The Illegal Page 3

  Randall took control of the television and radio stations and announced that he was naming himself President for Life, declaring that the Kano people were the rightful majority in Zantoroland and would no longer submit to the Faloo minority. In the city, rampaging began. Masked men attacked Faloo shopkeepers, breaking bones, warning them to close their businesses and stealing whatever they could carry: suits, ties, coffeepots, radios, lamps, laptops. Faloo people barricaded themselves in their homes behind locked doors.

  After looting the business district, the marauders moved uptown. Word spread like a grassfire in Keita’s district. Lena ordered her children to come inside and stay away from the windows. They turned their lights off. Keita, Charity and their mother could hear shouting and the sound of glass breaking. Then the pounding began at their door.

  “Don’t answer,” Keita said.

  “We have to,” his mother said. “If we don’t answer, they’ll just break down the door. But if I open, I’m still in control.”

  Lena opened the door. “Hooligans,” she shouted. “What would your mothers say?”

  Three men pushed her aside and came into the house. The leader was tall and gaunt and—like the others—had a white pillowcase over his head, with holes cut for his eyes and mouth. “Where is your husband?” he said.

  The leader’s voice seemed familiar to Keita.

  Lena said her husband was out of the country. The leader said no man would leave his family alone, and that just went to show how cowardly the Faloos were.

  “My husband isn’t even a Faloo,” she said. “He’s an immigrant from Cameroon. He’s a Bamileke. I’m a Faloo!” she shouted in their faces. “Do I look cowardly to you?”

  The intruders paced in the small space. One of them overturned chairs. Keita watched as one man lifted a water jug from the table and hurled it across the room. Then the mirror shattered. Keita wrapped his arms around himself. Charity got the broom and began sweeping up the shards.

  “Enough with the broom,” the leader said.

  She kept sweeping.

  “I said enough with the broom!”

  “I know your voice,” Charity said. “From the market. The eggplant stand.”

  “Charity, shush,” Lena said.

  Charity lunged for the leader’s hood, dislodging it. The man shoved Charity hard to the floor and reset his mask. But she got right back up, still holding the broom. The man yanked the broom from Charity’s hands and knocked her down again. Keita dove into the man’s midriff, pummelling and biting. He too was pushed to the floor, where he landed on his sister.

  “Do you want to die?” the leader said.

  “If you want to kill us, shut up and do it!” Lena shouted.

  “I know you,” Charity said. “David. David. That’s it. David. From the eggplant stand. Your sister goes to my school.”

  The man used the broom to knock all the bowls, plates, glasses and silverware off the table. Then he dropped the broom, signalled to his two followers and left the house.

  Lena locked the door and looked to Keita and Charity. “You must never—” But she didn’t finish her sentence. She clutched her chest, gasped and lowered herself to the floor.

  “Mom!” Keita shouted.

  Charity tipped her mother’s chin back and breathed into her mouth. Keita opened the door, checked to make sure that the thugs had disappeared, and ran from house to house until he found a neighbour who was willing to bring a car around. Keita and Charity helped lift their motionless mother into the vehicle, but there was no pulse, no breath. They inched through the littered streets, holding Lena’s hands as they approached the hospital. But they knew she was already dead. Keita took his sister’s hand, but he could not cry.

  BUSINESS PEOPLE FLED THE COUNTRY, TAKING THEIR MONEY with them, until General Randall temporarily blocked Internet access, closed the banks and shut down the airport. Randall brought out his troops, put a halt to the attacks and the looting, and promised to enforce peace and civility, as long as the Faloo people were prepared to respect him as Zantoroland’s President for Life.

  Yoyo missed the funeral. Two weeks later, he was finally able to fly back home. Shuffling with tiny steps and barely able to lift his head, Yoyo looked as if he had aged twenty years. He was unable to grieve in front of the children. He became silent and thoughtful. He moved as little as possible, like a reptile that has eaten too much. In the household, Yoyo remained formal and almost wordless. He would not laugh, smile or cry, but he told Charity and Keita to be strong.

  Keita did not feel strong. When he walked, his veins seemed filled with sludge. His breathing was as shallow as a barely dug grave. He should have attacked the leader with a cricket bat or hurled a vase at his head and spared his mother the confrontation. But he had done nothing.

  When Keita opened his mouth, his words sounded like they came from a stranger. He didn’t speak with Charity about his sadness or hers, but he often sat beside her on the couch when neighbours and friends brought roasted chickens and plantains and fresh mangoes to the house. On the couch, Keita absorbed the warmth from his sister’s shoulders, listened to her breath and parroted her inhalations and exhalations. She sat rigid and perfectly straight, just as her mother had done, and she had nothing to say either, but Keita felt he knew her thoughts and her sadness as they breathed together, in and out, in and out, on the same waves of isolation and shock.

  Keita longed to sit beside his father on the couch, but Yoyo spent hours a day at his desk on the other side of the living room, pounding furiously as he rolled page after page into the typewriter.

  “What are you writing?” Keita asked one day.

  “He’s writing about the coup,” Charity said. “It could be his last income for a while.”

  Yoyo tried for days to get a telephone line. He kept writing and revising, and when he finally got a phone line, he called the New York Times and dictated his story, word by word.

