On Black Sisters Street (32 page)

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.

Luc was having breakfast when she arrived and greeted her with a hug. “You are doing the right thing,
schat.
”

Life could be like this every day.
I could be a suburban housewife with croissants for breakfast on a Saturday morning
, Sisi thought. She sat down to breakfast, unable to eat anything but a thin slice of buttered bread.

“Take some charcuterie,” Luc urged, pushing the box toward her.

Sisi shook her head. “Thank you.” She could never get used to all the spreads and different types of cold cuts and cheese that Luc
seemed to require for one breakfast. Wouldn’t breakfast be much easier without all the many choices? Besides, when Luc told her that the lean red meat that he delicately placed between bread came from a horse, she had sworn never to eat anything she could not easily identify.

When Sisi should have been at the Western Union transferring her payment to Dele, she took a bus back to central Antwerp. Luc was working and she was bored. She had five hundred euros to spend, and she was determined to enjoy it.

On the last day of Sisi’s life, nothing could have prepared her for her transition. The sky was calm, and the weather was just the way she liked it: not hot enough to be uncomfortable and not cold enough for a jacket. Such weather made her think of heaven. Once, when she was young and was discovering words and worlds beyond her own, she had asked her mother what heaven was like. “Not hot like here,” her mother had answered, raising an arm over her head to dry sweat off her armpit with a handkerchief. “And not cold like I hear it is overseas. Heaven has perfect weather.”

Sisi walked in the perfect weather, walking Antwerp’s many narrow streets. People basked on terraces and conducted conversations in loud voices, a paean to the perfect day. Sisi had a song in her heart and money in her purse. Her destination was the shopping street. She looked at Antwerp as if with new eyes.
There are so many run-down houses. And so many people. This is a city that is collapsing under the weight of its own congestion
. Every time she took the bus outside Antwerp, she was aware how easy it was to tell that one had left the city. Or had reentered. The landmarks could not be missed: houses with peeling paint and broken windows. Derelict buildings looking like life had been hard on them. They always reminded Sisi of drug users who had aged before their time, scars of hard living crisscrossing their faces like mosquito netting. Sometimes, Sisi thought, stepping over a mound of brown stool, Antwerp seemed like a huge incinerator.

She walked along the Pelikaanstraat and toward the Central Station. For no reason she could pinpoint, she entered. She loved the architecture of the station, the way it seemed to have been crafted with the utmost care, attention paid to every little detail. It did not matter how many times she went into the station, its beauty always made her gasp. It seemed built for meditation.
This should have been a cathedral. Or a museum
, she thought.
Somewhere quiet, not rowdy and filled with impatient commuters. That’s the thing with Antwerp. Buildings are set up and misused
. She thought of the UCG cinema on the Annastraat.
That would do perfectly well for a train station. The cathedral looks like a museum. This city is just not planned!
She walked the length of the station and exited from the door beside the zoo. She had been to the zoo only once. With Luc. She had not found anything particularly enjoyable in walking around a park, looking at animals locked up in cages. Animals taken away from their natural habitat, only for that habitat to be artificially re-created. She thought it ridiculous that thunder and lightning should be imported for the crocodile. She walked into a huge superstore where everything from shoes to clothes went for a few euros. She turned left and walked to the front of the station. As always, here were drunks with eyes like quarter moons and throats full of stories. A middle-aged man with a long beard accosted her. He reeked of liquor, and beside him a shaggy-haired dog, fat like some medieval suzerain’s eunuch, stood with its tongue out, dripping saliva. The man held out a callused palm. “
Altsublieft. Heb je iets voor me?
No Dutch? Française? Deutsch? Español? English? You’ve got one euro for me? Just one euro. Bus fare, please? I just lost my wallet.” Sisi fished in her pocket and gave him a coin. She was in a good mood and had some money to spare.

She walked across the station and made her way to the Keyserlei, joining the throng of people that Antwerp spewed out every day. It was as if the earth itself cracked open and was hurling people onto the streets: black, yellow, white, and some a brilliant hue caused by a
mixture of all three. The city tickled her senses, and for the first time in a long while she felt thrilled to be alive. No longer buffeted by indecision, she felt at ease with the world. No more promises of happiness that crumbled and turned to dust under scrutiny. Today was the beginning of a brand-new life.

She headed to the Meir. In front of her a sea of shops spread out, beckoning to her like long-lost friends. She smiled to herself and tried not to think about her housemates back on the Zwartezusterstraat, probably wondering where she had gotten to. What would they say when they found out? She stifled any insurgent feelings of guilt.
There is no reason to feel guilty. I am doing nothing wrong
. Humming James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” under her breath, she walked on. She felt beautiful. The world was beautiful. The red-haired girl distributing leaflets outside the music store was beautiful. The streets she walked on smelled beautiful. Felt beautiful. Looked beautiful. She had the world beneath her feet.

She ignored the shops she normally would have entered. The superstores that looked like massive warehouses, with clothes so cheap that with twenty euros she had once bought three new outfits: the imitation-leather miniskirt that she wore a lot in the winter, a matching jacket, a turquoise cotton caftan and matching trousers, and the long black polyester dress with an open back and a very low neck that was her coup de grâce for difficult clients. When she had the hard-to-please sort, those looking for a little something extra, she would dance in it, swinging her hips and sitting on laps. Chances were she would be left with a huge tip or a request for an extra session by the time she was done. Today she would enter other shops. She would walk down the Meir and enter shops she previously avoided.

She walked into a boutique and spent an extravagant seventy-five euros on a pantsuit. She held the gray plastic bag of the shop in such a way that its name showed. She swung into a lingerie shop with a chic name she could not pronounce and a shop assistant with spiky
hair and a silver stud in her tongue. Fifty euros went on three pairs of knickers. They were nothing like she wore for work: thongs with frills and laces, huge bows suggestively trailing the front. These were sensible. The sort she imagined a schoolteacher would wear. Black and brown and cream. Elegant. Prim and proper. Like the queen’s.

After a day spent in shops, she walked back to the train station, filled in a Western Union money transfer form, and sent three hundred euros to her parents. She would call them later in the day to tell them to go and pick up the money. This was the most she had sent to them at any one time. Money enough to propel her mother into a leg-throwing, hand-clapping dance. Her father would be more subdued. He would carry a smile tucked into his cheeks. And Dele?
Oh well, Dele has more than enough girls working for him; he doesn’t need me
. Sisi pushed away thoughts of Dele as soon as they came. Why had she never thought of doing this before? From the train station, she floated along Pelikaanstraat, gazing into jewelry stores, exulting in the absolute beauty of the rings and bracelets behind the glass, and ultimately falling for a pair of gold earrings that she had no doubt were destined for her. She pondered how easy it was to spend five hundred euros. How many things one could get. How happiness could sometimes be bought. Whoever said that money couldn’t buy happiness had never experienced the relief that came from having money to spend on whatever you wanted. Not having to send it to an exploding pimp who had more money than anyone you knew. Why was he amassing so much wealth when he must have trouble spending the amount he already had? Sisi’s purse was lighter, her head turning with an unaccustomed dizziness that made her feel immortal. The money was spent and she could not retrieve it. There was no turning back now. She had defied Dele, cut all links with Madam and the house on the Zwartezusterstraat. She was ready to deal with whatever the consequences might be.