The Sheltering Sky (26 page)

Her lip was cut; the sight of the blood on her finger fascinated her and she sat quietly for a long time, conscious only of the music. Sitting quietly seemed to be the best way to avoid more pain. If there was to be pain in any case, the only way of living was to find the means of keeping it away as long as possible. No one hurt her now that she was sitting still. The woman’s fat black hands bedecked her with the necklaces and charms once more. Someone passed her a glass of very hot tea, and someone else held a plate of cakes before her. The music went on, the women regularly punctuated its cadences with their yodeling screams. The candles burned down, many of them went out, and the room grew gradually darker. She dozed, leaning against the black woman.

Much later in the darkness she climbed up the four steps into an enormous enclosed bed, smelling the cloves with which its curtains had been scented, and hearing Belqassim’s heavy breathing behind her as he held her arm to guide her there. Now that he owned her completely, there was a new savageness, a kind of angry abandon in his manner. The bed was a wild sea, she lay at the mercy of its violence and chaos as the heavy waves toppled upon her from above. Why, at the height of the storm, did two drowning hands press themselves tighter and tighter about her throat? Tighter, until even the huge gray music of the sea was covered by a greater, darker noise—the roar of nothingness the spirit hears as it approaches the abyss and leans over.

Afterwards, she lay wakeful in the sweet silence of the night, breathing softly while he slept. The following day she spent in the intimacy of the bed, with the curtains drawn. It was like being inside of a great box. During the morning Belqassim dressed and went out; the fat woman of the night before bolted the door after him and sat on the floor leaning against it. Each time the servants brought food, drink or washing water the woman rose with incredible slowness, panting and grunting, to pull open the big door.

The food disgusted her: it was tallowy, cloying and soft—not at all like what she had been eating in her room on the roof. Some of the dishes seemed to consist principally of lumps of half-cooked lamb fat. She ate very little, and saw the servants look at her disapprovingly when they came to collect the trays. Knowing that for the moment she was safe, she felt almost calm. She had her little valise brought her, and in the privacy of the bed she set it on her knees and opened it to examine the objects inside. Automatically she used her compact, lipstick and perfume; the folded thousand-franc notes fell out onto the bed. For a long time she stared at the other articles: small white handkerchiefs, shiny nail scissors, a pair of tan silk pajamas, little jars of facial cream. Then she handled them absently; they were like the fascinating and mysterious objects left by a vanished civilization. She felt that each one was a symbol of something forgotten. It did not even sadden her when she knew she could not remember what the things meant. She made a bundle of the thousand-franc notes and put it at the bottom of the bag, packed everything else on top and snapped the valise shut.

That evening Belqassim dined with her, forcing her to swallow the fatty food after showing her with eloquent gestures that she was undesirably thin. She rebelled; the stuff made her feel ill. But as always it was impossible not to do his bidding. She ate it then, and she ate it the following day and the days that came after that. She grew used to it and no longer questioned it. The nights and days became confused in her mind, because sometimes Belqassim came to bed at the beginning of the afternoon and left her at nightfall, returning in the middle of the night followed by a servant bearing trays of food. Always she remained inside the windowless room, and usually in the bed itself, lying among the disordered piles of white pillows, her mind empty of everything save the memory or anticipation of Belqassim’s presence. When he climbed the steps of the bed, parted the curtains, entered and reclined beside her to begin the slow ritual of removing her garments, the hours she had spent doing nothing took on their full meaning. And when he went away the delicious state of exhaustion and fulfillment persisted for a long time afterward; she lay half awake, bathing in an aura of mindless contentment, a state which she quickly grew to take for granted, and then, like a drug, to find indispensable.

One night he did not come at all. She tossed and sighed so long and so violently that the Negro woman went out and got her a hot glass of something strange and sour. She fell asleep, but in the morning her head was heavy and full of buzzing pain. During the day she ate very little. This time the servants looked at her with sympathy.

