Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

I sort of shrugged my shoulders, like I ain’t got one damn clue what she on bout.

Hiero start to muttering from the sofa. She looked over at him, troubled. ‘You didn’t get the visas? For real?’

‘You think I lyin to you, girl? Did the boy say he give them to me?’

She frowned, looked back at the open door. ‘He said he knocked. He said he left them under the mat.’ She was already rushing back to the mat, kneeling, peeling it up, running her hand along the old floor beneath like maybe those old visas be invisible.

Then she lift up her face, staring at me with this curious dark expression.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Don’t go lookin at me like that. Hell. Maybe he got the wrong damn flat. Maybe he knocked at the wrong door.’

She was gone then, her long heels clattering across the landing. I could hear her pulling back the doormats outside the other flats, running down the stairs, crossing the courtyard. Hell.

‘Sid,’ Hiero said quiet-like. ‘Sid?’

‘Yeah, kid, I’m here,’ I said. ‘You alright? Lilah just losin her mind, don’t mind her.’

‘Don’t let them take me,’ he said all a sudden, real clear. ‘Don’t let them.’

‘Sure,’ I murmured, ‘I won’t. I won’t let no one.’

The door closed behind me. I turned. There stood Delilah, breathing hard. She was studying the two of us with a haunted expression.

‘What’s going on, Sid?’ she said softly. She sort of cleared her throat, come closer, leaned into the doorframe. ‘Don’t lie to me. You didn’t get Hiero’s visas?’

‘I told you already. I ain’t got nothin.’

‘And you didn’t hear anyone knock on the door?’

I scowled, exasperated-like.

‘Then why didn’t you come check the other flats with me?’

I could feel my face flushing. ‘How you know this damn boy ain’t a rat?’ I said. ‘How you know he ain’t lyin to you? You ever seen him before?’

‘He’s the nephew of one of my contacts,’ she said coldly. ‘He’s not lying. What’s going on here, Sid?’

I opened my arms, like to protest. ‘Lilah, hell. Maybe they was stolen. These days? Some jack even made off with Ernst’s damn Horch, for Christ’s sake. Ain’t no gas, they take it anyway. The boy should never left such a sensitive thing just sittin out there in the hall. Hell.’

‘No one’s living here, Sid, just us. Who’d steal it?’

I turned to her in the half-light, those shrewd green eyes cutting right through me. The room was calm, the only sound Hiero’s damp breathing in his sheets. I wet my lips. ‘What you sayin, girl?’

Delilah’s face looked severe in that light. Very soft, she said, ‘If you do anything to hurt him, you will pay for it. I swear that to you.’

I gone cold all over, hearing her say it.

Then she was gone, the front door closing. I listened for the clack of her heels on the stairs. When I turned away the kid was looking at me with wet eyes.

‘You alright, kid?’ I said.

‘Don’t go, Sid,’ he said. He started to cry. ‘Sid, don’t go. Don’t go.’

I put a cloth to his hot forehead, wiped off the sweat.

‘I ain’t goin let nothin happen to you,’ I said firmly. ‘You hear me, kid? You like my own brother. Nothin. We goin get you out of this safe.’

The June light come in soft through the curtains, the streets still as death outside. All was calm, peaceful. I run the cloth over his forehead. He was wrapped up in those white sheets like for the grave.

I gripped his hot hand.

I woke. Opened my eyes to all that brightness, the yellow walls of that bus burning with it, dazzling and sharp. I cast all about, looking for Chip, but I ain’t seen him. The doors at the front was open and I stumbled over to them, down the steps, into that strange white light.

‘Chip?’ I shielded my eyes, squinting. ‘Where you at, brother?’ My voice come bending back at me, sounding weird, like it was underwater.

My suitcase been dragged out of the hold under the bus; it stood in the dirt.

‘Hell,’ I muttered, blinking. ‘Welcome to damn Poland.’

