Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [15]
17
BACK AT THE apartment at 102, rue Auguste-Comte, Askia wanted Olia to describe the photo session with the turban. If Sidi had in fact stepped in front of her lens and had actually agreed to stop for a while within the Leica’s field of vision, he who was cursed with endless migration. The girl believed that Sidi had been willing to pose for her because he was not afraid that the lens would throw light on his soul and his many lives. And because he hoped the lens would fix him forever on paper and allow him to cast off the curse.
Askia returned later that afternoon. Her smile greeted him. They went directly upstairs to the mezzanine because she wanted to show it to him. The wooden steps creaked under their weight. When they reached the top, there were two doors on the landing. She opened the one on the right, which led to a workshop-bedroom. It was actually another, smaller mezzanine built a metre and a half below the ceiling. A raised platform, Olia’s bunk. Under the bunk, the floor. In the wall on the left-hand side was a closet that must have contained clothes and odds and ends, as well as books, some of which were scattered around the room. Boxes of film, lenses, pictures, or rather picture frames, arranged in a corner next to a spotlight mounted on a stand. And in the opposite corner stood a matching spotlight, as if in dialogue. Between them the walls were naked, empty, blank. There was a screen with a rather high barstool front and centre. Two mirrors, one oval, the other square, were positioned near the spotlight, alongside a large, rectangular table that occupied the whole partition opposite the platform. The table was covered with miscellaneous items: two crates, a ruler, pliers, a length of string, a lamp, thumbtacks, another box of film, a few gizmos that Askia could not identify, a bottle containing some brown liquid, and, at the far end, a teapot.
They drank the tea without speaking. Olia raised her eyes from the cup and squinted. She described how Sidi Ben Sylla had posed for her in front of the mural in the deserted loft. She had asked him to sit on a high stool against the background of colours, figures, words, and dates that told the history of the Songhai. He complied. She triggered the camera, shooting without a flash. She paused, pulled the spotlights from the corner of the room where she had placed them, and directed them at his face. It was harsh lighting. Sidi turned his head away. She told him to sit in profile, looking first in one direction and then the other, in full face, with his back to her, in profile again, first with his face lifted towards an invisible sky and then lowered towards a hypothetical river at the foot of the stool. Sidi was calm. Olia continued to shoot, capturing the immaculate strip of cloth above the broad forehead, the regular features of the face chiselled out of dry wood, the straight nose, the high temples, and the supple bearded chin. The clicks of the Leica pelted down on Sidi’s turban.
Following the session, her strange model appeared sad. He let out a sigh before continuing. “You know, I’ve been on the move so much I’ve lost a few addresses. If I had them I would ask you to send a photo to my uncle Sidi Barouck in Nouadhibou, another to my brother Saidou, who stayed behind in Zinder, and finally one to my old aunt, who has probably passed away, in Médine, near Kayes.”
“I’m very sorry, Sidi.”
For Olia it was impossible to forget Sidi’s gestures and words that day, even though ten years had gone by. His voice still resonated in her head.
18
THEY WENT BACK down to the living room and Olia became very serious. She took up her usual lotus position in front of the low table, on which they had set their cups of tea. “The man with the turban,” she said, “stirred up something inside of me. An emotion that brought another one back to me. The past.”
The past.