Dirty Feet

by Edem Awumey

  The Cell. He was to be a cab driver like any other. Pick up fares and ask them harmless questions. And if they turned out to be rebels who found fault with the government, eliminate them, silence the stinking mouths whose words were fouling the atmosphere. Tarnishing the country’s name and image. People incapable of truly loving the country because they had no country. Troublemakers. Vermin. Schemers, enemies, envious of the nation’s accomplishments — that is what the Powers said of them. And how could they not be envious, since they had no nation. He was to eliminate all the political adventurers. With the night and the darkness as accomplices. He had his badge and he moved like a cat among the shadows. Or rather, he had to make the night his element and make a career of hunting down idle, irresponsible globetrotters. His job: drive the rebels far outside the city, where the downtown lights were no longer visible, where his passengers could not be seen, strap the explosive belt onto them, and, sitting in his taxicab, push the button.

  His past. A deserted night, an empty lot, a vehicle in the night, the driver holding a box, a red button, a finger — more specifically, the thumb — on the button, the thumb pressing down on the button and the adventurer’s belly exploding just a stone’s throw from the taxi. A death dirge to decorate the silence of the streets and the ghosts’ laments.

  Because that was what he was — a maker of ghosts and death works. The suspect passengers, the ones he made disappear, had to be dispossessed of the thickness of the living. They became a mirage of the living. Nonentities. Removed from the thickness of life. Of the nation. They became, like his father, vague traces, sketches in pencil or black ink stains, stillborn portraits, unformed sculptures into which the artist had not had time to breathe life. He was an artist of death who, during his childhood in Trois-Collines, had been able to practise on the dog Pontos.

  36

  ASKIA THOUGHT back to his flight, to what he had done to extricate himself from the murderous night. After years of hunting down the enemies of the nation, he had moved into a different field. A new specialty. He became a bodyguard. The Cell offered various positions according to one’s tastes and aptitudes: tailing, interrogation, assassination, close protection. The Cell was bursting with talent. Askia was assigned to protect important people. People who mattered. Who made decisions. Who travelled because they needed to expand their network. He waited. Impatient as a fledgling waiting for the baptismal sky, for flight. Three months into the new job, the politician he was guarding was given a mission. Askia never learned what it was. It was that kind of mission. They landed at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. For him this was a new beginning. He would hold on, tooth and nail, to the pavement of exile. Two days after they arrived, taking advantage of his night off, he left the hotel on Rue de Rivoli where the members of the mission were staying. He put the Cell behind him, crossed the line. That’s what they said in the Cell whenever one of them deserted. His college friend Tony, who lived in the Barbès district, was expecting him. He had been able to leave the country thanks to a scholarship. For six months Askia holed up there, going out only rarely, at night. Tony had warned him: Paris wasn’t the best place to hide from the Cell. He thought Askia should go farther away, across the Atlantic, to America — some forsaken Caribbean island or a backcountry town in Maryland. Or to Montreal, where Tony knew people who could help his friend, people who never responded when he wrote to them.

  Askia touched the spot above his eye — the swelling had gone down somewhat. Zak had not punched him very hard. Just enough for the cops to believe his story. Apparently it was nothing serious. The cops had taken his deposition, his charges against X, and he had left the station.

  He took an ointment out of his first-aid kit and rubbed it on the bruise. Back behind the wheel, he thought about the charges. Against X. And he smiled. Because he had been an X. A no-name driver. Like Zak, in those Cell cabs, planting death in the heart of the tropical night.

  He decided not to go back to work. There was someone he wanted to see. Monsieur Ali of Port Said, a no-name with whom he occasionally chatted. He had met Monsieur Ali by the Auguste-Comte entrance of the Jardin du Luxembourg, directly across the way from Olia’s apartment. Monsieur Ali, the chestnut vendor. He had smiled at Askia and gone back to roasting his chestnuts, making sure not to burn them. It was late, the tourists were gone, but Monsieur Ali could not stop roasting chestnuts. He made paper cones, which he then filled with chestnuts. He used newsprint or pages torn out of old books. He put ten roasted chestnuts in each cone and charged two euros a cone. Monsieur Ali of Port Said was there, preparing cones of chestnuts for the tourists, and Askia sat down near him on the curb. The chestnuts were cooking on the grill. From time to time Monsieur Ali of Port Said fanned the embers. He said he made paper cones and pyramids so as not to forget the country of his father. It made him happy when he succeeded in shaping a beautiful large cone.

