by Edem Awumey
“The young man in the book,” Sidi explained to him another day, “is Telemac. A nice name, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you like to have it? I’ll gladly give it to you . . . Take the name and forget everything else — the roads and the search that will wear you out.”
His waking cut short the troubled night.
20
OLIA’S MEMORIES were the only evidence that Sidi had come through Paris. She did not see him again after their photo session in the loft. Her strange model seemed to have been sucked into the frescos showing the ancient cities of West Africa. He had entered into the world of the characters in the mural.
Askia went back to his cab, his runs. An old woman got in at the Madeleine. Shivering all over from the cold. Crumpled by the seasons and the years. She settled into her seat and he sensed that she was uneasy. She scrutinized the interior of the car, tested the seat, brushed her small, trembling hand over it. She finally told him where she wanted to go. After making the first turn he felt that she was still uneasy.
Two minutes later she asked if he was from Onitsha, in Nigeria. When he did not answer immediately, she continued. “I’ve just returned from Onitsha. A photograph of a man who resembles you is going around there. He wears a turban. They say he is a taxi driver. Underneath the photo it says, ‘Do not get into a taxi driven by this man.’ The man is rumoured to be a ghost who picks people up to kill them in the seedy neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Onitsha. Uh, you’re not that man, are you?”
“. . .”
“Apparently he does no favours to the people who get into his taxi. He kills them. I was lucky — I didn’t come across him. Actually, I didn’t leave the hotel very often. Didn’t mix much with the local population. That’s what you have to do — not mix. Are you from Onitsha?”
“. . .”
“It seems that, despite the turban, the man is a voodoo priest. He offers up his clients as sacrifices. Cuts their throats! They say he is insane and bears a curse that he can’t get rid of. The curse is that he can’t keep from moving. He was condemned by some gods, Shango and Oya Igbalé, I think. That’s what they say in Onitsha. Sentenced by the gods to travel forever. So to put an end to the curse he must sacrifice people! Well, at least he doesn’t act that way out of wickedness. It’s because of the curse. Listen, you wouldn’t be that man?”
“. . .”
“Apparently he murders them in the basement of his house, which is full of sanctuaries, little nooks filled with the presence of spirits, altars with statuettes, massive rough terracotta busts, Legba statues, which I was told he’d had sent from Ouidah. It’s said the man pours his victims’ blood on the Legbas, the pyramid-shaped altar, the white of his boubou. Hey? You aren’t from Nigeria, are you? You’re not that man?”
“. . .”
“I suppose the malediction has not ended, because he can’t keep from slitting the throats of those poor people. He runs around making one sacrifice after another because he wants to stop running . . . Hey, are you a real taxi driver? You don’t do these runs because you want to stop running? You’re not him? You haven’t changed cities?”
“. . .”
“This is where I get off, sir. Keep the change!”
The old, frightened woman got out and scuttled down the sidewalk, back in the direction they had come from.
21
ONE DAY — he must have been barely an adolescent at the time — his mother sighed. “My son, I’m afraid you won’t be able to elude the curse. It’s enough to see how you scan the horizon, how your eyes search beyond the boundary of the earth and the screen of the clouds. I sense that you too will leave, Askia; I always knew it. My prayers have served no purpose except to open the roads even wider . . .” She was sad right then. They were living in the shabby little town on the outskirts of the big city where they had landed after their exodus. His mother said that his father had stayed on the road. This was necessary, she assured him. Askia had to be shielded from the father’s baleful presence and aura.
During all the years they lived in that shabby town she was a cleaning woman for people who lived in the real city, on the plateau. Because she had sent him to school and that cost money. And when he came home after school, he recited his history and geography lessons to her. There was that afternoon when the class had been about Timbuktu. The teacher, Monsieur Christophe, spoke of a city where for five centuries thousands of travellers had converged. Timbuktu, somewhere in Mali, the same territory where Nioro du Sahel was situated. The city from which they had departed twelve years earlier. The teacher cited the names of the travellers who had trod the sands of Timbuktu: Ibn Battu¯ta of Tangiers, Leon the African, René Caillé, and many others who had come from lands beyond the dunes of the mysterious city. Askia thought that Sidi had gone back there. In Timbuktu Sidi had found peace and practised many trades. He was a merchant, a basket maker, a weaver, a sculptor, a magician, a storyteller, a gold dealer, a camel breeder, a poet, and an architect working on the blueprints of the house where he would live after his long journey.
