What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

is too greedy, right? You don’t see it?” He was a regular on the sidewalk outside the barbershops. Each day he had a new topic, but this was one of his staples.

“Well, I don’t know …”

“Look, let me give you an example. Let’s say there’s four of us, right? And we decide to … make some dumplings, okay? And we only have enough flour to make twelve dumplings, so we boil the dumplings and we leave them in the pot for everybody to share. Let’s say it’s four of us. Three apiece, right? Believe me, some man knowing all we go through for the twelve dumplings will go in the kitchen and take four dumplings. Don’t laugh. Man is greedy, that’s why communism can’t work.”

“Righteous truths, man,” Oku humoured him, going into the barbershop.

The barbershops on Eglinton were sites of great philosophical rumination on the world. Here everything from the war in the Middle East and genocide in Rwanda to the cost of toilet paper and the existence of God were rigorously gone over—examined from every possible angle. Oku came to the barbershops sometimes less for a haircut than for the conversations.

“You hear that? ‘Righteous truths’!”

He got a haircut from Paul at Castries Barber Salon after an hour’s wait and strong debate on the state of the world. The barbers were in-house philosophers. They commanded a chair and an audience—people waiting for their hair to be cut. They rivalled each other for the fineness of argument and their depth of knowledge. The barbershops were universities of a kind and repositories for all the stifled ambition of men who were sidelined by prejudices of one sort or another. And also a lock-box of the vanities of men so hamstrung. These men became pig-headed about how they thought a life like this should be handled, about the order of the sexes, the order of children, the order of everything. One moment they were radicals preaching communism, the next they were putting women in purdah, the next decrying the pope, the next rooting out the devil from homosexuals.

Paul dusted Oku’s neck and face with a brush of baby powder. Oku slipped him a couple bucks extra with the embarrassing thought that his student loan was practically gone and he’d better find a job. He might have to haul gyproc and wood this summer after all. Fine, he would have to bite his tongue and get Fitz to hook him up to the job, but it would be on different terms. He didn’t want Fitz hassling him and berating him. That fight at the breakfast table would give him some leverage. He got the sense in that small moment that he had put Fitz in his place once and for all.

He shook himself out of Paul’s chair and left the barbershop, walking through a gauntlet of arguers on different subjects on the sidewalk. The whole strip of Eglinton between Marlee and Dufferin was full of West Indian stores selling hot food, haircuts, wigs, cosmetics, and clothes. There were stores selling barrels for stuffing goods to send to families in the Caribbean and there were stores selling green bananas, yams, pepper sauce, mangos, and salt cod, all tastes from the Caribbean carried across the Atlantic to this strip of the city. Wrapped in oil and sugar and pepper, waxed in onions and thyme; modified, hardened, and made acrid and stale by distance; hardly recognizable if any here were to really take a trip to where they once called home.

This was how Oku experienced his mother and father each day. As people who somehow lived in the near past and were unable or unwilling to step into the present. But then in some ways they were ahead of him, he thought. Hadn’t he been dogging behind Jackie since high school? Hadn’t she moved on? Had herself a German boyfriend, a second-hand clothes store, a life he could not enter? And he had hung on anyway to the idea that one day she would notice him and bring him into the present. And he had been passive in this, seeming to do nothing to actually get there with Jackie; afraid that if he pushed it she would definitely say no. He had thought that if he left it like a possibility, it could still happen.

Oku pointed the Buick south on Oakwood, leaving the Eglinton strip behind. He headed to Queen Street, where Jackie’s store was. He hadn’t heard anything from her. He had to know if she’d heard his music. Maybe it was the way the morning had begun that made him bolder. When he first took the car he had no idea he was heading for Jackie. Nor when he got the haircut, a small vanity that said the idea was lurking in him. But now he was there and certain.

He parked, and walked a block looking for the store. He saw the sign from across the street, Ab und Zu, and it hit him that Reiner might be there. Just as he thought it, Reiner walked out the door, his black guitar bag on his shoulder. Jackie held the door open for him, then waved as he walked down the street. Oku stood poised, not wanting to be witness to this domestic scene, let alone be caught doing so.

Jackie retreated inside the doorway, but then she stopped, catching sight of him across the street. She raised her hand in greeting, or was it beckoning him to come? He couldn’t make out the expression on her face. It wasn’t happiness, which he wanted. It wasn’t distaste either, which he dreaded. It was that closed, smoky look she always gave him—half derisive, half curious, as if there was something she was waiting for him to do. Now he followed the invisible string in her hand, crossing the street in the middle of moving traffic. He felt as if he was colliding with something as he entered the doorway.

“So, hey,” Jackie said, standing close to him.

“Hey,” he managed to get out