Gorgeous East (4 page)

“Why not?”

“For one thing, your age.”

“I’m forty-four—how old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“That’s not so bad, is it?”

And it wasn’t, in France. For the French, such an age discrepancy was entirely acceptable. But Louise, who had perhaps spent too many years in the United States, wouldn’t answer him.

They walked along now in silence, the tide sparkling below, the seabirds fighting one another for minnows in the surf, and stopped again at a small guard tower. They had reached the end of the public ramparts, as far as they could go without mounting to the walls of the abbey itself, and the way was blocked from here. They stood for a long time staring out over the sea in silence, but were really looking out with breathless trepidation over the uncertain vistas of a shared life.

“I know nothing about you,” Louise said, her voice hoarse. “You’ve let me talk and talk and you’ve said practically nothing—” She stopped herself. “You see? It’s impossible.”

“What do you want to know that you didn’t find out in bed last night?” He grinned. “Just marry me and find out the rest later.”

“So, would I have a title?” she said, trying to sound cynical. “Madame la Duchesse, perhaps?”

“There was a title,” Phillipe admitted. “Vicomte de la Tour Grise. But the tower is long gone and the title no longer exists, as far as I’m concerned. We haven’t used it since the Revolution.”

“
Merde, un aristo!
” Louise very nearly spit.

“I’m a citizen of the Republic, just like you,” Phillipe replied calmly. “I work, I have a job. I’m in the army. Doesn’t pay enough to live decently; it’s more of a family tradition with us. A vocation. One of my ancestors fought with Turenne at Sinzheim, another with Bonaparte at the Nile. And so on.”

“
Militariste!
” Louise jabbed a finger in his direction, belligerence rising in her voice. “Fascist! You’d probably vote for Le Pen!
Eh bien, moi
, I’m a creature of the Far Left. You might as well say I’m an anarchist, antiglobal, antiwar. So you see, it would never work out with us. I must have someone of my own politics.” She was looking for anything, desperate for any reason to turn and walk away.

“Good.” Phillipe nodded, refusing to be discouraged. “Because I usually vote Left—Socialist Party. Depending on the candidate, of course—the important thing is character. But . . .” He hesitated. “. . . You should hear the whole story, everything. I went to Saint-Cyr, you see. The top five officer candidates out of every class have the honor of applying for a commission in the Foreign Legion—though very few are accepted, since first you must endure the same harsh basic training as the men who will be under your command. But I applied and so—”

“
Non!
” Louise gasped, interrupting. “
Putain!
You’re not with the Foreign Legion!”

“I am.”

“They’re the worst! A bunch of brutes! Criminals! I’ve seen them beating each other in the bars in Pigalle in their ridiculous white hats! Drunk and bloody, just beating people up with their fists! Just for the fun of it!”

“There are no saints in the Legion,” Phillipe admitted somberly. “Only desperate men from every nation, men with no place else to go, men who need a second chance.”

“You mean mercenaries, hired assassins . . .”

“I mean foreigners who have volunteered to serve France to the last drop of their blood. It’s an ancient tradition. Louis Philippe gave the Legion its first standard, which has since been carried to every corner of the earth.”

“Oh, very nice!” Louise said, disgusted. “Spoken like a true imperialist!”

“If it makes you feel better, think of me as a musician,” Phillipe offered brightly. “I play the piano, like your father. I’m not famous, of course, but I am second in command of la Musique Principale. We’re very well known, one of the best military marching bands in the world. And there’s le Chorale du Légion, which is my direct responsibility. Singing is one of the great traditions with us. Last year, in the competition at Moscow, we took the silver medal. If we only had a decent top tenor. But good tenors are hard to find—”

“Enough!” Louise cried suddenly, clutching her head. “Stop!”

Phillipe stopped himself, abashed. He had already said far too much. The thing that separated Satie from every other composer of his era—from Debussy and Ravel and Saint-Saëns—was his exquisite silences; the long, melancholy pauses between notes. Now, Phillipe played out one of Satie’s somber sarabandes—that courtly, complicated little dance—in his head, leaving plenty of space for the reverberating silences, and when he had finished, he took Louise by the arm again and they went back to the hotel, to the dining room, just open for breakfast.

Louise ate like an American, which is to say heavily, ordering an omelette,
spécialité de la maison
, usually reserved for dinner, more like a soufflé than an omelette, and a platter full of homemade goose liver sausages, and ate every scrap. Phillipe ate a few crumbled pieces of a croissant and drank several cups of coffee. His stomach felt unsettled, sour, though he appeared completely at ease, an ability that might be attributed to battlefield training or an aristocratic disposition, or both. They finished eating; the bill came and Phillipe paid, but neither of them stood up to leave. The waiters clattered around impatiently, clearing dishes. The lovers didn’t speak, they didn’t say a word; they hardly looked at each other across the starched white tablecloth.

2

GATEWAY TO

THE AGE OF THE

HIDDEN IMAM

1.

F
rom the air the Saharoui refugee camp at Awsard in the Algerian Sahara looked like a heap of dirty clothes tossed onto a pile of sticks. Scraps of canvas, blue plastic UN tarps, striped bits of native fabric all flapped and billowed from improvised tent poles in the steady desert wind known by a woman’s name—Simoom—unbearably hot and pregnant with a nagging, sandy grit.

The Russian-made Antonov C-160 circled the camp in the teeth of the wind in the yellow desert light, lowering toward the uneven airstrip below, flecks of mica hissing against the scarred glass of the cockpit. As they banked for the approach, dark stains revealed themselves between the dunes at the southern perimeter. These couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, even at this altitude: great mounds of trash and human excrement, the refuse of the refuse.

