Текст книги "Grace"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

31

I accepted the assignment from Bea and we flew from winter back toward warmth, taking the PATH train from World Financial Center to Newark in the early evening rush. Our plane lifted and tacked out over the bay, then up the Hudson in harmony with the boats and the evening traffic along the West Side Highway and Midtown skyline. The entire city was aglow with activity, and the silhouettes of the buildings were a calming sight, and we fell asleep peacefully.

We woke the next morning with the Atlantic sun over the Netherlands, and changed flights in Amsterdam, where we stopped to buy buttery Dutch pastries, and the European papers. It was always refreshing to see the news from a perspective beyond the information firewall of America, and shocking every time to realize how thick that firewall was. Sylvie said much the same, as we scanned the papers from around the world in the free Dutch port.

“Which do you want?” I asked.

“Let’s take them all.” She gathered up a stack. “We can compare them and sort out for ourselves how much truth is in each and what’s really going on.”

As we fastened ourselves in for the next leg of the journey I told her how much I was looking forward to the trip.

“That’s nice of you to say, sweetheart,” she said, turning from the window. “I know you’re only going to make me happy, and it does make me happy.”

“I have my own reasons, too. Did you ever wonder why us, though?”

“No. I know why.” She pulled her pashmina around her neck and leaned against me.

“Tell me what you think,” I said.

“A lot of it is stuff you don’t believe.”

“Try me.”

“A shrink might say our neuroses match. A believer would say when we are open on the deep level the universe sends to us what we need, always. A pragmatist would shrug and say it is the causal outcome of a chain of factors we can never know completely, and probably shouldn’t worry too much about. A traditionalist might say people like us belong together. A mystic, that it is only mutual submission to what is happening to us. The Greeks would say it is éros. But ask, is it also philia? Pragma? Agápe? My mother just wants to know if you are good to me. If I am good to you.”

“What do you tell her?”

“Yes.” She laughed with her eyes and kissed my cheek.

“And the rest?”

“I think if all those ways of looking at the question exist it must be rich and complex enough to sustain so many different ways of looking; the richest, most complex thing there is, which we know less about than we do the cosmos, so only a fool would think to say anything definitive. Maybe when gods walked the earth and showed themselves to us, there was certainty. Except they retreated from us, or we from them, and now – thinking that by knowing the laws of the universe we know the universe – we celebrate our reason as all there is, like little baby children who believe themselves grow. And still, it is there for us. And somewhere, I like to think, they are smiling, watching lovingly while we bumble about, claiming to know their intent, except it really is just a great mystery. So what do I know? I have given up on theories of love. All we can have is the experience and practice of it, allowing the rest to work through us. That is enough. We were willing and ready and submitted. That is what matters. Unless we decide to go all the way as seers do. But for us it is probably best to simply accept it.” She squeezed my hand.

I did not tell her I did not agree with all of it. I had no theory of my own, or anything more adorned than that she made me a better man. That was satisfaction enough, as we lifted through the sky, and fell asleep against each other.

When we woke again the Rift Valley had split open below us, ample and lush. We had a five-day safari planned. After that I would report my story, and eventually we would meet back in Farodoro. Beyond that we did not have plans.

“Where would you like to live?” I asked, as the plane descended.

“With you. Wherever you wish,” she indulged me, not too convincingly. “Let’s just enjoy ourselves, and not talk about it yet, because if you wish to live somewhere I do not, we are going to have a fantastic little fight. You will begin with whatever argument you have readied in your mind, and it will be some kind of tautology or other, which I will tenderly deconstruct, for your own good, with actual facts, so there is no winning for you that way. Next, we will start psychologizing, and after that it will be all down to the emotions. You will throw up both your hands, and say, ‘Please. Just listen to me, woman.’ Of course you will not say the last, because you are not stupid that way, but you will think it, honey, and I will overhear.

“I will calmly point my finger, right here.” She poked my chest playfully. “And say, ‘I heard you plenty. Is that the best you got? Cause if it is, you just see here, man.’

“Yes. It’s going to be an exquisite little fight. I wish we could have it now, but I’m too tired, so just you wait. We’ll argue, and eventually get through it, as soon as we agree. But in the end, you’ll see you will agree with me, and everything will be beautiful again.”

“When I agree with you?”

“Yes. And you know why you will?”

“Tell me.”

“Because I would follow you – if you had somewhere to go with meaning for you, even if it was simple as, ‘This is where I truly wish to be right now.’ You do not, though, and I do. But you are going to make us go through that awful fight first. That is fine, as I said. I’ll win, and off we’ll go happily ever after to make a real home for us.”

