The Forgiven Read online

  THE CURTAINS HAD BEEN LEFT OPEN AND THE MOON BURST across a scene that looked like petty warfare. A shoe, an orange, a broken glass, a knife laid across a sill and forgotten long ago. There was a smell of dank grapes and orange zest, and the product he splashed expensively under his arms. While he slept, she moved her hands across the sheets and into little pools of drying semen. The sameness of men came as a sudden revelation that served to calm her down. It never occurred to them that they were remarkably similar to one another. All pieces of the same contiguous ectoplasm. She lifted her head a little and caught the moon shining on an unknown piece of pisé wall. There seemed to be a distinct human noise of some kind coming from the open air, like someone breathing. The fan whirred over them. Her broken pieces slowly came together again and she realized that she was not going to fall asleep. She knew that she was being watched, listened to, because nothing was secret in the ksour.

  IT WAS HAMID, IN FACT, WHO STOOD OUTSIDE IN THE shadow of the pisé wall listening intently to the lovemaking inside the cottage, which he had expected but which nevertheless shocked him profoundly. No one had asked him to come down here and spy, but he had been drawn by an irresistible curiosity. The infidels, he now realized more than ever, were extraordinarily shameless in their copulations and betrayals. And to think that he had felt sorry for the Henniger woman as her husband was hauled off to the desert to answer for a crime that in all probability he had not even committed. Though he never said so to the other members of the staff, he considered David’s gesture quite noble; it was surprising and even honorable. No one had forced him to do it. And as soon as he was gone, the wife entered the cottage of another man. So this was their vaunted female freedom. That was their miserable liberation.

  He crouched with one ear pushed forward, his incredulity warping his senses so that he heard only the erotic struggle of the unbelievers. Then, when he had heard enough, he leaned against the wall and composed himself. He heard the woman pad her way to the bathroom. Truly, as was said, a woman without discretion was like a gold ring in a pig’s snout. The lights came on for a moment and then were turned off again. He moved away at last, disgusted with himself for continuing in the service of Richard and Dally, whose friends were so worthless. He continued because he needed the money and because his father’s hospital bills were mounting. He was trapped inside a necessary dishonor.

  He made his way back up to the gate, where paper lanterns were hanging on long bamboo sticks. The party that night had acquired a curious atmosphere due in no small part to the vast quantities of cocaine that had been distributed earlier. The drug provoked a mild horror in him because it was unfamiliar, alien, and its effects so unlike those of kif. It was not clear to him why people took it at all. They seemed to derive no pleasure from it, and it did not, like kif, improve their mental functions. On the contrary. It made them supercilious, bellicose, and even worse mannered than they usually were.

  As he reached the roadside wall where he traditionally smoked his nocturnal pipe and tried to get a grip on the day’s misfortunes, he felt suddenly immensely tired. Tired of the breakfasts with their epic wastages, and of the volumes of toxic alcohol constantly being stashed, prepared, wasted, spilled, and vomited up again. Tired of the lost jewelry and the braying men from London and Paris rolling around like toys in their hideous inebriation. Tired, for that matter, of the constant gossiping and superstitious suspicions of the semiliterate, provincial Moroccans with pathetically dated prejudices and childish boasting. To tell the truth, he had liked Jo. And now …

  He looked out over the dark immensity of the plain, with the dense oasis in the foreground. Far off, where the desert met the sky, there was a pale, elongated glimmer of straw-gold light. The wind was cool, indifferent, and he wondered if half the night had really passed so quickly.

