Read Online The Bay of Foxes by Sheila Kohler - Free Book Online Page A

the only African in the restaurant, young and well-dressed in his tailored suit, sitting erect beside these older white people. They are wondering, as he is, what he is doing with these people in this celebrated place, while most of his kind suffer quietly. What would Asfa think?
    Gustave leans toward Dawit, speaking slowly, as if he might not understand. “We are pleased to meet you. We have heard such good things.”
    M. puts her hand on Dawit’s arm as though he belonged to her. “He’s quite brilliant, you know. Speaks so many languages! Perfect French! Even some Italian! He went to Le Rosey in Switzerland as a boy with all the Arab sheikhs, Egyptian royals, the Rothschilds. Imagine! And he’s remarkably diligent and efficient! You can’t imagine how much energy he has! Up at dawn. Works for hours! It’s quite frightening.Who would have guessed what a dark gem I found in a café? A brown diamond.”
    Dawit sees the editor’s intelligent gaze travel admiringly from his face to his narrow waist and hips. Simone, too, eyes him hungrily from under thick black lashes. They clearly think Dawit is using all this energy for one purpose, and M. seems to enjoy their misapprehension. He smiles at them, batting his long eyelashes and showing off his white teeth in a wide grin, playing the role of the black lover. Like everyone else these French intellectuals are all
au fond
racists, he decides, though they have the good grace to pretend not to be. They are probably considering the length of his penis.
    He recalls the many times M. comes to him in the night, waking him from his sound sleep. She switches on the lamp on the piano and asks him to sit on the piano stool and watch, as she does it to herself with her hand. In her pleasure she calls out a name he does not quite catch: perhaps the name of the lover from long ago. She tells him she has never forgotten him, her first and lost love. “He was so much in love with me—but my family ruined it all. My mother made him take us all out to dinner and pay for the entire family, and my brothers were so rude to him—humiliated him.” This lover has, probably, been utterly transformed over the years; perhaps he never existed at all.
    Now she makes him tell his family stories over the lobster salad,
the gigot d’agneau
, the
flageolets
, and the bottles of pink champagne. Apparently the editor still feels M. is worth treating lavishly, or perhaps it is just an old habit. Dawit wonders if they really like one another. Certainly they seem to enjoyone another’s company, the splendid evening, the excellent food. The conversation is lively, filled with allusions to literary life that are difficult to follow. Dawit enjoys the delicate dishes, the champagne, the quick repartee.
    Then Simone turns toward him. “Do tell us more about your life in Ethiopia, what it was like there,” she urges.
    He explains that he was only a child there and often away all year at boarding school in Rolle or in the winter in Gstaad, where the school moved in the winter months. He tells them his father was absent much of the time, following the Emperor to his palaces in Addis Ababa or in Dire Dawa, and increasingly abroad. The Emperor voyaged a lot, particularly in the last years, because he felt more comfortable on these state visits than at home. Everyone wanted to go along, but Dawit’s mother would often remain behind in Harar, where she was busy with good works, the schools, the hospital, the Ras Makonnen, which was near the palace. She was often with the Orthodox clergy, who huddled around her. Mostly, in boarding school, he was terribly homesick, he confesses. They treated him with a certain deference because his nobility was stressed, but to them he remained an African boy. He learned to ski, to play tennis, to ride horseback, and to play poker. He spent his time reading books. He says he knows very little about the Emperor’s complicated politics, though he would overhear things his father