The Ivory Mask

By Jarda Cervenka

The story takes place in three continents, but the visions behind my eyes remain most vivid by the images of Africa, where most of it was written. I still see the hazy sea grey as flint, the laterite ground hardened to brick emanating heat, eternal palms rustling, and people with white smiles everywhere. To this land the three main characters of the story intruded innocently and almost did not survive. Their rather narrow existence has been transformed by an extraordinary experience. Or was it transformed?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462835713

Jarda Cervenka

Jaroslav (Jarda) C e r v e n k a was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he received degrees in medicine and genetics. He immigrated to Minnesota in 1968 in the wake of Russian invasion and was employed by the University of Minnesota as Professor of Medical Genetics, reknown in the field of cytogenetics and dysmorphology, author of “Chromosomes in Human Cancer.” Lived in Kenya, Japan and Nigeria and traveled extensively and intensively in five continents. His thinking and views were influenced mainly by studies of diverse people and their culture, or lack of one. Jarda Cervenka is the author of three collections of stories, “Mal d’Afrique”, “The Revenge of Underwater Man” and “Fausto’s Afternoon”, travel book for children and young adults “Travels of Missi One” and novel “Ambush.” He is the recipient of Richard Sullivan Prize for Fiction, Minnesota Voices Award and The Franz Kafka Award from the European Circle Franz Kafka. Now retired, he and his wife Sasha live near their children Vojta and Tereza in Minneapolis, dividing their time between Florida Keys and Prague.

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Copyright © 2009 by Jarda Cervenka.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY EIGHT

TWENTY NINE

EPILOG

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The story takes place in three continents, but the visions behind my eyes remain most vivid by the images of Africa, where most of it was written. I still see the hazy sea grey as flint, the laterite ground hardened to brick emanating heat, eternal palms rustling, and people with white smiles everywhere. To this land the three main characters of the story intruded innocently – and almost did not survive. Their rather narrow existence has been transformed by an extraordinary experience. Or was it transformed?

Each one of them came from very different background to develop their own complex minds and powerful feelings, but they got along by the ancient skills of social intercourse, by masquerades. I know, I made acquaintance of each one of them (under different names than in the book.)

Despite taking the characters to actual places and into real situations this narration must be taken as a work of fiction, since the experiences had been changed and reimagined. However, there is absolutely nothing that could not have happened.

I would like to thank Jan Kavan for his beautiful interior graphics and cover design.

PROLOGUE

Semper anquia novi Africam et Bohemiam adferre,

Rubrus, Naturalis Historia

(Always something new comes out of Africa and Bohemia.)

Coconut Grove—Dakar—Prague—Lagos—Paris

Coconut Grove

He pumped my hand up and down, slowly, with a limp squeeze, as it is done in West Africa, I learned. The feeling of holding a dead fish before the rigor mortis set in remained with me. I was introduced to Bruce Fortner, Ph.D., in his untidy office in the Department of Anthropology of the Miami International University in Coral Gables.

I doubt sincerely, Sir, I could be of any help to you, he stated with his unanimated face after I explained my assignment for an article on the origins of Haitian voodoo rites. He might have been spooked by my calling card which revealed that I work for the Miami Herald and the El Nuevo Herald, too.

Anything, every word I’ll write, I’ll present to you for a review and approval, I swear, I cross my heart! I crossed my heart, trying to lighten the situation. He offered me some percolated tepid fluid and we started to talk.

Fortner could have been about forty some, but a few of his features made him seem to be older: the white skin stretched tightly over his skull was visible through the rare strands of his hair of no color. His face appeared to be molded of unleavened dough with soft curves everywhere, lips pale, nose forgettable, only his eyes were memorable by a certain kindness carved around them. That is how he was when listening. When he started to explain the African roots of voodoo, his animation changed him, his features became delineated, and it was quite pleasant to observe him and be impressed by his expertise, too.

He had to leave for a meeting, he said, but agreed to meet again. When he shook my hand, limply again, and smiled, I had an intense feeling of liking him.

That evening I called on Lucien Alvarez, on the staff of the El Nuevo Herald, a renowned sleuth par excellence, the resource man. He has been known to find anything about anybody, and also reputed for his Mexican anti-gringo ravings. Who is Bruce Fortner, I asked. There was no protracted mañana, mañana. I got a brief answer in 24 hours, above a couple of mojitas in a bar Don Pedro, on Calle Ocho, the Miami Cuban Champs-Elysées.

