The Forgiven (12 page)

“I’m sure it’s what they have.”

“I saw him grab a drink at the breakfast buffet. He was guzzling
it. His hand was shaking. He’s pathetic. Never again with those two, I swear.”

“Probably wise,” Richard thought dourly.

“We should have invited the Bainbridges. They’re genuinely wacko at least. And they don’t kill people on the way up.”

“There’s always next time.”

They laughed, complicit again. The swirls of dust had reached the cliffs where the tents stood, baking mud-brown in a lengthening sun. Dally poured himself a Scotch. Slowly, Richard got dressed. He loved the desert at this hour. A wild camel nosed its way along the black ribbon of the road, and far off at the opening of the valley a menacing orange light gathered. The fig trees in the garden shuddered as if beaten with sticks, but there was little wind during those moments. The hour of dusk could be tasted, but not seen.

THE CATTLE EGRETS AND AFRICAN FINCHES CAME BACK TO
settle in their ruined nooks, and an old man in a tattered coffee-colored
djellaba
rolled out of the Toyota jeep that had pulled up in front of the main gates and bared his six gold teeth in a grimace of extreme discomfort. The car that Dally and Richard had seen had savaged number plates and panels patched up with cheap epoxy; its wipers were bent back and the radio antenna had collapsed. The other occupants remained inside, huddled together in their ragged
chechs
. But at length, as the old man approached the door and took off his cloth cap, they also got out and stretched their legs. “A cold place,” they muttered, keeping their expressions tense. Their clothes were caked with grit and sand, and as they unbent themselves, a small cloud rose from them. They beat their sleeves and
chechs
gently, stretched their mouths, and looked warily around them. A dark orange powder caked the car, clogging the grille and the side mirrors, and on the backseat lay a large sack of uncooked rice. The men of Azna could tell there were weapons in the
car, though none could see them. There was a smell of weapons. A smell of bullets and goat grease.

The old man walked up to the closed gate and slowly, orchestrating creaky knees, knelt down in the dust. He settled in, holding his hands together across his chest. His eyes were completely expressionless. Almost under his breath at first, then louder, he said the following words: “I am Abdellah Taheri of the Aït Kebbash from Tafal’aalt. I am here to collect my son. Will you hear me? Will you open your gate?”

He said it again and again, while his companions watched him impassively. They were middle-aged men with grizzled half-beards and large, blunted hands. They were thin desert men of the far south, with bird-beak noses and stony eyes set close together, their teeth half silver. Their faces were covered; their clothes were white and indigo. Their hands were scarred. They spoke Tamazight.

Hamid heard the voice at once. He crept to the gate and put his ear against it. It was the thing he had been expecting all along. The old man raised his voice and he repeated his demand until even the guests could hear it. His voice carried far on the shrieking wind. It was a level, grave voice with no trace of hysteria or emotional exaggeration. Like a repeated hammer blow, it struck home until it produced movement, reaction. Voices can open doors. Richard came down quickly to the gate.

“The father?” he hissed at Hamid.

The servant nodded.

“Well, open up, then. Are you going to keep them there?”

“Are you sure, Monsieur? They are Aït Kebbash.”

Richard smirked. “So?”

“Very well, Monsieur. But they will try and extort money from you. May you be warned!”

Richard ignored him. He heard the word
Tafal’aalt
. Was it a village somewhere? He asked Hamid if he had ever heard of it; the latter shook his head.

“Where do the Aït Kebbash live?”

Hamid shrugged. “Far, far out.”

And he made a grim gesture with one hand.

“They must have driven all night,” Richard said.

“All day and all night. Many nights.”

“Open the gates, then.”

“They will blackmail you, Monsieur. They are blackmailers.”

It was Richard who slid open the huge bolt.

“Keep the guests away from here. We don’t want them nosing around while this is going on.”

“Do not step out, Richard. Let the other step in. We will see how he is.”

“You mean, enraged?”

