by Chika Unigwe
“We could go to the police. This man has no right to make you work for him. It is against the law, even. He has broken rules. He got you a false passport. He is the one who ought to be afraid. Not you. You are innocent.”
Luc could be incredibly naïve, she thought, as she often did when he spoke about her quitting. It was exasperating explaining to him that she was as complicit as Dele. She took a deep breath. “He didn’t exactly tie my hands and feet and dump me on the plane, you know. I could have chosen not to come. I was a grown woman, and he did explain the situation to me.” She was weary of repeating the same things to him. It was starting to feel like déjà vu.
“That’s beside the point, schat. We report him and report Madam, too. Then we can live happily. Forever.” He was, as usual, insistent, his face contorted by an unusual irascibility.
Sisi was tired. “Just see me off, Luc. I am running late.” She was already on the stairs before he got out of bed.
“What can they do to you, anyway? What are you so afraid of? What—” Luc’s words staccatoed as Sisi said, “I am tired, please. I can’t go through this now. I have to go, Luc. Really. Now is not the right time. We’ll talk about this some other time. Not now. Please.”
She had been seeing Luc for two months, and he asked the same questions each time. “What are you afraid of? Why don’t you leave? Don’t you love me enough?” On the bus, his questions boomed in her head. What was she so afraid of? What could Dele do to her from Nigeria? And what could Madam do if, as Luc promised, she would be locked up in prison? On the bus back home, she thought about it. Dele was far away. Luc would help her take care of Madam.
Luc. He wanted her. She wanted him.
Luc. It was getting more and more difficult to walk away from him into the arms of a trick. His persistence was starting to erode her insistence that his plan was not workable. It drilled holes in her and showed her just how possible it could be. I can do this. I can just up and walk away. Start a new life with my man. I don’t want to lose Luc, but how long will he hang around? How many men would wait knowing that every night their girlfriends were with other men? When she asked Luc why he bothered with her when he could have any woman he wanted, one without her baggage, his response was simple. He loved her. And the simplicity of his words moved her. But how long would the love last if she kept her job? Even love did not have endless patience, that much she knew. Just look at what had happened to her and Peter. What exactly do I have to lose? What am I afraid of?
She heard Dele’s “No try cross me o. Nobody dey cross Senghor Dele!” But really, what could he do from so far away? Surely she could not take that threat seriously. He probably said it to scare her. She had to admit, she was afraid.
Luc. She loved him. He loved her. He would look after her. He would make sure Dele could not touch her. They would marry, and in a few years, she would be a bona fide Belgian. She would have her own children. A different life.
The more she thought about it, the more she realized that there was very little to be afraid of. On the contrary, she stood to gain a lot: She could have a proper relationship. No more strange men in her bed. She could get another job, maybe a cleaning job. Cleaners were always in demand. And Luc had offered quite generously to give her a monthly allowance she could send to her parents. She might even be able to invite them to visit her in Belgium. She would show them the wonders of her new home. There would be no need to lie to them anymore. The lies were starting to distress her. Her parents never questioned her, never asked her to explain what it was she did. And it was this lack of curiosity, their not wanting to know, that got to her, haunting her sleep, slicing it up into miserly chunks so that she was never fully rested.
When she got home, she threw herself on the bed fully clothed. She was still lying there, her head full of thoughts, when Madam rolled in to ask why she was lying down. “What’s going on, Sisi? Should you not be leaving for work? Everybody else is gone!”
She told Madam she had her period.
“How come?” Madam queried, her eyebrows joining together to form a long wavy line of suspicion. “I am sure I gave you a period break less than a month ago.”
“But I am. I can’t explain it. You want me to show you?”
Madam shook her head hastily, let out an annoyed hiss, and walked out of the room.
Sisi sighed in relief. For all she knew, Madam might have insisted on seeing. It would not have been out of character in a woman who sometimes inspected their underwear as if they were schoolgirls in boarding school, checking for signs of dirt or wear, telling them that her girls were always at the top of the range. “I don’t want to find you wanting in any respect.”
