The Gloaming Read online

The late afternoon light stretches out the shadows and the air cools. We sit on the steps. Down by the roundabout I see the men with the goat resting. The goat bleats with passion, its ribcage visibly expanding and lifting. How it longs for the reassurance of another goat’s answer.

  ‘Kessy says you walked with him toward the north.’

  As if we’d gone on a little hike. ‘Yes. He came to help me.’

  ‘The children, he told me. I’m sorry for your trouble. They are very bad. Little animals.’

  ‘So Kessy said.’

  She’s looking up at me with a small smile. ‘This word, animals, you don’t like it.’

  Tom and I could never trust anyone with frankness. In those high-minded, expatriate circles, a comment made even in dark humor or innocence could be twisted. To call someone ‘an animal’—even one of the perpetrators—would lay you open to charges of racism. It would be a career-ender.

  ‘Somehow it is shaming?’ Dorothea presses.

  ‘Yes.’ And this makes her laugh.

  ‘But they are without shame. Like animals. Do you see? You maybe feel shame for them, but they do not feel shame for themselves. They are strong, because their brothers and sisters who are weak have already died.’ She waves her hand around, encompassing all we see. ‘This is a graveyard. Here are more babies than rocks buried in the soil. It is too crowded. There is no room for shame.’

  In my mind’s eye, I see the three children dancing in the road—yes, shameless, weightless, and Kessy saying, ‘Do you think they will become civil?’ They were beating a puppy to death.

  ‘Friend.’ Dorothea touches my wrist with her fingers. ‘Sometimes you’re going very far away.’

  Soon, I think, soon she will start asking questions. Why and how and who. So I turn to her, the party trick of my full attention. ‘Tell me. Tell me about Mr Kessy.’

  ‘You see that he doesn’t belong here?’

  ‘He doesn’t belong here.’ Tom called this means of deflection, lobbing. He was proud of my ability to lob our associates. For hours at any given dinner table I was able to deflect, to reveal not a single thing about myself while giving the impression of participating in the conversation.

  Dorothea adjusts her wig. ‘Kessy is a bad policeman but a good man. Once he was a good policeman and a bad man. He changed, you see. One day. In only one day, one hour, one minute. For the police, it is not the same in this country. They are corrupt. They must be.’

  Possibly, I could say to Dorothea: You’d be surprised at what happens in my country. But which country? My country was Tom. Instead, I simply lean forward, creasing my brow to show her my concentration.

  ‘In this country,’ she says, ‘the salary of a policeman is too low and the barracks are filthy with very poor plumbing and often no running water.’ The spool of her story unravels, the more she tells, the more she wants to tell.

  There are seasons of corruption: twice a year, when school fees are due, and just before Christmas or Eid. The pressure on police to provide for their families is greatest during these times, so they set up roadblocks to check drivers’ licences and find all kinds of things wrong with cars: a cracked mirror, a missing door handle. This is easy to do because the Traffic Act is hundreds of pages long. Even driving in flip-flops is an offense.

  ‘We plan for these periods,’ she explains. ‘We make sure we never have a lot of money in our wallets, only small bills, because a policeman will accept even two thousand shillings. A policeman does this twenty times a day and he has made enough for one child’s school fees for one term. That is what he must do. Even we, his victims, understand.’

  Now Dorothea hesitates. She glances at me, gauging my interest. Tom said witnesses often spoke to hear their own voices. They sought to confirm their existence, and speaking gave their thoughts weight, transformed the invisible into the tangible. I see, now, Dorothea’s need for definition. So I say, ‘Kessy was a good policeman,’ and she quickly takes up the thread.

  Kessy was working a particularly lucrative stretch of road in downtown Arusha. The police drew lots to get these spots, and had to pay off their superiors with their takings. After all, just because you had been promoted and sat behind a desk in an office, why should you lose out on bribes? Kessy was standing at the roadside, stopping cars, telling the drivers, ‘Oh, your side-view mirror is cracked’ or ‘You are missing a hubcap.’ He was building a small house for his wife. They planned to have children. Only one room of the house was finished, and they lived in this. The rest was still a cinderblock shell without a roof, and in the back, there was a wooden latrine. It was, Dorothea explains, a beginning.

