Eleven weeks ago today my husband walked out. I went to the park and when I came home, he was gone. When I closed the door behind me that morning there was no warning this would be our last night under the same roof, our last day as beloveds, the last time I would ever kiss him behind his little ear, or hear his voice under my cheek.
We weren’t actually married. But how he loved to call me his wife. Every taxi driver and all his friends: Mrs Him, my woman, my wife.
He had moved to Berlin to be with me, never having left Ghana before. His whole family came down eight hours from the village and he stepped bravely onto a plane all alone after his secondhand phone died suddenly overnight. Imagine walking away. You go through the passport control, take off your shoes. You leave the ground. And now – you’re in the air. Accra falls away like a toy, like safety. You fly nine hours across Africa, and across the white continent where everything costs five times as much. In your pocket, the phone is dead, no way of contacting her, or anyone.
It had taken us fifteen months to get him here, five lawyers, a serially declined student visa, a costly private college sponsored by my mother, who believed in our love. We moved in together to my artist’s apartment so joyously. The little cat fell in love. Then the winter came and then, corona: the twelve weeks’ isolation at home, at the end of winter’s grim five-month lockdown. We both got stressed, alongside everyone else on this earth; we had a fight, and spent the night in separate rooms. In the morning I went out to sit under the trees and read a little while to calm my mind. We had been six weeks in lockdown: I read Mary Beard, on women and power. Then I came home, and he was just gone.
Eleven weeks. I have seen him only about half a dozen times. I had only been gone about an hour. There was no note or sign but the door was deadlocked and his bicycle was gone; as I entered the house his absence quivered in the air like a guitar string. I had no way of knowing I would never kiss this sweet man all round the hinge of his jaw again, white people kisses he calls them, on the hairline, and he wondered aloud with his friend who has a German girlfriend, “What did I do to deserve all these kisses?”
For three days he didn’t answer my messages and I lay awake wondering was he ok, would a person breaking the curfew get arrested, was he sleeping in a park, where would he go? I tried not to imagine Berlin’s fearsome Neo Nazis having cornered him and pulped him, that he might be brought home in a wheelbarrow. Another Ghanaian man who lives in our street had been menaced right around the corner, a gang of seven spread out across the road, they toyed with him until they had made him afraid and then, he said, he all of a sudden just got so tired. He said in German, Ich will einfach nach Hause. I just wanna go home. And the leader told his gang: let him go home.
Let him come home. It’s been two and a half months and my throat thickens with sick tears every time I think of him and how we’ve parted. It’s so abrupt, sometimes my heart itself still feels quivering, like a guitar string dying into silence. That he will not give our sweet love a chance. That he believes I would move mountains to get him here and then on a whim in a rage tell him, get out, you have no place to go. That I said to him: Get out! Get out of my house. How could I, a white woman, say this to an African man. I cannot forgive myself and at the same time, I can’t understand like a dog locked outside this endless punishment. It feels like we were on a long journey together, we own a tiny property in Ghana, we have a business, we spoke of our longing to raise a child. His friends called me Mrs Him. She misses him. We were on our long road trip into our lives, two lives sustained by love and enhanced and emboldened by each other into great and wild adventure. He threw me out of the car, and drove off. He left me here standing at the roadside in a landscape I don’t recognise, and just drove off without me.
Everything in our world, as Europeans so comfortably call the place, must be so foreign and so strange. We went walking and he was wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt, with the tongue. “Are you a fan of the Rolling Stones?” I asked, and he said, “What rolling stones.”
When he wrote to my mother to thank her for her sponsorship, he signed the letter with his name and Cx. That’s how I always sign mine. I guess he just thought that’s how white people end their emails.
Can’t you be curious, I have said, about the miscommunications that evolved between us, for it was never a difference in our values, it was never a lack of love. When I put my hand round him in bed he yelped my name. The two of us were strong and open and free together. Don’t you want to be loved, I have asked him: don’t you want love and affection in your life. My love and affection. Don’t you even want to be curious about what might still be possible? Why would you move across the world to be with someone, that someone being me, and then… refuse to have the painful or uncomfortable conversations, including with yourself, that might have cleared up our enterprise and given us our free channel down through the mangroves and out into the lovely sea.
How life is transformed when love is present. How everyday living is sweetened by waking up with someone whose presence fills you with longing and desire, by taking our breakfast together, just coming home and hearing his voice. I had been living alone, and eating every meal alone it felt like, for a thousand years. Now I was outside my lonely castle and at large in the free and wild ransom of the garden.
It was two and a half years. Australian poet, Ghanaian athlete. Our conversation had a terrific ease right from the start. We met online and I went to Accra to meet him, for three weeks, stayed three months, cried at Kotoka Airport. We went from penpals to shacking up together on our first night, so ridiculous and it shouldn’t have worked – but did. I am a few months older than his mother. When he met me at the airport we’d had only a few satellite calls spaced by a bad line, hollering, What? Can you repeat that? He went to work our first morning and came home and I felt I was home at last; the second night when he texted to say, I am at our gate, I ran pelting down the alleyway my bare feet slapping on the concrete and flung myself against the steel gate and he grabbed me and dragged me against him and we pressed each other close between the curling bars and kissed passionately.
