Dirty Feet by Edem Awumey Page A

get off, sir. Keep the change!”
    The old, frightened woman got out and scuttled down the sidewalk, back in the direction they had come from.

21
    ONE DAY — he must have been barely an adolescent at the time — his mother sighed. “My son, I’m afraid you won’t be able to elude the curse. It’s enough to see how you scan the horizon, how your eyes search beyond the boundary of the earth and the screen of the clouds. I sense that you too will leave, Askia; I always knew it. My prayers have served no purpose except to open the roads even wider . . .” She was sad right then. They were living in the shabby little town on the outskirts of the big city where they had landed after their exodus. His mother said that his father had stayed on the road. This was necessary, she assured him. Askia had to be shielded from the father’s baleful presence and aura.
    During all the years they lived in that shabby town she was a cleaning woman for people who lived in the real city, on the plateau. Because she had sent him to school and that cost money. And when he came home after school, he recited his history and geography lessons to her. There was that afternoon when the class had been about Timbuktu. The teacher, Monsieur Christophe, spoke of a city where for five centuries thousands of travellers had converged. Timbuktu, somewhere in Mali, the same territory where Nioro du Sahel was situated. The city from which they had departed twelve years earlier. The teacher cited the names of the travellers who had trod the sands of Timbuktu: Ibn Battu¯ta of Tangiers, Leon the African, René Caillé, and many others who had come from lands beyond the dunes of the mysterious city. Askia thought that Sidi had gone back there. In Timbuktu Sidi had found peace and practised many trades. He was a merchant, a basket maker, a weaver, a sculptor, a magician, a storyteller, a gold dealer, a camel breeder, a poet, and an architect working on the blueprints of the house where he would live after his long journey.
    History and geography were more than a passion for Askia. These subjects offered him the possibility of finding refuge in unknown worlds. He wanted to succeed and earn enough money to take his mother to the faraway cities that his teachers alluded to: (Lourdes, Marie-Galante, Syracuse, Capri . . .)
He would take the old globe that his mother had salvaged from one of her employers in the real city, and pick a city, any city, by randomly placing his finger on the globe. The map of the world would spin on the rusted trunk that served as a table and his finger fell on different cities: Mexico City, Jaipur, Saint-Louis du Sénégal, Florence, Beirut . . . His finger on the elsewheres in which his mother could start her life over with a man who would stay put, stuck to the earth and the bodies of his loved ones.
    The globe spun and his mother yelled:
    â€œStop that game, Askia! What good does it do to wake the gods of the curse?”
    â€œ. . .”
    â€œYou mustn’t, my son. They might rouse from their light sleep and send us back on the road! Don’t you like this city?”
    â€œ. . .”
    She gripped his shoulders and squeezed them with a fever in her eyes. This frightened him and he changed his plans. He grew more careful to avoid waking the gods of the road. He did not want to leave anymore; he organized his life around the shacks of the slum while in his dreams he saw Sidi running across the old globe, alone, in the middle of a cityscape with high towers and dense traffic.
    He abandoned his plan of freeing his mother from the seedy neighbourhoods. So it was a great surprise to hear her say one morning as she shook out their sheets, striking them against the trunk of a dead acacia in front of their shack: “This country isn’t worth a penny. It’s not worth staying here. You must leave, my son, my knight. Your dreams must take you