The Blue Taxi Read online

  In the silence that came next, Sarie sensed that Hazel wanted something from her, a reward for being gracious. It was one thing staring Hazel down in the safety of her own apartment on Mchanganyiko Street—but here at the Mountain Top Hotel, where Hazel and not Sarie seemed to be in charge, Sarie felt unsure. “Stones,” she said. “Bien sûr.”

  Hazel nodded, pleased. Maybe it did take something shocking, like a baby at her age, to set Sarie Turner straight. “That’s wonderful.” She was satisfied, for now. So, turning on her heel, she waved. And said, “You will be there on Friday, won’t you? For our meeting, as we said.”

  Relieved that Mrs. Hazel was going on her way, Sarie said yes very quickly. “Absolument. Yes, Mrs. Hazel. Yes, I will be there.” To vaccinate the babies. Indeed, what could be more important? “I will come,” she said. “Yes, yes.” Hazel Towson smiled. They would talk more about the stones in a few days, and of course, disease.

  Sarie, peering out into the parking lot between two shelves of soapstone boxes, the clever lids of which concealed a frog to show a snake, noted with some awe that Hazel Towson climbed into a taxi. She took her daughter’s hand. She was ready to go, too. She’d seen enough to know that she was thinking the right thing. And Mrs. Hazel had confirmed it. What she’d said about the stones, that they were a good investment! That’s what they would do, eventually. Start out with the crafts and end up with the stones. She and Gilbert would do far better in the end than even this shopkeeper had, she thought. Oh, yes, they’d outdo this little shop with exports. She smirked a little, pleasantly. They’d make themselves a fortune. On the way back home, she thought about what she’d say to Gilbert. And how grateful he would be.

  Gilbert was not the sort of man who recalls with any clarity what he has dreamed of in the night. Nor did he put any stock in images that, now and then, inexplicable and strange, did nag him when he had come awake. He’d often claimed, in fact, whenever Sarie talked about the things that came to her in sleep—face creams, porcelain bedpans, spears, or shining pairs of shoes—that he never, ever dreamed; as though the nighttime nothingness he swore by made him wise. In the void of his own sleep, he’d found a kind of pride. His dreams, if one could call them that, came to him during the day, when his faculties were sharp, when he was in control. My little hopes, he called them, as when he told Kazansthakis that he’d like to be in business or wished to spend his old age by the sea. But it hit him as he tied the final shoelace and stood up. Something had come in the night. Something sleek and smooth, disturbing and familiar.

  Unlike Bibi, with her roses, pineapples, and taxis, unlike Majid, with the things he saw in half-light, and also unlike Sarie, who could recount her dreams with a remarkable precision that Gilbert found exhausting, he didn’t quite know what he’d seen. What had come to him as he was bending down, aware of a little itching in his back and a pain along his hip, was more specifically a feeling. Something he’d once known. Or something that would come. Absurd. What kind of thought was that? He jiggled the heels of his hands against his ears to shake it off, cleared his throat, and made his way downstairs.

  In the sandy courtyard that was the stomach of their building sat, as always, the quiet Morris Oxford, shapely, smooth, and still. The damson fruits had left dark marks on the boot, like pepper or like mud. Mr. Suleiman’s taxi, Gilbert thought. He had seen it many times, of course. And just the other day. But—was there… something different? Perhaps. Perhaps indeed there was. Gilbert looked at it, in fact, as though he never had before. It was regal, really. Handsome. Quite a vehicle, he thought. That blue paint, so durable, was also pleasant to behold. Not unlike a sky. Gilbert cocked his head. Felt quiet. Unnerved and transfixed. What was tugging at his throat, the corners of his eyes? What was stirring in him? Looking at the Morris still, Gilbert noted how its trimmings shimmered in the sun, how clean the windows were, the hubcaps, too, their spokes, despite the city dust. Did Mr. Suleiman polish it at night?

  He sniffed. He narrowed his brown eyes and tapped his closed mouth with two fingers. And, vaguely but more surely with each step, he sensed that whatever had awoken while he slept had had to do… with cars. With cars! Gilbert almost laughed. How very, very odd. He cocked his head again. He cracked a knuckle in his pocket, took a step towards the street. And swore that with a drink (to fuel the thinking process, finances be damned), seated at the Palm, he’d mull the feeling over before turning to the plan. The plan, he thought. He pulled up his loose trousers and, vigorous, rubbed his forearms. He threw back his head and felt a springing in his stride. Perhaps! What if? he thought. Indeed. What could be more manly? Here Gilbert thought of Sarie, smiled: Something for the cars.

