The Blue Taxi (46 page)

I
n the Mchanganyiko flat, Sarie was astir. She’d been awake for hours, limbs thick with a dull tingle, eyes fixed on the ceiling,
sightless, hot. In the early afternoon, though the deadened parts of her might have stayed that way forever, her body tired
of it. She rolled onto her side. Her legs deposited her feet onto the cold floor with a hollow thud. Her shoulders pulled
her up. Sarie sat there for a moment, hands loose by her knees, before rising, struggling, as though pulled up by the hair.
Standing at the mirror, naked, she felt dizzy, full of enervated blood that has been sluggish for too long.

Looking at herself uncertain what she saw, she listened for her breath. Her mind was not quite clear. Fingertips lightly pressing
on the dresser, and swaying back and forth because her balance was not good, she tried to catalog events. But something wasn’t
right. Time, for one, was different: it was as if none had passed at all, not between discovering Majid’s absence from his
house and Mr. Frosty’s visit, and not between her lying down and getting up, as if everything that had brought her fall about
had taken place at once, and as if she, though standing, were falling through the air and had been falling, for an interminable
moment, well beyond the reach of clocks, sunsets, dawns, or movements of the moon. Time heals things, Sarie knew. Time takes
pain away. She did not feel at all well, and therefore time stood still.

She willed herself to understand what had taken place. She couldn’t, not at first. The people who had harmed her—Maria,
Majid, Sugra, Gilbert, and the Frosty King—she conceived of as one person, causing one complex collapse; she felt their effects
simultaneously, as one intolerable wound. Her body ached so cruelly that Sarie, facing herself in the glass, was not convinced
she wouldn’t, if she checked all of her flesh, find signs of the disaster. But how unmarked her skin was, how unbleeding and
unbruised! The trouble was elsewhere.

She wished to be methodical. Eyes shut, she tried distinguishing between them, husband, lover, woman, enemy, and friend; between
the afternoon at Kudra House and (afterwards? before?) the noontime shock of Mr. Frosty with his plugs, arriving in her home.
She brought her fingers to her brow and focused on Majid. She tried to help herself
He did not know we were coming. He did not do this to hurt me. He wants very much to see me. Had he known I was coming…
She said Majid’s name a few more times, softly, in several different ways, thinking how her Agatha sometimes requested little
songs to help her from a dream or to distract her from an illness: “Majid, Majid, Majid Ghulam, Majid Jeevanjee, Majid Ghulam
Jeevanjee. M. G. J. and”—what she herself had never said but knew that others did—“and Ghuji.” The sound of her voice helped.
She pressed her thumbs against her eyelids, waited for the coiling and uncoiling of the livid golds and reds she knew would
rise up there. She listened to her hair. She thought next about the spark plugs. She could see these clearly and they hurt
her. But she pressed her teeth together. She tried to see, again, Gilbert on the carpet, bright thing in his hand.

The next thought came to her because she couldn’t face the rest. A tiny one at first, it was a bit of her old self, for, if
not resilient, then what was she?
Well, so we could begin. We could begin the thing with spares. And later…
Her long legs almost gave, she almost fell back on the bed, but her knees snapped into place.
No
. She could
not reframe the thing, tell herself that she was still all right. Such enthusiasm would be false.
Branching out
, from car parts into baskets, as if souvenirs had been a second, new idea, instead of Sarie’s first, would not be a branching
out at all, not from Sarie’s tree. All the wrong way round. But if not that, then what? She let her eyes come open and looked
down at her feet. If she was to live at all, she thought, she could not enfold her husband’s vision and pretend that it was
hers, couldn’t think of it that way.

She must erase the first idea, what had come to
her
. Forget everything she had envisaged, say it hadn’t happened: that she had never stood before the Gymkhana looking at a horse,
or pulled Agatha behind her into the Mountain Top Hotel, that she had never peered at gems that winked behind a glass. That
she had never rubbed her husband’s feet and thought herself his savior. She must:
Forget, forget, dismiss
. But thinking was too hard, and noting so specifically what she should forget was rather like remembering, the opposite of
what she had to do.

