The Bestiary (30 page)

Under the desk lamp, her hair shone, and I wanted to stroke it.

“Have you been up long?” I said.

“Long enough to appreciate the work you’ve done.” She indicated the stacks of notebooks and folders. “It’s incredible.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t really understand.”

I was touched.

“I hope you don’t mind that I pried,” she said.

“Not at all. I’m glad you did.”

When I woke at dawn, she was gone. The quilt was folded neatly on the couch. There was an envelope beside it on which she had written:

Xeno, thanks for everything. Bring this tonight…10 o’clock?

Inside the envelope was the gold locket with her initials that she had worn since she was a girl. I clicked the catch and the front flipped open, revealing a tiny image. It was my face, cut out of a photograph taken in my late teens.

That night, we met for a drink at a café near her office. At five
A.M
. she was flying to East Africa on a mission for International Refuge that had been scheduled weeks before. She had to pack and get some sleep, so we only had an hour.

I took out her locket, and she searched my face, waiting expectantly.

“You made me so happy,” I said. “All these years I hoped you knew I felt the same way.”

“I thought I did,” she smiled faintly. “But so many things were in the way.”

I raised my hands and put the locket around her neck. As I fastened the clasp, she leaned forward and kissed me. We were suspended like that for an instant, before she closed her eyes and I held her close and kissed her again.

T
HE NINE DAYS
she was in Africa felt interminable. The fact it rained much of the time didn’t help. I threw myself into my work even more than usual. Then, on a brilliant spring afternoon, she was at my door again. She was tanned, and her hair was combed back. She was wearing a trim red jacket and black jeans. Makeup, too, and perfume.

“I got back this morning,” she said, embracing me. “Sorry I was incommunicado. Mostly I was in the wild.”

“How did it go?”

“Fine. After Madagascar, we went to Niger. I was laid up with a fever for a couple of days. I’m okay now.”

“You look beautiful.”

She smiled, and between the coral bands of her lipstick, the chipped tooth stood out.

“So the trip was a success.”

“You know, we operate in increments. Two steps forward, one step back. Madagascar is an isolated ecosystem. Hundreds of unique species have been jammed into shrinking pockets of rainforest. Some have been reduced to ‘bushmeat.’ Lemurs like the indri—our most direct ancestor—and cats like the fosa are being hunted to extinction. It took years to push through a ban on the hunting. Now we’re trying to get them to enforce it.”

“Sit down. We’ll have something to drink.”

“I’ve been cooped up for days. Would you like to go for a walk?”

We circled around to the river and crossed the Pont d’Arcole to Notre Dame. The usual crowd jammed the plaza. Many cameras taking the same picture. Tour guides with their rote recitations, provincial priests on pilgrimage, beggars. A boy in a wheelchair was selling crucifixes. An African band was playing the Marseillaise on steel drums.

Lena and I climbed the north tower to the Galerie des Chimères, where the gargoyles, facing outward, protect the cathedral from evil spirits. Claws extended, fangs bared, they were intended to be more fearsome than any beast the mind could conjure.
^*5
On the parapet to the south tower, between a particularly fierce pair, we gazed over the city: the Hôtel de Ville, the Petit Pont streaming with pedestrians, the gold Dôme des Invalides blazing, and, just below, the Seine green as jade, swollen with rainwater.

“I missed you,” Lena said.

“I missed you, too.”

“But I had time to think.” She leaned back against the wall. “We have so much history together, Xeno. I’ve been asking myself: ‘How do we do this? Where do we start?’”

I put my arms around her. “How about right here?”

She smiled. “I knew you’d say that.”

“This is more than most people ever get.”

She hesitated. “Sometimes I think if you get too happy, it’s taken away.”

Her hair was blowing. Up there, the din of the city became a low hum. The two gargoyles peered down at us.

“That’s not going to happen to us,” I said. “We won’t let it.”

She rose up on her toes and I kissed her.

A few hours later, as evening fell, we lay in bed in my apartment. On the way there, I bought her a bouquet of white lilies from a vendor. Now they were in a vase by the window. Their scent filled the room. A candle burned beside them, gilding the thick petals. Lena’s head rested on my shoulder, her arm on my chest. I ran my fingers through her hair. I still couldn’t believe she was beside me. We had traveled so many miles and been so far apart.

