The Gloaming (8 page)

Guilt, he said, is seldom felt by the guilty.

 

I found an empty cup in the kitchen sink. I had not put it there. It seemed oddly emboldened. Proud cup looking up at me with its remnant puddle of coffee. Black, no sugar. I placed the cup on the table. I supposed I should be frightened. Someone had been here.

Down the stairs, I knocked on the Gassners' door. Mrs Gassner opened it a fraction, keeping the chain on the latch as if to suggest she feared for her life. ‘
Kindermörderin
,' she hissed and slammed it shut. The word was everywhere, now, whispered like a mantra in the grocery store, the chemist, as I walked down the street. I was no longer sure if it was being uttered or if I was simply hearing it in expectation.

Kindermörderin
.

‘Mrs Gassner,' I said through the door. ‘Do you know who has been in my apartment?'

There was no answer.

I knocked again, even louder, and tried my bad German. ‘I know someone was there.
Haben Sie die reingelassen?'
Just in case I'd said it wrong, I added, ‘Did you give them a key? That's against the law.'

She responded only by turning up the volume on the TV.

I raised my voice. ‘I'm going to call the police.'

This was an empty threat. Because of course the phone was disconnected. And I had taken no measure toward its reconnection. There was no one to use it. The unpaid bill was still in my handbag.
MAHNUNG
!

I walked down the road to a phone box. In Switzerland, public phones still exist and they always work. I called Tom's mobile. Elise answered.

‘How are you?' she asked. ‘Poor thing. We've been so worried.'

We. That stubborn burr of a word. I contained myself, ‘Is Tom there?'

‘Oh honey bunny,' she murmured to a small squeal in the background. ‘That's my little plumpkin, oh, yes, my baby boy baby Mummy's boy boy-joy.' Then to me, adjusting her vocal dial from saccharine to smug: ‘Let me get Daddy for you.'

In the pause that followed I suddenly remembered myself with my leg up on the bathroom vanity as I slipped in my diaphragm. This act of preparation aroused Tom; he always watched, saying, ‘Pilgrim, Pilgrim.'

Now, he came on the line and said my name. ‘Pilgrim.' There was no difference in his voice.

‘Were you here?' I tried to find my neutral tone.

‘Here? Where?'

‘Here in the flat in Arnau. This morning.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Was Elise here?'

There was a pause, a patient sigh, ‘This is about Elise, then. Why on earth would Elise have gone to Arnau?'

Why on earth. I wanted to take the phone and smash it again and again against the metal hull of the phone box until it broke.

Even though he couldn't see me, he said, ‘You need to get a hold of yourself, Pilgrim.'

I hung up and began to walk home.

Why on earth
.

A car drove past and a young man honked, yelled
Mördende Hure
.

In my kitchen, I picked up the cup with a pair of cooking tongs. I had the idea that I could call the police and have it fingerprinted—that sympathetic Sergeant Caspary. But my next thought was how I might seem to her: in the wake of the tragic incident I was concerned about a mysterious coffee cup in my sink. And I'd already proven the faultiness of my memory. She'd wonder if I'd drunk the coffee myself and forgotten about it, the way I forgot to pay the phone bill. Forgot killing three children.

Killing three children.

The words made no impression. Should I carve them into my arm with a knife?

Sergeant Caspary would be sitting there, a frown afflicting her face. ‘The cup is yours but the coffee isn't?'

‘I don't drink coffee,' I would insist to her. ‘I don't like coffee.'

How could she be sure I was telling the truth? There was coffee in the cupboard. A cup with coffee in the sink. No evidence of a break-in, nothing taken. She might conclude I was a fantasist or a liar.

And even though I
knew
I was neither, I felt a tearing, a leaking: if my memory was so unreliable, so ready to malfunction—e.g. the forgotten death of three children, the phone bill—then what else had I forgotten? Or simply misremembered?

I could count on nothing. Had Tom and I lain upon the land? Had he said, ‘This is our land now'? Had we even been married? No physical trace of him remained in the flat, there was no ring upon my finger. Even photographs; there'd been so few, and these were packed away on Rue Saint-Léger. I had no proof of a twelve-year marriage, other than my impression of it.

