Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [21]
He started imagining that Sidi had returned to Paris. He pictured his sire in the metro, pushing a shopping cart filled with his belongings and food, some stew from the food bank where he had made a stop. People were bothered by the smell, turned heads in his direction, then uttered obscenities, but some smiled too because he was funny, this man in the metro pushing a shopping cart filled with his belongings and some stew. They scrutinized his long silhouette from the immaculate turban to the oddly clean bare feet. Askia could not say why he imagined Sidi barefoot. Then he saw him on the street, walking towards his loft, the land of the frescos.
They went down ten steps to the platform. Their train would be there in about ten minutes. Askia thought back to his city on the shores of the Atlantic, a station where trains no longer stopped because there were no tracks left. On the board bolted to the concrete wall above their heads, illuminated letters and numbers indicated the stations remaining before their stop: Luxembourg, Port-Royal, Denfert-Rochereau. Seeing the series of names, Olia was thinking out loud of another series, her metro line, the stations she went through before getting off at Opalchenska: Vardar, Konstantin, Velichkov. So Askia in turn was prompted to silently perform the same mental gymnastics. He saw in a flash the green minibuses of his coastal city, the bus ride that invariably cost fifty francs, the ride to Kodjoviakopé, which first had to go through Bè, Amoutivé, Hanoukopé, Nyékonakpoé . . .
The train finally arrived amid the plaintive tune of its brakes. They chose car number seven because Olia was superstitious. She believed that nothing could happen to her in car number seven, that no evil spirit would slow their ride in car number seven, because the music had whispered to her, Take car number seven, Olia . . . She was reassured. She was not afraid.
23
THEY WERE frightened when they came out on the sidewalk in front of the old building. Horrified by the apocalyptic scene of flames licking at the windows, making the panes explode and crash in splinters on the asphalt below with the sound of tolling bells, tolling for the bodies inside the building, bodies letting out earth- and soul-shattering cries, bodies falling together with the glass onto the cold asphalt.
The fire had broken out on the ground floor. From there it climbed to the upper floors, engulfing, scorching, charring the damp, porous, cracked walls. Driven by a merciless wind, it seared the walls and the people. No part of the building was spared. The whole thing was ablaze. They stood rooted before the reddening structure, the dead windowpanes at their feet. Wailing. Moaning. The last signs of life, of a clinging to hope. On the ledge of an overheated window, a pair of feet testing the void for a place to stand. But the void was powerless and had nothing to offer the feet but its inability to bear them. The hands gripping the window frame let go, and that was all. Askia started for the front door of the building. Olia grabbed his sleeve and held him back. It would do no good, she said, the cries could hardly be heard anymore, and what that meant was obvious. Besides, sirens were approaching and the red of the fire trucks. The firefighters of Lutetia coming to the rescue of the poor creatures trapped in the ruins of the smoking tomb. Olia shouted that the firemen were going to collect the remains and harvest the writing of the dead, the burnt letters on the wall.
The smell of burning was the same — O horrific childhood! — as what he and his confederates had smelled that time at the garbage dump