On Black Sisters Street (10 page)

“No. The papa of my son no wan’ sabi him. We no sabi him, too.” She dismissed Titus and any claims he might lay on the boy later, had he been interested. “I no get anyone,” she added, head bent, eyes down. She hoped she had given enough hints that she was available but not loose, the sort of girl he could have an affair with but treat with respect at the same time. And, if she played her cards right, even marry. She did not have anything left over from what she’d saved while she was with Titus. And the money she made working just about paid for L.I.’s necessities. She did not want to be reduced to the sort of girl who went around with just any man for money. The sort of girl, like so many she knew, who went with carpenters and car mechanics for a bit of cash. She might have had a baby outside wedlock,
but it did not mean she was cheap. She could still pick, and Dele seemed the type of guy to give his girlfriend a munificent allowance. The type to give L.I. everything she hoped for him and more. The sort of man to see that she got a break from the scrimping and the cleaning and the tiredness that were taking over her life.

But try as she might, Dele never asked her out, and it was not until seven months later, when she started to complain about finding a good nursery school for L.I. so that Rita could go back to school, that Dele asked if she would like to go abroad. “Belgium. A country wey dey Europe. Next door to London.”

He made it sound as if you could walk from Belgium to London. From one door to the next.

Had he not started talking seriously about payment, an installment plan to repay the debt, of her sharing a house with other “Nigerian women” being looked after by a friend of his, she would not have believed that he had not asked her the question in jest, that he had not dangled the idea in front of her like a wicked adult might dangle food in front of a hungry child, keeping it always out of reach but close enough to be seen and smelled.

“If I wan’ go abroad, Oga Dele? Anybody dey ask pikin if de pikin wan’ sweet?”

Who did not want to go abroad? People were born with the ambition, and people died trying to fulfill that ambition. Was it not just the week before that the cyclist whose
okada
she had boarded told her of the Nigerian man who died at the airport in some abroad country he could not pronounce because the bags of cocaine he swallowed had burst in his stomach? “Sister, dem say the man face come swell like dis and he jus’ fall dead!” the cyclist said, demonstrating with his hands how the head had swelled, so that Efe had to ask him to please keep his hands on the bike, she still had a long life ahead of her. “If you are tired of life, take only yourself out of it. Leave innocent people alone,
abeg,
” she pleaded.

People knew the risks and people took them, because the destination was worth it. What was it the song said?
Nigeria jaga jaga. Everytin’ scatter scatter
. Nobody wanted to stay back unless they had pots of money to survive the country. People like Titus and Dele.

She had agreed to Dele’s terms before she asked what she was expected to do abroad. “Clean?” To which Dele laughed and said, “No. Sales.” It was the way he sized her up, his eyes going from her face to her breasts to her calves under her knee-length skirt, that told her what sort of sales she was going to be involved in. She would be Dele and Sons Limited’s export. L.I. would get a better life. Go to good schools, become a big shot, and look after her when she was old and tired. L.I. was a worthy enough investment to encourage her to accept Dele’s offer. And even though leaving him would be the hardest thing she would ever do, she would endure it for his sake.

When she got home that night, Rita was already in bed but not yet asleep. Efe called her into the kitchen. “I have something to tell you,” she said as she went ahead of her sister and drew a kitchen stool to sit on. Her dinner was still in the pot on the table from under which the stool came. She ignored it. There would be time enough for food. Cleaning three offices always tired her legs. She sat gratefully, with her back to the gas cooker, and Rita stood in front of her, blocking the door.

“Rita,” she began, her voice already acquiring a tone that was at once distant but warm, the way it would sound on the telephone when she would call home to ask about L.I., “I am leaving Lagos.” She stopped and started again, as if searching for lost words, mindful of not saying the wrong thing. “I am going abroad.” The word “abroad” brought a smile that stretched her lips from one end to the other and a sweet taste to her tongue, a taste not unlike that of very ripe plantain. “I’m going to Europe. Belgium.”

Before Rita had a chance to ask her how and where, Efe preempted her and said, “Close to London. Next door to London.” She
repeated Dele’s phrase, seeing in her mind’s eye two big doors one beside the other, with
BELGIUM
marked on one and
LONDON
marked on the other. Belgium’s proximity to London suggested that it was like London. Everybody knew London. Had sung London in rhymes while playing in dust-covered front yards, clapping to its tune:

London Bridge is falling down

Falling down

Falling down

London Bridge is falling down

My fair laaaaaaaadddyyyyyyyy

Pussycat, Pussycat

Where have you been?

I have been to London to see the queen
.

“A man has promised me a job in Belgium.”

The sound of it thrilled her. Belgium.
Bell. Jyom
. Something that tinkled and ushered in dawn, clear as glass.

“My boss.
Oga
Dele. The kind one. You remember him, abi? The one who gave me extra five hundred naira at Christmas. He’ll get me a job. In Belgium.” Her voice fell. “He says a woman can earn easy money there. They like black women there.” A pause. She did not look at Rita. “He says before I know it, before one year even, I’ll be rich. I’ll buy a Mercedes-Benz!”

Dele had not exactly told her that, but sitting on the bike on her way home, Efe had dreamed up the riches she would amass and had calculated that she would be able to afford a Mercedes by the time she had spent a year working. As for liking black women, Dele had told her they were in great demand by white men tired of their women and wanting a bit of color and spice. She would not tell her other siblings; they were too young to deal with the truth. They were still at the age when the world was either black or white. They would
be told that Efe was going abroad to live with a rich family and work as kitchen help. She would make lots of money and send them to school. And for a very long time, they believed it and told anybody who cared to listen that they had a sister living in London—for nobody had heard of Belgium—cleaning homes and making pots of money for them.

