The Illegal Read online

  From a distance, the pack of runners resembled a cloud of dust in the wind. “Look, Charity,” Keita whispered. “Look at them coming. Look how fast they go.”

  Keita felt a surge of pride. His country produced the fastest marathoners in the world. Zantorolanders had swept first, second and third place last year, two oceans away in the Boston Marathon. If you won Olympic gold for Zantoroland, every citizen would know your name. The president would give you a free house and a hundred thousand dollars. Later, you could have a coaching job for life. You would be world famous, like the Eritrean American marathoner Meb Keflezighi.

  The runners were bunched tightly together. They all wore the same gear: running shoes, white socks, white running shorts stained with the red dust, and the blue-and-red singlets reserved for the top twenty runners in the national marathon squad. The runners spilled along the road like blood out of veins, passing over yet another hill. Brown arms swung in loose unison and legs churned smoothly, feet nearly soundless on the dirt road, apart from the crunching of pebbles. When they were within earshot, Deacon Andrews led the choristers into song with another verse from “Rock My Soul.”

  As the runners drew near, they sang right back:

  So high, you can’t get over it

  So low, you can’t get under it

  So wide, you can’t get around it

  You gotta go through the door.

  The runners sang well and in tune, all twenty of them, raising their hands in salute as they flew past the church. None of them seemed to be suffering. Perhaps it was early in the run. Keita followed every bending knee, every foot touching down only to resume flight. And then, in an instant, the runners rounded a curve in the road and disappeared.

  The choristers went back inside and rehearsed five more songs, and then Deacon Andrews told them to drive straight home. Just to be safe, in case the troublemakers came by again.

  Charity took Keita’s wrist. “Come home,” she said.

  Keita pulled his arm free. “I’ll stay and help the deacon.”

  “Dad and Mom would want you to come home now.”

  “Dad and Mom said I had to come here to clean. To work for my shoes.”

  She touched his wrist again, gently this time. She didn’t usually touch him like that. She gave him a little smile. When she wasn’t trying to rule the world, Charity was a good sister.

  “Brother,” she said. “Come with me.”

  “I’ll be safe. In these shoes, I’m uncatchable.”

  “I’ll tell Mom and Dad to expect you in an hour. Don’t make them wait or worry.” Charity left with the choristers.

  Keita ran his cloth along the varnished pews. The deacon picked up another cloth, and joined him.

  “What is your father up to these days?”

  “Writing,” Keita said. “What else?”

  “He’s the only man who is trying to tell the world about the Faloo people. We used to be looked up to in this country. Politicians, business leaders, shopkeepers. But now we’re in danger. Your father is a great man. Courageous. Some might say too courageous.”

  Keita nodded politely, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. How could a person be too courageous? He stepped out to shake his dusting cloth on the porch, and saw them coming. Ten men, carrying big sticks and cricket bats. Not the same men who had been in the truck. Different men. Swaying a bit on the road. Were they dancing? No. They were drunk.

  Keita shouted for the deacon, who rushed to the porch. “You must leave,” he said. “Now.”

  He turned and locked the doors. Then he took a cellphone from his pocket. Keita heard a woman answer.

  “Martha,” the deacon said, “get the constable to come out to the church. Troublemakers are on the way. Love you.”

  The deacon picked up his Bible. Keita stood with him. It didn’t feel right to leave him alone. A line of sweat ran down the side of the deacon’s forehead. The men were just a hundred metres away now, and Keita could hear them shouting like football hooligans. What did they want? Every second word from their mouths was a curse. Keita could run! He was the quickest boy in his school over every race, from 100 to 1,500 metres. He could run, and they would never catch him. But what about Deacon Andrews?

  “Fucking Faloos and their fucking church,” one of the men called out. “Let’s burn this shithole down!”

  “Keita, I will teach these young men the language of God,” said the deacon. “You get running.”

