The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  When he did get up, Majid brought a slender forearm to his brow and sent his trousers properly back down his thin legs with a tugging at each thigh. He bent forward and unrolled the tattered cuffs, which had come up to his knees. Sarie held her hand towards him, but he pointed out that his was dark with soil. She touched his wrist instead. He blinked at her. Sarie’s face was open, sunlit. She felt very, very tall, indeed, as though her weight were concentrated in a mass that hung far above her skull, balanced on the distant needles of her feet. His smile made her feel dizzy.

  Majid held the blue door open for her. She looked meaningfully towards him as she passed, leaned very slightly in. He moved into the kitchen, beckoned. Sarie watched him wash his fingers, palms, and wrists with a stub of laundry soap. Then, thumb and finger on her elbow, he ferried her into his room. “Tahir is asleep,” he said. Majid closed his eyes and placed, by way of explanation, both of his clean hands flat against her chest. And so, before everything else, they riffled through each other’s clothes. The dress, which she had so nicely straightened in the stairwell, fell, at her insistence, from her body to the floor. Majid kept his shirt on.

  He smiled lightly while they did the thing—not at her, exactly, but at the room, himself, and at their moistly urgent stew. It pleased him that she frowned, that she tugged and plucked at him as though she were very busy drowning and did not especially desire to be saved. That she seemed, he thought, A wild one. He pressed himself against her with a certainty he recognized: it was the same sureness he’d felt, years and years before, when choosing the right word. When slipping commas into place.

  Afterwards, Sarie wanted to stay naked for a lovely little while. When Majid held her dress out, Sarie shook her head. He set it down, instead, upon a chair, and patted Sarie’s arm before going down the hall. She rested on his rumpled bed and waited for him to come out from the bathroom, clean, shirtsleeves long again and fastened at the cuffs. She plucked idly at a kapok tuft that had come creeping through a small tear in the mattress, and squinted at the window. Between the wooden shutters, the afternoon was soft.

  Sarie also listened, idly, for sounds from Tahir’s room. As Majid was pouring water from a ladle down his chest across the hall, Sarie heard, from the other side, the side that held the boys’ room, something that sounded like a shuffle, a stretching in the dark. How many things a person feels in the midst of an affair that has not yet firmly taken shape, or ended! She sat up with a gasp, as though with Agatha’s absence, too, she were more naked than ever, more at risk of something: His boy is awake! She lurched forward for her dress, imagining that Tahir might come bursting through the doorway, finger pointed at her heart. She had almost reached her dress when she had a second thought. She listened, listened. There was nothing. Then she calmed herself with a tinny, awkward laugh. He is not walking on his own yet. No one has got crutches. Tahir’s new condition, Sarie thought, held a few advantages for them. Even if he is awake, if he tries to leave the bedroom, he will hop and hop; then he will fall and be in need of help. A fall must make a loud noise. She yawned, too; then, stretching out her arms, determined that if Tahir was astir—her very will would force him back to sleep. She wanted to be happy.

  When Majid, trousers traded for a blue seruni cloth, came back and closed the door behind him, Sarie rolled onto her stomach and crossed her ankles in the air. She patted at the rumpled sheet, but Majid smiled and shook his head. “In a moment, Sarie. Wait.” He moved away, and as Sarie’s feet described fine circles in the air, he sat down at his desk. He pulled a pencil from a drawer and opened up a notebook she had never seen. She wondered, Will he write me a poem? She watched him in the mirror.

  Majid, whose body had just lain with hers, who could still faintly smell her talcum and her other, rougher scents on the surface of his skin despite his recent bath, was writing her a poem. Or, a poem about her. This, he thought, is what she’s bringing me. The pencil moved, slowly at first, jagged. He looked up into the mirror for a moment. Saw Sarie watching him. How pale she is, he thought. How big. She was big, much bigger than he was, and Majid, eyes resting for a moment on her jutting hip, then moving up her muscled arm, felt awe. He wrote: Above the quiet sea, a giant moon has shown. He stopped. In the mirror, Sarie smiled at him. She wanted him to write a good one, then come to sit beside her, read it while she rested her great head on his knees. “Is it for me?” she asked. Majid smiled but didn’t answer. Sarie watched his head and back, the slight bobbing of his shoulders as the pencil scratched and stopped. She wondered, Shall I tell him now about Great-Uncle James? No, she’d wait, she thought. She liked feeling, when with him, that nothing else could matter, that what went on out there, with Gilbert, meant nothing at all. Telling him would change things, shift a balance. She didn’t want to, yet. She’d linger.

