The Bay of Foxes: A Novel Page 10

  They are sitting out on the wide terra-cotta terrace, sipping the coffee Dawit has served in her gold-rimmed demitasses, when she speaks. She sits upright in the flowing silk trousers and a high-necked black blouse she had changed into before dinner. Her white hair is tied severely back from her face, which makes her nose seem even more sharp, her eyes more slanting. She stares out across the darkening hills and the glittering silver sea in the distance, puts down her cup, and leans forward for him to light her cigarette. There is a full moon illuminating the night sky, so that only the brightest of stars are visible in the vast expanse above them.

  In the bright light of the moon, he can see how her eyes snap at him with malice. She is in a rage, smoldering and spiteful, blowing out smoke into the air. As she leans toward him, looking into his face, he can smell her fetid breath.

  He thinks of a kinae from his childhood. The Capuchin monk who taught him as a young boy asked him to fathom its meaning. There were always two layers that he would have to find, the bronze and the gold. The gold to this particular kinae went something like, “Now that you have decided to deny me my due, there is no point in continuing our relationship. I am not one of those who can forget or forgive.”

  He thinks of Enrico but knows very well what he would do if Dawit arrived with his suitcase on his doorstep. Enrico is not, he knows, a man of courage or even determination. He doesn’t pretend to be. It is partly for this, his timidity, his self-deprecating honesty, that Dawit loves him. His weakness is part of his charm, but it makes him someone Dawit cannot count on in an emergency of this kind.

  M. puffs on her cigarette, blows out the smoke, and says, “I had an interesting letter some time ago. I didn’t consider it seriously at the time, but I did have the foresight to stall. I told them I’d think it over and I would let them know.”

  Dawit waits for her to go on.

  “It was an offer to teach in America.”

  “Surely you wouldn’t consider such a thing?”

  He stares back at her. There is no possibility of his accompanying her there, of course, because he would never be granted a visa. He doesn’t have a working visa for France. The tourist visa she has obtained for him is temporary and will soon expire.

  But M. goes on smoking her Gitane and speaking, waving her fine fingers, telling him about the position she has been offered. “It’s a chair at one of the most prestigious places. I wouldn’t have to do much teaching, just one course, with all my summers free, a month at Christmas, and sabbaticals. I wouldn’t even have to attend many meetings, they assure me. The means to procure a house would be provided, along with a generous salary, health benefits. A distinguished group of professors would be my colleagues. Basically, I would just be lending the program a famous French name. It seems like a wise move at this point in my career, don’t you think? I’m not sure how much longer I can churn out books to support myself. In any case, I’ve decided to write and accept.”

  “You would start teaching this fall?” Dawit asks.

  “I would only have to start next spring, but I’d leave quite soon to look for a house in the area, settle in. It would be a change.” She looks at him and smiles in a grim, ghastly way. “I think we both need a change, don’t you?” She purses her lips and looks away from him. There is something of the rat about her, he thinks, looking at her profile in the moonlight, or perhaps it is a ferret.

  He remembers his arrival in Marseilles, his fear of the police as he made a secret descent from the ship, and the misery of the train ride to Paris followed by a wash of gray days of rain, the cramped quarters, the smell of rotting drains in the crowded apartment in the banlieue where Asfa had so generously received him along with all the jetsam and flotsam of African society, the impossibility of finding any work without papers, without degrees or letters of recommendation. And ultimately roaming the damp gray streets, scorned and humiliated, hungry and terrified.

  Without M.’s protection, her money and her fame, it is clear to him, and surely to her, what will happen to him. Sooner or later he will be picked up and sent home, where the same government, unbelievably, still clings to its ill-gotten power, despite famine in the land. He will not be as lucky a second time around. His Solomon, alas, is most probably dead, killed in one of the frequent purges.

  “You would shut up the apartment in Paris?” he asks, his voice trembling.

