Now Dorothea hesitates. She glances at me, gauging my interest. Tom said witnesses often spoke to hear their own voices. They sought to confirm their existence, and speaking gave their thoughts weight, transformed the invisible into the tangible. I see, now, Dorothea’s need for definition. So I say, ‘Kessy was a good policeman,’ and she quickly takes up the thread.
Kessy was working a particularly lucrative stretch of road in downtown Arusha. The police drew lots to get these spots, and had to pay off their superiors with their takings. After all, just because you had been promoted and sat behind a desk in an office, why should you lose out on bribes? Kessy was standing at the roadside, stopping cars, telling the drivers, ‘Oh, your side-view mirror is cracked’ or ‘You are missing a hubcap.’ He was building a small house for his wife. They planned to have children. Only one room of the house was finished, and they lived in this. The rest was still a cinderblock shell without a roof, and in the back, there was a wooden latrine. It was, Dorothea explains, a beginning.
‘We are not like you,’ she says. ‘We know it is maybe years before we have a roof or a sofa or running water. White people want everything, they are used to their own way. Sorry for this, but it’s what I have seen. My mother was a house-girl for some British people in Dar es Salaam. It was in the eighties and there was no water in the town system. They couldn’t believe this, they couldn’t believe that if they turned on the tap nothing happened. They complained to the City Council. They wrote letters. Nobody wrote back. Nobody wrote to tell them, “There is no money to fix a broken pipe up the line.” Nobody told them, “You will wait twenty years for that pipe.” And anyway, small boys were stealing the letters. You would put your letter in the postbox and one minute later these boys come with wire and hook the letter. They look inside, perhaps there’s money? If not, they just take the stamp. Even this they could sell.
‘In the end, my mother’s white people realized they were wasting their time with the officials, so they made my mother get water from the well down the street and carry it up onto the roof and fill the water tank so that they could take showers. She carried twenty buckets a day, along the street and up three flights of stairs.’
Dorothea smiles at me. ‘But I don’t think you are severe like that. Only…’ she pauses, searches my face. ‘Only it’s difficult for you here because you have a white mind.’
‘Kessy said the same thing. That I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she pats my arm reassuringly. ‘When you understand this country, you know you cannot ever understand it.’ Returning to the story of Kessy, she reaches a certain day, when he was taking bribes on the roadside and a young boy ran across the street near him. A crowd surged after the boy, shouting, ‘Mwizi! Mwizi!’ Thief! Thief!
Kessy knew well enough how these situations ended: the mob will catch the boy and the boy will be beaten to death. So Kessy grabbed the boy. The boy was not so strong. Tough but not strong, and anyway he saw he could be safer with Kessy. He went with Kessy to the car.
But an old woman pushed through the crowd. At first, Kessy thought she was a madwoman, and he ignored her, but she would not go. She followed him, then pecked at him with her words. Something about a girl, a young girl.
Why did Kessy go with her? He doesn’t know, even now. He was a good policeman and good policemen do not go into the slums. They ate their chai, they got fat. It was a good job, being a good policeman. Easy. Instead, Kessy went with the old woman. They walked and walked, they turned corners, more corners. They stepped over ditches that were choo. Where else can people relieve themselves? Even Kessy could not believe the smell.
‘At last,’ Dorothea says, ‘Kessy and the old woman came to a door.’
It was not locked. Kessy wondered if it was a trap. But it was too late, he had to find out. He opened the door. It was dark and there was another smell. He could not describe it, but it made him afraid. He knew he was about to see something that he could not have imagined, and that the vision would be with him forever. He would know what one person could do to another. He wanted to turn from this, to save himself. He heard the girl breathe.
‘I’m here to help you,’ he said.
He opened the door further and the light sliced across the darkness.
And he saw her. What was left of her.
‘He saw her, what was left of her,’ Dorothea repeats, as if the horror belongs to her as much as to Kessy.
Kessy took the girl directly to Doctor Miriam, a white doctor at the hospital in Arusha. Doctor Miriam didn’t ask any questions. She took the girl, this poor girl, and she sent her somewhere safe where she could never be found. The story was printed in a local newspaper and some important people were very embarrassed because they knew. Of course they knew about the girl. She belonged to one of them, and Kessy was the source of the whole problem. He was not being a good policeman.
Dorothea doesn’t know what had been done to the girl. Kessy only ever told her one detail. Her toes had been smashed by a hammer. The rest he keeps for himself, inside his eyelids.
‘So you see,’ she says. ‘They will forget Kessy, as they are forgetting me. And sometimes I think we are even forgetting ourselves and one day you will come back here and you will say, “Oh, Dorothea, how are you?” And I will say, “Who is Dorothea? There is no one here by that name.”’
As we sit on the steps I think of her crazy outfits as a kind of armor against despair. She is defiant. And I consider what it must be like to be this clever woman, to have become a doctor without medicine, as Kessy is a policeman without laws.
Kessy does not come and dusk moves in and she asks me to help her look for him. We find him walking back along the nowhere-nothing road. Dorothea smiles when she sees him.
Of course, they are lovers. Who else would they choose?
Arnau, March 14
I thought I misheard. My brain, still thick and slow, resisted input, so that the exterior world remained remote. As a child I’d had my tonsils removed and I remembered the waking: the muffling effect of the anesthesia, the soupiness of my senses. In this way, I stood in front of the frozen foods aisle of the village store, trying to decipher the contents from the packaging. Gemüsegerht. Huhn mit Reis. I knew the words, but they were encrypted. I was hungry. I opened the freezer door, reached in. Lasagne.
Kindermörderin.
I stared at the packet, the layered pasta dripped with cheese. I turned the word over in my mind. Kindermörderin: was that the German word for lasagne? Surely it was just ‘lasagne.’ Curiously, I felt my cheeks flush, as if my body was able to process the translation before my mind. The heat in my face alerted me to the embedded word: ‘kinder.’
She was standing beside me, unnaturally close. Intimate. A middle-aged woman with short hair, unremarkable but familiar. She worked at the local hotel, may even have been a manager. Slowly, I turned toward her.
Her dark brown eyes hard as pebbles, her English heavily accented. ‘I hope cancer eats your face.’
Then I became aware of the entirety, the stillness of the shop, the invisible antennae twitching in my direction. Every person in there was concentrating on me. Even as they chose laundry detergent or consulted their shopping lists, they attended to me.