Nine
Every day watched the time displayed on the microwave, the numbers changing minute by minute, thinking she would have been vacuuming a room now, straightening a bedsheet, chatting with Lin while on break.
Lin called often to check on her.
The guest, it turned out, the naked man who came bulldozing at her, had over the years asked hotel staff to come to his room for champagne.
Shaquana said he asked her a few times.
The maid from Haiti said he asked not long ago.
“So nobody went up there to drink his champagne?”
Lin said.
“Only the ones that said no are talking about it.
Maybe he doesn’t like little Chinese ladies, because he never asked me.”
Lin was trying to be funny, but could not muster the energy to smile.
“Instead of asking you to have champagne, he attacks you and forces you.
Terrible man.
He must pay you big money, Kadi, and you can retire.”
shifted, and Lin, sensing her discomfort, said, “In America, justice is money.
You don’t see how they celebrate big money judgments? This man attacked you, so you deserve American justice, money.”
said nothing.
“It’ll be okay, Kadi,”
Lin said.
“So many people support you.
Do you know how many letters have been arriving for you, even some by courier from other countries.”
hadn’t known.
She asked if Lin would open and read them to her.
The first one Lin read was from France, sent by DHL, and the unusual envelope crackled over the phone as Lin opened it.
You will die.
You have destroyed a great man.
He is innocent.
You will die.
Lin stopped, held up the card so could see it, as if she could not believe what she was reading.
Somebody somewhere in France went looking for the hotel address, and sat down and wrote in a card, You will die, a pink-and-blue card, a field of flowers painted on its front.
Lin said she would not read any others. “Maybe later. You rest, Kadi, you rest.”
The next day, Lin sent her a bottle of Chinese sleeping aids, whorls of dried bark slices that looked unappealing, which Lin’s friend dropped off outside the front door of Chia’s house.
—
The man was asking her to tell him, again, and again, what happened in the room.
He kept shifting in his chair, his body fluid with the language of irritated impatience.
She sensed that he wanted her story to change, but she did not understand why.
His icy blue eyes rarely blinked, trained on her, focused on her, a hostile stare rich in contempt.
Tom Bone, even his name sounded cold, this pale-haired, pale-faced White man with a flat expression that vowed to remain flat.
He was the prosecutor’s investigator.
Chia said the prosecutor was on her side, fighting for her, but she knew as soon as she arrived that she was not among friends.
He wasted no time on courtesy, or her comfort; he started asking questions right away, before she was fully settled.
The room was overheated, the tepid water in a paper cup tasted of bleach.
There was a woman already seated at the table. She looked African, her rough ghana-weaving held up in a ponytail. “I am Mariama,”
she said.
“I am Fula like you and I will be your translator.
They have asked me to tell you that you must tell the full truth and answer all the questions and they are recording everything.”
found the woman difficult to understand, as if each word was smudged before being spoken.
This was Fula but it was not Guinean Fula, Pular; it was a Senegalese Fula, spoken in an accent with strains of Wolof.
There were words the dialects did not share, meanings had to deduce.
“Did you have any knowledge, any knowledge at all, of the guest before you knocked on that door?”
Bone asked.
understood but still, to be sure, she waited for the translator to echo the question.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
Bone asked.
“No.”
“No? Are you sure?”
She nodded then shook her head, confused, thinking back on the question, in search of lost meanings, because why did he keep asking if she was sure, when she had told him a few times already that she did not know.
“What happened when you opened the door?”
Bone asked.
“Think about it carefully and tell me exactly what happened.”
But she had already told him, three times.
She began again.
It was easier, in Pular, to describe the guest’s surprising strength, how astounded she was to see him rushing naked toward her, a ghoulish specter forever imprinted in her mind.
The translator asked her to repeat herself a few times, perhaps to intuit the meanings of some words.
After the translator’s stream of English, Bone said, “You went back and cleaned the room after the assault? That can’t be possible!”
