by Zadie Smith
‘Hey, Choo?’
There was silence. Levi knew someone was there because the intercom had come on.
‘Choo? You there? It’s Levi.’
‘Levi?’ Choo sounded half awake, his sleepy accent Gallic and smooth, like Pepe le Pew. ‘What are you doing here, man?’
Levi coughed. The rain was now coming down hard. It made a harsh metallic sound as it hit the sidewalk. Levi put his mouth close to the intercom. ‘Bro, I was passing, ’cos I live not so far and . . . and this shit’s coming down outside, yo, so . . . well, you gave me your address that time, so, as I was passing . . .’
‘You want to come into my place?’
‘Yeah, man . . . I was just . . . Look, Choo, it’s chilly out here, man. You gonna let me in or what?’
Silence again.
‘Stay there, please.’
Levi released the intercom and tried to get both his feet on the thin doorstep, which afforded him about three inches of cover from the overhang of the roof. When Choo opened the door, Levi practically fell on top of him. Together they stepped into a concrete stairwell that smelled bad. Choo met Levi’s fist with his own. Levi noticed that his friend’s eyes were red. Choo jerked his head upwards to signify that Levi should follow him. They began to climb the stairs.
‘Why did you come here?’ asked Choo. His voice was dull and quiet, and he did not turn to look at Levi as he spoke.
‘You know . . . I just thought I’d pay you a call,’ said Levi awkwardly. It was the truth.
‘I don’t have a phone.’
‘No, I mean,’ said Levi, as they reached a landing and a damaged door, patched up with a panel of unpainted wood, ‘pay a call. It’s like in America when you go visit someone to see how they are, you know.’
Choo opened his front door. ‘You wanted to see how I am?’
This too was true, but Levi now acknowledged that it sounded a little weird. How to explain it? He wasn’t sure himself. Simply: Choo had been on his conscience. Because . . . because Choo wasn’t like the other guys in the team. He didn’t travel with the pack, didn’t screw around or go dancing, and he seemed, by contrast, lonely, isolated. Basically, Levi figured that Choo was just plain smarter than all the people around him, and Levi, who lived with people similarly cursed, felt that his own experience in this area (as a carer of smart folk) made him especially qualified to help Choo out. And then the book on Haiti had conspired in Levi’s mind with the little he had surmised about Choo’s personal life. The tatty clothes he wore, the way he never bought a sub or a can of Coke like the others. His raggedy hair. His unfriendliness. That scar along his arm.
‘Yeah . . . basically . . . I was thinking, well, we down, ain’t we? I mean, I know you don’t talk too much when we be working, but . . . you know, I consider you my friend. I do. And brothers look out for each other. In America.’
For what felt like an awful long time, Levi thought Choo was about to kick his ass. Then he began to chuckle and put his hand heavily on Levi’s shoulder. ‘You have nothing to do, I think. You need to be more busy.’
They came into a reasonably sized room, but now Levi noted that the kitchen units, the bed and the table were all compressed into this one space. It was cold and it stank of marijuana.
Levi slipped off his rucksack. ‘I brought you some stuff, man.’
‘Stuff?’ Choo picked up a fat joint from his ashtray and relit it. He offered Levi the only chair and took for himself the corner of the bed.
‘Like, food.’
‘NO,’ said Choo indignantly, cutting the air with his hand. ‘I’m not starving. Forget about charity. I worked this week – I don’t need help.’
‘No, no, it ain’t like that – I just . . . it’s like, when you go see someone, you bring something. In America – that’s how we do. Like a muffin. My mom always takes muffins or pie.’
Choo stood up slowly, reached over and took the offered packets from Levi’s hands. He seemed unsure as to what exactly they were, but he thanked Levi and, peering at them curiously, walked across the room to put them on the kitchen counter.
‘I didn’t have no muffins and I just thought . . . Chinese soup. Good for when it’s cold,’ said Levi and mimed coldness. ‘So. How you been? I didn’t see you Tuesday evening.’
Choo shrugged. ‘I have a few jobs. I did a different job on Tuesday.’
Outside on the street came the loud voice of someone crazy, cursing a lot. Levi flinched, but Choo didn’t seem to notice.