In the evening he appeared. As he came in the door and motioned the black woman out, Kit sprang up, bounded across the room and threw herself upon him hysterically. Smiling, he carried her back to the bed, methodically set about taking off her clothing and jewelry. When she lay before him, whiteskinned and filmy-eyed, he bent over and began to feed her candy from between his teeth. Occasionally she would try to catch his lips at the same time that she took the sweets, but he was always too quick for her, and drew his head away. For a long time he teased her this way, until finally she uttered a long, low cry and lay quite still. His eyes shining, he threw the candy aside and covered her inert body with kisses. When she came to, the room was in darkness and he was beside her, sleeping profoundly. After this he sometimes stayed away two days at a time. Then he would tease her endlessly until she screamed and beat him with her fists. But between times she waited for these unbearable interludes with a gnawing excitement that drove every other sensation from her consciousness.

Finally there came a night when for no apparent reason the woman brought her the sour beverage and stood above her looking at her sternly while she drank it. She handed back the glass with a sinking heart. Belqassim would not be there. Nor did he come the next day. Five successive nights she was given the potion, and each time the sour taste seemed stronger. She spent her days in a feverish torpor, sitting up only to eat the food that was given her.

It seemed to her that sometimes she heard the sharp voices of women outside her door; the sound reminded her of the existence of fear, and she was haunted and unhappy for a few minutes, but when the stimulus was removed and she no longer thought she heard the voices, she forgot about it. The sixth night she suddenly decided that Belqassim never would come back. She lay dry-eyed, staring at the canopy over her head, the lines of its draperies dim in the light of the one carbide lamp by the door where the woman sat. Spinning a fantasy as she lay there, she made him come in the door, approach the bed, pull back the curtains—and was astonished to find that it was not Belqassim at all who climbed the four steps to join her, but a young man with a composite, anonymous face. Only then she realized that any creature even remotely resembling Belqassim would please her quite as much as Belqassim himself. For the first time it occurred to her that beyond the walls of the room, somewhere nearby, in the streets if not in the very house, there were plenty of such creatures. And among these men surely there were some as wonderful as Belqassim, who would be quite as capable and as desirous of giving her delight. The thought that one of his brothers might be lying only a few feet from her behind the wall at the head of her bed, filled her with a tremulous anguish. But her intuition whispered to her to lie absolutely still, and she turned over quietly and pretended to be asleep.

Soon a servant knocked at the door, and she knew that her nightly glass of soporific had been handed in; a moment later the Negro woman opened the bed curtains, and seeing that her mistress was asleep, set the glass on the top step and went back to her pallet by the door. Kit did not move, but her heart was beating in an unaccustomed fashion. “It’s poison,” she told herself. They had been poisoning her slowly, which was the reason why they had not come to punish her. Much later, when she raised herself softly on one elbow and peered between the curtains, she saw the glass and shuddered at the nearness of it. The woman was snoring.

“I must get out,” she thought. She was feeling strangely wide awake. But when she climbed down from the bed she knew she was weak. And for the first time she noticed the dry, earthen smell of the room. From the cowhide chest nearby she took the jewelry Belqassim had given her, as well as all he had taken from the other three, and spread it out on the bed. Then she lifted her little valise out of the chest and quietly stepped over to the door. The woman still slept. “Poison!” whispered Kit furiously as she turned the key. With great care she managed to close the door silently behind her. But now she was in the absolute dark, trembling with weakness, holding the bag in one hand, and lightly running the fingers of the other along the wall beside her.

“I must send a telegram,” she thought. “It’s the quickest way of reaching them. There must be a telegraph office here.” But first it was necessary to get into the street, and the street was perhaps a long way off. Between her and the street, in the darkness ahead of her, she might meet Belqassim; now she never wanted to see him again. “He’s your husband,” she whispered to herself, and stood still a second in horror. Then she almost giggled: it was only a part of this ridiculous game she had been playing. But until she sent the telegram she would still be playing it. Her teeth began to chatter. “Can you possibly control yourself just until we get into the street?”

