Born with the Dead

Eight

“—Israeli wine,” Mick Dongan was saying. “Well, I’ll try anything once, especially if there’s some neat little irony attached to it. I mean, there we were in Egypt, in Egypt, at this fabulous dinner party in the hills at Luxor, and our host is a Saudi prince, no less, in full tribal costume right down to the sunglasses, and when they bring out the roast lamb he grins devilishly and says, ‘Of course we could always drink Mouton-Rothschild, but I do happen to have a small stock of select Israeli wines in my cellar, and because I think you are, like myself, a connoisseur of small incongruities, I’ve asked my steward to open a bottle or two of’—Klein, do you see that girl who just came in?” It is January, 1981, early afternoon, a fine drizzle in the air. Klein is lunching with six colleagues from the history department at the Hanging Gardens atop the Westwood Plaza. The hotel is a huge ziggurat on stilts; the Hanging Gardens is a rooftop restaurant, ninety stories up, in freaky neo-Babylonian décor, all winged bulls and snorting dragons of blue and yellow tile, waiters with long curly beards and scimitars at their hips—gaudy nightclub by dark, campy faculty hangout by day. Klein looks to his left. Yes, a handsome woman, mid-twenties, coolly beautiful, serious-looking, taking a seat by herself, putting a stack of books and cassettes down on the table before her. Klein does not pick up strange girls: a matter of moral policy, and also a matter of innate shyness. Dongan teases him. “Go on over, will you? She’s your type, I swear. Her eyes are the right color for you, aren’t they?”

Klein has been complaining, lately, that there are too many blue-eyed gals in southern California. Blue eyes are disturbing to him, somehow, even menacing. His own eyes are brown. So are hers: dark, warm, sparkling. He thinks he has seen her occasionally in the library. Perhaps they have even exchanged brief glances. “Go on,” Dongan says. “Go on, Jorge. Go.” Klein glares at him. He will not go. How can he intrude on this woman’s privacy? To force himself on her—it would almost be like rape. Dongan smiles complacently; his bland grin is a merciless prod. Klein refuses to be stampeded. But then, as he hesitates, the girl smiles too, a quick shy smile, gone so soon he is not altogether sure it happened at all, but he is sure enough, and he finds himself rising, crossing the alabaster floor, hovering awkwardly over her, searching for some inspired words with which to make contact, and no words come, but still they make contact the old-fashioned way, eye to eye, and he is stunned by the intensity of what passes between them in that first implausible moment.

“Are you waiting for someone?” he mutters, shaken.

“No.” The smile again, far less tentative. “Would you like to join me?”

She is a graduate student, he discovers quickly. Just got her master’s, beginning now on her doctorate—the nineteenth-century East African slave trade, particular emphasis on Zanzibar. “How romantic,” he says. “Zanzibar! Have you been there?”

“Never. I hope to go some day. Have you?”

“Not ever. But it always interested me, ever since I was a small boy collecting stamps. It was the last country in my album.”

“Not in mine,” she says. “Zululand was.”

She knows him by name, it turns out. She had even been thinking of enrolling in his course on Nazism and Its Offspring. “Are you South American?” she asks.

“Born there. Raised here. My grandparents escaped to Buenos Aires in ’37.”

“Why Argentina? I thought that was a hotbed of Nazis.”

“Was. Also full of German-speaking refugees, though. All their friends went there. But it was too unstable. My parents got out in ’55, just before one of the big revolutions, and came to California. What about you?”

“British family. I was born in Seattle. My father’s in the consular service. He—”

A waiter looms. They order sandwiches offhandedly. Lunch seems very unimportant now. The contact still holds. He sees Conrad’s Nostromo in her stack of books; she is halfway through it, and he has just finished it, and the coincidence amuses them. Conrad is one of her favorites, she says. One of his, too. What about Faulkner? Yes, and Mann, and Virginia Woolf, and they share even a fondness for Hermann Broch, and a dislike for Hesse. How odd. Operas? Freischütz, Holländer, Fidelio, yes. “We have very Teutonic tastes,” she observes.

“We have very similar tastes,” he adds. He finds himself holding her hand.

“Amazingly similar,” she says.

Mick Dongan leers at him from the far side of the room; Klein gives him a terrible scowl. Dongan winks. “Let’s get out of here,” Klein says, just as she starts to say the same thing.