‘Scene,’ said Levi. ‘You got a lot of projects, like me – that’s cool. Keeping it all rolling. Hustling.’
Levi sat on his hands to keep them warm. He was beginning to regret coming here. It was a room with no distractions from its own silence. Usually, when he was hanging at a friend’s place, the TV would always be on for background noise. The lack of a television, of all the privations in evidence in this room, struck Levi as the most poignant and unbearable.
‘Would you like some water to drink?’ asked Choo, ‘Or rum? I have good rum.’
Levi smiled hesitantly. It was ten in the morning. ‘Water’s good.’
While the tap ran, Choo opened and closed cabinets, seeking a clean glass. Levi looked around himself. By his chair on a little table was a long sheet of yellow paper, one of those Haitian ‘bulletins’ they gave out for free everywhere. The main feature was a photograph of a little black man on a gold chair with a mixed-race woman on another gold chair beside him. Yes, I am Jean-Bertrand Aristide, read Levi from the caption, and of course I care about the illiterate, poor Haitian scum! That is why I have married my wonderful wife (did I mention she is pale-skinned???), who is bourgeois de souche, not like me, who came from the gutter (and can’t you see how I remember it!). I did not buy these reasonably priced chairs with drug money, no way! I may be an uncommonly totalitarian dictator but I can still have my multimillion-dollar estate while protecting the grinding poor of Haiti!
Choo put a glass of water down over this photo and sat back on the bed. The damp ring spread out across the paper. He smoked his joint and said nothing. Levi got the feeling that Choo wasn’t used to entertaining.
‘You got any music?’ asked Levi. Choo did not.
‘OK if I . . . ?’ said Levi, and took from his knapsack a little white speaker set which he plugged into the wall by his feet, and then connected to his iPod. The song he had just been listening to in the street filled the room. Choo came forward on his hands and knees to admire the thing.
‘Jesus! It’s so loud and so tiny!’
Levi got down on the floor too and showed him how to pick songs or albums. Choo offered his guest some of his joint.
‘No, man – I don’t smoke. I’m asthmatic and shit.’
They sat together on the floor and listened to Fear of a Black Planet all the way through. Choo, though very stoned, knew it well and repeated all the words, and tried to describe to Levi the effect first hearing a bootleg of this album had had on him. ‘Then we knew,’ he said eagerly, bending his bony fingers back on the floor. ‘That’s when we knew, we understood! We were not the only ghetto. I was only thirteen but suddenly I understood: America has ghettos! And Haiti is the ghetto of America!’
‘Yeah . . . that’s deep, bro,’ said Levi, nodding largely. He felt stoned just breathing in this room.
‘Oh, man, YES!’ cried Choo when the next song began. He did this whenever the songs changed. He didn’t nod his head like Levi; he did this strange shaking of his torso – like he was hanging on one of those elastic straps that vibrate and make you thin. Every time he did it Levi cracked up all over the place.
‘I wish I could play you some of our music, Haitian music,’ said Choo mournfully, as the album ended and Levi used his thumb to flick through other possibilities. ‘You would like it. It would move you. It’s political music, like reggae – you understand? I could tell you things about my country. They would make you weep. The music makes you weep.’
‘Scene,’ said Levi. He wanted
– but did not feel sufficiently confident – to speak of the book he’d been reading. Now Levi brought his little music machine close to his face, looking for a particular track whose name he had slightly mistaken, making it impossible to find in the alphabetical lists.
‘And I know you don’t live near here, Levi,’ added Choo. ‘Are you listening to me? I’m not an idiot.’ He was sitting on his heels and now laid his back right along the floor. His T-shirt rode up his rigid chest. There was not an extra piece of flesh on his body. He blew a large smoke ring into the air and then another one that fit into that. Levi kept flicking through his thousand songs.
‘You think we’re all peasants,’ said Choo, but without any sign of rancour, as if objectively interested in the proposition. ‘But we don’t all live in dumps like this. Felix lives in Wellington – no, you didn’t know that. Big house. His brother runs the taxis there. He saw you there.’