  Sarie stretched her legs, ran her toes along the panes in the high board. How pretty those panes are. A peacock, lotus flowers, waves. Some of them were missing. Majid was still hunched over his notebook, frowning, shaking his bent head. Now and then he brought the pencil to his mouth. Sarie looked at her own legs, then arms, next at her smart lover, then at her legs again. She felt slow and long. This was nice, this quiet after making love. This sitting in a room while a good man wrote a poem. She thought Majid looked handsome, and that the part of his face she could still see in the mirror looked feverish, intense. Sweetly, as she might have thought of Agatha if the girl had been a boy, she wanted to protect him.

  The thought she had surprised her: He is not as strong as I am. These things he feels could kill him. And Sarie almost laughed. How strange that she should feel that way about a man. And then, she thought, Not so. Had she not felt this way about young Gilbert Turner, too, once she had been married, once she’d seen him bare? That she, not he, could withstand anything to come? That she had bones, not he?

  Majid was writing on: Along the shore her sizely jewels are treasures for the poor. Yes, the poem was for Sarie, somehow. At least it was for the Sarie he was thinking of just then, who was bringing him new life. When he looked up at her reflection, Majid’s face was bright. The lines around his eyes were slack with gratitude, contentment. Sarie’s wish to shield him sharpened and grew teeth. No, she would not tell him, yet, about planning for a business. She reached out for her dress. It might, she thought, upset him. His job, Sarie thought, was to write, and write, and write.

  “It’s late,” she said. It was. The light outside the window had acquired a greenish cast, gone deep. Sarie rose, and Majid put down his pencil. “Don’t stop writing,” Sarie said. She came to stand behind him and touched him on the shoulder. “Just please if you can zip my dress.” He reached out from his seat and brought the zipper up, pausing, as she bent, to touch her tousled hair.

  “The clasp,” she said. “Please you must also close the clasp.” Majid’s fingers flailed and stumbled at her nape, tried twice, and managed on the third. Sarie thought, but did not say, I do not trust my husband to close my dresses for me without making a tear. But my lover, yes, my lover, is another sort of man. She didn’t let him walk her down the stairs. “You write,” she said. Majid took her hand and squeezed it. “You’ll read it to me next time.”

  Once Sarie was gone, Majid rose up from the dresser and went into the hall. He stepped into the boys’ room. In the dimness, Tahir was an ashy shape, small beneath the sheets. A thin arm dangled to the floor. Something in Majid, a tiny anxious thing, plucked once at his heart. “It isn’t the world’s end,” he thought. That’s what Sugra said. He tried to feel that this was true. And Sugra’s visit, Sarie’s (holding her! her legs!), and the poem, and the softness he could despite it all feel rising now and then from unexpected places—in the bathroom, on the balcony, sometimes in the very air itself—helped Majid to think that Tahir would be fine. Patience, that was all. He touched Tahir on the forehead, said a little prayer. From the hallway he could hear Maria. There she was, banging loudly at a pot—bang! bang!—just as Sarie must have crossed into the street. The pa
rrot, waking, let out a vivid shriek that sounded like the slamming of a door.

  Sarie walked home from Kudra House still feeling slow and thoughtful. She’d stayed rather late. The street was coming quiet. Her thongs flipped lightly on the ground, a dull thud underfoot. She could hear her steps, her sighs, and also heard her hands as they brushed against her dress. Her legs felt very long. On Libya Street the cane-juice man had locked away the grinder in the empty hardware shop from which he rented space. Flecks and sprigs of cane flesh glowed pale along the curb. From behind the boarded doors, Sarie sensed the presence of the press, which was painted blue, which had (she could see in her mind’s new and eager eye) an ornate metal wheel. Sarie stopped there for a moment, then moved again, cool beneath the awnings. From nowhere, everywhere, from beneath her flip-flop feet, there rose the sweet and heavy under-smell of sewage. Sarie took it in. She wanted to smell everything: cane and gasoline, and even rotting things, and talcum, and the heat of Majid’s chest. So many details, suddenly, so many things to feel!

