Hangman E-Book

Maya Binyam

• Herausgeber: ONE
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 292

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

An existential journey, a tragic farce, a slapstick tragedy: a shockingly original debut novel about exile, diaspora and the search for Black refugeA man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years living in exile in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn't recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone at the airport knows him-a man who calls him brother. As they travel to this man's house, the purpose of his visit comes into focus: he is here to find his real brother, who is dying.In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of this twisted odyssey, and of the phantoms and tricksters, aid workers and taxi drivers, the relatives, riddles and strangers that lead this man along a circuitous path towards the truth. Hangman is an uncommonly assured debut: a strangely honest story of one man's stubborn search for refuge-in this world and the one that lies beyond it.

Leseprobe

For Binyam Tamene

Contents

Title PageDedicationOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenTwelveThirteenFourteenFifteenSixteenAcknowledgmentsAvailable and Coming Soon from ONE An imprint of Pushkin PressAbout the AuthorCopyright

One

In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up. The radio announced traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman whose occupation the dispatcher did not specify. But there was no traffic. My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door. Waiting in line, I felt I had no body, but by the time I reached security, I was hungry. Inside my carry-on, I found two apples and a croissant, which tasted like nothing. The security agent asked me for my name. I gave him my driver’s license, walked through the metal detector, and then my body went away.

Before takeoff, a flight attendant announced our destination. Everyone cheered. The passenger to my right asked if I was happy to be going home. He didn’t speak our destination’s national language, which had become the language of the plane. I told him that I was neither happy nor unhappy. He said he understood where I was coming from, because his work had introduced him to people like me. He said that people like me had changed his life. It was true that they needed money, but the fact that he gave it to them had nothing to do with what they meant to him.

His real life, outside of our destination, was complicated by ambivalence. Since childhood, his basic needs had been met as if by an invisible force. At first, he believed his mother and father were providing for him, but when they died, he was surprised to feel he had suffered no loss. Care, he realized, didn’t originate within his parents, whose protection remained palpable in almost everyone he encountered: wait-staff, his internist, even the prime minister. It had merely taken up residence in their bodies, which he didn’t need to visit, because the cemetery had nothing to do with the rest of his life.

He looked cautious when he mentioned that word, “cemetery,” as if he had accidentally said a slur. When he was done worrying about being offensive, he moved on to talking about his wife. Things had come to her easily. As soon as they got married, she wanted children, and then she gave birth to two. She considered recipes to be extraneous. Instead, she ordered cooking magazines, and then reproduced the food on the cover page from sight. He had no use for leftovers, because his office provided a catered lunch. Everyone he worked with had been elevated to the status of a boss. They made a lot of money but weren’t fond of discussing it, especially not with people like me. He appreciated the fact that people like me didn’t have desires. His desires felt paralyzing because they weren’t motivated by need. Everything was available to be possessed, which made it impossible to quantify an object or person’s relative allure. He wished he felt more lust for his mistress. I tried to relate to him and understand his concerns.

After takeoff, I unbuckled my seat belt. A flight attendant asked if I preferred coffee or tea. I thought about it but didn’t think I had a preference. She tried another language. When she said it like that, I realized I preferred coffee. The man to my right asked for sugar, and the flight attendant asked if I wanted sugar, too. I said no, and then she switched languages again and gave me sugar anyway. The coffee was delicious. The man to my right spit it out.

Behind me, an elderly woman was coughing. When her body gave her a break from that, she told the flight attendant her life story. As a young girl, she said, she had been very beautiful. When she was six, her classmate fell in love with her. He wrote her letters every day. One day, one of his letters was confiscated by the school principal, who loved her, too. To humiliate the classmate, the principal read the letter aloud. Everyone laughed, and the classmate never came to school again. Instead, he got very good at shooting guns. He realized that if he approached someone with a gun, even if it wasn’t loaded, he could get them to give him anything. When he turned sixteen, he fell in love with his servant. He wanted to marry her, but she got pregnant by the other servant. A few days before the birth, he saw the other servant chopping wood. His aim was really good at that point. When the other servant raised the axe above his head, the elderly woman’s classmate fired a shot between his legs and permanently damaged the other servant’s penis. Everyone in the town was sad about that, but the elderly woman’s classmate was rich, so they let him live his life.

