On Black Sisters’ Street

‘Lively and engaging... Unigwe has a good ear for idiosyncratic language... On Black Sisters’ Street is a pleasure to read: fast-paced, lucidly structured and colourful’ Times Literary Supplement

‘An important and accomplished novel that leaves a strong aftertaste. Unigwe gives voice to those who are voiceless, fleshes out the stories of those who offer themselves as meat for sale, and bestows dignity on those who are stripped off it’ Independent

Four very different women have made their way from Africa to the red light district of Brussels. They have come to claim for themselves the riches they believe Europe promises but when Sisi, the most enigmatic of the women, is murdered, their already fragile world is shattered.

Drawn together by the tragedy, the remaining three women – Joyce, a great beauty whose life has been devastated by war; Ama, whose dark moods hide a past injustice; and Efe, whose determination to earn her keep is motivated by a particular zeal – slowly begin to share their stories. They are stories of fear, displacement, love and most of all, they are stories of a sinister man called Dele...

‘Sobering... the humiliations endured by the quartet are forcefully driven home by Unigwe’ Sunday Times

About the Author

Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria and now lives in Turnhout, Belgium, with her husband and four children. She holds a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands and is the recipient of several awards for her short stories, including first prize in the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition, a Commonwealth Short Story Award and a Flemish literary prize for ‘De Smaak van Sneeuw’, her first short story written in Dutch. In 2004 she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her stories have been on the BBC World Service and Radio Nigeria.

Her first novel, De Feniks, was published in Dutch by Meulenhoff in September 2005; it is the first book of fiction written by a Flemish author of African origin.

To the ABC Triumvirate, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Jackee
Batanda Budesta and Brian Chikwava for being there from
A to Z.

Armed with a vagina and the will to survive, she knew that destitution would never lay claim to her.

On Black Sisters’ Street

Chika Unigwe

12 May 2006

THE WORLD WAS exactly as it should be. No more and, definitely, no less. She had the love of a good man. A house. And her own money – still new and fresh and the healthiest shade of green – the thought of it buoyed her and gave her a rush that made her hum.

Humming under her breath, relishing the thought of new beginnings, she thought of how much her life was changing: Luc. Money. A house. She was already becoming someone else. Metamorphosing. A word recalled from a long-ago biology lecture. Sloughing off a life that no longer suited her.

What she did not know, what she would find out only hours from now, was just how absolute the transition would be.

Sisi navigated the Keyserlei and imagined everything she could buy with her brand-new wealth. How it would buy her forgetfulness, even from those memories that did not permit silence, making her yell in her sleep so that she woke up restless, wanting to cry. Now the shops sparkled and called to her and she answered, touching things that took her fancy, marvelling at the snatches of freedom, heady with a joy that emitted light around her and made her surer than ever that the Prophecy was undoubtedly true. This was the true epiphany. Not the one she had on a certain Wednesday night on the Vingerlingstraat. That was a pseudo-epiphany. She knew that now. For sure.

She was hungry and stood undecided between the Panos and the Ekxi on the Keyserlei. Her new life smiled at her. It nudged her towards the Ekxi, with its prices a notch higher than Panos’s. She went in and bought a sandwich with lettuce spilling out of the sides, ruffled and moist. To go with it, a bottle of thick fruit smoothie. She sat at a table outside, her shopping bags at her feet; carrier bags shimmying in the light spring breeze, evidence of her break from a parsimonious past. What should she get? Maybe a gift for Luc. A curtain for his doorless room. Imagine a room without a door! The architect who designed the house had a thing for ‘space and light’ and since Luc was coming out of a depression when he bought the house, he had been certain that ‘space and light’ were the very things he needed. The lack of a door had not disturbed him in the least. ‘Rooms must have doors,’ Sisi told him when he showed her round the house. ‘Or curtains at the very least!’ Luc said nothing in response. And silence was acquiescence. Certainly. Curtains with a frenetic design of triangles and squares, bold purple and white splashes against a cocoa brown, found in the HEMA. She imagined what the other women would say of Luc’s doorless bedroom. She imagined their incredulous laughter. And that was enough to feed the guilt that she was trying hard to suppress. She hadn’t abandoned them. Had she? She had just . . . moved on. Surely, surely, she had that right. Still, she wondered: What were they doing now? When would they notice she was gone?

In a house on the Zwartezusterstraat, the women Sisi was thinking of – Ama, Joyce and Efe – were at that very moment preparing for work, rushing in and out of the bathroom, swelling its walls with their expectations: that tonight they would do well; that the men would come in droves; that they would not be too demanding. And more than that, that they would be generous.

