by Melanie Finn
‘Yes, I tell this to Kessy. You are a good person, I tell him. Such a man as Martin Martins cannot have business with a good person. But, friend,’ she hesitates—and I can see she needs to speak but does not want to offend. ‘Friend, why are you here?’
I stare up at the plastic flowers in their vase on top of the vast cabinets. Below, in a special place of honor, she keeps the photograph of her sons. I look back at her, the small, intense, intelligent face. Of course she wonders. She and Kessy have been speculating.
And yet what might I tell her? Why am I taking so long to answer, as if I have a stutter, and cannot find purchase in the word I need to begin.
Kindermörderin.
She’s looking at me, scrutinizing my face, and whatever it is she sees there leads her to say gently—forgivingly: ‘There is a mine north of here. Run by South Africans. Maybe this Martin is working for the South Africans.’
I say nothing, so she carries on, gathering confidence. She has enough conviction for the both of us. ‘Titanium. Yes, of course. That is why he is here. Yes, I know it. He is nothing to do with you.’
I should tell her he’s a mercenary. But then she will ask, Why was a mercenary here in Magulu? Was he here for you, friend?
Was he?
She walks into the kitchen and comes back with serving bowls of beans and rice and rich, thick goat stew.
Arnau, March 19
The coffee cup was in the sink. The chair was slightly askew. I stood and listened, though I was quite sure he had gone.
The flat was very quiet. Even the Gassners’ TV was mute. The silence felt like a withdrawal, a withholding, that might at any moment surge back with a scream.
He had been here again. He, I concluded, because the coffee was black, and I didn’t know any women who drank their coffee black. Once, I had expressed a pet theory about this to Tom: that men, single men, often forgot to buy milk or sugar, so they grew accustomed to making do without. Tom took his coffee with full cream milk, making the exception when we lived in Addis, where the coffee was served black and sweet and strong. He had laughed a little at my idea, asking how I’d done my research—how many single men I knew. Not many, of course.
So I had no basis, no basis at all, for the notion that the person coming into my flat was a man. It was an impression. The scent of him hung upon the air. Or I could determine the disturbance of molecules by some atavistic radar.
But what did he want? To just sit here with his coffee? I could find no other trace of him. He hadn’t rummaged through my drawers the way a stalker might. Hadn’t taken anything the way a thief might. Deliberately, he had left the cup for me to find.
I put my bag of shopping down. I washed the cup and placed it on the sideboard. I pushed the chair flush against the table. I felt a creeping coldness. The small hairs at the nape of my neck rose like tiny antennae. He was not in the room, he was not in the flat, but the cup was his message: he could come anytime he wanted. When I was not there. When I was there.
It was pointless to ask Mrs Gassner, though she must know who it was. He could not have entered without her complicity. She perched like a praying mantis behind the peephole of her door. Perhaps she had even given him a key.
Outside, along the street, there was a taxi stand. I took one to Thun. The driver, whose darker skin and heavy accent suggested recent immigration from the Middle East, kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror. When we’d reached the lake road, he snapped his fingers, ‘Yes, madam, it is you, the American lady. The accident. Those children. Three of them. I know, yes, my sister, she is marry to the cousin of the woman who work for Mr Emptmann.’
I said nothing.
‘They say you were driving like crazy woman. You were drunken woman.’
I kept my eyes on the lake, on the gathering momentum of Thun.
‘If you kill my children I kill you that is sure thing.’
I entered the police station tentatively, but no one seemed to recognize me. No one turned away or murmured their disgust. No one spat or threatened me. A young police officer behind the Plexiglas window spoke in a quick interrogative burst. ‘Kann ich Ihnen behilflich sein?’
‘Strebel,’ I said with my terrible pronunciation. ‘Kann ich mit Kommissar Strebel sprechen?’
‘Let me see,’ he replied in English. ‘Your name?’
‘Pilgrim Jones. No—Lankester.’
‘Which is it?’
‘Jones. But the file may be under Lankester.’
‘Wait.’
I waited.
Strebel appeared, pushing open a security door with a hesitant smile. ‘Miss Jones?’
‘I wasn’t sure—the name,’ I fumbled.
‘My name?’
‘My name.’
‘You don’t know your name?’ He raised a wayward eyebrow.
‘I mean, who I might be to you. Jones or Lankester.’