  ‘We are not like you,’ she says. ‘We know it is maybe years before we have a roof or a sofa or running water. White people want everything, they are used to their own way. Sorry for this, but it’s what I have seen. My mother was a house-girl for some British people in Dar es Salaam. It was in the eighties and there was no water in the town system. They couldn’t believe this, they couldn’t believe that if they turned on the tap nothing happened. They complained to the City Council. They wrote letters. Nobody wrote back. Nobody wrote to tell them, “There is no money to fix a broken pipe up the line.” Nobody told them, “You will wait twenty years for that pipe.” And anyway, small boys were stealing the letters. You would put your letter in the postbox and one minute later these boys come with wire and hook the letter. They look inside, perhaps there’s money? If not, they just take the stamp. Even this they could sell.

  ‘In the end, my mother’s white people realized they were wasting their time with the officials, so they made my mother get water from the well down the street and carry it up onto the roof and fill the water tank so that they could take showers. She carried twenty buckets a day, along the street and up three flights of stairs.’

  Dorothea smiles at me. ‘But I don’t think you are severe like that. Only…’ she pauses, searches my face. ‘Only it’s difficult for you here because you have a white mind.’

  ‘Kessy said the same thing. That I don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she pats my arm reassuringly. ‘When you understand this country, you know you cannot ever understand it.’ Returning to the story of Kessy, she reaches a certain day, when he was taking bribes on the roadside and a young boy ran across the street near him. A crowd surged after the boy, shouting, ‘Mwizi! Mwizi!’ Thief! Thief!

  Kessy knew well enough how these situations ended: the mob will catch the boy and the boy will be beaten to death. So Kessy grabbed the boy. The boy was not so strong. Tough but not strong, and anyway he saw he could be safer with Kessy. He went with Kessy to the car.

  But an old woman pushed through the crowd. At first, Kessy thought she was a madwoman, and he ignored her, but she would not go. She followed him, then pecked at him with her words. Something about a girl, a young girl.

  Why did Kessy go with her? He doesn’t know, even now. He was a good policeman and good policemen do not go into the slums. They ate their chai, they got fat. It was a good job, being a good policeman. Easy. Instead, Kessy went with the old woman. They walked and walked, they turned corners, more corners. They stepped over ditches that were choo. Where else can people relieve themselves? Even Kessy could not believe the smell.

  ‘At last,’ Dorothea says, ‘Kessy and the old woman came to a door.’

  It was not locked. Kessy wondered if it was a trap. But it was too late, he had to find out. He opened the door. It was dark and there was another smell. He could not describe it, but it made him afraid. He knew he was about to see something that he could not have imagined, and that the vision would be with him forever. He would know what one person could do to another. He wanted to turn from this, to save himself. He heard the girl breathe.

  ‘I’m here to help you,’ he said.

  He opened the door further and the light sliced across the darkness.

  And he saw her. What was left of her.

  ‘He saw her, what was left of her,’ Dorothea repea
ts, as if the horror belongs to her as much as to Kessy.

  Kessy took the girl directly to Doctor Miriam, a white doctor at the hospital in Arusha. Doctor Miriam didn’t ask any questions. She took the girl, this poor girl, and she sent her somewhere safe where she could never be found. The story was printed in a local newspaper and some important people were very embarrassed because they knew. Of course they knew about the girl. She belonged to one of them, and Kessy was the source of the whole problem. He was not being a good policeman.

  Dorothea doesn’t know what had been done to the girl. Kessy only ever told her one detail. Her toes had been smashed by a hammer. The rest he keeps for himself, inside his eyelids.

  ‘So you see,’ she says. ‘They will forget Kessy, as they are forgetting me. And sometimes I think we are even forgetting ourselves and one day you will come back here and you will say, “Oh, Dorothea, how are you?” And I will say, “Who is Dorothea? There is no one here by that name.”’

