Switzerland, 1969
56. MARIE AND BONNIE walk into the precinct barefoot. The sun has dried their clothes, but their limbs are still numb. Until she sees her reflection in the glass, Bonnie doesn’t know why people are staring. She grabs her hair, pulling it out, pushing it down, rushing to fix her appearance as they approach the busy woman at the front desk.
“You’re making it worse,” Marie says, pushing Bonnie’s hands away from picking at herself. Marie’s black cornucopia of braids has fallen but somehow, after all the water, and wind, the cornrows are still glossy and fresh.
Marie pulls Bonnie down into a seat. A few people look over their shoulders as Marie grabs a pin from her hair and parts Bonnie’s down the middle to begin two big cornrows.
“What are you doing? Ow, Jesus!”
“I’m trying to make you look human.”
“Good luck.” Bonnie’s examining the woman at the desk, who’s just broken quick, suspicious eye contact with her. “What do we even say to her?”
“It doesn’t matter. It isn’t him anyway, remember?” Marie looks down into Bonnie’s face. “The dead cat isn’t him.” Marie repeats the mantra.
Bonnie nods, agreeing again to believe what they have to believe.
“OK, let’s go,” Marie says when she’s content with her work. As Bonnie approaches the front desk again, she sees herself in the round mirror above the woman’s head and can’t believe how Marie has transformed her.
“We’ve come to see … the body, please.”
The woman looks at her blankly.
“The dead Black guy,” Marie says for the white woman.
The morgue director is a little too thrilled to see them. Says that he was the one who pushed for the radio story, that he didn’t want this Black body to have the fate of the last one: unidentified, transferred to a community gravesite to be bagged and tossed on top of the homeless, the forgotten, the ones nobody claimed.
“They may not have any family here, but these people often worked hard to send every penny home to a family somewhere else,” the man says in the meditative room of teal lights, pulling open a few drawers of bagged bodies until he finds the right one. “Here we are.”
He unsentimentally zips it down to the chest. Looks at the women. The women look at each other; neither of them approach.
“Come on, he won’t bite.”
He tells them to observe carefully, that the bloating may have altered his appearance. Bonnie steps forward, contemplating some way to look without looking. She starts with a strange place, staring just at the tip of the nose, then moving to the concentration of flesh above the upper lip. Then she gets bolder, willing to see a cheek, the shape of the ear, the hairline.
And the hairline is Mansour’s.
She thinks back to his soccer matches, crowded dusk affairs in Goutte d’Or in Paris, where she watched from their seventh-story window as he weaved through the Afroed Algerian boys, seeming to trace the circular pattern of her breaths along the cobblestones. Then she’s seeing the accordions of sheet music that outgrew the closet space and that lay beside them on the bed. And how seriously he took breakfast, standing in line at the bakery when it first opened, a meal she hadn’t bothered with since the fifth grade.
Marie is yanking her arm, dragging her back to the world.
“Bonnie”—her breath is hot on Bonnie’s nose—“it’s not him.”
As they walk back to the car (still barefoot) they chatter, calling each other punk asses for avoiding the body.
“At least I looked!” Bonnie says.
“No, you didn’t. You blacked out! I touched it!”
“You did not!”
“I did, and his bracelet was fake. That’s how I knew. Mansour would never wear that fake shit.”
Their laughter is a force, a sound they push out into the world from their guts. Their hands pressed firmly to their stomachs, as if they mean to rid themselves of every ounce of it. They shut the doors of the car, sighing a final time as they look over the quiet city that’s just beginning to stir. Their peace becomes a nervous silence.
“So where are you?” Bonnie says aloud to him.
Marie looks at Bonnie, points at her wrists stacked with bracelets.
“Did he give those to you?”
Bonnie nods. Marie gives them an affectionate touch.
They both look at the bakery across the street at the same time.
“Do you have money?” Marie asks. Bonnie shakes her head, sheepish.
“You didn’t bring money?”
“It was in my pocket when I got out to push the car.”
“So?” Marie says, her scratchy voice speaking with harmonies.