  YOYO CALLED CHARITY AND KEITA INTO HIS STUDY. “Children, forgive me. I’ve been distant. It is only because I miss your mother so much.”

  Yoyo hugged Keita against his left side and Charity to his right. “Let’s sing together.”

  In Keita’s household, tears were never allowed with conversation. Only in song could they hug each other fiercely and let their grief flow.

  They stood close and sang “I Stood on the River of Jordan,” the way Keita had learned it in church, years earlier, from Deacon Andrews. Finally, Yoyo’s tears cascaded. Charity started bawling. Singing made Keita finally feel the real meaning of his loss. Singing made his mother’s death seem both inconceivable and insurmountable, and for the first time, Keita felt a thousand shards of sadness massing under his skin and threatening to cut their way free.

  I stood on da ribber ob Jerdon

  To see dat ship come sailin’ ober.

  I stood on da ribber ob Jerdon

  To see dat ship sail by.

  O don’t you weep

  When you see dat ship come sailin’ ober.

  Shout! Glory Hallelujah!

  When you see dat ship sail by.

  That night, Keita worried that the troops might come for his father. Who would care for them? Would Keita and Charity be raised by sympathetic neighbours? Faloos, but not people who knew them intimately?

  Keita fell asleep to the clacking of typewriter keys. It sounded like rain. It sounded like voices merging. Was it true what they said in church, about his mother’s soul ascending to the heavens, where she would be forever peaceful and joyous among the angels? Keita could not stop thinking about his mother’s body, inert on the living room floor, and he found himself not believing in the heavens.

  When his father did not know where to put his pain, he wrote. Charity studied. Keita went running. Up the path that rose for two kilometres, ascending mercilessly up the mountainside. The climb was so difficult that the locals had given it a name: the Struggle. On days when he could not stop thinking about his mother, Keita would run up the hill, and
at the top he would jog back down. Up and down he would run, three, four or even five times, gasping and bawling and gasping and bawling, until he felt dry and empty and ready to lie down and sleep again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  YOYO OFTEN LEFT THE HOUSE AT NIGHT AND DID his interviews away from home, but Keita could not remember a time when his father was not grinding coffee beans in the mornings. He would talk to his espresso maker, spooning coffee into it and patting it down with the back of his spoon until he was ready to screw on the lid and heat the contraption. He had a name for his espresso maker: Wolverton. Come on, Wolverton, tell me a story today. What you got in there for me? Yoyo used a battery-powered grinder so as not to be hampered by blackouts. He took his coffee black, which Keita—who needed milk and sugar to make his palatable—could not fathom.

  Yoyo would sip his coffee on the porch while reading one of the dozen newspapers and magazines to which he subscribed. They arrived two weeks late in Zantoroland, but never mind—Yoyo devoured them anyway. Yoyo was frugal beyond belief—he would rejuvenate stale peanuts by re-salting them, sliding them onto a greased cookie sheet and broiling them in the oven—but newspaper and magazine subscriptions were his only indulgence.

  Yoyo sat in his rocking chair on the porch and greeted the schoolchildren passing in their uniforms and backpacks. The children were all barefoot, with shoes zipped into their bags. For greater longevity, shoes were worn only in the schoolyard.

  One day in April of 2009, however, Keita smelled no coffee. Yoyo was not in the kitchen or on the porch. Charity had already left the house, but that was typical. She clung to her routines. Each night before she went to bed, she assembled her lunch (one Granny Smith apple, a handful of almonds and ham-and-cheese on rye with mayonnaise, but never mustard), folded her school clothes and piled them on a chair, cleaned her shoes and put them at the door (Keita knew that the surest way to drive her crazy was to hide her shoes), and reviewed her schedule of classes, violin lessons and school newspaper meetings. She met a tutor early most mornings to keep her marks as close as possible to 100 percent. But on this day, she had left for an overnight field trip to a museum on the far side of Zantoroland.

  Keita, at fifteen, trained daily with a track club but barely kept any study schedule. What was the point of hitting the books when he had no possibility of matching his sister’s success? When his father or his sister inquired about his marks, Keita said that he would happily skip being an overanxious, overachieving A-plus student and opt instead to be a cool B student, a runner dreaming of the glory—and cars—that would accompany his Olympic victory.

  Keita slipped on his knapsack and tied his shoelaces. At an easy clip, it would only take him eight minutes to run to school. But it was 8:45 a.m. now and time to get going.

  “Papa,” he called.

  No answer.

  Keita was writing a note to his father, teasingly scolding him for being absent at breakfast, when someone knocked on his door. Three times. Politely, but firmly. In Zantoroland, three knocks meant official business. Keita opened the door. He looked down. It was a young boy, around ten years old. Years ago, when his homeland had been different, it might have been a neighbour child come to visit his father. But in recent years, the president had been known to use young messengers. Keita stepped back in alarm.

  “Sir,” the boy said. “Message about your father. You must report to the Ministry of Citizenship immediately.”

  “What has happened to him?”

  The boy shifted from his left foot to his right. “Don’t know, sir.”

  “Who is detaining him?”

