Uhuru Street (16 page)

I entered through the black door with the brass knocker that opened directly onto the street and went straight up to the first floor and knocked on Number One as instructed. There was a shuffle of feet behind the door, which was then opened by a girl in a faded pink home-style nightie with a laced neckline. Behind her, sitting on a bed already made, was my Amina, writing letters. On Sunday you write home I said to myself.

It was still breakfast time and we went down three flights of creaky stairs into the basement. There a narrow pathway through junk and clutter led into a medium-sized brightly lit room laid with blue linoleum, long tables and some benches. There was a steady trickle of traffic in and out of this room and up and down
the stairs. Here you could get onion omelettes, cornflakes, and black tea and milk (‘English style’) from waiters with strangely familiar faces who added advice and humour to the morning’s fare.

Later we went out sightseeing. She made her pilgrimage to Trafalgar Square and with her Instamatic I took a picture of her feeding the pigeons to send back home. Then Buckingham Palace and finally Parliament with Big Ben, which for ages had chimed out the nine o’ clock hour to us over the radio. ‘Eighteen hours, Greenwich Mean Time,’ she echoed with amusement in a mock BBC accent.

That night we had dinner at my flat. Rice and curry from a takeaway Indian store in Earls Court. After dinner we sat side by side on the sofa to watch television. From the floor below came the sounds of female laughter and hilarity. I knew them well, a group of Asian girls from back home who in their inimitable way mothered the boys they knew. I often stopped at their place and had dinner there. Later I was to introduce Amina to them, but meanwhile I hoped they wouldn’t come up to fetch me this night. They didn’t and we sat quietly holding hands. Then we went to bed. I slept on my box spring and she on my mattress on the floor. She would not have it otherwise. ‘I have to learn to be tough,’ she said. For a while we talked in the dark, holding hands. We caressed, touched, our hands trembling, groping for each other in the space between us. Finally the tension reached a breaking point and I looked down in the darkness at the figure below me. ‘Can I come down?’ I asked, my voice straining. ‘Yes,’ she said.

How frail our defences, how easily cast aside when the time comes. Nothing could have been more natural. Yet nothing could have shocked more, caused greater pain, in a different setting. How easy it was to judge and condemn from there. Yet no sooner were you here than a layer of righteousness peeled down from your being.

Last night we took a drive down Yonge Street, my daughter Zahra and I. We drove among the Saturday night traffic, among the Camarros and Thunderbirds swooping down south for the evening, or just a zoom past downtown, as we’d done before. This time we parked the car and started walking with the crowd, caught by the summerlike festive mood. People waited outside restaurants and cinemas; vendors of popcorn and nuts called out; cars hooted; stores were open and display windows lighted. At Bloor Street we exchanged salaams with a Sikh vendor, then stopped and I bought the little lady some flowers from him. We walked along Bloor Street for some time, arm in arm, talking about our joint future. Fortunately loneliness is not a word in her vocabulary yet. We reached the end of a queue outside an ice cream shop and joined it. We were happy, the two of us. We kept walking on Bloor Street. Somewhere nearby was her mother’s apartment; she knew where, but I didn’t ask. We reached a repertory cinema where another crowd was queueing and I picked up a schedule. Then, at a whim, I turned on her and asked, ‘How would you like to see
Wuthering Heights
?’

Tugging my arm playfully she pulled me along. ‘How about seeing
Star Wars
? Finally?’

Furtively, he threw another quick glance at the reflection in the window across the aisle. Then a confirming, brooding stare at himself in the window beside him. Through the glass he peered outside at the passing scenery in the dark: ghostly trees and buildings, not a sign of life. When finally he sat back from the darkness, it took moments to adjust to the brightness inside.

There was nothing of interest in the compartment, just the rows of seats and people. Stops were few and far between on this train, passengers who entered and sat down were as quiet as those who got up and left. At one point a big man in a blue suit sat down heavily beside him, barely suppressing a grunt, glanced at him with a look of surprise and turned away to the aisle. Later the man brought out a magazine called
Kultur
and read it, still turned away. In reaction Karim confronted himself in the window yet again, then stared outside. A station flew past that the train ignored. He did not catch its name. It was this unpredictability that was the cause of his anxiety. He had been told to get off and change at Pegnitz.

He was, he had realised unhappily, dressed all wrong. He had bought the right kind of things, of course, and was wearing some of them. All according to fashions picked up from films, tourists, and foreign-returneds. His two sisters, who prided themselves in matters of fashion, had accompanied him shopping; his mother and father had approved his choice. Yet now in the bright light of
this train compartment he stood out like a sore thumb, he thought, using an expression he had read from American novels.

No one that he had seen in the train wore sneakers, yet his stood out, sparkling white. His denim jeans were starchy like cardboard, and uncomfortable too. The sweater that in the store in Dar had appeared distinguished and conservative, now betrayed its faded grey, with the three large dirty red and white diamonds in front making pathetic attempts at design and colour. No wonder the first thing anyone looked at was his bright shoes then his face that needed a wash and shave. He looked, felt, so shrunken and small in this strange, alien environment. Alternately he sat forward; leaned back, pressing his arms onto the armrests; arched his back, stretched out his shoulders. He just wasn’t right.

