Dirty Feet (11 page)

THE BLACK CAT
had left him the white cloth as a gift, and he gathered it up off the ground. The surface of the water had gone smooth again, as if to signify that nothing had occurred, that Askia was the sole inventor of the scene he had just witnessed. In his hand the spotless cloth smelled of sweat, of a presence. He could not help sensing a kind of force behind him. Askia wheeled around and saw him on the wharf on the other side of the street.

He was wearing a costume — a collection of variously coloured cloths sewn together to form a robe — while a mask of wood and leather cloaked his head. The wood covered the face, and the leather portion was a hood enveloping the crown and the back of the neck. The robe had a golden sheen and bore the image of a shell on the breast. A luminous aura surrounded the apparition. The feet were invisible inside an ample pair of stockings that comprised the lower part of the costume. He resembled an egun — a ghost. He began to dance, emitting little yelps, spinning around, spreading out the skirt of his costume, hopping, floating the flounces of his robe on the night wind, and most of all rotating on the axis of his body, which he never managed to stabilize, turning as if he were a planet, with starlike sequins sewn onto the cloth. He executed little dance steps in every direction, stepped back, and returned to the starting point.

Askia was petrified. He knew what they were, the eguns. Or rather he did not know. The eguns would come on feast days to dance in the sacred forest on the edge of the coastal city where he had grown up, or in the village squares in Porto-Novo and Oyò and the hamlets around Lake Togo. You were not supposed to see what — man or god — was concealed under the cloth or raffia costume. The egun on the wharf was hiding inside this costume, the mask of his exile. He wished to remain wrapped in the cloak of night, to disappear into its folds. He was enraged because someone was following its every move. Under no circumstances would he wish to go back to the Sahel or the shores of a river down there to ask for an explanation from the god Oya Igbalé. To ask why he had been condemned to wander. He stopped dancing, and when Askia went to cross the street to meet him, the egun bolted towards the nearest metro station.

Askia arrived at the entrance to the station, which was closed. No sign of the egun.

IN HIS HANDS
a strange object, the turban — relic of a time or a being that had been. He would tell Olia that he had found him. He keyed in the entrance code to the girl's building and found himself face to face with the concierge, who stopped him. “She has gone away, Mademoiselle Olia. She left a letter for you.”

A beautiful night. Laughing stars. His hand was shaking. Standing on the sidewalk in front of his friend's building, he tried to make sense of her sudden exit. He looked around in every direction, wondering which way the girl from Sofia had gone. There were only a few possibilities: either end of this street, the building behind him, or the gates of the park across the street. He rubbed his eyes and discerned a silhouette in front of him. It resembled the one that had approached him in the parking lot, the night he had decided to end it all at the foot of the pillar.

The silhouette wore the same long coat and a hat. Askia recognized him. He had often noticed this man leaning against the fence of the Jardin du Luxembourg. A few times Askia had heard him ranting to himself. Olia one day said that the man had been coming there for years, repeating the same story, always with exactly the same ending: “I arrived in 1985. From East Berlin. They promised me. They said, ‘Get across the Wall, go to the West, and you're saved.' I crossed the Wall. Nothing on the other side. No one. Maybe I should go back in the other direction.”

Olia thought the man was demented. Once, as she walked out of her apartment with her Leica hanging across her shoulder, the man had stepped up and handed her a piece of paper with these words written on it:

And she threw into the camera

Twenty gardens

And the birds of Galilee

And continued searching beyond the sea

For a new meaning to truth.

The man told Olia these were the words of the poet of the narrow land, Mahmoud Darwish. One of the Dirty Feet. He had smiled with his tobacco-yellowed teeth and disappeared into the crowd in the garden.

Askia was expecting the man to trot out the same East Berlin story. He was not shaking so much now, and he went to sit down in a corner to read Olia's letter. But the man, the silhouette in the long coat, was watching him, his hands covering his mouth. There was smoke rising from his face. The cigarette was burning between his lips. The lighter, which he had not bothered to extinguish, was in his left hand, close to the pocket of his coat, which at any moment could catch fire. The flame danced over the fabric and it seemed that his left side was quivering, twitching as though gripped by an attack, the nerves shuddering under the skin of the arm that held the flame.

It was difficult to see the man's face in the half-light. A face that must have been sneering — he could hear the snickering. He thought the man was going to tell him his story. The man was a shadow in front of the fence. The shadow raised its right hand to its hat and tapped it in a sort of salute, a show of respect before the speech that followed: “Good day, friend. I know you've had a hard day. Here you are, heir to a piece of white cloth. In other words, a blank page, with no footprints for you to step into. Heir to emptiness! It's hard, this city, isn't it. Everything leaves here, everything escapes, people pass through. She's left, the girl, hasn't she. She must not be the kind that stays.”