‘Well, which do you prefer?’
‘Jones.’
‘So I got it right.’
‘It’s odd to hear. After so many years.’
‘But it’s a nice name. Complex in the beginning, then simple, so people have to think a little bit, but they don’t forget and they don’t mangle the spelling.’
Again he gave me that half smile. It didn’t promote levity or humor or the complicity of friendship. It was carefully appropriate and meant to reassure: in all this madness, I’m not swayed, not partial, not your friend, but not your enemy. In its strict neutrality, Strebel’s smile was deeply sincere.
He shifted his weight and tilted his head. ‘How can I help, Miss Jones?’
I knew, then, I could not tell him about the cup and the chair. That even if he believed me—which was unlikely—I would seem ridiculous. And I wanted this singular man to like me.
With Tom, I’d never considered how people felt about me, because they liked Tom, they loved Tom. They leaned in to hear what Tom had to say. But Strebel did not know Tom. He spoke to me, not around me, as if I was a portal to Tom. With Strebel I wasn’t Tom’s wife.
‘Has there…’ I began, uncertainly. ‘Has there been anything new?’
He frowned. ‘New?’
‘I mean, evidence. Or—’ I put my hand over my mouth. Was I lying? By asking the question I had not intended to ask, by showing concern that was merely improvisation, was I being dishonest? This clever man would ferret out dishonesty.
‘Evidence?’ Strebel noticed the gesture. ‘No, no new evidence. Only what we have. As I said.’ He peered at me, then fussed with the papers on his desk. ‘Let’s go, shall we? Lunch? I’m a little hungry.’
‘Is that appropriate?’
The smile—only this time, something warmer. ‘Miss Jones,’ he said. ‘You’re not a suspect.’
The café was around the corner, nondescript with an unhappy rubber plant in the window. The waiter knew Strebel and hailed him with menus and a gesture to the table by the plant.
‘The soup is always good here,’ Strebel said to me. ‘Everything else, very mediocre.’ I saw him pat his breast pocket, then turn to me. ‘Can you tell me what it says, the day’s specials. I’ve forgotten my glasses.’
‘Consommé,’ I began. ‘That comes with a side salad.’
‘So you read German?’
‘Strictly menus.’
‘No to the consommé.’
‘Blumenkohl? Cauliflower?’
‘Yes, cauliflower.’
‘And chicken with vegetables.’
‘What about you?’ he said.
‘The cauliflower.’
‘It’s excellent here, they add a bit of Appenzeller.’
While we waited for the soup, he said, ‘How is it for you? Sometimes people can be cruel.’
I did not meet his eyes. A cup. A chair. I hope cancer eats your face.
‘It’s fine,’ I said.
‘Even so,’ Strebel said. ‘People want to blame. They want there to be bad so they can believe in good. So they can be good.’
‘Is
n’t there bad? Isn’t there good?’
‘Only degrees. But that’s my experience. I’m not a philosopher or a priest.’
He seemed to me a little of both.
The food came. It was the first meal I had eaten with another person since Tom left.
‘You’re right,’ I said of the soup.
‘I think Swiss cooking is like Scottish cooking. We praise blandness.’
‘Except for cheese.’
‘Well, cheese is not food. It’s sacrament.’
I almost smiled. He noted this struggle. He put his spoon down. ‘Why did you come today?’
The question cornered me, and he spoke in the gentlest voice, so I had to lean forward to hear. ‘What I’m asking, really, is do you have anyone to talk to?’
I looked away.
‘Miss Jones—’
‘Pilgrim, it should be Pilgrim.’
‘Well, I’m Paul, then.’
‘Paul.’
‘You’re very isolated,’ he said. ‘I’m worried for you.’
‘For me?’
‘That you should have someone to talk to.’
‘Tom suggested his girlfriend’s shrink.’
Strebel laughed out loud. ‘Really! What a sensitive guy!’ He chuckled on, and then stopped abruptly. ‘I’m sorry. I know that even if you could find it funny, there’s no room in you for laughter now. But, really, I hope you find it funny one day.’
He reached out to touch my arm. ‘You can talk to me, okay? Look, try. Ask me something. You’ll see, I’ll answer as Paul not Inspector Strebel.’
