The Blue Taxi (12 page)

But, Sarie thought for the first time, perhaps they’d wanted to be rid of her. Hadn’t heavy, satisfied Clothilde said, “If
you don’t go with him, what can
we
do with you?” Hadn’t they all said, “You can’t live your life here”? But, no, it wasn’t all their fault. She
had
thought, hadn’t she, that she was supposed to go with him, let him take her from the clinic and escort her, like a prince,
closer to the sea, to a kingdom of delight. It all seemed a sad tale. She knew now it hadn’t been a plan, no divinity at all.
In fact, she thought, it was car trouble that had sent Mr. Turner and his Magistrate down to the Jilima Mission, to ask if
they could stay. There had been an accident, something with a donkey. Sarie didn’t know, exactly. A broken strap or fan, perhaps,
a dislodged, leaky valve, a puncture in hard skin. But whatever belt or metal piece had failed, Sarie had got married because
of trouble with a car.

What stories he had told! There would be a house and garden by the harbor. She would be admired. He would be promoted. But
of course Independence came, and with it, all that went.
What if I had not accepted him?
Sarie rubbed her mouth with a long hand.
If
I’d met Mr. Jeevanjee instead?
The very question hurt her, and she turned to rise from bed. But thoughts of Mr. Jeevanjee, it seemed, kept on popping up,
no matter how she tried.

Aware of Agatha gabbling to herself in the next room—Taj and Dunya, threats of murdered men—she wondered for a moment what
Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee liked to have for breakfast. How
did
people like him, widowers, poets, men from those green islands,
Jeevanjees
, get moving with the day? Samosas, was it? Gruel made from some grain? A sweet, light-scented pastry? Confronted with the
item, would Sarie know its name? And would she ever in her lifetime learn how it should be cooked? She drew the sheet away,
ran her fingers hard across her face, sat up, set her feet on the cold floor, and strode into the kitchen.

After breakfast, Gilbert, unfaithful in his way, put down the book on coastal merchants and replaced it with a favorite, a
slender teal-gray volume called
The Mohammedan Peoples of East Africa’s Coast Lands
. Oh, how he was glad about his books! How they calmed him, how they promoted in his heart a sense of order in the world!
But let us tell the truth: he was not a conscientious reader. While Gilbert loved the varied books with a constancy and ardor
that were probably unmatched, and took great pleasure from his ownership, he gave them less than all of his attention. He
did not read them through and through, not as they had been written. Gilbert loved their shapes, what they hinted about
him
, far more than their intricate, sometimes difficult insides. He loved to hold the volumes open in his lap, to gauge their
width and heft, to feel the paper with his palms. Holding books like that, with care, made Gilbert feel like—yes. A professor.
Like a man who
understood. Like
, he sometimes thought,
the man I really am
. When he did cast his eyes down among the pages (which he
did
do, yes, he did,
sometimes), he was often more intrigued by the appearances of things, their outlines, than by their inner cogs.

In the cherished books, Gilbert sought out vivid anecdotes and clear-cut section headings. Statements in bold print. Single
sentences, or pairs of them, not often more than three, that jumped from off the page. In the book on merchant sailors, he
had liked to learn that slaves came to the coast from Yemen and also from Circassia. Oh, Circassia! In
Mohammedans
, Gilbert found expressions he was curious to try out on fellow drinkers at the Palm: “prestation,” “affine,” “rights in rem,”
and more. Gilbert practiced his pronunciation softly, just under his breath, while Sarie clattered in the kitchen. Then he
looked at his high bookshelf, reassured and proud.

As her father read, Agatha wandered out into the courtyard to find pebbles and to watch the neighbor’s chickens recover from
the storm. As Sarie did each day, though she knew that Agatha never strayed into the road and that the only car to speak of
was the broken Morris taxi, which could neither run a person over nor even give a growl, she said, “Look out for the cars!”
and Agatha ignored her.

Later, in the bedroom, Sarie watched another Sarie in the dresser mirror. The yellow light from the three windows, tinted
with the residue that gums all city glass, showed up Sarie’s wrinkles. A veritable bunch of them around each of her eyes,
and a slight but undeniable new give at the skin of her long throat. Dissatisfied, she frowned. She peered a little closer.
The mirror showed a shadow at her lips—coffee? A mustache? She licked a finger, wiped.

