Dirty Feet

by Edem Awumey

  25

  MOMENTS OF gloom. The strollers on the banks of the Seine were few. Because of the weather. An icy sky. Olia was away, delivering an order to a client who was in a hurry. The start of another day. Askia raised the collar on his jacket. He noticed that there were more creases on the surface of the water. A bateau-mouche was approaching. After it had slipped by, a good half-hour elapsed before the water could once again stretch out, a smooth, ironed, tranquil bed. Very soon the wrinkles returned. A police boat patrolling the banks. Because there might be someone careless, or suspicious, a sans-papiers who might not be entitled to that spot on the riverbank where he sat freezing, hands quivering, lips too, coughing, hugging his jacket tight to his chest. Askia tried to stand up. How long had he been there motionless, a useless feature in a setting where, on the contrary, everything — people, events — was supposed to move?

  Eventually he got to his feet.

  He retrieved his taxi at the garage and drove down to the parking lot. He did not have the slightest wish to go back to his squat. Which looked like the building that had burned, a damned rest stop where he had paused to catch his breath. But a place to stop was a trap for people like him. You plant your butt on a riverbank, have a drink, rent a motel room, take a liking to a girl you’ve met by chance, and before you know it the sky crashes down and consumes you and your vessel, which was only searching for a harbour and about to moor in the belly of that one-night lover. Of this Sidi had surely been aware. He had gone back to die in the trap of that old rest-stop building. Otherwise he would have pushed his shopping cart farther, towards other passages, other landings.

  Olia had said that she had seen the man in the turban again, on the train. He had not recognized her. It was on the number four metro line, which runs from Porte d’Orléans to Porte de Clignancourt, the underground thread between the south and the north of the city. He was travelling from the south of the city northward — that was his life: to leave the South of his childhood and trek towards the North of his wanderings. She had followed him.

  Askia believed that if he returned to his ghost building, his squat, he would burn and cause others to suffer. He therefore decided to live from now on in the shifting space of his taxicab. He climbed into the driver’s seat and tilted it back. He preferred not to lie down in the back seat as some of his colleagues did. He had the feeling that if he did he would be taken somewhere. Naturally. That was the seat meant for passengers, who were to be taken somewhere . . . The past. The Cell.

  He lay on his back. An atrocious pain shot up his spine. He turned on his side. His body felt heavy. He experienced something resembling sleep, a weight that pressed down on his eyelids in spite of his discomfort. He was propelled into another sky, another universe, a reality with a door opening onto a streetless city.

  26

  HE HAD ON occasion amused himself by imagining the contours of the streetless city. The contours because, if this city existed, obviously nothing but its contours could be imagined, since it had no streets. It would be a great mass of bricks or concrete where all things would be enclosed: people, animals, objects, projects, plants, all shut inside the grey mass, cloistered in cells for all eternity without any possible view of the outside. The great mass of the streetless city would contain everything — shops, public squares, bars, libraries, churches of every denomination, filles de joie, monks, hospitals, cemeteries — everything except a view of the outside and, perhaps, a street through which the inhabitants of the streetless city might escape and spread out over unknown and at times dangerous roads. In his dreams he sometimes lived in the streetless city.

  He often went to see Petite-Guinée on nights when he was feeling low. He enjoyed finding himself in this bar, with its decor of hazy nights warmed by the soft light of the lampshades and the barman’s unchanging, practised gestures: serving, refilling, clearing away the glasses, rinsing his hands, placing them on the counter, offering a smile to a new customer who had adjusted his itinerary to include the bar.

  The barman smiled at him. “What’s your pleasure, Askia?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Which, if I’m not mistaken, means whisky?”

  Askia stared at the glass, then drained it in one go. His fingers strolled over the varnished wood of the bar. He tapped on the smooth surface. There was some Miles Davis playing. The notes drifted up from behind the bar. Miles’s “Bye Bye, Blackbird” rose like a joyful, translucent requiem.

