O, Africa! Read online

  “The heat is killing,” Spiro complains, perspiring into his rum and Coke. “And I asked the waiter for water twenty minutes ago, and it still hasn’t come.”

  “The climate’s delightful,” says Micah, khaki drainpipe trousers and flaring coat contrasting with the rest of the company’s formal wear. “Besides, dwarf, you’re a son of the circus. You should know that all great adventures begin by leaving home.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” says Castor, raising a glass like Lady Liberty holding aloft her torch. “To the success of Pot of Trouble.”

  “I hope the picture’s jake,” says Till, “but I miss my wee chicks already.”

  “Speaking of chicken,” Spiro says, “what’s safe on the menu?”

  “Bread,” answers Izzy, splitting open a roll and testing its spongy warmth.

  “I miss my boys, too,” Micah says, attempting to buoy his star, swilling a thimbleful of scotch. “But imagine our return! I know you’re just a humble midwesterner, Henry, but read the Greeks. The Greeks!”

  They had traveled by car and train and ship and plane around the stretched bow of the earth, but Izzy still felt that very little had changed. Even after the panic of takeoff, gravity’s forward rush that rudely pushed him into the small of his seat; even after the dollhouse shift in perspective, shaved fields seen from above as neatly lined as graph paper, parking-lotted cars like checkers on a board, telephone posts and wires dancing by like musical notation; even after the city obediently slipped into the great green cup of the Atlantic Ocean like a pea in a shell game; even after the water revealed in its depths blues within blue, purples and blacks swimming under the blue, architectural scaffolding of color suggesting entire inverted oceanic strata; even after the hours-long pursuit of the sun across its transit, yellow waves cresting off the silver wings and vibrating skin of that miraculously rising and dipping aluminum can; even after adjusting his watch for the time difference, entire hours of terrestrial existence impossibly lost in atmospheric transport; even after taking up temporary residence in the empyrean, even after accepting the invitation to feast upon heretical messages of clouds, Izzy, found himself still, sadly, irrevocably, Izzy.

  The anticipation that he could begin at last the punishing and heroic project of smelting his crude ore into fine metal gave way to the suspicion that the trip might prove little more than a bit of rear-projection trickery: the same people doing the same things in front of different backdrops. The accommodations weren’t helping any. There were tennis courts and a nine-hole golf course. There was the Times and the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph delivered each morning. And everyone finished work at four-thirty or five to have tea under tents, sweet-smelling yellow candles charming the insects away.

  “Reminds me of the Cotton Club,” Micah says, slapping one of two giant ivory elephant tusks parenthetically framing the nightclub entrance. There were berobed men in fezzes and an insectlike buzzing going on all around. There was the alien quality of the staff, their grace and courtesy absent any hint of obsequiousness, with some private withheld dignity, tucked away like a pocket kerchief. There was their language, Congolese, strong and efficient and delivered in staccato bursts like a quiet secretary pecking away on a typewriter. There was the nation’s flag, the Belgian Congo having imagined for itself following annexation the simplest and most beautiful flag that Izzy had ever seen—a five-pointed yellow star on a field of royal blue.

  The floor show was bizarre. There were feathers and drums and, at the climax, a man dressed in a matted ape suit chasing a scantily clad girl around the club. If Izzy was following the skit correctly, the ape had long reigned as an unseen island king until a group of treasure seekers learned of the gorilla and made it their mission to catch him. Instead the great ape kidnaps a bottle blonde the bandits have in their party. And, rather than the ape smooshing or disemboweling the girl, the two develop a connection. They grow kind of goofy for each other. Finally captured by the bandits and brought to the West, our primate hero never forgets his blonde. Shackled in chains, he never forgets her. Dropped into the alien city and exploited as a Broadway headliner, he never forgets her. The magic straw of her yellow hair, her tender stroking of his enormous engorged finger, his flared and outraged nostrils reflected in her bright blue irises. Sensing she is near, our besotted gorilla escapes and goes on a rampage, laying waste to the entire metropolis in pursuit of his girl. Finding her at last, our persistent primate pulls his paramour to the ground and forces upon her an act of interspecies love.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes! Now, that’s the picture we ought to be making!” Micah declares, leaping from his seat to deliver a one-man standing ovation as the ape continues pumping away. “A movie about miscegenation, forget it. But the story of a girl and a giant monkey? Now, that’s genius!”