After making love, we remained locked together, drenched in sweat, and then eased apart. Her thoughts had obviously been following a parallel path; pressing her palm to my heart, touching my lips and my cheek, she murmured, “Is it really you?”

I held her into the night, feeling her chest rise and fall as the candle flickered out and the darkness expanded around us. Her body was as beautiful as I’d always imagined: full breasts, small hips, shapely legs. There was a faint hollow between her breasts, a gold shadow. Through all those hours we never said a word. Just when I was certain she had fallen asleep, she slipped from my arms and stood up with a shiver and crossed the room. Her skin shone silver, then white, before she melted into the darkness. There was a long silence. The bathroom door opened and closed. I heard water run in the kitchen. A glass clink. There was another silence. Then a floorboard creaked in the hall.

I felt a cool rush as the sheet was lifted and she curled in beside me.

“I was afraid I would never see you again,” I said hoarsely.

“You were dreaming,” she whispered, kissing my cheek.

It certainly seemed that way when I closed my eyes and images from the past began flooding my head.

Steaming avenues bleeding tar. Antennas cluttering rooftops. Ragtag crowds streaming from the subway. I recognized individual faces. The blind man playing a mandolin on his fire escape. His sister from Mexico City selling corn cakes from a cart. The hustlers at the pool hall drinking Cuba Libres at dawn. The seminarian with a glass eye arrested for shoplifting. The Jewish shoemaker’s son selling fire-works. The daughters of a bus driver, murdered on the job, turning tricks. Our mysterious neighbor, the Irish nurse, whom my grandmother claimed to have seen levitating at the Laundromat.

Denizens of that world, Lena and I had escaped it—or, unawares, been expelled. It didn’t matter which. Like its inhabitants, we, too, were destined to be grains in the great hourglass, as Mr. Hood, expounding on the flow of history, once described the billions of human beings that have preceded and will follow us, some embracing this world, most rejecting it, before, without exception, it swallows us up again.

Beside Lena, I felt far removed from the hourglass—from the dead, the unborn, and even the living. We were as alone as we would ever be, like the stars on some remote latitude that shine on no one. We could shine for one another, with no need or desire for anyone else. We were very lucky just then, and we knew it.

“Hold me closer,” Lena murmured the next morning, her breath warm against my throat.

But I was already holding her as close as I could.

W
E SPED OUT
of the city on my new motorcycle, taking the western autoroute past Versailles and Chartres to Courville, a river town at the edge of a forest. The speedometer ticked past 150 kph, but Lena shouted into my helmet, “Faster!”

I had not owned a motorcycle since I returned from Vietnam. Every so often I rented one to ride out of the city. After Murphy rode behind me the day he was killed, I had not been able to take anyone on the back of a bike. Friends, girlfriends, co-workers, no one. But the previous week I had bought a black 750cc Dugatti, so precisely tuned that, even at high speed, its four-hundred-pound frame barely vibrated.

Lena loved speed—another thing about her I hadn’t known. I bought her a black helmet with a tinted visor, like my own. She pressed up against me and locked her arms.

“You’re still in such good shape,” she laughed, as we weaved through traffic. “For a desk jockey.”

“Thanks.”

Buildings, bridges, factories flew by before we exited the autoroute and rode across open countryside, in and out of small towns, down long roads where the poplars lining the shoulder felt close enough to touch. We stopped at a restaurant with a sky-blue awning where we lingered over lunch at a white table.

Except when Lena went to work, we had been inseparable for a week. That Saturday I had picked her up at an unfamiliar address on the rue de Rivoli, a professional building. It was only when our waiter brought us bread and uncorked a bottle of wine that Lena looked me in the eye and smiled broadly.

“I fixed it today,” she said, and I saw that the dentist had done a fine job capping the chipped tooth and matching the color to the enamel of her teeth.

I smiled, too. “It looks beautiful,” I said, taking her hands in mine across the table. “You look beautiful.”

