The Blue Taxi (26 page)

While Gilbert softened on the bed and the sound of rain grew large, Sarie started thinking. She was not pregnant with a baby,
no, but she did feel something growing. Was there not a small thing, an unknown, at work now in their lives? Something that
might cause—who knew—a satisfying swell? New life? Certainly the recent feelings she had had, that all kinds of things were
possible, had to do with Mr. Jeevanjee, with going out into the world. But what if they also had to do, as in an aftershock
or echo, with surly Uncle James? She thought about her life. What a wild conjunction of events! There might be love, and money,
too! They
would
soon be making money, Sarie thought, because they had no choice. The urgency of it, while she sat comfortable in the bedroom,
thrilled her.

She let her mind move from one thing to another as Gilbert’s limbs went still: Majid Ghulam, who had whispered in her ear,
who had pronounced her name as though it were that of a country; the aerogramme with its invigorating dare; horrid Mrs. Hazel;
Gilbert’s new excitement! She couldn’t think about everything at once. So very much had happened! She’d focus on the business
first, and then, and then, she’d stop and close her eyes and think about the way that Mr. Jeevanjee had held her shoulders
still as he pushed himself inside her, and how the world had spun.

First things first. A business. The Turners needed an idea. And could she not, if asked, be brimming with ideas? What if she
came up with something? What if she showed Gilbert that she could think as well as he believed he could? Hadn’t she been fine,
succeeded with the Jeevanjees? Taken a hard thing upon herself? Been faced with a hurt boy, assisted him, then later marched
down to the clinic and discovered where he lived? Had she not changed the texture of her days with a little bit of verve,
some action? She’d show Gilbert, Sarie thought. She would make her value known. Oh, yes, she would think of something.

What might the Turners do? At first, eyes closed, to get warmed up, she tried imagining lighthearted, decorative things. She
giggled. What about… what about… ladies’ gowns made out of ribbon, which (thanks to Amélie) she knew how to stitch? She had
made a blue one once, which as it happened she’d put on the first evening that Gilbert and his Magistrate had spent at the
Jilima Mission. What better to get Gilbert and herself firmly out of danger than the very type of dress she had been wearing
when he’d been smitten by her youth? Sarie yawned, cracked her neck and hands. She looked down at sleeping Gilbert.
Non, non, c’est bête
, she thought. A silly, funny thought. Who, in these great times, had the cash to spare for something so adorable and frivolous
as a whole gown made of ribbon? The business must move capital, and lots of it to boot. Offer people what they could afford,
something that they needed. She gave up on the ribbons. She bit down on her lip and tatted idly at the covers. What else might
they do? A restaurant, perhaps? Waffles, which, as she had heard but could not remember seeing, people ate in Belgium? No,
no, Sarie was no cook. The very notion tired her, made her want to bathe. And who wanted waffles here? She closed her eyes
and waited.

A business. Uncle James was requesting something large. Did he
have any idea, any clue at all, about how things really were? There was no real business to speak of, not for ordinary people,
what with high-minded officials declaring left and right that business was unpatriotic and only for the few. The Frosty-Kreem
and Hisham’s Food and Drink, thought Sarie, had been permitted to remain, but with a lot of dealing. Perhaps even Hisham’s,
like the shops on Urasimu Road, was not owned any longer by those who had put it into place; shop doors were government property
now, required friends up high. A business in a shop! No, it would not be possible, thought Sarie, to acquire all the permits,
to sneak and slide beneath the eyes of officers and Ministers and spokespeople and spies. They could not have a storefront.
And Gilbert, Sarie thought, this time without any satisfaction, Gilbert was a nobody.
Mrs. Hazel’s right. Poor Gilbert
, Sarie thought.
Without me he is lost
. She would have to think of it herself. But what was the perfect thing?

While Gilbert set to snoring and the evening sky spread out, Sarie’s real idea came, and when it did, it took hold with the
clarity of answers on a math test, with the stillness of a mountain range revealed by shifting clouds. It was a floodlight
in her brain. And once Sarie had had it, she was on her way. In the deepest recess of her chest, in the lining of her stomach,
Sarie knew what they would do.
If I’m worth anything, du tout, this is what we shall make. Of course
, she thought,
bien sûr!
Without pausing to shake Gilbert and alert him to her brilliance, or even let him in on the ground floor, to say, “My dear,
what do you think of that?” Sarie took a mental step that she would later find rather tricky to undo. She understood that
native crafts would save them.

