Eddie Signwriter (26 page)

I
t
WAS EARLY
in summer when Kwasi Dankwa arrived in Paris. His trip had been long and tiring, and at times dangerous, and he was grateful to be put in touch with a countryman of his, with whom he shared a room above a covered arcade near the Boulevard de Strasbourg.

His countryman’s name was Denis Owusu. Within a month Denis was able to organize him papers, and then a job, washing dishes in the underground kitchen of the Restaurant Paros, just south of the river, near the Cathedral. He worked five days a week in that kitchen, and two night shifts that ended at three in the morning. On a hard day he’d sometimes spend over fifteen hours standing at the sinks, which were down a series of narrow stairs at the back of the restaurant, his hands in hot water and the sound of frying oil at his back.

A set of windows at the top of the wall above the basins was the only opening through which fresh air could enter. Particles of grease tanned the glass a light brown, and the angle of the sill limited his view to a strip no higher than a few centimeters, through which he could see the ankles of passing pedestrians.

Out front, the boss, a small man named Nikos, would shave
sandwich grec
from a pillar of meat turning on the spit. Nikos brought a cowbell from Greece and hung it from the beams above the restaurant door. It made a hollow tonking sound when he struck it, which he did when nobody was looking his way or reading his menus, and he’d grin at the curious faces turned towards him and sharpen the blade of his long knife against his file with special vigour.

Nikos didn’t like Arabs. He didn’t like any immigrants, but he trusted Africans. At least he trusted them enough to employ them in his restaurant, although only
sans papiers
—since it made them easier to get rid of if trouble came up.

The evenings he had off he spent mainly in the streets of the quarter where he lived, and which left a very strong impression on him: the decrepit passages colonized by cheap restaurants, the Indian music clicking like rickety trains, the brass and tin candelabras and the drapes crawling with tattered, twisted patterns of snakes and amoebas.

Taking a drink at a terrace on the street he would watch the world passing by: a man with trays of sweets laid out like bright baubles and seeds; a man in a track suit, folding his baguette in half; a
clochard
sitting on the pavement cleaning his toes; a girl in a shawl running across the street shouting; a smiling bald white man with his half-caste child; a black woman with a mass of blonde locks, jumpy as Marilyn Monroe.

He would see the off-duty concierge walking by, shouting
“Bonsoir tout le monde”
on his way to his house, his blue coat brilliant with golden snakes, and shot through with a row of shining buttons. The brothers on the step in front of the steel wall-length shutters would slap hands. People would wave at the
clochard
, drinking on a step, and the
clochard
would tinkle his fingers in greeting.

Everything seemed to him to be thrown together: bars on a bay window, a warehouse of plastic rolls appearing through an open lobby; house, factory, house, house, warehouse; a fish shop with its slippery chunks of stinking meat and the wet sticky ribbons of squid’s legs; a sign, a lamp, a neon light, and the hairdressing shops all the way down from Château d’Eau, with their shelves of wigs, black, red,
yellow, and their window fronts packed with people being styled and shorn, the floors swept round the clock, of ringlets and splinters of hair, while the hum of electric shears seeped onto the street like the sound of unsafe electricity.

This, for five months, was his home. The company that Denis kept became his company. A large loose group of them inhabited the
quartier
, all of them West and North Africans, all of them
clandestin
. Their precarious circumstances quickly bound people together. It was a close community, but also it allowed for anonymity. Nobody knew who he was—his family, his district, his country, his home language. He could be who he wanted to be.

The freedom made him dizzy. He went to a different part of the city every Sunday and walked. He went to the districts—as he named them in his head—of clocks, of churches and palaces, the district of cemeteries, the district of film houses, clothes, street markets, inside-out buildings. He deciphered the maze of the metro, spending hours traveling round and round, surfacing here and there—sometimes randomly—to see what awaited above.

