The Gloaming Read online

  ‘I forgot to pay the bill. That’s all.’

  He sat at the table, holding the flowers. I turned away from him. I didn’t want him to see my swollen face, the bruises, how ugly I looked. And this appalled me. That my vanity held so fast.

  ‘How’s Elise? How’s the baby?’

  There was a tic in his movement as he put the flowers on the table. ‘Fine. We’re all fine.’

  ‘That’s good. It would be a waste if you were unhappy with each other.’

  ‘Pilgrim,’ he said, and moved to touch my hand.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do.’

  ‘You’ve done enough.’

  He ignored this. ‘What about your parents? Have you called them?’

  ‘You know that’s not possible.’

  ‘They’re still living like that?’

  ‘Like what?’ I wanted him to condescend, to sneer.

  ‘Like—’ But he stopped himself. ‘Without a phone?’

  ‘Yes. Still. It’s how they live, Tom. Feral as goats, and happy.’

  ‘You could—’

  ‘Go and stay with them?’

  He sighed, bowed his head. ‘I don’t know. But I’m worried about you. We’re worried.’

  We. I thought about this shift, made in a matter of sentences. Not years, not months, not weeks. Once—for twelve years—we had been we. Now we was exclusive of me. This new we he spoke of casually, yet with surgical precision. He was a lawyer, he always chose his words.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  But Tom was not finished. ‘Elise has the name of a great therapist.’

  ‘You think I should see Elise’s shrink?’

  ‘Therapist. Highly qualified psychotherapist.’ He spoke calmly. ‘Shock. It’s very insidious. I see it all the time at work. You know that.’

  ‘And just what do you think Elise’s shrink would suggest? That I start an affair with a married man and get pregnant by him so he leaves his wife?’

  Tom exhaled softly. ‘Jesus, you’re so bitter.’

  ‘Or did I get it the wrong way round? You got her pregnant so you could leave me.’

  ‘It’s time to move on.’

  ‘Why? So you can feel less guilty?’

  He stood and shook his head with contempt, ‘Three children are dead. Don’t talk to me about guilt.’ He tossed the flowers in the sink, an expensive bouquet worth several hundred Swiss Francs.

  Magulu, May 3

  A mob of children surrounds Kessy. He holds in his hands a box, and they are all trying to touch the box. Kessy is losing his temper, but he must hold the box with both hands as it is torn, at risk of collapse, and he cannot fend them off. Gladness’s brother, Samwelli, wades out to help him. Samwelli is small and neatly formed, like Gladness—not so much bigger than the children, but he is quick and strong; he picks out the main troublemaker and pulls him roughly aside.

  The ragged procession moves down the street, drawing in new members, as if Kessy is the center of gravity. The children are screeching and jumping, the adults grinning and chattering. I can feel the frantic energy of the crowd, the greed of it, not for Kessy, or even the box, but for the event itself: something is happening in Magulu!

  Dorothea stands outside the clinic, ready and alert. Kessy hands her the box and turns on the crowd, his club swinging like a propeller, opening up a semicircle of space. People are shouting questions at him. One man, in a red T-shirt, shoves forward and stabs his finger at Kessy, his voice hysterical with accusation. In an instant, Kessy grabs him, flips him onto the ground, cold-cocks him. The crowd steps back in awe, as if they have seen a magic trick. Kessy places his knee on the man’s back and jerks his wrists into handcuffs, one at a time.

  Now, looking at the crowd, pulling the man to his feet, Kessy speaks in a low, hissing voice. They listen and seem to obey, for they back up. But I see in their eyes something base. One day, they will tear Kessy apart. One day, they will hit him until he falls on the earth and they will kick him, his face, his ribs, his stomach, his groin, until he is no longer a policeman, no longer anyone they knew, and when he is good and dead, when he is meat and dust, then they will vanish into the bush.

  Am I beginning to understand?

  ‘Friend!’ Dorothea calls to me. ‘Come, come here!’

  Inside the clinic, she opens the box. It once contained paint and is tied with yards of sisal string. One panel is agape.

  ‘Why is Kessy bringing me such things?’

  Just as she finally succeeds in cutting away all the sisal, Kessy reappears to explain: some children found it in the roundabout.

  Tentatively, with the end of her pen, Dorothea pushes back the flaps of the box. Its contents are wrapped in newspaper. She puts on latex gloves and unwraps the first item. It is about a foot long, severed at both ends. The surface is pale as milk, shriveled and dry. I think it must be some part of an animal.

  Dorothea recoils. ‘God bless us.’

  She takes out another object, unwraps it. It looks like a large prune.

  ‘A human kidney.’

  ‘You are sure?’ Kessy asks.

  ‘And the first is a forearm, cut at the wrist and the elbow.’

  There is also a hand, dried and shrunken, so that it seems to have belonged to a monkey; but these are all human parts: a heart; a liver; and two ears, wizened as dried apricots.

  A human being can be reduced in any number of ways. I think of Tom’s reports. Machetes. Kalashnikovs. Axes. The clustering of words in certain paragraphs: disemboweled, decapitated. We never spoke about any of it and he never read the reports when I was in the room. But they were always there, on a desk, in his briefcase, vibrating with detail.

  ‘Albino,’ Dorothea says. ‘From the color of the skin, I can tell this was an albino person.’

  Kessy shakes his head in disgust and turns to me. ‘This is the magic of the Sukuma people and their superstitions. They believe albinos are spirits and ghosts. And their bodies are magic.’

  ‘How do they get the bodies?’ I ask, although I’m sure I already know because nausea is welling in my throat.

  Dorothea makes her noise of disapproval: a soft snort. ‘They kill them. Yes, they kill them, even children. And they then cut them into small pieces. Like this. For a lot of money. This magic is worth a lot of money.’

  Perhaps Dorothea mistakes my disgust for disbelief. She looks directly at me. ‘It is to put on a curse. A powerful curse.’

  ‘What kind of curse?’

  ‘For many things,’ Kessy says. ‘To get some land or some money. To kill an enemy.’

  ‘How do you kill with this?’ I gesture to the box.

  Kessy smiles. ‘Imagine someone hates you this much? What have you done to him? Perhaps in your heart you know you are guilty. And this magic speaks to your heart.’

  A sensation comes over me, as if something is moving underneath my skin, one of those terrible worms that beds down in your flesh. For a while, no one says anything, and I realize Kessy and Dorothea are afraid. Yet they don’t want me to see their fear: that they are like the people of the village or the people who would kill an albino and cut him up. They don’t want me to see that a part of them believes in magic so strong.

  Dorothea says to Kessy, ‘You must keep this at the police station. It is not safe here.’

  ‘But I have no place to keep it there. Only my desk. And there are no locks.’

  ‘I’ll keep it,’ I say, and I see their relief, even as the worm flutters at my throat like a pulse.

  I take the box and as I’m walking to my room I see Martin Martins.

  ‘What you got there, princess? Some kind of treasure?’

  Holding the box in one hand, I can’t quite unlock my door. He moves in to help, taking the box before I can protest. He sniffs. ‘Smells funky.’

  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 a
nd 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.

  Magulu, May 5

  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.

  Magulu, May 7

  ‘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 Ro
oster. 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?