The Gloaming (30 page)

‘To find her.'

Gloria knew very well that she should ask why. She knew very well, very, very well, the rage after James. She'd wanted to find the cops who shot him. She'd wanted to pluck out their teeth. She'd wanted to grind their skulls into dust. Mr Koppler did not want to sit down with Pilgrim and have a little, what was it called? Tate-a-tate.

She had to think fast. On one hand, there was sad Ernst Koppler, the father of a dead child, a compatriot in the ragged land of grief. On the other hand was Pilgrim. Gloria had first seen her in the market. Gloria, like a lovesick dyke, stared at the bead of sweat in the hollow of Pilgrim's throat. She was buying fruit, paying too much. She didn't even notice Gloria. She didn't even notice as Gloria stared at the roots of her dark hair, the strands lifting off her long, lovely neck. Her hair shimmered. Pilgrim was clean, a mountain stream, pure like a white nightgown drying on the line. Gloria stood there in the proximity of such loveliness and smelled the whiff of herself: the residue of thirty years of bacon grease. It never washed off, even with the cheapest soap.

So, on the other hand, Pilgrim. Gloria knew she could not separate the image of Pilgrim in the market from what Mr Koppler had just told her. She couldn't backtrack, could not un-know. Pilgrim is no longer beautiful, untouchable, fragrant.

‘I know where she is.'

He nodded. He put down his coffee cup. ‘The taxi driver, he tells me about your orphans.'

‘They will be here any day now.'

‘I help you,' he said.

They both waited. They were holding the same rope, moving through the dark, hand over hand.

‘You understand I will not return to Switzerland.'

‘Yes.'

‘I have no one for my money. I am not rich. But my house, my business. I will arrange. It is enough for you. For what you need here.'

Gloria bit her lip. ‘That's not necessary, Mr Koppler.' But, in truth, it was. In truth, she didn't have funds to last six months.

He held her gaze, he needed her to know him, to bear witness.

‘Yes, yes, it is necessary,' he said.

It is, she silently agreed.

Money changes everything.

*

Gloria looks at the water, soft chiffon, the diffusion of light, a kind of magic substance. If she was Mary, plunging through it, flexing tensing arcing, if she was Mary at sixteen she'd swim away from Milton. But without Milton, she would be without James.

Far out, at the mouth of the cove, a dhow sails past: a vignette of tranquility. But if it came closer in, Gloria would see the ripped sail and the ragged fisherman with his salt-burned hands and dearth of fish. She waits, just to make sure he's not going to tack into the bay and find her. She couldn't possibly explain what she was doing with a body covered in a tarp.

She ties an old anchor to Koppler's legs. She could tie her body to his, she could fall with him into the still, green-blue sea. Companions. She could lie with him in the eelgrass and look up at the tiled surface of the water.

But instead she shuts her eyes. She says, out loud, ‘James.' His name carries over the water.

She pushes Koppler out of the boat. No easy task as the little boat tips and tosses and Koppler is a heavy man. But underneath Gloria still has her swimmer's strength. There's a splash and then silence.

She watches the body sink.

Harry says she mustn't compare pain, mustn't want it to all add up. But that's a human need. The way a bill tallies, the items equal the cash. French fries are $1.99. And maybe, Gloria thinks, there is a reckoning, somewhere very far down the line, where it adds up and evens out. Profit and loss, perfectly balanced.

Harry and Pilgrim will be in Pangani now, Harry's little shack there. Where she herself had been happy, lain with him for a brief sojourn. That's when she'd told him about James, and that's when he'd begun his retreat. He couldn't bear her loss because of course—as she's come to realize—it reminded him of his crime.

She doesn't know—can't decide—if she wanted Pilgrim dead. She only knows it's immaterial to her that Pilgrim is still alive. Perhaps there's a life for her after all, who can tell. Redemption can never be ruled out.

