The Bay of Foxes (24 page)

Then Maria warns him that there is someone upstairs
waiting for him. For a moment he is startled, afraid M. will materialize as she did on that first day, with her distant expression, her blue jeans, the blue scarf tied prophetically around the long, arrogant neck. “Who is it?” he asks.

“A surprise,” Maria says and smiles at him mysteriously. He presumes it must be Gustave. He will have to give him his book tonight. There will be no delay.

He takes the small caged elevator upstairs to delay his entrance, at least, and stands before the door, as he did that first day. He hesitates to use his key and decides to ring the bell instead. The door opens quickly, as though he were expected, and to his surprise it is not Gustave at all, but his wife, Simone. She is laughing and smiling as she welcomes him back, her white, even teeth glistening. She kisses him warmly on both cheeks. “Welcome! I’m so glad you are back,” she murmurs. She wears a low-cut pink dress with frills on the shoulders and smells of a pungent perfume. Seeing his surprise as he enters the hall, she says she and Gustave thought he might prefer a little company on his first night back here in the empty apartment. What can he tell the poor woman? He says nothing, just looking around the elegant hall, the living room, with the low lamps lit.

“I have had the concierge tidy up and put some flowers in the vases for you,” she says brightly, her cheerful French voice grating to his ears. He doesn’t know how to respond. Trying to be polite, he tells her it was kind of them both to think of him. All he wants is for her to leave him alone. He strides away from her, murmuring something about the bathroom, going once again through the large rooms, the salon with its fireplace, where Simone has had a fire laid, the study with all
M.’s books, where he worked so hard for her. He goes down the corridor to his little bedroom at the end. Simone follows him like a shadow, as he once followed M. through this apartment. She stops at the door to his bedroom and watches him throw his suitcase onto the bed.

“You could sleep in the big bedroom now,” she says, smiling suggestively.

“That’s not necessary,” he says, looking at her. “This is quite enough space for one.”

She leans against the jamb of the door and asks him if his voyage was good. She says she has some dinner waiting for him. She will wait for him in the salon, while he freshens up. He listens to the click-clack of her high heels as she goes down the corridor. He is tempted just to throw himself down on the bed and sleep as he did that first day he came here, but he feels obliged to say something to Simone. She is waiting for him. He relieves himself, washes his hands, and gulps down a glass of water from the small basin in the corridor.

When he returns to the salon, Simone sits before the fire, her legs crossed, her sling-backed shoe dangling from her toes, sipping a glass of white wine. She looks up and says, “Ah, there you are, darling, do come and sit beside me, will you? Have some wine,” and she pats the sofa at her side. But he stands at the French windows, looking out into the gardens, surveying the scene. At this season the trees have lost their leaves, and he can see the Panthéon through the dark tangle of branches, visible across the park, lit up in the dim light.

“You have had an anxious time, I hear. I do hope you will be happy again here,” Simone says, getting up and coming
over to him. She stands beside him, smiling, and puts her hand gently on his arm. She has prepared a little supper for them, she says, and if he does not mind she will share it with him.

He looks down at her and hesitates. He remembers that moment when M. had asked him to share a meal with her on his first night in her home. What would have happened if he had refused? This time he does just that. He tells Simone he is not feeling very well. He doesn’t think he can eat. He needs to lie down. Indeed, he does not feel well. He is giddy, as though he is standing on a ship, the floor tilting under him. “So many terrible things have happened,” he says, looking at her.

She draws herself up, purses her lips, and stares at him with her deep blue eyes. “So I have heard. As you prefer,” she says coldly.

“Before you go, though, you must take my book for Gustave,” he says and turns from her to fetch it. “I think he will find it interesting,” he says as he thrusts it into her hands.

“You want me to take this now?” she asks, looking down at his pages with some distaste. “Surely it could wait a day or two? There’s no rush, is there? You could, perhaps, bring it over one day next week yourself to the office?”

He hesitates for only a moment. “I think it’s better you take it now, so that I don’t change my mind,” he says with a smile. She looks at him for a moment, then shrugs her smooth shoulders in her pink dress. He leads her to the door, helps her into her soft cashmere coat, and almost thrusts her forth onto the landing with his book in her reluctant hands. “Give it to Gustave. I think he’ll be pleased,” he says to her back as she presses the button for the elevator.

Then he goes into the living room and picks up the phone.
He calls Asfa at the hotel where he works and waits for someone to find him. He tells him he must come over tomorrow. He has space for him and his family, at least for a while. They must all come. He has written a book, and now, with the money, he is in a position to reciprocate.

“You wrote a book?” Asfa says. “That’s wonderful.”

“Yes, and you are in it. We are all in it, all the Africans, the French, and the Italians, too. It’s called
The Bay of Foxes
.”

Though this book is fiction and its characters fictional I would like to acknowledge the debt I owe these writers whose books were of great help to me:

And particularly Maaza Mengiste who was generous enough to read and comment on my text.

My thanks go to my colleagues at Bennington and Princeton for their support and encouragement and particularly Joyce Carol Oates, Edmund White, Amy Hempel, and Susanna Moore.

As always I thank my family: my three loving daughters, discerning readers and great generous hearts.

And my husband Bill for once again editing these pages with such diligence.

For the continuing support of my publisher at Penguin Books, Kathryn Court, I am most grateful.

