The Bay of Foxes (3 page)

He perches on the edge of the wicker chair, ready to flee. Of course, he knows, or thinks he knows, how to respond to an invitation of this sort. He is careful what he says. He keeps his response short, underplays the recent events, and peppers it with a few exotic details. He makes some modest reference to his illustrious ancestors, his aristocratic family in Ethiopia, the privileged existence he led as an only child in the summer palace in Harar. He speaks of its surrounding scrub-covered hills, mild climate, stone walls, the guards at the gate, the chauffeur who drove his mother to the shops or to visit her friends, and that it was briefly the residence of Rimbaud.

He slips in a few intimate details about the Emperor:
the importance of protocol, the nine palaces, the coronation coach, the Emperor’s formidable memory, of the necessity of gaining access to him, as his father, a minister of justice, was so skilled at doing, though even his father was banished for a time when he recused himself from a case in the sixties that he did not feel fit to judge; he talks of the importance of the Pillow Man, who slipped in the pillow so as to prevent any shameful dangling of the royal feet as the short Emperor sat on his high throne, the same pillow that slipped as easily over the Emperor’s face, at the end, or so they said. He mentions the Purse Man, who doled out the envelopes that sometimes turned out to be empty or nearly so; the man called the Cuckoo Clock, who announced the passing of the hours.

He says something about the nationalization of his own family’s lands. He says little about the student movement, the closing of the schools, the difficulties with the junta, the dreadful years of confinement, and the precipitous exit from his homeland with no more than the clothes on his back. He tells her he is a student of anthropology at the Sorbonne. He has occasionally managed to slip into an amphitheater and sit on a dusty step, trying to follow what some ancient man whom he could hardly see or hear was reading from a
polycopié.
He describes his homesickness, before returning to the subject of his admiration for her writing.

“You have described life in Africa so well,” he says. He has seen one of the films for which she wrote the screenplay. She seems capable of going from book to screenplay without effort. He does admire her spare, concentrated prose, her brief, evocative novels, but he is also thinking of what she could do for him. He needs a place to hide, and he needs protection.
He is in constant fear the police will pick him up and send him home. Above all, he needs some peace of mind after the violence of more than two years in prison and the squalid life of his cramped quarters.

He can see she appreciates his compliments. “Where did you learn such excellent French?” she asks. He responds that he was given the traditional education of the children of Ethiopian aristocracy. His parents employed a French Capuchin monk to teach him the language, history, geography, philosophy, and Latin. His father admired the French, for supporting Ethiopia in its struggles against the British. Dawit learned English as well. He even speaks a little Italian. He has always been gifted at languages, has a good ear, indeed is musical. He plays the piano.

“Ah, the piano!” she says and opens her eyes wide. The bright light of her attention seems sincere, but he wonders if she really wants to hear about other people’s lives. Perhaps his, coming from the Horn of Africa, where she, too, grew up, though under very different circumstances, is particularly interesting to her.

She speaks then longingly, as people do when they have lived in Africa as children, of the strength of the sunlight, something not to be found elsewhere, the warmth of the people, the friendly, easygoing way of life. “The light here seems diluted, like a weak glass of whiskey,” she says, looking at him longingly, as though she might find the lost light in his bronze skin.

He says nothing about the terrible violence he has known, the brutality that contrasts with the beauty of the land. “October is the prettiest month,” he says, remembering the
fragrant yellow maskal flowers, which covered the fields in the spring.

What she remembers about Somalia are the women carrying pots on their heads, so erect that the pots seemed an extension of their bodies; the nomads in their long, sacklike robes, a large dagger at the belt; the camels, led so cruelly with a ring splitting their lips. She remembers their poverty, her mother suddenly washing all the floors and pouring water over her daughter’s head, scrubbing her skin, then sending her daughter out to look for men. His presence seems to bring back her childhood, her dreams.

