On Black Sisters Street (5 page)

The office was large, with carpeting that yielded like quicksand under her feet and air-conditioning that kept out Lagos’s oppressive heat, keeping her skin as fresh as if she had just taken an evening bath. He smiled at her as if he’d been expecting her, which made Chisom wonder what she was doing there. Why had she come to see this stranger with a leer on his face and folds of flesh under his chin?

In his office, Dele’s voice was not as loud as it had been in the salon. Perhaps, Chisom thought, the rug and the air conditioner swallowed up the noise, so that when he spoke he did not sound loud. Or perhaps it was the sheer distance put between them by the massive
wooden table he sat behind, his stomach tucked neatly away from sight.

“I dey get girls everywhere. Italy. Spain. I fit get you inside Belgium. Antwerp. I get plenty connections there. Plenty, plenty!” He panted with the effort of talking.
Hmph, hmph
.

A phone rang, and he picked up one of the seven mobile phones on the table. “Wrong one,” he muttered, and picked up another. He barked into it for a few minutes in rapid Yoruba and hung up. “Ah, these people just dey disturb me! ‘Oga Dele dis,’ ‘Oga Dele dat.’ Ah, to be big man no easy at all!” He grunted and continued talking to Chisom. “But I no dey do charity o. So it go cost you. Taty t’ousand euro it go cost you o.” He smiled. His gums the black of smoked fish.

The amount spun in Chisom’s head and almost knocked her out. Was this man serious?

“If I had that kind of owo, sir, I for no dey here. I for done buil’ house for my papa and my mama!” she protested angrily. For that amount of money, she could not only buy a house for her parents, she could buy an entire city. Why would she be desperate to leave the country if she could miss thirty thousand euros? It hurt her head even to do the math of how much that would amount to in naira. Millions! The kind of money she only read about in the papers, especially when there was a politician and a scandal involved. Was this man completely mad?

“Ah ah?” the man asked. “You tink say na one time you go pay? No be one time oo.”

He bit into a corncob, and Chisom watched him munch with his mouth open, his jaws working the corn like a mini grinding machine.

“Na, when you get there, begin work, you go begin dey pay. Installmental payment, we dey call am! Mont’ by mont’ you go dey pay me.” He spoke through a mouthful, and she watched half-masticated corn and spittle splatter onto the table, minuscule yellow and white grains that made her think of coarse
gari
. Why couldn’t the man eat
properly? Did he not grow up with a mother? She fixed her eyes on the clock above his head so that she did not have to see him chew. What was she doing here, by the way? What did she think Dele was going to do for her? Grant her a miraculous consummation of a vision that even her father was losing faith in? Chisom picked up her handbag. She ought to be going back home. There was nothing for her here.

ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT, MAY 13, 2006

NOBODY KNOWS SISI’S REAL NAME, NEVER HAVING USED IT. NOT THESE
women gathered in this room without her. And not the men who had shared her bed, entangling their legs with hers. Mixing their sweat with hers. Moaning and telling her, “Yes. Yes. You Africans are soooooo good at this. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Please. You. Are. Killing. Me.
Mmmmm. Mooi!
” Asking her, “You like it here?,” as if she had a choice.

The silence is unnatural. Shrieks and tearing of clothes should accompany such news, Joyce thinks. Noise. Loud yells. Something. Anything but this silence that closes up on you, not even needing to tug at your sleeves to be noticed. But Sisi’s death is not natural, either. So perhaps silence is the best way to mourn her. There is dust everywhere, Joyce thinks, dusting hard, clutching her rag tight, imagining it is Madam’s neck.

Ama, the slim, light-skinned woman in the middle, coughs. She wants to bring some noise into the room. Her cough hangs alone and then disappears, sucked into the enormous quietness. She toys with the tiny gold crucifix around her neck, tugging at it as if demanding answers from it. Efe watches her movement and wants to ask her again why she wears a crucifix, being the way she is, but she does
not. The last time Efe asked her, Ama had told her, “Mind your own fucking business!”

The flat-screen TV facing the women is on, but the sound is muted. There is a soap on, probably American. Impossibly beautiful blond women wearing huge volumnized hair and men with well-toned bodies and stormy eyes flit on and off. Nobody is watching. The CD player in a corner of the room right of the women is uncharacteristically off. On any normal day, Ama would have some music on, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of liquor in the other as she danced to Makossa or hip-hop, swearing that life could not be better. The other women might have joined her, smoking and downing liquor, twisting their waists to the music, except for Efe. She never drinks alcohol, and the others often tease her about her juvenile taste buds.

“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.