by Melanie Finn
‘Please come in,’ I said. Polite, calm. ‘Can I get you something?’
‘Thank you, yes. But no caffeine. I’m not a good sleeper.’
‘Tea? Mint? Chamomile?’ Was this right? Should I be offering him herbal tea? He was here to talk about dead children and all I had was manners. As if I was hosting a cocktail party for the associates in Dili. Smile, serve exquisite canapés while wearing an elegant black dress. Anything to distract from the atrocities in the files.
‘That’s fine,’ Strebel said, without specifying. He took off his gloves but not his coat. The gloves were fine-grained black leather, but they didn’t suit him. He wasn’t urbane. I suspected someone had bought them for him as a gift, his wife or daughter.
We sat, I poured. My hand trembled on the teapot’s handle and he saw this. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Worry?’
‘I mean, don’t be afraid.’
‘Of the tea?’
‘No.’ He ventured a smile. ‘Of me.’
I put the teapot down. ‘Is that it? Am I afraid of you?’
He leaned forward to sip his tea. ‘I expect so. You don’t know what to tell me. You don’t know what I know.’
When I said nothing, he went on. ‘Or perhaps it’s more a generalized fear. It can be frightening to lose control.’
Would he know about that? I glanced at his kind, tired face and tried to imagine him losing control, shouting or crying. I tried to imagine him being afraid. Then I realized he wasn’t speaking of personal experience but professional observation: he had seen people lose control. His profession—like Tom’s—concerned people who lost control.
‘Are you here to arrest me?’ I said.
‘For what?’ He turned the cup in his hands. ‘You think the accident is your fault?’
‘But it must be, somehow. I was the driver.’
‘Fault would mean you drove into them on purpose. Do you think you are such a person—capable of such an act?’
Tom believed everyone is capable of everything, fundamentally. To him, violence is circumstantial. The nicest man, given the right set of circumstances, may become the most brutal genocidaire. Everyone? I’d pushed Tom, even you, even me? How do you think these atrocities happen, he’d countered, if not for people like you, people like me?
‘If I can’t remember,’ I clarified. ‘Then I don’t know. I can’t tell you with any certainty.’
‘Perhaps you were driving carelessly.’
I looked at him. Was this a gentle form of interrogation? Was he asking me to incriminate myself? ‘Was I?’
‘Did you, for instance, overtake on the corner?’
Had I passed on a corner? I had. Yes! That was it. Suddenly, I knew with absolute certainty. I felt a great wash of relief. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The corner just below the village. That’s what happened.’
Putting the tea aside, he kept his eyes on me. ‘But that’s not what happened. Let us be completely clear.’
‘I’m sure. I can see it now. In my mind.’ And then clarity clicked immediately to shame. Hot shame on my cheeks. ‘Oh, God. I did. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’
Spilling words, awkward, ineffective words, sorry, sorry, sorry, but only in fear and self-pity of what might now be done to me. No—not for the dead children, but for myself. I wanted to be sobbing, on my knees, begging forgiveness as the parents shouted: ‘Die of cancer, Mörder Hure, die with cancer eating your face.’ But even in this notion I glimpsed a deeper selfishness, layers of selfishness like tissue. That if they beat me, if they stoned me, put me in the stocks and pelted me with excrement, only when my skin opened up: then might I feel. Their anger, their sorrow would make me real; like Frankenstein’s monster, make me exist. I could not pull away from myself, this grasping, selfish woman who wanted to feel guilt not for what she had done, but so she could prove to herself that she existed.
My face was wet. I was crying. Strebel stood. For a moment he hesitated like a schoolboy, then he put a hand on my shoulder.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t overtake. All our evidence confirms it was an accident. That is what I’m here to tell you.’
‘But I remember—’
‘You don’t remember. You did nothing wrong.’ He looked at me again, tilting his head. ‘There is just luck, terrible, cruel luck, and people like you, like the parents, like those poor children get caught in it.’
He took a white cotton handkerchief from his pocket, and I wondered what kind of man carries a white cotton handkerchief anymore? What kind of man hands it to a crying woman? I did not take it, so he began to dab at my face.
