The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  The Fathers were called in. Maudlin, they polished off two bottles of good scotch. Not completely without pleasure, they came up with scenarios. For certain, a misfortune had befallen her. She had been dragged from bed by force. Subjected, even, in some still-unknown locale, to complicated tortures at the hands of pagan men. From the very start, they suspected the involvement of a man, or men, dark men with terrible intentions. Failed converts—possessed, as natives were, by devils, maybe—performing nasty but delicious tortures on a Sister! They did not voice their fears out loud to the Sisters, but Sisters, too, have rich imaginations. They feared the very worst.

  On the quiet clinic grounds, the russet cows consumed the grass, and everything went brown. Sister Amélie, the first to give up hope of a fantastical return—she’d seen Angélique heave off herself, she knew it was for real—assigned a local boy to graze them. With Brigitte’s grudging approval, she ordered the milk sold. Clothilde, who had enjoyed access to cream, came around soon after, and she and Amélie put their heads (and two and three) together. Double chin aquiver, Clothilde announced, “He’s taken her just like a cow!” A tear snuck into the crook beside her reddened nose. Clothilde had turned to Sarie and had held her, had dampened Sarie’s smock. Amélie, counting up the change from that morning’s sale of milk, nodded and agreed: “A cow!”

  They did not consider this: perhaps, perhaps, that Kuria man had made a fair exchange. What if he’d taken her just like a woman, had been fairer than was due? Who expects two head of cattle for someone taken as a lover? But the Sisters didn’t see things in this way. They understood the natives, didn’t they? And the Fathers, who wrote books in their spare time, confirmed the local lore: Kuria men, it is widely known, employ a special paste, which, when rubbed into the forehead of a cow, will give that beast false memories and a fitful, homesick sense. Thus cursed, to Kuria-land that cow will walk, unaided, undeterred by lack of food or water or even fear of death. All over the highlands, it was known, beasts had gone unswervingly away, lost to their real homes until firmly in the keeping of the thief whose paste had marked them. Kuria-cows they never were, but such they helplessly became. Hadn’t people in Mangombe lost three thousand dizzy head to such a pilgrimage trumped-up?

  And so he’d treated Angélique, the saddened Sisters said. Perhaps just beneath the croton tree, so familiar to them all, he had daubed that charming mole with potent Kuria paste. Oh, there could be no doubt! Possessed, she had scaled the mission wall and gone to do his bidding. Kuria-woman now, erstwhile Nursing Sister doctored by a patient. She was lost to them already, on a strange, amazing journey the Sisters could not bring themselves to fathom. She was a warning to them all.

  Two months after Angélique had gone, and hope been given up, an American nurse named Betty, from the nearby Baptist Center—a healthy woman in her fifties, large, white-haired, and pink—brought the Sisters eggs. While Betty rested in the garden (partly green again, recovered from the cows), Sarie, young, efficient in her way, fastened newly laundered bedsheets to the clothesline with curved pale wooden pins. Betty said, offhand-but-not-offhand, stretched out in the sun, “This Angélique of yours.” Sarie, young, was still willing to be led. She looked up with a clothespin clamped between her lips. Sheet in hand, she waited. “It’s really just too bad.” Sarie didn’t think old Betty sounded sorry.

  Betty looked back at her evenly and spoke as though imparting a deep secret: “That’s what happens here,” she said, “when you take this place to heart.” Betty didn’t move her eyes, though she rolled her shoulders greatly and righted her thick neck as if preparing for a leap. Her dark eyes narrowed, almost disappeared. Something in the air went cold, a bifurcated breeze that touched only Sarie’s throat and the plump part of her calf. “Those men. Don’t even think about it, honey. Don’t you let that happen.”

