The Forgiven (21 page)

Eventually Anouar sauntered over and asked him if he’d like to go up and sleep. They took a narrow, dingy staircase to the second floor, and a room with a small balcony overlooking the pool. To David’s surprise, the air-conditioning had already been turned on and the room was half cool—as cool as it would ever get, anyway. Anouar was quite friendly.

“Sleep,” the latter said, “and I’ll wake you at five.”

David fell onto the bed and lay there on his side with his eyes open, watching the corrugated white surface of the wall opposite. Then he rolled over slowly and turned on the ancient TV set. An image sprang to life of a moose struggling across a marsh littered with broken trees. “Climate change,” a distant voice could be heard saying in English, “in Siberia.” He opened his cell phone and tried Jo again, but the signal was dead. The moose came to a standstill and stood there bewildered, paralyzed apparently by climate change. David closed his eyes. He was going to have equally paralyzing dreams. He was going
to dream that he was in a hotel room in Erfoud, in which sand poured through the broken windows, suffocating him as he lay innocently in bed, watching a moose.

AT FIVE TO FIVE, ANOUAR KNOCKED SOFTLY ON THE DOOR
. David was still on his side and the TV was still on. Waking in a snap, he said, “I’ll be there,” and got up like an automaton. He went into the plastic-looking bathroom to splash a little tepid water on his face.

In the fluorescent mirror light, his gray face appeared. The eyes were brighter and more urgent than the skin, more wounded. Sometimes it’s a great disadvantage to have to see oneself in a mirror. It would be better to keep one’s pride intact. He fed on the small bottle of Evian supplied by the hotel, then stepped for a moment onto the balcony. The temperature had lowered by about ten degrees so that the air was just about breathable. It was almost light and the wind was still. A maid silently swept the patio around the pool, upon which a detached palm frond floated. On one of the poolside tables sat a single coffee cup, obviously intended for him.

Anouar wished him good morning and escorted him down. David reasoned that he was about thirty-five, moderate in mind-set, with a smidgen of education. But where had he gotten that education?

“Ten minutes for coffee, Monsieur David. Then we leave. Is your stomach all right?”

“Fine.”

David sat stunned with his coffee while birds chattered loudly in the trees. He had never felt so alone, so cut off; the others crowded into the lobby and drank swift pots of mint tea in the gloom where a single oil lamp burned. It took some time for his mind to revive and to resume control of his surroundings. He wondered if he had really slept at all. It wasn’t certain. He drank sip by sip and told himself that all he had to do was see this through—sail through it like a stretch of choppy water. All he had to do was appease the furiously cold, implacable
father. Above the pool, a clear sky had emerged with the first color of dawn. Hundreds of doves in cotes nearby that one couldn’t see burbled together as if roused. He went outside into the street for a breath of air. Black-clad women padded silently between the turquoise shutters, and out of the semidarkness a huge radio antenna began to materialize on the top of a hill. From close by there came the sound of hundreds of small mallets and hammers chipping away somewhere, in some open-air workshop near the Oued Ziz. The fossil shop across the street already stirred.

By the town’s only intersection, where the post office stood, a cop in white gloves loitered as if waiting for a small crime that might well not happen, and all along avenue Moulay Ismail men and boys slept on dozens of mats laid out under the closed doors. David stood waiting for the Kebbash by the Ziz gas station, impatient to get going, impatient for first light, and when his co-travelers appeared he was irritated with them for being so dilatory. Abdellah strode out into the road holding a half-peeled orange and stood for a few moments inspecting the arid, washed-blue sky, across which flocks of sparrows were crossing with a jubilant din. His grief was still impressed upon the surface of his face. He held himself stiffly, as if a tremendous energy inside him could not yet be released. He sank his teeth into the orange and spat out the pips, tore the fruit apart, and attacked it a second time. It was his breakfast.

