On Black Sisters Street (11 page)

SISI

THE DAY SISI LEFT LAGOS, IT RAINED. IT WAS NOT AN AUSPICIOUS DAY
for traveling (“Rain, rain, go away, come again another day!” a mother and her three young children sang as they waited to board the plane), but the rain had not bothered Sisi at all. She stood at a window and watched the rain tripping the light fantastic, glistening on the tarmac with a phosphorescence that seemed to be for her alone: a glowlike halo that reminded her of the vision that had been seen for her. Assuring her that she was doing the right thing. The only thing she could. It was to her Prophecy that she was headed. A Prophecy she now believed in, not with the wounded faith of her father but with a faith that was so total it left no room for doubt, not even a hairline crack. If she stayed back, if she let this chance slip, she would only be giving life the go-ahead to treat her dreams with derision, the same as it had done with her parents’.

There was her father. He worked in the Ministry of Works. A civil servant, he had imagined that one day he would be able to buy a car, a secondhand Peugeot 504, but apart from a pay raise in his first year, his salary had remained static even as the prices of everything else rose. He could never afford a car. Especially now that President Obasanjo had put an import embargo on cars older than five years. (Hot on the heels of his wife banning a certain type of lace she
wanted exclusively for herself. “That president
sef
! While people are busy killing each other in senseless riots, he is busy banning the importation of everything. Toothpaste. Chloroquine for malaria. Soaps. Detergents. Envelopes. How am I ever supposed to buy a car? We thought we were suffering under Abacha. This is worse! At least a military dictatorship did not hide under the cover of democracy. This is worse.” He could never buy a car. He could never buy a decent house. He could never earn enough to fulfill his dreams.) His predicament weighed on his shoulders and resulted in a stoop that belied his fortysomething years. He walked like a man in his eighties, shuffling, head bent, perpetually searching for the dot on the ground that would either signal a change in his fortune or widen and eat him up whole, obliterating him from the earth. He never looked people in the face when he spoke, raising his head only a few inches, so that mostly people had to ask him to repeat himself.

Her mother had had her own dream of being a landlady, of owning a house in Ikoyi, a Lagos suburb she had eyed ever since she set foot in the city that her new groom had told her had towers that grazed the skies. (She, with the brazenness of a new bride, had squealed, “How can? There can never be houses that high! I don’t believe you.” But it turned out to be true. Her new husband had taken her around Lagos, hopping on and off
danfo
buses to gaze at the high wonders that Lagos had in abundance. The truth of the high towers had solidified her trust in her husband, and her certainty that he would fulfill the promise of getting her into a better house in Ikoyi.) She had in her head the plan of the house she was going to own. A duplex with a wide garage and a fenced lawn. Behind, there would be a boys’ quarters with two rooms for her maids. She dreamed of being rescued from the Ogba flat from which they eked out their daily existence, sandwiched between Mama Iyabo with the rolls of flesh under her chin and the brood of six children to their left and the white-wearing, churchgoing young couple to their right. She had cosseted
dreams of having her own bathroom, her own kitchen, her own toilet, and three rooms since the day Godwin married her and brought her from her village, Oba, to Lagos. He had promised her that the flat was a temporary arrangement until he got a promotion. “I shall whisk you off to become a landlady. We cannot have a family here. We cannot raise children here. We need a house of our own. A big house, with separate bedrooms for each of the children. We cannot have a baby here.”

But a year later, their daughter had come. And twenty-four years later, they were still there, their daughter having to sleep in the sitting room. Mama Chisom had nurtured the dreams through the years, nursing them and drawing them out to comfort her on days when she felt tears spring to her eyes for no reason at all, finally watching them flail and plunge weightless onto the cement floor of their flat. “No leave, no transfer,” she often told her husband these days, laughing at the dreams she had dared to have. These days when she laughed, her laughter sounded like it was being dredged from behind her throat rather than from the stomach, which is where laughter comes from. And as for children, after Chisom no more babies had agreed to take root. It was as if something within her expelled them, and month after month she suffered the low-waist pain of menstruation. “It is just as well,” she said when her husband was not within earshot. He missed not having a son and would say whenever they had a quarrel that every man had a right to a son, as if it were due to a shortcoming on her part that he had failed to have one. On days when his temper was up, he would tell her that if he could afford it he would have married a second wife, someone whose womb was more receptive to sons. Sons might have changed his fortune.

He would be quieted only by Chisom’s mother reminding him of the Prophecy. “Do not forget the Prophecy!” By 2005 even that was no longer enough to soothe his apoplectic rant. His faith in the Prophecy had become wounded, his belief in it tried by time.

The memory of her mother’s behind-the-throat laughter and her father’s anger at life’s unfairness would accompany Sisi on the days she went walking and her housemates wondered where she’d got to, why she would not let anyone go with her. And when she would receive her first epiphany, it would be of her parents that she would think. Of their dreams, so intertwined with hers that there was no separating them.

ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT

NONE OF THEM CAN SAY HOW LONG THEY HAVE BEEN SITTING THERE
, huddled together on the couch as if seeking the heat of one another’s bodies, listening to Efe’s story usurp the silence. Their arms touch, and the fight of before is all but forgotten. Joyce’s rag is balled up in her fist.

