Elegy on Kinderklavier (12 page)

For the first years of his life with the Wheelers though, Sambul slept in a small, narrow room exactly halfway between the cavernous lounges of the estate and the small bundle of shacks that the servants and guides occupied. Beyond the shacks were the pool and the big safari tents and, beyond that, the wilderness. Often, walking up to the great house for dinner, Sambul would encounter a particularly intrepid bush deer stilled perfectly in the middle of the path and the two would stand there in the near silence of the dusk, watching each other, Sambul thinking of the meandering route the animal must have taken after jumping the fence, of the way it must have walked so quietly along the pool and past the tents and shacks, just to arrive there, at Sambul's feet.

In Sambul's adult memory, the subsequent years he'd spent at the estate condensed themselves mostly into the passage of several long afternoons with Soren, full of their desperate attempts to fight the heat and boredom. When later pressed by the braver and more curious of the servants, Sambul found himself capable of recalling for them other details. Sambul could remember taking his school lessons from Martha Wheeler in the mornings, for instance, in the company of Soren, a handful of the servants' young children, and
an old woman from the local village. These sessions were held in what Soren called the “solarium,” and when Sambul thought about it he found himself struck again by the way the morning light came in through the windows, backlighting the many fly-aways of Martha Wheeler's hair into a gentle, messy corona.

There were other things too, that came floating back: Sambul walking slowly around the rooms of the estate when the Wheelers took their annual trip to the States for the holidays, trailing his fingertips along every wall of the house; Martha returning from Nairobi every season with new athletic clothes for both Soren and Sambul, each of whom complained bitterly about the way they matched. But these things only returned to Sambul's mind when one of the servants—their disbelieving, almost painfully curious faces raised to him late at night—gathered the nerve to ask if it was true about how he had been raised as family to the Wheelers when he was a boy. The rest of the time, watching as Soren talked animatedly to one of the tourist chaperones or trying not to watch as Soren quietly attempted to eat dinner as he sweated through his shirt with fever, Sambul thought only of those afternoons.

The boys would begin each day around two o'clock, after lunch and after Sambul had finished his job helping the maids clean the tourist tents, picking up the cigarette butts, laundering the towels, and beating the beds for scorpions. They usually met in Sambul's room, lying on their backs, shirtless, against the cool tile floor and staring up at the posters of the various football stars Martha brought Sambul by request from the city. They talked idly of football sides and tactics or the various strange and amusing characters that had appeared in the most recent bunch of tourists. Once in a while, if Martha had returned from a shopping trip recently, the boys had a new tape of music to listen to. When this happened, they would listen together to the best song of the album on repeat until they both
knew every word. Then Sambul would goad Soren into performing for him—the tall, thin, blond boy standing atop Sambul's bed and crooning with exaggerated earnestness into an invisible microphone. Sambul liked it best when Soren would make some motion—running his hand slowly back through his hair, for instance, while tracing the long trajectory of a single, wavering note. Eventually it would cool off enough to go outside and one or the other boy would slowly stand up and stretch, fake yawning, hamming it up, before bolting out the door and calling out names of the things the other was slower than.

The running became a feeling in itself; the late afternoon breeze pushed over their torsos and faces as they sweated, cooling them as the light got long and reddish over the brush and the dirt roads. They were allowed out of the compound as long as it was still light and they stayed together, and their jogs traced long, erratic laps of the relevant geography: the place where the road dove into the river that would cover it in winter and reveal it again in summer; the small bluff from which the tourists in their jeeps were taken to watch the hippos and elephants loll around a mud hole; the circling path around a tree where small tribes of monkeys scolded them, occasionally tossing down fruit cores at the boys' heads. When bored or winded Sambul and Soren would stop, dallying along the main road that led away from the Wheelers' land or lazily following one of the women from the village as she herded her goats back toward the cluster of improvised shanties in the distance.