  To such an inundation, Sarie was unused. So much had happened in one week that Sarie was surprised she still knew the way home. The sky—after all, a city sky that she had known for years and should have felt was hers—seemed lush and suddenly like powder. Ponderous and feathery, brittle, delicate, and grand. The house crows were gray flashes in the hidden wings of things—sometimes a swift rustle, sometimes a hard caw. The houses, too, which she had known a little while in other, better days, looked older and more secretive than she had ever thought them. She wondered to herself if she was seeing things through the eyes of love or through her lover’s eyes. The second (ever practical) she discarded as a physical impossibility. But, without for all that being certain she knew what it was, she liked the first one: love.

  Heading for the roundabout, where she would make a turn and start towards the water, Sarie said something to herself for the first time, because this was an afternoon of firsts: When I was young, I did not expect to live here until I became old. But here, thought Sarie, noticing for the first time that the trees in front of the old mosque were not mango trees at all but another sort of rich and green, thick thing, I am. Next, I will be here forever. And this—with a bit of drama, now a sigh, an exhalation whose temperature exactly matched the air outside her mouth—is where I am going to die.

  She experienced a moment of surprise, a shock. When I am very old, she thought, I will remember Mr. Jeevanjee. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps I will still know him. In the evening street, Sarie felt an overdue, a much-belated, orphan’s pang. In her soft, loose state, unfolded as she was by her secret man’s caresses, and perhaps by having been beside—as she saw him—a poet, it struck her, years after the fact, that her parents were both dead.

  In Jilima, Sarie had thought more than once that when she became old enough, she would go back to Belgium and would learn, properly this time, how to be a nurse. But she hadn’t. She had been, it struck her, passive about things. It would not have been simple to go back. There was no one left to see. After the War’s end, there had been too much to do, renew, expand, recover; the Sisters, to whom she’d grown accustomed, seemed to feel themselves in the middle of the future. They were busy planting vegetables, building a new hut. They’d studded the two cows. And they themselves had no idea how to take her home. They’d waited without saying so for this: a husband, for someone else to show her what to do. It was easier to stay. Sarie grew up and grew tall, and when the Magistrate’s assistant hit a donkey with the car and came to them for help, she was, it seemed to everyone, ready to be wed.

  She had thought (in the vague, mild way that she had long been used to thinking) that she might end up in England with her husband. He was British, after all, and wouldn’t he, as British people did, long somehow for old, familiar things? Know what his home was? Europeans, Sarie had once heard, didn’t die in Africa unless killed in native wars, or by terrible diseases, or unless they were, as the Jilima Sisters had all been, inexplicable, for good or ill, and determined to remain.

  But when other expatriates packed up, made steamer reservations, and held their final dos, and Gilbert Turner, longing to be different, afraid of failure back at home, had gone running in the opposite direction, dug himself right in, Sarie, unperturbed, had exchanged one future for another with a few words from a husband. “If we are to be resting here,” she said, “I will take back all the blouses which I was going to give away.” How full of accidents life was! She’d simply plucked her blouses from the box she had prepared and set them on the shelf. She hadn’t asked herself, or him, a thing.

  At home on Mchanganyiko Street, Gilbert was asleep, but he was shaken by the sound of Sarie’s voice as, finding Agatha alone on the dark steps, she told her to wash up. He yawned, stretched his pale, short fingers in the air. He heard Sarie opening the door and thought, not entirely awake, confused, How simple marriage is. He was proud of Sarie for attending that long luncheon. He felt sympathetic towards her, tender. How she must have suffered. He made up his mind to ask her what the ladies at the Council had to say, if Hazel Towson had proposed anything outlandish, whether she had thought to bring back any cake. He wasn’t sure that he would tell her that he had spent the afternoon composing the most important letter of his life. Or that, once the thing was done, he had taken Agatha for ice cream at the Parlor, where he had given the blue envelope to Mr. Frosty, who would give it to a steward who was flying to Dubai and on to London the next day. Not quite yet, he thought. It will be like a gift. He’d surprise her with it all once he’d had an answer.

