The Bay of Foxes: A Novel Read online

  Praise for Sheila Kohler

  “Sheila Kohler’s timeless stories are always transporting. The elegance of her writing underscores the charged, disturbing behavior she presents so vividly.”

  —Amy Hempel

  “A real master of narrative.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Her themes of displacement and alienation cut to the heart as she quietly strips away the tales we tell ourselves in order to go on from day to day.”

  —Booklist

  Praise for

  Love Child

  “A widowed South African woman of forty-eight confronts the betrayals of her past in Kohler’s graceful new novel.… Kohler’s tale is full of tension, haunting images, and admirable restraint.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[In a] sharply detailed book, [Kohler] portrays a slightly disreputable white woman in Johannesburg who came of age, married, had children, and was widowed, all within the confines of South Africa’s English enclave.… Bill looks back and questions the choices that were made for her… A strong portrait of a weak woman. Recommend this to readers of Damon Galgut and J. M. Coetzee. For all literary fiction collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “Secrets drive this gripping historical novel about a white South African woman…. mystery is always there…. Everyone compromises in this melancholy tale of looking the other way, and what holds the reader is how even the few dramatic revelations tell ‘so little of the truth,’ offering only haunting questions about the hidden power of money and prejudice.”

  —Booklist

  “A woman’s life of disappointment has been written thousands of ways, but the stories that endure dismantle the facades that time and practice erect over a lifetime of hurt and lost love.”

  —The Washington Post

  “This novel packs a lot of story into its pages…. Love Child is an intriguingly messy story with an unusual perspective on family dysfunction.”

  —ShelfAwareness.com

  “This story, set in the South Africa of the past, is the tale of a woman’s revenge on her demanding husband and the privileged class she has married into—and the vindication of her secret past. Sheila Kohler’s prose smokes and burns like a fire that cannot be put out and that suddenly leaps into all-devouring flame. She has all the gifts of a natural storyteller—a passionate interest in human motives, an eidetic recall of period and place, and a sense of the shape of a tale unfolding in the fullness of time.”

  —Edmund White, author of City Boy and Genet

  “Sheila Kohler possesses a gorgeous imagination. Love Child is a warm, moving and beautifully crafted story of passion and loss and redemption.”

  —Patrick McGrath, author of Trauma

  “Absorbing settings with exquisitely rendered prose; Kohler’s Love Child is a classic story of forbidden love and past lives told in retrospect…. Readers in search of a summer page-turner suffused with passion and intrigue, Love Child is a story that will take you there, and back.”

  —Redroom.com

  Praise for

  Becoming Jane Eyre

  “Exquisite… A stirring exploration of the passions and resentments.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Sensitive, intelligent and engaging… Kohler offers an imaginative recreation of the woman who created this once-scandalous, now beloved classic.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Passionate… a novel that refuses to be distracted from the simple but sophisticated act of literary creation.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Sheila Kohler moves with assured ease between fiction and biography, between the inner life of Charlotte Brontë as she composes Jane Eyre and the comedy of professional rivalry among the three Brontë sisters.”

  —J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace and Summertime

  “Sheila Kohler’s imagination—deep and playful, always original—instinctively completes that of her elusive subject, Charlotte Brontë, with such intelligence and perception that we give ourselves over without hesitation.”

  —Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut

  “An unforgettable journey enriched by a sympathetic understanding of the three Brontë sisters as well as their writing.”

  —Frances Kiernan, author of The Last Mrs. Astor

  “Sheila Kohler speculates with great grace and insight upon the currents that run between a writer’s work and a writer’s life.”

  —Julia Leigh, author of Disquiet

  “Bravo! I couldn’t put it down and finished it in the depths of the night.”

  —Lyndall Gordon, author of Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life

  “Becoming Jane Eyre is lush and filled with dark sensuality and the tension of unsaid things. The style is quite different from Charlotte Brontë’s in Jane Eyre, yet the tone and imagery and spirit remain in the same realm. Jane Eyre is one of my favorite books and Sheila Kohler one of my favorite writers.”

  —Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club

  The Bay of Foxes

  A Novel

  SHEILA KOHLER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Sheila Kohler, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kohler, Sheila.

