O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  “King!” Micah shouts, tossing the camera to the ground as Mishi dodges away from the animal in a yellow blur.

  “Bloody hell!” Castor cries after taking up the rifle and, with impeccable aim, firing a stage blank into the dust.

  Upon the introduction of the prop—an anachronistic bolt-action rifle standing in for the musket they were unable to secure from Imperial’s prop department before shipping out—Cri immediately makes the connection between the camera and the weapon, christening both with the same Malwiki word. Both are instruments that rely on good optics and quick reflexes, both hard-lined forms one scarcely finds in nature, both implements of possession and domination.

  With Izzy needed as an actor in the scene, playing the role of first mate, Cri has been charged with operating the camera for those handful of shots. For all his shyness, appearing on film wasn’t something that Izzy disliked. Rather, he looked upon these rare occasions as opportunities to learn more about the nature of performance. Appearing in the scene, however, required some additional prep work on his part, and the night before, the cameraman created an animated flip book of the sequence, which he uses now, isolating several pages at a time in order to reference compositions and approximate shot durations. Once Izzy is in costume and light-meter readings are taken, the pair review the previous night’s English lesson, repeating back to each other the words for “stop,” “start,” and the numbers one through ten. Cri stands in for Izzy as the cameraman blocks the scene, adjusts the aperture, and demonstrates a short panning maneuver.

  “Good, good, good,” Izzy says from behind the camera, shooting the rehearsal, his hand habitually churning the crank even after the scene is satisfactorily blocked and Izzy feels secure in Cri’s abilities as camera operator. “Now, if you’ll just hand me that prop.”

  Action precedes thought. Castor throws the rifle tomahawk style at the animal’s hindquarters; the prop ricochets off the animal’s left buttock and lands like a twig.

  “In the car, now!” Castor turns and sprints toward the vehicle, first one in, leaping into the driver’s seat, slamming on the gas as hard as he can, gripping the steering wheel hand over hand and interjecting the automobile between the lion and the other three men just as the beast begins to charge. Everything is viewed in flashes, events hopping in the periphery, but there’s enough visual data to comprehend in the workings of the lion’s musculature the enactment of some magnificent rope-and-pulley system, some marvelous lock-and-tumbler number, some murderous demonstration of cause and effect.

  The lion rams into the Citroën, grotesquely smashing the driver’s side—more billy goat than cat—its mane close enough for Castor to inhale loose dander and a not-unpleasant smell that mixes hay, mustard, and freshly sharpened pencil. The vehicle swerves at a forty-five-degree angle, the driver’s-side door accordions in on itself, strips of metal gouging Castor’s leg, all accompanied by fairy-tale sounds of spraying glass.

  Jelly-legged Micah wraps an arm around King Mishi’s waist, hoists him into the vehicle, and dives on top. With Micah, Mtabi, and the king all squeezed into the backseat, the Citroën exits its spin, tires aligning and exerting renewed traction confirmed by four corresponding puffs of smoke. The lion leaps and latches onto the side of the vehicle as it peels away.

  Gaining a foothold on the running boards, the creature begins pawing wildly, half attacking the passengers, half sloppily trying to improve its grip. Rearing up, it takes a swipe at the king, successfully removing a segment of his shoulder as neatly as a chemist lifting a weight from a triple-beam scale. There is a delay before the blood arrives, the wound deciding what its reaction might be. Then red sparks everywhere, liquid fire flowing from an iron mine, and blood—with its almost-no-smell—is suddenly ubiquitous.

  Castor veers wildly from side to side in an attempt to shake the animal off the car. The lion’s snout—a wet, livid thing—pushes itself just inches away from Micah, who presses a Thanksgiving handprint against the animal’s cheek. The moment is intimate, the contact relaying a message about the inadequacy of the match-up: so encrusted and vivid the animal’s face, so tough and wiry the thick whiskers, so ancient and unyielding the undergirding bone.

