Refuge
For my children,
Kayla, Kieran and Jaimen
may you never know a home
other than the tender place
that you have chosen
This is a work of pure fiction and any resemblance in character or situation to actual persons is coincidental. However, I would like to extend my thanks to all those members of the Nigerian and other immigrant African communities for the time they afforded me in telling me their stories. Thank you to the team at Zebra Press, especially Robert Plummer and Marlene Fryer, and to my editor, Martha Evans. My special thanks to my wife Patti, not only for her comprehensive research but also for patiently enduring the process of writing this book. There is a short bibliography at the end of this book in which some of the more interesting sources of our research on Nigeria are listed.
Werewere lewe nbo lara igi
Gbebe nii ro koko lagbala
A taboyun a ti koko
Yio ryin lorun
Gbedemuke
Gbedemuke
A ripe leaf drops easily
The cocoa in the courtyard is always green
For the pregnant mother and the child about to be born
It will be easy
Gentle
Gentle
Traditional Yoruba poem for baby-naming ceremony,
Nigeria (by Abiodun Adepoju)
‘H
ELLO
,
MY NAME
is Abayomi. Please come inside.’ With this simple beginning, his world changes for ever. The sound of her voice, so close, makes it irredeemable. As with all deflowering, something fundamental is lost and something sage acquired.
He cannot see her yet. She stands in the shadow of the doorway, shielded by the glare of sunlight off the white walls. His eyes smart as he tries to make out her form. But just hearing her address him, he knows he has embarked on a course definitively contrasting to the one he has followed up until now. The sultry lilt, the suggestion of foreignness in her accent, the undertow of eroticism, all combine in an instant to unbalance him. It brings with it a freshness that unseats him and lifts his staidness. Even if he walked away now, he would have something pure and poignant to recall. He could sit alone, surrounded by bustle and noise, and call on this memory. He could pocket it like a stone and rub his thumb across its smooth form. He could store it in a velvet-lined box and take it out in privacy.
The steps that brought him to this door were small. Simple decisions made, perhaps impulsively, each without moment, but each directing him towards this culmination, this initiation. The true consequence of these half-conscious acts lies in the doorway, now open, and in the dusky interior beyond. It beckons but is ultimately treacherous. Perhaps his momentum could still be stopped, if he wished. He could retreat, apologise and leave. Or take one more step and enter. A step back, the door will close again and he will have only the glimpsed memory of another world. A step forward, the door will shut behind him and he will enter the whirlwind unleashed and be pushed along its tumultuous path of death and rebirth. Once inside, the street outside is gone for ever; he cannot pass through the same doorway again.
He is described by those around him as dependable, as having integrity – he suspects that these are other words for uninteresting. In their eyes, he knows he always looks the same, mundane and featureless. But they do not know how close he feels to losing control. He fantasises about letting go, just releasing his emotions into open space – like a swimmer suspended in the turquoise light of a deep bay, his arms and legs splayed open, far from the shore. He dreamt once that he was an astronaut, treading with heavy boots on top of his spacecraft. Looking up at the spray of distant stars, utterly quiet, he bent his knees and pushed out, his body drifting away from his ship into unbounded space. When he awoke, he had felt crushed with the weight of sadness.
His life has been an accumulation of regrets – chances that were offered and not taken, moments of opportunity that he was too afraid to grasp. He looks back in mourning. And yet the thought of abandoning his trodden path fills him with panic. He is like a tiler who sees that his pattern has run skew, but who knows that he is unable to go back and correct it, and so doggedly continues, increasingly straying from his chosen line with every tile he lays.
His whole adult life, he has been moving down an island of expectation between lanes of traffic. Some days he plods forward like a blinkered carthorse. Other days he moves like a wounded man, stumbling along his narrow strip, with surging trucks passing on either side. No one can see him bleeding; to them he is walking deliberately, not staggering and thrashing. Small decisions, tiny forks in his road, he knows, have appeared each day and directed his passage. But the deviations have been so minute that he has remained on the same skewed path, as if it were predicted. Fear, familiarity, loathing; these are the untouchable fences that border his route, subtle and unfelt but as strong as cable wire. If he steps off the island, he will strike into other worlds, those that now rush past, inches away, and be sucked away by lives unknown. The possibility scares him – the idea of floating untethered, buffeted by collisions with strangers. But he has reached the edge of his designated space and must now choose to step out or pull back into torpor.
She stands just behind the opened door, hiding herself from the curious eyes of passers-by, waiting for him to enter. With a drawn breath, he steps into the passageway. She has not moved away and is standing close to him now. The passage is softly lit compared to the bright sun outside. It smells of sandalwood, cedar and palm oil. The fragrance reminds him of the beach house where he stayed as a child on the shores of Inhambane. There he would sit on the wooden deck with his toes digging into the warm sand, the palm fronds rustling overhead in the afternoon wind. He would watch the bare-chested men pulling the boats along the shallow shore. The bows were marked with peeling paint, red and green and yellow, creosoted sweeps of wood meeting together at a solid keel that scoured a path up the beach. Small fish looped together on knotted ropes, and salt water dripped freely down the men’s muscled backs. The vanilla aroma of chestnuts and cashews roasting on a nearby fire drifted in the air. Behind him on the deck, the young housemaid pounded maize kernels for the evening meal, her dress rucked up on her hips, smelling of cheap soap and hair oil.