‘Where’s my fucking mascara?’ Ama shouted, emptying a make-up bag onto the tiled floor. Joyce was at the same time stuffing a denim duffel bag with deodorant, a beach towel and her Smiley, so nicknamed by Sisi. Smiley was a lubricant gel, innocuously packaged in a plastic see-through teddy bear with an orange conical hat and a wide smile; it might have been a child’s bottle of glue. She blocked out images of her mother’s face looking aghast at Smiley, her lips rounding to form the words of a name that was not ‘Joyce’.

‘I haven’t seen her. Maybe she don’ leave already,’ Efe said, putting an electric toothbrush into a toilet bag. In an inner pocket of the bag was a picture of a boy wearing a baseball cap. On the back of the photograph were the initials, L.I. The picture was creased and the finish had worn off, but when it was first sent to her, it would have been easy to see (in the shine of the gloss that highlighted a broad forehead) that the boy bore a close semblance to her. The way a son might his mother. Efe carried this picture everywhere.

There was time before they had to leave, but they liked to get ready early. Some things could not be rushed. Looking good was one of them. They did not want to turn up at work looking half asleep and with half of their gear forgotten at the house.

‘Who cares?’ Ama ran her hand quickly across her neck as if to assure herself that the gold chain which she always wore was still there. ‘All this “Sisi”, “Sisi”, “Sisi” – are you people lovers? Maybe she’s gone on one of her walks.’

Sisi went out alone at least twice a week, refusing company when it was offered. Nobody knew where she went, except that she sometimes came back with boxes of chocolate and carrier bags of Japanese fans and baby booties embroidered in lace, fridge magnets and T-shirts with Belgian beer logos printed on them. ‘Gifts,’ she mumbled angrily when Joyce asked her once who they were for.

Joyce was already out of the bathroom. She had been hoping Sisi would help her cornrow her hair. In between perm and braids, her hair was a wilderness that would not be subdued. Neither Ama nor Efe could braid. Nothing for it now, she would have to hold it in a bun and hope that Madam would not notice that the bun was an island in the middle of the head, surrounded by insubordinate hair that scattered every which way. For Sisi’s sake, Joyce hoped she would be back on time. How could anyone forget what Madam did to Efe the night she turned up late for work? Nothing could excuse her behaviour, Madam said. Not even the fact of her grandmother’s death.

Zwartezusterstraat

IT WAS NOT every death that earned a party. But if the deceased was old and beloved, then a party was very much in order. Efe’s grandmother was both. And being too far away to attend the burial herself, the next best thing, the expected thing, was a big party.

Efe did not invite Madam to the party. It was not as if, were she invited, she would attend anyway. The girls had started the day in the kitchen doing dishes from the previous day.

Sisi’s laughter was the loudest, rising and drowning the voices of the other women. She slapped her thighs with a damp kitchen towel. ‘Tell me, Efe, your auntie really believed her husband?’

‘Yes. She did. He told her she could not go abroad with him because the British Embassy required her GCSE results before they would give her a visa. Dat na de only way he could tink of to stop her wahalaing him about travelling with him. Four wives and she wanted him to pick her above the rest? And she no be even the chief wife. Imagine! De woman just dey craze!’

‘Your uncle handled it well. Sometimes, it’s just easier to lie to people. Saves you a lot of trouble and time,’ Joyce said, placing a glass she had just dried in the cupboard above her head. Her soft, childish voice made it difficult to believe she was thirty, as she claimed.

‘Ama, lighten up. Since when did this story become about men being bastards, eh? Everything has to be so serious with you, you know how to spoil a good day. You just have to get worked up over nothing!’ Sisi wiped a plate dry, examined it for smudges and, finding none, placed it on top of another on the work surface beside the sink.

Ama turned towards Sisi and hissed. ‘Move the plates, abeg. If you leave them there, they’ll only get wet again. Why don’t you just put them away as soon as you’ve dried?’ She sucked her teeth and went to work on scrubbing a pot in the kitchen sink. ‘How could you burn rice, Sisi? I can’t get the fucking pot clean!’

‘I don’t know what’s eating you, Ama, but I don’t want any part of it. Whoever sent you, tell them you didn’t see me, I beg of you.’ She flung the dish towel she had been using over her shoulder and raised her hands in surrender. ‘I don’t want to fight abeg.’

‘Fuck off. Why don’t you fuck off on one of your long walks?’ Ama’s voice was a storm building up.

Sisi took a step closer to Ama and started to say something but Efe broke in, ‘Girls, girls, it’s a beautiful day. Make una no ruin am!’ She hoped it would not rain today. It was a pleasant day for November: leaves turned aubergine purple and yellow and white by a mild autumn and a clear sky. A minor miracle for the time of year. ‘See as de day just dey like fine picture, and una wan spoil am?’

‘Nobody’s ruining anything. Anyway, I’m done here.’ Ama banged the now gleaming pot on the draining board, and walked out of the kitchen into the sitting room where she turned up the volume on the CD player flooding the room with the twang boom bam of a highlife tune. She lit a cigarette and began to dance.

