Sailing to Byzantium (28 page)

Which could have ended it. He might have returned to Los Angeles and picked up the pieces of his life. All this semester he had been on sabbatical leave, but the summer term was coming and there was work to do. He did return to Los Angeles, but only long enough to pack a somewhat larger suitcase, find his passport, and drive to the airport. On a sweet May evening a BOAC jet took him over the Pole to London, where, barely pausing for coffee and buns at an airport shop, he boarded another plane that carried him southeast toward Africa. More asleep than awake, he watched the dreamy landmarks drifting past: the Mediterranean, coming and going with surprising rapidity, and the tawny carpet of the Libyan Desert, and the mighty Nile, reduced to a brown thread’s thickness when viewed from a height of ten miles. Suddenly Kilimanjaro, mist-wrapped, snow-bound, loomed like a giant double-headed blister to his right, far below, and he thought he could make out to his left the distant glare of the sun on the Indian Ocean. Then the big needle-nosed plane began its abrupt swooping descent, and he found himself, soon after, stepping out into the warm humid air and dazzling sunlight of Dar es Salaam.

Too soon, too soon. He felt unready to go on to Zanzibar. A day or two of rest, perhaps: he picked a Dar hotel at random, the Agip, liking the strange sound of its name, and hired a taxi. The hotel was sleek and clean, a streamlined affair in the glossy 1960s style, much cheaper than the Kilimanjaro, where he had stayed briefly on the other trip, and located in a pleasant leafy quarter of the city, near the ocean. He strolled about for a short while, discovered that he was altogether exhausted, returned to his room for a nap that stretched on for nearly five hours, and awakening groggy, showered and dressed for dinner. The hotel’s dining room was full of beefy red-faced fair-haired men, jacketless and wearing open-throated white shirts, all of whom reminded him disturbingly of Kent Zacharias; but these were warms, Britishers from their accents, engineers, he suspected, from their conversation. They were building a dam and a power plant somewhere up the coast, it seemed, or perhaps a power plant without a dam; it was hard to follow what they said. They drank a good deal of gin and spoke in hearty booming shouts. There were also a good many Japanese businessmen, of course, looking trim and restrained in dark-blue suits and narrow ties, and at the table next to Klein’s were five tanned curly-haired men talking in rapid Hebrew—Israelis, surely. The only Africans in sight were waiters and bartenders. Klein ordered Mombasa oysters, steak, and a carafe of red wine, and found the food unexpectedly good, but left most of it on his plate. It was late evening in Tanzania, but for him it was ten o’clock in the morning, and his body was confused. He tumbled into bed, meditated vaguely on the probable presence of Sybille just a few air-minutes away in Zanzibar, and dropped into a sound sleep from which he awakened, what seemed like many hours later, to discover that it was still well before dawn.

He dawdled away the morning sightseeing in the old native quarter, hot and dusty, with unpaved streets and rows of tin shacks, and at midday returned to his hotel for a shower and lunch. Much the same national distribution in the restaurant—British, Japanese, Israeli—though the faces seemed different. He was on his second beer when Anthony Gracchus came in. The white hunter, broad-shouldered, pale, densely bearded, clad in khaki shorts, khaki shirt, seemed almost to have stepped out of the picture-cube Jijibhoi had once shown him. Instinctively Klein shrank back, turning toward the window, but too late: Gracchus had seen him. All chatter came to a halt in the restaurant as the dead man strode to Klein’s table, pulled out a chair unasked, and seated himself; then, as though a motion-picture projector had been halted and started again, the British engineers resumed their shouting, sounding somewhat strained now. “Small world,” Gracchus said. “Crowded one, anyway. On your way to Zanzibar, are you, Klein?”

“In a day or so. Did you know I was here?”

“Of course not.” Gracchus’ harsh eyes twinkled slyly. “Sheer coincidence is what this is. She’s there already.”

“She is?”

“She and Zacharias and Mortimer. I hear you wiggled your way into Zion.”

“Briefly,” Klein said. “I saw Sybille. Briefly.”

