Dirty Feet Read online

  Copyright © 2011 Edem Awumey

  English translation copyright © 2011 Lazer Lederhendler

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2011 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343 Fax 416-363-1017

  www.anansi.ca

  An excerpt from the draft of this translation was previously published in the online journal Carte Blanche.

  The epigraph is from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish titled in English “My father.” The translation is by A. M. Elmessiri and can be found in The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry, collected and translated by A. M. Elmessiri (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1982).

  The excerpt on page 156 is from the poem “Birds Die in Galilee” by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, and can be found in The Music of Human Flesh, a collection of poems by Darwish selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980).

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Awumey, Edem,

  [Pieds sales. English]

  Dirty feet / Edem Awumey ; translated by Lazer Lederhendler.

  Translation of: Les pieds sales.

  eISBN 978-0-77089-044-2

  I. Lederhendler, Lazer. II. Titre. III. Titre: Pieds sales. English.

  PS8609.D45P5313 2011 C843’.6 C2011-902216-8

  Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover photograph: Cosmo Condina/Getty Images

  Text design and typesetting: Alysia Shewchuk

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For Nado and Kéli,

  tender lands

  To Martine Verguet,

  for the sustaining words. — E.A.

  For Izja Lederhendler, my brother, whose lifeline

  traverses many boundaries in time and space. — L.L.

  And my father once said,

  As he was praying on the stones:

  Avert your eyes from the moon

  Beware the sea, and journey not!

  Mahmoud Darwish

  “My Father”

  1

  ASKIA WOULD recount how in her final delirium, his mother had kept on about the letters that Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed, his father, was supposed to have sent from Paris. Along with some photos. Which he had never seen. But then one day Askia went off on the same route as the absent one. He did not leave to find the missing father. He could live with gaps in his genealogy. He left because of a strange thing his mother had said: “For a long time we were on the road, my son. And wherever we went, people called us Dirty Feet. If you go away, you will understand. Why they called us Dirty Feet.”

  Paris. He was standing in front of 102, rue Auguste-Comte that afternoon because three days earlier, in his taxi, a passenger had intimated that she had once photographed Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed. Scrutinizing his face in the rear-view mirror, she had said, “You remind me of someone. A man with a turban who posed for me a few years ago.”

  This was not the first time a passenger had used the you-remind-me-of-someone line on him, just to make conversation. Often enough an exchange of words would turn into a physical exchange, as an antidote to boredom. To the emptiness deep in the skin and the dark night. But that evening the girl had mentioned a turban, a detail echoing the distant words of Kadia Saran, Askia’s mother. Yes, it was the same refrain: “You look like him, Askia,” his mother had said. “Exactly like him. If you wore a turban, it would be almost as if he’d come back. Almost. Because he won’t come back.” He was an adolescent then. More than thirty years had passed. Askia had gone away, though not to confirm his resemblance to the absent father.

  Still, he did want to see the photos, and the girl said that he could, but not right away. She would be away from the capital for one or two weeks, working on a project.

  Askia’s travels had begun because of another of Kadia Saran’s mysterious pronouncements: “Our family is under a curse to depart again and again, to tramp over thousands of roads until we are exhausted or dead. Look at yourself, my son, endlessly wandering through the night in your taxi.” It was hard to understand his mother and her words. All Askia knew was that his line of work obliged him to rove the streets. Yet in his flight across the pavements of the North he wanted to verify whether or not his machinery, programmed for roaming, could stop.

  A dog and its mistress passed in front of him on the sidewalk. He recalled that as a child he would spend his days at the garbage dump in Trois-Collines, the squalid tropical suburb where he had landed with his mother. There he would mingle with dogs that he did not like. In particular the one belonging to old Lem. Its name was Pontos.

  2

  102, RUE AUGUSTE-COMTE. A newly refurbished four-storey building. Askia rang the doorbell. On the ground floor, to the left of the entrance, a window opened. He supposed this was the apartment of the concierge, someone — perhaps an old lady — banished to the desert island of this apartment, stationed there to challenge visitors with a thousand questions and drive away troublemakers. But it was not an old woman who greeted him. A man in his fifties thrust his head out.

  “I have an appointment with Mademoiselle Olia,” Askia said.

  “The full name, please?”

  “Olia.”

  “A given name doesn’t tell me very much.”

  “She has brown hair.”

  “That doesn’t tell me much either. Which floor does she live on? You have an appointment? I wasn’t told anything. Sorry, I can’t help you.”