Efe sighed and followed her into the sitting room. ‘I can see you don dey get ready for the party, Ama. Ooh, shake that booty, girl! Shake am like your mama teach you!’

‘Oh, shut it! What has my mother got to do with my dancing?’ Ama moved away from Efe, the crucifix around her neck glinting. Her anger seemed exaggerated. But Efe let it pass. She had other things on her mind.

The party for starters. The Moroccan man who had promised to get her cartons of beer at a discount had just called to say that his contact had not come through. Now the drinks would cost her a lot more than she had budgeted for. She was spending a lot of money on this party. The other women, unused to such extravagance from Efe, had teased her about it. ‘So at last we get to enjoy your money, Efe?’ Sisi joked. At her birthday party the year before, Efe had limited her guests to two bottles of beer each and had served only jollof rice and fried chicken gizzards, claiming that she had to send so much money back home that she hardly had enough for extras. ‘Some of us get big problems to settle for house.’ For this party the girls had promised to help her with the food, but with Ama in this mood, she might have one less pair of hands. Everything had to go to plan today. The wake for her grandmother had to be talked about for months to come. That was how much she loved the woman. She wanted a party that would last all night. And that would be what would put her in trouble with Madam. The party was a success, so much so that Efe could not leave until almost midnight. Madam’s anger manifested itself in a laughter that was dry like a cough and a sneering, ‘Ah, so you’ve earned enough money now to waltz into work whenever you want?’ For a week she refused to let Efe use her booth. Instead, Efe had been forced to work in bars – when she could agree a fee with the owner or barman – having sex with men in dingy hotel rooms if she was lucky or servicing those on tight budgets in bar room toilets. She had made a lot less money than she would have otherwise. One week of working under such conditions was enough to put anyone off getting into Madam’s bad books.

Still, Iya Ijebu got a party worthy of her memory. ‘She’s not even my real grandmother,’ Efe told the women when she first learned of her death wiping tears from her eyes. ‘I been dey call her Granny, but she be just dis woman wey live near our house wey I like well well. On Sundays, she made me moi-moi. When I was in primary school, if my mother wasn’t home, she’d make lunch for my younger ones and me. Ah, the woman dey good to us. Which kin’ granny pass dat one? Goodbye, Granny. Rest in peace.’

But Efe did not know how the woman had died. The news of her passing had been a mere aside between ‘Buy me a Motorola mobile phone’ and ‘Papa Eugene wants to know how easy it is to ship a car from there to here.’ A distant ‘Iya Ijebu died two weeks ago’ carried along a faint and crackling line from a telephone cabin in Lagos to a glass-doored booth in a Pakistani Internet/phone café in Antwerp.

‘She died? Iya Ijebu? Osalobua! What killed her?’ Efe had tried to drag her sister back to the news she had just delivered. ‘How? What happened?’

And then the line had whined and cut off and Efe immersed herself in the frenzy of organising a party.

At the party she would distribute badly xeroxed pictures of the deceased: a woman in a huge headscarf, looking solemn and already dead, against a backdrop of palm trees painted wildly on a prop behind her. Below it would be the announcement that she died after a ‘sudden’ illness at the age of seventy-five (which was an estimation. Who cares really about exact ages?), and that Efe, her granddaughter, was ‘grateful to God for a life well spent’. Summer might have been a better time, its temperament better suited to feasting, but a party was what dreary November needed to cheer it up. She had a lot to worry about. What to cook. What to play. Who to invite. There would be lots of Ghanaians – those people were everywhere. Nigerians of course. A sprinkling of East Africans – Kenyans who ate samosas and had no traditional clothes and complained about the pepper in Nigerian food, not really African. The three Ugandan women from the ‘Black is Beautiful’ store close to the Berchem Station where Efe bought her wigs. Women who stumbled over their words, brackening black and renthening long. And the only Zimbabwean she knew, from the Schipperskwartier a woman who shuffled her feet when she danced. Those guests would spawn other guests, multiplying the guest list to infinity so that she was glad she had the foresight to hire a huge abandoned warehouse close to the Central Station, not the church hall she had rented last year to celebrate her birthday.

Here, Efe had enough space not to worry about the number of people that would eventually turn up. And unlike the floor of the church hall which she had to ensure was spotless at the end of the party, there was no such obligation here. The tiles had come off in some places, exposing dark concrete, like half-peeled scabs over old wounds. Against the walls were high metal racks, most of which were already corroded. The racks would come in handy for stacking crates of beer and cool boxes of food so Efe did not need to borrow tables. In front of the racks were white plastic chairs. The space in the middle provided ample dancing room.

