Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  “You’re definitely an acquired taste,” she tells him, reflecting one afternoon on all the crazy games he makes her play.

  “You talk too much about life,” he tells her.

  “You think too much about it,” she says back.

  That makes him smile.

  Well, he’s my acquired taste, she is thinking as she turns off the avenue and into Rue des Belles Feuilles.

  As she walks over the cross streets the sunlight comes out from in between the buildings and warms her face.

  The shopkeepers have come out onto their pavements with brooms and buckets and are cleaning away the dust and debris of the week. Water is flowing down the sides of the road, channeled into the drains by rolls of green matting, taking it away into the pipes beneath the city.

  She passes a chemist’s with its green fluorescent sign, the pattern of the light expanding and contracting like a concertina.

  She passes the pavement terrace of a restaurant, lined with a herbaceous border made of plastic saplings in concrete bases with wood chips for soil. From inside comes the sound of a pinball machine, just burst into jingles, its paddles flapping and lights flashing, a teenager in jeans and a vest, back to the window, leaning over it menacingly.

  Just before she gets to the end of the road she passes by the entrance of the one-star Hotel Anton, which now that summer is in has its side windows open. Taking breakfast in the small tiled dining area to the side of the reception (with its faux-impressionist sketches of Paris monuments, and its lace-covered table bearing fruit, cereal in plastic jars, a milk jug and a stack of yoghurt pots) is the large tired-looking man who appears to have been staying there now for more than a week, who takes his breakfast always at the same time, and who looks up from his newspaper just as she passes, and smiles at her kindly—a face that for no immediately apparent reason seems both knowing and familiar.

  Until the reason comes to her early the next morning while she’s getting dressed, and without explaining anything to Kwasi she rushes over to the Hotel Anton, and there waits for three hours until ten a.m. for the man to take his breakfast; except this morning the man does not appear in the dining room, and still she is waiting as the waiters start clearing the plates away and the tables are washed down, and it is then that she goes into the hotel to ask.

  The hotel manager is friendly.

  A very nice gentleman, she remembers in response to Bernadette’s enquiries, who she believes has been visiting relatives in the quartier, although she can’t be sure since her English is not so good. How long has he stayed? Almost three weeks, she tells Bernadette, although now she believes he’s gone home, or at least checked out.

  “Which was when?” Bernadette asks.

  “Only today,” says the hotel manager.

  Bernadette returns immediately to the apartment. Kwasi has gone to work. He has left footprints of water next to the sink, where he’ll have washed himself with a sponge and a towel because the shower down the corridor was occupied. She’s about to get down on the floor and mop up the water with the damp towel hanging over the back of a chair, but then doesn’t. She goes to the phone and calls Denis’s number in Lille. Denis picks up. She hears the sounds of the garage in the background. Denis is his usual friendly self. Nothing in his voice indicates that more than a month has passed without a call from Bernadette. He tells her that the man who came looking for Kwasi eventually left. That he stayed maybe ten days or so, each day of which he returned to the garage at closing time in the evening to learn if Denis had news for him, and each day of which Denis continued to tell him that his efforts to locate Kwasi had failed.

  For her silence she tells Denis that she is sorry. She admits to him that she has not passed to Kwasi the message of the visitor’s arrival. She knows she should have, but that she was afraid. It was a mistake, though one she will have to make amends for in her own way, and can she count on Denis not to preempt her. She can, Denis tells her, and that as far as he is concerned this is a matter between her and Kwasi. She thanks him for his loyalty. His loyalty she can take for granted, Denis tells her, but that others may not have been so loyal—that the visitor was determined, and that he had money. This does not surprise Bernadette, but she does not mention this to Denis, asking only whether the man in question was a large man or a short one.

  A large one, Denis tells her.

  After she has put down the telephone she walks over to the flower shop. She briefly greets Madame, who is with a client and only has time to raise her eyebrows in acknowledgement. Without looking for Kwasi she goes directly to the back of the shop, gets the key from its hiding place in the cupboard where the mugs are kept, and lets herself into the Refuge.

  The light coming in from the shop is enough to see a little way in, beyond which the images on the walls recede into darkness, though she doesn’t need the light; she knows each panel so well by now.

  The image she is looking for is close to the door, before which she now stands—a big yellow taxi, the driver leaning back in the seat, body expanding around the seat belt, large forearm resting on the window frame, head cocked—Festus Ankrah, oversized, square-jawed and implacable.

  A shadow falls across the floor and the wall, obscuring Festus Ankrah’s face. Bernadette looks up. Madame is standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  “What is going on today?” Madame asks, sounding flustered.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Bernadette says.

  “It is,” Madame says, sitting down now on the bottom stair. She’s wearing a large, loose-fitting floral dress resembling in shape a collapsed parachute. Its folds stretch over her knees, making a hammock in which she rests her hands.

  She sighs.

  “Kwasi suddenly leaves with a strange man … You arrive suddenly …”

  She sounds perplexed.

  “What strange man?” Bernadette asks.

