He says, “I know it.”
They both stare ahead, neither looking at the other.
He says, “I love you, too.”
They carry on in silence, like they’re taking their time getting used to the feel of it.
The door to the apartment building is now only a few steps away.
She says, “Kwasi?”
He says yes.
She says, “I can’t help wanting to ask you.”
“What?”
She says, “If I ask you to ask me to marry you, will you?”
It’s only the sound of their feet walking and the wind in the branches.
“Why?” he says
“Because sometimes you just have to say things to make them exist.”
They stop.
She comes up against him, her head on his chest.
He says, “Everything?”
She says, “Not everything. But this thing.”
She looks down the road, towards the glow of the city. A lone car swings round the distant circle, then accelerates away. A small mechanical pavement sweeper is making its way up the street, grinding along like a slow olive-green bug.
“All right,” he says.
She feels his arms strengthen around her.
“Then do it,” she says.
He says, “Bernadette Mary Luyundula, will you marry me?”
He can feel the fuzziness of her hair on his chin.
A small sound comes out of her, half-breath, like an exclamation of approval. She says, “I tell you I love you and five seconds later you ask me to marry you?”
She can’t see his face, but she knows the expression on it without having to.
“Such a tricky girl,” he says, his voice smiling.
She pulls a little out of his embrace and looks at him. She says, “Fine, but never forget it was you who asked.”
“You haven’t answered,” he says.
“Sure, I’ll marry you,” she says.
“Then I won’t forget it,” he says.
Now she gets on her tiptoes and she kisses him, and they stand in the entrance like that, until the mechanical street sweeper has almost passed them. A middle-aged guy with a tired expression on his face sits at its wheel, slouched. It must be a dull job.
“Good evening,” the man says as he passes them.
“Good evening,” they respond.
Then Kwasi opens the door to the apartment building with his key, and lets Bernadette in. He steps through the doorway himself, looks briefly over the empty street, then lets the door close shut behind him.
When they wake up the next morning it is late. The sheets are all undone because they didn’t make up the sofa bed properly and before they fell asleep they made love and whenever they make love the sheets come undone, especially the ones that are too small for the futon. Bernadette, who has woken up on the coarse material of the bare mattress, pushes the heavy body of Kwasi over until he moves up and she can slip in beside him onto the sheet. They lie in the corner of the bed, against the wall, not asleep, but for a long time not talking.
Why is he so quiet?
Just because he’s waking up.
He hasn’t changed his mind about what he asked the night before?
He tells her that he hasn’t, and kisses her and then they make love again, and she does know that he hasn’t changed his mind.
Afterwards he gets up to fix them coffee and something to eat. She watches him as he walks around naked, going from the fridge to the hob where he boils the water, forages in the cupboards for bread and cans, and in the drawers for a can opener.
She thinks suddenly how funny it is to watch this naked man walking around, strong and big, with his penis which is still not down yet bumping into the counter as he works on the coffee jar. She wants to laugh at how totally naked he is, with happiness, but also at the extraordinariness of it—such a large human being, covered in muscles, strong in the way that men are built strong, but in fact he’s just a grown-up version of the small naked child you see running around with unconscious happiness, whether it’s in a slum in Accra or the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Then she does laugh.
What’s so funny?
She only tells him it’s because his penis is bumping into things.
He looks down at it, then comes back to bed with the meal.
They eat a stale croissant and some crackers and yoghurt with coffee.
He tells her that the only thing he regrets about last night’s conversation is that he didn’t ask first.
Was he going to ask anyway?
Maybe not then, but eventually it would have come to that, he tells her; at least he was already in the state of mind that gets a person to that point.
She considers his words.
“But you did ask me first,” she tells him, and has he forgotten already what she said? Does she have to remind him again?
No, she doesn’t, he says, letting her have her way.
That evening, down in the Refuge, the Saturday gathering turns into a party to celebrate their engagement. Telephone calls are made to invite more people than can usually be accommodated in a sitting.
The guests bring pots of food wrapped up in paper bags. The Christians among them bring more alcohol. They bring cakes and fruit. They bring additional tapes of music to be played.
Madame brings down from the shop an extra flower arrangement that they’d made by mistake the night before, but which she only discovered when the delivery van arrived in the morning.
“If it’s good enough for the weddings of Neuilly it’s good enough for us,” she declares, placing it in the middle of the table at which Bernadette and Kwasi are sitting, surrounded by their friends of the Refuge community.
Everyone applauds.
The party continues into the night. The time at which people must leave to catch the last metro approaches, then passes. Nobody notices. People should stay as long as they like, Madame declares eventually. She will close the shop on Sunday and people can sleep on the floor all day.
The celebrations continue until just before sunup, when the quartier begins to rise and greater care is needed. Madame closes the shutters over the windows upstairs, and tablecloths are removed from the tables and bundled up to make pillows and the guests drift up into the shop to find places to sleep on chairs or benches or on the mosaic floor among the buckets of flowers, the flower pots, the statues, and the fountains.
