Refuge (4 page)

Richard walked across to Dumbela. The prosecutor stood with a straight back, adjusting his carefully knotted tie. ‘Bradley, we both know this is going nowhere without your eyewitness. What’s happening on that score?’

Dumbela smiled thinly. ‘Mr Calloway. I have already spoken to Miss du Toit. She told me you’d been to see her.’ He paused, as if weighing the significance of this for the first time. ‘So, don’t worry, we’ll find him. We have some good leads. He left the scene after talking to the policeman who took the statement, but we’re confident we can find him again. We have some good leads,’ he said again, still smiling. ‘So you don’t have to worry, Mr Calloway.’

Richard found Dumbela’s politeness mocking rather than respectful: it was almost as if he were belittling him. An unarticulated racism perhaps, Richard thought, as Dumbela walked away.

‘What did he say?’ Svritsky hissed at him.

‘He says they’ll find the witness.’ Richard became aware of a rancid odour and took a pace back. ‘He seems very confident about that,’ he added distractedly.

‘Yes? We’ll see, no? We’ll see about that,’ Svritsky responded, bright-green eyes glinting in the clinical lighting of the courtroom.

I
FASEN COULD SMELL
the simmering pepper soup even before he reached the door: the sweet but unmistakeably acidic aroma of
obe ata
, made from stewing ripe tomatoes, ground peppers, red palm oil and, if today was a good day, a cheap cut of mutton or goat. The smell displaced the sour odours of urine and cigarette smoke that pervaded the corridor. Tonight they would spoon the stew onto their plates, letting the sauce soak into the steamed rice, eating it in clumps that would stain their fingers and mouths like lipstick. The aroma filled Ifasen with childhood nostalgia: Abeni their housemaid standing in the cool kitchen of his old home. There she diced okra and skinned speckled beans with quick fingers, shooing him away as he tried to pick at the cooling bell peppers. She always worked with the windows pushed out wide, letting the breeze waft through the room, standing at a table close to the open door so she could flick the translucent skins to the clucking chickens waiting outside. Sometimes a skin would land on a hen’s back and they would laugh together as they watched it being pecked by the others, charging around the backyard in confusion. ‘You see, little one,’ she once told him with affection, ‘in Nigeria it is not always so good to have something that everyone else wants.’

Abeni was a thickset Yoruba woman, with stout legs and a soft belly. Her wide face seemed to be permanently crinkled in a warm smile, as if life were eternally ticklish. If she scowled, it was only in mockery, momentarily pulling a face before dissolving into throbbing laughter. Life around Abeni was a series of delicious meals. She made Ifasen
adalu
– yellow maize cut off the cob and cooked with beans, all smothered in pepper soup. She would place a pitcher of water with lemon slices and ice next to his plate, in case the pepper caught in his throat. She plied him with snacks of
chin-chin
, scotch eggs and small meat pies. On his birthday, before he awoke, she always prepared
moyin
, grinding the beans into a paste and mixing them with tomatoes, peppers, thin slices of fresh meat and vegetables, then mixing it all with egg and spices, cooked slowly in foil in a heated pot. By the time Ifasen awoke, the expansive house was filled with its fragrant breath. His gifts would wait, and he would hold back his excitement, first cutting chunks of his birthday breakfast and gulping fresh juice. His family shook their heads at his appetite, and Abeni lurked at the door of the kitchen, watching with an approving smile, her arms flopped across her chest.

Ifasen missed the simplicity of familiar tastes and the regularity of meals that had defined his home life. The memories of his childhood hung like pegged cloth, each recollection held in place by a taste or fragrance that conjured the moment in his mind. He sometimes felt that his family had been held together by Abeni’s cooking and that, but for that, they would have broken apart far sooner than they did.

He longed to give his own child something of that culinary experience, but it was difficult to find the ingredients in a foreign country. There were no yams for
ikokore
or
iyan
, no cassava for
gari
, no cola nuts to chew, no
oro
seeds to boil for
ogbono
or even plantains for
dodo
or to bake whole as
boli
. No vanilla
zobo
to drink, no palm wine, no home brews. Only beers with many different labels but the same thin, bitter taste. The restaurants served up foreign meals: pasta, pizza, curry, chicken with hot spices that made the flesh orange. The shops sold tightly packaged containers of food in cold aisles filled with metal trolleys and lonely faces. He longed to plunge his hands into a hessian sack of speckled beans, to pour a cup of brown rice over his fingers and into a paper bag, to hear the shouts and laughter of the traders. Sometimes – most times – it felt that he was not in Africa at all, this purgatory where he waited, not returning but not leaving.