Tomorrow, Sisi told herself, she would go back to Luc and tell him she was ready to quit. They would go to the police together, and she would be a free woman. She suddenly felt weightless, as if the decision had rid her body of a physical burden. She leaned against the door, securely locked against the world, and raised a fist into the air.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” she whispered in triumph. She looked at her bed, dressed in the white sheets Madam for some reason insisted upon, raised her eyes to the picture on the wall, whispered “Yes” again, and said to the room, as if addressing a Sisi who was separate from her, “Tomorrow it will be all over. Tomorrow you shall be free. Sisi will be dead.”
She could already feel the taste of freedom rush into her mouth, intoxicating her into a rapid dance that pirouetted her round and round the room until she had to stop to catch her breath.
• • •
SISI TOSSED IN HER BED ALL NIGHT, THINKING ABOUT HER DECISION, her certainty of before gone. It occurred to her that the other women might not like it. By going to the police, she would be forcing them to give up their jobs, and she was not entirely sure she was ready to take on that responsibility. She had Luc, she had a future after this, but the rest? What did they have? Who did they have? Joyce, who had confided in her that she had no family anywhere on the face of the earth. What would happen to her? And Ama? Efe? The house on the Zwartezusterstraat was like a family home. The communal kitchen and the shared living room bound the women. They met there when they yearned for company but could always retire to their rooms for some privacy. It was where they could escape the glare of the Schipperskwartier, live a life that did not include strange men with sometimes stranger requests.
She remembered the party they went to in Brasschaat the week before. The Ghanaian community was installing a new chief; Nana something or the other, she could no longer remember, but she and the three others had sat together, a family, trading jokes and having a laugh. They had gotten the invitation through Madam, who had been invited by a friend of hers. They had their fun; she had no right to put a stop to all that just because she was fed up and in love. What would happen to Joyce’s dream of owning a boutique? Luc could not assure Sisi that she would not be deported. She was an illegal immigrant, after all. And so were the rest. There was no way she could avoid implicating them if she went to the police. She lay faceup in bed and studied the cracks in the ceiling, watching them merge into whole pictures, clear as day. She put her palms under her head while she waited for the slow-coming dawn to steal across the sky and send her out of bed. Maybe she could just walk out without a forwarding address. She could move in with Luc. She would move in with Luc. He will marry me. In five years, I’ll be a citizen. She would not have to work hard only to send her money to Dele. The man was fleecing them. How much did it cost him to get a passport? Get a visa? She was aware that he was bringing in girls almost on a monthly basis. There was no reason why she should work to line the pockets of a man whose pockets were already bulging. Greedy man! I’ll be shut of him. Up until now she had never defaulted on her payment. And she always paid more than minimum because she wanted to be done with it in the shortest possible time. That meant that what she saved was minimal. The gold earrings and necklaces on the Pelikaanstraat were still beyond her reach, though she was one of the hardest workers in the
industry. In the winter, she tried to forget the cold and displayed her body in front of her window, push-up bras and tiny thongs, rapping her gold-plated-ringed middle finger on the window to attract the men. Rat-a-tat-tat. See me here. Let me be the one to satisfy you tonight. She had swallowed her pride, chucked her shyness in the bin, and gotten on with her job. She was a model worker, the perfect employee, with a bit of sunshine for every client. The customer was king even when he was being obnoxious, Madam warned them, and Sisi never forgot that. “As long as he’s paying for your services, his wish is your command, and you do what he wants you to. No complaints. Make him forget that he is paying for the tenderness that you are showing him. That is the secret of the game, the golden rule of the game, and you’ll do well to remember it. People are funny, men especially. They’re happy to pay for love as long as it does not feel like they are paying.”
