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Masterworks of Science Fiction 61 Gollancz Garden, Child Year: 1988 Language: english File: EPUB, 504 KB Your tags: 0 / 0

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De Aanklacht Areopagus Chiel, Deborah Year: 1996 Language: dutch File: EPUB, 167 KB Your tags: 0 / 0

On Black Sisters Street is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Chika Unigwe

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House,

an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks

of Random House, Inc.

This work was originally published in Dutch as Fata Morgana by

Meulenhoff/Manteau, Antwerp, Belgium, in 2007. This English translation was

previously published in slightly different form in the United Kingdom by Jonathan

Cape, a member of The Random House Group Limited, in 2009.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Unigwe, Chika.

[Fata Morgana. English]

On Black Sisters Street: a novel / Chika Unigwe.

p. cm.

Originally published in Dutch as Fata Morgana in 2007.

eISBN: 978-0-679-60446-4

1. Prostitutes—Belgium—Antwerp—Fiction. 2. Africans—Belgium—Antwerp—

Fiction. 3. Prostitution—Belgium—Fiction.

4. Human trafficking victims—Fiction. 5. Female friendship—Fiction. 6. Antwerp

(Belgium)—Fiction. I. Title.

PT6467.31.N54F3813 2007

839.3137—dc22 2010015076

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design: Kimberly Glyder

Jacket photograph: Debra Lill

v3.1





To Jan and our four sons:

for their incredible capacity

to tolerate my moods


To the ABC Triumvirate—

Arac de Nyeko, Monica; Batanda Budesta,

Jackee; and Chikwava, Brian—

for being there from A to Z





Contents


Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph



1. May 12, 2006

2. Zwartezusterstraat

3. Sisi

4. Zwartezusterstraat

5. Sisi

6. Zwartezusterstraat, May 13, 2006

7. Sisi

8. Zwartezusterstraat | Efe

9. Sisi

10. Zwartezusterstraat

11. Sisi

12. Zwartezusterstraat

13. Sisi

14. Zwartezusterstraat | AMA

15. Sisi

16. Zwartezusterstraat

17. Sisi

18. Zwartezusterstraat | ALEK

19. Sisi

20. Z; wartezusterstraat | JOYCE

21. Sisi

22. Zwartezusterstraat

23. Sisi

24. Zwartezusterstraat

25. Sisi

26. Zwartezusterstraat

27. Sisi

Acknowledgments

About the Author





Armed with a vagina and the will to survive, she knew that destitution would never lay claim to her.

BRIAN CHIKWAVA, Seventh Street Alchemy





MAY 12, 2006


THE WORLD WAS EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD BE. NO MORE AND DEFINITELY no less. She had the love of a good man. A house. And her own money—still new and fresh and the healthiest shade of green—the thought of it buoyed her and gave her a rush that made her hum.

These same streets she had walked before seemed to have acquired a certain newness. Humming, relishing the notion of new beginnings, she thought of how much her life was changing: Luc. Money. A house. She was already becoming someone else. Metamorphosing, she told herself, recalling the word from a biology class. Sloughing off a life that no longer suited her.

What she did not know, what she would find out only hours from now, was just how absolute the transition would be.

Sisi navigated the Keyserlei and imagined everything she could buy with her brand-new wealth. It would buy her forgetfulness, even from those memories that did not permit silence, making her yell in her sleep so that she woke up restless, wanting to cry. Now the shops sparkled and called to her, and she answered, touching things that took her fancy, marveling in the snatches of freedom, heady with a joy that emitted light around her and made her surer than ever that the Prophecy was undoubtedly true. This was the true epiphany. Not the one she had on a certain Wednesday night on the Vingerlingstraat. That one was a pseudo-epiphany. She knew that now.

She was hungry and stood undecided between the Panos and the Ekxi on the Keyserlei. Her new life smiled at her, benevolent and lush. It nudged her toward the Ekxi, with its price a notch higher than Panos’s. She went in and bought a sandwich with lettuce spilling out the sides, ruffled and moist. To go with it, a bottle of thick fruit cocktail. She sat at a table outside, her shopping bags at her feet; the bags shimmied in the light spring breeze, evidence of her break from a parsimonious past. What should she get? Maybe a gift for Luc. A curtain for his doorless room. Imagine a room without a door! Ha! The architect who designed the house had a thing for space and light, and since Luc was coming out of a depression when he bought the house, he had been certain that space and light were the very things he needed. The lack of a door had not disturbed him in the least. “Rooms must have doors,” Sisi told him when he showed her around the house. “Or curtains, at the very least!” Luc had said nothing in response. And silence was acquiescence. Certainly. Curtains with a frenetic design of triangles and squares, bold purple and white splashes against a cocoa brown, found in the HEMA. She imagined what the other women would say of Luc’s doorless bedroom. She imagined their incredulous laughter. And that was enough to feed a guilt that she was trying hard to stop. She hadn’t abandoned them. Had she? She had just … well, moved on. Surely, surely, she had that right. Still, she wondered: What were they doing now? When would they notice that she was gone?


IN A HOUSE ON THE ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT, THE WOMEN SISI WAS thinking of—Ama, Joyce, and Efe—were at that very moment preparing for work, rushing in and out of the bathroom, swelling its walls with their expectations: that tonight they would do well; that the men who came would be a multitude; that they would not be too demanding. And more than that, that they would be generous.

“Who has my mascara? Where’s my fucking mascara?” Ama shouted, emptying a makeup bag on the tile floor. Joyce was at the same time stuffing a denim duffel bag with a deodorant spray, a beach towel, a duster, and her Smiley, so nicknamed by Sisi. Smiley was a lubricant gel, innocuously packaged in a plastic see-through teddy bear with an orange conical hat and a wide smile; it might have been a child’s bottle of glue. She blocked her mother’s face, looking aghast at Smiley, her lips rounding to form a name that was not Joyce.

“Where’s Sisi?” she asked.

“I haven’t seen her. Maybe she don’ leave already,” Efe said, putting an electric toothbrush into a toilet bag. In an inner pocket of the bag was a picture of a boy in a baseball cap. On the back of the photograph were the initials L.I. The picture was wrinkled and the gloss had worn off, but when it was first sent to her it would have been easy to see (in the shine of the gloss that highlighted a broad forehead) that the boy bore a close semblance to her. The way a son might his mother. She carried this picture everywhere.

They still had a bit of time before they had to leave, but they liked to get ready early. There were things that could not be rushed. Looking good was one. They did not want to turn up at work looking half asleep and with half of their gear forgotten.

“How come Sisi left so early?” Joyce asked.

“Who knows?” Ama answered, running her hand quickly across her neck as if to assure herself that the gold chain that she always wore was still there. “All this Sisi, Sisi, Sisi, are you lovers? Maybe she’s gone on one of her walks.”

Ama laughed, slitting her eyes to brush on mascara.

Sisi went out alone at least twice a week, refusing company when it was offered. Nobody knew where she went except that she sometimes came back with boxes of chocolate and bags of Japanese fans and baby booties embroidered in lace, fridge magnets and T-shirts with Belgian beer logos printed on them. “Gifts,” she mumbled angrily when Joyce asked her once who they were for.

Joyce was already out of the bathroom. She had hoped Sisi would help her cornrow her hair. In between perm and braids, her hair was a wilderness that would not be subdued. Neither Ama nor Efe could braid. Nothing for it now, she would have to hold it in a bun and hope that Madam would not notice that the bun was an island in the middle of her head, surrounded by insubordinate hair that scattered every which way. If Sisi had not left, if she was simply running late, she would have Madam to answer to. For Sisi’s sake, Joyce hoped she would be back on time. How could anyone forget what Madam had done to Efe the night she turned up for work late? Nothing could excuse her behavior, Madam said. Not even the fact of her grandmother’s death.





ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT


IT WAS NOT EVERY DEATH THAT EARNED A PARTY. BUT IF THE DEPARTED was old and beloved, then a party was very much in order. Efe’s grandmother was both. And since she was too far away to attend the burial herself, the next best thing, the expected thing, was a big party. Plus, in dismal November, nothing could beat a good party.

Efe did not tell Madam of the death. Or of the party. Nobody told Madam anything. It was not like, if she were invited, she would attend anyway.

The girls had started the day in the kitchen doing dishes from the previous day. Sisi’s laughter was the loudest, rising and drowning out the voices of the other women. She slapped her thighs with a damp kitchen towel, and the strength of the laughter shut her eyes. “Tell me, Efe, your aunty really believed her husband?”

“Yes. She did. He told her she could not go abroad with him because the British embassy required her GCSE results before they would give her a visa. Dat na de only way he could tink of to stop her wahalaing him about traveling with him. Four wives, and she wanted him to pick her above the rest? And she no be even the chief wife. Imagine! De woman just dey craze!”

“Your uncle handled it well. Sometimes it’s just easier to lie to people. Saves you a lot of trouble and time,” Joyce said, placing a drinking glass she had just dried in the cupboard above her head.

“Men are bastards,” Ama said.

“Ama, lighten up. Since when did this story become about men being bastards, eh? Everything has to be so serious with you; you know how to spoil a good day. You just have to get worked up over nothing!” Sisi wiped a plate dry, examined it for smudges, and finding none, placed it on top of another on the work surface beside the sink.

Ama turned toward Sisi and hissed. “Move the plates, abeg. If you leave them there, they’ll only get wet again. Why don’t you put them away as soon as you’ve dried?” She hissed again and went to work scrubbing a pot in the kitchen sink. “How could you burn rice, Sisi? I can’t get the fucking pot clean!”

“I don’t know what’s eating you up, Ama, but I don’t want any part of it. Whoever sent you, tell them you didn’t see me, I beg of you.”

“Fuck off. Why don’t you fuck off on one of your long walks?” Ama’s voice was a storm building.

Efe tried to calm the storm. “Girls, girls, it’s a beautiful day. Make una no ruin am!” She hoped it would not rain. It was a beautiful day for November: leaves turned aubergine-purple and yellow and white by a mild autumn and a sky that did not forebode rain. A minor miracle for the time of year. “See as de day just dey like fine picture, and una wan spoil am?”

“Nobody’s ruining anything. Anyway, I’m done here.” Ama pulled out the now gleaming pot and walked out of the kitchen into the sitting room. She flooded the room with the twang boom bam of a Highlife tune. She lit a cigarette and began to dance.

Efe, swishing a kitchen towel over her head, sighed and followed her into the sitting room. “I can see you don’ dey get ready for the party, Ama. Oooh, shake that booty, girl! Shake am like your mama teach you!”

“Oh, shut it! What has my mother got to do with my dancing?” Ama moved away from Efe, the crucifix around her neck glinting. Her anger seemed blown up. Exaggerated. But Efe let it pass. She had other things on her mind.