By the time Sisi, Joyce and Ama arrived, the party was in full swing. Music blared and a lady in bright orange stilettos pulled off her shoes, held them over her head, and yodelled at the very high ceiling. Joyce, radiant in a black minidress which showed off her legs, edged further into the room and began to dance with a man in an oversized shirt. Several times that evening she would be told that with her height and her good looks she could have been a model. It was not anything she had not heard before. So she would laugh it off and say, ‘Now, that’s my plan B.’ Ama spied two Ghanaian guests going back for a third helping of rice and smirked to Sisi that surely, surely, Nigerians cooked better, made tastier fried rice than Ghanaians. (People who threw whole tomatoes in sauces could not really cook, could they?) And both women agreed that Ghanaians were just wannabe Nigerians and Antwerp was, for all its faults, the best city in the world and Belgium had the best beers, the Leffes and the Westmalles and the Stella Artois. You could not find those anywhere else, could you? Efe toddled up to them, complaining that the soles of her feet hurt from too much dancing. She should not have worn such high-heels.

‘But you always wear high heels! You’ll complain today and tomorrow you’ll be in them again,’ Sisi teased.

Efe was not really short. At least, not much shorter than Sisi who described her height as ‘average’. ‘Average’ translated in her passport to five feet seven. But of all four women, Efe was the shortest and this gave her a complex.

High-heeled shoes and wigs were Efe’s trademark. Ama called her the Imelda Marcos of wigs. Today she wore a bobbed black wig, so that it was as if she was wearing a beret. It was new, bought for the occasion. It was not as voluminous as the wigs she usually wore, and the hair moulded close to her skull exaggerated her features: her nose, her lips, her eyes looked blown up, as if they were under a magnifying glass.

Before Efe could answer Ama was already off. She found her way to the drinks and grabbed a bottle of her favourite blonde beer. Swigging the beer, she danced alone in the middle of the dance floor, bumping into other dancers, shouting out at intervals that life was good. GOOD! A dark man with short, angry dreads swayed effeminately towards her and Ama moved back. He tried to grab her hand and she snatched it away and gave him an evil eye.

‘What’s wrong with ya, sister?’ he said with what she could only guess was meant to be an American accent.

The man shrugged and went in search of a more willing dance partner, grumbling, bloody Africans, under his breath. He found his way to Efe who was sipping a glass of apple juice and dragged her to the dance floor. Efe was more obliging. She downed her juice and glided onto the dance floor that was fast filling up. ‘Wema, you’re an awright sister! You Africans can really pardy!’

‘Oh, Nigerian? We got a lotta those makwerekweres in Joburg. Lots of Nigerians. They in the news all the time back home in Seth Africa.’

Efe said she had to get back to her drink. What was it with the South Africans she met, claiming another continent for their country? And it was especially the black South Africans. She saw Joyce, her hair extensions moving furiously as she danced with a light-skinned man in a kente shirt. Efe smiled and mouthed jerk to Joyce and pointed at the South African who was now talking to a woman with braids down to her shoulders. Sisi danced behind Joyce, a bottle of beer in one hand and the other waving wildly in the air, two gold rings catching and dispelling light like magic.

Sisi moved close to Joyce and whispered that Ama seemed to be in a much better mood. ‘That Ama. She can be tiresome sometimes. What does she want us to do? Walk on tiptoe in our own house?’ Sisi and Joyce had joined the women only two months before.

Joyce shrugged. She was out to have a good time, not to worry about Ama. Of all the women in the house, Sisi was the only one she was remotely close to. Sisi was the most beautiful of the other three, she thought. Her beauty was all the more striking for it being unexpected; she had slim legs, a low-slung waist and a short neck. When you saw her from behind – which was how Joyce saw her the first time – you did not expect to see a beautiful face, flawless skin. She also seemed genuinely nice. Ama was a basket case and, given to bellicosity, everything set her off. Efe, she was not sure about. Perhaps, given time, she would like her. She was definitely more likeable than Ama, although she had her own issues. Yesterday, Joyce had called her ‘Mother’, because she had tried to mediate between Sisi and Ama who were having a quarrel over what TV programme to watch. Everybody could tell it was a joke, even Ama (even Ama!) laughed, but Efe had not been amused. ‘I’m nobody’s mother,’ she had said, her voice wan as if in disappointment at a betrayal. Still, she was better than Ama.

‘I need to pee,’ Sisi said and she went off in search of a toilet. Ama saw her pushing her way through the people on the dance floor and caught up with her.

Sisi’s lips pursed. ‘I’m just looking for the toilet. Not like it’s any of your business.’

‘What’s your fucking problem? Jeez!’ Ama hissed. She had a bottle of beer in one hand.

‘Oh, get over it! Are you still upset about Segun?’ She quaffed some beer. ‘If it’s a lie, why are you so bloody worked up?’