  The strange man that came in an hour ago or so, Madame explains, although perhaps not so strange, since Madame has seen him a few times in the quartier over the last few weeks, but this for the first time in her shop. He came in, and smiled at her—they both recognized each other—but said nothing, and just nodded when Madame asked if she could help him. And so Madame left him to browse, and in fact almost forgot about him until Kwasi came into the front foyer, at which point things took a turn for the bizarre, to say the least, Madame explains breathlessly now, because obviously Kwasi and the man knew each other. The man called Kwasi by his name, and started speaking to him in an African language Madame could not understand.

  “Twi,” Bernadette tells her.

  “Yes, Twi,” Madame says, “perhaps this is what it was”—at least it sounded to her like the kind of language that might be called Twi, she says, laughing nervously. In any event, she says, for a moment Kwasi was speechless when the man spoke to him, but then he started talking back to the man, and clearly Kwasi was not happy, Madame could tell. Madame has never seen Kwasi in such an agitated state before, frankly. But the man spoke quietly, he calmed Kwasi down. He seemed kind and patient to Madame, who had taken a few steps back towards the hallway but all the while was watching these exchanges she did not understand. At some point Kwasi turned from the man to Madame, and tried to explain something to her, but he was so agitated that he was still speaking Twi to Madame, who obviously did not understand, though she could work out the gist, and began walking forward to introduce herself to the man, but before she could take more than a few steps towards them Kwasi told her, this time in French, that he would have to take the morning off and then he and the man simply left, walked out, and does Bernadette have any idea of what all this was about?

  “Some,” Bernadette replies. “Which way did they go?”

  “Left, down Victor Hugo,” Madame says, and is about to say something else, but Bernadette is already past her and running towards the door.

  Two men sit on a green wooden bench in a small gravel-covered square overlooking the Museum of Mankind.

  A few fee
t off pigeons jockey for pieces of bread thrown to them by a child directed by its mother. The pigeons, growing bold, approach too close to the child, who steps back in alarm. The mother stamps on the gravel with one foot and the birds retreat. The child laughs. The mother takes the bread from her child, flings it over the pigeons, picks up her child and leaves. The birds pounce on the bread.

  To somebody walking past the two men would appear to be strangers sharing a bench.

  Neither of them have spoken since they arrived at this spot five minutes before. Nor the ten or so minutes it took for them to reach the square, the younger of the two leading all the way, not looking back once, the older following a few steps behind.

  The younger man is breathing as if he had just run a race. The older is waiting for the younger’s breathing to slow down before he talks, but it is the younger man who speaks first.

  “How did you find me?” he says.

  “I followed the signs,” the older man says to his nephew.

  The younger man is silent.

  The older man says, “A person only has to learn what they’re looking for.”

  Silence still.

  “You left directions. It started with John Bediako. Once I got to Ibrahim it was easy. Ibrahim was very sympathetic.”

  “You mean you paid him.”

  “No more than you,” the older man says, not allowing the interjection to interrupt his explanation, as he relates to his nephew how he traveled to Dakar, found the hotel in the Place de l’Indépendance, the people in the barber shop; how they eventually sent him to Lille, to his tight-mouthed friend Denis, where the trail seemed about to end, and would have, had he not found an associate of Denis more disposed to financial reward.

  “This was almost two weeks ago,” the older man says. “I have been staying here in the neighbourhood ever since.”

  “Spying on me,” the younger man says bluntly.

  “Taking a holiday,” the older man says, “visiting relatives.”

  “Am I meant to thank you?” the younger man says.

  The older man doesn’t respond, as he has not responded to any of his nephew’s outbursts.

  He says, “You have a beautiful girlfriend.”

  “You don’t know anything about her,” his nephew says.

  “I know what I see,” the older man says.

  “We’re going to get married,” the younger man says softly, looking into his hands, the belligerence suddenly out of his voice, the words spoken with a soft childish intimacy that so takes his uncle by surprise that for a moment he cannot talk.

  “I am very happy for you,” he manages to say.

  The two men continue to sit in silence, observing the square.

  “I can see that your seeing me hurts you,” the older man says at length.

  His nephew ignores the observation. They have not been looking at each other. But now the younger man deliberately looks away.

  He says, “What are you doing here?”

  “I should ask you the same thing,” the older man replies, trying to make a joke.

  The younger man says, “I ran away, and this is where I ended up.”

  “So you have,” says the older man.

  Two shop assistants on their lunch break come into the square. They pick a bench furthest from the two men talking, lay down a newspaper on the seat, take out their sandwiches and begin to talk.

  The men watch them, though neither of them is much interested.

  The older man says, “To see you here, living like this, it makes me proud. If I’m allowed to be proud.”

  “As you like,” the younger man says, the hostility returning, that his uncle knows was never gone, and will not completely be gone, at least during this day’s conversation.

  “Kwasi, I know why you left,” the older man says.

  “You cannot possibly know why I left.”

  “I know enough.”

  “What do you know?” the younger man says.