  “From now on, the apartment in Paris, this villa, as well as the chalet in Gstaad would certainly be shut to you,” she says and stubs out her half-smoked cigarette in the large glass ashtray at her elbow. She stares at him without seeing him, her blue-gray eyes blank. He can only stare back, but what he sees is himself, shuffling eight steps to the overflowing plastic bucket in the corner of his cell, the smell of feces and fear in the air, the sensation of his chest pressing into his spine.

  Surely M. must know that by banishing him she is sending him back to certain death. Obviously, she no longer cares. She has toyed with him for a while—he has served a certain function—but now she has had enough.

  “In fact, I’d like you to be gone by tomorrow morning. Leave your keys on the console in the hall, along with your checkbook, will you? I’ll give you something to tide you over, of course, enough to get you off the island, but you’ll have to fend for yourself after that. I’ll be closing your account in the morning.”

  He thinks of her telling him how he had brought her youth back into her life. How can he go back to his other life now, after the one he has led with M.? His position has not changed. He has not acquired any degrees, or letters of recommendation, or permanent papers, and no money at all. Foolishly, he has spent all she has given him, giving most of it away, living through her, believing, hoping she would protect him as the courtiers in his homeland had expected the Emperor to do. He has learned nothing from his parents’ bitter experience. He has lived a fantasy, playing games, making believe. She well knows he has nothing to sustain him.

  “What will I do?” he asks, his voice shaking, folding his fingers to stop their trembling. How can she abandon him so easily? Does she want him to go back to his country, back to prison? Is she trying to kill him? When he looks into her eyes, he feels, indeed, that her rage is such that she would like him dead.

  “You’re an enterprising young man. You’ve survived so far. In fact, you’ve been very lucky. We’ve had a good summer together, haven’t we? We have brought each other a moment of reprieve.” For a moment she seems to see him again, and her eyes fill with tears. Will she relent, change her mind? But she quickly regains control of herself and goes on, “Let’s leave it at that. I’m sure you’ll figure it all out. Perhaps you could do some sort of secretarial work for someone else? I’m sure someone will pick you up, as I did, take pity on you. You tell your story rather well, I must say. A few tears and you’ll be in someone’s arms. You are so young, heartbreakingly beautiful, and very smart, to boot—an excellent secretary,” she says, then waves her hands in the air and looks at him now as though he were some sort of merchandise she was considering but has now decided is entirely unnecessary.

  She rises stiffly and strides across the stone floor into the living room, where he follows her. He considers going down on his knees, weeping, as he did that first day in the café, or jumping up on the brick wall, threatening to throw himself off the cliff, but he senses it would not change her decision. She would just allow him to jump. In her furor she is like a rock, unbreakable, immovable. Besides, his pride prevents him from begging. He can only watch her go. He can see that her excessive passion has changed into excessive hate. She is bent on humiliating him completely.

  She bends over and opens up her safe, which is in an alcove in the wall beside the sofa. She pulls out a small stack of bills, puts them on the inlaid table beside her, closes the safe, and twists the knob. “This will get you off the island. I expect you to be gone by noon tomorrow. I don’t like lingering good-byes. You can take the Land Rover and leave it at the airport. Put the keys under the mat
. I’ll have Michelino come and pick it up. You’d better start packing tonight. Take whatever clothes you want. At least you’ll be well dressed this time. I’m going to take some sleeping pills and try and get some sleep.” And she walks away and goes up the steps to her bedroom without a backward glance, or another word.

  XXI

  HE WALKS BACK AND FORTH IN HIS ROOM IN THE HEAT AND silence of the quiet summer night. Then he stands at the open window for a while. He looks out at the scintillant sea in the moonlight. His whole life rushes back to him like a wave, as though he were drowning in his humiliation—as his torturers once almost drowned him or as if he were about to face his own execution. Indeed, he feels death is close. What happens now will determine his future and somehow even his past, all that had gone before since his and his mother’s and father’s births. This moment had always awaited him.