‘How do they—’ I stopped myself. Again, I felt the conundrum of honesty. Did I really want to know, or was I just asking what I thought he expected me to ask? I was so tangled in words, in what I should think versus what I did.
‘How do they get through the day?’ he finished for me.
‘Yes. How do they get through the day?’
He took a moment to realign his side plate and butter knife in front of him. ‘They brush their teeth,’ he said. ‘They do the laundry.’
I thought of the cup: the ritual of making coffee, the kettle, the cafetière, the measuring of grinds. The rigid sequence.
‘And they breathe their loss. Bitter air. And it takes a long time. But life is persistent. For you, too.’
‘And you?’
‘Me?’ he raised his eyebrows. ‘This is my work.’
‘But when you’re not a policeman, when you’re Paul.’
‘Yes, I see. Because I’m always a policeman, an investigator, aren’t I? It’s a state of being.’
‘A suit of armor?’
He tilted his head to consider me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Because you can take that off.’
We sat for an odd moment in silence, as if too much had been revealed and we didn’t know how to return to the mundane. The waiter came with the bill. Strebel paid. ‘We should get back before the rain.’
‘You said that last time.’
‘Ah. Next time we must make sure it’s sunny.’
In the street, he hailed a taxi and told the driver my address. As the door closed, as the car pulled away, he glanced through the glass and then raised his fingers as if to doff an invisible hat.
Magulu, May 15
I sit on the bed in the room that was Martin Martins.’ I look in the empty waste-paper basket, the empty drawer, the empty cupboard. I feel ridiculous. Did I think I would find a clue? To what? Anyway, Gladness has cleaned everything with her usual thoroughness. The room reeks of bleach; though, underneath, the smell of cigarettes lingers. I think back to every instance I saw Martin. What he was doing, what he was reading. Wasn’t it an old Spiegel? He drank beer, he slept in his room, he slept with a prostitute, he watched the TV in the restaurant, he smoked Roosters. This is the behavior of a man waiting for a spare part for his broken car.
So why do I have this cold pit in my stomach? Martin’s lie about the fuel pump. His I know you.
Too many coincidences, Kessy said.
But who decides how many is too many? Who can see conspiracy in the random? I forgot to pay a phone bill. MAHNUNG! Mrs Gassner could not tie her laces. Tom brought me to Arnau because he’d met Elise by the lake. In proximity—the imposed proximity of chronology—these events clustered and swarmed, connected.
But taken separately—
Perhaps Martin lied about the fuel pump for some reason quite beyond me or Kessy or Dorothea. Perhaps he was waiting, or hiding. Perhaps Kessy is wrong and the fuel pump was broken.
Why am I so ready to believe Martin Martins intended me harm? He called me princess. He saw my coldness, my vanity: the hard, little pea of my heart. He saw what I keep from others, and so I imbue him with special power. I give credence to his story of being a mercenary.
Or have I fashioned a projection of unexamined guilt? What better tableau than a professional killer on which to display my moral dilemma—my inability to feel anything for three small, dead children. Martin Martins absorbs all light like an imploding star.
I have taken lives, like a petty god. I have importance because of that. I am no longer Tom’s wife, no longer his ex-wife. I am a looming giant in the lives of the children’s parents, Godzilla, stamping and tramping, crushing and smashing. I am Kindermörderin. I am Martin.
I note the shambling rustle of pink bougainvillea outside the window and the filament of a spider’s web. Beyond the bougainvillea lies the kitchen courtyard. I can see Gladness hanging up sheets on the line. Around her scatter ubiquitous chickens, and an emaciated kitten toys with a piece of colored wool. Gladness bends and plucks white pillowcases from the green laundry tub. I recall how she watched me when Martin told me his story. Suddenly I realize that she’s the one who slept with him, and she was worried I might fuck him for free. In the same matter-of-fact way she does everything here, she sleeps with the customers. It’s all money. Apart from Dorothea, with her commands and her talk of STDs, no women come near the place. But there are plenty of men.
I go to my room, retrieve the box from the back of the cup board. I estimate its weight at six pounds. Hate does not diminish, I’m learning. It can shift atoms, congeal into matter. It takes shape in the material world.
Magulu—Butiama, May 16
I do not say goodbye. This is force of habit: all the leavings in my life with Tom, associations with associates abandoned every two years. There were no parties, no one said goodbye. People left Dili or Lagos and the only evidence of their leaving, of their ever having been there at all, was the new people in their house. Tom taught me; leave quietly, don’t slam the door.
