by Chika Unigwe
Three months later and a month before she turned sixteen, Alek met Polycarp. A Nigerian soldier. He was accompanying the group fetching firewood. Defiant in his uniform. Under his left eye a thin scar the length of her little finger; she found herself wanting to touch it. To feel it. To hear the story that gave birth to it. Love. It did not take her long to recognize it. Here, of all places! That was what she said. Of all the places to find love! She had not known she had it in her. She had dreamed of marriage and children, but that was before. Before she knew the human capacity for pain and loss. Before she knew that you could go to the center of hell. And not die. Surely not. Denial. Not with a soldier. Surely not. But Polycarp was different. He never looked at the refugees with curiosity. Or with pity. Or with anything that closely resembled derision. Or a sense of superiority. His eyes were warm. His strides, when he walked, firm but modest. As if he was no better than the people he was protecting. He played with the little ones. Let them touch his uniform. Rub their hands across his gun. He pinched their cheeks. Made them squeal with a laughter that did not annoy Alek with its intensity. That did not make her question how anyone could be happy under the circumstances. It was normal for anyone around this soldier to be happy. To laugh. To recover their joie de vivre. And she wanted so very much to be touched by him. Wanted him to induce the high laughter in her as he did the children. Oh yes, she wanted that so very, very much that his face followed her. Every moment of the day.
Polycarp noticed Alek, too. He seemed to find a reason to be near her while she chopped wood. Offered to help her tie her bunch. And when their hands touched, he squeezed hers. This tiny gesture made her want to burst into an aria. When he placed the wood on her head, he touched her neck so gently that she almost missed it. Yet it made fireworks explode somewhere inside her.
Secretly, he brought her presents. A bag. A tin of sardines. A hair comb. A mirror. Some sweets. Alek hid the presents in a corner of her tent. Sometimes she brought out the mirror and surveyed her face. Whenever she did this, the face of a stranger stared back at her. A tightness at the corners of the mouth. Fine lines fanning out from the sides of the eyes. The stranger looked old. At least twenty-five, she thought. She did not think she could ever look older than she already did. What did Polycarp see in her?
He said, “Hold your hair in a bun. So I can see your neck.” She giggled.
At night she dreamed of him. She dreamed of the children she would have for him. She dreamed of a life away from the camp. And she woke up with a grin on her face. Life was no longer a chore she had to get through every day. Life was a face. A beautiful scar. A hand sending ripples down the back of her neck. These days, when she talked to the stars, she told her family about Polycarp. She described him to her mother: a man so tall that he could stand on tiptoes and touch the sky. He was the color of yellow maize. Did she think anyone could be that yellow? His voice was hoarse, as if he constantly nursed a cough. And his nose, Mama, his nose was almost beaked, it makes you think of a bird. She laughed about how skinny Polycarp was, so skinny he could be a pencil drawing of a stick person. She told her father how Polycarp brought her presents. How he made sure she got extra food. She told her brother how much Polycarp reminded her of him. How they had the same eyes: the pupils not quite dark, a tint of gray. She told them how often she thought of marriage these days. Of being a mother and a wife. She felt like an object that had lain dormant for years and was being excavated.
One day Polycarp gave her a note. It asked her to meet him outside her tent later.
On a night made luminous by the moon, Alek followed Polycarp back to his quarters. His tent had a strange smell. A man’s smell that Alek had not smelled since her father died. She must not think of her father now. Nudge the thought aside. Polycarp led her to his bed. He undressed her. Delicately, as if she were fine porcelain that might shatter. He lifted her dress over her head. Bent down and plucked her nipples with his mouth. He threw off his shirt. Guided her hand to unzip his trousers. Gently pushed her down onto the bed. The thick green army blanket scratched her back, but she did not mind. She was floating. Flying. A butterfly fluttering. She felt Polycarp between her thighs. There was no pain. No ache. Just a long, long sigh and a happiness that filled in the hollowness in her chest. Her excavation was complete. She had been dug up from deep under.
In the still of the night, she whispered to her mother, “I’m a woman now, Mother. A proper woman.” Her mother would forgive her, would she not? The rules had changed. She had slept with a man without being married to him. She called up her mother’s face. And the woman smiled a wide smile that included Polycarp as well. Absolving her. Totally.