“No, no,”
said, without waiting for the translator.
The woman, Mariama, wasn’t quite saying what felt accurate, but didn’t have the sufficient depth of English to reach in and correct her.
Maybe she should speak English, slowly, so Bone would understand her.
“I say I go to the room near elevator.
I enter and come out, after…”
She paused, searching for a name to give this desecration.
They said “assault,”
the Americans.
She had not known that word until Shaquana told the manager.
He assaulted her.
“After he assault me,” she said.
Bone’s eyes narrowed.
“Why do you need a translator?”
was sure she had misunderstood.
“Is he asking why I need a translator?”
she asked Mariama in Pular.
Mariama, ruffled, said yes.
“Your English sounds good to me.
You didn’t need to have a translator,”
Bone said.
In a different time and place, she would have been pleased to hear an American saying her English was good.
This man seemed certain of her guilt in a crime unknown to her.
But having a translator was surely not a crime.
Her lawyer said she could request one and speak in Pular, if she preferred, and of course she was relieved: no searching her brain for correct English words that were often never found.
“Did you ask for a translator so you’d have time to decide how to respond to my questions?”
Bone asked.
“No,”
said.
She did not know what he meant, only that he was suggesting a dark intention from which she had to defend herself.
“You have to be honest here, completely honest,” he said.
She nodded, feeling overwhelmed by her bewilderment.
“I’m going to ask you some questions about your asylum application to the United States,”
Bone said, and her heart leaped.
What did her asylum have to do with this? Amadou always said immigrants never asked other immigrants how they came to America, each person’s story was a private mystery, what mattered was that they were in America.
She had never spoken to anyone of her asylum case.
“Were all the details you gave in your asylum application true?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure about that? You have to be completely honest.”
Why was he asking if she was sure? She could not think of what he meant, but she felt as if she was stumbling toward a trap.
“No.
Yes,” she said.
“No? Yes? Which is it, yes or no?”
“Yes.”
He rolled his eyes and threw back his head, awash in exasperation.
She feared he had an uncomplimentary expectation of her that she had just fulfilled.
“What was the basis of your asylum request?”
he asked.
“Why did you request asylum?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know why you requested asylum in the United States?”
She reached for the cup of tepid water and drank.
She did not understand why he was asking about her asylum, with the manner of a person who already knew a terrible secret of hers.
Sweat pooled under her breasts.
He must be looking for a reason to send her and Binta back to Guinea, so that all the fuss about the guest would end.
Bone was working for the guest.
Or maybe he was just angry with her for reporting a VIP, a small insignificant maid like her, disrupting so much.
“You haven’t answered my question,”
Bone said.
“I tell you what happen in the room,” she said.
“We actually still don’t know what happened in that room,” he said.
She stared at him, astonished.
He didn’t believe her.
He thought what she said happened had not happened at all.
She went into a room to do her job and a guest turned into a wild animal and ran toward her.
She had told him this many times, in the same sequence, with the same words, and all the while he thought she was lying.
It wasn’t that she had dared report a VIP.
It was that he disbelieved the content of that report.
Why would she lie? She wanted none of this.
She wanted to go back to work, talk to Amadou on the phone, go with Binta to the movies, cook attieke on weekends, look after Chia’s house, watch her Nollywood films.
Her life was good. Why would she lie about something she did not in any way want?
“I tell you what happen in the room,”
she said again.
“Why will I lie?”
“Why would you lie, indeed,” he said.
There was an ugly spikiness in the air, true positions being unveiled, the gap widening of mutual unreachability.
She did not look at him.
Through the window she saw forlorn snow flurries floating by.
“This case depends entirely on your credibility.
Do you understand that?”
Bone’s voice was slightly raised.
His narrow face, his white beard, his white hair, his glassy stare.
He scared her.
Now he was asking her about the money Amadou put in her account, and she almost gasped from panic.
