The Forgiven: A Novel Page 6

  AS THE NIGHT ENDED, THE STAFF ASSEMBLED BY THE GARAGES out of their fanciful uniforms. They gathered by the doors in their workaday burnooses and smoked cigarettes together as the sand pitter-pattered around them. A gray light lit the half-ruined mud walls as the fairy lights were turned off. A tumultuous mood connected them, drew them together though they said almost nothing. The ferocity of the wind was enough to restrain them. But rumors still flashed here and there. They pressed into the garages in small groups and paid their respects, looking down on the colorless corpse with a mixture of dread and determined fascination. Outside, someone muttered the words road kill. By the gate, the cooks cowered from the wind, looking out at the brownish miasma that smothered the road and the cliffs. What they had seen in the garage made them vaguely mutinous, though they wouldn’t mutiny against a cushy job. There were motivated by a rage that was not clear even to themselves. Deep down, they did not and could not accept the idea of an accident. A Muslim had been killed by a Christian. The mind could not accept it entirely, except on the flimsy level of reason.

  “I have heard,” one of them said, “that his legs were pulped. They ran over him, maybe more than once.”

  “My uncle is right. They think of us as flies. They cannot help themselves. And they are not mindful.”

  “They must have reversed over him. It defies belief.”

  “It was fate, then.”

  “But they did not hesitate. They reversed over him.”

  They winced in the wind and considered the word reversed. It was typical. Of course the infidels reversed. They didn’t want a witness to their blundering, their crime. They covered their tracks. It was unsurprising, and it was probably unconscious on the part of the foreigners. That was the most incredible thing about it. Just as you would swat a fly.

  “The police have done nothing,” one of them commented, rubbing his index finger against his thumb.

  “What do you expect them to do?”

  Money: that was the issue. The foreigners always had it.

  Five

  HEN THE SCAR ON THE DEAD BOY’S LEFT HAND WAS mentioned, some of them, thinking back with care, remembered a tall boy with a subtle distraction written across his face, an anger that they recognized but which in him was more prolonged, more deepened by events that were not disclosed. Perhaps, they thought, that was him. A loping, tense boy who worked in the prepping yards in Erfoud and who had a scar on his left hand from an accident with a lathe. It was him, they thought.

  His name was Driss. He had emigrated to France some time back. When he returned, he had gone to work at the Mirzan quarry at the same wage he had enjoyed a year earlier. He lodged in Erfoud. Ismael, the younger boy who had stood with him that night by the road as the Hennigers drove up drunk and wild-eyed, sometimes saw him prepping outside near the telecommunications tower in the center of the town. His head covered with sacking to keep the sun off him and chipping away with his meticulous technique at Tridents he obtained on the black market. He had prepped all his life, like Ismael. It was what he knew, and for that reason he hated it.

  Ismael watched. Driss seemed badly dressed and irritable, as if his French adventure had failed, and he smoked a lot of kif in the evenings with the boys from Alnif who worked in the prepping yards. He looked thinner and more anguished, and he talked without the loose charm that had once made him a favorite with the girls. Such transformations, Ismael reasoned, happened among the unbelievers.

  Ismael saw him at the Green Coconut and the Hotel Tafilalet talking loudly at the ammonite bar, boasting about the money he made from tourists at the five-star ksour hotels on the outskirts of town. Soon they were hanging out. Driss came to the quarry on off days, and he was there before first light, squatting by the entrance with his teapot and his harmonica waiting for the little girls to come down and give him pieces of bread from the foreman. They worked in the intolerable afternoons chiseling out a great ancient fish that a customer from Spain had commissioned for a private bar. They stayed till after dark, making fires on the top of the cliff and looking down at the walls studded with ammonites and crinoids that remained half emergent, their demonic provenance so obvious that it did not merit attention. Nightmare forms that no human, and certainly no reasonable God, could have dreamed up. They were demons that had fallen long ago from the skies and lain for thousands of years among humans, not part of God’s created world. They came from another dimension, from the malevolant spirit world. Their faces were supernatural, it could not be denied. They caused nightmares to appear among the believers, they were hostile to love and peace. Violence was their fruit.