  As we sit on the steps I think of her crazy outfits as a kind of armor against despair. She is defiant. And I consider what it must be like to be this clever woman, to have become a doctor without medicine, as Kessy is a policeman without laws.

  Kessy does not come and dusk moves in and she asks me to help her look for him. We find him walking back along the nowhere-nothing road. Dorothea smiles when she sees him.

  Of course, they are lovers. Who else would they choose?

  Arnau, March 14

  I thought I misheard. My brain, still thick and slow, resisted input, so that the exterior world remained remote. As a child I’d had my tonsils removed and I remembered the waking: the muffling effect of the anesthesia, the soupiness of my senses. In this way, I stood in front of the frozen foods aisle of the village store, trying to decipher the contents from the packaging. Gemüsegerht. Huhn mit Reis. I knew the words, but they were encrypted. I was hungry. I opened the freezer door, reached in. Lasagne.

  Kindermörderin.

  I stared at the packet, the layered pasta dripped with cheese. I turned the word over in my mind. Kindermörderin: was that the German word for lasagne? Surely it was just ‘lasagne.’ Curiously, I felt my cheeks flush, as if my body was able to process the translation before my mind. The heat in my face alerted me to the embedded word: ‘kinder.’

  She was standing beside me, unnaturally close. Intimate. A middle-aged woman with short hair, unremarkable but familiar. She worked at the local hotel, may even have been a manager. Slowly, I turned toward her.

  Her dark brown eyes hard as pebbles, her English heavily accented. ‘I hope cancer eats your face.’

  Then I became aware of the entirety, the stillness of the shop, the invisible antennae twitching in my direction. Every person in there was concentrating on me. Even as they chose laundry detergent or consulted their shopping lists, they attended to me.

  Kindermörderin.

  I put the pieces together. Mörderin. Murderer.

  Very slowly, I put the lasagne back. I wanted to do the right thing, to be seen as reacting properly. Perhaps I should cry, as I had done with Sergeant Caspary. Tears of grief. But I had the notion this wasn’t what they wanted. I kept my eyes straight ahead, careful not to inadvertently catch anyone’s gaze. At the door, I put my shopping basket back in the stack.

  Outside, I checked for traffic as I crossed the road. I did not turn around, but I was certain they were watching me from the window, clustered like flies.

  Magulu, May 2

  He is white.

  How shocking whiteness is. Having become accustomed to seeing only black skin, whiteness seems awkward—bleached. We were not meant to be white; it’s an adaptation. The dappling of freckles, the coarse crop of his red-gold hair. His eyes are bright blue. How did we ever convince black people that whiteness was preferable, more beautiful? His eyelashes are pale, like those on a golden retriever. I realize I am staring.

  He extends his hand, ‘Martin Martins.’

  A slight European accent, the origin difficult to discern.

  ‘Pilgrim.’ I take his hand; the surface of his palm is rough and surprisingly cold.

  We are in the narrow hallway between the rooms. I stepped out and there he was, proximity forced by the small space.

  ‘Are your parents religious?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The name.’

  The name, the curious name, the cocktail party banter. ‘They’re hippies,’ I say, as I always do. ‘The Journey of Life.’

  ‘Seriously?’ He laughs. He actually laughs in a ha-ha-ha way.

  I consider the comeback, something about how his parents had no imagination and used the same name twice. But though Martin laughs, I already know he’s not a humorous man.

  ‘And here you are on your journey,’ he says. ‘Magulu. What a shithole, hey?’

  I listen to his voice. Perhaps somewhere in the former Eastern Bloc. Poland or the Czech Republic. Possibly further east.

  ‘Magulu’s not so bad.’

  ‘By what standard? A Nigerian jail?’ Ha ha ha.

  Tom spent two years writing a report on Nigerian jails. He came home from his research and interviews stinking. At first I thought it was the smell of the jail, but he said, no, it was him, how he came to smell, listening to the prisoners, seeing what he saw. It was a physical reaction to the suffering of others.

  ‘Sure, by that standard,’ I tell Martin.

  He’s clearly not sure how to take this flat response, and he inspects me more closely. ‘Imagine the guidebook! The Rough Guide to Shitholes!’

