by John Updike
On top of one set of bound statutes, their uniform spines forming horizontal streaks like train windows streaming by, lay a different sort of book, a little paperback. In the dim room, where their nakedness was the brightest thing, she made out the title: Emma. She answered, “No.”
And, though there was much in the aftermath to regret, and a harm that would never cease, Betty remembered these days—the open fields, the dripping eaves, the paintings, the law books—as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not scattered as is a constellation but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn.
Ethiopia
The Addis Ababa Hilton has a lobby of cool and lustrous stone and a giant, heated, cruciform swimming pool. The cross-shape is plain from the balconies of the ninth-floor rooms, from which also one can see the long white façade of the Emperor’s palace. In the other direction, there are acres of tin shacks, and a church on a hill like the nipple on a breast of dust. Emerging from the pool, which feels like layers of rapidly tearing silk, one shivers uncontrollably until dry, though the sun is brilliant, and the sky diamond-pure. The land is high, and the air not humid. One dries quickly. The elevators are swift and silent. From the high floors the white umbrellas on the restaurant tables beside the pool make a rosary of perfect circles. All this is true. What is not true is that Prester John doubles as the desk clerk, and the Queen of Sheba manages the glass-walled gift shop, wherein one can buy tight-woven baskets of multicolored straw, metal mirrors, and Coptic crosses of carved wood costing thousands of Ethiopian dollars, which relate to the American dollar as seven to three.
The young American couple arrived at the hotel very tired, having been ten days in Kenya, where they had seen and photographed lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyraxes, oryxes, dik-diks, steinboks, klipspringers, oribis, topis, kudus, impalas, elands, Thomson’s gazelles, Grant’s gazelles, hartebeests, wildebeests, waterbucks, bushbucks, zebras, giraffes, flamingos, marabou storks, Masai warriors, baboons, elephants, warthogs, and rhinoceroses—everything hoped for, indeed, except hippos. There had been one asleep in a pool in the Ngorongoro Crater, but it had looked too much like a rock to photograph, and the young man of the American couple had passed it by, confident there would be more. There never were. It had been his only chance to get a hippopotamus on film. Prester John, cool behind his desk of lustrous green marble, divined this, and efficiently, gratuitously arranged that they spend the night away from Addis Ababa, in the Ethiopian countryside. The countryside was light brown. Distant figures swathed in white trod the tan landscape with the floating step of men trying to steady themselves on a trampoline. But these were women, all beautiful. The beauty of their black faces, glimpsed, lashed the windows of the car like fistfuls of thrown sand. Some carried yellow parasols. Some led white donkeys. A few rode in rubber-wheeled carts, rickety and polychrome, their mouths and nostrils veiled against the dust. He tried to photograph these women, but they turned their heads, and the results would come out blurred.
The hotel was cushioned in bougainvillea and stuffed with Germans. At six o’clock a bus took all the Germans away and the young Americans became the only guests. They walked the blossoming grounds, and looked from their balcony to the brown lake distilled from the tan landscape by a cement dam, and in their room read magazines taken from the hotel lobby—Ce Soir, Il Tempo, Sturm und Drang, the English edition of the official monthly publication of the Polish Chamber of Commerce, the annual handbook of Yugoslavian soccer, the quarterly journal of the Australian Dermatology Association (incorporating Tasmanian Hides). “God, I love this country,” he announced aloud, letting his magazine sink beside him to the bed.
“Quiet,” she said. “I’m reading.” The Brazilian edition of Newsweek.
“If you ever get tired of reading,” he began.
“It’s too hot,” she said.
“Really? Actually, as evening comes on, in these high, dry countries—”
“Have it your way, then,” she said, noisily turning a tissue-thin page. “It’s too cold.”
