The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  Oh, she could see it clearly—a business for the times. A business that would not require a shop-front or a local clientele. A business that could sneak and curl and shiver along the tricky mangrove coasts. What if, thought Sarie, we can borrow someone’s ship and do it from Nairobi? She didn’t worry about details or the fact that they knew no one. She was swept up in her vision. Yes, she could already see small crates packed tight with dark, emaciated figures, shipped efficiently far northwards, to be bought by portly, eloquent, discriminating men (like slavery, indeed, she thought with some surprise, but without such blood and terror; a revision, rather, yes, for better, modern days). She imagined other boxes filled with baskets made of fibrous, tightened stuff that would give a scent of Africa, for ladies to set out on dining tables, to display their finer fruits; or velvets from Kasai to line a gracious hall. Perhaps even Uncle James could sell them from his house! Didn’t he want souvenirs of things he’d never done?

  Sarie almost laughed. Only two days into the news and, already, see how she had solved it. The export of such things would put her on the move. She might be central to a traffic of this sort, off on journeys to the west, to railway towns and harbors where artisans might live. She still had contacts, surely—one or two White Fathers or some Jesuits, languishing in ruins. They’d remember her and point her in the right direction. They’d collected masks. And by now each one of them must have published a great book, a wise compendium of all the local ways. They must know where the best trinkets were hidden! She thought about Jilima. What if Betty had not returned to Texas, was still living at the Baptist Mission selling eggs and knitting children’s hats? Sarie even thought she’d like to see Betty most of all. “I’ve slept with a local man,” she’d say, “but, I think, don’t worry”—she felt the hairs along her scalp each give a little tremble—“that it might be like love.” Betty would listen in amazement. Then she would talk about it with Clothilde and Amélie. Sarie would tell them they looked young, and all of them would thank her. She might find news of Angélique, learn what really happened. She might even find her. They’d have a cup of tea.

  Sarie smiled into the room. How different life seemed, after little Tahir’s accident, after those amazing visits to his home, after holding—oh!—Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, after Uncle James’s letter, even after Mrs. Hazel’s (here she giggled right out loud, smacked her sleeping husband lightly on the rump) great mistake about what had set to work in Sarie’s nether parts. She felt, indeed, at the very heart of things. Perceived. She even wished that Uncle James had pushed them like this many years before. We could have had ideas from the start! We have been rotting, pourrissant! So lazy. Missing what was just before our eyes.

  In her new excitement, she did very briefly try waking Gilbert up. She pressed her biggest toenail into Gilbert’s sloppy calf and tapped softly at his shoulder. She tickled Gilbert’s chin with two light fingertips and crooned. But Gilbert only gave out a great sigh and a wiggle of his feet. If she had woken him just then, let him see the brightness in her eyes, shown him she was serious, things might have turned out differently. But Sarie let him sleep. And, upon a second thought, she decided that she wouldn’t tell him right away. Later, he would see how wise she was. Feeling sure and glad, she thought about her lover. Perhaps, she thought, I will take Majid Ghulam with me to the highlands. We shall together purchase knives.

  What Sarie didn’t know, what she could not expect, was that her familiar Gilbert—soft, a reader, shy, and in general amenable to her commands when she could not fulfill his—would from his own dreaming pull another Gilbert. From the rhythm of massage, from the pressing of her fingernails at his yielding flesh, perhaps from his own agitated skin, a little boy in his old head clambered to an attic, where he found and opened up a box, looked in it, and felt glee. As outside the green rain battered the flat roofs and chilled the steaming roads, Gilbert, all his knots undone, was changing, and was being given, in a dream, an idea of his own.

  Twelve

  Bibi spent the evening with Issa and Nisreen. They listened to the news from England, and later to the Germans: in Egypt things were changing, in South Africa they weren’t, and, somewhere on the border, there were more rumbles of War. But the news did not intrude too much on the loveliness of things. In her hands, the pineapple was growing. The pineapple, thought Bibi, had been a good idea. She hadn’t done the taxi. Wouldn’t. Even if it was a herald, she wasn’t yet prepared to say so openly at home. At the moment she regarded the idea of her prophet-self with affectionate amusement. Though she had been too shy to take it up, she did feel, at least, that she had weathered that first dare with grace: “Thought you were a seer, eh? A person who can know things?? Well, my dear, stitch that!”