  Monsieur Ali had survived, thousands of miles from his home, thanks to those cones and pyramids that he fashioned to stay in touch with history. In 1968, when he had arrived in France, the wind of Port Said was still on his face. He wanted to be a teacher. To teach the poetry of Abu Nuwas and the suras in the West. But minds were being seduced by a different music and new words, rock and the poems of Allen Ginsberg. Seducing a generation with long, dirty hair, outraged at the establishment, like those unwashed hippies in a California park wallowing in a disgusting orgy. Preferring dirty love to the violence of military boots in the Vietnam War.

  Monsieur Ali had seen rock music engulf the words of Abu Nuwas. So he became a street vendor. He moved around to avoid sitting in some station where he might catch cold. To keep moving, he sold chestnuts from Gonesse to Boulogne. And Port Said slipped farther and farther away. Port Said and Abu Nuwas. So he made paper pyramids on Boulevard Saint-Michel in order not to forget. Monsieur Ali was a man of few words.

  37

  OLIA TOOK THE remote control, turned on the TV, surfed the channels, turned it off, then on again, surfed, turned it off. She was anxious. She had never lost a piece of her work. Sidi’s portraits must surely be somewhere. Still, she began to have doubts, and Askia reminded her that Sidi was a shadow. She sighed, exhausted, laid her head on her friend’s shoulder, shut her eyes.

  “You ought to go up and get some rest,” he advised.

  “My legs are numb. Does it bother you to lend me your shoulder?”

  “Shoulders aren’t very comfortable.”

  She seemed not to hear him anymore. Maybe she was not pretending but was truly weary, drained. Again he spoke to her but received no response. He gave her a little shake. No response, just a murmur and some purring. Finally he decided to carry her upstairs. He lifted her up. She wrapped her arms around his neck and placed her head on his chest. On the fourth step leading to the mezzanine he almost stumbled. He caught himself, instinctively planting his right foot on the next step in front of him, just barely preventing a fall. Otherwise he would have had to pick up the pieces of her brittle body from the floor.

  She tightened her grip around his neck. They managed to reach the room. He was obliged to clear a path through the framed pictures strewn over the floor. Then he climbed up the wooden stairway leading to the platform on which the bed stood, a metre below the ceiling. He put her on the bed. Next to the pillow was a balled-up blanket, which he spread over her. She looked very small under the blanket. Her lips murmured something, and Askia heard the words within himself: “I looked in my boxes. He wasn’t there. There’s nothing in my boxes, no trace of an event or a face that was . . . There’s nothing in the boxes, Askia. I searched and I started to put new things in them, a few items. Because we can always leave again if the urge comes back.”

  She had spoken with her eyes closed the whole time. Now she was asleep. Askia walked out of the room and went to the bathroom to relieve himself. He looked at the ceiling. Through one of the panes in the skylight he could see a bit of clear, transparent sky, and he wanted to inhale it. He pushed open the skylight. The air
chilled his face. He rose up on his tiptoes and contemplated a few roofs pierced by chimneys blowing white smoke into the scene. They were solitary mouths open to the sky, not just to breathe but to swallow, to glean . . . he did not know what exactly. Like the orphaned mouths of the kids in the lanes of his childhood.

  He went back down to the living room. To do the same thing as Olia. Sleep a little.

  But sleep did not come. He felt hot. He went back up to the bathroom to take a proper shower. Then perhaps he would feel better. He stripped off his clothes and dropped them on top of the laundry hamper. The water did him good. He worked up a thick lather, using the foam to massage the painful areas on his ribs. Then he went back to the living room and turned on the television. The journalist on TF1 spoke quickly. He reported that a man had been found dead in a downtown parking lot. His throat had been slit. A photo of the victim flashed across the screen and Askia recognized Zak, who had come to Paris to be forgotten by the Cell. The journalist described the crime as gruesome because the body had been dismembered. The legs, most conspicuously, had been sawed off, in keeping with some strange ritual. To keep the dead man from running in the afterlife? The Cell did not fool around. The journalist spoke quickly. More news and personalities streamed by on the TV screen.