‘Shut up, Ama!’ Sisi’s voice was raised. Ever since the incident with Segun, Ama had been frustratingly smug. Winking and making silly comments. Screeching songs around the house about Segun and Sisi. ‘You think you know it all.’

‘So why don’t you tell me then?’ Ama bridged the gap between them so that their shoulders touched. Sisi was the taller, bigger woman, but if it came to blows between them both she would bet on Ama. The regularity with which she picked fights suggested brawn of such superiority as to instil dread. Sisi took a step back. Ama took one step forward. Then Efe appeared at their side, ‘I hope you girls dey enjoy my party?’ Chance. Luck. Whatever it was that had brought Efe, Sisi grabbed it and walked away.

When she got back from the toilets, Joyce was still on the dance floor. Sisi went over and tapped her on the shoulder.

‘What time do we leave?’ Joyce asked, turning away from the man in the kente. They had to be in their booths by eight.

‘I’ve eaten so much here that I worry I’ll just snooze at work,’ Joyce said and laughed, a bit of tongue showing through the gap in her front teeth; white teeth that contrasted so sharply with her dark lips.

‘Sleep, ke? Me, my eyes are on the money, baby! I’ve got no time to sleep and neither do you!’ Sisi mock-scolded. ‘I want a gold ring on each finger.’

She danced away to the racks for a piece of chicken fried a golden brown, hoping she did not run into Ama again. She picked out a leg, bit into it and thought, I’m very lucky to be here, living my dream. If I’d stayed back in Lagos, God knows where I’d have ended up.

She banished the notion. Lagos was not a memory she liked to dredge up. Not the house in Ogba and not Peter. She tried to think instead of hurtling towards a prophecy that would rinse her life in a technicolour glow of the most amazing beauty.

And before all that . . .

The pilgrims came

Each one bearing gifts of words

Of worlds

Of lives

Of truths.

Sisi

THREE FRAMED PICTURES hung on the walls of the Ogba flat. The first was the wedding photograph of Chisom’s parents: the bride, beautiful in a short, curly wig (the rage at the time) and a shy smile. The groom, hair parted in the middle and daring eyes that looked into the camera. One hand proprietorially placed on his seated bride’s shoulder, the other in the pocket of his trousers: a pose that said quite clearly, ‘I own the world.’ A happy couple drenched in fashionable sepia tint. The second picture, the one in the middle, was of Chisom in a matriculation gown that touched the ground, flanked by her parents. Her father’s head was slightly bent, but a smile was visible. Her mother’s smile was more obvious, a show of teeth. Chisom’s was the widest. This was the beginning. In her new shoes, bought especially for the occasion, she knew that her life was starting to change. The third picture was the largest, its frame an elaborate marquetry of seashells and beads commissioned by her father, specifically for this photo. ‘The very best! The very best! Today, money is no issue.’ Taken on the day of Chisom’s graduation, it showed all three with bigger smiles. With wider eyes than in the previous picture. After the photographer had arranged them for the shot, Papa Chisom said he wished the woman that had spoken for the gods when Chisom was born were around, ‘It’d have been nice to have her in the picture. Her words gave us hope.’

Chisom said, ‘I’m just glad I’ve graduated.’ For she was looking forward to a realisation of everything dreamed. To a going-to-bed and a waking-up in the dreams she had carried with her since she was old enough to want a life different from her parents’. She did not need a clairvoyant to predict her future, not when she had a degree from a good university. She would get a house for herself. Rent somewhere big for her parents. Living with three people in two rooms, she wanted a massive house where she had the space to throw Saturday-night parties.

The Prophecy haloed their heads and shone with a luminescence that shimmered the glass. By the time Chisom visited her parents from Antwerp, she would have acquired the wisdom to see beyond the luminescence, a certain wrinkling of the photograph, a subtle foreshadowing of a calamity that would leave them all spent.

Chisom dreamed of leaving Lagos. This place has no future. She tried to imagine another year in this flat her father rented in Ogba. She tried not to breathe too deeply because doing so would be inhaling the stench of mildewed dreams.

‘The only way to a better life is education. Akwukwo. Face your books and the sky will be your limit. It’s in your hands.’ Her father’s eternal words. The first time Sisi would return to the flat after she had left, she would go up to her father, whisper in his ear that he was wrong. ‘You were wrong about that, Papa,’ she would say. He would not hear her.

Her father had not studied beyond secondary school and often blamed his stagnant career on that fact. Destiny had not lent him an extra hand either by providing him with a peep into a sure future.

‘I am giving you the opportunity I never had, use it wisely.’ As if opportunity were a gift, something precious, carefully protected in bubble wrap to keep it from breaking and all Chisom had to do was unwrap it and it would hurtle her to dizzying heights of glory.

