The Forgiven (2 page)

At the bottom of the gorge stood white houses with jars of salted lemons on their roofs. Around them, dogs barked in the palm groves, and the waiters at the Salam seemed subtly ashamed of them. One of the Dutch beauties floated in the little terrace pool, rotating slowly under the first stars while gazing at her own toes. He watched her with meticulous curiosity. Her breasts nicely rounded, parting the waters. The dinner was short and efficient, because their minds were racing ahead to the journey instead of enjoying the present moment. Afterward, he finished the remains of the Boullebemme and cleaned his teeth with a pick from the center of the table. Something in his voice was not quite right.

“I feel like going for a walk. Let’s get coffee up at the
kasbah
, no? The waiters here are making me feel gloomy.”

Avenue Hassan II led straight into the Bab El Hammar and the
kasbah
by way of the lovely place El Makhzen. In the first hour of dimming, the menfolk were out in force on the long square filled with trees, eager for debate in crisply laundered
djellabas;
they stood around in circular groups holding hands, fingering rosaries behind their backs.

There was something shrill but paradoxically quiet about the masculine cleanliness, the speed of the children whistling about with shopping bags and peaches. The whitewash, the angular shadows. She
gripped his hand, the marriage ring biting into his palm, and she held on to it as if it would provide long, consecutive moments of stability inside this flux. Did she need him more for a little while, just enough to get through this town? The petty disputes of the last few weeks melted away and in the end it was all just words and words, she thought, words that melt away easily as soon as you are in a strong enough sun and you are moving. They found a lopsided square with a fig tree where there was a Café du Miel with tables that all leaned to one side on the slope on cedarwood legs. It offered no drinks, but strong coffee with grains and a good smoke, and he felt at home at once. There was a saucer of cardamom seeds for the coffee and a plate of almond pastries. Small acts of delicacy. The streets were patriarchal, if you liked, but they possessed intimacy. The trees made delicate shadows on the underfoot stones. He stretched and dropped a cardamom pod into his coffee.

“I feel less tired now. I think this afternoon was the worst stretch. If we leave at seven, we can be there by midnight or so.”

“Do you think they’ll wait up?”

“They’ll wait up. We’re a large percentage of their weekend emotionally speaking. They’ll be boozing long past midnight.”

Or all night, she thought hopefully.

“It’s not a military timetable,” he said with more conciliation. “If you want to stay here a night, I don’t mind. I was thinking … two nights of party might well be more than enough.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t want to, I want to get to Richard’s place.”

In a moment, her eyes brimmed over, and she felt an irrational hatred of the whole situation. It was the usual things. The heat and the thick coffee and the stickiness in the air and the tone in his voice. That clipped and impatient twang seemed to go so perfectly with the way the men in the cafés stared at them with their eyes held back in some way, yet sharpened by their provincial curiosity and used like pointed sticks to pry. She had thought a trip through the desert would give her ideas for a new book, but such calculations rarely pan out. What kind
of new book after all? Instead, she was beginning to feel boxed in by the schedule to which they had to stick, and the men in the street stared and stared and their hands played with rosaries on the surfaces of the tables. They stared so hard she felt her center of gravity giving way. They stared with a blank hatred, but it was equally possible that it was not hatred but a sense of unconscious superiority that did not even need to be conscious in order to put the other in her place.

“It’ll be all right,” he said tersely. “We know they’re repressed and enraged. They treat their woman like donkeys. For them, you are an escaped donkey.”

She looked away, and she was gripping her napkin.

“I hate it when you say that.”

“Why? It’s true, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t matter if it is.”

“I would say it mattered,” he countered. “I would say it mattered if they disliked your presence because of your sex.”

“I’m sure it isn’t that. And you have no idea how they treat their women—none.”

He laughed and picked up a cardamom with two fingers. She was being sophistic.

“Well, have it your way, Miss Feminist.”

Wanting to show off his French, he asked the owner of the Café du Miel seated at the next table how hot it was in the desert. The Moroccans went into the usual exaggerations.

“
Vous allez souffrir, vous allez voir. Mais c’i beau, c’i très beau
.”

