The Blue Taxi (35 page)

When she went to Kudra House, without or with her child, Sarie didn’t say to Gilbert any longer that she was going for a visit
to the father of the boy who’d lost a leg to the big bus. She allowed Gilbert to think she had moved on to other things for
which he would have felt, she thought, his habitual disdain. She said vague words to him, about the British Council, about
getting books for Agatha, even about nonexistent teas with Mrs. Hazel’s friends. She mentioned baskets now and then, and soapstone
men and frogs, and Gilbert would look up from his books and smile pleasantly at her, as though she’d been particularly clever.
“We’ll see,” he’d say, and reach out for her hand. He had by now understood that Sarie did have an idea, that it had to do
with trinkets. But he didn’t take it seriously. He’d show her what ideas were, he thought, when the thing had come out right.
It amused him, charmed him, that she thought she could help. It
moved
Gilbert, in fact, and made him all the more determined to do well, to show her that she needn’t worry, that she herself need
not make any contributions. His desire to surprise her with a ready-made, impeccable solution that could not fail to charm
and to impress, to bring about relief was firm. He neither disabused her of her vision nor explained the truth to her. How
glad
Sarie would be that she had him to rely on, that he would, at last, take proper care of her.

When Agatha did accompany her mother, she still spent time with Tahir, who was getting better. He talked about the crutches,
which were going to be more suitable, correct, he told her, than the stick Habib had found. He told her how his favorite aunt
came by to make sure he was well; he described for her the way Aunt
Sugra laughed, the little jokes she told, and how she brought him sweetmeats she had made for him herself. Agatha, who didn’t
have relations whom she knew, attempted to describe her father’s old great-uncle James. “He’s been alive for years,” she said.
“He doesn’t bring me things.”

Tahir let Agatha run her hands over his stump. He moved it up and down for her like a lever or the tail on a slow dog. To
the hollow sound of Agatha’s applause, he sometimes took up Habib’s cane—another stump, a hard, curved piece of driftwood,
knob larger than his hands—and, palms fastened to the wall, the bedstead, or the dresser, hobbled round the room. He admitted
now that it did hurt, sometimes, in the empty air where his shin and foot had been. Agatha was glad to know that things you
couldn’t see could harm you. She smacked at the ghost leg to see if Tahir winced. They were finished with the science primer,
which (Tahir with assurance, and Agatha, less skilled, following along) they had read aloud. They had imagined many things:
the known and unknown planets, the peculiar sucking dance of water down northern, southern, and also equatorial drains; and
considered how a rubber ball can both be heavy with inertia and elastic, bouncing more and more. For a while, they had nothing
else to look at, and they talked. In exchange for stories Tahir had heard Sugra tell or had gotten from Maria, Agatha, sitting
at the far end of the bed beside the leg that wasn’t anymore, explained to Tahir what her father did at home.

On a Sunday visit to the book stand, Gilbert learned that the Christian man in the green hat had set a book aside for him.
A blue one called
Shambala
, which set out the history and nature of a kingdom not too far from the sea. “A book that is exactly right for
you! God bless, God bless! In the name of heaven, this I knew that you would like!
Mungu akujali!
” The book vendor was ready, so he said, to sell it very cheaply. But, while a previous Gilbert might have taken pleasure
in the busy man’s attention, he felt, instead, resentful.
Right for me?
How could the man pretend to know the sort of books he liked? He seemed to have decided that Gilbert was one way and only
one just as, Gilbert thought, he was becoming something else.
I’m a different man now
. He’d said, “No!” and had refused to take it home, even for a song.

He’d found a truer thing and purchased it: a sturdy plastic-covered text that promised to inform him of everything a man like
him—an
ordinary
man—should know about the workings of a motorcar. It was a not-too-ancient guide to the mechanics of the engine, a do-it-yourself
manual published in a city called West Lowell, USA. The vendor looked at him, perplexed, but Gilbert only smiled.
Imagine that
, he thought.
It may have been right here for months, and without your new idea, you never would have seen it! Who’ve you been for all this
time, old man? Tell me that, just who?
He’d wished just for a moment that Mrs. Frosty, pretty and admiring, had been there to see him choose. He squared his stoop
and held his head up high. He tipped a nonexistent hat to great old Uncle James and winked at passersby.

