Amriika by M. G. Vassanji Read Free Book Online Page B

asked when they were alone later, and Ramji simply shook his head. Not to deny sin, no, but to deny confession.

    April is the cruellest month, yes, but for sheer doomsday bleakness, for gut-wrenching, soul-searing emptiness, you can’t surpass Christmas. Ask your resident aliens.
    Get away for Christmas, his Ethiopian friends told him; unless you want to risk jumping down from the fifth floor into that ultimate abyss. It is the worst time in America — if you don’t have anyone. Last year it was Rich Corey, and he belonged here. Richard Corey? You’re having me on — isn’t he the fellow in the Simon and Garfunkel song? Same name, same fate; only, this Corey jumped. Why? Loneliness, perhaps; LSD ; couldn’t make the grade — who knows, could be a combination of all three. This firstChristmas, get away to your host family. Phone them, they’ll invite you. They always invite you. Americans are kind.
    The fifth floor had three Ethiopians, all bright, among the cream of their poor country’s student crop, all waiting for the downfall of their diminutive but unshakeable emperor Haile Selassie. Ebrahim, Marek, and Tekle, of whom the first was tall with a halo-like Afro haircut, and an admirer of Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, a constant drinker of sweetened black tea, and a teller of Haile Selassie jokes. He and Ramji had developed a warm friendship, though they had yet to become close. Marek had a quiet, mousy American girl spending nights with him, and Tekle, as tiny as his emperor, was at his books day and night.
    Hey Ramji, have you heard the one about Ethiopia’s space flight to the sun?
    To the sun?
    You haven’t heard it then.
    No, tell me. And I’ll tell you the one about Nehru and Nyerere stealing flatware at Buckingham Palace.
    Listen, says Ebrahim. You know that Haile Selassie always says, For everything we do, we think twice — that’s the royal “we.” Well, last year UNESCO held a space conference for the benefit of Third World countries. Okay, you didn’t hear about it, but it’s true. Each leader was asked: Where, in the future, would you like to send your spaceships?
    Yes?
    Well, some said Mars, some Venus, many said the moon. When it was the turn of the King of Kings, the Lion of Judah, he said, We would like to send our men to the sun.
    UNESCO thought these Ethiopians must have some ancientscientific wisdom they hadn’t revealed to the world. The Americans and Russians were curious. “Tell us,” they said, “how you can send astronauts to the sun when advanced countries like ours can’t. Do you know how hot the sun is?”
    Haile Selassie smiled. He said, “For everything we do, we think twice. We will send a rocket to the sun at night!”
    And now, tell me about Nehru and Nyerere.
    Later, said Ramji. But tell me, how come you’re not going to
your
host family?
    Ebrahim’s smile was part sheepish, part defiant. It turned out that on his first visit there he’d been accused of making a pass at one of the two daughters of the family.
    Shame on you, said Ramji, how
could
you? And then: Did you do it? How old was she?
    A tight-lipped silence. I don’t have to tell you, the expression on Ebrahim’s face seemed to say, I know what I know. And that’s what stood between them, Ramji thought, what couldn’t draw the bonds of Africa any closer: the feeling of black anger and the defiance that was an expression of “black power.”
    And so he was going to spend his very first Christmas at the Morrises. It was going to snow, it would be a white Christmas, the forecast said so. He had known Christmases only through storybooks — images of stockings, Father Christmas, and snow. Back in Dar, a shop not far from where he lived had stuck a cottonwool beard on a roly-poly red doll to improvise a Santa Claus for its display window, in a background of cotton-wool snow and matchbox houses and a zebra-drawn carriage to make a Christmas scene that had drawn large crowds of viewers.
    How do you