‘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.