The Blue Taxi (13 page)

The journeys of some people gesture with their motion to the hidden heart of things and leave deep marks on others. For Sarie,
the first day after her moment in the hall with Mr. Jeevanjee, Sister Angélique loomed large. Born Angélique Magisse, efficient
and hardworking, Angélique had been much older than Sarie, twenty years perhaps, a very grown-up woman.
Not much younger
, Sarie thought,
than I myself am now
. Sarie had admired her, as the other Sisters did, but from a distance made of awe: a girl child’s adoration. Angélique, she’d
thought, was perfect. Suited more than anyone to Jilima and its trials.

Pinafores and fingernails as clean as clean could be, Angélique never cried or shouted. Faster and more forceful at her work
than any other Sister, she could disinfect and wrap a wound in the time it took poor Amélie to uncork an aspirin jar, could
pluck a splinter from a toe, dab-dab, and wish its wearer well while slow Clothilde had only located the tweezers and coughed
three times for show. And Sister Angélique was handsome. Small and strong, well-shaped. With stiff red hair and small sharp
teeth. A beauty, in her way, brash and quick and vivid. The old men who cycled up with fish always hoped that
she
would come to the back gate, not Sister Brigitte. The boys who tried to sell them chickens liked her best of all. Indeed,
the Fathers who drove down once a week from the town of Uchuipo often winked at her, inviting her to whiskey and tobacco in
the frothing purple dusk. And Angélique was game. She praised them, shared their bawdy jokes, and, blowing smoke out of her
nose, laughed into the night.

If she was occasionally unseemly, her straighter mates forgave her, because she was generous and skilled. They found excuses
for her manner. She could not be, the Sisters said, Belgian through and through. She was too fearless and too vivid. “There
is some Ireland in her,” Sister Brigitte (who was bald) would say, enamored of that hair. Or, thrilled and also horrified,
“A Frenchman in that family, at least. Perhaps she was adopted.”

The most regular of patients, too, had ideas of their own. In the very center of Angélique’s broad forehead, slightly raised,
smaller than a circle of confetti but larger than a speck, was a perfectly round mole that matched the rusty tint of dry Jilima
earth. The patients said, “She was meant to be a Hindu, a Banyan from the north. All that white-white skin is but a trick
and a mistake.” The patients (themselves certainly not Hindu but feeling well within their rights) proposed that Angélique’s
poor mother had been visited one night by a Brahmin spirit-man whom Angélique’s poor father had been too busy doing other
things to ward off from his bed. “And spirit-lust is strong, or not?” Perhaps Angélique’s cuckolded pa had been herding humpless
cattle or minding a big shop. They imagined the girl’s mother very pale and mole-less, smooth as glass or water. Angélique,
for reasons of her own, perhaps, never set them straight. She laughed with patients, too.

When Angélique, the pillar, the pistol, the one with too much spark, with more agility than anyone they knew, fell in with
an indigene, Sarie, tender, was still young, making herself useful in the kitchen and the grounds, learning to wash bandages
and identify a fever. One Sunday, as a buttered sky grew scarlet at the rim, a Kuria cattle-thief came into the clinic with
an ulcer on his leg. Sarie saw him coming and ran into the ward to say a person had arrived. But he was not exactly welcome.
Because Sister Brigitte thought he smelled bad, like cows and heat and dust (if she passed close to him
she sneezed), they put him in the bed nearest to the window. This he didn’t mind; that bed afforded him a fine view of the
mountain and, by implication, of far-off Kuria-land, which, with a little give-or-take, does lie just beyond.

Brigitte, though very good with ulcers, didn’t want to treat him, and he was passed to Angélique, who (wise girl!) did not
think he smelled. The cattle-thief was quiet. He had, in general, a surly look, which Brigitte would in later stories say
should have been a warning: it presaged all of his perversions, as had—if only they had measured it—the sharp slope of his
skull. For Angélique, however, who turned out to be as skilled as anyone with treatments of the leg, he now and then displayed
a rare and lovely smile. She tended him. He gestured to the mountain, and Angélique, able with her hands, made clever gestures
back.

The cattle-thief stayed with them for two weeks before walking into town, hobbling but not weaving, aided by a slender walking
stick he’d fashioned expertly himself. Sarie had been warned away, and she had not approached. But she saw him make the cane
from the kitchen window. He spent hours sitting on a rock, whittling away. She had thought him picturesque and serious. He
said he would be back. He had business in the area before heading home to Kuria-land and would return before the journey for
a final checkup and a cleaning of his leg. Sister Clothilde later swore that just before he left, she saw him speak with Sister
Angélique on the far edge of the grounds, beneath the biggest tree.

