Читать книгу Dry Season - Gabriela Babniik - Страница 4

Chapter 1

You cannot know how much a chicken weighs until you pick it up and shake it.

(African proverb)

We were lying on the bed and had not let the sun into the room, but even if we had turned on a light, I don’t know if anything would have changed – if I’d have become what I was or he what he was. I moved nearer to him. I moved as near to him as possible. To his raspy breathing and warm skin. He was unusually warm. He had said in total seriousness, which gave his words added charm, that he had the heart of a buffalo. I had harnessed him, this buffalo, and now it would be hard to ever let him go. My bones wouldn’t let me. I know I write as if from the previous century, but I am from the previous century. I was born not long after the Second World War. I read somewhere that’s not the way to start a novel. I mean saying ‘I was born in such-and-such a place’, but let me do it anyway. Let me be forgiven for lying in bed without the light on next to this young man whose face looked like it had been drawn on. Eyes, forehead, nose – as if cut out of cardboard and pasted there.

He slept with his lids half-open and I found myself wanting to close them. There were also things about him I just knew, from a distance. I could have predicted them. Like when we were going to the hotel. While I was bent over my bag searching for my wallet, he looked away. Or on the avenue in the middle of the day, when I wanted to take his arm, it was better not to, even though I had done it just a little while before. It was better that he just walk beside me, with his slim, slender car mechanic’s body – although... although he must have already done many things in his life; you could see it in his veins, not only the veins on his arms but especially at his temples, big powerful veins, veins like electrical cables, veins like steel, like salt, like water, invincible veins, and I, next to him, was carrying my yellow bag printed with garden flowers, which later, somewhere halfway along the way, I let out of my hands. In the hotel, when we had leaned back on the plastic chairs, when our bodies had rested, he said the bag was what made him notice me. From across the avenue. Rivers were flowing between us – cars, people, street vendors, women with and without bundles on their heads, children with old and less old faces, but even so he spotted me on his retina. He was squinting his eyes, as he did now, except now they were almost completely open. Though now he was no longer looking anywhere, at least not in my direction. I imagine him looking inwards, at that buffalo heart of his and the hot blood flowing in waves through his body.

That’s probably why he was rasping in his sleep like that. In total seriousness. As if he hadn’t slept for an eternity, as if he could barely wait for someone to invite him into bed. I suppose I sensed that even from across the avenue. And when we were finally standing face to face, he said, ‘You were looking at me.’

I remember it clearly, him using the formal vous with me. Then I said the same thing, only with the familiar tu: ‘I noticed you were looking at me.’

‘So what do we do now?’ he laughed. I said nothing, with that yellow printed bag of mine, since it would have been too stupid to say something and look away. That’s also when I realized it would be hard to bear not looking. At that tall, slender body. But I suppose I’ve already said that, so now I need to say something else, to lay my cards on the table. When I looked away from him, I imagined him slipping his big dark hand, which reflected the sun and everything else too, beneath my sweat-soaked T-shirt and lifting those breasts that for a century had been sagging to either side. ‘I will help you carry your bag,’ he added, as I slowly turned my eyes back to him.

I laughed back. After I barely escaped death crossing the street, you wanted to carry my bag for me? Only that and nothing else? No, not that I didn’t know how such things are done on this continent – no kissing on the street, no holding hands, least of all between two people of the opposite sex, no intimacy at all in public – but to carry my bag, when what I had in mind was a finger in the mouth, a hand on the belly, was simply too much. I shook my head – what else could I do? Even as I child, whenever I really wanted something, I shook my head. ‘No need. I’ll manage.’ Of course the subtitles said the direct opposite and I think he even deciphered that. From across the street, beneath the sun. Later, as we walked side by side, slowly, lightly, like two cotton flowers in swirls of dust, he took my bag all the same.

We went to a nearby hotel. Where else should we have gone? A wo­man like me and a man like him. Standing up, he was two heads taller than me. But I’m used to tall men from home. For me that’s not a problem. Maybe it bothered other people. That a sixty-two-year-old woman and a twenty-seven-year-old man were strolling along side by side. Maybe it bothered the receptionist at the hotel. That when I put my hand in my bag our elbows accidentally touched, and then our shoulders. I saw it; it was written on her face. Here’s another woman who’s come for a safari. Except that here, in this faded hotel, I don’t see any clouds, let alone grass or lions in the grass. Just a dark, narrow hallway and stairs that lead to a room. When you open the door, on the left is a bed and, next to the bed, a night table with a tawdry shine; a little to the side, a fridge with a vase of plastic flowers on top. Also, let’s say, two chairs, on which we sat down timidly, maybe me a little more than him. I bent my legs a little, a pose I’d later assume more than once in Africa; he, meanwhile, went to the fridge and took out a bottle of water. I was pretending to look at the window, the curtains on the window, heavy curtains that reached to the floor and somehow jarred with what was happening outside, all that sunlight and those exaggerated gestures and inviting smiles from the street vendors, and trying not to think about the things that might happen between us. I suppose I was afraid, yes, afraid of the words from his mouth. That he would suddenly turn away from the fridge, the bottle of cold water still in his hands, and say, ‘Lie down and spread your legs’ or ‘C’mon, let me fuck you, ’cause that’s why you brought me to this hotel, isn’t it?’ Words like that I wouldn’t know how to respond to.

‘Are you cold?’ My shoulders flinched, but I would have probably flinched no matter what he said. And because the question was followed by silence, I looked over at my bag and only then realized I had put it on the floor by the bed when I entered the room. As if he understood the quick turn of my head, as if he understood more than I ever would, he walked back toward the bed, and I thought he was going to sit on it and thus summon me to finally do what we’d come there to do, but he just bent down, picked up the bag from the floor and, as if it was nothing, as if those plastic flowers and that somewhat shabby rug and that silk bedspread were nothing, handed it to me. I held it to my breast as if holding a child. ‘If you are cold, can I give you my shirt?’

I shook my head. I don’t know if he understood me, since the very next moment, in a quick yank, he pulled the thin fabric over his head and stood there like that before me. All I remember is his fur, that thick dark fur, spreading up from his genitals to his belly and almost to his neck. It had never really occurred to me that black men could be hairy, at least not this much.

In this scene, this mute, timid, almost palpitating scene of expectation, in which anything could happen and anything be denied, a third person would have been helpful. But since none was around and since the moment was lasting too long, I leaned over to him and accepted the sweaty T-shirt with two fingers.

‘Please don’t use vous with me.’

‘No?’

Again I shook my head. Surely by now he understood what I meant. My son used to break out laughing. Especially when he was little. Years later he told me that all through his childhood he thought his mother had a mane. A lion’s mane, if you can imagine. And maybe this mane was also why the young black man was stroking my face with his hand. His big warm hand, checking to see if that forehead, those hollows for the eyes, and that nose weren’t just pasted on me. Cut out of cardboard and pasted there. I wanted to tell him that my son was the same age he was so it would be better if he used tu with me, but I found myself, when he turned away from my face, went over to the window and closed the heavy velvet curtains, preferring to stare at his backside. I suppose Madonna needed fifty years to get buttocks like that; I probably won’t manage that even in the next life.

‘The hotel’s not too bad,’ I said, to finally say something. ‘Only the way the receptionist was looking at us...’

He waved his arm as if to say, stop right there, it’s not worth conti­nuing. And when he moved nearer the bed, when his shadow was again thickening over mine, I realized he reminded me of someone. Someone who was no more, but who through him, through those jeans hanging off his backside, through his long fingers, was again inhabiting me. Ever since I left home, scrubbed the floor, fluffed the pillows, pushed the chairs in around the table, and locked the garden door, he had been with me. So this encounter, or rather, this looking at each other in the street, did not happen because I was carrying a yellow bag and he was wearing his warm, too warm, skin and his inside-out buffalo heart, but because we had in fact been pasted together all this time. It was only here, in this landscape without clouds, without tall grass or lions in the grass, that we could unpaste ourselves and stand on opposite sides of the street. Maybe I’m crazy but I believe in such things. But if I am crazy, then the face of this man who carried my bag for me to a nearby hotel, who, after drinking water from the fridge, took off his T-shirt, and then closed the curtains and fell asleep, does not exist at all, and so neither do I.

* * *

Malik wanted us to rob the woman. He pointed her out to me at the market; I mean her yellow bag. When it came to this sort of thing we did not need to talk. Eye contact and a gesture or two were enough. Then like polecats we followed the silhouette, which stopped a little here, a little there, until we came to an open area and all became clear. Malik was always the one in front; I, more often than not, was watching his back. If things were going wrong, I would make somebody trip or try to draw attention to myself. But with this woman, I mean her yellow bag, I knew it would not be easy. She seemed like she was made of cotton and if Malik bumped into her with that heavy body of his, she would just collapse. I did not have the feeling she’d scream or anything like that. But I could imagine her just dropping on the sidewalk and starting to cry. And I hate stuff like that. Malik once told me I was a pussy. He pounded his chest and called me names. ‘You must to be bastard. If you are no bastard, dey will crush you. Dis here is Ouagadougou, dude. Dis here is no your bush.’

Malik’s blather was a lot of nonsense. I had been living in this city long enough to feel like I was born here. Other people my age on the street, I would tell them it happened under a bridge; what bridge I don’t remember exactly, but it was definitely here, in the city. So Malik was more of a bushman than me. But back in the market it was not about that.

Then, I wanted to tell him I really did not feel so much like nicking that woman’s bag, and besides, I thought she was a little too white, a little too soft, like those pillows you see on TV in some white lady’s fucking bedroom or living room – men and women sit on them like they’re dreaming, like that is all they know, all they can think of, and of course they think all us other people also live like them; meanwhile, we other people are only dreaming their dreams – and I was still tired from the night before. I really did not feel so much like running two to four miles in the hot sun, which is what the usual robbery required. Last night, for example, it did not make any sense. And we lost the motorbike too. Malik got stoned before it all started so I doubt he could even see where he was going. Otherwise he probably would not have tried it with that white woman. Her hands were shaking, her eyes went all marbly, like she was going to kick it any minute. I think what scared her most were Malik’s pink lips and the pink blotches on his face, like a star had exploded there. Maybe I’ll talk about his skin disease some other time, but not now; now I have to say something else too: that the white woman – an American, Belgian, Flemish woman, how should I know? – wasn’t there by herself; a black dude was standing next to her. And because of him, that fucker, I told Malik, do not stop the bike, but that is exactly what he did. He rammed it into the dirt, got off and walked over to them, like it was nothing. Like he just wanted to ask for a light. And before they could count to three they had knives at their bellies. We took the dude’s trousers off and frisked his arse, but he didn’t have anything there, not even a thousand francs.

The people walking by looked away like it was none of their business­ – when the same thing happens to them, no one will give a shit either – and bam, that’s when I got the feeling things would not turn out good for us, that something smelled funny. But last night I let Malik go through with it all the same. And the way he went through it was we ended up with no motorbike and no dough; all we got off the dude was his passport, which we really could not do anything with. All we could do was wait two or three days and then put it into circulation.

