Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

Lucky for me, Chip done already left the club. Unlucky for him, he lay out on the pavement of South Broadway.

‘Shit, Chip,’ I said, fixing to help him. His nose been bashed up real good, blood messing up his two-tone jacket. I helped him up. We sat side-by-side on the pavement, panting.

‘Well I known mine was a whore,’ said Chip, smug like.

I begun laughing. A long, loud crackling laugh. Chip, he tried to look all serious, all adult, but he couldn’t help it and started laughing too. There we sat on South Broadway, howling like two escapees from the Spring Grove asylum.

The jazz life. I was hooked.

In time we passed through dead fields. Passed makeshift barriers tangled with rusted barbed wire. Passed ancient wooden houses left to rot like so much garbage. I known places like that. Reeking of harsh soap and cheap tobacco, their living rooms full of doilies, cobwebs, widows.

Every hour or so we’d stop at some abandoned crossroads, some dusty old driveway, and another passenger would climb down and drag their old luggage from the undercarriage and disappear off into the landscape. Already, it seemed like half the passengers had got off. Ain’t no one else climbed aboard yet.

‘Poland,’ I murmured.

I nudged Chip. He grunted.

‘Why you reckon Poland?’ I said.

‘What you saying?’ Chip was trying to prop his feet on the seat across from ours but his legs was too short. His face looked like slack leather, the skin exhausted, the mouth drooping. ‘Why Poland what?’

‘Why’d he come here? Of all places?’

Chip just sort of grimaced. ‘Hell, brother, ain’t nothing of his life make sense.’

‘I know. I know. Just seems sort of strange to me.’

‘Halelujah and praise the damn powers that be. Of course it’s strange, brother.’

We sat for a while in silence then. But I ain’t stopped brooding over it. The rhythm of the tires thrummed up through my legs. I could see an old lady in a scarf delicately peeling a hard-boiled egg across the aisle, holding its white globe between one thorny thumb and finger. She ain’t had but three fingers. I tried not to stare as she sucked the whole damn thing into her mouth and started to chew.

I guess Chip ain’t stopped thinking on it neither, cause after a few minutes he said, ‘I think only Hiero can answer that. The why of it, I mean.’

I gave him a look. ‘Think about it. Kid just come out of internment, why ain’t he headed west? Why go east? You a black man arrested for sticking out like a second head — wouldn’t you go where you less visible? DPs was all over the place back then. Why go east? Don’t make no sense.’

‘I don’t know, Sid. I guess you got to ask him.’

‘He could have gone back to France. He known France. Could have gone south. Ain’t never been south. But east? Toward the damn Soviets?’

Chip shook his head.

‘It don’t make no sense to me,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe he was a Communist.’

‘Hell, is everyone suddenly a damn Communist to you?’

He looked sheepish, remembering the documentary.

I paused. ‘It’s like he wanted to suffer.’

‘There’s easier ways to suffer, Sid.’

‘I know.’

Chip sat there frowning. ‘What’s weirder to me is that he could stay here. After the war, like. The Poles was real eager to rid their country of Krauts. Couldn’t be quit of them quick enough. Even before the Potsdam Conference.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen, Charles C. Jones, Human Encyclopedia,’ I said.

Chip reached down into his pocket and pulled out a slim little guidebook. ‘One thing I learned in my life, Sid: sightseeing ain’t but a waste of time ’less you know what you looking at, ’less you know the history.’

I barely heard him. ‘Maybe we assuming too much. Maybe he only just moved to Poland now. Last year, like. Maybe he spent all his life living somewhere else, somewhere west. But then why ain’t we heard he was still alive?’

Chip shrugged, suddenly uninterested. He tucked the book away, settled back, closed his eyes. I watched him awhile, then turned to the window. All that Poland rolling by. Its cliffs and rivers. I couldn’t stop thinking about the documentary, and all of what I’d heard about Hiero. How he’d lied about his pa being royalty, how he been out of place his whole life. Growing up in Köln, folk used to tease him something awful. Called him all sorts of things. Chimney Sweep. Monkey’s Son. Blubber Lips. Black-Eyed Chinaman, because of his squint.

Hell. And to go back into all that, after the war. It didn’t make no sense. But then he ain’t never done what you expect, even as a kid. He’d just go to some cold place inside himself to wait out the teasing. I seen it myself, I remembered how it was. Never struck out. Rarely talked back. Like a shadow.

A shadow of his father, maybe. Florian — that was his father, the blond Florian Falk, if Caspars’ film wasn’t all lies — he wasn’t the kid’s real pa. No, sir. Typical war story, but with a kink. Florian, see, he come home from the Great War to find his sweetheart married to another man. So old Florian ends up marrying the sister, Marieanne, who was pregnant by another man. She sweet as dates, sure, but a little touched. From birth she been odd, they ain’t known what was wrong with her. Anyhow. Her sister gone and told Florian that Marieanne been raped by a French soldier, and would he step on in, do the right thing. Well, his heart was broke anyway. What did it matter. I guess he probably thought he’d take the kid on as his own. Ain’t no need to complicate things with the truth, see.

But eight months after the wedding, sweet dark Hieronymus come into the world.

Who the real father was, Caspars claimed to know. Almost seven feet tall and blacker than a power outage. He ain’t been a rapist at all. He was a colonial soldier from Senegal, one of them sent to occupy the Rhineland by the French government. And apparently, Marieanne Falk had loved him.

The old bus was slowing down, turning, its tires crunching into the mud-crusted lot of an old restaurant. Or what I reckoned for an old restaurant. I watched a small boy sitting with his grandpa at the front of the bus, the old man shaking and swaying along with the turn. The boy kept twisting around, staring back at us, like we was something from another world entirely. Go on, boy, I thought. Get yourself an eyeful.

Wasn’t no other passengers left now, just them two and us.

The driver stopped with one last shudder, punched open the folding doors. He leaned far back in his seat, barked out some raspy word in Polish.

‘What do you figure, brother?’ I asked Chip.

He chuckled. ‘Rest stop. How hungry are you?’

Outside there was rickety wood tables under a blue tarp awning, and peeling posts standing off-kilter in the mud. We shuffled on over, our legs stiffer than wood, sat down. A paper menu, all in Polish. I seen Chip’s soft leather shoes was smeared with mud, and smiling, I shook my head. Serves him right. There was a few weathered wood buildings, with wood arcades set out front. I set my hands on the table and looked at Chip. He smiled back.

‘Lovely spot for it,’ he said.

The flies was huge, armoured things, they swarmed in the cool air. There wasn’t no sun in the sky, just a white haze. I slapped weakly at my neck and wrists. I could see the spots of blood where they already got at me.

‘Aw, they got to eat too,’ Chip chuckled. ‘Just leave em.’

‘This a restaurant for folks too? Or just for the flies?’ I stared at the driver who sat with his back to us at the farthest table. ‘You think he deliberately keeping away from us?’

Chip shrugged. ‘No. No, I reckon he just don’t like folk much.’