Indigo (3 page)

The secretary stared at them but then pushed herself away from her desk, tucked at her clothing, and ambled across to the inner-office door. When she left the room both men sat down and Sunday placed a thick hand on Jerry's arm. “Too much palaver,” he said. “But it is importan' to go through each step slowly. Then we will be fine.”

Sunday smiled, but after that the two men were quiet, content to sit down low on the broken couch. Aside from this couch and the secretary's desk, the room was empty, but it was still a little cooler than the street outside, making them both realize that the power had not been down too long.

When the secretary returned she walked heavily over to her desk but managed to say “He will see you” under her breath.

The minister's inner office was thickly carpeted and heavily draped and chaired. There were official-looking photographs on the walls, and the minister's desk alone was nearly the size of his entire outer office.

The minister was staring at a ledger of some kind and made them stand before him for a full minute before waving a hand and telling them to sit down.

“How can I help you?” he finally asked.

“Alhaji, you might remember that last week we spoke by phone,” Jerry Neal began.

“Of course,” said the minister.

“Concerning visas for teachers at my school…”

The minister closed his ledger and sat back. His chair was big enough to be a small country's throne. “If I broke the law in America would I be allowed an audience with the secretary of state?” he asked.

“I'm sure not,” said Jerry Neal.

“Would I be allowed, even, to enter your country if my intention was to work and I arrived with documents stating that I was a tourist?”

“Probably not.”

“Are the tourists in question teaching now?” asked the minister.

“They are not tourists,” Jerry said. “We were only obeying instructions from your consulate in San Francisco.”

“Then if it is the consulate's mistake it is up to the consulate to rectify it. Send the tourists back and let them do things properly this time.”

“In that case we must close the school,” said Jerry.

The minister shrugged. “There are many good Nigerian teachers who would love to teach in such a school. I myself could provide you with a list. Hire Nigerian teachers. Surely you are not unaware of our indigenization program?”

“Of course not,” said Jerry Neal, “but our charter states that our teachers must be U.S.-trained.”

“Why?” the minister asked.

“So that the children of U.S. citizens will not have the nature of their education interrupted when their parents work abroad. It is not intended as a comment on the quality of Nigerian teachers.”

The minister laughed, smiling for the first time. “Of course it is,” he said. “Why not tell the truth?”

“I am telling the truth,” Jerry Neal said mildly.

“Do you have Nigerian students in your school?”

“We do.”

“How many?”

“Very many. Perhaps twenty-five percent.”

“Are they the children of ordinary citizens, ordinary men and women?”

“Of people who can pay the fees,” Jerry said.

“Which are how much?”

“Five thousand per annum. In the end a little more.”

“That is steep,” said the minister of internal affairs.

Now Jerry Neal shrugged. “It is the same everywhere,” he said. “Among international schools.”

“I have children,” said the minister. “Could my children go to your school?”

“It would depend upon their ages. Some of our classes are full, some are not. Also they must take a test, to discover at what level they can read.”

“And if they read poorly you would turn them away?”

“We would do our best to find them tutors who would help them read better,” the principal said.

Jerry was beginning to feel uneasy. He had supposed that the minister might seek admission for his children as payment for allowing the visas to be changed, and he knew his school board would say no. But he could not think of a way of changing the direction of the conversation.

“I would be glad to show you the school sometime,” he said.

For the last minute Sunday had been pushing his foot against Jerry's, trying to tell him that things weren't going well. They had powerful weapons they could use and he was telling Jerry that now was the time to use them. And the minister, finally, asked a question that opened things up a bit more.

“Do the children of my colleagues go to your school? Are the children of other ministers enrolled?”

The principal leaned forward, touching the edge of the desk and lowering his voice. “Not of ministers, perhaps, but of the president. The president's youngest child is there.”

There it was, their best card played. Now the minister knew that he could not decide to close the school. Jerry had been careful to present this information only as a statement of fact, not as a threat. Nevertheless, the pause grew long while the minister studied him. Finally Jerry spoke again.

“We are very sorry to have broken any laws. We would never have done so knowingly.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” said the minister. “Haven't you heard that somewhere before?”

“Yes,” said Jerry. “It is an expression of our own.”

Things had been so tense, to this point, that Jerry and Sunday both were startled when the minister slapped his desk and laughed loudly, nearly losing his balance in his chair.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I first heard it when I was driving badly in Washington D.C. I was a student at Georgetown and thought it rather fine. I have used it often since!”

Jerry took a chance. “Georgetown is a good school. I myself applied there once but was turned down.”

The minister was pleased by this pronouncement and leaned forward. “And I'll tell you what,” he said, “though ignorance of the law was not an excuse, that cop let me off. I told him I was Nigerian and he seemed to think my citizenship, rather than my ignorance, was excuse enough.”

The minister looked at Jerry Neal and then at Sunday. The story was funny but Jerry didn't know whether or not to laugh. He had hoped that the minister would carry it through, telling him that he was going to repay the kindness of the Washington D.C. cop by allowing the teachers to remain. It was Sunday, however, who spoke next.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “we are all brothers under the skin.”

To Jerry the statement seemed trite and completely beside the point but it struck a chord with the minister, and Sunday, once again exhibiting his masterful sense of timing, opened his briefcase and placed the teachers' files in the center of the desk. “Alhaji, this is a serious matter,” he said. “Maybe we could show that it was an honest mistake in some way that would do no harm to the children.”

“Yes,” said the minister. “I suppose it would be the school-children who would suffer most were I to make their teachers leave.”

He seemed truly saddened by that thought, but before anything more could be said the secretary slouched back into the room, mumbling something about an appointment elsewhere. When she departed it was clear that their meeting was over.

