Dirty Feet (10 page)

OLIA TOOK THE
remote control, turned on the TV, surfed the channels, turned it off, then on again, surfed, turned it off. She was anxious. She had never lost a piece of her work. Sidi's portraits must surely be somewhere. Still, she began to have doubts, and Askia reminded her that Sidi was a shadow. She sighed, exhausted, laid her head on her friend's shoulder, shut her eyes.

“You ought to go up and get some rest,” he advised.

“My legs are numb. Does it bother you to lend me your shoulder?”

“Shoulders aren't very comfortable.”

She seemed not to hear him anymore. Maybe she was not pretending but was truly weary, drained. Again he spoke to her but received no response. He gave her a little shake. No response, just a murmur and some purring. Finally he decided to carry her upstairs. He lifted her up. She wrapped her arms around his neck and placed her head on his chest. On the fourth step leading to the mezzanine he almost stumbled. He caught himself, instinctively planting his right foot on the next step in front of him, just barely preventing a fall. Otherwise he would have had to pick up the pieces of her brittle body from the floor.

She tightened her grip around his neck. They managed to reach the room. He was obliged to clear a path through the framed pictures strewn over the floor. Then he climbed up the wooden stairway leading to the platform on which the bed stood, a metre below the ceiling. He put her on the bed. Next to the pillow was a balled-up blanket, which he spread over her. She looked very small under the blanket. Her lips murmured something, and Askia heard the words within himself: “I looked in my boxes. He wasn't there. There's nothing in my boxes, no trace of an event or a face that was . . . There's nothing in the boxes, Askia. I searched and I started to put new things in them, a few items. Because we can always leave again if the urge comes back.”

She had spoken with her eyes closed the whole time. Now she was asleep. Askia walked out of the room and went to the bathroom to relieve himself. He looked at the ceiling. Through one of the panes in the skylight he could see a bit of clear, transparent sky, and he wanted to inhale it. He pushed open the skylight. The air chilled his face. He rose up on his tiptoes and contemplated a few roofs pierced by chimneys blowing white smoke into the scene. They were solitary mouths open to the sky, not just to breathe but to swallow, to glean . . . he did not know what exactly. Like the orphaned mouths of the kids in the lanes of his childhood.

He went back down to the living room. To do the same thing as Olia. Sleep a little.

But sleep did not come. He felt hot. He went back up to the bathroom to take a proper shower. Then perhaps he would feel better. He stripped off his clothes and dropped them on top of the laundry hamper. The water did him good. He worked up a thick lather, using the foam to massage the painful areas on his ribs. Then he went back to the living room and turned on the television. The journalist on TF1 spoke quickly. He reported that a man had been found dead in a downtown parking lot. His throat had been slit. A photo of the victim flashed across the screen and Askia recognized Zak, who had come to Paris to be forgotten by the Cell. The journalist described the crime as gruesome because the body had been dismembered. The legs, most conspicuously, had been sawed off, in keeping with some strange ritual. To keep the dead man from running in the afterlife? The Cell did not fool around. The journalist spoke quickly. More news and personalities streamed by on the TV screen.

ASKIA DID NOT
want to remain a character, like the puppet that danced at the command of a busker on the sidewalks of the real city, the downtown area where he would stroll as a teenager. The puppet was called Abuneke, a little man made of scraps of cloth. He would go to see the routine and follow the story of the cloth man. This was something he did when the films at Le Togo Theatre did not seem very appealing. The show was held outdoors in front of the old savings bank, by the side of a road that teemed with life day and night. The puppeteer worked his marionette with nylon strings that were hardly noticeable in the shifting twilight. The man told an ancient story of exodus, the one about the Ewe people's march from Egypt through Oyo in Nigeria to the Gulf of Guinea. The story was conveyed through the mouth and movements of Abuneke: bowing to the crowd, wagging his head, spinning his head all the way around to grab the public's attention, arms flung out in counterpoint to the legs that danced, hopped, wandered around while the arms traced a strange figure in the air — an infinite road — with an invisible baton.