  Sarie hadn’t thought about it, or anything to do with men, ever happening to her. But she missed Angélique, and she did wish, like the others, that she hadn’t disappeared. Betty was intent, and what she did next shook Sarie. Her eyelids taut and wide, mouth stiff, Betty raised a plump pink finger to her forehead and ran it horizontally across the furrow in her brow. “That’s what happened,” Betty said, spreading unseen paste above her eyes, miming the erasure of everything but love for nasty Kuria-men, long-horned cows, and scrub. “That’s what happened, now.” She rose, and she poked Sarie in the chest. “Look out.” In the dull gray morning light, Betty’s soft, short hair was whiter than the sheets. Clouds shifted. A thick and gummy stillness replaced the little breeze. Betty wiped her forehead with a handkerchief, which she then tucked into her bosom. The thing between them passed. Betty took possession of the basket she had set beside her. She made a show of wistfulness, shook her head with a tight smile. “That Angélique of yours, my girl. She’s gone and done it now.” This time, as though to someone else that neither of them saw, Betty said again, “Oh, yes. She’s gone and done it now.”

  For a while there were sporadic sightings, each as dreamed-up as the last: a mad white woman dressed in rags, hunting on the plains, bare-breasted, astride a hot Ankole cow. Or Angélique, sunken, battered, red hair shorn, spotted at the harbor of busy Vunjamguu, making for Odessa with her passport and the pocket-knife, both nicked, a glazed look in her eyes. Or, milder, but even more disturbing: Angélique, happily done up in dusty local gear, golden baby or perhaps a red-haired black boy nestling on her back, purchasing tomatoes at a market north of town—then gone, as local women were.

  Eventually, however, the Sisters left off gasping, and, one by one, gave up on the whispers. Brigitte once again denounced all smells that came from patients as if no one with a dreaded stink had ever passed her way. Clothilde undertook a diet. Amélie thrilled to selling milk as if she’d brought the cows herself. Thus the Kuria-man was excised from their anguished hearts, forgotten, and Angélique grew stiff and distant in their minds. She had surely got what she deserved. If they spoke of her sometimes, they said her name aloud, and even with distaste, but with no hint of sorrow. The Sisters had been healed. They couldn’t know what had really happened, nor would they ever learn. And, besides, far more serious than perversion, scandal, or abduction, even pure desire or unsurpassed affection discovered where one least hopes to find it, there also was a War on: Europe, battles bulging, camps and bloated trains. Other things to think of.

  In her bedroom, hands now on her head as she bent over, thinking, Sarie pictured Betty’s finger sliding on her brow, how pale her hair had been. She smelled the fresh sheets in the air. What had the Kuria-man told Angélique beneath the croton tree, or from his mountain-looking bed? Was any of it true? When she thought about her own surprising man, she reassured herself. She was not at all like Sister Angélique. Oh, no. No, she wasn’t. She was not. She had not done the thing. La chose, she thought. Not yet. She looked into the mirror, steeled herself: “Mr. Jeevanjee has never stolen cows. He is no bad-smelling Kuria-man with an ulcer on his leg. He knows how to read. And I”—she touched her brow and neck—“I have yellow hair.”

  After an hour in the courtyard, Agatha came into the bedroom. “Look,” she said. She opened her closed palms and let her newfound stones spill across the folds of her parents’ unmade bed. Intent on her pebbles, she didn’t see how very still her mother was, or how she stood, sideways to the mirror, fingering her hair as though uncertain it was hers. “Kudra House,” said Agatha. “Nineteen thirty-two. When should I get dressed? “And, “We’re going to have juice.”

  “We are not,” her mother said. Upon a second, unmoored vision of Betty’s moving finger, and a third and fourth, Sarie had decided that she surely wouldn’t go. She’d been foolish to think of going back so soon, to think of it at all. She had herself in hand: she would make a lunch for Gilbert; she would take Agatha to market, seek laundry soap and beans.

  Agatha was dogged. “When we go today,” she said, “I’ll wear my purple dress.” “You will not,” said Sarie. Agatha kicked the air, tossed a pebble at the w
all. But Sarie’s resolve held. She needed, she decided, a little time to think. Indeed, what if going back to Mr. Jeevanjee spelled a great disaster, as great as Angélique’s? What if, she thought, he makes me disappear? Agatha complained. She cried, she stamped her feet, she pounded at her mother’s legs with vigorous fists, but Sarie, once she’d made her mind up, could not easily be moved. “The Jeevanjees need time,” she said. “We have visited enough.”

