The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

Later, in the quiet, Gilbert thought about what Hazel Towson had said before the Bank, about Sarie not having arrived somewhere. Perhaps Sarie had been a little off, already, for a while. She’s got a hard life, he thought with sympathy. I haven’t done my best. And then, though it was quite impossible, What if she’s pregnant after all? The thought, which he pushed aside as promptly as he’d had it, made him nonetheless feel warm. He smiled into her scalp. Far more injured than either of them knew, she let out a wail. “Sarie, Sarie, dear,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Twenty-one

  When the Frosty King saw Gilbert next, he did not mention Sarie. He had, it seemed, decided to assume that Gilbert Turner must be man enough to handle his own home, and the only thing he’d said had been encouraging and kind: “Once you’ve gotten moving, Turner, things will be A-Okay and Tip Top.” He had winked, bought his friend a beer, and Gilbert had felt forgiven for an error—one that he, in fact, still did not quite understand to be one, and that he had, in any case, not at all intended. But he did not resent the Frosty King for thinking he’d been wrong: he liked feeling forgiven. Also, he did love Mr. Frosty and admired him too much to call up any anger or to argue with him about what wives ought to be told. And, he thought, moreover, If Sarie were like other women, then, yes, I might have told her. But she isn’t. Look at her, in bed like a stone. She isn’t really normal.

  Believing that she was unlike any other woman and that only he clearly understood how unbalanced she was, he didn’t put a lot of stock in the Frosty King’s reaction. Much more comforting and meaningful was that the Frosty King had also generously forgiven Gilbert for not knowing right away what the packaged things were called. Friendship, Gilbert thought.

  Kazansthakis, for his part, felt that once you undertook a thing it was foolish to turn back (he had in his own life tried a great many odd things, knew the value of continual adjustment, and understood that people didn’t often know a lot until they learned things on the way, because they had no choice). He was also implicated now in Gilbert’s little business: he had relied for Gilbert’s benefit on some very valuable connections. There was, therefore, pride at work in what he said—he couldn’t live with failure, not even from a distance, and if Gilbert Turner failed, Mr. Frosty didn’t think he could envision endless evenings at the Palm again, things as they had been. He would, he knew, leave the man behind. And so he hoped that Gilbert would succeed.

  He offered reassurance: Gilbert, in the Frosty King’s opinion, need not know in depth how motors really worked to be an adequate purveyor of their parts. He urged Gilbert to keep at it, to be more theoretical, to operate instead in the kingdom of ideas and not get lost in details. “It’s not the nuts and bolts of it, my friend,” Mr. Frosty said, restraining a ha-hah, “it is knowing how to move things. Management is key. How do you think the British did it for so long?” Gilbert liked the sound of that. It relieved him of the fear of letting slip how little he had learned. It let him think the difficulties he had had—with memorizing names, with understanding how cars actually moved—were not a sign of weakness. No, they were certain proof that his role was more important than he’d thought: I am no mere mechanic, then. I’m the man in charge. He thought about the history makers, the colonialists, and Empire. And these thoughts gave him freedom. Strangely, this not-needing to know unexpectedly achieved for him what the notepad and the handbook hadn’t: it brought engines to life.

  In the days of Sarie’s breakdown, Gilbert’s mind grew sharp. He allowed himself to take some pleasure in his own imagination. His mind conjured engines up for him, bright ones, rusted ones, big ones, small ones, engines of all kinds, and set them whirring in his ears. He focused on the parts he thought that he could name, saw fan belts busily afan, radiators radiating, agleam in a pale light. Could picture pistons dancing. And the names refracted, became other words: Pistons, pistols, crystals; radiators, aviators; fan belts, sand belts, sand. He thought seriously of horsepower, considered wagon trains and steeds, saw cowboys, Kazakhs, Sultans, and the might of Nordic men. In a kind of play, delirium, he understood at last—in a way that did not cause him pain—that every wire had a place and that for all time this was true, whether he knew well or did not which wire went where. Releasing himself from the need to know exactly how things worked, he felt their beauty rise. Their inner elegance or turmoil didn’t matter. Their overall effectiveness, their magic general movement, took resolutely hold and drew him. Their mystery, indeed. Confident in his affection, Gilbert grew increasingly enamored of them—cars and parts and smoke, the smells, their secret, complex sounds. Engines. He forgot to hate his ignorance and learned instead what felt to him to be a manly, royal secret. He needn’t be an expert to make a business work. He was not proposing to fix engines, after all, only to procure their little needs, their sundries. He was not, as Kazansthakis said, “about to build a car.”