They played a game sometimes when all else failed to entertain them. They called it keepy-uppy, and it consisted of each taking off their shoes and socks and venturing a few rows into the small field that the Wheelers allowed the servants to keep behind their quarters. It was never clear to Sambul, even later, why Soren and he had felt the need to do this, to draw the veil of tall green corn stalks behind them, but it is what they did, wordlessly, when one
or the other wanted to play. The game was this: Sambul would lie down on his back in the cool, soft dirt between the rows and Soren would carefully step up until he was standing on Sambul's chest, the soles of his feet roughly in the area of Sambul's pectoral muscles. Soren would then see, counting in a whisper (here another mystery to Sambul in his middle age), how long Sambul could bear it, could keep Soren up. Eventually, lungs bursting, Sambul would roll, sending Soren flying off, laughing, and then the boys would switch positions. Sometimes to make it more interesting, one or the other would tease the one on the ground by balancing on one foot and placing the other sole ever so lightly against the prone boy's face, nibbling the cheek with his toes. Even at the time Sambul sensed the intimacy of this—the smooth hold of the corn's husks, the weak yellow sun wavering behind Soren's listing head suddenly infused with a sense of nervous joy. This is how the memory would continue to feel, anyway, even many years later, when Sambul could recognize neither boy in his and Soren's tired faces.

This arrangement lasted until sometime after Soren's thirteenth birthday, when, on their holiday trip back to the States, Martha Wheeler was killed in an automobile accident and died, leaving Soren and his father to return to the estate alone and defeated, as if all the words had gone out of both of them. That fall, Mr. Wheeler announced that he was sending both Soren and Sambul off to boarding schools in Nairobi for the remainder of their education. Soren was sent to a preparatory academy mostly filled with the children of European diplomats, while Sambul arrived on his first day at a Catholic school on the outskirts of the city that specialized in native children who had been identified (by the foreign businessmen in the city who employed their families) as showing some amount of promise. For a year the two boys saw each other only at the training sessions and matches of the Massey Insurance Juniors, a local football
club that both boys played for and that Danforth Wheeler owned a controlling stake in. That was only for the one season, however. By the next time Sambul and Soren found themselves alone in the fields together, Soren would be returned to the continent with an American degree, Sambul would be head manager of the Wheeler estate and safari business, and Soren would be dying.

•

Soren waited until all the guides, redeployed for the day as messengers, had returned from the villages before ordering Sambul and Benny to wrap up the body and put it on the rear board of one of the jeeps. No one was missing, and there were no reports of an unfamiliar man in the area. Soren was quiet as they drove back to the compound. He made them go very slowly, and allowed no one else besides Sambul and Benny in the vehicle, as if to limit the number of people forced to have contact with the nameless man's corpse, sheathed as it was in a way that looked both ridiculous and ceremonial. Benny had returned to the spring with several rounds of old, yellowed muslin. Standing there before the body, laid out in the dirt between Soren and Sambul, Benny had turned his round, pitted face up to them, only then recognizing the inadequacy of the cloth.

Now, riding in the back seat of the open-topped vehicle, Sambul had one hand over the swaddled form tied to the luggage board. Beneath his fingers the man's body felt neither cold nor warm, only hardened. The deep tone of the man's skin could not be masked by the thin muslin and its deeper hue shone through in an ill-defined way. As they entered the gates and slowly trolled up through the safari camp, a few guests leaned out the front flaps of their big tents or stood on the porches of packed earth and watched them pass.

Sambul knew it was not a good solution, but thought it was the only one. Soren for some reason hadn't even wanted to move the body, other than to remove it from the water, as if to preserve the basic facts of the story that might be told to any family member the guides might bring back.

Sambul had squatted beside Soren and, quietly pointing with a pinky finger, suggested that the yellowed flesh of the calluses Soren was looking for did in fact pad the man's palms, forming a ridge at the top of the ball of the right hand. Sambul knew that Soren knew that all the men had been thinking the same thing since first seeing the body: that this man was just another of the migrant workers who wandered undocumented over the border, that they'd find no name, no family, and no story.

