The Other Language (41 page)

Life/death/life again, but quieter.

It was hard to figure out exactly where they’d fallen (a riverbed, a ravine?) and the position they were in (where was the sky? where the passenger door?), because the car had landed on its side. For a handful of seconds she heard nothing inside the car. Then she felt his hand touch her ankle in the dark.

They whispered, quickly, economically.

Are you okay? Yes, and you? Yes. Good.

He helped her out of the car from the shattered windshield. They eased through the broken glass, nimbly finding their way without getting a single scratch. Outside, there were stars and a sliver of moon peeking from behind the trees. She smelled something green and fresh rising from the broken branches. Eucalyptus.

He took her hand.

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Let’s go then.”

“Go where?”

“To the hospital. It isn’t too far from here. We can walk there. They’ll give us painkillers or something.”

At the time, in the confusion of the moment, it seemed a perfectly logical thing to do, to walk barefoot in the bush (her right shoe was missing) in the middle of the night, leaving the car on its side like a dead elephant in the gully and thinking nothing of it.

“What about animals?” she said.

“What animals?”

“I don’t know. Anything dangerous.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that now.”

He put a finger under her chin and lifted her head just slightly, like one does to a child.

“We’re going to be all right. Just follow me, okay?”

So they climbed out of the canyon and got back onto the road. He took her hand and held it tightly. The gesture startled her. They didn’t talk much, so intent were they to experience the warmth of their hands, finally free to touch. They didn’t seem to be frightened or surprised that they should be alive and unscathed on top of it. More than anything they felt euphoric that they should be together in this predicament.

“It’s a beautiful night,” she said dreamily.

He nodded and gave her a light squeeze on the fingers.

“We are still drunk, right?” she asked.

“We most certainly are.”

The crash had finally splintered all pretense of formality between them, like a bomb annihilating what was left of barriers and trenches, accelerating the process of their coming together. The accident, more than all the alcohol they’d been drinking, had finally earned them an intimacy. After all, their bodies had been rolling together in the air, bouncing and dancing in the front seat in what had felt like slow motion—like bodies of astronauts in space, she thought—and had reemerged from the wreck intact. At this point they both felt they were allowed to be quiet and give a rest to the exhausting flirting they’d been engaged in, up until they had fallen off the road.

“We can take a nap and lie on a bed for a while. We’ll take it from there,” he suggested, as though, after lying in a hospital bed for a few hours, they would be presented with a variety of desirable options they could choose from.

They reached the hospital as the sky was beginning to pale behind the trees.

The small building was an outpost built in the forties by the British for the white farmers and the officers who lived in the Northern District. It was a dainty cottage surrounded by flower beds and herbaceous borders blooming with agapanthus. It looked more like an old English lady’s residence than an emergency room for people shot by Somali
shiftas
or mauled by buffaloes. It sat right outside the northern side of the town and marked the border between two worlds. Anything south of the hospital still maintained a resemblance to civilized life: there were irrigated farmlands, trucks that daily drove pea and flower pickers to the fields or to the greenhouses; there was a bank, a post office, a small supermarket. Even a hairdresser. North of the hospital lay the Great Nothing: an endless desert dotted by thorny acacias
and dust devils, nomads who spoke an incomprehensible clipped language and whose cheeks and foreheads were marked by tribal scars. The electricity line and running water stopped there, the faint phone signal tapered off and vanished a few miles into the arid scrubland.

At the hospital they had been let in by the night watchman, then a sleepy nurse had medicated their superficial cuts and wheeled them into a cozy room, assuming they were a couple. The head nurse, a tall Kikuyu lady with an elaborate braided hairdo, had actually referred to the stranger as “your husband.” Sonia had felt a thrill and didn’t think of correcting the mistake.

Now it was nearly eight in the morning, only a little time left before they’d be pulled apart and sucked back into their respective lives. In a matter of hours, long phone calls and complicated flight arrangements would have to be made, spouses and possibly children might appear to reclaim them.

Sonia glanced around the room. A stack of ancient videos sat next to a TV set, books in leather bindings were lined on a shelf, an old-fashioned cotton print on the curtains (shells? sweet potatoes? UFOs? She couldn’t tell what those funny shapes were) matched the print on the bedspread. He followed her gaze.

“Astonishing decor for a hospital in the middle of nowhere, right?” she said.

He was lying in his cot across from hers in the sunny room with a cut across his nose and a small bandage on his temple. He didn’t say anything, but looked at her long and hard.

“What?” Sonia asked, puzzled.

“We may as well do it,” he said.

Sonia pretended to ignore him, though a rush of blood behind her neck rose slowly, warming up her cranium and her face.

“I see no point in prolonging it anymore, since we’ve done it a hundred times already in our heads,” he said.

She swallowed hard. The blood now was rushing everywhere beneath her bruised skin, from the tips of her fingers to her toes, carrying a scintillating substance that woke up every pore. She had never felt this alert.

“No way. And besides, every bone in my rib cage hurts,” she said, playfully.

“We’ll do it softly,” he said, dead serious.

Sonia raised her eyes to the ceiling and gave no answer.

She wasn’t sure what to do with whatever time they had left, but she wanted to use it in a way that would be long-lasting. Having sex didn’t seem to be the most useful option: it was going to be over and done with too quickly and it would drain all the luminous force they had accumulated during their short life together as a couple. She knew exactly what would happen: they would spend all the energy that had built up in one go and they’d be left with nothing. Despite this sensible argument, all Sonia could think of was his body. His bare legs were muscular and tanned. The shape of his knees was perfect. He had beautiful, strong forearms. She longed to see the rest of him and feel his touch all over her.

The day before, her car had died on her way back from the village school. She had sat staring into the nothingness ahead of her windshield, with the resignation people must acquire when traveling through such remote parts of the world. She had tried to call the rental car office but there was no signal where she was. All she could do was sit and wait for someone to rescue her. It was about four in the afternoon and she figured that if nobody was going to drive by in the next couple of hours she would have to spend the night in the backseat, as it was unlikely that people would travel on that road in the dark. In her canvas bag she had a change of clothes and a warm jacket; she knew well how chilly it could get after dark in the desert. She happened to have a book, a torch,
a half-full bottle of water and some chocolate biscuits she had bought in town on her way up, by habit.

When she was a child, way before cell phones came into the country, her parents were always ready for that kind of emergency when traveling in the bush: they never left home without food, water and a couple of blankets in case the car broke down. She did remember getting stranded a few times, having to spend the night on the backseat next to her little brother, to be rescued at the crack of dawn either by a group of park rangers in their khaki uniforms or by African farmers in a beat-up pickup truck. They would end up squeezing in their rescuers’ vehicle till they reached the next village. These rides always turned out to be cheerful occasions, filled with Swahili banter and laughs, with a stop for
chai
and hot fried
mandazi
as soon as they hit the first tea stall.

After seven years of European life, she found herself smiling at the predicament she’d found herself in. It was a reminder that there were still places in the world where
one could vanish, be lost, be found and rescued by strangers.

She had dozed off only for a few minutes in the driver’s seat when the sound of a running engine approaching behind her startled her. The sun was low, about to set, and the first thing she saw in her rearview mirror were a man’s faded shorts and long legs, unlaced leather boots, an indigo blue shirt. A tap on her window. A mop of unruly hair, shades, a maroon cotton scarf wrapped around his neck.

Yes, she’d had a problem.

No, it wasn’t the battery. Yes, of course she had plenty of gas.