On Black Sisters Street (13 page)

ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT

SEGUN IS IN HIS ROOM. EVEN AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, THEY ARE NOT
sure what his job is, exactly. He hardly talks to them. Sometimes he acts as Madam’s driver, chauffeuring her to business meetings that they know nothing about. Sometimes he goes out on his own, dragging his lazy feet across the hallway so they heard the
sheesheesh
of it, as if he were bent on erasing the prints on the carpet. Once he came back with Sisi in his car. She would never talk about it.

“Maybe,” Ama suggested then, “they meet in secret, Segun and Sisi. Maybe they’re secret lovers. Why would he carry her in his car, eh? And they both had boxes of chips!”

While they cannot prove that Segun and Sisi are lovers, or determine the exact nature of his job, one thing about him is not in doubt: When there is a job to be done in the house—lights that need changing, a cupboard handle that needs fixing, nails to be hammered into the wall for Madam’s paintings, a table to be made—he is the man for it. Always working in silence. Not even humming to himself as he unplugs lights or tightens screws or hammers in nails. Beyond his name, nothing else is known about him. Sisi once joked that he was a spy, drawing laughter from the rest because Segun, with his habitual look of buffoonish imbecility, mouth constantly hanging open, hands flailing, does not look smart enough to be a spy. Somebody
else said that he was maybe Madam’s bodyguard. This drew more laughter than Sisi’s suggestion because, as Joyce said, Segun looked like he could not even guard himself. Bodyguards were supposed to be huge and muscular and with fists of steel. Segun’s frame suggests a pusillanimity that would shrink from danger, no matter how small. “How would he guard Madam? With his screwdriver and hammer?” Sisi had asked, breathless with laughter. “Screwdriver in one hand, hammer in the other, shadowing Madam!” The image had made them laugh so much, they had to hold on to one another so as not to fall over from laughter. They settled on Joyce’s suggestion that he was either Madam’s or Dele’s relative. They would never know, because Segun would never volunteer to tell them. And of course they could not ask Madam.

Ama sits down and picks up a cushion and hugs it to her body. “Just yesterday, just yesterday, Sisi was telling me about the bag she was saving up to buy,” she says, all the while rocking herself forward and backward, thinking about the bag that will now never be bought by Sisi. She finds something inconsolable in the fact, and the tears that come down are furious. “Fuck it!” she says, and hurriedly wipes away the tears with a tissue that she has discovered in her pocket.

“
Shebi
, it was only last week she borrowed my eyeliner,” Joyce adds, her palms cupping her face. It looks like she is crying. But she is not. Joyce is not one to cry easily, explaining when pressed that she has done all the crying she will ever do. “Who would have known that she would be dead a week later?”

Joyce details how Sisi had come to her to ask for her eyeliner because she could not find her own and could not begin work without her trademark lined eyes. Joyce speaks into the room, remembering how she told Sisi, even as she gave her the eyeliner, that not lining her eyes would not kill her. “Maybe that was a premonition,” she suggests, but no one answers her.

They all have their memories of Sisi. Little meetings become poignant, as they often do when someone dies. A remark, a look that would otherwise have gone unremembered, takes on a monumental meaning. Sisi’s earrings, forgotten on the pane of the bathroom window, become “her way of leaving a bit of her behind,” Ama says.

Two days later, Madam will bin the earrings because “leaving a dead woman’s property around the house is inviting her spirit to visit.” And a spirit, good or bad, has no dealings with humans. Their visits can never forebode well. For that reason, she will also bin all of Sisi’s clothes and shoes, her scarves and bags. She will tie them up in thick black garbage bags—even the Hermès scarf that Sisi bought from a wandering salesman and that Madam envied—and throw them down the throat of the green metal receptor opposite the house, which is emptied once a week for charity. She will also walk with incense through the house, a warning to Sisi’s ghost to keep at bay. Sisi’s ghost will listen, for she did not even haunt her former housemates in dreams the way some ghosts do. Madam believes in the power of incense to keep spirits away, and not just the spirits that belonged to humans. None of the other women believe in the efficacy of her incense, but Madam is not one to be contradicted.

