When the Gods Are Paying Attention

When the Gods Are Paying Attention

C. R. Magwaza

Donald Ensom, aged sixty-six, and showing it, was yet three steps away from the determined three-year-old as she turned sideways, oblivious to the traffic, and stepped down off the high curve onto the new cobblestones. The driver of the SUV, an elderly, wispy-haired fellow whose forehead barely cleared the arc of the steering wheel, could not have seen the little girl, despite her yellow dress and matching hair ribbons. He was coming at speed, perhaps hoping to beat the traffic light a block beyond. Unless Donald could pick up his own speed and then somehow put on the brakes of his rotund body long enough to catch the child and lift her back up onto the sidewalk, a ton of steel and chrome and glass would strike and roll over her.

Only by mere chance did Donald now find himself hurtling himself towards the street and stretching his fingers towards the girl’s arm. It had rained hard during the night so that his morning plan to mow the backyard had to be postponed. He would cycle to the bank instead. Pedaling along happily enough, no hands on the handlebars, as when he’d been just a brainless kid in Whilom, Massachusetts, he discovered he’d come away with no pen in his shirt pocket.

He could not recall when last that had happened. Normally, there were two or three there, keeping company with scraps of lists. At least one would be red for correcting the essays of his students at the international school in Copenhagen. Any of them could be used in case some snatch of a poem or idea for a short story meandered into his mind. He was not actually a very good poet, and his fiction was at best so-so, but it did not hurt to pretend. He used to tell the kids in his classes that he might be among the very best 100 unpublished American novelists in all of Denmark. There were times in his life when he had to admit he’d not done much with his life other to teach kids to quit splitting so many infinitives, and on his better days finding them seats on the raft with Huck and Jim.

         Years ago, back in America, he’d sold a few poems to newspapers and scholarly quarterlies. Way back when he was sixteen, a publisher for a contest of under-twenty short-story writers had written him a pleasant letter saying they were publishing the dozen best, and his was the thirteenth. Maybe they’d sent that to a lot of kids. He’d kept the letter, anyway. It was probably still in some box or other out at the dilapidation of a summerhouse his two brothers and he had inherited from their folks.

         While his own two kids, a son and a daughter, had been growing up, he’d been too busy and too happy to write much of anything. He’d made up stories to tell them at bedtime, about two water drops, Hydro and Oxo, and their adventures. Now that they’d gone back to America, his wife dead a decade, he’d written a couple of novels to keep himself company during the long darks of Danish winters.

         Not very good novels, as it turned out, not ones even his old friends could get through, but they and the characters in them—for whom he had developed great affection--had occupied his evenings and tired him out sufficiently so that he did not often have to lie awake brooding on why his good and beloved wife had gotten such an evil disease. What would it be, he sometimes wondered, to get lucky and write one novel or even one poem that would last, to redeem all the things he’d failed to get right in his life.

Once he’d parked and locked his bicycle among the hundreds at the train station, Donald found himself not heading for the bank, but towards the stationery store across the street. “You are not,” his dead wife said to him in his head, “going in there to buy yet another pen.”

         “Of course not,” he replied, “just a little innocent browsing.”

         “You and pen shops,” his wife said, but he could hear the old smile in her voice, for this was a tried-and-true topic they had shared throughout the twenty-eight years of their marriage.

         For the pleasure of prolonging it, he said, “Can I help it if I feel naked without a pen in my pocket?”

         “As if you don’t have eight hundred and thirty-seven pens littering every bookshelf and flat surface in our house.”

         It pleased him she had said our house, but when he asked if anyone could ever have enough pens she wouldn’t answer.

The green-ink roller ball pens he now preferred were two for forty kroner, roughly eight dollars, but he resisted, getting instead only one that wrote in crimson ink with a fine point, the kind that let him write copiously down the margins of his students’ essays, usually a mix of suggestions and praise, sometimes writing longer end comments than the length of the essay itself. He never knew, after all, if he might not be in the presence of a future Nobel Laureate. Since he was beginning to admit that prize might elude him, he’d settle for one of his students standing tall in Stockholm and telling the world he or she owed it all to a high school English teacher, may the old warthog rest in peace.

