Today—this wicked hot day in July, the air thick with the weight of terror and intercession, Kunle would die. He felt oddly calm at the prospect of this. Excited almost. On the deserted stage hidden within his mind, he directed with utmost precision the scene he hoped would play out: the nose of a plane piercing through soil—quick as a needle jammed through a flimsy piece of cloth. Then flame. Angry and red-hued, licking paint off a decaying machine. On its tail, death. Dripping ink across green grass, slinking through bellowing black smoke, hungry to claim the wretched folk enclosed in the plane’s metal belly. And what loot it would be! Rich men with naira notes stuffed in silk-lined pockets. Poor men with kissing kobo coins kept hidden in nearly empty purses. Unborn children kicking against an angry current of blood and water. And Kunle, Kunle would finally be able to breathe without feeling as though he were swallowing a handful of thorns. He would taste peace, no matter how painful the circumstance.
The woman squashed next to him was screaming, voice strained over the crackling PA system. The moment she walked through the cabin door and onto the aisle, all those hours before the plane took off from Berlin Tegel, Kunle prayed that some other miserable creature would have the misfortune of keeping her company. She, of course, settled right next to him. As her mammoth-like body pressed him against the window, and as he watched loose skin swing like a pendulum in a grandfather clock, revulsion washed over him. He radiated it.
In his early days in Germany, Kunle would have been indifferent to this aspect of her person. But after five years in Europe, he had grown disgusted with all forms of excess. When he saw her, he saw greed, and when he saw greed, he saw Berlin—dangerous, dazzling, a city that was never satisfied. She nodded politely. He did not acknowledge her.
“Calm down, everyone! The pilot says it’s just a touch of turbulence!”
The wind, seemingly offended at its relegation to mild inconvenience, jerked the plane about once more. The young flight attendant fell to her knees dragging the PA system along with her. A chorus of yells arose from the passengers of Virgin Nigeria 131. As most of the passengers were Nigerian, and as Nigerians possessed an incomparable obsession with divinity, calls to God and denouncements of the devil flew across heads with dizzying speed. They assumed the force of weapons.
Kunle wondered what his mother would do once she discovered her only son had perished. Burned to cinders on the same journey she begged him not to undertake.
“Why would you come back to Lagos?” she asked, voice sputtering over the cellphone.
“I think—”
“I don’t care what you think!” she replied. “Your father and I poured millions into your education.”
She was met with silence.
Kunle hung up.
Now, there was a chance he would not make it home. Would his mother throw herself onto the ground? Roll across carpeted floors and scream, gripped by the cold hands of the Holy Spirit? Would she fashion her curses into missiles, hurl them to hell?
The night before Kunle left Lagos for Berlin five years ago, his mother snuck him to the church across the street from their villa. Under the hefty cloak of a starless Lagos sky, Folashade dragged her son by the wrist to the basement of Wale Ecumenical Ministry—a decrepit building brimming with exorcized spirits and dirty naira notes and lies so thoughtfully flavored, that when placed upon the tongues of the unexpecting, they acquired a faint truth-like taste. Eternally assiduous, she had engineered a covert prayer session in cahoots with the head pastor.
“My son,” he said. “Your mother tells me you’re going abroad soon.”
Kunle rubbed his eyes roughly, unable to make sense of the scene rapidly unravelling itself before him: a fat man in a white gown; feet so large that it was a wonder the ground could withstand such weight at all; a damp room lit only by the flames of two candles; his mother, face gleaming with sweat and determination.
“Yes, my son,” the man continued. “Are you not the Kunle going to Germany tomorrow?”
Slowly, the kneeling boy glanced at his mother. She gave him a sharp nod.
“I am,” he said hesitantly. Folashade had warned him to tell no one of his imminent departure. “Evil eye is everywhere,” she said. “Remember Motun’s son—the skinny boy with the big nose. He managed to get a scholarship to England, fully funded! And then he began to run his slack, good-for-nothing mouth and the wretches at the British Embassy denied him a visa. If you don’t want that curse, you’ll keep your mouth shut.”
