I, Eric Ngalle

by Ngalle, Eric;

  Once he had collected his rent for the month, Vincent became restless; he would not stay long in the house and when he was in the house, he was on the house telephone, speaking so quietly that he was on the point of whispering. He was in and out, his behaviour erratic. Vincent reminded me of the Duaine, who escaped with ten thousand dollars of student fees in Stavropol.

  It was no surprise when in the early hours of the morning when Vincent was not home there was a knock on the door. I opened the door to six police officers, dressed in full riot gear, with guns and dogs. They went into every room and brought everyone into the living room. They said we must gather our things and leave. This was one of those days my Russian did not help. They were not aggressive and they didn’t search the house, our bags or anything, they simply wanted us to move out as the house had been rented out to someone else. I knew it. Moscow was a dog eat dog world. These guys were police officers but they were also Vincent’s friends. Vincent had collected eight hundred dollars from the eight of us and then proceeded to rent the house out to other people. The police officers were simply doing his dirty work.

  Chapter 10

  Alphonse gave me the telephone number of a businessman called Tigran who he had met at a café in south west Moscow. The man had approached Alphonse and invited him to be his drug mule and Alphonse had agreed. We knew this was the first step to our first scam in Moscow, but what we didn’t know was that the meeting would be the first time one would be pistol-whipped and taken hostage.

  I called Tigran and we arranged a meeting. At this point I only had around one hundred dollars left, which meant I didn’t have any other choice but to go along with Alphonse’s plans. What was the worst that could happen? Get caught? Killed? I knew I needed an exit visa, for this I needed money and I needed a permanent place to stay. What better way to make some quick money, than get an exit visa and vamoose to Zimbabwe?

  We met Tigran at the underground station in Tanganskaya where the yellow and the brown lines meet. Tigran did not approach us but Alphonse had noticed him in the centre of the platform, he was wearing a long, greyish woollen jacket. He was well built and from the way his shoulders bulged, you could tell he was a gym addict. We followed him at a distance; the worst combination in Russia, especially in a group, is that of a dark-haired Russian and a dark-skinned African; this would send police signals. Black-haired Russians have it bad in Russia, especially in Moscow. I picked up a few extremely rude words that were standard in conversation among Russians. For those who were dark-skinned and recognised as being from Africa or ‘The Dark Continent’, we were simply obieziany (monkey). For the dark-haired Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Tartars, it was all yobany urod (which translates to ‘fucking bastards’). My sixth sense did not kick in and even though the paintings on the Moscow underground shook their heads we ignored their warnings.

  Once out of the station, we followed Tigran but still kept our distance until he stopped at a red Niva. He looked at us for a few seconds before opening the door and sitting in the passenger side. We crossed over the road and jumped into the back. Curiously he didn’t say a single word, a few minutes later, another extremely well-built, dark-haired gentleman arrived wearing black trousers, a white shirt and a brown leather jacket. He looked extremely smart and was carrying a man bag under his arm. When he got into the car, he stank of chewing tobacco.

  Alphonse turned to me and said, ‘We’re in the money.’ The same phrase that The President used when we had a successful mission with Arban and his friends in Stavropol. Tigran drove us to a block of flats. The flats were stained with age and neglect. There was a babushka selling semechki (dried or smoked pumpkin seeds), two drunken diedushki arguing on the lavuchka (a bench outside the entrance to their apartment which was very common in most Russian apartments) and some teenagers doing parkour, using goal posts and swinging from end to end.

  As we drove further into the area it opened up into beautiful, low terraced private housing surrounded by small trees and roses. Tigran dropped into first gear and came to a stop outside one of the houses. The path to the house had plenty of fresh potted plants including one flower that looked like hibiscus. Black and white slabs of tiles formed the path leading to the front of the house. It reminded me of the carpet at my aunt’s house that I used to clean day and night before Mola got home from work. Tigran opened the door and let Alphonse out, the other guy whose name was Shant, was fiddling with a set of keys. We walked behind Tigran as he ushered us into the house and the sweet aroma of homemade food greeted us. They had a giant television, books, and beautiful rugs on the wall. The house was small from the outside but quite big on the inside.

  Shant said, ‘So guys, how are you?’

  Alphonse and I replied, ‘We’re good’.

  He nodded and said, ‘Good. Let us do business.’

  He placed a large bag of cocaine on the table, unfiltered. He then brought a series of small bags and told us the small bags retailed for twenty-five roubles each. He was excited, finally they’d found their own mules. Despite the problems I had had with my brother, we had become very close during my last days in Cameroon, and the one piece of advice he had given me repeatedly was to avoid drugs, taking or selling them; he had warned me of the stern and lengthy imprisonment they brought. Not only that, I had watched television in Stavropol and had seen how Ibo Nigerians with Cameroonians were being chased by the Russian police, some had drowned crossing the river. I had seen that Bakossi boy at the Cameroonian embassy who had been locked up for drugs offences so there was no way I was going to start selling drugs. It was my cue then to introduce them to our own line of business.

