Maimuna clutched the pouch in her lap. A beautiful dress was waiting for her there, turquoise as the morning sky. It revealed her shoulders. She would pull it on as soon as she escaped her cargo, as soon as Mister Mecanico took the belts, as soon as she was free. Liya Kebede, Alek Wek, Waris Dirie, Iman – and soon Maimuna Mimi Mbegue, age twenty.
She had truckloads full of courage.
ULRIKE PLAYS DEAD
Let’s play Dying! Shlomith yells excitedly, almost impatiently, now that they finally have a new playmate. Her voice has gone shrill like a child just about to receive permission from her parents to dive into the amusement park ball pit, or into the sea, into the frothing waves under a watchful eye, into turquoise water, which is warm and clear. Soon her tiny body would tremble from head to toe with the pleasure of it. And this excitement begins spreading to the other women too. What will happen now? No one has a clue yet about Ulrike’s story. Shlomith, Nina, Polina, Maimuna, Wlibgis, and Rosa Imaculada all realize together that they are finally faced with something new, that for a moment they will no longer need to ladle the same thrice-reheated meal into their mouths. Ratatouille, moqueca, ceebu jën, bacon mashed potatoes, chicken soup with dumplings, stroganoff. Finally they will be served a surprise menu made from all fresh ingredients, and this makes them realize they are hungry, so terribly hungry. How long has it been since the last time? An eternity? One second? Maimuna was arrival number six, so they must have gone on her journey last. Yes, they have been in the desert, in Timbuktu. They have closed their eyes and each imagined as best she could dying with Maimuna in a hail of bullets. But how long has it been since then?
Shlomith can’t wait any longer. She claps her hands. (Her fleshless hands slapping together makes a very strange, loud and splintering sound, which disappears without an echo almost as soon as it begins: whim-whim-whim. It is like a whip that never hits anything. It just swings and then the sound disappears.) Let’s play Dying! Lightly Shlomith touches the girl’s shoulder. Ulrike, what happened before you woke up here? What happened before our first meeting? What is your last memory? Try to remember!
Ulrike takes a contemplative position, sitting, legs crossed. She has already spent a few moments considering this question herself; for instance, when her legs finally found the furious, hacking rhythm she was able to use to move in the emptiness. The rhythm, which demanded focus and calm, began to fill her mind with a cloudy substance unfit as raw material for words, emotional states that briefly illuminated images, possible flashes of memory: a mountain, a home, a ravine, a conductor’s purse, a flower, mother, father, an elevator, Hanno, a mountain, Ulrich B. Zinnemann’s glass eye, a home, a ravine.
But the images soon went dark. No story stuck to them or bore them up. From the edges of the images, terrible flapping black tatters have sprouted, leading—no, practically tugging toward an all-consuming black hole that causes pain to even think about. So much pain that she has to seek safety in words after all, no matter how trivial what she spits out of her mouth might be.
All the other women already know that the final memories preceding the white space are not so simple to grasp. You have to lure them out, and group pressure strangely seems to help. Staring at Wlibgis’s wig also has an effect that improves concentration now that it isn’t on poor Wlibgis’s head, now that her head isn’t detracting from the brilliance of the artificial fibers any more. Polina has just crouched to fluff the fire, to straighten the fibers with her fingers, so the wig forms a complete and unbroken, calming circle. When she has finished she straightens her back and looks at Ulrike encouragingly.
In the name of truth, it must be said that all of the gazes focused on Ulrike are not equally encouraging. Some of the women stare at the girl meditating in the lotus position with unvarnished greed in their eyes, each observing something different: one the trembling of the girl’s lips, another her deepening frown, a third the motion of her eyelids. (Ulrike has her own gaze fixed on the wig.) Some of them clearly expect somewhere in the recesses of their minds, hidden even from themselves, that the young, beautiful girl from Salzburg will begin to cry. No tears will