‘Please,’ I said. But of course he didn’t understand what I meant. ‘Please, please.’
Tom said I was ugly when I cried. I covered my face and turned away from Inspector Strebel, and then, at last, ‘I’m not crying for them.’
He did not sigh with disgust. He did not leave. He stood as if nothing had changed, as if he had not heard.
‘I’m not crying for them.’
‘No,’ he said very quietly. ‘You are crying for yourself.’
I went to the sink and splashed cold water on my face. When I looked back at him he was putting his handkerchief away.
‘Are you okay now?’
I nodded. A vague exhaustion washed over me.
‘Come, then. Could you come with me to the incident scene?’
‘Would that be helpful?’
‘I always go to the scene a few days later. I want to know the place without all the cars and the confusion. That it’s just a place and holds no special menace.’
I fumbled with the keys, dropped them. He picked them up, and again gave me that small smile. He pulled on his gloves, buttoned his coat. I had the feeling he was fighting the urge to reach over and button mine, too.
We cut through the village on the footpath. He said he preferred to walk, he spent too much time in the car or behind a desk. The morning was damp and gray: we couldn’t see the lake or the mountains, and without them Arnau revealed its essential dullness.
Perhaps he felt this also, for he suddenly asked, ‘Why are you here? Arnau? Alone?’
The question was so direct that I wondered again if, despite what he said, he was prying. Perhaps his whole visit was an elaborate means of revealing my motives. Even the handkerchief might have been a manipulation.
‘My husband and I were going to build up the valley, our dream house.’ I was aware that he would notice my use of the past tense.
‘Excuse me,’ Strebel said quickly. ‘I shouldn’t have asked. It’s not my business.’
‘Isn’t it?’
He looked down at me, dark eyes under unkempt eyebrows.
‘Isn’t everything your business in a case like this? Who I am, why I’m here, what I was doing driving past the bus stop on a day like that.’ I heard myself spill this out. ‘The dream house, it was a lie. He never even bought the land. But that’s why I’m here. I believed him.’
Strebel said nothing. He let me move into the silence.
‘We’re getting a divorce,’ I said, pushing my hands deep into my coat pockets.
‘I know that. It’s in your file. Swiss efficiency.’
‘Does my file say he left me? For another woman. They have a baby.’
‘No. We’re not the KGB.’
Perhaps he meant to lighten the mood. But I felt a burning, like fury. ‘Do you want to write it down? Maybe it’s important. Maybe everyone should know. I thought we were enough, I thought we were happy, but he wanted that squeaky little woman instead.’ And then I reminded myself. Three children were dead. Three children were dead and I hid my face.
Strebel put his hand on my shoulder, steady and unjudging. I felt like a stray dog to whom someone is suddenly, unaccountably kind. ‘Squeaky?’
‘I must seem despicable.’
Simply, softly, he replied: ‘There is no way you should seem. This tragedy is yours also.’
By now we’d r
eached the main Arnau road. We turned left, downhill. I kept expecting to feel a turn of emotion. Even if the memory was gone, flown like a bird, surely the primal sensation must remain. A template.
But there was nothing.
I looked upon the road, the curve in the road, as I had for the past six months. And I realized I had always done this with unease. Even before Tom left—when I believed we were intact—I hadn’t wanted to be in Arnau. There was nothing prescient about this feeling; rather, it had been the sense of dislocation, as if I’d accidentally disembarked at the wrong train stop. I’d loved Geneva and the bistros and the babel of languages and the weekends in Paris and Berlin. I’d followed Tom without complaint to Arnau. Happily. As I always had. Lagos. Addis Ababa. East Timor. Geneva.
Arnau.
I saw that I had clenched my fists. I relaxed my hands, put them in my pockets. ‘Why did you want me to come here with you?’
Strebel noticed my hands, noticing, noticing everything. ‘You think I’m trying to trick you. I’m sorry for that.’
‘But surely you want me to remember.’
‘Surely? No, not at all. Memory is so…’ his long fingers wriggled in the air. ‘So unreliable.’