Three days ago, Ama reminds them, Madam had walked around with her incense stick, purging the house of the spirit of jealousy. Madam said the evil spirit of jealousy lived in their house, and the incense was supposed to exorcise it. “You are sisters. You are all the family you have here, and yet you cannot live in peace.”

She was talking to the four women, yet her speech had been directed mainly at Sisi and Ama. The two women had been in a fight over who was supposed to clean the communal bathroom. There had been a roisterous party the night before, and bottles had been left upturned and drinks spilled on the leather chairs. Even though Sisi had been on the roster to do the cleaning, she had refused to, claiming
that Ama’s guests had made the mess. Ama refused to take responsibility for her guests, and fists flew. It took Madam’s intervention to tear the girls away from each other.

Ama’s voice is soft. “If I had known she was going to die, I’d never have fought with her, I swear.” The scratch marks Ama got from Sisi are still visible on her chin. She tries not to think about them.

“None of us knew,” Efe responds. “Who would have thought that Sisi would be dead today? Murdered for no reason at all?”

“Who would want to kill Sisi?” Joyce asks, not for the first time since they got the news.

“Nothing was stolen,” the police said. “At least not that we could see.”

Joyce’s question is rhetorical, but she continues nevertheless. “What did she ever do to deserve a death like this?”

The death of the Malian nanny and her ward is still on their minds, but they skirt around it, refusing to speak of it. Not now. Not when they are all feeling very vulnerable. But they think it all the same. The Thursday morning they woke up to hear that, with a machine gun, eighteen-year-old Hans Van Themsche had
pop-pop-popped
and killed two people on their street. They had all watched the news on TV, gorging themselves on the re-creation of the crime, remembering when they themselves had walked down that same spot without any thought of being in danger, thinking it might have been them. “Antwerp is becoming America, with all these shootings. First that boy that was killed at the Central Station for his MP3 player, and now this. What is happening to Antwerp?” Sisi had queried that day. And when Ama reminded her that the MP3 murder had occurred in Brussels, not in Antwerp, Sisi had said that it did not matter. It could so easily have been Antwerp.

Antwerp is changing on them, but they will not think about it. Not with Sisi murdered, too. The police told Madam they were investigating the case as a possible racist attack.

“Which kin’ possibly be dat?” Efe fumed when they were told. “They know say na racist attack. Who else go wan’ kill Sisi?”

“Fucking shitheads, that’s what they are,” Ama said.

Joyce gets up, sighs, and switches off the TV. She has had enough of the soap, she says, even though she has not been watching it. She starts to wipe the top of the TV. “Leave that alone, Joyce. You don wipe am a hundred times today!” Efe shouts.

Joyce stops.

One second.

Then she starts again.
Swish swish swish
, wiping like a woman possessed. Efe throws her hands up in exasperation.

“Fuck! Just stop!” Ama stands up, then sits again.

Joyce ignores her.
Swish. Swish. Swish
. She breathes on a spot and wipes.

Suddenly, she stops. Smiles. She has had a brainwave. She suggests that maybe they should have some sort of a service for Sisi. Something to send her soul on the way. “We just can’t let her die like that. We have to see her off. Have a pastor come here and pray and send her soul off properly. We can’t do much, but we can do that, at least. See it off on its way.” She seems pleased with her suggestion. “It is the least we can do for her. Invite some people we know. Have a small get-together for her. But first a church service to send her on her way.” She is getting animated. She wants to talk about how many people they can invite, what they can cook, but Ama interrupts her.

“On the way to where?” It sounds as if she is about to laugh. Joyce ignores her, as does Efe. She repeats her question, this time standing up, as if for emphasis. Her eyes are blazing. No one answers her. Efe tries to pull her down. Ama hisses but lets herself be pulled into the chair. They know that she has a dislike for all things spiritual. Once she was invited to church by Efe but turned her down rudely, saying that her stomach had had about as much church as it could ever hold. “I had a bellyful of church growing up. I don’t like pastors.
Never trusted them. I am not about to start now.” She will repeat these words again many years later, when she is ninety-three, a tiresome old woman on her way to death. By then her voice will be weaker and the fire in her eyes gone. “I don’t like pastors. Never trusted them. I am not about to start now.” She would die listening to young boy bands croon about love and lust and life in the fast lane.

