Elegy on Kinderklavier (13 page)

Soren had prepared Sambul and some of the servants for this yo-yoing health that would eventually just never rewind itself, but when Soren's first descent into sickness had started no one had been ready for the racking coughs, the inability to eat, the wandering, temporary dementia giving way finally to the immobility, the weakness so
great that Soren could barely even move his cracked lips to request the water that Sambul had to drip into his mouth. How had that not been the end? What was that, if not the end of Soren's life? But it wasn't: he'd more than recovered, everything happening in reverse, abilities one by one regained and remastered. And this robust infection of good health hadn't stopped there, but continued until Soren was more hale and lively than he had been upon his adult return to the country. “Har har, just kidding,” Soren had joked to the servants after this recovery, without smiling.

So everyone at the estate knew that the plateau of good health would end, knew that what they were doing was waiting. That had been a year ago, though. Then this summer had come with the boys and simultaneously, as if mocking their youth, the stirrings of the weight loss, the shaking hands at dinner as he tried to eat his soup.

Soren was doing fine for the moment, though, with the body safely away in the freezer and him free to return his attentions to the young Indian man from somewhere back in Britain. Soren had seated himself beside the Indian and kept leaning slightly over to deliver his punch lines so that their shoulders touched lightly, though this was the only contact they had. The man, impossibly young-looking, with rounded cheeks, a shock of black hair and big, earnest eyes, had already agreed, Sambul could see. He was smiling, happy to be taken in by Soren's older, comforting grace. When the dinner petered out and the other guests took their big bottles of beer to the pool, Soren quietly got up and made his way back to the great house. A few minutes later the boy got up and followed. When it was possible, Sambul left too, walking the long way up before taking his usual position.

Technically, Sambul used the small room off of Soren's quarters when Soren was sick, or when someone needed to keep a vigil over him as he slept. In healthier times it was used as a sort of all-purpose
folding room by the maids who kept up the great house, with the understanding that they quietly slip out the door that led to the back stairs whenever Soren entered his quarters. There was no door between Soren's living room and this small space; instead, a long, gauzy curtain hung in the doorway that was generally respected as if it were solid.

Sambul thought of what he did in these situations in a vaguely proprietary way. Soren might need something, for instance, might get sick, with no one there to help him but his clueless young men. But Sambul also knew it went beyond that, felt that Soren somehow needed him to see, to witness, in the same way that he had no compunction in calling Sambul to his quarters when he'd lost controls of his bowels in the night.

Sambul could see them now, through the narrow space between the curtain and the doorframe. The young man was standing, Soren kneeling in front of him, head bobbing, reduced in his disease to this exercise, this pleasuring of the other. There seemed something off to Sambul about this setup, something wrong about the young man being the one experiencing this feeling, his eyes closed, his body stiff. When he was done Soren slowly stood and said something to the boy. They each moved around each other awkwardly, actors ignorant of the scene's proper blocking, until the boy was bent, kneeling forward on an ottoman facing the other wall and Soren was behind him, arm working at himself, head looking down at the boy's full buttocks, where Sambul knew Soren was not even touching him, masturbating instead into a doubled condom. Sambul sat like this for a long time, unfolding the linens and then refolding them, looking up after each one to check that Soren was still there, to see that there was still the fact of his body: naked, pathetically curved into itself, his diminutive, shallow buttocks very pale and cupped in the effort. Sambul watched him begin to shake weakly, and waited for the familiar
moment, the climax that would not come, that would be replaced with the strangely banal sound of Soren's infirm weeping.

•

Soren Wheeler left the country for an East Coast American university in 1986, failing to stick around or even visit to bear witness to the gradual decline of Danforth Wheeler's business empire-in-miniature. Besides the estate, the crown jewel of his father's holdings was Hotel Sporting Nairobi, a towering hotel for businessmen, diplomats, and foreigners, full of curving white architectural lines and glass. This was where Sambul had spent his solitary breaks from the Catholic school, wandering the lonely corridors, convincing a friendly barman to slip him weak drinks, not knowing where Soren went for his holidays. Sambul had taught himself French during his last years of high school and, a year after Soren left for college in the States, had won a scholarship to study humanities at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, which he did until his program ran out of money and he was forced to finish at the University of Nairobi in a lowly mechanical faculty. After that he'd gone to work for the aging Wheeler as a handyman in the same tea concern town where his mother, almost twenty years before, had died. Sambul eventually worked his way up through the ranks to a position at the lodge's flagging safari business, and made a comfortable home for himself among the servants' quarters of the estate.

By the time Soren returned, all that was left of the Wheelers' Hotel Sporting Nairobi was one wing of high business offices in the commercial development that had taken over its floors. Danforth had died a year earlier, and the workers in their mourning had been given security in the interim until his estate could be sorted out. When it
seemed that he had exhausted all options other than to run the company himself or sell it off, Soren had arrived again in Nairobi.

As his first order of business, he'd summoned Sambul to the high, corporate office and informed him firstly that he was to be promoted to head manager of the entire lodge and estate business and secondly that Soren himself was sick, that he was dying.

Soren said this in a tired, matter-of-fact way, and Sambul had sat back in his leather chair. The office was dim, the day brooding outside, overcast and rainy in the floor-length windows behind Soren's desk. Soren put the cap back on his pen, sighed, smiled in a gentle, sad way and stood, turning away from Sambul. He looked down and out the big windows as he spoke, as he narrated the disease's probable progression, the secondary infections, cancers, pneumonias, organ failures. As he explained about a new drug system, something called Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy that had just been introduced in the States and nonetheless featured extremely low chances of helping his particular situation, Sambul rose and stood beside him at the windows. He wanted to put his hand on Soren's back, to press his palm gently into the flat space of gray suit-coat material that draped so smoothly away from his shoulders, but he didn't. Soren's hands were in his pockets and he was quiet for a few minutes. After a while he pointed down at a gray oval on the neighboring block encircling a deeply green space.