  Keita ran across the yard to the road, but stopped about fifty metres away. The deacon had walked out to meet the men. Keita didn’t understand why these men hated Faloos. Keita’s mother was a Faloo, but his father was a Bamileke, from Cameroon in Africa. Yoyo had written for a newspaper in France about the growing unpopularity of Faloos as shopkeepers and business people. Keita wished that he were 100 percent Bamileke, like his father. He wished that he, too, had come from Africa—a continent thousands of kilometres to the west of Zantoroland. Maybe then these men wouldn’t hate him.

  The men with sticks surrounded Deacon Andrews, who held the Bible closed in his hand and quoted from Exodus. The deacon towered above the men, but they attacked him like a pack of hyenas: from the front, from the sides and from behind. They knocked the Bible out of his hands. Keita watched it somersault through the air and land in a ditch. Deacon Andrews flung off the first man as if he were a small dog. He flung off the second. Then the men drew knives, and one of them shoved a blade deep into the deacon’s belly. Keita heard a wailing, furious cry—the likes of which he had never imagined a grown man could make.

  “You are not men,” the deacon cried out. “You have no souls.”

  Moments ago, the deacon had stood strong like a tree, but now he lay like uncoiled rope in a pool of blood.

  One of the men turned toward Keita. “Get the kid!” he shouted.

  A man with a cricket bat turned toward Keita, who set off running, checking over his shoulder to take a measure of his pursuer’s speed. The man was quick, and now he threw down the cricket bat to run harder. Keita set out at 400-metre speed, sure that after a hundred metres, the pursuer would give up. But the man must have been a runner in his youth. At two hundred metres he was closing the gap. Keita tried to suppress his rising sense of panic and focus on running as fast as he could manage at a pace he could sustain over a distance.

  Keita was ascending a steep hill when the pursuer gave up and headed back toward the church. At the top of the hill, bent over and gasping for air, he turned and saw the men bashing in the church windows and throwing burning sticks inside.

  Within minutes, the Faloo Zion Baptist Church erupted in flames. Laughing and shouting, the men ran off in the direction they’d come from, shaking their sticks above their heads. Keita waited until he was sure they were not coming back. Then he ran back to the deacon and dropped to his knees. But Deacon Andrews was not breathing. Blood pooled under his head. He was motionless, an arm splayed out on the red earth.

  Keita wished that the deacon were just pretending. He wanted the deacon to get up and fetch his Bible. It didn’t seem possible that a person could be so big and strong one moment, and lifeless the next.

  “Deacon Andrews?” The deacon didn’t stir. “Deacon Andrews,” Keita said, louder. Still no response.

  Keita knew what his parents would tell him: Run, Keita. Just run.

  So he got up and ran, focusing on his breathing, just as he had been coached. Inhale deeply, fill the diaphragm, exhale. Control the air. Keep the oxygen moving through your blood. Breathe. Run.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ON THE LAST PERFECT DAWN OF HIS CHILDHOOD, with the sun rising out of the Ortiz Sea and casting a soft light over Yagwa, the capital of Zantoroland, Keita awoke in his family’s home. He was twelve years old and training every day to become a champion runner.

  Keita rose from his bed, pulled on his shirt, shorts, socks and shoes, and slipped out of the bedroom that he shared with his sister. Apart from the bathroom, the house had only one other room, whic
h shared three functions: there was a small study in the corner where his father wrote, a bed for his parents curtained in another corner, and a space with a fridge, stove, table and couch where the family gathered. “Liquidity,” as his father called it, was a bit short, and the family had been required to give up their summer home in the Red Hills, but they still had more than most residents of Yagwa: the windows of their home weren’t broken, the roof held, the door locked and they had an air-conditioning unit that worked when the electricity was on. Keita passed through the front room and out the door.

  It was a clear sunny day. To the south of the city and beyond the flatlands with their orange and lemon orchards, Keita could see the mountains in the distance.

  Keita had studied maps, and he knew that Zantoroland—only one hundred kilometres long and eighty wide—was but a speck in the Ortiz Sea in the Indian Ocean. Africa to the west and Australia to the east were far too distant to be seen, but Keita knew they were there. Looking down Blossom Street, Keita could see the port and the waters of the Ortiz Sea. There were fifteen hundred kilometres of open water stretching north to the nation of Freedom State. Like all schoolchildren, Keita knew that Freedom State had enslaved Zantorolanders for some two centuries but, after abolishing slavery, had deported most black people back to Zantoroland. Ever since that time, adventurous Zantorolanders had braved the Ortiz Sea in fishing boats, taking their lives into their hands as they tried to slip back into Freedom State, one of the richest nations in the world.

