The Night Language Page 3

  “Of course. Though some believe men like me to be no better than apes.”

  “So to those people, you lie. You present yourself as a gentleman when you’re tied in knots with anger, as I’ve seen you more than once. You show yourself to be quiet and contrite when you know more than they do. The heart has many rooms, my friend, but only room to hold so much. The rest is a facade, not meant to be inhabited.”

  “Well said.”

  “We Jews have the gift of gab, you know.”

  “Three decades with you. Yes, I think I know.” They laughed quietly. “You’re a wise and good man yourself, rebbe.”

  “You see how skilled a liar I am? Stay in Paris with me, and learn from the very best.”

  He blurted it. “I knew Alamayou. And the queen. I was there at Windsor. I lived there with them for a time. God, such a short time before it all ended.”

  “Philip, I’ve seen more of you in a day than in the years I’ve known you. What you want to say, say. My son, my son.”

  It was more than he could bear. In three days’ time he’d heard too many words cast skyward in surprise and loss. My son.

  Alamayou.

  He quickly left, knowing the rabbi wouldn’t follow.

  §

  Queen Victoria and the princess left France the following day, on a morning of quiet, steady rain. She crossed the Channel in the ivory light of a sky wrapped in silky gray cumulus to the fanfare of a brass band and hundreds of onlookers. The Journal des débats reported on her visit and her departure in bold headlines, but it made no mention of her visit to the Exposition Universelle or her breakdown before the dreaded dark race, and said nothing about the name she cried out before falling.

  No one in Paris recognized that name. Certainly not in the Marais where he’d found the closest thing to belonging that he’d known after his own Channel crossing so long ago. Shortly after his arrival in Paris, he’d made a test of it, asking several people on too many streets to recall. He said the name out loud, saw their utter confusion or indifference, and never uttered it again.

  After so many years of silence, one spoken word could be louder than anything. Louder than rockets, louder than war.

  Alamayou.

  He packed his trunk as if he wouldn’t come back. Atop the bed he placed a note for the rabbi.

  Hold my apartment for as long as you think reasonable. Await word from me. Sell what can be sold if I don’t return in that time. My gratitude is yours. I wouldn’t have taken offense if you’d refused to speak to the likes of me thirty years ago.

  To the Channel.

  §

  He made his way by train and carriage to a quiet dock at Menton. Soon the boat would emerge from the bank of sea-clinging clouds to carry him away. In all he’d travel some thirty hours.

  London waited.

  The rain slowed to a fine mist. Paris was transformed, made a dream as he left it. Behind him, the storm lidded the city in woolen light. The rain smudged Paris’s steel, making it appear impressionistic and suggested, both beautiful and impossible to see clearly. Soon, though, the city would explode in foliage, blossom, earthen-toned umbrellas and children in boarding school lines, shedding their coats despite the warnings of the proviseurs, to play where now he saw only puddled reflections of the battleship clouds passing overhead.

  Over the years he’d lived there, he’d witnessed the city evolve in a wondrous geometric progression. Roofs of tar and flinty stone gave way to spires, to gleaming metal, and to artisan glass. The open sky became stitched with wire, along which the voices of the age carried. Dirigibles floated like clouds and, because of them, the world below came to think of its hemispheres as something to be measured and traveled.

  It was a time of marvels. So much to consider. Almost too much to take in.

  He stood at the boundary Channel and thought of Alamayou as London first saw him. A stranger who emerged from the war that leveled the only world he’d known, who came with nothing but a legacy too large and terrible to put into English words, who grew like London and Paris until there was no more room and the truth of his life burst into the open, at last. An orphan, accused of murder before the queen and Parliament.

  There had been a moment back at Ha Kehilot when he was certain he’d say it all, but he’d been too terrified of the destruction doing that would surely cause. How could he even begin to save a human being, a life? The only thing he knew how to do was what he’d always done. Hold that life inside of him. It had been enough until his glimpse of the queen. Now, it felt as if there was nothing left inside but the secret he carried.

  The boat came for the Channel crossing. He let the others board first so they wouldn’t take offense. Porters carried their possessions, but he carried his own. While they were seated and attended to, he provided papers proving him fit and free to travel.

  When it was clear that his presence was an undeniable fact, he dragged his trunk and found a seat well apart from the others.

  A few passengers appeared queasy at the insistent turn of the water. He could have suggested Doan’s pills or a pressure point to push to lessen the nausea. But he wasn’t called upon, and besides it wasn’t any of his business.

  “I brought you some of my tea, Philip. I knew how much you’d miss it.”

  Rabbi Ariel took a seat next to him. He held a fat cloth valise packed full for a journey.

  “What are you doing, rebbe?”

  “All my life spent in one arrondissement. What use does anyone have for a man like me, who lives his whole life without seeing the world? Now you, you’ve seen things. Perhaps you’ll tell me about them as we travel. It will help pass the time, or so I’m told.”

  “It’s better that I’m alone. In London I don’t even know what will happen to me. If you understood, you’d want no part of this. You’d turn around and go back to the Marais while you still could.”