The ten-minute delay at the stationery meant he was just entering the heavy glass, double doors of the bank as an African woman was emerging. Not a European Black, nor an African American, but by her dress and facial features a southern African, possibly even from Swaziland, where he’d gone in the Peace Corps so many years ago, where he’d met and married his wife, the daughter of Scandinavian missionaries, where they’d lived for six happy years before the tug of Denmark had pulled her home.

         The African woman was standing in the space between the outer doors and inner doors. She had turned around to face back in towards the bank. Her knees were slightly bent and she was wagging a finger at a small child, perhaps three years old, pressing her small palms against the inside of the inner door. She was saying to the child in siSwati, “You must stay there. You must stay that side. I am coming just now.”

         The small girl, her lower lip turned down and her eyes unblinking, watched her mother turn and depart through the outer door. Donald followed the little girl’s eyes and saw her mother crossing the street. The girl tried to push the door with her small palms, but the thick glass was too heavy. Donald smiled. He was willing to bet she was a handful. Her mother had braided her hair into twenty or thirty short spikes each with a ribbon that matched her dress.

         When a tall Danish man inside the bank reached the inner door and pushed the handle above the girl’s head, she was through it before him. He had barely gotten the outer door open before she was through that, as well, and headed for the street.

         Donald, who was secretly proud of how quick his reflexes still were, did not hesitate, but stepped right out behind her and reached down to take her by the hand, saying in English, not trusting what remained of his siSwati, “Sorry, little buttercup, but your mother says you must stay in the bank, because she is coming just now.”

         The girl looked up at him with huge eyes before her lower lip began to curl down again.

         “Are you from Ngwane?” Donald asked in siSwati, using the Swazi name for their country.

         It seemed to him she nearly smiled to hear her language coming from the mouth of this old and large-as-an-ox European man, but her eyes looked down, for she remembered a child must not look directly into the eyes of an adult. She nodded her head slowly and murmured to her shoes, “Yebo, baba,” which in English meant, “Yes, old father.”

         Bending over slightly, Donald led her by the hand back into the bank and sat her on a chair in the corner. He asked in siSwati if she could like a good laying hen sit there quietly until her mother returned just now. With her head down, the girl murmured, “I must try, old father.”

         Only as he was walking towards the only teller available at the other end of the long room did it occur to him that several of the bank’s other customers had been giving him curious looks. He knew why. In Denmark, the human climate was such that no adult—male or female—would dream or dare to take the hand of an unattached little girl and lead her anywhere. But he had been momentarily back in Swaziland, back in a culture where every child was the child of every adult and as such was looked after and watched over.

Donald had decided to send his son and daughter a hundred dollars apiece, just out of the blue and just for the heck of it. Blow it at the bookstore or a restaurant dinner with a friend. His wife had heartily approved.

The teller took Donald’s Visa card, ran it through the scanner, fetched two portraits of Mr. Franklin from a lower drawer, and slid the receipt across for him to sign. After he had done so with his new red pen and was folding the two notes to slip into his pocket, he glanced around to make sure the small African child was still sitting in the big chair.

She was not there.

His eyes darted towards the doors. A lavender-haired woman with a walker stood between the outer and inner doors. The girl stood beside the walker. When two teenage girls dressed in gothic black opened the outer door, the girl slipped through and darted between them.

“Jesus, Donny, go get her!” shouted his dead wife in his head because she was still so alive in his head and because she had grown up in that other culture of watchful aunts and uncles.

He was moving then on his out-of-shape legs, all 250 pounds of him, doing his best not to tip over or flatten the other bank customers as he dodged between them. He had no time then to wonder what they might be thinking, bank robber or something, but only hoped no heroic type might try to stop him.

