Four
Why had I forgotten Johan? The Swedish man with a long torso who looked like a pale European gazelle would, if such a thing existed.
I sent Omelogor a photo of him and she wrote back, “Englishman has permanently changed your spec.”
Loudly I protested but quietly I wondered.
After Luuk, and here I was with another tall, thin White man.
Johan was blond, with the throwaway air of an adventurer who could live for weeks on a single backpack.
He was not made for permanence of any kind, and I felt from the beginning that we were sailing on the surface because there was no option of depth.
“Do you know of the saying that romantic love lasts three years?”
he asked, as though to prepare me, even though we barely lasted a year, both of us benignly watching as the seams of our relationship came apart.
With him I had a rare moment of feeling known, while walking about fruit and vegetable stalls in a farmers’ market, the air smelling of the rightness of imperfect things.
“Which do I like, peaches or nectarines?”
I asked him.
I could not remember.
“Nectarines.
You don’t like how fuzzy peaches are,”
he said, and in that moment, there was splendor all around.
We met at a book festival in Brooklyn, during a travel-writing panel that turned out to be insipid.
The moderator talked about himself for too long, while the panelists sat uncomfortably silent, one doodling on the back cover of his book.
Johan was next to me and he whispered, “Somebody should shut that man up,”
and I had the sensation of being alone with him in that room filled with people.
His front tooth was missing, and each time he smiled I tried not to focus on the square hole.
It was from an accident, he said.
He had cracked his skull and, after surgery and complications, a lost tooth seemed inconsequential.
The accident had shaken him into clarity, and he saw how skeletal his routines were, how he was living like a person waiting to live.
He left his culture job at a newspaper in Stockholm, went freelance, and began traveling.
“I could have died without having done any of the things I really wanted to do,” he said.
I felt that I understood this sentiment and, therefore, understood him.
He laughed at my jokes and often said, “You’re so funny.”
I was not that funny—I could not possibly be, perhaps he didn’t know any really funny people—but I basked in this, my image as a funny person, my ability to so easily make him laugh.
When we talked of travel, our words came rushing out, eager to share and compare, under the enchantment of a mutual passion.
“Trieste? You went to Trieste?” he asked.
“Yes,”
I said.
“I read this Jan Morris book about it and decided to go.”
“Wow.”
He loved Germany and had briefly lived in Frankfurt and Berlin.
He laughed when I said Frankfurt was dingy, that there was something in its corners that was past its prime.
He was amused that I had gone the year before to Berlin just to rent a taxi and drive around looking at the Gründerzeit houses.
“You haven’t seen the real Berlin,”
he declared.
“Why are the dirtiest parts real? The people in grungy places live there because they have no choice, not because they want to be real.
They would leave if they could.”
“But those are the parts that show the real city, the real character.”
“I think I will keep going to the unreal parts, then.”
Johan laughed.
I told him there were cities I loved almost as soon as I landed, wide-armed cities I knew I could befriend, and others that left me cold, and still others that smoldered with unwelcomeness to which I knew I would never return.
“Left you cold?” he asked.
“Kraków.
Santiago.”
“Loved on landing?”
“London, of course.
Colombo.
Auckland.
Dakar. Rio.”
“Won’t go back?”
“Moscow.
Sydney.
Buenos Aires.”
“Racist much?”
he asked, and I laughed.
“I mentally prepare myself for hostility in small places, but sometimes it’s in the larger cities that you feel Blackness as this heavy thing that you have to rise above.
Moscow was like that.
Just not a good feeling.”
“I’ve never been to Russia.”
“They can’t build toilets, by the way; you flush and the thing is still sitting there in the bowl looking at you.”
“Still better than the pit latrines I used in China!”
He was learning Mandarin.
He wanted to write culture pieces that connected America and China.
“Nobody is doing that.
How can your biggest market also be your biggest enemy? They should cooperate.
If they cooperate, both of them will benefit and so will the world.
But it’s all ego, on both sides.”
I said Korea and Japan interested me, not so much China.
“China is the future,”
he said.
“Let’s plan to go together in the fall? Oh, I know they’ll be difficult about visas to Nigerians.
I can’t believe what you go through with a Nigerian passport.
It’s kind of crazy.”
And he looked at me as if I had given him entry into an exciting new reality.
At first, we explained our worlds to each other, and it was intoxicating, how we peeled back layers and saw our lives anew.