Years later, when he was an adult, he came across a prison guard sitting outside a prison. He told the prison guard to let the prisoners go. They were political prisoners. The prison guard said he didn’t want to let them go, because it was very important to the prevailing political party that the prisoners remain imprisoned. The elderly woman’s classmate pointed a gun at the prison guard’s head and told him to do it anyway. Unfortunately, the prison guard, who was not educated in politics, continued to refuse to set the political prisoners free. He got shot in the head. Once it was clear that he was fully dead, the political prisoners went free. Their political party, the opposition party, turned the elderly woman’s classmate into a political symbol. Then the prevailing political party hanged him. That was the end of the elderly woman’s story.

After an hour, the ocean was the size of my window. I looked at the other passengers. Everyone was asleep, except the man to my right, who was watching a film on a portable DVD player. On the screen, a strange man with a bald head was standing on a street corner. A woman with a stroller walked by and he asked her to stop. She didn’t want to stop. I think she was worried for her baby, who wasn’t on the screen but who was supposed to be in the stroller. The man said to hold on a minute. The man said he had a question for her, and her face became open. He said, Do you belong to anybody? She looked flattered. I think she thought the question was specific to her, but when she walked away, he just did the same thing to the next person, who wasn’t even a woman. The next person was a teenager riding a bike. He didn’t stop, so the bald man just yelled out the question. The teenager rode away, and no one else was around to hear. Everyone was ignoring the strange bald man. He started to look lonely, and then he walked to a movie theater. He sat there and watched a movie about people having sexual relations. When it was done, he decided to walk across the city in a straight line. It didn’t matter if there were obstacles. He got to a fence and climbed it, then jumped off on the other side. He got to a building and the security guard told him to show his credentials. He said, Do you belong to anybody? The security guard didn’t answer the question but let him go through. The strange bald man climbed up to the roof, walked onto the roof of the next building, and then he fell.

I didn’t think the movie was supposed to be over, but the DVD player announced that it was going to sleep. I looked at the man to my right. I was hoping he would do something to make it wake up. His eyes were open. I said, Excuse me? No answer. To be fair, I had watched his personal movie without permission. He might not have liked that.

I decided to close my eyes, and then I fell asleep. When I woke up, the flight attendant was asking the man to my right if he preferred chicken or fish. He didn’t say anything, which I could relate to, because I also didn’t have a preference. If the fish was fresh, I would have preferred that, but I assumed it had been previously frozen and then cooked in some kind of unidentifiable oil, so comparing it with the chicken, I had no preference. I was thinking about that when the flight attendant began to scream. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I thought she must be having a personal problem. I turned to the man on my right, wondering if he could understand what was happening with the flight attendant. His eyes were still open, and his head was slanted to an extreme degree.

The flight attendant switched languages and told me the man to my right was dead. Another flight attendant asked me if I knew the man’s name. I told her that I knew about his problems with his desires, but to please excuse me, for I had not thought to ask for that information.

They made an announcement and asked if there were any doctors on board. Unfortunately, there were none, so a third flight attendant arrived with a first aid kit. Inside, there were bandages and medicated creams: nothing to help a dead man. I wanted to ask to move to another seat but wasn’t sure that would be the right thing to do. I stayed sitting in my seat. The flight attendants wrapped the man’s body in blankets and put a pillowcase over his head. I didn’t think that was any way to treat a dead man, but I recognized that they had no other option, just as I had no other option but to accompany him to our destination. For the rest of the flight, I couldn’t do anything but think about my life.

