The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  And yet, see how Sarie Turner, with her thick, long legs and those—he thought—kind eyes, had made things suddenly seem light! How at the first appearance of her small but chubby and not inconsiderable breasts beneath his gaze and then his own excited hands he’d felt a kind of sway, a circus in his mind! How easy it had been! The import of what had taken place in his own hallway—the simplicity of it—stunned him. In just one moment he had felt the floor shift, the air throw off its coat, the evening light a balm. He’d felt joy, and joy. A manliness, a cheer. He hoped she would return!

  But, prey to sorrow and to fear, he also asked himself the following, and the question made him sick: if it could be replaced so deftly by a hunger for round biscuits, for the flat and endless heft of a foreign woman’s back, and for the awful, hot excitement of his hands between his tired legs in that old and sagging bed, what had the madness, all that long, long grief, been for? And had he really meant it?

  In Majid’s version of the thing, Sarie Turner had thrown herself quite shamelessly at him, and he, long loyal, so he’d thought, to lifelessness and Hayaam’s death, had caught the woman squarely in his arms and felt a shivering at his core which he had heretofore reserved for sleepy fumblings with his, yes, nine-years-dead, once lively, comforting Hayaam. Illicit grapples with his loins were bad enough, wasting bright seed on a sheet. And with a woman who was dead, much worse—a sin of the first order! How could he? But thinking now of a live shape, the possibility of Sarie Turner, who still breathed—a much greater transgression, Majid thought. Dreaming of Hayaam and thrilling sadly to her in the night… wasn’t it a version of fidelity somehow, talk of sin be damned? This, with Sarie Turner, was a special kind of treachery. Still, had the embracing been his fault? No, he thought. She took me. He had not desired it. Sarie Turner was a fleshy accident, Majid told himself for which he had not asked. He cursed her and himself And in the rippling of his skin, the thoughts he could not help but have—of limbs, and mouths and loins—he discovered a new fear, a strange one: had it always been Hayaam behind his eyes at night? Because, to tell the truth, it hadn’t been so difficult, clutching Sarie Turner, not as difficult as he thought it should have been. But if he could so easily take hold of her, had he already practiced touching other women in his sleep? Had he been disloyal to Hayaam well before Mrs. Sarie Turner showed up on the steps? Majid began to wonder if his memories of that first and only wife—Hayaam! Hayaam!—were true. Did he know, precisely, with any certainty at all, into whose place Sarie Turner had (with his permission, this he knew) made such a decisive and significant advance?

  In a yellow envelope that Majid kept beneath a metal mathematics box that he had won at school (compass, ruler, pencil, chart—for planning things just so), he’d saved three photos of Hayaam, which he had never shown the boys. In the early days of grief, he’d studied them, had held them to his heart, had on several nights kept them by his pillow to see her face on waking, had thought to make a shrine. But in later years, he had rarely pulled them out. For he had memorized them, hadn’t he? Had he not carved, in tears, an image of Hayaam in the tender darkness of his chest? In his mind’s eye, he could still—could he not?—call her up exactly as she’d been. Before stepping towards the drawer and clasping the brass handle, he pictured the three photos in his mind. There would be Hayaam, draped in lavender, as he well knew, seated on the sand of Scallop Bay: one knee up, the other folded underneath her, hands loose among a pretty mess of seashells, her face turned towards the camera, and behind her the blue sky. Hayaam at someone’s wedding, eyes and cheeks modestly aglow beside a gold-encrusted bride. The last, an accidental snap: Hayaam caught unawares, Fruity Pop in hand, before the Frosty-Kreem, hair escaping from her braid and playing in a breeze. Majid knew, he told himself, just what the shots would show. Just as Tahir in his bedroom could dream up his old leg so firmly that its absence in the morning was a shock, did not an old husband know precisely what was gone?

  The questions prompted him to open up the dresser drawer and check his memory’s sharpness. Had he, with a sinking in his bowels, already known what he would find? It’s possible. When Majid slipped the pictures from their sheath, he frowned. He blinked to clear his eyes, gave a shake of his sore head. He brought the pictures close up to his face, one after the other, then held them at arm’s length. Confused, he thought, What happened? He unfocused his eyes, tightened them again. He felt each hair on his scalp as though it were a needle traveling through his skull.

