The Blue Taxi (29 page)

Thirteen

S
arie woke up with a start, as though her heart had skipped. Inside her, locked tight in her chest, the warm red shape at work
reminded her of Majid. Outside her, Gilbert slept. She nudged the pillow up to hide his head from view. He felt her move and
sighed. Against her husband’s flank, the mirror (already aglow with city light), the heavy dresser, and the door, Sarie closed
her eyes and thought about her lover: a poet, a man with serious wounds, kissing her at last! Though she tried to feel again
as she had with Majid’s lips upon her, and as she had before she woke—tried remembering the hot point of his tongue—she could
not manage it completely. Could not see him, quite. Something in her, Sarie thought, had shifted, and she was not certain
what. Slow, perplexed, aiming with her stretching to put herself in order, Sarie stiffened all her toes and cracked her neck
into the pillow. Between what went on outside of her, at the surface of her skin, and what sat immobile, locked away inside
of her, she discovered a new gap. As though those limbs she felt, spreading from her joints—hers, of course, not anybody else’s—were
a little foreign to her. As she brought her hands up to her face and touched her own warm cheeks, ran her fingers through
her matted hair, she had, throughout, the odd impression that she was being touched by someone other than herself. As though,
indeed, there were two Saries, not one.

And, somehow, it was true. From that morning on—perhaps presaged by Uncle James’s letter, or by Hazel Towson’s visit, when
she had laughed so hard, or by the new idea that had come, or perhaps it didn’t matter what or when—from that morning on,
Sarie occupied two times, two separate dimensions, as if she had two lives: one that bloomed in darkness, in a secret, thrilling
present teetering on the lost edge of the past; and one that begged for light, that gestured, urgent, from a summoning future.
In the present, which filled her from the inside, there was Kudra House with its swollen, stolen hours, the fluttering on
Majid Ghulam’s bed, a sharp and visceral excitement, a man for whom she was—she knew it—extraordinary, new. And in the other
life, the one she felt outside her, there stood another Sarie, palms damp but future-bound, prepared to make an entrance.
Change
, she thought. A business. Ideas to be had. The present stood for Majid. And the future? Well, Sarie wasn’t sure.

Could these worlds, this present and the not-yet-given future, move along together?
Could they?
This was the hard thing, the perilous confusion: as certainly as she had felt she should attend to little Tahir when he fell
down in the road, Sarie felt required—but by two things, not one: by her present lover, what it meant to be held tightly by
a man, and also by Great-Uncle James’s push. Each needed all of her attention, all her energy and care. At once. There was
no other way. How was she to do it? Not to anything specific, but to it all, whatever it would be,
D’accord
, she thought, agreed. She’d be doubled if she must. She’d juggle and not fall.
I am a brave woman
, Sarie thought.
I am very strong
. And appearing single and contained, though inside she was split, she got up out of bed.

Finding water in the pipes, Sarie filled up all their buckets and put the kettle on. As she moved, despite the many different
forces she felt welling up inside and around her, she noted that her muscles functioned well. But she overfilled the buckets,
spilled water on the floor. Bending with a cloth, she thought,
C’est ça. Je suis distraite
,
distracted
. And she found that this was strange: what, since marrying Gilbert Turner and agreeing to
this
life, to moving to
this
flat, to mothering
that
child, had there ever been that could
distract
her? So many things at once! Sarie laughed out loud. The sound of her own voice, thankfully unchanged, had a steadying effect.

Looking out the window, she pushed the slats of glass apart to let in a little air. Through the gum and grime, she saw the
street fill up. A well-dressed man holding a clean but battered briefcase paused to check his watch. Moved on. A drunkard
with long locks and short pants teetered at the curb. A litter-woman stooped to poke a cardboard square. A watchman called
a coffee salesman to his perch along a wall and drank three cups in a row. She heard engines come to life. So much, inside
and out! She felt for a moment overwhelmed, and the quality of that emotion, the very fullness of it, made Sarie feel—let’s
say it—young, and also ripe, brimming with potential, ready to be plucked. And had she not
been
plucked? Had she not already undertaken something unexpected? Taken on a lover? Had Uncle James not suddenly provoked Gilbert
into action, and her, too? Had Hazel Towson not surmised the unlikeliest of things? Oh, there
was
a tingling in her. Anything could happen. Looking at the street, which was filling, too, with sunlight, Sarie felt, tinily
at first, but soon with greater certainty, a desire to go out. To be out there and to walk, and walk and walk and
think
. She remembered her idea, fixed her mind to it. The
souvenirs!
she almost said out loud.
I’ll think about just that
.

