Dirty Feet (7 page)

THEY WERE
frightened when they came out on the sidewalk in front of the old building. Horrified by the apocalyptic scene of flames licking at the windows, making the panes explode and crash in splinters on the asphalt below with the sound of tolling bells, tolling for the bodies inside the building, bodies letting out earth- and soul-shattering cries, bodies falling together with the glass onto the cold asphalt.

The fire had broken out on the ground floor. From there it climbed to the upper floors, engulfing, scorching, charring the damp, porous, cracked walls. Driven by a merciless wind, it seared the walls and the people. No part of the building was spared. The whole thing was ablaze. They stood rooted before the reddening structure, the dead windowpanes at their feet. Wailing. Moaning. The last signs of life, of a clinging to hope. On the ledge of an overheated window, a pair of feet testing the void for a place to stand. But the void was powerless and had nothing to offer the feet but its inability to bear them. The hands gripping the window frame let go, and that was all. Askia started for the front door of the building. Olia grabbed his sleeve and held him back. It would do no good, she said, the cries could hardly be heard anymore, and what that meant was obvious. Besides, sirens were approaching and the red of the fire trucks. The firefighters of Lutetia coming to the rescue of the poor creatures trapped in the ruins of the smoking tomb. Olia shouted that the firemen were going to collect the remains and harvest the writing of the dead, the burnt letters on the wall.

The smell of burning was the same — O horrific childhood! — as what he and his confederates had smelled that time at the garbage dump in Trois-Collines when they had tried to burn Pontos, Father Lem's dog. Rigo, the cruellest among them, had gone to steal some gasoline at the Texaco station in the business district. After that they had only to wait, because they knew that Pontos would come as usual to get his scraps at the dump, the maternal provider for all of them. And so, before the onset of twilight heavy with the stench of rotting garbage, the dog appeared, muzzle twitching, tail held low. The children fell upon him. With a strength born of despair he freed himself, but they managed to burn his tail. O Pontos, why did those kids hate you so?

THE BUILDING
was burning. In the hearth of the night Olia stood frozen. Perhaps she too was dead, a charcoal statue unable to grasp what was happening, an unhappy piece of work created by that cynical artist, fire. Whose ends were murder and ashes everywhere. In the end, death and ashes. The firemen who eventually came found the end result, and blamed it on the gas raging through the slit throats of the old building's pipes.

Askia saw the sequence of events. The events previous to their arrival on the scene. Sidi lying on the floor beneath the frescos. Before the shock of the fire he had gotten up to look out through the smashed shutters of the loft at the grey facade of the building across the way, a lighted window framing a woman in black who was savouring the pleasure of at last witnessing the apocalypse she had so desired, her feverish eyes riveted on the loft. And below, in the silence of the street, the dark metal ring of a gas outlet where a doddering old man had stopped to warm himself, holding his shopping bags and a doubtful treasure just salvaged from the green garbage bins of the building across the street. He was thinking of the generosity of the trash bins of Lutetia. As green as hope.

The window. When the fire broke out, that was where Sidi was going to escape. Jumping into empty space. But he wanted to take the shopping cart with his belongings, his souvenirs, and some leftover stew. He made an about-face. Stepping in the direction of the cart, he bumped up against a greasy box that was lying there. He fell and struck his head against one of the pillars of the loft. He blacked out, and when he regained consciousness, it was too late. The windows were hung with curtains of flames, the staircase was a furnace. He watched the fire consume the columns, the walls, and the towers painted on the cement. The fire seized hold of the clay fields, the yellow savannah, the horrified people in the frescos, the heart of the cities: Oualata, Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Agadez . . . the skirt of his robe and the mementos in the cart: a photograph, some earth in a small bag, a few coins, a worn-out pair of shoes.

MOMENTS OF
gloom. The strollers on the banks of the Seine were few. Because of the weather. An icy sky. Olia was away, delivering an order to a client who was in a hurry. The start of another day. Askia raised the collar on his jacket. He noticed that there were more creases on the surface of the water. A
bateau-mouche
was approaching. After it had slipped by, a good half-hour elapsed before the water could once again stretch out, a smooth, ironed, tranquil bed. Very soon the wrinkles returned. A police boat patrolling the banks. Because there might be someone careless, or suspicious, a
sans-papiers
who might not be entitled to that spot on the riverbank where he sat freezing, hands quivering, lips too, coughing, hugging his jacket tight to his chest. Askia tried to stand up. How long had he been there motionless, a useless feature in a setting where, on the contrary, everything — people, events — was supposed to move?

Eventually he got to his feet.

