He is an early riser, trained by the monks to say his prayers at dawn. He slips down the back stairs at first light, the sky still a faint pink. He likes to run. It reminds him of his childhood, when he would escape barefoot from the mansion, running free into the hills around the town with Solomon, though they had been warned about the hyenas and jackals in the hills. Now he runs alone around the Luxembourg Gardens, barefoot on the blond footpath, as he did as a child, running fast, going past the white marble statues of queens long since dead, staying within the high, gold-tipped fence. He is still a good runner, even after the beatings and bruising of his feet. The few people up at that hour watch him pass with curiosity.
M., he gathers, is often just going to sleep. She seems to go to sleep very late, but she opens the door so he can come into the kitchen before she sleeps. She does not use the reception rooms in the day. Perhaps she awakens late and works in her wide bed in the afternoons and through the night, as he never sees her at her desk.
One afternoon, he catches a glimpse of her bedroom when the concierge leaves the door open. While the concierge, with her back to him, pushes the noisy vacuum cleaner, he peeps in. He sees M.’s manuscript spread all over the sheets, her old typewriter, an Olivetti, propped up on a board across the bed, cigarette stubs piled up in ashtrays, books and bottles scattered all over the floor. Despite the drinking, he decides, she must be an almost constant worker. Apparently no one is ever allowed to disturb her work. When she is working she does not go out, even to see her friends. She says, “I’m pulling down the veil,” and she smiles and makes a gesture of pulling something down over her face, as their paths cross for a moment in the kitchen.
Not many people seem to call. The telephone rarely rings. Like him, she has no family left, she has told him, since her mother and both her brothers died long ago. Her younger brother, whom she loved dearly, died as a child. She must have good friends, or at least many acquaintances, fans, surely, but they seem to respect her privacy and perhaps wait for a summons from her. He realizes she must live the dead-quiet life of a working writer much of the time.
He would like to repay her kindness—he would like to contribute to his rent, he says, when he sees her in the kitchen, coming in one evening for a bottle of tonic water and ice from the refrigerator. She has been so kind. It is such a privilege to live near these beautiful gardens, in this safe and quiet district, above all to have the luxury of his own room. “I feel as if I have stepped from hell into paradise,” he says quite truthfully. She smiles and says it is not necessary. He cannot accept charity, he says. She presses on, “It’s so rare we have the opportunity to pay our debts, and I feel I have a debt to you and your people.”
He goes to the shops with the little money he has left and looks for something to buy her. He recalls the market in Harar, the beggars pleading, goats bleating, the merchants elbowing their way forward to approach his nurse, crying out, “Lady, lady, real silk, Indian silk!”
All he can find is a large bunch of yellow daisies that make him think of his homeland, the maskal flowers. He puts them in a blue and white pitcher on the kitchen counter. When she comes into the kitchen, she thanks him for them, leaning over and smelling them as though they were roses.
He says he wishes he had learned to cook or to clean the house, but no one ever taught him how. Brought up with a household of servants, he is not very good at it. He remembers the elderly retainer, Yonas, who polished the silver to such a high shine, buffed the furniture, scrubbed the dishes, and polished the stone stairs in the palace with such diligence, half singing, half whistling.
She explains that the concierge, Maria, comes three times a week to clean and cook. She is Portuguese, an ungainly young woman with big feet and red hands, and she weeps a lot. He notices that she seems to be pregnant. She has an open, kind face and cleans thoroughly and cooks delicious soups and compote to last the week. She startles easily and jumps each time he appears. “I’m not dangerous, I promise,” he tells her with a grin, and she smiles at him and bobs her head. “Bien sûr, monsieur,” she says, but she continues to startle at his presence.
When she falls sick for a few days, M. cooks him a dinner of fried fish, which she picks at politely, leaving most of it on the serving platter. Afterward, he thinks he would like to take what remains to Asfa’s family. Instead, on an impulse, he carries the platter down the stairs and knocks on the concierge’s door. She opens it in her pale gown, her eyes red. “I brought you some dinner,” he says. “Monsieur is too kind,” she says and grins broadly, her pale cheeks flushing with pleasure.