She raised her eyes again and tried to see herself.
I’m yellow
, Sarie thought. Her teeth were caked, rough, filthy. She ran her hands along her throat and ribs. Her hips. She felt her
bones protrude. Her tears welled up again.
I’m old
, she thought.
I’m old
. She heard Gilbert coming up the stairs. She didn’t wish, just then, for anyone to see her—Gilbert least of all—so very,
very bare. So sallow. She reached out for the nearest thing; and, meanly, it was Gilbert’s dirty robe, which he’d left over
the chair. How close it felt, how thick.

Gilbert was surprised to see her standing. He came up to her and kissed her. “Sarie, dear.” He tried to hold her hand. Sarie
didn’t flinch. She didn’t pull away from him; she didn’t, either, take his hand in hers. Gilbert raised his fingers in the
air; they hovered, fluttered, near her head. He would have liked to stroke her cheek, but
Sarie’s look—red eyes, mouth closed, confused—persuaded him he shouldn’t.
Too soon
, he thought.
Not yet
. He smiled at her and sighed. The sight of his tall wife in his robe—too short for her legs, but, still—was touching. “Don’t
you look nice, love? How do you feel?” he said. He wondered if the color suited her. Didn’t lovers sometimes wear each other’s
clothes? He had heard (or had he read?) somewhere that local men slept in colored cloths they borrowed from their women, mistresses
and wives, to demonstrate their love? Was this what Sarie meant? To say she cared for him, though she found it hard to speak?

Sarie, long-stilled blood now coursing to her feet, felt a sinking in her chest. She leaned without intending to towards Gilbert,
and he did, at last, clumsy, eager, dart in to rest his lips a moment on her cheek. He spoke because he didn’t know what else
to do—he’d mastered Sarie silent in the bed, but Sarie standing, still upset, looking so worn out, made him a bit nervous.
“You know, dear, I think I have an idea.” He sat down behind her.

At the word “idea,” Sarie felt a curdling in her throat. She turned and gazed at him as if at a geological formation that
rose up far away, a mountain.
An idea
. Her gums hurt. She saw once again all of
her
ideas, how certain she had been about the trinkets and the baskets and the long Dodoma knives, the bright blue shards of
stone. She felt foolish in a way she hadn’t felt before—not when ladies at the garden parties had dropped their drinks in
horror at her talk, not when Gilbert told her shoes were too expensive, and not when he had so heartlessly insisted that women,
if you please, can make or break a man.

She felt tremendously outdone, and stupid, which was worse. She didn’t want to hear Gilbert’s idea, but she didn’t either
have the strength to move or cover up her ears. When Gilbert asked her if he could please be introduced to Jeevanjee, who
might be just
the man to help, Sarie looked at him as though he’d asked her to perform a crazy kind of sex. But she was not entirely surprised.
“Your friend Mr. J.,” he said. Why should the world not topple?

It hurt her to hear Majid Ghulam’s name in Gilbert’s clumsy mouth. “You know,” her husband said, “the Jeevanjee you’ve gotten
friendly with. The father of that boy.” Sarie heard a ringing in the thickened air and watched as her old husband came in
and out of focus not far from her face. Though her eyes had cleared enough to see that he was not a mountain, Sarie saw instead
an insect, a knobbed creature, a lizard, on the bed.
The Jeevanjee
. It sounded like a joke, the name of a small animal, something foreign, quaint. Gilbert’s eyeballs seemed to swell and shrink
and spin.

She didn’t say a word. She sank down on the bed, not beside her husband, whose feet were on the floor, who
sat
, like a man explaining things, but beyond him, where she lay, knees curled into her chest, while Gilbert talked and talked
about how useful it would be for him—“for
us
”—to put his head together with the head of an experienced businessman like this M.G., whom she had so providentially got
to know and like. “You
do
like him, don’t you? He’s
all right?
” he asked. He turned around to take up one of her hands. “Have you seen him recently?” Sarie made a fist. Looking sweetly
down, Gilbert clutched the furled mass tightly, as if, like an envelope that he could open, it might conceal a prize.

