Scattered raindrops formed fat, dark circles on the green-and -gold scarf wrapped over Aishatu Ewaso's braids. She only put it on as an afterthought. Rain in Paris was normal, and she had her umbrella, but she went back for the scarf anyway. She couldn't really say why.
The museum opened at 9 am and Aishatu planned to be there as early as possible. The Metro was packed, the car nothing but a sea of tops of heads peering at phones. Tinny music streamed out of countless earphones. Tourists chattered in several languages. She occupied herself with her own thoughts, staring into the image of her face reflected in the window, the tribal scars on both cheeks standing out like white comets in the darkness.
She wasn't the only one forced to wait outside the museum. A small crowd of twenty or so tourists was clustered in front of the ornate gates waiting to be let in. It was summer, but Aishatu had not expected so many visitors so early in the morning. She shook her head as she approached.
Silence. She'd wanted the silence of the museum for herself. The kind of silence that empty galleries and vacant stairwells provided. She wanted to take in the information and process, but she couldn't do that with nattering tourists surrounding her, making banal comments, invading her mental landscape. Aishatu looked around at the others and wondered how she could remove herself from them in the most efficient manner.
The gates were opened ten minutes after the official opening time by a silent, stone-faced guard. The people streamed in, and Aishatu, shaking out her umbrella, entered the museum as one of the crowd. In the foyer, she put away her backpack and umbrella in one of the grey, lockable cupboards and joined the ticket queue.
Almost as a reflex, she noticed that she was the only African. That did not bother her. She was always aware on some level that she was in a white country, no matter how many dark French she saw on the streets every day.
Most of the other visitors in the ticket queue were clearly French, on holiday in their own country, judging by their clothing and the sound of their murmured speech. Only a married couple and a young man looked foreign to her.
When it was her turn, she smiled at the ticket seller who scrutinised her and her university identification.
"Doctoral studies," she informed him, still smiling.
The man grunted a reply and keyed the appropriate combination into his computer. A student ticket and her identification were pushed through the cut-out arc at the bottom of the glass window that separated them from each other.
The time printed on the ticket read 9:17.
A minute or two later, Aishatu Ewaso approached the first display in the first gallery of the museum as one of the last of the crowd.
YOU ARE READING
A Visitor to the Museum
Action*Action Short Story* Terrorists storm a Parisian museum taking the twenty startled visitors hostage. One woman refuses to cooperate. A fact the French police can't, or don't want, to believe. When politics, race, history and the War Against Terroris...