The morning Mary went to the dentist she'd been thinking again about killing herself. It was absurd: going to fix her teeth when what she really wanted to do was stick her head in the oven. She was just so very tired. The real reason she'd picked up
National Geographic
was the cover article about suicide. The story was about the global history of suicide, the rituals and reasons, maps, charts—so much more than the plodding consequence of depression. Mary already knew her desire to die didn't come from depression, but from losing the only person she'd ever loved. The grinding loss, the meaningless years after his death had not been mental illness, only a loss she could not gain traction against.

The nurse called her name.
Doctor Babbits is ready to see you, Mary
. She turned the page and saw those dark-skinned children's faces staring out—
Africa's AIDS Orphans
. They stood half-naked in the mud, hungry, forsaken, their little hearts emptying of useless sadness and filling with violence that would keep them alive. In another issue, she'd be seeing the same faces with guns, dead eyes hidden by mirrored shades.
Africa's Child Killers
.

The most ironic thing that can happen, will happen.

Mary had touched their faces with her fingertips. Oh, her heart had said. Oh.

Mary?
The nurse tapped her shoulder.
Mary? Doctor Babbits is ready to see you
. She got up, clutching the magazine. She knew it had happened, the answer to a question she hadn't known to ask.

How do you carry on?

It was like finding a crack in the earth and glimpsing the hot and certain core.

Because love endures with grief and hate. And every day, just as she feels her grief and hate, she feels her love and its great, shining purity.

She turns the boat south and west, back through the cove and the shallow channel to the blue, open harbor of Tanga's bay. She glances up in the tussling green of the land. She can almost see her little house. She can imagine herself there when the bus arrives and she will finally hold them. Oh, yes, money is everything. Her careful bribes, her persistence has paid off: the last permit has been granted. And Mr Koppler's money will be enough for quite some time.

Today, in only a few hours, in her arms, in her house, in her life, the children she has waited for, the children who have waited for her, shall be gathered safe therein.

 

Dorothea looked at Kessy's hands on the steering wheel. The smooth, even brown skin. He was handsome. She wanted him to know how afraid she was even though he couldn't take that fear away. But he was excited, he was confident. He glanced at her now and smiled. ‘Only a few more miles.'

Her hands were flat against her thighs. She felt the sweat of her palms through her trousers. Her whole body was flooding with adrenaline. It was as if the years of loss had condensed. Sludge now filled her veins.

The old white man had come last week in this car, a Land Rover. ‘Hello, I'm Harry,' he'd said and handed her the keys. ‘This is for you.' Dorothea thought he must be mad; certainly he exuded the kind of manic buoyancy that marked certain kinds of mental illness. But he was insistent: the car was a gift. He refused to say from whom. He seemed to think she really wouldn't guess.

‘But what will you do without your car?' she said to him.

‘It's not my car,' he said, laughing. ‘It's your car.'

‘There is only the bus on Thursday,' she said.

‘I'll walk.'

She thought he was joking. ‘Can I drive you?'

‘I used to walk everywhere,' he said. ‘Once from Juba to Addis. Heck of a slog.'

Then he'd bought some bottled water and a loaf of bread, put them in his backpack and headed back toward Butiama on foot. A puppy with a piece of string tied too tightly around its neck followed him. He bent down, took off the string and tried once to shoo it away. But the puppy refused to leave him so he picked it up and carried it on his shoulder.

‘
Simama
,' she said now to Kessy. ‘Stop. I just need you to stop for a moment.'

He did as she said. She got out of the car and stood looking around her at Kenya. They were only a hundred miles from the border but the land did not look like Tanzania. Every inch of soil was cultivated and the soil itself was darker, denser. The people who passed on foot or on bicycle looked different, too, for they were Luo, big-boned with wide faces and very dark skin. They were Isaac's tribe. Hadn't she loved that about him? His otherness? That they were forging a new Africa, trans-tribe, trans-border. What the colonials had done with red pens on maps, Isaac and Dorothea were going to un-do. The borders of countries would always exist but people like them would transcend them.