They drove through the intersection close to where a huge fossil store called Usine Marmar stood. As they passed the cop, Abdellah rolled down his window and stuck out his hand to graze the white glove of the policeman, though as far as David could see, nothing passed between them.

ON THE ROAD TO MERZOUGA THEY PASSED LINES OF BERBERS
on rickety bikes loaded with tool kits. They were Aït Atta, Anouar explained, riding off into the desert to prospect for aquifers and
crinoids. They, the men of Tafal’aalt, did not prospect for such things, which were the preserve of the detested Atta. The men of Tafal’aalt dealt only in trilobites, and in trilobites alone. Issomour was the richest source of trilobites in all of Africa, Anouar continued in a lazy, half-serious voice. Why would they need to trifle with fossilized marine plants? They willingly left such baubles to the Atta, while traders from Germany, France, and the United States paid handsome sums for the beautifully preserved Comura Tridents that they dug from the faces of their holy mountain. Some specimens sold for hundreds of euros.

Before the sun rose, they were at Hmor Ladgad. There was a quarry called Mirzan set among great trenches of scarred red rock. They stopped by a cluster of wretched huts where a group of ragged little girls stood in the dawn with chisels and hammers in their hands. Their father ran the quarry. A forty-year-old compressor stood nearby, inside a deep trench whose walls were inscribed with the delicate forms of prehistoric placoderm fish and floating aquatic plants. Here the father appeared, scampering up toward them with another small girl. She was wild looking, with matted hair, and she homed in on the white foreigner with something in her hand. She danced around David crying
“Ortho-cerus!”
The men said nothing, hunkering down instead to a pot of tea. David examined the stone in the girl’s hand, which looked like a polished razor shell, and bought it from her on a whim for a few
dirhams
. She pointed at her own chest and said, “Tuda!” Anouar pulled him gently away from the group around the tea, however. Abdellah, it appeared, forbade David from coming anywhere near him.

“He says you cannot drink from the same cup, not eat from the same plate. He says your shadows must not cross.”

Anouar said this quietly, out of hearing of the others.

“He says you cannot touch what he has touched, and he cannot touch what you have touched.”

He’s mad, David thought methodically. Or it’s the grief.

“Is that a custom?” he asked Anouar.

“It’s not. It is just his way right now. It will pass.”

“I find it very strange.”

Anouar said nothing. They watched the men haggle over some crudely prepped
Orthocerus
wrapped in newspapers and some fragmented trilobites. While they did so, the girls stood in the rising wind with a baby wrapped in wool, the stonecutters’ children, born to hack at fossils all their lives. Goats stood around them, cocking their heads and bleating, but no women. David put on his sunglasses to protect his eyes and rummaged through filthy boxes of assorted spinosaur teeth and ringed crinoid stems. He was beginning to feel their sinister quality, their evolutionary remoteness and otherworldly allure. Anouar came with him, as if he needed to be entertained, or at least orientated. David wondered if Anouar felt sorry for him. It wasn’t impossible. They passed some strange “sand roses” from a place called Kem Kem, then some fossilized turtles embedded in a massive slab of rock that was being raised by hand on a single car jack. It was being sent all the way to Norway as a coffee table. It had the feel of a materialized dream, a nightmare that had gone subtly wrong.

Anouar yawned and kept his eye on the others. The foreman was called Amar Taglaoui, Anouar said with a hint of resentment. He was an
ouvrier
and a poor bastard, but you had to watch him. David shook his head. Around his feet he noticed hundreds of snail-like forms embedded into the small rocks, the sediments of millions of years from when the Sahara was an ocean, and it seemed like a landscape of madness equivalent to what he imagined was going on inside Abdellah’s head. Full of life, but dead; rich in forms, but monotonous. He felt sourly depressed. Grief was just a giant confusion in which millions of bits from a life lay about like ruined fragments, and nothing could make them cohere again. Seeing this terrible mood appear in David, Anouar tried to cheer him up, and he threw up his hands as if performing a conjuring trick.