  The vehicle brakes, and the lion comes tumbling off, rolling over itself like a Chinese acrobat. Halting, the grizzly, pumpkin-headed thing performs a top-to-bottom shake, ridding itself of this indignity, and suddenly everything stops. The auto and the animal face each other, perhaps twenty yards apart. Contemplative and stone-faced, the animal is now the physical manifestation of a single idea. There is not enmity but a terrible lack of affect in the lion’s eyes as it sits there, splashing gravel and determining which verb it will unloose to bomb, blast, steam, slam, slice, slash, smash, cleave, wreck, dismantle, and destroy the vehicle and everyone in it.

  “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” Micah yelps. Castor grinds his foot down on the gas pedal, and the automobile belches its response: a sputtering engine and a hood hissing steam. Micah and Mtabi grab whatever they can—canteens, Baedeker books, gasoline tins—and begin hurling them at the animal. The objects glint off its back like streamers in a victory parade. The camera lies on the ground not a hundred yards away, black celluloid spilling out of the cracked chamber door. Its unspooled shiny filmstrip attracts the lion, which saunters over to it and begins playing with the tangle like a kitten with a ball of black yarn.

  “Drive, Benny! For fuck’s sake—drive!” Micah hears himself exclaim as the lion, irritated by the clingy jumble wrapping around its limbs, coils up again. This is it, Micah thinks as the animal springs through the air in a perfect parabolic arc that eclipses the sun, this is what we came to see. (That, and how odd for Goldwyn to have picked a lion as cinema’s mascot. Why this particular animal? What about its ferocity relates to the nature of the motion-picture business? And he thought of Rose’s wedding. Was it tacky and impoverished or a joyful affair? Had the day been a happy occasion or a lonely-making one? And he was thinking, too, of imaginary headlines in tomorrow’s Variety: A GRAND MEAL: IDIOT DIRECTOR, DEVOURED.)

  “Got it!” Castor says as the ignition catches, the vehicle peels off, and the beast crashes and conforms into a self-made crater. A moment later the lion is galloping behind them—its shifting weight and springy limbs far better attuned to the variable terrain than the shocks and rigid carriage of the boxy automobile—the animal gathering speed while the vehicle stop-starts, recovering and recalibrating after every molehill and dip.

  “Sir,” Mtabi interjects, a model of polite composure still. “I feel it important to note that a ravine lies ahead.”

  And, sure enough, a few hundred yards along, the plains stop altogether, the ground dropping away and the landscape resolving into sky, in what, it is impossible to determine: a cliff or a pit or the very end of the flat world itself.

  Castor jackknifes the vehicle around, charging directly toward the lion, which continues sprinting, looming up larger and larger. Then an explosive hiccup signals that the engine has failed again.

  “Get down! Get down now!” Micah screams, pulling at his friends, all of whom take up the curled postures of the unborn. All except King Mishi, who, damp with blood, rises like a spirit to face the beast. Confronted with a noble adversary at last, the lion bares its teeth as it leaps. Even in his crouched position, eyes squinting from terror and glare, Micah—his observational habits asserting themselves instinctively, visual acuity never finer than in Africa’s irradiated light—believes he can see inside the animal’s cavernous mouth, that he can discern in that self-sustaining micro-universe an insect, a gnat or a small beetle, cleaning one of the beast’s teeth. From the perspective of the insect—busily removing some plant fiber or string of antelope muscle—all this furious activity is extraneous frippery. The bug has its job to do. Just as the lion has its job. And the filmmakers theirs. Apart from offering a profound insight into the nature of relativity, the vision makes, even Micah must admit, a not-bad note on which to go out.