C’est ça
, she almost said aloud.
Nous vendrons les souvenirs. For people unlike us who have great things to remember
. Surely now in England there were proud, imperial dreamers crippled with nostalgia who would give up all their teeth and
more for a Makonde
statuette, or a basket from the Lakes? All those men who’d eaten at the clubhouse, who’d hosted garden parties and taken long
safaris with their wives to snap pictures of the hippos? The men Gilbert had been certain smelled of History and more? Wouldn’t
they like a reminder? So many of them had run off in a hurry, giving all their clothes away, selling furniture for songs.
They will like
, thought Sarie,
to have some items when they tell their friends the stories. Like the show and tell
. If only they had statuettes, how much more people would listen!

Oh, she could see it clearly—a business for the times. A business that would not require a shop-front or a local clientele.
A business that could sneak and curl and shiver along the tricky mangrove coasts.
What if
, thought Sarie,
we can borrow someone’s ship and do it from Nairobi?
She didn’t worry about details or the fact that they knew no one. She was swept up in her vision. Yes, she could already
see small crates packed tight with dark, emaciated figures, shipped efficiently far northwards, to be bought by portly, eloquent,
discriminating men (like slavery, indeed, she thought with some surprise, but without such blood and terror; a revision, rather,
yes, for better, modern days). She imagined other boxes filled with baskets made of fibrous, tightened stuff that would give
a scent of Africa, for ladies to set out on dining tables, to display their finer fruits; or velvets from Kasai to line a
gracious hall. Perhaps even Uncle James could sell them from his house! Didn’t
he
want souvenirs of things he’d never done?

Sarie almost laughed. Only two days into the news and, already, see how she had solved it. The export of such things would
put her on the move. She might be central to a traffic of this sort, off on journeys to the west, to railway towns and harbors
where artisans might live. She still had contacts, surely—one or two White Fathers or some Jesuits, languishing in ruins.
They’d remember her
and point her in the right direction.
They’d
collected masks. And by now each one of them must have published a great book, a wise compendium of all the local ways. They
must know where the best trinkets were hidden! She thought about Jilima. What if Betty had not returned to Texas, was still
living at the Baptist Mission selling eggs and knitting children’s hats? Sarie even thought she’d like to see Betty most of
all. “I’ve slept with a local man,” she’d say, “but, I think, don’t worry”—she felt the hairs along her scalp each give a
little tremble—“that it might be like love.” Betty would listen in amazement. Then she would talk about it with Clothilde
and Amélie. Sarie would tell them they looked young, and all of them would thank her. She might find news of Angélique, learn
what really happened. She might even find her. They’d have a cup of tea.

Sarie smiled into the room. How different life seemed, after little Tahir’s accident, after those amazing visits to his home,
after holding—oh!—Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, after Uncle James’s letter, even after Mrs. Hazel’s (here she giggled right out
loud, smacked her sleeping husband lightly on the rump) great mistake about what had set to work in Sarie’s nether parts.
She felt, indeed, at the very heart of things. Perceived. She even wished that Uncle James had pushed them like this many
years before.
We could have had ideas from the start! We have been rotting, pourrissant! So lazy. Missing what was just before our eyes
.

In her new excitement, she did very briefly try waking Gilbert up. She pressed her biggest toenail into Gilbert’s sloppy calf
and tapped softly at his shoulder. She tickled Gilbert’s chin with two light fingertips and crooned. But Gilbert only gave
out a great sigh and a wiggle of his feet. If she had woken him just then, let him see the brightness in her eyes, shown him
she was serious, things might have turned out differently. But Sarie let him sleep. And, upon a second thought, she decided
that she wouldn’t tell him right away.
Later, he would see how wise she was. Feeling sure and glad, she thought about her lover.
Perhaps
, she thought,
I will take Majid Ghulam with me to the highlands. We shall together purchase knives
.