Levi knelt up, still with his back to Choo. He never could lie straight to someone’s face. ‘Well, that’s ’cos my uncle, see, he lives there . . . and, I like, I do small jobs for him, stuff around his yard and – ’
‘I was there Tuesday,’ said Choo, ignoring him. ‘In the college.’ He treated this word like ink upon his tongue. ‘Fucking serving like a monkey . . . teacher becomes the servant. It’s painful! I can tell you, because I know.’ He thumped his breast. ‘It hurts in here! It’s fucking painful!’ He sat up straight suddenly. ‘I teach, I am a teacher, you know, in Haiti. That’s what I am. I teach in a high school. French literature and language.’
Levi whistled. ‘Bro, I hate French, man. We have to do that shit. I hate that.’
‘And now,’ continued Choo, ‘my cousin says – come and do this, serve them one night, thirty dollars in the hand, swallow your pride! Wear a monkey suit and look a monkey and serve them their shrimps and their wine, the big white professors. We didn’t even get thirty dollars – we had to pay to dryclean our own uniforms! Which leaves twenty-two dollars!’
Choo passed Levi the joint. Once more Levi declined it.
‘How much do you think their professors get paid? How much?’
Levi said he didn’t know and it was true, he didn’t. All he knew was how hard it was to get even twenty bucks out of his own father.
‘And then they pay us in cents to serve them. The same old slavery. Nothing changes. Fuck this, man,’ said Choo, but it sounded harmless and comic in his accent. ‘Enough American music. Put some Marley on! I want to hear some Marley!’
Levi obliged with the only Marley he had – a ‘Best Of’ collection copied off his mother’s CD.
‘And I saw him,’ said Choo, kneeling and staring past Levi, his bloodshot eyes acute and fixed upon some demon not in this room. ‘Like a lord at the table. Sir Montague Kipps . . .’ Choo spat on his own floor. Levi, for whom cleanliness had long superseded godliness, was repelled. He had to move position to where the phlegm was not in his sightline.
‘I know that guy,’ said Levi as he shuffled across the carpet. Choo laughed. ‘No, I do . . . I mean I don’t know him know him, but he’s this guy that . . . well, my pops hates his ass, he’s like, you even mention his name and he’s like –’
Choo pointed his long forefinger right in Levi’s face. ‘If you know him, know this: that man is a liar and a thief. We know all about him, in our community, we follow his progress – writing his lies, claiming his glories. You rob the peasants of their art and it makes you a rich man! A rich man! Those artists died poor and hungry. They sold what they had for a few dollars out of desperation – they didn’t know! Poor and hungry! I served him his wine –’ Here Choo lifted his hand and pretended to pour out a glass, with a crude servile look on his face. ‘Don’t ever sell your soul, my brother. It isn’t worth twenty-two dollars. I was weeping inside. Don’t ever sell it for a few dollars. Everybody tries to buy the black man. Everybody,’ he said, pounding the carpet with a fist, ‘tries to buy the black man. But he can’t be bought. His day is coming.’
‘I hear you,’ confirmed Levi and, not wanting to be an ungrateful guest, took the joint that was, once again, offered to him.
This same morning, in Wellington, Kiki also paid an unannounced call.
‘It’s Clotilde, isn’t it?’
The girl stood shivering, holding the door ajar. She gazed at Kiki vacantly. She was so slender Kiki could see her hip bones through her jeans.
‘I’m Kiki – Kiki Belsey? We met before.’
Now Clotilde opened the door a little wider and, upon recognizing Kiki, became distressed. She gripped the door handle, twisting the plank of her upper body. She had no English words to convey her news. ‘Oh . . . madame, oh, mon Dieu, Meeses Kipps – Vous ne le savez pas? Mme Kipps n’est plus ici . . . Vous comprenez?’
‘Sorry, I –’
‘Meeses Kipps – elle a été tre `s malade, et tout d’un coup elle est morte! Dead!’
‘Oh, no, no, I know . . .’ said Kiki, fanning her hands up and down, putting out the fire of Clotilde’s anxiety. ‘Oh, God, I should have called ahead – yes, Clotilde, yes, I comprehend . . . I was at the funeral . . . no, it’s OK . . . honey, I just wondered whether Mister Kipps was here, Professor Kipps. Is he in?’
