by Chika Unigwe
It was hot inside the café, although on the streets you could tell it was already September: The weather was cool without being really cold. “Wait until October,” Ama had warned Sisi earlier in the day. “That’s when the cold sets in, and it doesn’t let off until the next summer. You’ll be talking, and smoke will be coming out of your mouth, as if you’ve eaten fire. And by the time it gets to December, I tell you, no amount of fire will keep you warm.” Sisi had wanted to ask then about the snow, whether it came in December, and was it as beautiful as it looked on TV? All soft and edible, like soursop. But she had not asked. After all, she would be in Antwerp to see it whenever it came. It would be her story to tell someone else. She would be here. She would see snow and winter and meet her destiny. She had the willpower. When this man came back, she would pick up the splinters of her smile and make them whole again.
She watched him walk up to the bar. Now that he had his back turned, Sisi thought that his buttocks looked as if he had diapers on. She chuckled, the vision of the man in diapers momentarily relieving her of unease at the thought of how the night would develop further. Even if she had not had Peter, she told herself, this was not the type of man she would have slept with. She did not find him attractive at all. His face was too wide, his eyes too far apart. What sort of man would go to a prostitute, anyway? Could he not find a woman? At least she was doing it for the money. She had no other choice. What had pushed this man to seeking pleasure between the thighs of a woman he most likely would not recognize outside the café? Laziness? Too ugly to find a woman? What?
A man in a dark brown shirt open over a black singlet passed by on his way to the toilet. His female companion danced behind him, sticking her pelvis in the face of a bespectacled man sitting at one of the tables. He smiled at her. She laughed and licked her lips. “I will wait for you here,” Sisi heard her shout to her companion. Twisting at the waist, she went down until her knees were on the floor. Someone applauded her. Overcome by the music, she shut her eyes, thrust her chest out, and jounced her breasts. A whistle greeted this. Her companion turned back and grinned at her before disappearing into the toilet. He had a few front teeth missing. From the back, the grayness of his ponytailed hair melted into his shirt. He could hardly walk straight, and Sisi wondered if his posture was from age or from drink.
The man with the striped shirt returned with two bottles of Stella Artois. “Come, we sit at a table.”
Sisi did not usually drink beer. Apart from the fact that it had been too expensive a habit for her to cultivate back in Lagos, she did not appreciate its salty bitterness. It did not lift her to any heights. She had often wondered why people drank bottle after bottle of the stuff. Now she wondered if she would start drinking bottle after bottle to forget. But forget what? There were worse things to become, she reminded herself. She was not a robber, not a cheat, not a 419er sending deceitful e-mails to gullible Westerners. She would make her money honestly. Every cent of it would be earned by her sweat. She did not need to enjoy her job, but she would do it well. She said thank you for the drink as the man poured out some beer for her in a glass. She drank it in one gulp and hoped it would numb her senses or at least make the man before her look attractive. He smiled at her and refilled the glass, emptying the bottle. “My name is Dieter,” he said as he picked up his glass and took a sip. Foam gave him a mustache on his upper lip for an instant. He did not look desirable. Sisi lifted the glass, tilted her head, and once more drained the glass in one go. Its coldness masked some of the bitterness. He still did not look desirable. Dieter got up, went to the bar, and came back with another bottle. “You don’t talk much, do you, See See?” he asked, refilling her glass a third time.
“No.” Sisi shook her head. She struggled to smile, but the splinters rejected her attempts to make them whole, to bring them back to life. They disintegrated like baby ghosts floating about the room and finally disappearing into the gloom.
“Your voice is beautiful. Like you,” Dieter told her, reaching across the table to touch her right cheek, his palm clammy. Sisi’s natural instinct was to shake it off, but in her new life common sense ruled over instinct, so she left it there. She tried to force herself to imagine that it was Peter’s palm, that she and Peter were married and had simply gone out for a drink. It did not work. Dieter’s hand slipped and moved to her neck. He ran his fingers down the outside of her neck, all the time muttering, “Beautiful. Beautiful.” His eyes bulged out, and shifting on his chair, he moved his hand to her breast, cupping each one in turn. I can’t do this, Sisi thought. She sat still, her glass of beer untouched before her, her heart heavy with a sadness that felt like rage. She imagined she was in a dream. But she would never let this man into her dreams. She could no longer make out which music was playing, as her ears were filled with the rush of a waterfall.