  Sarie, loosened by her walk, and feeling—because making love can do this—that her body was uniquely suited to affection of all kinds, stepped into the bedroom and touched Gilbert on the shoulder. The openness and gratitude she felt for Mr. Jeevanjee, her Majid, spilled out also onto Gilbert. She had—and though it disconcerted her, she gave over to it the way one gives in to a swoon—the same desire to protect him that she had had at Kudra House, for Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee and his sudden little verse. Gilbert touched her hand with his and laid his cheek upon it. Sarie pressed her fingers down, released them. She felt able, well, and proud. In charge of both her men.

  III

  Fifteen

  And so. In the days between Gilbert’s sending of the letter and the receipt of Uncle James’s reply, there was a certain stillness: the surface of the world a smooth expanse, nothing to disturb it but the future’s unknown shade and twitch. Bibi, keeping when she could an eye on Issa and Nisreen, nursed her aching fingers. Majid simmered quietly. Gilbert’s back itched intermittently and seemed, sporadically, to show signs of improvement.

  Sarie, laboring in secret, continued to feel doubled. She liked her private self increasingly, was enamored of the person brought out by her walks to Libya Street and by Majid’s (now tender and now furious) investigative hands. In Kudra House’s parlor and in Majid’s cool, damp room, it was sometimes for Sarie as if time itself come to rest on vast, oblivious haunches, were nodding, happy, in the sun. That present self, which was Majid’s and her own, was prospering, and it pleased her. Squinting as though from a glare, she did also think about the other one, the self-on-the-horizon. That self occupied the future, and Sarie vaguely understood it as belonging rather to a public—or to Gilbert, Agatha, and even Hazel Towson. To customers, accountants. She was hazily excited about the things she felt were coming; in that audience, surely, Majid also sat (Where would he go, she thought, unless he was to die? He lives so close to me!), but she could not either fathom Majid’s Sarie at the same time as she envisioned the Sarie that moved forward, into other days.

  In that future life, did they still meet, like this, or had they learned another style of being? Did they still take off their clothes? Did they go out to the balcony to feel the city’s air? The future gave her headaches. She couldn’t see it clearly. And because it so confused her, she didn’t tell Majid about her plans or Uncle James’s letter. She made no mention of the export business, volunte
ered no news about the husband she was fooling, and kept her daydreams about visiting Jilima with Majid—on a train, in search of baskets, knives—mostly to herself Though dream of this she did: Majid on a hilltop, beckoning to her; Majid close beside her in a taxi, slipping a warm hand between the treasured trinkets and her thighs; Majid bringing breakfast to their table at a state-run coffee shop; Majid naked in the empty, freeing rooms of far-off, strange hotels.

  Without the special mix of attributes that made her who she was—that combination of great strength, curious inattention to the things that milled around her, and an insatiable desire (for Majid, for the wonder of her own splayed limbs beneath another body, for a house her legal, chairbound man could not, she thought, imagine)—she would not have been as equal to the task of simultaneously administering to each separated self. Such projects are hard; she struggled, but Sarie was no weakling. She became accustomed to the quivering between her present and her future, which was like a wall between her insides and the outside of her skin; to waiting without knowing for what Uncle James would say; now and then to thinking deeply of the changes he might bring, and wishing them intensely—just as she grew capable at once of forgetting Uncle James and Gilbert, and even little Agatha, completely while Majid removed her clothes. Perhaps when things were set, when everything was sure, she would regale her lover with a tale about how useful, independent-minded, she had been. Tell him something to amuse him. Tickle his thin arms and talk about Dodoma knives and oval heads from Zambia. But until then she would protect with all her might the winsome, fragile steadiness of those private afternoons.