My Soul to Keep (African Immortals)

by Tananarive Due

  Even the word murder, when she thought it, drove into her mind like a hatchet. Her coworkers rarely used that word. They mentioned “losing Peter” or “Peter’s death” when they talked to her; few wanted to call it by its horrible name. It was like processing two calamities; first, the grief over a friend dead so suddenly, then the added shock and anger at the bloody method of a killer who had gotten away without a clue except for a security videotape that was so dark and blurred it was useless.

  Jessica did not go into the office the day Peter’s body was discovered. “You don’t need to be here,” Sy kept saying on the phone. “It’s best for you not to come here.”

  When the newscast came on—Peter’s murder was the lead story on all three local channels, and even made the network evening news—she understood why. The first shot she saw, before she or David could think to turn off the television set, was the windshield of his car coated with dried blood. Sy had told her the killer cut his throat, but she’d managed the idea by thinking of an act that was somehow clean. She wasn’t ready to see the shower of blood. Her friend’s blood. She’d screamed. An hour later, she was still trembling.

  And the old question came again: Why would God do this?

  The memorial service three days after Peter’s death, while difficult to face because of its finality, helped a little. Sy and some of the editors who had known Peter for nearly twenty years planned the service at the Unitarian Church, which he’d attended sporadically. At David’s urging, Jessica hadn’t been back to work, so the service helped her quench her need to know that others were as dazed and angry and miserable as she. She wanted to hug even clerks and editors she rarely spoke to.

  For the first time, Peter’s life took full shape for her. His doughfaced parents, who lived in Michigan, came to the service with a lanky teenager who kept his head bowed. The boy, it turned out, was Peter’s son from a bitterly dissolved marriage. She heard someone behind her whisper that Peter’s whole family, including his son, practically shut him out when he told them he was gay. Things had been better in recent years, but not much. She also discovered, in a testimony from the bearded man she’d seen with Peter at the festival, that Peter had nursed his lover, who’d had AIDS, until he died ten years before.

  Learning these things, Jessica loved Peter more fiercely. But she was also hurt that he’d kept his life’s sorrows from her, making himself a virtual stranger.

  Despite the comfort of being with other people who cared about Peter, none of them could think of his death as a journey or a homecoming. It was a theft, plain and simple. A horrible, brutal theft. Jessica thought she felt better after the service, but when she tried to sleep that night, she envisioned Peter’s Mustang and the blood-spattered windshield.

  She dreamed she walked to Kira’s bedroom window and saw the Mustang parked below in their driveway, the driver’s side door open. In the dream, she gingerly walked outside to the car, to see what was inside. Someone she couldn’t quite make out, not Peter, was sitting in the driver’s seat.

  Once, in her dream, the man sitting there was David.

  On Monday, Sy called her to ask if she still planned to take a short leave. Jessica said she didn’t know. Neither of them mentioned the book. She told Sy she’d gotten a good tip on drug dealing in the housing projects, but she stopped midsentence, remembering that she’d met Boo on the night of Peter’s murder. Some crack addict or mob hit man or arbitrary psycho had been killing Peter at that precise moment.

  Sy told her to take all the time she needed. He mentioned that the newspaper had decided to bring in some grief and trauma counselors for the employees. Everyone was taking it hard, having anxieties about their stories. Sy said he planned to go to the sessions, and he urged her to come too.

  When Jessica asked David what he thought, he looked uncertain. “Do whatever you think will help,” David said, “but I don’t know if that would be good for you. There’s a shadow over that place now. You have to stop thinking of Peter as a victim, Jess. The sum of his life was so much more than the awful way he happened to leave. That was only a split second in time. I think you’re better off here with me.”

  She decided that he was right. She didn’t know how she could have functioned without David’s constant pampering and the wordless moments when he nestled beside her and pulled her head toward him until it rested on the familiar cradle of his shoulder. Occasionally she could let go enough to cry in front of him, and the world felt normal again for a time. Then, unexpectedly, the tears would come back later, worse than before.

  David stuck his head into the bedroom doorway, drawing Jessica’s attention away from flipping through her newly finished photo album pages. “Last call for the movie train,” he said.

  She shook her head, smiling. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Want me to bring you some food after?”

