by Mbue, Imbolo
“Eh? You stopped because you pregnant a girl?” Bubakar said, jotting down something.
“Yes,” Jende replied. “Her father put me in prison because of it.”
“Boom! That’s it!” Bubakar said as he lifted his head from his writing pad, his eyes glowing with excitement.
“What is it?” Winston asked.
“His asylum. The story we’ll tell Immigration.”
Winston and Jende looked at each other. Jende was thinking Bubakar must know what he was talking about. Winston looked like he was thinking Bubakar must know nothing about what he was talking about.
“What’re you talking about?” Winston asked. “The imprisonment happened in 1990, fourteen years ago. How are you going to convince a judge that my cousin’s afraid of persecution back in Cameroon because he impregnated a girl and got sent to prison a long time ago? Mind you, in our country, and maybe even in your country, it’s perfectly within the law for a father to have a young man arrested for complicating his daughter’s future.”
Bubakar looked at Winston with scorn, his lip curled down on one side. “Mr. Winston,” he said after a long pause, during which he wrote something down and deliberately placed his pen on his writing pad.
“Yes?”
“I understand we’re both lawyers, and you’re Wall Street smart. Is that not so?”
Winston did not respond.
“Let me guarantee you something, my friend,” Bubakar continued. “You wouldn’t know the first thing to do if you were put before an immigration judge and asked to fight for the likes of your cousin. Okay? So, why don’t you allow me to do what I know, and if I ever need a lawyer to help me find a way to hide taxes from the government, I’ll let you do what you know.”
“My job is not to help people find ways to hide taxes,” Winston replied, keeping his voice low even though Jende could tell from his unblinking eyes that he yearned to reach across the table and punch out all the teeth from Bubakar’s mouth.
“You don’t do that, eh?” Bubakar asked with mock interest. “So, tell me, what is it that you do at Wall Street?”
Winston scoffed. Jende said nothing, equally as angered as his cousin.
Perhaps afraid he’d gone too far, Bubakar tried to rein in his comments and appease the cousins.
“My brothers, make we no vex,” he said, switching to a blend of Cameroonian and Nigerian pidgin English. “Now no be time for vex. We get work for do, abi? Now na time for go before. No be so?”
“Na so,” Winston replied. “Let’s just stick to the matter at hand.”
Jende sighed and waited for the conversation to return to his asylum application.
“But just so you know,” Winston added, “my job as a corporate lawyer does not involve any lying or manipulation.”
“Of course,” Bubakar replied. “I’m sorry, my brother. I must have mistaken it with another kind of law.”
The two men laughed.
“What happened to the young lady you impregnated?” Bubakar said, turning to Jende.
“She is back in Limbe.”
“And the child you had with her?”
“She died.”
“I’m so sorry, oh, my brother. So sorry.”
Jende averted his gaze. He needed no sympathies. He certainly did not need condolences coming fourteen years later.
“You went to prison before or after she died?”
“Before she was born, when my girl’s parents found out I was the one who pregnant her.”
“That’s how it normally works,” Winston said. “Parents call the police, boyfriend gets arrested.”
Bubakar nodded, double-underlining a word on his writing pad.
“I was in prison for four months. I came out, the baby was one month old. Three months later, she died of yellow fever.”
“Sorry, oh, my brother,” Bubakar said again. “Truly sorry.”
Jende took a sip from a glass of water on the table and cleared his throat. “But I have another child in Cameroon,” he said. “I have a three-years-old son.”
“With the same woman that you had the daughter with?”
“Yes. She is the mother of my son. She is still my girlfriend. We would be married now and be a family with our son if only her father would let me marry her.”
“And what’s his reason for disapproving of the marriage?”
“He says he needs time to think about it, but I know it’s because I’m a poor man.”
“It’s a class thing,” Winston said. “Jende’s from a poor family. This young lady’s family has a bit more money.”
“Or maybe it’s because this young lady’s father hasn’t gotten over what happened to his daughter?” Bubakar said. “I mean, as a father, to see your young daughter get pregnant, drop out of school, and then lose the child, it’s all very hard, abi? I don’t think I’ll ever like the person who did this to my daughter, whether he is from a rich family or poor family.”
Neither cousin responded.
“But it doesn’t really matter what his reason is,” Bubakar continued. “I think the story is our best chance for your asylum. We claim persecution based on belonging to a particular social group. We weave a story about how you’re afraid of going back home because you’re afraid your girlfriend’s family wants to kill you so you two don’t get married.”
“That sounds like something that would happen in India,” Winston said. “No one does anything like that in Cameroon.”
“Are you trying to say Cameroon is better than India?” Bubakar retorted.
“I’m trying to say Cameroon is not like India.”
“Leave that up to me, my brother.”
Winston sighed.
“When can we send the application?” Jende asked.
“As soon as you provide me with all the evidence.”
“Evidence? Like what?”
“Like what? Like your prison record. Birth certificates of your children. Both of them. Death certificate of the little girl. Letters. Lots of letters, from people who’ll say that they’ve heard this man say he’s going to kill you if he ever sees you again. People who’ve heard his brothers, his cousins, anyone in that family talk about destroying you. Pictures, too. In fact, anything and everything about you and this gal and her father. Can you get it for me?”
