The Bay of Foxes (5 page)

T
HE MORNING AFTER HE MEETS
M.,
HE GOES TO THE NEAREST
Monoprix, picking up and putting down various garments. He chooses a tight-fitting black cotton shirt with long sleeves and a round neck, and khaki trousers with pleats at the waist that make him look a little less emaciated. He buys toothpaste, a comb, and soap. On the third day he goes to the public baths early and washes himself thoroughly. Then he takes the bus back into the city.

He stands in the afternoon shadows of the chestnut trees opposite M.’s blond stone building on the side of the Luxembourg Gardens. He looks up at the first floor and sees the terraces, the green plants in the window boxes, the red awnings. It seems another world, as though he has stepped out of a place of grayness into bright light.

He feels, as he did in prison, that he is split in two. He is Dawit in his stiff new clothes in the uncertain light, and he is watching himself, a young, painfully thin man with large dark eyes. He is unable to move. His head spins, and he hears the voice like an echo writing the novel of his life. His mind is filled with words that record his actions, or rather his incapacity to act. He has been alone for so long that this voice has become his companion, the secret sharer of his destiny. He
must cross the street. He must ring the bell. He must ring the bell.

He forces himself to cross the street and press the shiny brass button that opens the door. He walks quickly past the concierge’s loge with its net curtain, afraid she will stop him. He goes up the step and opens the glass door. He sees the small elevator, but M. has told him to come up the steps, so he runs up the shallow carpeted steps, two at a time. He stands in the unfamiliar silence to catch his breath on the landing. There seems to be only one apartment on each floor. He rings her doorbell. He waits in the silence. Just as he is beginning to lose hope, he hears steps, and she opens the door.

She is wearing blue jeans, flat shoes, and a white shirt, the sleeves turned up to the elbows. She has tied her white hair back from her face, which makes it look more pointed. She looks at him blankly, as if she does not quite remember who he is. He draws himself up and lifts his chin. “You told me to come this afternoon,” he says.
Please don’t turn me away
, he prays.

He has scrubbed himself, brushed his teeth, and tied back his unruly locks as best he could. He knows he needs a haircut. He has done the best he can with his appearance, but perhaps she has forgotten what he looks like, how dark his skin, or even how young he is, how thin? Perhaps she has forgotten the encounter altogether? Is it possible she was drunk? Does she regret her act of generosity? Does she wonder suddenly if he will steal her silver or put a knife in her back?

She tells him to come inside and shakes his hand solemnly in the large entrance hall, as though they were meeting for the first time. Her hand is icy cold. She has tied a small
blue scarf stiffly around her long neck. He does not know what else to say, and she does not say anything. She does not offer him anything to eat or drink. Had they not talked about Africa, about the large families, the way people helped one another? Had she not put her arm around his shaking shoulders? Is she going to send him away? But she tells him to follow, turns and walks rapidly. They cross the shiny parquet floor, the sound of their shoes loud in his ears. They go through a
grand salon
with a black leather chaise longue and a fireplace at one end, a
petit salon
with a Louis XVI desk, soft blue and red Oriental rugs with animal designs, filled bookcases, and pink flowers fanned in glass vases. They walk through a formal dining room, with a silver bowl in the center of a long mahogany table. All these rooms look directly onto the Luxembourg Gardens and, across them, just visible through the first yellow-green leaves, the Panthéon. Even the kitchen looks through French windows onto a small terrace and the gardens.

They go down a dark, narrow corridor, where the rooms are much smaller and look over a courtyard, shadowy rooms once or perhaps still used for the staff. There is a little sink in the corridor, and closets that seem to go up to the ceiling.

At the end of the corridor, she pushes open a door. There is barely room for a single bed, with its dark green counterpane and an old frayed armchair with a small white towel over the arm, and to his surprise and delight, a battered upright piano with a candle-shaped lamp on top. She shows him at the end of the corridor a back entrance to the apartment, through which he can come and go as he wishes. She presses the key into the palm of his hand and tells him the room is
his, as well as the small bathroom with a shower and toilet next door.