  38

  ASKIA DID NOT want to remain a character, like the puppet that danced at the command of a busker on the sidewalks of the real city, the downtown area where he would stroll as a teenager. The puppet was called Abuneke, a little man made of scraps of cloth. He would go to see the routine and follow the story of the cloth man. This was something he did when the films at Le Togo Theatre did not seem very appealing. The show was held outdoors in front of the old savings bank, by the side of a road that teemed with life day and night. The puppeteer worked his marionette with nylon strings that were hardly noticeable in the shifting twilight. The man told an ancient story of exodus, the one about the Ewe people’s march from Egypt through Oyo in Nigeria to the Gulf of Guinea. The story was conveyed through the mouth and movements of Abuneke: bowing to the crowd, wagging his head, spinning his head all the way around to grab the public’s attention, arms flung out in counterpoint to the legs that danced, hopped, wandered around while the arms traced a strange figure in the air — an infinite road — with an invisible baton.

  Not to remain a character, an Abuneke bound to genealogy by strings. To become something else, a cold image or — why not? — a statue, frozen in the world of stone. So when he walked through the streets of Paris he made the biblical gesture, turning around in the hope of being turned to stone.

  39

  RESTLESS NIGHT. Dreaming again that he had found Sidi. In Cité Rose. A posh neighbourhood for the nouveau riche, once a shantytown where he had lived with his mother. The slum area had been razed a few years before and its inhabitants forced to leave and find shelter elsewhere, to push farther into the new outlying zones.

  He was in the cemetery that lay on the perimeter of Cité Rose. The cemetery: the only place that had survived from the past. Sidi’s grave was there, in a corner by the fence that was to the right as you entered. He sat down on the tombstone, at the end where his father’s head must be. Facing Sidi, whom he had finally found. He felt no particular emotion. He looked at the dead man lying with his eyes closed in his sepulchre. What were his eyelids shutting out? Was he ashamed? Of what?

  The tomb was isolated. There was bare red earth around it. The other sepulchres stood several metres away. Silently. Eventually Sidi opened his eyes and looked at him. He was calm, serene. Guessing the question in his son’s gaze, he offered what could be taken as an answer: “I wanted to find my cousin Camara Laye at Aubervilliers. At the Simca factory. When I arrived on that dreary afternoon in the fall of 1971, they told me he was no longer there. Gone. After that I kept moving. It’s a passion of mine — the road. Our road. The only one we have.” And he began to laugh. The sepulchre shook. So did the surrounding neighbourhood and the whole city. The other dead grumbled in their resting places: “Sidi, when will you, along with your nomad offspring, leave us in peace? You wouldn’t by any chance envy us for being at rest, would you? You can’t sleep — we know that. You’re always turning.” The sepulchre quaked again. The tombstone moved. Sidi showed him a road map. And ordered him: “Get going, Telemachus! Hit the road! For whatever reason suits you!”

  40

  HE THOUGHT of Zak again, hunted down by the Cell. Zak had been quick to grasp that it was game over, that Paris would not protect him anymore, that he would have to travel farther north, although that would just be a way of delaying the execution. He had harked back to all the people they had murdered in their cabs. And so he had drawn the conclusion that this turn of events was fair, to the point that it was senseless to decamp any farther towards the polar latitudes.

  Consequently, Zak had come back to the square of the church where he was in the habit of going around in circles, searching for the way to deliverance. He had sat down on the paving stones right in the middle of the square, stretched out his legs, and placed the flat of his hands on the pavement, like a lover who is reluctant to leave. He knew this was the best way to close the book of his undoing: to behave like a man who wants to stay connected to the stones and smells of a place. To sit there a good part of the day, pretending to abide in the place of his migration. Time passed, nighttime arrived together with a cold wind, a street lamp came on, two men stepped into the square. They dragged him to the parking lot and chopped him up.