Liquid rushed loudly in her ears.
How did he know about that, from years ago? If he was asking about Amadou, maybe he knew of that tape Amadou gave her, the voice of a woman talking about soldiers, words still undimmed in her mind.
Maybe he knew how easy it had been, how the kind woman at the asylum interview said congratulations too soon.
But what did that have to do with this case? Something happened in a hotel room and Bone was asking her about her asylum?
Mariama was tapping her pen on the cover of her notebook and the noiseless movement of that pen made dizzy.
Nothing felt right.
She had come to talk of the desecration the hotel guest had done to her, to a person said to be on her side, but instead she was sitting here tense and heavy-tongued.
“Any lie told on your asylum application needs to come out now,”
Bone said.
But she hadn’t lied.
Why did he keep suggesting she had? Everything she said during that interview either was true—the razor blade her aunty cut her with—or had become true—that she did not want Binta to be cut.
From the moment, years ago, when Amadou put in her mind the idea that a girl could marry without being cut, she had thought of it, and grew certain with time that Binta would not be cut.
“If there is any discrepancy in your asylum application, any at all, I need to know it now,”
Bone said.
A rising headache, from thinking so much, the convoluted confusions of it.
He wanted something from her and she did not know what.
“No,” she said.
“No? What is it you’re hiding?”
Bone asked.
“What are you hiding? What are you not telling me?”
Suddenly the words from that tape were rising to the surface of her mind and were rolling out of her mouth.
“It was four soldiers.
They said I disobeyed the curfew.
They came into the restaurant already drunk.
One of them said he would do his turn with his gun.
I was bleeding…”
She stopped abruptly, with a frightening sinking feeling at the bottom of her stomach.
“You were raped in your home country?”
Bone asked.
“No, no.”
“You just told me you were raped.”
“No, I make mistake.
It is just the cassette tape.”
“You made a mistake and said you were raped?”
And he laughed a barking laugh.
The translator leaned back, as if to move away from .
“It is a cassette tape,”
said.
“But I don’t use the tape.”
“What cassette tape?”
Bone asked.
What had she done? She wished lightning would strike, somebody would burst through the door, anything to interrupt this.
Maybe if she fell to the floor she might distract him.
And so she pushed back her chair and fell writhing to the floor, forcing tears from her eyes.
“I think we need to take a break,”
somebody said.
allowed herself to be helped up.
Her forced tears had become tears, and she cried, her nose running.
How could all this have happened to her, and where would it end?
As she walked out of the room, she heard Bone say, “She’s a con artist.”
Later, she asked Binta, “Con artist, what does it mean?”
“Like someone that is a very good liar, someone that deceives people.”
“Oh.”
’s breath caught in her chest.
“Why? Mom, did somebody call you a con artist?”
“No, no,” said.
—
Zikora came to Chia’s with bottles of zobo for .
didn’t like the Nigerian version of hibiscus juice, but she said, “Thank you,”
and sipped from one bottle.
The kitchen sticky with the swell and rise of expectation.
Omelogor was on a video call, iPad propped up on the kitchen island.
Chia perched on a counter stool, next to , and felt the urge to get up and walk away, like leaving a distressing ceremony she had been forced to attend.
Zikora stood near the window and began reading out the charges from her phone.
Forcible touching
Sexual abuse in the first and third degree
Unlawful imprisonment
Attempted rape
Criminal sexual act in the first degree
“What’s the major one?”
Omelogor asked.
“Criminal sexual act in the first degree.
He can get twenty-five years for that,”
Zikora said.
“Good,”
Chia said.
“Well.
Only five percent of rape cases get a conviction,”
Zikora said.
“Five percent?”
Chia asked, eyes round.
“That’s just monstrous,”
Omelogor said.
“Honestly.
Why do men rape?”
“You’re probably going to explain it all to us and it will have something to do with pornography and with your website,”
Zikora said.
“Pornography is part of it, actually.
