Authors: Esi Edugyan
Delilah said, ‘He doesn’t speak English, Lou. But he speaks your language. I can tell you the rumours weren’t wrong, he’s the real thing. One of the greatest players I’ve ever heard in my life.’
Oh, girl. And I was almost yours again. Suddenly I was struggling to keep that smile on my face.
‘Lookin forward to hearin you swing, Pops,’ said Armstrong, grinning.
Hiero ain’t understood. He let go of the knob, give a shy little nod.
‘
Sid
,’ said Delilah. ‘Tell him.’
‘Louis wants to hear you play,’ I said numbly.
The kid nodded, give a little grave bow to Armstrong. Thing was, it ain’t seemed ridiculous at all. It seemed, I don’t know, dignified.
Armstrong laughed. ‘You and me, sure, we got some
talkin
to do. We surely do.’ He look over at Delilah. ‘Say it again?’
‘Hieronymus. We practised this.’
Armstrong chuckled, shook his head. ‘Again?’
‘
Hieronymus
, Lou. What, you losing your ear now too?’
‘Hurronnious,’ he said. ‘Herro… hell, that’s Little Maestro. That pup over there be Little Maestro. Ain’t heard him play yet, but I’ll take the world’s word for it till I do.’
‘You’ll take
my
word for it,’ said Delilah. ‘You need more than that?’
‘No, ma’am.’ Armstrong smiled. ‘Now, when we goin to swing?’
Chip give a happy shrug. ‘Anytime, Louis.’
‘Hiero needs a trumpet, Lou,’ said Delilah. ‘He lost his in all the fun getting out of Berlin.’
Old Armstrong, he just shrugged. ‘Aw, ain’t goin be no problem. I got a old one the boy welcome to. If he want it.’
No damn
way
. I stared at Hiero.
‘Well, tell him,’ said Delilah impatiently.
‘She say you can use Armstrong’s horn till she get you a new one,’ I muttered.
Hiero sort of ducked his head, smiled.
Delilah caught my eye like she just done
me
some favour. Hell. I was smiling so hard I like to split my damn face, trying to ease that burning in my gut. Little Maestro? Armstrong’s
horn
? Sure the kid could play a sharp set, but on Armstrong’s level? I smiled and I smiled, smiled, smiled. If all this damn jawing meant anything, it was that the kid still got borders to cross to get to where Louis was standing when he cut ‘West End Blues’.
Oh but Delilah, sweet Delilah. Sweet like lemon in a wound.
The dead don’t just stumble back into a life, like the grief ain’t been real. I could feel that old sickness in me I thought been carved out. I thought:
Sid, you just let it be. It ain’t goin happen with her again. Not like it was
.
Afterwards, we was standing out on the grey cobblestones in front of Armstrong’s pension. I looked down at the narrow streets of Montmartre, hardly believing we was here in the flesh. Chip clapped me on the shoulder, give me a gentle shake.
‘You awake in there, buck?’ He slip a address into my hand. ‘That be her flat. You goin over there to help move our stuff up.’
‘Whose flat?’ I said foolishly.
‘I got to spell it out for you? Go on over there.’
‘Aw, hell.’ I shook my head. ‘We stayin with
her
? No way, brother. No.’
But a hour later I was parking Ernst’s dusty Horch up on the curb and wrestling a big metal trunk out of the cab, banging it hard down into the street. When I glance on up, there she was, staring down at me through warped glass with dark eyes.
It was a shabby old apartment house. The street door was propped open with a cinderblock and I dragged that thick trunk through. Inside, a tile courtyard stood open to the sky and there was a checkered path leading across it to the stairwell. Stone lions crouched on the outer lintel posts. A fountain in the corner stood dry, its bowl stained by the pigeons. I dragged the trunk through the small foyer, set it down at the edge of the tile floor. The walls was yellow, chipped and peeling, and I leaned up against them as Delilah come out. She bent over the balustrade and called, ‘It’s up here. Second door on the left.’
I give her a grim look. It going be like
that
? She ain’t even coming
down
?
‘Where’s Hiero?’ she called.
Hell.
‘What?’ she said.
I shrugged. ‘I ain’t said nothin,’ I called up.
‘What? I can’t hear you. Come up.’
I blown out my cheeks, lifted that damn trunk up by the leather strap. I was determined not to ask her bout Berlin. Not to start nothing up with her. No damn way. When I come through, the apartment surprised me with its calm pale tones, the cream walls with their mouldings, the grey ceilings, and the long row of cold windows behind the furniture. Dragging in that trunk, I called out to her. But Delilah wasn’t in sight. Frowning, I gone back down and begun to wrestle our old instruments up the stairs. I set everything down on the gleaming oak floor of the living room.
