‘Ot’yebites!’ he said, spinning around to face me, at once defiant and fearful. Fuck off. Strangers never touch Muscovites, unless the stranger is intoxicated, which I was of course.
‘The bird,’ I said, catching my breath. ‘L’oiseau,’ I tried, grasping for a common language. ‘J’étais là dans le métro.’ I didn’t know the word in Russian, let alone in Arabic, Hausa or Yoruba. ‘I saw you on the metro.’
The man was thirtyish, loose-limbed, lean and lithe with dark brown eyes and full lips set in a slender face. His sunglasses were pushed back into his thick black hair. A ‘Patriotic Russia’ tracksuit top was slung around his neck, its arms dangling at his sides.
‘What do you want?’ he asked with the distinctive musical lilt of West African English.
I told him and he laughed, his eyes widening above the deep shadows. ‘My friend, I am sorry. I am too busy,’ he replied, cutting me dead. As annoyed commuters shoved by us, he stepped back and turned away with an unexpected spin. His movement was nimble and strangely familiar, apart from a peculiar hesitancy in his right foot.
‘Michael Jackson!’ I blurted excitedly, trying my own (lame) spin, and the man stopped in his tracks. His backwards glide had reminded me of the singer’s iconic moonwalk. I’d also recognised Jacko’s ‘Billie Jean’ ringing in his headphones. ‘Michael Jackson stayed at the hotel on this square,’ I went on, clutching at straws, gesturing above our heads, my fascination with cross-cultural pop trivia finding some use at last. I guessed that the man was a fan. ‘He played the piano in its foyer,’ I added.
The African stared at me for an age. He searched my face. He took half a step forward and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Then he turned up his collar with a studied flick and said, ‘Show me.’
Africans are as rare as hen’s teeth in Moscow, apart from students who’d been drawn by bargain basement tuition fees. Once thousands had studied in the USSR but the man was too young to be a fraternal nations relic, and too poorly dressed to be a modern businessman. I wanted to know why he was in the city.
The Metropol’s maître d’ pointed us to a corner table hidden behind a pillar. Sami didn’t hang back from the lavish buffet, working his way along it. As he loaded his plate with salmon pancakes, crêpes and pastries, his nest of hair – gathered, coiled and woven into a dense stack as if by a precise subtropical bird – tilted on his head like a living black turban. In his plastic carrier bag was a single pot of instant noodles.
As he’d ploughed through his second helping, I told him that Jackson’s piano stood by the entrance to the Grand Hall beneath the ornate stained-glass roof, pointing to a harpist playing Chopin Preludes beside it. I said that in 1993 Jacko had been the first American pop star to perform in post-Soviet Russia. After the show he’d written ‘Stranger in Moscow’ in his room.
‘Upstairs, here?’ he replied, raising an index finger. His hands were so fine as to appear sculpted. ‘Man, that’s inspirational.’
I half expected him to bolt at any moment but instead he told me that years earlier (and before the accusations of sexual abuse) he’d seen a video of that same concert, 4,000 miles away in northern Nigeria. At a corner drinks stall he and his teenage friends had tried to mimic Jackson’s dance moves, perfecting circle slides and MJ spins along Sokoto’s alleyways.
‘At home I was like a street dancer, like the kid who got up first to get some moves off his chest,’ he said, leaning forward, relaxing back into English. ‘Jackson sang, “Beat It”. He taught that no one should be defeated.’
I refilled our cups and heard then, and over our many later meetings, that Sami’s father had been a plantation manager, supervising irrigation projects, advising on the rotation of maize and millet. His mother had been a housemaid at one of the larger farms. As his parents worked away from home, Sami was raised by his mother’s sisters on the outskirts of the city. He did well at school, I learned, graduating top of his year in mathematics and deciding to study bookkeeping because he’d kept his father’s accounts for years.
‘I didn’t think of it as work. I saw it as my duty.’
Sami had wanted to see something of the world but that wasn’t an option, especially after his mother suffered kidney failure during his second year at college. The cost of her treatment, drugs, syringes and a full-time carer to turn her over in the hospital bed ruined his father. When she died the aunties, who’d mortgaged their land to fund Sami’s education, also wanted to be paid.
‘This happened in my life and it cut me deep,’ he said, not taking his eyes off mine.
I saw no anger lines etched across his face, heard no defeat in his voice. In time I would come to know him as one of the most hopeful people I’ve ever met, yet suffering must have marked him, for overnight, Sami and his father had been cast into debt. They’d been forced to sell the truck, could afford neither an agricultural licence nor tuition fees. Their best chance to make a new start was at the nearby Bukkuyum mines, one of the hottest places on Earth.
Day after day father and son had laboured beside each other, dropping into the deep shafts by gripping grooves dug in the wall. There were no safety ropes to break a fall, no support struts to protect them in the narrow, stifling galleries. Eleven hours a day and seven days a week, they hacked away at the rock face looking for a seam of gold. At any moment the mine could collapse, burying them alive.
Yet somehow throughout the seven terrible months, Sami – with a certain glorious energy – kept dancing.
‘People thought I was crazy, but that’s the thing that kept me sane. I’d tell myself: how good can our days be, if we waste them on dead feelings?’
Every evening, he’d moonwalked and side-slid across the clay-hard riverbeds and around the desperate work camp, entertaining the heavy-eyed itinerants as well as the tagalong sex workers. He’d thrilled to ‘Thriller’, trusted ‘You Are Not Alone’, played ‘Bad’ over and over until the pirated cassette tape stretched and wowed in the baking heat. Only when he began to lose the spring in his step did he realise that he had to make a choice. Join the exodus, or stay and die.
‘My father told me, look at the man in the mirror,’ said Sami, paraphrasing Jackson’s lyrics. ‘He told me to look at myself, then to make a change.’
Sami’s escape became possible when his father unearthed a single, thumb-sized nugget. They traded it with the boss man (a Hausa with plump, ringed fingers and black pointed shoes), paid shares to their fellow miners and, with the balance, hired a ‘travel agent’. Sami wanted to try for England, the ideal of generations of Nigerians (and Ghanaians, Gambians and Ugandans). He wanted to better himself, to make money and then to come home. He had an uncle in London, or some city to the north. The English were tolerant and welcoming, he’d heard. He also knew that Jackson had once planned to live there.
The agent advised Sami against land and sea routes. Turkey and the Aegean had ceased to be reliable, or rather more impossible. Russia had emerged as an obliging transit country, if one was able to pay.
Sami took a leap of faith, into the unknown, towards a world that offered to sustain his hope. He flew to Mexico then backtracked to transit through Madrid’s lax airport controls. He had never before been on an aircraft, didn’t sleep during the three-day journey and hoarded all the in-flight meals to see him through the coming week.
At Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, his (fake) return ticket secured him a twenty-day tourist visa. But the promised ride to Belarus and the Polish border wasn’t waiting for him. In his exhaustion he stepped out onto the terminal’s approach road, looked the wrong way and was struck by a minibus.