouard Empain, or Baron Empain as they call him, was the engineer who designed and built it. That was in 1907. It was a real luxury capital, broad avenues, big gardens. There’s a building there called Qasr Al-Baron, the Baron’s Palace, that was modeled on Angkor Wat in Cambodia and also on a Hindu temple, a specific one, but I don’t recall the name. And you know, this is now the most important suburb of Cairo; in fact it’s within the city boundaries now. The president of Egypt lives there today. But the Empains are in a tussle with the Egyptian government, because part of Heliopolis belongs to them, and they are trying to claim it, or at least get compensated for it. The family is still wealthy, anyway, one of the wealthiest in Belgium. Baron Empain was a great industrialist—not just Heliopolis, he built the Paris Métro as well, when the Belgians wouldn’t let him build one in Brussels—and his son was an industrialist also. The grandson Grégoire is modest, he doesn’t like to be in the limelight. But Grégoire has a brother, Jean, and he’s a different story.

I used to be crazy about skiing, and my husband, too, all my children—and we went to Mont Blanc with Grégoire, Jean, their sisters, and we skiied at Chamonix, at Megève. Not Negev, like in Israel, but Megève, close to Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps. And the Empains had this large chalet there, and all sorts of people showed up, you know, Jean-Claude Aaron, Edmond de Rothschild of the
French Rothschilds. And this always amuses me to think of it, but once the queen of Sweden came, and the poor thing, she came with her husband and, you know, I don’t think she had any idea the man was a complete faggot. It was obvious to everyone, but she was oblivious, and they just carried on. Anyway, we went, but it wasn’t because these people were there, it was just good skiing. And I needed to get away from America from time to time, this terrible, hypocritical country, this sanctimonious country. I really can’t stand it sometimes. Do you know what I mean?

But let me tell you about Grégoire’s brother, Jean. He is not as quiet as Grégoire, quite the opposite: he likes to do deals, to jet-set. He’s the one who inherited the title. He’s Baron Empain now, and sports cars, royal families, billionaire friends, that’s his kind of thing. But poor fellow, you know, he was in all the papers in the late seventies. I think it was in 1978 that he was kidnapped, you see, and held for two months. Grégoire, the whole family, they were of course frantic. The kidnappers were French, and demanded something like eight or nine million dollars, a ridiculous amount of money, but not impossible for the Empains. The family was willing to pay. But there had been a lot of kidnappings at the time, all through the seventies, and the French government had a strict policy of no negotiations, no payments. So these kidnappers, I think one of them was called Duchâteau—it is funny that I remember that, but you have to understand, we were following this story so intensely day after day in the newspapers—what Duchâteau and his mates said was: Money brings liberty. I mean, it’s ridiculous, they sound like philosophers, but they really meant it, and when the money was not forthcoming, they sliced off Jean’s little finger and put it in an envelope and mailed it to his wife. They cut it off with a kitchen knife, without anesthetic, and threatened to amputate additional fingers for each day of delay with the payment. But the negotiators refused, and somehow, the kidnappers didn’t follow through on their threat. Eventually, the police
were able to ambush them, and they killed one of them, and captured the other two, and Jean was released.