Then it became wearying, and I blamed him for not knowing what he could not possibly have known.
“This obligation to send money to people in Nigeria is fascinating,” he said.
“It’s not people.
I send money to my relatives.”
“It’s really kind.”
“It’s not kind.
It’s just what I should do.”
“So it is an obligation,” he said.
“No, it isn’t.
Not in the way you think of an obligation.”
When he said he had only been in the U.S.
for six months, I said, “Your English sounds so American.”
“Really?”
he asked, and a small smile appeared; he was pleased to sound American.
“I learned English from watching American television shows.”
His oozing infatuation with America disconcerted me, how he reeled off the smallest details about American films and American music, especially African American music.
He had visited Detroit years ago just because he adored Motown, which was no surprise since his parents said he had been conceived while the Commodores played loudly on the stereo.
He lit up talking about Tupac and Tina Turner and Prince, not merely their music but their recording contracts and their relationships, and it was almost perverse that he should know so much of a country he had never lived in.
He rarely spoke of Sweden.
“Maybe you’re actually an American who lived in Sweden?”
I said, and he laughed.
—
We traveled to Germany together because he was trying to interview a Chinese artist in Berlin.
He had lived briefly in Berlin and had friends there, and one of them was having a dinner party.
I was surprised by the big house in a self-satisfied neighborhood of big houses, all groomed greenery and low iron gates.
“Your friend is rich, which means she is not real,”
I said, and he laughed and said she had inherited the house, as if it made a difference.
His friend, Anna, was a stylish German woman who walked with a cane; slender, dark-haired, wearing jeans, her crisp white shirt almost halfway unbuttoned to her chest, small half-globes of her breasts exposed.
She seemed to fit well in the mixed décor of her home, the severe modern sofas and antique chests, the imposing paintings.
When she talked to you, she coolly looked you in the eye and held her stare for a little too long, as though she enjoyed the discomfort it caused.
The guests were already high-spirited from drinking, all speaking German, around a table spread with cold cuts and cheeses.
Johan said in English, “Chia is an English speaker, everyone.”
“No, it’s fine.
I like the sound of German,”
I said, which was a lie.
The harsh undertones of some German words unsettled me.
“Only English,”
our host decreed, watching me.
They switched to English and I felt sorry that some of the guests spoke haltingly, slowed by a language not normally at the tips of their tongues.
They were telling entertaining stories, louder than I expected, dipping into bowls of thin salted pretzels.
“The German middle-class trajectory of success is you go to school in Berlin, get your first job in Hamburg, and then start a family in Munich, with its spotless river—everyone loves the river,”
somebody said scornfully.
“Let’s tell jokes!”
somebody said, full of beer.
Johan told a joke about a conversation he had in India with an airport worker and everyone laughed.
I was next and unsure what to say.
Why did it matter to me that I amused these strangers? When in doubt, make fun of yourself.
I said when I was growing up in Nigeria, I read about bagels in a novel and imagined them to be elegant, like macarons or cupcakes, and how shocked I was when I finally had a bagel in America.
My punchline was “I asked for a bagel, not a dense doughnut!”
As soon as I said it, I wished I had told a different joke, more ironic and less folksy.
There was scattered laughter.
“Bagel,”
Anna said, ruminatively.
“Bagel is a Jewish food, yes?”
She had a kind of high style, an intentional superciliousness lodged inside her self-assurance.
She emphasized the word “Jewish,”
saying it slowly, at a pace different from the rest of her sentence, and gave it an unearned weight in the sentence.
The air swirled as it was not supposed to.
Her German accent, her expression, eyebrows slightly raised and lips slightly curled, became a cliché, and I felt myself suddenly plunged into German history.
Dizziness coursed through me and the chill of goosebumps spread on my skin.
I thought I should press shut my eyes, to make the vertigo pass.
“It’s a Jewish food?”
she repeated, her eyes on me.
Somebody said yes it was a Jewish food.
The chatter continued, as though she had not just asked “It’s a Jewish food?”
about a bagel.
Even Johan was indifferent, tipping his head back to drink from a beer bottle.
What was her family’s story? The walls of the room were unsteady.
An abstract painting hung on the other end and seemed suddenly to swell with accusation.
Pictures formed in my mind from films and documentaries about Germany during the war, the Nazis in their fastidious uniforms, flawlessly cultured and implacably murderous.