  She didn’t have much of an appetite, but David would force her to eat. “Whatever you guys get is fine with me.”

  “’Bye, Mommy!” Kira called from behind him.

  David told Kira to go find her jacket, since the temperature had dipped over the weekend. Kira came back wearing a heavy winter coat, and David sent her back to her room to find a lighter denim jacket. When she whined that she couldn’t find it, he went after her. Jessica could hear them speaking in French through the wall of the adjoining bedroom.

  David was trying to teach Kira languages early, and she was already doing well with rudimentary Spanish, which she was taking in school. Apparently, her French was improving too. Struck by Kira’s stumbling grasp of the language, Jessica thought of how strange it was that her own daughter could speak words she herself didn’t understand.

  “Marché, Daddy,” Kira said.

  The two of them paraded one last time in front of Jessica’s open doorway, waving as they passed. Jessica’s face froze before she could smile. Seeing them walking away, David first and Kira trailing after, eagerly grasping her father’s pant leg, Jessica’s insides clenched with a cold dread that held her immobile.

  She felt overpowered by a need to call out for Kira to stay home with her. Then she heard the door downstairs fall shut, and the uneasy feeling, after a moment, let her go.

  Her tears came, right on time.

  13

  Barcelona

  1710

  In the shadows, five figures stumble noisily in the stairwell, exchanging fondles and muffled laughter as they approach a rented room on the top-floor landing. The air is heavy with the salty perfume of the Mediterranean through the open windows.

  “Wait. Be silent,” Dawit whispers as they reach a closed door, annoyed with the three whores’ noisemaking. “I’ll bring Chinja out first.”

  “Chinja?” Mahmoud cries sloppily, louder than necessary. Dawit cannot see Mahmoud’s face in the darkness, but he can smell his wine-laden breath. “Let that cur watch!”

  “Who is Chinja?” asks one of the whores.

  Dawit ignores her, unwilling to be burdened by inquiries. He continues to speak to Mahmoud in Spanish, the musical language they have assumed with ease since their arrival. “And have his eyes staring on? It’s unappetizing, Mahmoud.”

  “I’ve appetite enough to carry on without you, but do as you like. Send him out, then.” Before Dawit can open their door, they hear a loud creaking below them, at the bottom of the stairs, and a swinging lamp fills the stairwell with a rocking glow. “Who’s there?” calls an old man’s voice, the innkeeper.

  “Your tenants, sir,” Mahmoud says mockingly, exaggerating his Spanish lisp, “and our new raven-haired friends.”

  The old man curses, climbing closer to them. Dawit can make out the grizzled white of his beard behind the light. “You come at this hour, closer to dawn than dusk, waking my wife? With whores?”

  “Dawit…” Mahmoud says, just within the innkeeper’s hearing, “his wife, the poor creature, is young and well favored. Would he allow us to borrow her for the night?”

  “For a coin, he might,” D
awit says, joining Mahmoud’s game. “Or, she might be so grateful she’ll offer payment to us.”

  The whores join them in laughing at their ridicule of the old man. One of the women shrieks as Mahmoud’s hand roves beneath her bodice.

  The innkeeper’s voice rises to a bellow. “What did you say?”

  “Dawit, he is so loud. He makes my head hurt,” Mahmoud says.

  “We have only said that we apologize, sir,” Dawit responds respectfully to the man. “And we wish your wife a good night.”

  Contemplating this for a moment, the innkeeper does not speak further. Perhaps, Dawit hopes, he will return to his quarters so that he and Mahmoud can relish these females’ talents; one of them has crushed her soft haunches against him, and his rigid anticipation has grown uncomfortable in his breeches.

  “Well said, Dawit,” Mahmoud says, again too loudly. “You’re so graceful a liar, you could convince a buzzard he is a peacock.”

  “Devils! Your tongues are vile!” the innkeeper shouts.

  “How my head aches,” Mahmoud moans. “Please persuade him to be silent, Dawit, or I swear I’ll tumble him down the stairs and send him to his mortal God.”

  “Sir, you misunderstand—” Dawit begins.

  “Moorish devils!”