Should she tell Gilbert her plan before leaving the flat? Was it still a good idea? How prescient she had felt the day before,
how clearly she had seen it. She’d felt it with an unmatched absoluteness while Gilbert was asleep. Would she be as certain
once he was awake? How would he react? Was she ready to divulge it?
No
, she thought.
I’ll keep it quiet for a day. I will think the new thing through
.
She would take a walk with Agatha, stretch her stranger’s arms and legs, and
ponder
. She buttered bread for Gilbert and covered up the plate with a warped round wire net. In the bedroom, where her husband
snored alone, she put on a pink dress. With a rubber band and pencil, she fixed her hair a bun. She stepped into her daughter’s
room to wake her. “Come on,” she said, “we’re going for a walk.”

At Mbuyu Mmoja Park, soothsayers in dozens had set up all their wares. Maasai ladies seated on the ground waved cardboard
sheets over special roots and powders, to keep the flies away. Shambaa men in kanzu gowns sat on metal buckets or on logs
behind their wooden tables, cloudy bottles in long rows like dominoes before them. Island boys on bicycles with coolers offered
Popsicles and water. At all edges of the park, buses stopped, and started.

Sarie walked with new assurance, yellow purse swinging in the air. Beside her, Agatha swung her arms to match. Sporadically
she kicked at things—pebbles, bits of leather—but didn’t say a word. Sarie was relieved; how easily, how kindly, Agatha went
along with her whenever she went out.
A good child
, Sarie thought. She patted Agatha’s shoulder and surveyed the world around her; it felt oddly open, large. She stopped before
a small display of woven baskets and wooden spoons in pairs.
A sign
, she thought. She bit down on her lip, said, “Hmm,” and ably repulsed the wrinkled man who lifted those wares towards her.
A little farther on, another man, in natty pants, transformed guavas into neckties and pulled watches out of mangoes. A squatting
youth sold goatskin seats and pale long-handled knives. Sarie looked at everything.

They walked right through a game of football played by quick boys with a fat ball made of twine on a torn and pitted field.
At the grounds of Emmanuel Revival, wall posters depicted a pink and
piglike man with too much orange hair; beneath his face, the caption:
Brother Ewald Matting Sheds His Light and Heals! Come All and Be Saved!
Agatha raised her arm to point, and Sarie absently reminded her that pointing was for apes.

They let the park recede, Agatha tripping now and then on her own feet, and Sarie feeling proud. They passed but did not stop
before several city landmarks: the Cooperatives Association, the local Library (which they did not frequent), the House for
State Statistics, and the New People’s Museum. They crossed another road, from which Sarie could make out in the distance
the weed-filled, rubbled graveyard that held the dust of British men who’d fought in several Wars. The busy central part of
Vunjamguu receded, and they found themselves not far from the old Yacht Club, before the Gymkhana, where, many years before,
an animated Sarie had spilled tea on her shoes.

Beneath a crimson frangipani, a peacock tottered on the rudder of its tail. Agatha stood still and memorized him, in order
to tell Tahir. In the distance, past a low white house with a fresh veranda painted red, in a far-off world that, light and
flat, was enveloped in a haze, Agatha and Sarie saw a horse, and Sarie paused a moment so that Agatha could watch. While Agatha
took mental notes (brown with a white spot, small man on its back, waving a long stick), soft, distinguished laughter burst
out from the house, and Sarie pictured for a moment British knives and forks aclatter on pretty Scottish plates.

