O, Africa! Page 10

  “Forgive the interruption,” Micah says, turning up the full blast of his charm like a radiator in winter. “But did I overhear correctly that you’ll soon be visiting Africa?”

  The woman purses her lips like she’s accidentally bit down on a wedge of lemon, her powdered face belonging to a woman of fifty, or seventy.

  “Yes, dear boy,” she says, in an accent exactly as Micah hoped she would have. “Safari. Kenya, for starters, in celebration of Martin’s thirtieth birthday.” Here she grips the baby boy’s knee with something approaching violence, sending a fool’s grin sailing across his broad white face.

  “Have you been before?” Micah asks.

  “Oh, just the nice bits, before Martin was born.”

  “Bunny!” Martin drools. “Bunny!”

  “Quite a rigorous trip, must be,” Micah says. “Why, if I might ask, do you wish to make a return?”

  “Well, Martin has always dreamed of the wildlife, you see—elephants and rhinoceros and cheetah and the like.”

  “Bunny!”

  “Yes, dear, I’m sure there will be bunnies,” she says, then turns back to the filmmaker. “But that’s not the real reason for undertaking such a journey, is it?”

  “No?”

  “No.” Micah now puts her age nearer to seventy, the cords of her neck a disaster, the pancake makeup creasing like cellophane as she talks. “The only thing you need to know about the place, the only real reason to make such a visit, is this: Africa contributes nothing. And, at a certain point, nothing comes as quite such a relief to those of us cursed with too much civilization.”

  “Huh,” Izzy says, lifting his head up from the floor’s herringbone pattern.

  “Africa, Egypt, ancient ruins, these places don’t truly exist,” the woman explains through a mouth that is pink, open, and benign. “Europe and America are everything now, the war saw to that. The rest are appointments on the map, in-between spaces with which to amuse ourselves. But never mind my theorizing, you’ll absolutely adore Africa. If the Italians are like dogs, and the French are like cats, Africans are, well, Africans are birds.”

  “And Americans?” Micah asks.

  “Bunny!” Martin exclaims, pointing at the twins.

  “Yes, Martin, bunny. Very good, indeed.”

  Micah had been to England before—for an international premiere or two, and to schmooze with European distributors while keeping Marblestone’s volcanic anger in check—but his brother hadn’t. Jittery from the sleeper flight, a twelve-hour passage that made a mockery of the months-long crossings endured by his forebears, Izzy was vibrantly alert to the differences in color and light, clothes and food.

  “Toughen up, will you?” Micah admonished on the ride into town, sensing his brother’s discomfort over London’s fog and rain-slicked streets, its prismatic spectrum of accents and impenetrable social cues. “You mustn’t allow yourself to be cowed by these people.” On the streets the homes and buildings looked thicker, more substantial, made of older, darker, more history-rich stuff, red telephone boxes the disapproving parents of squat American fire hydrants. There was the clumping of heavy shoes down cobblestone; there were weird hunchbacks and perfumed ladies with huge, crooked teeth; there were children with mature, wizened faces; there were frail coatrack men and squat dumpling women; and nowhere was a Negro to be seen. As Izzy and Micah made their way that morning from the Mayfair to the embassy, the sight of a lone man walking a gray whippet down a darkened street appeared as an emblem of the spirit of duty and sadness of the entire nation.

  Izzy had never before given much thought to being American. The extraordinary set of circumstances of his having been born Isidor Saul Grand, in Brooklyn, New York, in the millennial year 1900, as opposed to someone else, somewhere else, in some other time, had always been self-evident, something to be taken for granted as unthinkingly as eating, breathing, or sleeping. But here in London, the apprehension that he was the thing he couldn’t help being—American!—was on a par with the birth of self-consciousness, the great and terrible shift that occurs when a child’s thoughts go from “Look at that” to “I’m looking at that.” This encounter with gentlest England, coupled with the looming prospect of the African trip, had transformed the is-ness and such-ness of his very Izzy-ness into a thing, a position he could embrace or from which he could retreat. To overcompensate for these unsettling discoveries, Izzy overate.