His parents had needed him to get a job and help out with his brothers and sisters. School fees to be paid. Clothes to be bought. Mouths to be fed. We have trained you, now it’s your turn to train the rest. Take your nine siblings off our hands. Train them well and in two years the twins will have a School Leaving Certificate and get jobs too. Why have children if they cannot look after you in old age? It’s time for us to reap the benefit of having a grown-up son! But he had not felt very grown up at nineteen. He had hoped to go on to university at Ife. To wear the tie and smart shirts of a scholar. Not work as an administrative clerk for a company he did not care much for, being a Yes, sir, No, sir, subordinate to men who were not much smarter than he was. ‘I had the head for it. I had bookhead, isi akwukwo. I could have been a doctor. Or an engineer. I could have been a big man.’

He would often look around him in disdain: at the walls, at the three mismatched chairs with worn cushion slips, at the stereo set that no longer worked (the symbol of a time when he had believed that he could become prosperous: a pay rise that taunted him with the promise of prosperity), and he would sigh as if those were the stumbling blocks to his progress, as though all he needed to do was to get rid of them and whoosh! His life would take a different path.

Sisi studied hard at school, mindful of her father’s hopes for her: a good job once she graduated from the University of Lagos. She had envisaged her four years of studying Finance and Business Administration culminating, quite logically, in a job with a bank, one of those new banks dotting Lagos like a colony of palm trees. She might even be given a company car with a company driver, her father said. Her mother said, ‘I shall sit at the back of your car with you. You in the owner’s corner. Me beside you. And your driver shall drive us fia fia fia around Lagos.’ And all three laughed at the happy image of the car (a Ford? A Daewoo? A Peugeot? ‘I hope it’s a Peugeot, for that brand has served this country loyally since the beginning of time. When I worked for UTC . . .’). And her mother’s mock plea that Papa Chisom should save them from another trip down memory lane would gently hush Chisom’s father and then Chisom herself would say, ‘I don’t really care what brand of car I get as long as it gets me to work and back!’

‘Wise. Wise. Our Wise Daughter has spoken,’ her father would say casually, but his voice would betray the weight of his pride, the depth of his hopes for her, his respect for her Wisdom, all that Wisdom she was acquiring at university; their one-way ticket out of the cramped two-room flat to more elegant surroundings. For in addition to the car Chisom was expected also to have a house with room enough for her parents. A bedroom for them. A bedroom for herself. A sitting room with a large coloured TV. A kitchen with an electric cooker. And cupboards for all the pots and pans and plates they would need. No more storing pots under the bed! A kitchen painted lavender or beige. A soft, subtle colour that would make them forget this Ogba kitchen that was black with the smoke of many kerosene fires. A generator. No longer at the mercy of NEPA. A gateman. A steward. A high gate with heavy locks. A fence with jagged pieces of bottle sticking from it to deter even the most hardened thieves. A garden with flowers. No. Not flowers. A garden with vegetables. Why have a garden with nothing you can eat? But flowers are beautiful. Spinach is beautiful too. Tomatoes are beautiful. OK. A garden with flowers and food. OK. Good. They laughed and dreamed, spurred on by Chisom’s grades which, while not excellent, were good enough to encourage their dreams.

The days after graduation were filled with easy laughter and application letters, plans and a list of things to do (the last always preceded by Once Chisom gets a job, or As soon as Chisom gets a job, or Once I get a job). For, as her father would say, there were only two certainties in their lives: death and Chisom’s good job. Death was a given (many, many years from now by God’s grace. Amen!) and with her university degree nothing should stand in the way of the good job (very soon. Only a matter of time. University graduates are in high demand! High demand!). His belief in a university education so intrinsically tied to his belief in his daughter’s destined future as to be irrevocable.

Yet, two years after leaving university, Chisom was still mainly unemployed (she had done a three-month stint teaching economics at a holiday school: the principles of scarcity and want; Law of Supply and Demand), and had spent the better part of the two years scripting meticulous application letters and mailing them along with her résumé to the many different banks in Lagos.

Dear Mr Uloko

With reference to the advertisement placed in the Daily Times of 12 June, I am writing to –

Dear Alhaji Musa Gani

With reference to the advertisement placed in the Guardian of 28 July, I am writing to apply –

But she was never even invited to an interview. Diamond Bank. First Bank. Standard Bank. And then the smaller ones. And then the ones that many people seemed never to have heard of. Lokpanta National Bank. Is this a bank? Here in Lagos? Is it a new one? Where? Since when?

Even in their obscurity they had no place for her. No envelopes came addressed to her, offering her a job in a bank considerably humbler than the banks she had eyed while at school, and in which less intelligent classmates with better connections worked. It was as if her résumés were being swallowed up by the many potholes on Lagos roads. Sometimes she imagined that the postmen never even mailed them; that maybe they sold them to roadside food sellers to use in wrapping food for their customers. Maybe, she thought to herself sometimes, her résumé had wrapped ten nairas’ worth of groundnuts for a civil servant on his way home from work. Or five nairas’ worth of fried yam for a hungry pupil on her way to school. She sought to find humour in the thought, to laugh off the fear of an ineluctable destiny that she had contracted from her parents. The Prophecy, by now, meant nothing to her. Of course.