The flight attendants resumed their meal service. They didn’t ask for anyone’s preference, they just gave away whatever they had, and no one complained. For me, they provided both options: chicken and fish. I think the flight attendants felt that food was the only consolation they could give me. I pretended to eat it but really I just moved the food around the different compartments of the tray and then transferred it to a plastic bag so I could throw it away later. I wasn’t sure how it would look to arrive at my destination with trash, but I figured it was better than the alternative of offending the people in front of me.

I went back to thinking about my life. While I was thinking about that, a young man with very straight teeth reached over the dead man and tapped me on the shoulder. It was the pilot. He told me that once we landed, I would be given a voucher that would allow me to fly anywhere in the world that I wanted. In my head, I thought, I have no desire to get on a plane ever again. I said thank you, thinking that it was strange that he should leave the cockpit in order to give a gift to a stranger who had watched a movie, part of a movie, with a dead man.

When we landed, everyone clapped because they hadn’t died. I was basically sure I hadn’t died but didn’t think it would be right for me to clap at a dead man’s funeral. Unfortunately, because I was sitting next to the dead man, I had no choice but to be the final passenger to exit the plane. I wanted to look out the window, but the line to the exit had become a procession, and everyone wanted to stop to tell me they were sorry. I’m so sorry, said a man with a backpack. I couldn’t tell him apart from the dead man and was disturbed by that, so I looked at the next person, a woman, who said she was so sorry, too. The next man said sorry in a different language, and when he looked at me, he seemed like he was going to cry. I wondered if I knew him. I didn’t like that possibility, so I said thank you and waited for the next. I continued like that forever, at least a few minutes. I wanted to look out the window but had no choice. Outside was the country I had left twenty-six years prior, my brother, family, and everyone. And yet I had no choice but to sit and receive condolences for this dead stranger with a pillowcase on his head, who had entered my life only today, and whom I was now bound to think about so long as I lived.

Anyway, the experience was over. A group of airport workers came with a stretcher and wheeled the dead man away. I hoped he would find a doctor but had no idea what a doctor could do. I assumed resuscitation was not an option, but I prayed for that anyway.

In the terminal, everything smelled. I imagined all the smells that humans could make, and then in my head mixed them together. I decided that that was what the terminal smelled like. At immigration, they asked if I had already procured a visa. I had no idea if I had already procured a visa. I hadn’t even purchased my plane ticket. I didn’t say anything, so they switched languages and asked if I was a citizen. I was pretty sure I was not a citizen, but I said yes, because although I had become a citizen of another country, I could not, in that moment, remember if becoming a citizen of this new country had required me to revoke my status as a citizen of the country I was currently in. The immigration agents asked to see my passport, which was clearly the passport of someone who was not a citizen. They looked inside it but didn’t find any visas, because since receiving this passport I had never traveled anywhere that required me to have one. The immigration agents said that purchasing a visa on arrival would require me to pay fifty dollars. I asked if I had any other option. They said, No, you are not a citizen, you do not have a visa, and you have arrived here with the intention to leave the airport, therefore you have no option other than to get deported to where you came from. I thought about my intentions. If I didn’t have fifty dollars, it might make sense for me to agree to get deported. In my head, I thought, let me open my wallet and let the money make a decision. I opened my wallet and found fifty-five dollars. I had no idea if it was the right decision, but I handed the immigration agent fifty dollars, procured my visa, and walked into the baggage claim.

The baggage claim looked like a deserted zone. A man with a cart said that in order to get my bag, I needed to pay him. I was confused as to why I would need to pay a man with a cart for a bag that was already mine, so I said thank you and walked away. He followed me and said something, but I couldn’t understand it, because all his words sounded like they were drowning. He grabbed my arm and then tried to make his speech more formal. He told me that the bag system was such that in order to receive my bag and bring it through customs, I needed to have a cart. All the carts were controlled by him and other men with carts; therefore, the only way to use a cart was to rent it from one of the men, this man being the most reliable. He told me that unless my checked baggage happened to be a cart, that was the only way for me to leave the airport. I asked him how long it had been the case that this system was in place. He said the carts had been in effect since 1997. He might or might not have been telling the truth, but I could see that this particular cart was currently in effect, and so I had no choice but to accept my situation. I asked the man with the cart how much he charged for his service. He said five dollars. I gave him five dollars, the rest of my money, and prayed to God that there would be no more cart systems here or wherever I was going.

