Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [37]
Askia was petrified. He knew what they were, the eguns. Or rather he did not know. The eguns would come on feast days to dance in the sacred forest on the edge of the coastal city where he had grown up, or in the village squares in Porto-Novo and Oyò and the hamlets around Lake Togo. You were not supposed to see what — man or god — was concealed under the cloth or raffia costume. The egun on the wharf was hiding inside this costume, the mask of his exile. He wished to remain wrapped in the cloak of night, to disappear into its folds. He was enraged because someone was following its every move. Under no circumstances would he wish to go back to the Sahel or the shores of a river down there to ask for an explanation from the god Oya Igbalé. To ask why he had been condemned to wander. He stopped dancing, and when Askia went to cross the street to meet him, the egun bolted towards the nearest metro station.
Askia arrived at the entrance to the station, which was closed. No sign of the egun.
43
IN HIS HANDS a strange object, the turban — relic of a time or a being that had been. He would tell Olia that he had found him. He keyed in the entrance code to the girl’s building and found himself face to face with the concierge, who stopped him. “She has gone away, Mademoiselle Olia. She left a letter for you.”
A beautiful night. Laughing stars. His hand was shaking. Standing on the sidewalk in front of his friend’s building, he tried to make sense of her sudden exit. He looked around in every direction, wondering which way the girl from Sofia had gone. There were only a few possibilities: either end of this street, the building behind him, or the gates of the park across the street. He rubbed his eyes and discerned a silhouette in front of him. It resembled the one that had approached him in the parking lot, the night he had decided to end it all at the foot of the pillar.
The silhouette wore the same long coat and a hat. Askia recognized him. He had often noticed this man leaning against the fence of the Jardin du Luxembourg. A few times Askia had heard him ranting to himself. Olia one day said that the man had been coming there for years, repeating the same story, always with exactly the same ending: “I arrived in 1985. From East Berlin. They promised me. They said, ‘Get across the Wall, go to the West, and you’re saved.’ I crossed the Wall. Nothing on the other side. No one. Maybe I should go back in the other direction.”
Olia thought the man was demented. Once, as she walked out of her apartment with her Leica hanging across her shoulder, the man had stepped up and handed her a piece of paper with these words written on it:
And she threw into the camera
Twenty gardens
And the birds of Galilee
And continued searching beyond the sea
For a new meaning to truth.
The man told Olia these were the words of the poet of the narrow land, Mahmoud Darwish. One of the Dirty Feet. He had smiled with his tobacco-yellowed teeth and disappeared into the crowd in the garden.
Askia was expecting the man to trot out the same East Berlin story. He was not shaking so much now, and he went to sit down in a corner to read Olia’s letter. But the man, the silhouette in the long coat, was watching him, his hands covering his mouth. There was smoke rising from his face. The cigarette was burning between his lips. The lighter, which he had not bothered to extinguish, was in his left hand, close to the pocket of his coat, which at any moment could catch fire. The flame danced over the fabric and it seemed that his left side was quivering, twitching as though gripped by an attack, the nerves shuddering under the skin of the arm that held the flame.
It was difficult to see the man’s face in the half-light. A face that must have been sneering — he could hear the snickering. He thought the man was going to tell him his story. The man was a shadow in front of the fence. The shadow raised its right hand to