The Gloaming Read online

  ‘It’s Mrs Phillips,’ Jackson gestures to Melinda. ‘She’s very sick.’

  Doctor Dorothea’s eyes widen and she follows Jackson’s look to focus on Melinda. ‘Oh, I am so sorry. Mrs Phillips, please. Let us go inside.’

  Melinda gets out. She wobbles slightly and Jackson catches her arm. ‘I’m all right,’ she snaps.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Bob says, taking her other arm. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Of course,’ replies Doctor Dorothea. ‘We must all come.’

  Jackson now looks at me. ‘You come, also. You cannot wait here at the car.’ He then waves an arm in a general way. ‘These people are not good.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Dorothea says. ‘There is room inside.’

  A small crowd has gathered to watch us.

  Dorothea turns and stage-whispers, ‘These people are all thieves. They stole my stethoscope. Can you imagine? For what? What are they going to do with a stethoscope? It’s just to steal, that’s all.’ She shakes her head and makes a little snort.

  We reach the door and she pushes it open. The coolness inside is a dark, calm well in the heat. But the room is too small and there aren’t enough chairs. I tell them I’ll wait outside. Melinda looks as if she’s about to be sick again. Bob turns to me, ‘Yes, you wait outside.’

  There is space on the edge of the bench, next to the women with the babies. I sit and shut my eyes against the sun. I can feel it through the red tissue of my eyelids. The sun holds me, I hover in the heat. I am encased by warmth. Still. I can allow myself this, can’t I? Not peace, merely stillness.

  I can hear Dorothea talking quietly inside the clinic, the calm and sure tone of her voice, Melinda’s grateful murmur. Bob says something about fake drugs from India. Dorothea reassures him.

  When Bob and Melinda and Jackson come back out I tell Jackson I won’t be joining them for the rest of the trip. I’m slightly surprised to hear myself say this so definitively because the thought has only just surfaced. But maybe that’s why: I haven’t had time to consider the consequences.

  I don’t choose Magulu; simply, I can’t go back. I can barely bring myself to summon the image of Arnau and its Swiss chocolate quaintness, the faux chalets, the geranium window boxes. Within the coil of its streets, people whisper: Kindermörderin.

  ‘Are you also ill?’ Jackson squints at me.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not ill.’

  ‘But,’ he insists, ‘it’s not possible.’

  ‘What’s not possible?’

  ‘For you to stay here.’

  ‘Is there a law?’

  ‘There is no law. No law. But nothing, look, look! There is nothing here.’ His voice begins to rise, almost to a squeak, like a teenage boy. ‘There is nothing here! A bus once a week! Not even mobile service! Nothing!’

  I give him a hundred bucks. ‘It’s all right, I take full responsibility.’

  He takes the money and gets in the car.

  Melinda is in the back, lying down. Dorothea has put her on a drip and given her a full complement of antibiotics.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Bob says to me. ‘You can’t stay here.’

  ‘You are my witness,’ Jackson turns to Bob. ‘I don’t want to be accused.’

  Bob looks me over. I sense in him the shades of menace, what he hides even from Melinda. How he hopes bad things happen to people. He is familiar with the soothing pleasure of spite. ‘Don’t expect us to sort out the mess you’re gonna find yourself in.’

  I try to look calm and resolved. ‘Thank you for your concern, Bob. I hope Melinda feels better soon.’

  ‘Foolish,’ he mutters.

  Foolishness is the least of it, I feel like telling him. If you found out about Arnau, I would watch your face transform with disgust; and even Melinda would shrink back as if from a foul smell.

  ‘You are my witness!’ Jackson announces in his falsetto, this time stabbing the air, then wagging his finger at Bob. ‘It is not my responsibility!’

  This moment of my transgression will bond them, I think. They will talk for hours about my foolishness. They will discuss all the signs that I was trouble, all the ways I was difficult on the trip. How he and Melinda hadn’t wanted me along anyway. I just showed up, a party crasher, with a small suitcase and no safari clothes or sunscreen—not even binoculars or a camera! Odd, yes, there was something odd about me from the beginning. Bob will end up giving Jackson a good tip and calling him ‘pal.’ Back in Chapel Hill, he’ll talk about his pal, Jackson. ‘What a stand-up guy.’