There was no longer talk of a company car. Or a company driver. No arguments about a garden with food or flowers. And as the years rolled on, no more letters of application.

‘Why bother?’ Chisom asked her father when he tried to encourage her. ‘Unless you have found out that one of your friends is the director of any of the banks, because that is how things work, you know?’

She did not tell her father that she had also tried applying for other jobs, sometimes jobs she was hardly qualified for but, as she reasoned, she stood as good a chance with those as she stood with a job at the bank. An air hostess with Triax Airlines (must be an excellent swimmer; Chisom had never learned to swim), an administrative assistant with Air France (excellent French required; Chisom knew as much French as she didYoruba, which was not much, if anything at all. Words she had learned by rote from a zealous French tutor; ‘Comment tu t’appelle? Je m’appelle Chisom, et vous? Comme ci, comme ça. Voilà Monsieur Mayaki. Monsieur Mayaki est fort.’). And she was right. No requests for interviews came from those quarters either. Still, she scanned the newspapers, sending off arbitrary applications for jobs announced, finding satisfaction in the recklessness of her random choices, watching with anger as life laughed at the grandiosity of her dreams. So, when she got the offer that she did she was determined to get her own back on life, to grab it by the ankles and scoff in its face. There was no way she was going to turn it down. Not even for Peter.

Zwartezusterstraat

BEFORE EFE CAME to Belgium, she imagined castles and clean streets and snow as white as salt. But now when she thinks of it, when she talks of where she lives in Antwerp, she describes it as a botched dream. She talks about it in much the same way as she describes Joyce in her absence: created for elegance but never quite accomplishing it. In this part of Antwerp, huge offices stand alongside grotty warehouses and desolate fruit stalls run by effusive Turks and Moroccans. On dark streets carved with tramlines, houses with narrow doors and high windows nestle against each other. The house the women share has an antique brass knocker and a catflap taped over with brown, heavy-duty duct tape.

Outside, a neighbour’s dog barks. Its owner tells it to be calm, he’s almost ready for their walk. The ladies might still be sleeping, he says. Shh.

But the ladies are not sleeping. Inside, Efe, Ama and Joyce are gathered in a room painted in tongues of fire. They are sitting on a long couch, its black covers fading with age, its frame almost giving way underneath their combined weight. The wall against which their couch is placed is slightly cool and if they lean into the back their necks press against the coolness. They are mostly silent, a deep quiet entombing them, filling up the room, so that there is hardly space for anything else. The silence is a huge sponge soaking up air, and all three of them have thought at different times this morning that perhaps they should open the door. But they do not because they know it will not help as the door opens into a short, carpeted hallway. They think about the air that seems vile and rub their necks and temples. Still, no one says a word. They will not talk about it. Their eyes are mainly on their laps, their arms folded across their chests. Sisi is everywhere. She is not here, but they cannot escape her, even in their thoughts. Joyce says the room is dusty. She jumps up and grabs a rag from the kitchen – one of the many that she stocks in a cupboard – and starts to dust the walls. The table. The mantelpiece above the fake fireplace with logs that never burn.

Joyce continues dusting. Frantically. Her rag performing a crazed dance, like one possessed. The same way she dusts her bedposts in the Vingerlingstraat every morning, after the men have gone.

Ama has a bottle of Leffe on the floor between her legs. She picks it up and starts to drink. The sound of her gulping the beer takes over the silence for a while. Glup. Glup. Glup. Until it’s finished. She flings the bottle onto the floor. Efe eyes it as it rolls, slows down and finally stops.

‘Isn’t it too early to be drinking, Ama? Day never even break finish!’ Efe tells her.

‘It’s early and so fucking what?’ Ama burps. Tugs at her crucifix. ‘You dey always get ant for your arse. Every day na so so annoyance you dey carry around.’

The women are not sure what they are to each other. Thrown together by a conspiracy of fate and a loud man called Dele they are bound in a sort of unobtrusive friendship, comfortable with what little they know of each other, asking no questions unless prompted, sharing deep laughter and music in their sitting room, making light of the life which has taught them to make the most of the trump card that God has wedged in between their legs, dissecting the men who come to them (men who spend hours thrashing on top of them or under them, shoving and fiddling and clenching their brown buttocks and finally – mostly – using their fingers to shove in their own pale meat) in voices loud and deprecating. And now, with the news that they have just received, they have become bound by something so final that they are afraid to talk about it. It is as if by skirting around it, by avoiding it, they could pretend it never happened.

