He lifts his head and points up at the sky. I lift my head too, but I can’t see the stairway up to heaven. He lowers his head and then hands me the old key. I’m so excited, I snatch it from his hands.
As I get up to go he says, ‘Are you off for good then? Will I never see you again?’
I’m not listening though, I’m already running. I feel free, I can breathe deeply too. I feel like I can fly. I feel like I want to laugh like I’ve never laughed before. My feet hardly touch the ground. I think of Carl Lewis, and I run even faster.
I’ve already gone a long way, and I’ve even stopped thinking about the moment when I’ll hand my mother the key, when I suddenly remember that I’ve forgotten to ask Little Pepper two important things. So I turn back and I find him still in the same spot, with his head still bowed. He lifts it and smiles, and it’s as though he knew I would come back.
‘Ah, you’re back!’
‘There are two things I forgot to ask you…’
‘Then start with the first one.’
‘Have you still got the little key you found when we were looking through the bin together?’
‘Which little key?’
‘The tiny one that opens the cans of headless sardines from Morocco.’
He fumbles in the pocket of his old coat and gives me the little key.
‘What are you going to do with it, now I’ve given you a real one?’
Without thinking, I reply, ‘Maybe the little one is the right one. I’m going to keep them both, just in case.’
‘And what was the second thing you wanted to ask me?’
‘Have you seen My Sister Star and My Sister No-name?’
He stopped laughing then.
‘You didn’t give me their real names! I meet so many people, and if I don’t have their names I can’t tell who’s who, can I? Come back and see me any time, with your sisters’ real names.’
I run off again, without saying goodbye. I’m scared the night will grab hold of me, just as each ghost is settling back in its grave for a rest, after a long walk through the town.
As I run I hear the two keys knocking together in my shorts pocket. The noise soothes me. I feel light, I still feel like laughing, like I did just now. But if I laugh, people will think that I’m a mad child. How else will they understand that I’m happy and I’m talking to myself because what I have in my pocket is the key to my mother’s happiness, and my father’s. And mine too?
~ ~ ~
I can see a fat woman talking to our neighbour, Yeza the joiner. I peer at them, and make out Maman Pauline with them too, and Papa Roger and Monsieur and Madame Mutombo. When people are talking to Yeza it’s usually something to do with a coffin. Perhaps that’s why the fat woman’s crying and my mother and Madame Mutombo are comforting her.
As I’m now at our front door, I can’t quite see what’s going on. From this distance the faces seem blurred and when they talk it’s as though there are no words coming out of their mouths. It’s like those films in black and white that the priest sometimes shows us in the courtyard of the church of Saint-Jean-Bosco. There all you ever see is men, women and children on their knees praying.
I move forward into the middle of the lot and now I can see that the fat woman crying is the mother of Longombé, the apprentice. I recognise her, she’s the one who always comes to ask her son for money outside Monsieur Mutombo’s workshop. So I say to myself: ‘That’s it then, it must be Longombé the apprentice who’s dead’. And I start thinking about how it always made him laugh when I came to the workshop. How he would take my father’s trousers or my torn shirt and mend them. I’m not going to stay standing here in the middle of our lot. I want to know everything.
So here I am in front of Yeza’s lot now. My mother’s just noticed me, and she shouts: ‘Michel, don’t just stand there, go on home!’
Longombé’s mother disagrees. ‘He can stay, Pauline, my son was fond of him.’
I go into the lot, and walk towards the sad little group. I discover that Longombé was hit by a car in the Block 55 quartier. The car had no brakes, and after knocking over the apprentice it crashed into an electric pylon. The driver ran off and they’ll never find him if he goes to live in the bush, where most gangsters live, and where the police never go.
Longombé’s mother yells that a young man like her son can’t just die, the old should die before the young. ‘Why didn’t the car run me over, eh? It’s witchcraft!’
According to her, Longombé had a spell put on him by someone, and it’s not the driver’s fault, they should let him be, because the accident happened in front of the shop that used to belong to the Senegali, Ousmane.
And she just goes on shouting: ‘It’s all Ousmane’s fault, not the driver’s! Ousmane used his magic mirror to make a sacrifice of my son and make lots of money for his shop!’
Now if I remember correctly, Ousmane doesn’t own the shop in Block 55 any more. He’s sold it, and opened another one in the Grand Marché. How can he still be doing his magic mirror when a Congolese has bought his shop?
It’s as though Longombé’s mother’s read my mind. I hear her telling the others: ‘Yes, and you’ll tell me that Ousmane doesn’t run the shop on Block 55 any more! He’s sold it, you’ll say! Oh yeah! You think I’ll swallow that one? What am I, an idiot? My child’s death makes nice business for him, because he was my only one. And only sons are the sacrifice the fetishers like best in this country. You think it was by chance he had this accident? No! No! No! That Senegali, Ousmane, he’s the one behind all this. He sold his shop to that Congolese guy, and he sold him a piece of the magic mirror along with it! The two of them are in it together! And the mirror has to keep being fed with human blood, to create custom. The Congolese guy that runs that shop is his accomplice, they split the profits at night when everyone’s asleep, and they decide which child around here’s to be sacrificed next! You watch out, Pauline, you just be careful, one day they’ll try to take your son too.’
She says Longombé was crossing the street in front of the Congolese bar, that he thought the car approaching from the right was a long way off, when in fact it was only a metre away. And bang! While she’s talking I remember about the story of the magic mirror when I used to walk to school with Caroline and our parents would tell us not to go past Ousmane’s shop. The cars would have run us over too, because of Ousmane’s magic mirror.
Now they’re discussing the price of the coffin.