He pushed open the door and lingered at the threshold, taking in the cramped flat and allowing the smell to fuel his yearning. His feet hurt from a day of standing at the intersection and he longed to take off his shoes. But he waited, letting the sounds of his home calm him. He could hear his wife talking softly with his son, telling him what she was cooking. He knew his boy would be sitting on the scratched floor of the kitchen, wax crayons scattered about him and the white page in front of him splashed with colour. He felt his heart open out to them.

‘Okeke,’ he said gently, as if he were intruding, ‘I am home.’

‘Hello, Ifasen,’ Abayomi replied, equally softly. She looked up to him at the doorway and smiled. Neither would ask after the other’s day. ‘I am making
obe
– and Sunday found some fish for us.’

Ifasen’s face darkened at the mention of the man who shared their apartment, but Abayomi had turned back to her soup and did not notice.

‘Michael,’ she continued, half-turning to the little boy sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor, ‘say hello to your father. He has come home to—’

‘I wish you would not call him that,’ Ifasen interrupted. ‘It is not his name. You know that it upsets me.’

‘Ifasen,’ Abayomi said sharply, drawing in breath, ‘you must not start this again.
Chei!
He will never get anywhere in this country if we carry on calling him Khalifah.’

Her reaction was swift and the heat had risen in her voice immediately, as if she had been anticipating his comment. ‘You know this. I do not need to be telling you this. This is not a country for “Khalifah”. This is a country for “Michael”. It is why we speak English in our home. It is why we are here … living as we do.’ Her voice trembled for a moment and the little boy looked up, sensing his mother’s anger. She paused, waiting for her frustration to ease. ‘Please.
Haba?
Let us not go back to these things. Not tonight, o!’

‘You are right,’ Ifasen said, trying to salvage his homecoming, but the words came out through clenched teeth. The child did not notice the undertone and returned to his drawing. Thick lines of colour ran raggedly across the page. Ifasen could feel his heart beating in his chest and his fingertips tingling. Abayomi looked at him defiantly before shaking her head and turning back to her simmering pot.

Ifasen left the matter and walked into the cluttered living room. Pushing a tattered chair aside with his knee, he turned on the television. An American sitcom was showing, with canned laughter chattering inanely. He sat down, his body sinking uncomfortably into the rusted springs. The evening already felt ruined by the short interaction and he stared at the screen with hooded eyes.

The choice of name for their only child evoked a myriad other, more painful issues, including, most fundamentally perhaps, their self-imposed banishment from their homeland. Their love, and subsequent marriage, had disrupted his family, and the healing of the rifts had been slow and incomplete, grasped through small gestures and compromises. It amazed Ifasen that even in the midst of the horror-filled backdrop to their quiet ceremony – the violence in the provinces, the brutal attacks – his mother had still found the energy to focus on his young wife’s ancestral failings. Na’imah had picked at their love like a crone pulling at the threads of an old jersey, trying to scratch open holes in its weave. But young as they were – Abayomi had been just twenty-one – their bonds were not easily loosed. Ifasen’s parents were proud Muslim Hausa. His grandfather had been a learned scholar of Islam, whose views on the Quran and its teaching had been widely respected. His father, Hussain, still dressed in traditional white gowns and attended mosque every day before starting work. For her part, Na’imah filled her days by voicing strident disapproval of those who had failed to follow some small Islamic ritual. Her obsession with formalistic observances narrowed her parochial outlook and underscored her lack of intellect. It shocked Ifasen at times that he regarded his mother with such disdain, but he could not shake his disappointment, held since he was young, that this scrawny woman with her grating voice was his blood relative. Her pejorative manner goaded him, causing him to flinch whenever she complained about the minutiae of a neighbour’s sharia shortcomings.

