The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  When Majid Ghulam turned around to look at her, meaning then to say, “And now we will have tea. I will call down for Maria,” he caught Sarie Turner looking at the space where his own head had been, and right before his eyes, she turned the rich plum color of Ribena Concentrated Syrup. Next—suddenly—Mad Majid Ghulam pressed himself against her. His hands met briefly at the back of Sarie’s neck, slipped along her spine, then, riffling as though through a drawer to find the urgent thing, moved across her back and then all over her front to part the curtains of her dress and feel her freckled flesh come loose and tepid in his palms. Sarie touched him, too.

  Later, Sarie wished it had been slower than it was, so that she could make a calendar of small and sweet events: First he… and then I and then he, oh yes. And then I, yes, and then we and then I and then he again and I knew and he touched and I and I and I—Sarie would have liked to savor it. But Majid, from the moment that it started, wished he could forget how it began. He wanted to remember not the first betrayal of an ancient, dear love but a not-too-loved familiar clutching, an act he had committed many times before that did not mean so much. He wished, that is, to feel himself already in the midst, already at sea and too far from the shore. The shore: the fact of his now-mangled little boy, the growing needs of three two-legged sons, Sugra, with her endless energy and the kindness which so helped him but which he could not hope to repay, the Kikanga set who called him Mad and Sad, the hungry, talky aunts, Maria with her Bible looks, the ruins of the paper, even old Rahman, and everything, everything, that he had ever been and ever wanted to forget.

  At sea they surely were. Sarie had had scant experience with romance. And so she mimed the movie actresses she had seen in one or two hot films at the Old Empire Cinema. She released and squeezed her lips in patterns in the air. Expecting that she might eventually feel Majid’s tongue against her mouth, she bent down to match him, pressed her brow against his neck and sighed, keeping her eyes closed. But Majid on that day was not interested in kissing. For one thing, Sarie’s mouth was far. He remained intent on that long chest and stomach, which he rubbed, she thought, like the lamps she read to Agatha about, from which amazing spirits come. To Mad and Sad Majid, the space between her shoulders and her jutting hips was dangerous, unchartable and vast.

  While the embrace—sudden, hectic, endless—wound on and up and round the parents in the hall, Agatha watched Tahir. Perhaps connected much more tightly to her mother than either of them would have cared to know, she felt a thick confusion, a warm coal in her chest. While Sarie shivered in the hall, Agatha thought for an endless, awful moment that perhaps Tahir had died. As Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, failed widower, businessman, and poet, pulled Sarie Turner across the way a bit so as to prop her up against the peeling wall, Agatha was pulled closer to the boy. She let the book drop to the floor and leaned in towards him, where, chest tight and steaming still, at last she heard little Tahir snore. While Sarie bent her knees on the other side of that room’s door so Majid Ghulam would not be hindered by her stature, Agatha kept careful track of Tahir Majid’s slight, but yes, still, breathing. Eventually she was so lulled by it that she, too, closed her eyes and slept.

  When Sarie came to wake her, Agatha felt fresh. Sarie was no longer flushed. Her yellow hair was dark now, that peculiar shade of green that wetness can bring on. She had just poured water on her face. Majid, who had brought the battered bowl, had watched her, bent over by the window, tip the water out over her high cheeks with a beaten metal cup; he had wished that she were standing naked there instead of in that horrible old dress, that he could watch the water trickle over that long body, of which he was—too late to turn back now—already enamored.

  “We have stayed enough,” Sarie said to Agatha, hurrying her up. “When we get to our home—” She paused, stroked her daughter’s brown-shoe-polish hair. “When we get to our home, your father will no longer be there.” She meant that Gilbert would have headed for the watering hole, would be telling stories at the Palm. But she was also right, of course, in quite another way.

  Though she could not have said, exactly, with what eyes she was concerned, Sarie cast a furtive look behind her as she and Agatha arrived at their own building on Mchanganyiko Street. She wondered if they had been noticed coming in, her with her hair wet, heart drumming so loud, but thought, Who can be there, looking? Who would care, or know? Nonetheless, she shivered.

  This should be said, and clearly: despite Gilbert’s now-and-then democratic dreams, the Turners were not rooted in Kikanga. Apart from one or two acquaintances of Gilbert’s and the formidable Hazel Towson—who thought Sarie should be serving on Committees and whose sporadic visits always soured the air (and were they not overdue for one, any day now, any day at all?)—the Turners did not socialize, not of their own will. They did not lounge on any stoops; nor did they have a balcony on which they might have become fixtures. But for awkward waving from the stairwell or the courtyard on their way to somewhere else, they did not know their neighbors.

