My Soul to Keep (9 page)

Even now, alone, Dawit knew he was being watched.

One of the Searchers had found him, perhaps months before. He’d noticed a cigarette butt half buried outside the back door a week ago, his first physical clue; but other clues had been present for some time, especially his awareness, his certainty, of eyes following him. Maybe Khaldun had sent more than one.

Their methods were undoubtedly sophisticated. They may have equipped themselves with wires planted throughout his house, ears listening on his telephone line, discerning eyes intercepting his mail. He could put nothing past them. All the better, he thought. It should be clear to them that he had not betrayed the Covenant with Khaldun. He had never betrayed it. Why was mere separation always considered such a dire threat? All he wanted was peace.

Maybe they would leave him be this time.

Accidentally, scouring the house for signs of intruders—he did this daily now—Dawit unearthed the scratched, frayed clarinet case he’d hidden away in the cabinet below the bookshelf, among his papers. It had been ten years since he’d last seen the case. He opened the rusting latches and saw the fine stained-wood instrument, each section nestled in its proper indentation against the fading magenta felt, and the memories deluged him in a crystalline rush that made him take a step backward.

blowdaddyblow spideryousuredomakethatbabysqueal

His memory was so sharp that he imagined he could smell mingled cigarette and cigar smoke and illegal whiskey soaking through wooden floorboards.

ihearitspiderihearit sohotman takemehome

Dawit touched the dusty Grenadilla wood of his B-flat Laube clarinet, and his heart raced. His armpits felt pricked with perspiration. His fingers trembled as he lifted the mouthpiece from its bed and examined the cracked, dry reed. More quickly, he began to fit the instrument together.

It was Khaldun who had taught Dawit the joy of creating sounds in the House of Music, while Dawit spent those first bewildered years wondering if he really would live forever. Ten years stretched to fifty, and fifty to a hundred, and by then he knew he would be privy to delights most men would never experience. The learning!

Of all the other houses that made up his brotherhood’s community—the House of Mystics, the House of Science, the House of Meditation, the House of Tongues, and the House of History— Dawit had most treasured his studies in the House of Music. The first instrument Khaldun taught him to play was a simple, monochromatic flute carved from bamboo. Next, the stringed krar, with its wondrous ability to follow any human voice. And Khaldun had collected other instruments from around the continent: Egyptian lutes, bowl lyres from the lands south of them, the beautiful stringed
kora
from the far west coast, Bantu trumpets made from elephant tusks. And drums, of course, of every variety.

Dawit carried the love for music that Khaldun had cultivated in him wherever he went, always finding a way to indulge it. He’d bought this clarinet from a closet-sized music shop in Chicago in 1916, in January, his first day back in the States after his last short visit home.

How long had it been since he’d played his beloved instrument? At least fifty years, perhaps longer. He’d tried to make himself forget, but now the walls of his present were collapsing around him to clear space for the past, a happy past.

He moistened the reed with his lips and tongue, then blew. The aged reed spat at him. Too brittle. Damn it to hell. He searched the case for new reeds, or at least reeds that weren’t already worn out. He found two wrapped in a small cardboard box.

He put on a recording by Satchmo with his Hot Five, “Cornet Chop Suey,” turning up the volume until the music seemed to hold up the walls. After a breath to steel himself, he began to play. The reed and sticky keys fought against him. He was clumsy at first, stopping and starting as his head nodded to the music’s flow. He lost the beat and honked when he should have found the notes, but then it began to fit back together again. Oh man, oh man.

His fingers played under, over, and around the cornet’s lead. He had it, the way he had it then, just like that one precious time when the remarkable young cornet player from Kid Creole’s band appeared from nowhere, climbing up onstage with Dawit and his boys—”Hey, lemme try this one, boys,” the kid said with a wink. Then he gallantly pulled out the piano stool for Lil, his delicate- boned little wife—and they played their hearts out, almost enough to bring tears to the others’ eyes, who were just trying to keep up. “Cornet Chop Suey,” the kid told them it was called. Just wrote it, he said. Wanted to try it on for size.

That kid was something else. As much as Dawit loved to play with his own boys, he began looking forward to the end of their nightly gigs. And then he wasn’t ashamed, like every other true musician he knew in town, to find that kid wherever he was playing and watch him hold a club in a trance late into the night. He reminded Dawit of Khaldun, the way he drew them all around him.

Goddamn, he could go!

To go back there again and hear Louis Armstrong with his Stompers at the Everleigh Club! No, the Sunset Cafe. Nineteen twenty-seven. No one could play like Satchmo. No one.

yougotitboy yougotit

Playing on, Dawit heard his clarinet’s smooth notes swirling around his head. His flying fingers hurt. He blew until his face was dripping.

“You go on, Spider, show these cats something.”

“What ‘chu call this band?”

“The Jazz Brigade. Here every Friday and Sat’day night. Place jumps.”

“What’s that cat’s name on horn? Blowing the stick?”

“Bandleader. Spider Tillis.”

“His mama named him Spider?”

“Name of Seth Tillis. Hey, Spider! Man say we gon’ make a recording!”

He knew it, he knew it, even then he knew it. The music they made was new, it was an invention of sound, an American-born hybrid; it was going to take hold of the world and not let it shake loose. From the moment he’d heard it, from the instant he’d picked up a clarinet or a saxophone or sat at a piano to imitate it, he knew it.

Seth was the name Dawit lived under then, left over from slave times. He found the name Tillis in a book—no way he’d go by Ole Master’s vile surname—but Tillis was as agreeable as any other American name.

“How come they call him Spider?”

“Don’t ask, just watch his fingers move.”

He lived for that music. Lived for it. It woke him up in the mornings and would hardly let his brain go at night. For the first time in a century, he’d been happy to be alive, very nearly giddy, because the music was something fresh every time he played it. And it became something else again when the boys in his new band joined in, every voice distinct, their instruments conversing.