  Petite-Guinée arrived — his small, unobtrusive body, the slowness of his movements, the wrinkles in his smiling face. Askia realized that he had no more than an abstract, fragmentary idea of the book of his friend’s life: Born in Montmartre, a happy childhood spent in a choirboy’s surplice serving Mass at the Sacré-Coeur, an unhappy adolescence spent with the shame of having a collabo as a father, his youth spent as a roving seaman trailing his quest through the ports of old Europe. Adulthood brought him a career as a mercenary, the love of his life dead in the jails of Conakry, the return to Montmartre, dark years, alcohol and depression, a bistro bought with the proceeds from his contracts, old age, art as a way to forget. That was all Askia knew. The rest didn’t matter. Petite-Guinée, agile despite his age, perched himself on a nearby stool. Askia gave him an account of the fire at the loft and the past few nights.

  27

  THE PARKING lot. Deserted, dark, cold. He climbed into his cab and pulled his coat tight around his body. Sleep. At least an attempt at sleep. His foot nudging the accelerator. He told himself it would be a blessing to hit the gas and leave. His thoughts turned to Olia. She must be wondering where he was. He tried to conjure her up. Alone, the girl from Sofia, on this very sad, very beautiful night.

  He imagined her. Sitting on the sofa, her gaze hovering vacantly over her books of photographs, the posters of her idols on the walls, the cups of coffee she had probably drunk, hoping something new would come up on this dull night spent searching yet again for Sidi’s portraits, to the point of exhaustion.

  Then he visualized her, the photographer, lying on the sofa with a book over her face to shield her eyes from the light, her feet resting on the box of a pizza that she had had trouble finishing. She had left the lights on because in the dark the zombies would come out to frighten her with their half-burned faces. She could not sleep. Because as soon as she shut her eyes, what she saw was terrifying. Masked heads smashing her door down, ripping the photos of her idols off the living room walls, carrying them off to be burned in a city square. She stood up and tried to stop them. She blocked the way with her thin body, but the masked men took away the pictures of Richard Wright, Ella Fitzgerald, Malcolm X, and the others. They went up to the mezzanine and scoured it until they found Sidi’s portraits. They shouted:

  “We’ve got him!”

  “It took a while but we’ve got him!”

  “He thought he could hide in the stillness of a few black-and-white pictures!”

  He pictured Olia, eyes open, scanning the ceiling the way he would sometimes do. From time to time she heard footsteps on the stairway and hoped it was someone who had come to visit her. But the steps stopped one floor below and she concluded that it was her downstairs neighbour. That maybe none of this was real. That the steps she heard were in her troubled mind, that the turbaned man returning to Paris, asking for lodging, food, and water to wash his feet, was all an invention of hers.

  The footsteps stopped. It was not Sidi. No one knocked. In a rage she sent the pizza box flying against the door and went up to the mezzanine. Finally she could not bear it any longer. Disregarding the late hour, she put on her boots, grabbed her coat, and ran out. She hailed a cab and took it to the wreck of the burnt building. She roamed the neighbourhood for a good two hours, walked around the building several times, came back to the front and concentrated on the shutters of the top floor, where the loft was. Hoping for something. An apparition. That the man with the turban would stick out his head and tell her he agreed to another photo session, another attempt
to fix his movements in the face of any and all fires. But the stranger was not at the window. So it occurred to her to go to the plazas, the city squares, where a few illegals could always be found loitering. The stranger might be there — alive, burned, or dead.

  She flagged down another cab. She found, in the middle of the Beaubourg square, a man. Alone. A countryman, dressed like Sidi. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his coat, which he wore over his boubou, his head was bent, and his eyes studied the pavement like a beaten man. She ran towards him. He turned and looked at her. She was disappointed — this was not the man she sought. Nevertheless, she questioned him:

  “Have you seen a turban?”

  “. . .”

  “I mean Sidi.”

  “. . .”

  From his coat the man pulled out a long shepherd’s knife. No, not a knife, but a crippled hand that he raised above his head.

  “The turban, he’s dead!”