  And the concierge shut his porthole. Askia lingered on the sidewalk. He was not angry. He simply thought this photographer, the passenger who had promised to show him portraits of his father, had had some fun at his expense. He headed across the street towards the Jardin du Luxembourg. The railings were hung with an exhibition. Pictures suspended in the sky of another world — still shots from a film: Himalaya. L’enfance d’un chef. Images from a far-off world, hung on the park fence. The large boards displayed people walking in various seasons. Like him. The wind hammered at his neck. He raised his coat collar and strolled several times around the fence and the pictures. The crowd began to thin out. The night engulfed the landscapes on display. The night overtook him. He decided to go home.

  She came up behind him, surprising him in his dialogue with the faces on the boards. He followed her back across the street. She keyed in the code at the entrance to her building. They took the stairs opposite the door. The brass of the handrails and the sheen of the red carpet glimmered in the faint light of the hallway. They climbed the stairs, she in front and he at her heels. She stopped when they reached the top floor and slipped the key into the lock of the double door. He went in behind her.

  The place was small, attractive, new. The front door opened onto a room that served as both living room and kitchenette. A sofa draped with an ash-coloured sheet faced the door. Behind the sofa was a bookcase with four shelves in the same white as the walls. He scanned the contents of the shelves: books, bi
belots, an earthenware ashtray and bowl, a tiny square box made of wood.

  Inserted among the books was a very broad bird feather that stirred with the slightest breath of air. The books lined the backs of the shelves while the bibelots were placed in front. On the wall around the shelves were some photos. He studied them. There was a noticeable connection among the faces on the wall. He had once leafed through a tome on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and had no trouble identifying the four portraits arranged in a row high above the shelves: W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen. To the right of the shelves, hanging one above the other, he recognized Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, James Baldwin. He was unable to put a name to the fourth face. The girl noticed his interest.

  “I enjoy portraits of black people,” she said. “They have a way of capturing and holding the light.”

  “My father has no connection with the celebrities on your wall. Could you show me the pictures you took of him? Wasn’t that the reason you asked me to drop by?”

  In front of the sofa, to the left of the front door, the TV and CD player sat on a large chiffonier. On the wall above the TV there was another photograph, which he found quite beautiful. It was the interior of a nightclub: a bar, high stools, two women and a man, all holding cigarettes between their fingers, their heads wreathed in smoke. The little group was standing around some musicians. He identified the elegantly dressed man at the piano as Duke Ellington, and leaning on the piano, cradling his trumpet, was Louis Armstrong. Askia had a mental image of his hostess attending the nightly concert given by Louis and the Duke. At the exact moment when the concert began, she would no doubt sit down on the sofa facing the picture to take in and savour the sounds emanating from the glossy paper on the wall. But his father, Sidi Ben Sylla, would not have moved in such circles. His music, Askia’s mother would have said, was not jazz but exile.

  Olia must have read his thoughts.

  “You know,” she said, “I sit down in front of that picture and conjure up the concert, the notes. I imagine them soft and translucent and as slow as the water in a stream, at times lapping against the bank when the high notes soar into the air . . . Can we be less formal and call each other by our first names?”

  “Musical notes — they can be sad too, miss. Now, about those pictures. Could you please show them to me?”

  More photos lined the white walls, including the space in the far corner next to the TV, where some stairs led to a mezzanine and what Askia guessed was the bedroom. These other pictures showed Jesse Owens and the king, Carl Lewis, racing at full tilt, propelled by the gods of Olympus, and a very emotional Ella Fitzgerald at the microphone, with the beams of fame shining on her forehead. This girl Olia was peculiar. She evidently lived in a strange world filled with images and legendary figures. Askia thought she must be fond of legendary faces. She liked Owen and King Lewis, and Ella. But Sidi, the ghost he pursued through the dark Paris nights, was not a legend.

  He plumped down on the sofa. She bustled about in the kitchenette, to the left of the shelves. She made some tea, set the cups, sugar, and teapot on the low table in front of her guest, and sat down on the floor in the lotus position. After the pictures of the Himalayas, here was a second image of the East for him to contemplate that evening: Olia sitting cross-legged as if to prepare for meditation, as if he were an altar or the statue of a saint or an icon meant for prayers.

  “You really do look like the man in the turban I photographed a few years ago,” she said, laughing with her eyes and dimpling the corners of her mouth in a way that heightened her charm. Then she admitted that, following their encounter in his taxi, she had searched through her photo albums for the man with the turban. The portraits must have gotten misplaced in one of her many boxes. It would just take a little time, but she would find them.

  Askia had the impression that among all those images on the wall, the only thing in the room that was real was the shape of Olia’s face, her hair tied in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was neither too short nor too tall. But thin. Her face had the originality of a painting. Her body was ordinary. He thought she should always wear black. Black — the depths of night and mystery where her face had been drawn. He discerned two small pears under her sweater. Mother Nature could have been more generous, he said to himself. But he felt that what was most striking about this person was not her appearance so much as her personality.