As they stood, a Fiat rolled into the driveway just behind them, scattering white stones. Sarie didn’t wait to see what kind
of people would get out, who was heading in. She pushed Agatha ahead. Behind them, great skirts rustled softly, and well-oiled
car doors slammed. At the overgrown Botanical Gardens (no longer as well managed, as botanical, as they’d once been), Agatha
finally got
tired, asked where they were going. Sarie hadn’t known, not really. But when Agatha posed the question and Sarie looked around
her, she saw their steps had not been aimless. She’d been guided by an intellect wiser than her own.
Forcément
. She perceived their coordinates exactly.
Of course. That’s where I must go
. This time Sarie raised her hand and pointed, straight ahead. “There,” she said. “That’s it.” The Mountain Top Hotel.

In Gilbert’s early days, the Mountain Top Hotel had been among the gracious hubs of European life: explorers (real ones, not
like Uncle James’s vision of his nephew), politicians, planters, airmen, colonels, and their ladies (some quite modest and
some painted, others more like men) had convened there on the weekends after lunch at the Marina Gilbert mourned. Settlers
from the hills, officers fresh from the hinterland, had rented rooms, where they would sleep beneath cool fans and eat familiar
breakfasts brought to them without a sound by chambermaids and waiters so endearing and so dutiful that they were never seen.
From the Mountain Top Hotel, important people, royalty, had made off for safaris with delicious picnic lunches packed by unseen
cooks. Others, more ambitious, had scaled enormous mountains and flown champagne to the peak. They’d photographed it all:
their black-and-white mementos had once lined the hotel walls.

After Independence, the place had been transformed. What had once been just three stories high, in coral rag and timber web,
had burst up from the ground renewed—an imposing concrete block, fourteen floors that overlooked the sea. Built with Chinese
and German money, it had swelled into an edifice, a monument to freedom. Along the roof, the hotel’s name appeared in thick
black
letters more than ten feet high. On some nights, the neon outline of a mountain’s snowy crest flashed red, then gold, then
green.

It also had, these days, a different clientele. Socialists in suits discussed redistribution and the need for people’s power
with high-ranking members of the Cabinet. Thinkers—historians and economists—were invited to expound progressive theories
over filling five-course meals. Southern revolutionaries, outlawed in their homes, held conferences in the twelfth-floor meeting
rooms and wrote things down in code.

The photographs of British mountaineers and ladies in broad hats had been replaced by portraits of good men—one of whom, headed
for another mountaintop, had not so long ago been killed in Memphis, U.S.A., and others who, fists raised to the sky, had
risked everything they had for goodness in the future. The chambermaids and waiters had stayed on, but they had been infused
with nervy brightness, a visibility that scared off many of the ex-colonials who had moved to Scallop Bay: these domestics
spoke, and freely.

It was thus, in some important ways, much more glamorous than it had ever been. Downstairs there was a restaurant, open to
the public, in which people of all kinds were permitted to associate and where soft drinks were sold, as well as cornmeal
pap, poppy cake, and cheese. Daring women from the British Council sometimes went, to say they’d seen the world. A swimming
pool somewhere, concealed by a high regiment of upright ashok trees; inside, with a high view of the ocean, for hotel guests
alone, a well-stocked, glinting bar.

Sarie had not been inside the Mountain Top Hotel in years. But she knew that crafts were sold there. All the real hotels had
gift shops, and that’s where she would go. She would get a feeling for the kinds of goods that she and Gilbert might explore.
How
intrepid Sarie felt! Investigative and efficient. She pulled Agatha along, and, dismissing the two doormen (who had seen them
coming, who had already raised their caps), they spun together through the Mountain Top’s one revolving door. Walking tall,
Sarie pretended not to see the guests: African dignitaries in starched dark green or rosy suits, bright pens winking at their
pockets as they made toasts by the window; some European ladies from abroad in fashionable soft dresses sipping tea on leather
sofas beneath a few remaining posters of rhinos and giraffes; a big white man in creased safari gear—that Mr. Remington, perhaps.
They walked right by the bellboy (a man, really, an old, gray man in a red fez, back straight as a pole). They walked right
past them all,
As if
, thought Sarie proudly,
we were going to a room
.