Sankofa Page 8

  We eat at the kitchen table. The fish flakes. The sauce has depth of flavor. We talk of the mundane, the weather in Edinburgh, the annual festival that brings a crush of people.

  “I regret my book,” he says, when we are almost done. “It came from an honest place. You should have read the press around Bamana. Some of the African countries that gained independence in the sixties were already faltering, and so the media was just waiting for Bamana to fall apart. How long before the military topples Adjei? How long before he loots the place? And so I decided to travel there and prove them wrong. I really believed I was documenting the first hundred days of something truly remarkable. An African miracle. I wrote that book in 1978. By 1984, when I returned, I had already changed my mind.” It is a long speech given with almost no pause, but he is a professor, used to delivering lectures.

  “What made you change your mind?” I ask.

  “Well, the murder of the Kinnakro Five was still four years away. You know of them?”

  “Yes, the student activists.”

  “Rather grim affair. That was still in the future, but the seeds were already sown. Six years after independence, no one could challenge the great leader Kofi. Power corrupts, but nowhere more than a small African state.” I notice that he has called my father Kofi for the first time. I take my empty plate to the sink.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll clear up,” he says.

  “No, let me. The meal was delicious.” I pick up a sponge. “Are you still in touch?”

  He does not answer. I turn and catch him watching me.

  “What exactly is your family connection to Francis?”

  “You’ll have to read to the end of the diary,” I say.

  “I see. Well, to answer your question, we lost contact years ago. How shall I put it? We stopped moving in the same circles.”

  The bed in the guest room is laid with fresh sheets. There is an empty blue vase on the window. The night garments Adrian has laid out for me are nunnish, with long sleeves and buttons that stop at the base of my throat. I change and climb into the single bed. He has left a hot-water bottle under the sheets and I feel like a slice of bread slotted into a toaster. I close my eyes, expecting to be restless in this strange room, but I edge seamlessly into sleep.

  11

  I come down the next morning and find Adrian sitting at the kitchen table with his arms folded.

  “You’re Francis’s love child,” he says. His tone is flat, almost hostile.

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “So, what do you intend?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Now that you’ve found out you’re his daughter, what next? You’ve come all the way to Edinburgh. You must have a plan.”

  I do not know him well enough to be sure of his exact mood. I sit opposite him.

  “Is the diary real?” I say.

  “From what I can tell, yes, it seems original, although unfortunately he hasn’t dated any of the entries. But what he writes about Menelik’s circle, only someone who was there would know.”

  “Let’s say I did want to meet him . . .”

  “Almost certainly you’d have to go to Bamana. He doesn’t travel out of the country often these days. If, and that’s a big if, if you secured a meeting with him, you’d have to reveal your claim—”

  “My claim?”

  “It is a claim until there’s been a DNA test. You must realize that.”

  “Is there a resemblance?” I ask.

  “In the guile with which you approached me? Yes, certainly.”

  It is humor, but of the biting, caustic kind, not the good nature of last evening.

  “I haven’t seen him in many years,” he continues, “but there might also be a slight physical resemblance. Do you intend to ask him for money?” There lies the nub of his suspicions.

  “Of course not,” I say. I am almost indignant, but I remind myself I am a stranger to him, despite my expensive handbag.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. It’s just how, perhaps, the case might be viewed from outside.” He stands and walks to the fridge. “Right. Well, that settles things, then. Shall we have some breakfast?”

  The ease from last night’s meal is gone. I am now allegedly a president’s daughter. We eat quickly and leave his house. On our walk to the station we pass a large building, desperately trendy with bare stone walls and steel trimmings. “Scottish Parliament” is all the description Adrian gives. I have abused his trust. He has opened his home to me, while I have concealed who I am till the last possible moment. At the station, we stand by the barriers.

  “Do keep in touch and tell me how you get on. You have my e-mail address.” He is dismissing me, like he has dismissed many students, ushering them out of his office before throwing their essays in the bin.

  “I was hoping for a lead,” I say.

  “As I said, Francis and I have lost touch.”

  “But someone else in Menelik’s circle. Surely there must be at least one person you still talk to.”

  “Old age. It separates.”

  A whistle sounds, cutting through the noise of the station. Around us travelers surge forward. The trains wait for no one. I have met a man who knew my father, who shook his hand, who sees in my face a slight resemblance. I am further along than when I arrived in Edinburgh yesterday.

  “You do look like him,” he says. “Why didn’t you just tell me who you were?”

  “Would you have believed me without reading it in the diary first? A strange woman, out of the blue, telling you she’s Francis Aggrey’s daughter, a man you thought was too cold to take a lover. Wouldn’t you have thought me mad?”

  He smiles, his first honest smile of the day.

  “Your father’s gift of persuasion. I have an old address for Thomas Phiri. We haven’t been in contact for over a decade. It’s a long shot, but you can start there. I’ve written down my number as well. You can call if you need anything else.”

