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By Root 252 0

escape into being somebody else, a door I would postpone opening for some years, at least until I was beyond my teens. Those half-blurred afternoons remain with me. I remember one day, after he had knocked on a door and got no reply and I had slid through the bars of the window frame and let him in, we were shocked to find someone asleep in the large bed, the table beside him arrayed with medicine bottles. The Baron held up his palm for silence, went closer, and stared at the comatose body, which I would realize later was Sir Hector de Silva. The Baron touched my shoulder and gestured to a metal bust of the millionaire on the dresser. While the Baron continued looking around the room for valuables—gems, I supposed; that was, after all, what thieves seemed to take—I looked back and forth, comparing the metal head with the real one. The bust made the sleeping man look leonine and noble, in contrast to the reality that rested on the pillow. I tried lifting the bust into my arms, but it was too heavy.

The Baron now leafed through documents but did not take any. Instead he plucked a small green statue of a frog off the mantelpiece. “Jade,” he bent down and whispered to me. And then, almost too personally, he took a photograph of a young woman that was in a silver frame beside the man’s bed. He told me, as we walked down the corridor a few minutes later, that he found her very attractive. “Perhaps,” he said, “I will meet her at some point during this journey.”

The Baron would disembark, prematurely, at Port Said, for by then, suspicions of a thief on board were making the rounds, although they were not of course directed at anyone in First Class. I know that at Aden he mailed off some packages. In any case, all of a sudden he stopped asking me to meet him. He took me for a final tea in the Bedford Lounge, and I hardly saw him from then on. I never knew whether he had been stealing simply to cover his First Class passage or to give money to an ailing brother or some old partner in crime. He seemed to me a generous man. I still remember how he looked, how he dressed, although I am not sure if he was English or one of those mongrels who have assumed the panache of aristocracy. I do know that whenever I am in a country where they put up the faces of criminals in post offices, I look for him.

OUR SHIP CONTINUED TO MOVE NORTHWEST, crossing into higher latitudes, and the passengers could feel the nights becoming cooler. One day we were told over the loudspeakers that a film would be shown after the dinner sitting, on the deck outside the Celtic Room. By dusk stewards had set up a stiff sheet at the stern and brought out a projector, which they covered mysteriously. Half an hour before the film began, about a hundred people had made up a restless audience, the adults sitting on chairs, the children on the deck itself. Ramadhin and Cassius and I got as close to the screen as possible. This was our first film. There was a loud crackling in the speakers, and suddenly images were thrown onto the screen, which was surrounded by a receding purple sky.

We were just days away from landing in Aden, so the choice of The Four Feathers was, I see now, somewhat tactless, as it attempted to compare the brutality of Arabia with a civilized though foolish England. We watched an Englishman having his face branded (we got to hear the sizzle of his flesh) so that he could pass himself off as an Arab in an invented desert nation. An old general in the story referred to the Arabs as something like “the Gazarra tribe—irresponsible and violent.” Later another Englishman was blinded by staring at the desert sun, and he wandered slowly about for the rest of the film. As for the subtler issues of jingoism and cowardice in a time of war, those were blown away by the strong winds into the passing ocean. The sound system was not good, besides which we were not used to atonal English accents. We simply followed the action. There was also the possibility of an additional subplot: for our ship was approaching a storm zone, and if we turned our heads away from