They talk half the night and make love until dawn. “You ought to know,” he tells her solemnly over breakfast, “that I decided long ago never to get married and certainly never to have a child.”

“So did I,” she says. “When I was fifteen.”

They were married four months later. Mick Dongan was his best man.

Gracchus said, as they left the restaurant, “You will think things over, won’t you?”

“I will,” Klein said. “I promised you that.”

He went to his room, packed his suitcase, checked out, and took a cab to the airport, arriving in plenty of time for the afternoon flight to Zanzibar. The same melancholy little man was on duty as health officer when he landed, Barwani. “Sir, you have come back,” Barwani said. “I thought you might. The other people have been here several days already.”

“The other people?”

“When you were here last, sir, you kindly offered me a retainer in order that you might be informed when a certain person reached this island.” Barwani’s eyes gleamed. “That person, with two of her former companions, is here now.”

Klein carefully placed a twenty-shilling note on the health officer’s desk.

“At which hotel?”

Barwani’s lips quirked. Evidently twenty shillings fell short of expectations. But Klein did not take out another banknote, and after a moment Barwani said, “As before. The Zanzibar House. And you, sir?”

“As before,” Klein said. “I’ll be staying at the Shirazi.”

Sybille was in the garden of the hotel, going over that day’s research notes, when the telephone call came from Barwani. “Don’t let my papers blow away,” she said to Zacharias, and went inside.

When she returned, looking bothered, Zacharias said, “is there trouble?”

She sighed. “Jorge. He’s on his way to his hotel now.”

“What a bore,” Mortimer murmured. “I thought Gracchus might have brought him to his senses.”

“Evidently not,” Sybille said. “What are we going to do?”

“What would you like to do?” Zacharias asked.

She shook her head. “We can’t allow this to go on, can we?”

The evening air was humid and fragrant. The long rains had come and gone, and the island was in the grip of the new season’s lunatic fertility: outside the window of Klein’s hotel room some vast twining vine was putting forth monstrous trumpet-shaped yellow flowers, and all about the hotel grounds everything was in blossom, everything was in a frenzy of moist young leaves. Klein’s sensibility reverberated to that feeling of universal vigorous thrusting newness; he paced the room, full of energy, trying to devise some feasible stratagem. Go immediately to see Sybille? Force his way in, if necessary, with shouts and alarums, and demand to know why she had told him that fantastic tale of imaginary sultans? No. No. He would do no more confronting, no more lamenting; now that he was here, now that he was close by her, he would seek her out calmly, he would talk quietly, he would invoke memories of their old love, he would speak of Rilke and Woolf and Broch, of afternoons in Puerto Vallarta and nights in Santa Fe, of music heard and caresses shared, he would rekindle not their marriage, for that was impossible, but merely the remembrance of the bond that once had existed, he would win from her some acknowledgment of what had been, and then he would soberly and quietly exorcise that bond, he and she together, they would work to free him by speaking softly of the change that had come over their lives, until, after three hours or four or five, he had brought himself with her help to an acceptance of the unacceptable. That was all. He would demand nothing, he would beg for nothing, except only that she assist him for one evening in ridding his soul of this useless, destructive obsession. Even a dead, even a capricious, wayward, volatile, whimsical, wanton dead, would surely see the desirability of that, and would freely give him her cooperation. Surely. And then home, and then new beginnings, too long postponed.

He made ready to go out.

There was a soft knock at the door. “Sir? Sir? You have visitors downstairs.”

“Who?” Klein asked, though he knew the answer.

“A lady and two gentlemen,” the bellhop replied. “The taxi has brought them from the Zanzibar House. They wait for you in the bar.”

“Tell them I’ll be down in a moment.”

He went to the iced pitcher on the dresser, drank a glass of cold water mechanically, unthinkingly, poured himself a second, drained that too. This visit was unexpected; and why had she brought her entourage along? He had to struggle to regain that centeredness, that sense of purpose understood, which he thought he had attained before the knock. Eventually he left the room.

They were dressed crisply and impeccably this damp night, Zacharias in a tawny frock coat and pale-green trousers, Mortimer in a belted white caftan trimmed with intricate brocade, Sybille in a simple lavender tunic. Their pale faces were unmarred by perspiration; they seemed perfectly composed, models of poise. No one sat near them in the bar. As Klein entered, they stood to greet him, but their smiles appeared sinister, having nothing of friendliness in them. Klein clung tight to his intended calmness. He said quietly, “It was kind of you to come. May I buy drinks for you?”

