Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [7]
He remembered the animation of the throng of worshippers. The songs and the biblical text read by the pastor. Or the priest. What difference does it make? The text. Matthew 22:1–13: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son, And sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come . . . So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests. And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Later he had asked his mother, “What’s a wedding garment?”
“New, clean clothes.”
“What’s a wedding?”
“A celebration with new, clean clothes.”
“And with people too?”
“With clean, nice-looking people in new, clean clothes.”
“Will we be invited to the Wedding some day?”
“Possibly. But many people are never invited.”
“Why?”
“Because of the clothes.”
“And what happens to them when they aren’t invited? They die?”
“Sometimes.”
“Of what?”
“Of the cold. Or the sun. Of failure too.”
9
THEY HAD ALL run aground on this square in the middle of the city, like a derelict rotting in the port of his childhood. Faces that Askia had met here, on the plaza in front of the Centre Pompidou. Intractable. Immortal mugs. That’s how he described them. Adventurers, aimless runners, another incarnation of failure. A few such disreputable profiles were loitering in the agora: Lim, the portraitist who had fled Beijing in 1989; Kérim, with his slacker’s muzzle, his background, and the roads he’d travelled well hidden inside his jacket; Big Joe from Marie-Galante, a municipal worker, in his green street-sweeper’s uniform; Camille the whore in her skirt slit a thousand times on the front and sides, Camille swallowing bellyfuls of Lutetian flesh, Venus of the crossroads of their desires, her sex proffered to the city of a thousand lanterns. He had been here long enough to get to know them, having often come to stroll around this place where, as Tony had informed him a short while after his arrival in the capital, figures and shadows came to mope from every pole of our old planet: the pilgrims, the runaways, the curious, the unsatisfied, all the souls fated to spin their wheels in the direction of infinity. That is what brought him to the square — the hope of bumping into Sidi in the infinity of his flight, with or without the turban, which was surely worn out from all the winds he had faced.
On the square were all the others as well, those whom Askia did not know by name: the postcard hawkers, the police officers, the high school kids, the lonely grandmothers whose husbands rested in Père-Lachaise.
There was the museum, all colour and metal; the plaza, meeting place of the hour of exodus, filled with peddlers, vendors of odds and ends, knick-knacks, faces familiar or obscure, pretty little doll faces, girls stepping through the doors of the museum and its library at seven p.m., young ladies, their arms perennially laden with heavy books. At seven p.m. the heavy books spilled onto the pavement when they crossed the threshold of the library, and they would bend down to collect them. They squatted down as if for love, knees bent, and Askia could see their waists and the slenderness of their hips. Once a girl was holding a thick tome. It slipped out of her hands and lay unscathed on the square, and when Askia rushed