  The bay of foxes : a novel / Sheila Kohler.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58877-2

  I. Title.

  PR9369.3.K64B38 2012

  823’.914—dc23 2012005999

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Bembo

  Designed by Elke Sigal

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARS
ON

  For the immigrants, for the Africans,

  and particularly for John, whose surname I never knew

  For Nature, in no shallow surge

  Against thee either sex may urge,

  Why hast thou made us but in halves—

  Co-relatives? This makes us slaves.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE

  The Bay of Foxes

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Paris

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  Part Two: The Bay of Foxes

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  Part Three: Rome

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  Acknowledgments

  A Penguin Readers Guide to the Bay of Foxes

  An Introduction to the Bay of Foxes

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  Paris

  I

  DAWIT IS SITTING AT THE BACK OF THE CAFÉ IN THE SHADOWS, when he notices her. She floats in from the street, her cigarette, in the tortoiseshell cigarette holder, held in graceful, tapered fingers. A plume of smoke obscures her face, but he knows at once who she is: M. With a thrill he recognizes the ethereal presence of a celebrity whom he sincerely admires. He stares at her tall, slim silhouette. Beneath her hat her white hair shimmers around her pale face like a nimbus. The large expressive eyes gaze dreamily heavenward. The long Modigliani neck arches arrogantly. She turns her head and stares at him.

  He averts his gaze, conscious of his ragged jeans, threadbare shirt, holes in his shoes. Exhausted, faint with hunger, he has slipped into the shadows at the back of this café, ordered the cheapest item on the menu, adding several lumps of sugar, and lingering long over his espresso, which only the French seem to condone.

  St. Sulpice.

  The still Parisian square shimmers before him, and for a moment he is afraid he might fall from his chair. He lifts his cup to his lips with trembling hands.

  Sometimes he kneels in the pews in the church on the square for hours. He prays to his guardian angels and the saints of his childhood, Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel, asking for help—he wonders how Jesus knew to tell his followers to ask God for their daily bread. He thinks of his father, who loved Paris so much and first brought him here. He sees him in the white garment his father wore at home, which would fall from his shoulder from time to time, and which he would adjust. With his deep-set, dark eyes, his playful, ironic smile, the small, neat mustache, he always seemed to be laughing at Dawit. Or Dawit just wanders around the side aisles, staring at the dramatic Delacroix paintings, the man wrestling with an angel. Like his father, Dawit loves Delacroix, who he knows visited Africa.

  The café, too, is deserted at this dead hour on a late spring Sunday afternoon. The Parisians in this elegant quartier have already fled the town on the weekend for their country houses, for the sea. The waiters stand about idly in their long white aprons, vacant-eyed, their arms dangling lifelessly. From time to time their gazes register his dark presence with what seems to him suspicion. The French often take him for an Arab, which doesn’t help.

  He watches M. as she, too, sits down at the back of the café not far from him. The few people turn their heads, stare, and whisper to their neighbors. She is at the height of her fame, recognized wherever she goes as a rock star or a famous actress, her new book already both the Prix Goncourt for 1978 and a best seller.

  She smiles at him curiously from the corner where she sits. He cannot keep his gaze from her pale face. He feels obliged to answer her smile as one would a mirror.

  The famous face is found on the covers of her many books, which have been translated into every language under the sun. Highly praised by the critics for their originality, their distinctive voice and style, her books are also popular.

  He had read them as an adolescent. His father had given him a cluster, taking them down from the shelves of his library, handing him the books with their distinctive cream covers and the name of the great French publishing house, the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, the nrf scrolled elegantly below the title. “You must read these,” he can still hear his father say. “I think you will like them.”

  What Dawit appreciated was the authority of the voice, the brevity, the omissions, and, in one of his favorites, the unusual love affair: a young Ethiopian landlord of wealth, elegance, and position and his little white concubine, the girl he buys and falls in love with “to the death.”

  Dawit’s father was a reader, educated abroad, first in England in exile with the Emperor during the Italian occupation, and later at the Faculté de Droit in Paris, where he did his law degree. Even his mother, from a family of priests, was sent to Switzerland to study French during the exile. His father had written a book on Ethiopian history. The family spoke both French and English, as well as an elegant Amharic, replete with multilayered puns and allusions. Dawit, taught by Orthodox priests, had learned to recite all the psalms in Ge’ez by the age of six. At ten, thanks to the Emperor, he had been sent to boarding school in Switzerland. At dinner the conversation sparkled, often in French or English so that the servants could not understand. The paranoia of the palace.

