The Forgiven (9 page)

Ismael lit his second joint and they braced themselves against the wind blowing up from the road, where nothing could be seen.

“But tell me,” he said. “How did you get to Spain? And you with no money and no papers. How did you do it?”

“It’s a long story, and the truth is, I made it up as I went along. I had no real plans.”

“You went to Spain on an illegal boat, the preppers say.”

“True. I landed on the other side, but it was not as you all think. There was no trouble. I landed next to a luxury marina and swam in.”

“God be thanked.”

“It wasn’t even luck. The traffickers waited until the coast guard were away. It made me laugh.”

So that’s how it was, Ismael thought. Anyone could do the same.

“You paid them,” he said to Driss.

The older boy began to talk. He didn’t care if Ismael was even there; he only wanted to talk about himself.

“It was July,” he said, “and the heat had come. I walked through the marina at three in the morning, the marina called Sotogrande. No one even noticed me. I had nothing, not even a bag. Not even a watch. Nothing stopped me.”

Six

N HOUR PAST DAWN A FEW GUESTS WERE SEEN WANDERING
about the
ksour
in evening clothes, asking directions and in some instances demanding breakfast. It had been prepared. In the dining room, tables were already set, freshened by pots of lilacs. The coffee was being brewed; croissants and pastries baked in the ovens. The whole building smelled of hot butter and coffee and the sugar of the sweating lilacs. The windows had been closed against the inclement weather and the overhead fans switched on. A single man sat at a table, a German journalist who had managed to procure a day-old newspaper. The staff on duty in the room watched him swat the flies that buzzed around his head. On the insides of the windows, hundreds of these same gray flies seemed to have collected. They were sheltering from the scalding Chergui, which had pushed the thermometers up to a hundred and fifteen degrees overnight. It was a sign of bad weather
indeed when the flies came inside to escape. The servants had been ordered to kill them with aerosol insecticides.

Hamid was in charge of the younger boys. After a brief sleep, he walked up to the gate and dispersed them to their duties. The sun came up, dimmed by dust and sand, and the early-morning types among the guests became more numerous. They walked about in their dressing gowns and
babouches
, cheerful and yawning, and exchanged notes with other guests. Hamid wondered if they were discussing the accident of the night before. But there was no apprehension in their faces. It was the sand, the wind, that was disturbing them most. Sand had gotten into the yogurt; it was in their hair, in their teeth. They were not prepared for the sand, not by a long shot. Overnight, it had turned into a formidable enemy. An enemy that was so small, so insidious that they could not fight it. Nothing is more enraging than an unfair fight. The women complained; the men gritted their teeth and asked the staff for assistance. “With the sand?” the staff asked incredulously.

“Don’t you have screens? Masks?”

Hamid dashed about. Apart from an unsatisfactory nap he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, but there was so much to do. The champagne in the cellars had to be counted and calculated for both lunch and the evening party. The
couscous
deliveries from the local villages had to be coordinated; a consignment of dates and fresh mint was arriving shortly. His head buzzed. The masters were sleeping it off in the top bedroom in Tower 1, as they called it, and they could not be disturbed. The daily running of the operations was up to him. Truly, the world had not promised anything to anyone and no man ever lived the way he wished.

IN THE GARAGE, THE DEAD BOY SEEMED TO BE SLEEPING AS
well. His skin had turned a tint of blue, and his lips were black. Those keeping vigil began to wonder what would happen next. Under Islamic law, a body must be buried with haste, but no one had yet claimed him.
They hoped that the invisible gossip wires of the desert would send this news far into the interior. That someone would come. The police had said they would wait until sundown.

But Hamid was disturbed by this arrangement. He was not sure that it was lawful, that it followed custom. Discreetly, therefore, he prepared a bicycle to transport the body to the local graveyard if it became necessary. He went to the gate and peered down the road, checking his watch. His heart was beating irregularly, very irregularly indeed. He had the feeling that he was being watched, that his heartbeats were actually being counted.