The party, for starters. The Moroccan man who had promised to get her cartons of beer at a discount had just called to say that his contact had not come through. Now the drinks would cost her a lot more than she had budgeted for. The girls had promised to help her with the food, but with Ama in this mood, she might have one fewer pair of hands. Everything had to go to plan today. A burial ceremony for her grandmother had to be talked about for months to come. That was how much she loved the woman. And they were not even related. She wanted a party that would last all night.

And that would be what would put her in trouble with Madam. The party was a success, so much so that Efe could not leave until almost midnight. Madam’s anger manifested itself in a laughter that was dry like a cough and a sneering “Ah, so you’ve earned enough money to waltz in to work whenever you want?” For a week she refused to let Efe use her booth. One week of not earning money was enough to put anyone off getting into Madam’s bad books.

Still, Iya Ijebu got a party deserving of her. “She is not even my real grandmother,” Efe told the women when she told them of her death. “I been dey call her granny, but she be just dis woman wey live near our house. On Sundays, she made me moi-moi. When I was in primary school, if my mother wasn’t home, she’d make lunch for my younger ones and me. Ah, the woman was nice to us. Which kin’ granny pass dat one? Goodbye, Granny. Rest in peace.”

“What killed her?” Joyce asked.

Even Efe did not know how the woman had died. The news of her death had been an interspersion between “Buy me a Motorola mobile phone” and a “Papa Eugene wants to know how easy it is to ship a car from there to here.” A distant “Iya Ijebu died two weeks ago” carried along a faint and crackling telephone line from a telephone cabin in Lagos to a glass-doored booth in a Pakistani Internet/telephone café in Antwerp.

“She died? Iya Ijebu? Osalobua! What killed her?” A voice loud enough to reach the other end. She had tried to drag her sister back to the news she had just delivered. “How? What happened?”

“What? I can’t hear you. Did you hear what I said about the Motorola?”

And then the line had whined and died, and Efe went around in a frenzy organizing a party.

She did not know the details of the death, but at the party she would distribute badly xeroxed pictures of the deceased: a woman in a huge head scarf, looking solemn and already dead, against a backdrop of palm trees painted wildly on a prop behind her. Below it would be the announcement that she had died after a “sudden” illness at the age of seventy-five (which was an estimation; who cared, really, about exact ages?). And that Efe, her granddaughter, was “Grateful to God for a life well spent.” Summer would have been a better choice, its temperament better suited to feasting, but a party was what dreary November needed to cheer it up. She had a lot to worry about. What to cook. What to play. Who to have. There would be lots of Ghanaians; those people were everywhere. Nigerians, of course, went without saying. A sprinkling of East Africans—Kenyans who ate samosas and had no traditional clothes and complained about the pepper in Nigerian food, not really African. The three Ugandan women she knew who stumbled over their words, brackening black and renthening long. And the only Zimbabwean she knew, a woman who shuffled when she danced. Those guests would spawn other guests, multiplying the guest list to infinity, so that she was glad she had the foresight to hire a huge abandoned warehouse close to the Central Station, not the parish hall of a church she had rented last year to celebrate her birthday.

Here she had enough space not to worry about the number of people who would eventually turn up. And unlike the floor of the parish hall, which she had to ensure was spotless at the end of the party, this place had no such obligation. The tiles had come off in some places, exposing dark earth, like half-peeled scabs over old wounds. Against the walls were high metal racks, most of which were already corroded. The racks would come in handy for stacking crates of beer and cool boxes of food, so Efe did not need to borrow tables. In front of the racks were white picnic chairs. The space in the middle provided ample dancing room.

By the time Sisi, Joyce, and Ama arrived, the party was in full swing. Music blared and a lady in bright orange stilettos pulled off her shoes, held them over her head, and yodeled at the very high ceiling. Joyce, radiant in a black minidress that showed off her endless legs, edged farther into the room and began to dance with a man in an oversize shirt. Several times that day she would be told that with her height and good looks she could have been a model. It was not anything she had not heard before. So she would laugh it off and say, “Now, that’s my plan B.”

Ama spied two Ghanaian guests going back for a third helping of rice and smirked to Sisi that surely, surely, Nigerians cooked better, made tastier fried rice than Ghanaians (people who threw whole tomatoes in sauces could not really cook, could they?). And both women agreed that Ghanaians were just wannabe Nigerians and Antwerp was, for all its faults, the best city in the world and Belgium had the best beers, the Leffe and the Westmalle and the Stella Artois. You could not find those anywhere else, could you?

Efe toddled up to them, complaining that the soles of her feet hurt from too much dancing. She should not have worn such high-heeled shoes, she said.

“But you always wear high heels! You’ll complain today, and tomorrow you’ll be in them again,” Sisi teased.

“With my height, if I no wear heels, I go be like full stop on the ground.”

Efe was not really short. At least not much shorter than Sisi, who described her height as average. “Average” translated in her passport to five feet seven. But of all four women, Efe was the shortest, and this gave her a complex.

“You’re not short, Efe. You just like your heels high!”

High-heeled shoes and wigs were Efe’s trademark. Ama called her the Imelda Marcos of wigs. Today she wore a bobbed black wig, so it looked as if she were wearing a beret. It was not a wig her housemates had seen, so it must be new. Bought for the occasion. It was not as voluminous as the wigs she normally wore, and the effect was that her features looked exaggerated: her nose, her lips, her eyes looked blown up, as if they were under a magnifying glass.

Ama tapped her feet impatiently to the music.

“These your bowlegs dey always itch to dance,” Efe teased her.

“Where’s the fucking booze?” Feet still tapping to the music.

Before Efe could answer, Ama was already off. She found her way to the beer and grabbed a bottle of her favorite blond beer. Swigging the beer, she danced alone in the middle of the floor, bumping into other dancers, shouting out at intervals that life was good. GOOD! A black man in short, angry dreads swayed effeminately toward her, and Ama moved back. He tried to grasp her hand, and she snatched it away and gave him an evil eye.

“What’s wrong with ya, sister?” he said, in what she could only guess was meant to be an American accent.

“I’m not your sister,” and she twirled and danced away.

The man shrugged and went in search of a more willing dance partner, grumbling “Bloody Africans” under his breath. He found his way to Efe, who was sipping a glass of apple juice, and dragged her to the dance floor. Efe was a lot more obliging. She downed her juice and glided onto the dance floor, which was fast filling up. “Wema, you’re an awright sister! You Africans can really pardy!”

“Where’re you from?” Efe asked, amused.

“Seth Africa. The real deal. You Ghanaian, too?”

“Nigerian.”

“Oh, Nigerian? We got a lotta those makwerekweres in Jo’burg. Lots of Nigerians. They in the news all the time back home in Seth Africa.”

Efe said she had to get back to her drink. What was it with the South Africans she met claiming another continent for their country? Especially the black South Africans. She saw Joyce, her black hair extensions moving furiously as she danced with a light-skinned man in a kente shirt. Efe smiled and mouthed “jerk” to Joyce and pointed at the South African, who was now talking to a woman with braids down to her shoulders. Sisi danced behind Joyce, a bottle of beer in one hand and the other waving wildly in the air, two gold rings catching and dispelling light like magic.

Sisi moved close to Joyce and whispered that Ama seemed to be in a much better mood. “That Ama. She can be tiresome sometimes. What does she want us to do? Walk on tiptoe in our own house?” Sisi and Joyce had joined the women only two months before.

Joyce shrugged. She was out to have a good time, not worry about Ama. Of all the women in the house, Sisi was the only one she was remotely close to. Sisi was the most beautiful of the other three, she thought. Her beauty was all the more striking for being unexpected; she had thin legs, a low waist, and a short neck. When you saw her from behind—which was how Joyce saw her the first time—you did not expect to see a beautiful face, flawless skin. She also seemed genuinely nice. Ama was a basket case given to bellicosity; everything set her off. Efe, she was not sure about. Perhaps, given time, she would like her. Efe was definitely more likable than Ama, although she had her own issues. Yesterday Joyce had called her Mother because she had tried to mediate between Sisi and Ama, who were having a quarrel over what TV program to watch. Everybody could tell it was a joke—even Ama (even Ama!) laughed—but Efe had not been amused. “I’m nobody’s mother,” she had said, her voice wan, as if in disappointment at a betrayal. Still, she was more affable than Ama.

“I need to pee,” Sisi said, and went off in search of a bathroom.

Ama saw her pushing her way through the people on the dance floor and went up to her. “Not off, are you?” Ama asked with a wink.

Sisi’s lips pursed. “I’m just looking for the toilet. Not like it’s any of your business.”

“What’s your fucking problem? Geez!” Ama hissed. She had a bottle of beer in one hand.

“My problem is you,” Sisi responded.

“Oh, get over it! Are you still upset about Segun?” Ama quaffed some beer. “If it’s a lie, why are you so bloody worked up?”

“Shut up, Ama!” Sisi’s voice was raised. Ever since the incident with Segun, Ama had been frustratingly smug. Winking and making silly comments. Screeching songs around the house about Segun and Sisi.

“You think you know it all.”

“So why don’t you tell me, then?” Ama bridged the gap between them so that their shoulders touched. Sisi was the taller, bigger woman, but if it came to blows, she would bet on Ama. The regularity with which she picked fights suggested brawn of such superiority as to instill dread. Sisi took a step back. Ama took one step forward. Efe appeared at their side. “I hope you girls dey enjoy my party?” Chance. Luck. Whatever it was that had brought Efe, Sisi grabbed it and walked away.

When Sisi got back from the bathroom, Joyce was still on the dance floor. Sisi went over to her and tapped her on the shoulder. “What time do we leave?” Joyce asked, turning away from the man in kente. They had to be in their booths by eight.

“Around seven. I’d still like to clean up a bit before work tonight.”

“I’ve eaten so much at this party that I worry I’ll just snooze at work,” Joyce said, and laughed, a bit of tongue showing through the gap in her front teeth, white teeth that contrasted so sharply with her dark lips.

“Sleep ke? Me, my eyes are on the money, baby! I’ve got no time to sleep, and neither do you!” Sisi mock-scolded. “I want a gold ring on each finger.”

She danced away to the racks for a piece of chicken leg fried an incandescent brown, hoping she did not run into Ama again. She picked out a leg, bit into it, and thought, I’m very lucky to be here, living my dream. If I’d stayed back in Lagos, God knows where I’d have ended up.

She banished the thought. Lagos was not a memory she liked to dredge up. Not the house in Ogba and not Peter. She tried to think instead of hurtling toward a prophecy that would rinse her life in a Technicolor glow of the most amazing beauty.

But memories are obstinate.





