Elegy on Kinderklavier

by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

  “We used to play there,” he said. “The Massey Juniors, remember?”

  “Though it wasn’t there, exactly,” he added after a minute. “They’ve torn the old city place down. This one is much nicer.”

  Sambul had nodded and not known what to say.

  Perhaps it was because of this strange comment’s reference that Sambul later could remember this meeting only in the context of his great theory about the true source of Soren’s disease. Sambul had missed Soren over the years of his absence, had missed him so much and for so long that by the time he’d entered the office—Soren rising and smiling sheepishly, raising his arms a little in the suggestion of a hug—it felt exactly the same as not missing him. Later, remembering again and again the exchange, the medical words, Sambul only felt confused and angry. Soren had finally returned, just to be dying? And why was this happening (here, in Sambul’s aging consideration of this late development in Soren’s life, the seed of his great theory) other than because he’d been reckless—utterly, mysteriously, and unforgivably reckless—in all things since Danforth Wheeler had sent them apart and away?

  And so the memory of the afternoon that Sambul learned of Soren’s disease ended up always reaching back to include that season of the Massey Insurance Juniors, Sambul a solid defensive midfielder who rode the bench, Soren a mercurial starting striker, the last year that they’d seen each other as boys, their last year together. Sambul always remembered the dangerous, angry way Soren charged around the pitch, his sharp elbows swinging or his spikes turned up maliciously as he went to ground for an ill-advised tackle. It had been wild and relentless, the way he’d thrown himself against and into the other players, scoring occasionally but fouling nastily. Soren never lasted more than thirty minutes before getting injured or sent off, thus creating a necessary substitution, sending Sambul in. It was like he meant to do it this way, relaxing only as he passed Sambul on his trek past the bench, always giving him a quick, conciliatory look. They hadn’t really spoken much in training sessions, either, which had only been one more disappointment. Everything had been taken from them that season. Sambul remembered the first day of training, his heartbreak and embarrassment at discovering that the name of their game, “keepy-uppy,” was really just a little kids’ term for juggling the ball. After that, the two boys could barely even look at each other.

  As far as Sambul’s great theory held, Soren’s reckless behavior only continued at his American college. Sambul pieced together scenes from his endless Nairobi University dorm-room daydreams of Soren’s campus (its students laughing, calling out to each other across the college green) and the small bits of stories he’d overheard from others, Sambul concocting a thousand different stupid acts and men that could have put the disease in Soren’s body. And to Sambul’s mind, the recklessness thesis was given proof positive by the arrival on the estate, soon after Soren’s return, of Peter Oprong.

  Sambul never really knew Peter Oprong in his brief tenure at the estate, but he could remember clearly the man’s skin: black but mixed with some other mysterious, dusky race until his coloration was a cloudy, almost Indian hue, which suited particularly well his face, with its high Portuguese nose. He lived in a slum outside Lodwar, and apparently worked as an assistant to a Mozambican carved-trinket importer, which was how Soren met him. Sambul only became aware of Peter Oprong’s presence when Peter moved to Amdin, the little town about an hour’s drive from the estate. During the months that the safari camp was shut down while the servants renovated it to Soren’s new business standards, Peter Oprong spent long stretches at the estate, during which he and Soren were inseparable. Sambul was kept busy in his job overseeing the rebuilding and retraining, and only ran into the two men glancingly, though their happiness infected the other servants, who smiled at the ever-polite Peter whenever he was around.

  Sambul himself now, years after the episode, remembered being taken by the two men’s joy only twice. Once had been in late afternoon, as Sambul took a break from rethatching the roof of one of the “authentic” huts, when he heard their voices, each on the verge of laughter, carrying across the air as they stripped off their clothes on the riverbank and dived in. That time Sambul had been struck how, even at a distance, he could see the solidness of Peter Oprong’s body: his legs rippling up into his full, rounded gluteus muscles as he dove, his body disappearing into the muddy water. The other time, Sambul had discovered them together one night in the wide group tent that was the servants’ bar. Someone had turned on loud music from a hidden radio, and Peter, his long, curly hair gathered back in a woman’s wrap, was dancing in place, clapping his hands and singing in his clear, deep voice, much to the delight of the servants and guides who laughed and cheered him on. But what Sambul remembered most about this last encounter was Soren, sitting in his own seat and glancing back and forth happily from the cheering crowd to Peter, Soren clapping and calling, bobbing his head and trying to get into it with the rest of them, his nervous pride childlike and obvious.

