The Gloaming (9 page)

‘What do you want me to do?' I ask Dorothea again.

She squeezes my hand. Tears roll down her cheeks and her face shines with thanks. Her hair is a halo of light. ‘Take it from here. Take it far from here.'

‘Where?'

‘The
uchawi
will direct you.'

‘I don't know what that means.'

More forcefully, she squeezes my hands: ‘The
uchawi
will direct you.'

 

‘It is Detective Inspector Paul Strebel,' a voice said through the intercom. ‘I tried to phone—'

‘Yes, I'm sorry, it's disconnected. The bill. I forgot to pay it. Please come up.' I buzzed him up.

He appeared, almost too tall for the doorway, awkward, angular. In his early fifties, he was thin, with a narrow face, receding hair and quiet, dark eyes under eyebrows in need of trimming.

‘Please come in,' I said. Polite, calm. ‘Can I get you something?'

‘Thank you, yes. But no caffeine. I'm not a good sleeper.'

‘Tea? Mint? Chamomile?' Was this right? Should I be offering him herbal tea? He was here to talk about dead children and all I had was manners. As if I was hosting a cocktail party for the associates in Dili. Smile, serve exquisite canapés while wearing an elegant black dress. Anything to distract from
the atrocities
in the files.

‘That's fine,' Strebel said, without specifying. He took off his gloves but not his coat. The gloves were fine-grained black leather, but they didn't suit him. He wasn't urbane. I suspected someone had bought them for him as a gift, his wife or daughter.

We sat, I poured. My hand trembled on the teapot's handle and he saw this. ‘Don't worry.'

‘Worry?'

‘I mean, don't be afraid.'

‘Of the tea?'

‘No.' He ventured a smile. ‘Of me.'

I put the teapot down. ‘Is that it? Am I afraid of you?'

He leaned forward to sip his tea. ‘I expect so. You don't know what to tell me. You don't know what I know.'

When I said nothing, he went on. ‘Or perhaps it's more a generalized fear. It can be frightening to lose control.'

Would he know about that? I glanced at his kind, tired face and tried to imagine him losing control, shouting or crying. I tried to imagine him being afraid. Then I realized he wasn't speaking of personal experience but professional observation: he had seen people lose control. His profession—like Tom's—concerned people who lost control.

‘Are you here to arrest me?' I said.

‘For what?' He turned the cup in his hands. ‘You think the accident is your fault?'

‘But it must be, somehow. I was the driver.'

‘Fault would mean you drove into them on purpose. Do you think you are such a person—capable of such an act?'

Tom believed everyone is capable of everything, fundamentally. To him, violence is circumstantial. The nicest man, given the right set of circumstances, may become the most brutal genocidaire. Everyone? I'd pushed Tom, even you, even me? How do you think these atrocities happen, he'd countered, if not for people like you, people like me?

‘If I can't remember,' I clarified. ‘Then I don't know. I can't tell you with any certainty.'

‘Perhaps you were driving carelessly.'

I looked at him. Was this a gentle form of interrogation? Was he asking me to incriminate myself? ‘Was I?'

‘Did you, for instance, overtake on the corner?'

Had I passed on a corner? I had. Yes! That was it. Suddenly, I knew with absolute certainty. I felt a great wash of relief. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘The corner just below the village. That's what happened.'

Putting the tea aside, he kept his eyes on me. ‘But that's not what happened. Let us be completely clear.'

‘I'm sure. I can see it now. In my mind.' And then clarity clicked immediately to shame. Hot shame on my cheeks. ‘Oh, God. I did. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.'

Spilling words, awkward, ineffective words, sorry, sorry, sorry, but only in fear and self-pity of what might now be done to me. No—not for the dead children, but for myself. I wanted to be sobbing, on my knees, begging forgiveness as the parents shouted: ‘
Die of cancer
, Mörder Hure,
die with cancer eating your face
.' But even in this notion I glimpsed a deeper selfishness, layers of selfishness like tissue. That if they beat me, if they stoned me, put me in the stocks and pelted me with excrement, only when my skin opened up: then might I feel. Their anger, their sorrow would make me real; like Frankenstein's monster, make me exist. I could not pull away from myself, this grasping, selfish woman who wanted to feel guilt not for what she had done, but so she could prove to herself that she existed.

My face was wet. I was crying. Strebel stood. For a moment he hesitated like a schoolboy, then he put a hand on my shoulder.

‘No,' he said firmly. ‘It wasn't your fault. You didn't overtake. All our evidence confirms it was an accident. That is what I'm here to tell you.'

‘But I remember—'

‘You don't remember. You did nothing wrong.' He looked at me again, tilting his head. ‘There is just luck, terrible, cruel luck, and people like you, like the parents, like those poor children get caught in it.'