  “I’ve decided I can’t live with the not knowing. Like it or not, you matter to me. So if it’s complaint about my being here, sha. Go back to your silences. But if you’d like to entertain me with some stories of Abyssinians and royalty, you’ll find me an amiable listener.”

  He looked as any good father might look at his child. There was tolerance and concern in his eyes, along with a pervasive weariness.

  He pitied the rabbi’s ungrateful missing sons, that they somehow decided their father’s eyes weren’t worth the hard work of remaining.

  The ferry got underway. His thoughts came untethered to drift on the winds, across the water to London.

  “How did you meet such people?” Rabbi Ariel asked.

  “It began in the Abyssinian war.”

  “Simple as that, eh?”

  He sighed. “During the battle at Meqdala, there was a small cottage on a mountain peak. It was on fire. After that we returned to live at Windsor for a year, give or take. That’s all there is to it. You can go home now.”

  “Sha.” The rabbi settled back, making it clear he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “War isn’t an easy thing to talk about.”

  “Nothing’s easy for you to talk about,” Rabbi Ariel said sourly.

  War. No words could hold it. It was vividly death, but also vividly life. He’d seen the faces of the men waiting to be turned loose to charge the battlefield where they knew they’d die. He’d seen the impossibility in their eyes. No one was so alive.

  It’s a long ferry ride to London, he thought, and I ought to say something more. I guess the rabbi’s right about me, though I won’t give him the satisfaction. He knows me better than anyone has for a long time. I’ve forgotten my voice for some things.

  “You’ll tell me it’s none of my business,” the rabbi said, “but I don’t understand the point of this trip.”

  “My trip.”

  “Our trip now.”

  “The queen is ill. Terri
bly ill. The princess said so.”

  “A sad thing. Are you her doctor?”

  “I need to see her before she’s gone and it’s too late. That’s all.”

  The rabbi opened a book and began to read, his lips moving with the words.

  Reaching into his coat pocket, he withdrew an aged, yellowed letter and unfolded it along its well-worn creases.

  9 January 1869

  Love is language. It comes to us before we can speak it. It demands our fluency. Learning it undoes us, or brings us home.

  Maybe it’s finally time, he thought, for my life to be this. These words. Nothing in my life has ever brought me home. Maybe the only thing that will is the truth.

  He got up and walked to the bow of the ferry, away from the rabbi and the rest of the passengers, as a curious sensation settled over him. A ship, the water, viewed from this spot as it steered away from all he’d known, making its way to a strange place. He’d been in this precise place before. Each time he found himself crossing a boundary body of water, it was because the world was changing right out from under him.

  Now look at me, he thought. Crossing the Channel as if no time has passed since the first crossing, when I was someone else.

  ONE

  Chapter Two

  22 August 1868

  Aboard the Feroze

  Royal Victorian Harbor

  Alamayou fought to stay on his feet as he followed the curve of a narrow pitching corridor that spanned the entire hull bottom of the Feroze. He was in search of the ship’s cargo hold, where much of what the English had taken from Abyssinia was kept.

  The fever that had gripped him for weeks was finally receding. His chills were subsiding to slight tremors beneath his skin and his vision was clearing of the hot fog that mottled everything from the ship’s lamps to the stars.

  It was late and most of the Feroze’s crew slept in their thatch and metal bunks. Above every returning soldier was another, and one above him. Each cabin lined its war-weary men along the walls as if they were trophies from a hunt.

  He’d spent most of the night before up on deck, wrapped in a thin blanket that offered him no warmth. There he’d kept watch from the rail, staring at the coming sea as if it could give back what it had taken from him. Clouds had covered the waves completely, hiding everything. If not for the constant roar of the water as it swept against the ship, he would have sworn the Feroze could fly.

  Where he was now, below deck, it was almost easy to pretend the night before hadn’t happened. He hadn’t stood on deck with the salt air lacerating his skin and the starless sky a pitiless canopy over the ship, watching the clouds gather low above the waves like a white dream. He hadn’t stood there for hours, thinking of how it would feel to jump.

  He descended through holes, down ladders and steps. Night persisted in the lower ship no matter what time of day it was, so he carried a lamp and walked behind the pale yellow space it opened in the dark. The shuddering flame cast a rippling circle against the floor, and as he watched the motion inside the circle of light, he thought, That’s what wind would look like if it could be seen. As he stumbled along, he ran his hand along the hull’s wood. It was always cold and carried the sense of water even though it was dry.

  After what seemed like hours spent wandering, he arrived at the cargo hold where his country’s treasures were kept. On their first night at sea almost four months before, Philip—the one he’d stayed with over the many months at sea, the one he’d seen for the first time at the fire that killed what remained of his family—had held up a finger outside the same room. Alamayou hadn’t understood what that meant at the time, but he understood now. Philip had held up his finger that first night aboard the ship to say, One thing. Take one thing from the room that once was part of his life in Abyssinia. As a comfort, Alamayou supposed. He hadn’t that day. He wasn’t ready.

  He pushed the door open and went inside.

