She saw me walk back upstairs to my flat. ‘You forgot something?’
‘My phone bill.’
‘Ach, they cut you off no mercy. Watch out.’
In the flat, in the small kitchen — there it was by the toaster, the white envelope. MAHNUNG!
I put it in my bag.
I wondered, briefly, why I should bother to pay it at all. The phone hadn’t rung since Tom left. Our friends in Geneva were Tom and Elise’s friends, now. They were phoning Tom and Elise.
I went back downstairs.
Mrs Gassner was just driving off when I came out. Seeing me, she suddenly stopped and rolled down her window. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I forget to inform you. My cousin, he say the land, Tom never buy it.’ She gave me a little wave then jerked forward a few yards, the ancient white Fiat confused by the conflicting commands of the accelerator and brake. Mrs Gassner was a terrible driver.
I stood, quite unable to move. Stalled, not unlike Mrs Gassner’s Fiat. Tom had never bought the land. Never. Bought.
Tom never bought the land.
Although we’d taken a picnic, and lain upon the green, late summer grass, still woven with daisies, the high air a-shimmer, the occasional hum of a bee. The land, our land. Although he’d said the words, ‘This is our land now.’ The mountain behind us, up a steep path and onto a knife-like granite ridge. Below us, tumbling down several thousand feet of village and road and cow meadow, Lake Thun pooled in the sun. As it was summer, the deep blue water had been dotted with boats.
And at that same time, at the exact moment when he kissed me, when he put his hand up my skirt, Elise had been in Geneva. She had been four months pregnant.
There was the story I told myself because Tom, when he left, wouldn’t explain any of it. And in my story, he hadn’t known about the pregnancy, not until much later, perhaps the eighth month. This made the summer and everything in it true. Coming to Arnau in August. Talking about the dream house, our plans, how many bedrooms, a bathroom with a view. Renting the flat was a temporary measure, a way to be in Arnau on the weekends and, as Tom said, ‘To get a feel for the land.’
But the land had been a lie. He’d never bought it.
In September he’d suggested I stay in Arnau during the week, take German lessons in Tunn. He arranged these. He told me about yoga classes at the local school, about a hiking club. He wanted me to become part of the Arnau community, ‘make connections, make friends.’
On weekends, he couldn’t get enough of me, constantly taking me to bed. ‘Let me look at you, let me look at you.’ He’d been inside me with his lies.
I was aware of a bad taste in my mouth, as if the corruption was corporeal, like cancer. My skin smelled of it, my sweat reeked of it. I put my hand on the car door. Keep going, I said to myself. The language class in Tunn. It was a fact, like the car. It was all I had. Where I had ended up, after the world, the farthest corners of it, the clever conversations with diplomats and aid workers, after marriage, in this tiny, little life.
I got in the car, I started the engine. Keep going. Even though I’m terrible at languages, even though I could barely say ‘Grüsse.’
And I was driving. Straight, straight on. Through the village. I passed the small grocery shop, the post office, the apothecary — the pin-neat commercial array which was Arnau. Around the corner, toward the recycling center. Keep going, keep going, I told myself.
And then the windshield burst open like a crazy flower.
Magulu, April 30
Evening, around five, and I decide to go for a walk. To follow the nowhere-nothing road north. I intend to go a few miles and turn around. I walk past the clinic, which is shut — no sign of Dorothea. There are then the two half-finished buildings, which precede the edge of town. Immediately after: the bush. It is a matter of feet to step between the two worlds — this awkward human outpost and the stuttering, fidgeting bush.
The road bisects the green, drawn with all the certainty of a three-year-old’s crayon, wobbling, but indelible. I can’t understand why it’s a road at all as I never see cars, and there isn’t the trace of a tire track on the earth, even where, hard packed, some imprint might remain from the rainy season. There are, however, many bicycle and livestock tracks and footprints, some bare.
I walk for about ten minutes before I see the children. They are still some distance ahead — perhaps five hundred yards. I see they are playing with a puppy on a string. I wonder where they live, for there are no huts nearby, none that can be seen, only paths that diverge abruptly into the bush. I think how much is hidden.
As I come closer, I realize the children aren’t playing with the puppy, they are torturing it. One drags the puppy along the dust, the rope so tight around its neck it cannot breathe or squeal, while the other two hit it with sticks. They are so involved with their game, laughing hysterically as they hit and hit the puppy, that they don’t notice me until I shout, ‘Stop it!’
Immediately, they look up. Their faces express a strange and shifting mixture of emotion: fear, excitement, and something else I can’t quite register. They abandon the puppy, which has urinated and shat all over itself, and rush toward me, dancing around me.
‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’ they scream.
‘Pen, pen, pen!’
‘Mzungu! Pen! Mzungu! Give me, give me!’
They circle around me, laughing, their bare feet stirring little clouds of dust. ‘Mzungu! Give! Give! Give!’
I feel sharp little fingers pulling at the pockets of my skirt. ‘Give me!’
I grab the girl’s hand and push it away, ‘No!’
They move quickly, their dexterous little hands poking and pulling. And dancing, they laugh, so I can see their little pink tongues and sharp, white teeth. ‘Pen, pen, pen!’ I smell them, their unwashed clothes, the rags that pass for clothes, their filth and sourness.
‘Stop,’ I say again, but they do not pause or care.
One of the boys slaps the back of my thigh and screams with laughter. The other reaches over and pats the front of my skirt, my groin. I try to back away, but they move with me, patting and slapping now, pinching, dancing, laughing, chanting:
‘Mzungu, mzungu, mzungu, give me!’
‘Mwacha!’
An angry shout, a male voice.
In an instant they scatter, and are gone. Absorbed back into the bush.
It is PC Kessy. ‘They are animals,’ he says.
‘They’re just children,’ I turn, holding the tremor in my voice. ‘They don’t know what they’re doing.’
Kessy raises his eyebrows, ‘They touch you like that and you think they don’t know what they are doing?’
‘They don’t really know what it means.’
‘And when they do know, do you think they’ll stop and become civil?’
‘Yes.’
Kessy laughs. ‘You should not stay here.’
‘Because of these animals?’ I say it with a kind of challenge in my voice.
‘Because you don’t understand.’
‘They are just children.’ I repeat this as if to convince myself. Yet, I wonder: what would they have done to me if Kessy had not come?
He is silent a moment. ‘Please, madam, walk back to the town with me.’
‘No, I want to walk on. Not far. To the top of the rise.’
‘But the view is the same from here as it is from there.’
I start to walk anyway. He shakes his head and falls in beside me.
‘I don’t need a police escort.’