Two days later, after she had been working late, we met at the Japanese garden in the Bois de Boulogne. It was a quiet, out-of-the-way place. The miniature Shinto temple was weather-beaten. The carp pond, filled with leaves, had been drained. Vines covered the water wheel. I was waiting for Lena on a stone bench beneath the maple trees.

She was preoccupied. At first, she wouldn’t discuss it. She made small talk about a film we’d seen the previous night. Finally she said, “I have to return to Africa—West Africa. Not now, but soon.”

“For how long?”

“It depends. We’re trying to head off a disaster in Senegal. There’s a wildlife preserve the government has decided to dissolve—their word. They want to clear the land for cattle grazing, which is bad enough, and set aside a section for hunters. Turkey shoots with big game. Many of the animals have dropped their defenses with humans. Other animals will be relocated to the country’s other, already overcrowded game preserve—who knows for how long—or to foreign zoos. Some will end up on the black market, for their fur or their organs. Most will die in captivity.”

“There’s no way to stop this?”

“No. We thought we could do something through the UN, but the Senegalese government is impervious to all pleas. They presented a single offer: International Refuge has until July 30 to get out any animals it can. After that, all bets are off.”

“So you have two months.”

“Yeah. The catch is we have to provide transportation and find homes for the animals. It’s a huge undertaking, but doable. We’ve already lined up game preserves in Kenya and South Africa. Most of the animals—monkeys, water buffalo, zebras—will travel overland in trucks. They can handle the heat and the rough roads. It’s transportation for the big cats—leopards, cheetahs, caracals, and two prides of lions—that’s giving us fits.”

“What do you need?”

“A transport plane that can make a couple of trips in a short span. We petitioned the UN, but that’s going nowhere because of countries that don’t want to offend Senegal. Greenpeace owns two planes, but they’re too small. The U.S. said no. The French have large transport planes, but also a delicate relationship with Senegal. It goes on like that.”

“Could you do it by sea?”

She nodded. “It would be slower but better. A large ship could transport all the animals at once. Still, it’s not feasible.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s even harder to get a ship,” she said wearily.

I looked at her. “I have a ship.”

8

O
N THE SECOND OF
J
ULY
we embarked from Piraeus in a green rain. The sea was smoky, the anchored ships like ghosts as we headed for open waters, sailing south by southwest.

In the mess hall, Lena and I joined Captain Salice for breakfast at one of the two long tables. Plates and silverware were laid out on a long counter. The cook emerged from the galley through swinging doors and set down a steaming pan of scrambled eggs and hash browns. He was a small, heavyset man who wore high-top sneakers and a red apron. Nodding to the captain, he rang an old brass bell to summon the crew.

“That bell originally hung in a Bulgarian church,” the captain said to me. “My predecessor gave it to your father.”

My father.

I could never have imagined that his old cabin would be the first place Lena and I called home together. That night, after twelve hours in the hold, overseeing the workmen, she sat cross-legged on the bed, immersed in her graphs and checklists, while I sat at my desk, rereading my notes on Sarkas. I was restless, still awaiting additional information from the librarians at the Villa Ziane. I had faxed them another request, and instructed the radioman to find me the moment they replied. Before I disembarked at Crete on the return voyage from Senegal, I wanted to narrow the range of my search as much as possible.

Before falling asleep, Lena and I lay propped up in bed, leafing through a book of photographs of the churches on Crete. It was a comprehensive study, with interior and exterior shots, close-ups of murals, mosaics, and frescoes. The Greek text was dry, but straightforward, and I translated it for her as we went.

The night before we left Paris, I had stumbled on a line in Giorgio Zetto’s diary that I previously passed over. Two words in a throwaway sentence:
After hearing about Sarkas’s church when we visited Signor Algrete, I want to learn more, but no one has seen Sarkas for days.

