Sailing to Byzantium (29 page)

They talk half the night and make love until dawn. “You ought to know,” he tells her solemnly over breakfast, “that I decided long ago never to get married and certainly never to have a child.”

“So did I,” she says. “When I was fifteen.”

They were married four months later. Mick Dongan was his best man.

Gracchus said, as they left the restaurant, “You will think things over, won’t you?”

“I will,” Klein said. “I promised you that.”

He went to his room, packed his suitcase, checked out, and took a cab to the airport, arriving in plenty of time for the afternoon flight to Zanzibar. The same melancholy little man was on duty as health officer when he landed, Barwani. “Sir, you have come back,” Barwani said. “I thought you might. The other people have been here several days already.”

“The other people?”

“When you were here last, sir, you kindly offered me a retainer in order that you might be informed when a certain person reached this island.” Barwani’s eyes gleamed. “That person, with two of her former companions, is here now.”

Klein carefully placed a twenty-shilling note on the health officer’s desk.

“At which hotel?”

Barwani’s lips quirked. Evidently twenty shillings fell short of expectations. But Klein did not take out another banknote, and after a moment Barwani said, “As before. The Zanzibar House. And you, sir?”

“As before,” Klein said. “I’ll be staying at the Shirazi.”

Sybille was in the garden of the hotel, going over that day’s research notes, when the telephone call came from Barwani. “Don’t let my papers blow away,” she said to Zacharias, and went inside.

When she returned, looking bothered, Zacharias said, “is there trouble?”

She sighed. “Jorge. He’s on his way to his hotel now.”

“What a bore,” Mortimer murmured. “I thought Gracchus might have brought him to his senses.”

“Evidently not,” Sybille said. “What are we going to do?”

“What would you like to do?” Zacharias asked.

She shook her head. “We can’t allow this to go on, can we?”

The evening air was humid and fragrant. The long rains had come and gone, and the island was in the grip of the new season’s lunatic fertility: outside the window of Klein’s hotel room some vast twining vine was putting forth monstrous trumpet-shaped yellow flowers, and all about the hotel grounds everything was in blossom, everything was in a frenzy of moist young leaves. Klein’s sensibility reverberated to that feeling of universal vigorous thrusting newness; he paced the room, full of energy, trying to devise some feasible stratagem. Go immediately to see Sybille? Force his way in, if necessary, with shouts and alarums, and demand to know why she had told him that fantastic tale of imaginary sultans? No. No. He would do no more confronting, no more lamenting; now that he was here, now that he was close by her, he would seek her out calmly, he would talk quietly, he would invoke memories of their old love, he would speak of Rilke and Woolf and Broch, of afternoons in Puerto Vallarta and nights in Santa Fe, of music heard and caresses shared, he would rekindle not their marriage, for that was impossible, but merely the remembrance of the bond that once had existed, he would win from her some acknowledgment of what had been, and then he would soberly and quietly exorcise that bond, he and she together, they would work to free him by speaking softly of the change that had come over their lives, until, after three hours or four or five, he had brought himself with her help to an acceptance of the unacceptable. That was all. He would demand nothing, he would beg for nothing, except only that she assist him for one evening in ridding his soul of this useless, destructive obsession. Even a dead, even a capricious, wayward, volatile, whimsical, wanton dead, would surely see the desirability of that, and would freely give him her cooperation. Surely. And then home, and then new beginnings, too long postponed.

He made ready to go out.

There was a soft knock at the door. “Sir? Sir? You have visitors downstairs.”

“Who?” Klein asked, though he knew the answer.

“A lady and two gentlemen,” the bellhop replied. “The taxi has brought them from the Zanzibar House. They wait for you in the bar.”

“Tell them I’ll be down in a moment.”

He went to the iced pitcher on the dresser, drank a glass of cold water mechanically, unthinkingly, poured himself a second, drained that too. This visit was unexpected; and why had she brought her entourage along? He had to struggle to regain that centeredness, that sense of purpose understood, which he thought he had attained before the knock. Eventually he left the room.