Then, the glass doors of the dining room opened, and Delilah come in, holding them open with a hand on each door. She wore a blue dress that hugged her hips and a purple wrap on her head, and her skin looked soft, bruised, velvety in that pale light. A faint scent of sugared almonds, like she just been baking, reached my nose.
‘Hi, girl,’ I said, all at once shy.
‘Don’t mind me.’ She smiled, distracted. ‘I was just changing. You’ll all be alright out here? We can put one of you on the sofa, I think.’ She glanced round. ‘I sleep just through here.’ But she ain’t met my eyes as she said it.
I sat down, stood up. And then, hell, it ain’t mattered what I’d told myself.
‘Lilah,’ I said. ‘Listen.’
She cleared her throat, put one uneasy hand on her wrap. She ain’t come no closer. ‘I know it’s not much, but—’
‘It ain’t the flat,’ I said. ‘The flat’s fine.’
She give me a puzzled half-smile.
My head felt thick, strange. ‘Aw, Lilah. You goin tell me? Or I got to ask?’
‘Ask what?’
‘What you mean “what”.’
She clasped her hands before her thighs, stood there looking at me.
I swore. ‘If you was to tell me you Lilah’s twin sister, I’d believe it. If you was to say you just blinked you eyes in Berlin and was transported here on the back of a
pigeon
, I’d believe it. You ain’t real, girl. You ain’t. Not to me.’
At the mention of Berlin, her face darkened.
‘You get picked up by the Boots,’ I said, ‘and then you just disappear? End up back in Paris like it ain’t nothin? You know how that look?’ I turned, walked over to the window, walked back. ‘You ain’t got nothin to say to that?’
‘I had a
ticket
, Sid. I wasn’t arrested. Hiero didn’t tell you?’
‘Hiero?’
‘Hiero. Your
friend
. He didn’t tell you I was leaving?’
‘The kid
known
?’
‘Of course he did. You think I’d just run off like that?’ She give me this sudden sad look. ‘Oh, Sid,’ she said, sort of quietly, like she only just starting to understand.
I shook my head. ‘The kid
known
you was goin?’
All a sudden I sat down hard in her wicker chair. Kid known my grief. He known it, he seen it, he lived it alongside me. And he ain’t done nothing to soften it.
I wasn’t sure if maybe something was wrong in all of it, if there been some mistake. But then I thought back to his shifty looks, his worried frowns, his sudden brotherly protection of me, and I thought,
Hell, brother, he a cold old Kraut after all
.
‘Sid?’ said Delilah. ‘What’re you thinking? Sidney?’
She was still standing there, looking at me. Something gone dark in me then. Something I ain’t able to explain. It wasn’t jealousy, it wasn’t betrayal. It wasn’t even a lack of trust, exactly. I don’t know. It was like I been sick from Lilah too long to just start back in.
I pushed back the chair, made to get up and go.
But Delilah come over to me, laid one cool long hand to my throat. I froze. The light seemed to slow right down. ‘Sid,’ she said, as if from a long way off. ‘Where’re you going now, hmm?’
And then she leaned in, real slow, and kissed me.
Hell.
It was then I started to hate his damn face again. The kid, I mean. Hiero. Little Judas.
I ain’t said nothing to Chip, I don’t know why. Maybe it just felt too delicious, knowing what the kid was really capable of. That night we rolled up in them blankets and lay ourselves out on Lilah’s living room floor. Everyone but the kid. For some damn reason he gotten the couch. But no sooner he fall asleep than Chip rose up and dragged Hiero off that sofa by one ankle. The kid hit the floor like a sack of vegetables. Yawning, Chip sprawled out there hisself.
Hiero call over at me. He was standing, clutching his blankets to his belly. ‘You goin let him do that, Sid?’ he complained. ‘It ain’t right. You goin let him just take the couch?’
‘Eat it up, kid,’ I said coldly. ‘Eat it up and try not to choke on it.’
Chip cackled to hisself. ‘You young yet, kid.’ You could almost hear him smiling in the darkness. ‘You can take the stiffness. I only got one bone can take that kind of stiffness.’
I rolled over onto my back, folded my hands under my neck.
‘Hey, Sid, where’s you sweetheart?’ said Chip. ‘
She
got a sweet old bed.’
‘Shut up, Chip.’
‘Aw, she ain’t home yet,’ Hiero whispered, confidential like. ‘She out paintin the town, brother. Left our boy to his own
devices
.’
