“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“
E se,
” he says, though it hurts him to do. The music of the language makes him think of Nigeria. His sister. He stands. “We should get back inside.”
“Really?”
“Mosquitoes.”
“But our
family
’s inside,” she says, laughing.
“I know it.” He kisses her head.
Fola and Benson come out of the house now, Amina behind them with Tupperware containers. “You’re really too kind,” he is saying.
“Please. Take it. It’s just some
egusi
and
joloff
for later.”
“I have a small staff—”
“But your cook is Ashanti. He can’t make
egusi
, at least not like mine.” They are smiling, glancing downward, when Fola, feeling butterflies (lower left, bafflement), squints at the garden. There by the tree she can make out the beach chair, a figure beside it, tall. “K, is that you?”
v
Taiwo comes in and finds Olu there reading, the other bed empty. “Do you mind if we switch?”
Olu looks up from his book, sees she’s crying. “Are you . . . ?” he begins, but it’s clear that she’s not. He stands, slightly awkward, unsure what to do with his body, embrace her? He takes a step forward. Taiwo steps backward, a kneejerk reaction that doesn’t offend him.
“The rooms. Can we switch?”
Unnerved by the crying, he leaves without question. She closes the door and he goes down the hall.
vi
This bedroom is larger, a queen bed, small window, the smell of Ling’s lotion, faint sound from the garden. He thinks to go join them, hears Fola, “Where’s Olu?” his brother, “Nice to meet you,” but doesn’t go out. It doesn’t make sense to distrust this man Benson, to duck him. He’ll be back again, tomorrow it sounds like: was talk of a drive in his car to the village, preparations, picking coffins, greeting family, logistics—which are similar, thinks Olu, to the logistics of a hospital, these logistics of a funeral, clinical, procedural, managerial,
what to do with the body
the general question, a series of actions sucked dry of emotion—but strange to him, still, to be bothering with the answers, to be carrying out the actions when the body is dead. He doesn’t fear Benson will tell them, not really, but why he can’t tell them himself he doesn’t know.
He shouldn’t have waited. He should have just told them, or her, told his mother at least at the time, senior year, when he’d gotten that ticket to Ghana, the same airline ticket that came every spring. To the College. Wrong address: they all had a box at the New Haven post office for personal use, but the Temple Street address of Timothy Dwight College was all that his father could find from Accra. These, the last days before mass use of e-mail. Every year on his birthday, the twenty-sixth of May, came an envelope for Fola (which he’d send back unopened), a letter for him, and a ticket to Ghana. Thin hard-copy ticket in fading red ink with the three carbon copies of tickets of old, dated 26 May every year for four years until 26 May 1997, when he went.
He’s never really asked himself why, or why then, why he skipped graduation, didn’t want to attend. He’d always been frightened that Kweku would surprise them, showing up in New Haven unannounced and uninvited on a day that he knew that they’d all be together, but it was obvious that his father wasn’t thinking of this. Or wasn’t thinking. Not a stranger to American education, he would have known that graduations happened every four years, and that sometime in springtime in 1997 there would be two commencements (twins from high school, his from college); nevertheless sent the letters and ticket as always, same desperate entreaty that Olu come for his birthday, that he stay for a week, that he hear Kweku out, with no mention at all of the conflict of dates.
It was just a coincidence that the two graduations happened to fall on one day and his birthday at that, but he sat with the tickets—Milton commencement, Yale commencement, Ghana Airways—and wept for the first time in years. That his father had forgotten that his children were graduating, three of the four, somehow drove the point home: that he wasn’t a part of their lives any longer, their schedules, their rhythms, their world; he’d dropped out. It wasn’t that Olu hadn’t ever considered this (he had, once a day, since the Volvo drove off), but despair was dulled first by the sheer numbing shock, which in time became denial, which in time became hope.