‘But then you would know what happened.’
‘I do know what happened. I think it’s you who needs to know.’
‘It must be there, the memory. How can it not be? How can I have done this… this terrible thing and not remember?’
Cars passed. I watched for a moment, the drivers’ profiles shifting through the plain of my vision. Uphill, downhill. Intent they were, with shopping lists and marital grievances, lies to tell and food to cook. The banal world continued parallel to the world of tragic incidents. Relentlessly.
‘Perhaps there is no memory to retrieve. During intense trauma the brain can focus on simply trying to survive.’ He wanted to calm me, but he heard me—I heard myself—gasp and then swallow.
Briefly, he touched my wrist. ‘Memory is narrative. It is not truth. It is the worst witness. Police hate witnesses. We groan inside. People swear they remember a man in a red coat, when we know it was a blue one. Or they remember a man with a hat because their father wore hats.’
‘Sergeant Caspary told me “Almost instantly.”’ I looked straight ahead now, at the hard, dark mountains in the distance. ‘In the hospital, when she came to talk to me, she said two of the children had died “almost instantly.” What does that mean?’
‘They were deceased by the time the paramedics arrived.’
‘But alive for those minutes? What—five minutes, three minutes between the crash and the arrival of the ambulances?’
He was quiet for a moment, then: ‘It won’t help. This sort of talk.’ He walked on, toward the bus stand. I followed and we sat down. There was a heavy industrial smell, and I realized it was new plastic, because of course the shelter was new. The cement under my feet was clean and fresh with only a few splats of gum.
‘Please look.’ He gestured to a series of neon orange hieroglyphics painted on the asphalt and pavement. ‘The truth is physics. The car, the road, the surface of the road, the trajectory, the weather, the victims’ weight. Gravity is merciless but completely objective. You braked. You braked hard. See the marks there?’ He gestured and I saw the skid marks, the definite skid marks, and around them the orange arrows, numbers, squiggles. ‘You did what you could,’ he said. ‘This wasn’t your fault.’
Suddenly, fitfully, he pulled off his gloves. ‘I really don’t like these. I have a perfectly good pair of wool ones. But my wife—’ I could tell he was embarrassed, he’d revealed something too private.
‘I used to buy gloves for Tom,’ I said. ‘I thought he liked them. But perhaps he felt the same way.’
Turning his face to me, his dark eyes met mine. But he quickly looked away.
‘Tell me their names,’ I said.
He waited, as if deliberating. ‘Mattias Scheffer. Markus Emptmann. Sophie Koppler.’
‘Sophie. She lived for a little while.’
Strebel nodded. ‘Yes. A few hours.’ He adjusted his coat collar. ‘We should get back before the rain.’
I thought back to Mrs Gassner tying her shoes. It had been about to rain that morning, too.
Magulu, May 10
Martin’s fuel pump arrived yesterday with the Thursday bus from Mwanza, and he is now installing it. There’s a crowd around the car and, periodically, he slithers out and shouts at them to go away. He shouts in what I assume is Ukrainian, probably the filthiest slurs, and sometimes he shouts in English, calling them niggers and kaffirs and cunts. But the crowd doesn’t care. They laugh at him. He’s a sideshow clown. The second he slides back under the car, they move in again, resilient, insistent as a tide. Someone steals a wrench, and it almost makes me smile to see his fury.
‘There are always more of them,’ I am tempted to tell him.
When he is finished, he sits at the bar and starts drinking. As I pass by he calls out ‘Princess!’ and offers to buy me a drink. I ignore him. He follows me into the hallway. I turn.
‘What do you want?’
‘You’re very beautiful.’
‘I’m not going to sleep with you.’
He laughs, then talks in a low, soft voice: ‘Sleep? No. Fuck. I’d like to fuck you. And then maybe hurt you. You’d like that.’
I keep walking. He catches my arm, his fingers digging in. ‘I know.’
‘Know what?’ I turn to face him. Looking into his eyes I feel like I’m watching a snuff film.
‘I know exactly who you are,’ he says.