 . . . your gringo comes from sort-of a middle class family, a small house in the suburbs of Cleveland with an immaculate lawn, barbecue, that kind of place. Dad takes him to baseball games in the summer, or whatever you Americans do to get out of the house. His Dad was a salesman for some biotechnology company, and that induced an interest in the kid, your Bruce, in zoology, then in sciences in general. Went to college somewhere in the Midwest… I have a name in the file… majored in both chemistry and biology. He worked in a museum and became fascinated with African art.

"He got into the Master’s degree program in Art History; he was good, so he got money to continue for a Ph.D. His thesis was something about African masks. He was good, letrado, as I said, but poor. Then he meets this very rich and pretty broad hanging around art collections, drawing some fertility symbols or something. He knows everything about these fertility somethings, so she falls for the guy and marries him within the year. So the fair prince can finish his postdoc without bouts of starvation."

Well, I tried to get his psycho profile. You know, it helps us to get more suspicious, more into the habitual paranoia. Norma, my favorite psychopath chaser, did his profile; she knows the stuff well. Great knockers, too! Lucien displayed his teeth in his usual expression of sleaze. Your guy, this Bruce, is just little weird, but not more than anybody else on this globe of weirdoes. That was the conclusion of the psycho, in a capsule.

You did not mention how he makes his living, Lucien.

That’s interesting. He is considered tops in detecting fakes and forgeries of these African antiques, consults at museums all over, true expert. While being a University guy, he still lives in a big house in this sort-of tropical paradise, you know, Coconut Grove. Where is the money coming from? Alvarez asked me, not expecting an answer.

I checked that, carefully, he continued. It comes from mamacita, of course. Mamacita, his wife, is truly loaded. Old money, all. So the guy does what he likes and when and where he wants. No worries. Just like you or me! Right? Alvarez emitted sounds resembling a laugh, lit another cigarette, and checked his famous Movado.

And yes, the psycho profile. You should have a good time drinking beer with him, maybe, if you are into Africa. The guy is not the overpowering kind of eager workaholic shithead. But sort-of a one-track mind—as all Americans are. Right? Alvarez’ Mexican complex of inferiority tightened his facial muscles. He tends to slip out of any topic soon, talking shop, hitting on the African masks, his job—which bores most people. You’ll see for yourself, I guess. I know it is normal in the States—people always talk about their work. Norma, the big knockers and brain, you know, Norma tells me that is how they identify themselves, through their work. Can you believe it?

So I got up, not being much interested in Alvarez’ philosophies. I’d learned enough of the background of Bruce Fortner. I’d also learned my homemade mojito is as good as, or better than the one from Calle Ocho. The only better-mixed drink I know I discovered in the house of Bruce Fortner, mixed by the master Africanist himself: La Floridita daiquiri, where rum was enhanced by grapefruit juice, by a dash of Maraschino and lime juice. What a delight on crushed ice! And what a dwelling!

ONE

Bruce, as I would call him by our second meeting, invited me in to demonstrate some of the art subjects of his collection, to explain their connection to cubism, and even to link them to later fauvism. It was all new to me—as was the environment my informant occupied.

The house of the Fortners sat in a cul-de-sac, not far from Fairchild Gardens in Coconut Grove. There was not a coconut palm in sight—too plain for the neighborhood. The status enhancers, royal palms, lined the brick—or tile-paved driveways. With some imagination, they resembled the columns of temples from Greek antiquity, as intended, perhaps, by their planters and landscape architects. Their unbent concrete-white trunks stumped down imperially at the ground cover of tropical ferns. At forty feet and more, they exploded with a lush olive-green crown of fronds, which sawed and rustled softly in the breeze from Biscayne Bay, not only sounding the wind but singing about the affluence of their owners, too.

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Rare cycas, botanical remnants of the devonian period, had been the latest trend in landscape design, as were the multicolored bougainvilleas unknown in the wild, fern trees, and mute birds of paradise. Bruce’s wife insisted on all, including the clump of travelers palms (their fronds always oriented from west to east, to guide the traveler on Madagascar, not Coconut Grove). She wanted more, but there was no more space and the landscape architect, Gino Coppi, shrugged his narrow shoulders for a hundred dollars an hour and ran away howling when meeting the five-foot long green iguana which visited the garden regularly.