He retrieved his taxi at the garage and drove down to the parking lot. He did not have the slightest wish to go back to his squat. Which looked like the building that had burned, a damned rest stop where he had paused to catch his breath. But a place to stop was a trap for people like him. You plant your butt on a riverbank, have a drink, rent a motel room, take a liking to a girl you've met by chance, and before you know it the sky crashes down and consumes you and your vessel, which was only searching for a harbour and about to moor in the belly of that one-night lover. Of this Sidi had surely been aware. He had gone back to die in the trap of that old rest-stop building. Otherwise he would have pushed his shopping cart farther, towards other passages, other landings.

Olia had said that she had seen the man in the turban again, on the train. He had not recognized her. It was on the number four metro line, which runs from Porte d'Orléans to Porte de Clignancourt, the underground thread between the south and the north of the city. He was travelling from the south of the city northward — that was his life: to leave the South of his childhood and trek towards the North of his wanderings. She had followed him.

Askia believed that if he returned to his ghost building, his squat, he would burn and cause others to suffer. He therefore decided to live from now on in the shifting space of his taxicab. He climbed into the driver's seat and tilted it back. He preferred not to lie down in the back seat as some of his colleagues did. He had the feeling that if he did he would be taken somewhere. Naturally. That was the seat meant for passengers, who were to be taken somewhere . . . The past. The Cell.

He lay on his back. An atrocious pain shot up his spine. He turned on his side. His body felt heavy. He experienced something resembling sleep, a weight that pressed down on his eyelids in spite of his discomfort. He was propelled into another sky, another universe, a reality with a door opening onto a streetless city.

HE HAD ON
occasion amused himself by imagining the contours of the streetless city. The contours because, if this city existed, obviously nothing but its contours could be imagined, since it had no streets. It would be a great mass of bricks or concrete where all things would be enclosed: people, animals, objects, projects, plants, all shut inside the grey mass, cloistered in cells for all eternity without any possible view of the outside. The great mass of the streetless city would contain everything — shops, public squares, bars, libraries, churches of every denomination,
filles de joie
, monks, hospitals, cemeteries — everything except a view of the outside and, perhaps, a street through which the inhabitants of the streetless city might escape and spread out over unknown and at times dangerous roads. In his dreams he sometimes lived in the streetless city.

He often went to see Petite-Guinée on nights when he was feeling low. He enjoyed finding himself in this bar, with its decor of hazy nights warmed by the soft light of the lampshades and the barman's unchanging, practised gestures: serving, refilling, clearing away the glasses, rinsing his hands, placing them on the counter, offering a smile to a new customer who had adjusted his itinerary to include the bar.

The barman smiled at him. “What's your pleasure, Askia?”

“Whatever.”

“Which, if I'm not mistaken, means whisky?”

Askia stared at the glass, then drained it in one go. His fingers strolled over the varnished wood of the bar. He tapped on the smooth surface. There was some Miles Davis playing. The notes drifted up from behind the bar. Miles's “Bye Bye, Blackbird” rose like a joyful, translucent requiem.

Petite-Guinée arrived — his small, unobtrusive body, the slowness of his movements, the wrinkles in his smiling face. Askia realized that he had no more than an abstract, fragmentary idea of the book of his friend's life: Born in Montmartre, a happy childhood spent in a choirboy's surplice serving Mass at the Sacré-Coeur, an unhappy adolescence spent with the shame of having a
collabo
as a father, his youth spent as a roving seaman trailing his quest through the ports of old Europe. Adulthood brought him a career as a mercenary, the love of his life dead in the jails of Conakry, the return to Montmartre, dark years, alcohol and depression, a bistro bought with the proceeds from his contracts, old age, art as a way to forget. That was all Askia knew. The rest didn't matter. Petite-Guinée, agile despite his age, perched himself on a nearby stool. Askia gave him an account of the fire at the loft and the past few nights.

THE PARKING
lot. Deserted, dark, cold. He climbed into his cab and pulled his coat tight around his body. Sleep. At least an attempt at sleep. His foot nudging the accelerator. He told himself it would be a blessing to hit the gas and leave. His thoughts turned to Olia. She must be wondering where he was. He tried to conjure her up. Alone, the girl from Sofia, on this very sad, very beautiful night.

He imagined her. Sitting on the sofa, her gaze hovering vacantly over her books of photographs, the posters of her idols on the walls, the cups of coffee she had probably drunk, hoping something new would come up on this dull night spent searching yet again for Sidi's portraits, to the point of exhaustion.