  And so the older man tells him. He tells his nephew that he went to Akwapim. That he knows what happened there. That he knows about Nana Oforiwaa and John Bediako. He knows that his nephew came back to Accra and burned his shop.

  “What do you know about Nana Oforiwaa?” the younger man says scornfully.

  “Do I have to say it?” the older man replies.

  The younger man looks at the older.

  “No, uncle,” he says softly.

  “I went back,” the older man says. “I was there.”

  The younger man folds his arms over his chest. He sniffs. He is waiting until he can trust in the steadiness of his voice.

  His uncle does him the kindness of not noticing, looks ahead himself, quietly, waiting.

  Then the younger man says, “If you’ve come all this way to tell me how ashamed I should be and what you all think of me, then you’ve wasted your time. I already know.”

  “No,” the older man says, “I haven’t come to tell you that. And I don’t think it either.”

  “Then why have you come?” the younger man says.

  “Many reasons,” says the older.

  The younger man waits.

  The older man looks down at his shoes, brown and scuffed on the toes. He bought them new shortly before he began his journey. He looks away now to the centre of the square, where the statue of a general on a horse stands on top of a high concrete plinth. The horse, and the general atop it, stride out towards the traffic, great and immortal.

  The older man feels suddenly tired, and small, and unequal to the responsibility he has come all this way to acquit.

  Then he says, not looking at the younger man, “Shortly before I began my journey here I learned that Nana Oforiwaa didn’t die by accident. John Bediako killed her. Drowned her. In the middle of the storm when nobody could see. That is what made him mad.”

  Nothing.

  “He wanted me to tell this to you.”

  At first the younger man appears not to have heard. Suddenly he starts laughing. “I don’t believe it,” he says, though the laughter is far from a happy sound, and the older man recognizes it for what it is—a sound at the edge of hysteria.

  “I think it’s true,” the older man says softly.

  “Did he tell you this himself?” the younger man asks, his voice rising, as if in accusation.

  “No,” the older man says, and explains the circumstances by which he came by this knowledge.

  “So why do you believe it?” the younger man says sharply.

  “He has no reason to lie,” the older man says calmly. “Also, I am the easiest person to tell the truth. Who would believe me anyway if I repeated it? Not even you …” and he laughs dryly before adding, “And because of how carefully he worked things out. How he made sure of me—that I really wanted to find you, that he could trust me, that I had the means to get here. No, he went to far too much trouble for this not to be true. I was in his power from the moment I arrived on the ridge.”

  The younger man says nothing. He is rocking softly backwards and forwards. For a while a small humming noise has been coming from his mouth.

  Then it stops.

  He says, “Why would he have done such a thing?”

  “For the same reason I am here.”

  “What is that?” the younger man says.

  “To free you. To let you go.”

  The younger man laughs. He says, “Free? Look how free I am. None of you exist.”

  “But here I am,” the older man says.

  “And tomorrow you’ll be gone again,” the younger man tells him.

  “As it happens I will. But it won’t stop the past from having happened,” the older man says. “It takes a lot of imagination to become somebody different. You are full of imagination. But ultimately you will run out of it. Then all you’ll have left is what you started with.”

  “What is that?” the younger man asks.

  “You come from somewhere. You are the child of parents,” the older man says, and that hav
ing total freedom is not the opposite of having no freedom, and that everyone is dependent and that in the end, in the very very end, everything is connected.

  “I come from somewhere,” the younger man says, “but I can choose where I go.”

  The older man says, “You can, Kwasi, until you can’t.”

  Then he adds, “It’s unfair, but you don’t get to choose everything.”

  “Right now I can,” the younger man replies.

  “I know,” the older man says, “I know how that feels. But don’t enjoy the feeling so long that you can’t come back when you need to.”

  “Come back where? So many bad things have happened at home,” the younger man says.

  “But are they unbearable, Kwasi?” the older man asks. “Can you really not bear them?”

  “I have borne them,” the younger man says.

  “I know,” says the older man.

  Then nobody says anything. There is just the sound of the traffic behind them, and the noise of the eastern part of the city coming up the embankment.

  Then the older man says, “Also, I have come to ask you for forgiveness.”

  “For what?” his nephew asks him, surprised.

  He says, “I am asking your forgiveness for what happened to you.”

  When the younger man hears this he begins to cry.

  His uncle puts his arm over his shoulder.

  He says, “Somebody said to me that even when children defy us they still want our approval. What is my approval worth? But I can give you my blessing,” and he tells his nephew that he does have his blessing, wherever he goes.

  Then his nephew says to him how ashamed he is, and how he is sorry for what he has done to him, and to Celeste and to his parents; that it’s unforgivable, and that he knows it.

  “But it’s forgiven,” the older man says.

  “All right,” his nephew says at length.

  He regains his composure, and after a short while sits up.

  The two shop assistants, who have observed this scene, are getting up quickly. They bundle their sandwich wraps together and stride out of the square.

  “Pédés,” one says under her breath, as they pass the two men on their bench.