  Memories from his childhood come to him: the dawns in Harar, with the smells of overripe fruit and wood smoke in the air, the cries of the hyenas disappearing at dawn, the crescendo of birdsong in the lime and pomegranate trees, the calls to prayer from the ninety-nine mosques, the bells from the church Medhanie Alem. He sees the men in their splendid white robes and turbans, a large painting of Jesus on his cross over the altar. With his dark complexion and large dark eyes, he looked more like a youthful Ethiopian than a poor Jew. He remembers the smell of incense rising up in the air from a pair of giant censers, the chandeliers with their lit candles, the stone baptismal, the sounds of the drums and the sitra, the incantatory sounds of the chanted liturgy, and the clapping of hands.

  The villa is completely silent apart from the sawing of the crickets, the soft hush, hush of the waves in the distance. The servants have long since returned to their village for the night. He is alone, completely alone with M. So often she has come into his room to watch him sleep, turning on the light, stealing not just his sleep but something more precious with her avid gaze, her grasping hands, her pleas. She has used him up, prodding and poking at his flesh as if she wanted to possess his youth, his beauty, his life. He has been her chattel, her sex slave. She has forced him to lie on her thin body, to penetrate her with his tongue, his hands. Now she has discarded him, sloughing him off like the old skin of a snake; she has humiliated him deeply, wiping out his existence, to the point that he no longer knows who he is.

  He creeps quietly along the corridor, clinging close to the wall like a shadow. He walks silently across the living room and up the stone stairs and opens the door to her suite. Now he is the voyeur. He turns on the small lamp on her desk and quietly opens her shutters on the moonlit night. He lets the night invade her room with him. He stands by her bed and looks down at her, as she lies beneath the splendid blue iron bed-head. He watches her helpless sleep. Her mouth is half open, her breathing stertorous, a thin trickle of saliva in a corner of her lips.

  He remembers watching Solo sleep quietly beside him and how smooth his dark, dewy skin was. How touching he was in his defenselessness. M.’s body tilts to one side slightly, the angular lines, the thrust of the hip bone, the parted thin legs visible beneath the white sheet. Her body looks dislocated, lifeless, caught up in this artificially created little death.

  He remembers her floating into the café, that other woman with the famous face, whom he recognized with such a thrill. He remembers the exciting, smoky sound of her masculine voice, his fear and his hope, the large, limpid eyes, full of sympathy. “I will help you,” she had promised.

  Now all her glamour has vanished. Without her elegant clothes, without the mask of her makeup—there are still traces of blue mascara around her eyes—without the hat to conceal the thin, greasy hair, without her emerald rings lying now in a tulip-shaped glass bowl by her bed, without the allure of her reputation, she looks simply old and ugly to him. He notices the brown spots on the sides of her face, the lines, the sharp, pointed nose, the thin lips, an unsightly gray hair on her chin. He would like to pluck it out.

  He has glimpsed this many times before, but now he sees it all so clearly, as if under a magnifying glass. The chapped lips gape in an unseemly way. He sees the lined neck, the gray skin, the slump of the loose breasts she has made him hold. When he leans closer, he smells the breath that stinks of alcohol and bitterness. The bottle of sleeping pills and the half-empty vodka bottle are on the nightstand beside a glass, the rim stained with purple lipstick. She likes vodka, she says, because it has no taste, but perhaps she thinks you cannot smell it on her breath. She is mistaken.

  The manuscript of her new book that she calls a novel is piled on her desk beside her typewriter, all 150 pages, carefully edited by him. Her books are often short, hardly novels, rather novelettes, he thinks, but nobody seems to mind. They print them in large print with frequent white spaces, her name enough to sell them, apparently.

