Love on the Road 2015 (8 page)

‘Perhaps we should go to the house now. I have a couple of things I have to do.’

He says this as though he has forgotten an appointment. The young man comes over, manoeuvring him through the parade of people headed home. Their vehicle is at the head of the car park and again she watches painfully as his body is transferred. She will have to get used to this. He looks tired. On the way home he does not speak and she feels as though it was a mistake to have come here. He stares over the neighbourhoods. At the house, his chair is smacked apart again and his body is lifted and he is wheeled to the stairs. The young man carries him up into the house.

She steps out of the car into the yard. Children and mistresses have gone someplace else and she smells smoke from a charcoal cooker. The walls of the house are brown with grime and the palm trees are pushed deep into the dirt before the back fence. She walks over and touches one. Looks up to the clutch of coconuts at the top, genitals under a skirt. It’s been a while since she’s had sex. She supposes he can see it on her. She walks over to the next tree and flattens her hands around it, feeling the dry ridges and ruts. She remembers how he made her lie on the rooftop and describe clouds, a thing she’d hadn’t done since she was a kid. It never rang true – she knew his childhood had been stolen – his delight in unmarred things.

She still doesn’t know what she should ask him. Why she is even here. She looks up, imagining he is leaning
bare-chested over the railing, smoking, looking rangy, hungry for her. She hears a sound from the shower block at the back. A toilet is flushed and a squat, messy-looking woman walks out and back into the house, wiping her hands on her shift.

Upstairs, the door to his bedroom is closed and she hears water running. She wants to shower but doesn’t know if there is enough pressure for two of them to run at the same time. She leaves her things in the spare room, goes out onto the veranda and rubs the sand from her shins with a towel. She is still wearing her swimming costume. She can smell food cooking downstairs in the kitchen. He has always had mediocre, cranky cooks who would leave after big fights with everybody, usually involving theft. She doesn’t care for food right now and doubts she will this evening. On the table there is a carafe of water and two glasses, one with droplets inside. She drinks.

There is still no sound from his bedroom. She knew there would be a lot of dead time here, when he would rest or have other things to do. She has brought work with her, but she doesn’t feel much like it. She sits outside drinking water. The neighbourhood is quiet. They were all stylish homes once.

The young man comes out of the bedroom and closes the door. It’s hard to read his face. It is as though he embodies what has happened, even more than the paralysed man in the room, and when he leaves he takes away slabs of the tragedy. She is glad he is remote. She would not have liked some chatty nurse. She hears a voice from the bedroom. It is a clean, clear voice that projects and rises. She realises she checks her face in the mirror.

‘I’m sorry, I had a bit of a spell there. I’m not supposed to drink alcohol.’

She thought as much.

‘I needed it, you know. Your fault.’

She looks about the room, sees a photo of herself. There are photos of other people too, some of whom she remembers. She sees him next to a tall young woman with a broad forehead, the image of him. A pixie child with dreadlocks. She looks back to the photograph of herself. Her hair used to reach her buttocks and he would dress her in it.

‘I’m happy to have you in here again.’

He has showered and wears a different shirt. He wears printed drawstring trousers and looks more like himself. His hair is pulled back and his beard looks combed. The young man has placed him in a wider wheelchair by the window. His feet are bare. He sees her looking at them, watches the journey of her eyes.

‘Come here.’

She shakes her head.

‘You’re not afraid of a little guy in a wheelchair?’

Now she wants to know what happened. Why he was up a ladder. Why
him
when there are idle young men on every street corner here, all of them more able than a sixty-year-old filmmaker.

It’s not the first time he’s read her thoughts.

‘I was stupid. Very stupid. I was checking the phone cable. It was worn through, the wires were exposed. I wasn’t getting an Internet signal. Couldn’t get a technician to get over here. You know how it is. I fell onto the cement ledge you can see down there. Didn’t feel a thing. Just flying. Descent. And a crack inside. A horrible crack. They did their best, you know.’

She worked out that it must have happened in February.
The heaviest time of the year for her. Winter. Her favourite dog put down. And, over here, a spinal cord severed.
This.

‘I wanted to call you. I wanted to hear your voice. I waited because I thought there was a chance. Now I know there is no chance.’

She wonders who walked him through it, who was there when he woke up. A wife? A daughter? A sturdy old friend or half-brother? She doesn’t know what the fuck she is doing here. And yet she knows, she knows.

‘I’d like to swim with you. Shall we go for a swim together tomorrow?’

She nods.