  “Moorish devils?” At this, Mahmoud takes a step down toward the innkeeper despite impatient pats on the shoulder from Dawit. Why does Mahmoud insist on engaging in silly political debates at every turn? “The black Moors were Spain’s salvation, with all your ignorance here, you old fool. If you’re fortunate, you’ll be conquered again.”

  The old man makes flustered sounds, then his voice returns. “Let’s see how boastful you’ll be when my neighbors tear your limbs apart!” Surprisingly agile, he leaps away from them to the door below, which opens to the street.

  The women are no longer laughing. As soon as the innkeeper vanishes, they raise their skirts and descend the stairs behind him, frightened. Like a flock of turtledoves, Dawit thinks. Curse Mahmoud! Yet again, he has sabotaged a promising evening. Can’t Mahmoud even pretend civility toward mortals, in the quest of pleasure if nothing else?

  “We are forsaken,” Dawit says, sighing.

  “Oh, let them go. They are terribly ordinary, like this place. Spain is inhospitable, Dawit. Let’s set out now.”

  “We just arrived!”

  “Reason enough to leave. Besides, I fear that the innkeeper’s threats are sincere, and I’ve had too much wine to be a good ally to you. I couldn’t bear to see you strangled senseless on my account.”

  “As if I haven’t suffered worse for your sake,” Dawit says, smiling. “If you’re so charitable, you should have considered that before exercising your tongue. Of all times—”

  “Oh, don’t berate me like a wife. Let us go.”

  “Then wake Chinja,” Dawit sighs, “and we’ll find a ship. Arguing with you is futile.”

  Mahmoud suddenly takes Dawit’s arm and urges him down the frail wooden stairs, away from their room. “Why go back? We have our coin purses, so we lose nothing except a handful of clothes. Chinja is too worrisome. We’ll leave him to live by his wits.”

  “What wits?” Dawit asks, chuckling, resisting.

  “All the worse for him, then.”

  “But he serves us well, Mahmoud. Or tries to.”

  “He vexes me. We’ll find another valet.”

  “You see? I asked why you troubled yourself to steal him in the first place.”

  At this, the door above them opens slightly, and Chinja is there; he has been awakened by the shouting and voices. Despite the child’s mother’s pleading, Mahmoud abducted the boy two years ago to travel with them as a servant. The woman had begged Mahmoud to marry her and take them both; she was the loveliest daughter of a merchant whom Dawit and Mahmoud had business with in Bombay. She told Mahmoud her son by him had ruined her for any other man. “I’ll remove him, then,” Mahmoud had said, hoisting the wailing boy over his shoulder. “You are ruined no more, my flower.”

  It was a playful coup for Mahmoud, but an instant annoyance to Dawit. Like all mortals, the child seemed to adopt a new illness at every turn and was maddeningly inept.

  But, somehow, Dawit has grown accustomed to him. Dawit can see Chinja’s brown nose and baleful eyes through the crack in the doorway. Mahmoud’s son’s age, Dawit guesses, is seven or eight years old. A ghastly age, Dawit recalls.

  “Were you summoned?” Mahmoud asks Chinja.

  “No, Father,” he says, very softly.

  Dawit is weary of Chinja’s sad face. “Well, go, then,” he tells him sharply. “Close the door.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle,” Chinja says, and quickly obeys.

  Yes, Dawit decides, Mahmoud is right. It’s best for them to leave him. They have no place for any child.

  “Ah!” Mahmoud says, grabbing Dawit’s shoulder, excited by a thought. “Morocco! I count thirty years since we were there.”

  “Yes, and it’s a short journey,” Dawit says, suddenly heartened. “Agreed.”

  As the two men descend the stairs, they plan their adventures at the next port. The mortal child who listens to their fading footsteps from behind the closed door, like his mother, has already been forgotten.

  14

  “Like this, Daddy?” Kira asked, stirring a wooden spoon in cake batter from a bar stool he’d brought to the kitchen counter. His stewed chicken and lentils with rice were simmering on the stove, ready to eat. Next, dessert.

  Dawit’s head, for the moment, was quiet. “Just like that, Duchess,” he said. He wrapped his larger fingers around hers to guide the spoon. “Scrape the sides. The blender didn’t get it all.”

  “Can I lick it after?”

  He cocked his ear, leaning closer to her. “Excuse me?”

