The Gloaming (7 page)

Even with my door open, he refuses to hand back the box. ‘Allow me.'

‘I'm fine,' I say, reaching for it. Smiling, he hands it over and watches me put it in the cupboard.

‘Glad I could help.'

‘Yes, thanks.'

He reaches over and touches my cheek. ‘Princess.'

I pull away. ‘Why do you call me that?'

‘Are you offended?'

‘You mean to offend.'

Martin laughs, ‘Princess:
The Princess and the Pea
. You know the story. She can't sleep because something in the bed is bothering her. It's only a pea. But she's a princess. She doesn't like discomfort.'

‘Are you the handsome prince, then?'

He laughs louder, harder, making a show of it. ‘I'm the dark prince. Bluebeard.' Ha ha ha.

Then he walks out.

For a long while I sit on the bed and I think about the box and whether I can throw it out. But this isn't possible. I can't just throw away parts of a person. And I think about what Kessy said: Imagine someone hates you this much. Enough to kill. What do you do with that kind of hatred? It's heavy and dense. It must be placed in a drum and sealed, buried thousands of feet below a desert. And even then it might bubble its way to the surface.

 

A woman is howling.

Gladness and I run to the front of the Goodnight. The howling comes closer. It is difficult to make out what we are seeing: a bicycle surrounded by a group of people. As they approach, we see that on the back of the bicycle is a pregnant woman. Two men push the bicycle and two others hold the woman down. Her mouth is agape, red, a trout gasping for breath.

Dorothea is already walking toward them. She speaks to the men, then runs past the clinic toward us.

‘Friend,' she says. ‘Do you know where is the other
mzungu?
We need his car.'

We go together and knock on the door of room seven.

‘Martin?' I call out loudly over the sound of the woman screaming. ‘Martin?'

He comes to the door looking calm and relaxed, a magazine in one hand, a Rooster in the other. He pushes his hair back from his forehead. ‘Hey, princess, what's up?'

‘Your car,' Dorothea says. ‘Please help us. There is a woman in labor, her cervix will not dilate. The baby cannot come out.'

‘Huh. I thought all that noise was the TV.' He lies so casually.

‘Is it possible? Your car?' Dorothea presses on.

‘I'm sorry. But the fuel pump. As I told the princess, it's fucked. Cruiser's no good without the fuel pump.'

‘Are you sure there's nothing we can do?' I say. ‘Rig something?'

‘You're a mechanic?'

‘No.'

Martin glances at his magazine, then back at us. ‘It's a shit situation you're in. Really bad for that poor woman. But without the fuel pump there's nothing I can do.'

Dorothea looks at him severely. She is wearing the blonde Tinkerbell wig, and beads of sweat slip down her face. Abruptly, she turns and hurries down the hall. Her little kitten heels, worn down to nubs, make clippy-clops, like little hooves.

Kessy runs up the street. He and Dorothea speak, and he runs back toward the police station. ‘He will try to radio Butiama, to see if they can send a car.' She shakes her head, ‘But even if they can, it will be many hours. Pilgrim—' It is the first time she has used my name, ‘I think this woman is going to die.'

The screaming continues for hours. Sometimes there is respite for a minute or two. I sit with Gladness who is trying to listen to her radio. Outside, it's as if Magulu has fallen under the spell of a wicked witch. People have shut their doors. They try not to think about the young woman dying, the baby dying in her. Or maybe they just can't stand the noise. Gladness tells me through our tentative pidgin that the men brought the woman from many miles away, traveling overnight.
Mbale. Mbale sana
. Far. Far away.

Kessy sits on the veranda. He radioed headquarters in Butiama but they said their only vehicle had gone to Mwanza. Kessy studies the plants that Gladness cultivates in old tins and cans. He takes a leaf between his fingers, examining the veins.

But I'm convinced she won't die.

Things will work out. The woman's cervix will dilate. Dorothea will successfully perform an emergency cesarean. Somehow. Kessy will find a car.

Women don't die like this.