And now the same thing could happen here. There’s nothing in that woman’s yellow bag but tissues, a bottle of warm water, and a credit card. And somewhere in the background waits Dude No. 2. A little scrawnier and with his thing dangling, but still a black dude who can run, who wants to run, even with his trousers undone. Because last night, when people were strolling past, the dude with the passport and no dough decided to risk it. The Flemish woman almost passed away, and I can just see her laying into him back at the hotel. Saying what a bastard he is, the biggest arsehole alive. The point being that when he was running off to get help with his trousers undone, I could have sunk my knife into her belly. I did feel her up a little, I admit. Beneath her top, behind her bra, to see if she was hiding anything. But she wasn’t. And the one from the market, too, who is right now in front of us, she has probably done it too. Stuck fifteen, twenty thousand francs behind her bra, but those things of hers are in their last days – kaput is what Malik would call them. His old man once told him, a woman goes through two periods of life: a phase of growth and a phase of decline. But I think he must have read that somewhere; he didn’t come up with it himself. His old man was not an albino and even read things. Sometimes at night he would sit on the terrace and if he wasn’t reading he would listen to jazz. ‘Kind of Blue’ and that sort of bollocks. However you look at it, Malik’s old man was not so stupid. I think he even knew what Malik and I were up to, but he never said anything. Well, once he said we were going through that sort of phase and should make the most of life.

Make the most, man. I would rather make the most of that old lady from the market. I tell you, she should have stayed in her hotel and this would not be happening to us. I wouldn’t have to run in the hot sun and Malik wouldn’t be giving me signals to make a move already or he will rip my head off.

I turned to look at her one more time across the avenue. She may have been in the decline phase but she still had decent calves, nicely shaped, somewhat muscular thighs, and her arse did not sag. She was showing it off in a pair of dark three-quarter trousers. White ladies, from what I have been able to see of them, are always doing things like that. Wearing something that knocks you sideways. A low-cut top with a dark-red lacy bra underneath, or a little chain around the ankle. Because of the yellow bag it was not erect yet, which would really have been too much, to have to sneak into some filthy toilet and wank off over somebody like that, but in the end I could not rob her anyway. All the time it was going through my head that after we grabbed that thing off her she would just sit on the ground and start crying. And I hate crying women, like I hate marbles in the eyes and shaky hands. With all their gold rings and credit cards, the only thing they have left is fear. That alone is sometimes enough to make me want to put holes in them. They go out, leave everything at the hotel, take some black dude with them just in case, a local if possible, who just happens to stuff his passport in his pocket, although not necessarily by chance since only Allah knows how much he went through to get that document, which I don’t blame him for at all, and then they watch to see which corner somebody’s going to jump out of. But it was noon and the market was crowded, like it only gets at noon, and that changed everything. So I shook my head one more time to Malik. Yesterday we lost the motorbike and now it’s going to be our heads. And when I get a feeling, or should I say a jab, near a chamber of my heart, that is another sure sign. But Malik did not understand. Like he never understood what ‘Kind of Blue’ was all about. Night after night he would sit with his old man on the terrace but all he would think about was naked chicks and how he was going to stop doing small jobs and start doing big ones.

When the jab was punching me from behind my ribs, so strong I almost blacked out, I made up my mind. I would walk over to the woman and try to start a conversation. Carry your bag, Madame? Are you hot, Madame? Shall we go to the hotel, Madame? They love that sort of sweet stuff. I think Malik’s old man knows that too, how to approach white ladies. I think he must have brought back ‘Kind of Blue’ from over there. For a few months he was on a waiting list for a visa and would hang around the airport in Ouaga, until finally he hid in a wooden crate. After a few days of crouching in the dark without water he realized it was sheer rubbish, as he told me with his legs stretched out and his arms dug in somewhere behind his neck, me nodding the whole time like I knew about it, like I had spent countless heat waves crouched on a scant square metre, so he climbed out and turned himself in to the authorities. Deportation was followed by sitting on the terrace. But that too, how I got on with Malik’s old man, I will talk about some other time. Now the question was how to get that yellow bag in my hands. Nicely. Because knives at the belly is fucked up. I do not want to do that anymore. I have got to give it up, Malik’s titties or not. Let him make the most of them if he wants, I have a new day dawning; I don’t know what or how exactly, maybe I will train as a tailor; I’ve been invited, but I will see. First I need to take care of this marbly-eyed white woman in front of me. To get her over from the other side of the street and then lightly, invisibly, brush against her. If she smells good, I will get myself invited to her hotel – if she does not talk too much. But I do not think she will talk too much.

* * *

How did I know how old he was? Well, I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue who I was dealing with or what he wanted from me. Especially not after he fell asleep. I don’t think he knew either. These people can be unpredictable. Just when you think you understand them they do something unexpected. The cab driver at the airport, for example, instead of driving me to the market took me to meet his family. When I hinted that I had to pee, he waited for me by the road, as if from then on he would be my comforter, lover, and bodyguard. That’s also more or less how he introduced me to his family later, despite meeting me for the first and last time only that day. When I asked where I could wash my hands and pointed to the right, he nodded; when I pointed to the left, he nodded again. For him, there was water in the sky and water beneath the earth. He probably saw cloudy water even in me, which is why, after lots of persuading, fifteen cups of oversweet tea, and endless handshaking – how is your family? how are your children? how is your house? – he ended up dropping me in front of some building named after Gaddafi. Then I lugged my bag past insane drivers stirring up clouds of dust – I had arrived in Ouagadougou right at the start of the dry season, which the tourist brochure said was the best time to visit sub-Saharan Africa; the rainy season meant impassable roads, mosquitoes, regular power outages, and so on – past vendors selling butchered meat on which swarms of flies were grazing, big dark flies with green bellies; past troops of children who were trying to attract attention with empty, rusted tomato-paste tins – eventually I realized the tins were not so much functional but were mainly status symbols – past tall, slender women with dark, shiny skin, who sliced vegetables on their open palms.

Somewhere about halfway to the market, beneath a row of acacia trees, I leaned against the edge of a roadside wall with my bag and lit a cigarette. As I puffed out smoke I realized this was that opposite thing I had desired. To leave the silence I’d been cocooned in the past few months; to leave my relationship with my son, which had destroyed, no, not destroyed, but crumbled something in me. He was about the same age as the young man I would meet a few hours after that cigarette. And last but not least, I desired also, or especially, to leave my relationship with my aged father.

I called him that, though he wasn’t in fact my real father. He and my mother, who also wasn’t my real mother, adopted me when I was about three and a half. One afternoon when they were fed up with waiting, or rather my father was, since my mother was always a calm, quiet, too quiet, woman – when he was fed up with putting it in her soft, white, too white, body with no result. And so they came. Not all that far, really. I was sitting with my legs stretched out in the middle of a big, only half-whitewashed room in the orphanage. Shoeless, in a sort of baggy dress, which in fact had been sewn from remnants of the cloth they used to cover the potatoes in the cellar to keep them from sprouting. I’m not entirely sure what happened to the potatoes later; they probably ended up raw and blackened, with all their attendant outgrowths, in our stomachs, and so clothed us on the inside too. And in fact I don’t remember their faces either, which gazed at me expectantly. I could say that her face was kinder, more promising, than his. But I only see this now, from a distance. Back then I suppose I was lucky that they even crossed the threshold of the orphanage, that they even wanted me. Nobody asked if I wanted them. That’s how times were back then and that’s how it happened.

As I leaned on the wall by the road, at least ten people offered me a lift to the market, but I shook my head at each one in turn. Even before I’d finished my cigarette, one woman, a huge, dark-skinned woman with a great dome of batik cloth on her head, rolled down the car window and with two fingers let me know that what I was doing wasn’t good. That it did not set a good example. I don’t know if I can describe her gesture effectively, but it certainly had an effect on me. My first reaction was to turn red; then I realized I’d have to get used to a man nodding yes when you ask if the bathroom is on the left and doing the same when you point to the right, and I would also have to get used to non-privacy. I suppose that’s what I wanted. I suppose I wanted to cleanse myself of the blue light that filtered into my workroom from the garden. The cushioned chair, the table in the corner, and the view through the window. A static sight where only the birds changed; eventually it started getting on my nerves. When the situation became hopeless, or maybe only seemed hopeless to me, if hopelessness is like deafness, I tore the wallpaper off the walls – black-and-white, aqua­marine, violet wallpaper – shut the pillows away in cupboards, and threw my sketches in the waste­basket. At a certain point I couldn’t draw anymore; I couldn’t create the botanical motifs my customers were demanding. With a little exaggeration you could say I had stopped believing in art, or that the miles and miles of sumptuous fabric, the cashmere and silk on which I drew my stylized images of plants, had softened my skin.

Sometimes at night I dreamed I had cocooned myself in plant roots and couldn’t breathe. When at last I opened my eyes, no one was there in the morning to bring me a glass of water. I had been alone for such a long time it seemed entirely normal. Alone, that is, if I don’t count my son, who was cocooned in a world of his own, or my father, who had started bringing women home after my mother’s death. Not that he hadn’t done it before, but now it was definitely official.

I don’t know if it’s the right moment to reveal this, but my father isn’t the only one to blame for my leaving; mainly, it’s my son. Somewhere along the way I saw it was unhealthy; I mean a mother and her nearly thirty-year-old son living in the same house together. Everywhere you hear people railing against homosexual couples, but no one talks about the chauvinistic and racist relations in traditional families. What would supporters of the conservative camp say about my father’s behaviour toward my mother? He took all the money she earned sewing undergarments and scattered it to the winds. Later she had to ask him to give her something for nylons! What would they say about my son, who for several weeks sat in his room burning photographs from his childhood in a metal jug. When the photos ran out, he started in on my exquisite printed pillows. The tree leaf prints from different species burned like nobody’s business. Even later, after he was admitted to the mental hospital and given electro shock therapy, the black mark was still on the ceiling. I didn’t repaint; I didn’t want to touch anything anymore. His shirts, too, I left hanging in the wardrobe. Maybe he’ll return one day and want to find his things just as he left them.

The only thing I did after he left was to occasionally play a CD of his on the CD player. But that gloomy environmental music scared away the birds in the garden. So then I would just lay my head on the worktable and fall asleep. My customers, who’d been calling like mad, eventually stopped.

When my father rang the doorbell one afternoon, saying he wanted to introduce me to his new lady friend, who simply adored my stuff and would love it if I could decorate her flat for her – with silk throw pillows on the sofas, pink printed wallpaper, bedspreads in fiery shades – I knew things had reached the end. That I had to do something, go somewhere. For a moment or two I kept looking back and forth from the computer to the garden through the window, but then things inside me started crumbling, like the dust on African roads during the dry season. The last time I visited him, my son didn’t recognize me. I had brought him a carton of cigarettes and some mango juice. I hoped that after strolling through the park we’d light cigarettes and, like in the old days, in those black-and-white films we watched on Sunday afternoons, with all that elegance and all those women in high heels holding crystal tumblers of whisky, in which the crackling of the ice was barely audible – I suppose these symbolic objects were meant to proclaim their self-confidence, their independence, comparable at times to the self-confidence of men – I hoped we would share a few minutes of silence. But nothing like that happened. He looked through me, like the cab driver did when I asked him left or right. Maybe he was thinking about the water in the sky and beneath the earth, was maybe thinking too about the water that flows through our bodies, through his, especially. If nothing else, he must at least have felt his own body, physical pressure, pain.

My father, for example, did not want to visit him. He said it was all my fault. After everything he had done to us, to my mother especially, he had the nerve to utter such filth. So when his new lady friend was spinning around the house, sighing how wonderful, what fiery colours, what a wonderful investment I would be, and when finally they went out into the garden to look at the place of my inspiration, and even more the place of my loneliness, I locked the garden door behind them. I crept up to the door, as if creeping up behind someone’s back, and with an almost thievish smile on my face turned the key in the lock. At first they didn’t understand what had happened to them; what they felt later doesn’t matter one way or another. Had I given them the chance, they would have probably pressed their faces to the windowpane and with two fingers, like that dark-skinned woman with the head cloth, let me know that what I was doing wasn’t good. That it did not set a good example. That they would deal with me when they got out. But as I said, I don’t know what happened later. Then I just turned off the computer, fluffed the remaining pillows, scrubbed the counter a little too, and left. I locked the door and left.

