Dirty Feet

English translation copyright © 2011
Lazer Lederhendler

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This edition published in 2011
by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite
801
Toronto,
ON
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An excerpt from the draft of this
translation was previously published in the online journal
Carte Blanche
.

The epigraph is from a poem by Mahmoud
Darwish titled in English “My father.” The translation is by A. M. Elmessiri and
can be found in
The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual
Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry
, collected
and translated by A. M. Elmessiri (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press,
1982).

The excerpt on page 156 is from the poem
“Birds Die in Galilee” by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Denys
Johnson-Davies, and can be found in
The Music of Human
Flesh
, a collection of poems by Darwish selected and translated by
Denys Johnson-Davies (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980).

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Awumey, Edem,
[Pieds sales. English]
Dirty feet /
Edem Awumey ; translated by Lazer Lederhendler.
Translation of: Les pieds
sales.
eISBN 978-0-77089-044-2
I. Lederhendler, Lazer. II. Titre. III.
Titre: Pieds sales. English.
PS8609.D45P5313 2011       C843'.6
       C2011-902216-8

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover
photograph: Cosmo Condina/Getty Images
Text design and typesetting: Alysia
Shewchuk

We acknowledge for
their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the
Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the
Canada Book Fund.

To Martine
Verguet,
for the sustaining words. — E.A.

For Izja
Lederhendler, my brother, whose lifeline
traverses many boundaries in
time and space.
— L.L.

Mahmoud
Darwish
“My Father”

ASKIA WOULD recount how in her final delirium, his mother had kept on about the letters that Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed, his father, was supposed to have sent from Paris. Along with some photos. Which he had never seen. But then one day Askia went off on the same route as the absent one. He did not leave to find the missing father. He could live with gaps in his genealogy. He left because of a strange thing his mother had said: “For a long time we were on the road, my son. And wherever we went, people called us Dirty Feet. If you go away, you will understand. Why they called us Dirty Feet.”

Paris. He was standing in front of 102, rue Auguste-Comte that afternoon because three days earlier, in his taxi, a passenger had intimated that she had once photographed Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed. Scrutinizing his face in the rear-view mirror, she had said, “You remind me of someone. A man with a turban who posed for me a few years ago.”

This was not the first time a passenger had used the you-remind-me-of-someone line on him, just to make conversation. Often enough an exchange of words would turn into a physical exchange, as an antidote to boredom. To the emptiness deep in the skin and the dark night. But that evening the girl had mentioned a turban, a detail echoing the distant words of Kadia Saran, Askia's mother. Yes, it was the same refrain: “You look like him, Askia,” his mother had said. “Exactly like him. If you wore a turban, it would be almost as if he'd come back. Almost. Because he won't come back.” He was an adolescent then. More than thirty years had passed. Askia had gone away, though not to confirm his resemblance to the absent father.

Still, he did want to see the photos, and the girl said that he could, but not right away. She would be away from the capital for one or two weeks, working on a project.

Askia's travels had begun because of another of Kadia Saran's mysterious pronouncements: “Our family is under a curse to depart again and again, to tramp over thousands of roads until we are exhausted or dead. Look at yourself, my son, endlessly wandering through the night in your taxi.” It was hard to understand his mother and her words. All Askia knew was that his line of work obliged him to rove the streets. Yet in his flight across the pavements of the North he wanted to verify whether or not his machinery, programmed for roaming, could stop.

A dog and its mistress passed in front of him on the sidewalk. He recalled that as a child he would spend his days at the garbage dump in Trois-Collines, the squalid tropical suburb where he had landed with his mother. There he would mingle with dogs that he did not like. In particular the one belonging to old Lem. Its name was Pontos.

102, RUE AUGUSTE-COMTE
. A newly refurbished four-storey building. Askia rang the doorbell. On the ground floor, to the left of the entrance, a window opened. He supposed this was the apartment of the concierge, someone — perhaps an old lady — banished to the desert island of this apartment, stationed there to challenge visitors with a thousand questions and drive away troublemakers. But it was not an old woman who greeted him. A man in his fifties thrust his head out.

“I have an appointment with Mademoiselle Olia,” Askia said.

“The full name, please?”

“Olia.”

“A given name doesn't tell me very much.”

“She has brown hair.”

“That doesn't tell me much either. Which floor does she live on? You have an appointment? I wasn't told anything. Sorry, I can't help you.”

And the concierge shut his porthole. Askia lingered on the sidewalk. He was not angry. He simply thought this photographer, the passenger who had promised to show him portraits of his father, had had some fun at his expense. He headed across the street towards the Jardin du Luxembourg. The railings were hung with an exhibition. Pictures suspended in the sky of another world — still shots from a film:
Himalaya. L'enfance d'un chef
. Images from a far-off world, hung on the park fence. The large boards displayed people walking in various seasons. Like him. The wind hammered at his neck. He raised his coat collar and strolled several times around the fence and the pictures. The crowd began to thin out. The night engulfed the landscapes on display. The night overtook him. He decided to go home.