  At first, Kazansthakis thought Gilbert was mad. While he could be counted on for stories and peculiar facts and was not bad to drink with, Gilbert was in Mr. Frosty’s estimation perfectly incapable of doing anything demanding or original himself. It was the place of men like Gilbert Turner, Kazansthakis thought, to endure the strange new times in a not undignified, but permanent, poverty— never reaching, voicing a discomforting desire, or asking, for too much. He had no business making business. The very thought, Kazansthakis found, to his surprise, was nearly—just—offensive.

  Men like Gilbert had a special place in History’s bright march: they served as a reminder, Mr. Frosty thought, of what had been the case and wasn’t any longer. Empires, he thought, were fueled by men who couldn’t do much and whose prime task was to provide the bulk. Foot soldiers, like Gilbert. Yes. Gilbert was the very stuff of over-rule: not too bright, a little dreamy, interesting in his own idle, silly way, but, all told, rather weak. He was not bold, he lacked imagination, was not meant for center stage; he was brick, not mortar. And when Independence came—when loosed from those who might have led him—Gilbert had, exactly as required, shrunk, dried up, and gotten used to struggle. And from that struggle, Kazansthakis thought, he could never rise. He hung on, as others like him did, a barnacle, affixed by unknown glue to the changing world’s new walls; but he was not—as the Frosty King had said himself!—a doer.

  The colonials who had made it—the Greenleafs, Remingtons, and those who lived in Scallop Bay—would have been great men anywhere, Kazansthakis thought. They would always rise above. Their very greatness as the members of a Nation, emissaries of the Colonizing Power, was due in part but in part only to men like Gilbert Turner, who, through meaningless and boring, necessary acts, propped up the flash and flare: pushed papers around, organized the books, and never once complained too seriously or wanted what they couldn’t have. With Empires disbanded, the Thorntons and the Greenleafs could take care of themselves. Gilbert Turner, Kazansthakis thought, could not. He ought, a silent casualty, politely take his tiny place and not attempt a project that would only cause him pain.

  With two Congo Pilsners in him, frothy, cool, and sharp, however, his mood began to turn. There was something new in Gilbert. A weird, intriguing gleam in those watery brown eyes. He was remarkably persistent. Kazansthakis softened. “What exactly, Gilbert Turner, are you thinking? For…” He stopped himself from wincing. “For the cars?” Well, Gilbert didn’t know, exactly. It was enough for him just then to have determined on the way out to the Palm that he had indeed, perhaps, as a red-faced, pudgy boy in England, acquired as a hand-me-down a modest set of toys in the shape of such contraptions. Though he could not know, and perhaps had never known, their makes or precise models, he did recall—the more he thought about it and the more he drank—he did recall, with a ferocity that so shook Kazansthakis he ordered three more beers at once, that the little cars had thrilled him. Gilbert was quite drunk. “I loved them, Mr. Frosty!”

  Gilbert may or may not have owned such items as a boy. But he was certain of his story. “I loved them and abandoned them. I forgot,” said Gilbert—were there tears in his eyes?—“how very much they mattered.” Gilbert was suddenly amenable to the explanations Kazansthakis liked. He’d read too many books, perhaps, got tangled up in them, and forgotten who was
who. He began to think symbolically, to entertain theories of fate, and the connectedness of things. “I was unfaithful to them, don’t you see?” he said, knocking a great glass off balance and retrieving it—surprising himself most of all—with uncharacteristic grace. “I forgot all about my childhood!” Kazansthakis watched him, noncommittal, slightly worried for his friend but awed by his insistence. “This thing with Uncle James.” Gilbert belched. “It’s meant to put me on my feet. Return me”—this he said more softly—“to my forgotten glory.”

  The Frosty King had never seen his friend in such a confused state. Glory? Mr. Turner had had glory? Best forgotten if he had! Perhaps he had a fever. In his drunkenness, Gilbert for his part experienced his own mind as oddly sharp, uncharacteristically perceptive. “I’m not ill, Mr. Frosty,” Gilbert said, and hackles rose in him for the first time in what might have been a hundred thousand years. His throat itched with it, and his back. He felt certain and afraid. As though a deed had just been done. “No, I say. I’m absolutely serious. I’m not only a thinker, you should know.” And though he did not know at all what the thing was, he said, with a breaking in his voice, “I’m going to try this thing.”

