The Forgiven (32 page)

“So I see you have come for a walk. Of course, you saw that there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

“I wasn’t trying to hide,” David replied coldly.

With a quick, silent dart, the digger vanished.

“It doesn’t matter,” the other said. His voice was terse, impatient, and his body seemed to be on the verge of uncontrollable violence.

“You said I could walk about,” David protested.

He realized that he sounded as if he was pleading for his life.

“I did,” the older man admitted. Then he grinned nastily. “Were you trying to beat the dawn?”

Abdellah barked at Anouar to turn off the headlights. Darkness returned and suddenly they were alone together in the wind, straining to hold themselves upright as grit blew into their faces and the straw-gold break in the night sky had widened to become a gash of dirty sunlight.

Abdellah reached into his long, straggling overcoat and took out the SOG knife that he had used to peel the apples the previous evening. Its fearsome blade thus came between them, and it shone more than their skin, so that all David knew for certain was where the knife was. He took a step, and from the corner of his eyes he took note of the undulations of the earth around him and the vastness into which he could escape. Abdellah did not advance accordingly, however; he stood where he was. He was himself undecided as to what to do and his consciousness was not lit up by any dominating idea except that of pain. He lurched forward for a moment, then stopped again, gripping the knife so hard that it began to shake. Then, letting himself retreat mentally from a terrible idea, he raised the blade so that it pointed toward the distant town of Alnif.

“Anouar is going to take you back now. Your bags are loaded in the jeep.”

It was Anouar walking forward, his face open with fear and loathing
and some incoherent compassion that could not break into the open as it wished.

“David,” he called, “don’t be afraid. You can get in the car now.”

“You had better,” Abdellah thought, and lowered the blade to his side. He, too, stepped back a little, and some force inside him passed from his body and seeped into the open, where it was bound to disappear. So it was, for him.

He turned and walked back to the jeep, without climbing into it. He walked on toward the
oued
, with the sky breaking into gold and gray above his head. A dog from the village ran out to greet him, and soon there came the sound of chipping hammers from high up on the cliffs, a gibberish sound like that of thousands of birds converging upon a corpse. A cock crowed from Tafal’aalt. The old man walked on without slipping off the hood of his burnoose. His eyes were held down to control the emotion welling up in his mind, and he was—in some secret place of himself—glad of his ability to control what was darkest in his personality.

HE WENT BACK TO THE HOUSE AND PREPARED A PIPE AND A
pot of tea for himself. From the cliff face came the tinkling sounds of the children tapping away at the stone, and it could only remind him of the little Driss of fifteen years ago, strapped to a long rope and dangling from a ledge so high up that they felt a small fear for his safety. He smoked quietly and let those memories spin through him, the fragments of remembrance of his only son, to which he must now cling with a dogged single-mindedness.

After his pipe and a boiled egg, he went into the boy’s room and lingered among its effects, sure that there remained there a subtle, far-off smell of the living being who had once inhabited it. He remembered Driss locking himself in here with his immoral secrets when he had returned from France, never telling his family where he had been or what he had done in Paris. He had lain there smoking his
kif
, going out
only at night. He had gone back to Hmor to look for a job at the quarries, to recuperate his old job in effect, but who knew if he had been successful? He had come back much changed, much—he said it to the women—worsened. A bite in his voice, a new arrogance and intransigence. He had always been difficult, but now he had been aloof as well, keeping his meager earnings to himself, refusing to answer their questions about what he might have earned in Europe. He had gone with such braggadocio and false
élan
. I will come back, he had seemed to say, better than any of you. Richer, more knowing, more resourceful. So Abdellah had let him go without a word and the boy had come back a word miser. It had been strange and unwelcome, because no son of his should ever have been a bitter recluse.

Finally he closed the door behind him and walked slowly back to the main room, where he lay down for some time listening to the wind. Driss. He was right there in the dying cemetery and his soul was somewhere nearby with all its memories. Driss with the long hands and the small scar on the left one, Driss of the wandering eyes and the unscrupulous habit of slipping banknotes into his socks. When he was a boy, there was something green in his eyes that gradually disappeared. Who had ever known him? He used to listen to that music called
raï
, hours alone in his room with the plugs in his ears, and when he was away in Erfoud or Rissani, they would hear of the dishonor he had brought upon them. He sold drugs and illegal trilobites, apparently, but then it was no more or less than what the other boys sold; he was no worse than the others, he was just more indiscreet. He just couldn’t hold his tongue.