  Is was then that the flies dispersed at last and Ismael and Driss lay under the honey moons with their pipes and Driss talked about his time abroad. It was as if he had never talked about it with anyone. It was because Ismael had known him when they were kids. They were always together in those days and they had started at the quarry together.

  “The problem with you,” Driss said as they lay watching the sunset after the quarry workers had left for town, “is that you stayed a kid. You never left the bled. It’s too bad.”

  “I’ll leave one day.”

  “Yeah, but you never left until now. What counts is what you did, not what you’re gonna do. You understand that, mec?”

  Ismael could only nod dejectedly. True, he had done nothing, nothing at all, and he never would do anything.

  Driss rolled a joint of fresh sweet green weed and they shared it as a way of sealing themselves off from the heat.

  “Once you cross the sea,” he went on, “everything in your head changes. Everything falls apart. You look at everything differently. Some French broad said to me, ‘Travel broadens the mind.’ ”

  “What?”

  “Ah, never mind. French broads are always talking. It just stayed with me, that one.”

  He smiled at the younger boy’s naïveté, because Ismael could only take his word for everything.

  “The French broads,” the latter said. “Do they go with us?”

  “The scabby ones do.”

  But the others? Ismael thought.

  “As for the fine ones, forget it.”

  A shame, the younger boy thought.

  They lay still, smoking.

  “When you have some dough,” Driss said, “they will consider it.”

  “How much?”

  “Two hands’ full.”

  “Ah, les salopes.”

  “Leurs salopes sont comme les notres.”

  “I knew it, by God.”

  The lit joint flared up and showed Driss’s face tautened by pessimistic pride, but not by the disdain suggested by his phrases. He was never obvious. Even his toughness was not obvious; it was not like the toughness of other boys. You would never guess he was barely twenty-one. He could lie on bare stone without moving for hours, unmoved, consumed by thoughts that seemed to come and go inside him like wild animals, and nothing showed on his face but the vibrations of those “animals.” He had learned to not show anything, and to Ismael he revealed only his experiences, not his emotions.

  SOMETIMES DRISS SLEPT IN THE QUARRY, IN THE GEOMETRICAL trenches, wrapped in a piece of tarpaulin. It didn’t seem to affect him. He came and went and no one knew anything about him. He wore a chech wound tightly around his head and his eyes darted out with their gentle ferocity and you were left guessing by their mildness and coldness. He was eager to talk after the sun had gone down and the stars brought out his volubility.

  They made a fire when the nights were chilly, and Driss talked about the arguments with his father, that narrow-minded bumpkin, and how he had hitched a ride to Midelt and then Azrou and then down to Fez, a city like no other, a city he would have stayed in if there had been any work other than in the stinking tanneries.

  He asked Ismael if he had ever been farther than Midelt, and the boy shook his head.

  “You’re all the same,” Driss snorted. “You never go anywhere.”

  “It’s the money. How ca
n one live?”

  “If one wants to live, one finds a way. The world is made for living in. Why are you so scared of it?”

  “One never knows.”

  “Ismael, you have no instinct. That’s why you’re always afraid of the unknown. I thought to myself, All men are the same everywhere. They can be used, exploited, befriended.”

  Ismael crouched on the rock and looked into the fire. They were roasting goat from the Erfoud market; the bread lay in the open under a stone. Down in the road, the lamps of the fossil diggers on their bikes floated slowly past in the clouds of moonlit sand, edging their way back to the perimeters of the town where pale lights stood guard and the trees had not yet died. He couldn’t imagine them, let alone Spaniards and Frenchmen. The world, when he considered it, was not a place where instinct could carve out a safe passage.

  “Still,” he muttered defensively, “you need a bit of cash for the road.”

  “I left with nothing. My father refused to give me a single dirham. He couldn’t have cared less and he said that if I went to France, I would die there.”

