The Heat of Betrayal (43 page)

‘Speaking off the record . . . if I were you, I would be very selective about revealing what happened in the desert. The Moroccans have made it easy to do this – they have provided an official version of events on which you have signed off. Silence on everything else might be a wise strategy.'

I concurred with her reasoning. But by the time I saw Dr Hart – only forty-eight hours after this conversation – I kept having ongoing image explosions in my head, in which the moments from my being forcibly penetrated to my grappling the jerrycan open were replayed repeatedly. Just as I reviewed, in relentless slow motion, the instant when I grabbed the cigarette lighter from his accomplice's hand and tossed it on his gasoline-drenched body. And how – I'll admit this now – a huge sense of furious vindication came over me as I watched him ignite, writhing and screaming in agony.

Ben Hassan might be a bloated moral black hole of a man – but he did characteristically touch a very exposed nerve when he said:

‘
Don't try to take the moral high ground here. You are exactly like me. You killed to stay alive.
'

That knowledge was hardly comforting. It was stalking me day and night. Especially the night. In fact, all night.

Dr Hart was beyond sympathetic about Paul's secret vasectomy, because we had talked at length months ago about the fact that my husband and I were going to try for a baby.

‘I cannot begin to imagine the shock and dismay and sense of devastation you must have suffered when you discovered what he'd done. For that revelation to lead to his crack-up and disappearance, and your pursuit of him around Morocco, ending with that rape in the desert . . . it may not be very professional of me to say this, but I have little sympathy for your husband's fate. How guilty are you feeling about all this?'

‘The guilt is exacerbated by the insomnia and the panic attacks, and also the fear that I might have been infected with an STD.'

Over the next week I endured an entire battery of tests. I got lucky on several fronts. No parasites parading through my system. No sexually transmitted diseases. The gynaecological exam showed near-full recovery from internal trauma. I did not have a burst eardrum, but had suffered a sort of concussion to the ear canal which would subside in a few more weeks. A CT scan did not point up any damage to my left cheekbone. Nor did I have a dreaded ‘zygomatic fracture' of the eye socket (as the specialist called it), even though I still had a semi-dark ring beneath my left eye. ‘It will fade with time,' he assured me. The dermatologist whom I saw next said that, though the facial scarring would largely heal, there might be some subtle but potentially discernible reminders of the damage done to my legs.

When my friend Ruth flew up to Buffalo the weekend after my return I put her up on the sofa bed in the living room of my hotel suite. I told her just about everything that had occurred in Morocco, leaving out that one crucial detail. She listened wide-eyed and horrified, amazed by my fortuitous rescue and survival. When I mentioned that sleep was now an issue, she said:

‘You're back in the land of pharma-psychology. And you need to sleep. So ask your doctor to prescribe some pills. If I may say so, you should also consider talking to somebody professionally who can help you—'

‘What? Find a degree of
acceptance
about what happened?
Closure?
I know that talking to a shrink can help. It's just . . .'

I didn't want to complete the sentence. Because what I would have said was:
I am not going to sit in a therapist's office and somehow fail to mention that I burnt my rapist alive and, in the moments before his accomplice kicked me in the head, I felt a frightening sense of avenging triumph.
I was unwilling to share that hidden facet with anyone. It was a deeply troubling component within me which I was determined would stay just that: a secret, concealed for good.

I did accept Dr Hart's offer of an anti-depressant that also served as an aid to sleep. She told me it might take a week for its effect to be felt. Actually it took ten days, during which time an ongoing sense of oppression – a menacing sense of foreboding – stalked me. There were the flashbulb-like shards of memory which appeared in my consciousness without warning, and had me seriously skewed.

Finally sleep took hold.

Dr Hart saw me once a week to check how I was faring, especially when it came to sleep and the spectral zone into which I frequently retreated. She did suggest counselling on several occasions.

‘Surely if you had a massive toothache you'd consult a dentist,' she reasoned. ‘So won't you at least try a session or two with a therapist I know who specialises in trauma cases?'