  It was the courier man who ran errands for the estate who told Sambul, on the day that it happened. The man had been every week assigned to deliver the gifts that Soren sent to Peter in the days after one of his long stays; this was the man instructed to drive to the square in Amdin and find the tall building that Peter Oprong shared with several other men like him, and so it was this courier who was the first one from the estate to see the pillar of smoke, and the remains. A group of frenzied villagers had gathered in the middle of the night and engulfed the building in flames. When the men inside had come running out (stumbling, coughing, and collapsing into the square) the crowd had taken rebar rods salvaged from a nearby construction site (some of which had been held in the fire) and beat the men to death, stripping and piling their bodies in the middle of the square and leaving them there for anyone to see.

  Sambul spent all morning at the scene. In his anger at Soren, Sambul (listening to the chain of requests on the messenger’s CB radio) had not told anyone to stop Soren from taking one of the Land Rovers, had not stepped in to stop the courier from guiding Soren’s frantic driving to the proper square. Sambul’s feeling only broke as he saw the vehicle pull in at the far end of the square and stop, as he watched the tall, lone figure of Soren jumping out, unsure of whether or not to hurry, still in shock—only then did Sambul run over to step in front of him, to do him the mercy of blocking his view.

  Reckless, Sambul had decided, and stupid. As if the estate were the world. Sambul had been shocked more than anything at the swiftness of it all: three months, start to finish, from the day the man had come into their lives to the day he’d gone out. The one time Sambul found himself alone with Soren in those months of the remodel, Sambul still thinking about the conversation in the office, he’d shifted in the jeep’s seat, and said without looking at Soren, “Why—why are you trying so hard with the new guest?” And Soren had only smiled and sighed and looked at Sambul and, after a while, said, “It’s alright to still have, you know, a life.” To which Sambul had said nothing, only shook his head slightly, thinking, A life? Can you imagine? A life?

  •

  Now Sambul found Soren curled halfway into a fetal position on the carpet where the Indian had left him. Sambul had not waited to hear the sounds of the boy leaving the room, had instead slipped down the back stairs and outside for a cigarette. Upon his return, Sambul glanced through the space between the curtain and the doorframe and saw a sliver of Soren’s prone body, like someone had laid him there. Thinking he’d collapsed, Sambul rushed to him, only realizing once he was standing over him that Soren was still crying softly, dryly, a tiny wet spot of saliva staining the carpet near his mouth. It was as if his arms and torso had wanted to assume the inward-curled posture but his long, thin legs could not be convinced, and were splayed awkwardly, like two bent sticks. A small breeze sighed through the window. The wrapper from the condom skittered across the wooden floor in the next room.

  Sambul spent the entire week shut up in S
oren’s quarters with him. He slept when Soren did, which was extremely little, and the combination of the fatigue and the drawn curtains and shutters (Soren cried and recoiled at the intensity of even weak daylight) made the entire period seem like one never-ending day to Sambul. Soren allowed no one else inside. Sambul started off trying to keep him in bed, but the diarrhea (Soren too weak and the waste too watery for it to be controlled), combined with his retching, full-throated coughing made this impossible, and eventually they gave up and set up shop in the large bathroom itself, Soren lolling weakly in his fevers over the cool tile of the floor.