The man moved away from the fence and went off towards the metro on the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

Askia sat down on the curb. Had the man been referring to Olia? Had he possibly seen her leave? He stood up again. To run after the man and ask him if he had seen his friend. But he had second thoughts and sat back down. He had the letter. Opened it. His hands began to tremble again. He pulled out from the envelope a sheet of blue paper and recognized Olia's script from the notes he had seen on the back of her photos. It was too dark to read. He moved over to the nearest street lamp in front of the park fence. The light shone down on the paper and Olia's words.

THE STREET
lamp illuminated the paper and the black jackets. Their steel rods gleamed as they advanced towards Askia. They walked swiftly, and Askia's eyes were on the letter. From the shadow of a lone tree deep in the park came a melancholy birdsong. The first skinhead quickened his pace, and Askia knew he would not have time to finish the letter and at the same time that he could not accept what was happening without having read the letter.

The first skinhead was moving fast and Askia started to run. He clasped Olia's message against his chest.

Askia,
This is not a letter but an admission of failure. I thought I would be able to stay, but it has taken hold of me again. Already in Sofia we were the Gypsies, the black-haired, dirty outsiders, with our scattered world and our destiny bartered to the gods of the caravan.

The skinheads were moving fast. Ahead, the street was long and straight. The three men laughed and blustered:

“Hey, boys, should we let him run for a bit?”

“The cops have been through this area. They won't be back here for a while!”

“Keep running, nigger — that's something you know how to do! Racing, like an Ethiopian marathon runner!”

“Go on, run! Hey, what does your letter say?”

When I grew up, I didn't want to be the stranger with the dirty hair. I ran away. And I started taking photographs, putting together albums as a way to tie together my pictures, my dispersed lives, all those gobbled up by my Leica, as evidence of a failure. Apparently the striving endures, the desire endures — to create the connection, the bridge between the different shores of our lives, our wandering lives.

There were no bends in the street, no cross streets or alleys where Askia might hide long enough to finish reading the letter. Just this street that would not end, and if there were side streets, he was running too hard to notice. If he turned his head right or left, the leather jackets would catch up with him. They seemed to have decided not to let him keep running, and a thought occurred to him —
Stop and negotiate
: “Guys, I just need a little time to read the letter. Then you can go ahead . . .”

Not to check out without having seen what Olia had written.

The forms of my prints, my life, my mornings, my nights are breaking apart. They're liquefying because they carry within them lines of conflict. My conflicts, my memory, shattered, lying in pieces along the roads of my escape.

And this endless asphalt that would not run out, this street that would not run its course but which began to narrow, to gradually turn into a corridor, and he told himself that if it became a bottleneck it would pressure them and they would put an end to the whole thing. His knees were about to give out. He felt it. It looked as if the black jackets were also beginning to tire. The front-runner complained, “Hey! Marathon man! We didn't learn to run in the Kenyan mountains! We don't have specially baked feet! Stop so we can finish the job!”

The skinhead stopped running. Askia sensed this because no more footsteps echoed on the asphalt. The others must have followed his lead, and Askia thought he could finish reading the letter.

Askia, there is no constant in all of this. What our lives consist of is nothing but the gallery walls, the book pages where we sometimes happen to place a few pictures, an absurd story, while we wait for the echo, the response, while we hope to finally draw the line that threads us, others, the world together. Yet you see that the thread that could lead you back to the country you believe was your starting point and might hold out a more accurate image of who you are — that thread, you realize, has snapped. Your father's face, which I fixed on my rolls of film, has ultimately become dislocated, has broken up. There may be nothing left of him to salvage, so I think the time, the nighttime, has come to put an end to the flight.

AT THE END
of the night was Petite-Guinée's bistro. The long street had exhausted the black jackets. Behind the counter the barman was cleaning glasses.

“Whisky, Askia? Sorry, but I've already put away the Miles discs. You'll have to drink your whisky solo and neat. Without Miles.”

“. . .”

He asked after Petite-Guinée. The barman said he had not seen the old man very much in the past few days. He stole in like a burglar, served himself a drink at the bar, and then disappeared into the belly of the cellar. He didn't feel like surfacing anymore. He didn't bother with the bistro anymore, and the barman had taken on duties that weren't usually his: put in the orders, pay the bills, take reservations. He said he was worried about the boss, who had become a ghost.

Askia went behind the bar and took the stairs leading down to his friend's studio. The damp walls made him shiver. He stood in front of the cellar. Pushed at the door without knocking. He had never knocked on Petite-Guinée's door. He had always entered into the ex-mercenary's world as if it were his own house.

