by Chika Unigwe
“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.