Outside, I saw people standing in line. When I got to the front, I realized I had been waiting for a taxicab, which I didn’t know if I needed. I asked the dispatcher how much a taxicab cost. I didn’t hear what he said, because I realized it didn’t matter what he said, on account of the fact that I had no money. I exited the line and walked back inside, toward the other place where people were, a crowd near the door of the terminal. All the people had flowers, and when they found someone they knew among the exiting passengers, they screamed and cried, because they were overwhelmingly happy to be reunited.

I saw a man with a mustache, who, like me, looked like he had nothing to do with anyone else. I walked up to him and tried to find something familiar in his face. It looked like a normal face, but it had some sad qualities, either because the man was a fundamentally sad person, or because he knew something about the circumstance of my return and had temporarily sacrificed his regular expression, friendly, stupid, etc., in order to imitate my own.

In my head I thought, this may be the man who has been sent here to pick me up. I asked him how he was doing. He told me he was doing good, and then he told me that he actually wasn’t doing good at all. Even though he was a happy person, he said, he was having a hard time not thinking about the horrible things other people had done to him. As a child, he had lived in a beautiful house. He loved the house because he had his own room, and in his room, there was a gun. Growing up, he didn’t know anyone with any problems, and everyone in his family was content. There was a drought, but it didn’t affect them, because they were rich, and they didn’t know anyone who was poor, besides the people who worked for them.

Anyway, he said, the house was beautiful. But then there was a change in the government, and the land got nationalized, and then there was another change in the government, and the land got privatized, and now he would never have his inheritance, unless he were to somehow find his gun, which had also been taken away, and kill the current residents of the house, or at least threaten to do so. The current residents of the house were diplomats. He didn’t think that was the right thing to do, so now he lived in the city and worked all day at the zoo, where he fed steak to the lions who lived there. The lions were starving and way too skinny. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about it, because the size of their steaks was determined by his boss, who did not care about the lions’ desired steak size.

The man was getting really animated, either because he was angry about the unfortunate situation involving the lions, or because the unfortunate situation involving the lions reminded him of his own unfortunate situation involving the house. These days, he said, he belonged to the middle class. I asked him about that, because as far as I was aware, the middle class did not exist. He told me that it did exist, and that because he belonged to the middle class, his appearance before me was evidence of its existence. I wasn’t sure about that. All the news articles I read about my home country told me that in the years since my departure, the middle class had quickly grown and then become eradicated on account of inflation, which went on and on. But I had a representative of the middle class in front of me, so I had no choice but to put my reading aside and understand the world, my home country, through my own two eyes. Here was a man of the middle class, stuck between the lions, who were starving, and his boss, who did not want to give them enough food.

However, he said, all the difficult things that had happened to him were made easier by his wife, who had figured out how to manipulate reality to suit his emotions. The world didn’t adhere to his convictions, but she nevertheless recognized them as fundamentally righteous. She had grown up in another country, far away, that had no moral culture whatsoever. Her parents didn’t have any customs, so she learned values from people she saw on TV, who taught her to buy random objects, discard them, and then buy some more. That was her life goal. But even after she accumulated things, she felt empty, and so when she became an adult, she decided to spend her time visiting places where the people had nothing. That was how they had met. He gave her an ethical code based on centuries of tradition, and in return she constructed a world to fit it. Then they fell in love.

I congratulated him on his successful marriage, and then asked if his wife had any proposed solutions to his problems with the house, his gun, and the lions’ insufficient steak portions. Unfortunately, he said, she had no means of influencing the will of the government, private landowners, or zoo managers, but she could, to some degree, force their homelife to adhere to his sense of justice, which sometimes appeared unrealistic to others, even though it wasn’t.

