The Night Language Read online

  She visited Cimiez for a day, before journeying to Monte Carlo—he snuck onto an adjacent train car to follow. From the window he took in scenes of pastoral beauty. Local shepherds in knee breeches, white stockings and leggings, large black felt hats, tended to flocks as the train swept by like a meteor, making a blurred dream of the passing landscape.

  Reginald Manfrey, the shipping magnate, had a villa in Menton. The queen journeyed there and he followed. In the evening she dined at the Royal Opera House in Versailles. The stalls were cleared to make room for more than one hundred guests, with the sovereigns seated on the right of the Royal Box, beneath garlands hung from vaults and chandeliers. From outside its walls, he heard the musicians perfectly execute pieces from Strauss and Dufresne. Their swelling crescendos swept away the cacophony of the street.

  She made other stops. The stuff of tourism, like visits to the Louvre and the Palais de Saint-Cloud. Once he spied her through a window, enjoying a private moment with Princess Louise over a drink at the Grand Hotel in Nice. Away from her own country, the simple act of sitting across from her daughter’s open and adoring face must have felt like a moment of pure serenity.

  He chose to believe that. She didn’t deserve to be lonely. No one did.

  §

  On the last day she toured the Avenue des Nations at the Exposition Universelle in the company of her daughter, their servants, and a dozen gendarmes. They boarded a small locomotive and slowly rolled along a gauge railway, past careful reconstructions of the Bastille and the Galerie des Machines. Occasionally, someone called for the car to halt, and she got out to the astonishment of the other visitors to the grounds.

  Police kept the crowds well clear of her, affording him ample cover. Moving with the masses, he watched her stroll through the remnant gardens from the Paris World’s Fair, past exhibit buildings constructed from jute, a Parisian invention. She continued by stalls featuring the newly minted discoveries by which the coming century announced itself. Bell’s telephone. Arc lighting of the most fascinating sort, installed along the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Place de l’Opéra, powered by Zénobe Gramme dynamos that pulsed like blood flow.

  Her expression, as far as he could make out from behind a display of Edison’s phonographs and megaphones, suggested fear. It troubled her, the changes to life as she knew it.

  They followed the winding garden paths. She didn’t stay long at anything she saw until she and her entourage found the Human Zoo.

  Signs boasted that the Human Zoo exhibit featured four hundred natives from Africa and the Orient. A man in a heavy woolen coat and top hat bowed deeply to the queen and princess, then raised a walking stick. On his silent signal, a chorus of guttural howls rose up from deep within a display of a mock tribal village. Thirty or more half-naked Negroes rushed out from behind grass huts and shrubs as if on the attack. They gnawed at bones, leveled spears at stuffed prey animals, shimmered before burning tribal fires, dancing and singing gibberish that made him ill.

  There’s no stronger cage for a Negro, he thought as he watched, than the white man’s imaginings of him.

  The display went on for ten minutes until the show’s finale. The natives acted out the sacrifice of one of their own behind a curtain of fanned feathers. A boy, cut down and carried off to pagan gods.

  Her Majesty’s hand rose to her lips in disgust.

  At the foot of a jute statue, the natives lay the boy down and began to club him with the blunt ends of their spears. They made contact with the boy, who was just into his manhood. Sixteen, maybe. The beating was light by the sound of the wood against his back. It was all for show, for her benefit. Every few strikes, the natives paused in their violence and their war cries to glance at the top-hatted barker for direction. Their pale eyes pleaded. Do we have to keep doing this? Then they resumed hitting the boy.

  “Stop,” the queen said softly. “Make it stop.”

  “Your Majesty?” one of the women accompanying the queen said.

  He moved through the crowd, closer to the front and the African village. It smelled like the lie that it was, plaster and woodrot. He feared being seen, but the queen’s face beckoned to him. She was in some sort of agony.

  “Stop this.” Her voice was hoarse and weak. “It’s awful, that you should do this in front of us. We cannot see this.”