  “Ah, le salaud.”

  “They are beaten-down slaves. I told him so to his face.”

  Well, Ismael thought, I am only eighteen. When I am Driss’s age, I will have gone beyond Midelt. I will have done something.

  And he promised himself without uttering a word.

  “He laughed,” Driss went on bitterly. “He said I’d end up as a janitor if I was lucky.”

  “It is what fathers say to keep us safe.”

  “He is jealous of me, like all fathers. That’s all.”

  Insulting their fathers made Ismael nervous, and he said nothing. He scratched his ear and waited for the conversation to move on, and he felt the coiled tension inside the older boy.

  “But you came back,” he said at length.

  Driss admitted that it was inevitable.

  “I didn’t like the food over there. Unbelievers are unbelievers.”

  Yes, so much was unpleasantly undeniable, and Ismael said so.

  “But still,” he added, “we have to make money here.”

  “I have a plan,” Driss said. “Don’t you worry about making money. There’s money everywhere here. Look around you.”

  But it’s not for us, Ismael thought. It’s for Norway.

  Driss lay on his back and stared up at the constellations, none of which he knew.

  “I know what you think, Ismael. You are not bold.”

  “I think too …”

  “You think that you don’t want to spend the rest of your life hammering at fossils in a trench. But you are vague. You do not have a plan.”

  “No,” the other conceded.

  When they were a little stoned, Ismael asked him about France. Did he remember the pictures of Sweden that Driss’s father so treasured that he stuck to the walls of his house? A land green and wet, with wonderful, fearsome pornography and hotels with fireplaces. A land protected by clouds. A land blessed by someone else’s god.

  “It is not green,” Driss corrected him. “The clouds make it gray.”

  They laughed.

  “Truly,” Ismael said.

  “I wouldn’t exchange it for my desert. The tar of my country is better than the honey of others.” It was a good proverb.

  “You would exchange it.”

  “I was there, you fool. Everything there deceived me. It is not what you think, what you all think. You have it all wrong, you suckers. There is nothing there for us.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  Driss shook his head.

  “Nothing at all. Even the sex is not for us.”

  “It’s a shame.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not.”

  Driss reached over and opened the can of Red Bull they had brought for the morning. Ismael’s burning curiosity irritated him, and yet it was an audience at least. His nightmares had been coming back, and when he slept out at Mirzan, he had visions. The foreman’s little children used to throw stones at him until their father intervened. He let them torment him—it probably did them good. It was a favor the foreman would return later. That night, he would dream of the motorway from Málaga to the French border, which he had traversed on the back of a vegetable truck driven by a maghrébin. An endless road worthy of a nightmare.

  Ismael lit his second joint and they braced themselves against the wind blowing up from the road, where nothing could be seen.

  “But tell me,” he said. “How did you get to Spain? And you with no money and no papers. How did you do it?”

  “It’s a long story, and the truth is, I made it up as I went along. I had no real plans.”

  “You went to Spain on an illegal boat, the preppers say.”

  “True. I landed on the other side, but it was not as you all think. There was no trouble. I landed next to a luxury marina and swam in.”

  “God be thanked.”

  “It wasn’t even luck. The traffickers waited until the coast guard were away. It made me laugh.”

  So that’s how it was, Ismael thought. Anyone could do the same.

  “You paid them,” he said to Driss.

  The older boy began to talk. He didn’t care if Ismael was even there; he only wanted to talk about himself.

  “It was July,” he said, “and the heat had come. I walked through the marina at three in the morning, the marina called Sotogrande. No one even noticed me. I had nothing, not even a bag. Not even a watch. Nothing stopped me.”