Mostly, M. tells him to help himself from the cupboard and goes back into her room. He eats what she leaves in the refrigerator: little dishes of steamed spinach and salad, leftover pasta with fish, bread, but sometimes after dinner he goes for a stroll and buys a bar of chocolate with the small store of money he has left. He eats it ravenously in his room.
“Good,” she says, looking at him one evening when she sees him in the hall. “You are putting on weight, filling out, and I don’t hear you coughing as much.” Though he thinks of Hansel and Gretel in the witch’s house being fattened up, he only says, “I am happy here.”
VI
SHE HAS BEEN OUT THIS AFTERNOON AND RETURNS CARRYING big, shiny packets from the fancy Italian store on the square. He is standing on the little terrace at the window with one foot in the kitchen and one outside in the sunlight, looking over the gardens, eating a piece of bread and jam for his lunch. He recalls his days as a boy in the palace gardens in Harar, the freedom of climbing trees, of escaping on hikes into the hills. He and Solo were reckless, unafraid of the hyenas that roamed the hills around the town or even the people in the summer palace whose intrigues and maneuverings they watched with interest, secure in the shadow of his father’s position and the Emperor’s protection, which seemed unlimited, unassailable, God-given. All that has been shattered utterly, and he is terrified of everything. He stays close to the apartment on the Rue Guynemer as though its luxury could protect him from the dangers that proliferate outside. He has not been back to his banlieue.
It is past noon, and the sun comes and goes behind clouds—a French day, two weeks since he arrived. He is still wearing the same shirt and the khaki pants from Monoprix, which he has washed by hand in the basin and hung out in the sunlight on his balcony to dry. She looks at him as she puts her purple packages down on the counter. She lifts the tips of her two middle fingers to her lips, considering something.
“Come with me,” she says and takes him by the wrist, leading him into her big bedroom with the queen-sized bed and its shiny green brocade counterpane. Her bedroom, like his, looks over the quiet courtyard with its plants, dustbins, and back staircase. The room has stained-glass windows, as if in a church. “It used to be the dining room,” she says, as though that explained the windows.
She leads him into an enormous bathroom with dark brown wall-to-wall carpet. Against one wall are a huge tub, a mirror, and green wallpaper with a jungle pattern above the mirror. On the opposite wall is a row of closets. She throws open the double doors on a walk-in closet. There is a mirror against the back wall, so you can see front and back.
“Let me see what I’ve got here that might do,” she says, turning her head, studying him. “You need some clothes.” He stares at the racks of designer clothes, pantsuits, a few long evening dresses in dark colors, stacks of cashmere sweaters, linen shirts in all the colors of the rainbow, and below in the shoe racks all the polished shoes with their shoe trees. Mostly she wears flat shoes, because of her height, he presumes.
She is the same height as he, nearly six feet, though much frailer. She is very thin. She has no hips, and her legs are like brittle twigs. He has already noticed that she is very careful what she eats. He surmises she may have an eating disorder, or perhaps it is all the alcohol she drinks that takes away her appetite and gives her such thin legs.
He, too, is thin. He was always so, much to his mother’s dismay,
and his years in prison, the dreadful voyage to the coast in the back of a covered truck and then on the ship from Djibouti to France, the penury of his life in Paris for several months have reduced him to no more than skin and bones. For months he has not had a proper meal, subsisting on stale bread and an occasional piece of fruit or vegetable stolen from an open stand.
She pulls down heaps of sweaters and pushes them into his arms. She takes jackets off hangers, shirts, hands him shoes. She says, “I have to buy my shoes in America—size eleven—or I buy men’s sizes.” He just looks at her.
“Try them on,” she commands.
