Behold the Dreamers(6)

“Please, God forbid bad things,” he had replied. “Better you give me a bottle of kerosene to drink and die right now.” Asylum was the only way for him to go, he decided. Winston agreed. It could take years, he said, but it would be worthwhile.

Winston hired a lawyer for him, a fast-talking Nigerian in Flatbush, Brooklyn, named Bubakar, who was as short as his speech was fast. Bubakar, Winston had been told, was not only a great immigration lawyer with hundreds of African clients all over the country but also an expert in the art of giving clients the best stories of persecution to gain asylum.

“How d’you think all these people who gain asylum do it?” he asked the cousins when they met with him for a free consultation. “You think they’re all really running away from something? Puh-leez. Let me tell you something: I just won asylum only last month for the daughter of the prime minister of some country in East Africa.”

“Really?” Winston asked.

“Yes, really,” Bubakar replied, snarling. “What d’you mean, really?”

“I’m just surprised. What country?”

“I’d rather not mention, okay? It doesn’t really matter. My point is that this girl’s father is a prime minister, eh? She has three people wiping her ass after she shits and three more people dragging the boogers out of her nose. And here she is, saying she’s afraid for her life back home.” He scoffed. “We all do what we gotta do to become American, abi?”

Jende nodded.

Winston shrugged; a friend of his in Atlanta was the one who had referred him to Bubakar and spoken highly of the man. The friend had no doubt that Bubakar was the reason he was still in America, why he now had a green card and was only two years away from being eligible to apply for citizenship. Still, from Winston’s downturned lips, Jende could tell his cousin was having a hard time believing that the small man with extra-long hair flying out of his perpetually flared nostrils was an expert in anything, never mind the complex legal field of asylum-based immigration. The diploma on his wall said he’d gone to some law school in Nebraska, but to Winston his mannerisms must have said he’d gotten his real education via online immigration forums, the sites where many with aspirations for American passports gathered to find ways to triumph over the American immigration system.

“My brother,” Bubakar said to Jende, looking at him across the bare desk in his ultraclean and perfectly organized office, “why don’t we start by you telling me more about you so I can see how I can help you?”

Jende sat up in his chair, clasped his hands on his lap, and began telling his story. He spoke of his father the farmer, his mother the trader and pig breeder, his four brothers, and their two-bedroom caraboat house in New Town, Limbe. He spoke of attending primary school at CBC Main School, and the interruption of his secondary education at National Comprehensive Secondary School after he impregnated Neni.

“Eh? You stopped because you pregnant a girl?” Bubakar said, jotting down something.

“Yes,” Jende replied. “Her father put me in prison because of it.”

“Boom! That’s it!” Bubakar said as he lifted his head from his writing pad, his eyes glowing with excitement.

“What is it?” Winston asked.

“His asylum. The story we’ll tell Immigration.”

Winston and Jende looked at each other. Jende was thinking Bubakar must know what he was talking about. Winston looked like he was thinking Bubakar must know nothing about what he was talking about.

“What’re you talking about?” Winston asked. “The imprisonment happened in 1990, fourteen years ago. How are you going to convince a judge that my cousin’s afraid of persecution back in Cameroon because he impregnated a girl and got sent to prison a long time ago? Mind you, in our country, and maybe even in your country, it’s perfectly within the law for a father to have a young man arrested for complicating his daughter’s future.”

Bubakar looked at Winston with scorn, his lip curled down on one side. “Mr. Winston,” he said after a long pause, during which he wrote something down and deliberately placed his pen on his writing pad.

“Yes?”

“I understand we’re both lawyers, and you’re Wall Street smart. Is that not so?”

Winston did not respond.

“Let me guarantee you something, my friend,” Bubakar continued. “You wouldn’t know the first thing to do if you were put before an immigration judge and asked to fight for the likes of your cousin. Okay? So, why don’t you allow me to do what I know, and if I ever need a lawyer to help me find a way to hide taxes from the government, I’ll let you do what you know.”

“My job is not to help people find ways to hide taxes,” Winston replied, keeping his voice low even though Jende could tell from his unblinking eyes that he yearned to reach across the table and punch out all the teeth from Bubakar’s mouth.

“You don’t do that, eh?” Bubakar asked with mock interest. “So, tell me, what is it that you do at Wall Street?”

Winston scoffed. Jende said nothing, equally as angered as his cousin.

Perhaps afraid he’d gone too far, Bubakar tried to rein in his comments and appease the cousins.

“My brothers, make we no vex,” he said, switching to a blend of Cameroonian and Nigerian pidgin English. “Now no be time for vex. We get work for do, abi? Now na time for go before. No be so?”