Eddie Signwriter (33 page)

They gather up the cut stems and the discarded flowers, the stray leaves and ribbon threads in sheets of newspaper.

Madame tells them they should sleep there tonight if they’d like, in light of the lateness of the hour.

Bernadette doesn’t say anything. She waits for Kwasi.

“No,” he says, “it’s good. But thanks. It’s a short walk home.”

“Very well,” Madame says.

Kwasi and Bernadette head out into the night.

It’s chilly now. There are no cars on the street. The shadows of branches sway in the light cast by the shopfronts and the street lights.

They hold hands.

Bernadette asks him if he’s all right.

He says that he is. He feels fine.

“Why did you come?” he asks a block later.

She says, “I missed you.”

He squeezes her hand, and laughs the short laugh he did earlier in the shop.

He doesn’t press her any further.

She says, “I love you, Kwasi.”

These are not words they have ever used before, but they don’t feel foreign or difficult at all.

He says, “I know it.”

They both stare ahead, neither looking at the other.

He says, “I love you, too.”

They carry on in silence, like they’re taking their time getting used to the feel of it.

The door to the apartment building is now only a few steps away.

She says, “Kwasi?”

He says yes.

She says, “I can’t help wanting to ask you.”

“What?”

She says, “If I ask you to ask me to marry you, will you?”

It’s only the sound of their feet walking and the wind in the branches.

“Why?” he says

“Because sometimes you just have to say things to make them exist.”

They stop.

She comes up against him, her head on his chest.

He says, “Everything?”

She says, “Not everything. But this thing.”

She looks down the road, towards the glow of the city. A lone car swings round the distant circle, then accelerates away. A small
mechanical pavement sweeper is making its way up the street, grinding along like a slow olive-green bug.

“All right,” he says.

She feels his arms strengthen around her.

“Then do it,” she says.

He says, “Bernadette Mary Luyundula, will you marry me?”

He can feel the fuzziness of her hair on his chin.

A small sound comes out of her, half-breath, like an exclamation of approval. She says, “I tell you I love you and five seconds later you ask me to marry you?”

She can’t see his face, but she knows the expression on it without having to.

“Such a tricky girl,” he says, his voice smiling.

She pulls a little out of his embrace and looks at him. She says, “Fine, but never forget it was you who asked.”

“You haven’t answered,” he says.

“Sure, I’ll marry you,” she says.

“Then I won’t forget it,” he says.

Now she gets on her tiptoes and she kisses him, and they stand in the entrance like that, until the mechanical street sweeper has almost passed them. A middle-aged guy with a tired expression on his face sits at its wheel, slouched. It must be a dull job.

“Good evening,” the man says as he passes them.

“Good evening,” they respond.

Then Kwasi opens the door to the apartment building with his key, and lets Bernadette in. He steps through the doorway himself, looks briefly over the empty street, then lets the door close shut behind him.

When they wake up the next morning it is late. The sheets are all undone because they didn’t make up the sofa bed properly and before they fell asleep they made love and whenever they make love the sheets come undone, especially the ones that are too small for the futon. Bernadette, who has woken up on the coarse material of the bare mattress, pushes the heavy body of Kwasi over until he
moves up and she can slip in beside him onto the sheet. They lie in the corner of the bed, against the wall, not asleep, but for a long time not talking.

Why is he so quiet?

Just because he’s waking up.

He hasn’t changed his mind about what he asked the night before?

He tells her that he hasn’t, and kisses her and then they make love again, and she does know that he hasn’t changed his mind.

Afterwards he gets up to fix them coffee and something to eat. She watches him as he walks around naked, going from the fridge to the hob where he boils the water, forages in the cupboards for bread and cans, and in the drawers for a can opener.

She thinks suddenly how funny it is to watch this naked man walking around, strong and big, with his penis which is still not down yet bumping into the counter as he works on the coffee jar. She wants to laugh at how totally naked he is, with happiness, but also at the extraordinariness of it—such a large human being, covered in muscles, strong in the way that men are built strong, but in fact he’s just a grown-up version of the small naked child you see running around with unconscious happiness, whether it’s in a slum in Accra or the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Then she does laugh.

What’s so funny?

She only tells him it’s because his penis is bumping into things.

He looks down at it, then comes back to bed with the meal.

They eat a stale croissant and some crackers and yoghurt with coffee.

He tells her that the only thing he regrets about last night’s conversation is that he didn’t ask first.

Was he going to ask anyway?

Maybe not then, but eventually it would have come to that, he tells her; at least he was already in the state of mind that gets a person to that point.

She considers his words.

“But you did ask me first,” she tells him, and has he forgotten already what she said? Does she have to remind him again?

No, she doesn’t, he says, letting her have her way.

That evening, down in the Refuge, the Saturday gathering turns into a party to celebrate their engagement. Telephone calls are made to invite more people than can usually be accommodated in a sitting.

The guests bring pots of food wrapped up in paper bags. The Christians among them bring more alcohol. They bring cakes and fruit. They bring additional tapes of music to be played.

Madame brings down from the shop an extra flower arrangement that they’d made by mistake the night before, but which she only discovered when the delivery van arrived in the morning.

“If it’s good enough for the weddings of Neuilly it’s good enough for us,” she declares, placing it in the middle of the table at which Bernadette and Kwasi are sitting, surrounded by their friends of the Refuge community.