Had I made myself a cup of coffee? Did I like coffee?

Facts slipped from my hands, swam away like eels.

But I took hold of the cup. The cool curve of the ceramic surface, the neat arch of the handle, its whiteness. And inside, yes, the unmistakable coffee dregs that I had not made.

 

I haven't seen Dorothea for several days. The clinic has been closed. I ask Gladness to show me where she lives. She calls Samwelli and he nods at me. ‘
Njo, njo
.' Come, come. I follow him out the back door and down a narrow alley between houses. These are mud and wattle with rough thatch roofs. He turns corners, but I'm able to keep a sense of where I am, for I can see the main road through gaps, and the roundabout with goats standing in the dry fountain.

Dorothea's house is a real house: made from breeze-blocks with a tin roof and neat gutters connecting to a black plastic cistern. The door is painted the same pretty pale blue as the cross on the clinic door. Brown chickens peck at the ground. This has been swept to hard dirt, clean as a floor.

The door opens and Dorothea peers out. Her hair is undone completely, an afro arcing round her face. She is wearing pink Winnie-the-Pooh pyjamas. I think they were probably intended for a child.

She smiles in a small way, ‘Friend, you have come to visit me. Come, come inside, yes.' She says something to Samwelli, finds cash in her handbag and sends Samwelli off. He comes back shortly with Cokes and sweet sponge cakes. This country runs on sugar.

The main room is packed with furniture, all of it backed against the wall, nothing placed at an angle. The positioning reminds me of my room at the Goodnight; and how, if I move the chair to a 45-degree angle, Gladness returns it to its original position, so it stands to attention, like a soldier, flush to the wall.

Dorothea has several large, heavily varnished cabinets which glower over the room. They are so big that there is barely a passage between them and the coffee table. The cabinet tops sprout vases of plastic flowers, teddy bears and other stuffed animals, a ceramic Jesus statue and a set of praying hands. The sofa and two armchairs are faux velvet, pale gray, decorated with electric-green crocheted doilies and antimacassars.

‘Sit, sit,' Dorothea directs, taking out the cakes and opening the Cokes.

‘I'm not disturbing you?'

She smiles, ‘No, not you, I am glad you came, you are my good friend.'

‘I thought you might be upset about the other day.'

‘Me? Oh, I am fine. Sure. Fine, fine.'

‘The way that woman died. I keep thinking about it.'

‘It is why these people believe in the
mganga
. Because I cannot help.'

‘But they also believe in you. They brought her to you.'

‘Therefore it is worse when I fail. And I cannot help because I have no car, no radio, nothing, just a white coat.' She gives me a practical smile and pushes the cakes toward me. ‘You still have the box with those terrible things?'

‘Yes.'

‘You know, at first I was very afraid. I thought it was for me. From my husband,' she says. ‘Isaac is really full of such hate.'

Dorothea takes a dainty bite of her cake. ‘I left him. He was always going with other women, even with prostitutes. So I took the boys to live with me. We were in Dar es Salaam. He was so angry. He wanted to kill me. But he did something worse.'

She gets up, and as she unlocks one of the cabinets I feel a sense of intense alarm. What will she show me? What product of hate? Will its toes be smashed, its severed ears wrapped in newspaper? Will it be in a report?
Atrocity
. But instead she brings out a framed photograph of two boys. The picture is staged with the hokey, drab background of a studio and stiff performance smiles.

‘My boys,' she says. ‘My lovely boys. That is Luke, the big one. He is seven. And Ezekiel, the young one, the baby. He is five.'

Bright faces, earnest smiles: they wanted to please the photographer. ‘They are very handsome.'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘But this is an old picture.'

Again, the alarm sounds. What did Isaac do to them?

Dorothea takes the picture for herself and touches their faces with her fingertips. ‘Isaac took them, he took them from me. To Kenya, to his tribal place. He is Luo, from north of here, maybe three hundred miles. I don't know the village. Isn't that strange? We were married and I never knew the name of his birth village.'

How easy it would be to nod and smile in agreement. What we don't know, what we never ask, what seems un-important. Instead, I say, ‘Why did he do that?'