  They did not go back to Majid Ghulam’s house for four long, dreamy days. During those four days—because at the start of an affair one feels a great variety of things—Sarie sometimes thought the thoughts she felt a newly chosen woman should: I will take my time, I shall like to savor this, to think; alternately, she felt she had been mad to go at all—that by her dismissal of the girl with glasses at the clinic, who had been (hadn’t she?) somehow issuing a warning, she had sealed her fate. She wished for an alternative: she wished to do it all again, to say instead to the receptionist, “You’re right. We will let him rest. Give him our regards,” and go right home, straight from that pink room. And there were happy moments, too; when Sarie danced before the mirror, hugged her own self tight and stroked her great, long hips. If thrilled like this, she wondered what Agatha would look like if she did not belong to Gilbert. If Majid were her child’s real father, Sarie asked herself, would Agatha’s pale skin have come out nutty brown? Would those high brows be dark? Would the willful girl have had poetic leanings (which, in her current incarnation as the daughter of a man who couldn’t, Sarie thought, put two words old or new together in a bright or interesting way, Agatha, it seemed, most certainly did not)?

  What if her own hair were not as yellow as gelled ghee? She wondered what sort of clothing Majid’s long-dead wife had worn, and would they look well on me? She took her wonderings with her as she moved in the drab flat. She scrubbed the kitchen tiles, imagining the floor in Kudra House, its furred, brown, bare cement gone black and damp beneath the flakings in the scarlet paint. She peered out of the windows thinking she saw not Mchanganyiko Street but Libya, another world, indeed. What if she, and not the nameless love, had been married by the poet in her youth?

  But a simple cough from Gilbert, a shuffle in the other room, or a look from Agatha, who did, no matter what, look very like her father—that round, round face, those light brown eyes like clear glass beads beneath such opaquely brown hair—and who resented both the interruption of their visits and her mother’s recent habit of staring at her so, could make Sarie lose her happiness and think, I’ll forget it ever happened. At such moments, considering the back of Gilbert’s head or a dimple in her daughter’s arm with enormous concentration, I will, Sarie would think, forget this man completely.

  Six

  Majid also wavered, side to side, and down, and down, and up. He paced the hall and balcony of Kudra House; he walked the stairs from top to bottom and to the top again, then back. At the bottom, in the doorway, Majid stood as Sarie had, looking up the pitted steps into the bluish gloom. From this position, he made forays into the courtyard, which made Maria think that there was something wrong: at the far end Majid looked at the old tap as if he’d never known that it was there, rusting and sporadically aspurt; he eyed the upper rim of the old wall and noted, frowning, like a visitor from other realms, the passion vine that, having snuck across from an unseen neighbor’s root, now clutched the coral bricks; he walked down the narrow alley to the metal door, felt the street arush behind and almost pressed the panel out, almost crossed the threshold; then he turned around and moved back towards the stairwell, as if he’d come in from the street. As he walked below, he wondered what the big woman had seen, in their crumbling place, and him.

  That she’d looked at him at all caused Majid some amazement. That she had kept on doing so, that she had returned so many times, that she had pressed his body to her and might do so again—it seemed beyond belief. He had never, never, thought that such a thing could happen. Yet it had. There was a stirring in him, familiar and yet not. It made his skin feel strange. As if he were aswell. It must be, Majid thought. I am. How odd! He felt himself grow ample, filling his old clothes! Indeed, in the days after the embrace, it seemed almost to him as though, despite himself a younger version of Majid Ghulam, a healthy one whose arms could lift a mattress without effort, whose fingers might undo a door-bolt without pause, a young man who could laugh, were threatening to push old bereft-and-angry Mad Majid to the side.

  He thought about his body, about his own and Sarie’s: the electric rattling between. Recalling Sarie’s limbs, how greedily, how quickly, she had wrapped them all around him, Majid Ghulam felt restless, nauseous and excited. How wild she was with me! He recalled her as ferocious, nearly in a rage. He even thought she’d clawed him, growled a little in her throat. That ardor! It cannot have come from the pale woman alone. Had it been called up in Sarie Turner by something within him, a force he had not known? This thought pleased and jarred him. Yes, at some moments in his unraveling’s early wake, Majid felt like a new and different man. His body changed, his mind shook. Was it the biscuits that they ate? The clutching in the hall? The showing of the paper, after so many yellowed years? Majid didn’t know. And though he did not quite yet put any pen to paper, he remembered, almost, too, what it had been like to face an empty page and will himself to fill it. To make a mark, out there, outside of himself He thought of this: Were you not once a poet? Had he not once been so very full of clever words that they spilled out of him unsponged? Had he not once or twice been really listened to? Had he not had certain special, urgent things to say? Been praised for his fine wit? And in those days, he thought, had he not understood why a girl or woman might look to him and smile?

