Sankofa

by Chibundu Onuzo

  “No, but that piece of paper can be the first step towards a new life. If you want a new life.”

  There is another pause. She hasn’t written anything on her sheet except my name: Anna Graham.

  “I like my clients to give a firm yes to the question I asked at the start before we proceed,” she says.

  I attempt my own bluntness. “How do you make money, then?” I ask.

  “I always get what my clients want, but I like to make sure that they really want it first.”

  She twists her wedding band. It is slim and studded with diamonds.

  “All right, Anna. Shall we say we have begun the conversation? And you’ll get back to me once you have a firm yes. I’ll open a file for you. If we don’t hear back within another three months, I’ll assume that you’ve made other arrangements. Do you have any travel plans or family circumstances that mean you might need a little more time?”

  “I want to go to Bamana,” I say. “It’s a small country in West Africa.”

  “Sounds nice. Beaches?”

  “I have family there, but I’ve never been.”

  Once I say it, I know this is what I want. I want to meet my father more than I want to finalize my divorce. From this office stretches paperwork and itemization of my belongings, and the breaking up of my marriage piece by piece. Or I could go to Bamana and see if Francis Aggrey is still alive.

  “I’ll walk you out.”

  On the bus home I sit on the upper deck and I am level with the trees. The meeting has stirred up memories of Robert.

  We first met in a bar, the type in the City that was quiet in the afternoon and closed on weekends. I sat, hemmed in between my colleagues, fellow trainee architects, waiting until it was my turn to buy someone a drink. Robert was at the counter when I was getting a gin and tonic.

  “What are you having?” he asked. He had a pleasant voice. It cut through the background noise.

  “It’s not mine,” I said. I was too concerned with making a good impression on my colleagues. I didn’t have time to be chatted up by a stranger with a light baritone.

  I took the order back to my table and slotted into my space. I concentrated on the conversation and tried to keep my hands still. There were two other female trainees, privately educated and more assured than me, I thought, although perhaps I misinterpreted things. They also ended up quitting soon after they married. Later, when I made my way to the loo, Robert stopped me.

  “I just wanted to say I think you’re absolutely beautiful. I’ve been watching you all evening.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and walked past. When I came out, he was still there.

  “Would you like to go for dinner? There’s an Italian restaurant a few minutes from here. The pasta’s great. I’m Robert, by the way.” He put out his hand. At the counter I’d only seen his profile. He was handsome straight on, or, more accurately, he was well-groomed: tall, clean-shaven, trim in his suit. I shook his hand. Our grips were matched.

  “Anna. I’ll get my bag.”

  My mother liked Robert. He was tall. He spoke like a BBC announcer. She was a little awed by these shallow trappings. “You’ve done well for yourself, Anna,” she said when she saw my engagement ring. I pestered her for weeks after. What exactly did she mean? She turned on me in a rare show of spirit and said, “Stop trying to turn me into a women’s activist.”

  The only thing Aunt Caryl asked was “What’s he like in bed?”

  How much would I have made of my life if we’d never met? I wasn’t suited to architecture: the hours were too long, the opportunities to express myself too few. Only a precious few rose high enough to stamp their point of view on a building. The rest of us were sketch-drawing props to someone else’s grand vision.

  I look up and see I have gone past my stop. I press the bell and walk home, thinking now of my last words to the lawyer. Somewhere in the world, Francis Aggrey may be alive, may have only a few months to live, may be dead. To find out, I must go to Bamana, and to go to Bamana I need money.

  The fastest route is to either sell my mother’s flat or divorce Robert. The monthly allowance he gives me is not enough to fund a trip. I was in a foolish financial position for a woman my age. Rose has more money than me.

  When I got home, my eyes rested on a jade Buddha cross-legged in the hallway, brought back from Thailand in my hand luggage. It must be worth something. Perhaps I would end up auctioning the contents of my house to fund a trip to Bamana.

