Within twenty minutes, the lounge was filled with many young girls whom Kula recognized as prostitutes. Older white men took some of the girls with them, but more kept coming. At one point, an old English fellow started chatting up Miata and Isatu. He invited them to his room. Kula wanted to jump from behind the desk and deal with the man, but she calmed herself and walked around the barrier to where her daughter and friend sat.
“Sir, you should be ashamed of yourself. These are young girls and this one is my daughter. I am sure you have a daughter their age where you are from. How would you feel if someone as old as you solicited her for sex?” she said, fiercely but quietly, so that her boss wouldn’t hear her supposedly tormenting the customer. The man hurriedly left, heading back to where the rooms were. Behind him trailed some girls offering themselves for his pleasure. He put his arms around them and walked on. Kula made the girls move where she could see them directly from the reception counter.
Kula’s shift went on for another long hour, and she hated everything she saw with the young women and girls and the older white men. She eyed Miata and Isatu hard each time she caught them looking at these interactions. As soon as her shift was over, she quickly went in the back to change. When she returned, there were some girls physically attacking Miata and Isatu, shouting at them to find their own location and that this was their territory. Kula grabbed one girl by the hair and the other by her arm and took them outside. She slapped them harder than they expected.
“These are my children and you think any other woman sitting in the lounge of a hotel is like you.” She moved in for a second set of slapping. The girls took their high heels off and ran away, cursing at her as they went down the hill.
“This country is really not what it used to be. Not a word about this to your father.” She pointed her finger at Miata.
While Kula was looking inside her handbag to make sure that her work ID hadn’t fallen out as she was dragging those girls outside, a brand-new BMW sports vehicle pulled up next to them. The driver ran to the back door and opened it. A young man, no more than twenty-five years old, was sitting in the middle of the backseat like a king. He stepped out, a mobile phone at his ear, speaking and laughing to someone, a white towel around his neck and carrying a tall bottle of water. He saw that Kula, Miata, and Isatu were looking at him. He handed the bottle of water to the driver, reached in his pocket, pulled out some notes, and handed them to Isatu and Miata. He walked into the hotel holding his jeans, which kept falling off his buttocks. The girls giggled and jumped until Kula turned to them.
“Do you need a ride to town? I just returned to pick up some papers from the office,” Pascal called out from the nearby parking lot. Kula nodded and introduced her daughter and friend. The girls sat in the back of Pascal’s Toyota and Kula in the front seat.
“I see in your face that you have questions about the young fellow who just gave them money.” Pascal smiled.
“Has everything gone wrong in this country?” Kula asked.
“Well, that is a big question. In short, a lot of things have been rotting away for a while, but let me explain to you what you just saw.” His face got serious as he tried to start his car, whose engine took a while to respond.
“Here we are. The engine of a hardworking man always refuses to start at first!” He put the car in motion. The girls looked at their brand-new notes and whispered to each other, ignoring the adults. Pascal explained to Kula that she had just met a JC who had perfected “false life.”
“I used to be impressed by these young men and wanted to be like them, wanted to go where they lived and actually stopped looking for any possibility of succeeding here in my own country. Until one of my cousins who lives abroad came home and told me the truth. He knew some of these guys. Mind you, not every one of our people are like these, but there are many with these false lives who send the wrong messages to our young people.” He honked for the gate to be lifted. He went on after driving through the iron post:
“There are lots of people, mostly young men, who live in the United States or Europe. They had immigrated to various countries hoping to make good of their lives. However, when they got there, they saw that the realities weren’t as golden as they had envisioned. So instead of coming back home, because of shame and worry about being called failures by their peers whom they had bragged to before leaving, they stayed wherever they were, struggling.
“But they came home to visit, after saving up for a year doing odd jobs, just to show that they were doing really well wherever they were. Some of them even shipped vehicles like the one you saw at the hotel for the two- or three-week visit. They would end up selling those vehicles to pay their way back. Most of them would have no more than three to five thousand dollars, a lot of money to blow off here. So you would see them all over town, at the beaches and hotels, and they managed to impress girls, boys, men, and women, who then started dreaming that they, too, would do well only if they went abroad, not knowing the reality behind it all.
“Now, there are those among this population who are serious and go to school, get an education, and work hard for their money. When they come home they do so quietly, without any of this false life. But they are few in number.” The car slowed to allow the herd of motorcycles to go by.
Kula had been listening intently. “So they paint a deceiving picture of what their lives really are,” she said.
“Exactly, my sister, but it is an enticing picture. And they do it year after year. They even ruin young girls to whom they promise things when visiting.”
“So it is like a ritual of broken dreams that gets performed over and over.” Kula’s response deeply affected Pascal, and he could not speak for minutes, repeating her sentence in his mind again and again.
“I had never found the right words for it. It is exactly what you said. I am amazed.” He drove quietly into the city cloaked with such darkness that its beauty had disappeared from the eyes. The moon and the stars had gone elsewhere tonight.
* * *
Bockarie and Kula had done all they could to take care of their family, but things were getting harder. The prices of goods kept going up, and two weeks into work they were running out of money to feed their children. They wanted Manawah and Miata to continue their summer classes, but they couldn’t afford it anymore. They barely saw each other with energy in their bones for something other than sleep. Kula had also started working on weekends. They hadn’t even had time to write home and, as the elders had warned, sleep started visiting them less and less because they were afflicted with worries of what tomorrow would bring. They did manage to keep their children in line, but they knew if their life didn’t improve, they would lose them, especially Miata, to the enticements of the city.
