A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  Once he’d filled enough bottles of water, Hugh set off for the swamp. After two days of looking for her, he was becoming not only impatient but also a little bit desperate, so when a group of young boys approached him, arresting his momentum, he prepared himself for the onslaught of their demands, geared up for what he had come to perceive as a specifically Nuer wellspring of self-interest and a profound certainty of knowing exactly what they deserved.

  But these boys weren’t making material demands. All they wanted, for now, was his attention. Pointing grandly toward themselves, calling out louder and louder, as if they were seasoned vendors in a marketplace and not naked eight-year-olds, they presented miniature clay cattle. And their craft—if not their subject matter—was extraordinary. He touched the charcoal and ash shadings, the detailed udders, the pebble decorations hanging from little necks and horns, no different from the real ones in their fathers’ world. As Hugh offered his sincere admiration, he recalled how Charlie, in one of his more loquacious moods, had once told Hugh about seeing Margaret Mead in a coffee shop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She’d eaten a tuna salad sandwich and an entire pickle before Charlie—seated right beside her at the counter, drawing out his already drawn-out coffee-drinking—had screwed up the strength to introduce himself. They’d had, according to Charlie, a perfectly wonderful conversation. Mrs. Mead eventually explained how she’d never been psychoanalyzed, because she didn’t need to be, owing to the fact that she’d lived a life of observing children. When this had struck Hugh as rather simplistic, Charlie had cocked his head in that quintessential way he had of making Hugh feel as though his skeptical response revealed nothing but Hugh’s own personal flaw.

  Now, instead of demanding payment for their miniatures, the boys only wanted Hugh to watch as they played. The boys called to him, pointed at their cows, and though Nhial wasn’t there and couldn’t tell him for sure, he knew they were saying, Watch me.

  One of the boys pointed in the distance, past the dwellings and the dung piles, toward where some kind of galloping animal was approaching. Hugh’s heart sped wildly, imagining the lion they’d seen on their journey, the lion and the decimated antelope, which suddenly seemed like nothing more than a very clear sign leading up to this moment, when he was going to be mauled. It was unlikely it would be here and not at the watering hole, though, and, in fact, as the beast drew closer, Hugh saw that it was not an animal at all; instead, it was a mother and father running and holding up a listless boy covered with smallpox blisters, his skin so rutted that it ceased to resemble skin. Hugh was ashamed in front of these parents, ashamed to be not only white but also so big, as if slightness would have canceled out his color. At least, being the only white man around, he should have had more—much more—than a medical kit provided by the Harvard infirmary. And he was ashamed of being ashamed. Shame was not active, and, more than anything right then, he wanted to get something done.

  There was the child, afflicted with not only the blistery horror of severe smallpox (for which photographs had not prepared him) but also other horrors—pneumonia? What would Ed do? It came crashing forth, and though the thought was unquestionably irritating (because where was Ed? Where? Working for his future father-in-law, that was where), it also helped. Because Ed wouldn’t have been ashamed, Ed wouldn’t have been encumbered by doubt, and there was the child being literally thrust into Hugh’s arms, and nobody—suddenly not even Hugh—cared about his qualifications.

  With his fingers shaking, Hugh called out for Charlie, who was nowhere to be seen; he called out for Nhial and Etienne. He was the one with so little knowledge, and of course they’d come to him. He was finally beginning to understand that, through no design whatsoever, his appearance—fuck relativism, here was further proof of its stupidity—telegraphed strength to complete strangers. He took out the syringe he used to blast air at his camera lens and quickly filled it with water. “Don’t worry,” he was saying idiotically, over and over, as the parents stared at him, pale dung ash clinging to their frightened faces.

  He alternated between chanting Don’t worry and shouting Charlie, but he also managed to tear open the packets from his kit and force sugar and salt into the boy’s blistered mouth. Hugh held this boy’s head in his hands. His hair was bristly, his skin was no softer than the cracked desert floor, but the eyes sunken between swollen eyelids were pools of the warmest brown. Hugh looked into those eyes and didn’t look away. He worked quicker. “Charlie!” he cried, as the child convulsed right in his hands, coughing and coughing like a dying old beast, as Hugh somehow managed to shoot the child’s arm full of penicillin, after previously practicing only a handful of times on overripe bananas—just in case.