The door closes and the lock clicks quietly behind him.
‘Welcome to Touch of Africa. I am Abayomi. I am your pleasure.’
S
TEFAN SVRITSKY WAS
a man who had long ago mastered his own fear. Its defeat allowed him to trade mercilessly on the trepidation of others. He was born into a poor family in the industrial city of Murmansk, situated on the Kola Peninsula in the extreme northwest of Russia. Although the port was ice-free all year round, and for this reason had historically been an important naval base, the city was still situated within the Arctic Circle, and life in the grimy housing estate was hard. His father had been a deckhand on a naval supply ship; he had exacted the same military discipline at home that he endured at work, terrorising the small household with short-tempered commands. His death in an accident at sea was treated as an unspoken respite. But the family was left to survive on a paltry widow’s pension and, to help make ends meet, Svritsky left school early to join his older brother as a stevedore at the commercial harbour.
His brother had seemed content with the back-breaking labour and biting chill of the open quays, but Svritsky was always vigilant, looking for an opportunity to escape. He soon noted that certain consignments were treated differently: while all incoming cargo was subjected to ruthless Soviet bureaucracy, the wooden crates destined for the offices of the local militia were loaded onto a separate truck, under the watchful eye of the police commissioner. Svritsky ensured that he was always present to assist with these loads, nodding to the commissioner in deference before the consignments were whisked away. After a month or two the commissioner started to nod back, subtly tilting his head to signify that he had noticed the young man’s loyal attentions. Then one morning, while they were offloading a new consignment, one of the men stumbled, letting a crate slip forward. Its corner struck the concrete, and the sound of splitting wood and the shout of anger from the commissioner brought the quay to a standstill. Svritsky leapt forward and bellowed at his colleague, distracting him from the bottles of expensive whisky that glinted between the broken slats. He swiftly threw a tarpaulin over the crate.
The commissioner eyed him cautiously, saying nothing. But when the next consignment came in, the policeman barked instructions at the controller, and Svritsky was assigned responsibility for overseeing the loading of the shipment. Before long, the commissioner no longer bothered to attend at the docks, and Svritsky transported the illegal cargo to the militia offices himself. By the end of that year, he had left the docks altogether and had started working within the militia, assisting with a variety of nefarious activities. He rose swiftly in the ranks of the Soviet underworld, combining loyalty with stark self-interest. For years he wielded brutal control over the black market in northern Russia, supplying the political elite with their illicit luxuries. The militia’s monopoly came to an end with the collapse of the Union. Import controls imploded and opportunistic mobsters staked their territories with violence. Russia became an increasingly dangerous place for a former militia racketeer, and Svritsky was forced to flee. After a two-year stint in West Africa, he arrived in Cape Town without connection or family, but he soon turned this lack of emotional contact to his advantage. His unflinching self-reliance allowed him to exploit the slightest weaknesses in others; his dislocation made him untouchable. The Russian’s determination and willingness to exploit people to achieve his ends made him a vicious competitor. The combination of intelligence and ruthlessness quickly outmatched local gangsters; where they resorted to threats and expletives, Svritsky executed his plans with deliberation. He soon occupied a powerful position within the inner-city clubs and businesses.
Svritsky’s steely reputation was belied by a round body and a fleshy, folded face, often damp with perspiration. His smooth head and button nose added to his porcine appearance. He had been plagued by acne as an adolescent, and his skin had the mottled texture of cold porridge. White-grey stubble sometimes hid the worst of the scarring, but when he was angry the flesh around his neck burned as if scalded and the pockmarks flared like wounds. His right forearm was dominated by a tattoo of a naked woman holding a coiled snake at bay, its thick body twisted around her uplifted thigh, pulling between her legs and rearing in front of her pointy red nipples.
Svritsky liked to wear loose Bermuda shorts, which sometimes extended halfway down his stocky legs, with white socks and running shoes. Short-sleeved golf shirts accentuated his barrel chest and strong, hairy arms. It was a dress code that would have made most businessmen look ridiculous, but in his case it somehow added to the sense of menace. His eyes revealed his true resolve: the iris could seem almost opaque, a lifeless grey like the colour of the sea in the harbour of his home town, only to transform to a searing green, the iridescent colour of burning barium. The Russian was at his most threatening when he directed this blazing intensity at his victim.
Richard Calloway watched as his client now focused these scalding eyes on the diminutive figure of Cerissa du Toit, the National Prosecuting Authority’s senior controller. Du Toit had pursued Svritsky across the breadth of his career in the country, indicting him on an array of charges, including attempted murder, fraud, corruption, dealing in narcotics and tax evasion. Success had eluded her, thanks largely to Richard’s efforts as Svritsky’s lawyer. She had secured an incidental conviction relating to undeclared income and a finding on assault with a small fine. It was a deeply unsatisfying record, and her disappointment had not been assuaged by the wild tantrum Svritsky threw in court on hearing his conviction.