While she is sitting there in the room, surrounded by the news of Sisi’s death, and the smell of Madam’s incense that is still strong, and Efe’s story still in her head, she closes her eyes. She feels an obligation to tell them her story. Her true story, like Efe has just done. She opens her eyes and begins. “I grew up in Enugu. We lived in a house with pink walls.”

She draws out an ashtray in the shape of a chimpanzee hand from under the sofa, stubs out her almost finished cigarette, and fishes in her bag for another one. She flips open a pack of cigarettes and passes it around. Both Joyce and Efe shake their heads and say no thank you.

Ama thinks about the Udi Hills surrounding Enugu, rolling and folding into one another like an enormous piece of green cloth, and smiles.

“How did you meet Dele?” Efe asks.

Dele is the common denominator in their lives.

“At my auntie’s canteen. He used to come there to eat sometimes.”

“Why would he want to eat outside?” Joyce asks. “That man has a cook and a wife, what would drive him to a canteen?”

“I don’t know oo,” Ama answers. “Perhaps he does his scouting there.”

“I met him in his house,” Joyce says. “A man called Polycarp took me there.” She winces when she says the name, as if it gives her a toothache. “I hated that Dele as soon as I saw him. Bastard.”

Ama smiles and says softly, “Oga Dele just wanted to help. What choices did we have back home, eh? Oga Dele is trying to give us happiness.”

“And are we really happy?” Joyce challenges. Now she is sitting beside the table, on the floor, wiping smudges from the table legs.

“Me, I try not to think about happiness. L.I. is getting a good education. Dat one suppose dey enough for me.” Efe draws out her words with the hesitancy of a participant in a political debate, careful not to say the wrong thing. Parameters of happiness change, she thinks, but does not articulate it. “Sometimes I think my life is like a set of false teeth. The world sees what you show it: clean teet’ wey white like Colgate. But you know for inside dat your real teet’ don rot finish!”

The women laugh at Efe’s analogy, but the mood turns serious almost immediately.

“And as for me,” Ama starts, “I don’t know if I’m happy or not. I don’t like Madam. She’s a snobby bitch. I meet interesting people at work. In what other job do you earn money just for lying on your back? Heaven knows there is no way I can be any of the other alternatives open to us here. No way I am fucking ruining my manicure cleaning up after snotty women too busy or too lazy to clean up after themselves. I can’t braid hair. Even if I could, I don’t know that I want to stand for hours on end doing that for peanuts. Remove Madam from the equation, and I might be doing fucking cartwheels.” She laughs.
Ha-ha
. Then stops. An abrupt laugh.

“You know what, Joyce? I made this choice. At least I was asked to choose. I came here with my eyes wide open.” Ama cracks her knuckles and continues, “I get food, I have a roof over my head, I have a life. I can’t be greedy. Sisi is dead. Is she happy? We think our stories are sad, do we even know what hers is? Where did she always slink off to?”

Her voice rises as if in sudden anger, as if in a realization of that anger. “You’re asking me about happiness. You want to know how the fuck I ended up here?” She takes a puff on her cigarette and exhales, curlicues of smoke escaping her nostrils and her pursed lips. She taps ash into the ashtray. “Let me tell you about my life, Joyce. Let me tell you about my fucking life.” She tugs at the crucifix around her neck.

SISI

MADAM LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE SISI HAD IMAGINED SHE WOULD: LIGHT-SKINNED
, round, and short. Very much like something that was meant to be spun. She did not walk, she barreled. She rolled into Sisi’s room early the next morning, her arms barely covered by the cropped sleeves of the baby-blue blouse she was wearing on top of black bell-bottom trousers. On her chin, tufts of hair curled comfortably into one another, and when she spoke she rolled the hairs between her fingers as if trying to draw attention to them, to get you to notice them and comment on how well maintained they were. “I am your Madam,” she said by way of introduction, walking over to the window and opening Sisi’s blinds. “I heard you arrived well. I trust you have rested well. Today you start work. We haven’t got any time to lose.” Every sentence came out like an order. She caressed the hair on her chin. Sisi thought:
How confident. How totally self-assured
. She would envy that self-confidence and would try to imitate it in her bearing on the days she went walking alone.