Sarkas’s church.
At first, I assumed Zetto meant the Armenian Orthodox Church. But as a Roman Catholic, and a Venetian who surely knew the monastery on San Lazzaro, why would Zetto suddenly “want to learn more” about Armenian Orthodoxy? Would he really have been interested in hearing Sarkas discuss its liturgy? And even if he was, why would the renegade monk accommodate him? I never found evidence that Zetto saw Sarkas again; this diary entry, on March 14, 1820, was his last mention of him. Then in Athens I thought: what if Zetto was referring to a physical church in Crete with which Sarkas had become associated in some way? Before we sailed, I bought
The Churches of Crete
in a religious bookstore on Stadiou Street.

“What are you looking for, exactly?” Lena asked.

“I don’t know. Something that may only make sense when I learn more about Sarkas.”

“Such as?”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t know that, either.”

T
HERE WERE ONLY
three Americans on board, but on the Fourth of July we celebrated with Egyptian firecrackers and cognac. The captain ran up the American flag beneath the Greek. The cook baked me an apple pie.

I was thinking of the barbecues at the Morettis’. The pungent smoke off the grill, the pitchers of lemonade, the cans of beer nestled into a tub of ice. The backyard filled with firemen and cops, their wives and kids. The younger kids running with sparklers, the rest of us setting off ashcans and cherry bombs in the street. In the evening the men playing poker under the oak tree, drinking shots now, fireflies dancing around them.

Apparently Lena was revisiting the same memories. Wearing red shorts and a blue T-shirt, picking at her pie, she broke a long silence. “This was my father’s favorite holiday. He’d be upset with me, leaving the States the way I did.”

“He’d also be proud of what you’re doing now.”

“Maybe
I’ve
been upset about the way I left. I don’t want to go back; I just hate that I can’t,” she added sharply. She looked out at the sea. “Daddy would be happy if he could see us now, Xeno.”

The
Makara
was carrying a full crew and eight passengers, including me: Lena and four colleagues (a vet, two animal handlers, and the director of their African office, Dr. Lucapa, an Angolan lawyer), and two unexpected guests, Vartan Marczek and Oso.

We would put Marczek and Oso ashore at Safi in Morocco, where she had business with a famous glazier, before they traveled to Essouaria to stay with friends. When I heard about their trip, I offered them passage—an invitation Marczek couldn’t resist.

I had met up with him again in Paris, and he invited me to a party in his honor at his publisher’s swank apartment on the Boulevard Raspail. He had turned in his Byron biography. We drank champagne and smoked cigars on the terrace. I brought him up to date on my researches. He listened intently, his great head bowed.

“I have no doubt you are closing in on Sarkas’s final destination,” he said. “And on the bestiary itself. I can feel it. I thought of you recently when I came upon a line in Augustine: ‘If we find in the depiction of an animal an uplifting or penetrating symbol, we should not worry whether that creature really exists, or ever existed.’ Compiling or reconstituting a bestiary, Xeno, is a constant re-creation of Creation. Like Pigafetta and Byron, you’re leaving your own mark on the
Caravan Bestiary.
”

We were sailing due west now, north of Malta, south of Sicily—closer to Tunisia than Italy. The Ionian Sea was a deep purple on which whitecaps remained impossibly poised. The light penetrated everything, and the dome of the sky was like bright blue quartz.

One morning I spotted a phalanx of dolphins. They darted dangerously close to the prow, raced the ship, then peeled off and leapt above the waves. The second mate told me he once saw a dolphin skim the water vertically, propelling himself with his tail fin, aware of the amazement he inspired. No wonder Aelian, Pliny, and every other ancient naturalist—a cold-eyed bunch—wrote of these animals with such delight.

When Lena wasn’t toiling in the hold, she was meeting with her colleagues. They had sent and received dozens of radio messages and faxes, to and from Paris, Dakar, and London. I still hadn’t heard from the Villa Ziane. I was resigning myself to the fact I might hear nothing at all during our voyage.

In Paris, Lena was stunned at first that I would offer up use of the
Makara,
in effect underwriting a major portion of the mission. “I know you love animals—”

“If I could do more, I would.”

She took me to see the Director of International Refuge. After conferring with his board, he set up a meeting with their attorney and an attaché at the Senegalese Embassy. Pericles Arvanos sent me the insurance certificates. Visas and permits were obtained.

Arvanos and I had a testy phone conversation. He thought I was crazy. He spelled out how much money I would lose, and how much everything would cost: $175,000 for construction and another $30,000 to dismantle the modifications later.