* * *

There’s a scene from film noir which my father never questioned. The woman, her blouse quickly discarded, is sitting on his lap. Her naked arms embrace his neck; she is kissing him; then he pushes her away and goes to the window. Out of the corner of his eye he still tracks her skin and the scent that emanates from her skin, but for him it’s already too late. A few months ago he would still have forgiven her. A few months ago he would not have uttered that sentence: Il y a bien d’autres choses que toi dans la monde. But for her part, she is sure she has done nothing wrong, that things can be fixed. She does not understand the loneliness that engulfed him when she showed him the doctor’s report.

He has always been alone, he said, but this was a completely new loneliness. More bitter, more painful than before; a loneliness that was like being abandoned.

She slowly got up from the chair and crossed her arms over her breasts. Wearing only her skirt, she was cold, although she knew the chill came not from the room but from inside her. At the same time, she also knew how trite this scene was – her at one end of the room, him at the other. In fact, the only view from the window was the roof of another house, so there was nothing for him to see but himself. There are plenty of other things in this world besides you. Where did he get that sentence anyway? Did he really think they were in some movie? But her hair was not platinum blonde, just ordinary hair held in place by a gold-plated barrette, and his were not the powerful loins of a movie actor, from which he might make a child for her.

But all the same, she asked him again to forgive her. Maybe the doctor made a mistake; maybe nothing he wrote in the report was true. Maybe she isn’t empty inside; maybe he’s the one who’s empty, although she could not say this to him now, undressed as she was, with her exposed shoulders and breasts, her pink nipples erect from the cold; she felt herself becoming even a little embarrassed, that she had put herself in an impossible position, all the more impossible because at this very moment he was gazing out the window and thinking lofty thoughts. Something, she supposed, about how a person is always lonely, alienated, cast into the world. But if you are guaranteed offspring, if you know that this here and now is not all there is, then, presumably, things might be a little easier.

‘What if we adopt?’ she asked, although she’d been thinking about asking something else. Like, was it true that men don’t think of themselves as frivolous, or afraid of loneliness, let alone afraid of losing love? But this was exactly what was happening to him. He was afraid. She could tell by how he pushed her away, stood up, and went to the window. But now, from a distance, she also understood that, mainly, he was blackmailing her. Because they wouldn’t have children, because she could not give him children, he would extract certain privileges for himself. Women. Going out at night to films. And, again, women, and especially her consent, that he could have them whenever he needed. And money, too. What she earned from sewing undergarments would go straight in his pocket.

But all this she could still bear if, in the scene, he would turn and look at her. And kiss her naked breasts and tell her they didn’t have to be so lonely, they could adopt a child.

Instead, he only stepped away from the window, bent over – a pain­ful, unnatural bow, by which he was trying to conceal his hesitation, that despite everything he desired her milk-fragrant skin, her fine hair, which never grew past her shoulders, her slightly pink nipples – and then picked the blouse up from the floor all the same. He told her to get dressed and go make him tea in the kitchen. He spoke French, but in the late afternoons he still had his cup of tea. Sitting on the bench by the table, he still stared blankly in front of himself and wondered how he could overcome alienation. How does he explain to a woman who’s been fighting body and soul for what she ultimately saw as the only good – how does he explain to her that he does not believe it’s possible to eliminate dissonance in the realm of the empirical? What was she trying to say with that unbuttoned blouse? That everything would be different if they made love? That that was how they could reclaim their dignity?

‘There’s a three-year-old girl in the orphanage. I’ve already chosen a name for her. Ana. We’ll call her Ana.’

He lifted his face. He lifted it as if lifting it for the first time. Her skin really did seem mixed with water. Now he was already sorry for that sentence, though not for anything else. But since he had said it in a different language, she had not understood. There would always be an insurmountable barrier of loneliness between them. At first he thought they would overcome it by having a child, but he changed his mind when, in that skirt and blouse, she handed him the doctor’s report. All he had expected from her, nothing more and nothing less, was offspring. And a little lightness too. Like this tea and the plucked sprig of cherry blossom on the table. So far everything seemed fine, if only there wasn’t that obsessive look in her eye. That she had to hold on to him at any cost, that she would consent even to other women, would give him all the money she earned, would learn French, and, if he wanted her to, would perform that scene in the film where the man pushes the woman away when she tries to embrace him. Deftly, with a practiced motion, she slips out of her blouse and stands behind his back. Together they gaze at the roof of the neighbouring house. Because there is nothing for them to see, they are gazing mainly at themselves. The man thinks about the fact that, because she has consented to his meeting other women and taking them to evening films, he remains alone with himself and with the world, he has learned to experience himself and the world, and he knows what has been taken and what has been given; she, meanwhile, thinks about the sentence he said in French. Where did he get it anyway? Did he really think they were in some movie?

Suddenly, he leaned across the table; the darkened, half-cooled surface of the tea lurched and threatened to spill over the rim. ‘Ana’s a nice name. If you want, we’ll call her Ana.’

* * *

Despite all that happened between us, my son knew that the doors to the mysterious and unpredictable realms in the depths of my thoughts, overspread with gardens of strange and dread-inducing flowers and plants, were closed to him. This forbidden territory was at most the target of certain adverts for soap and detergent, and maybe detective novels and colourful newspaper supplements. I sometimes noticed him watching me from under his brows or from the side, trying to catch a glimmer of this oily female domain. Or when we’d be strolling in town and meet one of my girlfriends, he’d scrutinize her as if searching for a clue. Only once did he ask if I agreed with that Lars von Trier movie. The one where the woman loves her orgasm more than her son.

I wanted to stroke his hair, but he was too old for such things. We were both too old. I knew the scene he was thinking about: a few moments earlier the camera shows us a penis going in. It is big and wet. It goes into the woman and her scream is drowned out by music. Then a few shots later, a boy jumps out of a window. He moves a chair next to the window and falls into the snowflakes. Somewhere in the air a teddy bear is flapping all by itself. She, meanwhile, has her mouth open in pleasure; the man on top of her knows nothing.

That’s the sort of film my son would watch locked in his room, and that’s why he went crazy, I think.

But this sleeping man in front of me was from another time. He had a god drawn on his face. I wanted to say that earlier but it slipped my mind. As I was walking toward him from the other side of the avenue, I felt a strong desire for him to touch the secret territory inside me. Ever since I gave birth, almost thirty years ago, I knew I had to put it aside for a while. I mean, touching the silky surface of blades of grass with my palm or licking honey slowly from a metal spoon and then looking at my face in it. For a while I was about to surrender to this spell, but when my mother died and then the man my mother so strongly believed in left me, I could not shut myself away inside myself and let the plant roots grow over my face. My father, from the very start, in fact from the moment I came back to Ljubljana, made it all very clear. Do your work, print your botanical designs, or we’ll disown you. Glue the gold leaf onto the cupboards, or we’ll take your son away. So when it was time for me to let myself give in, I wasn’t allowed to. And now, when I could, I was haunted by the feeling that it was too late.

‘Are you sleeping?’ he said, and shifted his god-like body. He was from a golden age, when lovers did not hold hands and hardly ever ran their fingers through each other’s hair.

‘No, I can’t sleep.’

I wanted to say, ‘I don’t know how to sleep like you,’ but there was no point; he wouldn’t understand. A random stranger I had been lying in bed with for an afternoon and a night without anything happening between us.

As I was again depositing my bag on the floor, on the rug, which so many feet, mostly bare feet, had walked over, which gave off the smell of journey, of nakedness, of things left unsaid, it occurred to me that this appendage was all I had left from my former life. Outside it was pouring night, dripping stars, and somewhere in the other world my son was watching yet another crazy movie. This time from his own life.

I gazed at his silence, and then at his big hands with their beautifully shaped nails, somewhat strange for a boy from the street who had already done so many things, but which, all the same, were shoved into his jeans. This is that barren, stony realm, which probably only men possess. Or am I just being old-fashioned?

‘I am cold,’ he said, pointing his chin to just below his waist, as if trying to interrupt my train of thought.

‘So you’re warming your hands?’

‘Yes, but it is also a habit.’ I always imagined that when men stick their hands down their trousers it means protection and, of course, they’re making sure the thing’s still there. My son never did this, at least not in my presence. Our lack of concord, too, was part of it. When something was going on with him, he concealed it; when something was going on with me, I had to show him. To teach him. But I thought another woman would have to teach him everything about the birds and the bees. Another woman, just as I was that other woman for this young man in front of me. ‘A lot of men do it,’ he added lazily, and smiled at me, revealing his upper gum. ‘You have seen footballers do it, haven’t you?’

I was confused – confused by him suddenly using the familiar tu. Would he now start repeating again those vulgar words? Spread your legs, c’mon, let me fuck you. Although... although... he never said them the first time. A lot of women – I’ve seen it in those adverts for soap and detergent, read it even in those detective novels and colourful newspaper supplements – have a desire, no, not desire, obsessive craving, for a rapist. The dread that some man might take their body by force, violate them in some shadowy hotel room, especially if he is handsome and young and dark-complexioned and they are old and withered and fair-complexioned, can become a mantra, an invocation. Oh God, if he really does do something like that, my life will be over. I will open my mouth the way she did, with that moist, gleaming thing inside her, as her child fell into the snowflakes. And the chair by the window remained empty.

‘Sure. So?’

‘That is where we are most sensitive – down there.’ Again I looked at my bag on the floor. All my women friends, once they had met my son, once they had noticed his somewhat wilted, startled appearance, began eyeing me with suspicion. They saw me as a different person, not the Ana they knew. I was still Ana who wore high leather boots in winter and snakeskin flats in summer, Ana who made soft pillows with botanical designs and wallpaper in fiery colours, all those things because she couldn’t tame her mysterious and unpredictable garden, but all the same, I was a different Ana. Ana the traitress. Ana, her son’s inventor, who looked so strong when she gave birth to him. Ana, who after the birth was just like those divas who slurp whisky barefoot on stage and defy the entire world. But later this same Ana’s child went bad on her. ‘Did you know that when hyenas attack they always go for the testicles first?’

And since I didn’t want to see myself or my entire life from some new perspective, I quickly shot back: ‘If they attack a male animal. But what if it’s female?’

‘You women do not feel pain when you get a shock down there?’ he said, and now wasn’t smiling anymore, wasn’t showing his gums. He leaned a little toward my half of the bed and I thought maybe he wanted to touch that secret territory after all.

‘I wouldn’t know. It’s never happened to me. Although in my opinion a vagina is more meant to be gently opened and touched.’

The language we were speaking was not his language. He gave an impression of being some nonchalant brigand who thinks he’s fully in charge, but there, in a chamber of his heart, he was even more vulnerable than my son. ‘Yes, that’s true. It is more closed.’

Now it was my turn to laugh, to show my gums. ‘Do you know what this conversation is?’ And because it didn’t look like he knew, knew anything at all at that moment, I said, a little too brashly, certainly, for that hotel room and for my years: ‘Do you know that just now we’ve been making love?’

All my watercolours together did not possess half the tenderness of his question: ‘You mean with the tongue?’

I wanted him to run his hands through the forest of my hair, wanted to feel that marvellous, dreamlike moment of closeness between a man and a woman, wanted at least for him to open the curtains, the heavy velvet curtains that had made the night even darker, but he did something else entirely.