To her father, she would say simply that she was going abroad to live for a few years. It would have been impossible to tell him the truth, even if he had been a different sort of father, even if he had been the sort of father to insist on knowing how his teenage daughter was getting the money to travel abroad and, once there, how she was going to live. Rita, practically a woman herself and blossoming in more ways than one, would understand. She would not judge Efe. And if there was one human being into whose care she could entrust L.I., it was Rita, who had always been there for him, from the very beginning. She knew she was right when Rita’s response was a hug and a whispered, “Get me a Mercedes, too.”

In fact, in the thirteen years Efe would be abroad, Rita would become such a mother to L.I. that whatever memories he had of Efe would be replaced by those of the rounder Rita. Rita would let him sit beside her as she cooked. She would take him along with her when she went to the market. When he got taunted by the neighborhood children who called him a bastard, it was Rita who comforted him and told him he was no bastard, he was a child whose father was dead. When he asked what sort of man his father had been, Rita would tell him that he was a rich, strong man, better than the fathers of the boys who laughed at him and called him the bastard son of an unmarried woman. It was Rita who explained to him that sometimes his grandfather came back loud and angry because he had been given a cross huger than he was able to carry, and he, L.I., was not to pay any attention to the man. And when L.I. started school and his teachers asked for his mother, Rita would be the one to go, asking
how he was doing at school, was he well behaved? If there was any scolding to be done, Rita would be the one to dish it out, telling him, “Your mother is working hard to pay your fees, and this is how you repay her?”

L.I. would call Rita Mommy. And the first time he would see his real mother again, in a crowded Lagos airport, he would look to Rita for confirmation that indeed Efe, and not she, was the woman who had brought him into this world. It would be Rita who would nudge him forward, a boy on the cusp of manhood with a headful of dark oiled hair, and whisper in his ear that his mother would appreciate a smile, a hug, some recognition.

Efe was the last to leave the plane. She had flown Iberia through Barcelona. Dele told her that before, she could have taken Sabena straight to Brussels, direct, but Sabena had gone out of business. Iberia was the one everyone used these days, he said, because it was cheaper and gave more luggage allowance. Air France was the one to avoid, he advised, as if Efe were thinking of going home the very next day and the information was pertinent. Air France was very strict with its luggage allowance. “Dem no go let you carry even one kilo extra,” Dele said. KLM, apparently, was the one you wanted if you did not get Iberia. “You fit beg for excess luggage.” It did not make any difference to Efe. All the worldly belongings that she was interested in taking along could be contained in a plastic bag, leaving just enough room for the sadness she felt at having to leave L.I. behind. But the baggage allowance mattered to Dele, obviously, because on the day Efe was to leave, he brought two big suitcases packed full of food he said Efe had to deliver to the woman who would be looking after her: smoked fish and peanuts and palm oil sealed in a tin to avoid detection. “Dem no dey like make we dey bring palm oil, but you no go get good palm oil from there. She dey miss Nigerian food. Very soon you go begin miss am, too.” Efe was certain she would not.

The only luggage of worth she carried was in her head. A strong
memory of L.I. holding on to Rita, crying as Efe walked through security at the Lagos airport. Rita had said not to bring him to the airport, it would be better to leave him at home, but Efe had insisted. She wanted her son with her for as long as possible. She wanted to soak in the smell of his skin after he’d had a shower. And right up until she had to hand him over to Rita, she’d had her nose buried in his hair, where the scent was the strongest. She wanted to take the smell and store it where she could have easy access to it. She believed she would never forget that smell, but before she had been in Belgium three weeks, life would take over and she would struggle to remember the smell amid all the other ones suffusing the space around her. But on the plane, still far away from Antwerp and her customers, Efe remembered the smell and saw her child before her eyes and cried in a way she believed she never would again. Losing her mother had been hard; losing her son, even if temporarily, was worse. She hoped she would never have to cry like that again for as long as she lived. She was wrong. In the sixty-eight years she lived, she would find out that there were things far worse than leaving behind a child whom you hoped to see again.

Efe got off the plane feeling older than she was. Her knees hurt and her ears ached. The flight had not been as pleasant as she had thought it would be. She had always imagined that being on a plane, flying high above God’s own earth, would feel a bit like flying with your own wings. She’d always imagined that people in planes felt free, like gods who claimed the skies. But the experience for her had been anything but. She felt trapped in her seat beside a window that was so small it did not qualify to be called as such. It was a night flight, so she had been unable to see anything but the taillights of the plane whenever she looked out the window. The air was cold and felt used up, like secondhand air, and it made Efe slightly nauseated. The times she went to relieve herself, she felt claustrophobic in the toilet. And unlike in the buses back home, there was no one to chat
with. The man beside her slept right through the dinner of potatoes and salad.
And de dinner sef, na wahala
. White people might be good at a lot of things, but their culinary skills left a lot to be desired:
No pepper. No salt. No oil. How can they call this food? It’s like eating sandpaper
, she thought, leveling the mashed potato on her plastic airline fork with a knife.

It was a long walk to the baggage claim, where she had to go for the Samsonite suitcases, but the floors were shiny and the air was purer, so she skipped, skipped, skipped, and took in the first sights of her new world. Belgium.
Bell. Jyum
. Next door to London. Tinkling like a bell.