  He wonders if her work will last. Correcting her repetitive prose, he has lost much of his admiration for her as an artist. Her books have been overrated, in his opinion; even her early ones don’t have the allure they had once, now that he knows her so well. Her publishers and above all her publicists have done good work for her. The strength of one or two successful short books has carried all the rest. Fame is mostly a game of luck, it seems to him, an elusive whip-poor-will that may or may not last. Certainly she can no longer write anything with the energy of her early years. Without his corrections he is certain her editor would turn down the book that lies stacked on the desk.

  XXII

  AS HE STANDS THERE AT HER BEDROOM WINDOW ASKING HIMSELF if he is capable of this, he becomes aware that the sun is beginning to rise, the edges of the horizon stained pink above the sea. The night is almost gone. He must decide fast. Soon the couple will arrive from Abbiadori to start work.

  His head is filled with the voice that has come back to record his actions. He is Dawit, a young man with large dark eyes, in a fine linen shirt and navy linen trousers with a gold cross around his neck, standing at the window, and he is also someone else, someone unknown, watching himself. He tries to concentrate on the task at hand, but extraneous thoughts float through his mind as he stands there. He wonders why the desk was built as a long plank of shining wood without drawers, which would have been useful in a room of this kind, and why, indeed, M. had this villa built on the side of such a steep hill, though obviously it was for the view that lies before him, in the first light of day: the splendid sweep of the half-moon-shaped bay.

  Then he turns his back on the view and looks at her, still sleeping so soundly while he has been awake all night. For her he has been just a small link in what was probably a long chain of young lover-cum-secretaries, available young men who would do her bidding and whom she has taken into her house and used for a while. She has decided to banish him and will forget him fast, he is certain. In the end he has meant little to her. She intends to go on with her life, her successful career, and forget him completely. Perhaps she hopes that he will be banished far from her sight, sent back to his homeland, his cell.

  He remembers standing with the chain in his hands; the guard entering his room. In the end it had been a simple choice, one that soldiers make every day: their own life or that of another. It is an act many men commit again and again in battle. Birth and death; one unimportant, useless life lost for the good of many.

  He picks up her emerald rings from the bowl and slips them onto his two pinkies. Afterward, it is this action that he will find the most incomprehensible, the theft of a few stones, though what follows is surely stranger. He lifts the glass on the blue bedside table and mixes the vodka left in the bottle with the rest of the sleeping pills, stirs them together. He wants to fill her with this liquid, to invade her being just as she has invaded his. He will give her everlasting sleep, in return for having so often stolen his. Also, despite everything, he is loath to make this elderly woman, who has loved him in her way, suffer.

  He sits down by her side on the bed and gently pushes her over onto her back. Then he props her up, so that her mou
th opens wider, and he pours the liquid easily into her throat. She wakes immediately, of course, which he realizes he should have known she would do. What is he thinking? What is he doing? He can see the liquid is not going down her throat. She is trying to sit up and spit it out, but he holds her down, pushing against her chest, her head. His efforts are misdirected. She spits out the liquid and thrusts the glass away from her mouth, clawing at his hand with her nails, thrusting it away from her, trying to sit up. She reaches back to hang on to the iron bed-head to draw herself up, and for a moment he thinks the whole thing will crash down and kill them both.

  He draws back from her, stands up, and pushes on the bed-head to keep it upright. He hesitates, afraid of her now that she is awake and protesting so violently, shouting at him, “What are you doing?” He is so used to doing her bidding, obeying her orders, trying always to please. How can he do this to her, this woman who has been his benefactor? But he thrusts her back against the pillows roughly, bending over her and placing one hand in the middle of her chest, where the guard had thrust the gun into his mother’s. He wrenches her fingers from the iron bed-head behind her and recommences uselessly trying to force as much of the liquid as he can down her throat, jamming the glass between her yellowed, nicotine-stained teeth. Sputtering and choking, beating the glass away, so that much of the alcohol is soaked up by her white silk nightgown, the white lace pillow slip, she shouts at him again—“Get away from me!”—in groggy surprise, her voice so loud and forceful it frightens him.