  “Britain does not have an indigenous film industry,” begins J. P. Keneally once the brothers are ensconced in the bureaucrat’s office. “But what do we have in its place? History!”

  A man who delighted in the scent of his own freshly starched uniform, a crisp set of stamps, and perfectly proportioned scotch and sodas served at four o’clock, Keneally most enjoyed making sport of requests from visiting foreigners. “What does a culture that gave the world Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dickens need from vulgar merchants making pictures for people whose lips move when they read?”

  “I’m on the side of the lip-readers myself,” says Micah. “Lets you know they’re following along.”

  “Fair enough, but have you noticed a funny thing about your Mr. Marblestone and all your other refugee motion-picture executives? Whenever one encounters them, they carry the most curious smell.”

  “Really,” Micah says, noting the way the man keeps the ends of his mustache trim and sharp, like a tiny pair of axes. “Of what, might I ask?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, of garlic, of onions, of street vendors and the open-air markets. Smells not dissimilar to those one encounters here in our Hampstead and Highgate sections of London. You’ve really never noticed it?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  Izzy, always alert to scent, his own and others’, lowers his chin by degrees to test his musky armpits.

  “Nae bother, nae bother,” Keneally says, dismissing the remark with a chalkboard wipe of the hand. “If you’ll excuse me a moment, gentlemen, I’ll gather your paperwork and we’ll have you on your way.”

  Izzy’s eyes follow the official out of the room, alighting behind the man’s desk onto a framed map of Africa, a continent that in its contours resembles a giant bent knee. Bright swaths of color are applied across the terrain haphazardly, as in a child’s finger painting, each cheerful splotch standing in for stories of domination, vast human machineries of rubber, diamond, tobacco, and sugarcane industries. Red. Blue. Green. Yellow. Purple. A rainbow-bright, happy abstraction, the map appears to Izzy an instrument of purest black magic. A portent designed to obscure its own meaning, the map is wholly incapable of telling its own story.

  “Micah,” Izzy asks, “did you find that at all funny, what he said about Marblestone?”

  “He’s right.” Micah fiddles. “The guy sweats pot-roast gravy.”

  “I don’t know. I think he’s talking about us.”

  “Don’t let their kooky manners get to you. What he said about Arthur is because he’s vulgar, not because he’s a kike.”

  “If you say so. But I’d rather not stay longer than necessary.”

  Keneally reenters with a stack of papers, trailed by a manservant carrying a tray congested with an unappetizing assortment of brown-and-white food. There are studded scones and shortbread cookies, a bowl of clotted cream and a jar of dark jam, crust-free finger sandwiches of sliced cucumber and smoked salmon, and, in the center, a whole peeled orange shot through with skewers upon which are impaled cheddar-cheese cubes, pineapple chunks, and wrinkled gray cocktail onions.

  “Oh, spiffing!” Izzy says, deploying his favorite new expression and greedily grabbing a couple of sarnies.

  “Curious proposal,” says the officer, “making a picture in Africa.”

  “Well, so far as we know, it’s not been attempted before.”

  “Not a sterling area, where you’re heading. Rougher terrain the deeper you go toward the center. If my coordinates are correct, Malwiki is situated in the westernmost region of the border between Uganda and the Congo. One doubts the wo
gs even know they live under British rule.”

  “More dramatic wildlife, as I understand,” Micah says. “And Sidney promises us good guides once we get there.”

  “And it goes without saying the natives are godless bloody buggers. You’re aware, too,” Keneally says, riffling through the pages, making a notation here, striking a proviso there, “that without the consent of the British government it’s illegal to bring equipment, foodstuff, and arms in or out of the country?”

  “Well, as we say back home,” the officer’s procedural opposition awakening the Huck Finn in Micah, “ ‘no tickee, no washee.’ ”

  “Now, let’s just try one of these,” Izzy says, attempting to dislodge a cheese cube from the hors d’oeuvre centerpiece and instead lifting the entirety off the tray by a single skewer. It snaps, sending the orange rolling over the fading Oriental and nibbles hopping across the floor like jumping jacks.

  “Scone?” Keneally asks, ignoring Izzy’s faux pas and nudging the tray of pallid food closer to Micah.

