On Black Sisters Street (12 page)

SISI

WHEN SHE GOT OFF THE PLANE IN BRUSSELS, THE REMNANTS OF HER
old life folded away in her carry-on luggage, and saw her new life stretching out like a multicolored vista before her eyes, full of colors and promise, she knew she would make it here. She left the pumpkin her mother had insisted she carry at the airport in Lagos. Dumped it, together with any misgivings she had about her trip, in one of the huge dustbins outside the washrooms. Lagos was a city of death, and she was escaping it. She should not carry a pumpkin the size of the moon along with her. Or doubts that could make her back down. True, she liked pumpkin, and it crossed her mind that she might not find any in this place she was moving to. (“White people eat only bread. Drink only tea.
Eiya!
You are going to die of starvation.” The neighbor had sounded almost happy at the thought of Chisom’s demise from hunger in the white man’s land.) But she would learn to like other things, find substitutes for the things that would no longer be easily available to her. She would shed her skin like a snake and emerge completely new. It would all be worth it.

The flight landed at night, so she saw nothing of Belgium but lights (working streetlights at the sides of roads!) as the reticent man who met her at the airport drove her to Antwerp and deposited her in a house on a narrow gloomy street. She had thought at first that its
gloominess was attributable to the darkness, but in the morning she found out how wrong she was. The Zwartezusterstraat wore the look of a much-maligned childless wife in a polygamous home. No amount of light could lift it from the gloom into which it had settled, gloom that would only deepen with time, given the events that would happen there.

The house itself was not much to look at. Truth be told, it was quite a disappointment, really. A ground-floor flat with a grubby front door and, as she would find out later, five bedrooms not much bigger than telephone booths. The sitting room was a cliché. An all-red affair except for the long sofa, which was black and against the wall right beside the door; a single thin mirror ran from the ceiling to the rug. Sisi often thought that had she been asked to draw that room, she would have drawn exactly that, down to the mirror. The only thing she would have left out would have been the incense, which Madam burned nonstop, believing totally in its ability to rid the world of all evil.

Sisi was shown into a sardonic room with a single bed dressed up in impossibly white sheets. The whiteness shone bright, astonishing her. She ran her hands over the sheets, feeling the softness of the cotton, reveling in the richness of the texture. The walls were red, the same blood red of the sitting room. And on them hung two pictures: a white girl lying on her back, naked with legs splayed in a tanned V. She sucked on a lollipop. The other picture was of an enormous pair of brown buttocks jutting out at the camera. Buttocks with no face, two meticulously molded clay pots. Sisi wondered for a minute whose they were, those firm, wide buttocks, unmarked by stretch marks. She wondered if her buttocks looked like that. And for a moment she felt slightly self-conscious.

The man who had driven her from the airport—Segun, she now knew was his name—had not said much since they got in. He had just uttered his name haltingly, like a sacrifice being dragged out of
him, and ushered her into the room. “Some … some … bo … bo … somebody, I mean, somebody wi … ll be with you soon.” Sisi noticed that when he stammered, he tapped his left foot on the tile floor and clasped and unclasped his hands as if the words he could not articulate were in there, hiding from him.
Busy hands
, she thought. She remembered her mother telling a newly married niece that she had made a good choice marrying a man who could not keep his hands still, a man who, even as he sat at the high table on his wedding day, kept
tap-tap-tapping
on the table in front of him, his nervous fingers refusing to be restrained. “Men who cannot keep their hands still certainly make the best husbands, the best providers, because they always have the urge to work. Those hands have to find something to do,” her mother had said. But this Segun man walked with very lazy, very peculiar steps. He flung one long leg in front of him, drew a wide arc with it, let the foot fall, paused, and then the other leg was put through the same tortuous ritual. As far as Sisi could see, there was nothing, no discernible disability, that would inhibit him (should inhibit him) from walking properly. He did not look like he was the sort to want to keep busy. He had not even offered to help her carry her luggage when he met her; he had simply walked ahead of her to the parking lot, displaying the walk that made her think of puppets and hernias. It did not matter that the suitcase was small and not at all heavy. A man who was not lazy and had proper manners would have offered to help.

Sisi wondered if it was the stammering that made him reluctant to talk, or just plain bad manners. Beyond confirming that she was Sisi, he did not say a word to her from the airport to the house in Antwerp, letting the silence between them mount and mount and mount until she wanted to scream at him. Was he not Nigerian? Did he not know it was bad manners to just keep quiet like that? No word of welcome. No curiosity about home. No “So how’s Nigeria? I hope you brought some home food? How are the people back in Naija?
What was that I heard about a bomb exploding in the military cantonment in Ikeja?”

She had cleared her throat in the car—a classic prelude to a conversation or, if the other party was smart, an indication that it was expected to initiate conversation—but he had not caught the hint. Lips sealed. Eyes on the road. Hands with long, beautiful fingers turning the steering wheel. Sisi fumed at this blatant show of bad upbringing. She sat on her hands (badly bitten nails, palms rough from a habitual forgetfulness to rub hand cream in them) and fumed at the beautiful hands wasted on a man. Months later, after what would happen, Sisi would think of this moment, of Segun’s hands, looking soft and feminine. And of a momentary envy.

Sisi was tired. She yawned, kicked off her shoes, and stretched.

Sisi. Funny how she had started to call herself the name even in her thoughts. It was as if Chisom never even existed. Chisom was dead. Snuffed out. A nobody swallowed up by the night.