Efe says she wishes she could see L.I. She says that when she talks to him on the phone it’s like talking to a stranger, and that bothers her. “He’s polite and all, but I always feel like he wants to get off the phone, that he’d much rather be somewhere else.” She says that she is worried that L.I. does not see her as his mother, even though Rita once told her on the phone that he carries her picture to school, the picture of her in snow boots that she had sent home her first winter in Belgium. “But in that photo, I’m all covered up and you can’t even make out my face. All you see is snow,” she complains to the women. “Maybe he just wants the photo for the snow. I sure say na de snow wey dey sweet am.” She laughs, emitting a sound like the engine of a car spluttering to life and then spluttering out.

Joyce says she never would have guessed Efe had a child. “Your stomach is still very flat!”

“Oh, but I do,” Efe answers. She opens up her wallet and fishes out a tattered passport-size picture of a boy whose face is half covered by
a cap. “I’m his mother,” she says, passing the picture to Joyce. Joyce says, “Wow. Good-looking boy!” Efe smiles her gratitude and concurrence. Joyce takes the picture from Efe and holds it out to Ama.

“Having a child, that’s a big thing. It’s a big deal. How could you even think of having that baby when neither you nor the father wanted him?” Ama asks. “Why would you want to fuck up a kid’s life?”

“I didn’t want to
fuck
up anyone’s life, Ama!” Efe responds. “I was a kid. And let me tell you, I don’t for one second, not for a single second, regret having L.I. He gives my life meaning.” She hastily pushes the picture back into her purse.

“Some meaning he gives it!”

“Ladies, please. Not today.” Joyce tries to restore peace. She wrings the duster in her hands.

“Fuck off, all of you,” Ama says, and lights another cigarette. She gets up and starts pacing the room, the tip of her cigarette glowing an angry cherry.

Efe hisses.

And Ama hisses.

And Joyce hisses.

Then silence.

Inhale. Exhale. The neon cherry of the cigarette dims. Ama stops pacing. “You really don’t regret your son?”

“No. Never. Everything I do is for him.” The love in Efe’s voice is palpable; they can almost see it in the room. A soft, glowing love with angel wings and a cherub face.

Ama’s jealousy is so visceral that it claws at her chest. She rubs a thumb against her cross. Says, “He’s a lucky child.” She lights another cigarette and takes a long drag. Efe and Joyce look at Ama. “What the fuck are you looking at me like that for?” She shuts her eyes. Brings the cigarette to her lips. When she pulls it away, she blows a delicate ring that glides across the room. No one says a word.

The silence is lugubrious. Time moves slowly. By and by the women get hungry. However, no one wants to suggest food at a time like this, even though it is probably gone midday and they have not even had breakfast. They hadn’t had the time to go to the bakery before the news of Sisi’s murder came and soured the day that the weather forecast had said would be dry and sunny. Not a day for dying.

It is not appropriate that they should talk about food when they are supposed to be grieving. The sorrow is supposed to take away your appetite, take precedence over food. It would be unseemly for one of them to go to the kitchen and start cooking. Even Madam seems to understand this, so she did not bother to ask any of them to cook before she left, her cigarette held tightly between her fingers as though she wanted to snap it in two. She left incense burning on a stand in the middle of the room, smoke fluttering weakly from it.

“Back home in Nigeria,” it occurs to Efe, and she says this out loud, “neighbors would have gathered to cry with us. Nobody will let you cry alone!”

Here their grief has to be contained within the four walls of their flat. No matter how large it becomes for them, they must not let it swell and crack the walls. Efe recalls when her mother died. Neighbors had come to cry with them. Their mother’s sister had come to live with them for two weeks, helping with the cooking and the cleaning. After she went back to Warri, where she lived, the neighbors had taken over, cooking and looking after the family, even helping with the laundry and shopping, until her father’s drink made him obnoxious and difficult to help. He took umbrage at the neighbors’ help, sometimes shouting at them that he did not need their pity, his dead wife was three times the women they were. He screamed at them, “Get away from my family. Get out of my home. I don’t want you near my children. Witches.”

The women shut their ears to him, saying, “Poor man, he can’t
handle his wife’s death. Her death has broken him into pieces, he is not who he used to be. Poor Papa Efe.”

So they ignored him and kept coming with their offerings of food and companionship, which the children were grateful for, having been left with a father who was drinking more and more. Efe tells the women now of how the father broke a neighbor’s plate, flinging across the wall the rice and chicken stew the woman had brought, laughing all the while, the
caw caw caw
of a deranged hyena. The neighbor had picked up her plate, broken neatly into two equal halves as if by design, complaining while she did that not even the loss of a wife gave a man the right to throw kindness back into his neighbor’s face. That plate had been one of the woman’s favorites: expensive china edged in silver. “Go to Tejuosho and ask how much a plate like this costs,” she yelled above the manic laughter of Efe’s father. Efe had gotten the task of wiping the rich stew off the wall, tears of red and green flowing down the cream walls. There was spinach in the stew. The green came off easily, but the red stayed. “And is still there even as I speak.”

The neighbors had stayed away after that. “But it was all my father’s fault. Nobody will ever let you mourn alone back home.”

Ama and Joyce say it’s true. Nobody cries alone back home.

“Me, I dey feel for her family,
sha
,” Efe says. “To lose a pikin go hard!”

Joyce unfurls her rag and, leaning forward, starts rubbing at a spot on the table in front of her.