“Then there is the $180,000 contract I will have to break with Alta.”

Alta was a Turkish tobacco company that had commissioned the
Makara
to carry six tons of long-leaf tobacco from Istanbul to Buenos Aires.

“Take it out of operating expenses,” I said. “It’s only two months. Imagine the ship is in dry dock.”

“Imagine?” I could picture him shaking his head. “Dry dock does not entail losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Anyway, your mind’s made up. Tell me: after you’ve deposited these animals in Kenya, the
Makara
will return to Piraeus, correct? She can be reoutfitted in August and carry cargo again in September. Unless you have other plans.”

“Not at the moment.”

It wasn’t just that he disapproved of what I was doing; it felt as if he was conveying my father’s disapproval, by proxy from the beyond. I didn’t mind Arvanos’s concern—he was my lawyer, after all—but I wasn’t interested in his approval.

“Please send me the necessary papers as soon as possible,” I said, cutting short our conversation.

“Of course. It is your ship.”

It was my ship. And it felt that way for the first time.

After inheriting the
Makara,
I had tried reducing it in my mind to the monthly check I received from Arvanos. The irony of his reprising his old role—sending me my youthful allowance—was not lost on me. He worked for me now, but obviously I had been comfortable with that old template. It had helped make the ship into an abstraction, an investment impersonal as stocks and bonds, rather than what I now found it to be: a self-sufficient world, with its own codes, taboos, and humor, and an unusual group of seamen: the machinist who could play simultaneous games of chess blindfolded; the Algerian boatswain who had a wife and ten children. And the man who oversaw the engine room, Hasan, a Turkish Cypriot, who informed me that his prosthetic left foot was carved from a walrus tusk and his little finger from a triton shell.

Lena and I had flown to Athens and hired a team of carpenters, welders, and electricians to adapt it for this mission. In four weeks they constructed a dozen cages, partitions, storage bins. They installed sunlamps and air conditioners. We needed refrigerators large enough to hold enough raw meat for the journey back up around Africa, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, and south to the Kenyan port of Mombasa. Eight days’ sailing in all.

I had the passenger cabins painted and properly furnished. It was obvious my father had seldom taken guests on his voyages. I kept my own quarters as he had refurbished them. I tried to make them my own by stocking the bookshelves and hanging some Piranesi prints. I also brought many of my notebooks. My father knew enough about me to surmise that a desk would be an important item. This one, with its reassuring bulk, was good to write at.

After watching her go nonstop for weeks, I persuaded Lena to take a day off. We rented a car and drove north to Delphi, which she had always wanted to see. It was one of those places her aunt, who traveled to Egypt, told her about when she was a girl. We visited the site of the oracle, and Lena wanted to know how it worked.

“The high priestess of the oracle was called Pythia,” I said.

“A vestal virgin?”

“Far from it. She oversaw elaborate orgies. At the summer solstice she was required to give herself over to a stranger. In her ceremonial role, she sat alone in the Temple of Apollo. There was a chasm beneath the floor from which ethylene gases escaped. Inhaling them, she fell into a trance and muttered her prophecies in a secret language which only her priests could interpret. The priests then sold the prophecies to various supplicants.”

“They had to pay?”

“Through the nose. The oracle was only open for business a few days a year, so it was a seller’s market.”

She laughed. She liked to talk about what she called my work, which was my knowledge of ancient history.

We visited the amphitheater, then climbed the steep path to the stadium, which I told her had been carved right out of the mountain in the fifth century
B.C
.

Does it have a name?” she said.

“It was called
Marmaria,
which means ‘struggle.’ It accommodated seven thousand spectators.”

Twenty-five centuries later, we were the only ones there. The dust was hot beneath our feet. The cicadas were loud. Yellow flowers grew from cracks in the stone. We sat on the wall and gazed across the plain below to the Gulf of Corinth, a gold crescent suspended in haze. For the first time since leaving Paris, we were truly alone, even if only for a few hours. Before leaving Delphi, we mailed Bruno a postcard and signed it
Love, Lena Xeno.