The boys would begin each day around two o’clock, after lunch and after Sambul had finished his job helping the maids clean the tourist tents, picking up the cigarette butts, laundering the towels, and beating the beds for scorpions. They usually met in Sambul’s room, lying on their backs, shirtless, against the cool tile floor and staring up at the posters of the various football stars Martha brought Sambul by request from the city. They talked idly of football sides and tactics or the various strange and amusing characters that had appeared in the most recent bunch of tourists. Once in a while, if Martha had returned from a shopping trip recently, the boys had a new tape of music to listen to. When this happened, they would listen together to the best song of the album on repeat until they both knew every word. Then Sambul would goad Soren into performing for him—the tall, thin, blond boy standing atop Sambul’s bed and crooning with exaggerated earnestness into an invisible microphone. Sambul liked it best when Soren would make some motion—running his hand slowly back through his hair, for instance, while tracing the long trajectory of a single, wavering note. Eventually it would cool off enough to go outside and one or the other boy would slowly stand up and stretch, fake yawning, hamming it up, before bolting out the door and calling out names of the things the other was slower than.
The running became a feeling in itself; the late afternoon breeze pushed over their torsos and faces as they sweated, cooling them as the light got long and reddish over the brush and the dirt roads. They were allowed out of the compound as long as it was still light and they stayed together, and their jogs traced long, erratic laps of the relevant geography: the place where the road dove into the river that would cover it in winter and reveal it again in summer; the small bluff from which the tourists in their jeeps were taken to watch the hippos and elephants loll around a mud hole; the circling path around a tree where small tribes of monkeys scolded them, occasionally tossing down fruit cores at the boys’ heads. When bored or winded Sambul and Soren would stop, dallying along the main road that led away from the Wheelers’ land or lazily following one of the women from the village as she herded her goats back toward the cluster of improvised shanties in the distance.
They played a game sometimes when all else failed to entertain them. They called it keepy-uppy, and it consisted of each taking off their shoes and socks and venturing a few rows into the small field that the Wheelers allowed the servants to keep behind their quarters. It was never clear to Sambul, even later, why Soren and he had felt the need to do this, to draw the veil of tall green corn stalks behind them, but it is what they did, wordlessly, when one or the other wanted to play. The game was this: Sambul would lie down on his back in the cool, soft dirt between the rows and Soren would carefully step up until he was standing on Sambul’s chest, the soles of his feet roughly in the area of Sambul’s pectoral muscles. Soren would then see, counting in a whisper (here another mystery to Sambul in his middle age), how long Sambul could bear it, could keep Soren up. Eventually, lungs bursting, Sambul would roll, sending Soren flying off, laughing, and then the boys would switch positions. Sometimes to make it more interesting, one or the other would tease the one on the ground by balancing on one foot and placing the other sole ever so lightly against the prone boy’s face, nibbling the cheek with his toes. Even at the time Sambul sensed the intimacy of this—the smooth hold of the corn’s husks, the weak yellow sun wavering behind Soren’s listing head suddenly infused with a sense of nervous joy. This is how the memory would continue to feel, anyway, even many years later, when Sambul could recognize neither boy in his and Soren’s tired faces.
This arrangement lasted until sometime after Soren’s thirteenth birthday, when, on their holiday trip back to the States, Martha Wheeler was killed in an automobile accident and died, leaving Soren and his father to return to the estate alone and defeated, as if all the words had gone out of both of them. That fall, Mr. Wheeler announced that he was sending both Soren and Sambul off to boarding schools in Nairobi for the remainder of their education. Soren was sent to a preparatory academy mostly filled with the children of European diplomats, while Sambul arrived on his first day at a Catholic school on the outskirts of the city that specialized in native children who had been identified (by the foreign businessmen in the city who employed their families) as showing some amount of promise. For a year the two boys saw each other only at the training sessions and matches of the Massey Insurance Juniors, a local football club that both boys played for and that Danforth Wheeler owned a controlling stake in. That was only for the one season, however. By the next time Sambul and Soren found themselves alone in the fields together, Soren would be returned to the continent with an American degree, Sambul would be head manager of the Wheeler estate and safari business, and Soren would be dying.