  4

  The next day I continue with Francis Aggrey’s diary. His voice is familiar to me now—his dry wit, his flashes of anger, the pride that keeps him aloof despite his longing to make friends. He moved through London with this rich inner life hidden from all who passed him and concluded he was just another wog.

  He writes of his parting with Aunt Caryl. I am relieved that there is no overlap with my mother, who is yet to make an appearance.

  As for Francis and my aunt, he concludes that there is no spark between them. I am not surprised. The men in Aunt Caryl’s life were transient, migratory birds that shed a few feathers in their passing. She was the opposite of my mother. She loved change. I imagine that Francis had been something new that fast grew old.

  Menelik has given me another pamphlet about the diamonds in D.C. There is a small white settler population in Mion, which owns all the mines, and the indigenous Ba people are forced into their labor, the pamphlet says. Little is heard of their plight. The Ba were the last to come into contact with Europeans and only a handful are educated. They have few spokespersons and their chiefs are in the pay of the mine owners. I will go to Mion one day and see for myself.

  There are a few half sentences, fragments of thoughts.

  Pan-Africanism or socialism?

  Negro advancement in the twentieth century cannot be judged on . . .

  We face neither east nor west.

  My exams are in two weeks. I am buried in the library most days, cramming. I have not been to Menelik’s flat.

  Perhaps Francis’s exams will break Menelik’s hold over him. I was always good at exams. I could learn things and unlearn them once the test was over. It’s how I got into grammar school.

  My first exam is tomorrow. I have prayed to Christ and sprinkled some gin on my carpet for Bimba because I am a fisherman’s son.

  The last paper is done and I am free for a month. I would like to travel to Wales, or perhaps even Scotland, but as always I am low on funds. There are no jobs going for black men of my education, only work as diggers and bellboys, cringing for tips from some white patron or another.

  It was a fine day and I wandered into Hyde Park. Menelik was at Speakers’ Corner, denouncing imperialism. A small crowd had gathered. He paces when he speaks, like an animal in a tight cage. He talks in threes: Debt, Disease, and Death to imperialism. The English shuffled their feet and laughed. They do not take him seriously. I went back to his flat afterwards. We discussed socialism in Ghana with the newest member of our circle, Adrian Bennett. Bennett is a young lecturer at the LSE. He is the first obroni man I have seen in Menelik’s flat. He gave me another book. This time on ancient African kingdoms. It is the size of a dictionary. I don’t know when I shall have time to read it.

  My dislike for Menelik increases. He seems both dangerous and charismatic, a personality to attract a vulnerable and lonely young man like Francis.

  In a week’s time I will be homeless. As I write this, Blessing is on her way to London in a ship and she will arrive in seven days. She says Thomas is taking too long to be called to the bar and she is tired of playing the abandoned wife in Salisbury. She has been saving the money Thomas sends home from the articles he writes for the press here sometimes. “She was meant to buy dresses with that,” he said to me with his head in his hands.

  I am unprepared for renting in London. I have lost my carapace.

  It is like reading a play. The arrival of one character spells doom for another.

  I have spoken to Caryl of my situ
ation. I do not like to ask assistance from a woman I have walked out with but I am desperate.

  Where was my mother? It was like her to be missing from her own story, blocked out by Aunt Caryl.

  Caryl has found a place for me. If I take it, my new landlord will be her father. He has done up her old bedroom and is looking for his first lodger. It seems an improper suggestion. “Don’t be silly, Francis,” she said to me. We were hardly a serious item. How quickly these obroni women dispatch a man’s ego.

  Well, I am in Mr. Bain’s house now. It is a narrow Victorian dwelling on a modest street. Lower middle class, but tidily so. It is two floors high. Kitchen and parlor on the ground floor, two bedrooms on the first and my small room in what is almost an attic. I have a sink but I must share the bathroom with Mr. Bain and his second daughter.

  I recognized this house from my childhood. We lived there until I was eight, when Grandpa Owen died.