  When not lolling at the Palm discussing matters with his friend, and now and then impressing engineers with tales, Gilbert spent his time beside his wife as she slept and cried, or in the kitchen, where Agatha, fending for herself, ate buttered bread and looked out of the window. He felt a swelling in himself. A transformation, joy. Through his rounds—hotel, home, and back—Gilbert understood: all the years of office work, the rubber stamps and papers, the move into Kikanga, the sitting in the parlor with his library at hand, had been nothing but a pause, a long, slow interim that had begun with Independence, and ended on the day that Uncle James’s letter showed up in his box. An important hibernation. Time and history’s gestation, giving birth, at last, to a grown-up Gilbert Turner. He felt more alive than he could remember feeling since the first days of his marriage (five days in a borrowed coastal villa, Sarie vivid, furious, on the bed). Even Sarie’s silence helped him. Ensured his victory, in fact. It seemed to him, indeed, as if he could, as he never had before, hear his own heart speak.

  There was only one more thing, and it had Gilbert stumped. Kazansthakis, who had made some subtle inquiries and who knew, thought Gilbert, how a business should be run, urged his friend one evening at the Palm to bring someone else in. To take on, as Kazansthakis put it, “an adviser.” “A partner, like. A Tonto to your Ranger. A fast horse to your cowboy.” At first Gilbert had (amazed, in awe!) thought the Frosty King was making him an offer, the sort he’d dreamed of for so long. Could it be? That he had been coming to the Palm for years, eyeing all the others hopefully, when he might have, all that time, simply focused his desires on the man he met so regularly, the most faithful of his friends, the one who spoke his name? That the Frosty King had wanted him like that, exactly as he wanted to be wanted, truly, all along? “A partner?” Gilbert said. He looked down at the table, sure that he was blushing. The skin of his back tingled. He ran his thumb along the cracked rim of his glass. “But aren’t you… ? Aren’t you busy with the parlor?”

  The Frosty King was shocked. He intended no such thing. He was shocked and then upset. It was quite beyond him how Gilbert could have had the madness and the nerve to conjure this scenario. There was a moment’s pause. Gilbert’s open face. The scrape of someone’s chair. A glass set down too quickly. Then the Frosty King laughed loudly, a bit too hard, perhaps. “Not me, you fool! You need an assistant.”

  To show he was not hurt, Gilbert nodded, blinked three or four times, and then laughed, too, though not quite sure at what. He told the Frosty King that it had been a joke. “I know, old man,” he said, puffing out his chest even as his ears felt suddenly on fire. “And you know I wouldn’t have you. You’re always at the pictures. Your head’s in the freezer.” He took a sip of Congo Pilsner and looked out at the sea. To appear consumed by serious thoughts, he frowned. What did Kazansthakis mean?

  Kazansthakis did not want Gilbert to lose heart, but his own networks were far too precious to him to risk them all at once. On a dubious plan, no less. On the daydream of an inefficient man. The spark plugs had been a special, one-time gift. A trial. A favor he’d called in. And Xavier, wit
hout some recompense, would not do it again. He reached across the table and patted Gilbert’s hand—Gilbert, who had lost his footing, who was staring at the sea and wondering how to look as though nothing could harm him.

  The Frosty King took hold of Gilbert’s fingers and squeezed mightily at them. “Listen.” Gilbert did. “This is what I mean: for things to really work,” he said, “you’ll need a local man.” Gilbert, though he felt a headache threatening and that almost-healed old itch ahover at his back, regained a bit of his composure. He prepared to listen, bravely. But he was afraid of what he’d hear.

  Still pinching Gilbert’s knuckles, so that Gilbert had to give him all of his attention, Kazansthakis said: “You need someone who knows other places in the city. Who knows everything there is. Someone with connections. Someone who knows people we do not. And someone you can trust. You can’t,” said Mr. Frosty, “do this by yourself How will you find custom?”