They were dressed crisply and impeccably this damp night, Zacharias in a tawny frock coat and pale-green trousers, Mortimer in a belted white caftan trimmed with intricate brocade, Sybille in a simple lavender tunic. Their pale faces were unmarred by perspiration; they seemed perfectly composed, models of poise. No one sat near them in the bar. As Klein entered, they stood to greet him, but their smiles appeared sinister, having nothing of friendliness in them. Klein clung tight to his intended calmness. He said quietly, “It was kind of you to come. May I buy drinks for you?”

“We have ours already,” Zacharias pointed out. “Let us be your hosts. What will you have?”

“Pimm’s Number Six,” Klein said. He tried to match their frosty smiles. “I admire your tunic, Sybille. You all look so debonair tonight that I feel shamed.”

“You never were famous for your clothes,” she said.

Zacharias returned from the counter with Klein’s drink. He took it and toasted them gravely.

After a short while Klein said, “Do you think I could talk privately with you, Sybille?”

“There’s nothing we have to say to one another that can’t be said in front of Kent and Laurence.”

“Nevertheless.”

“I prefer not to, Jorge.”

“As you wish.” Klein peered straight into her eyes and saw nothing there, nothing, and flinched. All that he had meant to say fled his mind. Only churning fragments danced there: Rilke, Broch, Puerto Vallarta. He gulped at his drink.

Zacharias said, “We have a problem to discuss, Klein.”

“Go on.”

“The problem is you. You’re causing great distress to Sybille. This is the second time, now, that you’ve followed her to Zanzibar, to the literal end of the earth, Klein, and you’ve made several attempts besides to enter a closed sanctuary in Utah under false pretenses, and this is interfering with Sybille’s freedom, Klein, it’s an impossible, intolerable interference.”

“The deads are dead,” Mortimer said. “We understand the depths of your feelings for your late wife, but this compulsive pursuit of her must be brought to an end.”

“It will be,” Klein said, staring at a point on the stucco wall midway between Zacharias and Sybille. “I want only an hour or two of private conversation with my—with Sybille, and then I promise you that there will be no further—”

“Just as you promised Anthony Gracchus,” Mortimer said, “not to go to Zanzibar.”

“I wanted—”

“We have our rights,” said Zacharias. “We’ve gone through hell, literally through hell, to get where we are. You’ve infringed on our right to be left alone. You bother us. You bore us. You annoy us. We hate to be annoyed.” He looked toward Sybille. She nodded. Zacharias’ hand vanished into the breast pocket of his coat. Mortimer seized Klein’s wrist with astonishing suddenness and jerked his arm forward. A minute metal tube glistened in Zacharias’ huge fist. Klein had seen such a tube in the hand of Anthony Gracchus only the day before.

“No,” Klein gasped. “I don’t believe—
no
!”

Zacharias plunged the cold tip of the tube quickly into Klein’s forearm.

“The freezer unit is coming,” Mortimer said. “It’ll be here in five minutes or less.”

“What if it’s late?” Sybille asked anxiously. “What if something irreversible happens to his brain before it gets here?”

“He’s not even entirely dead yet,” Zacharias reminded her. “There’s time. There’s ample time. I spoke to the doctor myself, a very intelligent Chinese, flawless command of English. He was most sympathetic. They’ll have him frozen within a couple minutes of death. We’ll book cargo passage aboard the morning plane for Dar. He’ll be in the United States within twenty-four hours, I guarantee that. San Diego will be notified. Everything will be all right, Sybille!”

Jorge Klein lay slumped across the table. The bar had emptied the moment he had cried out and lurched forward: the half-dozen customers had fled, not caring to mar their holidays by sharing an evening with the presence of death, and the waiters and bartenders, big-eyed, terrified, lurked in the hallway. A heart attack, Zacharias had announced, some kind of sudden attack, maybe a stroke, where’s the telephone? No one had seen the tiny tube do its work.

Sybille trembled. “If anything goes wrong—”

“I hear the sirens now,” Zacharias said.