It was true he put himself at risk this way. On Denis’s advice he tried halfheartedly, and more out of deference to Denis than out of any real concern of his own, to pass as a tourist. He bought a sweater emblazoned with the letters of an American university, and a camera that he draped round his neck, and he made sure to stop frequently in public squares to consult a large guidebook with an ostentatious cover, as the busy crowds passed around him, even when he knew where he was. But in truth he had no fear. Without knowing why, he felt invincible and immune to chance, and proud—of having followed this journey to its end, of having taken the risks necessary to have what he now did, of his independence, his daring—even his cruelty.

Mostly he succeeded in not thinking about the past, and what he’d done to free himself from his old life. But in quieter moments he would sense the old currents still inside him, beneath the surface of his thoughts. And when he was tired, or resting, he would feel their pull again, and his thoughts drawing back to his flight, and all the
actions that preceded that action; and if he was at work and it was the end of the day, he would often get away to a particular church on the edge of the tourist district, that was dark and damp like a cave, with a small mouth facing away from the sun. It had a pillar in the nave, against which he would sit, on which the flutes curved round in a spiral and then spread out into the vaulted roof like a stretching canopy. Often he sat there looking up at the ceiling, and he felt that he was inside the great chest of a whale, surrounded by its ribs. When he stared long enough, and grew dizzy, the roof would begin to breathe, and sometimes in this state he’d fall asleep and wake in the morning as the windows were catching alight with wheels of fire, and he’d be able to walk out of that place and continue almost as if nothing had happened.

Closest to him, among the group inhabiting the
quartier
, was a tall Guinean, who they sometimes called Monsieur l’Ingénieur, though in Paris he was no longer an engineer, but checked people through at Monoprix, and repaired and sold old electronic equipment on the side. He first met Mamadou—the engineer’s true name—on a Sunday evening in the back of a small café a number of them frequented, on the side street off the main boulevard. It was called Le Refuge de l’Ouest, and didn’t attract much attention from anyone who didn’t know it. He had been about to sit at a table outside, when he saw the group crowding a table near the rotisserie, playing woaley. The noise of their laughter and conversation drowned out the pinball machines that lined the wall. He decided to sit inside instead.

Walking past their table, he noticed the unusual design of the set on which they were playing. The pips were carved from a polished hardwood. The board was surrounded by an inlay of small stones wound into curling S-vines that double-backed on themselves to form a series of loops, and caught in the light when the table was jolted. He later discovered from Mamadou that the set—which they would play on many times together—had been presented to him by the friends with whom he now sat, in honour of his escape the previous day from deportation.

Given the circumstances under which they all lived in Paris, trouble
of this sort could appear at any time. On this occasion, Mamadou told him months later, his wife, Juliette, had sent him down from the apartment to buy bread. As he turned from the door to cross the road he ran into a pair of gendarmes exiting the general store. They saw each other at the same time. Lowering his eyes and not altering his pace, Mamadou made his way directly to the
télécabine
on the corner, from which he phoned up to the flat to inform Juliette that he’d never stopped loving her from the moment he first set eyes on her in the shoe shop in Barbès where her cousin had been a sales assistant. He told her to hug the children and to wait to hear from him—as they had agreed she would do in such a situation. As he put down the telephone, the glass door of the
télécabine
was opened from outside and he was asked for his papers. He only laughed.

News went round fast. Soon the house was crowded with friends. A day passed with no word. The next morning Juliette phoned some French colleagues from work, who went down to the detention centre to find out how the situation stood. Mamadou’s case had already gone before the tribunal. He preferred to defend himself than be defended by the advocate assigned to him, who had mentioned as they entered the tribunal that an aeroplane was already waiting on the tarmac in Roissy. His plea was rejected after a quarter of an hour. Every day Juliette phoned the centre to speak to him, dreading the news that a place had been found on an aeroplane bound for Guinea, and he was now somewhere over the Sahara desert, handcuffed to an official, with chemicals injected into his body to keep him quiet.