•
Soren waited until all the guides, redeployed for the day as messengers, had returned from the villages before ordering Sambul and Benny to wrap up the body and put it on the rear board of one of the jeeps. No one was missing, and there were no reports of an unfamiliar man in the area. Soren was quiet as they drove back to the compound. He made them go very slowly, and allowed no one else besides Sambul and Benny in the vehicle, as if to limit the number of people forced to have contact with the nameless man’s corpse, sheathed as it was in a way that looked both ridiculous and ceremonial. Benny had returned to the spring with several rounds of old, yellowed muslin. Standing there before the body, laid out in the dirt between Soren and Sambul, Benny had turned his round, pitted face up to them, only then recognizing the inadequacy of the cloth.
Now, riding in the back seat of the open-topped vehicle, Sambul had one hand over the swaddled form tied to the luggage board. Beneath his fingers the man’s body felt neither cold nor warm, only hardened. The deep tone of the man’s skin could not be masked by the thin muslin and its deeper hue shone through in an ill-defined way. As they entered the gates and slowly trolled up through the safari camp, a few guests leaned out the front flaps of their big tents or stood on the porches of packed earth and watched them pass.
Sambul knew it was not a good solution, but thought it was the only one. Soren for some reason hadn’t even wanted to move the body, other than to remove it from the water, as if to preserve the basic facts of the story that might be told to any family member the guides might bring back.
Sambul had squatted beside Soren and, quietly pointing with a pinky finger, suggested that the yellowed flesh of the calluses Soren was looking for did in fact pad the man’s palms, forming a ridge at the top of the ball of the right hand. Sambul knew that Soren knew that all the men had been thinking the same thing since first seeing the body: that this man was just another of the migrant workers who wandered undocumented over the border, that they’d find no name, no family, and no story.
“He doesn’t have anything with him for travel, though,” Soren had argued, looking up at the other guides, who watched from a small distance away, leaning against the vehicles and spitting.
“And there’re no wounds, no immediate cause for death,” Sambul added helpfully, without knowing why. The guides squinted at Sambul for a moment then shrugged and readjusted their feet. Soren had looked at Sambul for a minute, blank-faced, before sighing and turning away.
By the time all the guides returned, it was too late in the day for anyone leaving the estate in one of the Land Rovers to make it to town and the municipal morgue before nightfall, when control of the highway reverted to the rural gangs who financed the rebels with robbery and beheadings. There was also the matter of the party that had been planned for that night, for the twenty-five or so guests currently in residence at the safari camp. So Sambul eventually had to say it, because Soren seemed to need him to, had to suggest the walk-in freezer in the great house’s basement kitchen.
When he, Benny, and Soren reached the house, Sambul helped them carry the body into the frigid space, each hefting it under his right arm.
The party was held for each group of guests on
the last night of their stay. The camp hosted guests on ten-day rotations and Sambul, overseeing the safari outings, had this summer become familiar with how Soren would appear about three days in, whipping one of the vehicles at high speed up to where the guests in their open-topped jeeps would be taking their break after the morning game drive, and hopping dramatically out of his car. This was how he began, Sambul knew, how Soren started his process. By the day before the party the guests inevitably felt that he had become one of them, and were excited by the presence of the master of the estate right beside them in the lounge chairs of the pool in the early afternoon’s clear sunlight.