SISI


ON THE WALLS OF THE OGBA FLAT, THREE FRAMED PICTURES HUNG. The first was the wedding photograph of Chisom’s parents: the bride, beautiful in a short, curly wig (the rage at the time) and a shy smile. The groom, hair parted in the middle and daring eyes that looked into the camera. One hand proprietarily placed on his seated bride’s shoulder, the other in the pocket of his trousers: a pose that said quite clearly, “I own the world.” A happy couple drenched in fashionable sepia that gave the picture an ethereal look. The second picture, the one in the middle, was of Chisom in a graduation gown that touched the ground, flanked by her parents. Her father’s head was slightly bent, but a smile was visible. Her mother’s smile was more obvious, a show of teeth. Chisom’s was the widest. This was the beginning. In her new shoes, bought especially for the occasion, she knew that her life was starting to change. The third picture was the largest, its frame an elaborate marquetry of seashells and beads commissioned by her father specifically for this photo: “The very best! The very best! Today money is no issue.” Taken on the day of Chisom’s graduation, it showed all three with bigger smiles. With wider eyes than in the previous picture. After the photographer had arranged them for the shot, Papa Chisom said he wished the woman who had spoken for the gods when Chisom was born were around. “It’d have been nice to have her in the picture. Her words gave us hope.”

Chisom’s mother said, “Yes, indeed. It’s a pity that she’s moved. If only we had kept in touch.”

Chisom said, “I’m just glad I’ve graduated.” She was looking forward to a realization of everything dreamed. To a going-to-bed and a waking-up in the dreams she had carried with her since she was old enough to want a life different from her parents’. She did not need a clairvoyant to predict her own future; not when she had a degree from a good university. She would get a house for herself. Rent somewhere big for her parents. Living with three people in two rooms, she wanted a massive house where she had the space to romp and throw Saturday-night parties.

The Prophecy haloed their heads and shone with a luminescence that shimmered the glass. By the time Chisom visited her parents from Antwerp, she would have acquired the wisdom to see beyond the luminescence, a certain wrinkling of the photograph, a subtle foreshadowing of a calamity that would leave them all spent.

Chisom dreamed of leaving Lagos. This place has no future. She tried to imagine another year in this flat her father rented in Ogba. Walls stained yellow over time—the color of pap—that she could no longer stand, their yellowness wrapping their hands around her neck, their hold on her life tenacious. She tried not to breathe, because doing so would be inhaling the stench of mildewed dreams. And so, in the house, she held her breath. A swimmer under water. Breathing in would kill her.

“The only way to a better life is education. Akwukwo. Face your books, and the sky will be your limit. It’s in your hands.” Her father’s eternal words. The first time Sisi would return to the flat after she had left, she would go up to her father and whisper in his ear, “You were wrong about that, Papa,” she would say. He would not hear her.

Her father had not studied beyond secondary school and often blamed that for his stagnant career. Destiny had not lent him an extra hand, either, by providing him with a peep into a sure future.

“I am giving you the opportunity I never had; use it wisely.” As if opportunity were a gift, something precious, wrapped up carefully in bubble to keep it from breaking, and all Chisom had to do was unwrap it and it would hurtle her to dizzying heights of glory.

His parents had needed him to get a job and help out with his brothers and sisters, school fees to be paid. Clothes to be bought. Mouths to be fed. We have trained you, now it’s your turn to train the rest. Take your nine siblings off our hands. Train them well, and in two years the twins will have a school leaving certificate and get jobs, too. Why have children if they cannot look after you in old age? It’s time for us to reap the benefits of having a grown-up son! But he had not felt very grown up at nineteen. Had hoped to go on to university at Ife. To wear the ties and smart shirts of a scholar. Not work as an administrative clerk for a company he did not care much for, being a “yes sir, no sir” subordinate to men who were not much smarter than he was. “I had the head for it. I had bookhead, isi akwukwo. I could have been a doctor. Or an engineer. I could have been a big man.”

He would often look around him in disdain, at the walls, at the three mismatched chairs with worn cushion slips, at the stereo that no longer worked (symbol of a time when he had believed that he could become prosperous: a raise that taunted him with the promise of prosperity), and he would sigh as if those were the stumbling blocks to his progress, as though all he needed to do was get rid of them and whoosh! His life would take a different path.

Chisom studied hard at school, mindful of her father’s hopes for her: a good job once she graduated from the University of Lagos. She had envisioned her four years of studying finance and business administration culminating, quite logically, in a job at a bank, one of those new banks dotting Lagos like a colony of palm trees. She might even be given a company car, with a company driver to boot, her father said. Her mother said, “I shall sit in the back of your car with you. You in the owner’s corner. Me beside you. And your driver shall drive us fia fia fia around Lagos.” All three laughed at the happy image of the car. (A Ford? A Daewoo? A Peugeot? “I hope it’s a Peugeot; that brand has served this country loyally since the beginning of time. When I worked for UTC …”) The mother’s mock plea that Papa Chisom should save them from another trip down memory lane would gently hush Chisom’s father, and then Chisom herself would say, “I don’t really care what brand of car I get as long as it gets me to work and back!”

“Wise. Wise. Our wise daughter has spoken,” the father would say casually, but his voice would betray the weight of his pride, the depth of his hopes for her, his respect for her wisdom, all that wisdom she was acquiring at university; their one-way ticket out of the cramped two-room flat to more elegant surroundings. In addition to the car, Chisom was expected to have a house with room enough for her parents. A bedroom for them. A bedroom for herself. A sitting room with a large color TV. A kitchen with an electric cooker. And cupboards for all the pots and pans and plates that they would need. No more storing pots under the bed! A kitchen painted lavender or beige, a soft, subtle color that would make them forget this Ogba kitchen that was black with the smoke of many kerosene fires. A generator. No more at the mercy of NEPA. A gateman. A steward. A high gate with heavy locks. A high fence with jagged pieces of bottle sticking out of it to deter even the most hardened thieves. A garden with flowers. No. Not flowers. A garden with vegetables. Why have a garden with nothing you can eat? But flowers are beautiful. Spinach is beautiful, too. Tomatoes are beautiful. Okay. A garden with flowers and food. Okay. Good. They laughed and dreamed, spurred on by Chisom’s good grades, which, while not excellent, were good enough to encourage dreams.

The days after graduation were filled with easy laughter and application letters, plans, and a list of things to do (the last always preceded by “Once Chisom gets a job,” “As soon as Chisom gets a job,” “Once I get a job”). As her father would say, there were only two certainties in their lives: death and Chisom’s good job. Death was a given (many, many years from now, by God’s grace, amen!), and with her university degree, nothing should stand in the way of the good job (very soon—only a matter of time—university graduates are in high demand! high demand!). His belief in a university education was so intrinsically tied to his belief in his daughter’s destined future as to be irrevocable.

Yet two years after leaving school, Chisom was still mainly unemployed (she had done a three-month stint teaching economics at a holiday school: the principles of scarcity and want, law of demand and supply), and had spent the better part of the two years scripting meticulous application letters and mailing them along with her résumé to the many different banks in Lagos.

Dear Mr. Uloko:

With reference to the advertisement placed in the Daily Times

of June 12, I am writing to—

Dear Alhaji Musa Gani:

With reference to the advertisement placed in The Guardian

of July 28, I am writing to apply—



But she was never even invited to an interview. Diamond Bank. First Bank. Standard Bank. Then the smaller ones. And then the ones that many people seemed never to have heard of. Lokpanta National Bank. Is that a bank? Here in Lagos? Is it a new one? Where? Since when?

Even in their obscurity, they had no place for her. No envelopes came addressed to her, offering her a job in a bank considerably humbler than the banks she had eyed while at school, and in which less intelligent classmates with better connections worked. It was as if her résumés were being swallowed up by the many potholes on Lagos roads. Sometimes she imagined that the postmen never even mailed them, that maybe they sold them to roadside food sellers to use in wrapping food for their customers. Maybe, she thought sometimes, her résumé had wrapped ten naira worth of peanuts for a civil servant on his way home from work. Or five naira worth of fried yam for a hungry pupil on the way to school. She sought to find humor in the thought, to laugh off the fear of an ineluctable destiny that she had contracted from her parents. The Prophecy by now meant nothing to her. Of course.

There was no longer talk of a company car. Or a company driver. No arguments about a garden with food or flowers. And as the years rolled on, no more letters of application.

“Why bother?” Chisom asked her father when he tried to egg her on. “Unless you have found out that one of your friends is the director of any of the banks, because that is how things work, you know?”

She did not tell her father that she had also tried applying for other jobs, sometimes jobs she was hardly qualified for, but as she reasoned, she stood as good a chance with those as she stood with a job at the bank. A flight attendant with Triax Airlines (must be an excellent swimmer; Chisom had never learned to swim); an administrative assistant with Air France (excellent French required; Chisom knew as much French as she did Yoruba, which was not much, if at all: words she had learned by rote from a zealous French tutor—Comment tu t’appelle? Je m’appelle Chisom, et vous? Comme ci, comme ça. Voilà Monsieur Mayaki. Monsieur Mayaki est fort”). And she was right. No requests for interviews came from those quarters, either. Still, she scanned the newspapers, sending off arbitrary applications for jobs announced, finding satisfaction in the recklessness of the arbitration, watching with anger as life laughed at the grandiosity of her dreams.

So, when she got the offer that she did, she was determined to get her own back on life, to grab life by the ankles and scoff in its face. There was no way she was going to turn it down. Not even for Peter.





ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT


BEFORE EFE CAME TO BELGIUM, SHE IMAGINED CASTLES AND CLEAN streets and snow as white as salt. But now, when she thinks of it, when she talks of where she lives in Antwerp, she describes it as a botched dream. She talks about it in much the same way as she talks about Joyce in her absence: created for elegance but never quite accomplishing it. In her part of Antwerp, huge offices stand alongside grotty warehouses and desolate fruit stalls run by effusive Turks and Moroccans. On dark streets carved with tram lines, houses with narrow doors and high windows nestle against one another. The house the women share has an antiquated brass knocker and a cat flap taped over with brown heavy-duty sticky tape.

Outside, a neighbor’s dog barks. Its owner shouts for it. Tells it to be calm, he’s almost ready for their walk. The ladies might still be sleeping, he says. Shh.

But the ladies are not sleeping. Inside, Efe, Ama, and Joyce are gathered in a room painted in tongues of fire. They are sitting on a long couch, its black color fading with age, its frame almost giving way underneath their combined weight. The wall against which their couch is placed is slightly cool, and if they lean back, their necks press against the coolness. They are mostly silent, a deep quiet entombing them, filling up the room, so that there is hardly room for anything else. The silence is a huge sponge soaking up air, and all three of them have thought at different times this morning that perhaps they should open the door. But they do not, because they know that would not have helped, as the door opens onto a short carpeted hallway. They think about the air that seems vile and rub their necks and their temples. Still, no one says a word. They will not talk about it. Their eyes are mainly on their laps, their arms folded across their chests. Sisi is everywhere. She is not here, but they cannot escape her, even in their thoughts. Joyce says the room is dusty. She grabs a rag from the kitchen—one of the many that she stocks in a cupboard—and starts to dust the walls. The table. The mantelpiece above the fake fireplace with logs that never burned.