  Was this the same old picture? Really? The one at Scallop Bay? Hayaam’s dress was blue, not violet. Beside her not seashells but stones. And, worse, much worse: rich, still plummy with old colors, the features of that well-known face did not, he thought, look as he expected. Was it humidity, perhaps, which can turn pictures brown? Her cheeks, her jowls, had bloated. The skin was darker than he’d known it. The dear flesh at her round skull—that brow he could recall in sleep, remember with his fingers—had taken on a rubbery look, had blurred along the temple. Was it decay, perhaps, of paper? At the center of himself, Majid hoped it was. Perhaps the photograph was ruined. Look: a watery stain across one eye concealed the bridge of her small nose; the edges of a black spot at her lips had lifted and, just beneath, Majid could see a speck, the blankness, shiny-white, that lurks under emulsion. Could he still see what would have been there, despite the little gap? Could he match what Hayaam in his mind’s eye had become with what was left of the old picture? Majid Ghulam tried. He leaned against the dresser and placed a hand on the flat wall. He closed his eyes. He wished. He tried, and he could not.

  Who was that woman on the beach? Majid’s unphotographic visions of her did not match even what he could still fathom from the pictures. How could it have happened that he could not recognize his wife? He asked himself hard questions. Had he grieved Hayaam as she had been? Or had he transformed her himself, so that each remembering of her was, in fact, a violent defacement? Had he replaced Hayaam already, at some lost, incalculable moment several years before? Before even grabbing someone else? And was grabbing Sarie Turner nothing but an echo? An empty move he had already, unknown to himself made and made again, with faulty grabs at his dead love?

  He spent several hours sitting on his bed, looking out into the mirror and trying to imagine young Hayaam as she had been when they first shared that room. Of them both, had she been the heavier? Had he been the stronger of the two? How had Hayaam’s hair smelled—was it rose, perhaps gardenia? Had Hayaam’s skin, when damp, given off a scent of myrrh, the tartness of a lemon? In his eyes and in the glass, Majid Ghulam saw nothing. He could call no scent into his nostrils. The session gave him headaches. He felt guilty and alone. Ashamed, he hid the photographs between the pages of a book, the book beneath the empty chest. Went down the stairs again.

  He would not think of Sarie. He tried instead to focus his attention on the face of his dead wife, but, with a persistence that alarmed him, his own mind conjured up instead Mrs. Turner’s throat and thighs and hair and the pink nipples that had stirred him. Intermittently, his thoughts of Sarie broke and Majid thought about his son. Another new, and equally upsetting, theory came to him: Tahir’s absent foot and calf and now-truncated knee! It was Tahir, after all, whose appointment with a reeling bus had brought Mrs. Turner in. It was the accident and nothing else that had so churned up the world that Sarie Turner, just like cream and just as pale, had risen to the top. Oh, Majid Ghulam was mixed up! To feel so many things at once can tire a body out! When he wasn’t feeling joy, reliving the embrace, or feeling, full of shame, that he’d been grieving a false memory of Hayaam instead of Hayaam-she-herself, Majid Ghulam was tortured by the thought that his youngest son’s left limb had been traded for cheap pleasure, that the crash on India Street had brought this lust his way. Could one be grateful for such gifts?

  Oh, nevermind. To each his star! emergent, manly Majid would insist. But older Majid would demur. How could a man who’d doubted God so much, who no longer believed in Divine Plans, all at
once presume that certain things were meant to be, the blade of life is hard, etc., but that each moment is the proof of a grand, unfathomable design? How could such a doubting man, falling headlong into a woman who’d appeared when Tahir’s leg and missing shoe did not, tell himself that God’s work is mysterious and one must simply go ahead? Two white breasts, an open throat, some fur (perhaps, or so he’d heard, a lot, among the women of her tribe) between two legs, that extraordinary quivering, traded for a shin-heel-ankle-calf, for his son’s two-footed life? Was this a Godly switch? A European-woman-gift in place of a boy’s limb, in place of Hayaam’s photographs as they had been the day they’d got them from the shop? No, no, gloomy Majid would reproach himself no pleasure to be found in someone else’s grief. And he’d resolve to turn away from Sarie, not to let her in. Whatever God had planned for him, whatever bauble of reward for having been so sad so long, Majid wouldn’t take. His travails were really far more difficult than Sarie’s. Oh, but life persists. A force did work in him, despite it all, and nonetheless, something in his lungs and hips and shoulders pushed him to make do, move forward. Take deep breaths and stand. Time, perhaps? A budding thing? A sign from his own garden?