  Keita passed through the Faloo district, where all the houses were similar—purple, pink, green or blue two-room matchboxes with gardens and briskly swept stone steps out front, and outhouses and family burial grounds out back—and jogged down the gentle slope of Blossom Street into the heart of town. Slow and easy, his father always told him. Not every run should cause pain. Some should just be to celebrate your working limbs, breathing lungs and beating heart.

  The street levelled out, and the pavement came to an end at the edge of the more heavily populated district where the Kano people lived in mud-brick houses with corrugated tin roofs. The roads were narrow, muddy and potholed in that neighbourhood, not safe for running.

  “We don’t have much,” Yoyo had said a hundred times, “but for those who are truly poor, running symbolizes privilege.”

  Keita would reply, “But I don’t have money. You never let me have any!”

  And Yoyo would say, “Your shoes would fit perfectly on someone else’s feet.”

  To avoid taunting the shoeless and to stay on the smoother pavement, Keita skirted the Kano district and ran to the heart of Yagwa, which held two banks, a library, a cinema, three restaurants, the Pâtisserie Chez Proust and all the shops kept by the Faloo business people around the four sides of President’s Square. In the middle of the square was the Fountain of Independence, surrounded by the outdoor stalls of the market vendors who sold meat, bread, cheese and produce every day but Sunday. It was still early—5:15 a.m.—and the vendors were busy hauling goods on flatbed wagons to their stalls.

  A group of six men walked by the fountain, each limping and leaning on a red cane. They looked broken, beaten, with shreds of clothing, torn sandals and bleeding sores on their feet.

  One of the men startled Keita by calling out to him. “Boy, give me a dollar.”

  Keita stopped running. “I’m sorry, I have no money.”

  “Then give me your shoes. You’re only a child. You don’t need them.”

  Keita’s mouth fell open.

  “Leave him alone,” another man said. “He’s the journalist’s son.”

  “Whose son?” the first man asked.

  “Yoyo Ali, the journalist.”

  “Well, in that case, son, go with God, and tell your father that the returnees send their best.”

  Keita’s father, who because he was a journalist knew everything, had spoken about these men before, and sometimes he stopped to give them coins. “Returnees,” Yoyo had said, “are good men who have been broken.” Keita waved nervously and resumed running, heading down to the President’s Promenade. He ran on the imported white marble, admiring to his right the South Ortiz Sea, and to his left, to the south above and beyond the town, the Red Hills crowned with pink clouds. At the far end of the Promenade, he came to the Olympic Stadium. His country would never host the Games, but nevertheless, it named its best track as if it had. Keita had hoped that his father would take him to a track meet that very day, but Yoyo was to fly overseas to Cameroon to research a story for the New York Times. He would be leaving the house at noon but had promised to take the family out for a treat that morning.

  Keita turned west to run along the north edge of downtown and up the sloping streets leading back to the Faloo residential district.

  At home, he showered and changed. After they all ate their oatmeal, Yoyo took them to Chez Proust. Keita and Charity were each allowed a hot chocolate and one madeleine. Keita took his madeleine à l’orange. Charity ordered hers au citron, which, she said, was beaucoup plus sophistiqué.

  “Stop being such a snob,” Keita said, “you’re not French. The French only ran this country for thirty years, and that was ages ago.”

  Charity countered, “If you want to be a famous journalist, you have to know how to be at least a wee bit sophistiqué and how to order your madeleine au citron. And stop dunking. That is so disgusting.”

  Charity asked her mother if she could taste the Drambuie displayed behind the barista.

  “No,” Lena said. “For one thing, it’s seven in the morning. For another, Drambuie is expensive. And for a third, you’re still a child.”

  “I’m thirteen. I’m pretty much an adult.”