I wanted to blurt out:
Get off this subject now!
Instead I tactfully said:

‘Let me handle it at my own pace.'

I threw myself into work. Twelve-to-thirteen-hour days. A determination to function and cope and keep moving forward that saw me land a big corporate account – a chain of upstate New York hardware stores – the month after my return. After six weeks at the hotel, I moved back home. But it was another ten days before I finally walked into Paul's studio. On the draughtsman's table where he worked was the package that I had sent back to my office from Casablanca; a package which Morton had brought with him to the airport on the night of my return, and which I had tossed into the studio when I got home. Now all these weeks later I finally opened it, staring down at the notebook he'd left at Fouad's, forcing myself to turn the pages, looking at his supremely accomplished, intricate take on Essaouira and ‘
la vie marocaine
'. Seeing them all again slammed home the loss, the betrayal, the guilt, the horror of his disappearance, the horror of what had been visited on me, the fact that I was here alone in our house, regretting so much, trying to keep trepidation and rage and sadness at bay. I broke down and cried for a good half-hour, accumulated grief rushing forth.

When it had finally subsided I went into the bathroom, threw some cold water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror. I knew at this juncture that, though the wounds both physical and mental might always be there, my work was to somehow achieve, in time, a degree of accommodation with their attendant agonies.

An hour later, nursing a glass of wine, I went online and found a cottage for rent deep in the Adirondack Mountains on the shores of Upper Saranac Lake. It was available as of tomorrow – and the owner (with whom I had an Internet chat) lived in nearby Lake Placid and said he could have the place cleaned and ready for my arrival by nightfall. He told me that it lacked Wi-Fi and that cellphone coverage was, at best, spotty.

‘Fine by me,' I said – and we then agreed a price for one month's rental. Negotiations completed, I packed a bag with clothes, another with a dozen or so books from around the house which I'd promised myself to read over the years. My last piece of business before I fell into bed was to send an email to Morton:

Sorry to drop a little bombshell on you, but I have decided this evening to disappear to somewhere rural and hidden for four weeks. I will drive to a café with Wi-Fi every few days to see if there's anything urgent to deal with at the office
.
Otherwise
I am going to be out of touch. Are you OK with this?

His reply arrived moments later.

Stay out of touch – and don't look at your email or cellphone for the next month. You evidently need this time away for all sorts of reasons. Go hide and think.

Hide I did. The cottage was simple, clean, idyllic. And isolated. It was located at the end of a half-paved road with no neighbours in sight. The nearest village – to which I drove twice a week for supplies – was ten miles away. I slept. I read. I cooked. I listened to classical music and jazz on the radio. I didn't open a computer or touch my cellphone for one entire month. There was a narrow walking trail just steps away from the cottage that followed the lake front. Every day I did a three-hour hike along its shoreline. And I thought. About a certain rigidity that, prior to Morocco, had frequently made me look at life as a giant balance sheet, on which I was endlessly obsessing about reversing the loss column. About how I was always wanting to put things right. About how my wonderful, maddening father cast a shadow over so much. And about how rational, hyper-organised me chose men whom I thought I could rescue from the impulse to self-destruct – something I had been unable to stop my dad from doing.

The search for love – especially when it's been withheld by one parent – can lead to all sorts of tricky rationalisations. Had I always gone through life expecting to be, on some level, betrayed? And why, when it came to the commitment that is marriage, did I pick individuals whom I instinctively knew would not be able to give me the stability so denied me as a child?

‘Life can change on a dime'
was one of my father's favourite sayings. He was always hoping that the dime would finally come his way. Life changed utterly for me in the Sahara. It sent me to the darkest places imaginable; the absolute limits of endurance. But I did just that: I endured. No one would ever know that I killed in order to live. That secret would stay with me for ever. Along with a new-found knowledge that almost everything is survivable if you choose to survive. The only way forward after great pain is fortitude.

So in those weeks alone by the lake, there was a slow diminution of that dark presence which had hovered over me from the moment I was free of danger in Casablanca. It wasn't knocking repeatedly on my psychic door as it had done so virulently in the first months after my return. Which, in turn, gave me the space to examine that most telling and thorny of questions:
What do you want?

