Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [24]
27
THE PARKING lot. Deserted, dark, cold. He climbed into his cab and pulled his coat tight around his body. Sleep. At least an attempt at sleep. His foot nudging the accelerator. He told himself it would be a blessing to hit the gas and leave. His thoughts turned to Olia. She must be wondering where he was. He tried to conjure her up. Alone, the girl from Sofia, on this very sad, very beautiful night.
He imagined her. Sitting on the sofa, her gaze hovering vacantly over her books of photographs, the posters of her idols on the walls, the cups of coffee she had probably drunk, hoping something new would come up on this dull night spent searching yet again for Sidi’s portraits, to the point of exhaustion.
Then he visualized her, the photographer, lying on the sofa with a book over her face to shield her eyes from the light, her feet resting on the box of a pizza that she had had trouble finishing. She had left the lights on because in the dark the zombies would come out to frighten her with their half-burned faces. She could not sleep. Because as soon as she shut her eyes, what she saw was terrifying. Masked heads smashing her door down, ripping the photos of her idols off the living room walls, carrying them off to be burned in a city square. She stood up and tried to stop them. She blocked the way with her thin body, but the masked men took away the pictures of Richard Wright, Ella Fitzgerald, Malcolm X, and the others. They went up to the mezzanine and scoured it until they found Sidi’s portraits. They shouted:
“We’ve got him!”
“It took a while but we’ve got him!”
“He thought he could hide in the stillness of a few black-and-white pictures!”
He pictured Olia, eyes open, scanning the ceiling the way he would sometimes do. From time to time she heard footsteps on the stairway and hoped it was someone who had come to visit her. But the steps stopped one floor below and she concluded that it was her downstairs neighbour. That maybe none of this was real. That the steps she heard were in her troubled mind, that the turbaned man returning to Paris, asking for lodging, food, and water to wash his feet, was all an invention of hers.
The footsteps stopped. It was not Sidi. No one knocked. In a rage she sent the pizza box flying against the door and went up to the mezzanine. Finally she could not bear it any longer. Disregarding the late hour, she put on her boots, grabbed her coat, and ran out. She hailed a cab and took it to the wreck of the burnt building. She roamed the neighbourhood for a good two hours, walked around the building several times, came back to the front and concentrated on the shutters of the top floor, where the loft was. Hoping for something. An apparition. That the man with the turban would stick out his head and tell her he agreed to another photo session, another attempt to fix his movements in the face of any and all fires. But the stranger was not at the window. So it occurred to her to go to the plazas, the city squares, where a few illegals could always be found loitering. The stranger might be there — alive, burned, or dead.
She flagged down another cab. She found, in the middle of the Beaubourg square, a man. Alone. A countryman, dressed like Sidi. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his coat, which he wore over his boubou, his head was bent, and his eyes studied the pavement like a beaten man. She ran towards him. He turned and looked at her. She was disappointed — this was not the man she sought. Nevertheless, she questioned him:
“Have you seen a turban?”
“. . .”
“I mean Sidi.”
“. . .”
From his coat the man pulled out a long shepherd’s knife. No, not a knife, but a crippled hand that he raised above his head.
“The turban, he’s dead!”
“You mean Sidi?” she asked.
“Yes, Sidi.”
“How do you know he’s dead?”
“Simple deduction. You