There was a knock on the door. It was their driver, asking in his excellent English if they wanted to see the hippopotami before dinner. Yes, they did. Their limousine wound through low, menacing foliage to a sluggish brown river. It seemed empty and scarcely flowing. They walked along a dim path beside the riverbank and met Prester John, barefoot, in rags, and carrying a staff. Though he seemed a shade darker than in his hotel uniform, he was recognizably the same man—small, clever, with beautiful feminine hands and a hurt, monkish, liverish look beneath his eyes. He looked, she thought, like Sammy Davis, Jr.; but, then, so many men in Ethiopia look like Sammy Davis, Jr. Prester John led them to a shaggy point above the river and made a noise of sonorous chuckling deep in his throat—deeper than his throat; his entire body and belly thrummed and resonated with the noise. And then in the dusk little snags appeared in the river current: hippopotamus eyes. As the Americans grew accustomed to the dusk, and the dusk to them, to the eyes were added ears, and the tops of heads appeared above the water, and the bulbous immensity of a back arched upward into a dive. It was a family, a clan, with two babies among them, all calling to one another; their deep soft snorting continued underwater as an unheard, vibrating jubilance. The air became as full of it as the river, one brown world flooded with familial snorting, until the hippopotami had tugged themselves around the bend and into night. Prester John accepted his tip with a bow and the shadow of a genuflexion. The driver was relieved to find his car unharmed in the bushes. Back at the hotel, the young American couple were served dinner in solitary splendor. Unseen hands had prepared a banquet; for all its eerie isolation, the meal was delicious. He wondered how the hotel turned a profit. He thought of sharing the question with his bride, but kept silent. Oh, if only he knew how to talk to her! The silence between them grated the plates and made the silver clash with the fury of swords. His thoughts moved on, to the hippos. If only there had been a notch or two more light! Oh, if only he had brought a longer lens!
Back in Addis, Prester John perceived that they were bored, and arranged to have a party thrown for them. He himself was the host; the Queen of Sheba was the hostess. Her hair was up in the halo of an Afro, and as she moved in her robe of all possible colors her body tapped now here, now there. The rings on her fingers formed a hoard and the little gold circles of her granny glasses gave her eyes a monkish humor. Her blackness was the shade in which God had designed Adam and Eve, a color from which the young American couple felt their own whiteness as a catastrophic falling off, caused helter-skelter by the Northern clime, snow, wolves, camouflage, and the survival of the fittest. The Queen of Sheba introduced them to beautiful, static people whose titles of courtesy were Ato, Woizero, and Woizerit. A Woizerits was unmarried. It seemed an elaborate way to say it. Also elaborately, the Emperor was never referred to but as His Imperial Majesty, which became HIM.
“… until we are rid of HIM …”
“… the latest story about HIM …”
“I understand,” the young American said to a stately Woizerit who had studied three years at the University of Iowa, “you’re in television.”
Prester John gracefully interceded. “This lovely lady,” he said, “is Ethiopian television.” His magical feminine hand turned a dial, and there she was, giving news about the latest Palestinian hijacking.
“Hitler,” a swarthy but handsome gentleman was telling the young American wife, “had the correct idea but was not permitted to complete it. A vivid proof of God’s non-existence.”
“Suppose I told you,” she said, “I was Jewish?”
He surveyed her face, and then her blond body, lovingly. “It would not lessen,” he told her, “my reverence for Hitler.” But reverence for her was what he expressed, for he clung pinchingly to her arm as if she had consented to join him in some superb indecency.
Her husband had found a fellow-American, a pale-brown Black woman from Detroit, in the pay of the American Embassy. They huddled close together, sharing remembrance of
that remote exotic land of Lincoln Continentals and Drake’s Cakes. “You happy here?” he asked at last.
“It’ll do,” she said, shrugging and, obliged to elaborate on the shrug, adding, “I can’t get servants. They’re very polite, and I offer top dollar, but the Ethiopians will not work for me.”
“But why not?”
Seeing that he truly didn’t know, very graciously she made a little gesture as if parting curtains, disclosing—herself. Seeing that he still didn’t know, she elaborated, “They have this racial hang-up. They keep telling you how Semitic they are.”
The Queen of Sheba clapped her hands imperiously. No Westerner could have produced that sound, as if with blocks of wood: worlds of body language are being lost. The guests sat to eat around great multicolored baskets lined with a delicious rubbery bread. One ate by tearing off pieces and seizing food as if picking up coals with a pot holder. The young Americans were delighted to be engaging in a custom. Prester John admired their pragmatism. His voice was high, reedy, and not accidentally unpleasant. “I would not want to say,” he said, “the many negative things I could say about America. But you have done this one thing of genius. The credit card. Money without money. That is a thing truly revolutionary. The world is thus transformed, while the political philosophers amuse one another.”