Maybe this woman was a recalcitrant granddaughter.
Maybe this house had blood in its solid stone foundation.
Until we left, I avoided looking at Anna, as if I might see proof of something I preferred not to see.
“How does a person think of a bagel today as ‘Jewish’ food?”
I asked Johan as we left.
“I think you’ve given this an American interpretation,” he said.
I stared at his unshaven face, his blond stubble.
I felt upset with him too.
“She made it about Jewish food.
Why does it matter whether or not it’s Jewish food, that’s not what the joke was about, and the way she asked and the look on her face…”
“You view this issue in an American way,”
Johan said, and I felt he had cut me off.
“It’s not the same here.
People don’t even eat bagels.”
“Really?”
I asked.
He shook his head and changed the subject, asking if we could go to Kreuzberg earlier than we planned, because the Chinese artist had moved the interview to late evening.
I looked at him.
I didn’t really know him; there was no reason to be surprised.
Our breakup was the nicest because it was the lightest.
We had not done the labor of learning each other, and so we parted unburdened by resentment, which, to grow, requires knowledge of the other.
—
The ending of lockdown trailed off like a forgotten song.
If only life could immediately return to what it used to be.
Some bars and restaurants had opened, all hesitantly, the rules changing day by day.
Zikora and I met at a restaurant in downtown D.C., and sat on rattan chairs outside, under the awning.
I looked around, at the three other customers.
We were wary and masked; we were beaten down, defeated by a changed world.
“Makes no sense to come in masked, only to then take off the mask and eat and drink.”
“I know.”
Zikora brought out a bottle of hand sanitizer, squirted into her palms, rubbed them briskly together.
I did the same.
“Driving here, I saw a police car and I panicked.
Just thinking of the early days of stay-at-home when they were cruising the empty roads, stopping the lone disobedient car to ask for proof of ‘essential worker’ status,”
Zikora said.
“I heard someone was shot in a Walmart over toilet paper.
You would think they would fight over food,” I said.
“We’ve become our base animal selves,”
Zikora said.
“But also our best selves,”
I said.
“People helped other people so much.
I used to cry watching the people on TV that came out to clap for essential workers.”
Zikora pulled down her mask to reveal a reddish cluster of rashes around her mouth.
“I feel like joining the crazies who don’t want to wear masks.”
“Goodness.
Ndo.
Are you putting anything on it? I have this rash cream I got in Colombia.”
“My mother suggested zinc cream, she’s always reading about all sorts of things.
I think it actually helped a bit.
Man, Chia, we lived through a plague.
Chidera now thinks masks are normal; he saw one of my old pictures and was shocked and said Mommy is not wearing a mask!”
“I miss him.
I miss the sweet sweet smell of him.”
“He loved that puzzle box thing you sent him.
You can keep him this Saturday.
My mom will bring him.”
“Our hummus place has closed down.”
“So many places have.
We don’t even know the full damage.
We’ll see in the next weeks how gouged out we are.
Like a coconut somebody scooped the flesh out of and put the shell back together.”
The waiter almost threw our drinks at us, standing too far away from our table, double-masked and wearing gloves.
“Well, he managed not to spill it,”
I said, and we laughed.
Our laughter lifted my spirits.
“But it’s really messed up, working like this, in service jobs.”
“I know.
I found this really good online therapy site.
But you wouldn’t need that, would you, Madam Milk Butter, because normal people spent lockdown suffering anxiety while you were busy looking up your exes and reviewing your body count.”
“My dream count,” I said.
“So how many dreams have you been with?”
“The world has changed and you look back to take stock of how you’ve lived.
And you have so much regret,”
I said.
I wished I had not used that word, “regret.”
Chidera was almost five and Kwame’s parents did not yet know of him.
“Regret is a useless feeling.”
Zikora paused and squirted more hand sanitizer.
“So what was the conclusion of your dream count?”
I was playing with my still-full glass, running my finger along the handle.
I was reluctant to drink because to drink would be to pull down my mask.
“I should have tried harder with Chuka.
I thought that wanting to sustain a relationship was not enough to sustain a relationship.
I Googled him and saw his wedding photos and I just felt…”
“What?”
“I don’t know.
That feeling of wanting to go back and do it all over again.”
“You are such a soft and spoiled person, Chia,”
Zikora said lovingly.
“Milk Butter.”