  “You mean Sidi?” she asked.

  “Yes, Sidi.”

  “How do you know he’s dead?”

  “Simple deduction. You can’t find him. So he’s dead.”

  28

  BLACK NIGHT. The dark sheet of the sky. Askia left the parking lot and went for a drive. Over to the dead end where he would routinely stop for a break. Down a long avenue, three or four turns, a big man in a curbside phone booth yelling at the top of his lungs, a cobblestone lane smelling of urine and blind alleys. Blind alleys and muffled noises. It was hard to see ahead of him. A blurred view of black jackets and shaved heads. Busy making a muffled noise. Busy hitting. Kicking someone in the ribs. The sound grew more distinct. A length of steel chain flashing in the cab’s headlights. Groans. He revved up his engine. The three men turned around, charged towards the cab, cursing loudly as they ran past. The steel chain striking the trunk.

  He stopped. In the dead end, the man by the wall tried to stand up. Then he collapsed again on his right side. His head bloody. Opening one eye, he felt obliged to explain:

  “Romania.”

  “I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  “Romania.”

  “You’re bleeding. I’ll . . .”

  “No. No hospital.”

  “It’s not far.”

  “No.”

  The Rom left him there in the dead end and hobbled away. He was afraid of the hospital, of the questions they might ask there. Or at the police station: “How did you enter the country?”

  The Rom, his bloody head. A red ball. As on that maliciously sunny day when he had managed to beat the dog Pontos on the head with a chunk of hard mortar. For weeks it dragged its wound around the garbage dump in Trois-Collines. Askia wanted to give it time to heal before striking again. And Father Lem was never there to protect his dog with the peculiar name, the name of some obscure divinity. An unsettling omen. A sign that the children would soon abandon Trois-Collines for the high seas and adventure. No, it wasn’t the dog — it was the dog’s name he disliked.

  He tried to get some rest. His seat would not tilt back properly. A snag in the release mechanism underneath. He forced it. Nothing. Broken. He decided to change positions, leaving his bum in the driver’s seat while dropping his upper body down on the passenger side. He ended up with his face against the glove compartment, his knees against the dashboard, and his feet underneath. An awkward position. Something nagged at his lower back. He tried to think. No use. An idea, just one, hovered in front of his eyes before rooting itself inside him: everything — the city, the blind alley, his cab — was going to blow up. It would start in the belly of the Earth; the pavement would lift up; every component of the street would be reduced to rubble and then propelled into the grey sky. It would be expertly done, with no trace left but the words on the last page: End of Story.

  29

  BUT THE photographer would not be put off and often repeated, “Who are you, Askia?” As if the answer to that question would somehow affect their relationship, as if a few clarifications would make him more familiar, less distant in the eyes of his friend. As if, in order to take part in the Wedding of the worlds, it was necessary to know who you were. It was necessary to be something or someone. Otherwise the king of the Wedding would reach out his hideous hand into the hall of festivities and banish you from the fete. Like the paws of that big bouncer who had shoved him away from the entrance of the discotheque where he had ventured one night when he was feeling blue. “You won’t get in if you don’t follow the dress code!” the bouncer had bellowed.

  “Who are you, Askia?” The question took him back such a long way it was impossible to say for sure whether any of it was real. Back to the country roads and city streets, the foursome advancing through the fog, in the sweltering days and cold nights: he, his father, his mother, and the donkey, which eventually gave up the ghost. From Nioro du Sahel they had gone down to the Atlantic coast, leaving behind the most badly parched lands, but the beast had used up its last ounce of strength. It died as they came out of a muddy ravine. Had it been able to cover a few more roads, it would have found water and grass in the north of the country where they landed one grey dawn.