Efe says, “Stop. It’s not dusty.”

Joyce continues dusting. Frantically. Her rag performing a crazed dance, like one possessed. The same way she dusts her bedposts in the Vingerlingstraat every morning, after the men have gone.

Ama has a bottle of Leffe on the floor between her legs. She picks it up and starts to drink. The sound of her gulping the beer takes over the silence for a while. Glup. Glup. Glup. Until it’s finished. She flings the bottle onto the floor. Efe eyes it as it rolls, slows down, and finally stops.

“Isn’t it too early to be drinking, Ama? Day never even break finish!” Efe tells her.

“It’s early, and so fucking what?” Ama burps. Tugs at her crucifix. “You dey always get ant for your arse. Every day na so so annoyance you dey carry around.”

“Fuck off.”

Another burp.

Joyce keeps dusting. Maniacally.

The women are not sure what they are to one another. Thrown together by a conspiracy of fate and a loud man called Dele, they are bound in a sort of unobtrusive friendship, comfortable with whatever little they know of one another, asking no questions unless they are prompted to, sharing deep laughter and music in their sitting room, making light of the life that has taught them to make the most of the trump card that God has wedged in between their legs, dissecting the men who come to them (men who spend nights lying on top of them or under them, shoving and fiddling and clenching their brown buttocks and finally [mostly] using their fingers to shove their own pale meat in) in voices loud and deprecating. And now, with the news that they have just received, they have become bound by something so surreal that they are afraid of talking about it. It is as if, by skirting around it, by avoiding it, they can pretend it never happened.

Yet Sisi is on their minds.





SISI


“THERE IS NO ROOM TO BREATHE HERE!” CHISOM DROPPED THE MIRROR and turned to Peter, her boyfriend of three years. She had left her parents in the middle of an argument and gone to Peter’s flat, not too far from theirs. Peter with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. The framed certificate had pride of place in his cluttered sitting room, on top of his small black-and-white television. Since the television faced the door, the certificate was usually the first thing a guest saw. Above it on the wall, another framed certificate announced that Peter was teacher of the year. Beside that, a framed photograph of Peter with stars in his eyes, shaking the hand of a bored-looking man in a stiff black coat. Under the photograph, the inscription TEACHER OF THE YEAR, with the commissioner for education, Chief Dr. R. C. Munonye. There were identically framed photographs in Peter’s bedroom. Peter with eyes that sparkled, shaking the hands of men (and occasionally women) in flamboyant suits who always looked bored. Or busy. And very often both. Peter’s flat was a shrine to an accumulation of incremental successes that did not camouflage, as far as Chisom was concerned, the fallacies of those successes. Peter’s life was a cul-de-sac. He did not have the passion to dream like Chisom did, did not aspire to break down the walls that kept him in.

And this made her think that she was outgrowing him.

“I’ll marry you one day, and I shall take you away from here,” Peter swore, his voice firm like a schoolteacher’s, as he wet his right index finger and pointed it up to the ceiling to accompany his oath. He walked toward her and held her around her waist, nuzzled the side of her face with the side of his. “I promise you. I’ll take you away from all this, baby!” Another nuzzle.

In Europe, when she would no longer be Chisom and before Luc, this was what she would miss most about him. His hands around her waist. His breath warm against her face. His stubble scratching her cheek. She would believe that she would never find that kind of love again. That she would never hanker after the sort of intimacy that made her want to be completely subsumed by the other. She would be wrong on both counts.

“I don’t want to become like my mother,” Chisom said, gently unlocking his hands around her and turning around to look earnestly at this young man who thought he could rescue her. What did he have? she thought. He had a job teaching at a local school. The months he got paid, his salary was barely enough to cover the rent on this flat where his five siblings lived with him. The months he did not get paid, he begged his landlord to allow him to live on credit. His eyes looked into hers, and their solemnity pained her. She looked away. His patience, of rather heroic proportions, aggravated her.

“Peter, you have to save yourself from drowning before you start promising to save others!” Her voice came out angrier than she had intended. What right did he have to make promises he could not keep? What right did he have to ask her to wait here, to wait for him, while she got pulled further underwater?

There had been a time when she had looked up to him. Her whiz kid with the soft hands and a brain that could make sense of any mathematical equation, (a × b) × c =a × (b × c) =a × b × c, decipher words that made no sense to her: polynomial, exponential, trigonometric. Algebraic identities. Laplace transform table. Scribbling magic in his notebook that fascinated her to no end and gave certainty to a future that included him.

It was not as if she no longer loved him. She did. She loved the way his left eye half shut when he smiled. She loved the way he cradled her when they made love, breathing into her skin. She loved the way he grinned while he ate, as if the very act of eating, the thoughtful chewing, never mind what was being eaten, was pleasurable; an art to be cultivated, elevated, and enjoyed. But love had its limits. Peter did not have the means to turn her life around. Had she had foresight, she often thought, she would have done a nursing degree. At Christmas most of the men returning home from Europe and America with wallets full of foreign currency, to scout for wives, always went for the nurses. They said it was easier for nurses to get a job abroad. “The British NHS depends on our fucking nurses, innit?” Ed, her friend and Ezimma’s cousin, told her. Ed also had come to get a wife. He lived in England—somewhere unpronounceable that ended in “Shire”—but so unmistakably English that it made him attractive, and within three weeks of being in Nigeria and parading both himself and his pounds, he found himself a willing nurse. Even though Chisom did not like the way he marinated his sentences in “shit” and “bloodyfucking” and “innit,” she knew that had he asked her to marry him, she would have. Because by then she had given up on love as a prerequisite for marriage. She would discover this yearning, this want to marry for love, a year later, abroad.

“We are all stuck here, baby,” Peter told her, his arms around her again. He took her ear in his mouth and bit on it gently. She liked it when he did that.

“And I am tired of being stuck.” She let him hold her, regretting her earlier outburst. It was not Peter’s fault, after all, that she had no job or that he did not earn enough or that the entire economy was in a mess, so her father had nothing to show for his many years in the civil service, or that she did not see Peter as part of the bright future that was hers. She closed her eyes and let the smell of his cologne take her away. “I wish life were like this,” she muttered. “I wish life smelled this good.”

Even as she said that, she knew she could not stand another year in Lagos. Not like this. I must escape. Perhaps it was this vow that made her recoil when Peter teased her mouth open and snaked his tongue in, running it across her teeth. She put a hand on his chest and gently pushed him away. She was not in the mood, she grumbled.

She would think, a few weeks later, that it was the vow that threw her directly in the path of providence. It would make leaving Peter easier. As for leaving her parents, she would be doing it for them as much as for herself.


CHISOM WAS AT THE HAIR SALON ON ADENIRAN OGUNSANYA STREET, getting her perm retouched, when a man with a protuberant stomach walked in with a young girl who could not have been older than seventeen. It was obvious from the way he held her with his left hand, casually touching her buttocks, that there was nothing innocent about their relationship.

“Oya! Make am beautiful. She dey go abroad. Today! Beautify am!” he shouted, almost pushing her toward one of the hairdressers. He brought out a white handkerchief and wiped sweat off his forehead. His breath came in loud pants, the hmph hmph hmph of someone who had just run a marathon. It occurred to Chisom that it was probably the talking that wore him out. The young girl—all bones mainly, except for a humongous pair of breasts—was quiet. There was an uncertain smile on her face as she stood while Tina the hairdresser, toward whom she was pushed, touched her hair to determine what to do with it.

“You wan braid am? You get good hair,” Tina complimented as she raked professional fingers through the girl’s hair.

“Braid? I tell you say she dey go abroad, you wan’ do shuku for am? Perm am. Put relaxer. Make she look like oyibo woman! I wan’ make she look like white woman!” The man wiped his forehead again. He looked around for a chair and, finding a wooden stool, drew it closer and started to sit. With his massive buttocks hovering over the chair, he shouted out at one of the hairdressers, his voice like a madman’s: “Una butcher meat for dis chair? Dis chair dirty plenty!”

The hairdresser rolled her eyes and grabbed a tattered towel from a client’s head. Standing behind the man, she spat on the towel and then proceeded to wipe the stool, rubbing slowly. Chisom, who had seen what the hairdresser did, snickered.

“It’s clean now, sir,” the hairdresser said to the man’s back with a self-satisfied grin as she watched him groan and settle into it.

Tina touched the young girl’s hair again. “You get good hair.” She sat the girl down in an empty chair beside Chisom’s. As soon as she was done with her client she would attend to the girl, she promised.

Chisom felt compelled to talk to the girl. Her silence bothered her. “So you dey go abroad?”

“Yes.” The girl nodded. Then added, almost as an afterthought, “Spain.” Her voice sounded garrotted, as if it hurt her to use it.

“Wetin you dey go abroad go do?”

“She dey go work. You wan’ go, too? You wan’ go abroad, too?” The man walked up to where Chisom and the girl sat, inserting himself, incredibly, into the space between their chairs. He brought out his handkerchief again and sighed as he wiped sweat off his neck. On the side of his neck, Chisom noticed a tattoo: a small dark drawing of a hammer. This was what Sisi would remember as she died. Dele and the tattoo on the side of his neck.

“If you wan’ comot from dis our nonsense country, come see me, make we talk,” he continued loudly, not giving the girl a chance to say anything. He brought out a wallet from the front pocket of his shirt and drew a card from it. “Here. Take.” He stretched out the hand with the card. Chisom took it out of politeness. She did not think she could take him seriously. Who offered a total stranger the chance to go abroad? She put the gold-edged card in her purse.

Chisom did not talk to the girl again, because she did not want to hear the man answer for her. His manner irritated her, and she half wished she had been rude to him, refused to take the card. She would never use it anyway.

When she got home that night and she had to eat gari and soup for the third day in a row, she thought nothing of the man’s offer. The next day, when her father came home to announce that there were rumors of job cuts in the civil service—“They’re likely to let me go. Twenty-four years and pfa, to go because I am not from Lagos State!”—Chisom merely brought out the card and fingered it. Like she would something beautiful, a pair of silk underwear, perhaps, and put it back in her purse. When she went to the toilet and found it broken and overrun with squirmy maggots and a day’s load of waste—there was a citywide water shortage—she felt short of breath. She needed to get out of the house. Go for a walk. A breath of fresh air. And even then she had no destination in mind until she found herself at an office on Randle Avenue, standing at the address on the gold-edged card, which she had somehow, without meaning to, memorized.