  “Mother,” Princess Louise said, “are you unwell?”

  “I sent him away.”

  The queen spoke those words to the natives. He saw her do it. He heard her, as clear as anything anyone had ever said.

  The natives dropped their spears. They stood uncertainly around the boy, who winced confusedly as he rubbed his neck.

  The queen looked at them with such obvious clarity that he no longer cared if he might be seen. Whether she, the princess, or anyone recognized him didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that there had always been a wall separating him from everyone else.

  Look at her, he thought.

  Princess Louise took the queen by the arm. “I sent him away and I knew he’d die,” the queen blurted as her daughter tried to turn her from the exhibit. “Of course I did. I could have fought on. I could have hidden him or just told him to run. I could have done something. Oh, God.”

  “There were no choices left to us,” Princess Louise argued. “You know that, don’t you? After all these years, Mother, please don’t torture yourself now. Not now, of all times.”

  “Oh God, I killed Alamayou, I killed him.”

  She crumpled to the cold pavement. “Alamayou!” she cried as the princess cradled her head in her arms. The gendarmes joined her. The natives vaulted their exhibit’s fence to aid the queen. They made a tight circle around her, closing in fast.

  “Leave her alone!” the princess screamed, and they all backed away. “Can’t you see she’s dying?”

  §

  It was a brilliant blue afternoon in the Marais district of Paris. On Rue Malher, in front of Congregation Ha Kehilot, the late daylight made a calliope of pale white buildings.

  He let the warm flickers of the synagogue’s candles draw him to its windows. Looking in, he was soothed by the sight of its pews and its ark behind doors and musty curtains that no amount of washing or fresh air could fix. Nothing new or unexpected, and that was what he craved. That the places he knew stayed as he knew them. No startling, upheaving changes. Nothing akin to a queen coming out of nowhere, floating on the sea, and crying out as she collapsed.

  Everything kept shifting around him as it always did at that strange hour bridging day to night. When he felt so alone that it was impossible to accept that he could belong anywhere, to anyone, it was good to step outside and let a bit of life turn itself toward him. And it did. The sun threw faint shadows, then a lone cloud came from some far place where perhaps it once carried rain, and slowly the shadows and the light were erased.

  It was hard to believe that this was his life he peered at. For almost eighteen years he’d lived in the modest appartement above Ha Kehilot, working in the synagogue in exchange for rent. The Jews were good to him. They believed his kind shouldn’t be vilified for the color of their skin. The Jews concerned themselves with the manner of living here in the world, not in any imagined hereafter. He respected them immensely, even if he didn’t always understand them.

  He understood one of them, at any rate. The man he knew best, a rabbi named Ariel. Ever since the day they’d met on the streets of the Marais, the rabbi had asked only that he clean and do the occasional repair, and for such paltry work he was able to live well enough and without any unwanted attention. He’d even set up a clinic of sorts, and he used his medical knowledge to care for Jews old and young. Like him, they weren’t wanted and had few options when they became ill.

  He supposed that made him a doctor of sorts, in a quiet vein, which protected him. Sometimes, those he treated would stare. It didn’t take a mesmerist to know th
eir thoughts. If I weren’t desperate, I’d never resort to the likes of you.

  As a result of his work and Rabbi Ariel’s kindness, he’d been able to carve out a decent life in Paris, at least in comparison to some. At night he returned to an appartement, built a fire in the hearth, enjoyed suppers of game and glasses of good port, and retired to a book by the firelight.

  But things were different now. He knew it in his heart. There was no going back to the man he was before. Seeing Queen Victoria rise out of his past into the pale Villefranche sun was shocking enough, but in a way she’d always been there, silently accompanying him on all his journeys. Now, for the first time in three decades, he was thinking of London. Of his once-life in that unimaginable city. Of war and Windsor.

  Dying. Princess Louise said she was dying. And the word on the queen’s lips, if she really was at the last turn of the earth, was that name.

