Eddie Signwriter (28 page)

Now, a week later, he pushed the door open. The wood jam wasn’t in place. But then Mamadou, it occurred to him, might not have been
the last to close the door. The room inside was dark. He didn’t need light to know his way around: the couch draped with a blanket; two chairs, the straw base of one lifting like the prongs of a fork (which was his when he and Mamadou stayed up late and the rest of the family went to bed); the television and video machine indistinguishable from the broken appliances Mamadou repaired to supplement his income, balanced in a stack in the corner of the room. The light from the landing cut a slice out of the floor. A plate of half-eaten food was on the table beside a pile of magazines. The sofa was pulled out at an angle from the table, the blanket twisted, it seemed, by movements of haste. The air was heavy with the smell of living—of soap, food, the weight of breath that fills an unventilated space. He let the door close behind him and turned on the light, and in the moment that the room sprang into existence was struck by the feeling that what until then he had regarded as the present had just become the past. He stood still for a few moments, then turned towards the doorframe that led to the bedroom. Mamadou had often talked of buying wood for a door, so that the presence of visitors staying up into the early hours of the morning would not disturb his wife and children. There had once been a piece of cloth hanging over the entrance, but that was now gone. As he turned he heard a whisper of movement—more a disturbance in the inner ear than a sound—and the cupboard door inside the bedroom slowly swung open to reveal Juliette, a stained bib tucked into her boubou, and a child holding on to each of her legs.

Mamadou, she told him a few minutes later—after he had sat her down and she’d dried her eyes, and the worst was confirmed—had managed to bundle her and the children into the cupboard before the police had come to the room. She had heard the scuffle, and the sound of blows, as Mamadou had charged them, trying to drive them into the corridor. Then shouting, the sounds of effort. Then silence. She hadn’t known what to do. She was afraid to answer the phone. She was afraid to leave the house in daylight.

That night he helped Juliette and the children move into her sister’s house in the north of the city. The next morning he started searching for Mamadou. But even with the help of their French
friends they could find no trace of Mamadou—not in the police stations, nor in the detention centres, nor in the hospitals. There was little they could do but wait. He visited every day after work. Juliette was in a very bad way. It was difficult to see her so weak. She barely communicated. When she did talk, it was in whispers. He would sit with her and try to discuss issues, and comfort her, but she would keep her eyes lowered, and nod, and only reply with a yes or a no. One evening they found the children feeding themselves from their plate that had been brought in at lunchtime, while Juliette lay on the bed, a bundle facing into the corner. They grew afraid of how much longer this could continue, and talked of what they could do. But finally they had news—from a countryman of Mamadou with family in Conakry. Mamadou had been repatriated. A short time after that came the telephone call they were expecting, and they went into the next room to let Juliette talk to Mamadou in private, though the wall was thin and they could hear her crying. But when the call was over, and they came back in, Juliette appeared cheerful and full of purpose, though her cheeks glowed with tears. Mamadou, she told them, had plans to return—he was gathering together funds. No more than a few months, he promised—they would go to Marseilles, where Mamadou had family. Mamadou’s family was already waiting for her. They asked her to stay a little longer, to rest, at least until Mamadou was safely back in France, since they knew how difficult and uncertain the journey was, even with means. But Juliette would hear nothing of it. They tried to reason with her. By the weekend, however, everything she and Mamadou had accumulated over four years had been sold off, and they waved goodbye at the Gare de Lyon, then stood and watched as the train threaded its way out into the dirty gray afternoon.

