The Blue Taxi Page 21

  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 wee
kends 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.

  The souvenir shop, which had stayed intact and in place as the hotel was rebuilt (even fired-up reformers pick up trinkets for their children), was not much larger than the Turners’ parlor, but it was stacked and filled to overflowing with exactly what she’d come to see. Moving through the doorway, Sarie coughed. The man who owned the place, sallow, wrinkled in a short-sleeved light brown shirt that did nothing for his arms, looked up and nodded vaguely. In a long, exhausted voice, he said, “When you want to buy, you ask me.” He went back to filling up a scrapbook with interesting stamps.

  Sarie didn’t greet him. There was too much to take in. Her big blue eyes were hungry. Could she see them all? She steadied herself with a hand on a low shelf. Her stomach hurt. Indeed, she felt nearly sick. Here were wooden and carved things from every region in the country, and even from elsewhere. Sarie lurched and shivered. Was this what hovered at her skin and waited to be known? Her eyes adjusted to the light, and in that hazy, variegated shine, Sarie sensed the future.

  The sallow man, she saw, dealt in items of all kinds: not simply statuettes and baskets, but gifts and memorabilia that Sarie, musing in the bedroom, had not yet considered. Bracelets made of jade; soapstone candlesticks and plates; arrows (neatly labeled Poison in typed print); walking sticks in green and scarlet paint; carved, dark busts of grizzled men and those of fresh young girls (men from brow to throat, girls from head to chest); the cured, weird feet of elephants and zebras; studded boxes from the islands; carpets; silver rings expressly left unpolished to seem older than they were; copper armbands from Rhodesia; beaded straps from Swaziland; neck rings from Uganda. Jewelry! she thought. How many, many items she could put into one box if only she thought small. There were also wooden animals in sets, wildebeest and boks of various shapes, lions, hippos, too. Oh! Sarie’s stomach settled.

  While Agatha picked up a giraffe and made it walk along a shelf, Sarie fingered necklaces and jade. She eyed the tiny gems whose blue, she was aware, was precious, mined only in these hills. Yes, she thought. Potential. They would work their way through statuettes and jewelry to stones, once they could afford it. Oh, she would have a lot to say to Gilbert! He would be impressed. She was peering at a case of fine transparent stones, imagining the rare and airy sounds of Gilbert’s admiration, when she had to close her eyes and groan because a real sound had intruded. Oh, would she always be there? Behind her, unmistakable and bright, came Mrs. Hazel’s voice.

  “Sarie, dear! Hoo!” Hazel wore a polyester sundress printed top to bottom with loud deep purple flowers, black belt tight around her. Her lips were painted red. She looked, thought Sarie, shocking. Where were her ordinary clothes? Whenever Hazel showed at the Mchanganyiko flat, she wore white blouses and khaki, long brown skirts, and big, brown, scratched-up shoes. She came dressed like a farmer. Even at the garden parties, Sarie had never before witnessed Hazel in such color. And nevermind in lipstick!

  Sarie was surprised. She felt oddly betrayed. It made Sarie think that Hazel, on her visits to the flat, thought of it as labor, that she intentionally dressed down. And, even more unsettling, that Hazel had, perhaps—though Sarie had the honesty to think, As, moi-même, I do, too—another, secret life that she liked to keep from them. At the Mountain Top Hotel, at the coast resorts, perhaps even in the high-walled homes of Scallop Bay, Hazel Towson bloomed. Sarie had the feeling that, just as she’d been caught by Hazel, Hazel, too, had been uncomfortably revealed. The duplicities abounding made Sarie feel more patient than she would have otherwise. And careful.

  “I was just here having lunch.” Hazel ran her hand across her belly with an appreciative, soft sigh, as if the food inside that gut were made of down feathers and gold. “That cornmeal, and a pretty little stew. Local food, you know.” Sarie thought that she had never seen the woman’s hands so gentle, Mrs. Hazel so beatific, so full and satisfied. Yet wasn’t Hazel Towson hard? Sarie’s knees felt cold. Did everyone have double lives?

  Sarie clutched her purse and nodded. Hazel stepped in close and smiled, peering at her as though through a magnifying lens, as though she, too, had just discovered something. “Then I thought: is it? It can’t be. Not here. Not at the Mountain Top Hotel.” She gestured with her shoulders at the shop, the neat tiles of the lobby, and the buzzing ceiling lights. “But then it was. It was. And look, Sarie!” Hazel patted Sarie’s arm as if to show her what Sarie didn’t know. Looked at her as though she might, one day, right there, ask Sarie to lunch. “I’m right. It’s you, just as I suspected.”

  Sarie blinked at Hazel’s hand. While she didn’t like the word “suspected,” part of her did warm to the appr
oval she could sense in Mrs. Hazel’s voice. And the sound of Yes, it’s you. Hadn’t she been a little less than sure, herself? Yes, yes. It is me, she answered silently. She smiled a little, shy, hoping Mrs. Hazel would not ask too many questions. Hazel Towson was persistent; surely, even softened by a meal and with a gloss on her thin lips, she could still sniff out a secret. While Agatha watched her mother from behind an ebony woman with a basket on her head (taller than she was), Hazel, softening even more, spoke the next thing quietly: “How’s it been, my dear?” She moved her eyes to Sarie’s hips, then back up to her face. “You know.”

  Sarie looked away and almost, almost, blushed. “Oh…” Sane shook her head. “Mrs. Hazel.” Hazel thought that Sarie was finally being prim, patted her to show that she approved. “Nevermind. I’m glad to see you’re better.” Sarie nodded, and, quite truthfully, she said, “Yes. I am. Yes, I really am.”

  She was. She did not know what she would say if Hazel asked her why she’d come across her so far from Kikanga, of all places at the Mountain Top Hotel. But women with a vision often fill things in. Hazel had ideas of her own. “Stones,” she said, “are such a good investment.” In fact, she’d bought stones here for fledgling children, too. Most recently for a grandniece who’d come into the world three months before, in Devon. Although she was thinking, Where on earth will Sarie find the money? she felt called upon to be polite and kind: Sarie did seem to be coming round, at last; and though the rubber band and pencil really wouldn’t do, that pink dress was all right. At least she was exhibiting the right kind of desire. Hazel added, “Small ones can be quite affordable.” She cast a skeptical and knowing eye at the gray man behind the counter. “If you can bargain with them.” The salesman snapped his stamp book shut and frowned. He looked into a drawer. Hazel patted Sarie’s hand. No, it didn’t matter if Sarie Turner had no money for the stones. Desire mattered most.