“We used to play there,” he said. “The Massey Juniors, remember?”

“Though it wasn't there, exactly,” he added after a minute. “They've torn the old city place down. This one is much nicer.”

Sambul had nodded and not known what to say.

Perhaps it was because of this strange comment's reference that Sambul later could remember this meeting only in the context of his great theory about the true source of Soren's disease. Sambul had
missed Soren over the years of his absence, had missed him so much and for so long that by the time he'd entered the office—Soren rising and smiling sheepishly, raising his arms a little in the suggestion of a hug—it felt exactly the same as not missing him. Later, remembering again and again the exchange, the medical words, Sambul only felt confused and angry. Soren had finally returned, just to be dying? And why was this happening (here, in Sambul's aging consideration of this late development in Soren's life, the seed of his great theory) other than because he'd been reckless—utterly, mysteriously, and unforgivably reckless—in all things since Danforth Wheeler had sent them apart and away?

And so the memory of the afternoon that Sambul learned of Soren's disease ended up always reaching back to include that season of the Massey Insurance Juniors, Sambul a solid defensive midfielder who rode the bench, Soren a mercurial starting striker, the last year that they'd seen each other as boys, their last year together. Sambul always remembered the dangerous, angry way Soren charged around the pitch, his sharp elbows swinging or his spikes turned up maliciously as he went to ground for an ill-advised tackle. It had been wild and relentless, the way he'd thrown himself against and into the other players, scoring occasionally but fouling nastily. Soren never lasted more than thirty minutes before getting injured or sent off, thus creating a necessary substitution, sending Sambul in. It was like he meant to do it this way, relaxing only as he passed Sambul on his trek past the bench, always giving him a quick, conciliatory look. They hadn't really spoken much in training sessions, either, which had only been one more disappointment. Everything had been taken from them that season. Sambul remembered the first day of training, his heartbreak and embarrassment at discovering that the name of their game, “keepy-uppy,” was really just a little kids' term for juggling the ball. After that, the two boys could barely even look at each other.

As far as Sambul's great theory held, Soren's reckless behavior only continued at his American college. Sambul pieced together scenes from his endless Nairobi University dorm-room daydreams of Soren's campus (its students laughing, calling out to each other across the college green) and the small bits of stories he'd overheard from others, Sambul concocting a thousand different stupid acts and men that could have put the disease in Soren's body. And to Sambul's mind, the recklessness thesis was given proof positive by the arrival on the estate, soon after Soren's return, of Peter Oprong.

Sambul never really knew Peter Oprong in his brief tenure at the estate, but he could remember clearly the man's skin: black but mixed with some other mysterious, dusky race until his coloration was a cloudy, almost Indian hue, which suited particularly well his face, with its high Portuguese nose. He lived in a slum outside Lodwar, and apparently worked as an assistant to a Mozambican carved-trinket importer, which was how Soren met him. Sambul only became aware of Peter Oprong's presence when Peter moved to Amdin, the little town about an hour's drive from the estate. During the months that the safari camp was shut down while the servants renovated it to Soren's new business standards, Peter Oprong spent long stretches at the estate, during which he and Soren were inseparable. Sambul was kept busy in his job overseeing the rebuilding and retraining, and only ran into the two men glancingly, though their happiness infected the other servants, who smiled at the ever-polite Peter whenever he was around.

Sambul himself now, years after the episode, remembered being taken by the two men's joy only twice. Once had been in late afternoon, as Sambul took a break from rethatching the roof of one of the “authentic” huts, when he heard their voices, each on the verge of laughter, carrying across the air as they stripped off their clothes on the riverbank and dived in. That time Sambul had been struck
how, even at a distance, he could see the solidness of Peter Oprong's body: his legs rippling up into his full, rounded gluteus muscles as he dove, his body disappearing into the muddy water. The other time, Sambul had discovered them together one night in the wide group tent that was the servants' bar. Someone had turned on loud music from a hidden radio, and Peter, his long, curly hair gathered back in a woman's wrap, was dancing in place, clapping his hands and singing in his clear, deep voice, much to the delight of the servants and guides who laughed and cheered him on. But what Sambul remembered most about this last encounter was Soren, sitting in his own seat and glancing back and forth happily from the cheering crowd to Peter, Soren clapping and calling, bobbing his head and trying to get into it with the rest of them, his nervous pride childlike and obvious.

It was the courier man who ran errands for the estate who told Sambul, on the day that it happened. The man had been every week assigned to deliver the gifts that Soren sent to Peter in the days after one of his long stays; this was the man instructed to drive to the square in Amdin and find the tall building that Peter Oprong shared with several other men like him, and so it was this courier who was the first one from the estate to see the pillar of smoke, and the remains. A group of frenzied villagers had gathered in the middle of the night and engulfed the building in flames. When the men inside had come running out (stumbling, coughing, and collapsing into the square) the crowd had taken rebar rods salvaged from a nearby construction site (some of which had been held in the fire) and beat the men to death, stripping and piling their bodies in the middle of the square and leaving them there for anyone to see.

Sambul spent all morning at the scene. In his anger at Soren, Sambul (listening to the chain of requests on the messenger's CB radio) had not told anyone to stop Soren from taking one of the Land Rovers, had not stepped in to stop the courier from guiding Soren's
frantic driving to the proper square. Sambul's feeling only broke as he saw the vehicle pull in at the far end of the square and stop, as he watched the tall, lone figure of Soren jumping out, unsure of whether or not to hurry, still in shock—only then did Sambul run over to step in front of him, to do him the mercy of blocking his view.