O, Africa! Read online

  Izzy enters the cabin. Situated around a folding table are Till (who outside his white suit and paraffin makeup could be mistaken for the manager of a small-town hardware store), Bloat (in a blue blazer festooned with giant gold buttons, looking like an admiral out of a children’s storybook), Castor (soused), Micah (facial ingredients a mix of fear, confusion, and wonderment), and a passenger unfamiliar to Izzy. He is a black youth of perhaps nineteen or twenty, and even before the boy speaks or makes a gesture, even before it registers that the young man is wearing dungarees, Izzy can instantly intuit that he is not native African but American.

  “Sit down, Itz,” Micah says. “We’ve got a stowaway.”

  “Hey there, Mr. Grand,” the youth pipes up. Hearing the boy’s voice, Izzy is able to crack the context question and recognizes the boy. Early, who’d run errands around the set for pocket change. Early, whom Micah had taken some kind of shine to and paired up with Billy Conklin. Early, the kid brother of that grouchy girl from the costume department Micah’d been shacking up with for months.

  “Micah, what the …?”

  “I know,” Micah moans, rubbing the back of his neck, protecting himself from some imminent beheading. “I know.”

  “Three thousand miles from home and still your pussymongering threatens to bring us ruin!”

  “Don’t, Izzy.”

  “Rose’s got nothing to do with it,” Early says. “I’m acting as Mr. Waldo’s oversight committee. Make sure you honor your agreement.”

  “Your sister doesn’t know you’re here?”

  “I ain’t seen Rose in weeks.”

  “Spiro,” Micah says, scribbling down a phone number and address, “have Späten cable New York as soon as possible.”

  “Aye, aye,” says Spiro, seafaring lingo sticking to him like insects to flypaper.

  “I’m here to help, Mr. Grand. Keep things kosher while Mr. Waldo runs the show up in Harlem. Besides, the looks of it, you’re traveling light.”

  “That’s an impressive use of Yiddish,” Castor volunteers.

  “This is bad,” Micah exhales. “This is real bad.”

  “Micah,” his brother says, “we can’t be responsible for this child.”

  “First off, I’m nineteen,” Early protests. “Second, before you decide to drop me off at the next stop, do you have any idea what it’s like being smuggled overseas in a giant carpet? It’s suffocating, man!”

  “You did this?” Micah, shooting a Sistine Chapel finger at the importer, who is already slipping out the door.

  “On this adventure,” Bloat says, “I am but Mr. Marblestone’s emissary.”

  “Lookit, Mr. Grand, I made it this far. That has to tell you something. I’m serious about this trip, serious about the picture business.”

  “What about your sister? If anything were to happen to you …”

  “Rose isn’t your concern anymore, Mr. Grand.”

  Micah bristles at the response. “And Africa? What about Africa?”

  “Africa?” Early answers, lighting a cigarette. “Africa’s nothing to me.”

  Day flips to night. There is rain on the water and a chorus of squawking creatures and midnight beasts. The jungle sounds different at night, Izzy registers through hammock rocking. The stars sound different, too. In the darkness there is distant drumming, percussion that grows louder and more insistent the more securely the evening’s envelope is sealed, the farther the ship penetrates the continent’s interior. Izzy tries affixing these strange rhythms to familiar childhood lullabies, to syncopate the spiraling repetitions into something less sinister and strange. He fears that sleep, if it even descends, will be a frail scrim. But the depths, the darkness, the heat, the rocking, the drumming—all of it blankets his senses, his bodily functions surrender, and sleep weaves its cocoon around him.

  It is only when everything stops that Izzy’s unconscious self registers a cessation of movement and thrusts him awake. Lighting an oil lamp, he feels his way down passageways, up stairs, and out onto the deck. There, a lone bulb on a shallow dock providing a single dot in the universe, is Captain Späten speaking English with a heavyset African dressed in a secondhand suit. The man’s mouth widens into a jack-o’-lantern smile, and his arms fling open in greeting at the sight of the pajama-clad cameraman.

  “Welcome,” says the guide in a voice that’s all honey and mellifluousness. “Welcome, Hollywood!”

