by Edem Awumey
They drained their coffee without speaking and then she admitted she had not yet found the portraits of the man with the turban. Perhaps, she went on, it was not important anymore to find them. She could do his portrait, a new version of the man in the turban. Askia thought there was nothing to tell about his four years of futile searching in Paris. On the other hand, about his past . . . what he had become in the heart of the tropical night.
She went upstairs to her room to make a telephone call. He focused his attention on the photos hanging on the walls, which had spoken to him the first time he had set foot in the apartment, the pictures of famous negroes. They lived on Olia’s walls, she who worshipped the time when the negroes of the Sorbonne and the Collège de France were friends of Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Desnos, André Breton. They had made a name for themselves in the Latin Quarter, on the sidewalks there, in the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They had raised their glasses at the Deux Magots, trading toasts with the light. Bantu philosophy had flirted with Cartesian thought. He flirted with Sidi, an image thinner than a thought, a myth, a phantom father.
11
BEAUBOURG AND its square had become familiar to him. Its beautiful crowd as well. There were those going in and those leaving through the museum doors. Where a pair of guards kept watch. A few brave souls had set up their easels long enough to pass as portraitists and earn enough to warm their bellies.
The old man with a slight stoop had called out to him, “Good Lord! You haven’t aged a single day! Though it’s been a while. Thousands of seasons gone by and forgotten. Don’t tell me you don’t remember! Nigeria, 1969. You were walking on a country road. Biafra was not far away. You stopped my Jeep and asked me flat out, ‘Do you sell weapons? I need one. To clear my reputation and regain my title as prince.’ You do remember, don’t you? You wanted to pay me with your ring. It was gold. And as if the gold were not enough, you unknotted your turban, where you’d concealed a few crumpled banknotes. Nigeria, 1969. No doubt about it! But what’s scary is that you haven’t aged at all! I apologize again. I had nothing to sell you that day. I didn’t deal with individuals.” This is what Petite-Guinée had said to Askia the first time on the museum square. His silver-headed, spare little body trembling with emotion. Askia too was shaken, but he had managed to say, “Biafra — that wasn’t me.” And it could not have been Sidi either. In 1969 he was still with his family. He hadn’t yet disappeared.
Petite-Guinée was a mercenary. He had filled contracts in various places: Arabia, Sudan, Guinea, Uganda, Biafra, Angola. As far as Askia was concerned, those contracts were wars, faces, photographs of the distant territories where Petite-Guinée had plied his trade, an envelope in the folder of his memory. After packing it in, he had lived in Conakry. With a woman. She had died in jail there in the wake of a political conspiracy incident. That was during the mid-seventies. He said he bore that woman, that country, inside him like an unhealed wound. Hence the name Petite-Guinée. They became friends, and Askia would go visit him whenever he could to listen to old recordings of Bembeya Jazz from Conakry. And the old man would point out to him, “They don’t make albums like that anymore! What do you say? That today’s music is different? Even if the violence is about the same? And also the prayers for all of it to stop?”
Askia saw Petite-Guinée frequently. At night before starting his taxi shift. In the basement studio of the old man’s bar in Montmartre. Over time he had become a painter. He wanted to map out on canvas all the roads he had travelled throughout his restless life as a mercenary.
Askia entered quietly. The old man confided to him that he had felt sick the whole bloody day, a fire scorching his soul, his insides smelling of something burnt. So he had taken out his box of brushes and colours, unfolded the easel that had been leaned up against the wall next to the frames, and tried to paint something. Anything, a scene, a figure, an emotion, his malaise. Carried along by the brush dancing on the canvas. He had painted a nighttime background, and within this preliminary void he wanted to draw the outlines of a concrete, palpable, sustained mass. Solid to the touch and the eyes. He wanted to reproduce the concreteness of a landscape or a human face, a pattern that would take over from the cracking, the shattering, the interior chaos he was experiencing. He was a mess because he had never been able to untangle all the roads that he carried within. He wanted to see something linear and solid on the canvas: a stone house by the side of a perfectly straight road, a picture reflecting a standard existence, smooth and unbroken. The kind that Petite-Guinée would have wanted for himself. A life exactly like all the others. But for Askia it was the life of the mercenary, the pilgrim, the conqueror that was standard. An adventure like all the others in every respect. Since the Exodus, the Hegira, the Crusades, the yellow, white, or black gold rush. And all the invasions yet to come. The latest illegal alien, coming dirty-footed from the South to dig for bread-gold in Lampedusa, New York, Montreal.