History and geography were more than a passion for Askia. These subjects offered him the possibility of finding refuge in unknown worlds. He wanted to succeed and earn enough money to take his mother to the faraway cities that his teachers alluded to: (Lourdes, Marie-Galante, Syracuse, Capri . . .)
He would take the old globe that his mother had salvaged from one of her employers in the real city, and pick a city, any city, by randomly placing his finger on the globe. The map of the world would spin on the rusted trunk that served as a table and his finger fell on different cities: Mexico City, Jaipur, Saint-Louis du Sénégal, Florence, Beirut . . . His finger on the elsewheres in which his mother could start her life over with a man who would stay put, stuck to the earth and the bodies of his loved ones.
The globe spun and his mother yelled:
“Stop that game, Askia! What good does it do to wake the gods of the curse?”
“. . .”
“You mustn’t, my son. They might rouse from their light sleep and send us back on the road! Don’t you like this city?”
“. . .”
She gripped his shoulders and squeezed them with a fever in her eyes. This frightened him and he changed his plans. He grew more careful to avoid waking the gods of the road. He did not want to leave anymore; he organized his life around the shacks of the slum while in his dreams he saw Sidi running across the old globe, alone, in the middle of a cityscape with high towers and dense traffic.
He abandoned his plan of freeing his mother from the seedy neighbourhoods. So it was a great surprise to hear her say one morning as she shook out their sheets, striking them against the trunk of a dead acacia in front of their shack: “This country isn’t worth a penny. It’s not worth staying here. You must leave, my son, my knight. Your dreams must take you beyond the threshold of our hovel.”
In the early eighties, when he found himself studying anthropology and literature at the Université du Golfe de Guinée, he discovered Cervantes’ Don Quixote, one of the knights-errant, who are described as those who live their dreams and dream their lives. He was struck by the similarity between the description and what his mother had said, she who had never read anything but the book of her misfortune. Three years later, having just finished his degree, he was recruited by the Cell. He had become an anti-knight, a dark knight, a midnight wolf at the wheel of his taxi, moving in for the kill.
22
A DULL DAY. Askia was beginning to grow bored after four years of wandering through Paris with nothing to show for it. Or could it be the weight of his forty-seven summers already pressing down on his broad, slightly stooped shoulders?
Olia greeted him with these words: “It’s not worth it anymore, Askia. It’s over — the time for acting the part of some obscure, obsessed Telemachus.” Her eyes shone. Askia expected her to add something else that might enlighten him. The apartment smelled of repose, the wood burning in the fireplace, an aroma of the story’s end, whe
n people come back to the hearth to warm their limbs frozen stiff with adversity. She had put on an album, Duke Ellington’s Take the “A” Train. He understood this music — there would be other trains left for him to take. And yet he could not quite grasp the significance of the girl’s words.
So she said, “I’ve found the man with the turban. He’s returned to the top floor of the building where the Songhai frescos are. He’s back in the picture. What do you say to that? Say something!”
Askia remained curiously silent. Sidi, he thought, was playing a game, hiding or showing himself on a whim, erasing and restoring his footprints in the sand of the cities.
Olia shook his shoulder. “I’m taking you to the loft.”
“. . .”
She took his hand in the street. They went down into the metro. His cab was in the garage because of a breakdown. The mechanic had announced that it would easily take half a day to get it running again. Until then he could take a break.
