On Black Sisters Street (3 page)

She danced away to the racks for a piece of chicken leg fried an incandescent brown, hoping she did not run into Ama again. She picked out a leg, bit into it, and thought,
I’m very lucky to be here, living my dream. If I’d stayed back in Lagos, God knows where I’d have ended up
.

She banished the thought. Lagos was not a memory she liked to dredge up. Not the house in Ogba and not Peter. She tried to think instead of hurtling toward a prophecy that would rinse her life in a Technicolor glow of the most amazing beauty.

But memories are obstinate.

SISI

ON THE WALLS OF THE OGBA FLAT, THREE FRAMED PICTURES HUNG
. The first was the wedding photograph of Chisom’s parents: the bride, beautiful in a short, curly wig (the rage at the time) and a shy smile. The groom, hair parted in the middle and daring eyes that looked into the camera. One hand proprietarily placed on his seated bride’s shoulder, the other in the pocket of his trousers: a pose that said quite clearly, “I own the world.” A happy couple drenched in fashionable sepia that gave the picture an ethereal look. The second picture, the one in the middle, was of Chisom in a graduation gown that touched the ground, flanked by her parents. Her father’s head was slightly bent, but a smile was visible. Her mother’s smile was more obvious, a show of teeth. Chisom’s was the widest. This was the beginning. In her new shoes, bought especially for the occasion, she knew that her life was starting to change. The third picture was the largest, its frame an elaborate marquetry of seashells and beads commissioned by her father specifically for this photo: “The very best! The very best! Today money is no issue.” Taken on the day of Chisom’s graduation, it showed all three with bigger smiles. With wider eyes than in the previous picture. After the photographer had arranged them for the shot, Papa Chisom said he wished the woman who had spoken for the gods when Chisom was born were around.
“It’d have been nice to have her in the picture. Her words gave us hope.”

Chisom’s mother said, “Yes, indeed. It’s a pity that she’s moved. If only we had kept in touch.”

Chisom said, “I’m just glad I’ve graduated.” She was looking forward to a realization of everything dreamed. To a going-to-bed and a waking-up in the dreams she had carried with her since she was old enough to want a life different from her parents’. She did not need a clairvoyant to predict her own future; not when she had a degree from a good university. She would get a house for herself. Rent somewhere big for her parents. Living with three people in two rooms, she wanted a massive house where she had the space to romp and throw Saturday-night parties.

The Prophecy haloed their heads and shone with a luminescence that shimmered the glass. By the time Chisom visited her parents from Antwerp, she would have acquired the wisdom to see beyond the luminescence, a certain wrinkling of the photograph, a subtle foreshadowing of a calamity that would leave them all spent.

Chisom dreamed of leaving Lagos.
This place has no future
. She tried to imagine another year in this flat her father rented in Ogba. Walls stained yellow over time—the color of pap—that she could no longer stand, their yellowness wrapping their hands around her neck, their hold on her life tenacious. She tried not to breathe, because doing so would be inhaling the stench of mildewed dreams. And so, in the house, she held her breath. A swimmer under water. Breathing in would kill her.

“The only way to a better life is education.
Akwukwo
. Face your books, and the sky will be your limit. It’s in your hands.” Her father’s eternal words. The first time Sisi would return to the flat after she had left, she would go up to her father and whisper in his ear, “You were wrong about that, Papa,” she would say. He would not hear her.

Her father had not studied beyond secondary school and often
blamed that for his stagnant career. Destiny had not lent him an extra hand, either, by providing him with a peep into a sure future.

“I am giving you the opportunity I never had; use it wisely.” As if opportunity were a gift, something precious, wrapped up carefully in bubble to keep it from breaking, and all Chisom had to do was unwrap it and it would hurtle her to dizzying heights of glory.

His parents had needed him to get a job and help out with his brothers and sisters, school fees to be paid. Clothes to be bought. Mouths to be fed. We have trained you, now it’s your turn to train the rest. Take your nine siblings off our hands. Train them well, and in two years the twins will have a school leaving certificate and get jobs, too. Why have children if they cannot look after you in old age? It’s time for us to reap the benefits of having a grown-up son! But he had not felt very grown up at nineteen. Had hoped to go on to university at Ife. To wear the ties and smart shirts of a scholar. Not work as an administrative clerk for a company he did not care much for, being a “yes sir, no sir” subordinate to men who were not much smarter than he was. “I had the head for it. I had bookhead,
isi akwukwo
. I could have been a doctor. Or an engineer. I could have been a
big
man.”

He would often look around him in disdain, at the walls, at the three mismatched chairs with worn cushion slips, at the stereo that no longer worked (symbol of a time when he had believed that he could become prosperous: a raise that taunted him with the promise of prosperity), and he would sigh as if those were the stumbling blocks to his progress, as though all he needed to do was get rid of them and
whoosh
! His life would take a different path.

Chisom studied hard at school, mindful of her father’s hopes for her: a good job once she graduated from the University of Lagos. She had envisioned her four years of studying finance and business administration culminating, quite logically, in a job at a bank, one of those new banks dotting Lagos like a colony of palm trees. She might even be given a company car, with a company driver to boot, her father
said. Her mother said, “I shall sit in the back of your car with you. You in the owner’s corner. Me beside you. And your driver shall drive us
fia fia fia
around Lagos.” All three laughed at the happy image of the car. (A Ford? A Daewoo? A Peugeot? “I hope it’s a Peugeot; that brand has served this country loyally since the beginning of time. When I worked for UTC …”) The mother’s mock plea that Papa Chisom should save them from another trip down memory lane would gently hush Chisom’s father, and then Chisom herself would say, “I don’t really care what brand of car I get as long as it gets me to work and back!”