  This did nothing. As he knew it would do nothing—even if it worked, the effect wouldn’t be immediate—but even as he scrambled to do anything—right then he would have done anything—he called out for Charlie, as if Charlie could do something he couldn’t. Hugh looked at the boy’s parents. They looked back without much expression, including reproach, before taking the boy back to their home.

  Hugh would go see them later. When the sun was lower in the yellow sky, when the dung was assembled in small fire pits and lit as the cattle came home, Hugh would go and see them. And as he knew that the cattle would be fed and brushed with ash at the end of this terrible ordinary day, as he knew that heifer who’d been braying would stop its complaining the moment it was allowed its mother’s teat, he also knew—though of course he hoped he was wrong—that boy would be dead. Just as that girl would soon be dead. The one he’d remember—not because she was any more deserving than any of the others but because, my God, was she beautiful.

  When Charlie and Etienne found him surrounded by children some time—how much time? He wasn’t sure—later, Hugh described the parents and the boy, his own panicked ministrations.

  “Where do they live?” Charlie asked.

  Etienne went off to collect Nhial.

  Hugh pointed.

  “Well, c’mon, then,” Charlie said impatiently, and—Hugh could tell—excitedly.

  They arrived minutes later and found the mother stirring a pot with another child—a baby—balanced on her hip. She looked at them blankly, and Hugh could tell in this look that his prediction had been right and that the boy had already died. And if he was dead, then he was also already underground, as the Nuer liked to bury their dead straightaway and without fanfare. She was standing upright, stirring. The boy’s father was on the ground, singing to his bull. When Charlie began filming, the man stopped and said something to Nhial.

  “What is it?” Hugh asked.

  If they were going to make pictures, the man had explained to Nhial, then he wanted to put on clothes.

  “Clothes?” said Charlie. “But they don’t wear clothes.”

  “Well, he wants to wear clothes now,” said Hugh. “Maybe they make him feel better. I don’t know,” said Hugh, shaking his head, “more regal.”

  The man returned, wearing khaki pants at least four sizes too large and a pink plastic belt.

  “Regal?” said Charlie.

  “Who cares if he’s naked or not, Charlie?” Hugh said.

  “I care,” said Charlie. “I do.”

  “You do.”

  “That’s right. And you should.”

  “His kid just died.”

  “You want to make films, Shipley? You want to capture something real? Or you want to sit around and talk about your dreams all day?”

  “Fuck you,” Hugh heard himself say. He said it reflexively and quietly—so quietly that he wasn’t sure that Charlie had heard—but he’d never said such a thing to anyone, ever.

  “Tell him,” said Charlie to Nhial, “tell both of them, first of all, that we are sad for them. We are sad their son has died.”

  Nhial told the parents, who remained impassive.

  “Now tell him that, after we make these pictures, we will bring them medicine, coffee, soap, and a goat.”

  “Jesus,” sa
id Hugh, “that’s the package? That’s the going rate these days? Why aren’t we vaccinating all those who don’t have it?”

  “We can,” Charlie said, Arriflex on his shoulder, ready for the OK to start filming. “We can do that.”

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it won’t make a difference.”

  Charlie rubbed his face with his hands, as if he could wash this aggravation away. Nhial and the woman were still having words. What little light was left in the sky was starting to fade. “Because it won’t. We won’t. This is smallpox, Hugh. It has not been eradicated. And we have limited vaccine. Who’re gonna be the lucky ones?”

  “The children, I should think.”

  Charlie nodded. “Yes,” he said, “of course. You want to choose which ones?”

  Nhial gave Charlie the go-ahead, and Charlie began to film. It was quiet, aside from the man singing to his bull and the baby whimpering on and off.