  Kazansthakis watched his friend. Nodded to the waiter to bring another round. Indeed. Well. “You’re certain, Mr. Gilbert?” He rubbed his round, red chin. “One hundred percent, then?”

  If Gilbert had stopped to ask himself this question, had not been so drunk, and had not been so—admit, it, yes—offended by the Frosty King’s response, he might have answered differently. He might have, as the Gilbert of the weeks and months before would have, stepped away from his own statement and said, “No, no, Mr. Frosty. Just a little joke, I suppose. I didn’t really mean it.” Or, “You’re right. I’d best forget it, don’t you think?” But these things he did not. The hubbub of the Palm—soft, rising in small waves, the tinny skittering of feet and cups and bowls—and the look on Mr. Frosty’s face (surprise, curiosity, an unexpected glow) spurred him on. So such decisions take. He needed to confirm it, say, “Yes, I am. I have always, always. Thought highly of engines. You know, cars,” he said, “and things.”

  The Frosty King was not entirely convinced that Gilbert had really had a motor-love as a small boy. It was the very first he’d heard of it, and they’d been meeting there for years. When had Gilbert ever sympathized with Mr. Frosty over the difficulties he endured supplying his own Fiat? Had they ever spoken wisely about OPEC, the ups and downs of fuel? The crises? Had they ever talked about the buses that the Soviets had brought in? No, he did not believe his friend. But he was swayed by something else. By Mrs. Frosty, truth be told, who had rubbed his neck and back, kissed him hotly on the ear, and said, “Poor, poor, Mr. Turner. Can’t you try to help?” And also, yes, by the fierce red look on Gilbert’s face, a kind of shame and fury, an excitement, something that could, perhaps—yes, why not, why not, if it did not portend disaster?—be transformed into joy. So what if people changed their spots? he thought. Perhaps this world was made for that. Oil prices were stable once again. He could not think of any trouble rising, other than another war on the far border, and wars were good—weren’t they?—for a certain kind of business. People used their cars, and most of them were old. The buses broke down all the time. Why not? he thought. Indeed. This shift, this sudden news—he thought: It’s just like in a movie. The dawning of adventure. So he stopped shaking his head and raised his glass to Gilbert.

  Gilbert sensed the change in Kazansthakis, and it stilled him. He sighed, felt the roll of his own gut settling nicely at the high edge of his trousers. He dug his hips into his seat, puffed out his pounding chest, expanded, spread his weight over the crooked metal chair. Beyond them, in a busy wind, white clouds came and went.

  When the Frosty King said, “Spare parts, then? Is that where you are going?” Gilbert, had he owned and worn a hat, would have thrown it in the air. Exactly. Spare parts, absolutely. He felt as if the world around him had come to an invigorating stop. And, in a moment, Kazansthakis, who did like a little play—especially when it involved outsmarting the smart (who liked to put men behind bars or at least extract from them large sums for putting into motion plans for things like this)—made a few suggestions, said he’d like to help. “Fun!” he said. “We’re going to have some fun! Spare parts, my dear Mr. Gilbert. Have another drink. To spares!”

  “To spares!” said Gilbert Turner. In the wet and dizzy moments that ensued, Kazansthakis drinking with both fists and Gilbert, belching, struggling to keep up, the Frosty King suddenly recalled a man he knew who now worked at the airport. And wasn’t there a woman he’d once tried to kiss (a single weakness, one small moment, about which Mrs. Frosty didn’t know—and thank God it hadn’t worked) who still harbored a small flame for him and now wielded at the Customs Office a much-desired stamp? What about, oh, yes, the Frenchman from the airlines who frequented the Frosty Kreem for scoops of sweet vanilla? And that other person, too, very, very local, who had liked pistachio in his youth and who was now, if Kazansthakis was correct, the Minister of Trade? The Frosty King did have a motor of his own, and he was often worried about spark plugs, brake shoes, base-plates, and the like. By his fifth order of drink, the Frosty King was hopeful and, indeed, violently, irreversibly impressed by Mr. Gilbert Turner.

