‘Because he could.’ Dorothea frowns. ‘And then he laughed. Isaac called me on the phone and he laughed at me.’
Ha ha ha. He must have known the pain he was causing her. And he found this amusing. Had he always been this way and she’d just never seen deep enough? There, in his spine, in his sinews, in the liquid dark of his body, such deception and brutality.
We. A little echo: We don’t want children. We will build a house together. We are happy. We we we we all the way home.
‘I told you I came here to help the peasants. But it’s not true. Not completely. Because here is close to Kenya. My best opportunity to be close to them.’ Pressing the photo to her chest, she says, ‘It is sentimental, of course. But I feel here we are having the same storms, the same rain or heat, and even this small connection I hold tightly.’
She puts the picture back, locks the cabinet door. She keeps the key around her neck. ‘My boys, I knew their smell. Luke was different to Ezekiel. I could tell them apart in the dark, even when they were sleeping tangled together. I could move close and say, “Ah, this is Luke’s hand. This is Ezekiel’s shoulder.”
‘After they were gone, for many weeks after, I had a fever, I was shaking. I thought it was malaria. But the test said negative. I think now I was like an addict and my whole body was reacting. Every cell was shouting, “Where are the boys? Where are my boys? Where is their smell, their touch, the weight of them?”
‘When that bad uchawi arrived I thought it was Isaac. But I discussed this with Kessy. I find it is important to think of the mind of a man because it is not the same as the mind of a woman.’
‘And what does Kessy think?’
‘That it is too much. Too much hate for a man who has already won. And you know, such a terrible curse is very expensive, a lot of money. Isaac likes his nice clothes and his shoes from Nigeria. Kessy is right, he wouldn’t spend the money on me.’
‘How much to buy such a curse?’ Twenty thousand dollars, I think, thirty.
‘Kessy says one thousand dollars,’ Dorothea says. I hear Martin laughing, ha ha ha.
‘But that’s not much money, Dorothea, a person died.’
She puts her head to the side, smiles patiently, ‘Friend, in this country you can pay someone ten dollars and they will go out and kill whoever you say. But Isaac would not even spend ten dollars on me.’
‘Then who is the box for?’
Dorothea waves a hand, ‘Someone in the village. It is probably a problem with land among relatives. Who can know what is going on out there?’
‘What should I do with it?’
‘Who is making their food?’ Dorothea says, I think with purposeful incongruity. The box still frightens her. ‘Who is cleaning their clothes? When they cry, who is there to hold them? I try many times to write to my ex-husband, to say, “Isaac, let us be reasonable. Let us think of the boys.” But he enjoys his hate for me.’
‘But you are their mother,’ I say. ‘You have a right to see them.’
She waves her hand. ‘They are their father’s children, they are Kenyan. He has taken them legally. He has the right.’
For a long moment she looks out the window, seeing the same light as three hundred miles north. Then in a rush: ‘The box, those things. As long as they are here my babies cannot return to me.’
She sees that I don’t understand. She takes my hand, looks into my eyes. ‘You are a mzungu. You see only this world. But there is another. Please do not think I am an ignorant African. I believe in God. But there is a place where many strange things happen. People can change into animals or other people. There are ghosts and spirits. Uchawi is as real as water or earth. And the power of this curse, it is a shadow, and we are all in the shadow. You see, this is why that woman and her baby died. We are in the shadow.’
‘I don’t believe in God, Dorothea.’ But even as I say this I remember the feeling of death in the clinic. The fluttering.
She nods. ‘Of course, your argument will be very logical.’
I almost smile at the idea that anything out of my head or mouth might be logical. Tom believed my atheism was an affectation intended to annoy him, there was nothing logical about it. He suspected it was a reaction to my parents’ spiritualism. Their earthship in the Mojave is filled with Buddhas and various Hindu gods and santos from Mexico. They appreciate the method of worship as a mechanism for connection to an unknowable, eternal Energy. ‘Chakras?’ Tom muttered when he met them, when my mother insisted on going about naked and my father smoked his bong and said Tom’s sacral and heart chakras were blocked. He couldn’t wait to get away from the incense. Neither could I.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I ask Dorothea again.
She squeezes my hand. Tears roll down her cheeks and her face shines with thanks. Her hair is a halo of light. ‘Take it from here. Take it far from here.’
‘Where?’
‘The uchawi will direct you.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
More forcefully, she squeezes my hands: ‘The uchawi will direct you.’
Arnau, March 18
‘It is Detective Inspector Paul Strebel,’ a voice said through the intercom. ‘I tried to phone—’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, it’s disconnected. The bill. I forgot to pay it. Please come up.’ I buzzed him up.
He appeared, almost too tall for the doorway, awkward, angular. In his early fifties, he was thin, with a narrow face, receding hair and quiet, dark eyes under eyebrows in need of trimming.
‘Please come in,’ I said. Polite, calm. ‘Can I get you something?’
‘Thank you, yes. But no caffeine. I’m not a good sleeper.’
‘Tea? Mint? Chamomile?’ Was this right? Should I be offering him herbal tea? He was here to talk about dead children and all I had was manners. As if I was hosting a cocktail party for the associates in Dili. Smile, serve exquisite canapés while wearing an elegant black dress. Anything to distract from the atrocities in the files.
‘That’s fine,’ Strebel said, without specifying. He took off his gloves but not his coat. The gloves were fine-grained black leather, but they didn’t suit him. He wasn’t urbane. I suspected someone had bought them for him as a gift, his wife or daughter.
We sat, I poured. My hand trembled on the teapot’s handle and he saw this. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Worry?’
‘I mean, don’t be afraid.’
‘Of the tea?’
‘No.’ He ventured a smile. ‘Of me.’
I put the teapot down. ‘Is that it? Am I afraid of you?’
He leaned forward to sip his tea. ‘I expect so. You don’t know what to tell me. You don’t know what I know.’
When I said nothing, he went on. ‘Or perhaps it’s more a generalized fear. It can be frightening to lose control.’
Would he know about that? I glanced at his kind, tired face and tried to imagine him losing control, shouting or crying. I tried to imagine him being afraid. Then I realized he wasn’t speaking of personal experience but professional observation: he had seen people lose control. His profession — like Tom’s — concerned people who lost control.
‘Are you here to arrest me?’ I said.
‘For what?’ He turned the cup in his hands. ‘You think the accident is your fault?’
‘But it must be, somehow. I was the driver.’
‘Fault would mean you drove into them on purpose. Do you think you are such a person — capable of such an act?’