Not to remain a character, an Abuneke bound to genealogy by strings. To become something else, a cold image or — why not? — a statue, frozen in the world of stone. So when he walked through the streets of Paris he made the biblical gesture, turning around in the hope of being turned to stone.

RESTLESS NIGHT
. Dreaming again that he had found Sidi. In Cité Rose. A posh neighbourhood for the nouveau riche, once a shantytown where he had lived with his mother. The slum area had been razed a few years before and its inhabitants forced to leave and find shelter elsewhere, to push farther into the new outlying zones.

He was in the cemetery that lay on the perimeter of Cité Rose. The cemetery: the only place that had survived from the past. Sidi's grave was there, in a corner by the fence that was to the right as you entered. He sat down on the tombstone, at the end where his father's head must be. Facing Sidi, whom he had finally found. He felt no particular emotion. He looked at the dead man lying with his eyes closed in his sepulchre. What were his eyelids shutting out? Was he ashamed? Of what?

The tomb was isolated. There was bare red earth around it. The other sepulchres stood several metres away. Silently. Eventually Sidi opened his eyes and looked at him. He was calm, serene. Guessing the question in his son's gaze, he offered what could be taken as an answer: “I wanted to find my cousin Camara Laye at Aubervilliers. At the Simca factory. When I arrived on that dreary afternoon in the fall of 1971, they told me he was no longer there. Gone. After that I kept moving. It's a passion of mine — the road. Our road. The only one we have.” And he began to laugh. The sepulchre shook. So did the surrounding neighbourhood and the whole city. The other dead grumbled in their resting places: “Sidi, when will you, along with your nomad offspring, leave us in peace? You wouldn't by any chance envy us for being at rest, would you? You can't sleep — we know that. You're always turning.” The sepulchre quaked again. The tombstone moved. Sidi showed him a road map. And ordered him: “Get going, Telemachus! Hit the road! For whatever reason suits you!”

HE THOUGHT
of Zak again, hunted down by the Cell. Zak had been quick to grasp that it was game over, that Paris would not protect him anymore, that he would have to travel farther north, although that would just be a way of delaying the execution. He had harked back to all the people they had murdered in their cabs. And so he had drawn the conclusion that this turn of events was fair, to the point that it was senseless to decamp any farther towards the polar latitudes.

Consequently, Zak had come back to the square of the church where he was in the habit of going around in circles, searching for the way to deliverance. He had sat down on the paving stones right in the middle of the square, stretched out his legs, and placed the flat of his hands on the pavement, like a lover who is reluctant to leave. He knew this was the best way to close the book of his undoing: to behave like a man who wants to stay connected to the stones and smells of a place. To sit there a good part of the day, pretending to abide in the place of his migration. Time passed, nighttime arrived together with a cold wind, a street lamp came on, two men stepped into the square. They dragged him to the parking lot and chopped him up.

That was how Askia pictured Zak's last moments, the final chapter of the book of his friend's flight.

He left the apartment on Rue Auguste-Comte and returned to the parking lot, feeling he had found his solution. He did not get in behind the steering wheel. Instead he sat down with his back leaning against a pillar and waited. Hoping to end like Zak. He unfolded his limbs, stretching his legs out on the cement, stretching his arms out along his thighs. To offer up his body to whatever violence happened to come along. He was not aware of the cold. He would not count on that to kill him. It would be more brutal.

He checked his watch. At least an hour had gone by with him sitting in this position. Nothing had happened. Then an idea occurred to him, one that could speed things up. He got up and ran over to his cab. Rummaged through the glove compartment, where he had carelessly stuffed the money from his last fares. He took the cash and went back to the spot he had chosen for his torture and death. He tossed the money onto his stomach and all around his body. In plain sight. All that was left for him was to hope that a random passerby would take the money and kill him. He would make a show of putting up a fight, of violently resisting his aggressor, who would then have no choice but to act decisively.