  He had carried Richard half drunk, half stoned to bed with the help of Nawfal and that bitter boy had spat into the master’s glass of fizzing Alka-Seltzer. Shocking, too, in its way; but not so shocking as the treachery of Madame Henniger. They had laid Richard on his Glaoua bed and then gone looking for Dally, who was unconscious in a flower bed with a French lad whose eyes were wide open. Terrible, terrible. And Hamid lit his long clay pipe with a burst of repressed indignation. The birds were beginning to sing. From the desert came a smell of iron and rot, a distant tang of decomposing salt. Terrible, to think of Richard and Dally entwined on that bed, snoring, dribbling, thrashing about in their perfidious dreams. His mind raced ahead, then, to his future life, which he was convinced would be far more glorious. A job at the Intercontinental Hotel in Casa, and then, who knew, perhaps a post in the Seychelles or Dubai running an executive floor among decent, respectable people. Such, anyway, are one’s dreams. He shrugged and sat on the wall, smoking with great seriousness as the night ended. So it was already Monday morning, and within a few hours the guests would begin to leave. By God, it was not a moment too soon.

  Twenty-one

  AVID WOKE AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME. THE WALLS were faintly visible because the lamp still burned, and it was a surprise that they were not white, but a pale red with scratched words and numerals cut into them. Everything in the room was coated with dust, including his fingernails. Next to the mattress he now noticed a glass jar with a Biro standing inside it and a small toy, a British Dalek from the Doctor Who television series. There was a pile of underclothes roughly folded and a notebook. Driss’s things; the few things a teenage boy needed in his room. He was sure they were rubbing this in his nose, making him feel the presence of the dead boy. It was their idea of torture. Because they were sure that he believed in ghosts.

  He sat up and his mouth craved not water but a stiff Scotch. He was astonished that he had come so far without a drink, not a single drop in so many hours. It was still dark, but he realized that he must have slept, because he felt refreshed as he opened the bolt of the door and slipped out silently into the corridor, making his way to the back door next to the kitchen, where a muzzled and suffering dog lay asleep. His muscles had recovered their snap.

  The animal opened its eyes but did nothing as he stepped over it and into the cool moonlight that breathed life into a small vegetable garden. Since the wind had died down, its various leaves stood upright with a kind of tender defiance and the half-dead palms shifted uneasily as if being disturbed by gravity. He felt like a schoolboy on a lark, stepping around the gardens and into the wide-open stony space in front of the houses. The moon was low now, and its radiance so weak that the outline of the cliff was indistinct, the numerous cave openings and ladders merged together in a great scar. The horror of that vertical surface where the children slaved was dimmed also. One forgot that only the children were small enough to wriggle into the caves with their hammers. Yet he was still appalled at the thought, because Driss had been one of those children and his labors had ended up in a grave behind the gardens.

  He fumbled his way to the edge of the oued and then picked his way along it as far as the place where it converged with a larger dried riverbed. It was a great confusion of piled-up white stones, and beyond it the open desert began abruptly. The flat earth shone with a dull silver dust. Carpets of blistered stones stretched away from him, a petrified sea. Long sulfur-yellow ridges with black crests would be visible by dawn.

  “I could run” was his first thought. “I could run all the way to the nearest road. Then I could walk until I ran into a car. I could beg a ride.”

  He looked desperately across the half-visible plain and there was a part of him that was prepared to jump, to make a dash for it. Run, a voice inside him urged. But that was always his instinct, to run, and famously one tires of running. Just then, he saw something flicker against the scabby wall of the cliff. It was a campfire. Next to it sat a man he didn’t recognize, a middle-aged digger in a dark brown burnoose who was sharpening some of his tools with a whetstone. The chip-chip sound of this operation produced a tiny metallic echo that came across the open space with a comforting human regular
ity. David walked over to him.

  “Salaam aleikum,” he tried, raising his hand.

  The man didn’t bother looking up.

  “It’s no use running,” he said in Tamazight.

  David didn’t understand and therefore didn’t reply.

  “I saw you looking,” the man went on. “You looked like a thirsty man gazing at water.”

  David shook his head: “Sorry, can’t understand.”

  “Are you awake now? You know very well I am here to stop you wandering off. No idea what I am talking about? Very well, it doesn’t matter.” And he added an Arab insult: “wlad lekhab.”

  The man stopped sharpening the ax he was working on and put it down. David shook his head and began to retreat. The man laughed.