So when the men came, Sisi smiled and flattered and complimented. She tried to make them forget they were paying her to say those things, to do those things, like Madam said. But she never lost sight of the reward at the end of every shift. She purred:
Yes, big man, I shall take that.
Of course, big man, I shall hold it out for you.
An enema? Most definitely.
Come to me. Come to your little sweetie pie.
Come to your kitty. Your little pussy cat.
When they wanted a French kiss and were willing to pay for that extra, she delivered it with the appropriate ahhs and hmms, forcing herself to obliterate the face of the man she was kissing. Even when, as it often did, her stomach churned, she stuck at it, her tongue in a stranger’s mouth, their saliva mixing. Make him forget he’s paying you for this bit of tenderness. Make him forget that you don’t really care. She held their head in her hands and arched her neck. No matter what service she delivered, her smile of straw never snapped. It stayed firm. Strong. Unmoving. A rock. One of her regulars who needed to listen to Barry White in the background got his wish. She had a nurse’s uniform hanging in her cupboard. She had a waitressing apron, a drawer full of gadgets, and a head full of regrets. Apart from that one man with a toupee, she had never received a single complaint. She had more than paid her dues, and now she could reclaim her life, and by Jove she would. She would get rid of Sisi, let a fire consume Sisi, char her, and scatter her ashes.
The next morning Sisi got out of bed early, dressed, and left the house, taking nothing but her nightgown and her toothbrush. She peeped into the living room. It was empty. She stood still for a minute, as if paying obeisance to the memory of a good friend she had just learned was dead. She breathed in the smell of the room: It was the smell of all the women who lived there, mingled with the smell of incense. It was a warm smell, something familiar, comforting. It almost smelled of home. Unlike their booths in the Vingerlingstraat, it did not have the muskiness of men, the bleach smell of sperm, and, unlike their bedrooms in this house, it did not have the shadowy smell of strangers. This was where they met, their shared space, and the room they felt the most comfortable in. It did not bother them as much as their rooms did. Ama hated the white sheets in the bedrooms. Nobody knew why. As for Sisi, it was the picture of the unknown woman on the wall that she hated. The buttocks seemed to mock her. Did Madam hang up those pictures to remind the girls of their duties? The living room had no pictures, just the redness you could not escape. She breathed in, soaking up the smell, exhaled, and said a silent goodbye. Tucking in her stomach the way her home-science teacher in secondary school had taught the class, she walked out into the cold May morning, desperate for some air. Eight months was a long time to live in a world ruled by Madam and Dele.
She walked around aimlessly for a while, her yellow tote under her arm, clearing her head and mentally gathering strength for the task ahead. It had all seemed easy last night, but in the bright light of day she was once more assailed with doubts pirouetting in her head.
Could I?
Should I?
Would I?
On the bus to Edegem, the questions twirled. She imagined how the rest would feel when they realized she was not coming back. Would they miss her? She had not told them of her plan because she was not sure she would go through with it. She had left her key to the front door on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen. What would they say when they discovered it? Would Joyce feel betrayed? Was this a betrayal? Surely not. It would be a betrayal if she were to go to the police and lose them their means of livelihood. She tossed the options in her head. She knew that, more than her indecision, it was the certainty of the others not supporting her that had stopped her from breathing a word of it to them. She was worried that they would try to stop her, get her to change her mind. They had carved out semi-perfect lives for themselves here; who was she to ask them to give all that up for her?
