The Blue Taxi Read online

  As her father read, Agatha wandered out into the courtyard to find pebbles and to watch the neighbor’s chickens recover from the storm. As Sarie did each day, though she knew that Agatha never strayed into the road and that the only car to speak of was the broken Morris taxi, which could neither run a person over nor even give a growl, she said, “Look out for the cars!” and Agatha ignored her.

  Later, in the bedroom, Sarie watched another Sarie in the dresser mirror. The yellow light from the three windows, tinted with the residue that gums all city glass, showed up Sarie’s wrinkles. A veritable bunch of them around each of her eyes, and a slight but undeniable new give at the skin of her long throat. Dissatisfied, she frowned. She peered a little closer. The mirror showed a shadow at her lips—coffee? A mustache? She licked a finger, wiped.

  The blouse she wore, with wooden buttons she’d stitched on herself, displeased her. Like all of Sarie’s things, it had been purchased secondhand from a man who sold old clothes. Acquired from a vast array of church groups, hospitals, old-age homes, and, thought Sarie, grim, Even from the morgue, the cast-off clothes of men and women from the U.S.A. who’d moved on to other things were sent past the Equator to the wretched, wretched South. Indeed, thought Sarie: A reminder to the people of exactly how things stand between themselves and the Great North, of how mighty powers churned. We wear past decades on our skin, she thought, because we’re stuck in time. The world goes on sans nous. The blouse, 100 percent U.S. cotton, now as thin as paper, suddenly seemed twice as old, twice as shabby as it was.

  Sarie laid a hand across her belly, which, between two thick and sturdy bones, was neither flat nor round. She measured that soft space with her palms, not only for herself, but also on Mr. Jeevanjee’s behalf: for her (Perhaps! she thought) new lover. She felt less worn, less aged. A lover. A man other than mine. The very thought refreshed her; she almost laughed out loud. But he was not quite a lover, was he? A lover was a man one had allowed to go as far as men can go, and she had not quite done that. Or was a man whom one permitted to explore most of one’s upper skin and squeeze what was still covered also like a lover? Sarie wasn’t sure. Would she let him, if he tried? Did she want him? Yes, she thought. She did. She puffed her chest and lips out, flexed her calves and thighs. But next, the thought of Majid frightened her. She held a hand out to the air. As though Gilbert were not reading in the parlor and Agatha not squatting (shameless) in the sand just beyond the lowest stair, she felt thoroughly alone.

  Sarie, like all women, had a past. Hers, as all pasts are, was particular, and not. There’d been, in brief, parents dead too young (run over by a car while Sarie played elsewhere), an avid aunt who had just taken vows and who, when she set out for the Colonies to spread the Light of Might, took little Sarie with her and soon after died herself, feverish and crazed, as many like her do. Accidents aplenty, unexpected change. One death to another. But there’d been steadiness as well. Sarie’s past, the part of it a person could explain, the one she could remember clearly, what she thought of as the real past, had begun in earnest at the Jilima Mission Clinic, one hundred rutted, hilly miles from seaside Vunjamguu. The clinic: pain and sickness, health. Blood and spit and bruises, sporadic wails and cries, and the pungent, complicated smells of potions of repair. A heady mix, indeed. Things that make strange tales.

  She’d been, when Gilbert met her, “our assistant, Sarie,” lacking formal training but certainly a help, a not-bad girl with heft, a girl who could be taught. When he had seen her in that hallway picking up a tray, when she had turned to him and said, “Hello!” he had had a momentary vision, truth be told, of what beauty might be like. In that dim, cool light and the bright air, so palely blond, she was! What dearly freckled skin! What girlish muscles, he had thought, in those able arms. He’d fallen then and there, that Gilbert who so rarely saw young women and to whom those he did see said: “Hello!” But he had, from the first, enamored somehow of himself and made uncomfortable by pain, understood the clinic as a place she should escape.

  He was delighted when she left with him; and though he’d found her past romantic, once settled in the city (tiny garden, tiny house, and no view of the sea), he found that he did not delight in Sarie’s reminiscing. When she started, if he could, he’d squeeze her hand and say, “Not now, sweet,” or turn his eyes from her. His stomach, among other things, was weak, and he did not encourage her, though now and then he did regard her life with awe: before Independence, most of all, Sarie’s past—the mission clinic part of it, though he did not like to think of it too clearly—had sometimes made him proud.