  As they drive off, Bob glances back. I wave, a quick ticktock of my wrist. He turns away.

  I sit quietly, listening to the sound of the car recede. I feel a touch on my shoulder. Doctor Dorothea. I’m sure she’s going to ask me what’s the matter, why have I been left by my friends—why I am here. But instead she asks if I need somewhere to stay.

  Magulu, April 28

  She doesn’t speak any English, but somehow we communicate. Gladness is proud of the Goodnight Bar and Inn. It seems to be her own business. When she shows me the room, she walks around it pointing out its many features in loud Swahili. But it is the gestures and the enthusiasm I understand: Look, the windows have bars on them, the bed has a net without holes, the cupboards are roomy. Here is a small sink and mirror. Here are the towels. And a complimentary pair of green rubber flip-flops. Down the hall are the bathroom and the shower. Baridi, she says, turning the knob so that water trickles out. I check my Swahili-English dictionary: cold. She picks up an empty bucket, ‘Moto.’ Hot. The hot water comes only in a bucket.

  She does the cleaning herself. I watch her in the bar area, bent double so that her torso is almost perfectly parallel to her legs, dragging a damp rag over the floor. She wipes down the plastic table cloths and the plastic chairs. She polishes the glasses behind the bar. She waters the plants on the veranda. Her industry stands in contrast to the sloth of her customers. They lean back in the plastic chairs and stare at the television and drink beer after beer. The TV is on mute, while a radio plays African rap and whiney Swahili gospel. ‘Mwanza fresh!’ the announcer burbles. ‘Mwanza poa!’

  Mwanza, I remember the name. Melinda was looking at the map with her endless questions and pointed to one of its larger dots. ‘Mwanza. What happens in Mwanza?’

  Jackson shook his head disconsolately. ‘A bad place. Mwanza. The people there burn old women as witches.’

  ‘How awful,’ Melinda gasped. ‘Do they really?’

  ‘They see the red eyes of the old women and they say they are witches, and they lock them in their huts and set the huts on fire.’ He tapped his head. ‘The Sukuma people are very superstitious. But me, luckily, I am Christian.’

  Melinda wanted to know more about witches and about black magic, but Jackson quickly became reticent. I think he was ashamed, insulted even.

  Now I’m sitting with a Coke on the veranda. The local policeman appears, PC James Kessy. His uniform is immaculate. He speaks very good English, and this makes me think that like Doctor Dorothea he comes from somewhere else. He says he needs my name and passport number. I produce the document. He peers at my passport photo.

  ‘This is you, Mrs Pilgrim Lankester?’

  I think to correct him. Not Mrs. Not Lankester. Anymore. Yet, the truth, that versatile palimpsest, will lead to more questions, will unravel Arnau. ‘Yes,’ I say, instead. ‘That is me.’

  ‘You have traveled a lot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ethiopia. What were you doing in Ethiopia?’

  ‘My husband was working there.’

  ‘East Timor?’

  ‘My husband was working there.’

  ‘He is UN?’

  ‘International Red Cross.’

  Kessy nods in a knowing way. ‘There is always a war. Refugees. Famine. Always employment.’

  Yes, I think. Always a large report documenting what humans can do to each other. Always a case file marked Atrocity.

  ‘And where is he
now?’

  ‘Switzerland.’

  ‘But he did not come with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  Why? An image of Elise flashes in my mind, her frizzy, badly cut hair, her small, sharp features. Her nose is slightly red, as if she has a cold. She is holding her baby. Their baby. Tom and Elise and the baby, like an image on a greetings card. ‘He is busy with work.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I am on holiday.’

  ‘Holiday?’ he laughs. ‘Without your husband? In Magulu?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think you are confused. Maybe you want to go to Zanzibar or Ngorongoro.’ He looks closer at me. ‘No beaches here. No wild animals.’

  ‘I don’t want those things.’ I can see how badly he wants to ask but doesn’t: What could you possibly want in this forsaken place?

  He hands me back my passport. ‘How long will you stay?’

  ‘A week.’

  ‘Then you will return to your husband?’