  That was how Askia pictured Zak’s last moments, the final chapter of the book of his friend’s flight.

  He left the apartment on Rue Auguste-Comte and returned to the parking lot, feeling he had found his solution. He did not get in behind the steering wheel. Instead he sat down with his back leaning against a pillar and waited. Hoping to end like Zak. He unfolded his limbs, stretching his legs out on the cement, stretching his arms out along his thighs. To offer up his body to whatever violence happened to come along. He was not aware of the cold. He would not count on that to kill him. It would be more brutal.

  He checked his watch. At least an hour had gone by with him sitting in this position. Nothing had happened. Then an idea occurred to him, one that could speed things up. He got up and ran over to his cab. Rummaged through the glove compartment, where he had carelessly stuffed the money from his last fares. He took the cash and went back to the spot he had chosen for his torture and death. He tossed the money onto his stomach and all around his body. In plain sight. All that was left for him was to hope that a random passerby would take the money and kill him. He would make a show of putting up a fight, of violently resisting his aggressor, who would then have no choice but to act decisively.

  At dawn a man arrived. Wearing a long coat and a felt hat. The hat slightly skewed over his left ear. A cigarette hung in his fist. A plume of smoke rose from the cigarette. The man walked with a limp. He looked like a veteran. A veteran of all the crimes he must have committed in the night, a veteran of the life that must have eaten up his leg. He stepped resolutely towards Askia. Askia stayed calm. There was an air of mystery surrounding the man. A magnificent picture: the long coat topped with the felt hat, which bent down, the cigarette smoking in his fist, the whole scene set against the background of an unreal night striped with rows of cars in the parking lot. He advanced. Would soon be touching Askia’s feet. A splendid tableau. The only thing missing was a colour, in fact, two colours: the gleam of a blade catching the pale light in the parking lot and the red of the victim’s blood.

  The man touched Askia’s feet. Plunged his hand into a pocket on the right side, froze for an instant, coughed, knelt down, touched the banknotes that rested on his stomach. Askia was ready. As soon as the man made another move, he would jump on him. Again the man coughed. Touched his chest. Askia closed his eyes. He could not see the aggressor. He could smell him. The man spoke: “Can I help you, sir? Would you like me to call the police? Have you been assaulted?”

&
nbsp; The man shook his shoulder. Askia opened his eyes. “Everything’s fine,” he answered. “I’m an actor. I have to play a role — mine. I’m in training.”

  The man uttered a few words that Askia did not catch. He stood up and walked to his cab. Meanwhile the man went back to his Cadillac, which was parked on the far side of the pillar. Askia checked his watch. Five o’clock. Daybreak. It would not happen this time. On another night, maybe in the next movie, he would be killed like Zak. He started to laugh.

  41

  IN THE LATE afternoon he once again found Monsieur Ali of Port Said and his chestnuts. Business had been very slow and he had amused himself all day by making cones and pyramids out of wrapping paper. Dozens of them under a street lamp on Boulevard Saint-Michel. Another night already. Askia had spent the day trying not to think of Zak, telling himself it was better this way, that in any event his colleague could not have hoped for a better end.

  He admired the innocence of the old man, who was full of hope, believing as he did that as long as he could sell roasted chestnuts he might be able to save enough money for passage back to Port Said, in which case he would always have his pyramids, his land of paper.

  Askia formed a mental image of hope: a crazy man who had found refuge in Paris, dressed in rags, sitting under a street lamp creating a paper homeland to maintain the illusion of having somewhere to live. Henceforward Monsieur Ali inhabited the words of Abu Nuwas, which he recited in the blind alleys of Barbès and on the steps of Montmartre, overlooking the city. At two euros for a cone of chestnuts, he said, if he sold thirty cones he would be able to pay for a Chinese dinner at the Ni Hao on Rue de la Hachette, a night out of the cold in a filthy Clignancourt motel, and a calling card to try, as he had every night for fifty years, to reach a woman at a number in Port Said.