  For a solid week they rested by the roadside. His mother, Kadia Saran, sold her medicinal roots and they were able to buy food. The terrible harmattan of 1967 was blowing itself out, its cutting edge growing duller on the skin. So they pushed on towards the plateaus, the centre of the new country that was to become theirs, and arrived in a village where the hospitality with which they were received surprised them. Askia thought the reason they had been shunned along the way was because those they encountered hadn’t much to offer strangers, or because the strangers to whom they had offered shelter and yams turned into outright thieves after nightfall. But he would never comprehend the reason for their exodus. Perhaps the cause was not the sparse rainfall or the swarms of locusts, as he had supposed. Instead it may have been what his mother mentioned one day. A matter of humiliation, according to the mysterious words she alone knew how to wield. She said, without elaborating, that his father, a Songhai prince, had been humiliated by his own people. Or possibly it was that he had wanted to avoid humiliation. Why? His mother, closing the chapter, said, “Such things are best forgotten, Askia.”

  In the village of the plateaus they were given shelter by Chief Gokoli. An abandoned hut at the entrance of the community, near the perimeter of an old cemetery with crumbling tombstones. An unhoped-for refuge after the Sahel and the roads of flight. They did not go out for three days, but the chief had fruit and boiled yams brought to them. Three days in the adobe hut. And when on the fourth day they walked down the main road of the village, they were called “Dirty Feet.” It was said they had trekked over many roads from the Sahel. The feet of the man in the turban and his family were caked with dirt and bleached by the mud and dust of all the roads they had tramped over. They had been subjected to heatwaves, rains, the monsoon, and the harmattan. It was the harmattan that was to blame for their cracked heels, their parched, creased skin. And in the creases there was dirt, a mixture of sweat and earth. The voices on the main street whispered:

  “Can it be that their feet are dirty because they could not stop walking?”

  “Well, they were able to stop, as you can see.”

  “They’ve stopped in our village!”

  “Because they can’t or won’t go any farther.”

  “Farther is the coast, the sea.”

  “And amidst the waves there’s a malevolent god who ensnares gullible souls with an enticing call to voyage. His name is Pontos.”

  “A call.”

  “Enticing.”

  “Over there, across the ocean, it will be like the Kingdom of Heaven. You will live in a palace that looks out onto everlasting pleasures. To speak in more practical terms, you will no longer be hungry.”

  “A call.”

  “Alluring.”

  “And when the gullible creatures embark on the waves, the divinity of the seas devours them.”

  �
��These people are not gullible.”

  30

  AT THE BISTRO he did not drink. He waited for Petite-Guinée, who had promised to take him to Sidi’s building. He leaned against the counter, not wanting to sit down and yield to the temptation of a drink. Or cajole the barman so that he would play Miles Davis again for him. Or try to follow the notes as they rose towards the ceiling through the whorls floating up from the smoky corner of a pair of lips. Or ask for another drink to drive the first one deeper into the maze of his doubts. He did not want to drink at all, because on this night he had to remain absolutely clear-headed.

  Petite-Guinée came out of his cellar through the hatch located behind the bar. He was wearing a leather jacket and a grey cap. They took the metro. Fifteen minutes later they emerged from the belly of Lutetia in front of Sidi’s building. Petite-Guinée glanced around quickly, waited a few moments, then headed straight towards the entrance of the building. Askia stayed by the metro staircase. Petite-Guinée pulled a tool from his pocket and began to work the lock of the makeshift door that must have been installed after the fire. The lock quickly gave way, which erased any remaining doubts Askia may have harboured as to the old man’s background and skills. Petite-Guinée waved him over and closed the door behind them, and with the help of a flashlight that he had slipped into his jacket pocket, they went straight up to the loft.

  The scene was grim. The steps were slippery with a fine layer of ash, the walls were sooty, and a strange odour permeated the air. One had the distinct impression of being in the mouth of a mine shaft. They went up. Askia was surprised by the stamina of his friend, who never paused to catch his breath. The loft finally came into view. Astonishingly unencumbered. The pillars were oddly clean. The beam of the flashlight swept over the walls, starting from the nearest corner to their left and then covering the entire space, as if seeking to shed light on the mystery of every surface in the dark loft. Secrets. Things and beings buried in the shadows: a precious casket, a man hidden behind the concrete partitions.