On the walk back to the Salam, he took her hand. The dogs were so loud in the gorge that he couldn’t relax; his mind began to turn with a pitiless inertia all its own. Had it been a good idea, he wondered, this extravagance, this sudden departing, this rush to amusement? All for the sake of fun and friendship and three days under a fiercer sun. He knew she hadn’t wanted to come. But something in him enjoyed the coercion he was imposing upon her. He liked pissing people off when he thought their irritations sprang from their rigidity and hypocrisy,
and hers certainly did. He thought of himself as a cleansing agent, a purifier of other people’s prejudice. She would be better off for it in the long run, he was certain, and as he thought this, a delicious pity crept into his calculations, a grim tenderness that had no actual purpose relative to his wife. It was like tending a pasture, clipping the edges with a sharp pair of shears. Keeping order with love and keeping the monsters at bay.

The Spanish Mosque was lit up, the water on the terrace pool flashing as the wind hit it. Two men walked arm in arm down Hassan II, whispering intently. No women on the streets now; it was the hour of men. Their eyes were upon the tall blonde in her worn cotton dress and red sandals, her jewelry and freckles. There was evidently a pleasure simply in tracking such a
gazelle
(that was the word they liked). Her gait that hoped to conceal itself from sexual curiosity, not quite a woman’s sassy walk. They could easily guess that she was a writer, an intellectual, just as they could guess that he was a doctor and a bore.

David and Jo got into the car. He opened the Michelin map and struggled to find the fine red line that was the route they had to follow without fail. She kissed his cheek, and there was sand between her lips, just as there was sand on his face. It was already everywhere, and it irritated him. The granules itched inside his ears.

“I’d rather sleep than drive to nowhere,” he said.

He spat out a grain of sand to make her laugh. But still there was a needling reluctance in her voice, a physical disinclination of some kind. She didn’t want to go. She always doubted him in moments of pressure, and when she doubted him, there was a tone in her voice that made him resist at once. So, naturally, they had to go.

“It’s a bit mad to keep driving,” she tried.

“We’re not staying in this dump. It’s still light. There’s still three hours of daylight left. It’s a breeze. It’s straight through.”

“But it’s getting dark.”

“Not at all. It’s getting less light, that’s all.”

“We
could
stay.”

He tuned the ignition. “Not a chance. The fleas would eat us.”

“Fleas?”

“Fleas. I noticed them at once.”

Oh, she thought disdainfully, it’s a Moroccan hotel, so it must have fleas in it.

“I didn’t see any fleas,” she said, pouting.

“You’re not a doctor. They were everywhere. I even noticed them on the turmeric eggs. The Dutch will have a
very
bad night.”

“At least they’ll be in bed,” she thought.

“It’s one of those places,” he went on, “that makes you want to move on. It’s not just the hotels.”

CHILDREN STOOD BY THE ROAD WITH THEIR HONEY SPOOLS
and fossilized shark teeth, holding up their treasures. They stopped at the long, spellbound lake of Aguelmane Sidi Ali. Ominous cedar forests clung to the mountainsides, and a few guides lounged at the edges of the oncoming night, watching them with a curious lack of interest. The sky was filled with dusk clouds, great shadows on the lake. Farther on, on the Col du Zad, it began to rain in spots, the fields of barren rocks hissing like frying pans being hit with cold oil. There was no one on the road, only a few army trucks. Gradually her mood grew more somber. She glanced down at the Michelin map and it crossed her mind that one can follow maps too blindly; it was a tremendous gesture of trust. One had to believe that these childish squiggles corresponded to an entire country. So her eye followed the line of the headlights now carving flashing visions out of the dusk—whitewashed barriers, spots of drinn grass, animals standing under the trees—and she did not quite believe it.

His hand reached down to the CD player and he pushed in a Lou Reed.

He said, “It’s the right road, isn’t it?”

“There’s only one road.”

He felt grimly satisfied.

“God, I hate Lou Reed. What a moron.”

“It’s perfect road music.”

“That’s what I mean. I also have Vivaldi. Almost as bad.”

Shaggy trees shot past in the side mirror. Rocks painted with Arabic words and numerals, leafless thorned trees bent to one side. Men in sackcloth slept in ditches by the road, with pickaxes and chipped trilobite slabs laid next to them. They rolled into Midelt.