Alek met Polycarp often in his quarters. Soon it became clear to her that she could not live without him. He had become as much a part of her as any other part of her body. He made her laugh. He made her forget sometimes that the only time she saw her parents and her brother was in her dreams. Polycarp had sneaked into her heart and carved out a comfortable place for himself in there.
She asked him stories about his life. She sketched his life before they met. The scar was from a lashing by his father. He was seventeen. His father had caught him smoking marijuana. The buckle of his father’s leather belt left the welt. He had walked around for days with a hand covering the eye. She relived his life and felt the pain of the flogging. He was the oldest of five children. His mother ran a bakery. His father owned a print shop. He lived in Lagos before he came to Sudan. Lagos was the most crowded city on earth. Lagos was so crowded that it was impossible to breathe. The markets were wildly beautiful. She said it sounded a lot like Khartoum. Only less dusty. “One day I’ll take you to Lagos. Treat you like the queen that you are.” She laughed at the thought of being a queen. He kissed her and said she had a laughter that sounded like the tinkling of crystal. She laughed at that and he kissed her. And she wished they could stay like that forever. His lips marrying hers.
Two months later, Polycarp was deployed to Lagos. He took Alek with him. About time, she thought. Seven months in the refugee camp was a death sentence. The plastic sheeting of the tents could not keep the sandstorms at bay.
SISI
THAT NIGHT, JUST BEFORE SHE WAS SHAKEN AWAKE BY MADAM, SISI SAW her car. A Lexus lit up in such splendor that she could not look directly upon it. But she could see the driver. And it was not her. It was being driven by a headless form with a candlewick for a head. When she woke up, she snapped her fingers over her head to ward off any evil that the dream might portend and, under the gaze of Madam, opened up the bag she had been given earlier and picked out the clothes for her first night of work. The car and the wick flittered at the periphery of her mind, so that when she was not even thinking, they strayed into her mind’s eye and filled her with a certain disquiet while she dressed. Determined not to turn and run (where was she running?), she tried to calm herself by dressing with a fervor she did not feel. She pulled on the skirt Madam had chosen. Clenched her teeth and reached behind to pull up the zipper. Triiiiiiip. She looked at the blouse. Laughed. Pulled it over her breasts with aggression. She pursed her lips and smeared on lipstick. Red. Red. Like her thoughts. Murderous thoughts that made her wish she could smash things. She had a degree, for Pete’s sake. Her hands shook. She did not think she could go through with this. Dark kohl under her eyes, cloaking the sadness that she was scared to see. Obasanjo’s children, were they being forced to do things just to survive? She had heard that they were in Ivy League universities in the U.S. She wiped off excessive kohl with a spit-covered finger. Why had she bothered to go to school? She thought of the flat in Ogba. Of Peter with the stalled life. Of her father folding into himself. Of the money she could make. She arched her eyelids in the color of the earth. Madam came to the door to inspect, to ask if she was ready. “Yes,” she said. She was.
Sisi was a dream maker in silver and gold. These were not clothes she ever would have picked out for herself, not even for this job. The blouse hugged her intimately, sequined in silver.
A gold-colored nylon skirt that showed her butt cheeks when she bent. Sisi felt like asking for a longer skirt. She felt naked, silver and gold nude. Long gold-plated earrings dangled from her ears and rested on her shoulders, thin strings of a setting sun. And on her lips, the rich red of tomato purée. Lips pouting sensually (she hoped), their redness gleaming. She tried to recapture the energy that had made her near-immortal on the drive to the airport.
She failed.
She would come close to feeling like that only once more in her life.
Madam pulled into a parking lot close to a kebab takeaway restaurant. The restaurant was open, and outside customers lined up. “This is as far as we can go by car,” Madam told her. The two women got out, and Sisi wondered how she was going to go past the restaurant—with its customers wide awake, waiting for their food—sparkling in her gold and silver clothes like flashy jewelry. Her skirt rode up her thighs, and she was sure that her butt cheeks showed. Was this thing even a skirt? She pulled on it, willing it to stretch and cover her shame.