  To his hot confusion Majid attempted to respond by pulling out other items from the past. From behind the dark armoire he took a cardboard box in which he had, at Hayaam’s death, set aside two tunics and one pair of loose trousers, keeping them from all the cousins who had taken things away for charity, for poor relations, for the helping-with-the grief He wanted, if such a thing were possible, to recall Hayaam as she had really been, before deciding what to do. Perhaps the clothes would help him. Sight is not the truest sense, he thought. Touch and smell may be. Practicing as he set the old box down, he said: “This is what you wore.” He squared his shoulders, bent forward carefully and slowly, peeled the cardboard wings apart, and eyed the folded bundle. He took a long breath through his nose. There was, as he had hoped, a smell, and it rose up and he breathed harder. But it was not a wifely smell. Not once washed since Hayaam’s death, the clothes smelled, disheartened Majid thought, like Kikanga dampness, mold. Like things left in the rain.

  Nonetheless, the clothing called up something from the shadows. As Majid Ghulam pulled the box into the middle of the room and settled on the carpet—could it be?—he felt the air grow thick; a shape appeared beside him. Could it be? In the heavy violet of the curtained morning light, Majid sensed an apparition at the corner of his eye. An apparition! He was not entirely surprised. He’d seen things after his wife’s death, hadn’t he, that no one else could see. Shadows. Birds where there were none. Ancient bearded men in white, sneaking through the dawn. Demons with one human hand and one hand that was wood. At least so people said. Wasn’t sadness-madness made of just precisely this? Why not, why not, when he desired it, a presence in the room? A woman, Majid thought. Why should he not call up the dead?

  Squatting on his heels, hands gone still above the cardboard flaps, which were like doors into the past, Majid held his breath and tried to keep his balance. He felt his chest go tight. He waited. He let the air out of his mouth. He steeled himself. With every blink the shadow took on weight. This is not unusual, he thought. I have been mad and sad. I have been more than dead myself. I have seen all kinds of things. He prepared himself to look. All right. Majid turned his head. Did he see her in his mind or in the space before his hungry eyes? Was she really there? No matter, no matter at all. It was, indeed, a woman. A full-sized one, moreover, in a shimmering green dress. With—was it?—Hayaam’s almost-shape. Majid sought her face. All right. The revenant was real. Could be.

  But—was this the wife he had been trying to recall? Majid could look carefully at things if he willed himself to do so. He kept very still and tried. Hunched just there beside him, the woman looked, perhaps, as Hayaam’s older sister might have. She was heavier than Majid’s memory of his own happy bride. More womanly, in fact. From the base of her round skull a silky rope of hair reached down to the floor. Did Majid feel it, prickling, waspish, like a shiver, too long and yet familiar under his bare feet? He watched. There was no glimmer at the woman’s nose, no stud shining in the light. Was she widowed, too? His working mouth went dry.

  She was not looking at her husband (if that was who he was). Her head was bent over the contents of the box. Majid’s eyes, his neck, felt almost frozen, tight. The figure shifted but Majid could not move. He felt no threat from her, no, simply swollen quiet. Everything felt still. This Hayaam-not-Hayaam, biting at her lip, reached out a hooked finger and pulled the cardboard flaps aside. Majid’s skin went cold. He felt a bit afraid. But, sensing that for good or ill he was in sudden partnership with the woman-shape beside him, propelled by something other than his will, Majid reached into the box. He brought the tunics out and set the sour pile between them.

  If Hayaam it was, he thought, braver than expected, then it was time to make a peace. Was that not what he should want? What if he kissed her clothes to show her his respect? Was that not what he should want? To say, “I know to whom these old, sweet things belong, my dear. You were very stylish once. You looked lovely, like a star.” Even if she didn’t look like the Hayaam he thought he’d known. Even if she wasn’t his Hayaam at all, but someone who’d been sent, a shade on her behalf. There is an idea in Kikanga and these parts that a supplicant may only be forgiven by the person they have wronged—but that person doesn’t always come! Then what is to be done? Majid for a moment closed his eyes against the ghost, and, wishing for a sugary taste—some sweetness!—bent to kiss the cloth.