  “Black-and-white?” Spiro says. “I’d rather cut it off first.”

  “Garçon!” Castor snaps. “A pair of tweezers and a nail file, vite!”

  “Why is that, Spiro?” Micah asks, thinking about Rose and indicating across the room a hostess standing imperious and serene. The perfect curve of her back reminds Micah of his first boyhood bicycle, her profile something he immediately wants to see cast in bronze. “I mean, look at her. She’s like something pharaohs built pyramids for.”

  “You must be balmy from the heat,” Spiro protests. “She’s black as tar!”

  “Do you remember that gentleman I told you about?” asks Sidney Bloat, Marblestone’s advance man having joined them on this leg of the journey. “The trader who lives just outside Entebbe? He says he can’t even look at the women when he returns to the Continent now. That they all look like day-old pastry to him. As a result, he can no longer eat flour or butter.”

  “I can see what he means,” Micah says, memory pressing upon him a catalog of images: Rose on her stomach, Rose on her back, his begloved mistress standing, sitting, walking, dancing, dressing. Rose.

  “I’ve been warned that all the pretty girls around here are gamy with clap,” Spiro says impatiently. “And then there’s the smell.”

  “What smell?” Izzy, still in mind of their encounter with Keneally, involuntarily lowering his chin by degrees.

  “These nigger girls reek south of the equator.”

  “Well, as my uncle used to put it,” Castor says, “once you get past the smell, you got it licked.”

  “Language, boys,” Till tut-tuts into his Coca-Cola, “language.”

  “If there is some kind of smell,” Micah says calmly, “it can’t be any worse than the streets of Midget City.”

  Sensing defeat at the invocation of the site of his ruinous boyhood, Spiro turns his attention to the waiters. “Boy!” he shouts across the length of room, striking his glass with a fork again and again. “Boy! You! Boy! Some service wouldn’t be frowned upon!”

  Three Negroes in white dinner jackets come trotting across the room, polished floor slats answering mirrored shoes tap for tap.

  “I asked for water over half an hour ago,” Spiro says to the youngest of the servers, straightening his posture to appear taller than Micah.

  “Wah-tah,” answers the waiter, pronouncing the English word carefully, in bifurcated syllables. “Yes, sah.”

  “Well then, don’t make a career of it!”

  “Quit it, Spiro,” Micah says, sloshing around an ice cube. “This is supposed to be a celebratory meal.”

  “All the more reason this service is unacceptable!” Spiro says, looking directly at the boy, who remains standing there uncertain whether it is appropriate for him to take his leave.

  “Spiro,” Micah quietly addresses his friend once the servant is out of sight, “you’re offending me.”

  “I didn’t know you were the defender of the Negro race.”

  “I’m not—you’re offending my sense of restaurants as semi-sacred places. There are very few venues in life where you ask for something and it’s brought to you. The whorehouse is one. Movie halls another. And restaurants. You’ll respe
ct the sanctity of restaurants, Spiro, if nothing else.”

  The boy returns with glasses of water for the group and silently begins placing them around the table, too abashed to make eye contact with anyone.

  “What’s your name?” Micah asks, gripping the boy’s forearm as it crosses his setting.

  “Sifiso.”

  “Thank you for your good service tonight, Sifiso,” and here Micah presses a ten-dollar bill—six months’ wages or more—into the boy’s hand. “You’ll forgive the rudeness of certain of my dinner companions.”

  Looking at the paper in his palm, the boy seems neither happy nor grateful but terror-stricken, convinced that such an incident must only be a portent from a malevolent deity. Somewhere, he is certain, a spell has been cast, a totem is being snapped in two, a cauldron with his name on it is bubbling over, his baby sister is drowning in a well. Looking down at the bill, the boy is certain that in a world full of misery such outrageous good fortune always carries a hefty price.