“I’ll try,” Jende said hesitantly. “But what if I cannot get enough evidence?”
Bubakar looked at him with a dash of amusement and shook his head. “Ah, my brother,” he said, putting down his pen and leaning forward. “Do I have to spell it out for you? You got to use your common sense and produce for me something I can show these people. Eh? It’s like that man Jerry Maguire says, show me the money. These people at USCIS are going to say, show me the evidence. Show me the evidence! You get me?”
He laughed at his own joke. Winston puffed. Jende did not react—he’d never heard of a man named Jerry Maguire.
“We got to show a lot of stuff to convince them, you understand me? One way or another, we produce a lot of evidence.”
“We’ll see what we can do,” Winston said.
Jende nodded in agreement, although he knew getting the kind of letters Bubakar wanted would be difficult. Neni’s father didn’t like him—that he’d known for years—but the old man had never once threatened to kill him. No one in Limbe could attest to that. But filing for asylum was his best chance at staying in the country, so he had to do something. He would have to talk it out with Winston and see what could be done; Winston would have ideas on how to do it.
“And you’re confident this will work?” Winston asked.
“I’ll make a strong case,” Bubakar said. “Your cousin will get his papers, Inshallah.”
Four
SHE COULDN’T GO TO BED UNTIL HE GOT HOME; SHE HAD TO HEAR EVERYTHING about his first day at work. When she had called him around noon to find out how his day was going, he had hurriedly said it was going good, he couldn’t talk, but everything was good. So she’d had no choice but to wait, and no
w, at almost midnight, she could finally hear him at the door, panting after having climbed the five flights of stairs it took to get to their apartment.
“So?” she asked, grinning as he sat down on the threadbare living room sofa.
“I cannot complain,” he said, smiling. “It went well.”
She went into the kitchen and got him a glass of cold water, helped him take off his jacket and, after he’d rested on the sofa with his head thrown back for about a minute, brought out his dinner and pulled out a chair so he could make himself comfortable at the dinette set.
Then she began asking him questions: What exactly did he do for the family? Where did he drive them to? What did the Edwardses’ apartment look like? Was Mrs. Edwards a nice lady? Was their son well behaved? Was he going to be working this late every day?
He was tired, but she was persistent, scattering the questions all over him like confetti on a victorious warrior. She had to know how rich people lived. How they behaved. What they said. If they could hire someone to drive them around, then their lives must really be something, eh?
“Come on,” she said. “Tell me.”
So he told her everything he could in between mouthfuls of his dinner. The Edwardses’ apartment was big and beautiful, he said, millions of dollars more beautiful than their sunless one-bedroom apartment. One could see the whole city through the window in their living room—his mouth had dropped open when he saw it.
“Chai!” she said. “What would it be like to have a place like that? I’ll jump and touch the sky every day.”
The place looked like one of those rich-people apartments you see on television, he went on. Everything was white or silver, very clean, very shiny. He’d spent only a few minutes there while waiting to take Mighty to school after he returned from dropping Mr. Edwards at work. Mrs. Edwards had asked him to come upstairs because nine-year-old Mighty wanted to be properly introduced before being chauffeured to school. “A very nice child and a well-brought-up one, too, that Mighty,” he said.
“That’s good to hear,” she said. “A rich child who is well brought up.” She wanted to ask if Mighty was as well brought up as their Liomi, but she didn’t—she thought it best to follow the advice her mother had given her years ago about abstaining from comparing her child to another woman’s child. “They only have this one child?” she asked instead.
He shook his head. “Mighty told me he has a big brother. He lives uptown in another apartment they own and goes to Columbia University. The School of Law.”
“You’re going to be driving him around, too?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. If I have to drive him, too, it’s no problem, but from the way Mighty was talking it looks like the brother doesn’t come to visit them often, and Mrs. Edwards is not happy about it. I didn’t ask him any more questions.”
She filled up his half-empty glass of water and allowed him to eat in silence for a few minutes before resuming her questions. “And Mrs. Edwards,” she went on, “what does she look like?”
“Good-looking,” he replied. “Just like a woman with a rich husband should look. Winston said she’s one of those food people.”
“What food people?”
“The people who teach other people how to eat … so they can look one way or not look another way.” He picked up the can of Mountain Dew she’d set on the table, opened it, and took a long sip. “People in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don’t eat that. If you don’t know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?”
“So she must be slim and really good-looking.”
He nodded distractedly, sweat pouring down his face from the extra pepper she’d tossed into the chicken and tomato sauce. Ignoring the sweat, he picked up a drumstick, ripped the meat off the bone with his front teeth, and sucked the juice inside the bone.
“But what exactly does she look like?” she pressed on. “Ah, bébé, details, please.”
He sighed and said he couldn’t remember too much about what she looked like. The one thing he remembered, he said, was that when he first saw her, he thought she looked something like the wife in American Beauty—a movie they both loved and watched whenever they wanted to remind themselves that life in American suburbs could be very strange and maybe it was best to live in peaceful American cities, like New York City.