  Mr. Bain goes to work at a factory at 6 a.m. and his younger daughter leaves not long after for a job at a clothes store. I carefully time my ablutions so we do not meet. Yet I have caught a few glimpses of Caryl’s sister. She is petite and pale with long black hair and eyes the shade of the Atlantic at noon. She is more conventional-looking than Caryl. That is my own proud way of saying I find her beautiful.

  At last, my mother appears, and I am glad Francis Aggrey found her beautiful. She was beautiful, although she carried her beauty with downward looks and a hesitant manner that somewhat effaced her features.

  Yet Francis had noticed her and picked the shy sister. Perhaps my mother hid this diary to protect me. It was better to know nothing of my father than to discover him on the first page and lose him again by the end.

  I set my alarm and wake up early. I am going to the British Museum. I went for the first time as a teenager to sketch the Elgin Marbles. Ms. Rendell, my art teacher, took a small group of us on a Saturday. I remember the stone rippling like cloth, the lithe torsos of centaurs, the naked display of muscle.

  The morning rush has passed and the street is deserted. My tube carriage is empty apart from an elderly couple in tweed. The man holds a large, folded umbrella the height of a small child. I have forgotten mine. I sit on a newly upholstered seat, holding a fresh copy of a free newspaper. It is mostly adverts interlaced with gossip for the commuters before they plunge into the grey haze of office work. The carriage sways as it moves through the tunnels, tons of earth above us, Londoners walking on our grave. I feel ill. I stare out the window, counting the stops to Russell Square.

  There are arrows in the station pointing to the museum. Even in November, the tourists are here: the orderly pack of Japanese, the elastic sprawl of Americans. The museum’s façade is Grecian, built in rational lines. Inside, the glass ceiling is curved and modern, crisscrossed with steel, held up by a thousand minute calculations.

  The Africa collection is in the basement. The noise from outside melts into a hush of spotlights and glass. A cloth of gold is mounted on a wall, draped in glittering folds, ceremonial robes of a great chief. It is an illusion, I see, when I draw closer—not cloth but tiny strips of metal, joined close until they look like fabric. El Anatsui, the placard says. Ghanaian. 2001. Francis Aggrey did not see this.

  I move towards a display of sculptures. There is a small wooden man who has come from Bamana, an idol in a boat with a tiny pipe in his mouth. He is to bring fishermen luck. Francis Aggrey’s mother dealt in fish. She might have prayed to this Bimba.

  I stand in front of a wall of masks. There are masks for death here, jumbled with masks for love and weddings and fertility. The placards do not explain much. Birth mask. Twin mask. How were they used? For sacrifice? For blood?

  I bring out my notebook to sketch a pair of nineteenth-century ivory leopardesses. A ring of coral encircles each waist, the haunches caught in motion, padding to their prey. I am shading in the hindmost spots when an American couple walks in.

  “Well, aren’t these creepy?” the wife says. She is sheathed in a grey puffer coat. Her blond hair straggles around her face like tassels of corn.

  “Wouldn’t want to wake up to that, would you, honey?”

  They are standing in front of the wall of masks.

  “They are not meant to be stared at,” I call out from my bench.

  They turn. There are only three of us in the room. The wife steps towards me.

  “Are you a guide?”

  “My father is from West Africa.”

  “So what are they for?” It is the husband asking.

  “I don’t know.”

  I return to my leopardesses and they move on to another part of the exhibition. I have drawn the waist of one leopardess too thick. Even in pencil, I cannot replicate the litheness the artist has rendered in ivory. By the time I have penciled in the whiskers the couple is gone. There is something domestic in the cats I have drawn, suburban tabbies not jungle creatures.

  It is lunchtime and I venture outside to the main road. The shops are selling Union Jack kitsch: mugs, clothing, stuffed bears. There is a bunting of international flags on the Italian restaurant I choose. A bell goes off. A waiter approaches.

  “Table for one, madam?”

  I am ushered to a table for two and Robert’s place is cleared away, napkin, knife, and fork. The menu is placed before me. It is written in green flourishes, curling vines on white stone. I order pasta. I have brought Francis Aggrey’s diary with me. I bring him out. Lunch with my father.