Only now does it dawn on him, here at the window where Fola’s deep laughter outside through the screen is a rumble of thunder before rushing rain, that perhaps he went
seeking
some final betrayal? It seemed obvious enough at the time why he left, with the lie about a poorly timed volunteer trip, “Doctors Without Borders,” he said, producing a pamphlet for Ling, saying that Fola should be with the twins, he didn’t mind: not to face the thing squarely, his father’s indifference. His greatest achievement, and Kweku forgot. He wept in his dorm room, alone, thirty minutes, then typed out a letter to say he would come, wiped his face, slapped his cheek, clenched his teeth in the mirror, silent vow
no more crying, man
, left the next week. Metro-North to the city, crowded subway to the airport, little shuttle to the terminal space reserved for Ghana Airways (now defunct), a funky alcove on some back lot at the airport where the circus act of check-in was just getting under way, ticketed passengers bumped at random off the flight protesting loudly, louder check-in agents shouting “There is no reason to shout!,” entire families pleading mercy for their overweight baggage with tearing of sackcloth and gnashing of teeth, bags unpacked and repacked on the floor around Olu (gifts, foodstuffs, cans, clothing, toys strewn at his feet), up the stairs to the aircraft, then ten hours later down the stairs to Accra.
To forget the occasion.
But there was something else also, apart from the horror at imagining himself on a stage in the sun with no family there cheering, neither parents nor siblings. For proper cauterization, still more was required. To scorch away hope—as he must have intended, he thinks, must have wanted—he
needed
what happened: a thing still more searing than being forgotten, the burn one knows only at being betrayed.
• • •
His father looked younger, or smaller, than he remembered. He’d always been short, as per Benson, “not tall,” maybe five foot ten, same height as Fola, and sturdy, with strong arms and shoulders, a runner’s lean legs—but looked
small
in the crowd that was gathered there waiting, a density of primary color and sound, men and women, the men rather short, Olu noticed, all strong-armed and smooth-skinned and, shockingly, brown.
For all of his life when he’d looked for his father, like this, scanning quickly to spot Kweku’s face in the bleachers at meets or the seats at recitals, he’d scanned for the contrast, first and foremost for brown. A bluish color brown appropriately likened to chocolate and coffee, the complexion that he had himself—and that no one else had, no other father in Boston. He could always pick out Kweku in an instant by the color. Here at the airport his eyes, as conditioned, scanned quickly for contrast and blinked at the shock: they were
all
the same color, more or less, all the fathers, his own blended in, indiscrete, of a piece. When his eyes at last settled at the edge of the gathering on a man in pressed khakis, a crisply white shirt, squarish glasses, brown shoes, with his hands in his pockets, so much smaller than remembered, his feet set apart, Olu saw with some awe that his father stood out like the proverbial thumb from the men in the crowd. Though their skin and their height and their builds were the same, more or less, his own father was different.
He paused at the door between baggage claim and exit hall (the old airport exit, before renovation) and stared through the glass at the throng of brown men, shifting his bag on his shoulders but not stepping out. Not quite recognizing his father, or overwhelmed by recognition, as if seeing the man clearly for the first time in his life, suddenly seeing him singular, without the benefit of contrast, without the backdrop (on white) and
still
different
(on brown). This is what stopped him and held him there staring, the way Kweku looked, like a man on his own, small and strong and apart, the one not like the others; all the familiar peculiarities more peculiar somehow: how his trousers were creased down the front, tightly belted, his cuffs rolled back once, thinning hair neatly cut, those same wire-frame glasses, scientist-immigrant glasses, the same ones as wore his professors at Yale (as if all nonwhite postgrads in America in the seventies had arrived from their homelands and received the same pair). Kweku. Not a father, a surgeon, a Ghanaian, a hero, a monster, just one Kweku Sai, just a man in a crowd with an odd sort of bearing, a stranger in Accra as in Boston. Alone. He couldn’t see Olu concealed by the doorframe so stood like a child told to wait without fuss, with his hands in his pocket, his eyes on the exit, his shoulders relaxed as if all things were well, the single visible sign of his mounting distress the rote up-and-down bounce of his foot on the ground.
Someone clipped Olu on the calf with a luggage cart. “Excuse me,” said the person, Luther Vandross it seemed. Olu turned around and saw Benson (a stranger). “Didn’t realize you were stopping there . . .”
“Sorry. You’re right.” Olu stepped aside to let the stranger wheel his luggage through the doorway, but he didn’t. He was smiling, pausing, too.
“Were you on the flight from New York?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Yes, I thought so. I saw you. God, this may sound strange, but I thought—just, you look like a woman I knew once. The wife of a friend.” Olu shook his head no. The stranger looked embarrassed. “Well. Welcome to Ghana.” He left with his cart, disappeared in the crowd.
Feeling somehow discovered—as the coward at the door, if not the son of Fola Savage—Olu looked at his dad.