  In those days, not long after their marriage, in the breezy hallways of the courthouse or at a gathering where serious drinks were served, if Gilbert was confronted by a District Officer (lips asmacking, chest plumped up) who presumed to “set poor Turner straight” about the natives and their ways, he sometimes took a deep breath of his own and, to take them down a peg, would say, “Indeed? My Sarie worked inland, you know.” And so, oh, yes, she had. And not too badly, either.

  Methodical and unimpressed, she’d had, despite herself perhaps, an aptitude for care. In little ways, she helped the sick grow well, the damaged find some comfort, and the dying void themselves. She’d wiped teary cheeks and bottoms with the same unfocused ease and had been particularly good—though Gilbert found this odd—with those among the pregnant ladies who thought to brave the clinic, hoping it would offer up a magick that a home midwife could not. What arrays of peoples she had seen! Gilbert liked the names. He’d think, awed again by Sarie’s height: my wife assisted at the birth of Chagga infants, Gogo babies, Haya kids, and Sumbawanga triplets! Gilbert, who read rather faithlessly but with an eye to customs and beliefs, imagined all the varied babies wearing colored beads and goodluck stuff to match their tribe and place. And Sarie, just beyond them, officiating, gowned in white, and wise.

  When Gilbert felt the smallness, the pettiness, of his own clerkship at the courthouse, or when too many colonials had passed through town with their interior tales, it cheered him up to think that he was married to a woman, in a way, who was really an adventuress. How capable she must have (must have, really) been. But if—as she rather often did—Sarie spoke out on her own, she made him feel ashamed, of her and of himself and Gilbert’s pride dried up.

  “A Maasai girl,” he’d once heard his new bride saying at the Gymkhana, where on a sunny, cloudless afternoon there’d been a garden party. Just beyond the patio, a polo match on the soft grounds (hollow thuds and gallops carried on the breeze) gave the gathering and its linen-covered tables (cloth clamped down by pewter weights) a fine, Imperial feeling. Closer in, rooted in red pots, miniature palms swayed. Across the garden path, but loud enough for all the men to hear, Sarie had continued brightly. “The spear, it passed completely, tout à fait, through her awful foot! Stuck in there for days!” Sarie held her nose. “The smell!” Her cup rattled on its plate. A little much for pleasant company. Rather. Too vivid, Gilbert thought, though old Jim Towson from the farms and Majors Daltry, Copeland, could tell far harder tales to men in other rooms with whiskeys in their hands. Oh, dear. Didn’t several ladies near Sarie step just a bit away to supplement their tea or reach for walls or men? Here and there, a gasp. Too vivid, for a woman.

  Sarie, unschooled (Not quite all she seemed, my man, Gilbert told himself again, again, again), mistook the gasps for interest. “Oh! Oh! Écoutez! And then!” She could not be stopped. She told them next about that region’s rice and flour magnate (“A Bohora man, you see,” as though the word determined the affair), who came bleeding to the clinic with two fingers hanging off, a stab wound in his thigh. “A fight with his own son, imagine, for a dark girl from Dodoma! And he already, s’il vous plaît, had a pleasant wife at home. A fine lady with the jewels.” Sarie (Was she drunk?), with the devious look a salesman might put on to tantalize a customer who is almost out the door, added, “And yet”—a head tilt to the men just across the way—“do they not say that the races are no
t permitted to and must not be making love?” How the small word “races” rang out through the party like a bell. Did the polo players pause, out there on the field, the palm fronds give a shake?

  Triumphant, laughing, feeling she’d done well, Sarie gestured at the ladies with her flowered saucer. Oh, the shudders that politeness could not quite conceal or perhaps in fact depended on: Major Daltry’s latest conquest raised a girlish hand; Jim Towson’s sturdy Hazel, licking her front teeth, brushed nonexistent smudges from her shirtfront and wondered whom Gilbert had married (“Lost her parents, did she?” as though it were Sarie’s fault), while the men, attention drawn, fell silent. Several of them were unnerved, crossed over to the gathering of women and sought their spouses’ hands (“As if,” Sarie later said, “to say it wasn’t true!”).