“Wise. Wise. Our wise daughter has spoken,” the father would say casually, but his voice would betray the weight of his pride, the depth of his hopes for her, his respect for her wisdom, all that wisdom she was acquiring at university; their one-way ticket out of the cramped two-room flat to more elegant surroundings. In addition to the car, Chisom was expected to have a house with room enough for her parents. A bedroom for them. A bedroom for herself. A sitting room with a large color TV. A kitchen with an electric cooker. And cupboards for all the pots and pans and plates that they would need. No more storing pots under the bed! A kitchen painted lavender or beige, a soft, subtle color that would make them forget this Ogba kitchen that was black with the smoke of many kerosene fires. A generator. No more at the mercy of NEPA. A gateman. A steward. A high gate with heavy locks. A high fence with jagged pieces of bottle sticking out of it to deter even the most hardened thieves. A garden with flowers. No. Not flowers. A garden with vegetables. Why have a garden with nothing you can eat? But flowers are beautiful. Spinach is beautiful, too. Tomatoes are beautiful. Okay. A garden with flowers and food. Okay. Good. They laughed and dreamed, spurred on by Chisom’s good grades, which, while not excellent, were good enough to encourage dreams.

The days after graduation were filled with easy laughter and
application letters, plans, and a list of things to do (the last always preceded by “Once Chisom gets a job,” “As soon as Chisom gets a job,” “Once I get a job”). As her father would say, there were only two certainties in their lives: death and Chisom’s good job. Death was a given (many, many years from now, by God’s grace, amen!), and with her university degree, nothing should stand in the way of the good job (very soon—only a matter of time—university graduates are in high demand! high demand!). His belief in a university education was so intrinsically tied to his belief in his daughter’s destined future as to be irrevocable.

Yet two years after leaving school, Chisom was still mainly unemployed (she had done a three-month stint teaching economics at a holiday school: the principles of scarcity and want, law of demand and supply), and had spent the better part of the two years scripting meticulous application letters and mailing them along with her résumé to the many different banks in Lagos.

But she was never even invited to an interview. Diamond Bank. First Bank. Standard Bank. Then the smaller ones. And then the ones that many people seemed never to have heard of. Lokpanta National Bank.
Is that a bank? Here in Lagos? Is it a new one? Where? Since when?

Even in their obscurity, they had no place for her. No envelopes
came addressed to her, offering her a job in a bank considerably humbler than the banks she had eyed while at school, and in which less intelligent classmates with better connections worked. It was as if her résumés were being swallowed up by the many potholes on Lagos roads. Sometimes she imagined that the postmen never even mailed them, that maybe they sold them to roadside food sellers to use in wrapping food for their customers. Maybe, she thought sometimes, her résumé had wrapped ten naira worth of peanuts for a civil servant on his way home from work. Or five naira worth of fried yam for a hungry pupil on the way to school. She sought to find humor in the thought, to laugh off the fear of an ineluctable destiny that she had contracted from her parents. The Prophecy by now meant nothing to her. Of course.

There was no longer talk of a company car. Or a company driver. No arguments about a garden with food or flowers. And as the years rolled on, no more letters of application.

“Why bother?” Chisom asked her father when he tried to egg her on. “Unless you have found out that one of your friends is the director of any of the banks, because that is how things work, you know?”

She did not tell her father that she had also tried applying for other jobs, sometimes jobs she was hardly qualified for, but as she reasoned, she stood as good a chance with those as she stood with a job at the bank. A flight attendant with Triax Airlines (must be an excellent swimmer; Chisom had never learned to swim); an administrative assistant with Air France (excellent French required; Chisom knew as much French as she did Yoruba, which was not much, if at all: words she had learned by rote from a zealous French tutor—
Comment tu t’appelle? Je m’appelle
Chisom,
et vous? Comme ci, comme ça. Voilà
Monsieur Mayaki. Monsieur Mayaki
est fort
”). And she was right. No requests for interviews came from those quarters, either. Still, she scanned the newspapers, sending off arbitrary applications
for jobs announced, finding satisfaction in the recklessness of the arbitration, watching with anger as life laughed at the grandiosity of her dreams.

So, when she got the offer that she did, she was determined to get her own back on life, to grab life by the ankles and scoff in its face. There was no way she was going to turn it down. Not even for Peter.

ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT

BEFORE EFE CAME TO BELGIUM, SHE IMAGINED CASTLES AND CLEAN
streets and snow as white as salt. But now, when she thinks of it, when she talks of where she lives in Antwerp, she describes it as a botched dream. She talks about it in much the same way as she talks about Joyce in her absence: created for elegance but never quite accomplishing it. In her part of Antwerp, huge offices stand alongside grotty warehouses and desolate fruit stalls run by effusive Turks and Moroccans. On dark streets carved with tram lines, houses with narrow doors and high windows nestle against one another. The house the women share has an antiquated brass knocker and a cat flap taped over with brown heavy-duty sticky tape.