“I will take it under advisement,” said the minister. “I understand now that you are men of good faith, a point on which I had serious doubts before.”

The minister stood then and went out the door ahead of them. The outer office was now full of petitioners, all of whom leapt to their feet when he suddenly appeared.

“When may I call again?” Jerry asked, but Sunday put a hand on his shoulder. The minister was collecting papers from the men surrounding him and speaking hurriedly before rushing out the door. Soon the office was as empty as it had been when they'd arrived. The secretary, sitting down low behind her desk again, had pulled one bare foot up and was picking at her toes.

“Come,” said Sunday. “I think it will be fine now.”

But nothing was settled and Jerry said, “We don't know what the man is going to do.”

Sunday put a finger in front of his nose. “I will come back in a day or two,” he said.

The principal wasn't satisfied, but he opened the door and had gone out into the hallway before he realized that Sunday had not come along. Sunday was still inside the room, sitting on the edge of the secretary's desk, quietly laughing with the woman and stroking his chin.

The principal was hungry, but when he looked inside the teachers' room refrigerator, his lunch was gone. His paper sack was there, but his plastic sandwich box and his thermos were missing. It was two o'clock and he had just returned from taking his new ironing board back to his flat so that it would be waiting when his steward returned from his afternoon break. Jerry had made a mistake with Nurudeen. He should have expelled the boy. This time he'd not only lost his food but his sandwich box and thermos as well.

At four p.m. Jerry left his office for the day. He had to drive to the home of the school board president by seven that evening, and he wanted some time to rest. But when he saw the chief custodian he remembered that he hadn't done anything more about the missing copy-machine toner, so while the two of them pretended to engage in small talk, they made plans for the chief custodian to sleep in the copy room once again that night. He had done so previously, without results, but though he pretended not to be, he was nervous about doing so again. The thefts were too mysterious to be easily explained and the chief custodian, like Nurudeen earlier in the day, was beginning to have the spirit world in mind. The thief's malicious plantings had had an effect even on this good man.

Nevertheless, the chief custodian said that he would leave the campus at five-thirty and asked that Jerry drive out shortly after that to pick him up on the main road. That way, should the thief be watching, it would appear that the chief custodian had gone home for the night. Once safely back on campus, sneaking him into the copy room would be easy. They said good night loudly, and Jerry walked back to his flat alone. When he opened his door he found Jules there ironing, but on the old ironing board, not the new one.

“Didn't you see the board I bought today?” he asked.

Jules, who was Togolese, put on a French West African pout and cast his head toward the back of the living room. “There it is, the terrible thing,” he said. “It is too tall and its cover is torn. Also it is warped. How much did you pay for that thing? Why didn't you look at it first?”

Jerry went past Jules and found the new ironing board leaning against the living room wall. He set it up and put his hands on it. It was too tall. And looking across the board was like looking out over the surface of a rumpled bed.

“What a waste,” mumbled Jules, but Jerry was not in the mood to be scolded by his steward, and he cast the man a look that made him stop. Tomorrow he would take the ironing board over to the school carpenter and get the legs shortened and a new top cut, but now he wanted a drink and some time alone in his chair, sitting under his assortment of masks and thorn carvings and other pieces of Nigerian art. He had collected these pieces carefully over the last three years, and he was proud of the quality of what he'd bought. He was most drawn to his masks, but he liked the juju pieces as well. Though there was too much nonsense concerning magic around the school these days, he really did think that the art was fine.

Jerry's dinner would be ready whenever he wanted it—Jules was great that way—so he would sit for an hour and then shower and eat before going out again to the meeting. Ah, but he had forgotten already about the chief custodian. And since it was four-thirty he had only an hour before he had to pick the man up. What a life he led. Before Charlotte's death he could not have imagined a life that encompassed worries such as what to do about a faulty ironing board or how to catch a toner thief. Jerry often wondered what Charlotte would have done had he died first. Would she have run from his death by leaving the country as he had? A frequent daydream of his was to imagine her living on without him, and in the daydream she always did it so very well.

Jerry went into the kitchen to get some ice and pour himself a drink. There was another letter from his sister-in-law on the counter so he opened it before handing Jules the lunch sack and telling him about the loss of the sandwich box and thermos. This new letter contained five name cards, with only a brief note scribbled on the back of one. The name cards were in the shape of the human spinal column and were stiff little plastic things, made to look like bone. The note said, “Hi Jerry, I met a female chiropractor from Nigeria and I told her to look you up. I've forgotten her name. Do you like my new name cards? I can see you now, looking down your nose.” Jerry held the name cards out, arrayed like a poker hand in his palm. Spinal-column name cards, the letters of Marge's name spaced evenly along the vertebrae and made to look like the ligaments and muscles that supported them. His sister-in-law was fifty-two years old, the same age, of course, as Charlotte would have been. Their birthday was January 1, a date that had let them easily calculate their ages throughout their lives. When Charlotte's cancer finally killed her she'd been forty-seven years, one hundred and forty-seven days old—that had been on May 27, 1978. Now, more than five years after her death, Jerry was ten years older, he was fifty-seven, and would not marry again. He had occasionally imagined that he might marry Marge, but that had only been a game. His love for Charlotte had been too complete for him to see her face again, hellishly housing the countenance of Marge.

Jerry took a second scotch with him to the shower and when he came out a plate of West African curry and a bottle of Star beer were set out nicely on the dining-room table. Jules had finished ironing and had put on a white shirt, something he always did for dinner. It was nearly five-thirty and Jerry imagined the chief custodian over at the school, letting people see him preparing to leave. He sighed and said, “I would love to be able to stay in tonight, but I have a meeting.” His comment was not so much intended for Jules, but was a testament to the vocal habits of those who live alone, and Jules did not reply.