Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

‘What’s coming is coming, Sid. It don’t do a man no good to dwell on it.’ Chip smiled. ‘I’m surprised you retired at all. I can’t imagine ever doing so.’

I believed it. We was old as mud, sure, but even at eighty-three Chip kept up a hectic touring schedule. As like to be in Buenos Aires or Reykjavík as Baltimore.

Not me. No, sir. I been my own boss these, oh, thirty-one years. A medical transcriptionist for a couple different doctors — a group of stuffy, high-hat gents with faces worn as dishrags. I typed out the long, complex illnesses of their patients thanking god it wasn’t me I was writing about. And despite the sickness around me I stayed hale, born under a lucky star, as my third wife liked to say with her face all screwed up. Don’t know as she was right. Try waking up alone at eighty-two and deciding to stop doing the one thing you got to do all day. It’s a job all on its own to keep the hours full. Not two weeks passed when I reckoned I’d start transcribing again. But see, something had already changed in me. I wasn’t as drawn to the body’s autumn — like I had some new awareness, some idea of my own frailty. I needed to keep it at bay. Cause once that invades you, you done for, friend.

Chip was looking uneasy at me, and I known he got something touchy on his mind. ‘So what is it, Jones?’ I said. ‘Talk already.’

He laughed all high up in his throat. ‘You such an old maid lately, Sid. I so much as pick my teeth and you got to ascribe ten meanings to it.’

‘Your false teeth, maybe,’ I said.

He leaned forward in his chair, and picking up his scotch, downed it in one sound gulp. He got oddly thin lips, and with the drink still glistening on them, they looked like oysters.

‘I am right, though, ain’t I? You got something on your mind?’

Looking irked, Chip cleared his throat. He stared me plain in the eye. ‘Sidney Griffiths,’ he said.

I kind of half-laughed. Old Chip here, he full of it.

‘Sidney Griffiths,’ he said again. He held the cigarillo close to his lips but didn’t smoke it. I watched the end burning down. ‘What I got to tell you I don’t want to tell you. Cause you ain’t going to believe me.’

Chip reckons he’s charming as hell, and who am I to poke holes in his theory. But what that means is that sometimes lies leave his mouth dressed like truth. He just can’t help it.

‘Sidney Griffiths,’ he said a third time, and then I known I was in for something. ‘You remember back to when the Wall fell? How I had to force you to put down the phone and go check the goddamn TV? This is like that, boy. Except bigger.’

I laughed, irritated. It’s true. I hadn’t believed the Wall had fallen. He’d had to force me to seek out the TV in my bedroom. That old den had seen me through three other brides after Lola, all of them still alive and none as beloved as her. I remember it’d still been filled with my final wife’s decor, polyester curtains and ugly knickknacks from her Roanoke childhood. I guess she hadn’t collected them all yet. She’s got them now, thank the good lord.

I’d sat on the bed and turned on the ancient TV. Hadn’t been on more than ten seconds when I already thought, god strike me down. Cause what I seen, it ain’t seemed real. How on earth. Folks with pickaxes hacked away at the Berlin Wall, that awful concrete with its rash of graffiti. Sprays of champagne flying. Screams and tears and cameras flashing like gun flare in the dark as people poured through cracks. Some went on foot, in worn shoes and speckled jeans. Some was in those toy-like cars, Trabbis, the crowds buckling the roofs with their banging. I’d sat there like some monk locked in prayer, disbelieving. It wasn’t no city we ever set foot in. Not that Berlin.

Now Chip sat forward in his seat, hitting with his big toe the empty scotch glass he’d placed on the floor. ‘You know what I mean, brother. You refuse to live in the world.’

‘Go on. Baltimore ain’t in the world?’ I shook my head. ‘And I’m going to Berlin, ain’t I? Berlin don’t count?’

Chip chuckled. He took pride in being the wiliest SOB this side the Atlantic. Always has, even when we was kids. He’s just got this madness in him, this rash hot need to be contrary.

I told him so. Cause, see, I’d made sacrifices . On his account.

‘See, now that’s what I mean,’ he said. ‘Take this trip to Berlin. This documentary. That ain’t something you done on my account. Least I hope not. You done it for Hiero. You done it for the history of jazz. You done it for yourself .’

I lifted an eyebrow at him. ‘Remind me to send myself a bill.’

Cause they was real. These sacrifices I’d made to please Chip, they was damned real. See, about a year ago, he approached me excited as all hell over some documentary. Fellow by the name of Kurt Caspars — a half-Finn half-Kraut filmmaker famous for an exposé on white slavery in Holland — he been commissioned by a German TV station to make the first full-scale film on Hieronymus Falk. Caspars was the natural choice, Chip had explained — his hatchet-fast visuals had a lot in common with the kid’s playing. But like any artist, Caspars needed raw material to build his pictures out of. And we, my friend, was to be that brick and mortar.

Caspars wanted talking heads to blab for ninety minutes on every last shred of the kid’s existence. We all know Buddy Bolden died nuts in the bughouse, and Bix Beiderbecke, he died of the DTs — but Falk? By all accounts he passed on right after being released from an Austrian work camp. Mauthausen. Except no one knows how, or when, or where. Knowing he died after being in a camp ain’t the same as knowing the nature of his death. If it was his suffering finally got to him or its sudden absence, the world strangely greyer afterwards with its safe, empty routines. Even less can you know what all it meant for him, if the end was a welcome thing, or the final outrage.

Hell, there wasn’t even a grave.

I ain’t had the least desire to be filmed last year, and even less to go see the damn picture in Berlin. It was only after Chip had Caspars arrange our tickets to Berlin for the premiere that he mentioned, just all casual, like it wasn’t nothing, that the film would be debuting at a bigger festival: the Hieronymus Falk Festival. A weekend-long celebration of the great trumpeter’s life. With the east now open, they could offer all kinds of walking tours of our old haunts. ‘Come on, Sid,’ Chip had said. ‘Everyone’s going: Wynton Marsalis, even old Grappelli. It’ll be something.’

I refused to go. Of course I did. Then slowly, over the last few months, Chip had talked me into it. The things you do for friends in old age. Maybe it’s cause you know you won’t have to suffer them much longer.

‘So what is it?’ I said. ‘Out with it now. I got a list of pressing things needs doing. My TV needs watching. Damn thing’s been off a whole two hours. It’s unnatural.’

Chip shrugged. ‘Aw. You ain’t going to believe me.’

‘I expect that’s right.’

He shuffled his feet. ‘I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.’

‘You just stalling now. What is it?’

But I could tell something was in him, and it was big.

‘You want to know? You really want to know?’ He leaned in, his face going totally serious. ‘Sid. The kid is alive.’

Seem like a whole damn minute passed. Then I let out a sharp laugh, my head swinging back to hit the headrest.

‘I’m not kidding, boy,’ Chip continued. ‘He’s alive and living up north Poland.’

‘This ain’t funny, Chip.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I mean it, it ain’t funny. What is it, really?’