Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [8]
Sidi, serious and steely-eyed on the book cover, Sidi with a red cotton headdress coiled high over his tall forehead. The rest of the face sharply chiselled out of dry wood, straight nose, sweeping temples, supple bearded chin. Dry wood because the anxious face seemed impossible to soothe. Blurting out his question, he asked the girl where she had found this book with the portrait of a man he took for his father. She stared at him for a while, not understanding, before replying, “You mean the illustration on the cover? It’s a portrait of Askia Mohammed, king of the Songhai Empire from 1492 to 1528. You think he resembles someone you know? Sorry, it’s not who you think. Perhaps you are Songhai yourself? You have something in common with this picture? History is so fascinating, you know. It’s part of us . . .”
Askia felt stupid standing frozen in front of the girl, who finally stepped into the museum on the heels of her delicate shadow.
10
SHE WAS A real pain in the neck. Olia. Askia had met up with her again. Two weeks later. In the same blind alley at Châtelet. Before he finally resolved to go to her apartment to see her. As usual, he was sleeping in the driver’s seat with its back tilted down, waiting for dawn to bring a miserly night to a close. At dawn he could get the early birds. She tapped on the back door as she had the first time. And as he was barely emerging from the fog, she followed through: “Same as before. Rue Auguste-Comte.” He understood. The drive was more relaxed this time around. It was late, Paris was asleep. She gave him her card again, thinking it necessary to add, “You may have lost the other one.” He answered that he would come by her place to see the photos that she had mentioned the time before. The pictures of the man in the turban. Along the way he came to understand that she had a contract for a job at an apartment in the blind alley where he regularly stopped for a break. So it wasn’t purely coincidental. In his mind he had nicknamed her the Blind-Alley Girl.
She was open. Like a road. Askia had stretched out on her sofa. With one arm bent behind his neck, he tried to read the book of the ceiling, as pale as the walls but lined with big wooden beams. He made a game of trying to guess how old they were, those beams extending horizontally above him. They did seem quite old, and possessed of a kind of coarse stylishness, the brown stripes of the wood on the white ceiling. They put him in mind of a ribboned sky, of roads running overhead and on which he drove an imaginary taxi. He quite liked the pattern of the beams, the white walls, the apartment of his blind-alley stranger.
She sat facing him in a lotus position. She probably did this often. A custom. Taking up this position in front of her guests. Her loosened hair somewhat altered her appearance. She looked younger. He sat up too. She wanted him to talk about his travels, to open the psalter of his wanderings. And the obvious thought once again occurred to him: She is crazy. After all, he was a stranger in her house, and in the company of strangers it was best to be wary. It was a refrain he had often heard sitting behind the wheel of his cab. It set the beat of a city that was afraid. She urged him to open up.
“So, these travels of yours. Tell me. Because you, you’re a battered ship lashed by the winds of many voyages.”
“My taxi plunges into the dark streets. That is a voyage, a dark journey.”
She did not understand. She insisted. “What are you talking about? The night is full of lamps. It’s not dark.”
“There are other nights. Which are dark. Which were. The past.”
Still she did not understand. She said, “Yes, a few centuries ago this city was dark at night. The torches did a poor job of lighting the streets of Lutetia. But I find you mysterious. Obscure.”
They drained their coffee without speaking and then she admitted she had not yet found the portraits of the man with the turban. Perhaps, she went on, it was not important anymore to find them. She could do his portrait, a new