He calls himself a car mover, for want of a better label. A man who moves cars from A to B because their owners don’t have time to or because they have gone away without them and suddenly find they need them where they are. Because by the sea the battery will not last; because in the bush the grass will grow into the engine; because my brother’s friend’s father wants to use it; so my wife can’t run away with it.
He listens to the stories and they settle in his head. As he drives he sets them to the music of the car. The particular brrr of an engine, the clack-clack of a faulty axle, the irregular thud of undercarriage on road – all accentuate different aspects of the narratives and make them new again.
He drives everywhere in straight lines. When there are bends in the road he follows them, but in Kenya the roads are generally straight. The people he met when he first moved to Africa from East Germany in the early eighties always said Germans were square. He was never quite sure if it was an insult, but he thought it must be just as well the roads were straight. They’re all still friends at any rate: he laughs with them and tells tales of the day’s adventures to them. On the road, though, they seem small in his mind, little ants carrying the breadcrumbs of their own lives to and fro in another place.
They call him Franz, as his mother has done since his birth and as Melanie, his wife, did in their few years together, but his name has never meant much to him; it is too rooted in pre-war Europe and he doesn’t like to be associated with a place that, in the late years of the twentieth century, no longer exists.
*
He introduced himself to Bina as Franz. She was the last of the few passengers who came along in whatever car he happened to be moving. She might have been memorable because she was Indian and her family was one of the first to return to East Africa after Idi Amin’s rule. Or because it was December 1989 and she, having flown into Nairobi from London where she was a student, could talk only of her elation that the Berlin Wall had come down.
‘You know East Germany was a great supporter of Amin,’ she said. ‘Funny that we should meet, nah?’
Was it?
‘You know, when the people who made you want to leave your country supported the man who made my parents leave theirs.’
‘Did I tell you that was why I left that place?’
‘No.’ She looked down at her hands and took short little breaths through her nose. ‘But that is why, isn’t it?’
In the end, he remembered her for other reasons. The fact of their joint experience of expulsion was sidelined in his memory.
Come inside with me.
I’ll be fine in the car, acha.
‘What’s this?’ Bina waved a scruffy booklet stitched with black thread in Franz’s face.
‘Don’t touch that. Please.’ He reached across without looking away from the empty road and took it from her hands. ‘It’s just a map.’
‘Who drew it?’
‘I did.’
He passed it back for her to inspect, quietly proud.
She fidgeted in her seat. The sun had been on them all afternoon and even through her clothes her skin had stuck to the beige-coloured fake leather.
‘Why didn’t you just buy one? Wouldn’t that be more accurate?’
‘Define accurate.’
‘Well it’s the same as precise, it means being truthful.’
‘Accuracy doesn’t exist in this part of the world. We have only approximations. You arrange to meet someone at lunchtime: one of you will arrive for tea. You arrange a place to meet: one of you will wait in the next village along.’ He laughed. ‘Just look at your flight.’
‘It was two hours late.’
‘Precisely. Approximately accurate. Like my map – it is accurate enough for me in this place.’
They drove in silence and she studied his attempt at cartography, before closing her eyes with a smile. She felt the sun burning her eyelids and saw the road extending all the way to Uganda, the plains and the bush falling away on either side. They were on the only smooth stretch and it seemed to bear the mud-caked 4x4 forwards as if it were on a wave.
The yellow sun turned blood red and fell from the sky. Beneath the moon everything was black. Franz alternately swore – which made Bina wince – and sighed – she consoled him – as they passed vehicle after vehicle that blinded them with undipped headlights. In the towns headlights were not illuminated at all. Homeless bodies and lost children wove in and out of the blind traffic in search of food scraps thrown from cars – or death by front wheels, Franz thought to himself, as he drove nose to windscreen to avoid them.
The dark frightened him. Not all dark, but African road dark. He usually made a point of not driving after dusk. He would stay with a friend or a client would put him up and then he’d continue with his journey in the cool dawn. But Bina’s parents wanted her back in Jinja as quickly as possible, and he’d agreed to drive her through the night. She didn’t drive; besides, it wasn’t safe for a woman alone. She was half his age, he guessed – the age his children might have been, if he’d had any; a mesh of cultures and places with her turquoise mirrored salwar trousers, over-sized grey t-shirt, and paisley scarf knotted around her head. He watched her eyes moving across the faint landscape, taking in the still grasses that lined the road, all their shades of green and brown revealing themselves to her in the beams of the headlights. Franz felt protective of her, and respectful, and jealous of her innocent curiosity.
They reached the Kenya-Uganda border a couple of hours after sunset. Passport control was familiar and they went through with a cursory nod to the guard who stamped their papers. It was a relief to stand and to find their legs still worked after eight hours in the car. They ate their cheese and tomato sandwiches and the food sat heavily in Franz’s stomach.
