‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘Poor thing. We’ve been so worried.’
We. That stubborn burr of a word. I contained myself, ‘Is Tom there?’
‘Oh honey bunny,’ she murmured to a small squeal in the background. ‘That’s my little plumpkin, oh, yes, my baby boy baby Mummy’s boy boy-joy.’ Then to me, adjusting her vocal dial from saccharine to smug: ‘Let me get Daddy for you.’
In the pause that followed I suddenly remembered myself with my leg up on the bathroom vanity as I slipped in my diaphragm. This act of preparation aroused Tom; he always watched, saying, ‘Pilgrim, Pilgrim.’
Now, he came on the line and said my name. ‘Pilgrim.’ There was no difference in his voice.
‘Were you here?’ I tried to find my neutral tone.
‘Here? Where?’
‘Here in the flat in Arnau. This morning.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Was Elise here?’
There was a pause, a patient sigh, ‘This is about Elise, then. Why on earth would Elise have gone to Arnau?’
Why on earth. I wanted to take the phone and smash it again and again against the metal hull of the phone box until it broke.
Even though he couldn’t see me, he said, ‘You need to get a hold of yourself, Pilgrim.’
I hung up and began to walk home.
Why on earth.
A car drove past and a young man honked, yelled Mördende Hure.
In my kitchen, I picked up the cup with a pair of cooking tongs. I had the idea that I could call the police and have it fingerprinted — that sympathetic Sergeant Caspary. But my next thought was how I might seem to her: in the wake of the tragic incident I was concerned about a mysterious coffee cup in my sink. And I’d already proven the faultiness of my memory. She’d wonder if I’d drunk the coffee myself and forgotten about it, the way I forgot to pay the phone bill. Forgot killing three children.
Killing three children.
The words made no impression. Should I carve them into my arm with a knife?
Sergeant Caspary would be sitting there, a frown afflicting her face. ‘The cup is yours but the coffee isn’t?’
‘I don’t drink coffee,’ I would insist to her. ‘I don’t like coffee.’
How could she be sure I was telling the truth? There was coffee in the cupboard. A cup with coffee in the sink. No evidence of a break-in, nothing taken. She might conclude I was a fantasist or a liar.
And even though I knew I was neither, I felt a tearing, a leaking: if my memory was so unreliable, so ready to malfunction — e.g. the forgotten death of three children, the phone bill — then what else had I forgotten? Or simply misremembered?
I could count on nothing. Had Tom and I lain upon the land? Had he said, ‘This is our land now’? Had we even been married? No physical trace of him remained in the flat, there was no ring upon my finger. Even photographs; there’d been so few, and these were packed away on Rue Saint-Léger. I had no proof of a twelve-year marriage, other than my impression of it.
Had I made myself a cup of coffee? Did I like coffee?
Facts slipped from my hands, swam away like eels.
But I took hold of the cup. The cool curve of the ceramic surface, the neat arch of the handle, its whiteness. And inside, yes, the unmistakable coffee dregs that I had not made.
Magulu, May 8
I haven’t seen Dorothea for several days. The clinic has been closed. I ask Gladness to show me where she lives. She calls Samwelli and he nods at me. ‘Njo, njo.’ Come, come. I follow him out the back door and down a narrow alley between houses. These are mud and wattle with rough thatch roofs. He turns corners, but I’m able to keep a sense of where I am, for I can see the main road through gaps, and the roundabout with goats standing in the dry fountain.
Dorothea’s house is a real house: made from breeze-blocks with a tin roof and neat gutters connecting to a black plastic cistern. The door is painted the same pretty pale blue as the cross on the clinic door. Brown chickens peck at the ground. This has been swept to hard dirt, clean as a floor.
The door opens and Dorothea peers out. Her hair is undone completely, an afro arcing round her face. She is wearing pink Winnie-the-Pooh pyjamas. I think they were probably intended for a child.
She smiles in a small way, ‘Friend, you have come to visit me. Come, come inside, yes.’ She says something to Samwelli, finds cash in her handbag and sends Samwelli off. He comes back shortly with Cokes and sweet sponge cakes. This country runs on sugar.
The main room is packed with furniture, all of it backed against the wall, nothing placed at an angle. The positioning reminds me of my room at the Goodnight; and how, if I move the chair to a 45-degree angle, Gladness returns it to its original position, so it stands to attention, like a soldier, flush to the wall.
Dorothea has several large, heavily varnished cabinets which glower over the room. They are so big that there is barely a passage between them and the coffee table. The cabinet tops sprout vases of plastic flowers, teddy bears and other stuffed animals, a ceramic Jesus statue and a set of praying hands. The sofa and two armchairs are faux velvet, pale gray, decorated with electric-green crocheted doilies and antimacassars.
‘Sit, sit,’ Dorothea directs, taking out the cakes and opening the Cokes.
‘I’m not disturbing you?’
She smiles, ‘No, not you, I am glad you came, you are my good friend.’
‘I thought you might be upset about the other day.’
‘Me? Oh, I am fine. Sure. Fine, fine.’
‘The way that woman died. I keep thinking about it.’
‘It is why these people believe in the mganga. Because I cannot help.’
‘But they also believe in you. They brought her to you.’
‘Therefore it is worse when I fail. And I cannot help because I have no car, no radio, nothing, just a white coat.’ She gives me a practical smile and pushes the cakes toward me. ‘You still have the box with those terrible things?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know, at first I was very afraid. I thought it was for me. From my husband,’ she says. ‘Isaac is really full of such hate.’
Dorothea takes a dainty bite of her cake. ‘I left him. He was always going with other women, even with prostitutes. So I took the boys to live with me. We were in Dar es Salaam. He was so angry. He wanted to kill me. But he did something worse.’
She gets up, and as she unlocks one of the cabinets I feel a sense of intense alarm. What will she show me? What product of hate? Will its toes be smashed, its severed ears wrapped in newspaper? Will it be in a report? Atrocity. But instead she brings out a framed photograph of two boys. The picture is staged with the hokey, drab background of a studio and stiff performance smiles.
‘My boys,’ she says. ‘My lovely boys. That is Luke, the big one. He is seven. And Ezekiel, the young one, the baby. He is five.’
Bright faces, earnest smiles: they wanted to please the photographer. ‘They are very handsome.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But this is an old picture.’
Again, the alarm sounds. What did Isaac do to them?
Dorothea takes the picture for herself and touches their faces with her fingertips. ‘Isaac took them, he took them from me. To Kenya, to his tribal place. He is Luo, from north of here, maybe three hundred miles. I don’t know the village. Isn’t that strange? We were married and I never knew the name of his birth village.’
How easy it would be to nod and smile in agreement. What we don’t know, what we never ask, what seems un-important. Instead, I say, ‘Why did he do that?’