The blouse she wore, with wooden buttons she’d stitched on herself, displeased her. Like all of Sarie’s things, it had been
purchased secondhand from a man who sold old clothes. Acquired
from a vast array of church groups, hospitals, old-age homes, and, thought Sarie, grim,
Even from the morgue
, the cast-off clothes of men and women from the U.S.A. who’d moved on to other things were sent past the Equator to the wretched,
wretched South. Indeed, thought Sarie: A reminder to the people of exactly how things stand between themselves and the Great
North, of how mighty powers churned.
We wear past decades on our skin
, she thought,
because we’re stuck in time. The world goes on sans nous
. The blouse, 100 percent U.S. cotton, now as thin as paper, suddenly seemed twice as old, twice as shabby as it was.

Sarie laid a hand across her belly, which, between two thick and sturdy bones, was neither flat nor round. She measured that
soft space with her palms, not only for herself, but also on Mr. Jeevanjee’s behalf: for her (
Perhaps!
she thought) new lover. She felt less worn, less aged.
A lover. A man other than mine
. The very thought refreshed her; she almost laughed out loud. But he was not quite a lover, was he? A
lover
was a man one had allowed to go as far as men can go, and she had not quite done that. Or was a man whom one permitted to
explore most of one’s upper skin and squeeze what was still covered also like a lover? Sarie wasn’t sure.
Would
she let him, if he tried? Did she want him?
Yes
, she thought. She did. She puffed her chest and lips out, flexed her calves and thighs. But next, the thought of Majid frightened
her. She held a hand out to the air. As though Gilbert were not reading in the parlor and Agatha not squatting (shameless)
in the sand just beyond the lowest stair, she felt thoroughly alone.

Sarie, like all women, had a past. Hers, as all pasts are, was particular, and not. There’d been, in brief, parents dead too
young (run over by a car while Sarie played elsewhere), an avid aunt who had
just taken vows and who, when she set out for the Colonies to spread the Light of Might, took little Sarie with her and soon
after died herself, feverish and crazed, as many like her do. Accidents aplenty, unexpected change. One death to another.
But there’d been steadiness as well. Sarie’s past, the part of it a person could explain, the one she could remember clearly,
what she thought of as
the real past
, had begun in earnest at the Jilima Mission Clinic, one hundred rutted, hilly miles from seaside Vunjamguu. The clinic: pain
and sickness, health. Blood and spit and bruises, sporadic wails and cries, and the pungent, complicated smells of potions
of repair. A heady mix, indeed. Things that make strange tales.

She’d been, when Gilbert met her, “our assistant, Sarie,” lacking formal training but certainly a help, a not-bad girl with
heft, a girl who could be taught. When he had seen her in that hallway picking up a tray, when she had turned to him and said,
“Hello!” he had had a momentary vision, truth be told, of what beauty might be like. In that dim, cool light and the bright
air, so palely blond, she was! What dearly freckled skin!
What girlish muscles
, he had thought,
in those able arms
. He’d fallen then and there, that Gilbert who so rarely saw young women and to whom those he did see said: “Hello!” But he
had, from the first, enamored somehow of himself and made uncomfortable by pain, understood the clinic as a place she should
escape.

He was delighted when she left with him; and though he’d found her past romantic, once settled in the city (tiny garden, tiny
house, and no view of the sea), he found that he did not delight in Sarie’s reminiscing. When she started, if he could, he’d
squeeze her hand and say, “Not now, sweet,” or turn his eyes from her. His stomach, among other things, was weak, and he did
not encourage her, though now and then he did regard her life with awe: before Independence, most of all, Sarie’s past—the
mission clinic part of
it, though he did not like to think of it too clearly—had sometimes made him proud.

In those days, not long after their marriage, in the breezy hallways of the courthouse or at a gathering where serious drinks
were served, if Gilbert was confronted by a District Officer (lips asmacking, chest plumped up) who presumed to “set poor
Turner straight” about the natives and their ways, he sometimes took a deep breath of his own and, to take them down a peg,
would say, “Indeed?
My
Sarie worked inland, you know.” And so, oh, yes, she had. And not too badly, either.

Methodical and unimpressed, she’d had, despite herself perhaps, an aptitude for care. In little ways, she helped the sick
grow well, the damaged find some comfort, and the dying void themselves. She’d wiped teary cheeks and bottoms with the same
unfocused ease and had been particularly good—though Gilbert found this odd—with those among the pregnant ladies who thought
to brave the clinic, hoping it would offer up a magick that a home midwife could not. What arrays of peoples she had seen!
Gilbert liked the names. He’d think, awed again by Sarie’s height:
my wife assisted at the birth of Chagga infants, Gogo babies, Haya kids, and Sumbawanga triplets!
Gilbert, who read rather faithlessly but with an eye to customs and beliefs, imagined all the varied babies wearing colored
beads and goodluck stuff to match their tribe and place. And Sarie, just beyond them, officiating, gowned in white, and wise.

