The Bay of Foxes Read Online Free Page B

completely by the time he arrives? And if she lets him in, what will she expect of him in return? What is the quid pro quo here, and is it something he can provide?

III

    W HEN HE FINALLY FALLS ASLEEP, HE DREAMS A TERRIBLE dream. Often his dreams are so close to memories they wake him up, rather than allowing him to sleep. In this one he is back in prison. Perhaps because of his father’s prominence, they had isolated him, and he had the privilege of being alone in his cell with the cockroaches and rats. There he had come to forget even the sound of his own voice, for though he chanted all the poetry he knew by heart, and all the psalms and prayers, and sang aloud the hymns, his voice came to him as if from someone else. He had the impression they had split him in two with their instruments: he was both Dawit and a stranger who lay curled up, weeping and beating his fists against the rough concrete wall. With the silence, the light that worked only randomly, and the ceiling so low he could not fully stand, they had reduced him to madness. Every sound terrified him: the screams and whispers from beyond his walls. With every footstep he was convinced someone was coming to take him to his death. Lions, hyenas, and jackals, snakes and spiders, lurked in the corner of his cell, ready to pounce on him and devour him.
    He did not know how long he had been there, only that there was no way to distinguish one day from the next. Therewere no windows, and the lightbulb that hung in a net in the low ceiling went on and off according to the whims of the faulty electricity. The food and water, too, came sporadically and in varying quantities. Sometimes he slept, but mostly he lay there chanting all the poems he had ever learned.
    There was a big, burly guard who particularly enjoyed tormenting him. He had noted differences among his torturers: there were those who carried out orders without any particular pleasure. But there were others who enjoyed the work and accomplished their tasks with particular inventiveness. They took an obvious pleasure in creating as much pain as possible. This guard was one of the latter. Probably he had been taught to think of Dawit as a corrupt and spoiled member of the ruling classes, an arrogant adolescent playing at politics in the student organization he had joined. The guard called him an “aristocratic anarchist” and mocked him for causing his own downfall. “An easy target,” the guard told him, and laughed. It was a fertile line of reasoning. He had indeed been critical of the old regime. He had seen its abuses up close, the infighting, the promotion of people without talent, the graft. The guard had used all the usual means to induce him to betray his comrades, yet there was always a small part of Dawit that escaped, something that enabled him to remove himself to the mansion of his childhood, the cool, high-ceilinged rooms, the scented garden, his friend Solo’s arms. Possibly the guard sensed this, and it spurred him on. Someone must have been determined to keep Dawit alive and in solitary confinement indefinitely, if he had not been lucky one afternoon. The miracle M. had spoken of in the café did occur.
    A new guard opened the door and came in, sliding the rusted can with the dry bread and urine-tainted water across the cement floor. A beam of light entered the cell. Dawit’s vision was blurred, and the edges of the pallet where he lay seeped into the hazy tips of the guard’s stub-toed boots. It was the sharp creases of his new starched trousers, the sudden scent of lemongrass, the thick-meshed black eyelashes that brought it all back: the ragged but ironed shorts and the carefully stitched T-shirt, the long, slim limbs, the slight body disappearing fast into a loquat tree. Solomon. He almost said his nickname. Solo. He lifted his blurred gaze toward him—just a moment of communication, a stare that made the undulating lines in his world spin in the gust of clean air and light entering