Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [39]
The skinhead stopped running. Askia sensed this because no more footsteps echoed on the asphalt. The others must have followed his lead, and Askia thought he could finish reading the letter.
Askia, there is no constant in all of this. What our lives consist of is nothing but the gallery walls, the book pages where we sometimes happen to place a few pictures, an absurd story, while we wait for the echo, the response, while we hope to finally draw the line that threads us, others, the world together. Yet you see that the thread that could lead you back to the country you believe was your starting point and might hold out a more accurate image of who you are — that thread, you realize, has snapped. Your father’s face, which I fixed on my rolls of film, has ultimately become dislocated, has broken up. There may be nothing left of him to salvage, so I think the time, the nighttime, has come to put an end to the flight.
45
AT THE END of the night was Petite-Guinée’s bistro. The long street had exhausted the black jackets. Behind the counter the barman was cleaning glasses.
“Whisky, Askia? Sorry, but I’ve already put away the Miles discs. You’ll have to drink your whisky solo and neat. Without Miles.”
“. . .”
He asked after Petite-Guinée. The barman said he had not seen the old man very much in the past few days. He stole in like a burglar, served himself a drink at the bar, and then disappeared into the belly of the cellar. He didn’t feel like surfacing anymore. He didn’t bother with the bistro anymore, and the barman had taken on duties that weren’t usually his: put in the orders, pay the bills, take reservations. He said he was worried about the boss, who had become a ghost.
Askia went behind the bar and took the stairs leading down to his friend’s studio. The damp walls made him shiver. He stood in front of the cellar. Pushed at the door without knocking. He had never knocked on Petite-Guinée’s door. He had always entered into the ex-mercenary’s world as if it were his own house.
The door stayed shut. Locked. Petite-Guinée did not want to be disturbed. Askia remained on the steps. There were noises coming from the bar. Voices, a tone, the laugh of the skinhead who had followed him longer than the others. More voices . . . He did not go back up to the bar. He went down, and found himself in front of that other door, the one that opened into the cubbyhole that Petite-Guinée called his land of the depths. Walls, a universe, the large table on which he had spread out his souvenirs of Biafra, the photos, faces, smiles of the kids that he had latched on to as a final homeland.
Askia pushed the door. It swung open. The luminous strip of the fluorescent fixture hung from the ceiling. On the big dining table was Petite-Guinée, curled up, with a bottle in the hollow between his bent abdomen and folded knees, barefoot, one arm hidden under his side, the other rigid against the exposed side of his trunk. His frozen fingers had dropped a photograph next to his thigh. Askia stepped closer, picked up the photo: two children, a girl and a boy, laughing in a countryside. The note on the back read: Biafra 1969. Petite-Guinée had lain down on top of the other portraits, on the little snapshots that reminded him of Africa. Dead. Buried in a landscape, a distant land.
There was mayhem going on upstairs. The black jackets were drinking and smashing up Petite-Guinée’s bar.
46
“WILL YOU finally tell me who Askia is?” Olia had pleaded with her eyes.
And he remembered his parents sighing. “At last!” At last, after the roads and humiliations they had left behind, they had made a little place for themselves in Chief Gokoli’s village during the winter of 1967. His mother, Kadia Saran, sold kola nuts on the steps of the German pastors’ century-old school — the only school there. His father, Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed, cultivated a plot of land in the hills to the east overlooking the village. In the evening he would come home from the fields carrying the machete in his left hand and the hoe on his right shoulder. The