When he’d first taken Melanie on a work trip he learnt from a squinted glance and forced smile not to patronise her by escorting her everywhere; after they were married he relaxed a little and found she returned physically and mentally unharmed if she went for a pee in the trees by herself.
Bina had been gone five minutes. Franz looked at the clock behind the steering wheel – more than five minutes. He would never have been a good parent. He gripped the steering wheel and twisted his fists tight around it so that the rubber squeaked. He drummed his fingertips across the dashboard and closed his eyes, imagining the sound of his fingers was the sound of wildebeest migrating across the plains. He pictured the ones that didn’t make it, the ones that were eaten by a lion or a crocodile. The click of the door handle jolted him back.
‘Oh, well done.’
‘Well done?’
‘You’re back.’
‘Of course I’m back. What, did you think I’d be dragged into the bush and you’d never see me again?’
He smiled sideways and checked his mirrors before starting the engine. ‘We’ll get through Busia and then stop for a hot drink.’
‘Can’t we keep driving?’
‘We could. But if I don’t have a coffee soon we’re not going to make it.’
Come inside with me.
I’ll be fine in the car, acha.
Please.
He remembers it like this: when he pulled up, Bina wouldn’t come in to the roadside café; she said she was fine in the car and would prefer to sleep. So he locked her in and went to get a coffee that he would drink back in the vehicle. While he was ordering, a vague friend came in and they chatted for a while.
Twenty minutes later, feeling alert and jittery because of the coffee, he stepped out of the café and saw the shadows moving around the car, all the doors open. The men disappeared in a dusty van when they heard his footsteps – or maybe they were finished anyway. A gun lay in the dirt by the front wheel. Bina was lying still, horizontal with fear, the mirrors on her salwar muddied with blood. He lifted her off the back seat where they had thrown her and carried her to the front. He smelt her hair, sour with sweat, as he carried her to the passenger seat, both of them shaking. He covered her with a blanket and then threw up behind the car.
She said she was fine.
You should have made her come inside. Forced her.
They were three or four hours from Jinja, he calculated. He drove fast, longing to crash through the potholes to jar his back in punishment, but swerving around them each time because going through them would cause Bina more pain.
They stopped at his friend’s on the edge of town as planned, so they could sleep through the last few hours of dark and clean up before he dropped her off. When they pulled up, Franz sent his sleep-drunk friend back to bed and carried Bina inside to wash her. She wouldn’t help him but neither did she stop him. He dried her gently, focusing on what he was doing to keep the shame away, and then dressed her in some clean clothes he’d picked out from her luggage. He hoped they constituted an outfit she might wear. Later, washing himself, he retched until his stomach was empty and his mouth tasted of bile and coffee. He did not sleep, only lay beside her on the hard bed they had to share, watching the carved animals chase each other round the wooden bed posts. He tried not to imagine arriving at her father’s house in the hope that they would never get there.
He didn’t accept her father’s money and couldn’t tell the story that would explain why. Except to get fuel and to snatch some sleep at the border check, he didn’t once stop the car until he reached his club in Nairobi. He sat in a quiet corner with a whisky, staring at his map for a long time. He marked an x on it where the Busia café was, folded it up and left.
Not long after that, Melanie was diagnosed with melanoma. The word and her name ran together in his head like a tongue-twister. Me-la-nie-me-la-no-ma-Me-la-nie-me-la-no-ma-Me-na-lie . . . If he’d thought of telling her about Bina before, he knew then that there was no point. The sick feeling was his and to share it would be nothing more than selfishness. Failing to protect a young woman was a betrayal of Melanie’s trust as much as anyone else’s.
*
Now, his empty house frightens him more than the road, and he takes jobs that keep him away from it for weeks at a time. He drops by to pick up clean clothes and, beneath a pile of the green t-shirts he wears, he finds one of the clay models Melanie made before she died: a crocodile with its jaws clamped around the leg of a wildebeest. He picks it up, puts it in his pocket and leaves with the shirts under his arm. In the car, he fixes the figure to the dashboard with glue.
As he drives out of the city towards the coast he thinks of Bina. Ten years later, he manages to ignore the guilt most days, but remains fiercely overprotective of people he knows only slightly. He wonders if she’s married or not, if she’s happy or distraught still. If she ever learned how to drive.
© Rosanna Boscawen, 2013
Rosanna Boscawen was born in the eighties and grew up in Suffolk. She has worked in a bookshop, walked from Siena to Rome, and written for the New York Observer. She likes travelling and cheese (among other things). She now works in publishing and lives in London.
Saul Reichlin: Winner of the 2010 & 2008 Audible Unabridged AudioBook of the Year Award, Saul has narrated over 50 TV documentaries for Sky History Channel. Nominated Best Actor in 2001, Saul’s one-man storytelling programme has toured 36 cities in 7 countries, including Off Broadway and off West End, London.
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