  “A dance is certainly unlikely these days,” mumbled Etienne.

  “I’d say so,” said Hugh, biting the inside of his mouth, but this time not from laughter.

  Long after the father stopped his singing, Charlie filmed the mother, still stirring, for a good ten minutes. Then he thanked the woman; he put the camera down. She took his hand and Charlie took both of her hands and they stood together.

  The man rubbed white dung ash over his face and teeth. Hugh still had no idea why the Nuer did this, but their teeth were among the whitest he had ever seen, so they were clearly doing something right. Maybe they saw the dung as a cure-all, a natural extension of their cows. The father nodded; the mother nodded. They went inside their hut.

  “Etienne,” said Charlie quietly, “beginning or ending a film about Africa with dancing is a cliché. A fatal cliché. Look at what is happening here, and give it a rest. Would you please?”

  Etienne was shocked, however briefly, into silence.

  When Charlie and Etienne began to shout at each other in earnest, Hugh brought Nhial to the opening of the hut. “Tell them I want to give that baby a vaccination,” he said. “Do they know what that is?”

  He was welcomed inside immediately. It smelled putrid. When he stuck the child’s arm with the needle, Hugh didn’t expect to feel much besides an overwhelming helplessness, but he didn’t feel helpless. He felt devoted. When he was finished, he started for another hut with small children.

  “You’ve got to get your head on straight,” said Charlie, catching up with him.

  “My head is on straight,” Hugh said. “I can do this. Even you said so.”

  “Hugh,” Charlie said, raising his voice.

  It was dark now. Hugh hadn’t realized just how dark it was, but as Charlie stood still, he was nothing but a silhouette against the vast ink sky.

  “At least wash your hands,” Charlie said, calm once again, “and do this in a more organized way, during daylight, and not from some kind of juvenile fantasy.”

  Hugh stopped suddenly and, as if cooperating with Charlie’s description, kicked at a patch of sand. “These people are stuck,” said Hugh. “We’re filming their deaths and they’re stuck between the Arabs and the pagans and they aren’t even in their own country anymore and they have smallpox and who even knows what other kinds of plagues—”

  “These people have a life that makes sense,” said Charlie calmly. “They happen to have supreme self-regard. We—” He stopped himself, and Hugh realized Charlie’s breathing was labored. “We are all fragile,” he said.

  “But—”

  “There’s meaning here.”

  “There are cows,” said Hugh. “There are very beloved cows. But they are still stuck. And you’re concerned about whether or not a man who just lost a child is going to look authentic to white people paying good money to see an authentic film about Africa.”

  Charlie didn’t answer for a good long while. “Yep,” he said. “That’s true, too.” Then he walked away.

  “Charlie!” called Hugh, but Charlie didn’t turn around. “Hey, Charlie—it was you who kept asking about my goddamn dreams! You think I wanted to talk about all that crap?”

  Charlie finally stopped. When Hugh caught up with him, Charlie firmly gripped Hugh’s shoulder and said, “Yeah,” and Hugh could tell Charlie was tired of him. “I do think you wanted to talk about all that crap. I think you were dyin’ to. And I don’t blame you.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” said Hugh.

  “Then stop askin’ to be patronized. We’re here to make a film. I let you come along—”

  “You let me come?”

  “I let you come,” he repeated. “You are a promising photographer and good company. And—not insignificantly—you were able to pay your own airfare. But you are not here to force me to defend my methods or provide moral instruction. Got it?”

  Hugh nodded.

  The dung fires were still burning. If he wanted to film anything, Hugh suddenly realized, it was only this: the smoke. The way it rendered everything—the conical huts and cattle horn spires, the dark tall slips of men and women, everything he had come here in order to understand—impenetrable.

  The next morning he was awake before Charlie and Etienne. The sky was pale and his body ached from the hard, cracked ground. He’d spent the better part of the night giving a small girl fluids and injections, only to watch her die, too. The coffeepot smelled of cow piss, and he knew that even with double their daily allotment of beans, the coffee would be revolting. He would never talk about his dreams again.

