Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

As his first order of business, he’d summoned Sambul to the high, corporate office and informed him firstly that he was to be promoted to head manager of the entire lodge and estate business and secondly that Soren himself was sick, that he was dying.

Soren said this in a tired, matter-of-fact way, and Sambul had sat back in his leather chair. The office was dim, the day brooding outside, overcast and rainy in the floor-length windows behind Soren’s desk. Soren put the cap back on his pen, sighed, smiled in a gentle, sad way and stood, turning away from Sambul. He looked down and out the big windows as he spoke, as he narrated the disease’s probable progression, the secondary infections, cancers, pneumonias, organ failures. As he explained about a new drug system, something called Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy that had just been introduced in the States and nonetheless featured extremely low chances of helping his particular situation, Sambul rose and stood beside him at the windows. He wanted to put his hand on Soren’s back, to press his palm gently into the flat space of gray suit-coat material that draped so smoothly away from his shoulders, but he didn’t. Soren’s hands were in his pockets and he was quiet for a few minutes. After a while he pointed down at a gray oval on the neighboring block encircling a deeply green space.

“We used to play there,” he said. “The Massey Juniors, remember?”

“Though it wasn’t there, exactly,” he added after a minute. “They’ve torn the old city place down. This one is much nicer.”

Sambul had nodded and not known what to say.

Perhaps it was because of this strange comment’s reference that Sambul later could remember this meeting only in the context of his great theory about the true source of Soren’s disease. Sambul had missed Soren over the years of his absence, had missed him so much and for so long that by the time he’d entered the office — Soren rising and smiling sheepishly, raising his arms a little in the suggestion of a hug — it felt exactly the same as not missing him. Later, remembering again and again the exchange, the medical words, Sambul only felt confused and angry. Soren had finally returned, just to be dying? And why was this happening (here, in Sambul’s aging consideration of this late development in Soren’s life, the seed of his great theory) other than because he’d been reckless — utterly, mysteriously, and unforgivably reckless — in all things since Danforth Wheeler had sent them apart and away?

And so the memory of the afternoon that Sambul learned of Soren’s disease ended up always reaching back to include that season of the Massey Insurance Juniors, Sambul a solid defensive midfielder who rode the bench, Soren a mercurial starting striker, the last year that they’d seen each other as boys, their last year together. Sambul always remembered the dangerous, angry way Soren charged around the pitch, his sharp elbows swinging or his spikes turned up maliciously as he went to ground for an ill-advised tackle. It had been wild and relentless, the way he’d thrown himself against and into the other players, scoring occasionally but fouling nastily. Soren never lasted more than thirty minutes before getting injured or sent off, thus creating a necessary substitution, sending Sambul in. It was like he meant to do it this way, relaxing only as he passed Sambul on his trek past the bench, always giving him a quick, conciliatory look. They hadn’t really spoken much in training sessions, either, which had only been one more disappointment. Everything had been taken from them that season. Sambul remembered the first day of training, his heartbreak and embarrassment at discovering that the name of their game, “keepy-uppy,” was really just a little kids’ term for juggling the ball. After that, the two boys could barely even look at each other.

As far as Sambul’s great theory held, Soren’s reckless behavior only continued at his American college. Sambul pieced together scenes from his endless Nairobi University dorm-room daydreams of Soren’s campus (its students laughing, calling out to each other across the college green) and the small bits of stories he’d overheard from others, Sambul concocting a thousand different stupid acts and men that could have put the disease in Soren’s body. And to Sambul’s mind, the recklessness thesis was given proof positive by the arrival on the estate, soon after Soren’s return, of Peter Oprong.

Sambul never really knew Peter Oprong in his brief tenure at the estate, but he could remember clearly the man’s skin: black but mixed with some other mysterious, dusky race until his coloration was a cloudy, almost Indian hue, which suited particularly well his face, with its high Portuguese nose. He lived in a slum outside Lodwar, and apparently worked as an assistant to a Mozambican carved-trinket importer, which was how Soren met him. Sambul only became aware of Peter Oprong’s presence when Peter moved to Amdin, the little town about an hour’s drive from the estate. During the months that the safari camp was shut down while the servants renovated it to Soren’s new business standards, Peter Oprong spent long stretches at the estate, during which he and Soren were inseparable. Sambul was kept busy in his job overseeing the rebuilding and retraining, and only ran into the two men glancingly, though their happiness infected the other servants, who smiled at the ever-polite Peter whenever he was around.

Sambul himself now, years after the episode, remembered being taken by the two men’s joy only twice. Once had been in late afternoon, as Sambul took a break from rethatching the roof of one of the “authentic” huts, when he heard their voices, each on the verge of laughter, carrying across the air as they stripped off their clothes on the riverbank and dived in. That time Sambul had been struck how, even at a distance, he could see the solidness of Peter Oprong’s body: his legs rippling up into his full, rounded gluteus muscles as he dove, his body disappearing into the muddy water. The other time, Sambul had discovered them together one night in the wide group tent that was the servants’ bar. Someone had turned on loud music from a hidden radio, and Peter, his long, curly hair gathered back in a woman’s wrap, was dancing in place, clapping his hands and singing in his clear, deep voice, much to the delight of the servants and guides who laughed and cheered him on. But what Sambul remembered most about this last encounter was Soren, sitting in his own seat and glancing back and forth happily from the cheering crowd to Peter, Soren clapping and calling, bobbing his head and trying to get into it with the rest of them, his nervous pride childlike and obvious.

It was the courier man who ran errands for the estate who told Sambul, on the day that it happened. The man had been every week assigned to deliver the gifts that Soren sent to Peter in the days after one of his long stays; this was the man instructed to drive to the square in Amdin and find the tall building that Peter Oprong shared with several other men like him, and so it was this courier who was the first one from the estate to see the pillar of smoke, and the remains. A group of frenzied villagers had gathered in the middle of the night and engulfed the building in flames. When the men inside had come running out (stumbling, coughing, and collapsing into the square) the crowd had taken rebar rods salvaged from a nearby construction site (some of which had been held in the fire) and beat the men to death, stripping and piling their bodies in the middle of the square and leaving them there for anyone to see.

Sambul spent all morning at the scene. In his anger at Soren, Sambul (listening to the chain of requests on the messenger’s CB radio) had not told anyone to stop Soren from taking one of the Land Rovers, had not stepped in to stop the courier from guiding Soren’s frantic driving to the proper square. Sambul’s feeling only broke as he saw the vehicle pull in at the far end of the square and stop, as he watched the tall, lone figure of Soren jumping out, unsure of whether or not to hurry, still in shock — only then did Sambul run over to step in front of him, to do him the mercy of blocking his view.