As they sat on the bed, Agatha appeared. She hovered in the doorway, made a testing sound. Gilbert looked towards her. “See?”
he said. “Your mother’s gotten up.” Agatha did not come in. “Look, Sarie.” Gilbert, for once emboldened by the presence of
his daughter, raised a hand to Sarie’s face and firmly pulled her chin towards the door. Sarie looked. She thought,
What does the child want?
She did not reach out to her. Agatha, as she often did, kept still. She’d been in the courtyard scouring the ground. There
were pebbles in
the pockets of her dress. “Come on,” Gilbert said. He found he wanted very much for Agatha to be there, near them on the bed.
It would have made him feel a little better.
We’re a family
, he thought. And Sarie wouldn’t cry in front of Agatha; with Agatha, Sarie was robust.

They both turned away from him at once: Sarie lay back down, and Agatha, looking down into a pocket, twisted a thin ankle,
bent a knee, unbent it. “I’m going back outside,” she said. And Agatha was gone. They heard her close the door, and then her
feet quick on the stairs.

He had not let go of Sarie’s hand. He thought her fist felt looser, and began stroking her thumb. Beneath Gilbert’s spotted
skin, where unseen blood and flesh were throbbing with new highways, traffic jams, the wreck and shine of speeding things,
Sarie felt the story change. She suddenly
could
think, and what she thought about was this: her lover’s back and toes and ankles and the flavor of his mouth. At last she
opened her closed hand and, hoping idly they would break, squeezed her husband’s fingers. Gilbert thought he understood the
fierceness of her grip. Yes, he felt Sarie’s love for him return. He sighed. He lay down on the bed beside her, eyes full
no longer of her face but of things that only he could see: the future, years ahead, when things had really changed, a legal
business with a sign, an office, and a girl to make the tea. He knew she had agreed. “You’re wonderful,” he said, and kissed
her on the brow.

He nestled his own tired head into the pillow. “It could be like this,” he said, and he went on, painted her a picture. When
he’d finished talking, Sarie took his robe off, handed it to him, and strode into the bathroom, where she stayed for a long
time. Cold in Vunjamguu’s sharp water, adding to it her own tears until she couldn’t anymore, she sat by herself in the dark.
Eventually, chill
and made of stone, Sarie heard Gilbert go out and felt her strength return.

She made up her mind. Because the hardships and the sadness that swelled and moved inside her were too difficult to think
of with precision, Sarie, with a monumental shove against and through her weakened skin, stepped outside of her body to give
herself advice. She thought instead of what somebody else, looking at her from a distance, someone with a sense of History,
might tell her. She wondered what Clothilde would do, or Sister Bénédicte. What Angélique might say. She thought of Betty,
too. But the voice she heard, the one she gave a sound to, was Mrs. Hazel Towson’s.
You are middle-aged. You are past your prime, and Belgian. You are the mother of a daughter. And you also have a husband
. That she didn’t want one, or the other, really, was well besides the point. That she
liked
her short, pale dresses, for all their stains and wear, did not matter at all.

She’d been foolish from the start. How blind she’d been, and silly, thinking she could have two lives, one that moved in time
and one that didn’t, ever. How
meaningless
she’d been. Gilbert’s business—this business in which she, apparently, had no business being—this business, she could clearly
see, was more important than anything she might have learned about herself or someone else, or life, or love, at gloomy Kudra
House. More important and concrete than whatever Majid Ghulam might want or whatever Sarie might have been, so vaguely, so
desirously, attempting. She’d end it. She’d end it then and there and not set eyes, if she could help it, on Majid Ghulam
again. Well, she would have to, she supposed, if she did what Gilbert wished. But even then, if she had to greet him on occasion,
ask him mildly how things were or inquire about his boys, he would be Mr. Jeevanjee again, that old Mr. J. Perhaps, as Gilbert
had called him when she had been in bed, once she’d forgotten everything and become somebody else, the second Sarie with no
first, he would simply be “M.G.” She did make one decision, the only one, she thought, that still belonged to her:
Foolish I have been, peut-être. But I will not be ashamed
.

Twenty-three