Yet, here he was, tired and confused, relaying to this man whom he had never met the story of how he’d obtained a scholarship to study engineering in Germany. In the corner of this mildewed room, heavy with the smell of grease and hush money—this scent which hung over Lagos like fog—Folashade smiled. No one, not her stupid sister, her nosy neighbors, her fair-weather friends could boast of such a feat: an engineer trained in Europe. Pride bubbled under skin, her eyelashes became leaden with diamonds, and then the prayers began. The bulky man with the big feet began to jerk back and forth, a babble of nonsense spurting from fat, fleshy lips. Folashade too began to dance around violently; as though the ground beneath her were a sea of burning embers.
“May Jesus protect you from failure! From seductive women! From envious men! From sexual deviance!” With each supplication came a firm push against the forehead, a cutting slap across the face. It continued like this until sunrise.
Kunle often thought back to that night each time he lay with strange, milk-colored men. Eighteen, kneeling beneath a painting of a blue-eyed, pale-skinned Christ, accosted by Pastor Wale and his gargantuan hooves. Now, rather than bowing before Christ, he bowed before men—eyes wide, mouth open, pleasure pooling at his feet.
II
Kunle discovered his penchant for beautiful boys three days after his debarking at Berlin’s Tegel Airport. It had been a difficult arrival, perforated with the strange taste of hole-riddled German, the strange sensation of a blue-black body sailing across an ocean of porcelain.
“Hi. I’m trying to—ich versuche, die Plaza Frankfurter Allee—uh—trying to get to Frankfurter Allee? Do you know how I could—er—geh dorthin?”
Both his English and the German he struggled to learn were caked in difference. They exuded an undiluted stench of “other” the moment his pink lips parted. Like many wealthy Nigerians, Kunle took speech lessons to dull the sharp edges of his accent: beat his tongue into submission, into something more palatable, a snake capable of slinking its way around the most difficult of sentences. As a result, he sounded like an odd mix of British and American. Nigerian and not.
The older woman who he’d stopped gave him a puzzling look. And then, before she could disguise it, disgust flashed across her face, so quick that Kunle wondered whether it had even happened at all. “Nein,” she said, giving him a faint smile. Luggage in tow, she continued resolutely toward the exit, refusing to meet the boy’s pleading gaze.
Such treatment continued until a young man, beautiful of face and lanky of body exclaimed with excitement, “Yes I do! I speak English too, so you don’t have to worry.”
A smile so brilliant, so wide that it momentarily disfigured him, burst across Kunle’s face. From that moment on, Alwin became proof of his mother’s benediction. Perfect Alwin with his jet-black hair and magnificent eyes and fingernails carefully coated the color of dusk. Perfect Alwin who kissed so tenderly, moaned so softly, whose fingers had brought Kunle to the brink of ecstasy more times than he cared to remember. Perfect Alwin who convinced him that he did not belong in Berlin. That he never would.
“So, you’re here to study?”
They were in a taxi heading to the International University of Applied Sciences.
“Yeah. Engineering. You?”
“I don’t go to school.”
Just as Kunle was about to inquire what he did rather than study, and why he was at the airport in the first place, Alwin smiled. It was at this juncture that Kunle really looked at him.A small beauty mark lived above the right corner of his mouth. A silver ring hung precariously from his nose. His hair fell above his eyes in a manner that accentuated the thickness of his eyelashes. A breath caught in Kunle’s throat.
He had experienced this only once before, this peculiar feeling of being unable to exhale regardless of how hard he tried. It was four years ago on a termite-infested bench tucked behind Redeem High School. He had asked Tunde, an old friend of his, to touch him. Breaths rattled. Voices choked.
He could not understand the origins of such a question, but before he could scrutinize the thought, analyze the strange sensation, the words had already tumbled out his mouth, clumsy and uncoordinated. Like water rushing from a tap.
They never spoke again.
He swallowed the questions he had for the beautiful man sitting comfortably beside him. A virulent quiet settled over them.
“Well, we’re here,” Alwin said uncertainly. “Let me know if you need anything.”
He scribbled his phone number onto the piece of scrap paper he fished from his pocket. He pressed it into Kunle’s palm, smiled, and then jumped out of the taxi.