  She hadn’t, was not strong enough quite yet. But she was happy with her second choice. The pineapple, she told herself, though likely not a cosmic gift—did not portend a person, for example, giving on the inside and prickly on the out, or a tangy glass to drink—was just the thing to stitch. It would grant her the appearance of an ordinary woman (no mad lady making cabs) and also reassure her that, even if she couldn’t tell the future, even if she’d chosen, knowingly, to turn the other way, she was clever with a needle.

  The small pineapple pleased her. She liked the sharp thing’s shape, the way the fruit was jagged, hard, how it was dangerous from too close up but how from a little distance it could look soft and round. The pineapple she stitched, in brown and yellow thread from a jersey she’d convinced Mama Moto to give up in exchange for some old shoes, was ripe, ready to be plucked. A grown thing. But Bibi also liked to think about how such fruits began: humble nut-sized promises concealed in scarlet folds, held intimate and safe by red and rosy spines. Like babies, Bibi thought.

  When Bibi thought of babies—which she often did, she really couldn’t help it—she felt happy and then sad, then happy once again. Such sweetness in considering new life! She thought about the new life she had made, her very own success: there he was, strong and stunning Issa, huddled by the radio with a serious look she liked to think he’d gotten from his mother, the look she’d had as little Kulthum at the Ladies’ Sewing Club, which had so impressed her teachers. He’ll always know he came from me, she thought. Just look at that nice face.

  As she often did, Bibi found herself recalling Issa’s absent brothers, all dead far too young. Her marriage, her first house, the troubles with her belly, the secrets she’d uncovered and had shared with cousins and some aunts—those things stayed quite vague. What she really did remember from those years were the faces of the babies she had lost, and these, like Issa’s, she was sure, had been just like her own. But tiny, wrinkled. Too young. Fruitlets, quickly gone from her. When she saw her own reflection in the mirror in her bedroom, Bibi thought about the lost children a lot. She was getting old; her face was getting smaller. She was shrinking. It was easy thinking those lost sons had looked like her, when she herself was growing smaller every day. We’re all babies, in the end, she thought. The idea made her smile. It also made her eyes tight, brought a perfect kind of sweetness, hovering on tears but hovering only, because the parlor with her Issa in it and his hardworking Nisreen, and the soft sound of the radio, felt so comfortable and right. Bibi let the pineapple slip down onto her lap and stretched her tired fingers. Her hands ached. It would be nice to go to bed. Oh, but not quite yet, not yet. How lovely evenings were! There was so much to think about at home, when she could bear it, when she let all the outside news go still, when she forgot about Kikanga—when she remembered exactly where she was, and who lived right there with her, and who would be beside her to the very end.

  She sighed, and smoothed the white cloth she’d been stitching out over her lap. Babies. Oh, perhaps everything had babies hiding in it, a little army of soft bodies, just waiting to be thought about and brought into the world! Babies in a fruit, babies among flowers, babies everywhere. Poor silly Nisreen! Bibi looked a little sadly at her, feeling all the love she had in her gather in her
chest. Nisreen, stretched out—so small!—on the bright sofa, was not listening any longer to the news, though when the broadcast had begun she’d paid very close attention, giving frowns and clucks about Johannesburg and Cairo whenever Issa made a fist or shook his thinking head. Now Nisreen was sinking into sleep; her heavy glasses had dropped down from her eyes, lenses at an angle, just above her mouth. Watching Issa’s wife stretched out like that, and feeling all the sweetness-sadness of the nighttime at her shoulders like a cloak, Bibi wished again that Nisreen would swell up.