We’d come to a stop in a small dusty clearing just off a dirt road. There was dark oaks and larches looming up all around, dense and grim. The air smelled of wood smoke, everything fresh and crisp, sharply outlined. As if all this land, all these bleak trees had stayed untouched by man.

I rubbed my old legs to get the blood going again, and then I seen Chip, standing out at the road, his beautiful suitcases lined up beside him.

‘We here?’ I said, shuffling over. My eyes stinging something awful. ‘Our driver ain’t stuck around, I guess.’

Chip shrugged. ‘He was gone when I woke up. Probably getting himself something to eat.’

I glanced around. No signs of anything.

But Chip gave a little nod across the road. I thought I could see, strangely veiled by all that light, a sloped grey roof in the trees. White smoke rising from its stack, near invisible against the white sky. I looked down the road. Huge empty sky, a low plain stretching forever onward.

And what could I do but keep going. Hiero ain’t asked for me, but wasn’t no turning back now. I was irreparably here.

Then something occurred to me. ‘What if Hiero ain’t here? Where we going to sleep, brother?’

‘He’s here,’ Chip said. ‘We ain’t wrong.’

Something in the way he said it, hell, my old heart started stuttering.

Chip began walking, and I trailed behind, dragging two of his damn suitcases along with my own. Not a soul in sight and the light in the sky glowing ivory, radiant. Something felt wrong but I wasn’t sure what. Then I known. It was utterly silent, utterly still. Like there wasn’t nothing living in them oaks, no birds, nothing. It was like the outer edge of the world.

As we trod through all this grand light, passing through bright, vacant fields, I started really thinking about the ones we’d lost, about Ernst, Paul, Big Fritz. About Delilah.

I thought of Ernst, getting it into his head the only way to take revenge on his pa was to kill himself. How he’d enlisted in the Wehrmacht, pleaded to be sent to the Russian front. Anything to stump that man who’d already gutted him. Not five weeks later, on a mission near Orel, he was shot through the eye and killed.

And I thought of Paul, trying to get back to our old flat. How he’d been after his epilepsy medication, a condition he ain’t never mentioned, and one we ain’t never suspected. He was walking the streets with Delilah when some ex-rival of his, a one-time jazz pianist turned Gestapo toady, caught him ducking down an alley and went hollering in after him. Hell. They arrested him on charges of treason against the regime, of race pollution. He was trucked out to Sachsenhausen, just outside Berlin. He ain’t never come out.

We was all so young . Even Fritz, Big Fritz, who’d stayed in Berlin when we fled. Wasn’t long before he nearly got arrested as a jazzman himself, had to flee to Hamburg just after we’d left for Paris. In Hamburg a friend got him a job playing jazz at the Regina, a scuzzy St Pauli brothel. There he was protected by the whores, who’d warn him ever the Gestapo turn up. He was rushed underground, tucked behind some damn barrels. He even survived the bombings in that deep cellar. After the war, homeless and hungry, he wandered the countryside, utterly alone. Son of a bitch died of starvation in the German wood.

Did he regret leaving us? I reckon he did. He wasn’t no Nazi, just a damn kid trying to save his skin. It hurt to think of him.

But Delilah, my lovely girl Lilah. Hell. I thought of how, after Hiero got picked up, she hid our discs in all different bags before quitting Paris, all the Hot-Time Swingers’ old records. Even went so far as to sew Half Blood Blues into a secret pocket on the inside of her coat. We wasn’t an hour in Marseille when some old Vichy bastard confiscate them, even Half Blood . Look on her face — hell, it hurt . Sure we was all upset, but Lilah — you seen in those wronged eyes she wouldn’t never get over it. Who can say exactly how the pain of it played out in her life. She ain’t spoken to me since parting ways at New York harbour. After kissing me coldly at the dock, she gone back to Montreal and disappeared entirely from my life. Again. I got word soon after that she had married, and then two years later I got word she was dead. Seemed to happen that quick. Blood cancer. Her husband said she gone peaceful at least. At least there was that.