  To her credit, Sarie was aware of one or two. The one she saw most often was an Arab from the islands, a Mr. Suleiman, old but not infirm, who listened on occasion to the radio in his parlor, pale blue door ajar; he sometimes stood beside the broken taxi—also blue, but brighter, like the sky—where he peered into the windows or fingered the sad chrome. There was also, now and then, a Comorian lady who sold thumb-sized vials of scent from an old cane chair beneath the meager shade of a gray thorn tree, where she muttered to herself and fanned her potent wares, and sometimes an assortment of small children, whose brave Churchgoing parents, hardworking and pious, were rarely seen outside. If they saw her, these children sometimes ran towards her and then away. (Here, Agatha was better. She traveled now and then in a very different world from the one her parents knew. She kept mostly to herself, but she could sing those children’s names. Sarie, for her part, did not even know if they knew who she was.) A wise person might ask: in the heart of Vunjamguu, in mixed and mad Kikanga, can such a state of things not be the fruit of arduous labor, of an insistent and unnatural closing-of-the-eyes? For sure, for sure. Indeed. Bibi would have howled and slapped her wobbly thighs. Nonetheless, on her return from Kudra House, Sarie had the feeling that something, someone, saw. Perhaps, although Sarie didn’t know it, the watcher from the balcony only four blocks down had left an imprint on the air, an eyeball-shake-and-shiver that had lingered in the breeze. Sarie felt observed, and the feeling made her cold.

  She urged Agatha to silence and led her slowly up the stairs. In the landing’s patchy gloom, she closed her eyes and conjured up a look she’d caught on Mr. Jeevanjee’s thin face. The tremor—the thought I have been seen—dissipated in the half-light, and she shook herself a bit, felt alone and clear. Her final steps were brighter. She pulled Agatha along, and in a moment she was laughing; yes, she was excited about what she and he had done. Or, après tout, what Mr. Jeevanjee had done. Hadn’t the sweet man (“Majid Ghulam,” she whispered) without any preamble at all pressed himself upon her, and she, willingly, succumbed? She thought, He conquered me, sent Agatha to wash, and lay down on the bed.

  When Gilbert came back home from drinks at the Victorian Palm, Sarie, who had stepped out of the bedroom at the whoosh-whoosh of his tread, saw him as though through a colored haze. She felt rather kind, protective. Her pink Gilbert, Mon petit mari rose, damp with beads of dew. How sweet an unsuspecting husband, protected from a shock by a thoughtful, able mate, could look!

  That evening, everything in Sarie’s tilting world looked clean and good to her: her dear, silly legal man, Agatha’s soiled hands, the cracked and dirty tiles.

  At the sticky table, Sarie fed Gilbert plain rice boiled in water, and when he as usual suggested that she might have spiced it up or tried to be inventive, she only smiled at him and did not even sigh. In the hanging bulb’s dim light, Gilbert appeared fragile, delicate, and rare. She noticed, noncommittally, the purplish age spots on his pate. The skin spots make my husband’s head
resemble eggs found in the nests of little forest birds. C’est précieux, après tout. He was, she thought, the only man to whom she’d ever been and would ever be deceitful; as such, as the husband of the woman who had not long ago embraced Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee so daringly and hotly in Kudra House’s hall, wasn’t Gilbert Turner finally, if modestly, historic? Sarie felt important, too. Yes, she thought. She beamed.

  Though often unperceptive, Gilbert was susceptible to gentleness. And it was gentleness he sensed, though it confused him, seeping like a halo from the contours of his wife. Belatedly inspired by the sayings of His Holiness (who felt, or at least maintained in public, that all peoples in one place were best conjoined in mutual assistance), he thought to repay Sarie for that unexpected smile by washing up the dishes. Sarie, not surprised to see that things were moving in her favor, said, “Oh, yes. Please. Of course.”

  Later, in Agatha’s small bedroom—no more than a closet—Sarie read aloud from a book that they had borrowed at the British Council Library. It was The Adventures of Aziz, in which Taj al Maluk, Prince of the Green City, falls heels over head for charitable Dunya, a comely, charming girl with an aptitude for making things from silk. While Agatha curled fists into her only pillow, tricky, energetic Dunya swore she’d kill off any husband foisted on her with the strength in her own hands. Agatha sleepily approved, and Sarie, satisfied, put her child to bed.