I go to the clinic with a couple of Cokes. I'm not quite sure what I think I can do with two Cokes. But what else? At first I don't recognize the small native woman with her hair in tight cornrows; Dorothea has taken off her wig and shoes. She holds the dying woman's hand. I take the woman's other hand. She squeezes hard and screams again, her giant belly arcing upward. It takes all my strength to hold her down and I wonder how Dorothea has managed by herself for hours. I look at the woman's contorted face. She is not a woman, just a girl, perhaps seventeen.

‘The baby is already dead,' Dorothea says.

After another hour, the girl begins to hemorrhage. Blood spews out from her vagina and splatters on the floor. My reaction is to try to clean it up. But Dorothea says, ‘Wait, there is more, much more, before it finishes.'

I keep thinking, cannot let go of the alternative future—which is surely still possible: Martin will fix his car. An airplane will land on the road, the pilot has heard about the situation and flown in to help. The slouching beast still might change direction; there in its flexible ligaments, there in its joints, it might turn and walk away.

But then I feel it, like a dark, dark poem: how it enters the room. It displaces the air. I shut my eyes. Dark, dark, pressing down, invisible but moving, moving the air like hot breath. I feel sweat pricking my armpits. I'm afraid to look; to see it has an incarnation.

I know exactly what it is.

In the next moment Dorothea lets out a breath. ‘She has passed from us now. She is with God.'

No—no, I insist, stubbornly, trying to scramble up a muddy bank. She is not dead. I'm sure I can hear the sound of an engine. It's still as if my wanting can make the sound real.

Dorothea cuts into the girl's belly, which is tough with layers of muscle, and lifts out the baby. She peels off the placenta, revealing a perfect boy. She puts the still, dead boy against his mother, between her breasts, which are heavy with milk. ‘They can be together now. It is the local custom.'

The room is full of light, light falling like talcum powder. The beast has gone now, furled or folded and slipped under the crack of the door.

But I know I felt it. Know it had substance, breath. There is its handiwork.

They do not look peaceful, this dead mother and her dead baby. Her face holds the lines of her agony, her terror, her diminishing. And the boy is too tightly curled, as if instinctively he made himself smaller so he might fit through the narrow cervix after all. Or, as if he was trying to hide, the way children do, in corners or under the bed, so death would not find him.

After, in the too-quiet, Dorothea and I sit and drink the Cokes.

 

‘Tell me your story, princess,' Martin Martins says. He turns the chair around, so that he can rest his forearms on the back like a dude. He's drinking beer. I think he's a little drunk.

I look at him. I keep my distaste to myself, for I believe it would only give him pleasure. I was by myself, reading a book Dorothea lent me. She has the complete works of Danielle Steele, a writer I never imagined reading. But there is a poignant innocence at the core of the stories. The heroine always makes her choices based on love, which is beautiful and honorable. And, thus, even if she loses love, she is triumphant.

I wonder for whom the books are written. The young woman who still believes in love—for instance, a nineteen-year-old who meets a handsome stranger on a street corner. A budding human rights lawyer, perhaps. Or the wife who has been left, cast aside by the highly respected human rights lawyer, and needs some reassurance that there is, after all, something noble about her.

‘Tell me about that hard little pea making you so uncomfortable,' Martin says, taking out a Rooster. He lights the match with one hand, a little party trick.

I look steadfastly at the text of
The Promise
. The resurrection of the heart, the wisdom that comes only from loss. Ha ha ha.

‘Then don't talk.' Martin leans in, blows smoke into my face. ‘Let me buy you a beer. Drink, look pretty. That's enough for me.'

Intent, I turn a page.

Now he laughs, ‘Are you still ticked off about the other day? What did you expect me to do? What did you do? Did you save her? Did your crying and feeling oh-so-bad save her? Ha ha ha.'

It's impossible to read now. I can smell the beer on his breath, his cigarette smoke smarts my eyes. When I glance up, he yells out, ‘Gladness!
Mbili
!'

She brings over two beers. She is looking at me in a way that I feel might be hostile.

‘Okay, princess. I can see you are on the edge of your seat.' Martin drinks, settles in. ‘It's really quite interesting, my story, from an objective point of view, if you didn't have to live it. I can see you're ready, you're fascinated. Ha ha.