  I nod vaguely, the best I can do. Perhaps he thinks I’m one of those women looking for a young African man, a Masai warrior, a hunky tour guide. Indeed, PC Kessy keeps his eyes on mine, discerning. Half of the truth is part of a lie. But which half? He’s not quite sure.

  ‘I hear these NGOs have very good benefits,’ he says. Then he walks past me, and takes a seat inside at the bar.

  * * *

  In my room, I wash my face at the sink. The water is cold and I imagine the dark walls of the well and the smell of the damp stone encasement. The bed is too short so I have to lie at an angle, from corner to corner. I turn out the light, but the room is not dark. Light from the hallway shines over the top of the doorway. There is no ceiling above the rooms, only the pitch of the roof. So the walls are no more than privacy screens. Light and noise breach the walls with ease. It is impossible to sleep as I can hear the men drinking in the bar, low banter and laughter and the loud wah-wah of the radio.

  Then, about ten, the generator cuts out. The darkness is sudden and complete. The radio stops and the voices mute and an entirely new layer of sound surfaces. The wind shaking the leaves of the bougainvillea bushes outside my window. The scuffing of feet and chair legs on the floor in the bar. A cough from one of the other rooms I didn’t know was occupied.

  After a while, the men in the bar finish their drinks and wander out into the street. I can hear them talking as they walk away and the conversations fade or end one by one as they diverge into the night. ‘Exactly,’ someone is saying in forced English, ‘that is my point exactly.’

  There is a brief hiatus of silence, then a dog barks. And a faint, rhythmic squeak begins, as if off stage. It grows louder, approaching, and I know it’s a bicycle. I have in my mind that it is the man in the pink shirt whom I saw on the way here. I get out of bed and go to the window. But he has passed and there is only the empty street and the long, deep shadows of the moon upon the dirt road that goes nowhere, to nothing.

  Magulu, April 29

  Gladness is sweeping. The dust particles tremble in the sunbeams. I am eating breakfast: tea and a greasy chapatti. Even though the menu is extensive, Gladness admits only the chapattis are available.

  ‘Not even a blood-pressure cuff,’ Dorothea says, sitting down. Today her wig is a red pageboy and she wears a black-and-white harlequin trouser suit. She orders Gladness to bring her a Coke, and I note Gladness’s hesitation. There’s something in the doctor’s tone she resents. A touch of superiority? But she obeys.

  As Gladness puts down the Coke, Dorothea announces, ‘Everyone here has an STD.’ Gladness accidentally spills the Coke, grabbing it before it tips all over Dorothea—who continues regardless: ‘Gonorrhoea, syphilis, genital warts. They are all infested. They are all having unprotected sex. I don’t know about AIDS. What is the point of testing? There are no retro-virals available.’

  Dorothea is so small that her feet, in worn-down kitten heels, barely touch the floor below her chair. The silky red strands of her wig sway in opposition to her almost continuous movement. She cannot sit still.

  I turn my head toward her. This is encouragement enough. I learned through my years with Tom—dinners, cocktails, luncheons, barbeques, embassy functions, speeches, gatherings, get-togethers, Christmas parties—that most people require only the slightest response to believe you are listening. The flicker of a pulse, really, is sufficient.

  ‘Do you know I chose to come here? I chose it! Yes! I believed it was my duty. All the others in my year, they wanted postings in the cities, in big hospitals. Me, I said, “It is my duty, it is my responsibility to provide medical care to the poor people in the countryside.” Do you know our first president? Julius Nyerere? Mwalimu. Teacher. He was a teacher, a humble man and he wanted a nation of humble people. He sent people from the cities, he forced them to go and live in the country so they would not think they were superior. They would know the life of a peasant. But the joke is that I have no blood-pressure cuff. Sometimes I don’t even have antibiotics because there is no distribution. The government pretends we do not exist. I gave my last Ciprofloxacin to your friend.’ She pauses to order another Coke from Gladness, then hurries on. ‘How can I get some? Anything? Betadine. Antimalarials. There is no vehicle, not one in this town, not one for many miles, and the District Medical Officer never sends anything to me. What kind of medical care can I provide? How can I be a doctor? Can you tell me?’

  I mumble the sympathy she must be expecting.