We had been going twenty straight hours by then, and were boarding our final flight over the dense, red valley and equatorial vegetation, then up into the spindly mountains, where the engines of the plane could be heard laboring to clear the peaks.

We landed on a narrow, old-fashioned airstrip beside a tin-roofed terminal, and made our way through customs behind locals laden with oversized suitcases and appliances brought back from the world beyond.

Whenever I arrived on the continent what I first noticed was not poverty, or the customs agent’s thinly-veiled request for baksheesh, or even the heat. What I felt when we disembarked in Africa was the sense of ease I always re-encountered upon arrival. Where in other countries I always met, or feared meeting, some occluded notion of who I was, in Africa the things that clouded the distance between others and myself was more subtle. If someone who did not know you needed to casually question your intentions or intelligence or humanity, he would find a better reason than your skin. Where there was enmity it was over real resources, or judgment against a true offense caused by some legitimately fucked-up thing about you, or your tribe.

Beyond that I was expected to wear the mask of my social self as everyone did, understanding these were merely masks, and only those who took them too seriously, with no space between self and mask, were harmed. Everyone else knew there was an interior beneath the surface of everything. The outside mattered, but only just so. I observed the sense of release I felt as an invisible burden lifted. Then I noticed the heat, and soon after that my own foul temper.

We had emerged into the humid arrivals hall, where the air was oppressive as a truncheon, and I retrieved my mental list of everything that drove me crazy about Africa, all of which boiled down to the fact that generations after decolonization, the electricity still did not work. Maybe that’s blaming the victim, or maybe it was a reasonable minimum standard for an international airport; in whichever case the air-conditioning and lights in the hall were out, and we were lost in the sea of people.

Sylvie’s mood was undampened and I tried to keep mine to myself when I saw how invigorated she was by the new landscape beyond the glass doors. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “It’s like an Eden.”

“It’s like hell,” I returned, as we searched for the driver from our tour company amid the bustle of the hall.

“Relax, we’re in paradise. Besides, you must know by now how sad it makes me feel when you criticize everything.”

I was uncertain how to respond as I realized she was serious. “I did not know.”

“You don’t know everything. Maybe sometimes, not even yourself and what you are feeling. How much sadness and anger – outrage and indignation at the world, but also just pure leaden rage – you carry. Or how much that weighs and space it takes up.”

There are seemingly insignificant things people say in close quarters, whose substance takes a while to come clear. Maybe it’s something they’ve said before, maybe you disagree, but you stop and hear it fully for once, because you realize it is bound up with, if not everything mean in the world, but a radius you can affect. She was not angry or skeptical or annoyed. She was hurt, a thought I could not bear. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Tell me how you would have me be instead.”

“Like I said, just relax. Stop weighing and comparing and ranking and judging everything you see. Only take it in and experience it every once in a while, the way they did in Eden.”

She gave my hand a quick squeeze, and released it when she spied our names on a neat, hand-stenciled sign across the hall. We began toward it.

Our driver was a jauntily dressed man in his mid-twenties, named Ali, of mixed African and Indian extraction, boundless energy, and morbid good cheer, as he helped us with the luggage and led us to a waiting Range Rover.

“I see you survived the flight,” he remarked as we exited the heat of the terminal. “You know they crash sometimes.”

We loaded into the truck, where he had been listening to bangra at full volume, which he quickly cranked down. “Sorry, boss,” he said, not fully apologetic. “It’s my theme song.”

I eyed him warily, still undecided how reliable he was, as I realized I had forgotten to exchange currency, and announced I was going back to the hall to buy some of the local money.

“Don’t bother with the touts here in the airport,” Ali advised. “The bank machine will be broken, and the brokers will only offer you ninety percent of the bank rate.”

“What is the right rate?”

“I can get you forty percent over the listed one any day of the week. Fifty on Sundays.”

I told him I was going to go to the restroom before the long drive, and ventured back inside, unconvinced of his claims. When I checked around the hall, though, it was as he said: the powerless ATM had a cardboard out-of-service sign affixed to it, and the currency kiosk took too large a markup. I exchanged two hundred dollars to be safe, and returned to the car.

“Did you check?” Ali asked.

“Yes, Ali,” I said.

“I would have checked, too,” he replied. “It is no offense to me, boss. But I can get you the best rate. Anything else you require, just let me know. I am the man for the job.”

“Thank you, Ali.”

