| |
There’s that noise again. But sleep is still holding onto him, a bit too long. Bene can’t open his eyes but doesn’t feel any urgency. Maybe he will in a moment.
He thinks of the girl with the nose-ring and a long chain connecting it to her earring. He remembers not liking her then for that. Not sure why. He doesn’t mind other jewellery. Has even wondered about getting an ear piercing himself. Gil tried to do it one evening as a joke. Lucky for him he slid over just in time for Gil to lunge forward and pierce the back of the leather sofa instead. They’d laughed so hard at that one.
The girl kept going in circles, dancing with herself. In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, he remembers now. She must have been on E. Did she slip one to him, when he wasn’t looking? No... it would’ve taken effect beforehand, surely. He remembers watching her, in a happy world all of her own, and wondering what it felt like in her veins. Did she really have an unending wave of happiness, just from a pill? He couldn’t believe it was possible. Or actually, he did believe it was possible, but there would always be a price. Some hidden or not-so-hidden cost for that heightened level of happiness. Maybe you had to sell off your first-born son or something.
He remembers being at the base of the Eiffel Tower, and the sketchbook in his lap. Charcoal, it was. Or pencil? He can’t seem to focus on what was in his left hand. Why can’t he remember?
He can see the people pitching souvenirs. They were laying out their blankets of trinkets for tourists. Also somewhere else... yes, outside the Pyramid. Loads of them – maybe eight or nine, all of them African. Their skin was a dark blue-black, not a mixed brother amongst them. They joked together, knowing they were all in the same boat.
He remembers those African men as if they were standing in front of him right now. They wore plain clothes in maroons and browns, and jeans, like anyone else. He knows they were assessing him, trying to place him. Does he fit in their category? No, skin too pale, twists too short. He was a kid playing tourist with a little bit of money to spend. Not like them. Who knows what their stories were? Crossing the Mediterranean or the Atlantic or the Sahara, who knows? Hell, what does he know? They could have been born right here in Paris, just found that selling to tourists is a better way to earn a living than something else. He can’t pretend to know what goes on in these men’s lives. They might have a story similar to his father’s, for all that he knows.
His father. All Bene has are those photos of him. He looks like a nice guy, a bit tired in the eyes maybe. He shared the photos with Fatima last night. Was it last night? They joked about baldness being hereditary. Will his hair go that way as well? Doesn’t show any sign of it at the moment, but you never know. He hopes he has a good long time before any of that happens.
––––––––
Fatima had thought that he had the same profile as the man. She had said it before kissing him on the tip of his nose.
He told her everything. Too much. He talks too much when he’s excited, he knows that about himself. After he had showed her the photos, he tried to explain why he wasn’t mad.
Fatima didn’t understand. ‘I’d be furious,’ she said.
‘You don’t get it, that’s just my mum’s way.’
‘I never would have allowed it,’ she said with authority. ‘I never would have let so many years pass without telling me the truth.’
‘She didn’t lie,’ he tried to explain. He felt protective. ‘She just didn’t feel like the time was right to tell me the whole story. Not when I was young.’
‘That’s the same thing as lying, telling just part of the truth.’
‘Not the same. Degrees of difference.’
She looked at him, eyes suddenly narrowing like a girl feeling she’d made a mistake. ‘I’ve said too much. She’s your mum. You want to defend her.’
‘No, no.’ He shifts to put the photographs back into his backpack. ‘Let’s talk about you instead.’
‘Me? There’s nothing special about me. I don’t get to go anywhere.’
‘What do you mean? Everything is special about you.’ He didn’t even know what he was saying. He would say anything, just to be kissing her again.
––––––––
The colours of Paris fly past his window, now that he has managed to catch a taxi. He apologises to the driver, noticing the drops of rain from his clothes landing on the cab’s leather seats. He doesn’t try to make conversation, just shows the man the paper with the name of the hospital.
He shivers in the back seat. The air conditioning is on, even though it’s not a hot day. Maybe it keeps the windscreen from fogging up, but it’s not working very well. He rubs his sleeve on the window to see out.
Paris is a beautiful city, he has to admit. It is orderly and majestic, at least in this section. He likes the sense of history in the buildings, the national pride.
At the same time, he misses Nairobi. The disorder that laces the side of the highways when you drive. The crowds that try to swallow you when you walk into the marketplace. You’re always on your guard against pickpockets or worse, but you also know that you can move around as you like. He can slide through the tightly packed tangle of humanity, he knows the way. It’s become his home, and he wishes he were there right now.
He can’t say why – is it the house? Coming home to Paradisa’s cooking and Omondi’s stories about school? He struggles to remember what they spoke about yesterday; it was a day like any other with the boy folded close over his homework. He’ll have to see if Omondi’s glasses prescription is strong enough. Maybe it needs changing. He’ll mention it to Paradisa as soon as he gets back.
He didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to the boy. He left a note to both of them. Promising to be back very soon. Paradisa would be surprised to get it, although she wouldn’t say anything. He can see her now, folding the paper and putting it into the front pocket of her apron. She wouldn’t like it, that there would now be too much food prepared. It could go off, and she hates letting anything go to waste. Maybe she will take the leftovers to her church for Bible study night. Lord knows, the people there will appreciate it.
He’ll be back soon. He knows his home is there. This will be a short visit; just something he has to do. Tying up loose ends from long ago. Squaring the circle, that’s what Lena used to say. It made him laugh, the way she said that. Very matter-of-fact, as if squaring circles was what everybody wanted to do. He challenged her about it once, demanding that she explain what it meant. She claimed that was impossible, it was just a British saying from her youth. They descended into laughter at the absurdity of it, and ever since then he’d thought of her when people said that, about circles. Or about any task that seemed absurd to one person, and straightforward to somebody else.
She has that way of creeping into his thoughts. Less often now that so many years have passed. But still, some eighteen years on, he often glimpses a reminder of something they used to talk about. Or some aspect that was particular to her and no one else in the world. Like the way she made a tight ring with her fist when looking out at a landscape, looking through it like an old-fashioned camera. He’d laugh at that, called it her telescoping. She would laugh too. They could do that, laugh at themselves and each other, without malice.
Something in her got damaged, he sees that now. She lost some of that laughter, the ability to just let it flow over and out of her. After those last trips to Darfur, she lost something. She was jumpy, and snapped at small things. Things he said, and other people. Snapped when things went wrong, as they sometimes did. The electricity faltering. The car failing to start in a dark parking lot after dinner out. It was as if she had a heightened sense of threat, and couldn’t adjust back to the daily rhythm of life in a busy city.
It was physical too. One time a matatu backfired a few cars ahead, and she jumped as if someone had shot a gun. For that split second he saw a woman truly terrified. Pinned to her seat, reaching for her seatbelt as if she was unsure whether to depend on it or to release it and run.
He saw all this from his peripheral vision, and it scared him. She had this animal instinct in her, to run, and he could see it but could not relate to it. He had no such instinct. It was as if they were wired differently, and at some point her innate wiring might cross and then she would detonate like a bomb.
And that’s perhaps what she feared, too. They never talked about it, those moments when she was petrified from a fear that seemed out of all proportion to the cause. It was something in her that he could not soothe, and could not reach. He assumed that she would keep it under wraps, or ask for help if it was getting out of control. But instead, she decided to let it rule and ran off with it. Like a lover, taking her away from him. Leaving him with nothing but questions, despair and regret.