Beyond the Doors of Death by Robert Silverberg, Damien Broderick Page B

there’s some neat little irony attached to it. I mean, there we were in Egypt, in Egypt , at this fabulous dinner party in the hills at Luxor, and our host is a Saudi prince, no less, in full tribal costume right down to the sunglasses, and when they bring out the roast lamb he grins devilishly and says, ‘Of course we could always drink Mouton-Rothschild, but I do happen to have a small stock of select Israeli wines in my cellar, and because I think you are, like myself, a connoisseur of small incongruities, I’ve asked my steward to open a bottle or two of’—Klein, do you see that girl who just came in?” It is January, 2021, early afternoon, a fine drizzle in the air. Klein is lunching with six colleagues from the history department at the Hanging Gardens atop the Westwood Plaza. The hotel is a huge ziggurat on stilts; the Hanging Gardens is a rooftop restaurant, ninety stories up, in freaky neo-Babylonian decor, all winged bulls and snorting dragons of blue and yellow tile, waiters with long curly beards and scimitars at their hips—gaudy nightclub by dark, campy faculty hangout by day. Klein looks to his left. Yes, a handsome woman, mid-twenties, coolly beautiful, serious-looking, taking a seat by herself, putting a stack of books and cassettes down on the table before her. Klein does not pick up strange girls: a matter of moral policy, and also a matter of innate shyness. Dongan teases him. “Go on over, will you? She’s your type, I swear. Her eyes are the right color for you, aren’t they?”
    Klein has been complaining, lately, that there are too many blue-eyed gals in Southern California. Blue eyes are disturbing to him, somehow, even menacing. His own eyes are brown. So are hers: dark, warm, sparkling. He thinks he has seen her occasionally in the library. Perhaps they have even exchanged brief glances. “Go on,” Dongan says. “Go on, Jorge. Go.” Klein glares at him. He will not go. How can he intrude on this woman’s privacy? To force himself on her—it would almost be like rape. Dongan smiles complacently; his bland grin is a merciless prod. Klein refuses to be stampeded. But then, as he hesitates, the girl smiles too, a quick shy smile, gone so soon he is not altogether sure it happened at all, but he is sure enough, and he finds himself rising, crossing the alabaster floor, hovering awkwardly over her, searching for some inspired words with which to make contact, and no words come, but still they make contact the old-fashioned way, eye to eye, and he is stunned by the intensity of what passes between them in that first implausible moment.
    “Are you waiting for someone?” he mutters, shaken.
    “No.” The smile again, far less tentative. “Would you like to join me?”
    She is a graduate student, he discovers quickly. Just got her master’s, beginning now on her doctorate—the nineteenth-century East African slave trade, particular emphasis on Zanzibar. “How romantic,” he says. “Zanzibar! Have you been there?”
    “Never. I hope to go some day. Have you?”
    “Not ever. But it always interested me, ever since I was a small boy collecting stamps. It was the last country in my album.”
    “Not in mine,” she says. “Zululand was.”
    She knows him by name, it turns out. She had even been thinking of enrolling in his course on Nazism and Its Offspring. “Are you South American?” she asks.
    “Born there. Raised here. My grandparents were East German. Grandfather was sent to Buenos Aires in ’77 on a diplomatic mission and defected.”
    “Why Argentina? I thought that’s been a hotbed of fascists since the old Nazi days.”
    “Was, yes. Was a long time ago. Also still full of German-speaking people, though. All their friends went there. But it was too unstable. My parents got out in ’95, just before one of the big revolutions, and came to California. What about you?”
    “British family. I was born in Seattle. My father’s in the consular service. He—”
    A waiter