The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [55]
Her husband had tried to hide his nervousness from her. Then, after someone called him anonymously—he got anonymous calls all the time, he was that kind of journalist, the kind who cultivated friendships along the way—to say that the head of state was personally furious, he no longer hid his fear; he let her see his shaking hands. Soldiers were on their way to arrest him, the caller said. The word was, it would be his last arrest, he would never come back. He climbed into the boot of the car minutes after the call, so that if the soldiers asked, the gateman could honestly claim not to know when her husband had left. She took Ugonna down to a neighbor’s flat and then quickly sprinkled water in the boot, even though her husband told her to hurry, because she felt somehow that a wet boot would be cooler, that he would breathe better. She drove him to his coeditor’s house. The next day, he called her from Benin
Republic; the coeditor had contacts who had sneaked him over the border. His visa to America, the one he got when he went for a training course in Atlanta, was still valid, and he would apply for asylum when he arrived in New York. She told him not to worry, she and Ugonna would be fine, she would apply for a visa at the end of the school term and they would join him in America. That night, Ugonna was restless and she let him stay up and play with his toy car while she read a book. When she saw the three men burst in through the kitchen door, she hated herself for not insisting that Ugonna go to bed. If only—“Ah, this sun is not gentle at all. These American Embassy people should at least build a shade for us. They can use some of the money they collect for visa fee,” the man behind her said.
Somebody behind him said the Americans were collecting the money for their own use. Another person said it was intentional to keep applicants waiting in the sun. Yet another laughed. She motioned to the blind begging couple and fumbled in her bag for a twenty-naira note. When she put it in the bowl, they chanted, “God bless you, you will have money, you will have good husband, you will have good job,” in Pidgin English and then in Igbo and Yoruba. She watched them walk away. They had not told her, “You will have many good children.” She had heard them tell that to the woman in front of her.
The embassy gates swung open and a man in a brown uniform shouted, “First fifty on the line, come in and fill out the forms. All the rest, come back another day. The embassy can attend to only fifty today.”
“We are lucky, abi?” the man behind her said.
She watched the visa interviewer behind the glass screen, the way her limp auburn hair grazed the folded neck, the way green eyes peered at her papers above silver frames as though the glasses were unnecessary.
“Can you go through your story again, ma’am? You haven’t given me any details,” the visa interviewer said with an encouraging smile. This, she knew, was her opportunity to talk about Ugonna.
She looked at the next window for a moment, at a man in a dark suit who was leaning close to the screen, reverently, as though praying to the visa interviewer behind. And she realized that she would die gladly at the hands of the man in the black hooded shirt or the one with the shiny bald head before she said a word about Ugonna to this interviewer, or to anybody at the American embassy. Before she hawked Ugonna for a visa to safety.
Her son had been killed, that was all she would say. Killed. Nothing about how his laughter started somehow above his head, high and tinkly. How he called sweets and biscuits “breadie-breadie.” How he grasped her neck tight when she held him. How her husband said that he would be an artist because he didn’t try to build with his LEGO blocks but instead he arranged them, side by side, alternating colors. They did not deserve to know.
“Ma’am? You say it was the government?” the visa interviewer asked.
“Government” was such a big label, it was freeing, it gave people room to maneuver