He returned to Bernadette’s place that evening, drained and tired, and ready to put the events of the last month behind him. But the next morning he could not bring himself to leave the bed. He lay rigid with fear. Juliette’s departure with the children had initially left him relieved—relieved that he’d no longer have to watch her helplessness and self-pity, from which deep inside he recoiled. But now that they were gone he realized that the helplessness and self-pity, and
the feelings of violated dignity from which they arose, were his own. He was in turns angry and terrified. He could not bring himself to open the door and step out into a world in which the accident of being born in one place, not another, or possessing one piece of paper and not another, could turn your fellow human beings against you, and you into a hunted animal, on which all kinds of legitimate violence could be inflicted. Having never given much thought to that violence, he was now terrified of it. He cowered during the day, and at night, sleeping thinly, he dreamed a series of repetitive nightmares. One was of standing in his room while all around him men with iron mallets pounded his belongings into powder. Another was of being dragged down dimly lit passages that somehow reminded him of the Paros kitchens, with only the light of the streets shining through before closing time.

A few weeks later, after an argument with Bernadette that arose from her frustration with his sudden mental fragility, he packed his bag and left. She let him go. He took the stairs down from her
chambre de bonne
in the attic. Taking the elevator, she beat him down to the ground floor, and was waiting for him when he came through the stairwell; and in the lobby of the building, with its echoing hallways that amplified every last sound up into the salons of all the apartments above, she began screaming at him.

How could he leave as calmly as he was? His friends were gone, but still there was her. Did she count for nothing?

He told her to stop her hysterics. He told her that she didn’t need him and that she knew it herself.

“You know?” she screamed. “I think that you’re right. Who do you think you are? You can’t hurt me.”

He slept that night under the Pont d’Iéna. The next night he found a room near Pigalle. He paid dearly for the room, but he had it to himself, and he locked himself in there, with a chair jamming the door handle shut. He left only to get himself food. Towards the end of a wretched fortnight he began to gain control of his thoughts, and rein in the bouts of paranoia, which left him curled up in the corner of the room. His time in Paris would soon be coming to an end, he reasoned.
Did he want it to end like this, cowering in a room, defeated? And so after many attempts at building up his confidence, and a few false starts, he set out into the city, to regain his place in it. He stepped out onto the road, and the sky was as he remembered it, and the walls of windows and doors and balconies were as he remembered them, though they seemed bleached somewhat of their colour, like the aftermath of a great headache.

He returned to Strasbourg, where everything looked the same, only the people he had known and loved—he realized it now—loved—were gone, replaced by new faces, new immigrants, new lives—just as good, only not those that had been part of his life.

He stepped into a music shop he had once known. Inside it was still stacked up its walls with records and tapes and CDs and videos. Those surfaces that weren’t displaying wares were plastered with posters advertising concerts at Bercy and the latest albums recorded by Central Africans in Parisian recording studios. The giants of Francophone African music looked down from the walls, in impossibly shining clothes, decked in impossibly large jewels, surrounded by women whose hips exploded with impossible fertility from their thin waists. On the back wall a wide-screen television played to an audience that stood in the centre of the shop floor, as the large speakers placed all around the ceiling fed the jingling soundtrack into the shop.

A man and his three friends were arguing loudly with the owner behind the counter about a cheque. Their language flew out of them like streams of erratic bats. The men standing beneath the television were shouting back to them to be quiet so that they could watch the video.

“And whose shop is this?” the owner shouted back. “You who buy nothing and only come here like a cinema.” But the spectators knew he didn’t mean this, and they laughed and told him then they wouldn’t come, and then who would buy his merchandise, and was there not another shop next door (which there was), and the shop-owner knew the spectators did not mean it either.

He stepped back onto the street. He walked to Bernadette’s house,
and stood at the door and thought of ringing the buzzer, but didn’t. Instead he went into the flower shop and Madame was there, and she laughed to see him after so long—she thought he’d disappeared (he had); and as she searched for a spare flower for him he looked down once again at the pattern of the whirling stones, and felt himself grow calm.