Petite-Guinée swept his brush over the canvas. It scurried over the rough outlines, searching for shapes. He drew some haphazard lines but was soon disappointed. There emerged bits of architecture, demolished faces, shards, a stretch of road obstructed midway by a large black hole, debris, fragments of some unidentifiable ruin. In the loneliness of his nights, Petite-Guinée practised the art of exploding forms, destroying lives and roads. It could not be said that the colours on the canvas amounted to no more than an impression, an idea of failure, a concept, an elaboration. There was truth there. The debris on the canvas was necessary, like the remnants of a life or of a failure that spoke the truth. His own. The basic setting of his painting was a roadway littered with the shards and rubble of lives. He grew despondent and eventually dropped his brush.
Askia left without saying a word and went back to his cab. A calm night. The girls on Saint-Denis were shivering. No customers in sight.
He drove towards Boulevard Haussmann, Gare Saint-Lazare. Two blocks away, the flames of a fire. The air was burning. A scarf of smoke choked the globular moon, hanging from the edge of a gutter. He thought of a chapter from Revelation. Pictured the remains of lives that would drop onto the sidewalk in front of the blazing building. As in Petite-Guinée’s painting. Pictured the remains of a body once big, bits of toes worn out from tramping over the pavement, a shred of cotton once an article of clothing, the turban shrouding Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed’s exile, his retreat. He pictured Sidi dead.
12
IN THE SHADOWS of Paris. His taxi crossed paths with fire engines. He prayed there would be a few skins left for them to save. Zero customers. He switched on the radio. The news report mentioned boatfuls of illegal African migrants grounded on the Canary Islands. Men and women come to find deliverance in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Tomorrow he would turn on his radio again and there would be new boats, another story of flight, and the next day yet another chapter with people running away, and so on in the days, weeks, months to follow, until their feet gave out and the nomad sky ended.
At Les Invalides he picked up an old gentleman who had hailed him from under a lamppost he had been leaning against. The man wore an impeccable suit, spoke courteously, sprinkling his sentences with phrases such as would you be so kind and forgive me when explaining his destination. The man kept his eyes on him constantly. For a brief moment he seemed to hesitate, concentrating on the driver’s face. Two bikers in leather jackets passed them before running the red light fifty metres away. Life is short, brother, so why slow down? A few seconds waiting at the traffic light. It turned green. Green, the go-ahead, and the man too went ahead:
“You know, I like skins.”
“. . .”
“I’ve been around the world and around skins. The flesh.”
“. . .”
“Kuala Lumpur, Phuket, Macao, São Paolo . . .
They were young. The skins.”
“. . .”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but yours reminds me of another. The face too. A head with a turban. It must have been a good te
n years ago. He was standing in front of the Gare de l’Est and he was cold. Don’t take this the wrong way.”
“. . .”
“A few years ago I experienced a moment of great intimacy with someone who resembles you. A beautiful night. Serene and passionate. Quite a contradiction, you might say. Don’t take this badly, but it was what’s referred to as an encounter. Truly. Only, his skin was dirty. But once he’d washed he was brand new. Shining. Like you. But you won’t take it the wrong way, will you? A treasure of softness under the filth. If I may be so bold, would you be interested?”
“. . .”