He jerks my arm behind my back. I hear the sound of his zipper. He presses against me so I can feel his erection and rubs himself slowly against me. ‘I know,’ he whispers. ‘I know everything, princess.’ When I try to move, he pulls my arm higher. He’ll break it if he wants to. Very quickly he comes with a sigh, and lets me go, zips up. He walks casually back toward the bar.
And I stand with my pounding heart, this constriction in my chest and this absolute fear. My breath comes in quick little bursts. I know exactly who you are. I know who you are. I know everything.
But how can he?
As my breath slows I decide he knows me the way a rapist likes to think he knows women, that my resistance merely masks my lust. Even as I need to run to the bathroom and vomit in the sink and take off my shirt, I consider the pettiness of Martin. For all his brutality, he holds onto a lie that he must at all costs turn into a truth: that I desire him, secretly, that other women do.
Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe Martin knows he repels me. And this excites him.
Or maybe he just doesn’t care. The way the villagers taunted him, laughed at him—the way he’d turn around and kill them if he was paid to, even the women, even the children. No matter how they die, burning, screaming, guts falling out, whatever. There’s always more of them.
But they would kill him, too, without hesitation, hang him from a meat hook, hack him to pieces with a machete. They are bound together, this merchant of violence and his victims, as if they need each other; as if, like a snake eating its tail, there’s no distinction. Tom would say to me that violence becomes an identity, how people see themselves in the world, and to ask them to stop being violent is asking them to erase themselves.
Martin Martins leaves that afternoon. The sound of his car rubs the smooth, familiar air. I can just see him through the window of my room. A dozen barefoot children chase him, shouting, laughing. And when he speeds up, pulling away from their vortex, they start to throw pebbles. Then stones. He is leaving, he is leaving without them, he is leaving them behind, and they are furious.
Magulu, May 12
Dorothea invites me for dinner. When I get to her house, Kessy is sitting on the sofa watching TV at top volume. He’s not in uniform, just jeans and a T-shirt. He’s quite at home. He shakes my hand—the three-part shake I’ve come to know here, but it’s a cursory greeting; he’s riveted by the football. Doroth
ea comes in and speaks curtly in Swahili. At first he ignores her, and so she turns off the TV. He looks at her, shakes his head with disdain, gets up and walks out. She immediately plumps the cushions where he’s been sitting.
‘This is just a private club to him,’ she says, mimicking him: ‘“Lete beer, lete nyama choma, lete chai, ongeza sauti.”’
She gives me a Coke. ‘These Swahili men, they think they can just tell you what to do. Get this, do that. White men do not treat their women in this way. You see for yourself in the cities. Women are all looking for a white man, even the old ones, the drunk ones, the poor ones. They are all better than one Swahili man.’
‘There are white men like Martin,’ I tell her. I think of his sticky cum on the back of my shirt. I think of the bruises on my arm.
Dorothea makes a sour face as she sits down. ‘Yes. He is mbovu. You know what Gladness told Kessy?’ She looks at me over her Coke. Tonight, she wears the red pageboy wig and a purple dress. She slips her kitten heels off as she curls her legs underneath her. I’m surprised by the soles of her feet, which are flat and callused, as if she is accustomed to going barefoot. She raises an eyebrow, ‘Samwelli found the old fuel pump from Martin’s car.’
She makes sure I am listening, then she leans forward. ‘It was not broken.’
‘Does Samwelli know about cars?’
‘He cannot even fix a flat tire on a bicycle.’ She makes her derisive little snort, then taps my leg. ‘But he gave the pump to Kessy.’
‘And Kessy knows about fuel pumps?’
She nods. ‘There was nothing wrong with it.’
‘But,’ I say. ‘But why would Martin do that? Come up with such a story?’
‘Kessy says he is looking for someone. Kessy says he’s looking for you.’ She touches me again, her hand now staying on my knee. ‘No one knows why you are here. And then another mzungu comes—this mtu mbovu. And then the box, with those things. Too many coincidences.’
‘It’s for someone in the village, you said so yourself.’