‘Because he could.' Dorothea frowns. ‘And then he laughed. Isaac called me on the phone and he laughed at me.'

Ha ha ha. He must have known the pain he was causing her. And he found this amusing. Had he always been this way and she'd just never seen deep enough? There, in his spine, in his sinews, in the liquid dark of his body, such deception and brutality.

We
. A little echo:
We don't want children. We will build a house together. We are happy. We we we we all the way home
.

‘I told you I came here to help the peasants. But it's not true. Not completely. Because here is close to Kenya. My best opportunity to be close to them.' Pressing the photo to her chest, she says, ‘It is sentimental, of course. But I feel here we are having the same storms, the same rain or heat, and even this small connection I hold tightly.'

She puts the picture back, locks the cabinet door. She keeps the key around her neck. ‘My boys, I knew their smell. Luke was different to Ezekiel. I could tell them apart in the dark, even when they were sleeping tangled together. I could move close and say, “Ah, this is Luke's hand. This is Ezekiel's shoulder.”

‘After they were gone, for many weeks after, I had a fever, I was shaking. I thought it was malaria. But the test said negative. I think now I was like an addict and my whole body was reacting. Every cell was shouting, “Where are the boys? Where are my boys? Where is their smell, their touch, the weight of them?”

‘When that bad
uchawi
arrived I thought it was Isaac. But I discussed this with Kessy. I find it is important to think of the mind of a man because it is not the same as the mind of a woman.'

‘And what does Kessy think?'

‘That it is too much. Too much hate for a man who has already won. And you know, such a terrible curse is very expensive, a lot of money. Isaac likes his nice clothes and his shoes from Nigeria. Kessy is right, he wouldn't spend the money on me.'

‘How much to buy such a curse?' Twenty thousand dollars, I think, thirty.

‘Kessy says one thousand dollars,' Dorothea says. I hear Martin laughing, ha ha ha.

‘But that's not much money, Dorothea, a person died.'

She puts her head to the side, smiles patiently, ‘Friend, in this country you can pay someone ten dollars and they will go out and kill whoever you say. But Isaac would not even spend ten dollars on me.'

‘Then who is the box for?'

Dorothea waves a hand, ‘Someone in the village. It is probably a problem with land among relatives. Who can know what is going on out there?'

‘What should I do with it?'

‘Who is making their food?' Dorothea says, I think with purposeful incongruity. The box still frightens her. ‘Who is cleaning their clothes? When they cry, who is there to hold them? I try many times to write to my ex-husband, to say, “Isaac, let us be reasonable. Let us think of the boys.” But he enjoys his hate for me.'

‘But you are their mother,' I say. ‘You have a right to see them.'

She waves her hand. ‘They are their father's children, they are Kenyan. He has taken them legally. He has the right.'

For a long moment she looks out the window, seeing the same light as three hundred miles north. Then in a rush: ‘The box, those things. As long as they are here my babies cannot return to me.'

She sees that I don't understand. She takes my hand, looks into my eyes. ‘You are a
mzungu
. You see only this world. But there is another. Please do not think I am an ignorant African. I believe in God. But there is a place where many strange things happen. People can change into animals or other people. There are ghosts and spirits.
Uchawi
is as real as water or earth. And the power of this curse, it is a shadow, and we are all in the shadow. You see, this is why that woman and her baby died. We are in the shadow.'

‘I don't believe in God, Dorothea.' But even as I say this I remember the feeling of death in the clinic. The fluttering.

She nods. ‘Of course, your argument will be very logical.'

I almost smile at the idea that anything out of my head or mouth might be logical. Tom believed my atheism was an affectation intended to annoy him, there was nothing logical about it. He suspected it was a reaction to my parents' spiritualism. Their earthship in the Mojave is filled with Buddhas and various Hindu gods and santos from Mexico. They appreciate the method of worship as a mechanism for connection to an unknowable, eternal Energy. ‘
Chakras?'
Tom muttered when he met them, when my mother insisted on going about naked and my father smoked his bong and said Tom's sacral and heart chakras were blocked. He couldn't wait to get away from the incense. Neither could I.