Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [14]
Later someone knocked at the door. He opened. The man stood on the threshold of his room. Askia raised his eyes from the gumboots to the massive face. Black eyeglasses. He was easily six feet tall. Traces of dirt on his dark sweater. In his hands, an iron bar. His skull was shaven. Askia cleared his throat.
“What can I do for you, sir? Are you looking for someone?”
“I’ve come to help you.”
“Help me?”
“To leave the country. You have to get out.”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“We don’t like you hanging about here. It’s a sanitation issue.”
“Might I point out that there are stains on your sweater? It could be oil or ketchup or some other sauce, possibly some vomit as well. There’s something vile about it.”
“I’ve come to help you. You wouldn’t want me to use my iron bar, would you? Isn’t that right? You wouldn’t want that, huh?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Well, then, I guess he’s not here. Maybe you’d have better luck in Zanzibar, Goma, or Lomé, huh? One of those towns in the ass of the world? You’re not welcome here.”
He woke up sweating. When he opened the window, the neighbour’s dog was there across the way, immutable on the screen of the windowpane. Eventually he had started referring to him as Pontos, like Old Man Lem’s dog. The one he and his buddies at the garbage dump in Trois-Collines had battered with iron bars one night because they wanted to spice up their games a little, because they had grown weary of stoning that hated mutt every day.
16
THREE DAYS LATER he parked in front of a dilapidated, deserted building. There were families living on every floor. He climbed the stairs to the last floor, the sixth, just behind Olia. There were no apartments up there. A large room, the walls covered with frescos, images of cities with colonnades, towers, walls rising out of clay earth. Depictions of battles: archers bending their bows, glittering blades cutting into a cloudless sky, blood-soaked savannahs. Street scenes as well: a crowd clustered around a kora player singing of a victory, no way of knowing which one. And below each picture was the name of a city or region: Timbuktu, Gao, Djenné, Oualata, Fouta-Toro, Dedri, Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Agadez. It was a beautiful mural, and even though there were a few dates providing some context — Cairo 1496, Mecca 1497, Agadez 1515, the Sahel 1516 — he would have liked to understand more.
The wind blew into the vast loft through the smashed shutters. The daylight heightened the colours of the frescos. Olia was calm. She scanned the room. Askia thought she had class, this girl from Opalchenska. Grace and tranquility. Opalchenska, the neighbourhood in Sofia where she had grown up. She told him that the man in the turban, Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed, had lived here and had slept at the foot of the mural. It was here that Sidi had sat for her. That was ten years ago, a short time after she arrived in the city, when she was prowling around the recesses of Paris with her Leica, hunting for unusual images. The frescos, Sidi had said, recounted the story of the Songhai Empire and its king, Askia Mohammed. It showed the cities he had conquered and those he had passed through during his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1497. The man in the turban was not the one who had painted the mural. He had said, “No one knows who the artist was. But the main thing is that it exists.”
Askia studied Olia’s profile. Hard to say how old she was. But she couldn’t be very young if indeed she had encountered Sidi ten years earlier. Her slenderness and the childlike