  Still.

  When Hugh saw that rising sun, it was so orange, so enormous, and the light it cast was so brilliant and warm, that—contrasted with the gray-brown landscape—he could feel nothing but this: Here he was, alive.

  And there was also this, Hugh thought, inviting her in, all of her—long fingers, breathless laugh, flushed cheeks, a loose strand of pale hair stuck to her lips—

  He didn’t miss her.

  Chapter Seven

  Summer, New York City

  They weren’t allowed to use the word deal.

  Forget about shirtsleeves, they weren’t allowed to go without jackets, not even with this terrible heat, this goddamn tremendous fucking heat (goddamn and fucking apparently being not nearly as vulgar a word as deal), not when it was in the nineties during some point of each day, not with the accompanying 98 percent humidity and the air-conditioning system that was on the fritz.

  They weren’t allowed to grow a beard, wear cologne, or eat garlic during lunch. They were not allowed to smoke cigars.

  When he passed through the lobby’s marble vestibule on the third Monday morning in August and entered the sparkling chrome elevator, it was all Ed could do not to ask Mr. Grisby, the elevator operator, what he made of Ed’s new sartorial choice. After making the decision to branch out style-wise, he’d eaten so little that he’d lost a good ten pounds, deposited a month of paychecks, and, over the weekend, had walked all the way to Brooks Brothers and bought a blue-and-white seersucker suit.

  When the elevator doors opened, he appreciated the fresh flowers in the entryway as he kept an eye out for Mr. Ordway, just as he’d done each morning for a little over a month. And just like on all the mornings preceding this one, there was no sighting. During his brief tenure at Ordway Keller, he’d had no real occasion to speak to the great man. Ed reported to Mr. Jack Stone, director of research, who took an eternity to explain even the simplest of concepts and, in addition, employed solely chess analogies, which meant that Ed spent his nights studying up on the rules of a game in which he’d never managed to be interested. As Stone droned on, Ed always thought of Hugh, who was fairly addicted to chess and would have known what the hell Stone was getting at. Hugh had done his best, on several occasions, to teach Ed how to play, but Ed could never get past being bored. It was nearly evening in Ethiopia. He could not remotely picture what Hugh was doing there.

  He took in the room, which, first thing in t
he morning, never failed to impress. It was a sea of mahogany desks. Only Mr. Ordway and Mr. Keller had offices. Everyone else was out in the main room, all within earshot of one another. He thought about how Hugh would react to this room, housed in a former squash court with little to no ventilation, with décor consisting of severe antiques and paintings. He couldn’t picture Hugh’s life, but he did keep up imagined conversations.

  Your workplace is giving me anxiety is how he imagined Hugh would respond. Anxiety and a double migraine.

  Come on, Ed would say, don’t all these old hunting paintings make you feel like going out and conquering something?

  He wanted to tell Hugh just then that someone could make a fortune selling this kind of décor to the educated average Joe, who was smart enough to know that dead pheasants and dark wood meant not that you gave a shit about hunting but that, if you could somehow possess these images (home products, hunting-influenced sportswear), they would signify wealth and class and … being an authentic American.

  Since Hugh was, of course, not there, Ed reminded himself to jot down that idea when he arrived at his very own (at least until Labor Day) mahogany rolltop desk. He sketched out his ideas in green felt-tip pen on a yellow legal pad, usually on the subway—in motion, which was where all his best ones began.

  “Good morning, Polly,” Ed said expansively. “Good morning, Bess.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Cantowitz.”

  “Any news about the air-conditioning?”

  “ ‘Fraid not,” said Polly.

  “Terrible heat,” said Bess.

  He was usually the first to arrive, and he relished the moment. Polly was an apple-cheeked brunette with green eyes, who couldn’t have been much older than he was. She always brought the same thing for lunch—cream cheese and cucumber on rye—and ate at her desk. He was often tempted to ask her to join him at the diner around the corner, just for a change of scene.