WHEN THE GATE OPENED, THE OLD MAN JUST AS SLOWLY
stood up. He brushed off his knees and put his cap back on his head, and the men by the car didn’t move as the gates swung open and the staff called out, beckoning him forward. There were summary greetings, exchanges, and Hamid courteously asked where they had driven from. Tafal’aalt was a village of one hundred souls on the far side of the Tafilalet, far out where the edge of the oasis was drying out and the desert plain was advancing. It was beyond the remote fossil town of Alnif. It was on the farthest edge of human habitation, close to the Algerian border and the lonely mountain of Issomour, where fine trilobites and aquifers were quarried. Jbel Issomour was where they made their living, in the quarries that circled the mountain. Nearby, they explained, was Hmor Lagdad, the mountain called the Red-Cheeked One, which could be seen from a great distance off and which they all knew because it could be seen distantly from the quarries just outside Erfoud. Hamid said that he was deeply sorry about his son. What was the boy’s name?

“Driss, my only son.”

“May Allah have mercy.”

“Allah has made it so.”

Hamid was suddenly moved. At last, the corpse had a name and an identity, and he was relieved. To die on the road in the middle of the night was a dog’s death.

“We have kept him here, if it please you,” Hamid said, ushering the old man toward the garage doors. “We have kept vigil every hour.”

He regretted maligning the men from Tafal’aalt as blackmailers, though he knew that they were exactly that. A man can be both a blackmailer by culture and a bereaved father, can he not? Abdellah was frail and stringy, and he must have had a son late in life. His clothes were wretched. Hamid wondered what fossils the Aït Kebbash specialized in. They made no money either way. They were people surviving at a subsistence level, unimaginable even to the poorest peasants in greener parts. They had the Toyota, and probably little else of value. He felt for them. Could anyone really imagine their lives? One look at them was enough to confirm that they made their living as fossil diggers and preppers. That they eked out a miserable existence trading second-rate trilobites in the tourist shops of Erfoud and Rissani. One saw types like that all over the place, shabby desperadoes wandering from table to table at the hotels, offering trays of their wares, quietly hustling Westerners on the side, swearing their trilobites were the rarest of the Sahara but going home empty-handed to their shacks on the edge of the desert. The oases were dying because of a tree infection called Bayoud disease, and all that was left them, it was popularly observed, was a trickling trade in fossilized fish. So he was polite to the Aït Kebbash, good Muslims from the scorched corners of the earth, who had nothing and who gave nothing either.

The desert men came in warily, holding their bodies delicately apart from their surroundings as if they were long used to doing so. They looked around themselves at the Cherokee jeeps with their state-of-the-art CD players, and their eyes went heavy and calculating. They had never been inside the house of a foreigner before. They could not
imagine how it could be inhabited. The infidels had no comforts, no delicacy. They had no sense of order or cleanliness or properness.

“It is like a stables,” one of them quipped.

“Truly,” Abdellah said with great seriousness.

At once, however, their thoughts were swept up by the dead boy laid out in the center of the room, and the father was allowed to step out alone to approach his dead son. The staff gathered to watch this as well, because it was a drama that they both dreaded and were compelled by. At its heart was an injustice. A young life had been cut short, a Muslim father propelled into unimaginable grief, and the guilty ones had not even appeared before the people to explain their actions or to offer their heartfelt apologies. They had been let off by the police without so much as a light reprimand; indeed, the police had probably
apologized
to the detestable visitors, for money speaks to the impure of heart, and those who possess it can do as they wish, even among the pure of heart. The onlookers therefore watched the old man totter toward his son and their eyes filled with tears. A quiet, communicable rage spread among them and they clenched their fists out of view. The old man, meanwhile, conducted himself with considerable restraint. His stupefaction was written all over him, but his lips did not move; he did not blink. He did not give way to that same stupefaction. He merely approached the terrifying object and drank it in with his eyes. It did not seem to move him outwardly. It merely sucked him into its supernatural spell. The son that was living had gone through a metamorphosis that he could not comprehend or accept; gaiety and love had turned into pure materiality. It was as if his son’s beauty was only now revealed to him and he was stunned by it, so much so that his motor reflexes could not respond to this emergency. His hands dangled limply at his sides and he absorbed and absorbed until he could absorb no longer, and when his capacity to absorb was exhausted he found himself not full with grief but emptied with it, and at that moment his mind went away, and his heart with it, and he was left standing like
something hanging by a filthy little string, a small animal that has been strung up by a primitive trap and is about to die.