“Unsatisfactorily. So once again you’ve followed her here. Give it up, man. Give it up.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t!”
Gracchus scowled. “A neurotic’s word, can’t. What you mean is
won’t.
A mature man can do anything he wants to that isn’t a physical impossibility. Forget her. You’re only annoying her, this way, interfering with her work, interfering with her—” Gracchus smiled. “With her life. She’s been dead almost three years, hasn’t she? Forget her. The world’s full of other women. You’re still young, you have money, you aren’t ugly, you have professional standing—”

“Is this what you were sent here to tell me?”

“I wasn’t sent here to tell you anything, friend. I’m only trying to save you from yourself. Don’t go to Zanzibar. Go home and start your life again.”

“When I saw her at Zion,” Klein said, “she treated me with contempt. She amused herself at my expense. I want to ask her why she did that.”

“Because you’re a warm and she’s a dead. To her you’re a clown. To all of us you’re a clown. It’s nothing personal, Klein. There’s simply a gulf in attitudes, a gulf too wide for you to cross. You went to Zion drugged up like a Treasury man, didn’t you? Pale face, bulgy eyes? You didn’t fool anyone. You certainly didn’t fool
her
. The game she played with you was her way of telling you that. Don’t you know that?”

“I know it, yes.”

“What more do you want, then? More humiliation?”

Klein shook his head wearily and stared at the tablecloth. After a moment he looked up, and his eyes met those of Gracchus, and he was astounded to realize that he trusted the hunter, that for the first time in his dealings with the deads he felt he was being met with sincerity. He said in a low voice, “We were very close, Sybille and I, and then she died, and now I’m nothing to her. I haven’t been able to come to terms with that. I need her, still. I want to share my life with her, even now.”

“But you can’t.”

“I know that. And still I can’t help doing what I’ve been doing.”

“There’s only one thing you
can
share with her,” Gracchus said. “That’s your death. She won’t descend to your level: you have to climb to hers.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Who’s absurd, me or you? Listen to me, Klein. I think you’re a fool, I think you’re a weakling, but I don’t dislike you, I don’t hold you to blame for your own foolishness. And so I’ll help you, if you’ll allow me.” He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a tiny metal tube with a safety catch at one end. “Do you know what this is?” Gracchus asked. “It’s a self-defense dart, the kind all the women in New York carry. A good many deads carry them, too, because we never know when the reaction will start, when the mobs will turn against us. Only we don’t use anesthetic drugs in ours. Listen, we can walk into any tavern in the native quarter and have a decent brawl going in five minutes, and in the confusion I’ll put one of these darts into you, and we’ll have you in Dar General Hospital fifteen minutes after that, crammed into a deep-freeze unit, and for a few thousand dollars we can ship you unthawed to California, and this time Friday night you’ll be undergoing rekindling in, say, San Diego Cold Town. And when you come out of it you and Sybille will be on the same side of the gulf, do you see? If you’re destined to get back together with her, ever, that’s the only way. That way you have a chance. This way you have none.”

“It’s unthinkable,” Klein said.

“Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing’s unthinkable once somebody’s thought it. You think it some more. Will you promise me that? Think about it before you get aboard that plane for Zanzibar. I’ll be staying here tonight and tomorrow, and then I’m going out to Arusha to meet some deads coming in for the hunting, and any time before then I’ll do it for you if you say the word. Think about it. Will you think about it? Promise me that you’ll think about it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Klein said.

“Good. Good. Thank you. Now let’s have lunch and change the subject. Do you like eating here?”

“One thing puzzles me. Why does this place have a clientele that’s exclusively non-African? Does it dare to discriminate against blacks in a black republic?”

Gracchus laughed. “It’s the blacks who discriminate, friend. This is considered a second-class hotel. All the blacks are at the Kilimanjaro or the Nyerere. Still, it’s not such a bad place. I recommend the fish dishes, if you haven’t tried them, and there’s a decent white wine from Israel that—”

O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown!

What dreadful noise of water in mine ears!

What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!

Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks;

A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;

Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,

Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,

All scatt’red in the bottom of the sea.

Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in the holes

Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,

As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems

That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep

And mocked the dead bones that lay scatt’red by.