And I began to formulate an answer.

When I finally did return to Buffalo, among the vast number of emails there was one which delighted me. It was from Aatif. Written in simple French, it arrived with a photo attached.

Hi Robin! Just wanted you to see a picture of my wedding and of the house we now live in. I will always be eternally grateful to you. I even have a mobile phone – number below – and an email address now. Allah ybarek feek wal 'ayyam al-kadima.

The photos showed Aatif and a petite young woman who – if the snapshot was anything to go by – was clearly outgoing and spirited. They were both in formal Muslim wedding attire in front of a simple squat one-storey house: concrete, painted that wondrous aquamarine blue which was so essential to the Moroccan decorative palette. I noted that laundry was already hanging on the line outside.

I sent back an immediate reply:

Happiness is a wonderful thing, Aatif – and it is splendid to see you and your wife so happy.

As I hit the ‘send' button and glanced once more at the photo of the proverbial happy couple I couldn't help but feel a stab of loneliness; the sense that I was flying solo, but with a phantom still in the adjoining room.

There was also an email from Assistant Consul Conway in Casablanca. As promised she was keeping me abreast of the ongoing search for my husband. She told me that the Moroccan army had recently been doing military exercises in the desert, in the vicinity of where Paul was last seen. They'd been conducting a comprehensive sweep of the area as part of their manoeuvres but had found no body.

She also said, with regret, that the search for Idir and his family had turned up nothing. But now I had a means by which to make contact with them – and immediately replied to her email with Aatif's details, explaining that he knew the family and might be able to assist with their whereabouts. I then shot Aatif a second email, letting him know that he might hear from a woman at the US Consulate in Casablanca about trying to locate my saviours – she had a sum of money for them, and if he could help her locate them I would be hugely grateful.

Weeks went by, then out of nowhere a further email arrived from Alison: she had finally heard back from Aatif after several attempts to contact him. He told her he was heading to the oasis in ten days' time – so yes, he could deliver the cash to Idir and his family. The money had been dispatched by registered mail to his home and she had had confirmation from Poste Maroc that it had been received and signed for.

A month or so later I got a one-line email from Aatif:

Money delivered!

There was a photo attached of Maika and Titrit and Naima – the latter two laughing and waving at the camera, Maika as stone-faced as ever. The men were clearly elsewhere. I printed the photo and put it alongside the one of Aatif and his wife that I had pasted near my computer. The only family I now had.

When I reached the six-month anniversary of my return home I had a second HIV test. Negative. Dr Hart also did repeat swabs for all other potential STDs: all negative.

‘You're in the clear,' she told me.

On one level this was true. The discoloration around my left eye was now a thing of the past. And the facial scars had reduced to a point where you would have to examine me closely to really notice them. Still the door to Paul's study at home remained closed. The house had gradually lost some of its hushed eeriness – but there were still moments when I could feel his presence within it.

My determination to push through the worst of the post-traumatic stress did pay off to the extent that I weaned myself off the pharmaceuticals, finding the one and only Chinese herbalist at work in Buffalo and switching to a strongly effective tea to help me sleep. At first, after I went off the prescription pills, there were moments of deeply unsettled regression and five days of complete insomnia. But eventually the herbal formula kicked in. I could function professionally. I could sleep. A few weeks later, on a morning noteworthy for its cold clarity, I presented myself at a fertility clinic attached to the State University for a psychological evaluation. It was an interview and a series of tests that lasted over an hour. I was just a little nervous in the run-up to this crucial hurdle.
Think of it as an audit
, I told myself. Much to my surprise I passed the evaluation. A few days later I returned for a series of examinations to determine if, now that I was forty-one, I would be able to hold a pregnancy to full term. Again I was approved – though the doctor at the clinic with whom I subsequently spoke did inform me that, at my age, the chance of a miscarriage or other attendant problems was considerably higher. Just as he warned me that, once I had chosen a donor, it could take at least three to five tries before I fell pregnant.