What Sarie didn’t know, what she could not expect, was that her familiar Gilbert—soft, a reader, shy, and in general amenable
to her commands when she could not fulfill his—would from his own dreaming pull another Gilbert. From the rhythm of massage,
from the pressing of her fingernails at his yielding flesh, perhaps from his own agitated skin, a little boy in his old head
clambered to an attic, where he found and opened up a box, looked in it, and felt glee. As outside the green rain battered
the flat roofs and chilled the steaming roads, Gilbert, all his knots undone, was changing, and was being given, in a dream,
an idea of his own.

Twelve

B
ibi spent the evening with Issa and Nisreen. They listened to the news from England, and later to the Germans: in Egypt things
were changing, in South Africa they weren’t, and, somewhere on the border, there were more rumbles of War. But the news did
not intrude too much on the loveliness of things. In her hands, the pineapple was growing. The pineapple, thought Bibi, had
been a good idea. She hadn’t done the taxi. Wouldn’t. Even if it
was
a herald, she wasn’t yet prepared to say so openly at home. At the moment she regarded the idea of her prophet-self with
affectionate amusement. Though she had been too shy to take it up, she did feel, at least, that she had weathered that first
dare with grace: “Thought you were a seer, eh? A person who can
know things?
? Well, my dear, stitch
that!
”

She hadn’t, was not strong enough quite yet. But she was happy with her second choice. The pineapple, she told herself, though
likely not a cosmic gift—did not portend a person, for example, giving on the inside and prickly on the out, or a tangy glass
to drink—was just the thing to stitch. It would grant her the appearance of an ordinary woman (no mad lady making cabs) and
also reassure her that, even if she couldn’t tell the future, even if she’d chosen, knowingly, to turn the other way, she
was clever with a needle.

The small pineapple pleased her. She liked the sharp thing’s shape, the way the fruit was jagged, hard, how it was dangerous
from too close up but how from a little distance it could look soft
and round. The pineapple she stitched, in brown and yellow thread from a jersey she’d convinced Mama Moto to give up in exchange
for some old shoes, was ripe, ready to be plucked. A grown thing. But Bibi also liked to think about how such fruits began:
humble nut-sized promises concealed in scarlet folds, held intimate and safe by red and rosy spines.
Like babies
, Bibi thought.

When Bibi thought of babies—which she often did, she really couldn’t help it—she felt happy and then sad, then happy once
again. Such sweetness in considering new life! She thought about the new life
she
had made, her very own success: there he was, strong and stunning Issa, huddled by the radio with a serious look she liked
to think he’d gotten from his mother, the look she’d had as little Kulthum at the Ladies’ Sewing Club, which had so impressed
her teachers.
He’ll always know he came from me
, she thought.
Just look at that nice face
.

As she often did, Bibi found herself recalling Issa’s absent brothers, all dead far too young. Her marriage, her first house,
the troubles with her belly, the secrets she’d uncovered and had shared with cousins and some aunts—those things stayed quite
vague. What she really did remember from those years were the faces of the babies she had lost, and these, like Issa’s, she
was sure, had been just like her own. But tiny, wrinkled. Too young. Fruitlets, quickly gone from her. When she saw her own
reflection in the mirror in her bedroom, Bibi thought about the lost children a lot. She was getting old; her face was getting
smaller. She was shrinking. It was easy thinking those lost sons had looked like her, when she herself was growing smaller
every day.
We’re all babies, in the end
, she thought. The idea made her smile. It also made her eyes tight, brought a perfect kind of sweetness, hovering on tears
but hovering only, because the parlor with her Issa in it and his hardworking Nisreen, and the soft sound of the radio, felt
so comfortable and right. Bibi
let the pineapple slip down onto her lap and stretched her tired fingers. Her hands ached. It would be nice to go to bed.
Oh, but not quite yet, not yet. How lovely evenings were! There was so much to think about at home, when she could bear it,
when she let all the outside news go still, when she forgot about Kikanga—when she remembered exactly where she was, and who
lived right there with her, and who
would
be beside her to the very end.