Travellers by Helon Habila

Author:Helon Habila [Habila, Helon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241986301
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

It was fortuitous that I bought a ticket for the French TGV train instead of the Deutsche Bahn, which, it turned out, was on strike today. It meant I had to go through Zurich to transfer to a Berlin train. I passed through a line of disappointed Deutsche Bahn customers waiting for answers regarding their travel. As the train pulled away from the glum faces on the platform, I tried to suppress a smug feeling of false prescience we all get when things work out for us and don’t work out for others in the same situation. It was three hours to Zurich, so I closed my eyes as soon as we got under way. I jerked awake as the train came to a stop at the Zurich station. I stood up and ran to my next train, I felt sluggish, slowed down by sleep, but I made it before the doors closed. I put my head down and slept off again. The next time I woke up a border policewoman was standing over me. We were at the German border, the train had come to a stop and the police were going around the train, checking documents. There were two officers in the carriage, the other, a man, was talking to another passenger a few seats away from me. I couldn’t help but notice that the other passenger was also African, with the tall thin frame and curly hair common to some East Africans. A Somali, most likely; with him was a boy of about twelve.

I handed the officer my passport.

‘Nigerian,’ she said. She looked at the picture in the passport and then at me in that way immigration officers always do, then she asked me if I had bought any watches or jewellery in Switzerland. I wasn’t worried about my documents, my German visa still had two more months on it, and I’d be long out of Europe before it expired. The other passenger seemed to be involved in a long discussion with the officer who had now taken his document, a piece of A4 paper, and was consulting with the female officer. They went back to the Somalian and asked him a few more questions before returning the document to him. Our eyes locked and he nodded at me, I nodded back. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t return to sleep. When the train stopped at the next station and I opened my eyes, I saw he was sitting opposite me. ‘This seat is free, yes? You don’t mind if we sit with you?’ he asked. We were the only black people in the carriage, and it was natural for him to assume some solidarity, a closing of ranks, the same way some black people would carefully avoid talking to another black person in a room full of white people. Obviously he was starving for company. I nodded. ‘Please.’

He looked to be in his middle to late fifties, but when he smiled he had a twinkle in his eyes and it took away five years from his face.

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