The Bay of Foxes (8 page)

Dawit adapts to M.’s schedule, her way of life. He listens to her, gives her good advice, and makes himself available to her. But there is a part of him she never reaches, a secret part that watches her with ironic detachment. Mentally he takes notes on the movements of her fine hands, her every expression, her particular words. He speaks her language perfectly, but she does not know a word of his. Despite her upbringing in Somalia, she has never taken the trouble to learn any of the languages of the country, he notes. He comes to know all about her intimate life, her work, her desires, but she knows very little about him. Like all colonizers, he thinks, she is ultimately the dupe.

“I
WANT YOU TO COME WITH ME THIS EVENING, SO THAT
I
CAN
introduce you,” she says. She is sitting before her kidney-shaped dressing table with its sea green organdy skirt. She wears her silk dressing gown and brushes her long hair with a silver-backed brush. He comes over to her, takes it from her hand, and goes on brushing, as he did for his mother in her bedroom, where she kept the photo of herself in her schoolgirl uniform and her round felt hat on the table by her bed.

“You must wear something elegant,” she tells him, looking at him behind her in the mirror. “Wear that black Armani pantsuit of mine with the hand stitching.”

“Is it someone important?” he asks.

“Very important to me: my editor and his wife. I’ve known him for a long time. He’s been good to me, published many of my books, though lately he has been turning them down. I have to be nice to both of them.”

“Are you sure you want me to come? Won’t I just be
de trop
?” he asks her.

“It would make me less nervous. You’ll see. And it will amuse and distract them. They will like you. It will be fun,” she says, smiling at him in the mirror.

“But won’t they want to talk about your work?”

“Oh, not at all! Not over dinner. They will want to talk about other things—the wife will fall in love with you. She’s much younger than her husband. You have my permission— no, my command—to seduce her,” she says with a laugh, raising her eyebrows, adding, “Good for business.”

“Do you want me to make up your face for you?” he asks. Sometimes he had done this for his mother, who was very beautiful, with her light café au lait skin, her long neck, and her large dark eyes, which she would turn on him so lovingly. He felt she loved him unconditionally. He was both her son and her confidant, her friend. She would weep over his father’s infidelity, and he would comfort her, telling her what she wanted to hear: that his father loved her, would always love her best, that she was the most beautiful.

M. nods her head. He makes her lie down on the wide bed with her head propped up on the big white pillow. He sits beside her with her makeup kit. He plucks her eyebrows and removes a hair from her chin. He thinks of the folktale of the woman who needs a love potion and has to get a whisker from the lion to obtain it. M. is quite a lion, he thinks.

He massages her skin with her anti-wrinkle cream. Then he paints her face carefully, applying makeup, masking the lines around her eyes and mouth, hiding the age spots, what the French call “the marks of the cemetery.” He outlines her eyes with kohl, rouging her cheeks, puffing powder on her nose. He helps her up and chooses a long black dress with sequins on the bodice. He does up the zipper at the back, clasps a triple string of pearls around her long neck, spreads her diaphanous scarf decorously around her thin shoulders. He
sprays a little perfume on her long neck. “Beautiful. Ravishing,” he says.

Saying, “You have made me beautiful,” M. kisses him on the lips. He stares back at her. She does, indeed, look beautiful and youthful with her white hair shimmering on her shoulders, the long black sheath of a dress that hugs her slender form, her face so skillfully made up, her arms covered with the fine silk scarf, a diamond bracelet that glints in the light. Almost he desires her.

He dresses up in the black pantsuit that she hands him from her closet. He stands beside her so that she can admire him. “
Trés chic
,” she says, smoothing down the lapel of the jacket. She takes his arm, and they walk up the road, linked together and laughing like an old married couple. They go through the revolving doors into the Closerie des Lilas at the top of the Rue d’Assas. He has seen it before, read the exorbitant prices on the menu, and imagined how many hungry Ethiopians the price of one of these dishes would feed. M. tells him famous authors have eaten here. “You can order a
bifteck à la Hemingway
, if you like,” she says, laughing.

The couple is waiting for them at the bar. Dawit is introduced to M.’s editor and publisher, Gustave, and his wife, Simone. “My most favorite people,” M. says, kissing them on both cheeks and once again. The editor is the head of the old and distinguished French publishing house that has published many of her books, a portly gentleman with a thick red neck, broken capillaries in his cheeks, small, astute, slightly slanting blue-gray eyes, and thick white hair carefully slicked back from his forehead. Dawit thinks he looks like Jean
Gabin, whom he has seen in a French film. He wears a shiny gray double-breasted summer suit and a signature ring on his plump pinkie.

His much younger pretty wife is dark-haired, deep-blue-eyed, and small. She lifts her pale face up to Dawit, her dark eyes sparkling with malice and interest. She wears a large square diamond on her ring finger. She writes, too, M. tells Dawit, though nonfiction.

The headwaiter ushers them to a good table on the terrace near the trellis with its climbing plants. The night is warm, the stars visible, the sky an impossible midnight blue. Dawit feels distanced from the scene. What is he doing here with these people in this strange country? He watches himself from afar, as many of the other diners do. They stare at him, the only African in the restaurant, young and well-dressed in his tailored suit, sitting erect beside these older white people. They are wondering, as he is, what he is doing with these people in this celebrated place, while most of his kind suffer quietly. What would Asfa think?

Gustave leans toward Dawit, speaking slowly, as if he might not understand. “We are pleased to meet you. We have heard such good things.”

M. puts her hand on Dawit’s arm as though he belonged to her. “He’s quite brilliant, you know. Speaks so many languages! Perfect French! Even some Italian! He went to Le Rosey in Switzerland as a boy with all the Arab sheikhs, Egyptian royals, the Rothschilds. Imagine! And he’s remarkably diligent and efficient! You can’t imagine how much energy he has! Up at dawn. Works for hours! It’s quite frightening.
Who would have guessed what a dark gem I found in a café? A brown diamond.”