Shakespeare:
Richard III

“—I
SRAELI WINE,” MICK DONGAN
was saying. “Well, I’ll try anything once, especially if there’s some neat little irony attached to it. I mean, there we were in Egypt, in
Egypt
, at this fabulous dinner party in the hills at Luxor, and our host is a Saudi prince, no less, in full tribal costume right down to the sunglasses, and when they bring out the roast lamb he grins devilishly and says, ‘Of course we could always drink Mouton-Rothschild, but I do happen to have a small stock of select Israeli wines in my cellar, and because I think you are, like myself, a connoisseur of small incongruities, I’ve asked my steward to open a bottle or two of’—Klein, do you see that girl who just came in?” It is January, 1981, early afternoon, a fine drizzle in the air. Klein is lunching with six colleagues from the history department at the Hanging Gardens atop the Westwood Plaza. The hotel is a huge ziggurat on stilts; the Hanging Gardens is a rooftop restaurant, ninety stories up, in freaky neo-Babylonian décor, all winged bulls and snorting dragons of blue and yellow tile, waiters with long curly beards and scimitars at their hips—gaudy nightclub by dark, campy faculty hangout by day. Klein looks to his left. Yes, a handsome woman, mid-twenties, coolly beautiful, serious-looking, taking a seat by herself, putting a stack of books and cassettes down on the table before her. Klein does not pick up strange girls: a matter of moral policy, and also a matter of innate shyness. Dongan teases him. “Go on over, will you? She’s your type, I swear. Her eyes are the right color for you, aren’t they?”

Klein has been complaining, lately, that there are too many blue-eyed gals in southern California. Blue eyes are disturbing to him, somehow, even menacing. His own eyes are brown. So are hers: dark, warm, sparkling. He thinks he has seen her occasionally in the library. Perhaps they have even exchanged brief glances. “Go on,” Dongan says. “Go on, Jorge. Go.” Klein glares at him. He will not go. How can he intrude on this woman’s privacy? To force himself on her—it would almost be like rape. Dongan smiles complacently; his bland grin is a merciless prod. Klein refuses to be stampeded. But then, as he hesitates, the girl smiles too, a quick shy smile, gone so soon he is not altogether sure it happened at all, but he is sure enough, and he finds himself rising, crossing the alabaster floor, hovering awkwardly over her, searching for some inspired words with which to make contact, and no words come, but still they make contact the old-fashioned way, eye to eye, and he is stunned by the intensity of what passes between them in that first implausible moment.

“Are you waiting for someone?” he mutters, shaken.

“No.” The smile again, far less tentative. “Would you like to join me?”

She is a graduate student, he discovers quickly. Just got her master’s, beginning now on her doctorate—the nineteenth-century East African slave trade, particular emphasis on Zanzibar. “How romantic,” he says. “Zanzibar! Have you been there?”

“Never. I hope to go some day. Have you?”

“Not ever. But it always interested me, ever since I was a small boy collecting stamps. It was the last country in my album.”

“Not in mine,” she says. “Zululand was.”

She knows him by name, it turns out. She had even been thinking of enrolling in his course on Nazism and Its Offspring. “Are you South American?” she asks.

“Born there. Raised here. My grandparents escaped to Buenos Aires in ‘37.”

“Why Argentina? I thought that was a hotbed of Nazis.”

“Was. Also full of German-speaking refugees, though. All their friends went there. But it was too unstable. My parents got out in ‘55, just before one of the big revolutions, and came to California. What about you?”

“British family. I was born in Seattle. My father’s in the consular service. He—”

A waiter looms. They order sandwiches offhandedly. Lunch seems very unimportant now. The contact still holds. He sees Conrad’s
Nostromo
in her stack of books; she is halfway through it, and he has just finished it, and the coincidence amuses them. Conrad is one of her favorites, she says. One of his, too. What about Faulkner? Yes, and Mann, and Virginia Woolf, and they share even a fondness for Hermann Broch, and a dislike for Hesse. How odd. Operas?
Freischütz, Holländer, Fidelio,
yes. “We have very Teutonic tastes,” she observes.

“We have very similar tastes,” he adds. He finds himself holding her hand.

“Amazingly similar,” she says.

Mick Dongan leers at him from the far side of the room; Klein gives him a terrible scowl. Dongan winks. “Let’s get out of here,” Klein says, just as she starts to say the same thing.