“Poor miserable bastards,” Phillipe said, half to himself, staring out the scratchy window. “Living in the middle of all that filth for generations.”

“Since 1973, Colonel de Noyer”—came a voice at his shoulder—“during the first Polisario war. That’s when the Moroccans drove them out of the coastal districts.”

The voice—nasal, self-important—belonged to Dr. Hanz Milhauz, the man from MINURSO, a befuddling acronym that somehow described the UN Mission to the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara, to which Phillipe had just been sent as an observer by the French government. French military observers are almost always drawn from the officer corps of the Foreign Legion; Phillipe had observed multinational peacekeeping forces at work all over the world in the last five or six years: Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus and the Comoros, Somalia, Kosovo again, Afghanistan, Iraq.

“It was the necessity of fighting on two fronts that brought Polisario to their knees,” Dr. Milhauz continued. “With half their forces besieging Nouakchott, they couldn’t hold Laayoune against the Moroccans. The evacuation was terrible, a botched job. Thousands died of starvation, the trail of bodies stretched from the Atlantic to the mountains.”

“Yes, I know all the history—” Phillipe began, but Dr. Milhauz made an impatient gesture. The little man acted as if Phillipe had stepped onto the plane at the UN Mission Compound in Dahkla that morning with a copy of
Paris Match
under his arm and nothing but the latest celebrity gossip in his head.

“You may know,” Dr. Milhauz said, “but you don’t truly understand. How could you? No one in Europe understands. They see refugees and say ‘Well, let’s find a way to send them home.’ But in this case, the home in question does not exist. The Saharoui Arab Democratic Republic is a fiction. It has been eroded, wiped off the map, not by wind and rain but by international politics. This is a very intricate situation. Extremely complex. One must first take into consideration the web of tribal affiliations, then the influence of the mullahs—they’re called Marabouts out here, and they’re more like magicians or miracle workers than holy men”—a breathy pause—“simply put, we’ve got to do our best to avoid the kind of disastrous mistakes the Americans are making in Iraq.”

“Which mistakes are you referring to exactly?” Phillipe stifled a yawn. “I was there, you know.”

“Oh, well—” Dr. Milhauz frowned. “Everything they’ve done has been a mistake, hasn’t it? A direct result of unilateralist arrogance!”

Dr. Milhauz was Swiss-German, a doctor, not the medical variety, only a Ph.D., one of those self-important economists who infest the UN and insist on introducing themselves to everyone as Dr. So-and-So. He had nervous hands, constantly in motion, and was as round as a person could be, like a walking egg—which somehow made his imperious conversational style all the more ridiculous. His black round-framed eyeglasses—in the style of Le Corbusier—only emphasized his general roundness. He wore the kind of great-white-hunter khaki outfit favored by UN functionaries and television journalists in desert places, the vest and pants covered with inexplicable flaps and pockets, some zippered, others buttoned, all filled with nothing in particular.

“Look—over there, to the west.” Dr. Milhauz poked an insistent finger at the window. “You can just see the Moroccan Berm. You’ve heard of the Berm, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of the Berm.”

“Well there it is, take a good look. The enormity of the thing can only be appreciated from up here.”

Phillipe squinted into the yellow light and saw two parallel lines inscribed on the desert in the distance as if by a giant hand. The Berm was a defensive wall of sand sixty feet high and two thousand kilometers long, backed by a corresponding sixty-foot-deep trench, undulating over dune and guelb and dry wadi, side by side across the desert floor like two snakes into infinity. It had been built by the Moroccans in the early 1980s to separate the desert-dwelling Saharoui refugees to the east from Moroccan occupied territory along the coast that had been the most inhabitable part of the Saharoui homeland. The Berm was one of the only two man-made constructions visible from space with the naked eye. The other was the Great Wall of China.

“A human rights disaster.” Dr. Milhauz wagged his head up and down like a bobblehead doll. “Took six years to finish. Convict labor, you know.”

“Yes, I do, actually, Dr. Milhauz,” Phillipe said, no longer concealing his annoyance. “But thank you so much for reminding me.”

“Just trying to be helpful,” the little man said stiffly. He returned to his seat and his laptop, its screen fading for lack of battery power.

In two months, Phillipe would deliver yet another report, this one on the Saharoui refugee crisis, to the Committee for African Affairs of the National Assembly of the Fifth Republic in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris in closed session. He had read the committee’s MINURSO dossiers thoroughly before leaving France. He had pored over maps, talked to every Saharoui refugee he could find, read at least twenty books—the best being
Never-Ending War:
The Gutting of Western Sahara
, written by a British journalist, since killed in mysterious circumstances at Laayoune in the Saharoui souk, a kind of walled ghetto imprisoning those Saharouis who had remained behind in what was now an overwhelmingly Moroccan city.

The book contained a gripping account of the Saharoui revolt against Spanish rule in the early 1960s and the chaos that followed Spain’s withdrawal from the phosphate-rich colony. Before the victorious Saharouis had a chance to establish their Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) or design a flag, they’d been invaded by the Moroccans from the north and the Mauritanians from the south, both hungry for territory and what wealth there was to be derived from phosphate deposits and fishing rights. The Saharoui rebel army, called Polisario—another befuddling acronym—which had defeated Spain, quickly defeated Mauritania, bringing the war to the very gates of Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, before a treaty was signed.