This is where Kunle’s life began.
III
The International University of Applied Sciences reeked of privilege. One that Kunle could not comprehend. Boys younger than him spoke with a force, a clarity only the moneyed possessed. Their clothes emanated superiority, their cars sang songs of stolen fortune, their feet glided across concrete—like Jesus gliding across the Sea of Galilee. Kunle swore that he never saw them touch the ground, these boys. He swore that they hovered just above it.
Of course, Kunle too grew up affluent—his mother ran a business importing Italian shoes from Milan (an obsession of deep-pocketed Nigerian women), and his father served as one of the many directors of PetrolCon—a company notorious for its numerous oil spills in the Niger Delta. Nevertheless, the truth of the matter remained that the Naira was slave to the Euro, even decades after Nigeria’s purported freedom. Subordinate, encrusted with the same “otherness” that glazed Kunle’s patchwork of an accent. His wealth—a surety of life in Lagos—did not accompany him to Berlin. Instead, it lounged comfortably in his father’s villa, gorging itself on the misfortunes of the poor; of destitute people unable to afford a breakfast of akara and pap.
Without incredulous abundance as an accessory, Kunle felt ill at ease. Incapable of connecting to his peers. A somber shadow of loneliness attached herself to him. It was she who drove him, exactly three days after he landed in Berlin, to smoothen the rumpled piece of paper he had kept hidden in his trousers. She coaxed him to take a deep breath. She lifted his thin index finger. She placed the digit carefully upon a random assortment of keys embedded in his Blackberry. The phone rang. Alwin’s voice ground through the speaker. Suddenly, Kunle’s shadowy companion burst into nothingness. Pieces of wispy gloom fell around him until a peculiar black dust coated his shoes.
“Hello? Who’s this?”
“It’s Kunle. I don’t know if you remember me from the airport? I–”
“Oh, hey! What can I help you with?”
He pondered the question, mulling it over in his mind.
There was quiet, a static crackle over the phone.
Before long, he found himself in the front seat of Alwin’s rickety Volkswagen, laughing with this man whose existence was a mystery only a week ago. As they flew down spray-painted streets, life took on a new hue: bright and orange. Like fire.
“I take it University isn’t treating you well?”
The car had rolled to a stop in an empty parking lot behind a dilapidated building in Kreuzburg. Alwin lit a cigarette. Kunle watched as his lips wrapped around it, watched as black, bitter smoke filled the creaky convertible.
“No. Although, it’s only been three days. I think I’m having some trouble adjusting. Everything here is really different. The food, the language, all of it is—”
“Different?” Alwin said, a small smile plastered onto his face.
Kunle laughed. “Yeah. My mother would say I should give it some time. She’d say I should pray about it. Probably something about how nothing worth doing is easy.”
Alwin chuckled. “That’s bullshit. Come with me.”
Alwin stubbed the cigarette out on the steering wheel and grabbed Kunle by the shirt. Grinning playfully, he led him down a winding road to another decrepit building down the street. Music poured from each crack and crevice of the structure. A large black man stood militantly by the steel door. Ropes of German burst from Alwin’s lips, and although the man stationed at the entrance seemed slightly unconvinced, the door swung open. Alwin yanked Kunle into the dark, damp warehouse and whispered, “Look. The whole ‘nothing worth doing is easy’ thing is bullshit. Everything worth doing should be easy. Life’s fucking short. No time to waste rotting away in your bedroom thinking about how to make a terrible situation less terrible. You just—you just go out and fucking do it.”
That night, ensconced in the thick heat of hedonism emanating from the floorboards, Kunle had sex with a man for the first time. A man he had never met, nor cared to meet again. It was the first time his strong, black hair was complimented and then pulled. It was the first time he was asked to speak African during intercourse. That night, deafening music blasting from bass-heavy speakers, pink strobe lights soaking bodies in sin, he made a man Jesus.