  The tea did him good. The tea and the warmth of this little home. And yet he was afraid. Afraid that the horrific hand bristling with razor-sharp hairs — the hand that lurked in his worst nightmares — might punch a gaping hole through the ceiling and seize him and cast him out of the apartment and into the cold. It was a dread that went back to his childhood.

  Olia stood up, affording her guest a view of her outfit, black from head to toe. She crouched in front of the small fireplace built into the wall to the right of the door. She lifted the logs out from the ash, rearranged them, and lit the fire. The flames enveloped the logs, the soot-coated hearth began to glow, the flames rose higher.

  3

  THE FLAMES AND the question in the girl’s eyes — “Who are you? Who are you?” — kindled a scattering of reluctant images in the haze of Askia’s memories. The outlines of a village, a red dirt road travelled by herdsmen, back there, near Nioro du Sahel. The ground, heated by the rays of a relentless sun, rising towards the thick clouds in a fine dust that stuck to the skin. Nioro. As far back as his memory could take him, it was the point of departure. He must have been five or six years old. Nioro, or a dry patch of land somewhere in the vicinity. The long red road and a bridled donkey led by his father, Sidi, who had sat his only son, Askia, on the animal’s back. Behind the donkey, the father and son, walked the mother, Kadia Saran. On her head a basket of provisions, a bundle, a pouch holding vials with potions, amulets, and root sticks, a noria of remedies against all the ills of time — remedies to which only the herders of the great winds were privy.

  All of them moved to the faltering tempo of the donkey, which could trot no faster than their flight over the sloping trails. Of this he was sure: it was there they had set off one opaque night steeped in a complicit silence. And when he hunted through his memory for the reason why they had departed, what emerged was the certainty that it could not have been in search of land for grazing. Because there had been no cattle left for a long while already. Only the donkey had remained, sole survivor of the epidemic that had mowed down their herd. This fact came back to him, and he saw their journey in a different light. A sombre light: the lack of rain in the Sahel, the burnt millet fields, the land covered with lizards through which despair crept in, the empty granaries, the stomachs hollowed out by hunger, and the gazes and prayers fixed on the horizon where the rain would come from.

  He thought their departure had been because of that rain and the earth dying under their feet. He recalled those days spent crossing other arid lands, ravaged plains where a few souls hung on, resigned or reckless, full of hope or outright scorn. Scorn because the father, the mother, the son, and the donkey passing by their huts gave off a strange odour. The odour of many unwashed days. The mocking voices on the roadside:

  “It’s true we don’t have any water left, but is that any reason to smell so bad?”

  “Can it be that the wind’s tongue may not have washed away their filth?”

  “It’s true that they are not to blame.”

  “They have no water.”

  “Still, is anyone entitled to stink like pariahs, like miscreants, like undesirables?”

  “Can it be that the sand may have refused to scrub away their dirt?”

  “Try to understand. The sand is hot. It’s impossible to cleanse your body with . . .”

  “Can it be . . .”

  “That they . . .”

  “Live on the long road . . .”

  “Because the long road is all they have?”

  Who are you? Askia read in the photographer’s eyes and came
ra lens. This was how those few scattered episodes, the starting point of the roads he had forever taken, came back to him.

  4

  PARIS. A RAW month of February running its monotonous course. His first meeting with the girl. He had forgotten to lock the doors of his taxi. She said, “You must have been sent by an angel — taxis are so rare at this time of night, especially on such a small street.” And, without waiting for a response, she settled in and asked him to take her to Rue Auguste-Comte, by the Jardin du Luxembourg. Engrossed in the pictures she was deleting from her camera, she hardly looked at him. Their eyes met in the rear-view mirror, and he heard her explain, as if answering a question of his, that she used a digital for minor projects. She stared at him for a split second and returned to her business. She talked while selecting and deleting pictures. He followed her with his eyes, furtively spying on his customer as she purged her camera of portraits that did not please her. A bitter smile appeared on his face. Because it occurred to him in very precise terms that, four years earlier, before he had fled, he too had been wiping out faces with the click of a button.

  He had taken boulevard Saint-Michel. There was nothing very complicated about this run. All he had to do was let his customer off farther along, near the Luxembourg gates. In front of the fountain bearing the same name as the boulevard: silhouettes gliding past, coats buttoned up against the dying winter, noises, moods, skins, a man standing alone with his back to a corner of the fountain, tending a grill and the chestnuts he sold to those scurrying over the cobblestones of Lutetia. The night had spilled its ink across the page of the day, the street had retrieved a light different from that of the old sun: signs glittering on the facades of the cafés, waffle shops, and newsstands. And another light streamed from the nimble fingers of a juggler, an artist throwing flaming torches, catching them and launching them back into orbit again. It was a beautiful performance, but he was afraid the juggler would get burned.