“We have ours already,” Zacharias pointed out. “Let us be your hosts. What will you have?”

“Pimm’s Number Six,” Klein said. He tried to match their frosty smiles. “I admire your tunic, Sybille. You all look so debonair tonight that I feel shamed.”

“You never were famous for your clothes,” she said.

Zacharias returned from the counter with Klein’s drink. He took it and toasted them gravely.

After a short while Klein said, “Do you think I could talk privately with you, Sybille?”

“There’s nothing we have to say to one another that can’t be said in front of Kent and Laurence.”

“Nevertheless.”

“I prefer not to, Jorge.”

“As you wish.” Klein peered straight into her eyes and saw nothing there, nothing, and flinched. All that he had meant to say fled his mind. Only churning fragments danced there: Rilke, Broch, Puerto Vallarta. He gulped at his drink.

Zacharias said, “We have a problem to discuss, Klein.”

“Go on.”

“The problem is you. You’re causing great distress to Sybille. This is the second time, now, that you’ve followed her to Zanzibar, to the literal end of the earth, Klein, and you’ve made several attempts besides to enter a closed sanctuary in Utah under false pretenses, and this is interfering with Sybille’s freedom, Klein, it’s an impossible, intolerable interference.”

“The deads are dead,” Mortimer said. “We understand the depths of your feelings for your late wife, but this compulsive pursuit of her must be brought to an end.”

“It will be,” Klein said, staring at a point on the stucco wall midway between Zacharias and Sybille. “I want only an hour or two of private conversation with my—with Sybille, and then I promise you that there will be no further—”

“Just as you promised Anthony Gracchus,” Mortimer said, “not to go to Zanzibar.”

“I wanted—”

“We have our rights,” said Zacharias. “We’ve gone through hell, literally through hell, to get where we are. You’ve infringed on our right to be left alone. You bother us. You bore us. You annoy us. We hate to be annoyed.” He looked toward Sybille. She nodded. Zacharias’ hand vanished into the breast pocket of his coat. Mortimer seized Klein’s wrist with astonishing suddenness and jerked his arm forward. A minute metal tube glistened in Zacharias’ huge fist. Klein had seen such a tube in the hand of Anthony Gracchus only the day before.

“No,” Klein gasped. “I don’t believe—no!”

Zacharias plunged the cold tip of the tube quickly into Klein’s forearm.

“The freezer unit is coming,” Mortimer said. “It’ll be here in five minutes or less.”

“What if it’s late?” Sybille asked anxiously. “What if something irreversible happens to his brain before it gets here?”

“He’s not even entirely dead yet,” Zacharias reminded her. “There’s time. There’s ample time. I spoke to the doctor myself, a very intelligent Chinese, flawless command of English. He was most sympathetic. They’ll have him frozen within a couple minutes of death. We’ll book cargo passage aboard the morning plane for Dar. He’ll be in the United States within twenty-four hours, I guarantee that. San Diego will be notified. Everything will be all right, Sybille!”

Jorge Klein lay slumped across the table. The bar had emptied the moment he had cried out and lurched forward: the half-dozen customers had fled, not caring to mar their holidays by sharing an evening with the presence of death, and the waiters and bartenders, big-eyed, terrified, lurked in the hallway. A heart attack, Zacharias had announced, some kind of sudden attack, maybe a stroke, where’s the telephone? No one had seen the tiny tube do its work.

Sybille trembled. “If anything goes wrong—”

“I hear the sirens now,” Zacharias said.

From his desk at the airport Daud Mahmoud Barwani watched the bulky refrigerated coffin being loaded by grunting porters aboard the morning plane for Dar. And then, and then, and then? They would ship the dead man to the far side of the world, to America, and breathe new life into him, and he would go once more among men. Barwani shook his head. These people! The man who was alive is now dead, and these dead ones, who knows what they are? Who knows? Best that the dead remain dead, as was intended in the time of first things. Who could have foreseen a day when the dead returned from the grave? Not I. And who can foresee what we will all become, a hundred years from now? Not I. Not I. A hundred years from now I will sleep, Barwani thought. I will sleep, and it will not matter to me at all what sort of creatures walk the earth.