Things became especially difficult during the last two weeks of the month before Bockarie and Kula expected to be paid. The family could afford only a few meals each week. A new kind of shame, pain, and discomfort found a home on their faces—the faces of parents who watched their children go to bed hungry night after night or dissatisfied with the little food they had eaten. Sleep also didn’t like visiting children or human beings with empty bellies. Many nights, Kula and Bockarie would sit on the veranda whispering to each other about whether they had made the wrong decision to come to the city. In the countryside you could at least count on someone sharing food with you, or you could grow something in the earth in anticipation of when you had no money. They hadn’t seen Mr. Saquee for a while because he was hiding from them, as he knew they were struggling and didn’t want them to feel that he needed the rent that they were supposed to start paying after a month. Laughter, too, was limited, something that had never before happened in their family.
Finally the day came for Bockarie to be paid and he allowed himself a smile at the prospect of beginning to weed out the thorns of suffering that had blanketed his countenance. He arrived at the operation center early and went to work. At midday, he heard a loud pounding at the entrance to the office. It was unusual; people were usually somewhat discreet when they came to collect their papers. When Mr. Kaifala opened the door, he was thrown to the ground by a number of police officers and handcuffed. The police asked everyone to stand against the wall and put their hands up. They searched the area and took bags of cash with them, along with Mr. Kaifala. Even after the police had gone, Bockarie remained with his hands up against the wall, frozen with the pain that ran through his heart. He knew he wasn’t going to get paid that day and didn’t know when. The police hadn’t come to raid the operation but to arrest Mr. Kaifala, who was suspected of being involved in smuggling cocaine into the country. Bockarie learned from his coworkers that a plane filled with cocaine had landed at the airport and was captured by the authorities. The investigation was unfolding, and many big men in politics and business had been arrested, while others had fled the country. The enigmatic fellow who had first met Bockarie on behalf of Mr. Kaifala told everyone that they must go home and they would be called when operations resumed.
Bockarie pulled the man aside. “What about my pay? I need that money.”
“Didn’t you see that they took all the money that was here? If we do resume, we will owe you a month’s pay.”
Bockarie raised his voice. “What if you don’t resume operations?”
“Then you have had some experience here that you can put on your résumé!” The man laughed and walked off. Some of Bockarie’s colleagues were gathered around a radio listening to a program about the cocaine plane. The argument took hold of the listeners and they, too, started debating. The issue was whether people should care about whether their country was used to bring drugs to Europe and the West. People disagreed on the matter.
“Why should we care about them, their children and families? They didn’t when we had a war and all the arms and ammunition was brought from their borders to us,” one of the debaters on the radio asked. Bockarie didn’t pay much attention to it. He had his own problems, which no one else cared about.
He was supposed to meet Kula at her hotel so they could celebrate by sharing a large bottle of beer. How was he going to explain this to her? He stepped outside and was greeted with a gust of hot wind that he despised. He loved hot weather, but everything had become sour. His children would not eat today again. He walked to meet his wife.
She was waiting for him at the entrance to the hotel, and she was crying. She had been fired because Pascal and the Chinese manager had fallen out and hence anyone he had employed was let go as well without any pay. They held each other, Bockarie remaining stronger for both of them. She was not crying out of weakness but for her children. Their words to explain to each other what had happened were broken, and when they got home, their children heard only a broken story as hunger cut through them and their capacity to listen. All their faces were ravaged with the gathering shadows of hopelessness. Kula’s face was stained with tears that contained the burden of yesterday and they rolled down her face, which had become older and rough with the worries of a broken tomorrow. Night was coming and tomorrow would arrive in one form or another. If anyone had told them that they would look back at this day while having conversations that mended the repetitive brokenness in so many lives, they wouldn’t have believed it.
They had all been sitting quietly for nearly two hours. No one moved much except for Oumu, who was restless because she wanted to ask her father to tell a story but didn’t know if it was appropriate. She thought about moments when she had heard stories from the elders. Something brought the voice of Mama Kadie to Oumu’s mind. “Always press your bare feet to the ground and listen to what the earth says and what it has to give you for the day. She always has something, but you have to listen to receive it,” Mama Kadie had said to Oumu during one of those times when the little girl had sat with her, peppering her with questions, which Mama Kadie had enjoyed because she knew the little girl was ready to receive the stories of the past, the ones that strengthen your backbone when the world whips you and weakens your spirit.
Oumu remembered these words now as her family sat together hungry and silent, the parents avoiding the eyes of their children. She looked at her family. Each person’s head was bowed in defeat, or perhaps that was all they could do. She stood up from the little chair she had been sitting in near the wall by the door. She removed her flip-flops, bent down, picked them up, and placed them on her head. She walked outside and slowly pressed her feet to the ground, walking around the yard a few times before something propelled her feet toward the main road. It was where she had last seen Colonel. He had waved to her and placed his hands on his lips as he had done on the first day she’d arrived in the city. As he had instructed, she hadn’t told the rest of the family that he was nearby.
Perhaps he might have some encouraging words for her, she thought, although she didn’t really know what good that might do. As she walked, she hummed a tune that was sung at the end of a story she’d heard. It was a story about how, if you went to sleep without the story of the night having been told, you would wake up somewhere strange and it would be long before you came back to yourself. She hummed it quietly to herself, keeping it within, rather than letting it into the outside world where it would be drowned out by the noises of those struggling to end another difficult day. She stopped at the edge of the boisterous street where she had arrived and raised her head to look for Colonel.
He had been watching her the entire time, his frame in the darkness.
“Oumu, wait over there,” he called from across the street. “I will come to you.” He looked to see if there were any cars, and then quickly crossed to her, holding a basket of food. He handed it to her without saying anything more, but his eyes said she must take the food home to her family. She smiled, her lips so dry from hunger that they held on to each other, so that her smile was not as wide as the dance of her heart. They stood side by side for a bit, and Oumu gathered some strength and lifted the basket with her small hands to see if she could carry it. She set it back on the earth briefly.