He puts the clothes down on the shelf and hesitates, watching himself in the mirror. “Go on,” she says, hovering behind him, not making any move to leave him alone to undress. He pulls his T-shirt over his head. He is plunged into darkness for a moment before he emerges into the bright light, where he can count his ribs, which seem to try to thrust their way out of his skin. Quickly he pulls on a soft black turtleneck sweater. He puts a jacket over it. The sleeves are a little short when he stretches out his long arms, but otherwise it fits. He stares at his reflection in the mirror before him. The jacket acquires elegance, a fine line, the allure of his youth. Also, there is grace in his long neck and the tilt of his head.
“Try these,” she commands, giving him a pair of linen trousers.
He hesitates again, thinking of his threadbare and possibly stained underwear. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. He is obliged to take off his khaki trousers and quickly pull up her Italian designer pants on his long legs. She gives him a leather belt to pull in the waist, so that they fit perfectly.
“It’s amazing, we are the same size,” she says, amused, looking at him in the mirror. She says, “A very young and dark double.” Then he slips on a pair of long, narrow American shoes. He flexes his toes in the soft leather. They, too, fit. He needs new shoes. He can feel the earth through the holes when he walks in his lone pair. How he wants them! She has so many, all with their shoe trees. He stands before the mirror staring at his reflection, laughing at himself, at her hovering behind him, his young, dark head blooming where her old, pale one has wilted.
“Formidable!” she says and claps her hands. “Magnifique!” she says, thoroughly enchanted by his appearance in her clothes, as though she were responsible for it, with all his beauty, his life.
Indeed, he feels she has brought him back to life.
“You definitely look better than I do in these,” she says, taking more clothes from the shelves, giving him another heap of sweaters, scarves, and even long-fingered leather gloves that fit perfectly. He stands there grinning in her gloves, with his arms filled with her designer clothes. Finally she takes a broad-brimmed black hat from the top shelf and angles it on his head. She stands back and admires, cocking her head to one side. The hat gives him a rakish air that reminds him of what he looked like as a young teenager, before all the troubles began.
How pleased he had been with himself in those days, he thinks with wonder, remembering standing in front of a mirror and flexing his muscles, an adored, pampered only boy who thought himself invincible, immortal.
“Perfect!” she exclaims.
“I can’t,” he says, taking off the hat, thrusting the clothes back into her arms. “I can’t take your clothes. I can’t accept all of this!”
“Go on, please. It gives me so much pleasure,” and she gives him a soft kiss on the cheek, thrusting her things back into his arms.
“Then you must let me work for you. It would give me great pleasure,” he says.
VII
HE AWAKENS IN HIS NARROW ROOM WITH A START, THE LIGHT in his eyes. He trembles with fear, remembering the light in the net in the center of the cement ceiling in the prison, which came on suddenly. “Please turn off the light! Please turn off the light!” he would plead with the walls, kneeling and putting his hands over his eyes. He craved sleep, oblivion. Sometimes he thought they had forgotten him there, left him alone to rot like carrion.
Then he realizes she is standing beside his bed. She has switched on the small candle-shaped lamp on the top of the upright piano to watch him sleep. It is hot in the airless room in the June night, though he had opened his window before he went to sleep and thrown the sheet back. Now he pulls up the sheet to his chin to cover his nakedness. He does not possess pajamas. He sits up, shaking.
“Don’t be frightened. I’m just looking at you,” she says, smiling, reaching over, and putting her hand on his arm.
“I wasn’t frightened, just surprised,” he feels obliged to say, though he is still trembling. Her face is pale without her makeup, and she is wearing a diaphanous black nightgown, her white hair loose around her face and shoulders, her slack breasts almost visible. She says extravagantly, “You are so beautiful, I would like to kill you. I will give you money, if you will make love to me.”
He looks back at her, and she reaches out to stroke his cheek. He shakes his head, crosses his arms, and says, “I can’t—that’s all I can say. I just can’t. If I forced myself, it would not be good for either of us. It might even be dangerous.”