  “I will find things out for you,” Kazansthakis said. “Do it, Mr. Gilbert.” He stood. He shook Gilbert’s hand with both of his, meaningfully, with respect, as if sealing something private, as though Gilbert Turner were a new, important man. Someone to be reckoned with. A Greenleaf or a Thornton! “The sky’s the limit!” Kazansthakis said. He gave Gilbert a wink before skipping down the stairs.

  Gilbert returned home with hubcaps spinning in his mind. “Spare parts,” he said under his breath, repeating it until the two words might mean almost nothing, or be the meaning of the world.

  By the following evening, a secret competition thrilled the tiles and carpet of the Turners’ old apartment. Gilbert paced and Sarie skulked. Each made notes beneath their fingers in the air, and, when colliding in the parlor, each turned from the other to hunt down the scraps of paper on which each had tried out sums. Though neither of them knew it, skinny statues, jewels, and woven bags were warring in the parlor against pistons, calipers, and flywheels. They each had an Idea.

  Sarie, however, was the more honest of the two. One day over lunch, she told her husband of the plan. “What do you think about it, eh?” she’d asked. “The crafts? For the big men who have gone back to their home? For people like your uncle?” Gilbert pushed his rice away and found himself contemplating Sarie with a kindness in his heart. In his visions of the future, Gilbert had begun, without so much as trying, designing for himself a slightly mythic spouse: a sweet one, a docile one who would admire him. So inspired by his talks with Kazansthakis, charged, excited, he felt himself becoming, in his own estimation, something like a businessman. And didn’t businessmen have charming, pretty wives who listened? He wasn’t really being cruel.

  If Sarie had ever said to him at an attentive moment, about someone else, “That person doesn’t look,” or, “That person doesn’t listen,” he would have said, “You’re right. Awful, yes, just awful,” because he himself had often felt that no one looked at him or heard him. He didn’t do it meanly. It was just that he had his little hopes, and he did like his daydreams. But Gilbert’s dreams, just then, were taking on all kinds of lucid shape. That evening in the kitchen, he found it hard to tell which woman was real and which woman he was just coming to sense would spring fully into being once the business plan was firm. When Sarie told him her idea, as a good man ought to handle a good wife, he decided to be tender, and took care not to be dismissive.

  “Why, certainly,” he said. “A good idea, dear.” And though he didn’t press her and didn’t ask for details about what she’d already sorted out, Sarie smiled at him over her teacup. It was not the full response she’d hoped for, but she was trying to be patient. The thing had been decided,
had it not? She could wait, and would. Men like Gilbert, Sarie thought, need time for bright news to sink in. “All right. We’ll talk about it soon.” She rose up from her chair so surely and so happily that it looked to Gilbert for a moment as if she had just burst up from the ground, a sudden tree, a fleshy woman-geyser. He refocused his eyes. “Oh, yes, my dear. We’ll discuss it at great length.” And then he turned back to his little paper, where he scribbled with his pen. “I am sorting les détails, you know,” she said, and Gilbert, a little bit impressed, thought, as he sometimes did, My Sarie can speak French, and murmured, “Yes, of course, I’m sure.”

  Sarie was relieved. She’d won. She’d had their idea. And Gilbert, she believed, would in good time come around. He will need to soothe himself at first, because he hasn’t thought of anything and he will owe to me success. She’d give his manly pride some room. Gilbert, thankful for her silence, began to write down what the Frosty King had told him (spark plugs, Germany or Japan; fan belts, France or England; flywheels, Emirates; and shipments, island ports and airports). It occurred to him as he wrote, flywheels, that he could not remember, exactly, what Sarie had just said. Baskets? Hm.

  As he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, an illuminated world emerged before his eyes, one of his own making, and he grew increasingly intent on keeping all specifics from her until everything was right. He’d reveal nothing to Sarie, to his wife—My helpmeet—until he’d seen Kazansthakis one more time and gotten his approval. He’d meet up with the Frosty King for some final talk and be ready in the end to compose a reassuring letter to great old Uncle James. Or perhaps, he thought, seduced by the idea of presenting her with (what was it people said?) a great fait accompli, he’d wait a little longer, until Uncle James had been so mightily impressed that everything was set. Then, he thought, I’ll tell Sarie what I’ve done. Gilbert wanted, shall we say, to impress the woman he had married, the mother of his child, just as, he thought, he had once done in his youth. Had he not been fine then, a promising young man? And had she not been darling? He was sprouting, bit by bit, a certain kind of wing.