* * *

It got on my fucking nerves the way she was always talking to somebody, always looking at that bag of hers, which as I predicted had nothing in it. Just some T-shirts, blouses, shorts, and a pair of high-heeled shoes. I guess she must have sewn her wallet and passport under her skin. Really. I searched the whole thing when she was asleep, when we were both officially asleep, and there was nothing there. Maybe she left the important stuff in some other hotel, but then why didn’t she leave the photo there too? A6 format. I know that sort of thing. I can show you my ID from when I worked at the copy shop, until they fired me. But I will not go into that now. Now what matters is what I saw in the photo: a high forehead with long stringy hair hanging down, narrow shoulders like a woman’s, the start of a belly – even though the dude could not have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six, my age in other words. Plus, he had her eyebrows and those big thighs, in red corduroys. So a relative then, a cousin or something. If it was her son, I don’t know what she is doing in bed with me all this time.

I got out of bed and indicated to her with a slight nod that she should follow me. At first she just stared, at my back maybe, or my backside. She was probably thinking it was high time we did it. I was thinking too, mainly that I should do something funny, something unexpected, like pick her up and carry her into the bathroom. That woman needed a serious cleansing treatment. All that dust and dirt. And now she was talking too; that drove me crazy more than anything. Maybe with wussy boy from the picture. He looked like he had just crawled out his mama’s arse. His sort is the worst. Smoking hash, getting into trouble, then putting on some angel face. On the street they would strip him and slap him around, then hang him upside down in the sun for a few hours.

Eventually she got up, but instead of following me she went over to her bag, unzipped it, and looked in the side pocket. I knew she was checking to see if the photo was still there. Then she took out a shower sponge and went into the bathroom.

‘Are we going to have a shower together?’ she said, looking a little surprised, though I could tell she liked the idea. I was about to say ‘yah, together’ but changed my mind.

‘You get wet first, then I will scrub you. If you want...’

I do not know. At first I used vous with her; then I started using tu. But after spending the night together, after ogling her thighs and going through her bag, I guess I could do that too. And besides, I did not dislike her. Despite all the dust, which in the harmattan season can fill your mouth and nose and ears and literally turn you into a mummy, she still smelled of something sweet. But here again, I cannot remember what. It’s like she was taking my memory away.

‘Because somewhere you heard that we white people scrub ourselves like this?...’ She showed me with her fingers. It meant as gently as possible. And basically I agreed, though I had no idea how white people took showers. I had never seen them do it, at least not close up and certainly not in a bathroom like this, with walls covered in ceramic tiles. I tell you, that was a five-star hotel.

‘Turn around,’ I blurted, a little too fast and too loud, which made her turn around right away, without hesitating. ‘And get undressed.’ Now that was not so easy. She hunched forward slightly, as if hiding something, as if trying to shield something on her body. Her belly, her backside, I don’t know, maybe her privates. Then I started to whistle. From sheer embarrassment. I sucked in my cheeks and made a kind of warble.

‘It’s taboo to whistle at night. You might summon up the spirits...’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Somebody told me.’

I looked at her naked back in the mirror. It was slightly curved, the spine shaped like an S, which told me that when she is alone, when everything disappears around her, when there are no sounds for her to listen to, no faces for her to touch, what pain she must suffer. The top of her back was painted with spots that were strangely grafted into her skin; below, nothing. Just a lot of pink. ‘What do you have here?’ I said, and from simple consideration put my finger on the glass. ‘These spots, I mean...’

‘Freckles,’ she said. ‘They’re just freckles. Nothing to be afraid of. You can touch them. They come from the sun, if you have sensitive skin.’

That one in the picture had skin the same as hers. His arms, too, were full of freckles. At first I thought they were hair. But again, I could not tell her this or she would find out why I followed her into the hotel in the first place, why I closed the curtains, and especially why now I wanted to wash her.

I shut my eyes, as if to gain time. And when I opened my eyelids she had the sponge in her hand and was holding it out to me. The expression on her face, or maybe just the way her hair was slightly tousled after she pulled her T-shirt over her head, reminded me of my Auntie. She was married to a Nigerian, a short, black-skinned dude who was always saying scheisse. He promised to bring her some day to that country where mostly they say scheisse and generally shit on everything, except their chocolate and gold watches, but in the end he just stayed there and completely forgot he was ever married to my Auntie and was supposed to make a baby for her. Because if he had made a baby for her then my Auntie would not have rubbed lotion on my body every night. When she pulled me out of the plastic basin, which was painted blue so I could pretend I was swimming in the sea, in the Atlantic almost, I would lick my lips and stare at her dark, ringed nipples. We were both of us naked to the waist – I forgot to mention that. Me and my Auntie, I mean. And when I dropped my towel on the ground, I had an erection. My Auntie smiled, shook her head, and rubbed lotion on my penis.

‘I think you need to take your shorts off too if you are going to take a shower,’ I said. I was still avoiding her eyes.

‘And my panties?’

‘Yah, well, I do not know, I think...’

I started feeling hot, like I was plugged into 220 volts, or like somebody had hung me upside down in the sun. If my skin was white, as white as hers or her son’s, I would probably not get freckles but blisters. As it was, my eyes merely bulged out of their sockets.

‘God, you’re adorable,’ she said, and laughed my Auntie’s laugh. ‘Do you really think I’m going to let you wash me?’

It was like that one in her bag was laughing at me too. Like he curled his lips and then suddenly turned around and stuck his arse in my face. Fuck. I would slice it off him if I could. And I would also slice off those delicate shoulders, those thighs and that belly stuffed with European shit – Coca-Cola, chewing gum, hamburgers and I do not know what else. Because that photo does not tell you the entire story; if you don’t know about such things you would not even notice that the dude has a problem. But I knew about them and my dick swelled up. She was not even undressed but there it was already. ‘Your son is a queerboy, isn’t he?’ I blurted out in a moment of inspiration.

I thought she would say something different. Like ‘go fuck yourself’ or ‘you have got to be kidding’. When she admitted it right away, I was stunned. I just stood in that bathroom, pressed against the ceramic tiles, and tried to keep my eyes focused on her back. If at that moment I had taken the sponge she held out to me and started massaging her sensitive skin with tender strokes – she’s the one who said it was sensitive – then this thing now would not be happening to us. Basically, for the first time in the entire history of my short life, I would have touched white skin. And if I had touched her on the back I would have touched something else too. But now it all turned to scheisse. I will probably never eat chocolate with seventy per cent cocoa or wear a gold watch, at least not in the country where that Nigerian who forgot about my Auntie works up and down from one end to the other. More than once I heard her crying at night behind that gauzy sheet. When she realized my eyes were open, that I was listening, she said, go to sleep, Ismael, go to sleep, it has nothing to do with you. But if it had nothing to do with me, then how did I end up now with this woman in a five-star hotel?

‘Well, what did you think? That I would have a nap, give you a massage, then magnanimously stick it in you? And do not give me that shit that black men have no feelings, that we all live in tribal communities...’

I would have kept going if she had not just sat down on the floor, right on the ceramic tiles. Her back wasn’t in the mirror anymore, not even her half-tousled hair, let alone those stars sprinkled across her back. If I took a step or two away, I would still have seen them sparkling. But I stood very close, so close I had no choice but to sit on the floor too. I wrapped my legs and arms around her belly from behind. She did not move; she did not show that she knew where such an embrace would lead. I pressed my legs a little harder, held her waist a little tighter, and listened to see if maybe she had stopped breathing. And since I still did not hear anything, I thought it best if I held my breath in too. That’s sort of how it was with us. Complicated, I tell you.

* * *

In my own city I would rise at the crack of dawn. I loved the electrified morning sky that descended on the houses, the backs of cyclists, the sidewalks the cyclists were riding on. I was doing things that didn’t require me to go anywhere. I mean, I went from the house to the garden with a cup of Japanese tea and watched the birds, who were sometimes scared off by a passing train, or sometimes just by me going back into the house, but I never had to stand in front of a mirror. To get dressed, put on makeup, go to work.

After graduating from the academy I went to England, to the Bright­on School of Art, and was soon working in my own studio. In those days people looked at me as if I fell out of the sky. My parents, especially, expected me to follow a more traditional path: to work for Labod or some other garment manufacturer. Mura or something. My mother projected all her unfulfilled dreams on me. To appease her, I took a job at a factory whose name it’s best I don’t mention. For a month, two months, three, I crouched in a foetal position over the women who worked there, whom I called into my office for a talk and whose wages I was forced by circumstances to lower, until one day one of them took her clothes off in front of me right in the office. I looked away and was already reading the director’s letter in my mind, where he noted that I possess definite artistic talent but no organizational skills at all, or rather, no sense of teamwork.

After that minor scandal it made no sense for me to stay there. One morning I decided to use my savings to rent a studio flat – in England it’s called a ‘studio’, in our country a ‘bachelor’ – and started working. I started by hand-printing a few scarves and selling them to Mama’s friends. Until one of them realized she wanted an armchair printed in eucalyptus leaves. And even before I had a clear idea of what eucalyptus might look like, even before I embarked on this journey of long, slender leaves, which I printed in a shade of red on a dark lilac background, which later became my trademark, I was getting more serious commissions. Not from Mura or Labod, of course – I was too fiery for them – but from a shop in London I worked with during my year of postgraduate study. But that had been a happy time, so happy that, especially when I look back on it, maybe it never happened.

In my studio I worked, slept, ate, and made love. And when in the morning my lovers woke up on top of me, next to me, under me, I would draw their bodies on paper in my mind. Some were eucalyptuses, but really, only some of them; others were ferns, with broad, fluttery, dark-green leaves that covered the entire surface of my body. Birch leaves gave me the greatest trouble, believe it or not, although my favourite were the bougainvillea blossoms. I discovered them fairly late, if memory serves, not until my last months at the Brighton school. I was living with a lady who kept food for her eighteen-year-old cat in the fridge next to the dinner leftovers. From time to time her relatives came to see her and they’d get a close-up look at the Yugoslavian miracle. More often, black men came to see her. I bumped into one of these men one afternoon on the staircase. He was wearing tight jeans and a polo shirt. Outside the summer was dazzling but we were surrounded by darkness. It was one of those staircases with a winding bannister. Although there was enough room for us to quickly say hello and go around each other, he pressed me against the wall. It felt like he put his dark hand inside me, carved something out of me, then pulled his hand out again palm down. It didn’t last long, it couldn’t – the lady appeared at the door and was calling out his name. Her voice rolled down the steps toward us, and a second later the man was at the top of the staircase.

Outside, when I stepped into the summer glare, tears started flowing. What the lady was doing with them, or what they were doing with her, remained a mystery to me even long after I returned home. But I saw the man pottering around the flat a few times; I suppose he came into my room, too, washed the windows, hoovered, made the bed, if I hadn’t done it in my morning rush, and then went out again. He remained a man without a name, the man in tight jeans, which hung off his backside. If, although it’s unlikely since the light in the stairwell never did work, but even so, if somebody had turned the light on, the man might well have vanished. His face was dark and his hand, which reached somewhere near my heart, was as dark as a tropical night. Later, whenever I saw laundry hanging idle in the sun, I thought of him. Because of the contrast, I mean, between the flickering air and the motionless pieces of cloth pasted on it.

It was about fifteen or twenty years before I moved from the studio into my parents’ house, and from fashion textiles to interior design. I found my niche designing textiles. That sounds simple but it wasn’t. Orders from shops in London, Paris, and Hong Kong started coming in only after I had shed a little blood. Especially in my private life – isn’t that what people call it? When I was young we didn’t divide life into public and private, as though living in some novel. Which is also probably why I put my table next to the window that looked into the garden and upholstered the antique chair with one of my cushions. Sometimes when I looked from the birds in the branches over to the glass door on the left I could catch the blue pouring inside. Toward my feet and then up the wall. It was from the electrified sky, I suppose, especially in the morning.