Then he visualized her, the photographer, lying on the sofa with a book over her face to shield her eyes from the light, her feet resting on the box of a pizza that she had had trouble finishing. She had left the lights on because in the dark the zombies would come out to frighten her with their half-burned faces. She could not sleep. Because as soon as she shut her eyes, what she saw was terrifying. Masked heads smashing her door down, ripping the photos of her idols off the living room walls, carrying them off to be burned in a city square. She stood up and tried to stop them. She blocked the way with her thin body, but the masked men took away the pictures of Richard Wright, Ella Fitzgerald, Malcolm X, and the others. They went up to the mezzanine and scoured it until they found Sidi's portraits. They shouted:

“We've got him!”

“It took a while but we've got him!”

“He thought he could hide in the stillness of a few black-and-white pictures!”

He pictured Olia, eyes open, scanning the ceiling the way he would sometimes do. From time to time she heard footsteps on the stairway and hoped it was someone who had come to visit her. But the steps stopped one floor below and she concluded that it was her downstairs neighbour. That maybe none of this was real. That the steps she heard were in her troubled mind, that the turbaned man returning to Paris, asking for lodging, food, and water to wash his feet, was all an invention of hers.

The footsteps stopped. It was not Sidi. No one knocked. In a rage she sent the pizza box flying against the door and went up to the mezzanine. Finally she could not bear it any longer. Disregarding the late hour, she put on her boots, grabbed her coat, and ran out. She hailed a cab and took it to the wreck of the burnt building. She roamed the neighbourhood for a good two hours, walked around the building several times, came back to the front and concentrated on the shutters of the top floor, where the loft was. Hoping for something. An apparition. That the man with the turban would stick out his head and tell her he agreed to another photo session, another attempt to fix his movements in the face of any and all fires. But the stranger was not at the window. So it occurred to her to go to the plazas, the city squares, where a few illegals could always be found loitering. The stranger might be there — alive, burned, or dead.

She flagged down another cab. She found, in the middle of the Beaubourg square, a man. Alone. A countryman, dressed like Sidi. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his coat, which he wore over his boubou, his head was bent, and his eyes studied the pavement like a beaten man. She ran towards him. He turned and looked at her. She was disappointed — this was not the man she sought. Nevertheless, she questioned him:

“Have you seen a turban?”

“. . .”

“I mean Sidi.”

“. . .”

From his coat the man pulled out a long shepherd's knife. No, not a knife, but a crippled hand that he raised above his head.

“The turban, he's dead!”

“You mean Sidi?” she asked.

“Yes, Sidi.”

“How do you know he's dead?”

“Simple deduction. You can't find him. So he's dead.”

BLACK NIGHT
. The dark sheet of the sky. Askia left the parking lot and went for a drive. Over to the dead end where he would routinely stop for a break. Down a long avenue, three or four turns, a big man in a curbside phone booth yelling at the top of his lungs, a cobblestone lane smelling of urine and blind alleys. Blind alleys and muffled noises. It was hard to see ahead of him. A blurred view of black jackets and shaved heads. Busy making a muffled noise. Busy hitting. Kicking someone in the ribs. The sound grew more distinct. A length of steel chain flashing in the cab's headlights. Groans. He revved up his engine. The three men turned around, charged towards the cab, cursing loudly as they ran past. The steel chain striking the trunk.

He stopped. In the dead end, the man by the wall tried to stand up. Then he collapsed again on his right side. His head bloody. Opening one eye, he felt obliged to explain:

“Romania.”

“I'll take you to the hospital.”

“Romania.”

“You're bleeding. I'll . . .”

“No. No hospital.”

“It's not far.”

“No.”

The Rom left him there in the dead end and hobbled away. He was afraid of the hospital, of the questions they might ask there. Or at the police station: “How did you enter the country?”

The Rom, his bloody head. A red ball. As on that maliciously sunny day when he had managed to beat the dog Pontos on the head with a chunk of hard mortar. For weeks it dragged its wound around the garbage dump in Trois-Collines. Askia wanted to give it time to heal before striking again. And Father Lem was never there to protect his dog with the peculiar name, the name of some obscure divinity. An unsettling omen. A sign that the children would soon abandon Trois-Collines for the high seas and adventure. No, it wasn't the dog — it was the dog's name he disliked.

He tried to get some rest. His seat would not tilt back properly. A snag in the release mechanism underneath. He forced it. Nothing. Broken. He decided to change positions, leaving his bum in the driver's seat while dropping his upper body down on the passenger side. He ended up with his face against the glove compartment, his knees against the dashboard, and his feet underneath. An awkward position. Something nagged at his lower back. He tried to think. No use. An idea, just one, hovered in front of his eyes before rooting itself inside him: everything — the city, the blind alley, his cab — was going to blow up. It would start in the belly of the Earth; the pavement would lift up; every component of the street would be reduced to rubble and then propelled into the grey sky. It would be expertly done, with no trace left but the words on the last page:
End of Story.