  How on that afternoon Gilbert wished that he had picked another wife, a girl, instead, come straight to him from England, docile, eager for a match. Or some honorable Nairobi horseman’s leggy, stable child, not this peculiar one, whose memories were unspeakable, who had, it sometimes seemed to him, no real History at all. Whose past was an affront. He begged Sarie in the future to exercise restraint. “A wife, you know,” he said, “can make or break a Service man.”

  In the backseat of someone’s car (Brickman? Masterson, perhaps?), Sarie had scowled deeply at her husband, then looked out at the waves as they spread from Seafront Road. This was not what she’d agreed to. In fact, in her whole life, she asked herself, to what had she agreed? Blown by winds, instead! A sorry, tattered flag with not even a pole! To calm herself she thought, The water of the ocean is bluer than my eyes. Then she thought about Jilima and wished she had not left. Years later, now, wondering whether with Mr. Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee she had taken a misstep far greater than at any garden tea, Sarie thought again about the mission clinic and the hills, and (for the first time rather urgently) about Sister Angélique, whose story—luckily for Gilbert—she had never raised at any public function.

  The journeys of some people gesture with their motion to the hidden heart of things and leave deep marks on others. For Sarie, the first day after her moment in the hall with Mr. Jeevanjee, Sister Angélique loomed large. Born Angélique Magisse, efficient and hardworking, Angélique had been much older than Sarie, twenty years perhaps, a very grown-up woman. Not much younger, Sarie thought, than I myself am now. Sarie had admired her, as the other Sisters did, but from a distance made of awe: a girl child’s adoration. Angélique, she’d thought, was perfect. Suited more than anyone to Jilima and its trials.

  Pinafores and fingernails as clean as clean could be, Angélique never cried or shouted. Faster and more forceful at her work than any other Sister, she could disinfect and wrap a wound in the time it took poor Amélie to uncork an aspirin jar, could pluck a splinter from a toe, dab-dab, and wish its wearer well while slow Clothilde had only located the tweezers and coughed three times for show. And Sister Angélique was handsome. Small and strong, well-shaped. With stiff red hair and small sharp teeth. A beauty, in her way, brash and quick and vivid. The old men who cycled up with fish always hoped that she would come to the back gate, not Sister Brigitte. The boys who tried to sell them chickens liked her best of all. Indeed, the Fathers who drove down once a week from the town of Uchuipo often winked at her, inviting her to whiskey and tobacco in the frothing purple dusk. And Angélique was game. She praised them, shared their bawdy jokes, and, blowing smoke out of her nose, laughed into the night.

  If she was occasionally unseemly, her straighter mates forgave her, because she was generous and skilled. They found excuses for her manner. She could not be, the Sisters said, Belgian through and through. She was too fearless and too vivid. “There is some Ireland in her,” Sister Brigitte (who was bald) would say, enamored of that hair. Or, thrilled and also horrified, “A Frenchman in that family, at least. Perhaps she was adopted.”

  The most regular of patients, too, had ideas of their own. In the very center of Angélique’s broad forehead, slightly raised, smaller than a circle of confetti but larger than a speck, was a perfectly round mole that matched the rusty tint of dry Jilima earth. The patients said, “She was meant to be a Hindu, a Banyan from the north. All that white-white skin is but a trick and a mistake.” The patients (themselves certainly not Hindu but feeling well within their rights) proposed that Angélique’s poor mother had been visited one night by a Brahmin spirit-man whom Angélique’s poor father had been too busy doing other things to ward off from his bed. “And spirit-lust is strong, or not?” Perhaps Angélique’s cuckolded pa had been herding humpless cattle or minding a big shop. They imagined the girl’s mother very pale and mole-less, smooth as glass or water. Angélique, for reasons of her own, perhaps, never set them straight. She laughed with patients, too.