This is not me. I am not here. I am at home, sleeping in my bed. This is not me. This is not me. This is somebody else. Another body. Not mine. This is not me. This is somebody else. Another body. Dieter got up and motioned for her to follow him. This is not me. This is not me. This is a dream. But I need the money. I can’t do this. The money. Return to Lagos? Can’t. Won’t? She tottered behind him, averting her eyes from his buttocks, her sadness abysmal.
This is not me. I am not here. I am at home, sleeping in my bed. This is not me. This is not me. A Lexus sparkled in her head. Think of the money. Then a candlewick with a human body. God help me!
In a men’s toilet with lavender toilet paper littering the floor, soggy (with urine?), and a shiny black toilet seat, Dieter pulled his trousers down to his ankles. A flash of white boxers. A penis thundering against them. A massive pink knob. Sisi gawked. Everything she had heard about the white man’s flaccidity, his penis as small as a nose (so that the greatest insult she could heap on an annoying schoolmate was that he had the penis of a white man), was smashed. He heaved and moaned; one hand tore at his boxers and the other at Sisi’s skirt. His breath warm against her neck, his hands pawing every bit of her; he licked her neck. Sisi shut her eyes. Raising his head, he stuck his tongue into her ear. In. Out. In. Out. Eyes shut still, she tried to wriggle out of his embrace. She did not want to do this anymore. “I don’t need this. Stop!” she said. He held her close. Pushed her against the wall, his hands cupping her buttocks, and buried his head in her breasts. “Stop,” she shouted again. Eyes open, she saw his face, his mouth open and his jaws distended by an inner hunger. “Stop!” His moans swallowed her voice. His penis searched for a gap between her legs. Finding a warmth, he sighed, spluttered sperm that trickled down her legs like mucus, inaugurating Sisi into her new profession. She baptized herself into it with tears, hot and livid, down her cheeks, salty in her mouth, feeling intense pain wherever he touched, as if he were searing her with a razor blade that had just come out of a fire. Her nose filled with the stench of the room, and the stench filled her body and turned her stomach, and she did not care whether or not she threw up. But she did not. The revulsion stayed inside and expanded, and she felt a pain, a tingling, start in her toes. The pain that could not be contained began to spread out around her and rise, taking over everything else. Even the sound of her heartbeat.
ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT | JOYCE
THE DAY THEY GOT INTO LAGOS, POLYCARP ASKED ALEK WHAT SHE thought of it.
She thought this: Too many people. Too many houses. An excess of everything. Nothing was organized. It reminded her of a drawing by an enthusiastic child with very little talent. Houses juggled for space, standing on one another’s toes, so close that Alek feared you could hear your next-door neighbor breathing. The building that housed their flat was long and small, so that even on the balcony she felt claustrophobic. Yet she knew they could have had worse. She went to Isale Eko in her first week and saw houses standing lopsided next to one another like wobbly tables knocked together by an amateur carpenter, and naked children running around with knobbly belly buttons. Polycarp had told her then that some of the houses had no bathrooms.
“And this is Lagos in the twenty-first century! Lagos in 2004!” He had sniggered. “All our government is good for is stuffing their pockets. They don’t care what happens to the people they are supposed to be ruling.” If she had told Sisi this, she would have said that Polycarp sounded like her father.
