The Forgiven (22 page)

As they neared it, the land grew almost black, its surface cracked and pitted. It was hard, jagged rock, not the sand he had expected, and before long they were rolling across open country, unbound by the puny formality of a road. The car pitched violently, and the Kebbash gritted their teeth. To the left, man-made ditches began to appear, fossil trenches. In the hot season, the workers fled to the Atlas to make
a gentler living and they left their tool kits and camping gear by the side of the trenches, where they would remain undisturbed until winter. When the temperatures came down, they would return to find their belongings exactly as they had left them. It was like the equipment of a Roman army that had disappeared two thousand years ago, like the camps you could still see surrounding Masada in Israel. The burned plain to the right had a color of roasted peaches and custard, and across it a single figure made its way in the full anonymity of a morning sun. The car stopped for a moment and the men jumped out and waved. It was a boy of about fourteen wrapped from head to foot in indigo cloth, following a flock of camels that were far out of sight below the horizon. Anouar helped David out of the car and they soaked up the sun for a few minutes while two of the party ran off to peer inside the fossil trenches. The shepherd threw them a few friendly words.

“They have a completely different idea of space,” David thought mutely as he watched the kid walk off with his stick. On the far western horizon, nothing could be seen but shimmering thorn trees. “They’re not even on the same planet.” Their planet bore only an extraordinarily slight resemblance to his.

Anouar offered him some water and they drank apart from the rest of the group, urinating by themselves. They walked up to the trench, and Anouar wound his
chech
more tightly around his face. Through the soles of his shoes, David could feel the heat of the ground.

“We’ll drive around the Jbel,” Anouar said, “and arrive through Boudib to Tafal’aalt. It’s the back way.”

“Why the back way?”

The Moroccan shrugged. It was too complicated to explain.

“It’s the father’s choice.”

David felt a surge of pent-up exasperation.

“So it’ll add hours to the trip?”

“I wouldn’t say so long. We’ll be there soon enough.”

Standing by the car, Abdellah watched them with a hawkish, cold suspicion. He had opened the back of the jeep for a while to see that
the body was all right, and his concentration lingered there. When he had closed the back of the jeep again, he stood very erect in the snarling gusts and drew his
chech
up under his eyes. Something in his look made Anouar shift uncomfortably and draw apart from David. The two men were forced to look at each other sheepishly, and neither could quite decipher the rage in Abdellah’s expression, because it was not entirely the rage that a son’s death would cause. It was directed at nameless things, at things that lay behind persons. David watched the old man turn slowly and kick a rock under the jeep. He walked off by himself and brooded, his head bowed onto his chest, where his long, hairy arms were folded.

Now Anouar said, “It was his only son. It was his only child.”

David felt his heart going dim and tinny, like something spinning on a piece of empty ground. He said, “I see,” and his fear assumed a more definite form. The suggestion of revenge began to emerge from the back of his consciousness, where it had been hiding itself. So it was possible. All his old prejudices recrystallized, and he gripped his useless cell phone. Oh, he knew what these tribals got up to when everyone’s back was turned. He was prepared for some cat and mouse.

They even said that Al-Quaeda squads roamed this part of the desert. He was sure that that blackmailing subject would come up at some point, and only the week before, he and Jo had read in the
Telegraph
about the western oil workers whose bodies were found near the oil installations in Mauretania. They passed across the Algerian border all the time. Dicky had admitted it, and it was incredible to think that they had all
known
this before so blithely sending him off to the badlands. They thought it was a high old joke. His heart was audible to himself in the silence, which was made total by the wind’s roar. He thought of his own father for a second, punting on the River Ouse in a straw hat. “Never trust an American or a Nigerian, Davie boy. Slippery tongues.” He looked at his watch, as if it might tell him something provocative, and still he heard Daddy’s plummy, ingeniously innocent voice describing places he had seen in Ecuador when he toured there
as a mining engineer in the forties. The world was a dreadful place, Daddy said, by and large, and the best thing you could do was make fun of it. At least that was an authentically English response.

As he looked up from his watch, Anouar shaded his eyes and went to sit in the car. From the pool of shadow that suggested the form of Abdellah came a sound like the gnashing of teeth. For even if the old man had been crying, he would have kept it down deep and inaudible inside his lungs.

THE TOYOTA HAULED ITSELF DRAMATICALLY UP LONG, SERPENTINE
gullies. It groaned like a beast of burden and sometimes stopped, exhausted, while the gears were changed and the brake was slammed, then released. The old man cursed it and talked to it. His teeth were still grinding. The rancid water in the bottles was now as hot as bathwater. But still they rose, inching toward the shrill blueness that hovered above them and which seemed potentially touchable.

The roof of Issomour was so high that, looking back, they could see expanses of desert that shone salt-white, pale yellow, and rose. It was windier and hotter, but even here, in the most terrible place of the ergs, there were long, skillfully cut trenches and workers’ tool bags lying in the sun, as if the cutters sometimes took picnics between their sessions. Now, Abdellah didn’t stop. They raced across this new wasteland with a surprising alacrity, as if chasing animals or avoiding men.

