Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

In these last weeks of summer, the estate had been hosting mostly long strings of high school and college tour groups, led by huffing geography teachers from the middle of America and spouse-chaperones along for the ride. Accordingly, Soren’s taste had gotten startlingly younger; Sambul watching in disgust as Soren flirted openly with the thin, tan boys who did knifing dives into the pool, skimming along its bottom, their half-developed muscles rippling in the water before surfacing, the air filled with their surprised, buoyant laughter. Is this what Soren wanted? Sambul found himself thinking, watching the display. This idiotic lightness?

Soren’s interest in these youths (the exact ages neither Sambul nor Soren were ever certain of, though what did it matter when they all looked to have been stalled in some vague prepubescence, their only body hair a delicate blond undercoat that served merely to bring the curve of their tanned lower backs or stomachs into further definition) was made even more unsettling given Soren’s changing appearance. As Soren’s lovers had gotten younger Soren himself, or at least his body, had begun to age considerably. He was back to losing weight again, helplessly — the bedclothes that Sambul had the maids change every morning sopping with sweat, the full plates of food pushed away in defeat. To the men and boys who stayed at the safari camp, however, this only accentuated Soren’s natural good looks, his face even more angular and sly. His small shoulders kept his fleshless torso from appearing skeletal, and his entire body only got even more out of the way of the unexpected pale green eyes that, as a boy, had flashed but that now gave him a calm, distanced air.

Soren had prepared Sambul and some of the servants for this yo-yoing health that would eventually just never rewind itself, but when Soren’s first descent into sickness had started no one had been ready for the racking coughs, the inability to eat, the wandering, temporary dementia giving way finally to the immobility, the weakness so great that Soren could barely even move his cracked lips to request the water that Sambul had to drip into his mouth. How had that not been the end? What was that, if not the end of Soren’s life? But it wasn’t: he’d more than recovered, everything happening in reverse, abilities one by one regained and remastered. And this robust infection of good health hadn’t stopped there, but continued until Soren was more hale and lively than he had been upon his adult return to the country. “Har har, just kidding,” Soren had joked to the servants after this recovery, without smiling.

So everyone at the estate knew that the plateau of good health would end, knew that what they were doing was waiting. That had been a year ago, though. Then this summer had come with the boys and simultaneously, as if mocking their youth, the stirrings of the weight loss, the shaking hands at dinner as he tried to eat his soup.

Soren was doing fine for the moment, though, with the body safely away in the freezer and him free to return his attentions to the young Indian man from somewhere back in Britain. Soren had seated himself beside the Indian and kept leaning slightly over to deliver his punch lines so that their shoulders touched lightly, though this was the only contact they had. The man, impossibly young-looking, with rounded cheeks, a shock of black hair and big, earnest eyes, had already agreed, Sambul could see. He was smiling, happy to be taken in by Soren’s older, comforting grace. When the dinner petered out and the other guests took their big bottles of beer to the pool, Soren quietly got up and made his way back to the great house. A few minutes later the boy got up and followed. When it was possible, Sambul left too, walking the long way up before taking his usual position.

Technically, Sambul used the small room off of Soren’s quarters when Soren was sick, or when someone needed to keep a vigil over him as he slept. In healthier times it was used as a sort of all-purpose folding room by the maids who kept up the great house, with the understanding that they quietly slip out the door that led to the back stairs whenever Soren entered his quarters. There was no door between Soren’s living room and this small space; instead, a long, gauzy curtain hung in the doorway that was generally respected as if it were solid.

Sambul thought of what he did in these situations in a vaguely proprietary way. Soren might need something, for instance, might get sick, with no one there to help him but his clueless young men. But Sambul also knew it went beyond that, felt that Soren somehow needed him to see, to witness, in the same way that he had no compunction in calling Sambul to his quarters when he’d lost controls of his bowels in the night.

Sambul could see them now, through the narrow space between the curtain and the doorframe. The young man was standing, Soren kneeling in front of him, head bobbing, reduced in his disease to this exercise, this pleasuring of the other. There seemed something off to Sambul about this setup, something wrong about the young man being the one experiencing this feeling, his eyes closed, his body stiff. When he was done Soren slowly stood and said something to the boy. They each moved around each other awkwardly, actors ignorant of the scene’s proper blocking, until the boy was bent, kneeling forward on an ottoman facing the other wall and Soren was behind him, arm working at himself, head looking down at the boy’s full buttocks, where Sambul knew Soren was not even touching him, masturbating instead into a doubled condom. Sambul sat like this for a long time, unfolding the linens and then refolding them, looking up after each one to check that Soren was still there, to see that there was still the fact of his body: naked, pathetically curved into itself, his diminutive, shallow buttocks very pale and cupped in the effort. Sambul watched him begin to shake weakly, and waited for the familiar moment, the climax that would not come, that would be replaced with the strangely banal sound of Soren’s infirm weeping.

•

Soren Wheeler left the country for an East Coast American university in 1986, failing to stick around or even visit to bear witness to the gradual decline of Danforth Wheeler’s business empire-in-miniature. Besides the estate, the crown jewel of his father’s holdings was Hotel Sporting Nairobi, a towering hotel for businessmen, diplomats, and foreigners, full of curving white architectural lines and glass. This was where Sambul had spent his solitary breaks from the Catholic school, wandering the lonely corridors, convincing a friendly barman to slip him weak drinks, not knowing where Soren went for his holidays. Sambul had taught himself French during his last years of high school and, a year after Soren left for college in the States, had won a scholarship to study humanities at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, which he did until his program ran out of money and he was forced to finish at the University of Nairobi in a lowly mechanical faculty. After that he’d gone to work for the aging Wheeler as a handyman in the same tea concern town where his mother, almost twenty years before, had died. Sambul eventually worked his way up through the ranks to a position at the lodge’s flagging safari business, and made a comfortable home for himself among the servants’ quarters of the estate.

By the time Soren returned, all that was left of the Wheelers’ Hotel Sporting Nairobi was one wing of high business offices in the commercial development that had taken over its floors. Danforth had died a year earlier, and the workers in their mourning had been given security in the interim until his estate could be sorted out. When it seemed that he had exhausted all options other than to run the company himself or sell it off, Soren had arrived again in Nairobi.