Lagos streets were rutted, gutted, and near-impassable, yet they were jam-packed with cars: huge air-conditioned Jeeps driving tail to tail with disintegrating jalopies whose faulty exhaust pipes sent out clouds of dark smoke, making the air so thick with pollution that a constant mist hung over the city, and the bit of sky that one saw was sullied with dirt. Broken-down trucks dotted the highways, their flanks huge banners of wisdom, warnings, tidbits of information, or prayers written in bold blacks and reds, each letter a flourish with a paintbrush: ROME WAS NOT BUILT IN A DAY; WORK HARD AND YOUR DAY WILL COME. POOR MAN GO RISE ONE DAY. GIVE PEACE A CHANCE; AFTER ALL STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE HAD TO LIVE TOGETHER. THE YOUNG SHALL GROW. GOD PLEASE MAKE ME RICH. EDUCATION PLUS BEAUTY MINUS CHRIST EQUALS HELLFIRE; SINNER REPENT. HAD I KNOWN IS THE BROTHER TO MR. LATE. ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE: MATTHEW 7:7.
The words were sometimes misspelled, the job shoddy splotches of paint, but it seemed to Alek that no self-respecting Lagos truck would be seen without a slogan or prayer inscribed along its side. She loved to read the slogans out loud to Polycarp as they drove around the city: “ ‘One plus one does not always equating two.’ ‘The world is my oysta. I shall eat it well.’ ‘Saluttation is not love.’ ”
The trucks that did move ferried cows and goats, packed tight like sardines. “For Christmas,” Polycarp said, and asked if they ought to get a goat, too. Christmas was only three weeks away. Alek said no, she preferred chicken. “You’re with an Igbo man. You better start liking goat!” Polycarp responded, his laughter almost muffling his words.
On any given day, one was likely to find a corpse abandoned by the roadside, waiting for someone to claim it or for the many vultures that circled the city to devour it. Some of the dead were victims of hit-and-run drivers, most of whom were never found and brought to justice. The majority of the dead, however, Polycarp told her, were homeless people murdered by those who needed them to make money. Apparently, juju made of human blood was the best sort to ensure abundant wealth. There were many flyover loops to ease the traffic of the more than ten million people who called Lagos home. Under the flyovers, beggars made beds out of cardboard and empty cement bags. They left their beds to harass passersby for money, touting their disability like trophies. Every sort of illness known to man was present in whole or in part in the homeless under the bridge. Alek thought it was almost a freak show, an unabashed display of anomalies. People with stumps for arms and legs sticking them at passing cars and pedestrians; blind people rapping on closed car windows and singing for money, led by children with perfect sight; people with disfigured mouths or eyeballs that were unnaturally huge; lepers with skin that looked plastered with coarse sand.
Once Alek saw a man with only a head and a torso being pushed in a wheelbarrow by an old man with the frail body of an invalid. She felt sorry for both of them, so much that at the risk of incurring Polycarp’s wrath, she threw a crumpled hundred-naira note from her window to them.
Polycarp had scowled at her, tut-tut-tutting his disapproval. “You’re just encouraging laziness. Some of these people have absolutely nothing wrong with them. If that old man can push that wheelbarrow, why isn’t he doing something useful? In Mali a blind couple are successful musicians. Their music is everywhere. I even know a Canadian professor who is blind. I met him. I shook his hand, so I know what I’m talking about.” In his anger, he gripped the steering wheel tighter. “I saw a TV program once where this white woman in London without arms or legs was painting with her mouth. She held the paintbrush between her teeth and one, two, fiam, she had finished painting this incredible picture. I saw this with my own koro-koro eyes. No one told me about it. I saw it. She is making money. She is making serious money. Her paintings are everywhere in London, and she is being paid for them. In this country, will it happen? No! They just get a spot under Third Mainland Bridge and wait for people to throw money into their palms. They are an eyesore. The government should get rid of all of them. Arrest them and shoot them like they did Anini and the other armed robbers. If they don’t want to make use of the lives they’ve been given, they should be cleaned up.”
Sometimes Polycarp’s views bothered Alek, but she loved him nevertheless. The same way that Lagos sometimes bothered her but she liked it still. She loved its arrogant noisiness, its dazzling colors, its fiery temperament, and its hot food that caught her by surprise initially, making her hold her throat and mime maniacally for a glass of something to drink. Polycarp had laughed at her and told her she had to try his mother’s ngwongwo. “It’s more pepper than goat meat.”