It didn’t last long. After ten days into a new job in Les Halles, he found himself slipping into a new and different depression. Now even his fear, he realized, had left him. He no longer saw it hanging back at a corner, caught by a red traffic light on the other side of a boulevard. Even its company he began to miss. He felt totally abandoned. He grew restless. And then he grew reckless. He took himself to places where he knew himself likely to be picked up. He put himself in the way of danger. He hurried with his eyes down past gendarmes in the marketplace. He stood against walls in the metro, staring vacantly. He observed the commotion caused as a large African woman with three children was picked up without a ticket. “Shame,” a passerby was saying to a policeman. “Can you not see how you have made her upset before her children?” But nobody came for him. He went up to a gendarme and stood before him. The Frenchman looked at him impassively, and his eyes widened with bored enquiry. Eventually he had to ask him the time.

The experience with the policeman stayed with him for a long while. He had given up his fear, but found himself more alone now than he’d ever been when he lived like a madman in his room, watching the days move across the walls.
Then
he had believed at least that those whom he feared, the fear of whom was his occupation, were likewise occupied with him. But he’d realized, looking into the face of the bored gendarme, that they were as little interested in him as they were in tying their bootlaces in the morning. He realized that he had in fact been comforted in his darkest hours by the thought of these men and women poring through papers, tracking down payment slips, utility bills, trying to seek him out, working meticulously towards him in his room. He’d been comforted by the idea that legions of them were anxious for his capture, were sleeping neither
night nor day as they hunted him. He believed he was hiding. He believed he was avoiding capture, avoiding his enemies, who were growing frantic with his elusiveness, with his uncanny ability to remain invisible to them. And part of him, he knew, was willing them to get closer and closer; and when they’d find him his heart would go crazy with fear and joy, and he would embrace them, and they’d be glowing with conquest, and the exuberance of their long chase. And so it came as a great shock to him that he mattered so little to them. That if they picked him up it would be by chance. And that what had happened to them—to Mamadou, Juliette, to the whole community in Strasbourg—was no more than an accident.

In this new state of despair he grew aimless, and his aimlessness made him vulnerable. He was sitting one day at a quiet table in a cheap café in the 20th arrondissement when the waiter—who had served him many times without so much as a nod of recognition—made a joke of bringing a bottle of water without a glass, which he then proceeded to produce from behind his back, as if it were a gift offered to a child. And his heart opened to this man, with gratitude. But later that night he knocked him cold with his elbow when the waiter tried to feel his private parts as he sat in the waiter’s little studio overlooking the rails in the valley of tracks where the trains from Gare du Nord carve their way out of the city. He left the man lying with his face hanging over the arm of his sofa, and the television dancing against the back of the wall, and he closed the door and went down eight flights of stairs and stood on the road, full of shame and anger and remorse. He reflected how deadening it felt to have nobody to sit opposite him and laugh with and share some food with, to take his hand, and to let him sleep beside them and watch them, and to give him a little of their life. His heart sat with deadness inside him. His living kept nothing alive. Days would go by where he could not throw his thinking into anything. He felt as if he were smoke, leaking out of himself.

He began to travel the metro endlessly, without a destination in mind. He did it for days, not knowing why at first, only later realizing it was simply to see the faces of people. To see that life was going on, and could go on, without him.

It was on one such day of travelling that, randomly exiting the metro at Filles du Calvaire, he mounted the stairs and surfaced into a chilly, overcast January morning. As he reached the corner of Rue Oberkampf he saw on the other side of the road an African woman with a blanket over her shoulders, followed by her three children in their lovely clothes—two girls, and trailing at the back, a small boy.

The braids of the girls were jumping off their faces, coloured beads at their ends. The little boy was wearing a necklace made of elastic threaded with small candies. His nose was running, and his cheeks glistened with mucus, and he was talking excitedly as he tried to keep up. As he watched the family walk by, it felt as if a piece of gauze were lifting from his vision. The world around him seemed to spring into focus. He was filled suddenly by an overwhelming feeling of pride in their happiness, that stayed with him as he followed them through the streets, until their journey took him into a road full of cut-price
agences de voyages
. He now let himself fall behind, so that within a few paces they had rounded a corner and were out of sight. Then he stopped.