‘His five-fingered device, maybe.’
There was headlights cutting up through the window as a taxi pulled past, the cold beams sliding over the ceiling, down the far wall. Some jack was hollering in the street below. I listened for the scrape of Lilah’s key in the lock, feeling something real black rising in me.
‘Or after that sweet old kiss, maybe she got what she needed,’ said Chip, a smile in his voice.
‘Maybe she scared she goin get more of it,’ said Hiero with a squeal.
Chip was laughing so hard he like to wet hisself.
I sat up on one elbow, stared over at the kid’s dark form. ‘You say another word and I’ll shove that fuckin horn down you throat. You hear me? Kid?’
There was a thick silence.
‘You alright, buck?’ said Chip. ‘We just foolin with you.’
I scowled. ‘Don’t you start on nothin. I mean it.’
‘Hell. I ain’t startin. You like this girl, you got to give her space. You keep on her this quick, she goin to lose interest in you, like that.’ Chip snap his damn fingers.
But I was thinking of that soft cool kiss she give me. Of her fingers on my throat. I lay awake a long time, thinking of that. Then I was thinking of old Berlin, and Ernst, and Paul. The kid started snoring soft like.
‘Chip,’ I whispered, after a long silence. ‘You awake?’
‘No.’
‘You ever think about that Boot? The one you stuck?’
He grunted, rolled over in his sheets. ‘What you mean? You mean like, I ever sorry about it?’
‘I don’t know. Yeah.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Never.’
We lay on in silence, Chip finally dropping asleep with a loud snore. I stared at the grand high ceiling, feeling anxious, angry. Goddamn kid.
Lilah, she ain’t come home at all. Not the whole damn night.
Delilah had promised us that Armstrong be set to play in two days. Two days –
hell
. We all known it was a lie.
But it seemed all Paris was waiting too. Anxiety hung over the streets like clothes on a line. When we walked them cobblestones, we seen families huddled in their apartments, crouched over the wireless. Waiters was bent over counters, listening to static. Hell, in those first tender days it seem like everyone was just hunched on up over some radio somewhere, it ain’t mattered where, staying put, like if they moved they might miss the war. First it was the Frogs advancing into the Saar. Then it was the Frogs and the Limeys advancing on the Maginot Line. Then the Krauts was advancing too. Chip, he just shook his damn head. Delilah told rumours of food shortages, but after the darkness of Berlin, all that damn butter and wine in the cafés told us different. It was just fear, we known. Only thing we trusted in all we heard was the static.
Hiero stopped talking in the streets, in the cafés. A damn relief, I thought, the little bastard. Then even the skies drained out. I wished to god I’d just go to sleep and wake up in another reality. Cause I seen what the Krauts was capable of, I ain’t no fool. They like to eat old France down to her crusts. Other days I’d go down to the Seine, lean out over the brown water, think of Paul and Ernst. There was posters going up, shabby gents pasting them along the walls with huge sopping rollers: tots in gas masks, flames, blond mothers herding children into bomb shelters. I watched shop clerks hooking blackout curtains in the windows, and I ain’t felt nothin but nerves.
Cause nothing seemed to happen neither. The Krauts kept on in Poland and the Frogs just waited. It was the beginning of the Phony War, and it was set to drag on through that bleak winter and into spring.
We kept close to Montmartre, to Delilah’s flat, lurking in the Café Coup de Foudre, or drifting aimlessly in the grey streets with our collars turned up. We walked sometimes twenty miles in a day. These was jazz streets, after all. That music done hung its hat here once, drawn near
everyone
to gig. We passed cheap pensions, abandoned flats where jazz men used to swing. Passed a rundown Le Rat Mort, saw the Big Apple’s narrow door nailed up, drifted past old Bricktop’s where Bechet and McKendrick had spilled out into the street, shooting at each other, both drunk as gulls. Along Rue Pigalle and Rue Fontaine only our own echoing footsteps kept time. We grown lean as greyhounds, our bodies all hope and bone.
And then I just wasn’t thinking of Ernst and Paul so much anymore. My mind turned to Armstrong, to playing with him, and to Lilah too. Wasn’t that my fear left me, it was still there. But a jack just worry and worry and worry, then it dies out in him. Guilt don’t enter into it. I guess folk just ain’t built to be faithful to nothing, not even to pain. Not even when it their own.
Delilah and me was set to have dinner this coming night but now I was dreading it. Sure, wasn’t none of my business where she been on her nights away. But, hell. That kiss.