  “Now, bring me another scotch and soda, please.”

  “Mr. Grand,” Bloat whispers once the boy has retreated, the importer’s dark beetle eyes disregarding all other tablemates. “I must caution you against making such extravagant gestures here. They’ll go misunderstood.”

  “I think you should listen to Mr. Bloat,” Izzy says.

  “Be quiet, Itz. And you”—to Bloat—“don’t tell me how to spend my paycheck, rug peddler. Just update me on the equipment situation.”

  “Very well,” answers Bloat. “I’ve been able to track down a pair of lightweight field cameras and a good supply of very fast film stock, in Prague of all places. Other shipments of matériel from Nairobi have preceded us.”

  “Good. There’s nothing another hotel nightclub can teach us.”

  “You talk,” Bloat begins, “like a man who doesn’t appreciate what lies ahead. Believe me, Mr. Grand, outside the tourist spots, Africa can be a hell on earth.”

  “It’ll be fun,” Micah says as the boy returns with his drink along with four other waiters who stare at the moviemaker, unable to discern if he is wizard, devil, or crow.

  “I can assure you, only cannibals and Christians find comfort in the jungle,” Bloat warns, “and you, Mr. Grand, are neither.”

  “You’re wrong,” Micah says, fully drunk, fully in possession of his faculties. “It’s going to be fun.”

  TWO

  Up the great Congo away from its mouth, where it drains into the great Atlantic, they were traveling toward the border between the Belgian Congo and the tiny British protectorate of Malwiki. They were on a rusty old steamer called the Roi des Belges, commandeered by Augustus Späten, a wiry German with prominent veins in his forearms. Everywhere they were followed by an overwhelming smell, powerful odors of dung and earth and green pine mixed, somehow, with cooling candle wax and schoolroom chalk, scents that were as much a physical presence in the air as gelatin wobbling on a spoon.

  “Nearly the size of Europe,” Captain Späten volunteers, hand-rolling loose tobacco leaves into a cigarette, acknowledging without making eye contact Izzy standing alone on the deck. “The Continent’s double. True heir to the Victorian Nile.”

  Izzy looks out into the overgrowth and tries imagining instead the fathomless river and the vegetable tangle brimming over with cathedrals and statuary and monuments, a world of white and stone and noble thoughts.

  “We’re here to photograph it, you know.”

  “Pictures, eh?” Späten says, lighting his cigarette. “Been up and back this river twenty years or more, ’fore the annexation. Seen plenty you wouldn’t want photographed. What kind of pictures you’ll be taking?” he asks, removing from a holster a small pistol, which he empties of bullets and begins cleaning with a dirty rag.

  “A motion picture, actually. Though I have to admit, we’re not especially well versed on the history of the place.”

  “Its history?” Späten repeats, almost merry over the word. “Just look at a map. Africa’s a pistol and Léopoldville’s the trigger, there’s your history.” He points out to sea with the gun, squinting, aligning the sight.

  “Huh,” Izzy says, their speech drowning in dark waters, disappearing under eddies and depths and currents.

  “Want to know the real purpose of the colonies?” Späten says, admiring a native sea hand who has come on deck and begun working a rope, stripped to the waist like a convict, exposing cords of black musculature. “It’s not for the minerals, and not for the labor either, not at the core. We’re jealous of their sunshine. That’s what it amounts to. Too much time indoors makes us wicked.”

  Izzy did not enjoy sea travel, and the smaller the vessel, the less he enjoyed it. That first day, however, he sat on the prow for hours, mesmerized. As they pulled away from the port at Léopoldville and the settlements and shanties and schooners and automobiles faded behind them and they entered the dark witch’s mouth of the world, at last the secret promise of the venture seemed validated to him. The only sounds were the river whisperings and birdcalls, the twitterings of tree rodents lining the shore, and the ship’s metronomic chut, chut, chut, chut.