“Please don’t be upset. I could pay you the equivalent of your night’s earnings and a handsome compensation on top of that. How does that strike you? Of course, you could take a bath . . .”
“. . .”
Askia dropped the man off in front of his mansion and drove back into the night.
13
OLIA INVITED him over for lunch. She still had not found in her boxes the signs, the photos of Sidi Ben Sylla’s passage through Paris. He started to tell himself, Askia, it’s all a joke. Sidi is a joke, the myth of a father you never had. He had stopped as usual at the Jardin du Luxembourg. There were new pictures on the park fence. It broke the routine, this change of scenery in the city where he lived. He had often wished he could drive his taxi across the landscapes hanging on the fence.
This time the exhibition was about volcanoes. Beautiful shots. The work was titled “Of Volcanoes and Humans.” Impressive, the orange summits with little yellow flecks, a music of lava descending a slope, the lava flowing, and standing there in front of the scene framed on the board, Askia thought, The lava had better not descend too quickly. It had better cool before reaching the valley. It must remain an image and not engulf the lane where he stood. The lane, the city, and Askia’s quest. In the valleys where the lava was heaped, everything was grey. Roofs of ash on the houses and trees. The valley town inhabitants forced to leave. In long lines, bundles on their heads, their shoulders. He had not left because of volcanoes or lava. Instead it had been the murderous nights, the violence he had had to escape, even if, in that coastal city on the Gulf of Guinea devoted to torture, it was he, Askia, who had done the torturing.
Eventually he went up to Olia’s apartment. She came very quickly to open the door, gazing at him intently, and he saw Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska. He had seen the portrait in one of Petite-Guinée’s art books. Olia wore a white collar like the woman in the painting and resembled her, but without the sadness or the long neck, like that of an Akagera giraffe. He called her Anna. In the painting, Madame Zborowska’s first name could be discerned through the purple overlay of the background. Olia was surprised.
“Anna?” she said.
“Anna Zborowska. An invention. Listen, are you sure you didn’t invent the man with the turban? Those portraits you said you made, did you see them in a dream? What if the man and the portraits never really existed?”
“Does he matter to you, that man?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know, Zborowska, that sounds Bulgarian. Do you want to know where I come from? I’m from Sofia. That’s what they call me, my colleagues at the magazine I work for. I take fashion photos, of models. I’m not crazy about fashion, but I have to make a living. I can’t complain. It’s well paid. I’ve been at it for ten years. The rest of the time I do things I enjoy. With my Leica.”
They went out. She put her hand in his and confessed that she was famished. She took him to Le Bulgare, near Austerlitz. The train station. She wanted to give him a taste of Sofia, as she put it. The restaurant owner, who must have known her, gave them a warm welcome. He and Olia exchanged a few words in Bulgarian. She asked for the table in the back. They sat down. She ordered shopska salata as a starter because she had a craving for fresh vegetables. The main dish would be a pork kavarma with mushrooms and lots of onions. On the recommendation of their host, Askia chose tarator as his appetizer, a delicious cold soup made with yogurt and cucumbers. And for his main course, pulneni chushki, peppers stuffed with meat, tomatoes, and rice.
They ate with gusto. Askia focused his attention on the face of the girl sitting in front of him. She was hungry and savoured her kavarma with a lack of inhibition that pleased him. She did not hold back. She licked her fingers. She was not one of those high-society ladies with affected manners. She was Olia. Askia licked his fingers too. He felt good with this girl in the present tense of his story.