The door stayed shut. Locked. Petite-Guinée did not want to be disturbed. Askia remained on the steps. There were noises coming from the bar. Voices, a tone, the laugh of the skinhead who had followed him longer than the others. More voices . . . He did not go back up to the bar. He went down, and found himself in front of that other door, the one that opened into the cubbyhole that Petite-Guinée called his land of the depths. Walls, a universe, the large table on which he had spread out his souvenirs of Biafra, the photos, faces, smiles of the kids that he had latched on to as a final homeland.

Askia pushed the door. It swung open. The luminous strip of the fluorescent fixture hung from the ceiling. On the big dining table was Petite-Guinée, curled up, with a bottle in the hollow between his bent abdomen and folded knees, barefoot, one arm hidden under his side, the other rigid against the exposed side of his trunk. His frozen fingers had dropped a photograph next to his thigh. Askia stepped closer, picked up the photo: two children, a girl and a boy, laughing in a countryside. The note on the back read:
Biafra 1969
. Petite-Guinée had lain down on top of the other portraits, on the little snapshots that reminded him of Africa. Dead. Buried in a landscape, a distant land.

There was mayhem going on upstairs. The black jackets were drinking and smashing up Petite-Guinée's bar.

“
WILL YOU
finally tell me who Askia is?” Olia had pleaded with her eyes.

And he remembered his parents sighing. “At last!” At last, after the roads and humiliations they had left behind, they had made a little place for themselves in Chief Gokoli's village during the winter of 1967. His mother, Kadia Saran, sold kola nuts on the steps of the German pastors' century-old school — the only school there. His father, Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed, cultivated a plot of land in the hills to the east overlooking the village. In the evening he would come home from the fields carrying the machete in his left hand and the hoe on his right shoulder. The blade of the hoe rubbed against the edges of his turban, perpetually white, impervious to dirt. It was a mystery how he managed to keep it so immaculate. The fact that he wore it on his head could not explain why it stayed absolutely spotless. In the fields he walked under trees and bird nests laden with excrement. Besides, he was tall, and his head would unavoidably brush against the wet leaves and low branches. In the absence of an explanation, the rumour eventually spread that it was not the turban. It was his heart. His heart remained unsullied.

They spent three peaceful years in the village, though they continued to be the Dirty Feet. Until that season when rain was scarce on the plateaus, where it was plentiful as a rule. And the seers and wise men who were consulted, and the villagers, and all the signs in the sky concurred that the paucity of rain was due, without a doubt, to the Dirty Feet. Who must have been afflicted by a curse. It had been right to welcome them for a few days, but letting them settle there had not been the best idea in the world. And the village notables went to see Chief Gokoli. To ask him to send the strangers away.

“Chief, should we let them stay in the village, when all the signs and sages say . . .”

“. . . that it is because of them the soil is dry and ungenerous this year?”

“Should we allow them to stay and watch our fields burn, our rivers and wells dry up?”

“Allow them to leave in their wake a hundred years of epidemics, many seasons of torment and tears?”

“Dead cities, knives of hate, the incessant groans of a woman pregnant with a three-horned child who will not leave her belly, a downpour of scorpions.”

“Is it possible for our hospitality to be boundless and hence for us to let all these things take place?”

“Should we go on offering shelter to these charlatans, who will continue to destroy all our lands to the point of exhausting them and murdering the world?”

Thus they were forced to leave the village of Chief Gokoli. And ended up on the coast. His mother told him that his father, Sidi, had gone still farther, for reasons even more obscure. And she spoke of the letters from Paris. Askia never saw those letters. But why Paris? Was it because, as his mother had apparently learned one day — he did not know how — Paris was a Mecca where thousands of Dirty Feet arrived after exodus, roads, hunger? And the letters, did they exist only in his mother's fantasies, she who was at times more clear-sighted as to what had happened to Sidi? One day, Kadia Saran, her eyes fixed on the ocean shore, spoke these words: “Askia, he has abandoned us. To escape beyond the bounds of the Gulf of Guinea. I've been told that he embarked on an old tub called
Bonne Espérance
and that, at this very moment, he is in a South African diamond mine near Kimberley, where they say the precious stones engender fortunes, happiness, and wretchedness. I picture him, his dry body stooped over, digging in the dirt with a pickaxe. He wears a safety helmet and an orange suit because down there they have serious companies that know how to do things according to the rules. He is digging and hopes to find the biggest, most beautiful stone, which will earn him a reward from the mine owners. I imagine it happening this way, my son, because for thousands of seasons I have had no news from Sidi.”