  The braver feelings were of course countered, too, by rather opposite emotions—emotions that in fact were not new, and had priority, had squatters’ rights, over any thoughts of happiness, which were arrivistes, indeed. Inertia: the sort described in Tahir’s science primer, the inertia of a body that has too long been at rest. He was widowed, after all, a man who’d lost his wife. Or was he? Though Majid would not have seen it, it is also possible to say that widower Mad Majid was not. For widowers can recover, can emerge from forty days of managed grief with the unpleasant, perhaps, but inevitable impression that life itself continues. Successful ones go on to take up other wives, to father other kids. Triumphant widowers take strolls to ease their sadness; they linger in the world and find their wounds grown dull. Mad Majid, instead, had languished, had never taken strolls, and had never felt before that life, skipping on without Hayaam, might show him a new thing. Perhaps he was no widower at all. Not yet.

  For years—and it had made him crazy, wild, unkind—Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee had refused to countenance the passing of Hayaam, the dear, bright-eyed, heavy-breasted, fine-ankled, laughing sweet first love. When in the cruelest of tricks she had exchanged her living self (which he’d been firmly promised!) for a whimpering baby boy, Majid had (here Bibi was right) as good as lost his mind. He had, almost—had it not been for Cousin Sugra, who was strong and never failed to say exactly what she thought—not gone to the funeral. He had almost failed to hold a maulid later on, after forty days had passed, when grief, it is assumed, will have softened its mean grip and made room for a smile. He hadn’t held it, really; Sugra had, taking over, smacking him to make Ghuji behave, though he had, uncontrollable, anyway announced to everyone (the cousins, the few still loyal brothers who’d wired from Toronto and from London, to the neighbors, who first eyed him softly, then with fear, to passersby, who hadn’t asked) that there was nothing now to live for. That he wished everyone would die. (That wet event with old Rahman, which Bibi liked to tell and tell and tell, was not made up at all.)

  Unspeakable, such things! Too much! What was not all right to say, what no one ever said. One said, instead, “The blade of life does sting, my dear, but we will not flinch, indeed.” One said, “Get hold of yourself. Withstand this. It’s all part of the plan.” One said, “We’v
e all got an appointment, a promised time, with God. There’s nothing to be done.” And even, “Buck up, love, this was meant to be.” How could it, though? How could such things be meant? Hayaam, after his failures, after the lost shop, the paper, after the embarrassment of not being a success, had been the sweetest, truest thing, the venture that had bloomed. He’d found himself unequal to it and upset, despite the grievers’ wisdom, the wisdom of it all. What good was life if all ended in death? What good was love, indeed?

  Majid Ghulam forgot to eat, grew frail, and also ceased to bathe. While the abandoned sons grew large because Sugra was determined that they should, his once-good teeth went bad. He cried, he swore, he shriveled. He did what no good Jeevanjee, what no good man, had ever done in the whole swath of human history; he did what faithful humans mustn’t: he stopped attending funerals and weddings. And what’s more, stopped making contributions to family events. Majid would not—do listen close—would not give a shilling for incense or a shroud, or even for the sugar to make funereal sweets. He said: I would rather die. Rebuffed at first, then wounded, by Majid’s transformation, people stopped asking him for help. They knew what he’d become. They called him Mad Majid, and they did not come to call.

  He spent weeks in his own room. He dreamed of furious things, and woke to even worse. He saw things in the shadows, moving in the walls. He felt visited by shapes. He was afraid to cross his room at night alone. He hated knocking sounds, and sounds of married life that came to him over the walls, from other houses, from the city’s air itself: the toothy scrub of graters, the clack and shift of pans in basins of cold water, the flap of carpets in the air; these things made him shout. Indeed, Majid had lived (or not lived) nine solid empty years—of rage, then sleep, and finally of worn and gummy grief He had not killed himself not with acid, knife, or pill. But he’d done as good as.