Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [12]
They ate with gusto. Askia focused his attention on the face of the girl sitting in front of him. She was hungry and savoured her kavarma with a lack of inhibition that pleased him. She did not hold back. She licked her fingers. She was not one of those high-society ladies with affected manners. She was Olia. Askia licked his fingers too. He felt good with this girl in the present tense of his story.
She confided that she wanted to go back. She missed her parents. It had been ten long years. Since she had seen her family, and Sofia. She had set aside enough money to provide for contingencies back home. She had finished building the house where she would live with her parents. In Sofia she would ask forgiveness of Saint Nedelya for having sold her body in the arenas of Lutetia. At first, in 1999. She had arrived in the city with a head full of plans and nothing in her pockets, having depleted all her savings to pay for the weeklong train ride from Sofia to Paris. A matter of survival. While waiting for word from one of the fashion magazines where she had left her CV, she applied for work as a waitress and a cleaning woman, but because of her vagabond gypsy appearance, the doors of the restaurants and homes stayed shut, so the only capital she could count on was her body. Until November 4, 2003, the day the owner of Le Bulgare, where she scrubbed pots and pans for fifty euros a week and a miserable maid’s room in the nineteenth arrondissement, brought her a letter from Orléanne, a magazine interested in her work, in the pictures of anonymous models she had hired for a pittance in the narrow back streets of Sofia. Now all she wanted was to be back in her city, among her family and friends, in the haunts of her childhood. To stroll down the alleys of Borisova, to sit for a while on the front steps of St. Petka Samardshijska. Places that she carried inside her but whose shape she feared would in time be lost to her.
Askia, meanwhile, had no desire to return to his city on the gulf with the Fréau garden where dogs and men had been burned, the edge of the sea and the sadness of the rowers, the Place de l’Indépendance, where freedom had eventually been consumed by the flame held aloft by the statue in the square, the three murky lagoons that reeked of death, the lagoons where his father perhaps had drowned himself to cut short the long trek. So he should have asked himself, What are you doing here, Askia? The father is an excuse. You made him up to account for your tribulations. He had no wish to see the colonial palace and the ruined wharf again, the military camps that occupied the heart and belly of the city where he had grown up.
Olia had listened to him without interrupting, looking at him with an intent stare. He was unaware of how much time had passed. The waiter brought the bill. She wanted to go somewhere else. Askia took her to the Beaubourg plaza, where his friends went about their business.
14
ON THE WAY, he looked at the girl and sensed the question Who are you? coming back into her eyes. He thought that to say and to understand Who he is he would have to go very far into the past, to the curves and edges of those country roads that he had tramped over with his parents after leaving the Sahel. He would have to replay the scenes with the dead trees, the dry brushland, and the silence that had enveloped their migration. His mother would later inform him that it had been during the terrible Sahelian harmattan of 1967. Judging from his birth certificate, dated February 12, 1962, he must have been going on five years old, just as his scattered memories led him to believe.
During the family’s migration, Askia had travelled a good portion of the way on the donkey’s back, but he recalled that his father would occasionally lift him down from the animal, which had