With cup in hand, in the garden, wrapped in my bathrobe, I sometimes wondered what it would be like, what would have happened, if I hadn’t done what I did. If I had done something else – write, for example. Although, if my feelings don’t deceive, writing is not so different from what I’ve been doing all my life. Gilding wardrobes, printing birch leaves on mohair scarves, giving meaning to velvet bedspreads. What I’m doing now – writing, I mean – is also probably about finding meaning. First, of course, it’s about the craft, but if you have a steady enough hand to trace all the indentations of a fern and then between the lines add the right amounts of green, black, and blue mixed with water, maybe on half the paper somewhere these same colours will run together in a way that’s quite all right.

The only question is, what if they don’t? What if they go over the edge, like I went over the edge on that staircase? What baffles me is that even now after so many years what I remember is not so much his smell as that of the recently painted wall he pressed me against. I have it in my nostrils, the smell of salt dissolving in a ceramic dish, the smell of quivering air at high summer. When I was alone and there was nobody next to me, I imagined the man watching me. He’d be sitting on the other side of the windowpane as I made my way through the garden with the dainty steps of a Japanese woman. At a certain moment I lift my arm and touch an invisible cord that stretches through the air and connects the house with a tree outside. I go a little further and when I come to the window I place my open palm against it. Of course there is no one there for me to touch, no one who could reach inside me and pull the bougainvillea blossom out into the open.

* * *

Now I need to say something about my mother too. The first time I saw her, at the orphanage, she seemed more indulgent than my father, but later things took their own course. She never spoke much, at least not to me, and most of the time she wore black. After undressing to the waist, after removing one more time that silk blouse which caused my father, sitting at the table, to think her skin looked exactly like it was mixed with water, she never put it back on again. He had told her – more, I suppose, to cover up his desire for her skin – to cover herself up and make him tea, but when she reappeared in the kitchen she looked completely different; she was wearing something else entirely. A dark-coloured dress with three-quarter sleeves, printed with red polka dots. From that time on she would go from room to room wearing nothing else. When she sat at her sewing machine, she undid the top button so you could see the edge of her brassiere. That’s what she was good at – brassieres, I mean. Everyone else was making white, cream-colored brassieres, or brassieres the colour of flesh, while she created an entire palette of colours. I respected her for that, if almost for nothing else.

As a child I sat for hours and hours next to her sewing machine, squee­zing some toy and dangling my legs. By then, I guess, I already knew why she had taken me home with her. It wasn’t hard to figure out. But after that half-naked scene where she persuaded my father to agree to visit the orphanage, nothing essentially changed for her. There was, certainly, an arrangement by which the housekeeper would look after me in the late afternoon and my mother would have me during the day. But because my father wasn’t around most of the time, was in his office most of the time, with his papers, with his clients, with the system insects, as he called his law colleagues, and because no one was therefore obliged to show any conscientiousness, kindness, or tenderness, I was left with the housekeeper during the day too. She was a small, pensive woman. Even in my dewy youth, she must have been a few years past sixty, and when I was entering my teenage years, she was found dead one afternoon in a bathtub with toys. After she had done all she could do, after she fell down the steps carrying an entire crate of tomatoes, my parents decided to install her in one of the flats the family owned. Hardly anyone ever checked to see what was going on with her, what stage of dementia she was in, or where those toys in the bathroom came from. But in those days women like her were not so uncommon, and even her demise was, to say the least, not entirely unusual.

What my mother didn’t get from my father she got from her brother. Namely, admiration. Whenever her brother rang the doorbell, a long impatient ring, she would run from the sewing room, embrace him affectionately in the hallway – an embrace, by the way, that I always took as a sign of his insecurity – and return for a brief moment to shut off the sewing machine, by which time I could already see the glassy look of the protector, the guardian, in her eyes; then she would invite him into the kitchen. From that moment on they would behave as if they were the only two people in the world. No pats on the head, no ‘How are you, Ana?’, no ‘My word, how you’ve grown, I can’t believe it!’, nothing. I might as well have been non-existent. And non-existent as I was, the only thing left for me to do was drop my toy on the floor and run to the kitchen door, from behind which came the sound of furtive weeping. At first it frightened me; I didn’t understand why grown-ups would be crying, especially since a minute before they had been laughing, but then through the door’s yellowish pane I saw a hazy figure, probably my mother, stroking a man, probably her brother, at neck level and telling him not to worry, everything would be all right.

So I learned the story of Mama’s brother’s crime only in bits and pieces. It seems that when he was eighteen, he killed a girl in a traffic accident. Unintentionally, but nevertheless he’d been running ever since. Especially from himself, while my mother had declared herself his protector, his comforter – in other words, the only one who knew her brother was a good man. Despite the fact that he looked at me suspiciously. Despite the fact that for him I was little more than a stranger, a connecting link of sorts to the man his sister had surrendered herself to, though in his view this same man was hardly worthy of her. I gathered this from the fact that he came by only when my father was not home.

Despite the fact that it was the black polka-dot dress that encouraged me to study in England, and that my mother took me home with her and gave me a name, there was no need, at least as far as I was concerned, for her to do any of it. She could just as well have left me on the orphanage floor. In fact, it made no difference if I went or stayed; the difference came only as the years passed. When I was done leaning against the kitchen door, behind which two strangers were caressing each other, the first thing I did was run to the mirror in the front hall. Now you expect me to tell you that I ran my hands over my face, blew the hair from my eyes like some television bimbo, only for it to fall right back into the same place, made my lips into a pout, or something similar, but it wasn’t like that. I was more obsessed with my entire look. The general impression my figure might make on another person. Were my shoulders drawn with a pencil or fountain pen? How defined were my calves, and how long was the shadow I cast on the floor in front of the mirror? I did it in a such a way that nobody could really tell I was looking at myself. Just a quick glance of the eye, and then back to the umbrella deposited in the front hall, the man’s trench coat split at the back, the leather gloves carefully folded on the little stand.

All this time something has been trying to make me write that my mother and her brother were drinking tea in the kitchen, but once you write something down you can’t go back and change it, and the truth is, the strangers behind the kitchen door were never drinking tea. The tea was for the husband and the wife, who held the husband to his promise to stay with her because they were going to adopt a little girl. Ana. More than once I’ve wondered if the woman who set me down in the empty room at the orphanage ever gave me a name. Did she ever stroke her belly when she was carrying me? Or was she from a different generation of women, who didn’t do that? My mother and I never talked about where I came from, only about where I was going. The fact that I had a triangle of a garden, where I sat for hours and hours watching the sky, searching it for faces I would never know; that an elderly woman looked after me and not the woman who was supposed to – all this should have been enough.

My eternally absent father too – he should have been enough, and also the chair, among all the chairs in the room, from which I had to watch my mother at her sewing, and the bread with marmalade and margarine every morning, no matter how disgusting the jar from which we spooned the marmalade, and the window that looked out at the roof of another house and which my father had stood in front of when he agreed to visit the orphanage. At that moment of not-looking, he did not yet know the child’s name, although that changes nothing. He was thinking only that he had reached the point where a woman was ready to sacrifice everything for him. He was not thinking about the little girl; nor later, on those rare occasions when he happened to be at home and in a quick glance caught her eyes in the front hall mirror, and maybe even saw something in them of the loneliness that belongs only to people, adults or children, trapped in an empty room, not even then did he think about her. This was all part of the contract; the tea, too. In the kitchen, after my mother and her brother left it, as my mouth was cleaning the tiny elongated glasses in which they had drunk their schnapps and, in the front hall, the unintentional killer was pulling on the detective gloves and clenching the umbrella under the arm of the trench coat, I noticed a spot of blood on the chair where my mother had been sitting. Because I didn’t know if it was a polka dot from her dress or an actual stain, maybe because I didn’t want to know, I sat down on it and waited for my mother to return.

When she opened the kitchen door, paned in a heavy yellowish glass through which you could see the outlines of people and objects on the other side, so I was sure that my mother and her brother knew about my eavesdropping but in their self-absorption forgot they should tell me to go away, she was the same as before. Slightly out of breath, slightly tousled hair, but still with the same pencil-drawn shoulders as always, with dark shading on just one side. It occurred to me we could even be related by blood, that this woman in front of me could even be my mother, but, fortunately, that was impossible. I leaned over, as my father had once leaned over long ago, who had tried, quite unsuccessfully of course, to get away from her, and picked my toy up from the floor, pushed the chair in so the housekeeper wouldn’t have to, and ran upstairs.

* * *

I will not deny there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since I last put it in somewhere, and the pressure was mounting. It’s also possible of course that last time I did not do a good job of it. The girl – who could not have been more than seventeen, maybe sixteen even, and you know what girls that age taste like: watermelon, warm, soft and wet – she and I were hiding behind a movie projector. It was an outdoor cinema, and since I was focusing too much on her trousers, I was not really following the movie. Before it all started, before the girl, whose face I don’t remember but then she probably doesn’t remember mine either, signalled to me that she knew a hiding place where we would be covered in darkness – not total darkness, because she probably would not have done it if it was total darkness – I heard they were going to show a Yugoslavian movie. When her trousers were down at her knees, I saw a man on a horse. And when she sighed and I knew she liked it and had done it before, and would certainly do it again, some black bloke with soft features was digging into an old lady’s wall. This same old lady was somehow connected to the other bloke, who had been riding the horse on the prairie. Like you’d expect in a cowboy movie, lots of guns were going off, and then mine went off too. At the same moment I put my hand over the watermelon’s mouth, probably more to keep myself quiet than her, but she wriggled out of my hold – I do not know what else to call the position we were in, one leg tightly around another as we kept checking to make sure nobody saw us. She ran off into the dark, away from the jumpy screen, and when I tried to follow her with my eyes, at least to see what she looked like from behind, she did not leave any cloud of dust behind her like there was behind the horse’s tail in the movie.

Obviously I had been too rough; obviously I was too much into it and that scared her. Or at the last minute she decided she really should not be doing this, that it was the last time and she would never do it again. In any case, I was almost crippled down there, not because I expected so much from that watermelon, but because there had been a whole lot of water under the bridge since my previous love-making too. That is what it’s like in Ouaga, or should I say that is what it’s like in Ouaga if you live on the street. Every twelve miles or so somebody takes pity on you, like that girl did behind the movie projector. Who knows, maybe she had a fight with her ex, or maybe she just liked the way I smelled. That is what women say in this city. They chase after this or that man because they like the way he smells, although basically they too are doomed to waiting. They think the ideal man is a man with a lorry. It used to be that men went off to hunt in the forest, but today they order lorries from Europe. Even if what they get from the Lebanese dealer is some beat-up hunk of metal, they hammer it, smooth it out, rewax it. I know because I have done it. Morning to night I used to bang cheap cars together. When I looked at the sun and the sun looked at me, my head would spin like I was going crazy. But it spins even more when I think about how I could not put it in right. How I just put it in somewhere in the folds of our trousers and then stupidly sprayed the both of us.

When the girl disappeared into the night with her trousers half down and my penis throbbing in pain, I don’t know why but I thought of a lorry lying in the road. Nobody can pick it up, not the police and not the army; only the birds can. And the natural enemies of beautiful women. That is how they see it, I think, though my watermelon was not one of the most beautiful ones. Despite the darkness between us, I could see her all the same. Malik would probably say, Big for nothing! It was the only English sentence he knew by heart. But at least Malik knew how to get things moving in the right direction; he never had to go through any dry season. Sometimes he would say his English sentence with such enthusiasm that women thought he must be from Nigeria. It might not be true that all Nigerians are in the Mafia, but it is true that most of the Nigerians in Ouaga have money, and for Ouaga women that is what counts. The smell of money. I think that’s what the Yugoslavian movie with the horse and the black bloke was mainly about. The black bloke digs and digs in the old lady’s flat, and meanwhile she tells him a story about saddles with no cowboys in them. There were two brothers and a woman, although I do not really get the point of that Yugoslavian-Macedonian triangle. Here we have polygamy for things like that, but now I’m just making it up because I didn’t see how the movie ended. The boys told me later that the black bloke gets on an aeroplane with some white girl and you just know he is going to put it in her.

