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Easy. Instead, Kessy went with the old woman. They walked and walked, they turned corners, more corners. They stepped over ditches that were
choo
. Where else can people relieve themselves? Even Kessy could not believe the smell.
    â€˜At last,’ Dorothea says, ‘Kessy and the old woman came to a door.’
    It was not locked. Kessy wondered if it was a trap. But it was too late, he had to find out. He opened the door. It was dark and there was another smell. He could not describe it, but it made him afraid. He knew he was about to see something that he could not have imagined, and that the vision would be with him forever. He would know what one person could do to another. He wanted to turn from this, to save himself. He heard the girl breathe.
    â€˜I’m here to help you,’ he said.
    He opened the door further and the light sliced across the darkness.
    And he saw her. What was left of her.
    â€˜
He saw her, what was left of her
,’ Dorothea repeats, as if the horror belongs to her as much as to Kessy.
    Kessy took the girl directly to Doctor Miriam, a white doctor at the hospital in Arusha. Doctor Miriam didn’t ask any questions. She took the girl, this poor girl, and she sent her somewhere safe where she could never be found. The story was printed in a local newspaper and some important people were very embarrassed because they knew. Of course they knew about the girl. She belonged to one of them, and Kessy was the source of the whole problem. He was not being a good policeman.
    Dorothea doesn’t know what had been done to the girl. Kessy only ever told her one detail. Her toes had been smashed by a hammer. The rest he keeps for himself, inside his eyelids.
    â€˜So you see,’ she says. ‘They will forget Kessy, as they are forgetting me. And sometimes I think we are even forgetting ourselves and one day you will come back here and you will say, “Oh, Dorothea, how are you?” And I will say, “Who is Dorothea? There is no one here by that name.”’
    As we sit on the steps I think of her crazy outfits as a kind of armor against despair. She is defiant. And I consider what it must be like to be this clever woman, to have become a doctor without medicine, as Kessy is a policeman without laws.
    Kessy does not come and dusk moves in and she asks me to help her look for him. We find him walking back along the nowhere-nothing road. Dorothea smiles when she sees him.
    Of course, they are lovers. Who else would they choose?
    Â 
Arnau, March 14
    I thought I misheard. My brain, still thick and slow, resisted input, so that the exterior world remained remote. As a child I’d had my tonsils removed and I remembered the waking: the muffling effect of the anesthesia, the soupiness of my senses. In this way, I stood in front of the frozen foods aisle of the village store, trying to decipher the contents from the packaging.
Gemüsegerht. Huhn mit Reis
. I knew the words, but they were encrypted. I was hungry. I opened the freezer door, reached in.
Lasagne
.
    Kindermörderin
.
    I stared at the packet, the layered pasta dripped with cheese. I turned the word over in my mind.
Kindermörderin:
was that the German word for lasagne? Surely it was just ‘lasagne.’ Curiously, I felt my cheeks flush, as if my body was able to process the translation before my mind. The heat in my face alerted me to the embedded word: ‘
kinder
.’
    She was standing beside me, unnaturally close. Intimate. A middle-aged woman with short hair, unremarkable but familiar. She worked at the local hotel, may even have been a manager. Slowly, I turned toward her.
    Her dark brown eyes hard as pebbles, her English heavily accented. ‘I hope cancer eats your face.’
    Then I became aware of the entirety, the stillness of the shop, the invisible antennae twitching in my direction. Every person in there was concentrating on me. Even as they chose laundry detergent or consulted their