He can only thank her, bowing his head. She cuts short his thanks and says he is free to use the kitchen, too, during the day.

He steps into the room, walks over to the window, and looks down into the courtyard with the green dustbins, plants, and the entrance to the back staircase. Briefly he wonders who inhabited this room before him, and why she had asked him to come three days after they had met. Has he displaced someone? And if so, what has happened to him or her? He looks around, just as he had in his cell, to see if there were messages written on the walls, wondering if the previous prisoner had survived.

She leaves him “to settle in,” she says, though he has nothing with him but a small plastic bag with a change of underwear, socks, a pair of shorts, and a few toiletries, which he lays out carefully by the basin, then stacks by the bed the three paperback books that he has picked up on the quay: a copy of Baudelaire’s
Fleurs du mal
; Marguerite Duras’s short stories,
Whole Days in the Trees
; and Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
.

Alone in the room, he puts the precious key in his pocket and shuts his door. He takes off his worn shoes and stretches out on the bed, opens up his arms, and stares at the ceiling, the voice in his head loudly recording all of this. He falls into a deep, dreamless sleep. When he wakes, he gets up and drinks some water from the basin in the corridor. Then he opens the piano, a German one, a Schimmel. He looks at the yellowed keys. He places his fingers on them, shuts his eyes, and feels
his way, playing from memory the simple pieces from his childhood. He plays a Chopin étude, the notes coming back to him from the tips of his fingers where they have remained.

He remembers the music teacher who came to the mansion, a blond young man from Sweden—the Emperor liked Swedes—whom his mother was always trying to marry off but who was clearly not interested in women. The teacher would stand behind Dawit as he sat at the piano, and reach over his shoulder to press down on the keys and against his back. Dawit has not played for years. Slowly, the notes of the Chopin replace the voice in his head.

He hears a knock on his door and rises quickly to open it, conscious of the holes in his socks. To his surprise, M. is wearing a white dishcloth tied tightly around her small waist. She asks him if he would join her for a simple meal. “I would like to cook something for us,” she says, almost shyly. He hesitates a moment, fearing that if he eats with her tonight, she will want him to do it every night, and he wonders what might be expected of him in repayment for the meal. But he is hungry, afraid of offending, and delighted with the small, quiet room with its piano. He smiles, nods his head, thanks her for her kindness, and puts on his shoes. He follows her into the kitchen. He asks her if there is something he can do to help, but she smiles and shakes her head. He sits on a stool and watches as she boils water in a big pot, washes the lettuce, and makes the dressing, dosing oil and vinegar judiciously, cutting the little loaf of bread.

“I hope this will be enough for you,” she says, serving the small bowls of pasta with oil and anchovies. He could easily eat three times what she serves him and would like to ask for
cheese, but he murmurs politely that it will more than suffice. They eat together in her kitchen, perched at a counter on high wooden stools awkwardly, like two caged birds, side by side. She eats very little, mostly sipping her drink. All their intimacy is transformed into awkwardness, now that he is alone with her in her house. He eats fast, distractedly, thinking of his last dinner with Asfa and his family, all the good-humored jokes, the children’s laughter, little Takla on his lap.

As soon as he has finished, he rises, says the pasta was delicious, and thanks her for the meal. She takes the dishes to the sink and starts to wash them. He offers to help, but she tells him there is a dishwasher, and the concierge is coming in the morning.

He says he is very tired and must go to bed. She looks at him, tilts her head to one side, and tells him she is afraid he might still be hungry, but she never eats meat or touches sugar or cream. Instead, she confesses, she drinks. She likes gin or, most of all, vodka, and she pours herself another glass. Would he not like a drink? He declines.

When he leaves her to go back to his room, he notices she follows him and locks the door that leads to the large reception rooms of the apartment, where her own bedroom must lie.

H
E NEED NOT HAVE WORRIED ABOUT THE INVITATIONS TO
dinner. She does not invite him to another one for several days. Indeed, he hardly sees her. He comes and goes through the back door, quietly, unseen, unheard.

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.