  A girl brought him his soup. He let go of Gilbert’s hand. The pressure he’d exerted had, just as he had wanted, the effect of stemming what the Frosty King had feared might be a burst of sobs, a breakdown. At the release of his sore fingers, Gilbert held his glass between his palms and tried to take deep breaths, succeeded. Now assured that Gilbert Turner was not going to crack up, Kazansthakis turned towards his steaming broth, slurping as he spoke. “You”—slurp-slurp, and a wave of the thin spoon—“must bring the capital”—slurp-slurp—“and your partner find the means.”

  Gilbert had not spoken. Watching Kazansthakis—so healthy and so broad!—so certain of himself, bent over the bowl, so prosperous in the sunset—it seemed to Gilbert for a moment that everything he’d hoped for might now be at risk. He felt foolish. Oh, why were his moods so inconstant? How could a person feel so confident one moment, so bare and lost the next? How could a grown man feel so suddenly that he might begin to cry? He looked at Kazansthakis but he did not respond. He pressed his lips together. Why has he not said this before?

  The old Gilbert in him threatened to come back, to say, “Oh, I’ll just scrap the thing. Try another project.” Even, “Souvenirs, perhaps.” Yes, he very nearly thought: What about the baskets? But he couldn’t let that old Gilbert return. What would Mr. Frosty say, Mrs. Frosty think? No. Attached to his fresh life, the new Gilbert stepped up: A moment, please. You’re now too far along. This new Gilbert—the one Gilbert esteemed—was made, he told himself, entirely of iron. He had come this far and he would not turn back. He would not let himself fail. All right. Kazansthakis was his mentor, knew things. And this wise, emboldened Gilbert had to be prepared to do whatever he was told. And so the Gilberts—new and old, ashift—listened.

  “Gilbert,” said the Frosty King, “what you need are some friends.”

  The Frosty King explained: Gilbert’s job was to give orders and to pay for what came through. But for someone to give orders, they need people nearby who will carry out the things that must be done. People who would know things that Gilbert Turner didn’t. At first, at least, someone who could get him customers, who would have more precise ideas about acquiring parts from this place or from that. Someone who—here the ancient Gilbert cringed and the new one puffed and roared—someone who was local.

  Gilbert knew the Frosty King was right. He shook but didn’t show it. He hadn’t any friends. And he had thought that Kazansthakis knew. But if he didn’t, didn’t know, Gilbert did not want him to, did not want to say it. To show he understood, he nodded and he smiled. “You’re right. I see. I should have thought of it myself A partner. A really local man.” Gilbert paused to order two kebabs and another round of beer. He looked sagely at his hero. Dishonesty, he was coming to suspect, was not unconnected to certainty and pride. He thought he’d try it out. He lied. “I have just the man.” Once spoken, as it goes, the lie almost came true. He curled his upper lip and turned to face the sea. “That’s right,” he said. “I have someone in mind.”

  Kazansthakis, who had expected arguments, complaints, or that terrible timidity Gilbert so frequently displayed, was pleasantly surprised. The evening was so sweet, after all, the twinkling lights of fishing boats already making patterns by the shore. The Frosty King finished his kebabs, didn’t press for details, finished his last beer. And next, aware that it was he this time, rising from his seat, and not the other way around, Gilbert rose, and said that Sarie would be waiting. Kazansthakis, as if Gilbert, right before his eyes, were becoming a real man, turned his lips down, tipped his head up, leading with the chin, and gave a single nod. Gilbert Turner, yes, might be shaping up. “Heigh-ho, then,” he said without to-do. “Give her my regards.” Gilbert nodded back, and Kazansthakis softened. Making two thumbs-up with his fists high as Gilbert tucked his chair in, the Frosty King gave his friend a smile. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Great guns! That’s the way to go.”

  On the way back home, Gilbert wondered what to do. Wondered how to make it work. It was true. He needed what the Frosty King called “networks,” and “connections.” He was ashamed that he had none. Great guns! And yet, when they’d first moved to Kikanga, hadn’t he said all kinds of things about fitting with the locals? About melding with the scene, rejecting all the folk who’d moved to Scallop Bay, the way wealth separated people so that some felt so much better than everybody else? Hadn’t he so recently recalled Judge Hewett and his porter? The frightened native boy with a leopard at his throat? He’d believed in all of that, he had. It was just that, as a reader—As a thinker!—he had been content to let Kikanga swell around him, while he read.