Everyone applauds.

The party continues into the night. The time at which people must leave to catch the last metro approaches, then passes. Nobody notices. People should stay as long as they like, Madame declares eventually. She will close the shop on Sunday and people can sleep on the floor all day.

The celebrations continue until just before sunup, when the
quartier
begins to rise and greater care is needed. Madame closes the shutters over the windows upstairs, and tablecloths are removed from the tables and bundled up to make pillows and the guests drift up into the shop to find places to sleep on chairs or benches or on the mosaic floor among the buckets of flowers, the flower pots, the statues, and the fountains.

Although they can easily walk back to their apartment, Bernadette and Kwasi decide to stay with the guests. They occupy a deep wicker bench on which customers often sit and wait while orders are made up, which with two large Indonesian-print cushions makes a comfortable bed. They drift in and out of sleep, talk, exchange and laugh at stupid comments that in the moment seem hilarious, sleep again.

A little after midday Kwasi wakes up. Bernadette’s head is on his chest. He props up his own head on his forearm by holding the side strut of the bench behind his neck. From downstairs he can hear the
sound of people clearing up, low conversation, laughter. From outside comes the sound of streets—Sunday traffic, footfalls, the sound of dogs, car horns, passing pavement conversations, music from the bistro three doors down.

With his head slightly raised he has a view of the foyer entrance of the shop. The light comes in through the shutters, casting white bars over the floor.

He is reminded suddenly of his train journey from Bamako, now so long ago—almost a year. Couples are asleep in bundles, individuals curled up on their own covered in jackets or tablecloths. It seems that nobody has left yet.

But sometime they will leave. Today, in a few hours. And later? Forever. Time, the police, will scatter them all.

He thinks,
Where will this all end?

A small happy life, here one day, and then gone in a flurry, with nothing left but furniture to pawn?

Can anyone tell him different?

Mamadou? What would Mamadou say now? Something about fearing the dark? No, he’d have nothing to say. His voice is already scattered.

And Bernadette? That marrying her will get him papers?

He pulls his hand from behind his neck and lays his head down on the bench and looks up at the ceiling.

He sees above him the identical depictions of Botticelli’s Zephyr and Aura that Madame had him paint in the corners, blowing into the room, with their gold-pierced ears, their cornrows and braids.

The sight of those defiant figures suddenly fills him with shame at his easy acquiescence.

These are not new questions he is asking. He has asked them all his life.

Does he still have nothing to say after leaving his life behind and traveling such a distance?

He hears his own voice in his head asking the questions—the same voice from his last weeks in Tudu, that spoke to him in his painting shed, and accompanied him to Farrar Street and told him how everyone
you meet on your way is an angel, and which he now knows to be true: Big Henry, Adams, Mamadou, Bernadette.

At that moment he feels Bernadette stirring against him.

“What’s going on up there?” she says. She is awake, must have been a while, and is watching him looking at the roof.

He begins to explain to her the figures on the ceiling.

Upstairs
, she means, and she taps him on his forehead with her finger.

“Nothing,” he says after a while, “just listening.”

“To what?”

To what? To the voices in his head.

“Oh,” she says. “Any particularly witty conversation? Anybody say anything interesting?”

“One person,” he says.

And what does he say?

He tells him, this person, that you never really have anything except if you choose it yourself.

“Yes,” she says quietly.

“And not just once. You have to carry on choosing every day.”

Yes.

And that if nothing can be taken away from you it doesn’t mean you’re free.

No.

It just means you have nothing.

Yes.

“I should meet him, this wise person,” she says.

“You have,” he says.

She has? “When?” she asks.

He smiles.

She knows she shouldn’t have to ask anymore.

I
t
HAS JUST
gone summer. A shipment of the last of the season’s tulips has just come in. Madame has buckets of them spread out over the counter.

One variety among them she has never seen before, that must have got into her order by mistake. They still have their leaves, like thick blades of grass, from which the stems curve upwards into deep purple petals, not rounded but ragged and pointy and lined with an almost fluorescent yellow trim, just slightly parting around their stamens in a way that makes Madame want to giggle, and as she does she looks up from the table and out of the shop window.

A man is standing on the pavement opposite, a piece of notepaper in one hand, a plastic bag in the other. She thinks little of him, but for the fact that he must be foreign, which she tells immediately from his clothes—an old checked jacket cut like her father used to wear, with wide lapels, and too hot for the season.

Then the bell above the door is disturbed into music. A client comes in, who is about to make an order, but then notices the purple
tulips on the table among the more common blooms. Conversation is diverted from the order.

The man, from outside the shop, sees the florist pick up a purple flower by the stem between two fingers, as if it were some strange creature. He sees her laughing silently from behind the glass with her customer, a distinguished woman with dark green clothes and gray hair pinned up in a bun like a small conch on the back of her head.

“I can sell them to you for a good price,” Madame is saying to her customer inside the shop.

“I could not,” the customer replies archly, “not with teenage daughters in the house.”

The man, from outside the shop, watches the florist and her client transact their business. Then the client leaves. There appears to be nobody else in the shop. Possibly he has the wrong address. He looks at the paper in his hand, looks at the number above the door. No, it is correct. He puts the paper into his pocket and waits.