Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [26]
For a solid week they rested by the roadside. His mother, Kadia Saran, sold her medicinal roots and they were able to buy food. The terrible harmattan of 1967 was blowing itself out, its cutting edge growing duller on the skin. So they pushed on towards the plateaus, the centre of the new country that was to become theirs, and arrived in a village where the hospitality with which they were received surprised them. Askia thought the reason they had been shunned along the way was because those they encountered hadn’t much to offer strangers, or because the strangers to whom they had offered shelter and yams turned into outright thieves after nightfall. But he would never comprehend the reason for their exodus. Perhaps the cause was not the sparse rainfall or the swarms of locusts, as he had supposed. Instead it may have been what his mother mentioned one day. A matter of humiliation, according to the mysterious words she alone knew how to wield. She said, without elaborating, that his father, a Songhai prince, had been humiliated by his own people. Or possibly it was that he had wanted to avoid humiliation. Why? His mother, closing the chapter, said, “Such things are best forgotten, Askia.”
In the village of the plateaus they were given shelter by Chief Gokoli. An abandoned hut at the entrance of the community, near the perimeter of an old cemetery with crumbling tombstones. An unhoped-for refuge after the Sahel and the roads of flight. They did not go out for three days, but the chief had fruit and boiled yams brought to them. Three days in the adobe hut. And when on the fourth day they walked down the main road of the village, they were called “Dirty Feet.” It was said they had trekked over many roads from the Sahel. The feet of the man in the turban and his family were caked with dirt and bleached by the mud and dust of all the roads they had tramped over. They had been subjected to heatwaves, rains, the monsoon, and the harmattan. It was the harmattan that was to blame for their cracked heels, their parched, creased skin. And in the creases there was dirt, a mixture of sweat and earth. The voices on the main street whispered:
“Can it be that their feet are dirty because they could not stop walking?”
“Well, they were able to stop, as you can see.”
“They’ve stopped in our village!”
“Because they can’t or won’t go any farther.”
“Farther is the coast, the sea.”
“And amidst the waves there’s a malevolent god who ensnares gullible souls with an enticing call to voyage. His name is Pontos.”
“A call.”
“Enticing.”
“Over there, across the ocean, it will be like the Kingdom of Heaven. You will live in a palace that looks out onto everlasting pleasures. To speak in more practical terms, you will no longer be hungry.”
“A call.”
“Alluring.”
“And when the gullible creatures embark on the waves, the divinity of the seas devours them.”
“These people are not gullible.”
30
AT THE BISTRO he did not drink. He waited for Petite-Guinée, who had promised to take him to Sidi’s building. He leaned against the counter, not wanting to sit down and yield to the temptation of a drink. Or cajole the barman so that he would play Miles Davis again for him. Or try to follow the notes as they rose towards the ceiling through the whorls floating up from the smoky corner of a pair of lips. Or ask for another drink to drive the first one deeper into the maze of his doubts. He did not want to drink at all, because on this night he had to remain absolutely clear-headed.
Petite-Guinée came out of his cellar through the hatch located behind the bar. He was wearing a leather jacket and a grey cap. They took the metro. Fifteen minutes later they emerged from the belly of Lutetia in front of Sidi’s building. Petite-Guinée glanced around quickly, waited a few moments, then headed straight towards the entrance of the building. Askia stayed by the metro staircase. Petite-Guinée pulled a tool from his pocket and began to work the lock of the makeshift door