Neither of them are hungry that evening. She finds a tin of tea leaves next to the kettle on a small refrigerator in the corner of the living room. She makes two mugs of tea and wheels him onto the veranda.

In the night she hears his door open and close quietly. She hears murmuring. She can’t get back to sleep. The hot food completes its course through her and she sits on the loo listening to mosquitoes whining. She scratches bites on her legs. She drinks more water, feeling cramps in her stomach. It is dark in the room though there is a violet fluorescent light on outside somewhere below. There are bars on her window. She lies down again. The sea is inaudible, only the palm leaves stroke each other. She wonders if he is listening to the same thing, if the nights have become a dark tunnel. Or if there is a woman from downstairs spreading warmth through his body, pushing its force against the border where his nerves dissolve.

At daybreak he is dressed and showered, wheeled onto the veranda, waiting for her. He looks happy. He motions
for her to come over and she feels bedraggled, creased and puffy. He tugs down her arm and kisses her cheek, which feels loose against the bone. His lips are warm, she knows their deep pressure. She feels a little spring, a fountain. She pulls away, closes her cardigan around her. The damp morning surrounds them. She never rises this early.

She knows what will happen. Somehow, she will lift him onto the bed. She does not know how their clothes will be removed, but they will be removed. He will cup his upper body to her back, a hand across her breasts, hooked under her shoulder. She will haul his knees behind her knees and her feet will enclose his lifeless feet. Later, she will trace the rim around his body, the fault line, the front. She will bring her wet cheek to the neat laceration on his spine.

It begins to rain. They both watch the morning shower, a clean curtain.

‘What is the first thing we’ll do when we arrive?’ Bibiana says to me.

‘We’ll make love,’ I say. ‘Right there on the beach at Lampedusa.’

She glances at the others and lowers her voice. ‘How can you say such a thing?’

‘They don’t understand our language. They speak Amharic, Somali, Tigrigna, Oromo … They don’t know what we’re talking about.’

‘They say we’ll arrive in twenty-four hours, no? My days are not good.’

‘What do you mean, “My days are not good”?’

‘Come on, you know what I’m talking about. We can’t risk it.’

‘Okay, in that case we’ll dance. We’ll hug and kiss and dance.’

‘Yes, we’ll dance,’ says Bibiana.

We both laugh and everyone in the boat stares at us. A baby begins to cry as though protesting that anyone could have the nerve to laugh in circumstances so dire. I turn to gaze at receding Tripoli: at the towering buildings some of
which have been ruined by the savage blows of bombs; at the minarets from which the muezzin’s call above the gunfire still reaches us at sea like a radio at low volume; and at the beaches with white polished pebbles not yet stained by the bloody war.

The boat rocks from side to side. The symphony of waves is pleasant to my ears. In a flash, I drop my hand from around Bibiana’s waist to grip the boat’s edge. It is frighteningly audacious that they have managed to pack all of us in here. It is a small boat, like a plastic dinghy. I don’t know how many we are – around seventy – in a boat designed to carry less than half that number. But I hear it can be worse on trips like these, so I suppose I should not be too concerned about the headcount. Thank heavens the boat is in good shape, its engine purring powerfully as we move with ease towards our destination. What a blessing that Bibiana and I are here, heading for this most precious of places. It’s a miracle, really, given how impossible it all seemed before we set off from home.

I turn again to look back to where we have come from. Africa is receding into our past. Tripoli is getting smaller. We can no longer hear the sound of the city’s bombs and gunfire and its call for prayer has now been muted by distance. Goodbye, Libya. I will never forget you.

Entering Tripoli was like walking into a blazing furnace.

‘Courage,’ Abdul-Jabaar kept telling us, ‘you have to have courage. I’ll leave you with Moustafa al-Arab, a close friend. You’ll be safe. The boat people will come for you when the weather is right.’

With those words he left us, after having taken us on the most perilous journey from our home city of Lilongwe on the southern part of our continent, after driving us in trucks disguised as fuel tankers, after crossing crocodile-infested rivers with us on shaky canoes, after making us pay double the amount we had initially agreed on so he could bribe immigration officials at numerous borders, after getting nearly roasted by the heat of the Sahara Desert, after surviving on only biscuits and water, sometimes for weeks, after fending off bandits who attacked us in the middle of the desert. After all that, Abdul-Jabaar left us in the hands of another stranger, in a Tripoli that had been set on fire by people who wanted their country to give them either freedom or death.