  THREE

  “I am Mtabi,” says the apparition the next day as the company descends the gangplank. “Welcome, good morning, and how do you do?”

  The guide has a thatch of gray hair that rises straight up from his head like a loaf of freshly risen bread and the purple-black coloring of a ripe plum. He speaks good if limited English in a voice that has trumpets and cymbals in it, a voice that carries its own conductor’s batons, and is dressed in an old but well-tailored suit of wide blue pinstripes, appearing on this scorching morning dry as chalk while the rest of the crew have already soaked through their clothes.

  The steamer is being unloaded by a team of boys—topless, barefoot adolescents hoisting boxes and crates off the side of the ship and tossing them onto the roof of a blasted old green bus. The bigger boys stroll along the vehicle roof like it’s sidewalk pavement, catching improbably large trunks and strapping them down with worn rigging. Sitting beside the bus are a pair of weary-looking Citroëns, open-air off-road vehicles that one might take on safari.

  Squinting into the sunshine, Mtabi explains that the flatulent bus will depart with the equipment immediately and drive through the night, while the crew will journey in the Citroëns, decamping overnight in a friendly village before arriving at its ultimate destination, with the final approach possible only by foot.

  “The Malwiki live deep in the interior,” Mtabi explains. “We’ll be going far, far away.”

  “That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear,” Micah replies, shaking off residual grogginess and stepping forth with an extended hand, instantly establishing himself as leader of the group. “There was too much turndown service where we were staying. The farther away from things we can get, the better.”

  “And of course a special welcome to Mr. Till, who can be recognized from motion-picture periodicals that reach us by foreign post!” says the guide, offering a steadying hand to the seasick star.

  “You don’t say?” the actor says, buoyed to learn the reach of his renown.

  “We’ll see our stuff again?” the more technically inclined brother asks the guide as a mechanical menagerie—light stands and scrims, makeup kits and wardrobe crates, lighting rigs and collapsible soft boxes, power generators and a small mimeograph machine—strobe past their field of vision and disappear into the back of the bus, a tarpaulin tossed over the lot.

  “Oh, yes sir,” says Mtabi through a smile that only wishes welcome to the world. “The bulk of your equipment will be certain to meet you in Malwiki when you arrive.”

  “If it’s all the same to you,” Izzy says to his brother, turning his back to the guide, “I’d prefer to take the cameras and film stock with us.”

  “Good idea,” Micah agrees. “I bet things go missing a lot around here.”

  “I can both read and write,” Mtabi continues, addressing the brothers’ backs as the twins rummage through the equipment, siphoning off essentials. “When just a boy, I learned English from a burgher. A great man, a burgher king.”

  The guide goes on to explain that he has performed the task of taking Western tourists and business concerns on expeditions through the continent for twenty years or more; but never before so large a group, and never to meet the Malwiki. A long time ago, Mtabi explains, before he was fully grown, he had visited Malwiki together with his father and uncle and had befriended their ruler, King Mishi, who keeps five wives and has fathered twenty children.

  “Sounds like he has his hands full,” Micah says.

  “Beg pardon?” Mtabi asks.

  “Your king. Sounds like a guy who swims in
the deep end of the pool.”

  “King Mishi is a great man. A man of wisdom.”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting him. Is he expecting us?”

  “No, sir. Apart from missionaries, the Malwiki have not seen white men in many, many years.”

  “Mm-hm, mm-hm. What about cameras? Have the villagers seen them before?”

  “No, sir,” says Mtabi. “But King Mishi is familiar with many Western advances.”

  And here the guide explains how the Malwiki sovereign had in the decades leading up to the Great War earned his education as a citizen of the world, first schooling in Djibouti, the old Red Sea port town on the Horn of Africa. Mishi then worked as a servant in a diplomat’s office in Cairo, then on the Mediterranean as a deckhand on an old galleon, picking up English, Spanish, and French as he went, ultimately attending a nondenominational school in Portugal, where he familiarized himself with works of Shakespeare, Homer, Chaucer, and Lewis Carroll and even set foot inside some of the Continent’s great cathedrals and museums before finally returning to his remote native land to take up the responsibilities of the throne.