  He brings out a folded piece of paper from his left pocket. He has carried it all the way here, swinging between trust and suspicion.

  “Your father was a remarkable man when I knew him. If you do get to meet him, don’t be too disappointed that he is no longer the man who wrote that diary.”

  “Thank you.”

  I step through the barriers and head to Platform 7.

  12

  Outside Colindale Station was a sign pointing to the RAF Museum. There were no signs for Grahame Park Estate, but it was a more obvious landmark than a warehouse full of model planes. A five-minute walk from the station, the estate sprawled in every direction like a brick cancer. On Thomas’s side of the estate, the buildings looked inward on a quadrangle of shops and restaurants. In one store, the attendant was trapped in a clear Perspex box with air holes for breathing and a letterbox opening for cash. A sign by the door said: NO CREDIT, NO GROUPS, NO KNIVES.

  It was too sunny to feel threatened. Two Somali women walked past. Their feet were covered by their abayas. They glided, tall black swans that had learned to swim in concrete. I found Thomas Phiri’s block. I leaned against the wall in the stairwell and waited for the boy at the top to descend. He should have been at school. He was trainered, tracksuited, hoodied, the uniform of the urban army I read about in the news.

  “No, miss. After you.”

  “Thank you.”

  I climbed the stairs ashamed but still cautious, pressing against the wall when I drew abreast of him. I found the green door of apartment 404. If Thomas had moved, perhaps the new resident might pass on a forwarding address, or a phone number. I knocked.

  “Yes?”

  A black woman’s face appeared with a scarf tied around her head, one stockinged and slippered foot also visible. The door covered the rest of her body.

  “Good morning. I’m looking for Mr. Thomas Phiri,” I said.

  “And you are?”

  “Anna Bain.”

  “Thomas doesn’t live here anymore,” she said, withd
rawing her face.

  “Are you Blessing?” I asked.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I’m so sorry to turn up at your doorstep, but I only had your address. I wasn’t given a phone number.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Who gave you my address?”

  “An old friend of yours—Adrian.”

  “I don’t know any Adrian.”

  “He was a lecturer at the LSE when your husband was a student in London. Adrian Bennett.”

  “The white spy who used to sniff around us?”

  Adrian, a spy? What could she mean by that?

  “Why’d he send you to me?” She asked with some impatience. She would shut the door if I didn’t say something.

  “I think I might be Francis Aggrey’s child,” I blurted.

  “That became Kofi Adjei?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a journalist? Is this a hoax?”

  “No.”

  There was nothing more I could say to convince her. She would either believe me or turn me away. I met her direct gaze, trying to appear as guileless as possible.

  “Come in, then,” she said.

  Blessing was heavyset and tall. Menthol fragrance wafted from the folds of her green and orange boubou. She walked with her right hand against the wall, dragging herself forward along an invisible rope. I followed her into a living room heated to tropical temperatures. Water damage spread across the ceiling in brown discolored patches. She motioned me to a sofa too big for the room.

  “Thomas is dead. He died two years ago,” she said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Died of stroke.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She studied my face. I waited for the examination to end, fixing my eyes on a photograph of a young Blessing and Thomas on their wedding day. She was a head taller than her husband but her chin was lowered meekly. A pose.

  “You say you’re Francis’s child . . . with a white woman?” she said.

  “Yes. He met my mother when he was a student.”

  “It’s possible. There were many cases like that we knew of. Irresponsible men. Not like Francis, though. Are you sure?” she asked.

  “My mother was Bronwen Bain. Francis lived in her house as a lodger. My grandfather was his landlord. Owen Bain.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “He left a diary. I found it among my mother’s things after she died. I also found this photograph.”

  I gave her the signed photograph of Francis. She held it close to her face.

  “Yes, that’s Francis. Always was a sharp dresser. So how can I help you?”

  “I want to meet him,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, I won’t be of much assistance. We haven’t spoken for almost forty years.”

  So that was it. Another brick wall. She was sliding to the edge of the sofa, preparing to stand and usher me out.

  “He wrote about you and Thomas in his diary.”

  “Is that so? What did he say?”

  “Here,” I said, holding up the diary.

  “Read it for me, please. My eyes.”

  “This is from when he moved in with Thomas.”

  “Yes, I remember that. I was still in Rhodesia. Go on.”

  “Thomas lives a rather interesting life. We are hardly ever in his flat, which is a mercy as the place is a pigsty. He steps out of his clothes and leaves them where they fall. He eats and dumps his plates on the windowsills. I cannot live in such conditions and I am constantly cleaning up after him.

  Thomas knows a great many members of what he calls the British left. They are an odd assortment. Duchesses and dustmen rubbing shoulders. We are all equal at the meetings we attend—Thomas Phiri and Sir Henry Norris, shake hands and be friends, no difference between black and white—but step out on the street to hail a cab and you’ll soon know the real story.”

