Americanah (45 page)

“Mark is a pediatric surgeon,” Georgina said to Obinze.

“One got the sense that people—progressive people, that is, because American conservatives come from an entirely different planet, even
to this Tory—felt that they could very well criticize their country but they didn’t like it at all when you did,” Mark said.

“Where were you?” Emenike asked, as if he knew America’s smallest corners.

“Philadelphia. A specialty hospital called the Children’s Hospital. It was quite a remarkable place and the training was very good. It might have taken me two years in England to see the rare cases that I had in a month there.”

“But you didn’t stay,” Alexa said, almost triumphantly.

“I hadn’t planned on staying.” Mark’s face never quite dissolved into any expression.

“Speaking of which, I’ve just got involved with this fantastic charity that’s trying to stop the UK from hiring so many African health workers,” Alexa said. “There are simply no doctors and nurses left on that continent. It’s an absolute tragedy! African doctors should stay in Africa.”

“Why shouldn’t they want to practice where there is regular electricity and regular pay?” Mark asked, his tone flat. Obinze sensed that he did not like Alexa at all. “I’m from Grimsby and I certainly don’t want to work in a district hospital there.”

“But it isn’t quite the same thing, is it? We’re speaking of some of the world’s poorest people. The doctors have a responsibility as Africans,” Alexa said. “Life isn’t fair, really. If they have the privilege of that medical degree then it comes with a responsibility to help their people.”

“I see. I don’t suppose any of us should have that responsibility for the blighted towns in the north of England?” Mark said.

Alexa’s face reddened. In the sudden tense silence, the air wrinkling between them all, Georgina got up and said, “Everyone ready for my roast lamb?”

They all praised the meat, which Obinze wished had stayed a little longer in the oven; he carefully cut around his slice, eating the sides that had grayed from cooking and leaving on his plate the bits stained with pinkish blood. Hannah led the conversation, as though to smooth the air, her voice calming, bringing up subjects they would all agree on, changing to something else if she sensed a looming disagreement.
Their conversation was symphonic, voices flowing into one another, in agreement: how atrocious to treat those Chinese cockle pickers like that, how absurd, the idea of fees for higher education, how preposterous that fox-hunting supporters had stormed Parliament. They laughed when Obinze said, “I don’t understand why fox hunting is such a big issue in this country. Aren’t there more important things?”

“What could possibly be more important?” Mark asked drily.

“Well, it’s the only way we know how to fight our class warfare,” Alexa said. “The landed gentry and the aristocrats hunt, you see, and we liberal middle classes fume about it. We want to take their silly little toys away.”

“We certainly do,” Phillip said. “It’s monstrous.”

“Did you read about Blunkett saying he doesn’t know how many immigrants there are in the country?” Alexa asked, and Obinze immediately tensed, his chest tightening.

“ ‘Immigrant,’ of course, is code for Muslim,” Mark said.

“If he really wanted to know, he would go to all the construction sites in this country and do a head count,” Phillip said.

“It was quite interesting to see how this plays out in America,” Georgina said. “They’re kicking up a fuss about immigration as well. Although, of course, America has always been kinder to immigrants than Europe.”

“Well, yes, but that is because countries in Europe were based on exclusion and not, as in America, on inclusion,” Mark said.

“But it’s also a different psychology, isn’t it?” Hannah said. “European countries are surrounded by countries that are similar to one another, while America has Mexico, which is really a developing country, and so it creates a different psychology about immigration and borders.”

“But we don’t have immigrants from Denmark. We have immigrants from Eastern Europe, which is our Mexico,” Alexa said.

“Except, of course, for race,” Georgina said. “Eastern Europeans are white. Mexicans are not.”

“How did you see race in America, by the way, Emenike?” Alexa asked. “It’s an iniquitously racist country, isn’t it?”

“He doesn’t have to go to America for that, Alexa,” Georgina said.

“It seemed to me that in America blacks and whites work together
but don’t play together, and here blacks and whites play together but don’t work together,” Emenike said.

The others nodded thoughtfully, as though he had said something profound, but Mark said, “I’m not sure I quite understand that.”

“I think class in this country is in the air that people breathe. Everyone knows their place. Even the people who are angry about class have somehow accepted their place,” Obinze said. “A white boy and a black girl who grow up in the same working-class town in this country can get together and race will be secondary, but in America, even if the white boy and black girl grow up in the same neighborhood, race would be primary.”

Alexa gave him another surprised look.

“A bit simplified but yes, that’s sort of what I meant,” Emenike said, slowly, leaning back on his chair, and Obinze sensed a rebuke. He should have been quiet; this, after all, was Emenike’s stage.

“But you haven’t really had to deal with any racism here, have you, Emenike?” Alexa asked, and her tone implied that she already knew the answer to the question was no. “Of course people are prejudiced, but aren’t we all prejudiced?”

“Well, no,” Georgina said firmly. “You should tell the story of the cabbie, darling.”

“Oh, that story,” Emenike said, as he got up to serve the cheese plate, murmuring something in Hannah’s ear that made her smile and touch his arm. How thrilled he was, to live in Georgina’s world.

“Do tell,” Hannah said.

And so Emenike did. He told the story of the taxi that he had hailed one night, on Upper Street; from afar the cab light was on but as the cab approached him, the light went off, and he assumed the driver was not on duty. After the cab passed him by, he looked back idly and saw that the cab light was back on and that, a little way up the street, it stopped for two white women.