“Air conditioning or window, boss?” he asked, as we pulled away from the curb.

“Ali. Don’t call me boss.”

“Whatever you want, sahib. Hakuna matata,” he turned and winked to me. “Means, don’t worry.”

“The window, please,” Sylvie laughed gaily.

He powered the windows down with the push of a button on his console, and hot air suffocated the interior of the car, until we cleared the parking lot and sped out onto the dense, new black road, which he navigated expertly through airport traffic, skirting the edge of the city to point us up toward the cool, green hills.

“How is lady boss?” he asked. “Is the air too much?”

“I’m fine, Ali. Thank you for asking.” I caught Sylvie’s reflection in the side mirror as she smiled, and I began to relax at last.

An hour later we were in the bush, with nothing around except an occasional zebra or giraffe herd by the side of the road, which by then had turned into a pretty improvisational affair. We continued climbing up over a range of hills, where the sweet air cooled enough to begin to hush our jangled nerves.

The vegetation thinned once we reached the other side of the hills, near our base camp on the plains, a set of low mud-colored buildings, with a brick-lined walkway and sparse garden, which, like the rest of the vegetation on the plains, was in the midst of a drought, though not so parched as the wilderness.

Our rooms were airy and simple. There was a sitting area with a sofa, a large bed draped with mosquito netting, and two nightstands. Out back we discovered an open-air shower, where we bathed in the cool waters and dying sun, before heading to the dining room. The beer at the bar was stored unrefrigerated in a dark pantry, but was cool to the touch, and refreshing when we drank it.

As we sat, the chef could be seen in the outdoor kitchen, and when he noticed us he came to let us know there would be eland for dinner, and offered something to tide us over if we were hungry.

We were, and he provided bread and fruit, along with some roasted peanuts, all fresh and good. Out in the field beyond the kitchen there was a commotion from the camp askaris, who could be heard chanting energetically, arranged in a circle, moving in turns in the distance.

“What are they doing?” Sylvie asked, trying to get a better glimpse. The barman demurred to answer, but Ali, who had come into the dining room, told her.

“Drinking the blood from the eland.”

“Why?” she asked. “Don’t they get meat too?”

“In their tribe they drink the blood first, because it is life, and it is a sin to them to waste it.”

He offered to arrange for us to try some, but we stuck with our bread and fruit.

That evening we had a supper of the just-butchered eland, with garden vegetables, then sat around a fire on the broad lawn, where we were joined by a group just in from Tanzania. They had all been traveling awhile, but had met each other in a bar near Kilimanjaro. They were already sick of each other, though, and after not too long we were sick of them, too.

There were three couples: one Australian; one British – she was Scottish, he was an Englishman; and an American couple from New Jersey with squeaky voices, who worked for an NGO. We called them the Coalition. The Americans we named Higher and Higher, because of their voices, which were like brittle glass. I did not like their politics either – their beliefs were State Department boilerplate and not their own. But mostly I hated them because of those voices. The Aussies I disliked because they were Australian. I had nothing special against the Brits yet, besides the ostentatious understatement the English specialize in, and Edward’s red pants – the leisure uniform that year of men who did not work for a living and their acolytes – and the fact that they were riding with the others.

All of them were full of talk about what they had seen, and – after a few beers – what they had heard about the rebels on the other side of the mountains. After that, they were full of “Who do you know in London?” and “How about New York?” and “Where did you go last year?” “Where did you study?” “Isn’t the Aussie dollar surging?” “Hasn’t the price of classified Bordeaux just gotten crazy?” “It is the Asian speculators.” “It buoys the Aussies as well, though” and “Now even Everest is gone all to hell.”

“Say, have ever you met the queen?”

“Why, we see her every year at Ascot.”

“What’s Ascot?”

“A horse race.”

“Oh my God! You guys hang out with the queen?! Like how awesome is that?!”

“Like totally awesome!! How come you get to go to the races with the queen?”

“Not exactly with the queen, dear.”

“Well, no, not exactly with her, dear,” Effie said. “But we are more than just in the stadium.”

Sylvie had greater patience than I did, and managed to humor them a bit longer to make certain my irritation did not show enough to put them against us.

I had moved over to a corner of the fire alone, and, when she joined me there under the evening stars, I asked whether she was in the safari club already. “Just because they are not thoughtful people does not mean we should be less thoughtful when we deal with them,” she said cheerfully.

“That’s generous of you.”

“It’s not for them,” she corrected me, as they grew drunkenly loud on the other side of the fire. “It is for myself, and how I want to be in the world.”