He took a white cotton handkerchief from his pocket, and I wondered what kind of man carries a white cotton handkerchief anymore? What kind of man hands it to a crying woman? I did not take it, so he began to dab at my face.

‘Please,' I said. But of course he didn't understand what I meant. ‘Please, please.'

Tom said I was ugly when I cried. I covered my face and turned away from Inspector Strebel, and then, at last, ‘I'm not crying for them.'

He did not sigh with disgust. He did not leave. He stood as if nothing had changed, as if he had not heard.

‘I'm not crying for them.'

‘No,' he said very quietly. ‘You are crying for yourself.'

I went to the sink and splashed cold water on my face. When I looked back at him he was putting his handkerchief away.

‘Are you okay now?'

I nodded. A vague exhaustion washed over me.

‘Come, then. Could you come with me to the incident scene?'

‘Would that be helpful?'

‘I always go to the scene a few days later. I want to know the place without all the cars and the confusion. That it's just a place and holds no special menace.'

I fumbled with the keys, dropped them. He picked them up, and again gave me that small smile. He pulled on his gloves, buttoned his coat. I had the feeling he was fighting the urge to reach over and button mine, too.

We cut through the village on the footpath. He said he preferred to walk, he spent too much time in the car or behind a desk. The morning was damp and gray: we couldn't see the lake or the mountains, and without them Arnau revealed its essential dullness.

Perhaps he felt this also, for he suddenly asked, ‘Why are you here? Arnau? Alone?'

The question was so direct that I wondered again if, despite what he said, he was prying. Perhaps his whole visit was an elaborate means of revealing my motives. Even the handkerchief might have been a manipulation.

‘My husband and I were going to build up the valley, our dream house.' I was aware that he would notice my use of the past tense.

‘Excuse me,' Strebel said quickly. ‘I shouldn't have asked. It's not my business.'

‘Isn't it?'

He looked down at me, dark eyes under unkempt eyebrows.

‘Isn't everything your business in a case like this? Who I am, why I'm here, what I was doing driving past the bus stop on a day like that.' I heard myself spill this out. ‘The dream house, it was a lie. He never even bought the land. But that's why I'm here. I believed him.'

Strebel said nothing. He let me move into the silence.

‘We're getting a divorce,' I said, pushing my hands deep into my coat pockets.

‘I know that. It's in your file. Swiss efficiency.'

‘Does my file say he left me? For another woman. They have a baby.'

‘No. We're not the KGB.'

Perhaps he meant to lighten the mood. But I felt a burning, like fury. ‘Do you want to write it down? Maybe it's important. Maybe everyone should know. I thought we were enough, I thought we were happy, but he wanted that squeaky little woman instead.' And then I reminded myself. Three children were dead. Three children were dead and I hid my face.

Strebel put his hand on my shoulder, steady and unjudging. I felt like a stray dog to whom someone is suddenly, unaccountably kind. ‘Squeaky?'

‘I must seem despicable.'

Simply, softly, he replied: ‘There is no way you should seem. This tragedy is yours also.'

By now we'd reached the main Arnau road. We turned left, downhill. I kept expecting to feel a turn of emotion. Even if the memory was gone, flown like a bird, surely the primal sensation must remain. A template.

But there was nothing.

I looked upon the road, the curve in the road, as I had for the past six months. And I realized I had always done this with unease. Even before Tom left—when I believed we were intact—I hadn't wanted to be in Arnau. There was nothing prescient about this feeling; rather, it had been the sense of dislocation, as if I'd accidentally disembarked at the wrong train stop. I'd loved Geneva and the bistros and the babel of languages and the weekends in Paris and Berlin. I'd followed Tom without complaint to Arnau. Happily. As I always had. Lagos. Addis Ababa. East Timor. Geneva.

Arnau.

I saw that I had clenched my fists. I relaxed my hands, put them in my pockets. ‘Why did you want me to come here with you?'

Strebel noticed my hands, noticing, noticing everything. ‘You think I'm trying to trick you. I'm sorry for that.'

‘But surely you want me to remember.'

‘Surely? No, not at all. Memory is so…' his long fingers wriggled in the air. ‘So unreliable.'

‘But then you would know what happened.'

‘I
do
know what happened. I think it's you who needs to know.'

‘It must be there, the memory. How can it not be? How can I have done this… this terrible thing and not remember?'

Cars passed. I watched for a moment, the drivers' profiles shifting through the plain of my vision. Uphill, downhill. Intent they were, with shopping lists and marital grievances, lies to tell and food to cook. The banal world continued parallel to the world of tragic incidents. Relentlessly.

‘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.

 

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.