Dirty Feet by Edem Awumey Page B

beyond the threshold of our hovel.”
    In the early eighties, when he found himself studying anthropology and literature at the Université du Golfe de Guinée, he discovered Cervantes’ Don Quixote , one of the knights-errant, who are described as those who live their dreams and dream their lives. He was struck by the similarity between the description and what his mother had said, she who had never read anything but the book of her misfortune. Three years later, having just finished his degree, he was recruited by the Cell. He had become an anti-knight, a dark knight, a midnight wolf at the wheel of his taxi, moving in for the kill.

22
    A DULL DAY . Askia was beginning to grow bored after four years of wandering through Paris with nothing to show for it. Or could it be the weight of his forty-seven summers already pressing down on his broad, slightly stooped shoulders?
    Olia greeted him with these words: “It’s not worth it anymore, Askia. It’s over — the time for acting the part of some obscure, obsessed Telemachus.” Her eyes shone. Askia expected her to add something else that might enlighten him. The apartment smelled of repose, the wood burning in the fireplace, an aroma of the story’s end, when people come back to the hearth to warm their limbs frozen stiff with adversity. She had put on an album, Duke Ellington’s Take the “A” Train. He understood this music — there would be other trains left for him to take. And yet he could not quite grasp the significance of the girl’s words.
    So she said, “I’ve found the man with the turban. He’s returned to the top floor of the building where the Songhai frescos are. He’s back in the picture. What do you say to that? Say something!”
    Askia remained curiously silent. Sidi, he thought, was playing a game, hiding or showing himself on a whim, erasing and restoring his footprints in the sand of the cities.
    Olia shook his shoulder. “I’m taking you to the loft.”
    â€œ. . .”
    She took his hand in the street. They went down into the metro. His cab was in the garage because of a breakdown. The mechanic had announced that it would easily take half a day to get it running again. Until then he could take a break.
    Olia was a little restless. Eager to see the turban again. He felt nothing. At the Châtelet station she let go of his hand and left him behind, walking ahead of him on the metal carpet of the moving sidewalk, the treadmill. She ran and stopped in the middle of the long grey belt conveying them to the way out. He saw her from a distance on the stage of the treadmill, her delicate feet on the metal. Olia standing there with her tinted hair and long skirt, the girl from Sofia on the stage of the moving sidewalk in the belly of Lutetia, planted on the music of her feet, turned away from the direction the metallic ribbon was moving in, turning her back to the world on the move but facing the other riders on the treadmill. With her long skirt she could well have been assuming the preparatory position, the genesis of the first steps of a Russian or Zulu ballet, Olia onstage somewhere in Kamchatka or Bulawayo, ready to perform the first dance in celebration of the end of all quests and the exhaustion of the roads.
    The strips of the steel belt slipped by under her feet and were swallowed up under the smooth surface of the cement that came after the treadmill. Askia saw her on the last strips just before they reached that smooth surface and was afraid she would go under with them. He leapt forward, jostling an old woman who was in the way, and grabbed Olia before she was devoured. He lifted her, and, propelled by the final thrust of the belt, they ended up on the ground, with Askia’s bulk enveloping, covering, cushioning the fall of Olia’s transparent, slight, fragile body. They laughed like children, to the applause of an indigent who looked like a Negus —