Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas

  “It comes back to me now, I think.”

  “Very well. The founder of the Omani Sultanate of Zanzibar was Ahmad ibn Majid the Sly, who came to the throne of Oman in 1811—do you remember?—upon the death of his uncle Abd-er-Rahman al-Busaidi.”

  “The names sound familiar,” Klein said doubtfully.

  “Seven years later,” Sybille continued, “seeking to conquer Zanzibar without the use of force, Ahmad the Sly shaved his beard and mustache and visited the island disguised as a soothsayer, wearing yellow robes and a costly emerald in his turban. At that time most of Zanzibar was governed by a native ruler of mixed Arab and African blood, Abdullah ibn Muhammad Alawi, whose hereditary title was Mwenyi Mkuu. The Mwenyi Mkuu’s subjects were mainly Africans, members of a tribe called the Hadimu. Sultan Ahmad, arriving in Zanzibar Town, gave a demonstration of his soothsaying skills on the waterfront and attracted so much attention that he speedily gained an audience at the court of the Mwenyi Mkuu. Ahmad predicted a glowing future for Abdullah, declaring that a powerful prince famed throughout the world would come to Zanzibar, make the Mwenyi Mkuu his high lieutenant, and confirm him and his descendants as lords of Zanzibar forever.

  “ ‘How do you know these things?’ asked the Mwenyi Mkuu.

  “ ‘There is a potion I drink,’ Sultan Ahmad replied, ‘that enables me to see what is to come. Do you wish to taste of it?’

  “ ‘Most surely I do,’ Abdullah said, and Ahmad thereupon gave him a drug that sent him into rapturous transports and showed him visions of paradise. Looking down from his place near the footstool of Allah, the Mwenyi Mkuu saw a rich and happy Zanzibar governed by his children’s children’s children. For hours he wandered in fantasies of almighty power.

  “Ahmad then departed, and let his beard and mustache grow again, and returned to Zanzibar ten weeks later in his full regalia as Sultan of Oman, at the head of an imposing and powerful armada. He went at once to the court of the Mwenyi Mkuu and proposed, just as the soothsayer had prophesied, that Oman and Zanzibar enter into a treaty of alliance under which Oman would assume responsibility for much of Zanzibar’s external relations—including the slave trade—while guaranteeing the authority of the Mwenyi Mkuu over domestic affairs. In return for his partial abdication of authority, the Mwenyi Mkuu would receive financial compensation from Oman. Remembering the vision the soothsayer had revealed to him, Abdullah at once signed the treaty, thereby legitimizing what was, in effect, the Omani conquest of Zanzibar. A great feast was held to celebrate the treaty, and, as a mark of honor, the Mwenyi Mkuu offered Sultan Ahmad a rare drug used locally, known as borqash, or ‘the flower of truth.’ Ahmad only pretended to put the pipe to his lips, for he loathed all mind-altering drugs, but Abdullah, as the flower of truth possessed him, looked at Ahmad and recognized the outlines of the soothsayer’s face behind the Sultan’s new beard. Realizing that he had been deceived, the Mwenyi Mkuu thrust his dagger, the tip of which was poisoned, deep into the Sultan’s side and fled the banquet hall, taking up residence on the neighboring island of Pemba. Ahmad ibn Majid survived, but the poison consumed his vital organs and the remaining ten years of his life were spent in constant agony. As for the Mwenyi Mkuu, the Sultan’s men hunted him down and put him to death along with ninety members of his family, and native rule in Zanzibar was therewith extinguished.”

  Sybille paused. “Is that not a gaudy and wonderful story?” she asked at last.

  “Fascinating,” Klein said. “Where did you find it?”

  “Unpublished memoirs of Claude Richburn of the East India Company. Buried deep in the London archives. Strange that no historian ever came upon it before, isn’t it? The standard texts simply say that Ahmad used his navy to bully Abdullah into signing the treaty, and then had the Mwenyi Mkuu assassinated at the first convenient moment.”