There was a wild intensity in the old man’s driving as he savagely changed gears and drove his beast on and on. By noon they were gently descending again, toward the north face of the mountain, underneath which five villages lay: Boudib, Ambon, La’gaaft, Tabrikt, and Tafal’aalt. La’gaaft was where the despised
haratin
lived.

In the backseat, the men slept. Their rifle pressed inadvertently against David’s own seat. The heat poured down through the jeep’s roof, stunning the senses, and the chugging AC produced almost no result. David’s head began to slump against the seat belt, and he felt
as if one of his eyes was coming loose like an aging lightbulb. As for Abdellah, he knew that Anouar, his translator, was asleep, so he said a few things to the pimply fool next to him in Tamazight—because even if this David understood a few words of Arabic, he surely understood not one of Tamazight. Roughly translated, Abdellah’s remarks were:

“In La’gaaft live the blacks. If they ask you in Tafal’aalt if you have been in the village of the blacks, admit it but do not say that you have drunk their water. Say nothing—it’s better that way.”

And he laughed mercilessly, as David nodded in confusion and said yes.

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LONG DESCENT LAY BOUDIB. ITS
houses were shaped like domes, and on its metal doors were painted the forms of yellow trilobites. Its back gardens were fringed with spindly, dying trees, and a prickling dust bowled along its rubble lanes.

At midday, the heat had driven all its inhabitants indoors; even the dogs cowered behind whatever cover they could find. Huge white stones like dinosaur eggs lay piled along the dried
oueds
where the infected trees gasped out their last. The men in the car were still asleep as they accelerated through Boudib toward Ambon, and even in Ambon they still slept. They had seen Ambon a thousand times, and there was nothing to see but the well.

Beyond it, outside La’gaaft, the father stopped for a moment to inspect the tires, and David took in the sheer mauve face of the north side of Issomour towering above the villages like a static tidal wave. Its surface was pocked with man-made caves from which ropes and ladders hung. The shadow from this monumental cliff was so long that it engulfed the whole settlement. There was the well, around which two figures stood, their faces visible through bundles of rags. The men in the car awoke. As they tumbled through La’gaaft, they were silent, clutching their old rifle, but far up the face of Issomour, David saw a boy sitting on the ledge of a cave, waving with a white cloth as if surrendering,
and the top of the precipice above him had a raw color like blood oranges.

In each village all the way to Tafal’aalt, the houses were the same cement domes with the same trilobites painted on their metal doors. People came out to shout and greet them. A man with a basket on his head, coiled with ropes, stood by the entrance of Tabrikt with a hand raised, and he called Abdellah by name, as well as one of the other men in the car, whose name was Moulay.

David felt all his revulsion revive as they came to the edge of Tafal’aalt itself, the last village before the open desert. So this was Driss’s home. It consisted of two dozen of the domed hovels looking like eggs sunk into sand, behind which he could see vegetable plots guarded by low stone walls and clusters of date palms. The paths between them were white like beaten chalk. As with the other villages, the shadow of Issomour reached right up to the gardens and would soon engulf them.

Abdellah parked his car and strode up to one of the metal doors covered with blue trilobites. He hammered it with his fists and yelled as David was hustled out of the car with his comically neat traveling bags that Jo had packed so fastidiously. The sun shone at its apex, and the blood orange tinge of the cliffs above them reminded the Englishman a second time of a tsunami frozen in time that might yet be released and come crashing down upon them. He peered up at the stone wall and noted the same ladders and cave openings. What could one think about it? One thought nothing, he realized. It was a zone of barbarism, of prehistory. It was a desolate comedy with child labor. One had to stop thinking, to just endure it. One had to
lie down
.

The metal doors swung open, and inside, sheltered from the sun’s glare, three women peered out. Their faces and hands were tattooed with delicate lines of spots. They burst out of the house in their black robes, slipping past the men and running toward the car. The sound of lamentation. The men had been dreading it all along. They set their jaws and looked down, almost in irritation, and David looked up at the
sun separated by an expanse of blue sky from the edge of the mawlike cliff. What time was it?

Abdellah waved an ironic hand at him.

“Come in,” he said in Arabic, as if this was the alien lingua franca between them. “Welcome to my beloved hovel. Please, mind your step.”

It was the house Driss had grown up in, and it carried the energy of his spirit in some way. Even in Paris, as he told Ismael, he had always kept the memory of it close to his heart.

Fifteen

FTER ROGER HAD LEFT, DRISS SAID TO ISMAEL THAT
day, he and Angela dug a new bed of sunflowers. Her brisk and yet tender manner with him seemed a little freer than it usually was, as if her husband’s presence always constrained it, and after their work in the garden, they went to the house and she made him pots of Earl Grey tea and scones with raisins—by God, he said to Ismael, a stranger food there was never seen upon the earth.

They talked more intimately then, and Angela told him that their business was not working as well as they had hoped and that Roger, in fact, had gone home to England to raise more money from his family. Times were difficult, and fewer tourists were coming to the marina at Sotogrande.

“So,” he asked, “is Roger coming back with a lot of money?”

“It doesn’t work quite like that. It takes a few months for the money to arrive.”

“I see.” Driss nodded. Then it is now, he thought, or never. And it cannot be never.

He said to Angela, “I have been wondering about that safe and how you open it. It seems like a very clever thing.”