  What a thin girl Issa’d taken on! “For smarts!” That was what he’d said. A girl who’d studied hard, had been apprenticed in a pharmacy. A girl with glasses on! How Bibi had argued. She knew several nice girls who’d studied in a pharmacy—for one, Ilham Masoud, who was beautiful and strong and who had stopped her studies when she married; Salma Ali also had studied medicine a while, found it couldn’t hold her. And how could she forget? There was Majid Ghulam’s cousin, too, and hadn’t he been on her mind? Of course, of course, charming little Sugra, who had even known Nisreen. And Sugra was now married, and as far as Bibi knew, her husband didn’t make her work for others, potion-smarts or no. Now there was an example. Wasn’t Sugra blooming, fat and round with babies at her breast and back, doing many interesting things that did not ruin one’s eyes?

  “Aren’t you smart enough alone?” Bibi had asked Issa at his suggestion of Nisreen. “Don’t you know smarts above mean nothing down below? Neck down, I mean to say?” But Issa had insisted, and when a mother loves a son so much, what is there to do? In the end, Bibi had to tell the truth: she liked Nisreen, she did. How could one not love a girl who did almost everything one asked? Who could fail to be impressed by a person who could solve the word games on the radio and read poems out loud?

  But glasses meant poor eyesight, didn’t they? From studying too much! Which brought gray hair, too, as it had to Bibi’s boy. Hadn’t Issa’s hair gone quite white at the edges from all that looking at the clouds and checking how-much-rainwater-has-fallen in the calibrated cups? He’d come back from the meteorological institute almost, almost, an old man! And where were the girl’s breasts? What hips could the girl claim? A baby would get stuck in there, no room to move around. Come out narrow like a twig, would snap in any wind! And, She limps, she thought, a hobbling child we’d get, if we got one at all. When she thinks too hard her eyes cross. If these two had a child, Bibi concluded—because when the thing a person wants is nowhere to be seen, it’s useful to decide that thing was never good—we’d get a blind boy with bad knees. Or even get a girl!

  Issa grunted at the radio, and Bibi, frowning, turned her thoughts to him. When she tired of blaming one, she set out towards the other. Couldn’t he keep at it? He thought too much, indeed, but in men that’s not a threat to things, not always. Issa, she was sure, was perfectly all right. Could function. Yes, of course he could. Who’d dare think otherwise? One small look at Issa was enough to make her glad again, and proud. Look at that big man! she thought. What hands! As his mother looked on tenderly, Issa leaned in towards the radio and propped his ankle on his knee, holding it for balance. How the boy can concentrate, thought Bibi. Like a dog on a lost chicken, like a shark on an old man!

  “What’s that they are saying?” Bibi asked. Issa didn’t hear her. “Weh! Issa!” She wished that he would look up from the radio and explain the news to her, not because she cared for details, but because she liked it when he spoke. And it seemed to her that he did not speak very much these days. “What’s going on out there?” Bibi asked again. Issa’s head came up. He raised his eyebrows at her. “What’s that, Ma?” He gave an absent nod and turned the volume up.

  The broadcast finally ended. The nation’s plodding anthem wheezed into the air. Issa turned the radio off before the band could finish. Nisreen, pulled away from sleep by sudden stillness in the room, stretched her arms and caught her glasses as they fell. She sat up and smiled. Issa bent to fold the newspaper. He yawned and rubbed his eyes.

  Nisreen said, “I thought it was morning.” Bibi turned to look at her and her hard thoughts slipped away. Nisreen did look sweet, half-woken. And if she’d just stop wearing glasses, well, her big eyes were not bad. And look, thought Bibi, how she does love my Issa.

  Nisreen, those eyes on her husband, did, indeed, look soft; but Issa didn’t notice. He was looking at his trouser leg, straightening a cuff. Nisreen wants what’s right, thought Bibi, despite that nothing-chest! Nisreen folded up her glasses and ran her fingers through the hair that had got loose from her twist. She waited. If I were Issa, Bibi thought, I’d make a sign right now, and lead her to the bed. What if tonight’s the night? she thought. What if she’s really ready? What if—she looked down at her pineapple—this one’s a sign, too? Bibi thought she would go first. If I leave them by themselves, Issa will look over at his wife and see what I just saw. His loins will be stirred up.