Lagos was not all pollution and dirt. It had a splendid beauty that was sometimes enough to make her cry. The first time Polycarp took her to the Bar Beach on Victoria Island, the day was made to order: clear skies and a sun that shone straight onto the beach, a dazzling show of splendor. She stood on the wet, incredibly white sand, Polycarp holding her hand, and she told herself that life would not get any better than it already was. She had reached the zenith. Later, they walked along the water’s edge. She held her sandals in her right hand and Polycarp’s hand in her left. Under her feet the sand was moist and warm, like Polycarp’s breath behind her ears when they slept. Her feet made love to the sand. It was a day of innocence: the sort of day that made people believe nothing bad could happen.
She was sure she would be happy in Lagos. Not in the way she had been in Daru, of course, but in a different way that had nothing at all to do with her former life. Her life in Daru would never come back, but she was ready to move on. No more dust clogging her lungs. She felt lucky to have been given another shot. And with Polycarp by her side, there was very little else she wanted.
The flat that Polycarp rented for them had two bedrooms and a small sitting room that she walked the width of in ten normal steps. Alek spent time decorating it. Buying curtains for the windows and pictures for the walls. She went with Polycarp to order a dining-room table from the local carpenter. Polycarp asked for a table that could sit three, for when they had the occasional visitor, he said. Alek smiled shyly and said she much preferred a table that could sit six. She was thinking ahead. To when they would have their own children. And before then, to when Polycarp’s family visited. She would make sure they felt at home. She would make it clear to them that they could look upon her as a sister. Or as a daughter.
“But there is no space for that, darling,” Polycarp said, reminding her that they still had to fit chairs, a TV, and a sound system into the same room. They compromised on a table for four.
Alek chose the sitting-room furniture; she picked out chairs upholstered in the softest shade of brown, with seats so deep they swallowed one’s buttocks.
“These chairs, na ministerial chairs ooo,” the salesman told her, slapping the arm of a sofa. “You just sit in them and you go tink say you be president sef!” Alek laughed and asked for a set of four.
They chose a bed together, and when the salesman said they had made a good choice in a mattress: a firm, solid Dunlop on which “one trial and babies will be born.” Alek smiled, but Polycarp looked away, embarrassed. She hoped their babies would have their father’s eyes.
What with the decoration and the new life to get used to, it took Alek a while to notice that Polycarp had not yet gone to visit his family. Or that none of them had come to see them. She asked Polycarp when she could meet his family. She was looking forward to hours of gossip with his mother, to loving the woman who had given birth to the one person alive she loved the most. He told her they lived down south, in Onitsha, and did not often make trips to Lagos. “Too long. Too many bad roads. And the bus drivers are not always careful.” He counted each reason off on his fingers.
She suggested that they go and v
isit them. “You’re a careful driver, Polycarp, and I don’t mind the distance.”
Polycarp told her he would think about it, but what with him being very busy at work and the distance being long, he did not know when they would be able to make it. “It’s not Badagry. You just can’t get up and go. You have to prepare, make arrangements.”
She tried to make friends with other women, wives of officers in her neighborhood. She asked good-neighborly-wanting-to-be-friends questions.
They answered her all right. Yes, they were fine. Yes, it was hard being an officer’s wife. Yes, it was impossible to sleep with the heat. Yes, Lagos had too many cars. Far too many for its own good. But they always fell still after the queries, and none invited her to their homes. And she did not have the courage to invite them to hers. Maybe she was too young for them. Most of the women had teenage children already, children who were her age. She had nothing in common with these children who still lived at home and so did not bother to seek them out. What would they talk about? School? Friends? Parties? The things she had been through had made her way older than they were. Instead of talking to them, she stood on her balcony fighting claustrophobia and dust, making henna patterns in the skies, trying to convince herself that she did not need anyone and that Polycarp was more than enough for her.