The wall at her left suddenly came to an end. She took two cautious steps forward and felt the soft edge of the floor beneath the tip of her slipper. “One of those damned stairwells without a railing!” she said. Deliberately she set down the valise, turned around, and stepped back to the wall, following it the way she had come until she felt the door beneath her hand. She opened it soundlessly and took up the little tin lamp. The woman had not moved. She managed to shut the door without a mishap. With the light she was surprised to see how near the valise was. It was at the edge of the drop, but close to the top of the stairs; she would not have fallen very far. She went down slowly, taking care not to twist her ankle on the soft, crooked steps. Below, she was in a narrow corridor with closed doors on either side. At the end it turned to the right and led into an open court whose floor was strewn with straw. A narrow moon above gave white light; she saw the large door ahead and the sleeping forms along the wall beside it, and put her lamp out, setting it on the ground. When she advanced to the door she found that she could not budge the giant bolt that fastened it.

“You’ve got to move it,” she thought, but she felt weak and ill as her fingers pushed against the cold metal of the lock. She lifted the valise and hammered once with the end of it, thinking she felt it give a little. At the same time one of the nearby figures stirred.

“Echkoun?”
said a man’s voice.

Immediately she crouched down and crawled behind a pile of loaded sacks.

“Echkoun?”
said the voice again with annoyance. The man waited a bit for a reply, and then he went back to sleep. She thought of trying again, but she was trembling too violently, her heart was beating too hard. She leaned against the sacks and closed her eyes. And all at once someone began to beat a drum back in the house.

She jumped. “The signal,” she decided. “Of course. It was beating when I came.” There was no doubt now that she would get out. She rested a moment, then rose and crossed the courtyard in the direction of the sound. Now there were two drums together. She stepped through a door into darkness. At the end of a long hallway there was another moonlit court, and as she approached she saw yellow light shining from under a door. In the court she stood a while listening to the nervous rhythms coming from inside the room. The drums had awakened the cocks in the vicinity, and they were beginning to crow. Faintly she tapped on the door; the drums continued, and the thin high voice of a woman started to sing a repeated querulous refrain. She waited a long time before finding the courage to knock again, but this time she rapped loudly, with determination. The drumming ceased, the door was flung open, and she stepped blinking inside the room. On the floor among the cushions sat Belqassim’s three wives, staring up at her in wide-eyed surprise. She stood perfectly rigid, as though she had come face to face with a deadly snake. The girl servant pushed the door shut and remained leaning against it. Then the three threw down their drums and began talking all at once, gesticulating, pointing upward. One of them jumped up and approached her to feel among the folds of her flowing white robe, apparently in search of the jewelry. She pulled up the long sleeves, feeling for bracelets. Excitedly the other two pointed at the valise. Kit still stood unmoving, waiting for the nightmare to end. By dint of prodding and pushing her, they got her to bend down and open the combination lock, whose manipulation in itself, under any other circumstances, would have fascinated them. But now they were suspicious and impatient. When the bag was open they precipitated themselves upon it and pulled everything out on to the floor. Kit stared at them. She could scarcely believe her good luck: they were far more interested in the valise than in her. As they carefully inspected the objects, she regained some of her composure, presently taking heart sufficiently to tap one of them on the shoulder and indicate that the jewelry was upstairs. They all looked up incredulously and one of them dispatched the servant girl to verify. But as the girl turned to go out of the room Kit was seized with fear and tried to stop her. She would wake the black woman. The others jumped up angrily; there was a brief melee. When that had died down and all five of them stood there panting, Kit, making a grimace of desperation, put her fingers to her lips, took a few exaggeratedly cautious steps on tiptoe, and pointed repeatedly at the servant. Then she puffed out her cheeks and tried to imitate a fat woman. They all understood immediately and solemnly nodded their heads; the sense of conspiracy had been imparted to them. When the servant had left the room they tried to question Kit:
“Wen timshi?”
they said, their voices betraying more curiosity than anger. She could not answer; she shook her head hopelessly. It was not long before the girl returned, ostensibly announced that all the jewelry was on the bed—not only theirs but a lot more besides. Their expressions were mystified but joyous. As Kit knelt to pack her things into the bag, one of them crouched beside her and spoke with her in a voice that certainly was no longer inimical. She had no idea what the girl was saying; her mind was fixed on the image of the bolted door. “I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to get out,” she told herself over and over. The pile of banknotes lay with her pajamas. No one paid them any attention.