  I had given Alphonse the last of my one-hundred-dollar bills and, together with his two-hundred, we had stained them with iodine and sealed them in a package waiting for this moment. Tigran and Shant looked on in utter amazement as I explained to them the procedure. They offered us vodka and told different anecdotes, they laughed out loud, so did we. They were going to be rich they thought, we knew we were going to be rich. I asked if they had a one-hundred-dollar bill as we only dealt in one-hundred-dollar bills. Shant disappeared into a room and came out with a clean bill. I knew the routine by heart but to put Tigran and Shant at ease, Alphonse spoke and I translated.

  Alphonse was an attaché to the American Embassy. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, America had signed contracts with different agencies in Moscow to flood the Russian market with dollars in order to undermine the Russian rouble. Producing counterfeit dollars was just a matter of mixing them with good dollars and using a chemical to wash them as Alphonse was going to demonstrate. Remember, our own dollars had been stained using iodine—this is what we present as fake dollars. Everything else is a game, a game that can have tragic consequences.

  I handed over the one-hundred-dollar bill from Shant and Alphonse asked for some scissors and a black carrier bag like the one we had already prepared at home, which Alphonse carried in his pocket. As I stood in front of them, Alphonse reached into his pocket and brought out two finely cut pieces of paper we had cut into dollar sizes and stained with iodine. I handed one to Tigran, who touched and smelled it in excitement, then Shant touched and smelled it before handing it back to me. With great care Alphonse placed their new one-hundred-dollar bill between our finely cut iodine papers. He then carefully placed the contents into the clean-cut black bag, sealing all the corners. When this was done, he asked if they had gloves and a syringe in the house.

  ‘Why do you need gloves and a syringe?’ Tigran asked. I proceeded to explain how dangerous the chemicals were and that Alphonse was going to be injecting them into the sealed dollars to help complete the metamorphosis. They didn’t have a syringe in the house but had gloves. So Shant left the house and a few minutes later came back with a packet of syringes. Alphonse carefully removed the sealed hospital container from his pocket, which contained nothing but a common kitchen detergent, he then unsealed the syringe, which he checked with all diligence to ensure it was working f
ine. All these little gestures go a long way to reassure the clients that all is genuine. The longer Alphonse took with the procedure, the more curious, keen and interested Tigran and Shant became. Tigran was then asked to make space in the freezer, as the package needed three days to rest, and it also needed three doses of chemicals injected over time. Alphonse had switched their packages so they now had our three hundred dollars in the freezer whilst we had theirs.

  They insisted we stay at their house, which was a bonus as we were practically homeless. For the next two days, Alphonse left the house with Tigran in the morning and came back late in the evening. He told me he never sold drugs. The first thing Tigran would do upon entering the house was to check the contents of the freezer. On the second night Tigran and Alphonse brought a girl to the house, her name was Natasha. She worked the streets in Okhotny Ryad, in central Moscow. I do not know how much Tigran had paid Natasha but she was paid.

  As we walked Natasha to the train station the following day, we were stopped by two police officers. They were not interested in our documents but took more of an interest in Natasha. They hurled her into the car and that was it. Our paths never crossed again.

  On the third day, the day of reckoning, the day when all would be revealed, the day of opening the package, there was a third person in the house. I cannot remember his name, but his man bag was slightly bigger than Shant’s. It explained why Shant had been talking on the telephone for most of the previous evening, not in Russian but Armenian. As we sat around the table, he opened his bag and brought out a brown envelope containing ten thousand dollars. Tigran said he didn’t want to be messing about, he just wanted to do one big deal and retire, and that is why he had invited his friend along. Alphonse and I were happy. I didn’t realise it was going to be this easy. Soon I was going to be able to afford an exit visa.

  All we had to do was bide our time and find a place where we could cut out thirty thousand dollars’ worth of bills. My gosh, our box trap had a rat mole—we were in the money.

  Tigran brought the package and placed it on the table. Shant had a small piece of paper in his hands, which were a bit shaky. The other guy sat at the end of the table quietly, ten thousand dollars in front of him. Alphonse asked Tigran for a bowl of warm water from the kitchen then, using his syringe, dropped a few drops of detergent into the bowl. Wearing his gloves, he slowly unwrapped the package. He then placed the one-hundred-dollar iodine-darkened bills into the bowl of water. Slowly the iodine disappeared and the dollars turned back to their original state. The eyes of the guy with the ten thousand dollars almost jumped out of their sockets. He was excited; this was magic they were witnessing. They chatted out loud, talking about how this will be their new investment branch. They asked why they’d not heard of such an advance in technology before? Alphonse spoke in English and I translated saying it was highly classified, you needed to have or know someone at the American embassy. Let me tell you, the way the iodine clears from the dollar paper, even you would be convinced of how genuine this scam was. One by one Alphonse cleaned the dollars and allowed them to dry. Once dried, they were ironed.