Olia was a little restless. Eager to see the turban again. He felt nothing. At the Châtelet station she let go of his hand and left him behind, walking ahead of him on the metal carpet of the moving sidewalk, the treadmill. She ran and stopped in the middle of the long grey belt conveying them to the way out. He saw her from a distance on the stage of the treadmill, her delicate feet on the metal. Olia standing there with her tinted hair and long skirt, the girl from Sofia on the stage of the moving sidewalk in the belly of Lutetia, planted on the music of her feet, turned away from the direction the metallic ribbon was moving in, turning her back to the world on the move but facing the other riders on the treadmill. With her long skirt she could well have been assuming the preparatory position, the genesis of the first steps of a Russian or Zulu ballet, Olia onstage somewhere in Kamchatka or Bulawayo, ready to perform the first dance in celebration of the end of all quests and the exhaustion of the roads.
The strips of the steel belt slipped by under her feet and were swallowed up under the smooth surface of the cement that came after the treadmill. Askia saw her on the last strips just before they reached that smooth surface and was afraid she would go under with them. He leapt forward, jostling an old woman who was in the way, and grabbed Olia before she was devoured. He lifted her, and, propelled by the final thrust of the belt, they ended up on the ground, with Askia’s bulk enveloping, covering, cushioning the fall of Olia’s transparent, slight, fragile body. They laughed like children, to the applause of an indigent who looked like a Negus — a shock of hair and a serene face — sitting in a corner and reeking of urine. A man with the cup and drama of his misery placed at his feet. On his chest the Negus of the metro carried a rectangular piece of cardboard bearing a message: A coin and I bless and cover your flight. Askia approached the man while rummaging in his pockets. The man chortled. His chin danced and displayed the ruined landscape of his teeth, the landscape of his gladness at trading a smile with the world.
They hurried towards the turnstiles. Olia hoisted her leg over the horizontal bar blocking the narrow passageway and slipped her small body through the tiny space between the ground and the gate that swung open to let commuters through. Askia was taken aback. She had retained something of the rebel, the outlaw. He searched in the pockets of his jacket and eventually pulled out a folded ticket that he inserted in the slot of the machine, but it would not let him pass. The horizontal bar refused to yield to the pressure of his legs and the small electronic screen flashed red: Ticket not valid! He repeated the procedure. Ticket not valid! Pushed the bar. Ticket not valid! Back in his corner the Negus giggled and said, “I see you’re not valid. You don’t have the right ticket to get through the gates of Lutetia. You’re not valid! You don’t have the right ticket to go to the ball on the other side of the barrier!” Then the Negus handed him a ticket and Askia passed through the turnstile and joined Olia, who was waiting for him with a teasing smile. She was being somewhat derisive because she had believed that he, the rhapsode, could open any door in the world.
He started imagining that Sidi had returned to Paris. He pictured his sire in the metro, pushing a shopping cart filled with his belongings and food, some stew from the food bank where he had made a stop. People were bothered by the smell, turned heads in his direction, then uttered obscenities, but some smiled too because he was funny, this man in the metro pushing a shopping cart filled with his belongings and some stew. They scrutinized his long silhouette from the immaculate turban to the oddly clean bare feet. Askia could not say why he imagined Sidi barefoot. Then he saw him on the street, walking towards his loft, the land of the frescos.
They went down ten steps to the platform. Their train would be there in about ten minutes. Askia thought back to his city on the shores of the Atlantic, a station where trains no longer stopped because there were no tracks left. On the board bolted to the concrete wall above their heads, illuminated letters and numbers indicated the stations remaining before their stop: Luxembourg, Port-Royal, Denfert-Rochereau. Seeing the series of names, Olia was thinking out loud of another series, her metro line, the stations she went through before getting off at Opalchenska: Vardar, Konstantin, Velichkov. So Askia in turn was prompted to silently perform the same mental gymnastics. He saw in a flash the green minibuses of his coastal city, the bus ride that invariably cost fifty francs, the ride to Kodjoviakopé, which first had to go through Bè, Amoutivé, Hanoukopé, Nyékonakpoé . . .
