Dirty Feet by Edem Awumey Page B

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.

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    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.

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    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