  Beyond the lamp’s weak glow, a cavern full of crates, suspended nets jutting out at odd angles from the mismatched shapes stuffed inside, and rugs piled high with carelessly strewn trinkets stretched almost the length of the ship’s bottom. Things he’d used, held, knew every day of his childhood, had been pulled from the wreckage of his father’s fortress after it collapsed under the English assault. Now it all lay in pieces alongside each other. The English had put it here in pairings that never happened in life. His father’s crosses, Bibles, and muskets lay gouged and bent next to his mother’s broken jewelry, her torn clothes, and shattered pottery. None of it looked real anymore.

  In the corner of the cargo hold there was a fragment of the shield given to him by his father, or one so much like it that he almost blacked out. He steadied himself against the corner of a crate, waiting for the months at sea, the war, the sight of his mother and father in the fire at Amba Geshen, all to stitch itself back together and make sense. He waited and looked around the hold for anything to keep while the lamp’s wick sputtered in its own flame.

  He left the remains of his country behind and walked to the other side of the hold, where the English kept the weapons they’d used in the war. Armstrong batteries. Eight-inch mortars. Snider rifles. All the things they used to pour steel into Abyssinian men.

  This room held the end of Abyssinia. He already had enough pieces of that inside of him.

  There’s no use pretending, he thought. The lie didn’t keep him warm any more than the rag of a blanket had. He sat on the cold floor, in the orphan space between the English weapons and the wreckage of his father’s fortress at Meqdala, and said it out loud.

  “Last night at the rail of this ship, I thought about joining you.”

  He’d been alone on deck the night before, at least for a time. He’d tested the rail’s ability to hold his weight. He’d run his fingers along its damp, pitted wood to see how slippery it was. Too slippery and he’d fall before he was ready.

  Had he jumped, it all would have been over by now. The fever, the loneliness and fear, the terrible things he’d seen—real, imagined, some awful mix of both—everything would be silence. Whatever fate waited for him in the days and weeks ahead would never find him.

  The moment his body would have hit the water, he surely would have filled with horror even as his lungs froze and his heart stopped and dank seawater pushed inside of him. Had he done it, he would have known a moment of flight, then falling, and, longest of all, the hopeless fear of dying alone, cold, and suffocating. No one would hear him cry that he’d been wrong, that he was afraid to die and wanted to be saved.

  In the last moment before it all went away, he wondered if he would have seen them again. Abat. Anat.

  And then he’d heard a noise, turned away from the sea and the horror his fever had made him believe he saw in the waves, and there was Philip. He couldn’t understand why. He’d been quiet when he’d left their cabin and, what was more, they barely knew each other. They didn’t speak each other’s language and could only communicate with their hands, with gestures and grunts. Their only connection was the war and their skin. They were the only two blacks aboard.

  Philip didn’t owe him anything, and when he’d awakened and seen Alamayou’s bunk empty, he could just as easily have rolled over and gone back to sleep. But there he’d been and at just the right time, staring at him with the same expression he’d worn at the fire on Amba Geshen. Like he needed to say something, but there were no words for it.

  It was as if Philip had known that dark thoughts were gathering on the deck, like the clouds gathered above the sea. All he had to do was look at Alamayou and he could see Alamayou conjuring it, to see if throwing himself off the ship’s rail was the right and only thing left to do, and now it mattered that Alamayou turn away from the waves and stay on board with the living.

  Maybe there’s something about me, Alamayou thought. A mark of some kind. This ruined hand, maybe, or something else, and every
one can tell I’m not meant for living in the world. Maybe Philip has it too, and that makes it easy for him to see it in me.

  We’re two black monsters, not fit for anything but fires and oceans.

  He left the hold without taking anything.

  Finding the steps out of the ship’s bottom, he climbed as the sounds of the Feroze began to rise with the dawn. Men called to each other and it sounded like a dirge. The clang of metal and the thud of booted footsteps echoed like drums, like the negrit at Meqdala.

  He didn’t want to see the deck again so soon after the long night, but the ship was beginning to slow. Wherever it was that they’d been heading, it felt as if they were close. He needed to at least see the rumor of the land, and see for himself the place where they’d been taking him all this time.

  §

  The thunderclap of bells woke Philip. He bolted upright in the dark of the cabin, the way worried men do at late hours. The bells brought him to the cabin’s porthole where he saw little. The lightening sea, the steamers and frigates splitting the water on approach to the Feroze.

  Home at last, he thought bitterly before turning to rouse his cabinmate.

  Alamayou’s bunk was empty, its threadbare blanket gone.

  Panic burst brightly in his chest. He leapt to his feet and began to dress in the murk, his thoughts bounding wildly from one possibility to the next. The Abyssinian was lost. He was wandering the corridors or, worse, grief stricken at being alone in the world. Back on deck, with that haunted look he’d seen the night before. What in bloody hell had Alamayou been thinking there at the rail?

  Philip wished he had words the Abyssinian could understand. You’re sad and scared and sick with fever. You’re wondering, where life’s left you off? You and me both, mate. Alone in this shitty world, and me longer than you. Just stay above ground. You may starve for just one good thing in your life, but maybe each day you’ll see something worth the trouble of the next day. Don’t let these bastards see you looking like you did on deck. Worse than afraid. Beaten. Don’t give them any more ground than what they were born with, and what they’ve taken from you since the day their mothers spat them out.