  “That’s right. That was Thomas. Untidy and too political for his own good. At least until I arrived. You said Francis wrote about me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have met Thomas’s wife. She is a formidable woman. He seemed rather diminished in his newly spick-and-span flat. She is determined that he be called to the bar this year. Blessing has been to Menelik’s flat and is unimpressed. ‘If you want to fight imperialism go back and join the Chimurenga.’

  ‘We are strategizing,’ Thomas said weakly.

  ‘Strategize on the boat home.’”

  “Interesting. I didn’t know he noticed me enough to make such an observation. I was unimpressed by Thomas’s friends. A bunch of radical posers. Although I didn’t mind Francis. He was kind. Never came round to our flat without a small gift. Milk, apples, and so on.”

  “Did Thomas ever get called to the bar?” I asked.

  “No. He couldn’t pass the exams. He became a librarian,” she said. “What else from those days?”

  “He wrote about Menelik.”

  “He was a Caribbean, you know? Calling himself Menelik like some Ethiopian prince. They didn’t take slaves from Ethiopia. Read it.”

  “Menelik has gone on a speaking tour of the North of England. His flat is closed and I am left unoccupied. I try my old haunts, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, but I am thrown into those first days when I was a lonely Londoner. The other African students have scattered to their holiday jobs or the homes of their classmates. I have received no invitations. I do not know how to make myself amenable to the English.

  I have begun the book Menelik gave me on African kingdoms. It is arranged in order of the alphabet. I have read through Adal, Aksum, Alodia, Asante, and am now on Bamana. It will be the end of the holidays before I reach Zulu.”

  We were silent for a moment, as if a prayer had just been read.

  “So that’s where he got the name Bamana from. You’re holding history in your hands,” she said.

  “What was he like?”

  “I didn’t know him that well. He was Thomas’s friend, not mine. There was something about him that made people want to impress him, something cool and aloof, like he was condescending. But I suppose he was just thinking things through as that book has shown, making note of everything. He was never one for a quick response,” she said. “Does he know about your birth?”

  “I don’t think so. He went back to Bamana before my mother discovered she was pregnant.”

  “Why do you want to meet him, then? You seem to have done all right for yourself. Are you married? Children?”

  “I have one daughter. I’m in the process of getting a divorce.”

  “Shame,” she said.

  Her pity made me suddenly spiteful. “The diary—it says Thomas had other women.”

  She leaned forward.

  “You think you can come here and shock me with anything you read in that book?”

  “I’m sorry, I spoke out of turn.”

  “No, you spoke to wound me because you’re ashamed of this divorce, although I can’t see why. People get divorced all the time. And Thomas was here for five years without me. What do you expect? I’m just glad I didn’t arrive to find a half-caste bastard.”

  “I should go,” I said.

  “Now I’m the one who has spoken out of turn.”

  “No, really. I’ve kept you too long.”

  “Your father came here once in a motorcade of three black Benzes. Just after he was elected. His bodyguards stood in the hallway with their guns or whatever was under those big coats and we sat here, three of us in this room.” She pointed at the spaces her husband and my father had occupied.

  “He ate. One of his men insisted on tasting the food first, as if my sadza could be poisoned,” she said with a small smile. “For months, the neighbors were talking about the African prince that came to see us. It left Thomas feeling small. My husband wouldn’t have been president if he’d gone back to Zimbabwe, wouldn’t have been a cabinet minister, probably wouldn’t even have been a school principal
. But seeing Francis made him feel like we should have gone home. That was the last time we saw him.”

  She stood. The interview was at an end.

  “Are you sure I can’t offer you a cup of tea?”

  I dialed Adrian once I got home.

  “Blessing said you were a spy,” I said, bypassing a greeting.

  “Did she?”

  “I was expecting a more straightforward denial.”

  “I wasn’t a spy, but I was invited in by the Home Office once or twice because of my friendship with some members of the black left.”

  “And you went?” I asked.

  “I was curious. It was all a little James Bond. I didn’t tell them anything of use. I didn’t know anything of use. I certainly didn’t know about Menelik’s guns.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “And you should have told me you were Francis’s daughter before spending a night in my home,” he said. “I spoke to the Bamanaian high commissioner today. He was my chaperone in Segu when I was researching the book. He wasn’t a diplomat then, just one of Kofi’s numerous lackeys. I told him I was thinking of returning to Bamana one last time and that I’d like to meet Kofi again if it were possible. He gave me a contact.”

  “You have my father’s number?”

  “Hold on. I have a contact for his personal assistant. There might be another six people between this assistant and Kofi, but it’s a start.”

  “I want to meet him.”

  “I know. I hope you’re ready. Have you told your family?” he asked.

  “Do you think I should?”

  “It’s up to you. Nothing has come of it yet, but I’m sure they’d like to know.”

  “Well, I told my daughter that I’ve found my father, but I haven’t said much about who he is.”

  “That may be best. Until we’ve fixed a concrete meeting.”

  “I agree,” I said.

  When the call ended, I put my keys in my pocket and left the house. It was dark outside and I was the only person on the street.