  Dorothea hasn’t finished: ‘I cannot treat people so of course they do not come to me and they continue to go to their mganga and so nothing changes. We are still living in a primitive time and they believe if they take tea from this root or that tree bark it will cure venereal disease, will cure glaucoma, will make it possible to have a baby even though the woman’s uterus is full of infections. Her ovaries are scarred. No eggs can come out.’

  Now she sighs, leans back, and again I am struck by the physical dichotomy: her neat, doll-like features belong to those of a young girl, but her skin is slack at the jaw; she’s older than I had first thought.

  I realize that I’m quite glad of her company, for she apparently requires nothing of me. She doesn’t want to know. She just wants to talk, to complain, and her voice is like an idling car; it gently pads the otherwise blank air. I drink my tea, tear at the chapatti and wonder where to wipe my greasy fingers.

  The dust lifts from Gladness’s broom, sparkles, and the stillness revolves around me and I’m in the middle of it, sitting very still. But there is something beyond it—movement, and I feel a tiny quiver at the base of my spine.

  On the periphery there is the rushing.

  On the periphery there is glass bursting.

  Little bouquets of flowers.

  Mrs Gassner trying to tie her shoelaces.

  A little girl moving like a beetle on its back—

  ‘Friend? Would you like a Coke, friend?’ Dorothea says.

  I wade back toward her. I see her clearly and precisely in the chair beside me, her head cocked to one side, smiling, but also with the same look of concern she had for Melinda. I feel a momentary rush of gratitude, as if she’s pulled me from rough water. I want to touch her small hand to confirm she’s here, I’m here. The dread in my stomach uncoils.

  ‘Do you have a fever?’ she peers from under the red pageboy. ‘You look somehow unwell.’

  ‘No, no.’

  She laughs, a little snort, ‘And what could I do anyway! No stethoscope. No antibiotics!’

  Later, I look up the word mganga. It means witch doctor.

  Arnau, March 12

  I went out the door and down the stairs. Mrs Gassner was sitting on the hall bench, putting on her shoes. She glanced up with her watery gray eyes.

  ‘Grüsse, she said.

  ‘Grüsse,’ I replied, fumbling even with this basic Swiss German greeting.

  ‘I go to the doctor,’ she said, trying English now. ‘My art
hritis, it is true pain.’ She shook her hands at her shoes.

  Her shoes. Stout leather lace-ups. Swiss made. Of course.

  ‘Look, my hands do not work.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Like a child. I cannot do my own shoes.’ But she moved her feet toward me in request.

  I bent down and pulled the laces tight, tied them in double bows.

  ‘Is that okay?’

  ‘Danke. This a bit tighter. Okay. Danke, thank you.’

  Mrs Gassner’s handbag was there beside her feet. It was slightly open, enough to reveal several white billing envelopes inside.

  ‘It will rain in one hour,’ she said, standing up, adjusting her hat. ‘I feel my old bones.’

  She saw me walk back upstairs to my flat. ‘You forgot something?’

  ‘My phone bill.’

  ‘Ach, they cut you off no mercy. Watch out.’

  In the flat, in the small kitchen—there it was by the toaster, the white envelope. MAHNUNG!

  I put it in my bag.

  I wondered, briefly, why I should bother to pay it at all. The phone hadn’t rung since Tom left. Our friends in Geneva were Tom and Elise’s friends, now. They were phoning Tom and Elise.

  I went back downstairs.

  Mrs Gassner was just driving off when I came out. Seeing me, she suddenly stopped and rolled down her window. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I forget to inform you. My cousin, he say the land, Tom never buy it.’ She gave me a little wave then jerked forward a few yards, the ancient white Fiat confused by the conflicting commands of the accelerator and brake. Mrs Gassner was a terrible driver.

  I stood, quite unable to move. Stalled, not unlike Mrs Gassner’s Fiat. Tom had never bought the land. Never. Bought.

  Tom never bought the land.

  Although we’d taken a picnic, and lain upon the green, late summer grass, still woven with daisies, the high air a-shimmer, the occasional hum of a bee. The land, our land. Although he’d said the words, ‘This is our land now.’ The mountain behind us, up a steep path and onto a knife-like granite ridge. Below us, tumbling down several thousand feet of village and road and cow meadow, Lake Thun pooled in the sun. As it was summer, the deep blue water had been dotted with boats.