In the dim light of the downtown Atlanta Renaissance Hotel room, fifty-year-old Nambi from Sierra Leone believed the younger white man with the stringy blonde hair had a foot fetish. He twisted her left leg and ran his fingers over the brown-black indentation on her calf. The scar was a legacy from a wound she sustained as her family escaped rampaging troops during the end stages of Sierra Leone’s Civil War.
Nambi remembered that she had fallen from the force of an explosion. A few yards ahead, she spied her sister’s skinny ankles, the swollen ones of her mother, and the white high-top canvas enclosing her father’s amid the smoke. She had started a crawl toward them when a bright flash and a second explosion catapulted the toes, ankles, and canvas shoes into the air. Chunks of flesh, bone fragments, metal scraps, and red laterite clumps rained on the pubescent girl. That was her last memory of family.
A woman who witnessed the explosion lifted Nambi to safety. That day, and during their ten-day trek to the regional capital, Kenema, she cared for Nambi’s wounds. “They need air to heal,” some among the fleeing trekkers advised. The woman applied ointments directly to the gaping laceration on her calf but did not cover it. “No,” others cautioned, “flesh wounds need to be covered so they don’t get infected.” The woman bound the wound, but it festered. Pathogens burrowed into the muscles, eventually healing into the concave indentation occupying almost all her left calf. When, years later, the self-conscious teenager bemoaned the blemish on her nubile body, the woman who had rescued and adopted her slapped the back of her head and asked, “You want to switch places with them?”
“No!” Nambi wanted no part of her family’s fate.
Indeed, she felt lucky as the man massaged the scar as if he wanted to resurrect her lost flesh, deserving, as his fingers slid along the back of her knee and tickled her gluteus, and justified, as she grabbed his member and guided him into her. Sweetness wracked her loins. Yet, an hour later, as the man’s pale torso rose and fell in a languid sleep beside her, she felt alone, dissatisfied, in the febrile coolness of the Renaissance.
How had she become entangled with this stranger? Anxiety surged through her body and sent her scurrying to the window. She parted the curtains just enough to let the Technicolour Atlanta night sky spill into the room. That, plus the trail of brightening and softening red taillights from vehicles heading north on I-285, steadied and then quickened her spirit. She wanted to run down the steps, jump into a car, and join the slow but purposeful journey forward.
Yet, here she was in this den of iniquity with a man whose last name she did not know.
Was this tryst reckless revenge for her husband, Big Man’s, infidelity? Was this the breakout Aphrodite and the other wives in her neighbourhood said she needed to make? Did this rendezvous amount to doing things differently? Would it change the balance in her relationship with her husband? She did not know.
Nambi had just slipped back under the thick bedcover to allow herself a warmer, more thoughtful accounting of her situation when the man’s phone burst into song,
“Waka-waka baby, oh yeah.
Corner-corner baby, oh yeah.
Chuku-chuku baby, oh yeah.
Sawa-sawa sawale.
Sawa-sawa sawale. Ashawo!”
She frowned as the ringtone excerpt from the famous song about a Lagos prostitute played and replayed before the man woke up, reached across her body, and grabbed the phone from the nightstand.
“Hello,” he growled into the mouthpiece. “Yes, this is he.” The man’s hand reached under the bedcovers, found, and began to massage Nambi’s scar. “Oh, no,” he sprang up, naked, from the bed and rushed into the bathroom. For several minutes, she could hear his distraught but muffled voice.
As Nambi awaited his return, her mind drifted to the woman who had raised her. She had used the rescue to justify everything – the tiled floor Nambi slept on, the hand-me-downs she wore, the chicken gizzards she ate, and the husband-to-be she presented to her three months before her college entrance exams. He was thirty years Nambi’s senior. When she objected, the woman asked, “Do you want to switch places with them? Accept him, now. He will change your life.”
And so, Nambi had agreed to marry Big Man. After all, he had offered a hefty bride price no sane single parent could refuse. He was Christian, a friend of the minister of health, and the country’s sole supplier of regulated and unregulated medications to brick-and-mortar government hospitals and ghost clinics existing only on paper. Most importantly, she argued, Big Man was ready to enter politics, national development. He needed a young but humble wife to complete his political profile.
“Feed him well. Make him your Lord and Master, and your life will be blessed with children and happiness,” the woman had whispered just before the S-Class Mercedes whisked the couple off to their honeymoon. That shared confidence, the first and last Nambi ever received from the woman, had calmed the anxiety-ridden bride. It became the anodyne she used to soothe the pain of his thickness that honeymoon night as he entered her from the back.
“Ouch.” She convulsed.
“Shush. Accept it now.” She had sucked in the pain. His pleasures became hers. So too did his friends and his life. She became his avatar.
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Back Home Abroad is written by Pede Hollist and published by Narrative Escape.