From his desk at the airport Daud Mahmoud Barwani watched the bulky refrigerated coffin being loaded by grunting porters aboard the morning plane for Dar. And then, and then, and then? They would ship the dead man to the far side of the world, to America, and breathe new life into him, and he would go once more among men. Barwani shook his head. These people! The man who was alive is now dead, and these dead ones, who knows what they are? Who knows? Best that the dead remain dead, as was intended in the time of first things. Who could have foreseen a day when the dead returned from the grave? Not I. And who can foresee what we will all become, a hundred years from now? Not I. Not I. A hundred years from now I will sleep, Barwani thought. I will sleep, and it will not matter to me at all what sort of creatures walk the earth.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

T.S. Eliot: Little Gidding

O
N THE DAY OF
his awakening he saw no one except the attendants at the rekindling house, who bathed him and fed him and helped him to walk slowly around his room. They said nothing to him, nor he to them; words seemed irrelevant. He felt strange in his skin, too snugly contained, as though all his life he had worn ill-fitting clothes and now had for the first time encountered a competent tailor. The images that his eyes brought him were sharp, unnaturally clear, and faintly haloed by prismatic colors, an effect that imperceptibly vanished as the day passed. On the second day he was visited by the San Diego Guidefather, not at all the formidable patriarch he had imagined, but rather a cool, efficient executive, about fifty years old, who greeted him cordially and told him briefly of the disciplines and routines he must master before he could leave the Cold Town. “What month is this?” Klein asked, and Guidefather told him it was June, the seventeenth of June, 1993. He had slept four weeks.

Now it is the morning of the third day after his awakening, and he has guests: Sybille, Nerita, Zacharias, Mortimer, Gracchus. They file into his room and stand in an arc at the foot of his bed, radiant in the glow of light that pierces the narrow windows. Like demigods, like angels, glittering with a dazzling inward brilliance, and now he is of their company. Formally they embrace him, first Gracchus, then Nerita, then Mortimer. Zacharias advances next to his bedside, Zacharias who sent him into death, and he smiles at Klein and Klein returns the smile, and they embrace. Then it is Sybille’s turn: she slips her hand between his, he draws her close, her lips brush his cheek, his touch hers, his arm encircles her shoulders.

“Hello,” she whispers.

“Hello,” he says.

They ask him how he feels, how quickly his strength is returning, whether he has been out of bed yet, how soon he will commence his drying-off. The style of their conversation is the oblique, elliptical style favored by the deads, but not nearly so clipped and cryptic as the way of speech they normally would use among themselves; they are favoring him, leading him inch by inch into their customs. Within five minutes he thinks he is getting the knack.

He says, using their verbal shorthand, “I must have been a great burden to you.”

“You were, you were,” Zacharias agrees. “But all that is done with now.”

“We forgive you,” Mortimer says.

“We welcome you among us,” declares Sybille.

They talk about their plans for the months ahead. Sybille is nearly finished with her work on Zanzibar; she will retreat to Zion Cold Town for the summer months to write her thesis. Mortimer and Nerita are off to Mexico to tour the ancient temples and pyramids; Zacharias is going to Ohio, to his beloved mounds. In the autumn they will reassemble at Zion and plan the winter’s amusement: a tour of Egypt, perhaps, or Peru, the heights of Machu Picchu. Ruins, archeological sites, delight them; in the places where death has been busiest, their joy is most intense. They are flushed, excited—virtually chattering, now. Away we will go, to Zimbabwe, to Palenque, to Angkor, to Knossos, to Uxmal, to Nineveh, to Mohenjo-daro. And as they go on and on, talking with hands and eyes and smiles and even words, even words, torrents of words, they blur and become unreal to him, they are mere dancing puppets jerking about a badly painted stage, they are droning insects, wasps or bees or mosquitoes, with all their talk of travels and festivals, of Boghazköy and Babylon, of Megiddo and Masada, and he ceases to hear them, he tunes them out, he lies there smiling, eyes glazed, mind adrift. It perplexes him that he has so little interest in them. But then he realizes that it is a mark of his liberation. He is freed of old chains now. Will he join their set? Why should he? Perhaps he will travel with them, perhaps not, as the whim takes him. More likely not. Almost certainly not. He does not need their company. He has his own interests. He will follow Sybille about no longer. He does not need, he does not want, he will not seek. Why should he become one of them, rootless, an amoral wanderer, a ghost made flesh? Why should he embrace the values and customs of these people who had given him to death as dispassionately as they might swat an insect, only because he had bored them, because he had annoyed them? He does not hate them for what they did to him, he feels no resentment that he can identify, he merely chooses to detach himself from them. Let them float on from ruin to ruin, let them pursue death from continent to continent; he will go his own way. Now that he has crossed the interface, he finds that Sybille no longer matters to him.