Why would you leave that. How could you leave.
No one ever crossed the world before to be with me. Then he fled as abruptly as a battered woman flees a violent man. Waiting for the moment of safety when he is out of the house. He fled carrying only his passport. He won’t tell even his mother where he is living. Do not call me, he said, and I tried and tried not to call. For eight weeks, very little contact, and I sent the most occasional possible messages. Yearning for him. Sleepless for the smell of his skin.
He said, nightmares, and not sleeping, and I kept thinking somehow maybe he would come home. I was angry, too. He didn’t listen, men don’t listen. He tried to tell me what I am. I could feel once he had gone how he was vibrating with fear and trauma and I longed so to comfort my young lover, just to hold him and calm him and be held and cosseted, without these elements of safety and love what is my life even for. My heart bleeds pain all day and night. I am so crushed and devastated, I’m unable to rise, and he writes me ‘I am trying to get up from this blow.’ He says he loves me, he tells all our friends, I love her. Then he says, no hope, please don’t hold out any hope. I come home to my rooms from the suddenly radiant day and have to hold the radiator while dizziness passes, I am trembling like an animal.
I cannot understand and that makes me not forget. My heart is a hot water bottle far too full. “I have something to live for now,” he said, casual
ly explanatory one day, months ago in Accra, “- and that’s you.” If all my love, and my devotion, and all that I am, was not worth fighting for – then what am I. What is this life, if we cannot get through to one another. “I love her,” he says to my mother, on the phone one night: “I love her.” “He said it over and over, maybe five or six times,” she tells me, and I bow forward on my couch where he lay around me with the tiny sickened cat in our arms a little family for those few sweet weeks or months or really – were they years – and we waited together the three of us for the vet to come.
One minute we were a little family, the three of us, two naked and one wearing her sweet lovely fur coat. The next minute unexpectedly she had died, horribly and in pain; he has simply vanished. I stay alone in the house with this long, slow, sharp pain. On the phone my mother starts up her familiar orchestra. Oh, so delicately. “I think maybe you were too much for him.”
We were living on separate continents, having grown up in different worlds. Every day I spoke to universities and read student forums and called lawyers. He was turned down for his visa and we had to appeal. A year went by. One afternoon the phone rang and his lawyer said, he’s got it! I said, “What? I’m crying!” and the lawyer said, “So am I.”
I booked him a ticket and went to Tegel to meet him. As I stood there waiting I had the feeling I had been standing waiting at the airport for eighteen months, to bring him home.
He won’t discuss it. “I have something to live for now, and that’s you.” When the Berlin bank gave him a debit card he handed it solemnly over. “You keep this, sweetheart, in case you need to spend it. Because I won’t be using it.” He told me, “We are one.” His friends say they have never seen him walking with a girl before. I weigh up his innocence with his responsibilities. His mother phones and tells me he’s not sleeping, he is ok, he’s having nightmares, he is fine. Her name is Patience, and she tells me, “We are all one family now.” We meet at last on the old abandoned meadows unkempt and flowering in the middle of Berlin, and I forfeit this chance to talk by breaking into hopeless tears and he lets me drop my head on his knee and cry until the denim is soaked through and when, ridiculous in grief, I howl, “Am I somehow unlovable? My mother keeps telling me there’s something wrong with me,” he is so angry he has to jump up and walk around, his voice breaks when he bursts out, “Well that’s just a big fat lie.”
The tawdry but beloved little honeymoon cottage in Accra, the mouse droppings in the cupboards. The three weeks become three months, and the tall steel gate. The flowers he sent me before we had even met, on his meagre salary, freely, beautifully, the casual sacrifice of such extravagance. The super-costly one way air ticket purchased at short notice at the height of summer in Europe and the feeling, as I prepared my house to receive him and told my cat, that now – I will be able to breathe again.
He texts me saying do I need anything, let me be there for you. He makes insightful suggestions about our business, which just as we paid off our loan totally stalled, the borders were closed and all our tiny guesthouse bookings were cancelled. He gets angry. Nearly every time we speak, he says, I love you.
Two years ago I took a screenshot of one of our video calls, to capture him, so far away, his soulful gaze and the interruption by satellite which ran an explanatory text across our screens, ‘Your connection is poor.’ “I disagree,” I told him, “I think our connection is rich and deep.” My sleep champion, my healthy role model of sleep, lying awake in some room whose address I must not know, sleeping on the couch of some friend he will not name, Europe looming on all sides of him like high white cliffs.
And me left behind, in the wrong kind of abandonment a lover dreads. I have rearranged my house; I’ve dragged furniture on rugs and hammered in pictures before it gets too late. I’ve asked him to redirect his mail. He has lied to me about money and told me the truth, today, about Tinder. He has told me: I don’t love you anymore.