As I pay the bill at the Goodnight, Gladness doesn’t ask where I’m going or why. Her job is to usher in and usher out. I give her a good tip. ‘Safari njema,’ she says. Travel safely.
The bus leaves at noon from under a huge fig tree near the market. It rattles as it idles, exhaust fumes stinking. The crowd here is focused, active; there’s incentive to leave Magulu. People shove bags and even children through the windows. Touts sell tickets. The driver sweats as he manoeuvres boxes and sacks into the luggage compartment. Boys sell hard-boiled eggs. Others carry large boards on their shoulders — window height — bearing plastic combs, mirrors, packs of cards, key rings, dolls. They resemble peacocks, moving their displays stiffly up and down the length of the bus.
A young man in a tie tries to co-opt my seat by the window. I bought my ticket from the bus office — a table under the fig tree manned by the agent, a Rambo-esque vision in a red bandana and mirrored shades. I paid extra for the window seat.
As the young man won’t move — he has settled in, folding his arms, crossing his legs, determined as a suffragette — I summon the tout. He shouts at the young man and smacks him on the head. When I have reclaimed my seat the tout comes back and stares meaningfully. I pretend I don’t understand that he wants a thank-you tip — which is a mistake, because he places a very fat old woman next to me.
She glances down curiously at the box on my lap.
‘Vitabu,’ I lie. Books. She looks away. And moves so that part of her buttock takes up part of my seat.
We reach Butiama at dusk.
Only a decade ago Lake Victoria lapped at the edge of the town. The dusty shacks and crumbling buildings might have then seemed almost picturesque. But the lake level has dropped, and a wide hem of mud and trash now separates the town from the silvery-blue water. The dark mud smells, the day’s sun has heated the garbage rotting within it, and I find myself almost gagging on the thick, fetid air. The woman next to me shrivels her nose, shakes her head.
Outside, a medieval scrum surrounds the bus, as if people want to lynch the passengers rather than greet them. We can’t disembark because so many beggars, thieves, taxi drivers, touts for other destinations, screaming relatives are blocking the door. I realize my best option is to slip behind the old woman, drafting her bulk like a cyclist.
I have not thought what to do now, where to go. The ticket touts shout out destinations: Arusha, Mwanza, Dodoma, Kisumu, Mbeya. Pick one, I think. But not Mwanza, where they burn witches, where they kill albinos. In the frenzy, I am separated from the old woman, and I feel as if I have just lost a friend. Almost immediately, the crowd notices my solitude and I am surrounded by shouting faces. I feel hands grabbing at my suitcase, grabbing at the box under my arm. ‘Sistah!’ ‘Mzungu!’ ‘Arusha!’ ‘This way! This way!’ ‘Sistah!’
Frantically I scan the faces for one that might be open, sincere. I see only the same hungry expression of the men in Magulu when they nearly attacked Kessy.
‘This way! This way!’ a boy in a white shirt is saying. ‘This way, this way, this way.’ He takes firm grasp of the handle of my suitcase. I look down at him, his dark, indecipherable eyes. The white shirt is huge, a man’s shirt engulfing him, making him thinner, smaller: vulnerable. So I soften immeasurably toward him, and he senses this in an instant. He pulls me, shoving aside his competitors as if they are not larger and heavier and meaner. He pulls me confidently, a fish on the line. ‘This way! This way!’
We are free of the crowd, but still he doesn’t let me go. ‘This way.’ We cross a road. A man tries to sell me a bottle of water. The boy shouts at him. We enter a narrow alley, turn into another alley, another, another. I think about the girl Kessy found deep inside a maze. I think about her toes, smashed with a hammer, a kind of meticulous cruelty. Kessy saved her, and he was punished, rendered helpless in exile. I remember him saying to me on the road north of Magulu, ‘Who is going to stop them? Me? With my club? My flashlight? My laws?’ The terrible cruelty extends to Kessy: for a man to find himself capable of good, and then be stripped of the means ever to do good again. I think of Dorothea holding the hand of a dying girl, holding the photograph of her lost sons. These emotional assaults seem so carefully crafted — bespoke — that I can almost believe in God.
The boy turns back to look at me. His expression is serious, but sure. ‘This way.’
Alley folds into alley, an origami of shadows. ‘Where are we?’ I finally say.
‘This way.’
And we burst out into a courtyard illuminated by evening sun. There is a water pump, a fig tree, a Land Cruiser. For a moment I panic, for I’m certain it belongs to Martin Martins. But a large, black Tanzanian sits behind the wheel. The boy seems to know him. They speak in rapid Swahili. The boy turns to me, assertively: ‘This man will take you.’
He has his newspaper half-folded in his hands, the sports pages. He smiles. ‘Only three hundred dollars.’ Then he taps the side of the door with the newspaper. ‘Missionary car. It is in excellent condition.’
‘But where are you going?’
‘Very comfortable. God has personally blessed this car.’
The boy looks at me and nods. ‘You go with him.’
‘Where?’ I demand.
‘You go with him. He will take you.’
Perhaps they think I’m someone else — some other white woman.
‘Who is the car for?’
‘You,’ the boy says, smiling. ‘It is for you.’
‘But who am I?’ I say and, almost — almost — I laugh. Because I wouldn’t be completely surprised if the boy and the driver said, ‘Of course we know! You are Tom’s ex-wife! Yes, Mr Tom. He is a very good man!’ So I try again, ‘The car — has it been ordered?’
‘Ordered?’ Boy and driver look to me.
‘Ordered,’ I repeat, hopelessly now. ‘A name, an organization. Someone who paid for the car.’
‘Order? No, no, madam, there is no order.’
‘You pay for the car,’ the boy taps the hood in reassurance. ‘Only three hundred dollars. It is in excellent condition.’
The driver extends his hand to me, ‘My name is Davis. Welcome.’
‘But I didn’t order a car. I didn’t arrange for a car.’
‘Yes,’ Davis says, giving me his own version of the boy’s bright and certain smile. ‘But it is an excellent car.’
I consider my trajectory, my arrival at this point: I view myself from high on a Google map. A white woman in a backstreet of a Tanzanian town stands by a white Land Cruiser. A series of dots illustrates my journey, back through Magulu, through Kilimanjaro Airport, north across Kenya, across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, the boot of Italy, the Alps, Arnau. I have to think quite hard about the distance I’ve traveled, that the journey is a physical reality; because it feels as if I’ve just stepped through a portal. I have to look closely at the figure on the Google map and say, yes, that’s me, definitely me, that far out, that far away. I could very easily believe I was someone else, that Arnau had never happened.
When I finally understood that I must not stay in Arnau, I took a taxi to Zurich airport. I did not know where I was going. I thought vaguely of Addis Ababa. I thought of calling Strebel. I thought — very briefly — of my parents. At the airport, I began to walk, absorbed by the other travelers, their sense of purpose buoying me, instilling in me the confidence of direction. Calm, assuring voices came over the PA system in different languages. I imagined that if I listened closely I would hear my instructions: ‘Passenger Jones, Passenger Pilgrim Jones. Please go to counter E13.’ Traveling with Tom, there had always been a car and driver, business-class tickets, everything preordained.