Emenike had told Obinze this story before and he was struck now by how differently Emenike told it. He did not mention the rage he had felt standing on that street and looking at the cab. He was shaking, he had told Obinze, his hands trembling for a long time, a little frightened by his own feelings. But now, sipping the last of his red wine, flowers floating in front of him, he spoke in a tone cleansed of anger,
thick only with a kind of superior amusement, while Georgina interjected to clarify:
Can you believe that?

Alexa, flush with red wine, her eyes red below her scarlet hair, changed the subject. “Blunkett must be sensible and make sure this country remains a refuge. People who have survived frightful wars must absolutely be allowed in!” She turned to Obinze. “Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” he said, and felt alienation run through him like a shiver.

Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.

Nicholas gave Obinze a suit for the wedding. “It’s a good Italian suit,” he said. “It’s small for me so it should fit you.” The trousers were big and bunched up when Obinze tightened his belt, but the jacket, also big, shielded this unsightly pleat of cloth at his waist. Not that he minded. So focused was he on getting through the day, on finally beginning his life, that he would have swaddled his lower parts in a baby’s diaper if that were required. He and Iloba met Cleotilde near Civic Center. She was standing under a tree with her friends, her hair pushed back with a white band, her eyes boldly lined in black; she looked like an older, sexier person. Her ivory dress was tight at her hips. He had paid for the dress. “I haven’t got any proper going-out dress,” she had said in apology when she called to tell him that she had nothing that looked convincingly bridal. She hugged him. She looked nervous, and he tried to deflect his own nervousness by thinking about them together after this, how in less than an hour, he would be free to walk with surer steps on Britain’s streets, and free to kiss her.

“You have the rings?” Iloba asked her.

“Yes,” Cleotilde said.

She and Obinze had bought them the week before, plain matching cheap rings from a side-street shop, and she had looked so delighted, laughingly slipping different rings on and then off her finger, that he wondered if she wished it were a real wedding.

“Fifteen minutes to go,” Iloba said. He had appointed himself the organizer. He took pictures, his digital camera held away from his face, saying, “Move closer! Okay, one more!” His sprightly good spirits annoyed Obinze. On the train up to Newcastle the previous day, while Obinze had spent his time looking out of the window, unable even
to read, Iloba had talked and talked, until his voice became a distant murmur, perhaps because he was trying to keep Obinze from worrying too much. Now, he talked to Cleotilde’s friends with an easy friendliness, about the new Chelsea coach, about Big Brother, as if they were all there for something ordinary and normal.

“Time to go,” Iloba said. They walked towards the civic center. The afternoon was bright with sunshine. Obinze opened the door and stood aside for the others to go ahead, into the sterile hallway, where they paused to get their bearings, to be sure which way to go towards the register office. Two policemen stood behind the door, watching them with stony eyes. Obinze quieted his panic. There was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, he told himself, the civic center probably had policemen present as a matter of routine; but he sensed in the sudden smallness of the hallway, the sudden thickening of doom in the air, that something was wrong, before he noticed another man approaching him, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his cheeks so red he looked as though he was wearing terrible makeup.

“Are you Obinze Maduewesi?” the red-cheeked man asked. In his hands was a sheaf of papers and Obinze could see a photocopy of his passport page.

“Yes,” Obinze said quietly, and that word, yes, was an acknowledgment to the red-cheeked immigration officer, to Iloba and to Cleotilde, and to himself that it was over.

“Your visa is expired and you are not allowed to be present in the UK,” the red-cheeked man said.

A policeman clamped handcuffs around his wrists. He felt himself watching the scene from far away, watching himself walk to the police car outside, and sink into the too-soft seat in the back. There had been so many times in the past when he had feared that this would happen, so many moments that had become one single blur of panic, and now it felt like the dull echo of an aftermath. Cleotilde had flung herself on the ground and begun to cry. She might never have visited her father’s country, but he was convinced at that moment of her Africanness; how else would she be able to fling herself to the ground with that perfect dramatic flourish? He wondered if her tears were for him or for herself or for what might have been between them. She had no need to
worry, though, since she was a European citizen; the policemen barely glanced at her. It was he who felt the heaviness of the handcuffs during the drive to the police station, who silently handed over his watch and his belt and his wallet, and watched the policeman take his phone and switch it off. Nicholas’s large trousers were slipping down his hips.

“Your shoes too. Take off your shoes,” the policeman said.

He took off his shoes. He was led to a cell. It was small, with brown walls, and the metal bars, so thick his hand could not go around one, reminded him of the chimpanzee’s cage at Nsukka’s dismal, forgotten zoo. From the very high ceilings, a single bulb burned. There was an emptying, echoing vastness in that tiny cell.

“Were you aware that your visa had expired?”

“Yes,” Obinze said.

“Were you about to have a sham marriage?”

“No. Cleotilde and I have been dating for a while.”

“I can arrange for a lawyer for you, but it’s obvious you’ll be deported,” the immigration officer said evenly.

When the lawyer came, puffy-faced, darkened arcs under his eyes, Obinze remembered all the films in which the state lawyer is distracted and exhausted. He came with a bag but did not open it, and he sat across from Obinze, holding nothing, no file, no paper, no pen. His demeanor was pleasant and sympathetic.

“The government has a strong case and we can appeal but to be honest it will only delay the case and you will eventually be removed from the UK,” he said, with the air of a man who had said those same words, in that same tone, more times than he wished to, or could, remember.