“Is that what you do? I mean, are you a political scientist? A teacher?” The American was not sure this was still Prester John—he seemed frailer, edgier.
“What do I do? I read Proust, over and over. And I write.”
“Could I read your books?” the American wife chimed in, from across the basket, at whose rim the admirer of Hitler was showing her how to eat raw meat, an Ethiopian delicacy.
“No,” was the response, said caressingly. “In Ethiopia, there is no publishing.”
“You understand,” the television Woizerit murmured on the American’s other side. “HIM.”
“I write and I write,” the frail clever host elaborated, “and then I read it all aloud to one special friend. And then I destroy it. All.”
“How terrible. Is that friend here?”
“No.” He smiled, forming a little prayer tent with his hands. He was certainly Prester John. A medieval face twitched in his midnight skin. “Do not eat raw meat. The uninitiated vomit for days.” He relaxed, slumped in his gaudy robes. “Yes.” His voice went high again, reedy, mockingly informative. “In this ancient kingdom, misplaced to Africa, we have been compelled to raise the art of living to the point of the tenuous.”
Though the party was gathering strength, the young Americans were tired. The Queen of Sheba and Prester John insisted on accompanying them back to the hotel, since marauders roam the slums with impunity; the poverty is acute despite massive infusions of American aid, corruption and reaction reign here as everywhere save China, not even one’s driver of twenty years’ service can be trusted, terrorists on behalf of Eritrean independence are ubiquitous. A curious optical effect: in the darkness within the car, the two legendary Ethiopians disappeared but for their clothes, which rustled with utmost courtesy, and but for their words, paraphrased above. Nevertheless, a disturbing and flattering possibility, indecent yet not impractical, communicated itself to the minds of their guests, as through layers of fluttering, tearing silk. In the cool lobby their shouted farewells echoed of disappointment. Oh, what was the custom?
In his twin bed on the ninth floor, the man of the young couple thought, The Queen of Sheba, black yet not Black, boyoboyoboy. Mine, she could be mine, as the darkness inside me is mine, as the spangled night sky is mine. God, I love this country. The jewels. The arid height. The Hilton corridors of greenish stone. The tiny dried-up Emperor. The bracing sense of never having been colonized by any European power. How long and lustrous her ebony limbs would feel in the darkness. But I might disappoint her. I might feel lost in her. She might mock me. My sickly pallor. My Free World hang-ups. Better simply snap her picture when she undresses. But the flash batteries died in the Serengeti, that night by the water hole. Darn it! Her breasts. Armpits. Belly. Down, down he is led from one dusky thought to the next. Travel is so sexy. Would the granny glasses come off first, or last?
And beside him his fair wife on her twin bed thinks of airplanes. She dreads flying, especially in Ethiopia, with its high escarpments, small national budget, daredevil pilots trained by Alitalia. Perhaps, if she slept with Prester John, by one of his miracles he could prevent her plane from crashing. Sleeping with men, especially black men, more fancy than fact, if they gave women decent educations they could think about something else. But still … His wicked ascetic smile and look of monkish sorrow did cut into her. In the car, his touch, or a fold of his silken robe, accidentally? If he could guarantee on a stack of Bibles the plane wouldn’t crash … The dedicated hijackers with stockings over their faces, the sudden revolver shots from the security guards disguised as Lebanese businessmen, the rush of air, the lurch above the clouds, the inane patter of the brave stewardesses, the lurid burst of flame from the port engine, the long slow nightmare fall, the mile-wide splash of char on the earth, the scattered suitcases … Oh God yes, I’ll do anything you want, consider me your slave, your toy. For without life how can there be virtue?
Because of security checks, one must appear at the airport two and a half hours before scheduled departure time. The young American is in the glass-walled hotel shop, dickering with the Queen of Sheba for a Coptic cross. He has reduced her price to fourteen hundred Ethiopian dollars, which is no longer divisible by seven in his head, because of the most recent American dollar devaluation. Fourteen hundred divided by two and one-third minus a little … She is bored. The Queen of Sheba thrusts a retractable ballpoint into her towering teased coiffure, and her ebony fingers drum with surprising percussive effect on a glass case. Her nose is straight, her nostrils are narrow. She sighs. These Americans, rendered insubstantial by rising gold, like drops of water running from the back of an aroused crocodile. He asks, will she accept a credit card?