He had been instructed carefully. As soon as he got off the plane at Frankfurt not to speak to anybody but head straight for the immigration counters. If anyone came to ask him anything, to offer any help, he was to say only: ‘I am a refugee.’ To the immigration officers, the same thing: like a prayer. If anyone asked, ‘Have you come to look for work?’ not to say yes or no, either way to fall into a trap, but to say only, ‘I am a refugee.’

He had done just that.

He had got off the plane tired and dazed. The airport was radiant, busy, impressively modern, he expected nothing else. He had emerged into a large open area and paused uncertain: about him human traffic in all directions. He decided to follow a group of fellow-passengers, the wrong ones, apparently, for they soon walked under a lit sign that said
TRANSIT
. Avoid at all costs he had been told. He stopped, started back in the opposite direction. At that instant, it seemed, two men who had been standing together some distance away started heading towards him. They walked purposefully but without hurrying, their looks fixed on him. Like cowboys walk in movies, he thought fleetingly, as he looked
around as if to escape; then he realised he couldn’t avoid them and waited. They were the same height, not very tall, one in a dark and the other in a light blue suit, their hair … what will they do? He watched them come to a stop.

‘Yes, can we help you?’ They were standing not very close to him – at a little more than arm’s length – but he felt crowded and without meaning to he took a step back but ran into his own bag and stumbled. One of the men leaned forward and took from him the passport he held and flipped the pages, in the process now coming to stand quite close to him.

‘I am a refugee,’ Karim said.

They tried several questions including the one about work. He stuck to his guns: ‘I am a refugee.’

The two men spoke briefly to each other, then started walking away with his passport, and Karim followed. He put his bag down and stopped when he saw a bank of clearly marked immigration counters to his right some distance away. But his interceptors walked on oblivious. He watched their backs, their unforced pace. Then one of them looked behind, and the other turned, and they stopped and looked at him for a moment. They walked back to him.

‘I am a refugee,’ Karim said, somewhat defensively. There was a pause during which they eyed him reflectively. Then the man who held his passport smacked it with one hand against the other before, to Karim’s surprise, handing it back to him. The two went sauntering towards the place where they had picked him up.

An immigration official made out some forms for him, stamped his passport, and gave him an address to report to. He was through.

Then the ordeal began. The few pounds and dollars he had come with he managed to have converted. He had just one telephone number with him, which he had learnt by heart, but he could not make the payphone work. Several times he had to yield
it to other, impatient travellers. Minutes passed, he panicked: surely it was not this that was going to undo him? His rejected money tinkled back; the phone buzzed angrily at him; an efficient-sounding operator said something unintelligible to him. Desperately, yet half-heartedly he searched for a face he could trust. But who?

A man walked up to him. He was tall with a greying brown beard, wearing glasses, and grinning with big yellow teeth. His clothes were casual, a tweed jacket over woollen trousers, well used.

‘You want to make a telephone call, yes?’

The boy was dumbfounded, alarmed.

‘Yes, yes?’ The man’s insistence did not sound unfriendly though the grin, and the glinting glasses, and the tilt of his head as he spoke gave him a somewhat sinister look.

‘I am a refugee.’

‘I know that. But you want to make a telephone call to a friend – perhaps a refugee like you – yes, yes?’

‘I am a refugee.’

‘You are a refugee from where?’

He told him.

‘Look, I have been to your country. Yes? I am not an immigration officer as you think. Nor am I a policeman.’

He would not give the man the number he had been trying to call. He had heard too many stories of betrayal, arrived with too many warnings. They sat down and the man bought him coffee.

‘I am waiting for someone,’ the man told him. ‘A writer, not a refugee. Yes?’

Karim nodded. He wondered what he should do. There was one telephone with instructions in English that he had barely tried before being ousted; surely he could make it work after a few more tries? Perhaps he could give someone – this man – a wrong number and learn how to use the phone! But no, if he made up
another number he would forget the one he had learnt. That would finish him. He could go to town first … but suppose he got lost?

Suddenly the man looked up past him, intently, towards the arrival gate then got up breaking into a grin. Walking towards them was a rotund man with a beard, wearing a corduroy jacket. He looked like an Indian and he was carrying a small hold-all.

‘I’ve got all your information,’ said the German, ‘except your flight number.’

‘Sorry, I forgot. Did you wait long?’

‘No, no.’

Karim was introduced to the Indian as the refugee. After a while, feeling rather foolish, he gave the two men the phone number. They talked, had more coffee and the German helped him make the telephone call. It was to a man called Anand in the city of Bayreuth. He was told to go to Bayreuth and given an address.

The German gave him a phone card and told him how to use it. He bought him his train ticket and told him he would have to change at Nurmburg. The train to Nurmburg was 20 minutes late and he might have to go to Pegnitz first and change for Bayreuth. But he should check with the conductor.

It was late afternoon and dusky when the train lurched forward taking him yet deeper into the alien country. The German had found his seat for him, the Indian had waited outside. The few hours of getting to the train station, the looking up of schedules and buying the ticket had been a lively frantic experience. Now left all by himself he began looking around him in the train. It was not very dark outside yet, and superimposed on the fleeting drab scenery outside the window he could just make out the constant but faint reflection of himself on it.