  Alamayou.

  He stood in the street outside Congregation Ha Kehilot like an imbecile, hoping something might magically give him a reason not to do what he increasingly felt he had no choice but to do. God, the wind, the dead sunflower clusters in the window of the bakery next door; really, he wasn’t picky and any sign would work if it calmed his racing mind.

  Inside, the rabbi would be preparing for Shabbat. There was nothing left to do but go in and tell the old man what had happened over the three days that he’d been away, even as the sight of the crumpling queen swam through his head.

  He wouldn’t tell Rabbi Ariel what it all meant. Never that.

  And when he calls you by name, respond, and keep from him what you’ve always kept.

  He found the rabbi in the oratoire, dusting the carved doors of the ark. He was an old, stooped man with a thorny white beard. His eyes were a rainstorm gray, abundant with patience and friendship.

  “Philip!” the rabbi cried.

  He waved to the rabbi as he closed the synagogue door.

  “Boruch aschem!” Rabbi Ariel walked unsteadily toward him, his arms outstretched. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick. I thought something happened to you.”

  “You’re dusting. I should be doing that, rebbe.”

  “You’d deprive an old man of the only exercise he gets? Now, let me sit.”

  He helped the rabbi to a rickety pew and lowered him down.

  “Seeing you relieves me,” Rabbi Ariel said, breathing hard, “and yet I can feel my heart like a hammer. What happened?”

  “Did you know that Her Majesty Queen Victoria is visiting France?” He tried to be light and airy.

  “Yes,” the rabbi said. “I read it in the papers. Such a fuss over an old woman. I might travel more if everyone parted like the Red Sea for me.”

  “I saw her. I was out walking and there she was.”

  “Philip, meyn zun, tell me what has happened to you. You look sick.”

  For a moment he wanted to say everything that he’d been hiding for three decades.

  “Help me up, Philip.”

  Rabbi Ariel rose with some difficulty. It reminded him of the queen, the way the old Jew’s body failed him.

  The rabbi went to the door of the synagogue and opened the wooden flap above the knob. There was a sign underneath that he revealed to the street, Closed—illness, and the address of another Jewish congregation a few streets over.

  He’d made the sign for the rabbi a few years earlier, painted it, sanded and polished it, cut it to fit, and built a wooden cover that could be opened and closed over it. Only when I need it, the rabbi had said, only when I’m too ill to help my people. May the day never come.

  There had been more and more of those days.

  “But the congregants will be here soon, rebbe, and you’re perfectly well to lead Shabbos services.”

  “Don’t tell me how I am,” the rabbi said.

  “Stubborn. I’ll tell you that.”

  “From one who knows stubbornness all too well. Come, have tea with me. We’ll talk awhile. If you’re not too long-winded, maybe I’ll get to evening services after all.”

  Together they climbed up one flight of chipped wooden steps to the rabbi’s appartement. Down a dark hallway from his own, it was larger and full of smells that carried the old country. Schmaltz, potato, sweet wine, onion, the sulphur of tinders struck at evening, the sourness of age wrapped in Paris heat and damp. The rabbi’s walls were barnacled with Stars of David and mezuzahs, gilt-edged portraits of long-dead rabbis, and sketches of the Torah scrolls.

  Ariel was a widower, and he missed her. He’d heard the old man on some nights reciting the kaddish and crying her name, Devorah. There were sons, though he never saw them. The rabbi once said the new world took them away with promises of beautiful vomen, music and dancing, a life in normal clothes with no tefillin wrapped like chains around their arms. It had been years since the rabbi had heard from them. They’d succeeded in losing themselves among the multitudes.

  He often wondered what that would be like, to lose himself out there among the millions like the rebbe’s sons. To be so much like others around him that no one even saw him. Just one raindrop in a storm.

  Rabbi Ariel brewed a weak tea and brought him a cup. It wasn’t the beefy English tea that he still craved each morning, but it warmed him as it seeped into his crevices.