The office was large, with carpeting that yielded like quicksand under her feet and air-conditioning that kept out Lagos’s oppressive heat, keeping her skin as fresh as if she had just taken an evening bath. He smiled at her as if he’d been expecting her, which made Chisom wonder what she was doing there. Why had she come to see this stranger with a leer on his face and folds of flesh under his chin?

In his office, Dele’s voice was not as loud as it had been in the salon. Perhaps, Chisom thought, the rug and the air conditioner swallowed up the noise, so that when he spoke he did not sound loud. Or perhaps it was the sheer distance put between them by the massive wooden table he sat behind, his stomach tucked neatly away from sight.

“I dey get girls everywhere. Italy. Spain. I fit get you inside Belgium. Antwerp. I get plenty connections there. Plenty, plenty!” He panted with the effort of talking. Hmph, hmph.

A phone rang, and he picked up one of the seven mobile phones on the table. “Wrong one,” he muttered, and picked up another. He barked into it for a few minutes in rapid Yoruba and hung up. “Ah, these people just dey disturb me! ‘Oga Dele dis,’ ‘Oga Dele dat.’ Ah, to be big man no easy at all!” He grunted and continued talking to Chisom. “But I no dey do charity o. So it go cost you. Taty t’ousand euro it go cost you o.” He smiled. His gums the black of smoked fish.

The amount spun in Chisom’s head and almost knocked her out. Was this man serious?

“If I had that kind of owo, sir, I for no dey here. I for done buil’ house for my papa and my mama!” she protested angrily. For that amount of money, she could not only buy a house for her parents, she could buy an entire city. Why would she be desperate to leave the country if she could miss thirty thousand euros? It hurt her head even to do the math of how much that would amount to in naira. Millions! The kind of money she only read about in the papers, especially when there was a politician and a scandal involved. Was this man completely mad?

“Ah ah?” the man asked. “You tink say na one time you go pay? No be one time oo.”

He bit into a corncob, and Chisom watched him munch with his mouth open, his jaws working the corn like a mini grinding machine.

“Na, when you get there, begin work, you go begin dey pay. Installmental payment, we dey call am! Mont’ by mont’ you go dey pay me.” He spoke through a mouthful, and she watched half-masticated corn and spittle splatter onto the table, minuscule yellow and white grains that made her think of coarse gari. Why couldn’t the man eat properly? Did he not grow up with a mother? She fixed her eyes on the clock above his head so that she did not have to see him chew. What was she doing here, by the way? What did she think Dele was going to do for her? Grant her a miraculous consummation of a vision that even her father was losing faith in? Chisom picked up her handbag. She ought to be going back home. There was nothing for her here.





ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT, MAY 13, 2006


NOBODY KNOWS SISI’S REAL NAME, NEVER HAVING USED IT. NOT THESE women gathered in this room without her. And not the men who had shared her bed, entangling their legs with hers. Mixing their sweat with hers. Moaning and telling her, “Yes. Yes. You Africans are soooooo good at this. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Please. You. Are. Killing. Me. Mmmmm. Mooi!” Asking her, “You like it here?,” as if she had a choice.

The silence is unnatural. Shrieks and tearing of clothes should accompany such news, Joyce thinks. Noise. Loud yells. Something. Anything but this silence that closes up on you, not even needing to tug at your sleeves to be noticed. But Sisi’s death is not natural, either. So perhaps silence is the best way to mourn her. There is dust everywhere, Joyce thinks, dusting hard, clutching her rag tight, imagining it is Madam’s neck.

Ama, the slim, light-skinned woman in the middle, coughs. She wants to bring some noise into the room. Her cough hangs alone and then disappears, sucked into the enormous quietness. She toys with the tiny gold crucifix around her neck, tugging at it as if demanding answers from it. Efe watches her movement and wants to ask her again why she wears a crucifix, being the way she is, but she does not. The last time Efe asked her, Ama had told her, “Mind your own fucking business!”

The flat-screen TV facing the women is on, but the sound is muted. There is a soap on, probably American. Impossibly beautiful blond women wearing huge volumnized hair and men with well-toned bodies and stormy eyes flit on and off. Nobody is watching. The CD player in a corner of the room right of the women is uncharacteristically off. On any normal day, Ama would have some music on, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of liquor in the other as she danced to Makossa or hip-hop, swearing that life could not be better. The other women might have joined her, smoking and downing liquor, twisting their waists to the music, except for Efe. She never drinks alcohol, and the others often tease her about her juvenile taste buds.

“Who found her?” Efe asks. She pats her head and, discovering that all is not well up there, inserts her thumbs under her blond wig to pull it in place. She crosses her legs. In the silence the squeak of her nylon spandex trousers as she lifts her left ankle onto her right knee is a loud hiss.

The story has been repeated many times, but Ama suspects that the owner of the voice is as oppressed by the noiselessness as everyone else and just needs to fill the void with sound, even if it is the sound of her own voice.

“A man. Didn’t Madam say the police told her it was an early-morning jogger?” Joyce responds.

Joyce sounds different. Younger. Ama has a sudden suspicion that she is not twenty-eight, as she claims. She is still walking around, finding things to dust, muttering about the dirt that is taking over the house.

“What do we do now?” Efe asks, wobbling her buttocks so that she sits more comfortably. She is sitting to the right of Ama and is the heaviest of the three. She pats her head again and scratches her neck. The skin on her neck looks burned, flaky ocher with interspersions of a darker shade of brown. It is her neck that hints at the fact that at some point in her life she was darker.

“ ‘What do we do now?’ ” Joyce mocks. She shakes her head and rolls her eyes up to the ceiling. “What can we do, Efe? What on earth can we do? You know her people? Who will you send the body to? And even if you knew her people, can you afford to pay for her body to be sent back to Nigeria? What can any of us do? What? Have the police even released the body? What do we do now, indeed!” Joyce’s voice is loud, bigger than her body, but if stretched she might be seen to be as tall as she is: six feet and then some. It is sharp. A whip. But it tells the truth. They do not know Sisi’s people. Joyce is stooped, dusting the top of the CD player.

“Why you dey vex now? Simple question. I just asked simple question and you start to foam for mouth.”

“Who’s foaming at the mouth, Efe? I ask you, who’s foaming at the mouth?” Joyce stands up—with a velocity that befits her trim size—and in one swift movement reaches across Ama and jerks Efe up, knocking the blond wig off to reveal thinning hair held in a ponytail. “I say, who is foaming at the mouth?” she asks again, tightening her grip around the collar of the other woman. “I’ll beat the foam out of your useless body today!”

It is Ama who pulls her away. “Somebody has just died, a human being, and you are all bloody ready to tear yourself to pieces. Sisi’s body has not even turned completely cold yet, and you want to kill each other. Tufia!” She sighs and sits down, handing the wig she has retrieved back to Efe.

Her sigh restores the silence, which has again become the community they share. Everybody is lost in her own thoughts. Sisi’s death brings their own mortality close to them. The same questions go through their heads, speech bubbles rising in front of each of them. Who is going to die next? To lie like a sheet of paper unnoticed on the floor? Unmourned. Unloved. Unknown. Who will be the next ghost Madam will try to keep away with the power of her incense?

Nobody says it, but they are all aware that the fact that Madam is going about her normal business, no matter what they are, is upsetting them. There is bitterness at the realization that for her, Sisi’s death is nothing more than a temporary discomfort. They watched her eat a hearty breakfast, toast and eggs chewed with gusto and washed down with a huge mug of tea, and thought her appetite, her calm, tactless.

Joyce thinks: When she told them of the death, she did not even have the decency to assume the sad face that the gravity of the news demanded. She did not try to soften the blow—did not couch the news in a long story about how death was a must, an escape, an entry into a better world—the proper way to do it. No. She just told of the discovery of the body. And: “The police might want to talk to you, but I shall try and stop it. I don’t want anything spoiling business for us.”

When she added, “Another one bites the dust,” in a voice that she might have used to talk about the death of a dog or a cockroach, Joyce felt the urge to slap her. Or to stuff her mouth with dust until she begged for mercy. But Joyce did neither. She could not. Instead, she tensed her muscles and bit into her cheeks until she drew blood. Her helplessness, desolate in its totality.

Ama lets out another drawn-out sigh that blankets them all, and they sit, subdued. Their different thoughts sometimes converge and meet in the present, causing them to share the same fear. But when they think about their past, they have different memories.

Years later, Efe will claim to understand why Madam is the way she is: detached, cold, superior. “If you’re not like that, your girls will walk all over you,” Efe will tell Joyce. “If you become too involved, you won’t last a day. And it’s not just the girls. The police, too. If you’re too soft, they’ll demand more than you’re willing to give. Oyibo policemen are greedy. They have big eye, not like the Nigerian ones, who are happy with a hundred-naira bill. They ask for free girls. A thousand euros. Ah!”

Efe adjusts her wig, pulling it down so that the fringe almost covers her eyebrows. Her eyes are far away, fixed on a memory that starts to rise and gain shape in front of her. “I used to know a man who sold good-quality weave-on.”

Ama and Joyce twist their bodies so they can look at her. It is the first time Efe has spoken about her life before Antwerp. The first time, as far as they can tell, that any of them has offered a glimpse into her past. Efe clears her throat. She does not know why she feels the urgency to tell her story, but she feels an affinity with these women in a way she never has before. Sisi’s death has somewhat reinforced what she already knew: that the women are all she has. They are all the family she has in Europe. And families who know so little of one another are bound to be dysfunctional.

“Titus was his name,” she continues, patting her wig. Joyce wipes the speakers of the CD player. Ama lights a cigarette. Efe’s voice hems them in. “I was sixteen. I met him long before I met Dele.”





SISI


CHISOM THOUGHT MAYBE SHE SHOULD GO. JUST WALK OUT THE DOOR, because the man was obviously a joke.

Every month she would send five hundred euros. “Or any amount you get, minimum of a hundred, without fail.”

The “without fail” came out hard. A piece of heavy wood, it rolled across the table and fell with a thud. Any failure would result in unpleasantness, he warned.

“No try cross me o. Nobody dey cross Senghor Dele!”

He let out a cackle, a laughter that expanded and filled the room before petering out and burying itself into the deep rug.

“But how I go make dat kin’ money?” Chisom asked, more out of curiosity than out of the belief that she could, if she wanted, earn that much. She was not even going to go through with it, whatever it was, with this man who made threats. She was just curious, nothing more.