  Because this stage of the sickness had happened in a very similar way the first time Soren had regressed after his return to the country, Sambul found himself watching what was happening with an uneasy detachment. His confusion the first time turned now to identification, his helpless noticing replaced by idle reflection. Here were Soren’s lips impossibly pale and bled of color. Here was the actual pool of liquid, of sweat, left beneath his fevered body when Sambul helped him up from the floor to the toilet. Here was the barking cough, the cough that seemed to come almost from Soren’s stomach, repeating and repeating but never producing anything except shallow wheezing, which itself soon gave way to the crazed, rapid breathing, like his lungs had suddenly shrunk to a child’s size. Certain areas around his mouth and feet and hands turned a graying blue so vivid during these episodes that it almost felt like a hallucination on Sambul’s part. There was not much Sambul could do except watch, except manhandle Soren’s body into the positions he needed to be in but could not ask for, except notice the invisible struggle that seemed to be playing itself out in the body before him. When Soren vomited it was a dark brown color, its acidic tang wafting, filling the entire bathroom. When his bowels evacuated, Soren was not even strong enough to hold himself upright on the toilet, and folded himself instead forward, arms wrapped under his knees.

  Sambul had been trained by a nurse in Nairobi to carefully administer a simple IV of fluids, which he did, holding the bag high above Soren as he moved, trying to help him keep his arm straight so the needle would hurt less. Sambul also fetched when he could the steroidal medicine Soren had been given the first time this happened, retrieving it from the cabinet beside the small minifridge where they kept the more expensive medicine for his disease that had to be flown in.

  This latter was the medicine that had been left unused, untaken, in the months after Peter Oprong died. First, Soren had returned to the country, installed the minifridge, and brought a doctor out from the American hospital in Nairobi to explain to Sambul the careful administration of the drug therapy. Then had come the renovations and Peter Oprong’s long visits. In the months after Sambul had guided Soren away from the grisly site in the square, Soren had seemed to give up. He became dramatic. In his grief he was reticent, staying away from the tour groups and instructing Sambul to stop counting out the pills from the containers in the minifridge. Once during this time, Soren made Sambul stop on a drive to a nearby town so that Soren could walk out and lie down in a field of soybeans as the wind pirouetted through their leaves. Another time Sambul witnessed Soren strip down, wade into the river, and float on his back for almost a mile, drifting serenely very close past the dangerous shapes of a family of hippos, a few small crocodiles twitching into the water in fear as he passed, the guides screaming at each other as he emerged, unscathed.

  That time, in the pall after Peter Oprong’s death, when he’d stopped taking the medicine and gotten sick, it made some amount of sense. This is the end, Sambul had thought numbly, watching him sweat and fight for breath. But it hadn’t been. Against his will, Soren had gotten better. When he finally started taking the special drug therapy again, it was in resignation. For a while after that, Sambul had felt like they were living out some poorly played coda, but as Soren’s health kept steady, and then as it improved even more, the feeling had been forgotten. Soren had seemed unmistakably alive again. But it was different now.

  This time the sickness broke on a Friday, in the hourless half-light of the dawn. During the previous night the violence of Soren’s sickness had subsided, and he’d slipped deep into a semicomatose calm. His breathing was so shallow it was nearly soundless, and several times Sambul startled awake at the quiet, making himself closely inspect the covers folded over Soren’s chest for movement, fearing that Soren had drifted away while unconscious, half-dreaming. Before first light Sambul, growing more and more worried, decided to wake him and was unable to. The best Soren could do was to halfway open his lids, barely tracking Sambul as he moved around him.

  Sambul gathered Soren up from the bed in his arms and carried him back into the bathroom, where he gently undressed him. Sambul filled the bathtub and lowered Soren, his skin cool and clammy against Sambul’s forearms, into the warm water. It was clear, after Soren’s face slipped immediately below the water level, that this wouldn’t work. Without really thinking and without taking off his clothes, Sambul climbed into the tub, sliding himself behind and under Soren’s body so that he was propped up against Sambul’s chest, so that he rested in Sambul’s arms.