Her mother was a French teacher in French Somaliland. Her father died when she was four years old, leaving three children, two boys and a girl. She has known a life of extreme penury, eating garbage, or so she tells him. Her mother, a disturbed woman, used her as a prostitute, or close to that, before she could escape and return to France.

“I know what it’s like to be poor and hungry,” she says, looking at him with sympathy. He knows this story from her books. She returns to the same themes repeatedly: the death of her younger brother, the cruelty of the older one, her mother’s madness, and her own African lover, a local landlord who must have been about Dawit’s age now.

She looks him in the eye and leans toward him, so that her shoulder presses against his. She asks him about his religion. He tells her his father actually had little respect for the clergy, whom he considered ignorant and greedy, but his mother was devout. Her Coptic Christianity was very important to her, but despite the boarding school in Switzerland, she also worshipped
the Tree of Life; there was room for both the saints and the
wukabi,
a pagan world within a modern one. “What a wonderful detail,” she says. “I’ll have to put it into a story.” He suspects she makes people dance like this for her like puppets on a string, and then uses what they tell her in small, almost invisible brushstrokes in her many canvases. Writers are like vultures, picking over the tragedies of other lives, he thinks. But he can see that she wants more from him than recollections of a shared past. She leans toward him again, lowers her hoarse smoker’s voice, and says, as if talking to herself, “You resemble him.”

He looks at her inquiringly.

“The one I lost. The one I wrote about, the lost lover in my youth. He had the same light of hidden flowers in his skin,” she says, quoting someone, perhaps herself, and putting her hand to his cheek.

It is then he feels a stab of desire. He remembers the scene in her book, where she meets a young man at the ferry crossing on the Blue Nile, in his linen suit, with his expensive automobile, his desire. He wants to possess M., this woman who sits beside him. She must see a flicker of this in his eyes or feel it as he reaches out to touch the back of her fine white hand, a breeze of a caress.

Then she leans even closer to him. He can see she is unable to resist. She almost touches his cheek with her nose as though she wishes to breathe him in. He thinks of his mother telling him of his father’s infidelity. “Fresh bread, that’s what he wants, fresh bread.” He knows, too, this is a unique opportunity, one that is not likely to come his way again.

She says, “I know something about the methods of the junta. It’s a miracle you survived.” She puts her hand on his arm, strokes the scars, the burn marks, the scratches. He says, “Actually, I didn’t.” Part of him is lost forever, escaped to a great distance from him, like her lost lover.

All his family is gone, he explains: his father executed with the other ministers on Black Saturday in 1974; his mother dying sometime afterward of untended wounds in the Akaki Prison, where she was held with the other princesses, he tells her.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

Her tears and kindness bring a rush of tears to his own eyes, as kindness so often does. All the time he has walked the hard, indifferent pavements of Paris alone, hungry, and wet, distanced from himself, all the time he has lived in the crowded, slovenly apartment in Clichy-sous-Bois he has not wept. Now, with her fine fingers on the back of his wrist, her watery blue gaze lingering on his face, he loses control and bows his head. He does nothing to check his tears. He weeps, his shoulders shaking. She puts her arm around him, holds him tight.

“You must come to my apartment. I will take you in, but you must give me a few days to organize things. Come in the afternoon, three days from now,” she says, taking out her black Montblanc pen and writing down her address on the white paper napkin before her, the ink spreading like a blue stain.

“I couldn’t possibly accept your hospitality,” he says, but she doesn’t seem to hear him.

“It’s an apartment near here, on the street that runs along
the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens—the Rue Guynemer,” she says and gestures across the square and up the street. “It’s the first floor. Just come up the stairs. Come after lunch. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Then she rises, floating off down the street, her fine linen clothes blown against her body, her scarf fluttering around her neck, as if she were swimming.

