Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

‘Aw, I ain’t goin back,’ I said. ‘Neither’s Chip.’

‘You should,’ she said. ‘Staying can’t help anyone. There’s no point in it.’

‘Louis goin?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m sure he will be. He won’t go just yet. But he’ll go.’

‘You goin with him?’

‘I always do.’

I give her a hard look. ‘And what about the kid? You just goin leave Hiero here?’

She frowned. ‘I’ll come up with something. I don’t know what.’

‘Sure you will, girl. You ain’t the sort to just disappear.’

She flinched.

I regretted it at once. But my guts was all knotted up. I was still brooding on her and the kid linking arms in Jean’s that afternoon. We was sitting at a small table set against the cellar wall, and I leaned one shoulder against the cold bricks and stared at her. The hard angles of her cheekbones in the candlelight. Her long graceful throat. How beautiful she was.

She lowered her face, turned the glass of wine in front of her in slow lazy circles. She looked away.

‘I didn’t want to go,’ she said soft-like. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

I fidgeted with the knife and fork beside the plate. That basket of bread sat steaming between us, and though I was starving, I ain’t cut so much as a slice.

‘We don’t need to talk about it, you don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I mean that.’

‘It was awful, Sid.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t know.’

I said nothing.

She give me a dark look, took a breath. ‘We’d gone back to the apartment for his medicine,’ she began, in a flat voice. ‘I don’t know what for. Paul didn’t try to explain it to me — the language. But I think even if I did speak German he wouldn’t have explained it. It seemed a private thing. Anyway, we were heading away from my hotel—’

‘ Your hotel?’

‘For my suitcase. It was on the way back.’

‘Listen, you don’t got to tell me,’ I said. ‘You don’t got to go back there.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I do.’

I give her a grim, exasperated look.

‘We were on our way back,’ she continued, ‘when I heard someone shout his name. I don’t know why he looked back. But then he was running into the crowd. I stood there holding my suitcase and then two men shoved past me, hollering at him. I didn’t know what it was about. I mean I didn’t know it then. But then they were shouting Jude , and I knew that well enough. Oh, Sid, they threw him up against a window. There were people in there, looking out. I tried to get in front of Paul with my suitcase but those men knocked me down.’

‘They was Boots?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

I ain’t wanted to feel anger. I ain’t wanted nothing but sadness for her. But I could feel myself scowling. ‘Hell, girl. You walkin round Berlin with a Jew, carryin a damn suitcase ? What you thinkin?’

She blushed, looking off up the street in the dying sunlight.

‘What you thinkin ?’ I said again.

She started to cry. ‘I didn’t know, Sid. I didn’t know.’

She was crying, real quiet, her thin shoulders shaking. I sat very still, staring guiltily at the tablecloth. All a sudden I wasn’t angry with her no more. If they called his name, I was thinking. If they called his name, they known him. Suitcase ain’t got nothing to do with it.

A long shadow hovered suddenly above us. I glanced up. A handsome black gent stood there wearing a fine black suit, his shirt ironed so sharp its collar look like folded paper.

‘Lilah?’ he said. ‘You alright, girl?’

She give a angry laugh through her tears, looked up. ‘Oh, hi, Billy. I’m fine, I am. Jesus.’ She sniffled. ‘I thought you were gone.’

‘Aw, I been tryin to call you, girl.’ He smiled to reveal gleaming white incisors. Like a damn wolf. ‘You one impossible lady to reach. I only got the one number.’

‘Well, I only have the one phone. So that’s not the problem.’ She give him one of her sad smiles, wiping the water from her eyes with her thumbs.

‘I ain’t meant to intrude,’ he said.

‘It’s alright, Billy. Really it is. I’m up on Abbesses now, in the count’s old flat. Drop on in, anytime.’

The jack’s eyes slid over to me, his shine fading a little.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She folded her napkin. ‘Bill, this is Sidney Griffiths. Sid, Bill Coleman. I believe you’re both in the business.’

Bill Coleman ? I rose from my seat. ‘Sure I know you, brother. You out of this world . You got to be this city’s second trumpet.’

‘You kind,’ he said.

‘It ain’t kindness. You that good, brother. You know it.’

‘Used to be maybe. But who’s this damn kid come in on the tide? I heard he plays like wildfire.’

‘The new generation,’ I said. ‘We gettin our come-uppance.’

‘Figure it near time to clock out, ship on back to the island.’

Delilah give him a look. ‘You’re going back to New York?’

‘Chicago, girl. Ain’t no other island.’

‘Chicago’s not an island, Billy.’

He smiled. ‘It be a island in the sea of mediocrity .’

‘You sure it ain’t this old war runnin you out?’ I said.

‘Brother, I done already lost that one. Germans overrun me.’

I ain’t said nothing to that.

‘You bring that Chip Jones with you?’ he said.

‘You know Chip?’

‘Aw,’ he said with a sly grin. ‘Everybody know that son of a bitch. Give him a brass hello from me.’

‘When’re you sailing?’ said Delilah.

Coleman shrugged. ‘Ain’t got no plans yet. It got to happen though, surely. What you doin? You ain’t stickin round?’

She smiled. ‘Where Louis goes, there go I.’

Our dishes arrived then, and Coleman muttered some excuse, already backing away from our table. ‘I goin drop by one a these days, Lilah. I see you then. Sidney.’ He give me a nod.

But Delilah called after him, ‘So you’ll be here for a while? Even with your consul shutting down the party?’

Coleman shrugged, his smile light and boyish. He bumped into a table, turned around, turned back. ‘Lady, I am the party.’

Then he was gone.

We et in silence then for a long while. It ain’t seemed right to start in on it all again. She seemed real cold, real calm. I felt uneasy. The fish I’d ordered tasted dry, thin, like sawdust sprinkled with lemon.

‘Well, he seem grand,’ I said at last. It come out sharper than I meant.

She frowned, stared past me at the swinging door to the kitchen. ‘I’m not sleeping with him, Sid.’

I give a bitter laugh. ‘I wasn’t thinkin it.’

‘Yes you were.’

‘Delilah, you ain’t got to—’

But she put her gloved hand on mine, her eyes bright and sharp. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, then paused, as if the sound of her own voice made her forget what seem so straightforward just seconds ago. She wet her lips. ‘Sometimes life just leaves no room for what you want. I’m sorry.’ She sighed. ‘You don’t know how sorry I am.’

Heat rushed to my face. ‘Sure. It all done now anyhow.’

‘Yes. It is.’

‘I just glad you got out.’

She stared a long time at me. ‘I didn’t say goodbye because I didn’t want it to end like that. It wouldn’t soften things. I was afraid anything I said would sound empty, which would’ve been worse than saying nothing. At least that’s how it struck me at the time — you’d hear these shallow words, this I’ll think of you everyday and whatever, and think, man, she is goddamn empty.’

I watched her face dim, her hands soft against the wine-stained tablecloth. She started fussing with the top button of her suit jacket.