“She grew bright in the face,” Clothilde would tell them with a shiver, “red as the leaves on that big croton, and redder
than her hair.” Hands twisting in her lap, eyes closed, Clothilde—who later swore she’d loved her the best!—would moan, as
if she and only she could have prevented the disaster. “I told myself right then that that one—
that one!
—he is coming back. We have not yet seen the
end.” Nevermind the cattle-thief himself had told them he’d be back, making signs that even Brigitte, elaborately wheezing,
could not fail to understand.

He returned one month after his discharge with two milk-cows in tow, elegant humped beasts with patient eyes and strong, fine
legs and rumps. This russet pair he tethered to a post behind the clinic, not far from the trees. He came into the kitchen,
asked for Angélique, and then requested tea (
demanded
, rather, this they later saw). This time, though, he left the cattle at the mission; he slept and ate in town. There, Clothilde
would say, rubbing her soft gut, she observed him more than twice behaving oddly at the Mukhtar Drink Emporium: eating chocolate
biscuits, which he washed down with a Fanta, skin-bag at his feet.

Sister Brigitte was as unhappy with the cows as she had been with his scent. When he came out in the mornings to visit Angélique
so she could help him with his leg, Brigitte told him they could stay until he left. But she also made it clear, eyes tearing
all the while, that it should not become a habit. “What if everybody did it? Eh?” she’d tell him, finger wagging at the sky
as if a herd of cloudy cattle lived there, dying, simply dying, to taste the clinic’s grass. Sarie had made fun of her, poking
with her finger at the air, and plump Amélie had slapped her. Three days later, Angélique was gone. The two milk-cows remained.

Amélie insisted that she had seen her go. At night, afraid of the dark toilets, she had stepped outside to pee. “I watched
her slip over the wall,” she said, “with nothing but a penknife and a ten-inch stick of sugarcane held in her two hands.”
The penknife glinted in the moonlight, and the foamy smell of fresh-cut cane came swirling through the grounds.

At the news that Angélique had vanished, Sister Brigitte—aware of Amélie’s propensity for self-important fictions—thought
perhaps that Angélique had simply gone to see a patient in the hills and been detained there overnight. Then, as though it
made any sense at all, as if Angélique were the sort of Sister who would do so—as if such a thing were
simple
—she thought, “She’s simply wandered off.” She sent the gardeners out, and asked the cook to look. To a Jiji man who repaired
shoes in the next town (and who had come in with his nose broken very much in two), Brigitte gave an antique pair of German
boots in exchange for any news. The shoe-man sent Brigitte a thank-you: the boots had sold for a high price, and his nose
was very fine, but he’d sniffed nothing of the Sister. No one else came forward.

The Fathers were called in. Maudlin, they polished off two bottles of good scotch. Not completely without pleasure, they came
up with scenarios. For certain, a misfortune had befallen her. She had been dragged from bed by force. Subjected, even, in
some still-unknown locale, to complicated tortures at the hands of pagan men. From the very start, they suspected the involvement
of a man, or men, dark men with terrible intentions. Failed converts—possessed, as natives were, by devils, maybe—performing
nasty but delicious tortures on a Sister! They did not voice their fears out loud to the Sisters, but Sisters, too, have rich
imaginations. They feared the very worst.

On the quiet clinic grounds, the russet cows consumed the grass, and everything went brown. Sister Amélie, the first to give
up hope of a fantastical return—she’d seen Angélique heave off herself, she knew it was for real—assigned a local boy to graze
them. With Brigitte’s grudging approval, she ordered the milk sold. Clothilde, who had enjoyed access to cream, came around
soon after, and she and Amélie put their heads (and two and three) together. Double chin aquiver, Clothilde announced, “He’s
taken her just like a cow!” A tear snuck into the crook beside her reddened
nose. Clothilde had turned to Sarie and had held her, had dampened Sarie’s smock. Amélie, counting up the change from that
morning’s sale of milk, nodded and agreed: “A cow!”