They were getting on with their lives, preparing for lives after Dele, mapping out the blueprint for who they wanted to be once they left the Schipperskwartier. Ama had been in Antwerp for almost six years. Efe, going on seven. They had repaid quite a huge amount of their debt to Dele. Efe believed that within the next two years she would be free of debt. She would see L.I. again. She was already talking of maybe acquiring some girls and becoming a madam herself. She would buy girls from Brussels, because it was more convenient, she said, to get girls who were already in the country. It would take Efe two years and six weeks to make her final payment. And then eighteen months to get her first lot of two girls, whom she would indeed buy at an auction presided over by a tall, good-looking Nigerian man in sunglasses and a beret. It would be in a house in Brussels, with lots to drink and soft music playing in the background. The women would enter the country with a musical band billed to perform at the Lokerenfeest. The man in the sunglasses was the manager of the band and had, in addition to genuine members of the band, added the names of these women who had paid him to the list he submitted at the embassy in Abuja. The women would be called into the room one at a time for the buyers to see and admire. They would all have numbers, for names were not important. Their names would be chosen by whoever bought them. Names that would be easy for white clients to pronounce. Easy enough to slide off the tongue. Nothing longer than two syllables and nothing with the odd combinations of consonants that make African names difficult for fragile tongues. “Number Three, ladies and gentlemen. Number Three is the type of woman white men like. Thin lips. Pointed nose. Sweet Ikebe.” He slapped her on her bare buttocks. Number Three smiled.
“Imagine her inside a window. This one is material for catching plenty white men. Look at her color.” Number Three’s skin was the color of honey. “She is one good investment.”
Number Three’s smile grew wider. Efe would buy numbers Five and Seven. Number Five because she smiled easily. Number Seven because she looked docile and eager to please, the sort of girl who was grateful with little. Like Madam, Efe would have some police officers on her payroll to ensure the security of her girls and her business. She would do well in the business, buying more girls to add to her fleet.
Four years after Sisi died, Joyce would go back to Nigeria with enough capital to set up a school in Yaba. She would employ twenty-two teachers, mainly young women, and regularly make concessions for bright pupils who could not afford the school fees. She would call it Sisi’s International Primary and Secondary School, after the friend she would never forget.
Ama, ironically, would be the one to open a boutique. She would make Mama Eko its manager. Mama Eko would tell her she always knew Ama would make it. They would never talk about Ama’s years in Europe.
SISI PLACED HER TOTE ON HER LAP. DAFFODILS AGAINST THE GRASS green of her dress. One more stop and it would be hers. She reached out a hand and pressed the bell on the pole behind her.
She got off the bus and walked the three hundred meters to Luc’s house. Sisi felt immortal. Unstoppable. Her world was as it should be. She liked Edegem. There was an authenticity to people there that made central Antwerp seem somewhat spurious. Here
people smiled and said hello to her. Strangers she was not likely to see again asked how she was and looked like they meant it. They listened while she said she was fine, thank you. And you? People would start conversations with her at bus stops and discuss the merits of the public-transportation system over private ownership of cars: With all the pollution cars cause, people ought to be more civic-minded and take public transport, shouldn’t they? They would talk about the rising cost of bread. Old women would tell of when they lived in the Congo many decades ago, talk fondly of Albertville, which had been renamed something they can never remember, something African. Ask you if you speak Lingala. What you think of Kabila. Talk of their niece who could not have a baby and adopted a beautiful little son from Rwanda. Or Burundi: “Beautiful baby, only problem is his hair. Quite difficult to comb, the krulletjes. I told them to try the clothes softener I use. Smells nice, and the best softener I’ve ever used. If it works on clothes, no reason it should not work on hair. Don’t you think?”
In central Antwerp, people did not care whether you lived or died. When they said hello in shops, you could tell that it was routine, something rationed and passed out grudgingly. They said hello and looked past you, wanting to get on with their day, their lives that had no place for you. There was no emotion in the voices. There was a furious pace to the city that hindered people from stopping to smile. And at bus stops there was a general suspicion of all things conspicuously foreign. Very often Sisi would find old women clutching their bags tighter if she stood close to them, strangling their bags under their armpits. And men quickly patted their trouser back pockets, assuring themselves that their wallets were safe. Even her fellow Africans did not talk to her. They had no curiosity to satisfy. Central Antwerp was a city of strangers, of anonymity. It was this anonymity that she craved sometimes.