  He writes of meeting Blessing for the first time. She is unimpressed by her husband’s politicking. I like the sound of her. She seems the first practical person that Francis has met. Perhaps she will be the one to finally break Menelik’s hold over him.

  Menelik has gone on a speaking tour of the country, attempting to set revolutionary fires in damp hedges and lanes. My father is left alone in the attic room. On some evenings, he hears my mother play the flute. I remember the mournful airs in minor keys. She tried to teach me but I hated the way spit bubbled through the notes and had to be drained after each piece.

  I spoke with Bronwen for some length today before she went off to her noon shift. Her name means “the white one,” a fitting description. She is only eighteen and says she will not work in a shop forever. She plans to design and sell her own clothes on Bond Street. She has made the red dress, the one I admire.

  My mother wanted to design clothes and sell them on Bond Street. I never knew. I did know the meaning of her name. My grandfather named her Bronwen and gave me the middle name Brangwen, which meant “pure and dark,” my mother’s opposite. There was a darkness that shone, he used to say, the gleam of an onyx, the luster of black marble.

  Grandpa Owen was a kind landlord. He invited my father to a Sunday roast with Aunt Caryl and my mother. He included Francis briefly, perhaps dangerously, in their family.

  I have dishonored myself. I chose to stay home this Friday, instead of joining Mr. Bain at the pub. Around 9 p.m., needing to relieve myself, I went down to the toilet. The door was unlocked and I found Bronwen sitting on the rim of the bathtub with her feet soaking in a bucket of water. She was wearing a dressing gown that stopped at her knees. She blushed.

  “Sorry. I should have locked the door. I’ll be out now.”

  And like an experienced seducer, I asked, “Might a massage help?”

  Before she could reply, I had knelt and lifted her foot out of the bucket. It was small and slender, the length of my palm, the width of four fingers. I began. I have seen it done in Segu. First the arch is bent back and forth, then the heel squeezed, then the toes splayed, fingers pushing in and out of the gaps.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked. She shook her head and so I took out the next foot. My hands slid to her leg. It was slim and strong, the muscles firm from walking miles of shop floor. I inched to her knee, wondering at my daring. There was a graze, a dark line not fully healed. I touched it with the tip of my tongue. The flesh was cool and salty, the taste of the sea. Black man cannibal. My
hand crawled under her dressing gown. She was naked underneath. When I touched her part, she gasped.

  For the first time, I looked in her face.

  “Shall I stop?” I asked, suddenly unsure of myself.

  “Yes,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. I withdrew my hand. Black man rapist. The evidence of my ministrations was already apparent. My fingers had left marks on her pale skin.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said.

  I heard a key turning in the front door and I fled. I have abused Mr. Bain’s trust. I have taken advantage of Caryl’s young sister. Me, a grown man of twenty-five. I will give my notice tomorrow and start looking for new accommodation.

  She was only eighteen, I want to shout. Predatory is what you would call Francis today. I’d guessed already that he was “an older man,” but still, I had hoped the story of their romance would be less sordid, less entangled in the grey area of consent. I wished I could read my mother’s version of events.

  “Madam, shall I take this?” the waiter asks with his hand on the edge of my bowl. The restaurant has emptied. The lunch crowd is gone. The evening patrons are anticipated. A corner of my pasta remains uneaten, cold and congealed. I am bent over the diary, my nose almost touching the page.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Shall I bring the bill?”

  “Coffee, please,” I say.

  I am still in the Bain household. I go out early and return late. Menelik has returned from his speaking tour. We went on a march against neo-imperialism today. I shouted myself hoarse against predatory capitalism, but afterwards I wondered to what end? Losing my voice will not displace Western business interests in Africa. Perhaps it is time I began thinking of what I, personally, can do when I return home after my studies.

  Coming in tonight, I saw Bronwen’s back in the kitchen but I hurried past her. The holiday will be over in ten days and then I will be too busy to dwell on that embarrassing episode.