They did not consider this: perhaps, perhaps, that Kuria man had made a fair exchange. What if he’d taken her just like a
woman, had been fairer than was due? Who expects two head of cattle for someone taken as a
lover?
But the Sisters didn’t see things in this way.
They
understood the natives, didn’t they? And the Fathers, who wrote books in their spare time, confirmed the local lore: Kuria
men, it is widely known, employ a special paste, which, when rubbed into the forehead of a cow, will give that beast false
memories and a fitful, homesick sense. Thus cursed, to Kuria-land that cow will walk, unaided, undeterred by lack of food
or water or even fear of death. All over the highlands, it was known, beasts had gone unswervingly away, lost to their real
homes until firmly in the keeping of the thief whose paste had marked them. Kuria-cows they never were, but such they helplessly
became. Hadn’t people in Mangombe lost three thousand dizzy head to such a pilgrimage trumped-up?

And so he’d treated Angélique, the saddened Sisters said. Perhaps just beneath the croton tree, so familiar to them all, he
had daubed that charming mole with potent Kuria paste. Oh, there could be no doubt! Possessed, she had scaled the mission
wall and gone to do his bidding. Kuria-woman now, erstwhile Nursing Sister doctored by a patient. She was lost to them already,
on a strange, amazing journey the Sisters could not bring themselves to fathom. She was a warning to them all.

Two months after Angélique had gone, and hope been given up, an American nurse named Betty, from the nearby Baptist Center—a
healthy woman in her fifties, large, white-haired, and pink—brought the Sisters eggs. While Betty rested in the garden
(partly green again, recovered from the cows), Sarie, young, efficient in her way, fastened newly laundered bedsheets to the
clothesline with curved pale wooden pins. Betty said, offhand-but-not-offhand, stretched out in the sun, “This Angélique of
yours.” Sarie, young, was still willing to be led. She looked up with a clothespin clamped between her lips. Sheet in hand,
she waited. “It’s really just too bad.” Sarie didn’t think old Betty sounded sorry.

Betty looked back at her evenly and spoke as though imparting a deep secret: “That’s what happens here,” she said, “when you
take this place to heart.” Betty didn’t move her eyes, though she rolled her shoulders greatly and righted her thick neck
as if preparing for a leap. Her dark eyes narrowed, almost disappeared. Something in the air went cold, a bifurcated breeze
that touched only Sarie’s throat and the plump part of her calf. “Those men. Don’t even think about it, honey. Don’t you let
that happen.”

Sarie hadn’t thought about it, or anything to do with men, ever happening to her. But she missed Angélique, and she did wish,
like the others, that she hadn’t disappeared. Betty was intent, and what she did next shook Sarie. Her eyelids taut and wide,
mouth stiff, Betty raised a plump pink finger to her forehead and ran it horizontally across the furrow in her brow. “That’s
what happened,” Betty said, spreading unseen paste above her eyes, miming the erasure of everything but love for nasty Kuria-men,
long-horned cows, and scrub. “That’s what happened, now.” She rose, and she poked Sarie in the chest. “Look out.” In the dull
gray morning light, Betty’s soft, short hair was whiter than the sheets. Clouds shifted. A thick and gummy stillness replaced
the little breeze. Betty wiped her forehead with a handkerchief, which she then tucked into her bosom. The thing between them
passed. Betty took possession of the basket she had set beside her. She made a show of
wistfulness, shook her head with a tight smile. “That Angélique of yours, my girl. She’s gone and done it now.” This time,
as though to someone else that neither of them saw, Betty said again, “Oh, yes. She’s gone and done it now.”

For a while there were sporadic sightings, each as dreamed-up as the last: a mad white woman dressed in rags, hunting on the
plains, bare-breasted, astride a hot Ankole cow. Or Angélique, sunken, battered, red hair shorn, spotted at the harbor of
busy Vunjamguu, making for Odessa with her passport and the pocket-knife, both nicked, a glazed look in her eyes. Or, milder,
but even more disturbing: Angélique, happily done up in dusty local gear, golden baby or perhaps a red-haired black boy nestling
on her back, purchasing tomatoes at a market north of town—then gone, as local women were.

Eventually, however, the Sisters left off gasping, and, one by one, gave up on the whispers. Brigitte once again denounced
all smells that came from patients as if no one with a dreaded stink had ever passed her way. Clothilde undertook a diet.
Amélie thrilled to selling milk as if she’d brought the cows herself. Thus the Kuria-man was excised from their anguished
hearts, forgotten, and Angélique grew stiff and distant in their minds. She had surely got what she deserved. If they spoke
of her sometimes, they said her name aloud, and even with distaste, but with no hint of sorrow. The Sisters had been healed.
They couldn’t know what had really happened, nor would they ever learn. And, besides, far more serious than perversion, scandal,
or abduction, even pure desire or unsurpassed affection discovered where one least hopes to find it, there also was a War
on: Europe, battles bulging, camps and bloated trains. Other things to think of.