“So, it’s gone,” Bonnie replies.
Marie sucks her teeth.
“We have to go back anyway.”
“To Mama’s?”
“Yes, we don’t even have clothes.”
Marie does the cross across her chest. “I lived a good life, Jesus,” she says.
Bonnie scoffs.
Then she does a double take, looking again at her lap, seeing something sticky caked on her left thigh. It looks like mud. Maybe from the muddy water, but that was hours ago, and it looks fresh. She runs her hand up and down her leg in a panic.
“I think I cut myself,” she says, but there is no wound and now she feels the wetness coming out from her body.
“Let me see,” Marie says, pushing Bonnie back, seeing how she’s bleeding out.
Bonnie heeds Marie’s instruction for her to get in the back and lie down flat on the seats.
“Has this happened before?” Marie says.
“No, never,” Bonnie lies. It had once before, but that is not a story that she is ready to tell. She hears the strangeness of her own voice, how the sound seems to come from outside herself. She swallows, trying to pop her ears, but it does not change. She stares up at the buckling ceiling of the car as Marie speeds down the road. The cold of the leather beneath her body, the woozy feeling softening her vision and amplifying with the jolts and twists of the car, reminds Bonnie of when she first arrived in New York. That moment of matching her grandmother’s face with the photograph in her hand.
“Go on in,” Sylvia had said when she helped Bonnie into the back seat of her old Volvo outside the airport. The leather was cold against her bare thighs. Bonnie felt the coldness of her grandmother’s rings, smelled the scent of her floral perfume as Sylvia had put her black shawl across Bonnie’s bare legs like a blanket, chastising under her breath.
“Did your mother remember that you were coming to New York? In the winter?” Bonnie felt a pang of something sour in her chest, her first taste of loyalty. The woman had insulted her mother.
“How are you, honey?” said a voice from the front passenger’s seat. Bonnie hadn’t noticed the other woman in the car: young, probably in her twenties, with long dark hair in waves from pin curls. The woman turned back to Sylvia.
“I think we need to get her some food.”
“No, no more stopping,” Sylvia had said. Then quieter: “She looks sick with God knows what as it is. We need to get her home.”
“That’s what I’m sayin’. She’s sick! She needs some food.”
“Oh, please. You want something,” her grandmother had protested. The passenger laughed, then turned around to face Bonnie. “I’m Laura, your grandma’s slave.”
“Hush!” Sylvia shouted.
“We’ve been in this game a long time together.”
“Laura is my nurse and a dear friend.”
When Bonnie didn’t say more, Sylvia had asked: “Do you speak much English?” Bonnie shook her head no.
Laura turned up her nose. “Well, what she speak then?”
“French,” Sylvia said.
Laura’s eyes had widened with curiosity.
When they’d finally arrived, Laura opened the door to Sylvia’s apartment. She turned on a lamp that was too dim to give a full impression of the room. What Bonnie could see was congested elegance: four antique lamps stuffed into a corner, cardboard boxes on a fine marble table, mismatched upholstered sofa chairs that were too large for the space. An old gray dog with no room to roam was stretched flat, and Bonnie had mistaken him for a rug on the hardwood. Laura took Bonnie to the bathroom to brush her teeth. The light in there was too bright, and Bonnie’s eyes took a while to adjust. She hadn’t recognized herself in the mirror, as if, in traveling around the world, some part of her had yet to arrive. The bathtub was full of paintings, enormous portraits with thick gold frames. The one closest to Bonnie’s fingertips was of Claudine. She wore a white dress, her hair rolled and pinned tightly. She appeared to be nine or ten, around Bonnie’s age—but Claudine’s face was the same as it had been the last time Bonnie saw her: long, calm, unsmiling. A wheelchair and a pile of other things blocked the toilet, and she struggled against a tower of Architectural Digests to reach the seat. She knocked them over.
Laura knocked. “You all right? Let me know if you need anything.”