  “You are far from an adult,” Lena said, “but I’ll review the names of the liqueurs for you.” Lena asked Patrick the barista, a family friend, to place some bottles on the counter. “Repeat after me,” she told Charity. “Drambuie is made from whisky and honey, and it hails from Scotland.”

  Charity repeated what her mother had said.

  “Grand Marnier and Cointreau both have an orange flavour and come from France . . . Amaretto is from Italy and made from almonds or apricots . . . Kahlua is made from coffee beans and comes from Mexico . . . Limoncello, a lemon liqueur, comes from southern Italy.”

  Charity repeated all the details.

  “Your future husband will appreciate such worldliness,” Lena said.

  “I don’t want a husband,” Charity said. “I just want to be a journalist and see the world.”

  Lena laughed. “Then go see the world, my darling girl. Bet every day on your own abilities, and you’ll be able to do anything you want.”

  Keita hated conversations that led back to his sister’s brains, so he asked his father to explain once again how the madeleines from Zantoroland had become world famous.

  Yoyo said the madeleine was Zantoroland’s only claim to fame, aside from marathoners. The Germans, the French and the British had all taken turns colonizing Zantoroland and populating it with African slaves, and although France had ruled the country only briefly, it had left an indelible mark with its madeleine. The student, Yoyo said, eventually surpassed the professor.

  “You can go to the best pâtisserie in Paris,” Yoyo said, “and you will not find a madeleine that competes with the ones made here. To make a great madeleine,” he said, “you begin with a scallop-shell baking pan. Then, you take the best flour and combine it with butter, vanilla, sugar and eggs. The real trick is to get just the right amount of lemon zest. In France, they just serve the madeleine straight up, like a plain doughnut. No imagination. But here in Zantoroland, we create a little glaze with the zest of an orange or a lemon. This makes the Zantoroland madeleine one of the wonders of the world. And that, my son,” Yoyo said, smiling playfully, “is why Zantoroland will one day outstrip France as an economic power.”

  Charity snorted. “We’ll never outstrip anybody.”

  “What’s ‘outstrip’?” Keita asked.
/>   “Outperform,” Charity said.

  “May I have another madeleine?” Keita asked.

  “No,” Yoyo said, “but you can finish mine.”

  It was a long walk home from the café. Keita could have run it in eight minutes or walked it in twenty, but it took their mother an hour. Keita had brought a water bottle along, because he knew his mother always needed it—even when she was seated and still—but it didn’t help much. She never seemed to be able to get enough to drink. Lena puffed as she walked. Even though she kept herself trim, she walked up the sloping street like an old woman, stopping repeatedly to bend over and catch her breath.

  At home, she gulped down several cups of water and took a nap. Yoyo sat by their bed for an hour, holding her hand and reading. Then he packed, grabbed his shoulder bag, kissed his wife and children, and left the house.

  Work often took Yoyo from his family, and Keita hated it when his father went away. It was easier to leave, Keita reasoned, than to stay behind. He waved as his father walked down the road. Then he went to the calendar and marked the day his father would return.

  HOURS AFTER THE DEPARTURE, WHEN KEITA IMAGINED THAT his father was high in the air and flying northwest across the Indian Ocean, neighbours shouted in through the window, telling him to turn on the TV. Jenkins Randall—commander-in-chief of the army, and member of the Kano ethnic majority—had staged a coup d’état in Zantoroland. A thousand troops had left the National Barracks, shot the guards posted outside the Presidential Palace and stormed the residence. The president—a duly elected Faloo named Porter Goodson, who had formed a government three years earlier—was hauled from the closet in which he was found hiding, marched onto the lawns of the palace and ordered to confess to crimes against the state. President Goodson refused, and ordered the troops to arrest General Randall. But they remained in place, waiting for the order from their military leader.

  General Randall and his troops ordered all the pedestrians they could find to enter through the gates and gather on the presidential lawns to form a suitable audience. Once a thousand people were found to watch, General Randall paid his foe the ultimate insult: he forced him at gunpoint to remove all his clothes. Then the troops opened fire. The president’s bloody body was dumped into the Fountain of Independence in the main square.