But she looks so sad, standing beside the bed on the small red carpet, and she is not asking for anything now, her shoulders slumped, her forehead down. He understands her despair. He understands desire. He says, “Turn off the light.” She turns to do it. Then he hears her come back and sit down on the floor, close beside him in the darkness.
Naked, he gets out of his bed and squats beside her. In the narrow dark space, the two of them pressed together like children playing hide-and-seek, he reaches out for her. He feels for her face and shoulders. He lifts her black nightgown over her head. He thinks of the tall young lover, the elegant landlord, the one with the fancy car, the linen suit, the glittering rings, the one she lost long ago, or the one she imagined she lost, who picked her up on the ferry and took her back to the hotel room with its sounds of the street and the night. He wonders if there was ever a man who even vaguely resembled the handsome one she described so vividly, so entrancingly, in her book.
He lets his hands run down her long neck. She puts her hands on his shoulders and runs them down his smooth bare chest, while he touches her small, slack breasts, sunken stomach, bony hips. Her fingers are groping for his flaccid sex. Blindly he forces himself to move his hands over her body, the voice like a Greek chorus on a stage recording his actions. He touches her legs; he runs his hands all the way down to the soles of her feet. She moans softly in the heat of the summer night. He slips down, lying stretched out on the floor. He pulls her back. She is stretched out beside him in the narrow space. He feels between her thin legs. He touches her damp sex with horror.
He turns her body over quickly, unable to bear the rise and fall of her flesh, her dampness, her smell. He plants her down with a rough shove and a smack, pushes her face into the carpet cruelly. She groans. He feels the wings of her shoulder blades, straddles her body, and tries to enter her from behind.
“It’s impossible,” he says, getting up, turning on the light, standing over her. She goes on lying there before him, so thin and white, her hair on her shoulders, not moving, as if she were dead. She makes him think of the witch in the folktales his mother would tell him. When she turns onto her back and shields her eyes with her hands, she asks, “You could never desire me?”
He sits down on the edge of the bed, takes her hand, lifts her up, and makes her sit beside him. He says, “I think you are very beautiful.”
She looks at him so sadly, tears shining in her eyes.
He recalls the moment when she told him about her lost lover. “That first day in the café, I wanted you, I really did. I remembered that beautiful description of the ferry on the Blue Nile, the African light glinting on the water, the elegant, dark young man. It was a book I read when I was young—I had never read anything quite like that, and I have always remembered that scene. Later I saw it, too, in a film. I don’t know who played the role but I wanted him, th
e man in the white linen suit.”
“Have you never desired a woman?” she asks.
“Never,” he says, shaking his head.
“It seems inconceivable,” she says. “Surely there must have been a moment, someone, sometime? Even your mother, when you were very young?”
He sits on the bed beside her in the hot, dark room and thinks of his mother finding him one morning with Solomon in his bed. She had taken him into her study, sat him down on her blue chintz-covered chair. She told him that these things happened in adolescence. She had felt the same way about a girl in her boarding school. She thought she was in love, had held her in her arms, but she had grown out of it. She had gone on to love his father so much, to have so much pleasure with him. “We change as we get older,” she told him. He must not be ashamed, she said. She kissed him and told him that in any case she would love him, whatever happened, that he was her beautiful, beautiful boy.
Then she advised him not to say anything to his father. “Men, even sophisticated ones like your father, don’t always understand these things. They see the world in black and white. We women understand that things are not as simple as they might seem,” she had said. She added, “Your father, despite all his fancy degrees, was brought up to think of Ethiopian men as soldiers, and to consider valor in battle the ultimate aim for a man.”
Now he leans back against the wall, his chest bare, and shakes his head, conceding, “Only you—for that second in the café.”
“It sounds like a song,” she says, laughing at him, singing in English now, “Only youooo!”
“Would you prefer that I go?” he asks, folding his fingers together in a position of prayer.
“No!” she says quickly. “If you stay with me I would be so glad; I would like you to stay very much. I feel as if I have found part of myself again, part of my youth.” She holds his hands gently in hers.
The Bay of Foxes: A Novel Page 4