  ‘Imagine.’

  He takes a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and uses the act of offering me one to close again the space between us. The brand is Rooster, I notice, a retro design of a cockerel printed on the pack.

  He lights up, turning his head to exhale the smoke. ‘I love Africa. Love it. You can still smoke anywhere you want. When they are chopping each other’s arms off and stealing billions in aid money, they can hardly say, “Oh, now we want to have stronger anti-smoking laws.”’

  Is this amusing? I’m not sure. Something I read comes back to me: ‘You know, this Continent of Africa has a terrible strong sense of sarcasm.’ I do not remember the book, one of Tom’s. But this man has about him a feeling of dark experience, has taken the sarcasm to heart. He is not a tourist or a traveler. He has purpose and is explicitly unafraid.

  ‘And you,’ I say. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Fuel pump’s fucked on my Land Cruiser. I’m trying to get a message to a mate in Mwanza. No fucking mobile service so I had to hire a guy on a bike. I’m here until I can get a replacement. There’s a bus or something. A week at least.’

  I do not want him here.

  I do not want his inevitable questions or his weird vibe or his cold North Sea eyes. I turn to move away.

  ‘You going out?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  I look at him. ‘Just out.’

  ‘Promenading?’

  ‘What?’

  He taps ash casually onto the floor. ‘Promenading. You know, walking around and about for the purpose of being around and about.’

  ‘Yes, promenading.’

  ‘You’ve come to Magulu to promenade?’

  ‘It’s in the guidebook. Page sixty-three. “The Promenades of Magulu.”’

  He laughs, ha ha ha, and wags his finger to let me know I’ve got one up on him. Then he taps on my door with his knuckle. ‘This you? Number four?’

  I nod.

  ‘I’m just across the hall.’ He gestures to room seven, as if I want to know.

  I start to walk away. ‘See you later, princess.’

  Outside, I turn right, staying within the perimeter of the town. An old woman selling mandazis smiles and waves, and this feels like a blessing: a moment of normalcy, a simple, unguarded interaction. I wave back, but now she offers up a mandazi and I feel compelled to purchase one. Her smile vanishes, she’s focused on
the coins in my hand. She gives me the dense, fried chunk of dough wrapped in newspaper, and the grease leaks onto my hands. I can’t possibly eat it, but I cannot throw it away because I keep thinking about the children, shameless and puppy beating, but certainly hungry.

  So I walk on, holding the oily newspaper self-consciously. It grows heavier, and when I find myself back at the Goodnight my arm almost aches with strain.

  The bar is quiet, the TV a cold, occluded eye without the generator’s power. I look but don’t see Martin Martins. Carefully, I walk down the narrow corridor to my room. I try to be silent, but the lack of ambient sound means every action is amplified: the key in the lock, the click of the lock, the grit on the floor scraping as I open the door. And the same in reverse as I shut the door, slicing through the still afternoon.

  Sitting on my bed, the window framing a rectangle of light, I watch thunderclouds. Muscular and grand. Their shadows cast across miles, shifting the dominant tone of the landscape from green to deep purple. Almost every afternoon the clouds perform. But despite their baritone rumbles, there is no rain, only the damp and oppressive weight of expectation.

  I can hear Martin Martins now. He must have been napping. Is that a real name? An anglicization of something unsayable? His bed creaks when he shifts his weight. I hear the sound of a match striking, a sigh, a page turning. I lie so still because I don’t want him to hear me. I believe he is listening.

  My hands are still greasy from the mandazi, and I wipe them on my skirt. The mandazi itself sits on the small corner table, nestled in its newspaper, gleaming with oil. Quickly now I grab it and throw it in the bin.

  Arnau, March 15

  Tom stood awkwardly in the doorway. He offered up a bouquet of peonies and delphiniums.

  ‘Flowers?’ I said, letting him in as though he were a salesman.

  ‘I wanted to make sure you’re all right.’

  ‘You could have just called.’

  ‘The phone has been disconnected.’

  ‘Yes. So it has.’

  ‘Is there a problem with money?’