  Gilbert, who had been reading by himself in the next room, came in once Agatha had dimmed. He could, it’s true, only kiss his daughter when she could not respond. With Sarie looking on, Gilbert pecked the sleeper chastely, then turned lightly on his heel. He fell asleep soon after, with (having taken a brief rest from the Tour) a book about the merchant sailors of the littoral on the table near the bed.

  Sarie felt her limbs and skin still mightily aglow. Too awake to make a show of lying down, she stood before the mirror. With a plastic yellow comb once designed to look like marble, she smoothed down her wild hair and thought that she looked fine, perhaps not as far into her middle age as she now was, perhaps closer to forty. She gave her own reflection a subtle plotter’s moue. When she finally joined Gilbert in their hard and narrow bed, he was snoring just as Agatha in the next room was (ruffle-ruffle-hoo). The bedsheet trembled gently at his mouth. He was as good as absent now; she was almost by herself In the quiet-but-unquiet stillness of her family’s soft sleep, the very air around her shimmied in delight.

  In the darkness, wet winds rose up from the shallows of the city; a haphazard rain swept in. More stains appeared on the face of Kudra House, and in the courtyard of the Turners’ building, a shed that held the neighbor’s chickens lost a good part of its thatching to a well-placed gust of wind. Infected by his second book, Gilbert dreamed of Indian Ocean kingpins and their mutinous retainers skulking in the mangroves, while Sarie, smiling, dreamed of warmth and love.

  Five

  Sarie woke the following day thickened with good sleep. All night while the rain fell, she had been curled against the narrow, dear form of Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee. The Mr. Jeevanjee she’d dreamed was not the Mr. Jeevanjee with whom she’d tussled in the hall just the day before. This dream-man was Majid Ghulam after weeks of care and comfort, a known lover: a brave man whose bliss she knew and who had seen (and wordlessly, graciously agreed never to throw back at her) how weeping spoiled her face. The dream-Majid-Ghulam was slack and comfortable beside her. Throughout the night he’d raised his hand up to his chin to rub a beard that grew there, then set his palm to rest again on his familiar lover’s flank. Oh, marvelous and sweet! But when Sarie awoke, the nocturnal man was gone. She found not only that the Mr. Jeevanjee she’d dreamed was different from the one she could recall with her eyes open (in her dream his fingernails were clean, his arms a little stronger), but that she was, sleep-creased and stiff in places she had not noted for some years, in bed beside her husband.

  Gilbert, who was used to waking by himself and often stayed beneath the covers until Sarie called for breakfast, was touched to find her there. Remembering the previous evening’s kindness, made daring by it all, he even thought he might, curling up to Sarie from behind, persuade her to collude with him. How long it had been! But Sarie groaned and pulled away. Not reconciled to being where she was, skin wrinkled from the pillow and her arms, she gave her real-life man a disapproving look. Gilbert, fixed by her blue gaze, stilled the hand that he had been about to slip between her arm and ribs, dropped his fingers to his chest, and blushed.

  Gilbert was the kind of man who kept a blush, sometimes for as long as half an hour, an outrage, a berry-colored shame that sometimes made Sarie despise him. She had no patience for his skin just then, no wish to be accused. She moved her tongue across her wide front teeth. She frowned. As though Gilbert had been privy to her dreams, as though he sensed that he was not, perhaps, the easy master of his home, she said, “What will you do about it?” Lip pushed out like a fist.

  Gilbert disliked squabbling and was not skilled at repartee. He didn’t answer, said, instead, “Make us breakfast, won’t you, love?” He stood up then, and, bent over at the middle, bloodless shoulders sagging, plucked his brown robe from its hook and went down the hall to bathe.

  Sarie lay back in their bed and pulled the sheet over her face. All the charm she’d felt the day before and for all of that wet night had been wiped conclusively away by Gilbert’s roaming hands. She thought: what could the world be like if there were not a husband of whom she had long been disillusioned? The cloying, serious gloom that had replaced the lovely night distressed her. How humid the air was.