  “Come, I will show you something weird. Did you know there is a lake just over there? A lake with flamingos.”

  He got up and beckoned David to follow. The wind suddenly rose and wailed around them as they struggled across the oueds and plunged into the darkness. David turned longingly to reassure himself that the fire was still there, and then followed the willowy digger as he trudged across a sheet of flat blue-tinted stones. After a few hundred yards, the man knelt down and pointed to a sloping shelf of rock that was inclined at a gentle angle within pockets of hardened sand. They would not have seen it if the first light had not suddenly broadened behind the edge of Issomour. The surface of the slab was covered with writhing forms as subtle as stencils, and among them was a huge fish with a beaked mouth and fins that could have been claws. An ichthyosaur, a Devonian mermaid. The man smoothed his hands over it and gave David a slick grin, switching to French.

  “We call them the flamingos. I can hack it out for you.”

  “I don’t want you to hack it out.”

  The man’s stick traced the outline of the fish. We’re at the bottom of a sea, David thought, reaching up to his own throat with his right hand and caressing it.

  The man’s voice rasped. “Where are you from? London?”

  “I can’t buy a fish,” David said in his tumbledown French.

  “We can make it into a kitchen table. Think how pleased your wife will be!”

  Already, the waltz between them was becoming threatening, but also liturgical. The man circled him tutting, while his stick tapped scales and tailbones of the monster fossil that could never make a kitchen countertop and his eyes sought out the truth behind the unbeliever’s facade. David, for his part, felt his resistance weakening, his knees giving out, and eventually he willingly crouched and let the man stomp around him crying “It’s a steal, a robbery, and you can’t even see it!” and as he did so, he covered his eyes with his hands, then reached out and ran his hand along the spine as if appreciating what was magnificent about it, which was its completeness, its manifest evidence that life had existed long before them.

  Abdellah’s jeep, meanwhile, moved at the edge of the oued for a few moments before its headlights came on. The sound of the engine suddenly pierced the silence and echoed along the bottom of the cliff. Looking up then, David saw a small child’s form swinging up one of the knotted ropes.

  “Ah, they’re looking for you!” the man crowed.

  He stood up and waved.

  As the jeep roared up to the slabs of fossilized sea creatures, David made out the enraged face of Abdellah behind the windshield and the softer countenance of Anouar. The father descended, slammed his door shut, and strode over to the two men who had been nailed by the headlights. The digger was deferential, and they exchanged four or five curt phrases, but Abdellah was concentrating on David.

  “So I see you have come for a walk. Of course, you saw that there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

  “I wasn’t trying to hide,” David replied coldly.

  With a quick, silent dart, the digger vanished.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the other said. His voice was terse, impatient, and his body seemed to be on the verge of uncontrollable violence.

  “You said I could walk about,” David protested.

  He realized that he sounded as if he was pleading for his life.

  “I did,” the older man admitted. Then he grinned nastily. “Were you trying to beat the dawn?”

  Abdellah barked at Anouar to turn off the headlights. Darkness returned and suddenly they were alone together in the wind, straining to hold themselves upright as grit blew into their faces and the straw-gold break in the night sky had widened to become a gash of dirty sunlight.

  Abdellah reached into his long, straggling overcoat and took out the SOG knife that he had used to peel the apples the previous evening. Its fearsome blade thus came between them, and it shone more than their skin, so that all David knew for certain was where the knife was. He took a step, and from the corner of his eyes he took note of the undulations of the earth around him and the vastness into which he could escape. Abdellah did not advance accordingly, however; he stood where he was. He was himself undecided as to what to do and his consciousness was not lit up by any dominating idea except that of pain. He lurched forward for a moment, then stopped again, gripping the knife so hard that it began to shake. Then, letting himself retreat mentally from a terrible idea, he raised the blade so that it pointed toward the distant town of Alnif.

  “Anouar is going to take you back now. Your bags are loaded in the jeep.”