  Shant took the dollars and studied them. The guy was very clever; he had written down the serial number of the one-hundred-dollar bill he had given us three days ago, so when he checked, his own dollar had mysteriously disappeared. He knew something was amiss but he could not fathom what. He checked the serial numbers again and again, then, with Tigran and the third guy, they adjourned to the other room. Their dialogue became loud and aggressive but they spoke Armenian. Alphonse was breathing fast, I was shaking. I thought about opening the door and running but Alphonse had read my mind and he said, ‘Eric, don’t do it!’ Even if I had managed to open the door and started running, where would I have gone? When they came out from the room, only Tigran had a smile on his face, Shant and the other guy looked pissed off.

  ‘Come on guys, let’s go to the money exchange,’ said Shant. You can imagine how relieved we were. I wondered why Shant didn’t sit in the front with Tigran, instead the passenger seat was empty while Alphonse and I were squeezed in the back of the car with Shant and his friend. We arrived at Aviamotornaya station where the money exchange was but there was no sign of the car stopping. We drove on, the road becoming narrower. Shant said, ‘Would you like some nganja (cannabis)?’ His eyes were red, the car smelled, Alphonse was shaking. I knew this was the day our lives here on earth would end. Eventually we came to an isolated derelict building. My heart was beating fast. I was playing with fire, I knew my hands would get burned. Shant opened his door and stepped out, throwing the last part of his nganja under the car and held the door open for me. As soon as I came out of the car, I was hit just under my jaw with the butt of a short gun. I saw stars flickering and passed out.

  *

  I hated school as a child because I was dumb, and I mean really dumb. My mother would walk me to the Small Soppo Catholic school but I would deliberately leave my books at home, so the teacher would then send me home to get my books – this became routine. I snapped out of the habit when one day the teacher had had enough; she used a massive ruler to hit me fifty times on my knuckles. When I showed my mother my swollen knuckles that evening and told her how I got them, she went to the back of the house and got a cane, we called Mbeti, and beat me again. This was not unusual, if your teacher or any other adult reported you to your parents, it would be worse—no investigation, just further punishment.

  It was more than an hour’s walk to go back home and then back to school, so instead I would go to where my mother worked. My mother is extremely good at maths and worked as an accountant for the Cameroon Development Corporation in Tole. I say accountant, just to make it sound a bit posh but she was ill paid for the job.

  Instead of going home to get my books, I would visit my mother. Her friends would recognise me from a distance and I would hear them shouting, ‘Sarah, your child with the big stomach is coming again.’ I had a huge stomach as a child, in some quarters people even suggested that I had kwashiorkor, which was a life-threatening and debilitating form of malnutrition caused by lack of protein in the diet. I also had permanent mucous coming down my nose. It never bothered me, but the fact that I timed my visit to my mother when she and her friends were on lunch breaks meant I was the last person they wanted to see.

  One of my mum’s friends, Aunty Monjowa, would say, ‘Eric, I beg you, wipe your nose.’ I would use the back of my hand to clean my nose, however this only made matters worse as it meant I smeared the mucous all over my mouth. This made the women eating their lunch nauseous and angry. They would tease my mother, ‘Please take your child to the hospital, he is not well.’

  I saw myself going back to school with my empty bag, the teacher chastised me and asked me to go home and get my books, instead I abandoned my bag behind the building and walked towards my mother. Only this time she was not there, Aunty Monjowa was not there to call out my mother’s name, the women were not there to tell me to wipe my nose. I was a stranger. Maybe I was dying, my life was flashing past me.

  *

  When I woke up, I was naked and tied to a chair, back to back with Alphonse, who was also naked, our clothes in a pile across the room. There was blood on the floor, my legs felt as if they were on fire. Alphonse then told me what had transpired whilst I was unconscious. Tigran and his friends had searched all our nooks and crannies, he said they knew we had tried scamming them but could not understand what had happened to their money. They could not understand how it had mysteriously vanished. They didn’t realise that we had swapped bills days ago, when we had initiated the scam. The truth is if they had found their hundred dollars, I do not think I would be writing this story.

  Summer was at its peak so even though we were both naked and had spent the night naked, it was not terribly cold. The following day only Tigran turned up, they had taken all the money that Alphonse had. He asked what had happened to the money Shant gave us? I swore to him Shant had made a mistake. He was confus
ed.

  He cut the ropes and watched as we dressed, he then got back into his car and drove away. My whole body was in pain. I do not know what they had done to Alphonse, and we never spoke about that incident again. He looked worse for wear. It took us ages to get to the nearest underground station. Luckily there was no one controlling the train barriers and we jumped on the train all the way to Taganskaya, where we changed to the brown line that goes around and round central Moscow. Most homeless people use the brown line to while away their days. As the train went around and around, I remembered the first time my mother banished me from the village.

  *

  In order to be near her place of work, my mother had decided to move into a neighbourhood called Tole, in a street called Mbo Quarter. Tole’s reputation preceded her; many children from Small Soppo, my own village, were scared to attend school because of the fear of encountering children from Tole. They were wild, ill bred. For the sake of company, my mother took my nephew Collins, my baby sister Queenta, and myself, with her to Tole. Surprisingly Tole was okay but one could smell the air of poverty. Apart from one or two, all the houses were made of what we call carabot (soft wood). The rest of the area is surrounded by a vast tea plantation, which was the only employer around and exploited the workers to its fullest.