Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

‘You get the feelin folks know somethin you just don’t?’ I said.

Chip shrugged. ‘I guess so.’

We could see smoke pouring up over the city to the south.

‘Someone’s burnin somethin,’ Chip muttered.

Next morning Chip got it into his head to report Ernst’s old Horch. Wasn’t no damn way to dissuade him. But we no sooner step inside the government offices than I known something was wrong, our footsteps echoing over the polished marble. The halls was silent, the chandelier sparkling darkly above that mahogany reception desk. We gone past the big elevators, made our slow way up to the third floor. There was papers stacked in the halls, filing cabinets standing open in the offices. Not one damn official in sight.

‘Hello?’ I called.

‘Holy hell, buck,’ Chip muttered. ‘Somethin goin on.’

‘It already gone on, brother.’ I swallowed hard. We ankled on through the gloomy halls, glancing into offices, all of it looking ransacked, overturned, abandoned. At last we found a clerk in a small outer boardroom, standing before a untidy table. With the care of a gent testing silk, he was holding a sheath of paper in his hand. Chip stiffened in the doorway, knocked twice.

‘We lookin to report a stolen car,’ he said.

That damn jack just frowned, jerking his pencil toward the clock on the far wall. In rushed English, he snapped, ‘I will come on work in ten minutes. You will wait over there.’ He glared pointedly at a row of chairs.

‘Hell.’ Chip scowled. ‘Their whole damn civilization comin to a end, and this jack still mindin his damn clock ?’

The clerk look up then, give Chip a long, appraising frown. ‘You are American, yes? Why your country don’t send us planes?’

I just shook my head. Everything done gone to hell, and here this jack ain’t got nothing to do but nag some Yanks. I dragged Chip away by his sleeve.

When we got back to the flat, it was empty. I banged through the rooms, hollering for the kid. No one hollered back, and I found a note from Delilah on the sideboard, next to a envelope holding our papers: The Germans are coming. The government left Paris last night. We are going to the gare d’Austerlitz to secure passage on a train. Meet us there when you get this. Don’t delay.

‘She took her damn visas,’ I said.

‘She left us ours. That got to be tellin you somethin.’

‘What?’

Chip give me a look like I was all kinds of stupid. ‘What you mean, what? That she wants us to get out. Whether we find her or not.’

‘Kid still don’t got a visa.’

‘I know,’ Chip said grimly.

You could hear the low stream of voices from blocks away. But even that ain’t prepared us for the sight of the gare d’Austerlitz. The chaos was stunning. A horde of terrified folk writhing in a wild crush of bodies, scrambling over each other and hauling trunks, cases and crates as janes fainted, kids screamed. All of it washing up hard against the spiked iron gates of the station. The stink of that wretched crowd like to knock a man down. And always the wave of shouts, screams, cries, the high shrieking of kids agonized by the savage heat. When I lifted my eyes, I seen the clouds roiling overhead in long plumes of yellow smoke, like the air done turn to poison up there. A jaundiced light filtered down over everything. I felt my heart lurch in my chest.

‘Aw, hell,’ I said.

Chip give me a sharp punch. ‘What is it, brother? You ain’t never been to a Orioles game? It just a crowd.’

‘A crowd with teeth . We ain’t never goin find Delilah in all that.’

‘Folk got a way of findin each other. You see. Now stay close.’

He plunged right in. We was jounced and shoved and dragged apart, and then Chip was grabbing my damn shirt front and popping the buttons as he hauled me close. The heat streamed over us in sharp waves of foul air, and I breathed deeply, trying to catch even the smallest piece of oxygen in all those fumes. Sweat run down my temples. Chip dragged me forward.

All a sudden a man was shouting in my damn ear. ‘Senegal, from Senegal,’ he hollered. He grab old Chip by the back of the neck, shouted some damn thing in Frog. Chip like to rip the old bastard’s arm from its socket. I seen a hard fist hit the jack’s kidney, and then he was crumpling.

‘Get the fuck off,’ Chip shouted in English. ‘Goddamn son of a bastard. Get off .’

In the madness we was jostled and shoved and pulled away from him. I seen the blood on Chip’s collar where the old git torn his shirt.

‘You alright?’ I shouted.

‘What?’

‘You alright?’

He just shrugged, like he still ain’t heard, and pushed farther in.

We ain’t seen no sign of Lilah or Hiero. None. There was thousands in that crowd, and we wasn’t nowhere near the big iron gates. We come to a halt, unable to jostle no deeper in. We stood there in the brutal heat, sweat glistening on our necks and arms, not looking at each other. I was blinking my stinging eyes when I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned.

I don’t know, I guess I was hoping maybe it be Delilah. But it was a young woman, holding a child high up over her head. She shouted something at me in Frog.

‘English?’ I called at her. ‘You speak English?’

‘ Le bébé ,’ she said, ‘ passez-lui aux portes .’

‘What?’

A tall man in a blue shirt was looking at us. He shouted in Frog.

‘ Le bébé ,’ she said again. ‘ Ils les laissent passer à la salle d’attente. C’est trop dangereux pour eux ici .’ And she ain’t even waited for me to understand, just dumped this soft wet thing in my arms and gestured over my head to the next jack. It start to squalling. I handed it along.

‘Hell,’ Chip shouted after a minute. ‘We ain’t gettin nowhere in this.’

He started dragging me again through it all, rolling past all them damp shoulders. I stumbled on something soft underfoot. Glancing down, my stomach wrenched at the sight of a woman just lying there, trying to protect her face with mud-caked hands. Before I could reach down for her, some other jack hauled her up and we was shoved onward. A sea of panting faces, women in shawls clutching bundles in raw hands, men with suitcases grasped hard against their chests. The heat was strong and moist, and with every step a new smell rolled over me like a strong current. A stink of onions, boiled eggplant, something riper and fouler than pungent leather. And hovering over everything, the sharp, acidic reek of piss.

We finally climbed out of it. Shaking Chip off, I leaned over in a doorway and begun retching. It was disgusting, all that fear.

‘Come on, brother.’ Chip was breathing hard. ‘We got to find another way. Ain’t goin be nothin when the Krauts arrive.’

Once we got away from the station, the sudden silence was near overwhelming. Wasn’t another soul in the street. We started making our way toward boulevard Saint-Michel, where all the damn refugees from the north been streaming through these past weeks. We known we get south of the city that way. We heard the crowds before we seen them. An incredible roar, as thousands of damn Parisians pushed on southward. Crowds thick as a river, dragging boxes, wheel-barrows, bicycles piled high with suitcases. Cars clogged the roads, going slow, mattresses tied to their roofs like to stop bullets from Stukas.

You couldn’t hear none of the cannonfire now, only people. The crowd poured out through the city gates, streaming up round automobiles run out of gas, round trucks with punctured tires, a singe of rubber on the air. Car doors stood open, their backseats loaded down with broken wall clocks, soup spoons, boxes of salted herring. There was a overturned cart, its axle snapped, a dead horse already stinking in the heat. In folks’ faces you read this quiet terror, a fierce, single-minded desperation as they trudged onward.