  There was no excitement, no electricity storming Sambul’s skin at this full body press. It came to him as he lay there—Soren’s body warm against his chest, his hair wet and stringy as his head lolled back on Sambul’s shoulder—that this was more physical contact than they’d ever had, or at least, not since they were kids. The two men lay there like that for a long time, Soren dipping back into sleep, Sambul wide awake, thinking of the vague sense of disappointment he found in what this actually felt like, the lack of intimacy in the way Soren’s limbs splayed against his. What had he thought it would feel like? What had he thought all those others had felt, mistaking this invalid husk for a body? Soren was a light and wispy weight against Sambul’s chest and legs and lap. As he waited in the tepid water for dawn to fully break, Sambul closed his eyes and could barely feel him, simultaneously there and not there.

  It was Soren himself who awakened Sambul, telling him from the doorway that he better get out or his skin might fall off. Sambul made Soren rest for that day, but his patient could eat again, and the cough was occasional, a kind of punctuation. He was resurrected, a minor miracle, again.

  The whole estate was uneasy. It had been a week since the drowned man was discovered, and as time progressed from his entombment in the basement freezer, the idea had seemed to grow more and more perverse to the servants, the guides, and Sambul. The easiest and most obvious thing would have been for Soren, as soon as the next day’s sun had risen, to order a few of the workers to load the body into the back of one of the trucks and make the long drive into the city, depositing the anonymous corpse at the municipal morgue. But this had not been ordered during Soren’s incapacitation, and wasn’t now, though Soren was now able to make the car ride to the village himself.

  They stood in a dusty square that could have been any square they’d been in so far that day, any place they’d stopped in Amdin or any of the other slums within driving distance of the estate. Colorful wash was strung across the roofs of the dun-colored buildings and flapped gently in the breeze. A group of old men sat in dirty plastic furniture and played dice games while drinking Coca-Cola from glass bottles. Sambul leaned against a building in the shade, keeping an eye on the car.

  It had been agreed that this would be their last stop. Soren had made it known to all the servants and guides, some of whom were getting panicked and angry, that if he and Sambul couldn’t find a relative or someone who could speak for the man this afternoon then he would take care of the body the next day and it would no longer be kept so unnaturally. As the locals who spoke to them had, slum after slum, proven unable to place the man, Soren had grown more and more moody and upset. A curl of pink had come into his cheeks, which in a different life might have meant good health but did not in this one, Sambul knew.

  Soren, the woman he’d come to see, and a short, round man came spilling out of the shack.
/>   “My sister demands to be compensated for her information!” the fat man was shouting melodramatically.

  Soren ignored him. He held up the picture of the dead man’s face and put it right in front of the woman’s eyes. Sambul pushed himself off the wall.

  “How do you not ask him where he’s from? How do you not take his name?” Soren shouted at the woman over the fat man’s protests.

  The woman ran one of the illegal liquor bars that were rife in the slums. She’d apparently once rented the backroom to the dead man, or someone who looked just like him, for one night. This was all she’d managed to say, however, before her brother had gotten the idea of a reward.

  “You didn’t hear his accent, you didn’t know where it was from?” Soren shouted at her.

  “No!” the woman shouted back, half-nervous, struggling to be defiant about something, at least.

  Soren was still holding the picture right in front of her face. The woman was ducking and moving, trying to look at him around it, but he only moved it with her.

  “But you recognize the face, yes?” Soren said.

  The woman stopped her bobbing.

  “I don’t know,” she said, subdued.

  “Now you don’t know,” Soren said.

  The woman was quiet. There was a pause. Soren’s heavy breathing was loud in the square.

  “You’re a liar,” Soren said, and spit at the woman’s feet.

  At this the little fat man rushed forward and shoved Soren, who went flying, tripping backward comically before collapsing in the dry dirt. The fat man immediately began backing away, reaching for his sister and looking around wildly. Sambul started toward where Soren lay, crumpled. As he passed the group of old men, they laughed hoarsely at Soren, who was trying to get up and failing. Sambul hissed through his teeth at them, raising the back of his hand and juking his upper body sharply in their direction, and they shut up, looking up at him with drawn faces as they scooted their plastic chairs inside.