She came up behind him, surprising him in his dialogue with the faces on the boards. He followed her back across the street. She keyed in the code at the entrance to her building. They took the stairs opposite the door. The brass of the handrails and the sheen of the red carpet glimmered in the faint light of the hallway. They climbed the stairs, she in front and he at her heels. She stopped when they reached the top floor and slipped the key into the lock of the double door. He went in behind her.

The place was small, attractive, new. The front door opened onto a room that served as both living room and kitchenette. A sofa draped with an ash-coloured sheet faced the door. Behind the sofa was a bookcase with four shelves in the same white as the walls. He scanned the contents of the shelves: books, bibelots, an earthenware ashtray and bowl, a tiny square box made of wood.

Inserted among the books was a very broad bird feather that stirred with the slightest breath of air. The books lined the backs of the shelves while the bibelots were placed in front. On the wall around the shelves were some photos. He studied them. There was a noticeable connection among the faces on the wall. He had once leafed through a tome on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and had no trouble identifying the four portraits arranged in a row high above the shelves: W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen. To the right of the shelves, hanging one above the other, he recognized Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, James Baldwin. He was unable to put a name to the fourth face. The girl noticed his interest.

“I enjoy portraits of black people,” she said. “They have a way of capturing and holding the light.”

“My father has no connection with the celebrities on your wall. Could you show me the pictures you took of him? Wasn't that the reason you asked me to drop by?”

In front of the sofa, to the left of the front door, the TV and CD player sat on a large chiffonier. On the wall above the TV there was another photograph, which he found quite beautiful. It was the interior of a nightclub: a bar, high stools, two women and a man, all holding cigarettes between their fingers, their heads wreathed in smoke. The little group was standing around some musicians. He identified the elegantly dressed man at the piano as Duke Ellington, and leaning on the piano, cradling his trumpet, was Louis Armstrong. Askia had a mental image of his hostess attending the nightly concert given by Louis and the Duke. At the exact moment when the concert began, she would no doubt sit down on the sofa facing the picture to take in and savour the sounds emanating from the glossy paper on the wall. But his father, Sidi Ben Sylla, would not have moved in such circles. His music, Askia's mother would have said, was not jazz but exile.

Olia must have read his thoughts.

“You know,” she said, “I sit down in front of that picture and conjure up the concert, the notes. I imagine them soft and translucent and as slow as the water in a stream, at times lapping against the bank when the high notes soar into the air . . . Can we be less formal and call each other by our first names?”

“Musical notes — they can be sad too, miss. Now, about those pictures. Could you please show them to me?”

More photos lined the white walls, including the space in the far corner next to the TV, where some stairs led to a mezzanine and what Askia guessed was the bedroom. These other pictures showed Jesse Owens and the king, Carl Lewis, racing at full tilt, propelled by the gods of Olympus, and a very emotional Ella Fitzgerald at the microphone, with the beams of fame shining on her forehead. This girl Olia was peculiar. She evidently lived in a strange world filled with images and legendary figures. Askia thought she must be fond of legendary faces. She liked Owen and King Lewis, and Ella. But Sidi, the ghost he pursued through the dark Paris nights, was not a legend.

He plumped down on the sofa. She bustled about in the kitchenette, to the left of the shelves. She made some tea, set the cups, sugar, and teapot on the low table in front of her guest, and sat down on the floor in the lotus position. After the pictures of the Himalayas, here was a second image of the East for him to contemplate that evening: Olia sitting cross-legged as if to prepare for meditation, as if he were an altar or the statue of a saint or an icon meant for prayers.

“You really do look like the man in the turban I photographed a few years ago,” she said, laughing with her eyes and dimpling the corners of her mouth in a way that heightened her charm. Then she admitted that, following their encounter in his taxi, she had searched through her photo albums for the man with the turban. The portraits must have gotten misplaced in one of her many boxes. It would just take a little time, but she would find them.

Askia had the impression that among all those images on the wall, the only thing in the room that was real was the shape of Olia's face, her hair tied in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was neither too short nor too tall. But thin. Her face had the originality of a painting. Her body was ordinary. He thought she should always wear black. Black — the depths of night and mystery where her face had been drawn. He discerned two small pears under her sweater. Mother Nature could have been more generous, he said to himself. But he felt that what was most striking about this person was not her appearance so much as her personality.

The tea did him good. The tea and the warmth of this little home. And yet he was afraid. Afraid that the horrific hand bristling with razor-sharp hairs — the hand that lurked in his worst nightmares — might punch a gaping hole through the ceiling and seize him and cast him out of the apartment and into the cold. It was a dread that went back to his childhood.

Olia stood up, affording her guest a view of her outfit, black from head to toe. She crouched in front of the small fireplace built into the wall to the right of the door. She lifted the logs out from the ash, rearranged them, and lit the fire. The flames enveloped the logs, the soot-coated hearth began to glow, the flames rose higher.