A PENGUIN READERS GUIDE TO

THE BAY OF FOXES

Sheila Kohler

The pampered son of Ethiopian aristocrats, Dawit is now an illegal immigrant living in Paris. Although he is finally safe from the revolutionaries who dethroned the emperor and killed both his parents, Dawit lives in poverty and constantly fears deportation. “He feels he has become invisible” (p. 7). Then a chance meeting offers him the opportunity to alter his destiny once more. While nursing a solitary espresso in a café, Dawit sees the famous author M. “With a thrill he recognizes the ethereal presence of a celebrity whom he sincerely admires” (p. 3). Much to his astonishment, Dawit realizes that M. is looking back at him.

As he already knows, the much older white woman also grew up in Africa, and many of her best-selling novels draw upon the events of her disreputable youth, including her passionate affair with a wealthy Somali landlord. Summoning Dawit to her table, M. tells him that he resembles this “lost lover” (p. 13). Even emaciated and in tattered clothes, Dawit is beautiful, and M. takes note of his elite education and courtly manners. They discuss Africa and their respective lives. “But he can see that she wants more from him than recollections of a shared past” (p. 13). At the end of their conversation, M. invites him to move into her apartment.

When the appointed day arrives, Dawit nervously sets off for his new patron’s luxurious apartment. He is relieved that she remembers her invitation. Yet he also “wonders who inhabited this room before him, and why she had asked him to come three days after they had met” (p. 31). The two fall into a happy routine. Dawit becomes M.’s secretary and the first reader of her new work. An excellent mimic, he also takes over her correspondence and telephone conversations. When they dine with her editor, she boasts, “Who would have guessed what a dark gem I found in a café? A brown diamond” (p. 59).

Dawit’s frail body begins to recover from the brutalities of his imprisonment and subsequent flight from Ethiopia. M. generously opens her elegant wardrobe of Italian suits and silks to Dawit, whose height and build are identical to hers, calling him her “very young and dark double” (p. 41). As Dawit’s health returns, his gratitude toward M. grows peppered with contempt, until summer arrives and they travel to her Sardinian villa beside the Bay of Foxes. There, the glorious beauty of the Mediterranean renews his affection for M., but it also awakens his own long-buried sexuality—and his yearnings for freedom.

A stunning accomplishment by an internationally acclaimed author at the top of her game, Sheila Kohler’s
The Bay of Foxes
explores issues of race, colonialism, and sexual politics in a chilling tale that deftly intertwines the events of Dawit’s tragic past with his increasingly complicated present.

Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She later lived in Paris for fifteen years. In 1981, she moved to the United States and earned an MFA in writing at Columbia University. She currently teaches at Princeton University and Bennington College.
The Bay of Foxes
is her twelfth work of fiction. She has been published in nine countries and now resides in New York City.

You’ve said that M. is loosely based upon Marguerite Duras. Was there a specific incident in her life that inspired
The Bay of Foxes?

Not really one specific event, though I did remember that her partner, at some point in her life, was an Asian and that, of course, she spent her childhood in Vietnam. I transposed this to Africa, which is where I was born.

When Dawit first meets M., he is already an admirer of “her spare, concentrated prose, her brief, evocative novels” (p. 10). While this description certainly applies to the work of Marguerite Duras, it could also be said of your own. And while the main biographical details are Duras’s, certain elements—the African upbringing and the position
at a prestigious American university—are more evocative of your life than hers. Was there any point in particular in plotting or writing this novel where you found yourself merging with Duras?

I suppose all characters lie in a “middle distance” somewhere between the author and the character created on the page. I was not aware at any point of writing about my own life, but of course there are always elements of that in everything we invent.

Have you spent much time in Ethiopia? How did you come to choose that country as Dawit’s homeland?

No, I have never been to Ethiopia. I think I chose it because of its history, its strong fight for independence, and its avoidance to a large extent of a long history of colonialism. I admire many of the young Ethiopian writers today who have brought the country to life for me, as well as the historians who have recorded the reign of Haile Selassie.

Midway through
The Bay of Foxes
, Enrico visits Dawit at M.’s villa, bringing “an Italian translation of a book by Patricia Highsmith” (p. 114). Did you always intend for Dawit’s path to echo that of Highsmith’s infamous character, Ripley?

No, not at the start, though I’m an admirer of her work, but once I realized there were echoes I wanted to acknowledge that. The problem of identity has always been one that has interested me. I remember as a teenager thinking, “Who shall I be? Melanie or Scarlett O’Hara!”

When Dawit first moves in with M., he thinks, “Writers are like vultures, picking over the tragedies of other lives” (p. 13). Does this idea resonate with you in your own work?

Yes, I’m afraid so. We use our tragedies and sometimes the sufferings of others on the page. I hope, though, that we act as well as witnesses, reminding people of what has come before so that it will not be repeated.

Dawit tells M. that Haile Selassie was smothered with one of the same pillows used to elevate his feet from the ground. Is this true?

I don’t think it is known exactly how Haile Selassie died, but the detail about the pillow for his feet is documented.

Although Dawit’s character is sometimes in question, the novel’s sympathies appear to lie with him. Is his “overthrow” of M., his oppressor, meant to mirror—and perhaps justify—the rebellion that dethroned Haile Selassie and killed Dawit’s own parents?

I didn’t think of it in those terms, but perhaps you are right. Certainly my sympathies were with him and with immigrants in similar situations who face such loneliness and loss in trying to establish new lives, though the older writer is also part of my story as you suggested.