  “An adventurer like us,” Micah says admiringly. “Saw the world, then found his way back home. See, Henry, what’d I tell you? The Greeks!”

  “Let’s take Jesus off the dashboard,” says Castor the next morning from the front seat, removing from the control panel a glued religious figurine. “He’s got enough on his mind.”

  The guide doesn’t drive. Instead he navigates in the lead car sitting next to Spiro, who reaches the accelerator pedal with the help of a wooden block, while Micah, Izzy, Early, and Till follow behind with Castor at the wheel. There are fields of hard clay and openmouthed caves, prehistoric peaks and calcified vegetation. Gnats are everywhere, and there are occasions where they’re met with clouds of insects that resemble gangs of chimney sweeps covered in soot. There are undifferentiated hours of cracked earth and brown mesas, hours spent driving through heat as thick and substantial as cake batter. Once, in the doldrums, Early spots a giant gray boulder that suddenly becomes animated and begins kicking up clouds of dust. The big rock revealed to be a fan-eared elephant, Izzy gets off a series of shots as the animal lumbers away into the distance.

  “We leave the vehicles here,” Mtabi says after ten hours of driving, the mid-evening sun as unyielding as its noonday twin.

  “This isn’t Malwiki, is it?”

  “No, sir,” he answers Micah, signaling to some underbrush. “Yedig, raisers of cattle. We rest tonight. Reach Malwiki tomorrow day.”

  The company walk another hour at least, carrying only the provisions they need for the night, marching over difficult terrain through a continuum of light and heat. A kind of viscid, cotton-candy stickiness clings to them, a second skin of coagulated sweat and dirt that provides strangely sleek insulation. While the men munch on hardtack—thin, unsalted biscuits used as military rations—Micah closely watches Mtabi, who is expert at finding gourds and prickly plants to chew for moisture. “Keep your sights on him,” Micah instructs Early. “One like him is worth a dozen back home.” When the smell of fire and dried dung reaches his nostrils, Mtabi informs the group, “Not too far now, sir.”

  A six-foot-tall herdsman, slender as a rope of licorice, materializes silently and begins walking alongside them, mimicking their progress from a bluff several yards above. His ovoid face is almost expressionless—a near-faceless face—and the only clothing he wears is a short leather skirt with a beaded belt that holds a sheathed blade and other wooden instruments. He is darker than anyone they have ever seen, as black and graceful as a musical note, and lyrical, too, in motion.

  “Ah, Yedig!” says Mtabi, scampering up the bluff to greet the herdsman. What follows is a Lower East Side–worthy pantomime of gesticulation, chest smacking, cocked heads, the pointing of fingers, and, gradually, some wary nods. Once the herdsman is pulled near, the company sees that his torso and arms are decorated with an elaborate pattern, a beautiful and ghastly design comprising hundreds of healed, raised scars that look like braille.

  “Dear God,” Izzy says, groping for the camera as Mtabi brings the herdsman near.

  “That’s what we came here for,” says Micah, a smile rising through glittering facial sweat as he steps forward to greet the man.

  The herdsman leads the way to a group of children by a watering hole, four unclothed boys with exposed bellies and members. Never before having seen white men, never having known slacks and shirtsleeves, pith helmets and corked hats, the boys begin screaming and launch themselves behind hot rocks. The herdsman, whose name is Arnewi, explains to the frightened children that the men are important makers of pictures who have come from the great lands to the west.

  Slowly, the bravest of the boys emerges from behind the stone. He looks at each of the travelers in turn, fixes like a missile on Izzy, and makes a straight line for the cameraman. The boy pokes a finger into Izzy’s midsection, the digit sinking a considerable way into the padded softness it finds. The inquisitive, froggy-faced boy keeps jabbing at Izzy’s stomach, throwing the switch on his ticklishness and causing him to jerk wildly. Enjoying the puppet-on-a-string effect this is having, the boy begins to poke Izzy even harder, all over—thigh, calf, buttocks—laughing uncontrollably all the while, disarming the other three boys, who come out from hiding.

  “What gives?” Izzy asks, pinwheeling away from the boy.

