Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [36]
He admired the innocence of the old man, who was full of hope, believing as he did that as long as he could sell roasted chestnuts he might be able to save enough money for passage back to Port Said, in which case he would always have his pyramids, his land of paper.
Askia formed a mental image of hope: a crazy man who had found refuge in Paris, dressed in rags, sitting under a street lamp creating a paper homeland to maintain the illusion of having somewhere to live. Henceforward Monsieur Ali inhabited the words of Abu Nuwas, which he recited in the blind alleys of Barbès and on the steps of Montmartre, overlooking the city. At two euros for a cone of chestnuts, he said, if he sold thirty cones he would be able to pay for a Chinese dinner at the Ni Hao on Rue de la Hachette, a night out of the cold in a filthy Clignancourt motel, and a calling card to try, as he had every night for fifty years, to reach a woman at a number in Port Said.
Askia left Monsieur Ali, who in the evening had a few customers to attend to. The alleys of the Latin Quarter were empty and sad, a black cat stood watch at a window, the dark mass of a roof blocked the horizon, and three men in black jackets were whooping it up three blocks down, where the alley melded with the wharves along the Seine. The closer he came, the more he could feel the reverberations of their party.
The three men were pounding on something. A drum sitting on the pavement. With what, Askia could not yet say. The skinheads jumped up, drew a deep breath before landing, and struck. They were using their feet too, and as Askia came closer, the steel studs on their jackets glinted in the night. Then he saw that they were beating the drum with steel bars, but the ritual that had delighted them a few minutes before now seemed to bore them. They stopped giggling. Their jumping diminished, the pavement stirred, the thing they were hitting rose from the ground, and Askia saw the turbaned head above the black jackets. It was white, the head, and for a brief moment it seemed to follow the festive rhythm of the leather jackets. It jerked in the wind, which made the turban fly off, and the skinheads again began to thump with their steel bars.
Askia heard a shriek. The black cat bounded into the lane and ran off towards the wharves. Nothing stirred on the pavement anymore. The three men picked up the body and cast it into the river before going their separate ways. The black cat returned to roll itself in the white cloth left behind by the poor wretch, but then it darted away like a child caught red-handed.
42
THE BLACK CAT had left him the white cloth as a gift, and he gathered it up off the ground. The surface of the water had gone smooth again, as if to signify that nothing had occurred, that Askia was the sole inventor of the scene he had just witnessed. In his hand the spotless cloth smelled of sweat, of a presence. He could not help sensing a kind of force behind him. Askia wheeled around and saw him on the wharf on the other side of the street.
He was wearing a costume — a collection of variously coloured cloths sewn together to form a robe — while a mask of wood and leather cloaked his head. The wood covered the face, and the leather portion was a hood enveloping the crown and the back of the neck. The robe had a golden sheen and bore the image of a shell on the breast. A luminous aura surrounded the apparition. The feet were invisible inside an ample pair of stockings that comprised the lower part of the costume. He resembled an egun — a ghost. He began to dance, emitting little yelps, spinning around, spreading out the skirt of his costume, hopping, floating the flounces of his robe on the night wind, and most of all rotating on the axis of his body, which he never managed to stabilize, turning as if he were a planet, with starlike sequins sewn