Agatha told Tahir that her father had moved his studies (so she called them, and they were) from the parlor to the kitchen
table. There, sweating with the effort—because engines, he was finding, were somewhat different from peoples (though, in a
way, according to this author they had customs and beliefs, apparently, as well)—he read the
Everyman’s Car Handbook
, trying to achieve the same demeanor he had mastered with the other, older books: that
of a knowledgeable reader, cool in his good judgment. It worked. He mimicked that old self so well, in fact, that Sarie didn’t
see what he was reading. Native marriages, she thought. Or farming by the shore. She was annoyed, however, by Gilbert’s recent
habit of sitting in the kitchen, where the light was always good, and where she went to be alone.

“My mother doesn’t like it,” Agatha told Tahir. She reproduced Sarie’s rolling eyes and the shaking of her arms high above
her head to show Tahir how her mother tried to press her father back into the parlor, where, Sarie had said, “a man like you
belongs.”

Gilbert would not have told a soul—not Sarie, and least of all the Frosty King—how different it was to be reading about calipers
and carburetor plates, the resurfacing of flywheels, instead of irrigation, rituals, and kings. To Agatha, he seemed capably
and energetically at work. He frowned and wiped his brow, sometimes nodding in amazement. He examined every picture and, in
pencil, listed all the words he wished to practice and recall.

On Gilbert’s rather fancy pad—which he had purchased at the Government Stationers (once known as V N. Chandra Books but taken
over in the fray)—each leaf of pale, translucent paper showed a light ink drawing of an animal, like a watermark, far away
on the savanna in a soft and subtle brown. Agatha’s father had shown them all to her: giraffe, lion, warthog, waterbuck, and
eland, and a charming, slender, small one, too, that he had called a dik-dik.

When Gilbert showed them to her, Agatha had asked him where “the real ones” could be found. Gilbert had looked up from his
handbook, open to a segment about cylinders, and laughed, relieved he had, for this at least, an answer. “Right here in this
country, silly girl. Where
do
you think we live?” (He did like, sometimes, to talk with Agatha. She made him nervous, as her mother did; but she didn’t
contradict him, didn’t mind his tone. Would only raise
her voice in protest if he was really in the way.) When she had sidled up to him, fingers edging towards the picture as he
wrote, Gilbert had felt uncomfortably aware of the smell that came from her—very different from his, from Sarie’s, very like
a child’s, like milk and like hot sand.

But when she stared at him in answer, he realized that Agatha had no reason at all to know where dik-diks lived. He softened.
She’d never been there, had she? She’d never left the city. The thought made him momentarily ashamed of his own fatherhood:
Have I been good at all?
He didn’t like to think of it, didn’t like to wonder if he had gone about it the wrong way. Where were models, after all?
There were none. Fatherhood and marriage, Gilbert sometimes told himself, were simply states of being, things a man lived
through. There wasn’t any reason to consider such natural conditions as if they were campaigns or things to be assessed. A
person simply
was
. Gilbert tapped his pencil on the page. He didn’t like it when his daughter looked at him so closely, made him feel that
he should say something, that he ought to ask her questions. He frowned and sent her to the courtyard. “Go and play now. Leave
me be.” And Agatha had gone—
glided
, more like, it had almost seemed to him, as though his daughter had no feet. Then he had looked down at the warthog on whose
horn tip he had written the word “idle,” and the warthog made him think.

Once, when he was just beginning and did not have his own desk, Gilbert had been taken to a wild place called Kimbuga by a
traveling Circuit Judge whose regular driver and assistant had with no notice fallen ill. The Judge, a man named Hewett, had
requested a replacement. Gilbert, just a clerk then, taking files from one person to another, had been spotted in the hallway.
The Court Secretary, potbellied, red-faced, ever-present pocket watch dragging down his shirt, had not even blinked. “Take
Turner,” he had
said immediately, and, with two scarlet fingers, flicked a small thing from his chest. “We won’t miss him today.”

Without apology or thanks, Judge Hewett had given him a leather case to hold and, like a chief or king, had preceded Gilbert
down the back steps of the courthouse to the parking lot, not once turning around to make sure he was there. Gilbert had felt
small and even a bit angry. He had blushed, of course he had. But once they’d left the city, were progressing down the bumpy
road, he had felt himself expanding, buffeted by wind.
I’m driving to the regions
, he had thought.
With the Circuit Judge, out into the wild
.