All the violence in contemporary pornography can make men think rape isn’t so bad.”
“Is pornography also why men steal and kill and lie?”
Zikora said.
“Zikora, seriously,”
Omelogor said coldly.
Chia looked drained and tired.
“What is their defense going to be, Zik?”
“They say it was consensual.”
“He doesn’t give her money.
He isn’t good-looking.
It was too quick to be a seduction.
So why would she fuck him?”
“Omelogor! Don’t use that word! It’s assault we’re talking about!”
Zikora said.
“I’m responding to their defense, that it was consensual.
If it isn’t what says happened, then how did the consensual version happen? In eleven minutes, she is either overwhelmed with attraction for him and quickly agrees to sex, or in eleven minutes she quickly concludes a transaction that somehow doesn’t involve any money?”
“The only way their own story makes sense is if you think of the woman involved as a complete idiot,”
Chia said.
shrank away from their words, her stomach churning, imagining words like these flung about, but in a larger space, an alien courtroom, Americans speaking fast, her name on strangers’ lips, chopping her story into bits with a knife, as if anybody but her could discern what truly happened to her.
This image of the court bulked forbiddingly in her mind.
They would hack at her with a machete and invite vultures while she lay, still alive, her open wounds exposed.
—
On television, she saw hotel workers gathered in front of the court, wearing their uniforms, like her own uniform, and she thought of her uniforms, one now lying forlorn in her staff locker in the hotel, the other in a plastic bag in the police station.
Some of the women were being interviewed by journalists.
“It happens often,”
one said.
“Powerful guests assault us.
It has happened to me twice, but I didn’t speak about it.”
felt sorry, for being the cause of all this, for disrupting their day; she hoped they would be paid for the hours they were out there, protesting, and supporting her.
The world was spinning and would not slow down, her phone always ringing and beeping, Chia hovering, Binta watching her.
A photo appeared on her phone, from one of her cousins.
She looked at it, uncomprehending, confused, because it was a photo of two White people, but it made no sense because they were in Mama’s compound, in her village.
In the background were trees she knew, near the vegetable garden where she plucked sour leaves.
She knew that gray-brown patterned terrazzo floor, she had sent Mama money for it; she knew the buckets and metal trays stacked in the corner.
“Journalists are in the village questioning everybody,”
the cousin said in a voice message.
“Bhoye is saying he will give them a picture of you if they pay him well.”
They had banged on her door, chased her away from her apartment, lay in wait outside Binta’s school, and now they had gone all the way to Africa, to Guinea, to her village in Fouta Djallon.
Her days had taken on the texture of a dream from which she longed to wake.
So much was wearing out or already worn out.
When she saw Binta’s face, she knew something was unsaid.
“What is it?”
she asked.
Binta said, “I saw it yesterday,”
and then reluctantly turned her phone toward her.
It was a newspaper headline, in large print, above a photo of her.
PROSTITUTE.
She knew that word, but it could not be.
“Is it what I think it is?”
she asked Binta.
Binta nodded.
“Mom, they don’t know you,”
Binta said quietly.
stared at it in disbelief.
How? How could they call her a prostitute? Thank God her father died, thank God he was long dead, to save him the shame of this, seeing her called a prostitute in front of the whole world.
She began to cry.
All the crying she had not done, all the tears held back, erupted in ferocious wails and she found herself on the floor, and all around her a terrible scattering of despair.
This would never end; she could not see how this could ever end.
She would never wash off this stain.
Her life would never be the same.
How could she rebuild, what would she rebuild from, how would she ever get a job when she was now a prostitute in the eyes of the world? She had never wished others ill.
What had she done to deserve this?
Chia had come into the room, she didn’t know when, but Chia was beside her on the floor, a feathery touch on her arm, saying, “Kadi, you’re not alone, Kadi, you’re not alone.”
But she was alone, she felt alone, never as alone in her life as then.