Bonnie had waited until she was certain that the woman was gone. Then she’d climbed the stack of magazines to access the small window. The ledge was covered with spiderwebs that she peeled away with both of her hands to get a glimpse of the world outside. Brooklyn was dark, complicated, sure of itself. There was no place in its perfect maze for her questions. So she kept them inside and let them erase her hunger. In bed that night, she settled into a blackness so complete that her eyes, wide open, never graduated to discerning shapes. Over time, the sleepless hours lent themselves to a sort of swimming, another kind of levitating. In their invisibility, the walls began to disappear. Soon the levitation was deliberate flight. She rose into the Brooklyn night sky. It was no surprise that she met stars, or that they, after all, as merely dust, could not be held in her hand. Her mother’s legs were in the sky, her stockings a shimmery black.
The next morning, Laura moved her to a new room, and Bonnie knew from first glance at the patterned curtains and ugly glass box of plastic fish and glittering lampshade that this new place would not lend itself to such nightly travels. Laura parted the curtains, and daylight flooded in. She stood over her, mixing a white powder into a glass with a spoon. Bonnie swallowed it down, and the darkness that came was pale in comparison to previous medicines. The medicine, whatever it contained, ended her nightly travels.
She’d needed to discover a new way to fly, so she turned to the record player. A familiar egress from unbearable things. The first question she asked her grandmother in that apartment, her French accent still thick, was “Can I play this?” Her grandmother sat up, straight. The child had finally come out of her room and was talking to her. The little girl was pointing to Billie Holiday. “Could I play this, please?” she said again.
Her grandmother had sighed. “Billie’s in a lot of pain. You sure you want to start with her?”
Bonnie nodded, her own pain evident.
“All right. Go ahead,” Sylvia had said. “Good Morning Heartache” filled the house. And Bonnie could fly again.
Though her understanding of her childhood did little to ease the pain of her own mother’s relinquishing, now that she was due to be a mother in four months, Bonnie could see some wisdom in the family pattern. The truth was that just because somebody had a child, it did not mean they were suitable to raise them. Turns out it’s what she meant when she’d once said to Emmanuel that Mingus shouldn’t play Mingus, that his music, his creation, was better served by softer hands.
57. THE NEAREST PLACE is the men’s bathroom at a gas station, and Marie blocks the entry with her foot as Bonnie cleans her thighs. The wooziness has passed, Bonnie claims. But she can’t stand up without leaning on the wall and Marie says again that they should go to the hospital. Bonnie shushes her, a sound far louder than Marie’s voice, a sound she keeps making even after Marie falls silent, shushing her body as if it were the baby itself. For a moment, she manages to restore her own peace, but the sticky blood along her thigh, no matter how hard she wipes, won’t move. She gives up, dropping her long arms to her sides.
“He promised,” she says, and she throws the stained tissue in the toilet. It expands in the water, tinting it pink like a rose. Bonnie reaches for the floor, sliding down, and Marie comes to her, helping her to the ground.
Bonnie whispers, her eyes on the tile floor, “He promised me I wouldn’t have to do this alone.”
Marie goes to the sink and wets toilet paper under the cloudy water. She wipes the blood from Bonnie’s hands. Then from her arms, then from her thighs, as Bonnie stays slack and sullen, letting her.
After a long wait, they do not see a doctor, but a Polish second-year medical student—a former classmate of Marie’s—examines Bonnie in a parking lot at the University of Geneva. She’s on a break from DJing at the student radio station and still has huge headphones around her neck. The sun is beaming and the contrast of students strolling easily around campus while Bonnie lies back in the dirty Peugeot with her legs in the air, chewing gum with her designer sunglasses on, makes Marie laugh. She doesn’t know what else to do. With no credentials and no cash, this is their doctor’s office.
“I should’ve gone to Yale, like my grandmother wanted,” Bonnie whines wearily, hearing her carefree peers mingle about the campus from the car’s open window. A college girl squeals the way she’d squeal when Mansour, out of nowhere, would sneak up behind her and lift her off the ground.
“You look fine,” the woman says, finally sitting up from between Bonnie’s legs.
Bonnie, who will not remove her sunglasses, mutters, “Told you,” to Marie.