  But not tod
ay. King Mishi, all silken composure, lifts his spear and holds fast as the lion descends. He leans back, as far back as a deep-sea fisherman braced in his chair, holding his ground as the beast comes crashing down across the hood of the car. With the sound of a great head of cabbage being chopped in half, the weapon thrusts far into the animal’s torso, just below the white curtain of neck, the weight of impact causing the front wheels of the vehicle to rear up, then smash back down to the ground as the lion’s limbs splay across the automobile. Deeper and deeper the king plunges the weapon, exerting more might as the lion grinds down onto the car hood and drapes across the backseat as it expires, beginning to regain some of its earlier expression of somnolence. The king, slippery with his own blood, stares down his nemesis as he feels the spear rooting through stratified layers of muscle and sinew and bone. The animal’s breathing—heavy and hot on their heads, offering its own form of benediction—gradually slows, then stops. After some time the men rise from their huddles. One of the lion’s limbs rests on Mtabi, the paw cupping the translator’s shoulder like the hand of a father acknowledging his son after a good showing at school.

  “You okay?” Micah asks Mtabi.

  “Yes, sir.” Lifting the heavy extremity off himself by his fingertips.

  “Benny?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  Micah looks to King Mishi, who sits slumped and closemouthed in a corner of the vehicle, apparently breathing from the lips of his open, palpating wound. For a long while, King Mishi does not speak or make any movement until, meeting the eyes of the filmmaker, he grants him a small smile. At this signal Micah bursts out weeping, hot tears mixing with blood and water and sprayed gasoline.

  The carnage is deep. Tourniquets are applied, stinging bourbon is used as antiseptic, and wounds are dressed with fresh bandages. Though the lion’s weight causes the automobile to sag considerably; though the animal continues issuing the message of its mortality the whole way, covering the backseat and floor in inches of warm blood; though Micah is sitting close enough to the animal to receive its residual heat and feel its bristles brushing against him, King Mishi insists that they bring the carcass back to the village, that his people should bear witness to his trophy, that the animal’s skin should be stripped and its heart eaten. Rumbling through the darkening veldt, the Citroën looks like an ambulance from the Great War zooming through the Italian front under bordello skies.

  “We took the wrong gun,” Castor repeats over and over. “We took the wrong blinking gun.”

  “It’s my fault,” Micah says. “I packed the prop by mistake.”

  “Blanks!” Castor says, smacking his free hand against the ruined dashboard, his bloodied palm crosshatched with gashes and embedded slivers of glass. “Blanks! You dragged us halfway around the world to pit us against a lion with a bloody toy.”

  Cri spent his days smiling, the kingdom of sunshine dancing on his face. He smiled through the worst of the historical re-creations, and he smiled today, too, all through the filming, right up to the moment the rifle went off.

  Days and months and years later, Izzy remained convinced that during that flash, time had indeed stopped, that the universe had folded in on itself, and for that instant he could plot the progression of the shell leaving the gun barrel in a puff of magician’s smoke, could chart through the air its demented trajectory, a straight line just a few meters long that in transit made some unholy wager between life and death. Izzy was certain he could divide the moment when the projectile hit Spiro’s face—the impact, the explosion of brainpan, the spattering of bone and teeth and skin and tissue and viscera, the snapshot of an expression erased, a human face erupting into instantaneous abstraction—into its component parts, its discrete millionths of a second.

  Izzy’s bowels turn to ice water as Spiro rockets backward off the crate, and the narrative meaning of what’s just occurred affixes itself to the permanent chronology of time. Early hunches over, grabs his stomach, and vomits steaming volumes into the earth, hands pressed on the ground in front of him, head lowered like a quadruped’s. Cri, who has no idea what’s just happened, clumsily points the rifle to the sky, confused as to how to proceed until Izzy gently relieves him of the weapon. The cameraman is surprised to find the gun still smoking and warm with Cri’s touch, like a serving dish you’d pass to the person sitting next to you at a dinner party.

  “What are we going to do?” Early says, directing his words to the ground, having erected an invisible wall between himself and the corpse. “What are we going to do, Izzy?”