“I get connections. Dat one no be your worry. As long as you dey ready to work, you go make am. You work hard and five hundred euros every month no go hard for you to pay. Every month I send gals to Europe. Antwerp. Milan. Madrid. My gals dey there. Every month, four gals. Sometimes five or more. You be fine gal now. Abi, see your backside, kai! Who talk say na dat Jennifer Lopez get the finest nyansh? Make dem come here, come see your assets! As for those melons wey you carry for chest, omo, how you no go fin’ work?” He fixed his eyes, beady and moist and greedy, on her breasts.

When his words sank in, she expected to be furious. To ask him what type of girl he thought she was. To say, “Do you know I have a university degree? Do you know I am a graduate?”

She expected that her anger would give her the courage to slap his fat face. She expected to want to smash his mobile phones through his double-glazed windows. She waited for the hurricane of anger that would drive her to start breaking things and shout, “Stupid, useless man. Oloshi! Old man wey no get shame.” Instead, images flashed in front of her like pictures from a TV show: the living room with the pap-colored walls. A shared toilet with a cistern that never contained water; anyone wishing to use the latrine had to first of all fetch a bucket of water from the tap in the middle of the compound. A kitchen that did not belong to her family alone. Her father folded, trying to be invisible. Her mother’s vacant eyes interested in nothing. Finally, she saw Peter and the way he was easing into the lot life had thrown at him, floating on clammy handshakes with government officials who presented him with the Employee of the Year award. She knew that he would, like her father, never move beyond where he was. She did not want to be sucked into that life. She imagined her life, one year from now, if she stayed in Lagos. But could she really resort to that? She was not that sort of girl. She turned to go, but her feet stuck in the quicksand. They would not move.

Dele looked up at her. Smiled. “You fit sleep on it. No need to decide now. But I swear, with your melons, you go dey mint money anyhow!”

Rather than rant and rave, she took in his words with a calm that assured her she would do as he said. Staying on in Ogba was biding time until what? Until she married Peter and moved in with him and the rest of his family? That was worse than Dele’s proposition. Certainly. But was she really capable of this? There had to be another way. Something else she could do.

She did not tell Peter or her family the details of her meeting with Dele. She told them that he was a benevolent uncle of one of her friends. Ezinne. You remember Ezinne? The girl with buckteeth. You must remember her. We used to study together every Wednesday evening to prepare for our SSCEs. No one seemed to recollect Ezinne, the girl with the buckteeth, but it did not matter. She went on with the story she had ready. Ezinne’s uncle had arranged for her to go abroad, and he would help her get work, and she would pay him monthly. She did not tell them that she had decided already to adopt a name that she would wear in her new life. Sisi. “Sister” in Shona. Roland, one of her classmates at the university, had told her that she reminded him of his sister back in Bulawayo. Roland, nostalgic for his home and missing his sister, had called Chisom Sisi throughout the four years they were classmates. She would rename herself. She would go through a baptism of fire and be reborn as Sisi: a stranger yet familiar. Chisom would be airbrushed out of existence, at least for a while, and in her place would be Sisi. She would earn her money by using her punani. And once she hit it big, she would reincarnate as Chisom. She would set up a business or two. She could go into the business of importing fairly used luxury cars into Nigeria.

That night her mother thanked God in a voice that brought in the neighbors from both sides. And the white-wearing churchgoing young couple did a dance around the room, clapping and calling on God by twenty-nine different names to let the blessings that had fallen on Chisom fall on them, too. When the woman said “fallen,” she made Chisom think of blessings as something heavy that could crush you, something that could kill. And even though her parents sat in the sitting room, welcoming their guests and shouting a fierce “Amen” at the end of each prayer and singing and dancing, Chisom caught them looking at each other with defeated eyes, as if they had let down their only daughter. She sensed that they suspected her story was made up, but feared to know the truth, as if they feared the culpability that came with full knowledge. Chisom tried to nudge them into belief by reminding them of what the woman with the future in her eyes had seen. “This is it! How many people get opportunities like this? This is it!”

Her father nodded. “Yes. Yes. Indeed, this is it!”

Her mother nodded. “Yes. Yes. Very true. Very true.”

Vigorous nodding. Yes! Yes! And behind the ferocious yes-yes nods were thoughts and questions that swirled and eddied and threatened to drag them down.

Her mother rushed into the kitchen. “The mortar cannot wait until tomorrow to be washed. If I don’t do it now, I’ll never get around to it.”

Her father went to bed. “Long day tomorrow at the office.” And in the morning he left for work, his breakfast of yam porridge untouched on the table.

Peter came a lot more often in the coming weeks, shoes dusty from the walk, cheeks bulging with the same plea. “Don’t go. Please. Forget this uncle of your friend’s.” His voice growing fangs at “uncle.” “We shall somehow muddle through. I promise you. I will look after you. I will take you abroad. London. Holland. America. Spain. Whichever one you choose. You know, no condition is permanent. We will make it. I’ll marry you, give you children.”

Chisom said none of the things she wanted to say, like how would he make it, how much would his condition change if he stayed on working at the same school and looked after his five siblings? How would he begin to raise a family?

It was almost as if he were afraid that once she went, he would lose her forever. “I love you and I don’t want to lose you,” he tried.

Peter, she thought but did not say for fear of hurting him, right now you’re not the man for me. She hoped he would not see the impatient excitement in her eyes, the way they twitched with the thoughts of somewhere far from both him and Ogba.


THE DAY CHISOM LEFT, NO ONE SAW HER OFF AT THE AIRPORT. PETER had simply stayed away, sending a nine-year-old neighbor of his with a letter that Chisom accepted but refused to read, stuffing it into her handbag. She did not want to have to deal with Peter’s declaration of love as well as the anxiety that was making her cling to her handbag tighter than she needed to. She had not realized that leaving would be this brutal. That she would want, almost harbor a wish, that a hand would stay her. Lagos was a wicked place to be at night, her father said. Especially in a taxi. And her mother concurred. So the taxi that Chisom chartered to take her to the Murtala Muhammed Airport had just her and her meticulously packed suitcase in it. The driver—a man with an Afro that was so high, Chisom feared it would tip him over—was very talkative. He complained of the difficulties of living with two wives and eight children, all of school age. He had inherited the second wife from his dead brother. “Practically chassis, almost a virgin. They had not even been married for a year when he died. And the girl is beautiful. Very beautiful. My brother had a sweeteye. But a beautiful woman is expensive to maintain, sista.”

He seemed to think that if Chisom was traveling abroad, she must have money to spare. “My boy is sharp,” he announced proudly. “Six years old, but you should hear the things he says! He is sharp, and I want him to go to school, but how? I can’t pay his school fees with my spittle.” His other children, all girls, went to the government school close to his house. “Cheap but rubbish. That school is not good enough for my son. At all!” He was breaking his back driving round the clock, because a son deserved the best. “You girls are lucky. All you need is a rich man to snap you up, and you are made. But boys? Their life is hard. God punishes us for the sins of Adam.” He gave a self-mocking laugh and started to turn the knobs on the radio. There was a crackle and Fela’s “Teacher Teacher” came on, hardly audible over the pitter-patter of rain on the windshield. The driver hummed and swayed slightly in his seat, breaking his humming to shout insults at other drivers for almost hitting his car, for cutting in front of him, for driving too slow. “You steal your license? Oloshi! T’ief man. Madman. You dey craze?”

Chisom stayed quiet through the journey. She had too much going on in her head to engage in banal conversation with this stranger. Let him sort out whatever mess was going on in his life, what did she have to do with it? Besides, despite all her years of living in Lagos, her Yoruba had never been sure. She still stammered her way through the language. She brought out the letter from Peter and crumpled it up. She reached behind her and stuffed it into the wedge between the backrest and the seat. Let it stay there. She was heading into the lights of her future. She put her hand into the wedge and pushed the letter deeper in, at the same time feeling a release from Peter, so that while she sat there in the taxi, her hand digging deeper and deeper, she suddenly felt immortal. The energy she felt oozing from her, enough to defeat love, enough to repel even death. She was ready to set forth bravely into her future. And it was all thanks to Dele. She owed him her life.





ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT | EFE


EFE DISCOVERED SEX AT SIXTEEN BEHIND HER FATHER’S HOUSE. THAT first experience was so painful in its ordinariness that she had spent days wanting to cry. She’d had no notion of what to expect, yet she had not thought it would be this lackluster, this painful nothing.

She felt somewhat cheated, like pikin wey dem give coin wey no dey shine at all at all. She remembered nothing but a wish that it would not last too long and that the pain between her legs would be very well compensated. The man who held her buttocks tight and swayed and moaned and was responsible for all that pain was forty-five. He was old. Experienced. But, most important, he had money that was rumored to be endless. Money wey full everywhere like san’ san’. He had promised Efe new clothes. New shoes. Heaven. Earth. And everything else she fancied between the two as long as she let him have his way. “Jus’ tell me wetin you wan’, I go give you. I swear! You don’ turn my head, dey make me like man wey don drink too much kai kai. I go do anytin’ for you. Anytin’!”

The moaning in the backyard was a culmination of two and a half weeks of laying the groundwork since setting eyes on Efe as she admired a tricolored handbag in a stall close to his Everything For Your Hair supermarket: waylaying the girl as she came back from the market loaded with foodstuffs for the week. Offering her a ride in his car. Buying her a bottle of chilled Coca-Cola when they got stuck in traffic. Smuggling a crisp thousand-naira note into her shy fist as he dropped her off at her home. It was the last act that swayed her. It was not just the money, it was the crispness of it, the smell of the Central Bank still on it, the fact that he had drawn it out of a huge bundle of like notes, so that she believed all the stories she had heard of his enormous wealth. The smell was enough to make anyone giddy.

Efe shut her eyes and thought of the blue jeans she had seen the week before at the secondhand market: with a metallic V emblazoned like something glorious on the left back pocket. Maybe she should ask for a blouse as well. Titus had money, he could afford it. “De money wey I get no go finish for dis my life,” he frequently told her, encouraging her to ask for whatever she desired. His shop did very well. He had no competition when it came to good-quality hair extensions. He was known to have the best weaves. “Straight from India. Not the yeye horsehair you see all over this city. I get a hundred percent human hair!” he often boasted, eyes bulging with pride. He said women from all over Lagos stormed his shop for their hair. “Every gal wey you see wit beta weave on, na me.” He thumped his chest three times. “Na me, Titus wey supply am.”

