The Bestiary

by Nicholas Christopher

  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.

  WE 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

  ON THE SECOND OF JULY 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.”

  THERE WERE ONLY three Americans on boa
rd, 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.

  PREVIOUSLY I had only seen the Rock of Gibraltar in photographs.

  Through binoculars I spied two of the famous Barbary apes (actually tailless monkeys, Lena informed me) perched on a ledge. There are four colonies on the Rock, comprised of the last free-ranging monkeys in Europe, two hundred of them. I remembered that it is also home to the peryton, but try as I might, I didn’t see a single one.

  Gibraltar is one of the Pillars of Hercules that intrigued the ancient Greeks. The pillars held up their sky. The other six pillars, notably Mount Acha and Jebel Musa, lie fourteen miles across the strait, at Ceuta in Morocco. The pillars are the gateway to the Atlantic—the end of the Greek world. Their mariners feared that if they ventured beyond the pillars they would slide into the void. Ultima Thule, they called it, represented on their maps by the blank spaces beyond Ocean (the self-devouring, world-encircling serpent Nathalie had worn on her jacket) and populated by monsters that preyed on unsuspecting travelers. Eventually they passed through the pillars and made their way into bestiaries—the most elusive and frightening into the Caravan Bestiary: the manticore, the gorgons, the monoceros (a horned stallion with razor teeth), and fiercest of all, Echidna, who had a beautiful nymph’s head on a serpent’s body. Her teardrops were venom, her blood lava. With her husband, hundred-headed Typhon, she produced the most grotesque monsters in Greek mythology.*6