Seven

O WAS RUNNING IN HER DREAM, BUT SUDDENLY HER
eyes opened: a butterfly hovered against the glass, a twist of black velvet and lemon, and the casement was filled with sunlight. The sand had fallen still. In the dream she was running downhill toward a glade of poplar trees where there was a well surrounded by crows pecking at grains in the loose earth round about. She knew it from somewhere. The lid of the well had been discarded, and she felt that someone had gotten there before her, someone who was hidden somewhere. But she came down anyway among the trees, and for a few moments, the dream and the insect pressed against the glass in real life merged confusingly. In the dream the sun was hot as it slanted through the poplars and she came to the edge of the well and peered in. Just as the dream was breaking apart, she knew that she had been running through it all night. She peered down and saw the flash of a
black reflection, a point of darkness, and the motion of a bucket slapping against the walls of the well. The rope attached to it hung wet by her ear and it was moving. She reached out and stilled it. She pulled and the bucket moved upward, swaying and slopping. Far down in that claustrophobic darkness she could sense something coiled inside the cup of animal skin, a small animal of some kind, a piglet or a young goat, and as she pulled the rope, the liquid black of its eyes suddenly appeared, staring up at her, and there was someone behind her in the poplar shadows, and she knew he carried an ax.

She lay for some time collecting her thoughts, with the blueness of the sky reflected all over the room, slowly realizing that she was alone in the chalet. David had gone out. Then element by element, she went over the previous night so that she knew it was real. A lizard on the white wall stared down at her, swiveling its head at an impossible angle. The eyes had pieces of dark orange rind in them, concentrated within a knowing brilliance. So it was all true. She hadn’t dreamt it.

Her long, athletic limbs filled the bed, which was sprinkled with sand. It was nearly midday. Light, percussive laughter floated over from the main house. She turned on her back and filled her lungs to bursting. The black despair of the night was not as strong as she had feared it would be. For one thing, she was no longer physically exhausted, and for another, she was thinking about it alone without David’s constant harassment.

She showered lazily. The water from the roof was scalding. Her introspection was perfect. If only she could be alone for the next twenty-four hours. If only David wouldn’t come back and the guests would ride off into the desert never to return. It was disarming the way Richard and Dally had Fortnum & Mason toiletries in all the rooms. She washed her hair, turned off the air-conditioning, and put on her bathrobe.

Outside, the air was bright but savagely hot. The paths were piled with sand, and the mountains beyond the walls had the color of cool ash. Azna was of the same color, like something that has burned
overnight and settled into a pile. She winced in the heat. As if summoned purely by her thoughts, a boy was walking toward her, his white robe billowing around him and his
babouches
slapping the path.

“Café?”

“You’re a godsend! Can I have some hot milk?”

She took it on the porch in her sunglasses with some toast and strawberry jam. Crickets ricocheted around her, and a gay splashing echoed from the pool area, where the girls laughed as if they were alone in the world. In the shadow of the house a few tables were set up with napkins. The wind had died down completely and palms stood motionless against a blank sky. She folded the toast slices and stuffed them into her mouth. Idly, she thought about her books. She hadn’t written one in eight years, but stories and ideas were constantly suggesting themselves. She stretched her shins into the sun and let them burn a little. “Punishment,” she thought. The boy returned with oranges that had obviously been stored in a fridge, a small silver knife laid next to them. He had forgotten the honey.

“Where is my husband?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I didn’t see him.”

The boy was
haratin
, with black features. He nodded and looked away. She had a sudden desire to engage him, to ask him all kinds of insolent questions. There was just a chance that he would tell the truth. Am I beautiful? Is my husband mad? Am I mad? But he responded slothfully, reluctantly when she asked again if he knew anything about the dead boy. She wanted to know if they were angry.

SHE WENT OVER TO THE HOUSE IN HER BIG YELLOW SUMMER
dress, which she had bought in a Chelsea antique store. It was patched up and precarious, and she knew that she was far too old for it, but it was okay for Morocco and a party where no one knew her or even cared. In a house full of buxom young women, she didn’t have to be
careful about her appearance. She was free. She breezed up to the house and for a moment admired the elaborate surfaces that adorned its sides. A riot of filigree screens and lacelike carvings made the four-sided structure look like an incredibly detailed sculpture made out of milk chocolate. A whole wall was covered with all sorts of lozenges, diamond-shaped motifs, and tiny lathed columns. She heard the music, the chatter coming from inside, the voice of Dally, and then, thinking better of her planned entry, she skirted around the house and wandered into the small maze of lanes and houses that sloped gently from it to the south wall. A space had been cleared among them and turned into a piazza with marble tiles. She walked across it, feeling the heat burst through the soles of her leather slippers, and snapped her fingers at her sides. Horse riding? He
was
mad. He wanted to escape from her and clear his head, but he had gone about it eccentrically.