At dawn a man arrived. Wearing a long coat and a felt hat. The hat slightly skewed over his left ear. A cigarette hung in his fist. A plume of smoke rose from the cigarette. The man walked with a limp. He looked like a veteran. A veteran of all the crimes he must have committed in the night, a veteran of the life that must have eaten up his leg. He stepped resolutely towards Askia. Askia stayed calm. There was an air of mystery surrounding the man. A magnificent picture: the long coat topped with the felt hat, which bent down, the cigarette smoking in his fist, the whole scene set against the background of an unreal night striped with rows of cars in the parking lot. He advanced. Would soon be touching Askia's feet. A splendid tableau. The only thing missing was a colour, in fact, two colours: the gleam of a blade catching the pale light in the parking lot and the red of the victim's blood.

The man touched Askia's feet. Plunged his hand into a pocket on the right side, froze for an instant, coughed, knelt down, touched the banknotes that rested on his stomach. Askia was ready. As soon as the man made another move, he would jump on him. Again the man coughed. Touched his chest. Askia closed his eyes. He could not see the aggressor. He could smell him. The man spoke: “Can I help you, sir? Would you like me to call the police? Have you been assaulted?”

The man shook his shoulder. Askia opened his eyes. “Everything's fine,” he answered. “I'm an actor. I have to play a role — mine. I'm in training.”

The man uttered a few words that Askia did not catch. He stood up and walked to his cab. Meanwhile the man went back to his Cadillac, which was parked on the far side of the pillar. Askia checked his watch. Five o'clock. Daybreak. It would not happen this time. On another night, maybe in the next movie, he would be killed like Zak. He started to laugh.

IN THE LATE
afternoon he once again found Monsieur Ali of Port Said and his chestnuts. Business had been very slow and he had amused himself all day by making cones and pyramids out of wrapping paper. Dozens of them under a street lamp on Boulevard Saint-Michel. Another night already. Askia had spent the day trying not to think of Zak, telling himself it was better this way, that in any event his colleague could not have hoped for a better end.

He admired the innocence of the old man, who was full of hope, believing as he did that as long as he could sell roasted chestnuts he might be able to save enough money for passage back to Port Said, in which case he would always have his pyramids, his land of paper.

Askia formed a mental image of hope: a crazy man who had found refuge in Paris, dressed in rags, sitting under a street lamp creating a paper homeland to maintain the illusion of having somewhere to live. Henceforward Monsieur Ali inhabited the words of Abu Nuwas, which he recited in the blind alleys of Barbès and on the steps of Montmartre, overlooking the city. At two euros for a cone of chestnuts, he said, if he sold thirty cones he would be able to pay for a Chinese dinner at the Ni Hao on Rue de la Hachette, a night out of the cold in a filthy Clignancourt motel, and a calling card to try, as he had every night for fifty years, to reach a woman at a number in Port Said.

Askia left Monsieur Ali, who in the evening had a few customers to attend to. The alleys of the Latin Quarter were empty and sad, a black cat stood watch at a window, the dark mass of a roof blocked the horizon, and three men in black jackets were whooping it up three blocks down, where the alley melded with the wharves along the Seine. The closer he came, the more he could feel the reverberations of their party.

The three men were pounding on something. A drum sitting on the pavement. With what, Askia could not yet say. The skinheads jumped up, drew a deep breath before landing, and struck. They were using their feet too, and as Askia came closer, the steel studs on their jackets glinted in the night. Then he saw that they were beating the drum with steel bars, but the ritual that had delighted them a few minutes before now seemed to bore them. They stopped giggling. Their jumping diminished, the pavement stirred, the thing they were hitting rose from the ground, and Askia saw the turbaned head above the black jackets. It was white, the head, and for a brief moment it seemed to follow the festive rhythm of the leather jackets. It jerked in the wind, which made the turban fly off, and the skinheads again began to thump with their steel bars.

Askia heard a shriek. The black cat bounded into the lane and ran off towards the wharves. Nothing stirred on the pavement anymore. The three men picked up the body and cast it into the river before going their separate ways. The black cat returned to roll itself in the white cloth left behind by the poor wretch, but then it darted away like a child caught red-handed.