  She had heard a phrase once and she had kept it for herself: I do not dwell on things. Dwell. She had liked the double meaning, once it was explained: the living, and the pouting that was also like a swoon. I do not dwell on things, she sometimes said in her own mind while other people talked. But here she was, adwell. What promises Gilbert had made, with the Sisters (Oh, les soeurs coupables!) assisting. The Sisters! Amélie and Brigitte, Clothilde, and all the others, too, had told her he’d been meant: “C’est ton destin, petite!” they’d said, over washing, steaming bedpans, crusted cups—her destiny, God’s plan. They had made it sound as if nothing could be done, as if she had no choice but to welcome the man in. That man, the pink young man with traveling dust in his brown hair and emotion in his eyes, had seen her and had wanted her and had asked if he could have her. And the Sisters had said yes excitedly, and shining, as if they’d been awaiting him for years. As though Sarie must have been waiting for him, too. “This is a sign from God,” they’d said. “You’re his.” And Sarie had believed them. They insisted she’d be cared for, that she would have a future. One or two of them had even, humbled by the bliss of married lives that they had never known, cried and held her tight.

  But, Sarie thought for the first time, perhaps they’d wanted to be rid of her. Hadn’t heavy, satisfied Clothilde said, “If you don’t go with him, what can we do with you?” Hadn’t they all said, “You can’t live your life here”? But, no, it wasn’t all their fault. She had thought, hadn’t she, that she was supposed to go with him, let him take her from the clinic and escort her, like a prince, closer to the sea, to a kingdom of delight. It all seemed a sad tale. She knew now it hadn’t been a plan, no divinity at all. In fact, she thought, it was car trouble that had sent Mr. Turner and his Magistrate down to the Jilima Mission, to ask if they could stay. There had been an accident, something with a donkey. Sarie didn’t know, exactly. A broken strap or fan, perhaps, a dislodged, leaky valve, a puncture in hard skin. But whatever belt or metal piece had failed, Sarie had got married because of trouble with a car.

  What stories he had told! There would be a house and garden by the harbor. She would be admired. He would be promoted. But of course Independence came, and with it, all that went. What if I had not accepted him? Sarie rubbed her mouth with a long hand. IfI’d met Mr. Jeevanjee instead? The very question hurt her, and she turned to rise from bed. But thoughts of Mr. Jeevanjee, it seem
ed, kept on popping up, no matter how she tried.

  Aware of Agatha gabbling to herself in the next room—Taj and Dunya, threats of murdered men—she wondered for a moment what Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee liked to have for breakfast. How did people like him, widowers, poets, men from those green islands, Jeevanjees, get moving with the day? Samosas, was it? Gruel made from some grain? A sweet, light-scented pastry? Confronted with the item, would Sarie know its name? And would she ever in her lifetime learn how it should be cooked? She drew the sheet away, ran her fingers hard across her face, sat up, set her feet on the cold floor, and strode into the kitchen.

  After breakfast, Gilbert, unfaithful in his way, put down the book on coastal merchants and replaced it with a favorite, a slender teal-gray volume called The Mohammedan Peoples of East Africa’s Coast Lands. Oh, how he was glad about his books! How they calmed him, how they promoted in his heart a sense of order in the world! But let us tell the truth: he was not a conscientious reader. While Gilbert loved the varied books with a constancy and ardor that were probably unmatched, and took great pleasure from his ownership, he gave them less than all of his attention. He did not read them through and through, not as they had been written. Gilbert loved their shapes, what they hinted about him, far more than their intricate, sometimes difficult insides. He loved to hold the volumes open in his lap, to gauge their width and heft, to feel the paper with his palms. Holding books like that, with care, made Gilbert feel like—yes. A professor. Like a man who understood. Like, he sometimes thought, the man I really am. When he did cast his eyes down among the pages (which he did do, yes, he did, sometimes), he was often more intrigued by the appearances of things, their outlines, than by their inner cogs.

  In the cherished books, Gilbert sought out vivid anecdotes and clear-cut section headings. Statements in bold print. Single sentences, or pairs of them, not often more than three, that jumped from off the page. In the book on merchant sailors, he had liked to learn that slaves came to the coast from Yemen and also from Circassia. Oh, Circassia! In Mohammedans, Gilbert found expressions he was curious to try out on fellow drinkers at the Palm: “prestation,” “affine,” “rights in rem,” and more. Gilbert practiced his pronunciation softly, just under his breath, while Sarie clattered in the kitchen. Then he looked at his high bookshelf, reassured and proud.