A Novel By Moses Kay Fembeh
PROLOGUE
THE DOOR BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Some journeys begin long before we understand where they are taking us.
The first thing Jim remembered about Nigeria was not the heat.
It was his father’s hand.
He was twelve years old when he held it for the first time.
The hand was larger than he had imagined. For years, he had known that hand only through stories.
His mother had once told him that his father had strong hands because he worked with buildings, machines, and plans. Mama Tiagay had described him differently. She said Femi could stand before an empty piece of land and see a building where everyone else saw only earth.
Jim had tried to imagine the man behind those descriptions.
Sometimes he had imagined someone tall. Sometimes stern.
Sometimes he had imagined a man who looked like him.
He had never imagined that the first thing he would notice would be his hand.
Jim stood at the edge of the small room, wearing a shirt that had become too large around his shoulders. His sandals were dusty. His hair had been combed carefully that morning, although he had spent most of the night wondering what he should say when the man finally arrived.
Then the door opened. Femi stood there.
For a moment, neither father nor son moved.
The man looked at the boy as though he were trying to recover twelve missing years from his face.
Jim looked back at him, searching for something familiar.
Perhaps the eyes. Perhaps the mouth. Perhaps the shape of the face.
Perhaps the father he had constructed in his imagination. “Jim.” The boy swallowed. “Daddy?”
The word seemed to travel across twelve years before it reached the man.
Femi’s eyes filled with tears.
He opened his arms.
Jim did not move immediately.
He had imagined being held by his father so many times that the reality of it frightened him.
Then he stepped forward.
Femi pulled him close.
The boy’s face disappeared against his father’s chest.
For several seconds, neither spoke.
Femi closed his eyes.
His son was alive.
That was all that mattered in that moment.
Outside, Sierra Leone carried on with its wounded life.
Somewhere, a vehicle passed along the road. Someone called from a nearby compound. A child laughed.
Ordinary sounds.
Almost cruelly ordinary.
Inside that room, however, a father and son were meeting after a war had taken twelve years from them.
Neither knew what the journey ahead would demand.
Neither knew that being reunited would not immediately make them a family again.
Blood could establish a relationship.
Time was required to build one.
Jim did not yet know the country his father had spent years calling home.
He knew only that his father lived there.
Nigeria existed in his imagination as a distant place filled with unfamiliar streets, enormous buildings, strange food, and stories he had heard from adults who had never been there.
Femi knew Nigeria differently.
To him, it was work. Ambition. Failure. Opportunity. Memory.
It was the country where he had built a life while the people he loved remained on the other side of a border he could not cross.
Years later, Jim would understand that his father had not simply been waiting for him.
He had been waiting for a part of himself that the war had taken away.
But before the marriage, before the business, before the boardrooms and wealth, before the photographs and international journeys, there was a boy who had learned hunger before ambition.
A boy who knew how quickly a home could disappear.
A boy who had slept in places that were never meant to be homes.
A boy who learned to read fear from the faces of adults.
A boy who understood that when Mama Tiagay said, Stay close to me, it was not a suggestion.
It was survival.
He had grown up surrounded by uncertainty, but he had also been surrounded by people who refused to let uncertainty become his destiny.
Mama Tiagay taught him endurance.
Susan taught him that kindness could exist even when there was little to give.
Kadiatu taught him that tenderness did not make a person weak.
His teachers taught him that knowledge could open doors that poverty could not.
And somewhere beyond the reach of his childhood, his father waited.
Nigeria would teach him another language of survival.
Discipline.
Enterprise.
Risk.
Responsibility.
Power.
But it would also teach him something more complicated.
Success could build walls as easily as poverty could.
A person could have money and still be haunted.
A man could build a company and still be searching for home.
A family could share a name and remain divided by things nobody knew how to forgive.
And love could cross a border only to discover that borders were sometimes carried inside people.
Years later, when Jim stood beside Salamatu in Lagos, he would finally understand what none of them had understood at the beginning.
The border had never been the real enemy.
The border had only exposed what people were afraid to lose.
A husband afraid of losing his wife.
A family afraid of losing its daughter.
A mother afraid of losing her child.
A father afraid of losing his son.
A generation afraid that history would repeat itself.
And beneath all of it was the same human desire: to belong without having to surrender who you are.
Jim would eventually stand in Lagos beside a woman from Sierra Leone and realise that his life had brought him back to the question his childhood had unknowingly asked: Could two worlds that had once wounded one another learn to live inside the same heart?
The answer would not come from politics.
It would not come from treaties.
It would not come from wealth.
It would come through two people deciding to love each other without demanding that either one erase where they came from.
That was why the journey mattered.
Not because Jim crossed from Sierra Leone into Nigeria.
But because, years later, he would cross again.
This time, he would not be a frightened boy following his father.
He would be a man walking beside his wife.
And he would not ask her to leave Sierra Leone behind.
He would invite Sierra Leone into his Nigerian home.
That was the second crossing.
The first had been made by Femi and Isata.
Love had brought them together.
War had torn them apart.
The second crossing would belong to Jim and Salamatu.
Their journey would begin where the previous generation’s journey had ended with two people standing before a border and deciding that it did not have to become a wall.
But none of that had happened yet.
At twelve, Jim knew none of it.
He knew only that his father’s hand was warm.
He knew that the man holding him was crying.
And for the first time in years, he allowed himself to believe that perhaps tomorrow could be different from yesterday.
His father loosened his arms.
Jim looked up.
Femi wiped his eyes and smiled.
“You have grown.”
Jim looked at him seriously.
“You took long.”
For a moment, Femi could not speak.
Then he laughed through his tears.
“I know.”
Jim studied his face.
“Are you going to leave again?”
The question broke something inside the man.
Femi knelt until they were looking directly into each other’s eyes.
“No.”
He took his son’s hand.
“No matter how far life takes us, I will never stop looking for you again.”
Jim nodded.
He believed him.
For that moment, that was enough.
Outside, the road stretched toward an uncertain future.
Somewhere beyond it lay Lagos.
Somewhere beyond Lagos lay a life neither of them could yet imagine.
And somewhere in that future was a woman named Salamatu who had not yet met the boy who would one day become her husband.
The journey had not begun with a honeymoon.
It had begun with a war.
It had begun with a separation.
It had begun with a father waiting and a child wondering whether he had been forgotten.
But sometimes the most important journeys in a person’s life begin long before the traveller understands where the road is leading.
Sometimes they begin with a hand reaching across a room.
Sometimes with a door opening.
And sometimes, after years of separation, two people discover that the distance between them was never the end of the story.
It was only the beginning.
The door was open.
And Jim walked through it.
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