  “I mean … May I lick it after? Please?”

  “Yes,” Dawit said, squeezing her shoulder with a wistful smile, “of course you may.”

  If this small pleasure is a crime, Dawit thought, no man has ever been more guilty. He had not come back to North America intending to collect another family. Yet, he had done it.

  He’d only left Lalibela again because the rigors of study in the House of Science had proven too monotonous, too dissatisfying; his brothers had teased him, saying he’d adopted the mortal’s laziness. After his stay at Harvard to write a small part of what he knew of jazz history, he’d bought this house in a simple neighborhood, envisioning it as a private retreat where he would organize his ideas and grade a few students’ papers, nothing more. He’d chosen a city near his beloved ocean, whose waters he’d missed while living in Lalibala’s seclusion. And Miami, he knew, was large enough to provide him any anonymous delight he might crave. That aside, he’d planned a quiet life as a teacher, just as he’d promised Khaldun when he left.

  How had it all changed so quickly? He had not only a wife but this child to call his. He was certain he’d sired countless children before—one or two who had even known his face well enough to recognize him and, upon chance meeting, call him Father—but this was something else again. This was not supposed to be.

  Shortly before his departure, a very wise Life brother, Melaku, had come to him and politely suggested that Dawit was the victim of an addiction; he hungered for his old way of life, the mortal’s way, and he was unwilling to accept Khaldun’s guidance to a higher consciousness. As always, he’d advised Dawit to practice his meditations. “The meditative state is a Life brother’s highest, and happiest, existence,” Melaku told him.

  Dawit had heard this said many times before, especially by Khaldun himself, but he could not abide it. Endless meditating? He had visited the House of Meditation and seen for himself how the brothers there were frozen, barely breathing, their eyes fixed on nothing. That was the same as not living, Dawit thought.

  So, he’d thanked Melaku for his advice, but told him not to worry. “Believe me, I understand better than most how frivolous the mortals’ world is,” he’d said. “My only
addiction is diversion, and there’s no hazard in that.”

  “Dawit …” his brother had said, as if he’d never spoken to anyone so confused, “Don’t you see that Khaldun has only prepared your mind with languages, sciences, and lessons from the old ways? That had its place in the beginning, to teach discipline, but it is only a means, not an end. You are ready to absorb much more, if you stay and allow it. When will you make your life’s home with your own kind?”

  His own kind? Whom could Dawit claim as truly his kind? Only Mahmoud had seemed kindred to him; they both enjoyed study, but they also needed their time away, and Mahmoud had shared his zeal for pleasure. The other Life brothers who traveled abroad too often behaved like cheerless archaeologists afraid to leave any markings. One brother, Teferi, had made homes with mortal families for ages—even Dawit had once joined his brothers’ complaints to Khaldun that such an act was akin to living with primates—but by now, Teferi had simply gone mad.

  No, Dawit knew, his Life brothers were not like him. He had not spoken to Mahmoud in many years, since he’d left Chicago to return to Lalibela in the late 1920s—and then Mahmoud had been embarrassed to learn of Dawit’s brief time spent with a mortal wife and children. It seemed to have come between them, Dawit thought sadly. He and his friend had shared a few happy reminiscences, but then Mahmoud cloistered himself in the House of Mystics, a group whom Dawit considered a pack of fanatics. Dawit hadn’t even had an opportunity to say goodbye to Mahmoud before he left again.

  Dawit cringed to imagine what Mahmoud would think of him now. Yes, he loved these mortals. Not all mortals, certainly, but these. He was learning lessons Khaldun did not teach, then. He was finally exercising not his mind but his heart.

  What a farce his family in Chicago had been, he realized, a mere backdrop for the dizzy pace of his life. His sole love then had been music. Christina surely had lived to curse the day she’d first heard him on his clarinet at the supper club, her watchful parents by her side. He’d noticed her rapt eyes while his fingers were possessed on the keys. Was anyone else hearing the music as he heard it? Yes, she was, a lone listener in a room drowned in chatter and tinkling silverware. Later, she would tell him that was when she’d fallen in love; she’d been fooled by the passion in his breathing, the beauty of his sounds. She’d failed to realize that, at that moment, all the humanity he had to offer was on the stage with him, leaving his lips.