  “Very strange,” Klein agreed. But he had not come here to listen to romantic tales of visionary potions and royal treacheries. He groped for some way to bring the conversation to a more personal level. Fragments of his imaginary dialogue with Sybille floated through his mind. Everything is quiet where I am, Jorge. There’s a peace that passeth all understanding. Like swimming under a sheet of glass. The way it is, is that one no longer is affected by the unnecessary. Little things stand revealed as little things. Die and be with us, and you’ll understand. Yes. Perhaps. But did she really believe any of that? He had put all the words in her mouth; everything he had imagined her to say was his own construct, worthless as a key to the true Sybille. Where would he find the key, though?

  She gave him no chance. “I will be going back to Zanzibar soon,” she said. “There’s much I want to learn about this incident from the people in the back country—old legends about the last days of the Mwenyi Mkuu, perhaps variants on the basic story—”

  “May I accompany you?”

  “Don’t you have your own research to resume, Jorge?” she asked, and did not wait for an answer. She walked briskly toward the door of the lounge and went out, and he was alone.

  Seven

  I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call “delusional systems.” Needless to say, “delusions” are always officially defined. We don’t have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.

  Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow

  ONCE MORE THE DEADS, this time only three of them, coming over on the morning flight from Dar. Three was better than five, Daud Mahmoud Barwani supposed, but three was still more than a sufficiency. Not that those others, two months back, had caused any trouble, staying just the one day and flitting off to the mainland again, but it made him uncomfortable to think of such creatures on the same small island as himself. With all the world to choose, why did they keep coming to Zanzibar?

  “The plane is here,” said the flight controller.

  Thirteen passengers. The health officer let the local people through the gate first—two newspapermen and four legislators coming back from the Pan-African Conference in Capetown—and then processed a party of four Japanese tourists, unsmiling owlish men festooned with cameras. And then the deads: and Barwani was surprised to discover that they were the same ones as before, the red-haired man, the brown-haired man without the beard, the black-haired woman. Did deads have so much money that they could fly from America to Zanzibar every few months? Barwani had heard a tale to the effect that each new dead, when he rose from his coffin, was presented with bars of gold equal to his own weight, and now he thought he believed it. No good will come of having such beings loose in the world, he told himself, and certainly none from letting them into Zanzibar. Yet he had no choice. “Welcome once again to the isle of cloves,” he said unctuously, and smiled a bureaucratic smile, and wondered, not for the first time, what would become of Daud Mahmoud Barwani once his days on earth had reached their end.

  “—Ahmad the Sly versus Abdullah Something,” Klein said. “That’s all she would talk about. The history of Zanzibar.” He was in Jijibhoi’s study. The night was warm and a late-season rain was falling, blurring the million sparkling lights of the Los Angeles basin. “It would have been, you know, gauche to ask her any direct questions. Gauche. I haven’t felt so gauche since I was fourteen. I was helpless among them, a foreigner, a child.”

  “Do you think they saw through your disguise?” Jijibhoi asked.

  “I can’t tell. They seemed to be toying with me, to be having sport with me, but that may just have been their general style with any newcomer. Nobody challenged me. Nobody hinted I might be an impostor. Nobody seemed to care very much about me or what I was doing there or how I had happened to become a dead. Sybille and I stood face to face, and I wanted to reach out to her, I wanted her to reach out to me, and there was no contact, none, none at all, it was as though we had just met at some academic cocktail party and the only thing on her mind was the new nugget of obscure history she had
just unearthed, and so she told me all about how Sultan Ahmad outfoxed Abdullah and Abdullah stabbed the Sultan.” Klein caught sight of a set of familiar books on Jijibhoi’s crowded shelves—Oliver and Mathew, History of East Africa, books that had traveled everywhere with Sybille in the years of their marriage. He pulled forth Volume I, saying, “She claimed that the standard histories give a sketchy and inaccurate description of the incident and that she’s only now discovered the true story. For all I know, she was just playing a game with me, telling me a piece of established history as though it were something nobody knew till last week. Let me see—Ahmad, Ahmad, Ahmad—”

  He examined the index. Five Ahmads were listed, but there was no entry for a Sultan Ahmad ibn Majid the Sly. Indeed, an Ahmad ibn Majid was cited, but he was mentioned only in a footnote and appeared to be an Arab chronicler. Klein found three Abdullahs, none of them a man of Zanzibar. “Something’s wrong,” he murmured.