When Gilbert felt the smallness, the pettiness, of his own clerkship at the courthouse, or when too many colonials had passed
through town with their interior tales, it cheered him up to think that he was married to a woman, in a way, who was really
an adventuress. How capable she must have (
must have, really
) been. But if—as she rather often did—Sarie spoke out on her own, she
made him feel ashamed, of her and of himself and Gilbert’s pride dried up.

“A Maasai girl,” he’d once heard his new bride saying at the Gymkhana, where on a sunny, cloudless afternoon there’d been
a garden party. Just beyond the patio, a polo match on the soft grounds (hollow thuds and gallops carried on the breeze) gave
the gathering and its linen-covered tables (cloth clamped down by pewter weights) a fine, Imperial feeling. Closer in, rooted
in red pots, miniature palms swayed. Across the garden path, but loud enough for all the men to hear, Sarie had continued
brightly. “The spear, it passed completely,
tout à fait
, through her awful foot! Stuck in there for days!” Sarie held her nose. “The smell!” Her cup rattled on its plate. A little
much for pleasant company. Rather.
Too vivid
, Gilbert thought, though old Jim Towson from the farms and Majors Daltry, Copeland, could tell far harder tales to men in
other rooms with whiskeys in their hands.
Oh, dear
. Didn’t several ladies near Sarie step just a bit away to supplement their tea or reach for walls or men? Here and there,
a gasp.
Too vivid, for a woman
.

Sarie, unschooled (
Not quite all she seemed, my man
, Gilbert told himself again, again, again), mistook the gasps for interest. “Oh! Oh!
Écoutez!
And then!” She could not be stopped. She told them next about that region’s rice and flour magnate (“A
Bohora
man, you see,” as though the word determined the affair), who came bleeding to the clinic with two fingers hanging off, a
stab wound in his thigh. “A fight with his own son, imagine, for a dark girl from Dodoma! And he already,
s’il vous plaît
, had a pleasant wife at home. A fine lady with the jewels.” Sarie (
Was she drunk?
), with the devious look a salesman might put on to tantalize a customer who is almost out the door, added, “And yet”—a head
tilt to the men just across the way—“do they not say that the races are not
permitted to and must not be making love?” How the small word “races” rang out through the party like a bell. Did the polo
players pause, out there on the field, the palm fronds give a shake?

Triumphant, laughing, feeling she’d done well, Sarie gestured at the ladies with her flowered saucer. Oh, the shudders that
politeness could not quite conceal or perhaps in fact depended on: Major Daltry’s latest conquest raised a girlish hand; Jim
Towson’s sturdy Hazel, licking her front teeth, brushed nonexistent smudges from her shirtfront and wondered whom Gilbert
had married (“Lost her parents, did she?” as though it were Sarie’s fault), while the men, attention drawn, fell silent. Several
of them were unnerved, crossed over to the gathering of women and sought their spouses’ hands (“As if,” Sarie later said,
“to say it wasn’t true!”).

How on that afternoon Gilbert wished that he had picked another wife, a girl, instead, come straight to him from England,
docile, eager for a match. Or some honorable Nairobi horseman’s leggy, stable child, not
this
peculiar one, whose memories were unspeakable, who had, it sometimes seemed to him, no real History at all. Whose past was
an affront. He begged Sarie in the future to exercise restraint. “A wife, you know,” he said, “can make or break a Service
man.”

In the backseat of someone’s car (Brickman? Masterson, perhaps?), Sarie had scowled deeply at her husband, then looked out
at the waves as they spread from Seafront Road. This was not what she’d agreed to. In fact, in her whole life, she asked herself,
to what
had
she agreed? Blown by winds, instead! A sorry, tattered flag with not even a pole! To calm herself she thought,
The water of the ocean is bluer than my eyes
. Then she thought about Jilima and wished she had not left. Years later, now, wondering whether with Mr. Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee
she had taken a misstep far greater than at any garden tea, Sarie thought again about the mission
clinic and the hills, and (for the first time rather urgently) about Sister Angélique, whose story—luckily for Gilbert—she
had never raised at any public function.