Although Ifasen had broken from the path expected of him, defiantly marrying someone of a different ethnicity and faith, he still sometimes felt shackled by his family. He carried the noble looks of his father, his features well balanced and refined beneath his high forehead. He had the same aloofness, a deep-seated seriousness of person that made him seem remote and even arrogant. In truth, he was pervasively unconfident and emotionally uneasy, but the moment he perceived a challenge, his familial shields would rise up, haughty and self-righteous. Na’imah had once referred to one of Abayomi’s friends as a ‘filthy dog’, a heartfelt insult in his mother’s diminutive world. In Ifasen’s moments of stiff-chinned withdrawal, Abayomi would parody Na’imah, disarming him by repeatedly hissing the phrase ‘you dirty dog’, circling him like a craven wolf, until he roared with self-retribution and tried to catch her as she ran whooping away.

It was a tactic she tried less and less these days, leaving him alone with his judgements. He knew, as the TV screen flickered before him now, that his wife would not seek him out to rescue the evening.

Abayomi’s ancestry was no less proud and perhaps with better reason. Her grandmother on her mother’s side had been Yoruba while her grandfather was Igbo. Abayomi had inherited her grandmother’s statuesque beauty, carrying herself with assurance and dignity. Her father’s parents came from a line of Igbo intellectuals and artists, and her parents, though not jingoistic, had been steeped in the rise of Igbo nationalism that precipitated the Biafran Republic’s brave declaration of independence from Nigeria in 1967. Before Abayomi’s birth, her father, Jideofor, had lectured in economics at the university. He had been part of an intellectual circle, many of whom were appointed to positions in the new Biafran government. Jideofor was approached and seconded to the new ministry of finance, to help advise on the strategic planning for the fledgling nation. The Biafran flag flew proudly for three years. But the euphoria was short-lived: the Nigerian state, backed at first covertly and ultimately quite openly by the West, mobilised its troops and declared war.

By 1970 the Biafran dream was in bloody tatters and more than a million people had been slaughtered. Britain turned a blind eye to the atrocities, and the world pretended that Biafra had never existed. It was crippling for Abayomi’s father, who lost his friends, his job and his optimism for his country and its people. He never spoke of the Republic or what they had hoped to achieve, or what had been wrenched away. Following the collapse of Biafra and faced with increasing persecution at the hands of the military state, he withdrew. It seemed to those left around him that he might retreat into a quagmire of depression, never to return. But the birth of Abayomi’s older brother Abazu and then the arrival of Abayomi herself drew him out of his sad reverie. He had delighted in being a father to his children, pouring all of his battered hopes for the future into their tiny hearts.

Jideofor gave his daughter the Igbo name Okeke, but her preferred name, Abayomi, was of Yoruba descent, given to her by her grandmother. Though Ifasen tended to use her Igbo name nowadays, when he had first met her he had loved to sound out the round vowels of her Yoruba title. Marriage, to his parents’ distress, had followed shortly after they had met, and Abayomi gave birth to their only child six months later. Khalifah was born in Abeokuta at a time of vicious strife between Muslims and Christians: full-scale conflict erupted under General Obasanjo, dragging on for years and leaving thousands dead. Shortly before Abayomi fell pregnant, the assassination of a prominent Hausa chief had reignited violence, creating massive refugee problems in the south of the country. Inevitably, the strife took on an anti-Igbo slant, and Abayomi had agreed to seek refuge in Hussain’s fortress-like house in Abeokuta. Living under the same roof as Ifasen’s parents had been immensely stressful for her and she was repeatedly reminded by Na’imah of her unsuitable background. When their son was born, they had decided on the name Khalifah as a gesture of respect towards Ifasen’s family. Still Na’imah had scowled when she heard that the new baby also had a middle name: Michael. Abayomi had hissed ‘dirty dog’ in a whisper alongside Ifasen, but this time he did not smile or chase her. Instead, his eyes looked sad as he watched his mother purse her shrivelled lips, jerking her head to the heavens as if demented, while his newborn son lay tucked in a woollen blanket in his arms.

He called to his son now, using the Christian version of the name in an attempt to appease his wife and gesturing to the boy to come to his side. The child looked up at him from the kitchen floor, but swiftly returned to his swirls of colour, sensing perhaps that he was a pawn in his parents’ quarrel.