IV
Berlin, for all its pleasures, remained particularly unkind to Kunle for much of the five years he called the city home. Chief of all terrors was the fact that he’d never looked at himself more. He had taken to placing sheets over the mirrors at home for fear that he would catch a glimpse of his body as he went about his day. Each time he met his own reflection, he stared, transfixed by it:
Dark skin, stretched taut over long, heavy bones. Lips, round and pink, flecked with small spots of black. A slender nose, slightly bulbous at the tip. Almond-shaped eyes the color of burnt honey. Big shoulders, a lean body, muscles rippling across a toned stomach. Fingernails filed to the bone. Flawlessly set teeth, bright white and blinding. Thick black hair.
His hair was what he noticed the most. The almost-perfect roundedness of it. The way it caught light, tips drenched in the afternoon sun. Its softness when slathered in coconut oil. Its sheen, its rebellion against Berlin’s flimsy plastic combs.
He often thought of shaving it all off. Taking a razor to it and watching tufts of hair fall around the room like snow, powdery and pitch-black. Yet, no matter how many times he willed it, no matter how many times he walked to the small barber shop in Schöneberg, heels burning and mind resolute, he could not bring himself to do the unconscionable. He would stop right at the door, turn around, and walk the two hours back to his neighborhood.
Kunle, who had never been black until his move to Berlin, quickly discovered the paradox present in the inhabiting of his black body. Indeed, there were many who refused to sit next to him on the bus, who looked at him as though he were a roach, or a piece of gum stuck underneath their shoes, who spat expletives at him like snakes volleying venom, but there were others too, to whom his blackness was a blessing, a gift. He feared that those people would desert him without his head of beautiful black snow. And so, he would leave Schöneberg with a head full of hair and a chest full of sadness, a dejection that bound itself to him like a millstone around his neck.
He routinely met these men at grimy clubs in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. Each interaction followed an indistinguishable progression;
“Hi! Where are you from?” they’d ask.
“Nigeria,” he’d say.
And then two bodies, one pale, the other pitch-black, would lock in a loud and ecstatic embrace.
One night, a big man with chest hair as dense as a forest asked him plainly:
“Can you bark for me?”
The question hung in the air suspended by disbelief and indignation.
And then Kunle got on his knees and barked.
Another asked him to growl like a lion, and another struck up casual conversation about Boko Haram and the Yar’Adua presidency while his penis was down his throat.
“I always thought Yar’Adua would’ve made a great president had he not died,” he muttered, thrusting deeper into Kunle’s mouth. When Kunle did not reply, he stopped and said, tone saturated in a frightening intensity, “I really do want to hear your thoughts.”
Then there was of course the man who regaled him with excerpts from the Curse of Ham, another who slurred in fits of violent drunkenness, “I love how you smell,” and another who asked whether his genitals were as black as the rest of his body.
But in a world so far from Lagos, so completely divorced from concrete reality, this oppressive hunger to be wanted ate away at his ability to reason. It took bite after bite until nothing remained. It left in its wake a peculiar mixture of dust and fog, a concoction trapped within the confines of a beautiful, tired head. In Berlin, Kunle was inferior, subordinate. In Bed, he was someone to be spoken to, desired. An object of simultaneous worship and lust. Little did it matter that he was asked to bark and growl. Men were animals at their core anyway.
V
The first time Kunle thought of returning home, he was twenty-two. He sat on silk sheets stained with blood, wondering to himself how the man in front of him would rid the fabric of its imperfection. Bleach wouldn’t work, he thought: silk was far too weak a cloth. Maybe the machine? No. Too risky. It would have to be handwashed, loved back to cleanliness.
“How will you get that out?” he asked, eyes fastened onto blotches of crimson.
“What?”
“The stain.”
“Oh!” the man said. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. I have people who are paid for that.”
With a grunt, he heaved himself out of bed and pulled on his trousers. He flashed Kunle a bright smile, teeth a faint red from the blood he’d drawn.
“Africans are tougher, no?” he’d grunted, as teeth tore into neck, arms, thigh. He did not stop until his tongue was colored copper.
Eyes still focused on the stain, Kunle got up gingerly. He slid into his clothes, took a deep breath, and began walking toward the bedroom door.
“Where are you going?” the man asked.