  “No thanks,” he says, removing from his jacket pocket a pack of Wrigley’s and unwrapping with maximum aluminum-foil orchestration a piece of gum, which he begins to chew. With his entire head.

  “Never cared for scones myself,” Keneally says, shuffling the brothers’ papers. “Too redolent of Communion wafers. Rum idea, eating a bit of corpse. Must be why our missionaries have such success with cannibals. Speaking of which: Africa! I was stationed in Cairo during the war. Had a marvelous time. A holiday, really. Most days I’d visit the markets around midday and enjoy a kebab. Return to the embassy and move some papers from here to there. Putter around until teatime. A game of snooker. Just before sundown I’d visit the brothels for a bit of the ol’ how’s-your-father? Bloody marvelous workers, they. Straight for the mutton! G&T at five. Then an excellent dinner. Usually fresh fish of some kind. Two or three fingers of brandy. Massive bowel movement. For three years this was my life. But, of course, that was during the war, days of glory before Britain was brought low.”

  “But you won the war,” goads the American gum chewer.

  “Mr. Grand, the beloved England of my youth is under assault. There are cabals at work in the highest places—and your émigré motion-picture producers only accelerate the conspiracy’s monopoly.”

  “Well, perhaps you wouldn’t speak so freely,” Izzy says, “if you knew who we are.”

  “I know perfectly well who you are: You’re the Grand brothers from America.”

  “Originally Grombotz, not Grand,” Izzy says softly, blooming under the man’s gaze. “We’re Jews, Mr. Keneally. Just like Mendelssohn was a Jew, and Mercadante was a Jew, and Spinoza was a Jew, and Prime Minister Disraeli was a Jew, too.”

  There follows a pause the approximate volume and duration of a drawbridge folding hands.

  “Well, of course you are,” says Keneally in that tinny British voice that instantly marks irrelevant any social miscue. “Understand, I have nothing against the Jewish race as a people. Just Lord Balfour and the Zionists, the ones who make such a bloody great fuss of things, you see.”

  “That’s swell,” Micah says, reaching beneath his shirt collar to withdraw a gold chain from which hangs a six-pointed gold Star of David. “Now, be a good soldier and stamp our papers, will you?”

  Keneally removes a creaky ancient mechanism from a desk drawer. “Yes, I’ll happily approve your permits. Besides—”

  STAMP!

  “—one’s personal opinions on these matters are hardly important.”

  STAMP!

  “One’s role is merely to shift one stash of papers from here—”

  STAMP! “—to there.” STAMP!

  “Very well, gentlemen!” Rising, saluting. “All of your documents are now in order. Enjoy your African excursion. And remember, as our forebears had it: Britannia rules the waves.”

  “Well, we’re just a couple of kikes from Brooklyn.” Micah, removing from his mouth and pressing the well-chewed wad of gum to the underside of the man’s desk. “So we’re going to waive the rules.”

  While in London, Micah paid a visit to Benny Castor, a former colleague who in a previous life had been one of the best script men in Hollywood, as well as one of the town’s leading alcoholics. With his engineer’s command over the wheels and cogs of story logic, his surveyor’s sense of plumb line, and his stenographer’s ear for dialogue, Benny had all the tools in the script maker’s cabinet. But he’d walked away from it. After the death of his father, Benny discovered that the family fortune (northwest, lumber) amounted to a few defunct mills, a failing paper-pulping plant, and a thicket of debt. Having existed until then in a booze-embalmed state of suspended boyhood, Benny, just shy of forty, took up the sadness and compromises of middle age like a new religion. Making a life project of absorbing the family scandal, he fashioned for himself a posture of noble self-defeat, quit the business, and settled just outside the British capital with his English wife, Gertrude, a woman of a temperament as mild as her peaches-and-cream complexion, and adopted a boy named Cecil. His face fell. His hair thinned. His waist thickened. He misplaced his laugh. Benny was not fun.