‘So, I was a pilot for the Ukrainian Air Force. Are you impressed? In the early nineties, the Ukraine sold off a lot of its old shit equipment to stupid African governments. Who else would take it? Only a dumb coon dictator so he can repaint it and parade it around. And, hey, the bombs still worked. As long as you could get the plane up, you could drop the bombs out the window and they would explode.

‘In 1991, three mates and me, we get an offer to fly three MiG-3s to the Congo. Oh, excuse me:
Zaire
. Fucking joke. They should just deal with the issue once and for all and call it The Republic of Total Stinking Shit.

‘These MiGs, let me tell you, princess, they were real pieces of crapola. Only one of us has working nav equipment, so we had to follow him, like little ducks in the sky.

‘We plan to stop in Uganda, at Entebbe. An hour, just to refuel. But some busybody from the American Embassy hears about us, and before we know it the planes are embargoed, our money and our passports are confiscated by the authorities. The Ukrainian Government denies all knowledge of the planes and us. And Mobutu? President for all Eternity of the Republic of Total Stinking Shit. What's he going to do? Send us a check?

‘So, first, we sell our watches, then our T-shirts, then our hats. We sleep on bits of cardboard under the planes. We get bitten to hell. We get malaria. We have to eat fucking
posho
. You've never eaten
posho
, have you, princess? We come up with stupid plans. How we're gonna steal the fuel or walk to Nairobi. We plan to hijack an airliner. It's all we do, come up with stupid plans. Viktor sells his shoes to a guy selling bananas and I take the money and go into town and make a phone call but I can't get through to Ukraine. I keep trying. I reach my cousin, he promises to send money through Western Union.

‘Every day I go into Kampala to the Western Union, but there's never any money. When my shoe fund is finished, Dimitri sells his shoes to the banana guy and we try all over again with his cousin. Fucking Ukrainians are all fucking liars. The money never arrives.

‘And there we are—you get the picture—we have our flight suits and one pair of shoes, and one night, this Angolan comes out to the planes. He says he's got jobs for us. The man had these black eyes, so you couldn't see the pupils. Hyena eyes. My
baburya
would have said he had the evil eye. But what do we care after three months of sleeping on fucking cardboard and shitting in the bushes and wiping our assholes with banana leaves. Ha ha ha. Three fucking months of
posho
and we are ready to lick the evil eye if it will get us the fuck out. And so, princess, we begin our lives as mercenaries in Africa. Twenty-five years now. Whatever you can imagine, whatever hell, your worst nightmare, I've seen it and I've certainly smelled it. And you know what I've come to realize, after all of it?'

He pauses now. He knows I'm listening, I can't help myself. His North Sea eyes never shift, never even blink.

I look at him, and wish I hadn't. ‘What? What have you come to realize, Martin?'

‘There're always more of them.' He smiles at his revelation and affects amazement, almost perplexity: ‘No matter how many die or how they die. Burning, screaming, guts falling out, whatever. There're always more of them.'

I wait for a moment. ‘Are you done?'

He laughs again, a belly laugh, as if I'm very, very funny. ‘You're offended,' he says. ‘Poor princess.' He reaches over and clinks his bottle on mine. And then he leans in, like a lover about to kiss, and whispers in my ear. ‘Very easy to be offended by a little pea. But so very difficult to make anything better in this world of shit.'

I'm careful not to move.

Finally, he smiles, lingers, just so I know he's in complete control. Then he taps the book. ‘I know this one. It doesn't have a happy ending.'

That night Martin Martins hires a hooker.

At least, I assume she's a hooker.

I listen to them, it's impossible not to.

Every detail of their fucking.

And when they're done, and when she's left, I hear him smoke his cigarette, smell the tang of it.

Finally, I hear his breathing downshift into sleep. And I listen to him sleep, for hours, his soft, baby breaths, he doesn't even move. I remember Tom saying that when he first started working in Rwanda he couldn't sleep. Stories and images, voices, sobbing, screaming—he couldn't clear them from his head. He told me that very few perpetrators had trouble sleeping; the same psychological mechanism that allowed them to commit terrible crimes allowed them to justify their crimes completely.