Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction

Every Day Is for the Thief
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007, 2014 by Teju Cole

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Originally published in Nigeria by Cassava Republic Press in 2007 in different form.

All photographs are by the author.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Maria Benet for permission to reprint three lines from “Three American-Style Studies of a Landscape Rendered Foreign” from
Mapmaker of Absences
(San Francisco, CA: Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cole, Teju.
Every day is for the thief : fiction / Teju Cole.
pages cm
“Originally published in Nigeria by Cassava Republic Press in 2007 in different form”—T.p. verso. ISBN 978-0-8129-9578-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9579-4
1. Nigerians—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Homecoming—Nigeria—Lagos—Fiction. 3. Reunions—Nigeria—Lagos—Fiction.
4. Life change events—Fiction. 5. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction.
6. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 7. Nigeria—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9387.9.C67E84 2014
823′.92—dc23     2014004326

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design by Alex Merto

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Other Books by This Author

Dedication

About the Author

The window was one of many,

the town was one. It was the only one,

the one I left behind.

—Maria Benet,
Mapmaker of Absences

Ojo gbogbo ni t’ole, ojo kan ni t’olohun
.

Every day is for the thief, but one day

is for the owner.

—Yoruba proverb

ONE

I
wake up late the morning I’m meant to go to the consulate. As I gather my documents just before setting out, I call the hospital to remind them I won’t be in until the afternoon. Then I enter the subway and make my way over to Second Avenue and, without much trouble, find the consulate. It occupies several floors of a skyscraper. A windowless room on the eighth floor serves as the section for consular services. Most of the people there on the Monday morning of my visit are Nigerians, almost all of them middle-aged. The men are bald, the women elaborately coiffed, and there are twice as many men as there are women. But there are also unexpected faces: a tall Italian-looking man, a girl of East Asian origin, other Africans. Each person takes a number
from a red machine as they enter the dingy room. The carpet is dirty, of the indeterminate color shared by all carpets in public places. A wall-mounted television plays a news program through a haze of static. The news continues for a short while, then there is a broadcast of a football match between Enyimba and a Tunisian club. The people in the room fill out forms.

There are as many blue American passports in sight as green Nigerian ones. Most of the people can be set into one of three categories: new citizens of the United States, dual citizens of the United States and Nigeria, and citizens of Nigeria who are taking their American children home for the first time. I am one of the dual citizens, and I am there to have a new Nigerian passport issued. My number is called after twenty minutes. Approaching the window with my forms, I make the same supplicant gesture I have observed in others. The brusque young man seated behind the glass asks if I have the money order. No, I don’t, I say. I had hoped cash would be acceptable. He points to a sign pasted on the glass: “No cash please, money orders only.” He has a name tag on. The fee for a new passport is eighty-five dollars, as indicated on the website of the consulate, but it hadn’t been clear that they don’t accept cash. I leave the building, walk to Grand Central Terminal, fifteen minutes away, stand in line, purchase a money order, and walk the fifteen minutes back. It is cold outside. On my return some forty minutes later, the waiting room is full. I take a new
number, make out the money order to the consulate, and wait.

A small group has gathered around the service window. One man begs audibly when he is told to come back at three to pick up his passport:

—Abdul, I have a flight at five, please now. I’ve got to get back to Boston, please, can anything be done?

There is a wheedling tone in his voice, and the feeling of desperation one senses about him isn’t helped by his dowdy appearance, brown polyester sweater and brown trousers. A stressed-out man in stressed-out clothes. Abdul speaks into the microphone:

—What can I do? The person who is supposed to sign it is not here. That’s why I said come back at three.

—Look, look, that’s my ticket. Abdul, come on now, just look at it. It says five o’clock. I can’t miss that flight. I just can’t miss it.

The man continues to plead, thrusting a piece of paper under the glass. Abdul looks at the ticket with showy reluctance and, exasperated, speaks in low tones into the microphone.

—What can I do? The person is
not
here. Okay, please go and sit down. I’ll see what can be done. But I can’t promise anything.

The man slinks away, and immediately several others rise from their seats and jostle in front of the window, forms in hand.

—Please, I need mine quickly too. Abeg, just put it next to his.

Abdul ignores them and calls out the next number in the sequence. Some continue to pace near the window. Others retake their seats. One of them, a young man with a sky-blue cap, rubs his eye repeatedly. An older man, seated a few rows ahead of me, puts his head into his hands and says out loud, to no one in particular:

—This should be a time of joy. You know? Going home should be a thing of joy.

Another man, sitting to my right, fills out forms for his children. He informs me that he recently had his passport reissued. I ask him how long it took.

—Well, normally, it’s four weeks.

—Four weeks? I am traveling in less than three. The website assures applicants that passport processing takes only a week.

—It should, normally. But it doesn’t. Or I should say, it does, but only if you pay the fee for “expediting” it. That’s a fifty-five-dollar money order.

—There’s nothing about that on the website.

—Of course not. But that’s what I did, what I had to do. And I got mine in a week. Of course, the expediting fee is unofficial. They are crooks, you see, these people. They take the money order, which they don’t give you a receipt for, and they deposit it in the account and they take out cash from the account. That’s for their own pockets.

He makes a swift pulling motion with his hands, like
someone opening a drawer. It is what I have dreaded: a direct run-in with graft. I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and face a brazen demand for a bribe: that is a shock I am ill-prepared for.

—Well, I’ll insist on a receipt.

—Hey, hey, young guy, why trouble yourself? They’ll take your money anyway, and they’ll punish you by delaying your passport. Is that what you want? Aren’t you more interested in getting your passport than in trying to prove a point?

Yes, but isn’t it this casual complicity that has sunk our country so deep into its woes? The question, unspoken, hangs in the air between me and my interlocutor. It isn’t until past eleven that my number is finally called. The story is exactly as he has put it to me. There is an expediting fee of fifty-five dollars in addition to the actual eighty-five dollars that the passport costs. The payment has to be in two separate money orders. I leave the building for the second time that morning, to go and buy another money order. I walk quickly, and am exhausted by the time I return at a quarter to twelve, fifteen minutes before the closing of the window. This time, I don’t take a number. I barge my way to the window and submit my form with the required fees. Abdul tells me to pick my passport up in a week. He gives me a receipt only for the original fee. I take it mutely, fold it up, and put it in my pocket. On my way out, next to the elevators, there’s a partially torn sign that reads: “Help us
fight corruption. If any employee of the Consulate asks you for a bribe or tip, please let us know.”

There is no number or email address appended to the note. In other words, I can inform the consulate only through Abdul or one of his colleagues. And it’s unlikely that they are the only ones on the take. Perhaps thirty or thirty-five dollars of the “expediting fee” is going to someone over Abdul’s head. I catch the look on Abdul’s face as I exit the room. He is absorbed in assisting other applicants. It is a farce, given a sophisticated—“no cash please”—sheen.

TWO

I
t is early evening when the aircraft approaches the low settlements outside the city. It drops gently and by degrees toward the earth, as if progressing down an unseen flight of stairs. The airport looks sullen from the tarmac. It is named for a dead general, and is all that is worst about the architecture of the seventies. With its shoddy white paint and endless rows of small windows, the main building resembles a low-rent tenement. The Air France Airbus touches down and glides onto the tarmac. Relief enters the holds and cabin with the inward-rushing air. Some of my fellow passengers break into applause. Soon, we are trooping out of the craft. A woman weighed down with bags tries to barge through the aisle. “Wait for me,” she cries out to her travel
companion, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I’m coming.” And I, too, experience the ecstasy of arrival, the irrational sense that all will now be well. Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.