What is a man who cannot face his father?
he thought. As a shame or a threat or a lark, as a small thing, too small in his lone peculiarity, or a large thing, too large per the shadows he cast: the root angst didn’t matter, the thing was the facing, and here he was hiding, afraid to step out. “Go,” he mumbled softly, rearranging his backpack (the one he always traveled with, the one Taiwo mocked, further proof of the “white boy” who lived inside Olu, guzzling water from Nalgenes, wearing Tevas in snow). He stepped into view, gripped the straps at his chest as if preparing to skydive. Called, “Dad.”
• • •
They drove into town from the airport without speaking, Kweku clutching the wheel, Olu clutching his backpack, the three years of silence a solid between them unsoftened by presence, proximity, flesh. Olu gazed intently out the passenger window, trying to work out the color of what he was seeing: the roads were lined thickly with wild shrubs and palm trees, but somehow the vista read brown and not green. It reminded him of Delhi (without the auto-rickshaws), the small honking taxis, good cheer, dusty haze, well-planned roads somehow wanting for order, retail signboards with hand-painted faces—but something was new.
The color
, he thought, it was back to the color, the newness of majority, seeming familiar
to oneself, chancing to catch his reflection in the window of a passing car and thinking for a moment he was looking at the driver.
When they stopped at the junction between Liberia Road and Independence Avenue, Kweku cleared his throat. “T-this is our N-national Theatre,” he began haltingly. He gestured through his window at the structure. Modern, white. “We have a National Symphony Orchestra and the National Theatre Players. They built it five years ago. A gift from the Chinese.”
“Interesting,” Olu said politely. “Five years ago.” Back when his father was part of their world.
Kweku rubbed his brow, sensing his error, falling silent. The stoplight turned green and he tried a new tack. “It’s changing, this city, not quickly, but changing. I think you might like it.”
“Seems nice,” Olu said.
“You wouldn’t remember your first trip to Ghana.”
“I don’t.”
“No, of course. But the place has transformed. The change is remarkable.”
Olu nodded, saying nothing, unsure if Kweku’s subject was his country or himself.
• • •
They turned into a side street off Independence Avenue and wound their way slowly through a maze of small streets to a clump of large houses set back from the road with chipped white stucco walls overgrown with dry blossoms. Stray dogs milled here and there nosing indifferently the small heaps of trash. Fruit skins, black plastic bags. A woman near the end of the road in a
lappa
and incongruous red Pop Warner Football T-shirt was turning meat on a grill like the black one they’d had at the first house in Boston, a half of a globe. Behind her the road stopped in overgrown weeds, a huge plot of dry grass with a lone mango tree.
Kweku stopped the car by the woman, engine idling. “I know you must be tired.” He leaned forward, looking out. “I just wanted you to see this before we go back to the house—to my house—to the place where I live.”
Olu peered out at the woman. “Who is she?”
“The land. I’d like to buy it. To build us a house.” He took off his glasses and wiped them off carefully as Olu sat frowning at the sound of this
us
. His father continued shyly, “It’s just for perspective. We’ll go now. I just thought we’d make that quick stop. The place that I’m living in now is quite humble. I’ve never believed, as you’ve noticed, in rent. I’d rather rent a modest place—some might say an ugly place—until I can purchase on the scale that I want. My father never rented, see, designed his own property. Quite striking—” He caught himself rambling and stopped.
But Olu turned, interest piqued, surprised at the mention of this father, whom Kweku had never discussed. Both of his parents were famously tight-lipped on the subject of who their own parents had been. “Died a long time ago,” was the general impression, to which Fola added only, “My mother died giving birth.” They didn’t have photos, such as Olu found lining the stairs of the homes of his classmates in school, faded, framed and important, generations of
family
, at which he’d stand staring until someone inquired, “You like our family pictures, ey?” Usually the father, who’d thump him on the shoulder blade, offer a tour (the fathers of friends rather loved to be near him, loved to thump him on the shoulder blade, eyes bright with awe, as if nothing in the world were more wondrous than Olu, a prodigiously intelligent athlete in dark chocolate skin). He’d tour their homes aching with longing, for
lineage
, for a sense of having descended from faces in frames. That his family was thin in the backbench was troubling; it seemed to suggest they were faking it, false. A legitimate family would have photos on the staircase. At the very least grandparents whose first names he knew. “What did he do?” Olu asked, suddenly hopeful.