  At first it was an effort for the ship to cleave its way through the river’s topmost layer of mossy scum, a thick, oatmealy porridge. All was wilder, toothier, more haphazard than Izzy had anticipated, the earth retching up bursts of color and vine. The foliage wasn’t beautiful either, but destructive, violent, amoral. After a lifetime of visiting gardens, it was as if Izzy had never before seen trees, never understood sinister arboreal logic: They demanded ascent. They’ll bend, they’ll twist, they’ll wrap around one another, they’ll burst through sidewalk pavement if necessary. But pretty they’re not. Remove the sentimentality, ignore the dozen or so transcendental poems he’d committed to memory as a schoolchild, and the fact was made clear: Nature is chaos.

  As he surveys the breathless fecundity around him, all illumined by the sun—that reckless card player who can’t keep his hands off his chips, tossing glints of silver, purple, and green onto the dark carpet of river—the numinous quality of light, its dual existence as particle and wave, becomes manifest to Izzy. Allowing his eyes to go slack, Izzy imagines the scene through the eyes of an impressionist painter. Only color and light, thinks Izzy, loosening the grip of his vision and allowing color and light to dictate until he no longer sees sky, trees, and water at all, only slashes of color, bands of vibrating luminescence.

  Unsettled by these visual experiments, Izzy reaches for his camera. It comforts him, holding his trusty Leica I single-lens reflex, its brass top cold to the touch upon removal from its scuffed leather satchel. It is received in his hands as a familiar, satisfying weight, like a wallet or a coffee mug. Prowling the deck, eye pressed to viewfinder, left hand gripping the device body, right hand cupping the lens in an inverted C, moving with something like grace, Izzy calms himself. Placing the camera between himself and the unmediated tames the space. Busy calculating F-stops and exposure times, focusing the diamond-sharp lens, winding the knurled knob between frames, considering how to crop a shot so the railings of the deck cut canted, diagonal stripes through bands of sea and sky, Izzy feels less out of his depth, technical demands quickly crowding out a sense of threat or wonder. Disorientation gives way to a soothing mechanical satisfaction, the remarkable reined in, made less so, through the act of picture taking.

  And something else. Loading. Aiming. Shooting. Taking. The vocabulary of photography that of violence and possession. Framing some trees and jungle vines that look uncannily like Brooklyn telephone lines, Izzy wonders what secrets he would discover later when he developed the roll. That the jungle—experienced through his senses as forbidding, impenetrable, and innocent of its own mystery and peril—had been tamed, transfigured in a technically perfect way, into something pretty? Something was wrong with the whole project. But he couldn’t help it, compulsive clicking and winding, the constant making of images, relaxed his shattered nerves.

  A birdcall caus
es Izzy to crane his neck skyward. One thing that can’t be photographed! Here the sun, lifegiver, not a brilliant source of joy but an oppressive fact to be endured, a blinding tear in the firmament that could not be looked upon too long. Had he ever really seen the sun? Certainly this wasn’t the same orb that baptized his Brooklyn boyhood, that crowned him in California. This an altogether different, more malevolent God.

  “You’re late for the production meeting,” says Spiro, strolling onto the deck barefoot, with rolled-up trousers. He also is shirtless, exposing a strongman’s physique on his little frame, a torso tattooed with a Renaissance ceiling’s worth of pictograms. There are squirmy anchors and swivel-hipped hula girls, verses of Scripture and polka-dotted snakes, moldering tombstones and bifurcated hearts emblazoned with the names of various women, all winding around his trunk like thread on a spool.

  “Sorry,” Izzy says. Then, rubbing his eyes, “Your face is a big red dot.”

  “It’s darker below deck. You’re needed downstairs. Surprises await.”

  Belowdecks, the cabins hold the stale smell of a summer home with closed rooms in hot weather. With Spiro leading the way, Izzy passes the kitchen and the mess, the sleeping quarters and the engine room, the utility closet and the storage facilities. An entire cargo area, too, is devoted to Bloat’s red carpet, magnificently rolled and stuffed into a cabin, a full ten feet across, an obscene lolling tongue. (“One never knows,” Bloat explained of its shipboard presence, “when one might need to beat a hasty retreat.”)