  Now he glances warily at M.

  She is wearing a mauve hat, which suits her, hiding what he surmises may be fine hair. The hat, despite its color, is mannish, with a wide brim, tilted slightly to one side, so that it shades her pale face. Her tailored, elegant clothes have a masculine air, too: the wide-legged gray linen pantsuit with the cream padded jacket, the striped gray and cream chiffon scarf, and the flat black tasseled shoes. He supposes they come from the Italian designer shop he has noticed on the square. She is smoking a Gitane in a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. She orders a menthe verte. She has a paperback book before her, but she is not reading. She is still staring at him.

  Knowing something about her life from her books, he can imagine why. He was a reader and a writer at an early age. For years he kept a diary, writing ten pages a day in French or English, trying out different voices, different styles, looking for his own. He imitated M.’s spare, strong voice as so many did, the sort of distinctive style that enters the mind and echoes there, recording the events of life in her voice.

  She is that rarest of writers, a literary best-selling one. Now, at her advanced age—she must surely be almost sixty—he finds her beautiful. She keeps looking at him as if she has seen him before.

  He knows it is not just the glow in his smooth bronze skin that often seems to attract people, nor the high cheekbones, aquiline nose, large eyes, long, slender body, or even his youth. He is not yet twenty-one.

  Mostly he dares not sit in expensive cafés. He walks the streets. He keeps moving for as long as he is able. He has no papers, no passport, no carte de séjour, not even an orange card for the bus. He hopes to mingle with the crowd, to hide, afraid of being followed, his own shadow, the police. He has seen what they do to African immigrants who attract their attention. His friend Asfa has told him of a man in the banlieue shot “by mistake.” Every noise startles him, every glance causes panic, every word a death summons. He reproaches himself, hearing his father say, They have turned you into a coward, Dawit!

  He has pawned the last of his mother’s rings long ago. He owes Asfa money for the rent and food. He avoids him and the others in the crowded apartment, slipping down the stairs and
out into the streets, ashamed to be seen in his increasingly ragged clothes, afraid to get caught up in endless and inconclusive conversations. Asfa would never press him for money, but Dawit knows his friend needs it badly. Asfa’s own children are hungry, and his wife glances reproachfully at Dawit when she sees him.

  He feels he has become invisible. People he knows shake hands with him so slowly and languidly and with such a bored expression, looking past him, he thinks they will fall asleep. Occasionally a stranger stops him, and he trembles, terrified. Usually it is a man whose gaze lingers on his shoulders, slender waist, narrow hips. He asks Dawit if he would like to come to his studio so that he could sculpt him, or something obvious of that sort. Dawit would like to ask if the visit would include a hearty meal, but he shakes his head, smiles, walks on.

  Sometimes he does odd jobs if he can find them, but he is not strong. He has not been trained to do manual work. He has difficulty washing his own clothes. All through the winter he has had a constant cough from exposure to the elements. It has taken him a while to realize that the fine mist in the air is rain, that it will wet his clothes and skin. Besides, he has no umbrella or raincoat. He hugs the walls to stay out of the weather, a voice in his head recording his every step. Mostly, he thinks about food.

  He has been hungry for so long now. At first he thought he would get used to it. Surely the stomach would adjust and shrink. But he has not. The hunger has become worse. Particularly as he walks past the bakery shops that trail their delicious scent of fresh bread, he is excruciatingly hungry. He has a craving for sweet things. He stands and stares at the croissants, the pains au chocolat, the chaussons aux pommes, as though he could absorb them with his eyes. He remembers the sticky deep-fried pastries of his childhood. Despite this longing he cannot manage to carry heavy things, the only work available.

  Sometimes, despite the rain, the grayness, the hunger, despite the homesickness, he becomes aware of the beauty of the city, the quality of the flickering light between the leaves of the plane trees. He thinks of his mother lifting her lovely gaze to the light sky and saying, “Levavi oculos,” lift thine eyes, her Swiss school’s motto. He thinks of the photo on her dressing table of her as a girl in her school uniform with the round felt hat, smiling shyly, showing uneven teeth, beside an identically dressed friend.