  “It does not matter, dear Jorge,” Jijibhoi said mildly.

  “It does. Wait a minute.” He prowled the listings. Under Zanzibar, Rulers, he found no Ahmads, no Abdullahs; he did discover a Majid ibn Said, but when he checked the reference he found that he had reigned somewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century. Desperately Klein flipped pages, skimming, turning back, searching. Eventually he looked up and said, “It’s all wrong!”

  “The Oxford History of East Africa?”

  “The details of Sybille’s story. Look, she said this Ahmad the Sly gained the throne of Oman in 1811, and seized Zanzibar seven years later. But the book says that a certain Seyyid Said al-Busaidi became Sultan of Oman in 1806, and ruled for fifty years. He was the one, not this nonexistent Ahmad the Sly, who grabbed Zanzibar, but he did it in 1828, and the ruler he compelled to sign a treaty with him, the Mwenyi Mkuu, was named Hasan ibn Ahmad Alawi, and—” Klein shook his head. “It’s an altogether different cast of characters. No stabbings, no assassinations, the dates are entirely different, the whole thing—”

  Jijibhoi smiled sadly. “The deads are often mischievous.”

  “But why would she invent a complete fantasy and palm it off as a sensational new discovery? Sybille was the most scrupulous scholar I ever knew! She would never—”

  “That was the Sybille you knew, dear friend. I keep urging you to realize that this is another person, a new person, within her body.”

  “A person who would lie about history?”

  “A person who would tease,” Jijibhoi said.

  “Yes,” Klein muttered. “Who would tease.” Keep in mind that to a dead the whole universe is plastic, nothing’s real, nothing matters a hell of a lot. “Who would tease a stupid, boring, annoyingly persistent ex-husband who has shown up in her Cold Town, wearing a transparent disguise and pretending to be a dead. Who would invent not only an anecdote but even its principals, as a joke, a game, a jeu d’esprit. Oh, God. Oh, God, how cruel she is, how foolish I was! It was her way of telling me she knew I was a phony dead. Quid pro quo, fraud for fraud!”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Klein said.

  What he did, against Jijibhoi’s strong advice and his own better judgment, was to get more pills from Dolorosa and return to Zion Cold Town. There would be a fitful joy, like that of probing the socket of a missing tooth, in confronting Sybille with the evidence of her fictional Ahmad, her imaginary Abdullah. Let there be no more games between us, he would say. Tell me what I need to know, Sybille, and then let me go away; but tell me only truth. All the way to Utah he rehearsed his speech, polishing and embellishing. There was no need for it, though, since this time the gate of Zion Cold Town would not open for him. The scanners scanned his forged Albany card and the loudspeaker said, “Your credentials are invalid.”

  Which could have ended it. He might have returned to Los Angeles and picked up the pieces of his life. All this semester he had been on sabbatical leave, but the summer term was coming and there was work to do. He did return to Los Angeles, but only long enough to pack a somewhat larger suitcase, find his passport, and drive to the airport. On a sweet May evening a BOAC jet took him over the Pole to London, where, barely pausing for coffee and buns at an airport shop, he boarded another plane that carried him southeast toward Africa. More asleep than awake, he watched the dreamy landmarks drifting past: the Mediterranean, coming and going with surprising rapidity, and the tawny carpet of the Libyan Desert, and the mighty Nile, reduced to a brown thread’s thickness when viewed from a height of ten miles. Suddenly Kilimanjaro, mist-wrapped, snow-bound, loomed like a giant double-headed blister to his right, far below, and he thought he could make out to his left the distant glare of the sun on the Indian Ocean. Then the big needle-nosed plane began its abrupt swooping descent, and he found himself, soon after, stepping out into the warm humid air and dazzling sunlight of Dar es Salaam.

