Nadu Ologoudou
​

They all knew what was happening. 
 

Despite its name, the compound known as La Muette was not a silent place. The cluster of walk-in-lie-down apartments did not stand stoically on the swampland where it had been built. It creaked, it groaned, it wept. Louvered metallic doors slammed. Children hollered as they chased each other across the red dirt of the courtyard. Faded wrappers tethered to sagging clothesline flapped in the wind. The tenants of the one-room units shared each other’s lives across the thin walls that separated one household from the next. They knew who came and who went, and how late Doudou, who claimed she was a student, returned every night. They knew the ingredients of each other’s dinners, cooked in the communal kitchen by the main gate – rice and fish, akume with bitter leaf stew or pounded yams and palm-nut soup. They knew the husbands who still made love to their wives, and the wives who still took pleasure in their husband’s lovemaking. Necks craned whenever the damp breeze from the lagoon would push aside a curtain. Ears perked to better catch the muffled conversations through the ineffective partitions. 
 

At night came the snores, the dreams. And on those night when her husband came home tired, or drunk, or angry, they all heard his fists against her flesh, and her screams behind the walls. 

They all knew what was happening. And they did nothing. Much as they had done nothing when we were the ones screaming our pain through the walls.
 

“Yesterday was bad,” one of the women might remark on those mornings when Grace was particularly late coming out of her rooms. The women usually appropriated the courtyard in the mellow hours of the morning, when the sun had yet to reach its scorching height. It was their time of the day, after their husbands had left for work, and the older children had gone to school. They would throw their doors wide open and pull aside the gaudy privacy curtains to let out the stale air from the night. 

“She needs to be careful,” someone else would say, but they would fall silent when Grace finally came out. They pretended not to see the dark bruise on her face, her eye swollen shut. It was not their place to interfere. The men never spoke about it at all. Speaking served no purpose. 

It had all happened before; it would all happen again. 

This we knew too well. 

#

We had watched Grace move into La Muette as a young bride, and we had remembered the early days of our own marriages and hoped that it would be different for her. But we could see the signs in her husband. We had seen men like him before – we were married to such men once. And so, the first time Grace crawled into bed and laid her bruised cheek against the cool cement of the wall, we were there. We whispered to her and sang back the songs from her childhood that we had heard her hum as she swept the concrete floors of the apartment. 
 

We always start with the whispers and the songs. For the longest time, it was all we had the strength to do. We were very weak at the beginning, when the first one of us disappeared into the walls, back when those walls were not yet cracked and La Muette housed the dreams of clerks, teachers and seamstresses who thought their futures as bright as that of their newly independent country. So much time had passed since those early days. We do not mark time in years, but by the changing of tenants. We watch them come into the units of the compound, settle, give birth to children and grow older. Eventually, they all moved on. There would be long reprieves, when the units were filled with husbands and wives who used hot words to each other, but no fists. Then new tenants would arrive, and the dance would begin anew. The first was joined by a second, and a third, and we became stronger with each woman who joined us into the walls. Our whispers grew louder. We learned to help in different ways too. A slammed shutter to draw the husband’s attention away during a fight. A light going off as a fist was about to make contact. We grew stronger as our numbers increased inside the wall, and the stronger we were, the more we could affect the world around us. 
 

We laughed when the mirror broke while Grace’s husband shaved. We saw the fear in his eyes, and we laughed.
 

They say the compound is haunted, but we are not ghosts. We are the women they have failed to protect. The ones they ignored as we screamed into the night. Now we live inside the walls, and we whisper to those who share what was once our fate. We are the women whose grief keeps these walls standing. 

Come and join us, we would whisper to Grace. Let us help you, since they won’t do anything for you. 

But she was not ready. We watched for a year as she cooked the most delicious meals, kept the shabby rooms clean, and darned her husband’s uniform, trying to give no hold to his anger.
 

It will not work, we warned, and she turned her head away from the wall as she went to sleep, trying to block our words.
 

And at first, there were fewer nights of pain and bruises. Yet violence will find a way, and soon enough, we were back to whispering words of comfort into her ears as she huddled on the thin mattress.

After a year, she started hoarding coins. She would bargain harder at the market, buy a little less fish, a little less oil, so she could put aside a portion of the pitiful allocation he gave her to run the household. She took in laundry from Tarek, the medical student who lived a few doors away. She saved, one coin at a time, hiding the money in an empty can of Nescafé. She no longer bowed her head when he hit her. She knew it would be over soon.
 

We watched as she walked away, the money tied into a corner of her wrapper. She crossed the courtyard unhurriedly. 
 

“Going to the market?” one of the women asked, and Grace nodded. 
 

We watched until she crossed the threshold of La Muette and stepped into the street. We sent a prayer into the wind. Good luck, we said. Do not ever return. 
 

The first day, it was all the residents of La Muette talked about. How Grace had disappeared. Where did she go? Would she be back?
 

Days passed, nights uninterrupted by tears and screams. But one morning, as daylight became to soften the shadows of the night, the door to the compound squeaked, and there she was, a well-meaning relative by her side. Returned by her own family. 
 

They all heard the screaming that night, across the walls. They heard the blows falling, and the pleading. No one intervened. 
 

Come and join us, we told Grace afterward, when she had regained consciousness. Come and make us stronger. We can do so much more if you join us. We can make this right. And she looked at us through the wall, for the first time, looked into our eyes. And she lifted her hand so it came to rest on the concrete. 
 

Welcome, we whispered.
 

#
 

The door to Grace’s unit did not open the next morning. It remained stubbornly shut as the women swept the debris of the previous night out of their apartment. It did not open as the children left for school and the husbands left for work. Grace was still not out by the time the first round of laundered clothes were hung up in the midmorning sun. The number of looks slanted toward her apartment increased. Conversations were interrupted mid-sentences as the women caught sight of a twitching curtain, or a shadow passing in front of the windows. 
 

“Has it really moved?” 
 

“Did you see something?” 

“Should we do something?” 

By the time the first pots went onto the stove for lunch, the whispers grew in their intensity. 

What shall we do? they asked. Has he gone too far this time? they wondered.

Finally, when doing nothing no longer felt like an option, they went and knocked on Grace’s door. Nobody answered. The door was not latched. After much debate, they pushed it open and stepped inside. 
 

One of them screamed. 
 

Grace’s husband was sprawled on the bed, covered in blood, no longer breathing, his neck sliced by the fallen ceiling fan.
 

Many swore they heard the echo of malevolent laughter. 
 

Of Grace there was no trace, only a wrinkled wrapper on the bed, and a bloody handprint on the concrete wall.

 

The End