Prester John appears, in shabby livery, with the young American wife in tow. She is flushed, pink, sleepy. Though the lobby is cool, blond ringlets cling to her brow. Hurry, the clever little black man says, you must see the monastery, there is just time before the airplane, it has been arranged.
Trailing protests like dust, the young American is led through the lobby, away from his luggage. It is not the usual limousine this time but a little red Fiat. Prester John does not seem to understand the gears. As he grapples with them, he looks comically like Sammy Davis, Jr. They head out of the city, uphill; the paved road becomes dirt. Prester John gossips nervously about the Queen of Sheba. “She is a magnificent woman, but thoroughly Oriental. I enjoy her loyalty, yet am vexed by, how shall I say, the lack of stereo in her sensibility. She cannot lift her thoughts above jewelry, lechery, and airbases. My intention was to irradiate her with Christian faith, fresh, even raw, from the desert Fathers—to make, here, upon this plateau, a dream to solace the tormented sleep of Europe. Instead, she has made of it something impossibly heavy, a mere fact, like the Catholicism of Ireland, or the Communism of Albania.” He cannot move the gearshift above second gear, so thus roaring they proceed up a dirt road transected by ridges of rock like the backs of sleeping hippopotami. At first, clouds of people in white had rimmed the roadway; now they meet, and swerve to avoid, intermittent donkeys and women staggering beneath wide bundles of little trees. One of these women, bent double like a scorpion, in rags, her feet bare, with long, dark heels and pale, cracked soles, looks familiar; the American turns in his seat. Dust obscures his view. He is certain only that she was not wearing her granny glasses.
Prester John sweats, embarrassed. The road is all rocks now, tan, with a white dusting. “I am growing worried,” he confesses, “about your airplane. It is possible I underestimated the difficulty.” He stops the car where the view falls away on one side. The Hilton pool twinkles like a dim star far below them. On the other side, stony sere pastures
mount to a copse of viridian trees. Between the trees peep ruddy hints of a long wall. That is the monastery. “Perhaps,” Prester John offers nervously, “a photograph? I am profoundly sorry; the road, and these recalcitrant gears …”
What the young American sees through his finder looks exactly like the sepia illustrations in his Sunday-school Bible. He sets the lens at infinity and snaps the shutter. But his inward attention is upon his wife, for her calmness, as their next airplane flight draws nearer, puzzles him. Prester John grindingly backs the Fiat around and hurtles downward along the cruel road of rocks; she lightly smiles and with dusty fingertips brushes back the hair from her drying brow. She feels she is already on the airplane—all of Ethiopia is an airplane, thousands of feet above sea level; and it cannot crash. This is true.
Transaction
In December of the year 197–, in the city of N——, a man of forty was walking toward his hotel close to the hour of midnight. The conference that had kept him in town had dispersed; he was more than a touch drunk; in his arms he carried Christmas presents for his loved ones—wife, children. At the edge of the pavement, beneath his eyes, bloomed painted young women, standing against the darkened shop fronts in attitudes that mingled expectancy and insouciance, vulnerability and guardedness, solitude and solidarity. A scattered army, was his impression, mustering half-heartedly in retreat. Neon syllables glowed behind them; an unlit sign, MASSAGE PARLOR, hung at second-story level, and his face, uptilted, received an impression of steam, though the night was as cold as the spaces between the stars.
A large Negress in a white fur coat drew abreast of him at a red light, humming. His eyes slid toward her; her humming increased in volume, was swelled from underneath, by a taunting suggestion of la-di-da, into almost a song. Fear fingered his heart. He shifted his paper Christmas bags to make a shield between him and this sudden, fur-coated, white-booted, melodious big body. The light broke; under the permission of green he crossed the avenue known as T—— and walked up the hard, faintly tugging slant of sidewalk that would lead him to the voluminous anonymity of his hotel, the rank of silver elevator doors, the expectant emptiness of his room.