“Pumpkin seed, what are you doing in here?”

“Mama said I could watch you play, Daddy.”

Rosalie.

The music stopped. The record had finished, and the only sound in the room with Dawit was the overloud popping and hissing from his speakers. The noise swallowed Dawit. His hands, suddenly fumbling and feeling too big, shook around his clarinet.

Rosalie.

She’d been at home in their apartment the whole time, she and Rufus, and his wife, Christina, while he was at the club making music. Then he’d left after the Searchers came. Just left, unquestioning, the way he’d been instructed long before, after taking his vow of Life.

And he’d killed her. Killed Rosalie. Crushed her face. Pressed the pillow hard even when her instincts willed her to fight against him to breathe. He’d killed her just as he’d killed so many before her, and would surely kill so many after.

Dawit howled and sobbed. The clarinet fell to his feet, the mouthpiece breaking loose. He nearly sank to his knees, but he lurched against the sofa and leaned against the armrest as he cried.

Were the Searchers watching him even now, in this state? Dawit, the fearless soldier, reduced to this?

The telephone rang on the coffee table beside him, and Dawit jumped. He let it ring three times, hoping that when he picked it up he would hear her voice, the voice that was his salvation.

Yes, it was her. The first word she spoke was his name, the name he’d told her, the Hebrew variation of the name his mother had given him in his first language, so long ago. She spoke it like a melody.

“David? It’s me.”

“Hey, baby,” Dawit said.

“What’s wrong? You sound awful.”

“I was sleeping,” he lied. He hated the lies. Everything he said or did was an utter, complete falsehood. Everything except what was in his heart, at its core. “What’s up?”

“Uhm … there’s been a development. Peter’s agent has already talked to somebody who’s really interested in our book.”

He couldn’t help pausing before he spoke. “You’re kidding. That’s wonderful,” he said cheerfully, ignoring the vise wrapped around his chest.

His words, it seemed, had stunned her. Her end of the line was silent for a few seconds. “Really?”

“Jessica,” he said, “I’m sorry for the way I’ve behaved. I’ve been an ass. There’s no excuse. You’re publishing a book, that’s your dream, and I would be a fool not to be thrilled. I’ll run to the store before school lets out to pick up some steaks for a special dinner. Does that sound good?”

She made a sound like a gasp. “Are you sure you’re David Wolde? My husband? The voice is familiar, but …”

“Just hurry home. We’ve endured enough unhappiness in this house. It’s time for a celebration.” He knew he had found the right things to say. He wanted so much to be sincere in sharing her elation that he’d nearly fooled himself. She deserved happy words. She deserved all he could say and more.

“David, I love you,” Jessica said.

Dawit closed his eyes. The vise, for that instant, was gone.

S
PRING,
1540

Two men on horseback gallop away from the colorful tents of a caravan of nearly two hundred merchants and their families, a traveling village. The sound of babies crying floats from inside a few of the tents. The caravan is flanked by dogs sniffing for scraps, camels, cows, and bleating goats, but the combined noises fall rapidly behind the men as their horses take them up the grassy hillside toward the stone city hidden in night’s darkness. The rainy season is near, and cold droplets spray their faces.

Dawit’s horse is swifter, pulling ahead. A convert to Islam, Dawit embraces the beliefs and language to trade silks and clothing from India. But he refuses to be called anything except Dawit, the name of the great emperor, the name his parents gave him. Dawit’s allegiances are fickle. In battle, Dawit has killed both Muslims and Christians. Muslims kidnapped him and slew his father when Dawit was a child, selling him to a silk-draped Christian nobleman, yet Dawit has now befriended Muslims. When Dawit and Mahmoud’s travels thrust them into unfriendly lands or the midst of skirmishes, they slay Christians from their horses. Both are good soldiers, but Dawit’s spear is more sure. He kills, others say of him, without blinking his eyes.

Dawit earned his freedom because of his skills with a knife and spear protecting his nobleman’s lands, and he has been free as an adult to travel and trade as he pleases. Many of his new Moorish companions are slavers, but Dawit refuses that trade, despite the rewards. After all, he’d been a slave himself, though lucky to be treated mildly by the man who’d bought him for a bar of salt. Dawit had been a child then, shamefully helpless, so that was his lot. The strong always overtake the weak, Dawit knows. But by their own laws, Christian merchants are forbidden to trade in slaves, and Dawit has come to agree with their thinking. Can people be considered cargo, like a bar of salt or a fabric?

Mahmoud, who rides three paces behind Dawit, is a skilled negotiator whom Dawit considers his brother. Dawit married his sister, but the pretty thirteen-year-old died with their baby during childbirth. Dawit’s shared grief with Mahmoud over Rana’s death sealed their bond. Tonight, they are bonded by a much stronger power they do not yet understand.

Lalibela is a city of priests and rock-hewn churches, so Dawit and Mahmoud hear chants in Ge’ez from dark corners as their horses’ hooves clop across the rocky path toward the market square. Three hundred years ago, this was the capital of the country. Dawit and Mahmoud enter this Christian city with arrogance; they ride in silence until they reach a small garden behind a castlelike monastery, where they dismount and tie their horses. They walk barefoot to a stone stairway leading into the earth, but they wait before descending into the dense dark. Dawit calls down, and only his echo responds. The others have not yet arrived.

“We should not have come,” Dawit says. He and Mahmoud wear nearly identical clothes, breeches with silk tunics. Dawit has a sheepskin slung over his chest as well, in the manner of his long- dead peasant father. Their scalps are covered with skullcaps.

“Are you losing your courage?” Mahmoud asks. He is from Arabia, younger and more fair-skinned than Dawit.