Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [23]
Olia had said that she had seen the man in the turban again, on the train. He had not recognized her. It was on the number four metro line, which runs from Porte d’Orléans to Porte de Clignancourt, the underground thread between the south and the north of the city. He was travelling from the south of the city northward — that was his life: to leave the South of his childhood and trek towards the North of his wanderings. She had followed him.
Askia believed that if he returned to his ghost building, his squat, he would burn and cause others to suffer. He therefore decided to live from now on in the shifting space of his taxicab. He climbed into the driver’s seat and tilted it back. He preferred not to lie down in the back seat as some of his colleagues did. He had the feeling that if he did he would be taken somewhere. Naturally. That was the seat meant for passengers, who were to be taken somewhere . . . The past. The Cell.
He lay on his back. An atrocious pain shot up his spine. He turned on his side. His body felt heavy. He experienced something resembling sleep, a weight that pressed down on his eyelids in spite of his discomfort. He was propelled into another sky, another universe, a reality with a door opening onto a streetless city.
26
HE HAD ON occasion amused himself by imagining the contours of the streetless city. The contours because, if this city existed, obviously nothing but its contours could be imagined, since it had no streets. It would be a great mass of bricks or concrete where all things would be enclosed: people, animals, objects, projects, plants, all shut inside the grey mass, cloistered in cells for all eternity without any possible view of the outside. The great mass of the streetless city would contain everything — shops, public squares, bars, libraries, churches of every denomination, filles de joie, monks, hospitals, cemeteries — everything except a view of the outside and, perhaps, a street through which the inhabitants of the streetless city might escape and spread out over unknown and at times dangerous roads. In his dreams he sometimes lived in the streetless city.
He often went to see Petite-Guinée on nights when he was feeling low. He enjoyed finding himself in this bar, with its decor of hazy nights warmed by the soft light of the lampshades and the barman’s unchanging, practised gestures: serving, refilling, clearing away the glasses, rinsing his hands, placing them on the counter, offering a smile to a new customer who had adjusted his itinerary to include the bar.
The barman smiled at him. “What’s your pleasure, Askia?”
“Whatever.”
“Which, if I’m not mistaken, means whisky?”
Askia stared at the glass, then drained it in one go. His fingers strolled over the varnished wood of the bar. He tapped on the smooth surface. There was some Miles Davis playing. The notes drifted up from behind the bar. Miles’s “Bye Bye, Blackbird” rose like a joyful, translucent requiem.
Petite-Guinée arrived — his small, unobtrusive body, the slowness of his movements, the wrinkles in his smiling face. Askia realized that he had no more than an abstract, fragmentary idea of the book of his friend’s life: Born in Montmartre, a happy childhood spent in a choirboy’s surplice serving Mass at the Sacré-Coeur, an unhappy adolescence spent with the shame of having a collabo as a father, his youth spent as a roving seaman trailing his quest through the ports of old Europe. Adulthood brought him a career as a mercenary, the love of his life dead in the jails of Conakry, the return to Montmartre, dark years, alcohol and depression, a bistro bought with the proceeds from