It was a pell-mell town of concrete and antennas. Its streets were filled with wild-eyed men in heavy woolen gowns exuding a ravenous, merry energy. There was a distant taste of quarries. Fossil country, with a long hill for a main street. The world capital of ammonites and crinoids. Desperate signs advertised
Fossiles en vente
and
Dents de requin
.

But in any case, they drove straight through the town, after a quick espresso at the Hôtel Roi de la Bière. The car groaned as it pushed up a long incline and into the dark of new forests, and between the Atlas peaks the night sky suddenly came into definition, sharply illumined at its center, a heartbreaking blue, but vague and treacherous as it reached down to the earth.

CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT, THEY PULLED OVER AGAIN. THEY
were not sure how far they were from Errachidia, or from Midelt, and the turnoff to Azna—tiny, by all accounts—lay closer to Errachidia. They would have to be extremely careful. “We’re going to miss it,” she wanted to say, but it was surely better not to. Instead, she walked down the middle of the road, letting something in her body go free, her hands flapping, and for the first time she drank in the sky and the hostility of the earth, which liberated rather than oppressed, at least for a few moments. Seeing this, he got out quickly and opened the flashlight on her. His voice was penetrating and hysterical, as if he understood perfectly that she had had a moment’s freedom outside of him.

“You’ll get yourself killed like that. Are you nuts?”

She turned in a measured way and hovered just out of range. Her fists were clenched and she was not quite steady, not really erect.

“Get in,” he shouted. “You’re in the middle of the road.”

And suddenly, behind her, headlights approached. He grabbed her arm; she twisted away, but then scuttled around the car to her door.

“I’m not blind,” she hissed.

A large car swept toward them, a regal silver Mercedes convertible with the top down. They were both so surprised that they simply watched it roar past, its fenders polished like tableware, an anachronistic show of brutal luxury.

“Must be one of the guests,” David said, fumbling with the keys. “We can follow them. A Mercedes!”

At this, she laughed outright.

“What if they’re not guests?”

“We’ll soon find out.”

“David, no. You’re
not
to follow that car.”

He shot off, slamming the pedals, and his mouth was grim and silly. She rolled down her window and decided to let this folly expend itself logically, because there was no way a worn-down Camry could keep up with a Mercedes. Its taillights were already rapidly disappearing into the gloom ahead. She sat back and waited to see what her excitable husband would do, and how he would apologize in due course for his abominable language. His violent moods always exploded and dissolved almost in the same moment, and after them came the quiet of septic ponds and bombed cities. The rages of the modern husband, inexplicable, dense, obscure in origin. And there was something about the Mercedes that had infuriated him even further—its arrogant assurance. Were they Arabs?

He said, “Did you see them?”

“Not a thing.”

“Strange they didn’t stop. What if we had been broken down? They didn’t even slow down.”

“Thank god they didn’t stop.”

“I’m talking about the underlying attitude.”

“What is the underlying attitude?” she thought bitterly.

Soon they were alone again. Small white buildings floated by, long-abandoned ditches, destroyed gates, tracks running off into a vast palmery. She knew he was lost, and he knew that she knew. Insects began to crust the windshield, a massacre of crane flies and moths.

As the road flattened out, the heat rose and touched the backs of her hands, the unprepared skin. Even above the hum of the engine, she fancied she could make out the slithering echoes of water wheels turning inside the oasis. Tracks spiraled off into the palmery, side roads with villages listed in Arabic. But of course they could not read the names. Occasionally, places were also written in French, and these were the beacons of hope. But none of them was Azna.

He slowed the car under her insistence, and they stopped again to consult the ever more ambiguous map, on which Azna was not marked. He thought it must be on the way to the high village of Tafnet. There the road bifurcated, and both branches petered out. Perhaps the glamorous renovated
ksour
of Messiers Richard and Dally was there, but they had said nothing about Tafnet in their directions. Nor were there any lights shining in the hills or inside the oasis. They had left too late, he knew, and his heart sank because in all likelihood it was his fault, and it couldn’t be disguised. They would turn toward Tafnet and there would be an argument. He would drive for miles waiting to see if he had been right or wrong, and when he was wrong, she would tear him to pieces. Or he would be right.