“Did you really get in there good?” Marie teases.
Bonnie rolls her eyes, dropping her legs as the Polish girl stands. The young woman observes Bonnie with a new curiosity.
“It’s a wonder you didn’t do more damage to yourself. Did you really drive through that storm?”
The woman doesn’t wait for an answer as she packs her tools and removes her gloves.
“I saw him sing once, in Paris. And you know, I might’ve driven through a storm or two for that,” she says, observing a swollen, bruised Bonnie with envy—and the tiniest smile.
58. BONNIE AND MARIE walk toward the house, through the mangled herb garden of the backyard. The back door that leads to the kitchen is cracked. Malian music pours out with the low light from the oven’s hood.
Bonnie and Marie exchange a glance, bracing themselves for the encounter with Mama.
The dishwasher girl has left a rack of dishes to dry on the counter, and she’s bent forward, with both hands and bare feet moving backward, as she swipes a dry towel across the sparkling floor.
“Where’s Eva?” Bonnie asks.
“Mama’s in her room,” the girl answers without looking up. “But she says to tell you that the Peugeot will cost you. And that work starts at 6:00 a.m.”
Bonnie looks at Marie.
“Welcome to the family business.” Marie shakes Bonnie’s hand and leaves the kitchen chuckling. “Mama never loses out.”
Of all the ways she could think of that Mama might exact vengeance, Bonnie never expected she’d have to work in her restaurant.
On her way to Mama’s room, Bonnie steps over a diner’s sleeping dog and a forgotten sack of red onions. She squeezes through the tightly arranged tables, through the loose clouds of cigar smoke, bay leaf–scented steam, and eager diners. The overcast has left the dining room unusually humid for the season; the wet heat makes Bonnie dizzy. More than once, she steps unwittingly on the foot of a stranger. The room is too crowded. For the first time, she’s feeling her weight in a new way. Her arms want to fall off her shoulders. Her knees need to buckle. She has to lift her heavy feet from her hips.
She reaches the hallway of bedrooms and hesitates before knocking on Mama’s door. She’s never been in her room.
“Sokhna?” Mama says. Bonnie becomes nervous then, anticipating her chastisement.
“C’est moi.”
“Kann?” Who?
As usual, the woman toggles between two languages without ever helping Bonnie along. Mansour never taught Bonnie Wolof, hardly ever spoke it around her. So around Mama, for this and other reasons she doesn’t understand, Bonnie perpetually feels apologetic and dumb, a giant step behind.
“C’est moi. C’est Bonnie,” she says.
“Entrez.”
Bonnie opens the door. The room is white with haze and she struggles to see through the smoke, to discern the powder-blue walls, the huge photograph of a Senegalese saint on the wall. A black-and-white television on mute is stacked with magazines, opened boxes of new dishes, opened boxes of old dishes, tablecloths, and shoes. In the center of everything is a large photograph of Mansour. He is a gangly, petrified version of himself, maybe fourteen, in a shirt and tie. His expression further weakens her. She cannot bear to imagine him so afraid.
Bonnie’s eyes find Mama as the smoke breaks. She appears to be on a cloud. The woman’s purple-black skin glistens. She wears a multicolored piece of cloth around her large body like a towel, her thin hair sectioned while she wraps a piece at the front in thread. Bonnie’s never seen anyone do this to their hair before. She’s staring.
“What do you want?” Mama says in French, plainly, without heat, then goes on wrapping her hair.
“I can just pay you the money.”
“Huh?” Mama leans forward, dropping more balls of black incense into the pot at the foot of the bed that’s filling the room with this haze. It starts up again, smoking out the already-smoky place. It’s Mansour’s scent, a woody aroma. He never burned that stuff, but whatever it was, it must have seeped into his skin over the years.
“I can just pay you for the car, instead of working.”
“Working is better for me,” Mama says, rubbing some lotion into her arm. “Come down at 5:40 a.m. tomorrow.”
Bonnie is silent. This woman is indeed intimidating. She gives up on pressing further.
“It wasn’t him.”
“Hm?”