Although they can easily walk back to their apartment, Bernadette and Kwasi decide to stay with the guests. They occupy a deep wicker bench on which customers often sit and wait while orders are made up, which with two large Indonesian-print cushions makes a comfortable bed. They drift in and out of sleep, talk, exchange and laugh at stupid comments that in the moment seem hilarious, sleep again.
A little after midday Kwasi wakes up. Bernadette’s head is on his chest. He props up his own head on his forearm by holding the side strut of the bench behind his neck. From downstairs he can hear the sound of people clearing up, low conversation, laughter. From outside comes the sound of streets—Sunday traffic, footfalls, the sound of dogs, car horns, passing pavement conversations, music from the bistro three doors down.
With his head slightly raised he has a view of the foyer entrance of the shop. The light comes in through the shutters, casting white bars over the floor.
He is reminded suddenly of his train journey from Bamako, now so long ago—almost a year. Couples are asleep in bundles, individuals curled up on their own covered in jackets or tablecloths. It seems that nobody has left yet.
But sometime they will leave. Today, in a few hours. And later? Forever. Time, the police, will scatter them all.
He thinks, Where will this all end?
A small happy life, here one day, and then gone in a flurry, with nothing left but furniture to pawn?
Can anyone tell him different?
Mamadou? What would Mamadou say now? Something about fearing the dark? No, he’d have n
othing to say. His voice is already scattered.
And Bernadette? That marrying her will get him papers?
He pulls his hand from behind his neck and lays his head down on the bench and looks up at the ceiling.
He sees above him the identical depictions of Botticelli’s Zephyr and Aura that Madame had him paint in the corners, blowing into the room, with their gold-pierced ears, their cornrows and braids.
The sight of those defiant figures suddenly fills him with shame at his easy acquiescence.
These are not new questions he is asking. He has asked them all his life.
Does he still have nothing to say after leaving his life behind and traveling such a distance?
He hears his own voice in his head asking the questions—the same voice from his last weeks in Tudu, that spoke to him in his painting shed, and accompanied him to Farrar Street and told him how everyone you meet on your way is an angel, and which he now knows to be true: Big Henry, Adams, Mamadou, Bernadette.
At that moment he feels Bernadette stirring against him.
“What’s going on up there?” she says. She is awake, must have been a while, and is watching him looking at the roof.
He begins to explain to her the figures on the ceiling.
Upstairs, she means, and she taps him on his forehead with her finger.
“Nothing,” he says after a while, “just listening.”
“To what?”
To what? To the voices in his head.
“Oh,” she says. “Any particularly witty conversation? Anybody say anything interesting?”
“One person,” he says.
And what does he say?
He tells him, this person, that you never really have anything except if you choose it yourself.
“Yes,” she says quietly.
“And not just once. You have to carry on choosing every day.”
Yes.
And that if nothing can be taken away from you it doesn’t mean you’re free.
No.
It just means you have nothing.
Yes.
“I should meet him, this wise person,” she says.
“You have,” he says.
She has? “When?” she asks.
He smiles.
She knows she shouldn’t have to ask anymore.
THE MUSEUM OF MANKIND
It HAS JUST gone summer. A shipment of the last of the season’s tulips has just come in. Madame has buckets of them spread out over the counter.
One variety among them she has never seen before, that must have got into her order by mistake. They still have their leaves, like thick blades of grass, from which the stems curve upwards into deep purple petals, not rounded but ragged and pointy and lined with an almost fluorescent yellow trim, just slightly parting around their stamens in a way that makes Madame want to giggle, and as she does she looks up from the table and out of the shop window.
A man is standing on the pavement opposite, a piece of notepaper in one hand, a plastic bag in the other. She thinks little of him, but for the fact that he must be foreign, which she tells immediately from his clothes—an old checked jacket cut like her father used to wear, with wide lapels, and too hot for the season.
Then the bell above the door is disturbed into music. A client comes in, who is about to make an order, but then notices the purple tulips on the table among the more common blooms. Conversation is diverted from the order.
The man, from outside the shop, sees the florist pick up a purple flower by the stem between two fingers, as if it were some strange creature. He sees her laughing silently from behind the glass with her customer, a distinguished woman with dark green clothes and gray hair pinned up in a bun like a small conch on the back of her head.
“I can sell them to you for a good price,” Madame is saying to her customer inside the shop.
“I could not,” the customer replies archly, “not with teenage daughters in the house.”
The man, from outside the shop, watches the florist and her client transact their business. Then the client leaves. There appears to be nobody else in the shop. Possibly he has the wrong address. He looks at the paper in his hand, looks at the number above the door. No, it is correct. He puts the paper into his pocket and waits.