  In the years leading up to that disavowal, however, there had been wild times: horse racing at Saratoga Springs, fully clothed leaps into outdoor swimming pools, sleeping with friends’ wives in a kind of never-ending game of sexual musical chairs. And drinking, drinking, drinking—always drinking, or thinking about drinking, or planning the next drink, or recovering from the last drink—the entire apparatus of moviemaking inseparable from a kind of alcohol-hazed masculine pounding, a knockabout adolescent rambunctiousness that very much found its way into the physical exuberance and punishment of slapstick.

  It had been five years since Micah and Castor worked together on a picture, five years, really, since Micah had corresponded with Castor in a manner more significant than office-sent Christmas cards. And it was half on a whim, half as a means of testing his own precarious better nature, that Micah called upon his former colleague now.

  “You’re looking healthy around the middle,” Micah’s host said once they were situated in wicker chairs in the garden. Castor was wearing professorly tweeds and Wellington boots; bifocals hung around his chest by a chain, and a sand-colored walking stick leaned against his seat. The entire prematurely aged country-gent ensemble made Micah’s palms itch. This was the man who had held Micah’s prick for him when, woefully behind schedule on Knock on Wood and suffering through a prodigious bout of gonorrhea, the wunderkind director needed to be propped up in the men’s room in order to pass a few scalding drops of urine.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you.” Surveying his friend’s face for burst veins, red tributaries around the nostrils. “How’d you like to take a trip?”

  “I’m skint.”

  “You won’t be paying.”

  “And where,” Castor asked, “would we be shooting this picture of yours?”

  “Africa.”

  “Charming. Do tell.”

  “There’s some jungle footage Marblestone’s looking to license off to the majors and a new Henry Till picture we’re looking to make. And parts of something else I’d like to try while we’re down there. Something Arthur doesn’t know about. One for us.”

  “ ‘One for us?’ Traipsing down to Africa on some secret project,” Castor chided. “Sure you’re not the one who’s been drinking?”

  “Certain of it. Look, it’s going to be like the old days—making three, four pictures at once. I need someone there I can trust, someone who can keep track of the details while I’m running around. What do you say?”

  “You know I’ve not given any thought to the business in years,” Castor said, tracing with a steady finger the handle of his porcelain teacup. “My life here is about as far away from the pictures as could be. I like London. I write the occasional culture piece for the papers, do a little gardening, drop by the pub, putter around. I always thought my days of adventuring were behind me.”
<
br />   “Nonsense.” A larcenous gleam lighting Micah’s eyes like a piece of coal glowing red. “In addition to my youth and my looks, clearly I’ve lost my powers of persuasion. Look, you’re the scribbler, what would you say if our roles were reversed?”

  Castor surveyed his little failing garden patch of cabbage and carrots, the village church spire, and the hills beyond that. “I’d say that travel is the way to avoid despair.… Where in Africa are you going exactly?”

  “Deepest darkest.”

  “All-inclusive contract? Food, lodging, per diem?”

  “Yes, the whole schmear, at least until we get to the rough. But you have to swear you’ll lay off the sauce.”

  “That’s a promise.” Raising from beneath the table a cloudy brown bottle and pouring two shots. “To friendships renewed. And to the New World.”

  “The New World?”

  “Sure”—clinking glasses—“every world’s new when you’ve never been before.”

  ONE

  And then they were in Africa, having arrived by freighter from Cairo, sitting in a corner booth at the Blue Angel nightclub at the Hotel Nationale in the Belgian Congo. Rather than the twisted trees and thick jungle vines, the dark rivers and anthills, the Pygmies and poisoned arrows and elephant stampedes that Izzy had feared and longed for, the excursion thus far was redolent of routine, a roundelay of familiar faces and ritual. There was nothing particularly exotic about sitting in a corner booth in a nightclub surrounded by his brother, Henry Till, and Spiro; no strange custom the expectation of the best food, drink, and entertainment on offer; no special deliverance being waited on by silent-faced blacks in white shirtfronts. (Though how different they seemed from American blacks!) There was nothing strange about seeing Micah, insatiable Micah, eating everything, drinking everything, smoking everything, opining on everything, smiling at every young woman who crossed his path, his face betraying flickers of sadness that he couldn’t gorge himself on all the world’s glories at once, to devour the earth in one magnificent swallow. No, there was nothing terribly unusual about any of it at all.