  TWELVE

  The rain returned and continued unabated, pouring and flowing and streaming and washing over everything. It rained so much that the damp kingdom attracted frogs and toads and grasshoppers and algae and paramecia and other forms of aquatic nuisances and pestilence, all threatening to overrun and pollute the Malwiki’s hard-won supply of fresh water. The huts were leaking terribly, too, and the Malwiki were cold and chilled under darkened daytime skies, wandering around the tropical pudding half dazed, drenched, and bedraggled.

  The burial was held in the rain. In its imperative to return the body to the earth as quickly as possible, the ritual reminded Izzy of Orthodox Jewish funerals he had attended as a child. Draped in ceremonial robes, fingers wrapped in crinkling, bright-colored snakeskin, a painted wooden decorative mask placed over his face, Spiro was laid to rest not far from the site of his wrestling-match victory over Yani. Spiro had no surviving family, and the group did not entertain the thought of transporting the body to a final resting place in America. Better to bury him here, where he would forever be remembered as a champion and an honored guest.

  Spiro’s small wooden coffin had been elaborately decorated with all manner of carvings relating stories and legends from his life as the Malwiki had come to understand it. There was the hero’s birth into a strange kingdom of little people, his adventures abroad on great sea vessels, caravan crossings over the Russian steppes, jalopy journeys to Tijuana, his glorious career as a maker of stories and as acrobatic master of the dream box. Certain of these drawings were based on fantastic tales Spiro had relayed to the villagers during their days together and nights spent swaddled in nests of Malwiki women. Others were based on the tattoos that twisted round his torso, angels and devils and hula girls and peg legs and ship’s anchors and white whales. These coffin scenes were unified by a snake motif, an ouroboros wriggling its way around the bamboo box and devouring its own tail, signifying the soul’s birth, death, and ultimate reclamation.

  King Mishi, ashen-faced and convalescing still, is first to speak, praising the wrestling champion’s athleticism and heroism and the special message his life held for the Malwiki about trusting essences over appearances. Afterward each member of the production company places a small tribute in the casket beside their fallen friend: a pair of spectacles from Till, an unopened pack of Camels from Early, a hip flask from Castor, Micah’s pocketwatch. Izzy is last, placing beside his friend’s strong, folded hands a brass kaleidoscope from his father’s collection and a photo he’d taken of Spiro on the deck of the Roi des Belges. Then the casket is closed, and Yani approaches to fasten a ceremonial spear over its lid.

  The next speaker is an unexpected one. Rip-cord thin, his physiognomy a distillation of the man’s severity and ambition, Talli rises like a shade to deliver a speech that is more rebuttal than eulogy. The rains swell during Talli’s peroration, plinking across the adviser’s shoulders like sparks of electricity. Though Mtabi does not provide translation, it is clear that Talli’s speech is a rebuke, a condemnation of the interlopers for bringing doom down upon the Malwiki. And it is from Talli’s lips that for the first time during the ceremony the name of the prince is spoken, sending a shudder through Izzy, who has not seen Cri since Talli and the royal guards came across the horrific scene of reckoning and ferried him away. Whether as a matter of penance or punishment, the prince’s whereabouts are unknown; Mtabi has relayed rumors that Cri traveled to the mountains to s
eek the forgiveness of the gods, while others have suggested he is being held in a jail beneath the royal palace, awaiting the verdict on his deed.

  The rains continue through the ceremony, gaining in intensity as the funeral progresses, an invitation for slithering snakes and hopping frogs, which gravitate toward the casket. Women are weeping and stamping their feet, some of them rending their clothes like Hasidic Jews. Others are shivering in the cold, their sanguine mourning garments clinging to their bodies, bright wet reds lending them the look of hatchlings, river creatures coated in birth slime, a reminder of aquatic origins.

  The casket is finally lowered, returning Spiro to the squirrel world. The frozen tableau reminds Izzy of his family’s first sitting for a professional photograph a quarter century before. All of these photos were vaguely similar, vaguely sad. Families visited the photographer with the same solemnity with which one appealed to a doctor or a fortune-teller: Tell me how I am, tell me who I am.