Excerpt from Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I

Michel Adanson watched himself die under his daughter's gaze. He was wasting away, racked by thirst. His joints were like fossilized shells of bone, calcified and immobile. Twisted like the shoots of vines, they tormented him in silence. He thought he could hear his organs failing one after another. The crackling noise in his head, heralding his end, reminded him of the first faint noises made by the bushfire he'd lit one evening more than fifty years before on a bank of the Senegal River. He'd had to quickly take refuge in a dugout canoe, from where—accompanied by the laptots, his guides to the river—he'd watched an entire forest go up in flames.

The sump trees—desert date palms—were split by flames surrounded by yellow, red, and iridescent blue sparks that whirled around them like infernal flies. The African fan palms, crowned by smoldering fire, collapsed in on themselves, shackled to the earth by their massive roots. Beside the river, water-filled mangrove trees boiled before exploding in shreds of whistling flesh. Farther off toward the horizon, the fire hissed as it consumed the sap from acacias, cashew trees, ebony and eucalyptus trees while the creatures of the forest fled, wailing in terror. Muskrats, hares, gazelles, lizards, big cats, snakes of all sizes slid into the river's dark flow, preferring the risk of drowning to the certainty of being burned alive. Their splashes distorted the reflection of the flames in the water. Ripples, little waves, then stillness.

Michel Adanson did not believe he'd heard the forest moan that night. But as he was consumed by an internal conflagration just as violent as the one that had illuminated his dugout on the river, he started to suspect that the burning trees must have screamed curses in a secret plant language, inaudible to men. He would have cried out, but no sound could escape his locked jaw.

The old man brooded. He wasn't afraid of dying, but he regretted that his death would be of no use to science. In a final show of loyalty to his mind, his body, retreating before the great enemy, counted off its successive surrenders almost imperceptibly. Methodical even unto death, Michel Adanson lamented his powerlessness to describe in his notebooks the defeats of this final battle. Had he been able to speak, Aglaé could have acted as his secretary during his final agony. But it was too late to dictate the story of his own death.

He hoped desperately that Aglaé would discover his notebooks. Why hadn't he simply left them to her in his will? He had no reason to fear his daughter's judgment as though she were God. When you pass through the door to the next world, you cannot take your modesty with you.

On one of his last lucid days, he had understood that his research in botany, his herbaria, his collections of shells, his drawings would all disappear in his wake from the surface of the earth. Amid the eternal churn of generations of human beings crashing over one another like waves would come a man, or—why not?—a woman, another botanist who would unceremoniously bury him under the sands of his ancient science. So the essential thing was to figure in the memory of Aglaé as himself and not merely as some immaterial, ghostly scholar. This revelation had struck him on January 26, 1806: precisely six months, seven days, and nine hours before the beginning of his death.

That day, an hour before noon, he'd felt his femur break under the thick flesh of his thigh. A muffled crack, with no apparent cause, and he almost fell headfirst into the fireplace. Had it not been for Mr. and Mrs. Henry, who had caught him by the sleeve of his bathrobe, he might well have ended up with more bruises and perhaps some burns on his face. They laid him out on his bed and went to get help. And while the Henrys ran through the streets of Paris, he tried to press the heel of his left foot hard against the top of his right foot to extend his injured leg and allow the fractured bones in his femur to snap back into place. He fainted from the pain. When he woke, just before the arrival of the surgeon, Aglaé was on his mind.

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Translation copyright © 2023 by Sam Taylor