I was always moved by the depth of her integrity, how she did not care how others were but remained always true to herself regardless of what there was to lose or gain, and tried hard to be the same way in every action she made and every word she spoke. It made me feel serene to be near, and I loved her for it.

Back in our room we closed the wooden shutters over the window, casting out the world and sealing ourselves in absolute night, and only the occasional sound of them still out on the lawn. But even that could not dispel the tranquility of that deep, certain darkness, the cool, ironed sheets and warmth of her there next to me.

The next morning we were awakened at dawn by the sound of the camp’s grey parrot squawking across the lawn, and made our way to the canteen for a breakfast of ugali, the local porridge, fruit, and hot chai. The Coalition was hung over, complaining the food was not much to speak of, until we finally loaded our packs into a large, military lorry, built to move troops and supplies over the roughest roads, and were off, just after sunrise, across the plains.

We reached our next station by evening, a cluster of platforms high in the trees, covered in white canvas. After we unpacked they fed us again, and we climbed the ladders for an early night, in order to get a good start the next morning on the game in the lowlands.

32

We awoke high in the trees, and from our roost watched the sunrise; and under the sun, the savannah rolling into the far distance. At the horizon’s edge the silhouette of mountains greeted the plain. The jewel-like dew in the grasses all the way across the savannah reflected back to us the minutes-old light like miniature stars, insufflating us with a feeling of indestructible well-being.

Looking out from the treetops was like looking back in time itself, and, from our ancient perch, the rising sensation of glimpsing with the spirit’s own eye, for a vanishing moment, how people must have first looked at the world.

After joining the others for breakfast in the dazzling early stillness, we hoisted ourselves into the back of the lorry with our daypacks and set out for the plains. The brush was already awake with matutinal animals going to water: the rhinoceros, aloof with power; the graceful, anodyne giraffes; the unruly zebra herds; and everywhere the hyenas lurking, slick and lowdown in the grass.

By midday we still had not seen much large game, though, until we happened upon a pride of elephants plashing in the mud to cool themselves from the torching heat.

“Yes, they do bury their dead sometimes,” Ali said, answering the inevitable question. “They use tools. They have names. They do everything we do.”

The others thrilled and snapped photos with impossibly large camera lenses. I had been on safari before, and was content to soak in the landscape, and clicked sparingly when I had a good shot of the landscape, or animals, or Sylvie, beaming with joy from the bounty of the wide open land.

After the elephants wandered off we drove down to the lake, where a group of villagers had paddled in dugout canoes from the other shore, working their way up and down the banks, trading maize, meat, tin pans, corn liquor, and cloth on a floating market. We bought fruit and nuts from them, which were safe to eat, and took our lunch in the shade near the shore.

After supper that evening we saw our first leopard, dashing across the plains after a Grant’s gazelle he had separated from the herd. “Look at the cheetah,” one of the others called, before another corrected him.

The big cat gave chase, and in the truck some of us were for the leopard, and some for the antelope. When it started, and cut back toward the herd, the leopard seemed to flag, and those who were for the gazelle cheered, until the leopard lunged up in a great desperate leap to take it down.

The group recoiled or else thrilled to the sight of blood, according to their makeup, but were all primed and eager for more.

“Gazelle gets away, life continues. Leopard gets gazelle, life continues,” Ali planed his hand evenly.

“Look, there’s another leopard, up in that tree,” someone called, as Ali brought the lorry to a halt.

We were stopped there beneath it for upward of half an hour, as the leopard slept through the hot afternoon, and the rest snapped endless pictures of the cat, and then pictures of themselves with the leopard in the background.

We spent two more days on the savannah like that, and every day was like the one before it. But Sylvie was happy, and what pleasure I had was in that.

The evening of the third day, as we headed back to camp for the night, the plain was heading to water and eat or else den down hungry. We stopped near a large mudhole, where the hippopotamus and okapi cooled themselves in herd, but suddenly all scattered amid a chaos of bleats and cries, as a dark rumble rolled low and powerful through the earth.

On the other side of the mudhole two colossal lions were circling one another, backing up toward the water. They were uninterested in prey. Off to the other side, a lioness in estrous watched them with supreme indifference.

The lions displayed their manes in turn, escalating the threat in stages until they filled the plains with echoing thunder, which terrified everything within hearing. Even at our distance, with the protection of the truck and guards, we feared being any nearer. The hair of their manes extended on end, until they were present in all their unbridled power and savage majesty.