Perhaps she ought to get a blue T-shirt, Efe thought. She had seen a light blue one that would go very well with the jeans. And the shoes to go with the jeans, of course, without saying. Maybe something high-heeled and sleek. Definitely something high-heeled and sleek. Something to make her look like a real Lagos chick, a veritable sisi Eko. She would have to get him to bring her some packets of hair extensions from his shop. How long should she make her hair? She imagined herself strutting down the road, going koi koi koi in her new shoes, her extensions stretching her hair all the way to her shoulders. She would be a senior chick, one of the big girls Lagos had in abundance: young women who had money enough to burn, theirs or somebody else’s. Maybe she could convince Titus to teach her to drive and eventually buy her a car. Why not? She could be a car owner, too, a small car with a little teddy bear hanging behind the windshield like in Titus’s car. She saw herself driving the car, voom voom voom, one hand on the steering wheel, the other hand on the gearshift, as she always saw Titus do. Her lips would be bright and beautiful and a shiny mauve. She loved mauve lipstick but had never owned it. Not yet. But things were about to change, were they not? Titus brought his face down to hers and breathed into her nose. She could smell the mint on his breath. It was not an unpleasant smell, even though at the edges of the breath was the smell of food that had been eaten long ago. Rice? Yam? Beans? Fufu? She tried not to think about the staleness of the breath and concentrated instead on the mintiness. He kissed her on the mouth and wriggled against her. He brought out his tongue and licked the side of her face. His saliva on her face was stale, but she tried not to mind, even thought she ought to enjoy it. Her back, bare on the brick wall, itched. His stomach pressed on hers, and she wished she could push it out of the way. De man stomach dey like water pot. There was nothing at all in this whole exercise that made her want a repeat performance. Why did women do it over and over again? Why did the girls at school giggle and glow when they talked about meeting boys behind the school’s pit latrines to do it? When it was finally over, she thought of Titus’s wife. She tried to ignore the pain between her legs, which burned with the sting of an open sore (with fresh ground pepper rubbed into it). Did Titus’s wife have to endure this night after night? Efe had heard that it hurt only the first time, but how could one be sure? Grown-ups did not always tell the truth. Adults were not to be entirely trusted. Look at her mother. Up until the moment she took her last breath, she had promised Efe that she would never leave them.

“Where am I leaving you to go to? Who am I leaving you for? Wipe your eyes. Don’t cry, my daughter. How can I leave you, eh? How can I leave my children? Tell me, how can I? I will get out of this hospital and walk home. Just you wait and see. How can I leave my children? Who will I be leaving them for, eh? It won’t be long now and I can come home. I am already feeling better. Soon. Very soon I’ll be back home.”

She had been so convincing that when the nurse on night duty at the Bishop Shanahan Memorial Hospital tried to pull Efe away from her mother’s stiffening body on that Tuesday morning, telling her in the reverential tone reserved for families of deceased patients, “She’s dead. Sorry. I’m sorry, my dear, but she is gone. Sorry. Come. Come,” Efe had resisted and shouted that her mother was not dead. She would not leave them. She had promised. Up until that day, nobody had suggested to her that her mother might have been lying. Not the doctor with her stethoscope around her neck, who came in twice or so a day to check on the woman. Not her father, who came in after work to relieve Efe so she could go home and look after her younger sister and brothers. Not their neighbors, who sometimes came with food “because we know what hospital food can be like. If the illness does not get you, the food will. It’s that bad.”

“Wait, she’ll soon get up from this bed and walk home!” Efe cried at the nurse.

The nurse had to drag her away from the body. At her mother’s burial a few weeks later, Efe had tried to jump into the grave, shouting, “You can’t leave me, you promised. Come back. You promised. Come back, Mama. Remember your promise? Remember, Mama?”

But the promise meant nothing to her mother. She stayed still in the coffin, her features set, and allowed herself to be covered with sand and to be gone forever and ever. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Efe would never forget the priest’s voice as he prayed over the corpse. It had a tone to it that signaled finality, the end of the woman she had believed would not give in to an illness that had sneaked up on her one Sunday morning when she complained of a headache, a tightness in her temple, and a pain that would not go away with two tablets of paracetamol taken with a tall glass of water, not even after she rested all day in bed.

Everything Efe knew about Titus’s wife, Titus had told her. She was tucked away in their Ikeja duplex with five bedrooms and three sitting rooms. She was old. Almost as old as Titus. He also said her bones were creaky, krak krak, and he needed someone with young bones to make him happy. He told Efe she made him the happiest man in Lagos, the happiest man in Nigeria, even.

“I go to bed with a smile and wake up with a smile because of you, my Efe.”

Efe was flattered to hear that she could please such a big man. Titus was big. And not just figuratively. He was tall and broad and looked rooted to the ground. When he wore shorts, his calves looked like they belonged to three men. Sometimes she thought that had her father had half Titus’s strength, her mother’s death would not have changed him. He would have remained the sober, sound man whom she remembered from before.

He would have remained strong enough for them, and Efe would not have had to quit school to look after the family. She missed her classmates, whom she no longer saw because other responsibilities had taken over and made her a lot older than they were, so that on those occasions when she did bump into them she felt embarrassed for reasons she could not explain. She missed the smell of new books at the beginning of every new term. She missed the smells of ink and chalk. She even missed the school bag, heavy with the weight of dead batteries for blackening the blackboard.

After the wriggling and the moaning had ended but the pain was still raw between her thighs, Titus gave Efe the money she needed for the jeans and the blue T-shirt. Efe wondered what the neighbors would think of this big man with his Jeep parked in front of the house, especially the Alawos, who lived in the flat right above theirs. Mrs. Alawo wey dey put nose for everybody business. Like rat, she dey sniff out person. Amebo! Tafia! Efe was convinced that Mrs. Alawo had seen her come out of Titus’s car, had seen them both enter the house, and had probably stood at the zinc door that secluded their backyard from the rest of the compound and listened to the moaning and groaning of Titus. The thought almost made Efe laugh. She put the money Titus gave her into her brassiere and went inside for a bath. She hoped the bath would relieve the pain.

The very next day Efe went shopping. She bought the jeans. And the T-shirt. And she still had money left over. Even after she bought the shoes—blue leather with high platform heels—there was still quite a tidy bit of cash nestling in her purse: crisp notes that made her nearly delirious with happiness. Efe hid the money under her pillow and every night ruminated on how best to spend it, siphoning it out in bits to buy this and that which caught her fancy: hair baubles for her youngest sister. Biscuits. Nail polish. Lipstick. A red handbag. Sweets for the little ones. Chewing gum in varying colors and flavors. She traipsed through Lagos markets and upscale boutiques in Ikeja, buying bits of happiness.

Every night for the next four months, Efe saw Titus at his insistence. He said she had taken possession of him, that he had never wanted a woman as much as he wanted her. She had never had any man before him, so she did not know if wanting him less than he wanted her was normal or an aberration on her part. But it did not matter, because his wanting her was enough. His need was buying her stuff. For the first time in her life, she felt that other girls might be envious of her, that they must want the things she had: the jeans with the glorious metallic V and the handbags that went with all colors and the high-heeled shoes that were so glamorous they could have belonged to the governor’s wife. Her mother had had such shoes, too. Fancy shoes with slim straps and heels that raised her feet off the ground (and which Efe used to wear and pretend to be flying), but her father had everything burned soon after she died. Her clothes and her shoes and her bags and her lingerie. Everything in a huge bonfire, a big ball of orange that reached up to heaven and roared, “God, why did you take my wife? Why? Isn’t heaven full enough? What am I to do with four children who still need a mother?” Efe would remember that bonfire for as long as she lived. She would see the brightness of the fire in the dark, dark night, and the clouds of smoke rising from it to join their mates in the skies. After the why-oh-why fire had burned and died, bringing no answer in its wake, no phoenix rising from its ashes, it was discovered that the clasp of one bag had survived the massacre, and the father, holding the clasp in his right hand, had hurtled out a laughter and said, “Even this lived through the fire, and yet my wife was taken.” He had collected the ash and smeared it on himself like a madman. That sight of her father, his face and hands smeared with the ash from her dead mother’s clothes and bags and lingerie and shoes, their neighbors gathered outside to watch, some of the children sniggering, would haunt Efe for a very long time. Long after she thought she had forgotten it.

Sex with Titus did not get better, but it certainly got easier. It no longer hurt so much to have him between her legs. It got more frequent, and Efe got bolder and the compensation increased. She asked for bigger things—a suitcase; a red vanity case like her mother used to have and which had been destroyed in her father’s fire; a musical jewelry case with a magnetic lock—and she got more money, even saving enough to buy a radio with a cassette player with dots of light that twinkled when it was switched on so that it was a wonder to behold in the dark and sent her youngest brother into a rendition of “Twinkul Twinkul Little Staa Hawai Wonda Wot Youya.” The bundle under her pillow grew, and she treated her excited siblings to new clothes. New sandals. New water bottles for school.

Sometimes she and Titus met in hotels far away from their part of Lagos, where he rented a room for a day and the receptionists ignored Efe’s greeting, occasionally looking at her with the same disdain they did the bugs that infested the hotels. The rooms were almost always small and the carpets threadbare. At other times it was a quick grope in the dark behind her house, leaning against a wall, trying to block the smell that came from the gutter running the entire length of the wall.

It was easy to escape her father, a man who, never having contemplated living without his wife, had fallen apart completely upon her death two years before. He regularly drowned his grief in glass after glass of ogogoro at the local beer parlor, run by Mariam, who was rumored to be a teetotaler and the mistress of half her male customers. De gin color his eyes sotey him no even fit see him feet. He left it up to Efe to look after the house and her three siblings, all younger than she was. The money he provided her every month was just enough for food, and Efe yearned for luxuries. If Titus was what she had to endure to get those luxuries, then so be it. Dat one na small price to pay.

Even before she missed her period, even before she felt her saliva turn rusty and metallic, Efe suspected that she was pregnant. So when her breasts enlarged and the morning sickness came, and the food cravings came, and the constant tiredness came, and she could not sleep well at night, she was prepared.

The night she told Titus she was sure she was pregnant was the last time, day or night, that he turned up for their daily appointment. He had been lying in bed, stroking her shoulders. “I am pregnant, Titus.” That was all it took to get him out of that bed, get him dressed, first the black trousers with the cord pulled tightly under his stomach and then the caftan reaching to his knees. Then he got up, turned his broad back to her, picked up his car key from the bedside table, and walked out of the hotel room, closing the door so gently that it made no noise.

For a long time after he left, after the blackness of his back had faded, Efe lay in the bed pretending to be asleep, welcoming the quiet. She was still naked. She preferred it when they met behind the house, because then their lovemaking did not last long. When they went to a hotel, Titus liked to take his time. He would drag her into the bed, which usually smelled of disinfectant, undress her, and then have her parade around the room naked before jumping on her and dragging her back into bed again. He would make love to her, sleep, wake up, and start again. Everything happened in silence save for Titus’s moans of pleasure. They would stay in the bed until Titus decided it was time to go home. In the car, he would give her some money and make an appointment for their next meeting. The day Efe told him of their baby, they had stayed in bed until the streetlights opposite the room they were renting came on, casting a faint glow of orange light into the room, making the peeling blue walls almost beautiful, like a blue sky with patches of white clouds showing and rays of sunshine scattered over it. Efe had commented on it at some point in the evening, but Titus had seen nothing remarkable in it. “Na just streetlight, Efe. Wey de sunshine in dat one?”

