Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Sambul instead believed that what set this memory permanently in his mind was the sight of his own mother, scrambling, falling, running toward him down the hill of tea rows behind the tree, her picking bag slurring a trail of leaves into the high, brilliant sunlight around her. It was the only time Sambul ever saw anyone stop working during their shift, and that feeling — his slow realization that he’d done something wrong, that her eyes, wide with fear, were turned not toward Sambul but to the blond bobber of hair coming fast through the rows and beyond it the figures (Sambul only now thinking to look) of the white man and woman, standing frozen back on the road — was the same feeling that Sambul would associate with Soren’s presence all the way until they were teenagers: a small, tense knot of queasy excitement and shame.

As far as Sambul could later reconstruct, this incident must have taken place shortly before Soren’s father, concerned over his young American child’s loneliness on a new continent, doubled Sambul’s mother’s pension and paid it eight years early in exchange for her allowing the Wheelers to take Sambul to live with them “for the season” at the family estate, a full day’s journey inland by car from the tea grounds. And if this was true then it could only have been a few months later that Soren’s mother, Martha Wheeler, sat Sambul down on one of the estate’s stiff living room couches and told him that his mother, retired in the small town near the tea concern, had died of untreated malaria. This was Sambul’s second memory of being a boy with Soren: Soren’s hand rubbing small circles on his back as Sambul lay on his bed and cried; Soren trying his best, saying, “Well, you’re too tall now to run the rows anyway, at least.”

They’d lived in those years on the grounds of what Soren’s father, Danforth Wheeler, called “the lodge” and everyone else, including the Kikuyu servants and Soren’s mother, called “the estate.” The estate was a compound of buildings arranged around a great house originally built by one of the Wheelers’ forbears as an American hunting lodge and meant to rival the opulent British ones of African lore. Soren’s father had preserved the hunting and guide business, relocating and updating it into a circle of semiluxury tents and communal showers. The idea was to offer all paying guests an authentic safari experience while still allowing them to avail themselves of the estate’s well-tended grounds and the emphatically blue waters of the modern swimming pool. Beyond the compound’s electrified strands of fencing lay many square miles of bush, populated by the bountiful descendants of the wild game that had over the years drifted onto the land or been purchased from other preserves. As boys, Soren and Sambul watched Danforth Wheeler entertain groups of American hunters, watched Soren’s father bagging almost insouciantly the many kinds of impala and eland that roamed the bush and that regarded the men who had come to kill them with stolid stares. Many years later, by the time Sambul had been promoted to manager of the entire estate, Soren would ban any hunting from the land and instruct the guides to freely discharge their rifles only at the sight of poachers.

For the first years of his life with the Wheelers though, Sambul slept in a small, narrow room exactly halfway between the cavernous lounges of the estate and the small bundle of shacks that the servants and guides occupied. Beyond the shacks were the pool and the big safari tents and, beyond that, the wilderness. Often, walking up to the great house for dinner, Sambul would encounter a particularly intrepid bush deer stilled perfectly in the middle of the path and the two would stand there in the near silence of the dusk, watching each other, Sambul thinking of the meandering route the animal must have taken after jumping the fence, of the way it must have walked so quietly along the pool and past the tents and shacks, just to arrive there, at Sambul’s feet.

In Sambul’s adult memory, the subsequent years he’d spent at the estate condensed themselves mostly into the passage of several long afternoons with Soren, full of their desperate attempts to fight the heat and boredom. When later pressed by the braver and more curious of the servants, Sambul found himself capable of recalling for them other details. Sambul could remember taking his school lessons from Martha Wheeler in the mornings, for instance, in the company of Soren, a handful of the servants’ young children, and an old woman from the local village. These sessions were held in what Soren called the “solarium,” and when Sambul thought about it he found himself struck again by the way the morning light came in through the windows, backlighting the many fly-aways of Martha Wheeler’s hair into a gentle, messy corona.

There were other things too, that came floating back: Sambul walking slowly around the rooms of the estate when the Wheelers took their annual trip to the States for the holidays, trailing his fingertips along every wall of the house; Martha returning from Nairobi every season with new athletic clothes for both Soren and Sambul, each of whom complained bitterly about the way they matched. But these things only returned to Sambul’s mind when one of the servants — their disbelieving, almost painfully curious faces raised to him late at night — gathered the nerve to ask if it was true about how he had been raised as family to the Wheelers when he was a boy. The rest of the time, watching as Soren talked animatedly to one of the tourist chaperones or trying not to watch as Soren quietly attempted to eat dinner as he sweated through his shirt with fever, Sambul thought only of those afternoons.

The boys would begin each day around two o’clock, after lunch and after Sambul had finished his job helping the maids clean the tourist tents, picking up the cigarette butts, laundering the towels, and beating the beds for scorpions. They usually met in Sambul’s room, lying on their backs, shirtless, against the cool tile floor and staring up at the posters of the various football stars Martha brought Sambul by request from the city. They talked idly of football sides and tactics or the various strange and amusing characters that had appeared in the most recent bunch of tourists. Once in a while, if Martha had returned from a shopping trip recently, the boys had a new tape of music to listen to. When this happened, they would listen together to the best song of the album on repeat until they both knew every word. Then Sambul would goad Soren into performing for him — the tall, thin, blond boy standing atop Sambul’s bed and crooning with exaggerated earnestness into an invisible microphone. Sambul liked it best when Soren would make some motion — running his hand slowly back through his hair, for instance, while tracing the long trajectory of a single, wavering note. Eventually it would cool off enough to go outside and one or the other boy would slowly stand up and stretch, fake yawning, hamming it up, before bolting out the door and calling out names of the things the other was slower than.

The running became a feeling in itself; the late afternoon breeze pushed over their torsos and faces as they sweated, cooling them as the light got long and reddish over the brush and the dirt roads. They were allowed out of the compound as long as it was still light and they stayed together, and their jogs traced long, erratic laps of the relevant geography: the place where the road dove into the river that would cover it in winter and reveal it again in summer; the small bluff from which the tourists in their jeeps were taken to watch the hippos and elephants loll around a mud hole; the circling path around a tree where small tribes of monkeys scolded them, occasionally tossing down fruit cores at the boys’ heads. When bored or winded Sambul and Soren would stop, dallying along the main road that led away from the Wheelers’ land or lazily following one of the women from the village as she herded her goats back toward the cluster of improvised shanties in the distance.