The train finally arrived amid the plaintive tune of its brakes. They chose car number seven because Olia was superstitious. She believed that nothing could happen to her in car number seven, that no evil spirit would slow their ride in car number seven, because the music had whispered to her, Take car number seven, Olia . . . She was reassured. She was not afraid.
23
THEY WERE frightened when they came out on the sidewalk in front of the old building. Horrified by the apocalyptic scene of flames licking at the windows, making the panes explode and crash in splinters on the asphalt below with the sound of tolling bells, tolling for the bodies inside the building, bodies letting out earth- and soul-shattering cries, bodies falling together with the glass onto the cold asphalt.
The fire had broken out on the ground floor. From there it climbed to the upper floors, engulfing, scorching, charring the damp, porous, cracked walls. Driven by a merciless wind, it seared the walls and the people. No part of the building was spared. The whole thing was ablaze. They stood rooted before the reddening structure, the dead windowpanes at their feet. Wailing. Moaning. The last signs of life, of a clinging to hope. On the ledge of an overheated window, a pair of feet testing the void for a place to stand. But the void was powerless and had nothing to offer the feet but its inability to bear them. The hands gripping the window frame let go, and that was all. Askia started for the front door of the building. Olia grabbed his sleeve and held him back. It would do no good, she said, the cries could hardly be heard anymore, and what that meant was obvious. Besides, sirens were approaching and the red of the fire trucks. The firefighters of Lutetia coming to the rescue of the poor creatures trapped in the ruins of the smoking tomb. Olia shouted that the firemen were going to collect the remains and harvest the writing of the dead, the burnt letters on the wall.
The smell of burning was the same — O horrific childhood! — as what he and his confederates had smelled that time at the garbage dump in Trois-Collines when they had tried to burn Pontos, Father Lem’s dog. Rigo, the cruellest among them, had gone to steal some gasoline at the Texaco station in the business district. After that they had only to wait, because they knew that Pontos would come as usual to get his scraps at the dump, the maternal provider for all of them. And so, before the onset of twilight heavy with the stench of rotting garbage, the dog appeared, muzzle twitching, tail held low. The children fell upon him. With a strength born of despair he freed himself, but they managed to burn his tail. O Pontos, why did those kids hate you so?
24
THE BUILDING was burning. In the hearth of the ni
ght Olia stood frozen. Perhaps she too was dead, a charcoal statue unable to grasp what was happening, an unhappy piece of work created by that cynical artist, fire. Whose ends were murder and ashes everywhere. In the end, death and ashes. The firemen who eventually came found the end result, and blamed it on the gas raging through the slit throats of the old building’s pipes.
Askia saw the sequence of events. The events previous to their arrival on the scene. Sidi lying on the floor beneath the frescos. Before the shock of the fire he had gotten up to look out through the smashed shutters of the loft at the grey facade of the building across the way, a lighted window framing a woman in black who was savouring the pleasure of at last witnessing the apocalypse she had so desired, her feverish eyes riveted on the loft. And below, in the silence of the street, the dark metal ring of a gas outlet where a doddering old man had stopped to warm himself, holding his shopping bags and a doubtful treasure just salvaged from the green garbage bins of the building across the street. He was thinking of the generosity of the trash bins of Lutetia. As green as hope.
The window. When the fire broke out, that was where Sidi was going to escape. Jumping into empty space. But he wanted to take the shopping cart with his belongings, his souvenirs, and some leftover stew. He made an about-face. Stepping in the direction of the cart, he bumped up against a greasy box that was lying there. He fell and struck his head against one of the pillars of the loft. He blacked out, and when he regained consciousness, it was too late. The windows were hung with curtains of flames, the staircase was a furnace. He watched the fire consume the columns, the walls, and the towers painted on the cement. The fire seized hold of the clay fields, the yellow savannah, the horrified people in the frescos, the heart of the cities: Oualata, Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Agadez . . . the skirt of his robe and the mementos in the cart: a photograph, some earth in a small bag, a few coins, a worn-out pair of shoes.