I pulled up my trousers and went over to them. They were smoking 57s and laughing their heads off in front of the jumpy screen. Most of them cannot read the subtitles so they make up stories as it goes along. A day or two later they are still telling them to each other. In tattered overalls, even more tattered than the movie screen, as they crawl beneath the corpses of cars or take engines apart. When I was a teenager I wanted to be just like them – they looked like adults to me, with their big rags tucked in their pockets, or wearing jeans which they always put one pair over another mainly to hide their scrawny lion-fleeing legs. Banging cars together, waxing, screwing on pipes end to end – in reality that was all more of a side business; the main stuff came later, at night. So when I was opening up that watermelon, I was just doing what they did. I copied their movements, pulled down my trousers just like they did, and even the words I whispered in the watermelon’s ear were the same as their words. The whole time I was somebody else, and it was not until I sat down on one of the benches around the movie screen that it dawned on me: I wanted to be somewhere else – not here. I stared at the screen. The names of the actors and a few other blokes scrolled across it, then suddenly the picture gave a jump and went out. The official part of the show was over, although for me it had not even started. I realized that it was not so much the girl I wanted, but her warmth, her moistness, her softness. I wanted to touch something other than banged-out metal. For a few weeks I had been one of the links in the long chain of car repair – a trivial, sun-blackened link; now suddenly I did not know anymore how long I could stand it.

I suddenly found myself missing Malik, missing his slightly clunky smile, his slightly clunky albino appearance. If he had been there I would have bought him a beer, and in exchange he would have driven me around the city all night on his motorbike. He called it the naked moto. He pinched it somewhere and stripped its skin off so the previous owner would not recognize it. If he was riding by himself he would usually lie down on the seat with his face forward and try to pump the last atoms of horsepower from the engine. Sometimes the naked moto could even run on fumes, but Malik was nowhere around at the moment. I filled my nostrils with the aroma of the cigarette the boy on my left was smoking; then I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and stood up. Since I did not know what to do with myself, I stared into the dark for a while, then turned my back to the screen. Somebody – I do not know who, probably a fellow mechanic – shouted something behind me, but I didn’t turn around. In the long, narrow room where I was temporarily staying, the only thing waiting for me was a mattress full of bedbugs. And above it, a poster of Pamela Anderson. I had paid a lot for it, but as I walked back from town with my hands in my pockets and kicking up stones in front of me, I decided to take it down. I decided that time had run out on us, me and Pamela. There was nothing original about our life together; it was just a copy of something we thought we were supposed to live. Later, back in the room, I stood the bedbugs on end and fell asleep on a plastic mat. If anybody was looking down at me from the sky, they would think I was a lorry lying in the road, which neither the army nor the police could pick up, though maybe the birds could, flying over my head and soothing the sun in my mind.

* * *

After the embrace on the bathroom floor, we each looked in different directions. His hands were just below my breasts, along the line where the flesh starts to curve and rises into the air. How to describe this embrace? Initially, it was about compassion; I know that. Compassion for my slightly sagging figure and my lips with too much lipstick. The lipstick, in fact, I had partly licked off, some of it the wind had taken, and the rest had seeped into my pores. That’s what I was thinking about, that’s all I was thinking about, when I was looking in my own direction. He probably thought I was thinking about my son, the queerboy, as he called him, but I had already thought about him too much anyway.

I grabbed hold of the edge of the sink. The most sensible thing, I thought, would be to stand up, for us both to stand up and bring this mute scene to an end, but he pulled me back down. His arms tightened, his veins bulged, and it was not until I indicated that we could also stay as we were that they returned to the normal rhythm of his circulation. In fact, I don’t really know how it is with the body – when, exactly, does it start to decline, when does it surrender to that cold blast of wind, not asking, not hoping anymore, that things might change for the better? The only comfort is the here and now, which becomes the best you’ve got. That’s also why I understood that our sitting here on the bathroom floor was half-caricature: an old woman with a young man behind her. I wanted to at least turn around, look him in the face and ask his name. And after he told me his name, I would ask him to tell me the names of his mother and brothers and sisters. He seemed too alone to have anyone, to have anything, but you never know.

Like I didn’t know who it was I was marrying when I got married. In a long satin gown, which had a scorpion drawn on it but only at the groin. So I played by the rules. Which is why I divorced by the rules. As far as I was concerned. As far as my ex-husband was concerned, I left because I couldn’t do without. A woman like me should be content with physical intimacy, tenderness, comradeship, closeness, and other such rubbish. If anyone should have left because the passion had gone out of our marriage, it should have been him. One afternoon, as the sun fell at a right angle into the room and I was packing my and my son’s things, I suppose he had an inkling of, but could never imagine, the horror I felt at the thought of having to live the rest of my life with him in his navy blue sweater and corduroy jeans. Later he branded me a whore, although I had only let one man into my life, while he, in the twenty years since we divorced, fathered three other children all out of wedlock.

Despite everything, I tried to turn my face toward him, a man whose name I didn’t know. Nor did it seem like he meant to tell it to me. So there on the floor of the bathroom we were as people without names. If I suddenly got lost, I don’t know how he would call out to me. Tubabu? White lady? No, that was too impersonal for people who have slept in the same bed, touched elbows, know each other’s scent. When he was taking off his T-shirt, when he showed me his dark nipples and even the start of the pubic hair around his genitals, probably without even knowing it, that was when I last thought about my son. I mean really thought about him. For a moment I wished this man with the arms of a car mechanic, arms that could encircle the world in a single embrace, was still a child, but also still a man, my son. And that I could shut my eyes and forget the whole of my former life.

As I was leaving that room where the sun fell in longitudinal, right-angled lines – I remember it clearly, and also my husband’s navy blue sweater, which by the way is one reason he got along so well with my mother – I could foresee my future: my husband would condemn me for leaving because I’d supposedly fallen in love with someone else; in his view, I was abandoning my son, too, destroying one family in hopes of creating another. But my son, in my husband’s forecast, of course, would blame me not so much for that as for the fact that I couldn’t hold on to any man. He wouldn’t want to know, or would only pretend he didn’t, what they did with me or what I did with them; he would only want his father. His wilted, prematurely aged image, shown in the photograph the young man found in my bag in the hotel room, would thus be a story of overspreading his earliest memories of a shattered family.

He pressed himself to me as tightly as he could, his naked belly against my back, and if in the background day was beginning to dawn, in that region there was only darkness. I laughed – what relief to feel this mass of pulsating flesh so close to me. His circulation was probably not what it should have been. Or what it was when he was sitting on the roof of the empty house. Not a lot of people lived inside it, he said later, after we stood up, after our bodies recovered from all the closeness, but you could see the entire world from its roof. It was most beautiful, he thought, during the harmattan season, when the farmers clear land to prepare new fields for cultivation. The animals run from the fire, and if you’re lucky, in the evening hours you see burning birds as they try to escape the flames. They hover for a while like phoenixes, until eventually the fire sucks them in. But before he started spewing out such sentences, I turned toward him in utter seriousness and caressed his face with my fingers.

I was about to ask him where that nearly empty house was located, in which a man and a woman lived, a couple, though it was still nearly empty, and how it got that way and what burnt grass smelled like, but then I bit my lip and felt the residue of the lipstick that had seeped into my pores clinging to the back of a tooth. I licked my lips and, as I was already at it, thought I might as well go into the cavity of his mouth, too. But when I finally got up the nerve, he swayed back, from his shoulders and neck. His skin, too, I thought, went grey, and because it went grey, he had obviously not been expecting this. And why should he? You sit down on a bathroom floor out of compassion, behind a body in decline, which after a brief silence turns toward you and tries to kiss you. For a while he just stared, not at me but somewhere in the distance, and then with his gleaming hand touched me on that spot where, like a ship run aground, I rested the weight of my entire body. If the same motion had been made by the man in the corduroy jeans on which the sun beamed down that afternoon, everything would now be different. But because he did not make that motion, things are as they are.

* * *

Now this is true. I often used to think about how things looked from above. Ouagadougou, for instance. Although I have never flown in the sky, I have seen millions of lights in my dreams. Most of them paraffin lamps. When women, the kind of women my Mama once was, would sit in the road and start heating up the oil. In the meantime, they would peel the red skin off the potatoes and laugh. I see them curling their upper lips and showing their gums. In Ouaga, there are two kinds of women – the ones who leave for the market at the crack of dawn and the ones who don’t carry stuff on their heads until it gets dark. My Mama did not do either. She would sit under the bridge and pick her teeth. Whenever I started crying, she would take a fistful of earth mixed with dust and other filth and shove it in my mouth. Once I got a big piece of plastic caught in my throat but I happily swallowed it down, digested it, and later passed it.

In my dreams I never land. But if I fly too long, my body starts getting cold. My internal organs start failing one after the other, the way the paraffin lamps come on in the evening. Sometimes I go almost to the end, but often I stop somewhere at the lungs. If I really did ever go right to the end, I am not sure if I would wake up again. Or if the women with the crackling fire, in which they gingerly place chunks of sweet potato, would be able to wake me up. I survived my mama, and if I survived her, and not only her but all those bridges we slept under, then I have to survive my own dreams too. When it gets to the point where my heart starts to beat against the wall really really slowly, that is enough for me to remember what it was like when Mama died. It is true I did not see her body, but that is still no reason for me not to believe it. Not long before they told me that a lorry had run her over – that it was really her, and not one of the night women or morning women – we had grown apart. Or maybe she had grown apart from me, I am not sure. It is possible that I was a burden to her. In our village seven-year-old boys are already responsible for themselves. They bite into green fruit, never meet their mama except in dreams, and eventually get used to her not being around and start paying attention to the things that are around. I do not know if at the same time they also forget that electric shock which makes you shudder when you realize that from now on you are completely alone in the world and there is no point crying since you have to learn how to survive.

What I wouldn’t have given then for a fistful of earth! Just to have somebody show me they wanted to take me home with them, or if not take me home then at least hug me, stroke my hair. But since nobody was around, I started counting trees, houses, people. Numbers drove me crazy. The good side of being completely alone was that I did not have to talk. Not with people and not with spirits. It was the spirits who told me the lorry ran Mama over because she had been standing in the road looking at me. We had been walking side by side, but suddenly space slipped in between us. Too much space for her not to sense it. Mama turned around, out of the blue, on impulse, like the crazy woman she was, and thought for a minute or two about what name to call to me with, but since I did not even have a name she could not call me, and that was when the lorry ran her over. That is the official version. Unofficially, we just went our separate ways, or rather, I was already old enough to choose my side of the road to beg on.

I went and joined the street kids – where else could I have gone? Street kids are children who huddle together at night and sleep under some leaky roof, or not, and during the day give directions to people on motorbikes or in cars on the road. They usually have a wet sponge and compass in their hands. When a car stops at a traffic light they show up like spirits. Some drivers get angry and wave them away with their arm, saying they do not want their windows cleaned, but then they let them do it anyway; others hurl insults at the boys, calling them vermin and little shits who only smear the windscreens on their precious cars; a few of them, however, will drop a coin into the big, too big, childish hand. And I liked them the best. They were usually women. Big, light-coloured women, whose skin smelled of lotion and the soft spray of air-conditioning. When they rolled down the window – I mean, they just pushed a button to do it – their other hand would drop twenty-five francs on the ground. They were always careful, of course, to avoid physical contact.