  The rabbi’s hand trembled badly as he set his own cup down on a modest table. It hurt to see the ravages of age overtake his friend. The old man was ill, their gentle teasing of each other aside. He’d become so frail over the last few months.

  Rabbi Ariel was the one he most often saw, a kind and even fatherly man. One day he’d awakened to the realization that he feared the loss of the curmudgeonly old Jew, and he wasn’t used to such notions. It had been far too long since he’d let his heart open.

  “Tell me what’s on your mind, Philip.”

  The rabbi’s was a honeyed and startling voice when heard in private, in a close and cluttered appartement. He never tired of it despite its harsh edges when speaking the Jewish language. It carried a melody of mild complaint that he’d come to learn was natural for a people herded throughout history to deprivation and death.

  We never sound like that, he would tease the old man, and we Negroes have plenty to complain about.

  Then the Negro should learn to speak up a little more, the rabbi would say.

  “I think I have to go to London, rebbe.”

  “Many years since you were there, yes?”

  “Yes. Many years.”

  “But now, a need?”

  “I suppose. Yes, one could put it as such.”

  “This language of yours, my friend. You think you should go. One could. Consider, kavana. To live life with intention. Purpose.”

  “‘Kavana.’ Yes, it’s a good word.”

  “Oy, Philip. You’re missing my point as usual. A good word? A good life. There in London, a good life waits for you?”

  “I didn’t say I was going to a new life.”

  “You didn’t need to. Who disappears for days to consider a brief voyage across the Channel? So where will you live?”

  “I’ve made some arrangements for what I’ll need. There’s a property on Frith, in Little Britain. Not that you’d know. But it ought to be suitable for me, and I’ve learned it’s available. Who can say its condition. It’s as good a place to begin as any.”

  “That’s important, to have somewhere to begin, or begin again. Yes?”

  “I listen to you, rebbe, and suddenly I don’t know if I will come back. I truly don’t.”

  “Then my friend, have you not already departed?” Rabbi Ariel smiled, clearly enjoying being right. “How much will have changed since you were there? Can you even imagine?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’ve told me where you need to go, Philip, but you’ve said nothing of why. What’s happen
ed to do this to you?”

  “Do what?”

  “Make you leave your home.”

  He felt undone by that word. “Home.” It carried too much.

  “This is hard for me, rebbe.”

  “I know. Such a quiet man must forget he has a voice. Do you have work tonight?”

  “No. Not tonight.”

  “Good. Nor do I. Let’s sit awhile. I’d like to hear.”

  He took one breath and hoped that it was pure, and told Rabbi Ariel all that he’d seen at Villefranche and the Exposition.

  The rabbi listened patiently, until the last word.

  “‘Alamayou’? I know that name.”

  “The Abyssinian, rebbe. The orphan taken in by Queen Victoria thirty-odd years ago.”

  “I vaguely remember the story. He was the son of the emperor of that country, right? He came to England after the war his madman father started.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to say I heard about this Alamayou’s story from you, when you came up to me that first day on the street.”

  “You did hear it from me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Philip. How horrible to see such a thing as that zoo. Men can be monsters.”

  The rabbi refilled both of their cups. He looked into the tea and saw his reflection there. Tapping the side of the cup, he was swept away by the tiniest of waves beneath the steam’s cloud cover.

  “But London?” the rabbi asked. “I don’t understand. From such a story, bad as it is, all this? It shouldn’t cause so much tsoris. A troubled heart. A sudden need to go back where you came from after so much time’s passed. I can see the pain it’s bringing you. You’re a good man, Philip. Take that with you wherever you may go.”

  “You don’t know me, rebbe. I’m no good man.” A breath. “I lie.”

  “Listen to me.” The rabbi put a fatherly hand on his leg, patting it. “I’ve known you these many years and though we don’t dine together or take long walks in the moonlight, still I think I know enough. You have a human heart, yes?”