Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [3]
The tea did him good. The tea and the warmth of this little home. And yet he was afraid. Afraid that the horrific hand bristling with razor-sharp hairs — the hand that lurked in his worst nightmares — might punch a gaping hole through the ceiling and seize him and cast him out of the apartment and into the cold. It was a dread that went back to his childhood.
Olia stood up, affording her guest a view of her outfit, black from head to toe. She crouched in front of the small fireplace built into the wall to the right of the door. She lifted the logs out from the ash, rearranged them, and lit the fire. The flames enveloped the logs, the soot-coated hearth began to glow, the flames rose higher.
3
THE FLAMES AND the question in the girl’s eyes — “Who are you? Who are you?” — kindled a scattering of reluctant images in the haze of Askia’s memories. The outlines of a village, a red dirt road travelled by herdsmen, back there, near Nioro du Sahel. The ground, heated by the rays of a relentless sun, rising towards the thick clouds in a fine dust that stuck to the skin. Nioro. As far back as his memory could take him, it was the point of departure. He must have been five or six years old. Nioro, or a dry patch of land somewhere in the vicinity. The long red road and a bridled donkey led by his father, Sidi, who had sat his only son, Askia, on the animal’s back. Behind the donkey, the father and son, walked the mother, Kadia Saran. On her head a basket of provisions, a bundle, a pouch holding vials with potions, amulets, and root sticks, a noria of remedies against all the ills of time — remedies to which only the herders of the great winds were privy.
All of them moved to the faltering tempo of the donkey, which could trot no faster than their flight over the sloping trails. Of this he was sure: it was there they had set off one opaque night steeped in a complicit silence. And when he hunted through his memory for the reason why they had departed, what emerged was the certainty that it could not have been in search of land for grazing. Because there had been no cattle left for a long while already. Only the donkey had remained, sole survivor of the epidemic that had mowed down their herd. This fact came back to him, and he saw their journey in a different light. A sombre light: the lack of rain in the Sahel, the burnt millet fields, the land covered with lizards through which despair crept in, the empty granaries, the stomachs hollowed out by hunger, and the gazes and prayers fixed on the horizon where the rain would come from.
He thought their departure had been because of that rain and the earth dying under their feet. He recalled those days spent crossing other arid lands, ravaged plains where a few souls hung on, resigned or reckless, full of hope or outright scorn. Scorn because the father, the mother, the son, and the donkey passing by their huts gave off a strange odour. The odour of many unwashed days. The mocking voices on the roadside:
“It’s true we don’t have any water left, but is that any reason to smell so bad?”
“Can it be that the wind’s tongue may not have washed away their filth?”
“It’s true that they are not to blame.”
“They have no water.”
“Still, is anyone entitled to stink like pariahs, like miscreants, like undesirables?”
“Can it be that the sand may have refused to scrub away their dirt?”
“Try to understand. The sand is hot. It’s impossible to cleanse your body with . . .”
“Can it be . . .”
“That they . . .”
“Live on the long road . . .”
“Because the long road is all they have?”
Who are you? Askia read in the photographer’s eyes and camera lens. This was how those few scattered episodes, the starting point of the roads he had forever taken, came back to him.
4
PARIS. A RAW month of February running its monotonous course. His first meeting with the girl. He had forgotten to lock the doors of his taxi. She said, “You must have been sent by