Sisi

‘THERE IS NO room to breathe here!’ Chisom dropped the mirror and turned to Peter, her boyfriend of three years. She had left her parents in the middle of an argument and gone to Peter’s flat, not too far from theirs. Peter with a BSc in Mathematics – the framed certificate had pride of place in his cluttered sitting room, on top of his small black-and-white television. As the television faced the door the certificate was usually the first thing a guest saw. Above it on the wall another framed certificate announcing that Peter was Teacher of the Year. Beside that, a framed photograph of Peter with stars in his eyes shaking the hands of a bored-looking man in a stiff black coat. Under the photograph, the inscription: Teacher of the Year, with the Commissioner for Education, Chief Dr R. C. Munonye. There were identically framed photographs in Peter’s bedroom. Peter with eyes that sparkled, shaking the hands of men (and occasionally women) in flamboyant suits who, likewise, always looked invariably bored. Or busy. And very often both. Peter’s flat was a shrine to an accumulation of incremental achievements that did not camouflage, as far as Chisom was concerned, the fallacies of those successes. Peter’s life was a cul-de-sac. He did not have the passion to dream like Chisom did, did not aspire to break down the walls that kept him in. And this made her think that she was outgrowing him.

‘I’ll marry you one day and take you away from here,’ Peter swore, his voice firm like a schoolteacher’s, wetting his right index finger and pointing it up to the ceiling to accompany his oath. He walked towards her and held her around her waist, nuzzled the side of her face. ‘I promise you. I’ll take you away from all this, baby!’ Another nuzzle.

In Europe, when she would no longer be Chisom and before Luc, this was what she would miss most about him. His hands around her waist. His breath warm against her face. His stubble scratching her cheek. She would believe that she would never find that kind of love again. That she would never hanker after the sort of intimacy that made her want to be completely subsumed by the other. She would be wrong on both counts.

‘I don’t want to become like my mother,’ Chisom said, gently unlocking his hands and turning round to look earnestly at this young man who thought he could rescue her. What did he have? she thought. He had a job teaching at a local school. The months he got paid, his salary was barely enough to cover the rent for this flat where his five siblings lived with him. The months he did not get paid he begged his landlord to allow him to live on credit. His eyes looked into hers and their solemnity pained her. She looked away. His patience, of rather heroic proportions, aggravated her.

‘Peter, you have to save yourself from drowning first before you start promising to save others!’ Her voice came out angrier than she had intended. What right did he have to make promises he couldn’t keep? What right did he have to ask her to wait here, to wait for him while she got pulled further underwater?

There was a time she had looked up to him. Her whizz-kid with the soft hands and a brain that could make sense of any mathematical equation, (a x b) x c = a x (b x c) = a x b x c, decipher words that made no sense to her: Polynomial. Exponential. Trigonometric. Algebraic Identities. Laplace Transform Table. Scribbling magic in his notebook that fascinated her no end and gave certainty to a future that included him.

It wasn’t that she no longer loved him. She did. She loved the way his left eye half shut when he smiled. She loved the way he cradled her when they made love, breathing into her skin. She loved the way he grinned while he ate as if the very act of eating, the thoughtful chewing, never mind what was being eaten, was pleasurable; an art to be cultivated, elevated and enjoyed. But love had its limits. Peter did not have the means to turn her life around. Had she had foresight, she often thought, she would have done a nursing degree. At Christmas most of the men returning home from Europe and America with wallets full of foreign currency, to scout for wives, went for the nurses. They said it was easier for nurses to get a job abroad. ‘The British NHS depends on our fucking nurses, innit?’ Ed, her friend Ezimma’s cousin, told her. Ed had also come to get a wife. He lived in England – somewhere unpronounceable that ended in shire, so unmistakably English that it made him attractive and within three weeks of being in Nigeria and parading both himself and his pounds he had found himself a willing nurse. And even though Chisom did not like the way he marinated his sentences in ‘shit’ and ‘bloodyfucking’ and ‘innit’ she knew that had he asked her to marry him she would have. Because by then she had given up on love as a prerequisite for marriage. She would rediscover this yearning, this desire to marry for love, a year later, abroad.

‘We are all stuck here, baby,’ Peter told her, arms around her again. He took her ear in his mouth and bit gently. She liked it when he did that.

‘And I am tired of being stuck.’ She let him hold her, regretting her earlier outburst. After all, it was not Peter’s fault that she had no job or that he did not earn enough or that the entire economy was in a mess so that her father had nothing to show for his many years in the civil service or that she did not see Peter as part of the bright future that was hers. She closed her eyes and let the smell of his cologne take her away. ‘I wish life were like this,’ she muttered. ‘I wish life smelt this good.’

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

On Black Sisters’ Street

Chika Unigwe

12 May 2006

Zwartezusterstraat

Sisi

Zwartezusterstraat

Sisi