For a long time I kept my gaze down. When I did look up I saw Tom, my husband, and it was everything I could do not to reach across the table and touch him.
‘Why,’ he said, quite gently. ‘That’s what you want to know.’
The waiter brought the coffees and shared a joke with Tom. Oh, everyone loved Tom.
‘Mrs Gassner told me you didn’t buy the land.’
He pressed his lips together. Something I’d never seen before: Tom at a loss for words. Finally, he managed only, ‘Elise.’ Whatever he intended to say next, he abandoned.
I began to laugh. It seemed better than the alternative, the great hard sobs lodged in my throat and the ugly tears that would stain my face and redden my nose. I giggled. Tom stared.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Tom. Tom, Tom, Tom.’ I tapped my fingers on the table, a little drum, the background music of my life. Tom-tomtom-tom.
I stopped, and we sat in silence.
At last, he said, ‘I don’t know how it happened, I can’t even remember how.’
‘Really? You can’t remember cheating on your wife? Did you do it all the time, is that why. I just didn’t know?’
‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘It was after work, and we went out for a drink. I wasn’t even drunk.’
‘But you found her attractive, you couldn’t resist her.’
Again, he pursed his lips. ‘I won’t do it, Pilgrim. I’m not going to betray her.’
‘But you betrayed me.’
‘There’s a difference. I didn’t intend to betray you.’
‘This is about intention? Oh, Tom, such a lawyer. It’s about what you did.’
He wasn’t looking at me, he was playing with a little sugar packet.
‘You left one Sunday evening,’ I said. ‘And you didn’t come back.’
When he turned his gaze to me, I saw his eyes were red and damp. I did what I’d seen him do to hostile witnesses on the stand, soldiers who’d put children in churches and burned them to the ground: I waited. Because it’s a human need: to justify.
‘I can’t explain Elise.’
‘Then explain me.’
He deliberated, he wanted to get it right. ‘The world is so broken. And I would come home and all I wanted was for you to be there, clean and smelling so wonderful, and I could wash myself in you.’
‘We could have had a child.’
Strangely, he regarded me. I had confused him. ‘But you never said so. You never said.’
‘I didn’t think. I mean, I did. I thought we had time.’
‘We didn’t.’
‘Quelque chose encore?’ The waiter was standing there with his white apron and benign smile.
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘Merci, mais non.’
No, there will be nothing more.
We walked outside, and I wondered what we should do — a quick, chaste embrace? Des bisous? Three or two?
‘I heard the inquest is over.’
‘Yes.’
‘How are you?’
‘It’s all right, Tom.’
He took my face in his hand and kissed me, the hungry Tom kisses, this act of open mouths and tongues, two humans inside each other. When it was over, I lightly touched his shoulder with my hand and walked away. He was watching me go, I knew. But I didn’t turn around. I took the train back to Thun and the bus up to Arnau.
My stomach tightened like a fist as I walked from the bus stop, up through the malkerai, toward the flat. I saw the downstairs curtains twitching. Mrs Gassner’s face appeared.
Tanga, May 28
‘Can’t you see what he’s trying to get you to pay for?’
I’ve just mentioned Jamhuri, who has told me about his child. She’s very sick. Gloria is driving me to the Amboni Caves north of town. She takes the road past the Hindu crematorium — a pretty, white colonial-style building surrounded by frangipani trees. It’s right next to the town’s fuel depot, and I wonder if this is a cause for concern.
‘The child has epilepsy,’ she says. ‘He wanted me to take her to a witch doctor. I won’t pay for that crap. So now he’s asking you.’
‘A witch doctor?’ I attempt a look of minor incredulity.
‘You can’t sling a cat in Tanga without hitting one,’ Gloria says. ‘But of course Jamhuri only wants the big gun. A certain Mr Sese.’
‘What does a witch doctor do?’
‘Oh, it’s not so much about the witch doctor, doll. It’s about the believer.’
I frown as if I don’t understand. But I’m thinking about Dorothea. ‘There is a place where many strange things happen. There are ghosts and spirits’ I see her clearly in my mind, her grief and her terror of the box: ‘Take it away from here, take itfar away from here.’
Gloria interprets my expression as disbelief, and rises to the challenge. ‘Last month, I took Jamhuri’s little girl to a specialist in Dar. He prescribed phenobarbital and reckoned she’d probably grow out of it in her teens. But you know how these people are — well, you don’t, do you? Jamhuri was expecting she’d get an injection or an operation and be completely healed, just like that. I don’t think he even tried the pills. That’s why he wants to go to Mr Sese. He thinks she’s possessed by shetani. He wants you to pay for his daughter to see Mr Sese.’
‘Shetani?’
‘Ghosts. Spirits. They’re everywhere. Apparently.’
‘And Mr Sese is—’
‘The pre-eminent witch doctor.’ She leans toward me in a stage whisper. ‘He advises the president.’
Gloria brakes at an intersection, takes this opportunity to turn and regard me with her curious owl stare. She’s trying very hard to locate the rat she senses scurrying through my words.
A loud honking erupts behind her. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going in such a hurry?’ she yells out the window, but shifts into first and pulls forward. ‘Don’t get me wrong. These guys like Sese are very powerful. When I first got here, I had a girl who came to cook and clean. She was a little thing. After a couple of months, I noticed she was turning gray. No kidding, her skin was turning gray. Like wet cement. I finally got her to talk to me. She said she was dying. I didn’t doubt that to look at her. I took her to the doctor. Full panel of blood work. A small fortune. No AIDS, no cancer, no TB, everything fine. The doctor told me she was indeed dying — from a powerful curse. I said, “You can’t be serious, you’re a doctor.” He said, “Of the body, not the spirit.”
‘He told me there are certain curses so powerful that the person who casts them must also die. The only way you can kill your enemy is to kill yourself. For instance, there’s this cooking pot curse. You sneak into your enemy’s kitchen and steal his cooking pot. You shout a curse into it, wishing their death. Then you smash the pot and bury the shards in the bush. If your enemy manages to find all the pieces and put the pot back together, then he will be saved. If not, well, kufa kabisa—he’s dead. But—’ she sticks a stubby finger in the air to make her point. ‘But, you die too. That’s the deal you make with the shetani. A twofer.’
‘Twofer?’
‘Sure. Two fer the price of one. And, you know, that little gray girl, I found her one morning in her room, curled up like a dead moth you’d find in the window. I suppose she’d died in her sleep, there was nothing to be done, she’d got it into her head that she was going to die, she’d willed herself to die. And so she died. I don’t know why she thought she deserved it. But that’s a powerful thing: to do with a thought what most of us can only do with a gun.’