  It was the right thing to have done. The way to call up memory, absolutely pure. With the first touch of his lips, beyond the fust and mold, he smelled Hayaam again, this time, Majid knew, exactlyas she’d been, with no time intervening and no meddling from his unwieldy attempts at remembering what-had-she-been-like. Majid almost yelped. Yes. There: a fresh, cool mix of samli, roses, powder, a young woman’s pungent (lovely!) sweat. How could he have wondered for a moment about lemon and gardenia when this, so clearly her own, was right here in the pockets of the very clothes she’d worn? Exactly as she had been. The precise and veritable-wife-smell made Majid feel faint. He teetered backwards on his heels and, fumbling from the shock, had to steady himself with his elbow on the wooden steps that led to their old bed.

  While Majid’s eyes were closed, a sound came from the shape. A sound as true as the good smell he’d found under the dust—a sound that had a long, long way to travel, from its source into this world. At first there was a sniff. A rumble in the nose. He sensed without needing to see a little shaking in that long tail of black hair. And there it was at last: a giggle. A precise and perfect neither-nudged-nor-turned-by-memory giggle that was, he knew in the crevices of his oldest, surest self, exactly how Hayaam—the real one, the living one, the one who’d gone and died—had laughed. And next? The widower’s last win? He found that he had missed this giggle, yes, none other. It filled the gaps between his ribs. In a dear and marvelous way, it hurt. She had not come, perhaps, as he remembered; she was not as slender, not as heavy-breasted or light-skinned, as his night pictures had been. Perhaps he’d lost her face forever, the real shape of her limbs. All right. But she had laughed like this.

  Majid’s very skin rippled in relief. For a pulsing, bruising moment, Majid felt that all the grieving had been worth it—yes, he’d missed exactly the right thing. No, he hadn’t altered her too much with the years and his forgetting! Was a laugh not grander than a face, an ankle, breast? For sure, a laugh could harbor all the things a person was—their essence. So pleased, so accompanied, by this ghost-Hayaam’s high giggle, the smell still wholesome in his throat, he almost felt prepared to undertake nine more years of same. For this nice sound, indeed, and scent. He had meant to reach out to the shadow, to tug on that black braid. Had hoped he could laugh with her. But when his eyes came open in the shadows, he saw nothing. Brown linen, and the pale pool of the floor. Nothing but the room. Majid was alone.
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  Majid Ghulam remained squatting on the floor for a long time, well past noon, until he couldn’t feel his legs. He thought. He squinted. He called out his wife’s name. But Hayaam, as she’d not been or had been, did not reappear. All right. He paused. He looked at his own hands. He squinted at the windows. He braced himself for what he knew was coming, what he, fearful and delirious, sensed ashiver and arumble at the far-off, unseen brim of a new, convulsed horizon. And it did. It came, tiny and unstoppable, shy, enormous, brave: in his chest a small thing snapped in two and its snapped pieces wiggled. On wobbly legs, Majid stood before the mirror. I will—, he thought. He felt all of his teeth swell, his tongue go sharp, then wide. He bit his lower lip and nodded. I will give these things away.

  He dropped the tunics in a basket. In the morning he would send them to Maria, finally to be washed. He did not need them anymore. Afraid that he would lose his certainty, he reached for an expression that could steady him. Clothes don’t make the man, he thought, or woman. Hayaam won’t, he thought, come back. My old Hayaam is gone. He walked out of the bedroom. In the parlor where he’d first sat with Mrs. Sarie Turner, beneath the glossy clock, he wept until his mouth hurt.

  That night, in the half-gloom of his bed, he thought of Sarie’s arms. He slept. He woke up in the dark. The air, after yet another rain, was chill. He stretched his arms above his head and reached his feet right through the baseboard, where, early in their marriage, he and his young bride had with their loving ardor kicked a panel out. He rubbed his toes together as if ridding them of sand. He took a great, deep breath and made his first attempt to firmly lock away an old, known widowed-feeling: a little twinge, a folding near his eyes. He stared at the black wall. He uncurled and curled his fists and, another Majid rising, thought at last: I will see her again. Her daughter will come to play with Tahir. Tahir’s going to walk. He is already sitting up. Habib, Ismail, and All will take him to the balcony to sit. The clinic will bring crutches. Maria will give these clothes away. And I will write a poem.