“He doesn't have anything with him for travel, though,” Soren had argued, looking up at the other guides, who watched from a small distance away, leaning against the vehicles and spitting.

“And there're no wounds, no immediate cause for death,” Sambul added helpfully, without knowing why. The guides squinted at Sambul for a moment then shrugged and readjusted their feet. Soren had looked at Sambul for a minute, blank-faced, before sighing and turning away.

By the time all the guides returned, it was too late in the day for anyone leaving the estate in one of the Land Rovers to make it to town and the municipal morgue before nightfall, when control of the highway reverted to the rural gangs who financed the rebels with robbery and beheadings. There was also the matter of the party that had been planned for that night, for the twenty-five or so guests currently in residence at the safari camp. So Sambul eventually had to say it, because Soren seemed to need him to, had to suggest the walk-in freezer in the great house's basement kitchen.

When he, Benny, and Soren reached the house, Sambul helped
them carry the body into the frigid space, each hefting it under his right arm.

The party was held for each group of guests on the last night of their stay. The camp hosted guests on ten-day rotations and Sambul, overseeing the safari outings, had this summer become familiar with how Soren would appear about three days in, whipping one of the vehicles at high speed up to where the guests in their open-topped jeeps would be taking their break after the morning game drive, and hopping dramatically out of his car. This was how he began, Sambul knew, how Soren started his process. By the day before the party the guests inevitably felt that he had become one of them, and were excited by the presence of the master of the estate right beside them in the lounge chairs of the pool in the early afternoon's clear sunlight.

Sambul always wondered at Soren's ability to recognize the urge in one or another of these guests, and at these other men's ability to recognize and respond to it in Soren, all without any doublespeak or sidelong look—without any sign, as far as Sambul could tell, at all. It was as if they were speaking a mental language encoded in the very facts of each other's bodies: in things like the effortless order of Soren's combed hair, of course, but also in the high cheekbones and dark stubble of one particular guest's face, in the litheness of another's body, the lack of resistance in his shoulders. Sambul was witness to these exchanges, could tell clearly when an understanding between Soren and one of the guests—usually a young, single professional on this trip with a large group of other young, single professionals from the same company—had been reached, but what bothered Sambul was how
at ease
each of these chosen guests was with the situation, the way after dark they walked up the path for their personal audience with Soren without shame but also without flippant striding.

In these last weeks of summer, the estate had been hosting mostly long strings of high school and college tour groups, led by huffing geography teachers from the middle of America and spouse-chaperones along for the ride. Accordingly, Soren's taste had gotten startlingly younger; Sambul watching in disgust as Soren flirted openly with the thin, tan boys who did knifing dives into the pool, skimming along its bottom, their half-developed muscles rippling in the water before surfacing, the air filled with their surprised, buoyant laughter.
Is this what Soren wanted?
Sambul found himself thinking, watching the display.
This idiotic lightness?

Soren's interest in these youths (the exact ages neither Sambul nor Soren were ever certain of, though what did it matter when they all looked to have been stalled in some vague prepubescence, their only body hair a delicate blond undercoat that served merely to bring the curve of their tanned lower backs or stomachs into further definition) was made even more unsettling given Soren's changing appearance. As Soren's lovers had gotten younger Soren himself, or at least his body, had begun to age considerably. He was back to losing weight again, helplessly—the bedclothes that Sambul had the maids change every morning sopping with sweat, the full plates of food pushed away in defeat. To the men and boys who stayed at the safari camp, however, this only accentuated Soren's natural good looks, his face even more angular and sly. His small shoulders kept his fleshless torso from appearing skeletal, and his entire body only got even more out of the way of the unexpected pale green eyes that, as a boy, had flashed but that now gave him a calm, distanced air.