Bruce gave her credit, though; she knew most of the plants’ Latin names and often their history, too. His wife. Robotic description of the first impression of her would be as shallow as a kid’s wading pool and as uninformative. She was a beautiful middle-aged woman, a decorative specimen with an intelligent face and cultured demeanor. But my subjective, non-robotic impression would be of a genuinely pleasant, personable lady, interesting and brainy while still beautiful and decorative. She served us cheese to go with the La Floridita, Papa Doble of Hemingway the daiquiri transplanted from Havana’s La Floridita Bar.

It was much later, after we had developed our friendship, Bruce and I, that I learned more about her and retained my affection for her, undiminished. But Bruce oscillated. It was her paintings that disturbed him. Lately, they had become larger and larger—until they came to nothing. She wrote, too, and there was a problem in that, as well. It was done with good grammar, strong sentence-structure, characters well developed, and metaphors placed with equal spacing—verbal howls so well intended and yet so forgettable, because the stories were uninteresting. She had no profession; she stayed at home. That’s how she called herself, she-who-stays-at-home. Not a homemaker—that sounded too much like cabinetmaker, Not a housewife—that sounded more like house arrest, to her.

However, her creativity was a minor problem when compared to her proclivity for vodka. Vodka… the beverage of housewives of this land. This clear fluid, with no pronounced taste and with vapors devoid of lasting strong odors, could be concealed in a plastic bottle labeled as Sparkling Spring Water. Her streak of curiosity, so characteristic for her, led her to explore, first, Smirnoff, then Roman, then Gorbachov, before she hit on Stolichnaya—which she recognized to have no equal, by far. She was a breakfast alcoholic, and as such, she finally ended in the Mecca of AA flunkies—in Minneapolis, in the famous clinic where the success rate is thirty percent and where dealcoholization first started in America. And indeed, she graduated successfully, the Russian product being replaced by Ethiopian Arabica coffee and Floridian orange juice. Bruce used to say, Rita, Rita, I don’t know, or just Rita, Rita, which was her first name. Rita India MacDougall. Lately, she had returned to alcohol, but only on social occasions, never in the morning again.

Bruce used to love her, and still liked her a lot. But his sexual desire of her seemed to increase with his diminishing affection. To discuss their mating life would result in many pauses. She despised regularity and, later in their marriage, disliked irregularity as well. So he had to view his constant and often unfulfilled longing for a lay as a secret affection to be tolerated, as is the burrowing acne or chronic constipation. Fuck, he used to think. Pits, he used to mumble aloud, just pits, because he was a kind man and to behave as well-bred was the rule of the house, enforced.

In the ten years of her married life, she did not lose her beauty. It seemed that the thin crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, the thinning of the baby fat under her chin, and the little sadness in her smile made her even more beautiful. No Botox or retinoids, mind you. The smile occurred rarely in later years, and Bruce missed it.

Her physique did not come from the MacDougall side; it came from the side of her mother, who was a Czech-Hungarian half-breed and remained quite a sight into her fifties. Rita kept her light brown hair lustrous and beautiful, even in her alcoholic stupor. In time, her skin became unnaturally translucent, which was striking to observe under fluorescent light. Miraculously, Stolichnaya-induced physical inactivity did not affect her body visibly—no sags. She was proof, Bruce deduced, of the power of genetics, of the victory of nature over nurture. He wondered if she had had an identical twin who did not succumb to vodka, whether he would love the twin more.

It could be said that with time his scientific interest preoccupied him more and more; he discovered that his hobby and profession had started to resemble a love. It was the collection of African art, antique stuff, some very precious pieces, all authenticated, all well preserved and scientifically catalogued. Some masks were hanging on the walls in the hallway; the rest were on the mahogany shelves in his African room, with windows screened and safeguarded by the latest in alarm systems with motion as well as heat and sound sensors. There he would retreat in the evening and peer into the hollow eyes of masks intended to evoke fear and horror, but which calmed him and evoked a peaceful smile, filled with contentment and the pride of an expert and an owner of precious, unique relics of history, a reminder of a faraway rain forest where a ju-ju priest prepared for sacrifice under a sacred tree, splashed with blood.

Bruce dreamt, but also, he knew. There were no forgeries in his collection, as Bruce was a specialist, called upon to recognize the fakes, to authenticate the real thing. It had been nearly a decade since he became serious in this study. He disproved the belief that skilled forgery could not be detected—not