On Black Sisters Street Read Online Free Page A

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 applicationsfor 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.
    Outside, a neighbor’s dog barks. Its owner shouts for it. Tells it to be calm, he’s almost ready for their walk. The ladies might still be sleeping, he says.
Shh
.
    But the ladies are not sleeping. Inside, Efe, Ama, and Joyce are gathered in a room painted in tongues of fire. They are sitting on a long couch, its black color fading with age, its frame almost giving way underneath their combined weight. The wall against which their couch is placed is slightly cool, and if they lean back, their necks press against the coolness. They are mostly silent, a deep quiet entombing them, filling up the room, so that there is hardly room for anythingelse. The silence is a huge sponge soaking up air, and all three of them have thought at different times this morning that perhaps they should open the door. But they do not, because they know that would not have helped, as the door opens onto a short carpeted hallway. They think about the air that seems vile and rub their necks and their temples. Still, no one says a word. They will not talk about it. Their eyes are mainly on their laps, their arms folded across their chests. Sisi is everywhere. She is not here, but they cannot escape her, even in their thoughts. Joyce says the room is dusty. She grabs a rag from the kitchen—one of the many that she stocks in a cupboard—and starts to dust the