Hunger rumbled her stomach, the chugging of an old goods train. A cursory look around the room failed to reveal any food. She had not eaten since she’d left Lagos. The food on the plane had tried her resolve not to miss anything she was leaving behind and made her think, almost with regret, of the pumpkin she had thrown away, its orange pulp cooked and dipped in palm oil. Rice and steamed vegetable, so bland that it seemed like a joke without a punch line. How could anyone eat that?
I wish I had shut my eyes and eaten that rice
. She thought of her mother’s favorite riddle:

She wondered if she could ask the Segun man for food. As unbearable as he was, he was the only person she knew in this country. She would not know where to find him. Why could he not look her
in the eye? Was he shy? Embarrassed for her? Did he know why she had come into the country?
Not like I care, anyway. There are worse ways to put my
punani to
use
. There was no room for shame. Or for embarrassment. Or for pride. She would toss them away with the same careless ease she had dumped the pumpkin and the nagging misgivings. She could not afford to lug them around in her new world; they would either slow her down or shackle and kill her. She would work for a few years, keep her eyes on the prize, earn enough to pay back what she owed Dele, and then open up her own business. She would resurrect as Chisom, buy a house in Victoria Garden City. Marry a man who would give her beautiful children. And her beautiful children would go to a private school. She would have three house girls, a gardener, a driver, a cook. Her life would be nothing compared to what it was now. And nothing compared to her parents’. The thought filled her with an airiness that made her feel all she had to do was raise her hands and she would fly.

There was a knock on the door. Sisi looked around her and for a second wondered where she was. She had not flown. The airiness had lured her instead into a deep sleep.

“Come in,” she said, yawning and sitting up.

A woman of indeterminate age walked in, one masculine leg after the other. She had on white tennis shoes, tight gym trousers that accentuated firm calves, and a purple pullover. Sisi could barely make out her face, hidden behind a massive blond wig. From the little she could see, the face was a dotting of black spots on a yellow surface.

“Hello. Efe.” The woman smiled. She looked between twenty-five and thirty when she smiled.

Sisi looked at her in confusion.

“I’m Efe. That’s my name.”

“Ah, sorry. I’m Sisi,” she answered, relishing the name, the entrance into her new world.

“I brought you food,” Efe said, pushing some hair away from her
face. Sisi had not noticed that she was carrying a paper bag. She saw it now. A big blue-and-white bag with
ALDI
written across it. She wondered what Aldi was. A supermarket? Or perhaps a brand.
Soon I shall know this and more. I shall part my legs to this country, and it, in return, will welcome me and begin to unlock its secrets to me
.

Efe’s paper bag contained a package of six rolls, a jar of jam, a box of orange juice, and a bunch of firm synthetic-looking bananas.

“Ah, I forgot a knife. Let me go and get a knife from the kitchen. I’ll be back immediately.”

She went out but returned promptly with a table knife, a glass, a chipped white plate, and a low kitchen stool. She set out the food on the stool, and the rest she put on the floor beside the stool. She settled herself on the bed beside Sisi, causing it to creak and dip even though she did not look that much heavier than Sisi. She waved a hand over the bounty and told Sisi, “
Oya
, chop. The food’s ready. Eat. Eat.” She sounded like a mother calling a child to dinner, urging the child to eat the food placed before it.

Her fingers sparkled with the glitter of rings. She wore a ring even on her thumb: a thick coil of metal with a broad tip that rested on her nail. Sisi wondered if they were gold or gold-plated. She had never owned gold and could not tell the difference.
But this is another thing Europe will teach me. To spot real gold
. Antwerp would provide her with the ability to sift the real thing from the chaff, to adorn her own fingers with real shiny gold. Every single finger like the woman’s before her. And like this woman, she would wear them with an air of someone who was used to the good things of life, so used to them, in fact, that she no longer noticed them.

“Won’t you eat, too?” she asked the woman, her eyes gobbling the rings. They hypnotized her, making her dream loud dreams.
One day I shall own these, too. I shall. I shall. I shall
.

“Ah. No. I ate already.”

“But the food, it’s too much for one person,” Sisi responded, all
the while calculating in her head how much the food would have cost her in Nigeria. How it was enough to feed her family.

Efe laughed. “You just eat what you can and leave the rest. You no need to finish am.” A warm voice. Massaging Sisi’s aching limbs.

They fell into the sort of awkward silence that befalls people on first meeting.

“So, how was Naija when you left?” Efe asked at last.

“Same as always,” Sisi said, thinking that for her, nothing would be the same again. She had watched her dreams and those of people around her scatter every which way. Like having a jar of marbles, glossy with promise, tip and scatter, hiding them from sight, under chairs and under cupboards. Antwerp was where she would tease out those marbles, gather them and have them fulfill their promise. It was the place to be when your dreams died, the place of miracles: a place where dead dreams resurrected and soared and allowed you to catch them and live them. She was ready, finally, to embrace the prediction of an enviable future that had dogged her every day since she was born, its omniscient presence like an eye, always following her. She was eager to begin.

“The man who brought me, he lives here, too?”

“Ah. Segun? Yes.”

“He didn’t even help me with my luggage.”

Efe let out a snort. “Dat man na only himself he sabi. He no dey talk to anyone. No dey do anyting. But him dey good with a hammer. Na him dey fix everytin’ around here!”

“With those hands?” It was out before she could stop it. Segun’s hands did not look manly enough, strong enough, to lift a hammer.

“You should see de tables wey him make!”

Sisi would see the tables and proclaim that indeed Segun’s hands were deceptive. She would watch him saw off the legs of a gawky table that Madam bought and marvel that his palms did not callous, that his fingers did not become thicker, stumpier.

The two women fell silent. Strangers with no words between them. Sisi slathered jam on the bread.
When was the last time I had jam?
The magenta-colored spread delighted her taste buds. She could get used to this, to living like this. The life of the rich and the arrived. If she had any misgivings left about leaving home, they were chomped into bits with each mouthful of food and pushed down into the pit of her stomach.