They walked past the restaurant, and Sisi did not hear the catcalls she had expected, the insults she was expecting to be thrown at her. I could never get away with this in Lagos, but then this is not Lagos, she thought, and was grateful. The cobbled road made walking somewhat difficult. They took a side street and came to a wide road on either side of which blocks of flats stood. The ground flats caught her attention. Huge windows like showcases, the edges of the windows lined with blue and red neon lights, and behind the windows, young women in various poses. Mostly poses that involved their chest being pushed out, eyelids fluttering, a finger beckoning. Pretty girls all in a row. Bodies clad in leather or half dressed in frilly lingerie. Boots way up the thighs. There was mainly a population of men on the street. The few women Sisi saw held their men around the waist or dragged at their hands as if to show possession, walking rapidly with their leashed men behind them. The womenless men walked slowly, pensively, yet maintaining the look of people whose presence on the street was transient. Flitting shadows whose images would fade quickly in daylight and whose temporary presence would be pandered to by the workers behind the windows. They would stop and stare at the window displays, matching the idea in their heads with the girl winking at them, urging them to come in. Sometimes they would go up to the windows and talk to the women through slightly opened doors. She saw one or two enter and disappear behind the scenes with their choice for the night.
They passed by a big building with its name lit up in neon red, the silhouette of a woman with long, long legs sitting atop one of the letters. There was something indisputably arrogant about the building. Madam noticed Sisi looking at it and said wistfully, “Villa Tinto. The queen of all brothels. Even has its own police station. It just opened a few months ago. January or February, I think it was. It used to be a warehouse before it was converted. Cost a lot for the conversion. It had to. It’s a paradise inside, all high-tech. Designed by some celebrity architect. I hear the girls who work inside have panic buttons beside their beds to press when a customer gets out of hand. They have Jacuzzis. Saunas. That kind of stuff. Too costly for us. Not too many black women inside. Two. Three, tops. This is where ministers get their girls. The girls here are top class. We are going to the Thee Potje. No ministers there, but paying customers all the same.”
At the door, a tall dark man stood guard. He had on a plain black face cap and stonewashed jeans. Sisi wondered where he was from. His darkness did not look Nigerian, but it did not have the shine of a Ghanaian complexion. Rather, it looked ashy, like a blackboard that had just been wiped but not blackened. Senegalese, perhaps. Or Gambian. He might even be from one of those Rwanda and Burundi places. She could not decide. They do look alike, don’t they, people from those countries?
The man moved aside, gesturing them in with a hand and his upper body bowed. “Your Beautifulness,” he drawled. This made Madam cackle a laugh.
Sisi walked in ahead of Madam to a surprisingly dark room. She had expected dazzling brightness. Lots of glitter and shine. Psychedelic balls of light. The café was dimly lit, and it took a few seconds for Sisi to get used to the dimness. It had a dark wooden interior, a wooden ceiling with blue, red, and orange spotlights arranged in the shape of a huge star that spanned the width of the room, with six other stars inside it, each one smaller in size than the one preceding it, like a matryoshka.
At first all Sisi saw was a cloud of smoke rising up to meet the lights. It was as if she had walked off the earth and stumbled into the clouds, with stars in every conceivable color. Sitting on stools along the wall to the right were eleven men, most of whom were smoking. To the left of her was the bar, behind which a portly built man in an apron washed long beer glasses. He raised a finger to Madam, and Madam nodded, smiled, and with Sisi behind her, walked up to the bar. In front of the bar was a line of about sixteen stools. Nearly every stool was occupied by a young black woman. The women were almost uniformly dressed in tight T-shirts that showed off some flesh: a bit of the stomach, some cleavage. Under the T-shirts, they wore trousers or skimpy skirts. They all had long silky weaves—in colors ranging from blond to brown—that swayed with the slightest movement. There were only three stools that Sisi could see occupied by men, drinking beer. A woman with a black tube top and denim trousers sat between the thighs of one of the men. She eyed Sisi and turned around and said something to her companion that made him laugh and shake his head.
The man behind the bar said something to Madam, who cupped her ear. “I can’t hear you,” she said.
“Just one moment. I be with you. One moment,” he shouted above the music, raising his index finger to indicate one. He smiled at Madam.