She confided that she wanted to go back. She missed her parents. It had been ten long years. Since she had seen her family, and Sofia. She had set aside enough money to provide for contingencies back home. She had finished building the house where she would live with her parents. In Sofia she would ask forgiveness of Saint Nedelya for having sold her body in the arenas of Lutetia. At first, in 1999. She had arrived in the city with a head full of plans and nothing in her pockets, having depleted all her savings to pay for the weeklong train ride from Sofia to Paris. A matter of survival. While waiting for word from one of the fashion magazines where she had left her CV, she applied for work as a waitress and a cleaning woman, but because of her vagabond gypsy appearance, the doors of the restaurants and homes stayed shut, so the only capital she could count on was her body. Until November 4, 2003, the day the owner of Le Bulgare, where she scrubbed pots and pans for fifty euros a week and a miserable maid’s room in the nineteenth arrondissement, brought her a letter from Orléanne, a magazine interested in her work, in the pictures of anonymous models she had hired for a pittance in the narrow back streets of Sofia. Now all she wanted was to be back in her city, among her family and friends, in the haunts of her childhood. To stroll down the alleys of Borisova, to sit for a while on the front steps of St. Petka Samardshijska. Places that she carried inside her but whose shape she feared would in time be lost to her.
Askia, meanwhile, had no desire to return to his city on the gulf with the Fréau garden where dogs and men had been burned, the edge of the sea and the sadness of the rowers, the Place de l’Indépendance, where freedom had eventually been consumed by the flame held aloft by the statue in the square, the three murky lagoons that reeked of death, the lagoons where his father perhaps had drowned himself to cut short the long trek. So he should have asked himself, What are you doing here, Askia? The father is an excuse. You made him up to account for your tribulations. He had no wish to see the colonial palace and the ruined wharf again, the military camps that occupied the heart and belly of the city where he had grown up.
Olia had listened to him without interrupting, looking at him with an intent stare. He was unaware of how much time had passed. The waiter brought the bill. She wanted to go somewhere else. Askia took her to the Beaubourg plaza, where his friends went about their business.
14
ON THE WAY, he looked at the girl and sensed the question Who are you? coming back into her eyes. He thought that to say and to understand Who he is he would have to go very far into the past, to the curves and edges of those country roads that he had tramped over with his parents after leaving the Sahel. He would have to replay the scenes with the dead trees, the dry brushland, and the silence that had enveloped their migration. His mother would later inform him that it had been during the terrible Sahelian harmattan of 1967. Judging from his birth certificate, dated February 12, 1962, he must have been going on five years old, just as his scattered memories led him to believe.
During the family’s migration, Askia had travelled a good portion of the way on the donkey’s back, but he recalled that his father would occasionally lift him down from the animal, which had begun to grow tired, probably from wondering where they were headed. To which land’s end they would march. With the sparse grass under its hooves.
They camped by the side of the road during the night, which was inhabited by the dream of that final destination where they would at last be able to swing open the doors of the house, tie the donkey to a tree rising grandly in the
middle of the yard, rest their bodies, and begin again to make plans: find work, a school for Askia, have more children, build friendships, and hold celebrations — in a word, the ritual of a life lived with a few joyful moments, and prayers for those who believe.
He remembered that they were camping out under the half-blind stars. In the towns and villages they had passed through, the talk was about the malicious pests that were devouring the fields. Migrating locusts. Or a similar species of small, voracious chops. And in fact it was possible that their exodus came about after the invasion of the locusts that destroy everything in their path. Locusts, eating and digesting the fields in an epiphany of utmost violence. And as they advanced along the red dirt road, through the forsaken villages and razed savannahs, he saw that he was not the only one marching with his father, his mother, and the donkey. There were also the locusts that went ahead of them, trailblazers of the migration.
Who are you? he read into Olia’s silences. And he thought of their journey. Of crossing through hamlets where the residents, standing in front of their homes, wondered, Who are they? The residents followed with their eyes the foursome made up of the father, the mother, the donkey, and the son, until they disappeared around the bend in the road. Among the residents, some took out machetes and slings to dissuade them from stealing even the most pitiful yam. These men and women scoffed.
“Who are they?”
“Who knows?”
“What I do know is that they’re not from here.”
“They’re as long as the road they must have travelled.”
“You mean that they don’t resemble us; that they’re thinner than us, we who’ve never gone down those long roads; that they’re better-looking than us?”