If Moustafa al-Arab had not hidden us in a garage at his Souq al Juma’ah house for three weeks, we probably would have perished. The fight to topple the dictator had turned bloody, and we came at a time when the fire was just beginning to burn too hot. For three weeks, we endured the sounds of guns and earth-shattering bombs. When we peered into the street through the crack in the wall, cars roamed in all directions, menacing weapons mounted behind them, their drivers looking for humanity to mow down. Sometimes we saw people, probably immigrants from our part of the world, being shot in cold blood. Moustafa told us that all those we saw killed, including women and children, were mercenaries hired by the dictator to fight the rebels.

Bombs seemed to fall from the heavens as though an amateur player of a video war game was pressing the wrong buttons. Twice, the bombs fell unpleasantly close, and
shrapnel gave our garage a good shaking, eliciting cries of ‘
Allahu Akbar
’ from those hiding with us. For three weeks, we saw no sunshine except through the crack in the wall. It was always heads or tails whether we would be alive the next minute. At the sound of every bomb, my stomach turned, and I nearly let loose in my trousers on many occasions. Bombs are fun in the war movies, but not when they are raining on the buildings across the street. I don’t remember hearing anybody laugh during those three weeks. We did not taste a moment of peace.

Where did these others hide? At Moustafa al-Arab’s there was only Bibiana and me and seven other guys. He fed us bread and tea. Morning, noon and night, bread and tea, for three weeks. That was what he could afford, he said. The only thing that changed was the type of bread: hard-crusted bread, soft bread, normal-looking bread, or bread that was long and thin, like a policeman’s baton. Sometimes I wondered whether, in a moment of despair, he might turn us in. It would be an easy thing for him because there was no difference in appearance between the mercenaries and us; but he seemed to be a good man.

Now, as the boat’s engine purrs with a reassuring steadiness, I am happy we’re still alive after the worst three weeks of our lives. I never want to return to that place. Goodbye, Africa. God willing, we’ll see each other again only through Google Earth.

The sea is calm and accommodating, like a patient hostess. The boat people must be geniuses for choosing a time so apt for our travel. Everyone in the boat is silent, perhaps thinking
of the paradise that lies at the end of our journey. The only sound is of the engine, as the boat ploughs the water apart, heading north. We are far from everything now. All around us there is nothing but water. The fear in me becomes too severe when I let my eyes stretch to the horizon, so I sometimes close them to think only of better things. I have never been in the middle of so much water before. Abdul-Jabaar was right: you have to have a lot of courage to successfully leave your country, your people and your continent.

‘The journey is not an easy one,’ he’d said as he smoked his cigarette in a small, dingy restaurant in Lilongwe’s Devil Street about a year ago.

I did not know that by courage he meant being ready to be in a situation such as this, floating in the middle of a vast, deep ocean to which our boat must seem like a lost beach ball that has strayed too far from the shore.

Bibiana grips my hand. ‘I’m afraid,’ she says.

‘Don’t be,’ I say, hoping that my voice has not betrayed my own fear. ‘There are only nineteen hours to go. Nineteen. After that we’ll be in Lampedusa.’

Bibiana is shivering. ‘But what if …?’

‘Don’t let such thoughts disturb you, my love. We’ll be fine. Trust me.’

Bibiana, amazing as ever, has always been in my life, or I have always been in hers. As far back as my memory stretches, to when I was about five years old – even then, she was there, playing with me in the rain, our mothers running after us, shouting, ‘Come in, you two, you’ll catch fever!’ after which they would grab us and take us for a bath as we giggled. I can say we grew up as lovers, so that when we finally got down to kissing and making love, our bodies
responded in such an energetic way that it was clear this was the moment we had always waited for.

All the twenty-seven years of our existence were filled with memories so vivid that time was powerless to erase them. Our parents were the best of friends in the neighbourhood of Lilongwe where we lived. As I was born first, I would wait for a week to celebrate our birthdays together, through the years of our kindergarten, through primary school where we shared a desk, until after secondary school, when our paths split. I went to the School of Humanities, while she opted for the National College of Nursing. By that time we had already made love, but at her insistence we agreed to slow down to prevent a ruinous pregnancy that could have stalled her progress towards a college degree. And then, a year into our studies, we both lost our parents. The car they were travelling in from their holiday upcountry collided with a bus.

When I graduated from college, as I looked for a job, Bibiana asked me to move in with her. Though her salary was too low to support two adults, she insisted on accommodating me. She was incredibly generous and went so far as sparing the little she had to take us out for dinner once in a while, or to visit Lake Malawi, where we would lie on velvet-soft beaches of white sand, or swim in water that was clear and blue like the sky above it.