  Too soon, too soon. He felt unready to go on to Zanzibar. A day or two of rest, perhaps: he picked a Dar hotel at random, the Agip, liking the strange sound of its name, and hired a taxi. The hotel was sleek and clean, a streamlined affair in the glossy 1960s style, much cheaper than the Kilimanjaro, where he had stayed briefly on the other trip, and located in a pleasant leafy quarter of the city, near the ocean. He strolled about for a short while, discovered that he was altogether exhausted, returned to his room for a nap that stretched on for nearly five hours, and awakening groggy, showered and dressed for dinner. The hotel’s dining room was full of beefy red-faced fair-haired men, jacketless and wearing open-throated white shirts, all of whom reminded him disturbingly of Kent Zacharias; but these were warms, Britishers from their accents, engineers, he suspected, from their conversation. They were building a dam and a power plant somewhere up the coast, it seemed, or perhaps a power plant without a dam; it was hard to follow what they said. They drank a good deal of gin and spoke in hearty booming shouts. There were also a good many Japanese businessmen, of course, looking trim and restrained in dark-blue suits and narrow ties, and at the table next to Klein’s were five tanned curly-haired men talking in rapid Hebrew—Israelis, surely. The only Africans in sight were waiters and bartenders. Klein ordered Mombasa oysters, steak, and a carafe of red wine, and found the food unexpectedly good, but left most of it on his plate. It was late evening in Tanzania, but for him it was ten o’clock in the morning, and his body was confused. He tumbled into bed, meditated vaguely on the probable presence of Sybille just a few air-minutes away in Zanzibar, and dropped into a sound sleep from which he awakened, what seemed like many hours later, to discover that it was still well before dawn.

  He dawdled away the morning sightseeing in the old native quarter, hot and dusty, with unpaved streets and rows of tin shacks, and at midday returned to his hotel for a shower and lunch. Much the same national distribution in the restaurant—British, Japanese, Israeli—though the faces seemed different. He was on his second beer when Anthony Gracchus came in. The white hunter, broad-shouldered, pale, densely bearded, clad in khaki shorts, khaki shirt, seemed almost to have stepped out of the picture-cube Jijibhoi had once shown him. Instinctively Klein shrank back, turning toward the window, but too late: Gracchus had seen him. All chatter came to a halt in the restaurant as the dead man strode to Klein’s table, pulled out a chair unasked, and seated himself; then, as though a motion-picture projector had been halted and started again, the British engineers resumed their shouting, sounding somewhat strained now. “Small world,” Gracchus said. “Crowded one, anyway. On your way to Zanzibar, are you, Klein?”

  “In a day or so. Did you know I was here?”

  “Of course not.” Gracchus’ harsh eyes twinkled slyly. “Sheer coincidence is what this is. She’s there already.”

  “She is?”

  “She and Zacharias and Mortimer. I hear you wiggled your way into Zion.”

  “Briefly,” Klein said. “I saw Sybille. Briefly.”

  “Unsatisfactorily. So once again you’ve followed her here. Give it up, man. Give it up.”

>   “I can’t.”

  “Can’t!” Gracchus scowled. “A neurotic’s word, can’t. What you mean is won’t. A mature man can do anything he wants to that isn’t a physical impossibility. Forget her. You’re only annoying her, this way, interfering with her work, interfering with her—” Gracchus smiled. “With her life. She’s been dead almost three years, hasn’t she? Forget her. The world’s full of other women. You’re still young, you have money, you aren’t ugly, you have professional standing—”

  “Is this what you were sent here to tell me?”

  “I wasn’t sent here to tell you anything, friend. I’m only trying to save you from yourself. Don’t go to Zanzibar. Go home and start your life again.”

  “When I saw her at Zion,” Klein said, “she treated me with contempt. She amused herself at my expense. I want to ask her why she did that.”

  “Because you’re a warm and she’s a dead. To her you’re a clown. To all of us you’re a clown. It’s nothing personal, Klein. There’s simply a gulf in attitudes, a gulf too wide for you to cross. You went to Zion drugged up like a Treasury man, didn’t you? Pale face, bulgy eyes? You didn’t fool anyone. You certainly didn’t fool her. The game she played with you was her way of telling you that. Don’t you know that?”