The money we begged we mostly spent on movies. I liked Indian and Mexican movies the best, where white people swapped miles and miles of spit. Burkinabe movies we saw only from a distance, from trees or on posters, and we got food from the night or day women. I felt respect for these women, not all of them, I mean, but mainly the ones who would first shout at us that we really were vermin and little shits but then would anyway wrap two or three sweet potato chunks in a piece of newspaper for us. A few were so generous they would sprinkle some crushed peppercorns on top, fried onion or a pinch of salt, too. One of them, who did this every time I showed up at her fire, though I did not show up there all the time since I did not want her to think I had bad manners, no sense of proportion – I chose to be my mama. She had big eyes and very dark skin, so sometimes in all that darkness I could barely find her. Once, when she moved her fire somewhere else, to the other end of the road, and I thought she had gone for good just like my Mama had, without calling to me before she left and saying ‘take care of yourself’ or at least ‘good luck’, my heart almost stopped beating. I felt like it was a dream or, later, when I started going to the cinema, like it was a movie. But then I saw her. She was standing there, among all the other night women, made from ebony and zealously, like someone who feels responsible for her family, who wants things to be good for her family, wrapping chunks of sweet potato in coarse paper. She would tear off a small piece of paper from a big sheet she had on the side, put the oily potato on top of it, sprinkle salt on it, and then wrap it up carefully. I would have to be looking at her from above for her to be more beautiful to me.

At that moment she lifted her face, as if she knew what I was thinking, smiled, although the smile was probably not meant for me so much but could be attributed to the night, the flickering lights around the two of us, the smell of burnt oil, which in us street boys always triggered enormous, insatiable hunger, and said, ‘Ismael, come closer.’ I ran to her as if flying and, in front of that big clay pot, which was throwing starry sparks into the air, nearly flung myself on my knees. Grateful, I guess, that somebody finally decided to call me by my name.

After the ebony woman wrapped a few thick potato chunks up for me, and I, in the darkest possible corner, obviously, so I would not have to share any, gulped it all reverently down, the newspaper was all I had left in my hands. I bent down over the letters, over the printed sentences, but at the last minute remembered that it would not be the taste of salt that stayed on my tongue, but the taste of ink. In our country newspapers are printed in the old, prehistoric way and the last time I licked a front page, I had a horrible, stinging pain. I scrambled to my feet and went over to the ebony woman. I stood right behind her back. For a few long minutes she did not say anything to me, did not even turn around. Maybe she thought I was just a moth and would soon enough fly away. Or she knew it was me and was pretending not to see me unfolding the paper over the lamp and moving my lips. I had learned quite a lot from the conversations of the idle lorry drivers I ran errands for, and from the shouts of newspaper hawkers. After endless pleading and sometimes even stolen bottles of beer they would draw the shapes of different letters on the ground, so that later I carried them around in my head and tried putting them together. I knew, for instance, how to write my name and the name of my mama, the one the lorry ran over. This made it easier for me to imagine her painful death. ‘A’ meant a body standing straight. ‘S’ was the approaching vehicle. ‘I’ depicted how she was about to be crushed. The other letters, which I didn’t know yet, spoke of how she went to join the spirits, from where she would never come back. At least not yet.

The ebony woman finally did turn around and look at me. She said, ‘Ismael, what are you doing? You’re blocking my light.’ I left, since I was not even supposed to be standing there, crumpled up the piece of newspaper and stuck it in my trousers. Walking along the road, past the cars, past houses and people I had registered long ago, I swore to myself that I would learn to make sentences, not just letters and words, but long weaving sentences, and would someday write it all down in the dust, in the ground, in the earth. And when somebody looks down at my writing from above, their heart, from all the beauty of it, will cling to their inner walls and simply stand still.

* * *

One night and half a day were enough for me to be seized with wolfish hunger. As far as I could extract from the receptionist, the hotel did not serve any breakfast, let alone lunch. My first thought was a petrol station, or at least a supermarket, but I suspected Ismael wouldn’t want to come along. I know it sounds pathetic that after nearly thirty-five years of living with emptiness you start thinking you can’t go to a shop by yourself. If there is a shop and if Ismael agrees to continuing our story.

On the stairs I hugged myself, wrapping my arms around my body. If he hadn’t been taking his time, hadn’t been sprawling across the bed, if he had been beside me, he would probably have asked if I was cold. Again I would have shaken my head, all the while thinking, I really have no right. At my age I should just be an observer. I would stay at that same hotel, swim my strokes morning and night, rest in-between, and when I wasn’t resting I would watch through the branches of the trees on the other side of the wall the joined heads of a young couple. Ismael would be walking slightly arched, because of the sun but especially because of desire, trying to conceal his slightly swollen penis, while her body would unconsciously touch his shoulder. I would see them through a gap in the wall, two or three times, and that would have to be enough. With some luck – my luck I mean, not theirs – I would invite them to join me for a glass of wine or milk. They would tell me their story of forbidden love and that would be enough for me. It would have to be.

But what was happening in reality was hunger. Even in the hotel room I was thinking about a big chunk of bread slathered in butter, and on the stairs I could hardly wait to step into the street. When Ismael finally appeared, he walked behind me, behind my back, so our shadows only halfway overlapped. People who saw us probably thought we were a boy from the street and an old lady tourist shopping for bracelets on the street. We were all of that and everything else too.

‘Ismael, will you wait for me outside?’

Now that I knew his name it was constantly on my lips. That made me feel safer, closer to him.

‘I am going in.’

I gazed at my reflection in the glass door, at Ismael’s reflection, and at once understood that not only was he willing to continue our story but for my sake would even step from one world into another. Earlier, on the stairs, it occurred to me that the real question wasn’t so much our different skin colours, or even the age difference, the main thing was, we came from different worlds. Ismael was the product of the African street, and also, in places, burnt grass, the harmattan, the harmattan season’s flaming birds, while the supermarket we were about to enter was the personification of camouflaged puritanism, of an imaginary and overrated evolution. I hoped, of course, that one night and half a day would be enough for me to forget where I came from, and even where I was going.

I bent forward slightly, accidentally touching Ismael’s shoulder, and rummaged through a miniature version of the yellow bag. Money, sunglasses, the keys I used to lock my father and his lady friend in the garden, a pack of cotton tissues; everything was still there. And Ismael, meanwhile, with his arched penis was offering me shelter.

When we finally walked into the supermarket, Ismael for a moment – though I might be wrong of course – held his breath. From all the blinding whiteness, from the spray of the air conditioning, from the vigilant looks of the security guards. Bottom to top. They probably did not imagine we were a random, fleeting couple who on the other side of the tree branches could barely take cover in our desire.

‘Choose what you want,’ I said in a lowered voice, as if hiding something, as if I cared about those people who were looking us over.

He nodded and went to the newspaper racks. For a moment I lost sight of him; I picked up a shopping basket next to the checkout and when I turned around his body was bent slightly toward the glass display case and he was peering at one of the covers. It was obvious he was reading. Slowly, with a kind of raptness, he moved his lips; he would clench his fist when he hit a snag and relax his hand when his reading started to flow again. But he never once moved his arms. They hung from his T-shirt like cut-outs, next to his body. It occurred to me that there was something distinctly incongruous in his pose. I shifted my eyes to below his waist, hoping to find the answer to such a coexistence of fervour and remoteness, desire and repulsion, but there was nothing there that might betray him, that might betray us, and tell a story of forbidden love. We were like all the other tourists who shop for bracelets on the street and like all the other boys from the street. Emboldened, I lifted my head, straightened my shoulders, and went to get my chunk of bread slathered in butter. If that was possible, I would ask the man in the white apron. He leaned across the counter and put on a serious face, as though the matter between us was strictly confidential. We both, it seemed, belonged to the world of brighty-lit streets, sparkling bathrooms, and cut flowers in vases. I might have added pets on leashes, too, only I wasn’t sure about this anymore. Maybe pets, at least for this Arab, were part of some now-unimaginable world. Later, when I’d been a few times in this or some other supermarket in Ouaga, when I wasn’t preoccupied by Ismael’s arms, I discovered the hierarchical structure of the employees: business was run exclusively by Arabs and carried out exclusively by blacks.

The belly behind the counter gave a sudden leap. No, he doesn’t do that. Doesn’t slice bread and spread butter on it. When I was a child we’d sprinkle minced nettle on top, too, but it wasn’t my childhood unfolding here, but my sunset.

‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ Ismael whispered to me.

Somewhere we can eat our fill. If at that moment I was sitting by a plastic table, on a plastic chair, in the hotel, right after swimming and just as I was about to turn my eyes toward the tree and then, farther, toward the hotel wall, which allowed the life of the street to enter only through aestheticized gaps, I could not have wished for a gentler bow from a man who, despite the air conditioning and the perfumed space, despite all the sterileness emanating from that space, smelled of cars, of dust from the street, and so represented the negation of the Cartesian, rational, sophisticated world. And I myself, when I put the shopping basket back on the stack and pushed my way past queues of other hungry Cartesians – the fact that only representatives of the light-skinned race can allow themselves the luxury of a supermarket in Africa is, after all, hardly in dispute, and if Africans do show up in one it’s because they have just run out of some expensive soap or powdered milk – I had now stepped out of it. If I had renounced the pillows on the sofa, renounced the view of the garden, renounced my own father, I could renounce this as well. Outside, in the wide-open light, where it was different from earlier, different from when we went in, where you could sense a kind of muffled hue, something between brick and gold, between calm and quiet, though it was possibly all due to the wind, which weaved around our ankles and then higher and higher, I took off my striped H&M jacket and draped it on Ismael’s shoulders. That would make it clearer who we were and where we were going. Now he no longer walked behind me; his shadow was no longer overlapping mine only halfway, but fully. Somewhere below his waist I also glimpsed the edge of a newspaper in his hand. Then we walked on, in silence and in sunlight.

* * *

My father was my first love, despite everything. A small, elegant man, who raised his hat to every female acquaintance. His arm in the air burnt bridges, removed earrings, undid the side zips on skirts. So it’s all the more peculiar that he never made any of them a child. He had only me, or more to the point, I had only him. He supported me when I opened my studio and when I left my husband. He did not oppose either of these actions, but I also knew he did not approve of them. His lips remained sealed; they only unsealed when one day from somewhere I brought a black man home. At first he just hid in the house, as if he was looking for something and had even forgotten that I was sitting with a black man at the solid-wood dining table drinking tea. While the water for the teapot was heating up, I wondered whether I shouldn’t tell my father about that encounter on the stairs. But he wouldn’t have understood, nor probably would the black man, who had picked up the cup, not by the handle, but with his entire hand and was slowly lifting it to his lips.

By then, my mother was long dead. She had floated away with her brassieres. Literally. One winter afternoon she carried the things she had sewn on her sewing machine down into the pool. We should have cleaned it, but nobody could be bothered since the grime was penetrating deeper and deeper. I don’t know where everyone was, I don’t know where I was, when my mother walked down the steps into the sludgy water. Lotuses were floating on top, and moss had overgrown the sides of the pool. Later I made wallpaper on that theme, a whole series of wallpapers in a shade of green. Some of my customers told me that when they entered the salon they felt like they were under water. And in fact we were – my mother and I, I mean. I found her lying on the surface with her face turned toward the bottom. I dropped the things in my hands and ran to the pool. Even now I don’t know how I understood in a moment that the floating hair and scattered brassieres signified the end. Of everything. Not just eavesdropping at the door when my mother’s brother came for a visit, sniffing the leather gloves in the hallway, and so on, but also the end of things from my later, grown-up years. If I remember correctly, even my father, for a few moments back then, stopped greeting female acquaintances with his hat in the air.

