“This pain is never going to go away if—”
She didn’t see the slap coming. She merely found herself stumbling backward and falling on the floor from the force and shock of it, her cheek burning as if someone had rubbed hot tar on it. He was standing over her, his fists clenched, screaming in the ugliest voice she’d ever heard. He was calling her useless and idiot and stupid and a selfish woman who would be happy to see her husband die in pain all so she could live in New York. She jumped up, her cheek still throbbing.
“Did you just hit me?” she shrieked, her hand on her left cheek. “Did you hit me?”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes wide open. “And you dare open your mouth one more time, I’ll hit you again!”
“Then hit me again!”
He turned around to walk away but she pulled him back by his shirt. He tried to shove her away but she wouldn’t let him go, standing in his way and shouting in his face as her tears came down. “That’s why you brought me to America, eh? To kill me and send my corpse back to Limbe. Go ahead and hit me, Jende … I’m begging you, hit me again!”
She pushed him with her palms, squealing like one of Ma Jonga’s pigs moments before its slaughter. Why don’t you just go ahead and kill me, she demanded. Why not? Hit me and kill me right now!
“Don’t you make me hit you again,” he growled as he pushed her hands away and clenched his fist. “I’m warning you.”
“Oh, no, please hit me,” she said. “Raise your hand and hit me again! America has beaten you and you don’t know what to do and now you think hitting me will make it better. Please, go ahead and hit—”
So he did. He hit her hard. One vicious slap on her cheek. Then another. And another. And a deafening one right over her ear. They landed on her face even before she was done asking for them. She squealed, stunned and pained; she fell on the ground wailing.
“I’m dying, oh! I’m dead, oh!”
Liomi ran out of the bedroom. He saw his mother balled in a corner and his father standing over her, his hand raised and about to descend.
“Go back to the bedroom right now,” his father barked.
The boy stood speechless, motionless, powerless.
“I say get back in the room right now before I box your face into pieces!” his father barked again.
“Mama …”
“If you don’t—!”
Liomi burst into tears and ran back to the bedroom.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Is everything all right?” a man asked from outside.
Neni quieted her sobs.
Jende opened the door.
“Yes, sir,” Jende told the elderly neighbor, pushing his sweaty face through a small crack in the door. “Everything is all right, thank you, sir.”
“What about the woman?” the neighbor asked. “I thought I heard her screaming.”
“I’m okay,” Neni answered from the floor, her voice as counterfeit as a dollar bill made on checkered paper.
The man left.
Jende put on his shoes and left, too, slamming the door behind him. No other neighbors came. If they heard something, they did nothing. No police came to the apartment to question Jende about domestic abuse or encourage Neni to file charges. The thought of filing charges against him received no deliberation in her mind, even though she knew it was something wives in America did when their husbands beat them. Such a thing was unimaginable to her; she could never do anything like that to her husband. If he beat her a second time she was going to ask Winston to talk to him. If he did it a third time she was going to call Ma Jonga. Between his cousin and his mother he would be brought back to his senses. A marital dispute wasn’t something to get the police involved in—it was a private family matter.
After twenty minutes of crying on the floor she stood up and went into the bedroom, wiping her tears with the hem of her dress. Liomi was sitting on their bed, whimpering. She hugged him and cried with him, both of them too scared to talk. They slept together on the big bed, Liomi taking the place of his father, Timba in the middle. Neni Jonga fell asleep with tears running into her pillow, convinced her husband had beaten her not because he didn’t love her but because he was lost and could find no way out of the misery that had become his life.
Jende slept alone on the living room floor, partly in rage, partly for his back.
The next morning she woke up before him, as she often did, and made his breakfast, which he ate before heading off to work.
When he returned fourteen hours later he had a bouquet of red roses for her and a new video game for Liomi, who took it and thanked him without looking in his eyes because he was still scared of his father after what he’d seen him do to his mother.
“I will do everything I can to make you happy in Cameroon,” Jende promised Neni. “We will have a very good life there.”
Neni turned her face away.
He tried to pull her into his arms.
She resisted.
He went down on his knees and held her feet. “Please,” he said, looking up at her face, “forgive me.”
She forgave him. What else was she supposed to do?
Three days later, he stood before the immigration judge.
“My client would like to request voluntary departure, Your Honor,” Bubakar said to the judge.
“Does your client understand what rights he is forfeiting?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
The judge flipped through the papers in front of him and looked up at Jende. “Mr. Jonga, you understand that if I grant your request for voluntary departure, you have to leave the country before one hundred and twenty days?”
“I do, Your Honor,” Jende responded.
The judge asked the attorney for ICE if she had any objection to his granting voluntary departure to the defendant. She said no.
“Very well,” the judge announced. “I’ll review the case and make a decision. My clerk will notify you, at which point you’ll have to leave the country before your time runs out.”
Jende nodded, but the relief he’d thought he would feel did not come immediately. It did not come when he walked out of the court knowing that, in all likelihood, he would never have to walk into it again. It did not come when he arrived at work and changed from his suit to his work clothes, knowing he most likely would never again have to wash dishes to feed his children. The relief came only later that night, when Neni looked at him and, with tears in her eyes, said how glad she was that his ordeal might soon be over.
Fifty-five