Dawit sees the editor’s intelligent gaze travel admiringly from his face to his narrow waist and hips. Simone, too, eyes him hungrily from under thick black lashes. They clearly think Dawit is using all this energy for one purpose, and M. seems to enjoy their misapprehension. He smiles at them, batting his long eyelashes and showing off his white teeth in a wide grin, playing the role of the black lover. Like everyone else these French intellectuals are all
au fond
racists, he decides, though they have the good grace to pretend not to be. They are probably considering the length of his penis.

He recalls the many times M. comes to him in the night, waking him from his sound sleep. She switches on the lamp on the piano and asks him to sit on the piano stool and watch, as she does it to herself with her hand. In her pleasure she calls out a name he does not quite catch: perhaps the name of the lover from long ago. She tells him she has never forgotten him, her first and lost love. “He was so much in love with me—but my family ruined it all. My mother made him take us all out to dinner and pay for the entire family, and my brothers were so rude to him—humiliated him.” This lover has, probably, been utterly transformed over the years; perhaps he never existed at all.

Now she makes him tell his family stories over the lobster salad,
the gigot d’agneau
, the
flageolets
, and the bottles of pink champagne. Apparently the editor still feels M. is worth treating lavishly, or perhaps it is just an old habit. Dawit wonders if they really like one another. Certainly they seem to enjoy
one another’s company, the splendid evening, the excellent food. The conversation is lively, filled with allusions to literary life that are difficult to follow. Dawit enjoys the delicate dishes, the champagne, the quick repartee.

Then Simone turns toward him. “Do tell us more about your life in Ethiopia, what it was like there,” she urges.

He explains that he was only a child there and often away all year at boarding school in Rolle or in the winter in Gstaad, where the school moved in the winter months. He tells them his father was absent much of the time, following the Emperor to his palaces in Addis Ababa or in Dire Dawa, and increasingly abroad. The Emperor voyaged a lot, particularly in the last years, because he felt more comfortable on these state visits than at home. Everyone wanted to go along, but Dawit’s mother would often remain behind in Harar, where she was busy with good works, the schools, the hospital, the Ras Makonnen, which was near the palace. She was often with the Orthodox clergy, who huddled around her. Mostly, in boarding school, he was terribly homesick, he confesses. They treated him with a certain deference because his nobility was stressed, but to them he remained an African boy. He learned to ski, to play tennis, to ride horseback, and to play poker. He spent his time reading books. He says he knows very little about the Emperor’s complicated politics, though he would overhear things his father said.

“What was the Emperor like?” Simone wants to know, turning toward him with interest.

His experience with the Emperor was that of the beloved child of a close and trusted associate. He still remembers waking one night as a little boy in his crib and finding the
Emperor leaning over him, giving him his blessing. When Dawit was a child, the Emperor seemed extraordinary, with his small body and big head. He spoke many languages, remembered everyone’s name and what they did and had done. He could be extremely charming. Dawit remembers the sparkle in his eyes.

M. urges him to tell them about the pillows. “It’s a wonderful story. It reminds me of the one Nabokov told me about the matches. The ones which an admiral used to show Nabokov the sea when he was a little boy,” she explains, using her fine hands to show the flat, calm sea and then forming her long fingers into a steeple to show how the admiral placed the matches to show a rough sea. “And then later, when he and his father were running away during the Russian Revolution, they met an old homeless man with a sack around his shoulders, walking across a bridge in St. Petersburg, I think it was. The man asked Nabokov’s father for a match to light his cigarette, and in the flare of the match he saw it was the admiral from long ago.” She knows everyone, has even known Nabokov.

He tells his pillow story, and everyone looks at him with great interest. “What wonderful details,” Simone says, clapping her small hands. “The dangling feet. I knew that Haile Selassie was a small man, but I never realized they would place him up high like that.”

“So that he would appear to be above everyone else,” Dawit says, looking down at her.

Seeing them all turn toward him and watch him in silence with great interest, he is obliged to go on. He feels as he did as a boy at the dinner table, when the grown-ups turned
toward him with interest and tenderness, encouraging him to speak.

Of course, later, toward the end, it was not clear to him if the Emperor was really aware of the severity of the drought and the terrible famine it caused, he tells them. At that point, in 1974, he was very old and probably senile. Most of the people in his circle were preoccupied, it seemed to Dawit, by protocol and their own status, rather than telling the Emperor what he needed to know for his own and the country’s sake. Dawit tells them he heard stories of people giving themselves up to the Derg, offended that their names had not been called with the other famous ones!

As with the French Revolution, a bad harvest, famine, and rising prices exacerbated what was already a dire situation. Then the military revolted, just as it had long before in 1928 when Haile Selassie came into power. It took control of radio and television, and spread information about vast sums of the Emperor’s money hidden in Switzerland while the people starved.

Simone questions him about his own life there. He feels her move her knee toward his, and he gently presses his leg against hers, smiling with complicity at M. He feels obliged to speak, though he hesitates to tell his terrible tale.

He says he remembers the sudden silence in the streets and looking out the window at the heavily armed troops, the army jeeps everywhere. The atmosphere in the palace was probably much like that in the French court during the Revolution. People had come from all over the country looking for security around the Emperor, still believing he could protect them, despite his age-altered mind, his inability to rule.
They slept all over the palace, huddled together in stunned disbelief, as the courtiers fled the sinking ship, going abroad, deserting, trying desperately to save their own skins. Only a few remained loyal in the end. His mother—he says her name, Sarah—was one of them.