  “He says,” Mtabi translates, “that you look made of stone but in truth are soft like rotting fruit.”

  “Gee, thanks a lot, kid.” Izzy reaches into a pocket and pulls out a melted, half-eaten bar of Cadbury chocolate he’d been hoarding since London. He breaks off a few small pieces for the boy and his friends that they accept with reluctance. They sniff the pieces, carefully holding the bits to their faces and withdrawing spasmodically, like pigeons pecking at seed, until, finally, the most adventurous of the group places a dark morsel on his tongue and allows it to dissolve there. Keeping suspicious eyes squinted on Izzy as the chocolate melts, the first boy bravely begins to chew. Another child, upon the foreign food’s first contact with his taste buds, throws himself onto the ground and begins shuddering with convulsions, calling out words to the translator between spasms.

  “Is he okay?” Izzy asks. “Are they going to be okay?”

  The boys are dancing around the men now, Early patting them on the heads, determining how different, or not so different, their kinky hair might be from his own. Licking clean his smeared fingers, the leader of the group speaks to Mtabi.

  “They believe you to be messengers from the sky,” the guide reports, “and this offering to be manna from heaven.”

  “Tell them it’s true.” Micah beams. “Tell them we’re messengers from the sky.”

  The Yedig live in a small compound of twenty or twenty-five circular clay domiciles with conical roofs. Poles covered by big leaves rib the ceiling of each hut at intervals like hoop skirts, and in the cross-woven thickness one can hear small creatures scratching and chirping and tweeting, the giant nest serving as a kind of amphitheater.

  Retiring on thatched mats in their hut following a meal of cold baked yams and a fermented, beerlike drink called pombo, Izzy busies himself fiddling with one of his father’s kaleidoscopes, splitting the world of wonder around him into gemlike fractures, while Micah works on some letters home.

  “Can you develop the pictures we’ve got already?” Micah asks, having deemed the postcard from the Hotel Nationale as unsatisfactory and sterile a representation of what they’d seen so far as a world’s-fair diorama.

  “Yeah, we’ve got the chemicals for it,” Izzy answers, putting down one of his keepsake optical devices. “Setting up a darkroom shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  “Good, I’ll include some pictures, then.”

  “To whom will you be sending them?” Izzy asks, aware that he has no waiting postcard recipients of his own.

  “To whom? Margaret and the boys. Arthur. Various and sundr
y other professional and personal interests. Why?”

  “I’d rather not be party to that last group, I don’t think.”

  Micah looks at him squint. “And why’s that, kid?”

  “I’d like to try making a clean slate of things while I’m here.”

  “Which means what? No longer aiding and abetting your no-goodnik brother?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re being a child, Itz. First, that kind of moral posturing is a form of vanity—it’s too easy by half. Second, things are through between Rose and me. Is it a crime to send her a note?”

  Izzy puts the camera down and looks at his brother. “Well, you should plan on making it a wedding card, then, because while we’re out here playing summer camp, she’s back home getting married.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Early told me.”

  “When is it?”

  “Saturday.”

  Micah counts out four days with his fingers, then lets the digits loosely curl back into a fist. “Well, we’ve all got our jobs to do, then, don’t we? Just print the bloody pictures, will you?”

  “I’m going outside.”

  Night. Something to be inhaled. Sweet eucalyptus smells. Even in the darkness, a linear crispness outlining all things. Ten hours behind us in New York. Thirteen in Los Angeles. Perspective changes the object. Less than a minute passes before Izzy hears from behind him the sounds of his brother’s wide-legged stride.

  “You know I can’t stand being left alone, Itz. C’mere, sit with me for a second.” And here Micah links arms with his brother and drags them both down to the crusted, coffee-colored earth, the better to lie back and examine the sky. Eyes lifting moonward, Izzy sees the pincushion firmament crammed with stars. Infinity spread out before them, expressed simply and without shame, like a child’s connect-the-dots drawing. Time made visible, devouring itself. Izzy turns back to his brother, whom he hates and loves. The desolation and comfort that come with being small. The local and the cosmic. Micah’s hand. This, the person the heavens had conspired to make closest to him in all the world.