The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories by Sayers Valerie;

Author:Sayers, Valerie; [Sayers, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781639820504
Publisher: Slant Books
Published: 2021-10-09T22:38:18+00:00

The Object of My Preposition

In memory of Ken Saro-Wiwa

HE WAS A SHORT MAN, five-two or so, no taller than I am. Straightaway I mistrusted him.

“My family and I are coming from Rwanda.” He would not meet my eye. He swept away imaginary dust from the seat I offered, waved off my offer of coffee, snorted when I said then how about tea. His feet dangled down from the big plastic clinic chair the same way mine did: like a child’s.

I had not seen a Rwandan that short. Not that I had a large sample to compare—maybe twenty Rwandans had streamed into Greenglass after the genocide, with their children and their adopted children and any little ones they could grab up and pass off as their children, and they were all tall, even the Hutus in mixed marriages. Greenglass has been taking in refugees since the Vietnamese boat people: Lebanese, Somalis, Kurds, Cambodians, Croatians, Bosnians. The interfaith council gets them here, and then God help them. Last year a Kosovar kid slashed five black girls in the Greenglass Middle School lunchroom with a razor blade. We’ve had our share of suicides.

I took out a legal pad and wrote down all the business you record about people whose lives have been ripped from them––not that I believed for a minute that this man was Rwandan. I would have staked my job on it. But I played along, told him that so far we’d had good luck with judges moving things along quickly. His was a very late request but we’d see what we could do. I could have one of the attorneys interview him tomorrow, and meanwhile he might think about any kind of trauma that would help account for the delay. That was going farther than I was supposed to go.

He wouldn’t look at me––he turned his torso almost to a right angle––but when I said he should bring all his papers when he came back, all of them, he swung around and stared hard, straight at me.

“We are not coming from Rwanda.”

“Well, how long did you think it was going to be before somebody figured that out?” I didn’t usually speak to the clients that way but then, the clients didn’t usually treat me his way either.

He matched any evil eye my ex-husband ever cast my way and lifted his chin. “We are coming from Nigeria.”

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Because I have heard that the lawyers speak only to Rwandans. Because I am not telling my private business to any busybody.”

I drew my own chin up, offended that he expected me to confuse one suffering African for another. “Mr. Okapu, I am not a busybody. I am the case manager. I compile the information the attorneys will need to interview you.” And I slashed through Rwanda, rather dramatically I admit, and wrote Nigeria in block letters big enough for him to read upside down. Then I affected a businesslike tone to indicate how uninterested I was in his private business.

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