But Mamadou had one last card to play. He had not had his passport on him when he was arrested and he refused to give the address of the house. The Guinean embassy would do no more than provide the French authorities with a stamped piece of paper confirming that Mamadou had lost his passport. In the end it proved impossible to move Mamadou without his identity documents, since it was impossible to move anyone without an identity.

They had no choice but to release him from the airport detention centre. Without a centime, he made his way home on foot. Making sure he’d not been followed, he arrived home at midnight. Juliette
opened the door and screamed with shock and happiness. The neighbourhood wives slipped out the back.

Twelve hours later Mamadou was in the café among his friends again, not two blocks from where he’d been arrested, and this was when he first saw Mamadou.

Surrounded by the noise of their company, Mamadou and his opponent—another of their friends at that time, an Algerian called Fawad—sat silent with concentration. Of Fawad, he noticed only his cheeks, which fell inwards into his face like the shadow of a hill. Mamadou, the African, with his strong coastal features, his high forehead and hair growing densely into a thick foam on his head, looked at Fawad from under his raised eyebrows. From time to time his top lip curled under the bottom in anticipation. His eyes smiled, even his skin, with its thick pores like small mouths, seemed to smile. He could not see the game, but he heard the tapping of the pips against the board and the fall of the die, and then the cheers of the small group, which accompanied the game to its end.

Mamadou won, and a drink was bought for him, and as he turned to receive it, Mamadou saw him sitting on his own and invited him to join their group. “An English is among us,” Mamadou said as he made room for another chair, having noticed his accent. “Now let us see if you can play.” He won the game against Mamadou in under five minutes. He noticed some of the observers smile, and Fawad wink knowingly. Whether Mamadou had let him win or he beat Mamadou fair and square, he did not ask and never knew.

Much of his time over the next few months he spent with Mamadou and Juliette, and their two small children. Their apartment was not too far away, and it was easy for him to stop over in the evening. If it was time to eat, Juliette and Mamadou would always invite him to stay. He would help them put the children to bed and then they would stay up eating and talking, and sometimes have a little too much to drink. Juliette would inevitably go to bed, and after clearing the table, Mamadou would take one of the video machines or radios or blenders from the pile in the corner, open it up and work on it with his tools while the two of them talked on into the early hours.

Mamadou and Juliette were among the few families in their group.
They had met in Paris. Juliette was Cameroonian—from a very good family in Douala, of civil servants, doctors and accountants, she was always pleased to remind Mamadou, whose family were migrant farmers making do in the shanties of Conakry. They talked of leaving, but as Juliette would say, Paris was the only place they had in common, and she didn’t see herself living in a tin shack with fifteen other people spending her days washing the clothes of Mamadou’s extended family. Mamadou suffered with good humour his wife’s condescension from the lofty heights of her good family in Douala, though he had privately hinted that Juliette was from a clan that had fallen out of political favour and lived less securely than Juliette would admit.

And so Mamadou and Juliette were an exception. The risk of deportation generally discouraged people from starting families. “But I cannot help whom I love, and where,” Mamadou would say laughing, and if Juliette was in the room he’d wrap one of his enormous arms around her, from which she’d invariably try to disentangle herself, teasing him that he should not remind her of her weaknesses, in case she repented of her past mistakes.

For this he admired them. He admired Mamadou and Juliette for the gentle, kind world they had created together. Those three rooms on the second floor of their building—with one window, little light, and rickety plumbing, but filled with humanity and generosity—seemed to him a rebuke of everything that made their presence there illegal.

It was not something they talked about often. When they did, Juliette would only shrug. What could they do? Mamadou would say that he knew people who had stayed twenty years
sans papiers
. He’d been there four already. Juliette, it was true, might sometimes have a bitter word to say, especially since Mamadou’s failed deportation, but Mamadou would not. It was not that he did not recognize what Juliette did. But as he also once said, one night at the Refuge, when conversation had turned to heavier matters: All happiness is precarious, and that if one day a person finds themself sitting in darkness, would they not prefer to have enjoyed the daylight when they could, than to have spent their time fearing the night?