“What’s the real name of that woman again?” he asked with a full mouth, tomato sauce running down his fingers. “You’re the one who knows these things.”
“Annette Bening?”
“Yes, yes. That’s who she looks like.”
“With the same eyes and everything? She must be beautiful, eh?”
He said he could not remember if Cindy Edwards had Annette Bening’s eyes.
“It’s not like you can even know what her real eyes are like,” she said. “Some of them wear colored contacts; they can change their eyes whenever they feel like it. A woman like Mrs. Edwards, she was probably born into a rich family and started wearing colored contacts even as a child.”
“I don’t know …”
“Rich father, rich mother, rich husband. I’m sure her whole life she’s never known what it’s like to worry about money.”
Licking his lips, he picked up a piece of plantain from the plate, broke it with his fingers, dunked half of it into the tomato sauce bowl, and hurriedly pushed it into his mouth for processing.
She watched him, amused at the speed with which he was devouring his food. “And then what happened after you dropped Mighty off at school?” she asked.
He came back and picked up Mrs. Edwards, he said, took her to her office and then to an appointment in Battery Park City and to another appointment in SoHo, before taking her home and picking up Mighty from school and driving him and his nanny to a building on the Upper West Side where he got his piano lessons. He took Mighty and his nanny home after the lesson and then picked up Mr. Edwards from his office and drove him to a steak house on Long Island and back to the city around ten. He refilled the gas, parked the car in the garage, and took the crosstown bus from the east side to the west side. Then he caught the uptown 3 subway home.
“Weh!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that a lot of work for one person in one day?”
Sure, it might be, he told her. But for the kind of money he was being paid, wasn’t it to be expected? She shouldn’t forget, he said, that two weeks ago he was making only half of what Mr. Edwards was paying him, driving the livery cab twelve hours every day.
She nodded in agreement and said, “We can only thank God.”
He lifted his glass of water and took a sip.
“I calculated your thirty-five thousand salary, plus my ten thousand,” she said as she refilled his glass again. “After we pay your taxes and my school fees and rent and send money back home and everything else, we can still save like three or four hundred dollars a month.”
“Four hundred dollars a month!”
She nodded, smiling, amazed, too, at how so much can change in so little time. “We save like that, bébé,” she said, “we try really hard, we can save five thousand a year. Ten years, we could have enough money for down payment for a two-bedroom in Mount Vernon or Yonkers.” She moved her head closer to his. “Or even New Rochelle.”
He shook his head. “We’re going to start paying more for rent one day. How long do you think before the government finds out Mr. Charles is qualifying for cheap housing even though he drives a Hummer? They find out we’re paying him to live here, they kick us out—”
“So?”
“So? Someday we’re going to start paying more than five hundred for rent, and forty-five thousand to live in Harlem will be nothing.”
She shrugged: just like him to think of all the bad things that could happen. “Someday is not today,” she countered. “Before they find out, we would have saved some money. I’ll be a pharmacist by then.” She smiled again, her eyes narrowing as if she were dreaming of that
day. “We’ll have our own apartment, two bedrooms. You’ll make more money as a chauffeur. I’ll make a good pharmacist salary. We won’t live in this place full of cockroaches anymore.”
He looked at her and smiled back, and she imagined he believed, too, that someday she would be a pharmacist. Hopefully five years, maybe seven years, but still someday.
She watched him take the last piece of plantain from the plate, use it to clean the tomato sauce bowl, and rush it, together with the last piece of chicken, into his mouth. Looking at him lovingly, she giggled as he finished up the Mountain Dew and burped. “You’re a tanker,” she said to him, poking him in the ribs.
He giggled, too, wearily. Tired as he was, she could see how pleased he was. Nothing pleased him like a delicious dinner after a long day of work. Nothing pleased her like knowing she had pleased him.
After a long pause, during which he leaned back in his seat and stared at the wall with a faint smile, he washed his hands in the bowl of water she had placed on the table and stood up. “Is Liomi in our bed or his bed?” he whispered from the hallway.
“His bed,” she said, smiling, knowing he would be happy for them to have the bed to celebrate on. She picked up his dirty dishes and took them to the sink. E weni Lowa la manyaka, she sang softly, smiling still and swinging her hips as she cleaned the dishes. E weni Lowa la manyaka, Lowa la nginya, Na weta miseli, E weni Lowa la manyaka.
These days she sang more than she had in her entire life. She sang when she ironed Jende’s shirts and when she walked home after dropping Liomi off at school. She sang as she applied lipstick to head out with Jende and Liomi to an African party: a naming ceremony in Brooklyn; a traditional wedding in the Bronx; a death celebration in Yonkers for someone who had died in Africa and whom practically none of the guests knew; a party for one reason or another that she’d been invited to by a friend from school or work, someone who knew the host and who’d assured her that it was okay to attend, since most African people didn’t care about fancy white-people ideas like attendance by invitation only. She sang walking to the subway and even sang in Pathmark, caring nothing about the looks she got from people who couldn’t understand why someone could be so happy grocery shopping. God na helele, God na waya oh, God na helele, God na waya oh, nobody dey like am oh, nobody dey like am oh, ewoo nwanem, God na helele.