         The lady with the lavender hair had made it through the inner door now held wide by a leg of her walker. As he burst through the outer door, grabbing the handle to make a tighter turn, he saw the little girl about ten feet from the street. Another few steps would bring her to the curb. He saw also a maroon SUV on high wheels rapidly approaching over the new cobblestones. Surely, he told himself, the driver must see the girl in her yellow dress and ribbons. But the vehicle did not slow, and Donald realized the elderly man driving it was barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel.

         The girl, having reached the curb, turned sideways, oblivious to the traffic, and was lowering a scuffed shoe. In some beautiful rural valley in Swaziland where she lived was there, Donald wondered, any such thing as traffic? Two pedestrians, a woman with a straw basket and a man in a purple tracksuit, stood directly between Donald and the girl. Neither moved, as if frozen by the accident about to take place in front of their eyes. A moment later, they could have been duckpins as Donald bowled himself between them.

         The girl had stepped out onto the cobblestones so that she was now directly in the path of the SUV’s right headlight, now possibly fifteen feet from her, the vehicle still coming at speed. Donald’s weight carrying him forward beyond his balance, he catapulted his right arm out and got hold of the girl’s right elbow, yanking her back and upwards as though—it occurred to him only later—he were pulling his first pickerel from the lake. He used his left hand to push back off the back door of the SUV and somehow managed to keep his balance.

The SUV kept right on going and went through the traffic light on yellow, what his wife used to call taxi green. The woman with the straw basket and the man in the purple tracksuit stared at him as though he’d recently arrived from some far away planet. The little girl, who was now perched on his forearm, had eyes roughly the size of Kennedy half-dollars.

“Come on, small darling,” he said to her in English, “let’s get you back inside and out of harm’s way.”

Donald was about to put the little girl onto a chair as far from the doors as he could get her when an African man in a bright dashiki emerged from a nearby office. The man could have been the brother or at least a cousin of the wonderful headmaster at the rural school where’d he taught while in the Peace Corps.

Donald said to the man partly in English, partly in siSwati, “This little intombizana wouldn’t be one of yours, would she?”

“Oh, yes, this one, she is my daughter,” he said, smiling at his daughter, who was now reaching her arms out to him.

Making the transfer, Donald said, “I found her footing outside.”

“Oh, this naughty one, she is always doing these things,” he said, not sounding surprised, as he gazed around the room. “I am thinking she was searching her mother.”

“She was thinking to cross the street.”

The man said, “Hawu,” which was the African expression for surprise.

“A very busy street.”

Understanding came into the man’s eyes. “Thank you, my friend,” he said, putting forth his hand.

Donald took his hand, and although they were thousands of miles from Swaziland they continued to shake for some time as was the Swazi custom. The Swazis unlike the New Englanders of his youth seemed unafraid of physical human contact.

“May I tell you something, buti wami?” Donald asked. My brother. “I know that in Swaziland, where I, too, once lived, we are all careful of each other’s small ones, but here in Denmark it is unfortunately not so. Here in Denmark you must have extra careful eyes to watch this naughty little one of yours.”

The small girl put her arms around her father’s neck and hugged her cheek to his.

On an impulse, Donald removed his new red pen from his pocket and put it in the pocket of the man’s dashiki.

The man regarded him in surprise and asked, “Why are you giving me this pen?”

“I think it will bring you good luck,” Donald replied. “It has already brought you good luck.”

The man said, “Today, we have been lucky.”

Cycling home, he felt like laughing. He did laugh. After all what were the odds? What if it had not rained during the night? What if he had mowed the grass and not gone to the bank that morning? What if he had not unaccountably left the house not in the company of at least one pen and then been delayed ten minutes to buy a new crimson-inked pen he did not need? Or if he had not lived in Swaziland and come to understand its compassionate culture? Or if his dead wife have had not shouted at him to get a move on?

         At the top of the last grade, about to begin the leisurely coast home, his wife said, “You did good.”

         “I did okay,” he said. “I am too fat without you, and I was almost too late.”

         “You did way better than okay,” she said. “Screw the novels. This was better.”

         He grinned and said, “Easy for you to say.”

In his mind, he heard again his wife’s lovely and luminous laughter and her saying, “Oh, boy, here we go again.”