The Mafia's Captive Girl

Amina

It was the middle of June when Papa called me to join him on the balcony. We lived in Jakande Estate, where the morning breeze was rough with noise. Papa read the newspaper while looking down at the chaos below him. In his lips lay loosely an unlit stick of strawberry-flavored Oris—his favorite brand. Despite the variety of brands of smoke and drugs Papa’s gang pushed, Papa still walked down to Mallam Abdul’s Shop to order a packet of Oris. Papa’s morning routine was to brush his teeth, drink a glass of water, and then slouch to the balcony with his cigarette and newspaper in his hands. Twenty minutes later, he would send for me, and I’d come with his ashtray and a milkshake to prepare him for breakfast.

When I kneeled to greet him, Paper took my hands in his and said to me:

"Jewel, you’re going to the HSE university." Papa’s eyes were shut as though he could not stand his declaration. I shook his hands to make sure he was not talking in his sleep.

"Papa? What did you say? HSE? Where’s that?" I interrogated him, and in my chest bloomed a warm excitement that made me shiver.

"Russia." Papa mouthed.

"Russia." I whispered back, with the weight of a country on my tongue. I had never left Lagos before, and now I was moving to another continent altogether.

I had just turned twenty-one on the 18th of June, and Papa had stalled my tertiary education for so long because he insisted that it was too dangerous for me to go to school in Nigeria, let alone in Lagos, where his rivals swarmed like bees. So I never sat for the Jamb examination, nor was I allowed to learn a trade or so much as set foot outside the house. However, I took online classes and became very fluent in technology. For my birthday, I had told Papa that I wanted to go to school or at least go to parties where I could meet my peers. I was the only child, and living in a mansion with no mother or friends—just an overprotective father—was driving me nuts. But my father simply glanced my way and said,

"Amina, anything; ask me anything, but not to roam about Lagos. Things have been stiff between us and the Mayorkungang."

I tried my best not to loathe my father because I knew he still grieved for my dead mother. Sometimes I just wanted to tell him and his gang to fuck themselves and run off into space as nobody’s daughter. But the thought of how broken my father would be if I left bound me to my home. We were the only family we had left—my father and I.

Mama died in a tailored car crash. She was on her way to pick me up from school when she was sandwiched to death by two speeding trucks at a roundabout. Papa told me he still saw her mangled red Camry in his dreams, matching the blood on the road. The two trucks were without license plates and were found burned and ditched in a burrow pit months later. I was six years old, in primary school, and hungry. I sat alone on the school premises, crying and sucking on Ixoras. My eyes were puffed and red when my father drove in in his black Honda Accord. Unlike my father, he did not carry me on his shoulders or call me "Jewel" with an animated drag on the "l" that made me giggle. Papa wore such a serious look on his face that once I got into the car, I began to cry—I felt unloved.

Mama was the wife of the chief of the wealthiest and most dangerous gang in Lagos, and her murder resulted in a full-blown gang war. It was also since then that I never again left my father’s sight; he employed a tutor, and I was forced to learn alone every day while my father burned with grief as he saw to the destruction of my mother’s killers. Papa blamed himself for being able to protect his followers but not the woman he loved the most, and he swore to protect what was left of his family until his last breath. I, for my part, grew, and so did my loneliness.

After Papa announced that I was going to HSE, I spent my days researching everything about Russia. I took courses to learn basic Russian phrases. I walked on eggshells around Papa so as not to trigger anything that could make him change his mind. The days passed by with Papa barely saying a word to me. He was always lost in thought or making plans for my travel as though I were twelve and not twenty-one. I could not blame him—the outside world was alien to me. I only heard broken stories of who had stolen from the gang, who had smoked his goods and ended up high, who had been apprehended by the police, who was shot on the streets, and what gang was asking for trouble. Although Papa tried his best to keep me away from his festering world, the stories always managed to reach me, and so it painted a picture of the world in my head that I found really hard to undo as I grew—the picture of a suicidal world, where death was expensive opium. Sometimes, I felt guilty that the deterioration of another human being was what put food on my table and butter on my lips.

In a month’s time, and after much expert advice, I chose software engineering as my course of study, and Papa, with his influence, made it possible for me to write my exams from my MacBook Pro. After passing the numerous screenings and interviews, I was allowed admission. If I had any friends, I would have called them and watched them gush at how lucky I was to be me to my satisfaction. But my celebration was within me—a cocktail party where all the guests knew each other and I anxiously counted my days till freedom. I was going halfway around the world to a place I had never heard of being in before. Although I did not really know Lagos or anything, it was still my home. I knew that my life was about to change; I might have to unlearn everything I already knew, which was pretty close to nothing. I closed my eyes in deep thought, put Obongjayar’s "Gone Girl" on repeat on my JBL speaker, and began to imagine what my first day in Russia was going to be like.