He had, for example, recently received an email notifying him of the death of his aunt, who had been to him like a mother. He took the notification, which was delivered impersonally, by a machine, as an affront. It went against tradition. Traditionally, he said, when someone died, their closest family members didn’t become aware of the news until they could be surrounded by other family members, who gave them the news all together. It was unreasonable to expect people to grieve without first deploying other people to demonstrate that grieving for them.

I wondered why the man felt the need to explain to me a cultural practice that belonged to us both, which had been thrust upon us by our parents, our ancestors, and, before them, probably God himself. Clearly, he felt that our way of life was under attack, either by the same forces that had encouraged his wife to value the accumulation of unnecessary objects, or by the internet, which forced people to forget their interests, habits, and historical way of life, and drove them to imitate the behavior of other people on the internet, whose motivations had no precedent. I didn’t share the man’s attachment to this particular tradition, which I sometimes found convoluted. But I could relate to his annoyance with the changing nature of life on earth, so I let him go on.

In the case of his aunt’s death, he said, there had been no ceremony. He had received the email while alone in an empty room, and so he couldn’t find anyone to show him what suffering looked like. When he told his wife about what had happened, he was not sad for his aunt, but angry at all his relatives who had outlived her, and who had sacrificed the typical conventions of mourning for something more convenient.

I told the man I was sorry about the untraditional behavior of his family. He told me that I didn’t need to be sorry about the untraditional behavior of his family, because his wife had figured out how to make the untraditional behavior of his family irrelevant. With her encouragement, he deleted the email alerting him of his aunt’s death, and then pretended he didn’t know anything about it. Meanwhile, she called his friends. She told them that she had just learned that he had suffered the loss of a very close relative and then invited them to gather at their home so that they might tell him together. His friends were gathering at their house now, while we spoke, and after he picked up his wife here, at the airport, they would drive to where the mourning party waited. After the news was delivered properly, he would be able to experience some release.

I waited for the man’s story to go on, hoping that it would eventually arrive at news of my brother. But his aunt’s life had nothing to do with my brother’s life, and even if my brother was close to death, the man’s story wasn’t about death in general, it was just about the redemptive qualities of his wife, a woman who was suddenly walking toward us, and who he began pulling into a hug. I realized we were not related, and, in fact, he had nothing to do with me. I was one hundred percent positive that he had not been sent to pick me up.

So, my journey continued. Some time passed, maybe a few hours. I wondered if I was going to have to stay in the airport overnight. I decided that that wouldn’t be the worst possibility, on account of the fact that I had grown used to the smell and the people with all their crying and hugging. I kept looking for someone among them, and they kept looking for someone among me. I felt like I didn’t know anyone. Not in the airport, not in the capital city, not in the country to which I was born or the country from which I had traveled, where I believed I had some people I knew, my wife, for example, but in that moment I was not convinced that she would know me, that if I encountered her here, in this terminal that smelled like all the human smells combined, she would not regard me as a stranger, as someone other than her husband, just a middle-aged man with two pieces of luggage: one on his shoulder, and the other one he was pulling at. I missed the old woman who used to be beautiful, I missed the flight attendants, the pilot, I even missed the dead man, who was gone from me forever, and the man with the cart, whom I hoped never to see again, but I missed him, too. It had been only one day and so many people I had lost. I was thinking about them but felt I had forgotten them already.

While that was happening, a bald man in an ugly leather jacket approached me. In another context, the jacket would not have been so ugly, but on him it looked ugly because his body was trying to escape it. I felt that everyone around me was bald today, myself included. The bald man came close, too close, until suddenly he was kissing my cheek. I said good afternoon, thinking that by then it must be night. He didn’t say good afternoon or good evening or even good morning. He didn’t say anything about the time of day, about the logistics of moving through the airport, and neither did he ask any questions about my travels, how I had experienced the flight, if I needed a cart, or a taxicab, or what had been my experience of waiting in this horrible place where the waiting continued forever. He just said, My brother.

