Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [6]
7
MORNING. BACK IN his apartment, a squat discovered with the help of Tony, an old schoolmate from the Université du Golfe de Guinée, his only contact in the French capital when he landed there on that cloudless early morning of May 2, 2005. When his friend had found him a place to stay he had said, “Thanks for the squat, Tony. This way I’ll be ready to decamp on a moment’s notice. Anyway, I’m not going to stay here too long. I’m indebted to you for the squat, my papers, and the contact for the taxi I’m driving.”
His taxi licence was bogus too. But he needed those scraps of paper to be able to circulate according to the standards and dress code of the profession. To share in the Wedding. To belong to the world of those who move and make things happen. The appearances may have been false, but what mattered was that his quest was not, that at the end of the dark nights there would be the reality of his chasing after Sidi’s shadow. For a few days he accompanied Tony, who worked as a deliveryman, on his runs through the city, thinking about his own route, the objective being not to deal out parcels and smiles to customers but to deal only with the road.
His room. Aside from the dampness of the green cracked walls, there was a grimy carpet pocked with a thousand landscapes. Holes. In the corner to the left as you came in there were pots and the hot plate, a tiny metal square with a heating element in the middle. Between the left corner and the right corner stood the radiator, which had never given off the slightest ray of heat. In the right corner was three-quarters of what had been a sink, where water still flowed, miraculously. The brass faucet poured out what he needed for cooking and drinking. And for shaving when he woke. On the wall above the sink hung a tiny blue cabinet. Opposite the kitchen utensils, the dead radiator, and the three-quarters of a sink was a mattress so ridiculously small for a man his size that he had had to extend it with his old valise, but even then his feet hung over the edge and threatened to punch a hole in the wall. His feet touched the wall, pressed against it, which was why Askia slept curled up on his side as if inside a belly. He was inside the cold, damp, dirty belly of an attic in Lutetia. Facing the front door, between the bed and the kitchen sink, was a window that overlooked his table, which consisted of a board placed on trestles that had been salvaged from the sidewalk.
He had a cramped view of the roofs, the chimneys, the stars. And of a skylight in the roof across the way, where he could make out the familiar muzzle of a dog that he did not like very much. A mutt that resembled the one belonging to Old Man Lem, which he would torture back then at the garbage dump in Trois-Collines. The dog, he recalled, was called Pontos, and he would pitch stones at it, together with his playmates, cruel children, at the most beautiful of all wedding celebrations.
8
HE REMEMBERED. The night his mother had made another of her strange pronouncements: “It must be a few months now that we have lived in this rotten district, my son. It must be a few seasons now since the muezzin’s voice last resounded on our roof. Well, what you might call a roof. Months since we last prayed. We have always prayed in our family. But I see that nowhere here is there anything that could be called a mosque.”
And the following day his mother had taken him through the rainy morning to the only Christian church in their shantytown. “The Prophet or Christ — what difference does it make to you, my son? One must still offer