‘Perhaps there is no memory to retrieve. During intense trauma the brain can focus on simply trying to survive.’ He wanted to calm me, but he heard me — I heard myself — gasp and then swallow.
Briefly, he touched my wrist. ‘Memory is narrative. It is not truth. It is the worst witness. Police hate witnesses. We groan inside. People swear they remember a man in a red coat, when we know it was a blue one. Or they remember a man with a hat because their father wore hats.’
‘Sergeant Caspary told me “Almost instantly.”’ I looked straight ahead now, at the hard, dark mountains in the distance. ‘In the hospital, when she came to talk to me, she said two of the children had died “almost instantly.” What does that mean?’
‘They were deceased by the time the paramedics arrived.’
‘But alive for those minutes? What — five minutes, three minutes between the crash and the arrival of the ambulances?’
He was quiet for a moment, then: ‘It won’t help. This sort of talk.’ He walked on, toward the bus stand. I followed and we sat down. There was a heavy industrial smell, and I realized it was new plastic, because of course the shelter was new. The cement under my feet was clean and fresh with only a few splats of gum.
‘Please look.’ He gestured to a series of neon orange hieroglyphics painted on the asphalt and pavement. ‘The truth is physics. The car, the road, the surface of the road, the trajectory, the weather, the victims’ weight. Gravity is merciless but completely objective. You braked. You braked hard. See the marks there?’ He gestured and I saw the skid marks, the definite skid marks, and around them the orange arrows, numbers, squiggles. ‘You did what you could,’ he said. ‘This wasn’t your fault.’
Suddenly, fitfully, he pulled off his gloves. ‘I really don’t like these. I have a perfectly good pair of wool ones. But my wife—’ I could tell he was embarrassed, he’d revealed something too private.
‘I used to buy gloves for Tom,’ I said. ‘I thought he liked them. But perhaps he felt the same way.’
Turning his face to me, his dark eyes met mine. But he quickly looked away.
‘Tell me their names,’ I said.
He waited, as if deliberating. ‘Mattias Scheffer. Markus Emptmann. Sophie Koppler.’
‘Sophie. She lived for a little while.’
Strebel nodded. ‘Yes. A few hours.’ He adjusted his coat collar. ‘We should get back before the rain.’
I thought back to Mrs Gassner tying her shoes. It had been about to rain that morning, too.
Magulu, May 10
Martin’s fuel pump arrived yesterday with the Thursday bus from Mwanza, and he is now installing it. There’s a crowd around the car and, periodically, he slithers out and shouts at them to go away. He shouts in what I assume is Ukrainian, probably the filthiest slurs, and sometimes he shouts in English, calling them niggers and kaffirs and cunts. But the crowd doesn’t care. They laugh at him. He’s a sideshow clown. The second he slides back under the car, they move in again, resilient, insistent as a tide. Someone steals a wrench, and it almost makes me smile to see his fury.
‘There are always more of them,’ I am tempted to tell him.
When he is finished, he sits at the bar and starts drinking. As I pass by he calls out ‘Princess!’ and offers to buy me a drink. I ignore him. He follows me into the hallway. I turn.
‘What do you want?’
‘You’re very beautiful.’
‘I’m not going to sleep with you.’
He laughs, then talks in a low, soft voice: ‘Sleep? No. Fuck. I’d like to fuck you. And then maybe hurt you. You’d like that.’
I keep walking. He catches my arm, his fingers digging in. ‘I know.’
‘Know what?’ I turn to face him. Looking into his eyes I feel like I’m watching a snuff film.
‘I know exactly who you are,’ he says.
He jerks my arm behind my back. I hear the sound of his zipper. He presses against me so I can feel his erection and rubs himself slowly against me. ‘I know,’ he whispers. ‘I know everything, princess.’ When I try to move, he pulls my arm higher. He’ll break it if he wants to. Very quickly he comes with a sigh, and lets me go, zips up. He walks casually back toward the bar.
And I stand with my pounding heart, this constriction in my chest and this absolute fear. My breath comes in quick little bursts. I know exactly who you are. I know who you are. I know everything.
But how can he?
As my breath slows I decide he knows me the way a rapist likes to think he knows women, that my resistance merely masks my lust. Even as I need to run to the bathroom and vomit in the sink and take off my shirt, I consider the pettiness of Martin. For all his brutality, he holds onto a lie that he must at all costs turn into a truth: that I desire him, secretly, that other women do.
Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe Martin knows he repels me. And this excites him.
Or maybe he just doesn’t care. The way the villagers taunted him, laughed at him — the way he’d turn around and kill them if he was paid to, even the women, even the children. No matter how they die, burning, screaming, guts falling out, whatever. There’s always more of them.
But they would kill him, too, without hesitation, hang him from a meat hook, hack him to pieces with a machete. They are bound together, this merchant of violence and his victims, as if they need each other; as if, like a snake eating its tail, there’s no distinction. Tom would say to me that violence becomes an identity, how people see themselves in the world, and to ask them to stop being violent is asking them to erase themselves.
Martin Martins leaves that afternoon. The sound of his car rubs the smooth, familiar air. I can just see him through the window of my room. A dozen barefoot children chase him, shouting, laughing. And when he speeds up, pulling away from their vortex, they start to throw pebbles. Then stones. He is leaving, he is leaving without them, he is leaving them behind, and they are furious.
Magulu, May 12
Dorothea invites me for dinner. When I get to her house, Kessy is sitting on the sofa watching TV at top volume. He’s not in uniform, just jeans and a T-shirt. He’s quite at home. He shakes my hand — the three-part shake I’ve come to know here, but it’s a cursory greeting; he’s riveted by the football. Dorothea comes in and speaks curtly in Swahili. At first he ignores her, and so she turns off the TV. He looks at her, shakes his head with disdain, gets up and walks out. She immediately plumps the cushions where he’s been sitting.
‘This is just a private club to him,’ she says, mimicking him: ‘“Lete beer, lete nyama choma, lete chai, ongeza sauti.”’
She gives me a Coke. ‘These Swahili men, they think they can just tell you what to do. Get this, do that. White men do not treat their women in this way. You see for yourself in the cities. Women are all looking for a white man, even the old ones, the drunk ones, the poor ones. They are all better than one Swahili man.’
‘There are white men like Martin,’ I tell her. I think of his sticky cum on the back of my shirt. I think of the bruises on my arm.
Dorothea makes a sour face as she sits down. ‘Yes. He is mbovu. You know what Gladness told Kessy?’ She looks at me over her Coke. Tonight, she wears the red pageboy wig and a purple dress. She slips her kitten heels off as she curls her legs underneath her. I’m surprised by the soles of her feet, which are flat and callused, as if she is accustomed to going barefoot. She raises an eyebrow, ‘Samwelli found the old fuel pump from Martin’s car.’