Kunle did not reply. He walked out the room, down the winding staircase, through the kitchen, and then out the oak-wood door of the foyer. As pain tore into him, as tears clouded his vision, and as the fog in his head began to lift, he swore to himself that he would never step foot in another club. He swore that he would never touch another man.
VI
When Alwin heard the story, he laughed.
“It’s funny?” Kunle asked, slightly irritated by his response. “I could’ve been eaten!”
They were at a small cafe down the road from his university. There was a mug of steaming black coffee between them, and a rendition of Bach’s “Air on a G String” blared softly from broken speakers. A few months ago, he and Alwin kissed on the dusty couch parked in the corner of the coffee shop. It had become a ritual now: Thursday evenings in this quaint cafe, discussing the happenings of the week, feet shuffling underneath pockmarked tables.
“It’s hilarious!” Alwin said.
Kunle frowned. “You never take anything seriously.”
Bitterness dripped from the words into the cup of coffee. Liquid turned to tar.
After they’d kissed all those months ago, Kunle told Alwin that he loved him. He had kept this information hidden, shoved it down the depths of his throat, the length of his body, unable to admit it even to himself. He told him that he wanted to stay in Berlin, build a life together. He told him that he was his best friend.
Alwin laughed. It was a patchy, nervous thing.
“I don’t think Berlin is for you in the long run,” he’d said. “You couldn’t last here.”
The world began to spin. Minutes dragged their feet across the face of the clock. Goosebumps ran across flesh.
“Maybe you’re right.” Kunle said. He bit his tongue to keep from crying.
Color seeped from the room into the ground, and a storm began brewing in his body. He thought of Tunde, the termite-ridden bench at Redeem, the barking, the man who ripped into him as though he were a slab of meat. He thought of Lagos, his mother, Pastor Wale’s elaborate pictures of the horrors of hell. And then wished he were dead.
Now, they were back at this cafe, sitting in the same spot where, not too long ago, a blood-red heart was thrown to the floor and trampled by patchy, nervous laughter.
Alwin sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. It’s not funny.”
Kunle softened. “Thank you.”
“So, have you decided whether you’ll stay in Berlin?”
“Why’re you asking?” Kunle said, voice swathed in indifference.
Alwin chuckled. “You’re my friend! And I’m interested in your life! That’s some sort of cardinal sin?”
“A few weeks ago, you didn’t seem too interested in whether I stayed or left.” Kunle’s eyes bored into Alwin’s.
“Look, I’m sorry about that. I was thrown off by—you—you said—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Of course I care whether you stay or go! Of course I want you here!”
“You have a funny way of showing it.”
Alwin laughed. It was a sour, acrid thing, sharp enough to tear into skin. “You’ve fucked every man in Berlin. And you want to lecture me about love?”
A once broken heart threw itself against its cage of bones. Suddenly, two men were in bed. Grunting, groaning, consumed by fire. Deft fingers undid buttons, fingernails raked across an expanse of skin, tongues danced, toes curled. Life burst into being—blazing white. Kunle looked at the man who lay beside him. It was the first time in many years that he believed God existed.
“I’ve never done that before,” Alwin said, voice sodden with a mixture of contentment and awe.
Kunle laughed. “That’s not true.”
“You know what I mean!”
“No, I don’t.” Kunle smiled at his friend, beautiful of face and lanky of body.
“With a black person, is what I mean.”
Air became brittle and a throat became dry and a mended heart shattered once more in a fit of resplendent violence.
Kunle stood up. “I need a cigarette,” he said.
Locked in the bathroom, cigarette hanging lazily from his lips, Kunle decided he would pack his bags and leave. He watched as sweat slid down dark skin sticky with spit and semen. Then and there, he said his goodbyes. To Berlin, to the many men of this frightening city who viewed him as an interpreter of struggle: an intermediary between the harsh jungles of Africa and the supposedly civilized contours of European life. He called his mother, told her that he’d be on the first flight back after graduation.
He would no longer make men God. He would destroy all his idols, set them ablaze in a fit of righteous anger.
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Image: nathan dumlao unsplash remixed