One of them sprung an instant later, and it was clear, as they fought there, it was not for anything but the abundance of the future, which waited stoically for the hero of that contest, whichever of them it was. Even those in the truck were too awestruck by their battle to wager on it.

The titans rose and fought in the air on uplifted legs with gruesome ferocity, each clawing for the throat of his opponent, before crashing back to the earth, where they fought ever more violently in the dust. It was not long before one of them began to fade, the other to triumph over him. The vanquishing lion, sensing his victory, let loose a thunderous roar in the red evening sun, declaring his dominion over the plain and right to ride further on down time’s arrow.

When he roared next his foe did not respond, but began stealing away in defeat. The alpha would not let him part, though, until he had sealed his conquest with a coup de grâce, which he did in a swift brutal blow that left the other denatured. The hero went off with the lioness after that; the other, back into the dry savannah grass to die.

The others snapped away with their cameras, never taking them down from their faces the entire time. Sylvie was gripped between watching and turning away in distress.

“It’s horrific,” she said, her face twisted in pain. “We should not be seeing this.”

“It is the jungle,” I shrugged my hands. “It is what we are here to see.”

“Now I have seen it. I am ready to leave.”

Ali heard her, and turned the engine and headed back to camp, as the others still thrilled and cooed like pigeons at what they had seen.

“When the lion goes off with the lioness they make love three days. Thirty times every day, and do not eat,” Ali reported over the drumming motor.

“That is why they fought so hard,” the others joked, as they reviewed the footage they had shot.

“What will happen to the one who lost?”

“He will die. Or if he lives he will lose his mane, and it is a bad life for him after that.”

“That poor fellow,” said Effie. “Isn’t it awful, Edward?”

“I only hope,” Edward said, still looking behind us to the lion in the grass, “when he had them, he let them swing a bit from time to time.”

At camp there was a fire prepared, and the smell of roasting meat, which warmed against the oncoming chill. It was our last night at that station, so we were permitted showers to cleanse the red savannah dust, as the evening sun departed.

While Sylvie wrote in her journal, I returned to the campfire, where the others were already gathered, drinking the last of the cool beers, which Ali had put out.

“How did Ms. Sylvie like the big show?” Ali asked, coming over to where I was seated.

“She liked it fine, Ali.”

“What about you, sahib? You didn’t like it so hot?”

“It was something to see.”

“You cannot let the others bother you so much, boss. Just focus on the land. On the first day you see the green and golds. On the first night the moon and stars. On the second day you hear the birds and insects. On the third day you can see the difference between the types of plants and rocks. On the fourth day the insects no longer bother you. If you stay out here long enough and look the right way, you will eventually be able to see everything and how connected it is. The rest won’t bother you so much then.”

“Thanks, Ali.”

“You hear what happened in the north?” One of the Coalition cut us off, coming over to where we were.

“No?”

“They are all done for,” he said. “They sent in planes from Brussels, and those rebel boys have nowhere left to run.”

We gossiped until the beer was exhausted, and someone produced a bottle of the local spirit and passed it around the fire. The others added it to their chai, not knowing a bad bottle of the stuff could blind you.

We had dinner together sitting on dry logs, reliving the day’s adventure, until one of the Coalition produced a ukulele and started playing it, not too horribly, but he started trying to sing and had no voice. Sylvie and I slipped away after that, as they began to carry on under the stars.

From our tent in the trees we heard Effie sing a Gaelic dirge as we tried to sleep, and I thought less meanly of them for it, and was even happy for the music.

We remained awake deep into morning, whispering and laughing idly under the stars, until I shifted myself toward her beneath the covers.

“You still want to, after what we saw today?” Sylvie asked, moving away from me.

“I do,” I said.

“It was awful how he suffered,” she said.

“He got to lord over things awhile,” I replied. “It should not stop us from making love.”

“Maybe,” she allowed, as I cupped her breasts in my hands, “but only if we make love all the way.”

“I thought we always made love all the way.”

“That is not what I mean,” she answered, moving her body back toward mine.

Her voice in the darkness was clear and sultry, and I felt her pelvis move under mine, until I could feel each vertebrae.

“Come,” she said. “Make love to me all the way.”

“I will,” I told her.

“Until we make the world again?” she asked.

“No one can make the world again.”

“I feel divine tonight. Don’t you think it would be beautiful to make the world again?”

I thought how magnificent that would be. We made love and I told her we could try to make the world again. If we succeeded or even if we did not, it was beautiful and good to try. Again and again we tried.