  He’d been lazy, hadn’t he? He hadn’t made new friends. He didn’t speak the language. But he’d let the Frosty King believe all kinds of things about the wisdom and the virtue of moving to Kikanga, of taking up a government-owned flat, of throwing in his lot with locals. The new nation! As he had done with Uncle James, old-new Gilbert thought, he’d let untruths take hold. It was time to turn untruths into fact. To live up to his story. How Mrs. Hazel Towson would have loved him at that moment! Yes, he would come right in the end.

  He walked slowly in the dark. He passed Mchanganyiko Street and chose not to go down it. Soon he found that he was wandering. He walked and walked, past the mosque, past high Mansour House, past the busy roundabout, and ended at the buses, not far from Libya Street. The answer came to him as he neared Mbuyu Mmoja Park. He recalled what Kazansthakis had once said, about accidents fastening the wounded to those who’d seen them fall.

  Of course the man was not his friend, exactly, but wasn’t he quite close to him somehow? Linked to him through Sarie? As the call to prayer spilled from all the loudspeakers at once, he thought: What about that Jeevanjee? Sarie’s little friend? Wasn’t the mysterious Mr. Jeevanjee as local as one got, for an Asian in these parts? And wasn’t (here Bibi might have sucked her cheeks in and said, Blood’s not everything, you’ll see) every Asian man an expert at doing things with money? He most likely had a shop or two already, had smuggled scores of things into the country and sold them at great profit. And wouldn’t Sarie be relieved to know she had been helpful in the end?

  Twenty-two

  In the Mchanganyiko flat, Sarie was astir. She’d been awake for hours, limbs thick with a dull tingle, eyes fixed on the ceiling, sightless, hot. In the early afternoon, though the deadened parts of her might have stayed that way forever, her body tired of it. She rolled onto her side. Her legs deposited her feet onto the cold floor with a hollow thud. Her shoulders pulled her up. Sarie sat there for a moment, hands loose by her knees, before rising, struggling, as though pulled up by the hair. Standing at the mirror, naked, she felt dizzy, full of enervated blood that has been sluggish for too long.

  Looking at herself uncertain what she saw, she listened for her breath. Her mind was not quite clear. Fingertips lightly pressing on the dresser, and swaying back and forth because her balance was not good, she tried to catalog events. But something wasn’t right. Time, for one, was different: it was as if none had passed at all, not between
discovering Majid’s absence from his house and Mr. Frosty’s visit, and not between her lying down and getting up, as if everything that had brought her fall about had taken place at once, and as if she, though standing, were falling through the air and had been falling, for an interminable moment, well beyond the reach of clocks, sunsets, dawns, or movements of the moon. Time heals things, Sarie knew. Time takes pain away. She did not feel at all well, and therefore time stood still.

  She willed herself to understand what had taken place. She couldn’t, not at first. The people who had harmed her—Maria, Majid, Sugra, Gilbert, and the Frosty King—she conceived of as one person, causing one complex collapse; she felt their effects simultaneously, as one intolerable wound. Her body ached so cruelly that Sarie, facing herself in the glass, was not convinced she wouldn’t, if she checked all of her flesh, find signs of the disaster. But how unmarked her skin was, how unbleeding and unbruised! The trouble was elsewhere.

  She wished to be methodical. Eyes shut, she tried distinguishing between them, husband, lover, woman, enemy, and friend; between the afternoon at Kudra House and (afterwards? before?) the noontime shock of Mr. Frosty with his plugs, arriving in her home. She brought her fingers to her brow and focused on Majid. She tried to help herself He did not know we were coming. He did not do this to hurt me. He wants very much to see me. Had he known I was coming… She said Majid’s name a few more times, softly, in several different ways, thinking how her Agatha sometimes requested little songs to help her from a dream or to distract her from an illness: “Majid, Majid, Majid Ghulam, Majid Jeevanjee, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee. M. G. J. and”—what she herself had never said but knew that others did—“and Ghuji.” The sound of her voice helped. She pressed her thumbs against her eyelids, waited for the coiling and uncoiling of the livid golds and reds she knew would rise up there. She listened to her hair. She thought next about the spark plugs. She could see these clearly and they hurt her. But she pressed her teeth together. She tried to see, again, Gilbert on the carpet, bright thing in his hand.