Inside the shop Madame shuffles through some order forms. Then she gets on the telephone. She begins to sort through the forms, lifting her shoulder and craning her neck to wedge the headset against her ear, so as to free her hands. Out of the corner of her eye she notices that the man across the road has not moved. He has put down his plastic bag and is leaning against the wall. He has a large umbrella of the kind that golf players use. She might normally assume him to be one of the old diplomats from the African embassies, with their impeccable French and their old-world ways, who sometimes walk through the quartier during lunch and might stop in on a Friday afternoon to purchase a bouquet for a wife or a mistress, except it is not lunchtime, and such men do not carry plastic bags or stand on street corners.
From across the road the man sees the woman begin talking on the phone. Suddenly she starts sorting through papers on her desk in a great hurry. Some of the papers fall on the ground. She puts down the phone to pick them up. She knocks the phone which pushes some flowers off the other side of the table and overturns a glass of water. She rushes round the table to pick up the flowers, then picks up the papers, some of which are now wet, sorts through them, seems to find the one she wants, and then picks up the phone again. The man smiles to see the small comedy playing out across the street.
After a while the florist appears to finish her business on the telephone. She puts down the phone. She seems overwhelmed. She shakes water off her hands. She calls out over her shoulder. She is looking for something on which to wipe her hands. Nobody comes. She disappears into the shop.
Kwasi, in one of the back rooms, has not heard her, since he is listening to music with earphones as he sorts through some of the other deliveries of the morning. Madame picks up a cloth and begins wiping her hands. Kwasi takes off his earphones. Madame tells him she has something interesting to show him.
They return to the front of the shop.
Madame asks him if he’s ever seen such things before, again beginning to giggle.
He tells her, “Never, at least not in the flower world.”
“I cannot sell such flowers in this quartier,” Madame says. “Why don’t you take them home tonight. I’m sure you two will enjoy them shamelessly.”
He tells her she’s blushing.
Madame knows it.
Kwasi gathers the purple flowers up in a sheet of newspaper, and heads back into the shop to finish off his work.
Madame, looking up, sees the man from outside striding off now down the road in the direction of Rue Saint Didier.
On regular weekdays when deliveries aren’t coming in, Bernadette and Kwasi leave the apartment at the same time, at a little after eight in the morning, so that Bernadette can walk with Kwasi to work. Madame, who has been getting up at five a.m. for twenty-five years, is already in the shop, spraying water onto the leaves of the fleshy plants. Although opening time isn’t until nine she has the music on already. She will already have taken the sheets off the two birdcages, so that the songbirds are hopping against their bars and chirping, and turned on the water pump so that the fountain in the middle of the central shop floor makes its water noises. The shutters may still be closed, but the slats are angled to let the sunlight in that slices through the fine mist from her spray bottle as she moves from plant to plant. Usually during the day she plays recordings from the half-price Mozart, Vivaldi and Handel box sets, but in the mornings, on her own, she plays the music of her own heart—which in recent weeks has been the piano works of Claude Debussy, and which, as she walks around her shop, makes her feel at the same time happy and wistful.
Some time before eight thirty there will be a knock on the window. She’ll put down her spray bottle and go to the door, and there will
be Kwasi and Bernadette in the doorway, and she’ll have to squint her eyes to protect them from the daylight streaming in.
Then Madame will go into the back to get coffee ready, for which Bernadette will join them if it’s closer to eight than eight thirty. Kwasi will start filling buckets of water and unbundle the flowers they expect to sell during the day. Bernadette will have pulled out the high chair behind the cash register, and when Madame joins them with a tray of coffee and a plate of croissants a conversation will already be going and there’ll be hardly a moment to breathe between words, right up until Bernadette leaves some time before nine.
Bernadette’s route to the Trocadero metro stop will take her down Rue des Belles Feuilles, where she will pass the Monoprix store in which Mamadou used to work, and in which she still knows some of the cashiers, although she’s had little reason to stop in since Mamadou left, and hardly ever did when he worked there, as it’s only since she started accompanying Kwasi to the flower shop that this particular route to the metro has become the shortest option—or so Kwasi tells her; she still believes it would be quicker to return up Avenue Victor Hugo, pass the apartment and continue up the avenue to catch the metro at Metro Kleber.
She’s the one who actually does the walking, she tells Kwasi, but Kwasi is insistent.
“It’s a waste of time to double back,” he tells her.
She says, “Not if it’s quicker.”
He says, “I think it’s quicker to keep on walking.”
She says, “It only seems that way.”
“If it seems that way then it is,” he says.
She smiles.
Though she still thinks he’s wrong she walks his route. She makes a point to him that she does it because she loves him, not because she thinks he’s right.
He laughs and tells her she’s a very stubborn girl, but he forgives her.
She scoffs with incredulity.
She thinks he probably knows he’s wrong. She thinks that it’s most likely a point of principle. Not turning back. Though it’s never just one thing. Ever. He likes the idea of her walking past the place where Mamadou worked, she thinks—to keep up some of the associations of the past, even if he doesn’t do it himself.
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