by Chika Unigwe
“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.
Sisi was shocked that Madam spoke good English. She had imagined that Madam would be like Dele, unable to string together an entire sentence in proper English. It went with the image she had of her before meeting her. She would learn later that Madam had a master’s in business administration from the University of Lagos. Not only did she speak perfect English, she spoke perfect Dutch, too. And was at this moment taking lessons in French.
Madam’s accent was sophisticated. Her words well enunciated, filed around the edges so that there was not a trace of roughness. The closest thing to the queen’s English Sisi had ever heard. It thrilled her to listen to it.
Madam opened the black leather bag she had slung across her left shoulder and brought out a pack of cigarettes. “You smoke?” she asked Sisi, holding out the pack to her.
“No. I don’t.”
“I didn’t before I came here. But this is a different world. This place changes you. You learn to eat cornflakes with cold milk. Can you imagine?”
Sisi could not imagine but said nothing.
“They clear the head, cigarettes. Just be sure to steer clear of dope. I have seen it mess with people’s minds. Antwerp is full of them: people who’ve been made mad by dope. This is not the right place to go crazy. Europe is for living, and living in full. I always think that our people who come here and run mad are a waste of space.”
She pulled out a cigarette and threw the pack back into her bag. Sisi watched her short hand disappear almost completely into the bag and come out with a slim black lighter, elegant in its compactness. Madam clicked the lighter and lit the cigarette. She inhaled, blew a cloud of smoke, and smiled at a memory she was not sharing. She took another draw, looked around, sat down beside Sisi on the bed, and tapped ash onto the table beside the bed. Then she spoke.
“Dele was right about you. Ah, that man knows his stuff. He never disappoints. He has the best girls on the show, you know? To see the girls some of these jokers bring in! Shitty faces, bodies that need serious panel beating, and breasts hanging like scrotums.” She laughed.
Sisi kept quiet. She did not know how to respond to what was obviously a compliment. Instead, she gazed at Madam, wondering if her body weighed heavy on her, trying not to laugh at the idea of breasts hanging like scrotums. Her silence was instinctive: Laughter might have been looked at as insolence.
Madam inhaled and exhaled another cloud of smoke, suffusing the room with the smell of the cigarette. Sisi wondered if it would be rude of her to move, to stand up and maybe go to the other end of the room. The smoke irritated her. Her thoughts wandered to
her parents, and she asked herself how they were, what they were doing. She thought of Peter, almost wishing that things had been different. He would have made a good husband, a considerate one, the sort who would wash his wife’s clothes if she were indisposed, maybe even cook for her. She chased away thoughts of him. She had had no choice but to leave. Peter had nothing to offer me. Maybe after she had made her money, if Peter was still available, she would marry him. If he was no longer available, there would be other men. There are always other men. One could buy anything, an attentive husband included. You just had to have enough disposable income. And I’ll make it. Even if it kills me. She shifted on her buttocks, and Madam looked at her.
“Not nervous, are we? You can’t afford to be. Not in our business.” She tapped some more ash on the table. “Ah, hand over your passport. From now until your debt is paid, I am in charge of your passport.”
Handing over her passport would be tantamount to putting her life into someone else’s hands, would it not? What if she changed her mind? What if she decided she was not cut out for this after all and that she wanted to go home? She looked at Madam, sized up the gold necklace hanging around the thick neck, and imagined it around her own neck. Who was she kidding? There was no way she could go back to the life she knew before. She would stay here and make it, so what did it matter who had her passport? She got up, knelt, and dragged her suitcase out from under the bed. She unzipped an inner pocket and brought out the envelope with her passport. She handed the brown envelope to Madam.
“Once you’ve eaten breakfast, you have to go and register at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
“Why?”
The question was out before Sisi could stop it. She did not really want to know. Answers were irrelevant to her. The only thing that was of substance, that really had meaning to her at this point, was survival. And the revelation that she would do everything required of her until she achieved her dream was not an abrupt one. It did not come upon her like an unexpected rain shower, catching her unawares. It was more like a shadow, comfortable enough to follow her around.
“Why?” Madam echoed, her voice mocking and lilted by a laugh. “My dear … what’s your name?”
“Sisi.”
“My dear Sisi, it’s not your place to ask questions here. You just do as you are told, and you’ll have an easy ride. I talk, you listen. You understand? Three days ago I gave Joyce the same instruction. She did not ask me questions. She just listened and did as she was told. I expect the same of you. Silence and total obedience. That’s the rule of the house. Be seen, not heard. Capisce?”
Yes. She understood. Voice as still as the night.
Sisi had met Joyce briefly the night before. She had come to introduce herself in an accent Sisi could not place as Nigerian. Sisi thought she looked young. Still a girl, really. And even though she said she was from Benin City, she did not look very Bini. She looked more Fulani than anything else, what with her cheeks that looked chiseled out of something pure. None of my business. We all come with our stories, and who cares which version is the truth. Everyone lives with their secrets. Everyone lives their secrets. We are all secrets to each other.
Sisi detested Madam’s tone, the way she spoke as if Sisi were a child. Back in Lagos, nobody would have dared talk to her in that manner. But this was not Lagos. And she needed this woman’s help in this city that was full of strangers.