During the following night, Abdellah regretted that he had not killed David. It was not that he was convinced of David’s guilt. It was that whatever the unbeliever had done or not done, he could not forgive him for the death of Driss. He regretted he had been weak in that moment at first light when he had held the knife and the unbeliever had seen it. “All power was in my hands,” he thought, “and I did not use it.” So Driss, his life and his death, had gone entirely to waste
because no punishment had been exacted. He went to the grave after midnight and sat there thinking about his weakness, which previously had seemed to him like a strength. But what he had wanted to avenge truly was the fact that he simply had never known his son at all. The unknowability of Driss had therefore been made eternal by a mistake on the road, a miscalculated angle or distance.
Bismellah
. Deep in his grave, his son remembered his past, but no one else was admitted to it, and the riddles from now on would recede and grow more complicated, since life is but a sport and a pastime, as the Koran carefully reminds us, and because it is a game and nothing more, one forgets that the point of life is death.

Twenty-two

HEN JO WOKE IN DAY
’
S ARMS, SHE FELT A MOMENT
’
S
suffocation and then caught her breath, bringing her panic under control. Where was she? The windows were open and the AC was silent, and so the room was hot as an oven, her skin prickly and wet. A sensation of drowning just before her eyes opened, then the awareness of night as it slid into day. She unpicked herself from the alien male arms and went to the bathroom to wash her face. The mirror was covered with fingerprints.

She had never been unfaithful to David in all those years, and for that matter, the thought had never even crossed her mind. Even when they had slept apart for the last two years, it had not occurred to her to venture out into the sea of other men, for what would she do there but wave and drown? Look at yourself in the mirror: haggard, exhausted, sweating. Can one ever recover instantly from such a mistake? It
was the potency of the secret one would from now on have to carry around with one that hurt the future and made it less livable. Even if she couldn’t even remember the lovemaking with Day (what an inappropriate phrase!), it would still exist inside her as a weight she would have to carry around, a semi-memory but still a form of knowledge. Had she enjoyed it? She didn’t know.

The sound of the faucets didn’t wake him. She crept back to the bed and gazed down at him with a dry amazement. Had she really made love with this snoring animal of pretty dimensions? What had made her do it? A string of moments of madness, a bottle of fermented grape juice, a clever man, and a subtle, aggravating rage against the husband who was not there, and who in many ways was never there. It was hardly a real argument for betrayal, but she hadn’t needed to be persuaded anyway.

Her first thought was escape. The door was wide open, and there were pieces of clothing everywhere, including her sandals and her hair clips, and from the soft open night came the enticing sounds of parties gone haywire and people walking about on tiptoe. These were all things she had wanted to drown herself in when they’d set out sulkily from London two days earlier, in those days of innocence: an all-night party with elegant touches, and nights filled with mysterious humanities. She went out and took a big gulp of that soupy air, then steadied herself against the doorjamb. The dawn was not even faintly there yet, and it was strange, because she was sure she had glimpsed it before falling asleep.

Between the sexually fetid darkness of the room and the open night, what a difference. The latter fresh, innocent, and plump like a girl who has just washed her hair, the former already stale and suffocating. Cicadas in the earth walls, water flowing down the runnels that fed into the pools. A promise of something. Whereas in the room there was just the remains of something already completed and forever done, and the man asleep in his cups. She stepped out and left it behind.

As she went down the path of embedded shells—they made little pictures she hadn’t noticed before, images of fish and tomatoes and gibbous moons—she found alien words flowing back into her mind, to the effect that even the most frozen, deadened heart has two or three drops of love at its bottom, enough to feed the birds. It was an American who had said it long ago, but she couldn’t remember who. She walked swiftly away from the room where Day slept and soon she was drifting back among the guests, and it was still surprising how few of them she knew or had met. Had a new crop arrived earlier that evening? They were even younger, louder, and they ignored her as she slipped between them with her middle-aged ease. On one of the wide artificial lawns some kind of
raï
-inspired hip-hop was playing, MC Rai, though she would not have known it, and the kids were rocking to it with pinwheel fireworks turning on three sides, smoothly replaced and relit by the staff when they burned out, the bars sprinkled around under the trees lit from underneath so that the immense glass pitchers looked brilliant, packed with floating ice cubes and pieces of fruit. There were bowls of sugared yogurt that were kept chilled and silver racks of hard-boiled eggs, and the staff held long spoons with which to mix drinks in the tall glasses and scissors to cut up the bunches of fresh mint. A brisk trade in mojitos, in caipirinhas and gin and tonics and “moroccojitos.” The boys dancing in borrowed slippers, high on
majoun
, and wet from head to foot.

She went past the spinning fireworks, which made the staff laugh and elbow one another, and into the stone courts that surrounded the main pool, around which the braziers were going strong in gusts of sparks that blew across the flagstones and died out. She felt them breeze past her, then sting her arms momentarily. Fifty people at least stood and swam in the pool, their arms raised above their heads. On the court’s far side, the long tent with its cushions and pipes was crowded with people lying on their side, indifferent to the time of night, or early morning, as it now was. She wondered what to do, locked inside that
deafening music. Unthinking, she dropped fully clothed into the pool and sank under the surface, letting her hair drift upward and stretching out her arms as wide as she could.