Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

They played a game sometimes when all else failed to entertain them. They called it keepy-uppy, and it consisted of each taking off their shoes and socks and venturing a few rows into the small field that the Wheelers allowed the servants to keep behind their quarters. It was never clear to Sambul, even later, why Soren and he had felt the need to do this, to draw the veil of tall green corn stalks behind them, but it is what they did, wordlessly, when one or the other wanted to play. The game was this: Sambul would lie down on his back in the cool, soft dirt between the rows and Soren would carefully step up until he was standing on Sambul’s chest, the soles of his feet roughly in the area of Sambul’s pectoral muscles. Soren would then see, counting in a whisper (here another mystery to Sambul in his middle age), how long Sambul could bear it, could keep Soren up. Eventually, lungs bursting, Sambul would roll, sending Soren flying off, laughing, and then the boys would switch positions. Sometimes to make it more interesting, one or the other would tease the one on the ground by balancing on one foot and placing the other sole ever so lightly against the prone boy’s face, nibbling the cheek with his toes. Even at the time Sambul sensed the intimacy of this — the smooth hold of the corn’s husks, the weak yellow sun wavering behind Soren’s listing head suddenly infused with a sense of nervous joy. This is how the memory would continue to feel, anyway, even many years later, when Sambul could recognize neither boy in his and Soren’s tired faces.

This arrangement lasted until sometime after Soren’s thirteenth birthday, when, on their holiday trip back to the States, Martha Wheeler was killed in an automobile accident and died, leaving Soren and his father to return to the estate alone and defeated, as if all the words had gone out of both of them. That fall, Mr. Wheeler announced that he was sending both Soren and Sambul off to boarding schools in Nairobi for the remainder of their education. Soren was sent to a preparatory academy mostly filled with the children of European diplomats, while Sambul arrived on his first day at a Catholic school on the outskirts of the city that specialized in native children who had been identified (by the foreign businessmen in the city who employed their families) as showing some amount of promise. For a year the two boys saw each other only at the training sessions and matches of the Massey Insurance Juniors, a local football club that both boys played for and that Danforth Wheeler owned a controlling stake in. That was only for the one season, however. By the next time Sambul and Soren found themselves alone in the fields together, Soren would be returned to the continent with an American degree, Sambul would be head manager of the Wheeler estate and safari business, and Soren would be dying.

•

Soren waited until all the guides, redeployed for the day as messengers, had returned from the villages before ordering Sambul and Benny to wrap up the body and put it on the rear board of one of the jeeps. No one was missing, and there were no reports of an unfamiliar man in the area. Soren was quiet as they drove back to the compound. He made them go very slowly, and allowed no one else besides Sambul and Benny in the vehicle, as if to limit the number of people forced to have contact with the nameless man’s corpse, sheathed as it was in a way that looked both ridiculous and ceremonial. Benny had returned to the spring with several rounds of old, yellowed muslin. Standing there before the body, laid out in the dirt between Soren and Sambul, Benny had turned his round, pitted face up to them, only then recognizing the inadequacy of the cloth.

Now, riding in the back seat of the open-topped vehicle, Sambul had one hand over the swaddled form tied to the luggage board. Beneath his fingers the man’s body felt neither cold nor warm, only hardened. The deep tone of the man’s skin could not be masked by the thin muslin and its deeper hue shone through in an ill-defined way. As they entered the gates and slowly trolled up through the safari camp, a few guests leaned out the front flaps of their big tents or stood on the porches of packed earth and watched them pass.

Sambul knew it was not a good solution, but thought it was the only one. Soren for some reason hadn’t even wanted to move the body, other than to remove it from the water, as if to preserve the basic facts of the story that might be told to any family member the guides might bring back.

Sambul had squatted beside Soren and, quietly pointing with a pinky finger, suggested that the yellowed flesh of the calluses Soren was looking for did in fact pad the man’s palms, forming a ridge at the top of the ball of the right hand. Sambul knew that Soren knew that all the men had been thinking the same thing since first seeing the body: that this man was just another of the migrant workers who wandered undocumented over the border, that they’d find no name, no family, and no story.

“He doesn’t have anything with him for travel, though,” Soren had argued, looking up at the other guides, who watched from a small distance away, leaning against the vehicles and spitting.

“And there’re no wounds, no immediate cause for death,” Sambul added helpfully, without knowing why. The guides squinted at Sambul for a moment then shrugged and readjusted their feet. Soren had looked at Sambul for a minute, blank-faced, before sighing and turning away.

By the time all the guides returned, it was too late in the day for anyone leaving the estate in one of the Land Rovers to make it to town and the municipal morgue before nightfall, when control of the highway reverted to the rural gangs who financed the rebels with robbery and beheadings. There was also the matter of the party that had been planned for that night, for the twenty-five or so guests currently in residence at the safari camp. So Sambul eventually had to say it, because Soren seemed to need him to, had to suggest the walk-in freezer in the great house’s basement kitchen.

When he, Benny, and Soren reached the house, Sambul helped them carry the body into the frigid space, each hefting it under his right arm.

The party was held for each group of guests on the last night of their stay. The camp hosted guests on ten-day rotations and Sambul, overseeing the safari outings, had this summer become familiar with how Soren would appear about three days in, whipping one of the vehicles at high speed up to where the guests in their open-topped jeeps would be taking their break after the morning game drive, and hopping dramatically out of his car. This was how he began, Sambul knew, how Soren started his process. By the day before the party the guests inevitably felt that he had become one of them, and were excited by the presence of the master of the estate right beside them in the lounge chairs of the pool in the early afternoon’s clear sunlight.

Sambul always wondered at Soren’s ability to recognize the urge in one or another of these guests, and at these other men’s ability to recognize and respond to it in Soren, all without any doublespeak or sidelong look — without any sign, as far as Sambul could tell, at all. It was as if they were speaking a mental language encoded in the very facts of each other’s bodies: in things like the effortless order of Soren’s combed hair, of course, but also in the high cheekbones and dark stubble of one particular guest’s face, in the litheness of another’s body, the lack of resistance in his shoulders. Sambul was witness to these exchanges, could tell clearly when an understanding between Soren and one of the guests — usually a young, single professional on this trip with a large group of other young, single professionals from the same company — had been reached, but what bothered Sambul was how at ease each of these chosen guests was with the situation, the way after dark they walked up the path for their personal audience with Soren without shame but also without flippant striding.