“I shall get you a cab that will stop you in front of the center. Tell them there that you are from Liberia. Are you listening to me? Tell them that your father was a local Mandingo chief, and soldiers loyal to Charles Taylor came at night to your house and killed your entire family: father, mother, sisters, and brothers. You escaped because you hid yourself in a kitchen cupboard. You dared to come out only after the massacre ended and the soldiers had gone. Tell them you heard a soldier shout that one family member was missing, that they were under obligation to kill you all, and that they would be back to do just that. Look sad. Cry. Wail. Tear your hair out. White people enjoy sob stories. They love to hear about us killing each other, about us hacking off each other’s heads in senseless ethnic conflicts. The more macabre the story, the better.”
She paused to take a long drag on her cigarette, blew a ring of blue smoke in the room, and continued. “Talk about seeing the corpses of your dead family. About stepping on the corpses as you made your way out of the house. Tell them that you couldn’t trust your neighbors, most of them were pro-Taylor and would have killed you themselves if they had caught you. Don’t forget, cry. Make sure tears come out. Real tears, eh? The cab will come back for you. You wait outside the building until you see him, okay? Don’t go with anybody else. He’ll bring you straight back to this house. Remember, you are Mandingo. You have no passport. You escaped Liberia with only your head and the clothes on your back. A white man took pity on you and helped you escape. He saw you outside a church begging for money. You understand?”
“Yes.” It was the only possible response. Not only would Sisi be Liberian, in the next months she would be other things. Other people. A constant yearning to escape herself would take over her life, so that being Sisi would no longer suffice. It would take Luc to put a stop to that. Briefly. And then she would be gone.
ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT | AMA
THE WALLS OF THE SITTING ROOM WERE PINK. SHE COULD NOT REMEMBER if they had ever been another color or if they had always been that chewing-gum pink she recalled so vividly, the pinkness rising up to meet her whenever she needed a friend, enfolding her in an embrace that was as warm, as comforting, as it was familiar. Fucking bloody pink. Can you imagine?
The girl liked to run her hands on the walls. When she got older and wiser, she would think of it as making love to the walls with her hands, feeling their silky smoothness, letting her hands glide, a lover’s hands, over silky-smooth skin. Those bloody walls were her best friends.
Silent, constant friends whom she could trust. They were not like her sandals, which she sometimes played with, but which had gaping mouths that reminded her of Christie from across the road, who her mother said had to be the biggest gossip alive. Radio Without Battery, her mother called Christie. “She never runs out of steam, broadcasting news from one set of ears to another.” Ama could never trust those horrible sandals that were never entirely comfortable (too tight, too loose, too wide, too narrow), and when she played school with them, she lashed them hard until she was sure she heard them cry.
Ama learned from childhood to keep secrets. It was like having a boil inside you waiting to burst and thinking that once it did, it would kill you. She had to share the secrets with someone. And her pink friends were the ones whose ears she filled with the stories she did not dare tell anyone else.
She was grateful for those walls, who were all the friends she needed. And, most times, all the friends she had. Her father did not encourage her friends to visit because he said friends sometimes led one astray. When they did come, he told them Ama had to study. From the window of her room, Ama would watch young girls from the neighborhood shouting out to one another as they played oga, their feet raising dust as they stamped on the ground. She wished she could crumple up her father and hurl him off the balcony. Fling him so far that his face would smash into the hills. She told the walls this.
She had not always spoken to the walls, but the day after her birthday, when it started, there was nobody else she could tell what she told the walls. The walls kept quiet and listened and did not push her out. They did not say, “Not now, go and play, that’s a good girl,” and so a satisfying friendship that was to span many years had begun.
It was 1987 and she was turning eight. Her father was throwing a party for her, a big birthday party with a clown hired to entertain her guests and a cameraman to capture the laughter on her face and the love of a father who would lay all these out. She had been top of the class for the third time that year, and this was her reward. A big party. A big cake with eight candles. And ribbons in her hair. The h
ouse smelled of jollof rice and moi-moi and fried beef. Her mother and two of her mother’s friends sat on low stools in the sweaty kitchen, sipping Maltina and supervising the housemaids’ cooking. Ama was in the sitting room, watching TV. She had been asked to keep out of the kitchen. “Go and watch something on TV, don’t disturb us here, be a good girl and run along,” her mother had said, shooing her out of the busy kitchen. Once in a while a face peeked out of the kitchen and called to her: “Ama, come and taste this. Is this rice to your liking, nne? Not too hot? Is the meat tender enough? Not too dry?” “No.” She shook her head. Everything was sam-sam perfect. Nothing could go wrong today. Ijeoma, the housemaid one of her mother’s friends had lent her for the day, had sweat running into her eyes. She wiped it off with the back of her hand and screamed that she had gotten pepper, ose, ose, in her eyes. “That girl is very foolish. Atulu. She’s a sheep,” her mother’s friend who had lent her out said. “Who forgets that she is cooking with pepper and rubs her eyes with her hands?”
The three women laughed as she ran around shouting, “Water, water, my eyes are on fire.” One of the other maids got her water and helped her wash the sting of the pepper out. After her pain had calmed and the women had stopped laughing, the woman she lived with told her, “Let that be a lesson to you. If this little pepper makes you shout ‘Fire, fire’ like a madwoman, think of how bad the fire of hell must be, and keep away from evil. Yesterday two naira disappeared from the table where I left it. Two days ago a fifty-kobo coin went missing from my room. Even if I have not caught you red-handed, the devil is keeping stock and shall come for you.” Bloody advice!