  It was Anouar walking forward, his face open with fear and loathing and some incoherent compassion that could not break into the open as it wished.

  “David,” he called, “don’t be afraid. You can get in the car now.”

  “You had better,” Abdellah thought, and lowered the blade to his side. He, too, stepped back a little, and some force inside him passed from his body and seeped into the open, where it was bound to disappear. So it was, for him.

  He turned and walked back to the jeep, without climbing into it. He walked on toward the oued, with the sky breaking into gold and gray above his head. A dog from the village ran out to greet him, and soon there came the sound of chipping hammers from high up on the cliffs, a gibberish sound like that of thousands of birds converging upon a corpse. A cock crowed from Tafal’aalt. The old man walked on without slipping off the hood of his burnoose. His eyes were held down to control the emotion welling up in his mind, and he was—in some secret place of himself—glad of his ability to control what was darkest in his personality.

  HE WENT BACK TO THE HOUSE AND PREPARED A PIPE AND A pot of tea for himself. From the cliff face came the tinkling sounds of the children tapping away at the stone, and it could only remind him of the little Driss of fifteen years ago, strapped to a long rope and dangling from a ledge so high up that they felt a small fear for his safety. He smoked quietly and let those memories spin through him, the fragments of remembrance of his only son, to which he must now cling with a dogged single-mindedness.

  After his pipe and a boiled egg, he went into the boy’s room and lingered among its effects, sure that there remained there a subtle, far-off smell of the living being who had once inhabited it. He remembered Driss locking himself in here with his immoral secrets when he had returned from France, never telling his family where he had been or what he had done in Paris. He had lain there smoking his kif, going out only at night. He had gone back to Hmor to look for a job at the quarries, to recuperate his old job in effect, but who knew if he had been successful? He had come back much changed, much—he said it to the women—worsened. A bite in his voice, a new arrogance and intransigence. He had always been difficult, but now he had been aloof as well, keeping his meager earnings to himself, refusing to answer their questions about what he might have earned in Europe. He had gone with such braggadocio and false élan. I will come back, he had seemed to say, better than any of you. Richer, more knowing, more resourceful. So Abdellah had let him go without a word and the boy had come back a word miser. It had been strange and unwelcome, because no son of his should ever have been a bitter recluse.

  Finally he closed th
e door behind him and walked slowly back to the main room, where he lay down for some time listening to the wind. Driss. He was right there in the dying cemetery and his soul was somewhere nearby with all its memories. Driss with the long hands and the small scar on the left one, Driss of the wandering eyes and the unscrupulous habit of slipping banknotes into his socks. When he was a boy, there was something green in his eyes that gradually disappeared. Who had ever known him? He used to listen to that music called raï, hours alone in his room with the plugs in his ears, and when he was away in Erfoud or Rissani, they would hear of the dishonor he had brought upon them. He sold drugs and illegal trilobites, apparently, but then it was no more or less than what the other boys sold; he was no worse than the others, he was just more indiscreet. He just couldn’t hold his tongue.

  During the following night, Abdellah regretted that he had not killed David. It was not that he was convinced of David’s guilt. It was that whatever the unbeliever had done or not done, he could not forgive him for the death of Driss. He regretted he had been weak in that moment at first light when he had held the knife and the unbeliever had seen it. “All power was in my hands,” he thought, “and I did not use it.” So Driss, his life and his death, had gone entirely to waste because no punishment had been exacted. He went to the grave after midnight and sat there thinking about his weakness, which previously had seemed to him like a strength. But what he had wanted to avenge truly was the fact that he simply had never known his son at all. The unknowability of Driss had therefore been made eternal by a mistake on the road, a miscalculated angle or distance. Bismellah. Deep in his grave, his son remembered his past, but no one else was admitted to it, and the riddles from now on would recede and grow more complicated, since life is but a sport and a pastime, as the Koran carefully reminds us, and because it is a game and nothing more, one forgets that the point of life is death.