  When Angélique, the pillar, the pistol, the one with too much spark, with more agility than anyone they knew, fell in with an indigene, Sarie, tender, was still young, making herself useful in the kitchen and the grounds, learning to wash bandages and identify a fever. One Sunday, as a buttered sky grew scarlet at the rim, a Kuria cattle-thief came into the clinic with an ulcer on his leg. Sarie saw him coming and ran into the ward to say a person had arrived. But he was not exactly welcome. Because Sister Brigitte thought he smelled bad, like cows and heat and dust (if she passed close to him she sneezed), they put him in the bed nearest to the window. This he didn’t mind; that bed afforded him a fine view of the mountain and, by implication, of far-off Kuria-land, which, with a little give-or-take, does lie just beyond.

  Brigitte, though very good with ulcers, didn’t want to treat him, and he was passed to Angélique, who (wise girl!) did not think he smelled. The cattle-thief was quiet. He had, in general, a surly look, which Brigitte would in later stories say should have been a warning: it presaged all of his perversions, as had—if only they had measured it—the sharp slope of his skull. For Angélique, however, who turned out to be as skilled as anyone with treatments of the leg, he now and then displayed a rare and lovely smile. She tended him. He gestured to the mountain, and Angélique, able with her hands, made clever gestures back.

  The cattle-thief stayed with them for two weeks before walking into town, hobbling but not weaving, aided by a slender walking stick he’d fashioned expertly himself. Sarie had been warned away, and she had not approached. But she saw him make the cane from the kitchen window. He spent hours sitting on a rock, whittling away. She had thought him picturesque and serious. He said he would be back. He had business in the area before heading home to Kuria-land and would return before the journey for a final checkup and a cleaning of his leg. Sister Clothilde later swore that just before he left, she saw him speak with Sister Angélique on the far edge of the grounds, beneath the biggest tree.

  “She grew bright in the face,” Clothilde would tell them with a shiver, “red as the leaves on that big croton, and redder than her hair.” Hands twisting in her lap, eyes closed, Clothilde—who later swore she’d loved her the best!—would moan, as if she and only she could have prevented the disaster. “I told myself right then that that one—that one!—he is coming back. We have not yet seen the end.” Nevermind the cattle-thief himself had told them he’d be back, making signs that even Brigitte, elaborately wheezing, could not fail to understand.

  He returned one month after his discharge with two milk-cows in tow, elegant humped beasts with patient eyes and strong, fine legs and rumps. This russet pair he tethered to a post behind the clinic, not far from the trees. He came into the kitchen, asked for Angélique, and then requested tea (demanded, rather, this they later saw). This time, though, he left the cattle at the mission; he slept and ate in town. There, Clothilde would say, rubbing her soft gut, she observed him more than twice behaving oddly at the Mukhtar Drink Emporium: eating chocolate biscuits, which he washed down with a Fanta, skin-bag at his feet.

  Sister Brigitte was as unhappy with the cows as she had been with his scent. When he came out in the mornings to visit Angélique so she c
ould help him with his leg, Brigitte told him they could stay until he left. But she also made it clear, eyes tearing all the while, that it should not become a habit. “What if everybody did it? Eh?” she’d tell him, finger wagging at the sky as if a herd of cloudy cattle lived there, dying, simply dying, to taste the clinic’s grass. Sarie had made fun of her, poking with her finger at the air, and plump Amélie had slapped her. Three days later, Angélique was gone. The two milk-cows remained.

  Amélie insisted that she had seen her go. At night, afraid of the dark toilets, she had stepped outside to pee. “I watched her slip over the wall,” she said, “with nothing but a penknife and a ten-inch stick of sugarcane held in her two hands.” The penknife glinted in the moonlight, and the foamy smell of fresh-cut cane came swirling through the grounds.

  At the news that Angélique had vanished, Sister Brigitte—aware of Amélie’s propensity for self-important fictions—thought perhaps that Angélique had simply gone to see a patient in the hills and been detained there overnight. Then, as though it made any sense at all, as if Angélique were the sort of Sister who would do so—as if such a thing were simple—she thought, “She’s simply wandered off.” She sent the gardeners out, and asked the cook to look. To a Jiji man who repaired shoes in the next town (and who had come in with his nose broken very much in two), Brigitte gave an antique pair of German boots in exchange for any news. The shoe-man sent Brigitte a thank-you: the boots had sold for a high price, and his nose was very fine, but he’d sniffed nothing of the Sister. No one else came forward.