“The body in Geneva. It wasn’t him,” Bonnie says, and she closes the door behind herself.
Her final obstacle to the staircase is the cluster of four tables that have been pushed together for what looks to be someone’s birthday. The local police chief lords over the hungry pack, reenacting last week’s murder with an empty bottle of wine—not quite empty—and when he raises the bottle like an axe coming down on wood, some wine spills, splashing a freckled woman at the next table in the face. Maybe because he is the chief, the woman laughs, licking around her mouth to savor the splash of his sour rosy liquid.
Bonnie sits on the ninth step, well away from the people but not quite in the attic, watching the African women carry trays to and from the packed dining room, watching couples yell over one another to finish jokes, eager children reaching across the table to steal from one another’s plates. She watches the ease and cacophony of family life as if it were a film and puts a cold hand to her stomach, wondering again if it could ever be hers.
When Bonnie is gone, Mama cups her hands and bows her head.
“Alhamdulilah.” Kiné, it wasn’t your boy. He is still out there, somewhere, alive.
59. MAMA’S GAZE SETTLES on the police chief. On weeknights like this, he usually comes with his mistress, but tonight he dines alone. As she recalls, there have been two women, maybe three, each one younger than the last by a decade, just like her father. She watches him eat heartily at one of the tables at the back and then arrange his fish skeletons on his plate so that all the heads face away from him.
She knew the police chief, and he knew her. Maybe, she thought, if some detail of her illegal status were to be revealed in helping her find Mansour, he would overlook it. Maybe they could even laugh about it one day. She’d catered his mother’s eightieth birthday party a few weeks ago, had walked the old woman arm in arm to the car afterward. She remembers pulling the hat over the old woman’s head and her hair being so slick and flat that it slid right off again. She remembers the rumors that his wife or his latest mistress left him—she can’t remember which—but she surmises that this is the cause for his sullen disposition.
She approaches him.
“The new girl, she doesn’t chatter much. Just straight to the menu. All business,” he says, watching the dishwasher across the dining room.
“Yes, she’s very shy,” Mama replies.
“You should know that that sort of thing can be mistaken for arrogance. Tell her to get me another brandy as an apology,” he says bitterly, staring down into his glass.
“I’ll get it myself.”
“No, I would like her to.”
“I’ll get it for you, sir.”
Mama quickly crosses to the bar. Her hands shake as she pours his drink. Bringing up Mansour will be harder than she thought. The chief is the sort of man she loathes, and it’s hard to pretend otherwise, but she knows him more than any other town official, and so she has no choice but to try.
When she spots him leaving about an hour later, she has summoned her courage. She follows him to the door.
“Eh! Henri! Henri!” she calls. She follows the police chief outside.
The man stops but doesn’t turn to face her. Mama puts her hands in her coat pockets, noting that he has not come in the police buggy as he usually does. She can tell, without asking, that he has no intention of going home, that he will spend a drunken night probably sleeping at a bar or wandering through the village until he’s due back at work right before sunrise. She walks around him so that they are face-to-face.
“Are you all right?” he says, and she’s mortified that her worries are showing on her face. She’s lived her whole life this way: feeling one thing but showing another. Now is not the time to crack.
“Yes. How’s your mother?” she asks. She watches three separate thoughts move through his mind at once.
“Mothers,” he says with a shrug. “She stopped talking a week ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Just stopped talking out of nowhere. I don’t think I’ve known anything more terrifying. She just … looks around. No voice. Not a sound.”
“I’m very sorry,” Mama says, and she is. And the man feels her sincerity, so he softens.
“How’s your son?” he asks in turn.
Her stomach flips; her heart is in her throat.
“He’s … well. Very well.” She fakes a smile.
“I haven’t seen him around.”
“He’s … still touring.”
“Oh, very good. I hope the, uh”—he gestures to his own stomach—“baby won’t come as a surprise when he gets home.” He laughs, moving past her toward his car. “She seems like the type.”
He laughs again, the sound echoing as he moves deeper into the dark woods. Mama listens; the insects in the trees grow louder. Were they mocking her cowardice too?