  Six

  N HOUR PAST DAWN A FEW GUESTS WERE SEEN WANDERING about the ksour in evening clothes, asking directions and in some instances demanding breakfast. It had been prepared. In the dining room, tables were already set, freshened by pots of lilacs. The coffee was being brewed; croissants and pastries baked in the ovens. The whole building smelled of hot butter and coffee and the sugar of the sweating lilacs. The windows had been closed against the inclement weather and the overhead fans switched on. A single man sat at a table, a German journalist who had managed to procure a day-old newspaper. The staff on duty in the room watched him swat the flies that buzzed around his head. On the insides of the windows, hundreds of these same gray flies seemed to have collected. They were sheltering from the scalding Chergui, which had pushed the thermometers up to a hundred and fifteen degrees overnight. It was a sign of bad weather indeed when the flies came inside to escape. The servants had been ordered to kill them with aerosol insecticides.

  Hamid was in charge of the younger boys. After a brief sleep, he walked up to the gate and dispersed them to their duties. The sun came up, dimmed by dust and sand, and the early-morning types among the guests became more numerous. They walked about in their dressing gowns and babouches, cheerful and yawning, and exchanged notes with other guests. Hamid wondered if they were discussing the accident of the night before. But there was no apprehension in their faces. It was the sand, the wind, that was disturbing them most. Sand had gotten into the yogurt; it was in their hair, in their teeth. They were not prepared for the sand, not by a long shot. Overnight, it had turned into a formidable enemy. An enemy that was so small, so insidious that they could not fight it. Nothing is more enraging than an unfair fight. The women complained; the men gritted their teeth and asked the staff for assistance. “With the sand?” the staff asked incredulously.

  “Don’t you have screens? Masks?”

  Hamid dashed about. Apart from an unsatisfactory nap he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, but there was so much to do. The champagne in the cellars had to be counted and calculated for both lunch and the evening party. The couscous deliveries from the local villages had to be coordinated; a consignment of dates and fresh mint was arriving shortly. His head buzzed. The masters were sleeping it off in the top bedroom in Tower 1, as they called it, and they could not be disturbed. The daily running of the operations was up to him. Truly, the world had not promised anything to anyone and no man ever lived the way he wished.

  IN THE GARAGE, THE DEAD BOY SEEMED
TO BE SLEEPING AS well. His skin had turned a tint of blue, and his lips were black. Those keeping vigil began to wonder what would happen next. Under Islamic law, a body must be buried with haste, but no one had yet claimed him. They hoped that the invisible gossip wires of the desert would send this news far into the interior. That someone would come. The police had said they would wait until sundown.

  But Hamid was disturbed by this arrangement. He was not sure that it was lawful, that it followed custom. Discreetly, therefore, he prepared a bicycle to transport the body to the local graveyard if it became necessary. He went to the gate and peered down the road, checking his watch. His heart was beating irregularly, very irregularly indeed. He had the feeling that he was being watched, that his heartbeats were actually being counted.

  Seven

  O WAS RUNNING IN HER DREAM, BUT SUDDENLY HER eyes opened: a butterfly hovered against the glass, a twist of black velvet and lemon, and the casement was filled with sunlight. The sand had fallen still. In the dream she was running downhill toward a glade of poplar trees where there was a well surrounded by crows pecking at grains in the loose earth round about. She knew it from somewhere. The lid of the well had been discarded, and she felt that someone had gotten there before her, someone who was hidden somewhere. But she came down anyway among the trees, and for a few moments, the dream and the insect pressed against the glass in real life merged confusingly. In the dream the sun was hot as it slanted through the poplars and she came to the edge of the well and peered in. Just as the dream was breaking apart, she knew that she had been running through it all night. She peered down and saw the flash of a black reflection, a point of darkness, and the motion of a bucket slapping against the walls of the well. The rope attached to it hung wet by her ear and it was moving. She reached out and stilled it. She pulled and the bucket moved upward, swaying and slopping. Far down in that claustrophobic darkness she could sense something coiled inside the cup of animal skin, a small animal of some kind, a piglet or a young goat, and as she pulled the rope, the liquid black of its eyes suddenly appeared, staring up at her, and there was someone behind her in the poplar shadows, and she knew he carried an ax.