I didn’t know what he meant by that, but in that moment, I remembered that I had not yet received the flight voucher that the pilot had promised me. After I received the voucher, I would be able to go anywhere in the world that I wanted, but where I wanted to go had no significance, since no one, no matter where I went, was going to know me. I looked at the man and said, Thank you, but I would appreciate it if you would please give the voucher to someone who has somewhere to go. There were thousands of people in the airport, at least a few hundred, and probably all of them knew someone somewhere else and would be happy to cross an ocean to find them, especially if the crossing itself were free of charge.

I was busy looking around for an alternative voucher recipient when the bald man said that thing again, My brother. At that point I thought this man might have a problem, since he was sent to speak with me for one reason only, and yet could not complete the simple task of handing me a voucher, or even following my instruction to find a replacement. On top of all that, I really hated his leather jacket, which got very close to me as he kissed my cheeks, which he was now doing, all while saying that nonsensical thing, My brother, my brother, my brother. I looked at him with alarm. Although I did not want to call security, and in fact had no idea where the security people were located or what capability they had to deal with a bald man in an ugly leather jacket who was refusing to give me, or another person, a voucher that I did not want, I felt I had no choice but to consider calling them. That was what I was thinking, but in reality, I wished to appear polite, so I allowed the man to kiss me, and when he hugged me, I hugged him, too.

Honestly, I had no idea what to do with the man. Something wasn’t clicking between us, and I was sure it never would, most likely because the man was stupid. But then he took his hands and used them to cover his forehead, so that his face was no longer obstructed by his baldness, and he became someone else.

My brother, he said. His face was clear and perfect. In that moment, I realized that this bald man with the ugly leather jacket, who referred to me not by my name, but by my status as his brother, was my cousin. He had arrived, finally, to pick me up, and would transport me to the next place where I was going.

Two

I slept for days, at least a few hours. When I woke up, it was morning. At first, I thought that my room, the room I had been given to sleep in, was bigger than I imagined. But then I remembered that I hadn’t imagined any room at all. This was the house of my cousin and his family. Thankfully, after we arrived, he had discarded his ugly leather jacket onto a chair, where it didn’t look like anything. I forgot about its presence entirely. When I woke up, I felt like a new person, and everything that had happened the previous day was in my past.

I made the bed in my usual style. I wasn’t sure if it was the style my cousin preferred, but I thought it would suffice, especially if I was going to be sleeping in the bed for another night. In that case, I would be the only one to encounter the bed in the style in which I had made it. I thought about taking a shower. Luckily, the bathroom was attached to my room, so I didn’t have to ask my cousin or anyone else any questions. I just had to open the door. However, when I opened the door, I discovered that the bathroom was not my private bathroom at all, for on top of the toilet was a pigeon. Yes, a pigeon. I had no idea what kind of bathroom it was, available for use by guests and pigeons, or at least one pigeon, the one pigeon being the pigeon in front of me. I considered not showering but felt I had no choice, especially given my association with the dead man and the uncleanliness that might have accrued through that. Anyway, I thought, many things have probably changed since I left this country, and being open to sharing a shower with a pigeon may be one of them.

I turned on the faucet. There was no shower curtain, and, in fact, there was no barrier at all between the shower and the rest of the bathroom. There was simply a faucet and a drain beneath it, with the rest of the bathroom continuing on from there. The water splashed everywhere. I had no idea if pigeons liked water, or if this one in particular had a preference for water versus no water, so I was concerned for him, and tried my best to keep the water splashing in my personal shower zone. Anyway, he didn’t seem to mind. He just sat on top of the toilet and cleaned his feathers with his beak, or at least that was what I assumed he was doing, because I didn’t want to get too close. I was able to forget about him long enough to clean my body, and then I ran out of the bathroom and left him to whatever he was doing before I got there, I didn’t care to know.