by Chika Unigwe
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:
Question: Who beats a child, even on its mother’s lap?
Answer: Hunger.
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.
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.