“Okay.” Madam smiled back and, leaning into the bar, said something to him in Dutch. The barman laughed. While Sisi waited, she scanned the room. In the stomach of the café were eight square tables. Each table had about four or so men. Each man had at least one female companion hanging around his neck, sitting on his lap, or simply standing behind him. Toward the back of the café was a jukebox. A young woman in tight trousers and a tank top sat on a stool beside the jukebox, tapping her feet to the music boom-booming into the room.
The woman had a small toylike black mobile phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her hair extensions came down to way past her shoulders. Sisi wondered why she was alone. Was she also a madam? Was she patrolling her girls? Making sure they behaved? Keeping an eye on her investment? She looked young. Too young to have her own girls. But rich enough to be no one’s girl.
It struck Sisi that the café was a study in opposites. Men/women. White/black. Old/young. Apart from five men, the rest of them did not look a day younger than forty. Sisi would learn later that the older men made better customers. Ama would tell her later, “Young men want lovers. Who wants to be a lover for nothing? Old men just come to be fulfilled. They are not looking for love. They pay to get what they want. Some of them are widowers. Some have wives who no longer want to give action. They come here, and we are the Viagra they need to face the world again. Young men, ah, they have energy, they have dreams. All they want is love. And love is not what we give in this job. It’s not part of the job description.” Ama would slap her thighs and laugh. Her laughter would ring with the hollowness of an empty shell and move Sisi close to tears.
Madam tapped Sisi on her shoulder. Lightly, like the flutter of a butterfly, but with urgency and authority. The man behind the bar had extricated himself and, to Sisi’s surprise, was not as portly as he had looked while behind the counter. He was almost as slim as Segun, and Sisi realized that what had made him seem bigger was his stomach. He had a beer belly the size of an advanced pregnancy, but the rest of him was quite slender. He walked ahead of them to an office at the back of the café: a door beside the toilet that Sisi had not noticed. In the glare of the office fluorescent light, Sisi saw that crumbs of something brown were stuck on his mustache. She wondered what he had been eating. Bread, maybe? He smiled at t
he two women, his teeth gleaming at them. He nodded, raked his fingers through straight black hair, brought out his hand, and traced Sisi’s figure.
“Very good, Madam, very good. She knows the drill? Ja? Here, the klanten … how you say klanten?” He turned to Madam, and she provided the lost word. “Customers.” “Yes, customers. Thank you. The customers, they come first, ja? Make them drink. Make them buy lots of drinks. Much much drinks. Expensive drinks. You give me business, I give you business, no?” He winked at Madam and, with an arm around Sisi, led the two women back into the café. Sisi, unused to high heels, staggered on the silver stiletto sandals that sparkled as she walked, moving her buttocks in the way that she had seen models do on TV, feeling more self-conscious than she had thought she would be. “Smile,” Madam whispered furiously to her, and Sisi took a deep breath, tucked in her stomach, and donned the smile that would become her trademark in her profession.
A man in a striped shirt smiled back. He was leaning against the wall, a bottle of beer in his hand. His smile was urgent, and Madam half pushed Sisi to his table and then barreled out of the café, vanishing into the night. She had some other business to see to, she said, and Sisi was to behave herself. Sisi pulled on her skirt in a vain attempt to stretch it farther down her thighs, but the skirt stayed put, and Sisi lost her smile.
“Hello, beautiful.” The man in the striped shirt grinned at her, gesturing her to an empty chair beside him. “What’s your name?”
“Eh?”
“Name? Your name?” He spoke into her ear.
“Sisi.”
Sisi sat down and tried to regain her smile. She stretched her lips and parted them. Like a weak flame, the smile came, faltered, and died out. She was a woman sinking. How could she smile while she sank? What on earth was she doing here? Smiling at this stranger for whom she felt nothing but who would probably have her tonight. She had slept with only two people in her entire life. Kunle, her boyfriend before Peter, when she was eighteen and experimenting, and Peter. What would Peter think if he saw her now? Tears found their way to her eyes. She was not doing this because she liked it, she reminded herself. But she was here now, and there was no going back. She clenched her teeth and tried again to smile. Her lips, as if made out of straw, cracked, and the smile splintered. “See See? Beautiful name.” The man chuckled. “Beautiful name for beautiful lady. You want a drink? See See?” He said the name as though it were something scrumptious he had on his tongue and was unwilling to let go of. Sisi nodded. “Yes, a drink would be good. Something cold. Thank you.”