“They pour Coke on these gypsum formations to make them look old. Crooks, David, operators!”

He nudged him to make him laugh. Crooked Arabs, what a thought!

The men rose from the teapot. They came crunching over the shards of agatized algae and the snail-like creatures, their
chechs
flapping because the wind had risen and was getting stronger with every minute, and suddenly the sun shot a low ray across the orange sandstone. They made for the car, and David followed eagerly, noticing that one of the men had an armful of fossil rocks. The little girls waved with ammonites in their hands.

“Where are we going?” David blurted out to Anouar. He knew that none of the others would answer him.

Anouar put his hand on his shoulder. “Relax, David. We’re going to Alnif.”

For a moment, Abdellah paused before turning on the engine. His eye scanned the empty road along which the crinoid dealers would pass back that night on their return to Erfoud. He seemed not to be thinking at all about his son or about David. He had paused en route to buy a few specimens from the stonecutters; he had allowed his mind to wander, apparently, and to entertain frivolous calculations—though in the context of a pitiless struggle for survival, such calculations were not so frivolous, perhaps. Abdellah paused, and his psychic attention seemed to turn to David. He caressed his teeth with his tongue and raised the knuckles of his right hand to his mouth for a second. He quivered. When he spoke, it was to Anouar, who sat in the backseat, who would translate for him.

“A wretched place,” was all he said, grinning suddenly but still not looking David in the eye. “It is dying, as you can plainly see. The desert is what we fish, and the fossils are our fish. Dead fish! It is a joke. God has played a joke on us. Does it make you laugh?”

“Not at all,” David said grimly.

“It makes you laugh,” the old man insisted. “It makes me laugh.”

“No,” David repeated.

“Soon, there’ll be nothing here. No people, no trees. We’re the last ones.”

The other men sighed.
Bismellah
.

“I am telling you, we are the last ones,” Abdellah repeated, rapping the steering wheel with his nails. “We have fossils and our children. And nothing else.”

David hung his head, and the engine roared to life.

“You will see,” the father said softly, as if he really would see when they arrived at their destination, which was Tafal’aalt.

An hour later, they were at the ruined ornamental gate of Alnif, where birds nested among the colorless weeds. Across a sloped square behind this
bab
, the villagers and fossil dealers stood about in the first shock of sunlight, unsurprised to see the Aït Kebbash appear among them yet again. The Kebbash went for a coffee at the
café
, and David leaned against the car trying his cell phone yet again. Nothing. Dicky had lied spectacularly to him about that. Ruefully, he walked back to the
bab
and peered out at the vast horizontal lines of the desert. Here were the ergs, the open wildernesses. Tufts of pale drinn grass lined the road with a hopeless greenery, and here and there a thorn tree rose into the immense morning light, glistening with a mysterious dew. So this was it, he reflected with all the resilience he could muster in a tight corner. He was trapped in the most definite way. Why had he not simply refused to go? It had been a curious moment of weakness, which was to say of guilt. As he looked back on it, it was incomprehensible. But everything must happen for a reason.

He thought of his wife asleep in her bed in Azna. She wouldn’t be up yet. She would be in her deepest dreams, tossing and turning. He thought of her skin that had a smell of library dust in the morning; her musty, haylike hair falling over the pillow, where he liked to kiss it. He would not describe this journey to her later, he decided. In fact he had already made a resolution to himself that whatever happened in Tafal’aalt would remain with him to the grave, even if it was sadder than anything he could imagine now.

Fourteen

HE ROAD GREW LESS DISTINCT AND MORE LIKE A
track scratched into the surface of the desert by a cosmic stick, and around it, receding infinitely, the acacias multiplied. Their dagger-like thorns lay all around on the ground. In the far distance they saw the mountain called Atchana, “the thirsty one” in Arabic. It formed one corner of the vast rectangular plateau of Jbel Issomour close to the Algerian border, which now began to rise to their left, a low shadow on the horizon.