I was the one who then got the house with the garden and the pool. I was trying to explain to the black man how this had happened. We had known each other an eternity but it never went further than lying in the grass, nibbling on triangle sandwiches, and in moments of confusion interlocking our fingers. Looking back, I can’t even remember his face; I just know he had very dark, almost papery skin and a penis that was slightly crooked, but my father thought I was going to have a child with him. One, two, three children, and then people would be laughing at us. He was a member of the League of Communists and maybe in some newspaper from the sixties had even seen a yellow-­suited Mrs Tito holding a skinny black boy in her lap, but the image didn’t stick in his memory. When the black man left, leaving the cup separated from its saucer, my father showed himself. Sometimes he slept at our place, mine and my son’s, out of habit, certainly – this, after all, was the family home – but also to keep an eye on me. Then he’d appear in the doorway bareheaded, with a slight droop in his shoulders, but still elegant. He wouldn’t say ‘I’m going for a walk’ or anything like that; he’d just stand there. Maybe he was thinking he should have incinerated my mother’s water-swollen body after all, instead of leaving it and hoping that putting it on view for a few days might help dry it out. Nothing changed; my mother remained as she had been. Big, indomitable, with her white, too white, skin, which now was literally mixed with water.

I touched the earlobe and then the earring. My hand, on its own, forced its way to the edge of the hole where the back of the iron or gold penetrates the flesh. I didn’t want to be the first to speak, and my father, too, was clearly at a loss.

‘We should call somebody to clean the pool,’ he finally said.

That, in fact, was my son’s job, by mutual agreement. But for a good while now I had not been able to count on him. He would shut himself in his room, lie on the bed with the headphones over his ears, and stare at the ceiling. If I had told my father to go call him so we could have a talk, he would have done it. But the double reproach against me would be too great. The black man was enough, and the way he brought the cup to his lips. I really did want to tell him everything, the story of my mother’s body in the pool, even the story of the just-opened salons, and most of all the story of how he had pulled something out of me that day on the stairs, but it didn’t seem like he’d be too interested. He had come here from London on business. That was it, that was as far as he would allow me. No more interlocking hands; the grass, too, was left far behind us. I stood up, started putting things away – the sugar bowl, the napkins, the big glass platter with a cake gleaming on top of it, and then suddenly my father struck his cane on the floor. The chandelier, the big, lavish chandelier from the nineteenth century, an heirloom I suppose, though I couldn’t say for sure from which side of the family, began to sway. The sound of the crystal travelled from my father to me and back again to my father. I knew what he wanted to say. That the house was mine, that’s a fact, but if only out of respect for my mother’s memory, I shouldn’t be bringing unusual individuals into it.

That’s how he talked, my elderly, bashful father, who, before undoing a woman’s side zip, would kiss her on the neck and all the way down to the shoulder. He made love in a way that escapes the present age. But all the same, I don’t know why my mother escaped him. Why she went deeper and deeper into the pool, despite not knowing how to swim. In fact, I don’t know why we even had it. The swimming pool, I mean, with the lotus blossoms. But I arrived after it. First there was water and then everything else.

I didn’t want to show my father he had hurt me. Not only by not knowing how to behave in front of a person whose skin was a different colour, but because he had let me be the first to find my mother and her floating brassieres. If anybody knew why she did it, he did. If she did it because of me, because she had no use for me, because I had not filled that space for her which should have been filled from the start but wasn’t, then my father must have suspected it. But at the scene of the crime he stood there as if it affected him least of all. His absent gaze swam through the water, just as now he was staring absently at the cup in my hand. We stood opposite each other, father and daughter unconnected by blood, with the now no longer swaying chandelier hanging between us. I hid behind my hair, hid even further inside myself, and went to the place where he had been playing his game earlier – that he was busy, maybe even a little deaf, and didn’t know I had a visitor.

I left the things on the counter, including the gleaming cake, and went out. For a short walk. By the time I returned, maybe my son would have taken off the headphones and stopped staring at a point on the ceiling. If he didn’t want to go to university, maybe he could help me with my business. There was, for example, a wedding set – dress hanger, photo album, and sachet of lavender, all in the same colour – which he had come up with himself. But when, in a surge of delight, I tried to hug him, he pushed me away.

In the park, the grass beckoned me to sit in it. I loved things like that, how the light reflects off the ground. I used to think my basic colour was metallic blue; even customers told me that that was where I was at my best, but it’s not true. It’s green. Exactly the kind of green it was on the day I waded into the swimming pool to pull my mother out. Even though it was all over, even though she only rarely, even in my childhood, ran her fingers through my hair. She preferred shutting herself in the kitchen with her brother, or in the sewing room with her brassieres. In the end those brassieres came to nothing. I pulled her by her dress, by her swollen fingers, and because she was too heavy, too stuffed with her unfulfilled life, I went to get a cane. In the meantime my father arrived; he used his hand, not to lift his hat, but to cover his mouth. I remember it clearly. An adult, elegant man, who could make poignant love to women, stands, elderly, next to the swimming pool, holds his hand over his mouth and does not move. I wanted to scream at him and knock his teeth out with the cane. This is the saddest scene in my life. It flooded me with homesickness for love, for old things, for the chandelier from the nineteenth century. But I didn’t strike him, at least not with the cane; maybe I did later with my unusual acquaintances. I merely dipped the cane in the water and used it to guide my mother’s corpse to the edge of the pool.

* * *

I couldn’t help looking at him. As he ate, bent over the plastic plate. He took me to a place he only went to once in a while. I could tell that from how he entered the restaurant. But it was nothing special. Walls painted a dirty blue, two benches on the side, a freezer in the far corner that was constantly being opened and closed, and behind the woman taking orders – ginger, bissap, bissap, ginger – the outline of a curtained window. I felt like everybody was looking at us, though nobody said anything. They spoke only with their eyes, and my eyes spoke back. And why not? Should I be like other elderly people who sit in remote villages and gaze into the fire and at certain rare moments think their life could have encompassed something other than simply what it is now? Or like the elderly lady who watches people’s faces through the window of a café, people too preoccupied to return her look? All my life I had lived the way other people wanted me to live, my mother, my father, my son, my ex-husband, my customers; all my life I had been the person they wanted to see. I could remember periods of my life lived through as somebody else, so now I had no need to pretend. So all those men sitting at that low table, and the woman by the window – I was able to return their gaze.

Ismael chose and I paid. This was the unspoken agreement between us. I knew he didn’t have any money, but it wasn’t about that. If he listened to my story, if he chose a sauce for me and walked beside me on the road, I could give him something in return. He hadn’t told me much about himself, other than his name, of course. In the bathroom he had mumbled something about living under a bridge and a lorry that had run over somebody, but I didn’t want to force anything out of him. When the time came, he’d tell me.

The sauce was steaming hot, too hot for me. The girl, who stood right next to our bench, started giggling when she saw I didn’t know how to eat tô, kneaded balls of dough soaked in sesame sauce. Ismael darted her a quick glance, and I thought that would be enough to make her leave, but because she was still standing there almost as if frozen, from youthful mischief I guess, Ismael’s hand made contact before she could get out of the way. She turned serious at once, started collecting the plates from the table, and then disappeared somewhere in the background. I imagine she went to a big plastic bucket filled with plastic plates. We continued in near silence, without needless commentary, without forks or knives, away from the street, though that was merely for shade. I was glancing toward the exit, carrying tiny bits of food to my mouth, and then stopped. I should have been sitting somewhere else right then. Also on a bench, also in some out-of-the-way place, but with an elderly man across from me, who wouldn’t close his eyes when he ate, and who wouldn’t insist that I open my mouth so he could stick a well-kneaded ball of sauce-drenched dough into it.

I hesitated. Not even my husband at the beginning was this gentle and bold at the same time; not even my son as a child was this playful. But I leaned forward all the same, and I too closed my eyes. The street disappeared, taking with it all those fleeting people who didn’t return my gaze. Then the bracelets on my arm jangled, and because all I could see were golden circles in front of my eyes, it was easy to imagine the path the kneaded food would take as it entered me. I would never have done anything like this at home, I mean let a man two and a half times younger than me, in an overcrowded restaurant, slip food into my mouth that I myself wasn’t able to put inside me, but Ismael was at home here and he was doing it all the same. In front of his own people, despite not being a regular at the restaurant.

I must have blushed as he put it in. From the neck up. It’s true that in these new surroundings I wanted to shed my repulsive snake skin and wanted maybe to shed other words, not my own, the words I used to ensnare customers, but all the same, in one of the concentric circles I saw that even within these dirty blue walls with the window and the woman taking orders in the background I wouldn’t be able to be everything I could be. Because if I was all of it, I’d burn out, evaporate into the air. Like the fleeting motorcyclists on the street. They were there for a while, and then gone. Like the girl who was giggling and showing her dark-blue gums – I’d heard that African girls do that, I mean pierce their gums with sharp metal, which is supposed to make them more attractive to potential suitors – until Ismael’s hand put a stop to her giggling.

My shoulders flinched and I moved out of the way of Ismael’s attempt to put the thing inside me. I know that, to some extent, I don’t feel responsible here for what I do. I can even tell myself I’m living a phantom life, almost like in a novel. The faces that hover at eye level and the plate somewhere below the shoulders of this young man, who is compassionately attending to the old lady across the table, are merely the work of the imagination, of something never realized, something unsated. And even the girl, who isn’t laughing at all anymore, who is simply bending over a washbasin filled with soapy water, is the same as the rest of us. I thought it made sense to get up and check. If I found her in the back and if she was doing what I thought she was doing, then I was right. We all live only the life we want to live. Even me, I ended up here not because my memory was going fuzzy on me, as my father, or my ex-husband or my son would say, but rather because it’s what I wanted. I went to a café one day; I could just as easily have gone to the countryside where people were lighting fires, but I went to a café. Leaning with my elbows on the table, I touched my earlobe. I was born without lobes, but all the same every so often I wear earrings. The waiter stood in front of me asking if I wanted my espresso short or long, just as Ismael was asking me now if I wanted ginger or bissap to drink, when I moved my hand toward the edge of my face. The earring wasn’t there. Emptiness. I took off the other drop earring, and what really annoyed me wasn’t that I’d lost it but that I hadn’t noticed the imbalance in myself.

Without answering, I stood up and ran out, onto the street where people were in motion. But first I had to glance in the rooms at the back, at the giggling girl. I told Ismael I was going to the bathroom; he replied that they didn’t have any bathroom here, the restaurant wasn’t on that level, and if I had to go I should wait until we reached the hotel, although his words held no meaning for me anymore. After I left the café, I mean the restaurant, my only thought was that I had to start everything over, start from the beginning, almost to the point of turning into a child, a child who grows weaker by the day.

* * *

She thought too much. Too much, too much, too much. But it seems like that is how tubabus do it. If I thought about my Mama as much as she thought about the things she left behind I would explode. As it was, I already felt like a horse, every day on the road, every day with Malik on my back. The days we were not stealing we did something else. We rolled ganja and smoked. And that was it. Usually, we leaned against the corner of some house and watched the hustle and bustle of the people in front of us, like in a movie or something. Since we were stoned, we could not understand the subtitles. But now that I did not want to get high anymore, even Malik was getting on my nerves. I imagined him riding his naked moto, waving his arms, and then sometimes standing up because his arse hurt – no other reason, just his arse, although he said it was easier to see ahead that way, right to the end of the road. If I was riding behind him, he would point to the drivers of the luxury cars. ‘Have you see him, dat bastard?’ he would yell to me over his shoulder. ‘Dey have da A.C. but still dey use da kleenex.’ If it was not for him I would not have noticed the tissue box with the pretty design on the dashboard. The car was really too big not to have air conditioning, and basically stuff like that is what made me like Malik. He knew how to see things, knew how to see women too; he would stretch out his hand and open their hearts up in a single stroke. But that was back then, ages ago; now things are completely different.