Gilbert balanced the wood pencil with his thumb, closed his eyes and tried to see Kimbuga as it had been that day. With Gilbert
at the wheel of the new Land Rover, the rugged road arattle beneath them as they went, Hewett, as men like him were wont to
do, had told Gilbert of his exploits. The one Gilbert recalled most often was about hunting in the south, how one day near
Twavuma the Circuit Judge had saved a porter boy from being eaten by a leopard. He had waited patiently until the beast was
almost on the child, while all around him natives prayed and howled. “I let him get
this
close,” he said, tapping with a finger on his cheek, just below his eye. “To fool him.” While the boy put up a fuss, Hewett,
knowing what a decent man should do, had pulled the loyal trigger—shot the spotted beast right in its soft neck. Hewett shrugged,
a proud smile at his lips. “That’s how you do it, you know. You wait. I got him in my sights, let the thing get close, and
then I did the job. Just once. Once is all it takes if you know what you’re about. What a pelt he made!”

Gilbert, shaken, asked about the boy. Oh, he’d burst right into tears, of course. Wet himself, the Circuit Judge was sure.
Had wept and hidden in the bushes, shaking like a flag. It had taken three of Hewett’s older lads to calm him down and to
convince the sorry
boy that he had
not at all
been shot and was not close to death. That he was as unmarred as they were and as ebulliently alive as the shattered beast
was not. Hewett’s laugh, too large for the Land Rover, had bounced along the glass and nudged at Gilbert’s legs. “Thought
he’d
been shot, you see. Couldn’t tell the difference between his own self and a damned beast!” Hewett said. “That’s their trouble,
don’t you know. Afs,” he added, “haven’t any nerves.”

While admittedly admiring of the High Court Secretaries and Circuit Judges of the world, Gilbert had experienced an uncomfortable
and unexpected solidarity with that weeping porter boy. Did he himself not often feel mistreated? Indeed, it had occurred
to Gilbert then that, just as
he
was, Africans were neglected rather often, too. Shuddering, he tried to picture himself in a helmet, sweating, his exposed
skin swarmed by mosquitoes, tsetse flies, and gnats, holding to a leather case for a superior, interrupted by a leopard. Would
he not have—also weeping—run?

He had parked the car beside a thorn tree. He hadn’t felt an intimate affection for the vehicle that day, nothing more than
pleasure in the drive; but now that he was on his way to starting up a business that would keep such old things fresh, Gilbert
thought about the Land Rover’s square bulk with the giddiness and thrill of the professional car man he now was, every day,
becoming. He dropped the pencil on the table in approval and rocked back in his chair: That Rover.
Brave old thing!
he thought.

He’d followed Hewett to the tiny district courthouse, where, so it seemed to him, not much was going on. In the veld beyond
the whitewashed compound, Gilbert caught a glimpse of motion and had himself gone still: his arm hairs rose and prickled,
his ankles turned to ice.
Leopards
, he was thinking. But the movements, once Gilbert could bear to look again, more closely, had been rich and
dappled; not threatening, but calm. Giraffes, a pair of them, on the horizon. Nice-looking, ambling things. So slow.

Hewett, who had marched ahead, as was his privilege, finally turned around and called for Gilbert to catch up. “Come on, then,
Turner. Never seen a ’raffe before? They’re the women of the wild, old man. Just waiting for a heart attack, they are, no
pump or muscle in ’em. Bear up! We haven’t got all day.” Gilbert pulled himself from them just as a human woman in dark cloths
emerged from the small courthouse and curtsied. He remembered that efficient bobbing of her knees very clearly, too. Practiced,
elegant, discreet.
Giraffelike
, he had thought. She had straightened herself up, and then she’d stood there, watching.

Hewett’s voice had torn right through the air. Pushing on, he said, “Bagged a pair last year.” His boots made bulky sounds
on the stony, still-damp earth. “Heads mounted on the wall.” Hewett gave Gilbert a very manly grin. “I like to tell my missus
if she gets too smart with me, I’ll put her up beside them. Have you a wife yet, Turner?” Gilbert hadn’t answered. When they
reached the courthouse patio, the woman made a sound and slipped into the shadows. Hewett pulled his case from Gilbert’s hands
without so much as a thank-you and made him wait at the reception while, in a room Gilbert didn’t see, he and a respected
colleague set an urgent matter right.