Sambul always wondered at Soren’s ability to recognize the urge in one or another of these guests, and at these other men’s ability to recognize and respond to it in Soren, all without any doublespeak or sidelong look—without any sign, as far as Sambul could tell, at all. It was as if they were speaking a mental language encoded in the very facts of each other’s bodies: in things like the effortless order of Soren’s combed hair, of course, but also in the high cheekbones and dark stubble of one particular guest’s face, in the litheness of another’s body, the lack of resistance in his shoulders. Sambul was witness to these exchanges, could tell clearly when an understanding between Soren and one of the guests—usually a young, single professional on this trip with a large group of other young, single professionals from the same company—had been reached, but what bothered Sambul was how at ease each of these chosen guests was with the situation, the way after dark they walked up the path for their personal audience with Soren without shame but also without flippant striding.
In these last weeks of summer, the estate had been hosting mostly long strings of high school and college tour groups, led by huffing geography teachers from the middle of America and spouse-chaperones along for the ride. Accordingly, Soren’s taste had gotten startlingly younger; Sambul watching in disgust as Soren flirted openly with the thin, tan boys who did knifing dives into the pool, skimming along its bottom, their half-developed muscles rippling in the water before surfacing, the air filled with their surprised, buoyant laughter. Is this what Soren wanted? Sambul found himself thinking, watching the display. This idiotic lightness?
Soren’s interest in these youths (the exact ages neither Sambul nor Soren were ever certain of, though what did it matter when they all looked to have been stalled in some vague prepubescence, their only body hair a delicate blond undercoat that served merely to bring the curve of their tanned lower backs or stomachs into further definition) was made even more unsettling given Soren’s changing appearance. As Soren’s lovers had gotten younger Soren himself, or at least his body, had begun to age considerably. He was back to losing weight again, helplessly—the bedclothes that Sambul had the maids change every morning sopping with sweat, the full plates of food pushed away in defeat. To the men and boys who stayed at the safari camp, however, this only accentuated Soren’s natural good looks, his face even more angular and sly. His small shoulders kept his fleshless torso from appearing skeletal, and his entire body only got even more out of the way of the unexpected pale green eyes that, as a boy, had flashed but that now gave him a calm, distanced air.
Soren had prepared Sambul and some of the servants for this yo-yoing health that would eventually just never rewind itself, but when Soren’s first descent into sickness had started no one had been ready for the racking coughs, the inability to eat, the wandering, temporary dementia giving way finally to the immobility, the weakness so great that Soren could barely even move his cracked lips to request the water that Sambul had to drip into his mouth. How had that not been the end? What was that, if not the end of Soren’s life? But it wasn’t: he’d more than recovered, everything happening in reverse, abilities one by one regained and remastered. And this robust infection of good health hadn’t stopped there, but continued until Soren was more hale and lively than he had been upon his adult return to the country. “Har har, just kidding,” Soren had joked to the servants after this recovery, without smiling.
So everyone at the estate knew that the plateau of good health would end, knew that what they were doing was waiting. That had been a year ago, though. Then this summer had come with the boys and simultaneously, as if mocking their youth, the stirrings of the weight loss, the shaking hands at dinner as he tried to eat his soup.
Soren was doing fine for the moment, though, with the body safely away in the freezer and him free to return his attentions to the young Indian man from somewhere back in Britain. Soren had seated himself beside the Indian and kept leaning slightly over to deliver his punch lines so that their shoulders touched lightly, though this was the only contact they had. The man, impossibly young-looking, with rounded cheeks, a shock of black hair and big, earnest eyes, had already agreed, Sambul could see. He was smiling, happy to be taken in by Soren’s older, comforting grace. When the dinner petered out and the other guests took their big bottles of beer to the pool, Soren quietly got up and made his way back to the great house. A few minutes later the boy got up and followed. When it was possible, Sambul left too, walking the long way up before taking his usual position.
Technically, Sambul used the small room off of Soren’s quarters when Soren was sick, or when someone needed to keep a vigil over him as he slept. In healthier times it was used as a sort of all-purpose folding room by the maids who kept up the great house, with the understanding that they quietly slip out the door that led to the back stairs whenever Soren entered his quarters. There was no door between Soren’s living room and this small space; instead, a long, gauzy curtain hung in the doorway that was generally respected as if it were solid.