Luke and Ezekiel were a mixture of her earth and Isaac's. He would rub her swelling belly and murmur to them in his language and then she would put her hand on top of his and speak to her babies in her's. Luke was born dark like his father and Ezekiel was paler like her, with a faint red tint to his hair.
Myeusi
and
Myeupe
, she would call them. Black and white, dark and light.

Far away she could just make out Lake Victoria, a thin slice of silver-blue marking the western horizon. Between here and there, small hills rolled and lifted, a quilt of
shambas
and dirt roads and villages. She had never come here with Isaac. Had he kept her from this place on purpose? Or had it simply been that they were both busy, young medical residents in Dar? He had this land in his mind, in his body, this sky, this view, his legs accustomed to its rise and fall. He knew its smells and seasons, the feel of its mud and dust under his bare feet. He'd been a poor boy, and it had taken him many extra years to finish his education, waiting for sponsors, always begging, always pushing, always scrounging.

Though she had been poor as a child, her family did well when Nyerere stepped down and the country opened itself to capitalism. It was because of their new wealth that she did not introduce them to Isaac. She'd felt instinctively that he would resent her parents' gated yard and satellite dish. She had also wanted to protect him from it so he wouldn't believe she could find a better man than him.

But the consequence had been that their families had no ties. He did not know the name of her village and she did not know the name of his.

Please, she wanted to call out. She wanted to fall on her knees on this Kenyan earth and beg God, oh please please please let me hold them let me smell them let me let me let it be okay. But you could not hope, you could not pray. And suddenly, she did not want the car, she did not want the possibility, she had grown accustomed to the hollow in herself. She did not want it carved out again, carved deeper. She was learning, slowly, to live with what had happened.

The day she'd come home, the day they had not been there—she relived this day so many times that it never became past. She'd called for them—
Ezekiel? Luke? Ezza? Luke?
—and there had been no answer. It was odd how she'd known right away, known they were not out at the market or the playground, had not gone to the beach. Her very first thought was that Isaac had taken them. She had suspected he would. In the silent apartment she felt careless, that she deserved this. But the boys did not, her small, sweet boys. And then she felt panic and she ran through the rooms. In the boys' room she saw that Isaac had forgotten Ezekiel's blanket, the one he could not sleep without. She grabbed this and ran out, down the stairs, into the street. She must find them to give Ezza his blanket. She ran along the street waving the blanket, down Mosque Street, onto Tom Mboya Avenue, she was pushing past people and in some crazy way she assumed she would catch up to them. She ran whichever way the traffic lights allowed her, as if momentum was gravity and would inevitably pull her toward her children. She was in a kind of dream and when she woke she was standing on a traffic island soaked with sweat, gasping for breath, holding a blanket. The traffic crawled past her, the
machinga
weaving in and out of cars, selling sunglasses and bottles of water and oranges and ornaments for the rearview mirror. The filthy, smog-choked air stung her eyes. People hustled past her. She sank to her knees. She wasn't crying—that would come later. She was astounded. She did not know how long she sat there before coins hit her head and clinked onto the pavement. A passing driver had thought she was a beggar.

Kessy took her hand and pulled her back toward the Land Rover. ‘Come,' he said. She resisted—wanting to turn back, wanting to stay here, afraid.

‘What if it's fine?' he said.

They drove on, they drove into the village, they drove to Isaac's family's house. Kessy would never tell her who he had bribed. A superior in town, a local businessman trying to get illegal goods over the border. Dozens of people. It must have cost him in favors, in money—his policeman's meager salary. He must have been persistent. He had done this for her. He had found Isaac's village for her.

‘Wait here,' he said.

She watched him walk into the simple mud house. Improvements had been made—the trickle down of Isaac's success: real windows, electric lights. He could probably have built his mother a cement house, but old people didn't like change, didn't think the new was better than what had served them through seven decades of rain and drought.

A red toy car lay on its side between her and the house. Did that mean they were here? Or only that they had been here? Or only that a neighbor had children? She had a desire to run and grab the toy car and flee like a madwoman across the maize fields. Instead, she shut her eyes, she held on to the seat.