  Bibi folded her new pineapple in half and, with a satisfying stab, fixed her needle to it. “I’m going now,” she said. She got up from her seat and held the wall for balance. She shook her head at Nisreen’s silent offer to help her to her room. Issa said, “Ma, are you sure? Can you get into bed?” and Bibi showed him that she could by taking one big step herself Nisreen told her to sleep well.

  Believing that if she thought what she was thinking hard enough, he’d do exactly as she wished, Bibi gave her son a look. He was made of the same stuff as she was, after all. She’d held him in her womb! How could there not be deep communication? Her eyes stayed focused on him even as she reached the doorway and stepped out onto the landing. Make Nisreen a baby, Bibi thought. Put something in her pot.

  But when she lay down in her bed and listened, hoping she would hear what one should hear, she only heard Nisreen’s soft shuffle down the hall and Issa telling her good night, he still had paperwork work to do. Bibi shook her head and turned over on her side. How difficult it was with such a modern, studious pair. Did she not prod enough? Did they not understand how important children were? How things that start like nuts and grow in scarlet worlds grow up to feed a person’s heart? That’s it, she thought. Perhaps she’d stitch a heart once the pineapple was done. Hearts were loud and clear these days, what with bright talk of romance and those movies from the West. A heart. What if that swelled his loins up, to flood poor Nisreen’s gate?

  There was no heart in the morning. Bibi’s fingers wouldn’t move. She had stitched too long the night before, and when she woke up the next day, her hands were cramped and stiff They hurt. She couldn’t stitch a thing. And that pineapple she’d worked so hard on wasn’t even done!

  Mama Moto gave Bibi some uji in a bowl so she wouldn’t strain her hands with bread or tricky fruit. When Nisreen came into the kitchen, Bibi looked her over. If Issa and Nisreen had done the thing she’d hoped, love would show on Nisreen’s face. She’d look fresh and clean and especially well bathed. But Nisreen, neatly dressed and spectacled, was plain Nisreen again—not as she’d been for a moment on the sofa when she woke—and was already talking like a person whose head is full of busy-city-thought. Nisreen said that she would ask the doctors at the clinic for an ointment and bring home spinach if she could. Issa, looking like a businessman—the important man he was—asked Mama Moto please to bring a rope bed to the balcony so Bibi could lie down. And next the two of them slipped out the door into the world, walking side by side, but with, thought Bibi, a space growing between them: a space she felt was mirrored in her chest, as though her ribs were parting ways.

  Once they’d gone, Bibi settled on the balcony. How early Issa and Nisreen got up! Out there, Bibi thought, Kikanga was only just coming awake. But she also felt a bit of pride. Early birds, she thought, as Mrs. Harries had so liked to say. Going for the worm. They did take care of her, and nicely. Comfortable on the rope bed, Bibi didn’t think so hard about the babies, or the baby, the one she hoped would form inside Nisreen at any moment now. The balcony was Bibi’s place to think of ot
her things. There were other things to look at—things that, at first glance at least, didn’t always have to do with women swelling up.

  Getting ready for the day, the street displayed for Bibi’s benefit its morning passersby. Mango-men prepared their tables, organizing salt and chili-pepper bowls, sharpening their knives; litter-women stretched their backs and rubbed at their thin necks before getting down to work; the boys on cycles and on foot called out to one another; a chain of little girls in white and blue, with satchels, moved past like a colored snake to catch a city bus; five Bohora ladies in light gowns, big purses heavy at their arms, ambled towards the market. Bibi sighed. She watched. Got ready to take note.

  In the street and in the windows of the houses just across the road, she looked for faces she might know. Down there, Kirit Tanna, shirttails loose over his trousers, shouted at a dark boy from the alley, demanding the day’s water. Abrahman Ferozi, old and gowned, was heading out already to the corner coffee stand, where he’d argue about Pakistan and Zionists and Russia, the price of coffee beans and oil, until, at noon, heart apatter and exhausted, he’d give a little boy some sweets to get him safely home. Mama Ndiambongo, gray and hunchbacked, swept the courtyard at what had once been Lydia House. Behind two dusty flame trees, the New Purnima Snack was almost, almost, open. She could see Vijay Mehta rolling up his sleeves, bend to start fryers.