‘Clotilde!’ came Kipps’s voice from somewhere deeper in the house. ‘Close the door – fermé – must we all freeze? C’est froid, c’est tre `s froid. Oh, for goodness sake –’
Kiki saw his fingers curl round the edge of the door; the door swung wide; he stood before her. He looked astonished and not quite as dapper as usual, although his three-piece suit was in place. Kiki sought the anomaly and found it in his eyebrows, which were wildly overgrown.
‘Mrs Belsey?’
‘Yes!I–I. . .’
His huge head, with its glossy pate and brutal, protruding eyes, proved too much for Kiki. She lost her words. Instead she held up the wrist of her left hand, around which one of the thick paperbags of Wellington’s favourite bakery hung.
‘For me?’ asked Monty.
‘Well, you were so . . . so kind to us in London and I . . . well, really I just wanted to see how you were and bring you –’
‘Cake?’
‘Pie. I just think sometimes when people suffer a –’
Monty, having processed his astonishment, now took control. ‘Wait – come in – it’s Baltic outside – there is no point talking out here – come in – Clotilde, out of the way, take the lady’s coat –’
Kiki stepped into the Kippses’ hallway.
‘Oh, thank you – yes, because I think when people suffer a loss, well, the temptation is for folk to stay away – and I know when my own mother died, everybody stayed away and I felt most resentful of that, and bottom line, I felt, you know, abandoned, and so I just wanted to come by and see how you and the kids were doing, bring some pie and . . . I mean, I know we’ve had our differences, as families, but when something like this happens I just really feel . . .’
Kiki saw that she was talking too much. Monty had snatched the briefest of glimpses at his pocket-watch.
‘Oh! But if this is a bad time –’
‘No, not at all, no – I am on my way into college, but . . .’ He looked over his shoulder, and then put a hand to her back, ushering Kiki forward. ‘But I am just in the middle of something – if you could possibly – could I leave you here, for two minutes only, while I . . . Clotilde will make you some tea and . . . yes, just make yourself comfortable here,’ he said, as they stepped on to the cowhide rug of the library. ‘Clotilde! ’
Kiki sat down on the piano stool as she had before and, with a sad smile to herself, checked the shelf nearest to her. All the N’s were in perfect order.
‘I’ll be back in one minute,’ murmured Monty, turning to go, but just then there was a loud noise in the house and the sound of someone charging up the hallway. The someone stopped at the library’s open door. A young black girl. She had been crying. Her face was full of rage, but now, with a start, she spotted Kiki. Surprise
supplanted anger on her features.
‘Chantelle, this is –’ said Monty.
‘Can I get out? I’m leaving,’ she said and walked on.
‘If you wish to do that,’ said Monty calmly, and followed her a few steps. ‘We’ll continue our discussion at lunchtime. One o’clock in my office.’
Kiki heard the front door slam. Monty stayed where he was for a moment and then turned back to his guest. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kiki, looking at the rug beneath her feet. ‘I didn’t realize you had company.’
‘A student . . . well, actually that is the question,’ said Monty, walking across the room and taking the white armchair by the window. Kiki realized she had never really seen him like this, sitting down, in a normal, domestic setting.
‘Yes, I think I met her before – she knows my daughter.’
Monty sighed. ‘Unreal expectations,’ he said, looking at the ceiling and then at Kiki. ‘Why do we give these young people unreal expectations? What good can come from it?’
‘Sorry, I don’t . . . ?’ said Kiki.
‘Here is a young African-American lady,’ explained Monty, bringing his signet-ringed right hand down solidly on the arm of the Victorian chair, ‘who has no college education and no college experience, who did not graduate from her high school, who yet believes that somehow the academic world of Wellington owes her a place within its hallowed walls – and why? As restitution for her own – or her family’s – misfortunes. Actually, the problem is larger than that. These children are being encouraged to claim reparation for history itself. They are being used as political pawns – they are being fed lies. It depresses me terribly.’
It was strange being spoken to like this, as if in an audience of one. Kiki wasn’t sure how to reply.
‘I don’t think I . . . what was it she wanted from you, exactly?’
‘In the simplest terms: she wants to continue taking a Wellington class for which she does not pay and for which she is entirely unqualified. She wants this because she is black and poor. What a demoralizing philosophy! What message do we give to our children when we tell them that they are not fit for the same meritocracy as their white counterparts?’