As I pay the bill at the Goodnight, Gladness doesn’t ask where I’m going or why. Her job is to usher in and usher out. I give her a good tip. ‘Safari njema,’ she says. Travel safely.
The bus leaves at noon from under a huge fig tree near the market. It rattles as it idles, exhaust fumes stinking. The crowd here is focused, active; there’s incentive to leave Magulu. People shove bags and even children through the windows. Touts sell tickets. The driver sweats as he manoeuvres boxes and sacks into the luggage compartment. Boys sell hard-boiled eggs. Others carry large boards on their shoulders—window height—bearing plastic combs, mirrors, packs of cards, key rings, dolls. They resemble peacocks, moving their displays stiffly up and down the length of the bus.
A young man in a tie tries to co-opt my seat by the window. I bought my ticket from the bus office—a table under the fig tree manned by the agent, a Rambo-esque vision in a red bandana and mirrored shades. I paid extra for the window seat.
As the young man won’t move—he has settled in, folding his arms, crossing his legs, determined as a suffragette—I summon the tout. He shouts at the young man and smacks him on the head. When I have reclaimed my seat the tout comes back and stares meaningfully. I pretend I don’t understand that he wants a thank-you tip—which is a mistake, because he places a very fat old woman next to me.
She glances down curiously at the box on my lap.
‘Vitabu,’ I lie. Books. She looks away. And moves so that part of her buttock takes up part of my seat.
We reach Butiama at dusk.
Only a decade ago Lake Victoria lapped at the edge of the town. The dusty shacks and crumbling buildings might have then seemed almost picturesque. But the lake level has dropped, and a wide hem of mud and trash now separates the town from the silvery-blue water. The dark mud smells, the day’s sun has heated the garbage rotting within it, and I find myself almost gagging on the thick, fetid air. The woman next to me shrivels her nose, shakes her head.
Outside, a medieval scrum surrounds the bus, as if people want to lynch the passengers rather than greet them. We can’t disembark because so many beggars, thieves, taxi drivers, touts for other destinations, screaming relatives are blocking the door. I realize my best option is to slip behind the old woman, drafting her bulk like a cyclist.
I have not thought what to do now, where to go. The ticket touts shout out destinations: Arusha, Mwanza, Dodoma, Kisumu, Mbeya. Pick one, I think. But not Mwanza, where they burn witches, where they kill albinos. In the frenzy, I am separated from the old woman, and I feel as if I have just lost a friend. Almost immediately, the crowd notices my solitude and I am surrounded by shouting faces. I feel hands grabbing at my suitcase, grabbing at the box under my arm. ‘Sistah!’ ‘Mzungu!’ ‘Arusha!’ ‘This way! This way!’ ‘Sistah!’
Frantically I scan the faces for one that might be open, sincere. I see only the same hungry expression of the men in Magulu when they nearly attacked Kessy.
‘This way! This way!’ a boy in a white shirt is saying. ‘This way, this way, this way.’ He takes firm grasp of the handle of my suitcase. I look down at him, his dark, indecipherable eyes. The white shirt is huge, a man’s shirt engulfing him, making him thinner, smaller: vulnerable. So I soften immeasurably toward him, and he senses this in an instant. He pulls me, shoving aside his competitors as if they are not larger and heavier and meaner. He pulls me confidently, a fish on the line. ‘This way! This way!’
We are free of the crowd, but still he doesn’t let me go. ‘This way.’ We cross a road. A man tries to sell me a bottle of water. The boy shouts at him. We enter a narrow alley, turn into another alley, another, another. I think about the girl Kessy found deep inside a maze. I think about her toes, smashed with a hammer, a kind of meticulous cruelty. Kessy saved her, and he was punished, rendered helpless in exile. I remember him saying to me on the road north of Magulu, ‘Who is going to stop them? Me? With my club? My flashlight? My laws?’ The terrible cruelty extends to Kessy: for a man to find himself capable of good, and then be stripped of the means ever to do good again. I think of Dorothea holding the hand of a dying girl, holding the photograph of her lost sons. These emotional assaults seem so carefully crafted—bespoke—that I can almost believe in God.