At length, however, his lips did begin to move. They pronounced nothing, but they moved. A cool dread spread around him, so that the onlookers were ruffled yet again by a restless mood. They felt themselves growing dark and suspicious. Abdellah lost all consciousness of them as his grief came upon him. His mind whirled and all was indistinct at its edges. Where was he? He felt the words of the Prophet simmering at its deepest part and the words of his own father murmuring behind them, and he looked up at the ceiling and the stalactites of cobwebs looked like dusty daggers pointed down at his heart. The killers. Where were the killers?

IT WAS A QUESTION THAT ALSO OCCURRED TO THE STIFFLY
overdressed boys as they laid the napkins around that evening’s dinner table, whose theme was Bandits and Corsairs. They laid out the heavy French forks with agile and hostile minds, stifled by their bow ties, crimped by the cuff links they had to sport, thinking to themselves with quiet fever about the whereabouts of
les anglais
, whom no one had seen all afternoon.

They didn’t speak among themselves except to ask one another questions about the utensils. Another generation of flies, exterminated with the aerosols, had to be swept away from under the windows, and they did this with solemn brooms, performing long, graceful strokes. Later, they were going to have to dress as either bandits or corsairs, and some of them would even wear swords. With apprehension, they listened to the Ella Fitzgerald purring away in the library and the clink of glasses that went perfectly with glissando female laughter. It was a sound texture that embodied things they both desired and detested. The sound of women and whiskey glasses could be counted as belonging to the desirable or the undesirable side according to temperament, but that of clacking billiard balls was unambiguously positive.
They would have crept into the house at night and played the table if there were any way of muffling the sound. They could hear the men from London and New York talking in bold voices about their wives. The sandwich services rolled from room to room and there was a padding of spoiled Irish greyhounds, and the village boys dreamed of castles and luxury villas and orgies with Jaguars waiting outside. These weird, faithless men, they thought, were reprehensible in many ways, but they had nevertheless succeeded at purely material things. They had a grudging envy of them on that account, but the envy never quite became respect. But who can say that the two things are not sometimes identical?

As they swept up the dead flies and laid out the large Talavera plates upon which Rif cuisine and seafood would be served later in the evening, they scanned the doors for scenes that might be revealed beyond them, pricking their ears to detect morsels of scandal. As Moroccans, they were expert linguists, adept in several tongues: French, English, Spanish, Arabic, Berber dialects, and, in the case of one or two from the deep south, Hassaniya. Their ears were subtly attuned to the slipping between these various languages. They were born observers and critics, because that’s the way history had made them.

Hamid swept into the dining room and seemed pleased. He clapped his hands impatiently and shooed them into the corridor.

“The bowls of nuts are running low in the library. The dogs haven’t been fed. The wine is still warm. The fans are at the wrong speed. Must I do everything myself?” And under his breath, he added, “Dogs.”

Then he went up to the second floor, where Monsieur Richard was alone on the telephone with a look of vexation. “I can’t help it,” he was saying quietly, straining his neck muscles. “One doesn’t plan these things.” Hamid hung by the door with the worried expression that he knew annoyed Monsieur but which also goaded him into action. Richard looked up quickly and cupped a hand over the mobile telephone.

“What is it, Hamid?”

Hamid stepped carefully into the room. Richard was in a smoking
jacket, which was so old it must have belonged to a grandfather. He looked a little shabby with the desert behind him fading out into darkness. There was a smell of whiskey in the room, of male sex. The hand that cupped the phone was wet from the olives in the bowl by the sofa.

“The father,” Hamid began, “says the English must pay him.”

Nine