Sambul thought of what he did in these situations in a vaguely proprietary way. Soren might need something, for instance, might get sick, with no one there to help him but his clueless young men. But Sambul also knew it went beyond that, felt that Soren somehow needed him to see, to witness, in the same way that he had no compunction in calling Sambul to his quarters when he’d lost controls of his bowels in the night.
Sambul could see them now, through the narrow space between the curtain and the doorframe. The young man was standing, Soren kneeling in front of him, head bobbing, reduced in his disease to this exercise, this pleasuring of the other. There seemed something off to Sambul about this setup, something wrong about the young man being the one experiencing this feeling, his eyes closed, his body stiff. When he was done Soren slowly stood and said something to the boy. They each moved around each other awkwardly, actors ignorant of the scene’s proper blocking, until the boy was bent, kneeling forward on an ottoman facing the other wall and Soren was behind him, arm working at himself, head looking down at the boy’s full buttocks, where Sambul knew Soren was not even touching him, masturbating instead into a doubled condom. Sambul sat like this for a long time, unfolding the linens and then refolding them, looking up after each one to check that Soren was still there, to see that there was still the fact of his body: naked, pathetically curved into itself, his diminutive, shallow buttocks very pale and cupped in the effort. Sambul watched him begin to shake weakly, and waited for the familiar moment, the climax that would not come, that would be replaced with the strangely banal sound of Soren’s infirm weeping.
•
Soren Wheeler left the country for an East Coast American university in 1986, failing to stick around or even visit to bear witness to the gradual decline of Danforth Wheeler’s business empire-in-miniature. Besides the estate, the crown jewel of his father’s holdings was Hotel Sporting Nairobi, a towering hotel for businessmen, diplomats, and foreigners, full of curving white architectural lines and glass. This was where Sambul had spent his solitary breaks from the Catholic school, wandering the lonely corridors, convincing a friendly barman to slip him weak drinks, not knowing where Soren went for his holidays. Sambul had taught himself French during his last years of high school and, a year after Soren left for college in the States, had won a scholarship to study humanities at the U
niversité Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, which he did until his program ran out of money and he was forced to finish at the University of Nairobi in a lowly mechanical faculty. After that he’d gone to work for the aging Wheeler as a handyman in the same tea concern town where his mother, almost twenty years before, had died. Sambul eventually worked his way up through the ranks to a position at the lodge’s flagging safari business, and made a comfortable home for himself among the servants’ quarters of the estate.
By the time Soren returned, all that was left of the Wheelers’ Hotel Sporting Nairobi was one wing of high business offices in the commercial development that had taken over its floors. Danforth had died a year earlier, and the workers in their mourning had been given security in the interim until his estate could be sorted out. When it seemed that he had exhausted all options other than to run the company himself or sell it off, Soren had arrived again in Nairobi.
As his first order of business, he’d summoned Sambul to the high, corporate office and informed him firstly that he was to be promoted to head manager of the entire lodge and estate business and secondly that Soren himself was sick, that he was dying.
Soren said this in a tired, matter-of-fact way, and Sambul had sat back in his leather chair. The office was dim, the day brooding outside, overcast and rainy in the floor-length windows behind Soren’s desk. Soren put the cap back on his pen, sighed, smiled in a gentle, sad way and stood, turning away from Sambul. He looked down and out the big windows as he spoke, as he narrated the disease’s probable progression, the secondary infections, cancers, pneumonias, organ failures. As he explained about a new drug system, something called Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy that had just been introduced in the States and nonetheless featured extremely low chances of helping his particular situation, Sambul rose and stood beside him at the windows. He wanted to put his hand on Soren’s back, to press his palm gently into the flat space of gray suit-coat material that draped so smoothly away from his shoulders, but he didn’t. Soren’s hands were in his pockets and he was quiet for a few minutes. After a while he pointed down at a gray oval on the neighboring block encircling a deeply green space.
Elegy on Kinderklavier Page 9