It was at that time that I began to feel my country spitting me out. Our government, the biggest employer of graduates with my kind of qualification, had suddenly decided that humanities were no longer important. They had stopped recruiting secondary-school teachers with qualifications in this field, and would be making these subjects
optional, effectively phasing them out. The humanities had been judged irrelevant and downgraded. We were going to be a science-only nation. This, our minister of education said, would put our country firmly on the path to development: ‘With proper roots in science, we can send one of our own sons into space within twenty years.’

After three years of job hunting, I had had enough. I needed to leave the country. Three of my former classmates from college had gone to Ireland, where it was clear they were prospering. We saw their photos on Facebook, wearing expensive suits, smiling as though they had just been crowned masters of the universe. We saw them disembarking from limousines or dancing at parties. We saw them drinking in bars or celebrating birthdays with huge cakes and lots of wine. I too wanted to be there, to be happy.

I had to move. Initially, I wanted to go to the United Kingdom. But when I went to the High Commission to apply for a visa, they wanted a letter from an employer I did not have. They wanted payslips for my last three months of employment, and half a year of bank statements. They demanded that I submit a copy of a letter from the person or institution inviting me to the UK, complete with the address where I would be residing. The cash I would be bringing along too – how much would it be? As though they had not asked for too much already, they insisted on collecting my fingerprints, the way our authorities do with criminals. How, I wondered, did people ever manage to go abroad?

It was at that time I learnt of the skills of Abdul-Jabaar, he who could take you anywhere in the world without a visa. Through a friend of a friend, I arranged to meet him in Devil Street. A man with bushy eyebrows and a perpetual
frown, he got straight to the point. All I needed was $2,000 for him to take me to the Mediterranean, and then $1,000 for his colleagues to take me by boat to the other side. To avoid any misunderstanding, he stressed that the dollars had to be American.

Although I had no idea where to get the money, I decided we should do it. I told Bibiana: ‘Finally, we have a realistic chance of moving to Europe. There’s a man who can take us to Lampedusa. After that, we’re on our own. All I need now is to raise the money for the trip.’

‘Drop that idea,’ she said. ‘Stay. Something good will come your way soon. Have patience, please.’

‘Patience? Three years of job-hunting is not enough patience for you?’

‘It is, but just a little more.’

‘For how long? Until my hair is grey and my back bent by age? No, I can’t wait that long. We need to leave now.’

It took us weeks of arguing. At one point, we did not talk to each other for days. Still, I stood my ground. Then she tried to change her approach, telling me harrowing tales of how some had been deported from Europe with nothing, or how they had ended up begging or sleeping in the streets. I countered with stories of those who returned with lots of money, or those who sought asylum and got the right papers and jobs.

‘As far as I know,’ she said, ‘asylum is only granted to those running away from war.’

‘Is poverty peace then?’ I asked.

When it was clear she had given up her opposition, I moved to part two of the grand plan, which was logistics. How would I raise the money for the journey?

The answer, finally, came to me in a way I could never have imagined. An opportunity suddenly presented itself for me to sell my kidney to a Very Important Person whose name I was asked never to disclose to anyone. It was something I stumbled upon by chance. Somebody who had attempted to donate a kidney was ruing his missed luck in my presence at a local pub. Apparently, he had been turned away because he belonged to the wrong blood group. At once, I saw my opportunity and decided to grab it without hesitation.

After I bought the fellow three beers, he loosened up and gave further crucial details. The man looking for the donation was a top politician who did not want his chances of re-election ruined by doubts about his health. He was prepared to pay well. Scores of potential donors, I was told, had tried without success. The doctors carried out so many tests – for hepatitis, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, syphilis and a lot more. They checked potential donors’ HIV statuses. Though I was apprehensive about all these requirements, when I went through the tests I came out clean. The doctor who counselled me in preparation for the donation remarked, ‘You are in remarkably good health.’

Finally, when all the testing was over, I informed Bibiana.

‘You are frightening me,’ she said. ‘Please don’t do this.’

‘I must,’ I said.

‘Can’t you see you’ll die?’

‘It’s entirely harmless, Bibiana.’

‘There’s a reason our bodies must have two kidneys.’

‘Scientists have found it harmless to share kidneys, Bibiana.’

We were about to have our dinner that evening. She left the table and did not return. After the meal, I followed her to the bedroom. I lay next to her and tried to put my arm around her. She pushed it off and faced away from me.

‘Listen, my love,’ I said, ‘I’ve not killed anyone. I’ve not robbed anyone. It’s my kidney I’m selling. Can’t you understand?’