While Efe lay down, eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, her greatest worry was not the pregnancy, which Titus obviously was not interested in. Her greatest worry was how on earth she would get home. She cursed Titus for choosing this out-of-the-way hotel in the middle of nowhere. The fried rice she had eaten and enjoyed earlier soured in her stomach and caused it to rumble, so that she had to rush to the bathroom. What a waste of good food, she thought as she sat on the toilet, evacuating the rice and the shrimp and the cubed meat that Titus had ordered for her at the beginning of the evening. If she could have, she would have kept them all in; having no idea where she was, she did not know how long it would take her to get home.

Done with the toilet, Efe decided it was time to go. She dressed in slow motion, wondering how long it would take for her stomach to grow and already feeling that it was no longer a part of her. Like say an alien don invade am. When she pulled up her skirt, she ran her hands over her stomach, still flat and firm, and could not believe that there was a baby growing inside her, gnawing her insides, feeding off her in a symbiotic relationship she was not entirely sure she appreciated. She hung her head when she walked out into the lobby, not wanting to look into the eyes of the receptionist, who was at that moment, she was sure, staring at her with a smirk. It was not the pregnancy that made her ashamed, for no one could see it. It was the fact that she had been abandoned in this Royal Hotel. She felt cheap, for it was only the cheapest sort of girl who was brought to a hotel and left on her own to find her way home. It was a good thing she had some money in her purse. Although she never had to pay for anything while she was with Titus, she had stuck to her habit of always making sure she never left the house without some money. Her mother had instilled that in her. “You never know what might happen. Always be prepared.” Well, you were right, Mama, she said to herself, and sent a quick prayer of gratitude to her. What would she have done if she had been empty-handed? Who would she have asked for money?

Abortion never crossed her mind, not that day and not in the days and weeks that followed, when she started to feel really pregnant and her face puffed up and she could no longer stand the smell of okra soup. She had heard enough horror stories of abortions gone wrong. Nkiru, two houses away from theirs, knew of a girl who had died from a cold that got into her stomach when the doctor who performed an abortion on her did not close the stomach properly. Nkiru said the cold went from the stomach and spiraled into the throat, finally blocking the nostrils, so that the girl could no longer breathe. Somebody else knew of someone who had tried to do it with a clothes hanger and had bled to death. What Efe would try, three months gone and horribly sick, would be to punch herself several times in the stomach. She had heard from Nkiru’s older sister that this was a sure but harmless way to get the baby to expel itself. “A surer bet than the abortion belt. It’ll just be a clot of blood and you’ll be okay.” But it had not worked for Efe, and after two different attempts she would resign herself to fate and a baby who was determined to be born.

It took Efe over three hours, a cab, and a bus drive to get home that night. Her father was in the sitting room, snoring off twelve bottles of lager and fifteen shots of ogogoro. Efe touched her stomach for the second time that day and, without meaning to, she began to cry for want of her mother.

She wondered how to tell her father about the pregnancy. She could not remember the last time they’d had a proper conversation. Mostly he yelled at them. “How long does it take for breakfast to be ready in this houseful of women? What does a man have to do to get food in his own house?” A normally loquacious man, given to long-winded talk, he became egregious after he had drunk a bit, picking fights on the way until he got home, bruised and battered. The children saw him some mornings when he got up for breakfast and work, and some nights, if they stayed up long enough, they heard him sing meaningless songs about soldiers and women. And about death and how he would conquer it, live forever, because he had death in his pouch. He sang disconsolately of how death had married his wife and taken her to his home. Twice a month, sometimes more, an irate neighbor would walk down to their ground-floor flat and ask him to shut up, his family could not sleep with all the ruckus he was creating. Some of us have to work in the morning, let us sleep abeg! Sometimes the neighbor would manage to get him to calm down. Other times, the plea for quiet would seem to inspire more songs in him, louder and more senseless:


I saw a madman weaving a basket and he wove me a trap to catch you in. He said, catch that man with the devil in him, catch him and roast him on a big big big fire.

Lagos dey burn burn burn, you dey here dey chase rat rat rat.

Rat go burn, you go burn

And your bones go scatter over the sea.


In the end Efe would not tell him, leaving it up to him to notice and initiate a discussion, drunk or not. But she would tell her sister. Not that night but in the morning, after they had eaten and the younger ones had been fed and sent off to school. Some things were better discussed on a full stomach and in a quiet house. Rita would not have the words to articulate the fear that gripped her when she heard. What would they do with a baby in the house without their mother to teach them what to do? With a father who stumbled over his own feet after he’d had a drink? But Efe did not need her words because an identical fear had taken ahold of her the moment she suspected she was with child, and the fear refused to let go. But she knew her baby’s father. That in itself was a blessing. Rita agreed with her. And from all indications, Titus had the wherewithal to take care of their offspring. Some babies entered the world with far worse prospects. There were babies born with fathers unknown or with fathers who did not have anything to their names. Not even two coins to rub together. At least my baby will never want for anything, Efe consoled herself, trying hard not to think about the baby extending her stomach and making it difficult for her to sleep at night in any position. She spent many nights on her back, swearing that she would never as long as she lived go through another pregnancy, wondering how her mother had done it. How had she coped with four pregnancies? And the women who went on to have twelve children? How had they done it, knowing the pain that came with the pregnancy?

If her father noticed that her body was changing, he said nothing of it. He maintained an air of stolidity that Efe found mildly irritating. Surely he could see her stomach. At the beginning of every month, he faithfully gave her money from the wages he earned as a laborer renting himself out to building contractors, and guzzled the rest up at Mariam’s, as was his custom. Even when he was in a screaming mood, he never mentioned the stomach that was starting to bulge not just forward but sideways. “Making me look like a pregnant goat,” Efe complained to Rita. It was as if the stomach were invisible to him. If his daughter’s growing stomach was indeed invisible to him, it was not to the neighbors, the women especially, who pointed at Efe and laughed out loud whenever they passed her, clapping their hands and baring mocking teeth. Their daughters, girls who had played with Efe or gone to school with her, either avoided her or were called away as soon as they stopped to talk to her. Collectrose! Go and get me matches from the store! Evbu, you need to do your homework! Efe’s laughter became muted. Her steps slower. And it was not just the stomach that hindered her laughter or slowed her steps.

“People look at me as if I am dirt,” she complained to Rita.

“Don’t mind them, Efe,” her sister consoled. “Once the baby is out and the father starts taking care of him, they will know that you’re not one of those useless girls who just sleep around with any man.”

Efe smiled at her sister, grateful for her support. “I hope it’s a boy. If it’s a boy, his father will definitely want him.”

“Don’t worry, Efe. God is not asleep. It will be a boy.”

“Amen.” Efe sealed her sister’s prayer.

When she became too big and developed a waddle like an overfed pigeon’s, she handed over the reins of power to Rita, eleven months younger. Their father did not ask Rita why it was she and not Efe who came to him for money. He just counted out the notes, mainly crumpled notes that had gone soft from too much touching, permeated with the musky odor of utaba, snuff, the way poor people’s money smelled. Rita proved as capable as her predecessor, shopping, cooking, and organizing the younger ones to help with the cleaning so that Efe could get on with the time-consuming business of being pregnant. Efe would think much later, when her life was more settled and she had lost the weight she gained in pregnancy and had regained a normal appetite, that she never would have gotten through it without Rita.

When her water broke and she feared that birth was imminent—she remembered her mother telling stories of when she, Efe, was born, how her water had broken while she was making lunch and how she had barely made it to the hospital before Efe came—it was Rita she woke up and begged to get her to the hospital because the pain was sawing her in two, separating her torso from the rest of her. She held on to Rita all the way to the hospital, pinching her when the pain became too much for her to bear, and Rita bit her tongue and shared her sister’s pain, urging the taxi driver to take it easy, go jeje, when he drove into a pothole and Efe cried out in agony. The driver snapped at Rita that he was not responsible for the bad roads in Lagos.

“If you wan’ complain about potholes, go talk to the gov’ment. Na just driver I be. If you no as I dey drive, I go stop make you comot.”

The man had had a rough day, and the last thing he needed was to be told how to drive by two young girls who could have been his children, one of whom was pregnant. He had not noticed a wedding band on the pregnant one’s finger. Lagos girls, he fumed silently, they have no morals at all. When he got home later that night and told his wife about his day, he would tell her that the pregnant girl looked fourteen. “Right about to have her bastard in my car, I swear.”

Efe was relieved to see the reassuring creaminess of the All Saints Maternity, and Rita was relieved to hand her sister over to a matronly nurse whose very walk as she guided Efe to a bed was a lesson in efficiency. The klop klop klop of her black shoes, the cadenced accompaniment to her hands, which searched around for a hospital gown and gloves. Efe was undressed and hooked up to a machine that bleeped intermittently and then stopped. The nurse unhooked her and said, “Sorry, the machine’s stopped working. We have run out of paper. But some hospitals don’t even have this. We have three here. Donation. It shows the progress of labor. It draws it on a paper and we can see how bad the pain is, if it is real labor or not.” She tapped the machine in awe.

A doctor with too many teeth came in, a stethoscope around his neck like an oversize metal necklace. Rita worried that he looked tired, that he would not be able to look after Efe well. She wondered if she should voice her worry, ask for maybe a different doctor, say that this doctor needed a bed and hours of sleep. She looked at Efe and smiled, hoping her sister would not see the worry on her face. He sat at the foot of Efe’s bed and asked the nurse questions. She gave her answers in the confident tone of one who was competent and knew it. “Four centimeters dilation. Water broken. Baby not distressed.” None of what the nurse told the doctor made sense to either Rita or Efe.

The pain in Efe’s stomach came and went in waves, peaking and dipping at irregular intervals. She said no to pain relief. She wanted to feel it all, as if in expiation of this pregnancy that had marred her life, marked her out as a loose girl. She wished she could insert her hand inside the womb and drag out this baby who was causing her to writhe so much in agony. Rita sat by her on the bed as soon as the doctor left and cried along with her sister when the pain became too much for Efe to bear. When Efe cussed the “evil child” who was the cause of all her pain, Rita told her to stop, for everyone knew it was taboo to cuss a baby who had its head half into the world. It was bad luck.

“Just try and bear, Efe, you hear? Just try. It’ll soon be over. You’re doing great. It’ll soon be over. You hear?”

Thirteen hours later, when Efe shrieked her son into the world, it was Rita who stood beside her, holding her hand and crying