H
E TAKES THE BUS BACK TO HIS SUBURB
, C
LICHY-SOUS
-B
OIS
. His fingers in his jean pocket touch the wad of bills M. has left on the table, the napkin with the address which he has already memorized. It is dark now. He goes into the local supermarket near Asfa’s apartment and buys lamb for stew, salad, spinach, and big bunches of black grapes. Then he stops at the bakery and gets several large loaves of crusty bread and, for the children, pastries. He hugs the parcels to his chest, going fast along the dangerous dark concrete walkway, past the endless rows of identical, anonymous buildings, smelling the wonderful scent of fresh French bread. He carries the food up the ill-lit stairs, because the elevator is broken. The walls are covered with graffiti and filth, and sounds of loud voices, arguments, and screams of children come from behind thin doors.

Three teenage boys and a plump girl with wild hair come running down the stairs past him. They brush against him rudely, on purpose it seems, so that he almost drops his precious bags. He huddles against the concrete wall and swears at them. They laugh loudly as they clatter down the stairwell. “
Salaud!
” one of them shouts, as the glass door bangs shut.

Breathless, he enters the open door on the fourth floor, the air redolent with the odor of coffee and incense. He almost
falls over the small child, Takla, Asfa’s youngest, who is crawling across the floor, crying. “Here,
mamush
,” he says, taking a warm
pain au chocolat
from the bag and giving it to the little boy, who sits on the dusty floor, thin legs apart, chewing, smiling up at him, happy. He goes into the hot, grimy, windowless kitchen and puts his bags down on the chipped counter, with its cigarette stains and sticky surface. He takes out the lamb and opens the wrapping, as the women crowd around to see what he has brought, marveling at the abundance. The older ones still wear slippers and white scarves around their heads, as though they were about to step out into the streets of Addis.

Asfa’s wife, Eleni, looks up from the coffee she is pounding with a mallet she brought all the way from Djibouti, tears in her eyes at this sight. She asks him if he has robbed a bank. He laughs and says there will be enough to eat for everyone tonight: they must cook all the lamb for dinner. She says she will serve it with her
berbere
sauce, and he rubs his hands at the thought of the spicy taste. He asks her if Asfa is home yet.

Before he left Addis Ababa, a friend had given him Asfa’s address. Now Eleni scowls at him and tips back her shapely head to indicate her husband’s whereabouts. She says he is there with yet another of his rescued victims. An unusually lively and good-hearted man, Asfa seems unable to turn anyone away, much to his poor wife’s despair. In his great, openhearted generosity he seems almost simpleminded, which indeed his wife accuses him of being, though she knows he is not at all simple, having earned a degree in engineering from the university in Addis.

Dawit goes into the smoke-filled back bedroom to find
his friend. Asfa is watching a soccer game on the television. He sits cross-legged on a cushion on the floor with a group of young men crowded around him. There is hardly any furniture in the whole apartment except for the large television set, which always seems to be on. Asfa smiles broadly at him. He rises to his full height and strides across the floor through the others to greet Dawit enthusiastically, asking him where he has been hiding.

Asfa is the only one of these men who has managed to find a regular job. He works in a hotel in Paris, where he has to wear a ridiculous uniform, a long, braided coat with a high hat. He does all sorts of menial jobs, thanks to his great strength. He is remarkably tall and strong but subject to violent fits of rage and once felled a man with one blow. He leaves every morning before dawn to take the long bus ride into the city and often comes back late.

Now he asks Dawit why they have seen so little of him, why he has become such a stranger, why he leaves before anyone is up in the morning and comes back so late at night. Why does he no longer eat with them? In response Dawit looks at the scuffed linoleum on the floor, takes some of the money out of his pocket, and hands it over. “Here, take this. I’m sorry it is so little and so late,” he says and presses it into his palm, while Asfa whistles and stares at the wad of bills suspiciously. He seems surprised and disconcerted. He frowns, shakes his head, and looks at Dawit worriedly. Dawit adds, “I hope to have the rest of what I owe you soon—perhaps more than that,” as Asfa looks down at him in wonder. Asfa says, “Are you sure about this? There is no rush. We are happy to have you here with us, brother. You would do the same for me.”
He speaks in a low voice, smiling at him but looking concerned by this sudden good fortune and putting an arm protectively around his shoulder.