  “Don’t know, sir, but you must bring a flatbed wagon.” The boy turned and ran.

  Keita did not have a flatbed wagon. In Yagwa, wagons were pulled by the labourers who hauled oranges, chickens and okra to market. How important could a wagon be? Better that he go straight to help his father. Keita flew out the door and began running.

  The Ministry of Citizenship was housed with other government offices in a three-storey pink building on the bay at the south end of the President’s Promenade. After the coup d’état three years earlier, Keita had been warned to not approach the building—which was also known as the Pink Palace—or to walk within a block of it. Faloos and dissidents were sometimes snatched off the street near there, never to be seen again. No sane person approached the building unless they had good reason to do so.

  ARMED SOLDIERS STOOD GUARD AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE building. Keita informed them that he had been summoned to meet his father.

  One of the soldiers nodded.

  Keita ran up six steps and into the building. Ahead of him was an office. Not a soul was inside.

  “Dad!” he shouted.

  No answer. No one was visible in the building. Keita heard nothing but his own voice echoing off the marble floors and the walls adorned with portraits of President Randall.

  Keita tried to open doors on the first floor. The first three were locked. It was cold in the building, and he shivered as he remembered his father’s words: It’s not truly a Ministry of Citizenship. It’s a Ministry of Detention, Abuse and Worse. The fourth office door that Keita tried was unlocked, so he opened it and entered a square, windowless room with an unoccupied desk and seats all along the walls, like an empty medical clinic. On the walls were more portraits of the president. Keita walked slowly around the room and noticed another door. He was reaching for the handle when the door opened and a man came through. Keita jumped back.

  The man was short and thin with a military brush cut, inscrutable black eyes, a nose the size of a plum and what appeared to be a permanent sneer on his face. He wore a black suit and a black tie.

  “Hello,” Keita said, “I am—”

  “We know who you are. Where is the wagon?”

  “I came for my father.”

  “Not ready to leave,” the man said.

  “May I see him?”

  “You were instructed to bring a wagon. Are you deaf, or are you dense?”

  “I don’t have a wagon, but I wish to see my father.” Keita wondered if it was safe to argue. What would Charity do? His sister, he knew, would not take no for an answer.

  “Wait here,” the man said.

  “May I ask—?” Keita began, but the man raised his palm, turned and passed through the door, which closed behind him.

  Keita waited a moment. He tried the door. Locked. He pounded on it, but there was no answer.

  Keita had no book to read, no material to study. He waited. And waited. And waited. In his hurry to leave the house, he had forgotten to put on his watch. There was a clock on the wall, but the hour and minute hands were fixed at noon. It seemed to Keita that an hour or two passed, but nobody came to see him.

  Then, from the other side of the locked door, he heard a voice. “Nooo,” it wailed. It sounded at first like a child, loud and insistent, but then it didn’t sound like a child at all. Keita waited for the sound again, listening carefully. When it came again, he knew.

  Keita stood up and pounded on the door. No answer.

  “I don’t know!” his father cried out, just beyond the locked door.

  “Dad!” Keita pounded on the door.

  Now his father’s voice came from farther away. Keita shouted again. “Dad!”

  The door swung open and the short man stood before him. Keita tried to see into the room, but the man blocked the way.

  “You are a poor listener,” he said. “No wagon, and not patiently waiting either. Well, if you must, come in. Be quiet, or you will make matters worse.”

  “I want to see my father.”

  “That will have to wait.”

  The man stood to the side and Keita stepped into the room. Then he felt a blunt, hard blow that left him dizzy. The man had punched him. Keita raised his hand to stop the blood from his nose.

  “It will get worse than that if you show any more insolence,” the man said.

  “What is happening to my father?” Keita said.

>   “You are how old?”

  “Fifteen. What is going on?”

  “Fifteen is too young for questions. But let me tell you something.” The man looked straight into Keita’s eyes.

  Keita thought of his sister, strong and bossy, and all the passion that his father had channelled into a thousand newspaper articles. He stood firmly and stared right into the man’s eyes.

  “Your father is not a good man. He is neither law-abiding nor respectful.”

  Keita was quite sure that the only lawbreakers in this building were the short man and his cronies, and he wanted to say so. He did not want to cause his father more pain, but he could imagine his sister pushing harder.

  “There is no need to hurt my father. Tomorrow, you will have to live with the things you have done to him. Let him go. I will take him now.”

  “You could have seen him two hours ago, if you had done what I said.”

  “What is it with the wagon?”

  “Disrespectful question!”

  “I don’t have a wagon!”

  “You can find a wagon if you put your mind to it. Bring it to the front door, where the soldiers wait, and then come back here and knock on the door.”

  His father’s voice again: “I work alone, and I don’t know!”

  “Dad!” Keita shouted.

  All that came back was a long, slow moan.

  Keita wondered if he could overpower the man, or run past him to find his father. But there would be other men, and he would not succeed.

  “I will be back with a wagon,” he said.

  He left the building and ran to the market, where he found the woman who had sold mangoes and bananas to Charity and him a hundred times.

  “Please, I need to borrow your wagon.”

  She pointed to the oranges and lemons stacked high on it.