Tangier

by William Bayer

  He was delighted to find the shop still open and only Colonel Brown's dusty Plymouth parked outside. He walked in, nodded to Peter, then inspected a rack of spy novels while observing the transaction taking place in front.

  "Bunch of damn baboons," the Colonel was saying, "that's what these Moroccans are. Still swinging from the trees as far as I'm concerned."

  He purchased an oversized bottle of soy sauce and a pair of gardening gloves. "It's not just Barclay," he muttered as he paid. "It's all of us now—the whole British community under attack."

  He rushed off then, the door slamming behind him. Lake emerged from behind the book rack and approached Peter with a smile.

  "I know," he said, "Katie Manchester called Janet the minute she got home from church. Guess you've got some ideas about that, Peter. Who do you think it is?"

  Zvegintzov squinted through his spectacles. "If I've learned one thing," he said, "it's not to speculate about the British."

  "Very good," Lake laughed. "Well put, Peter. So—have you had a good business day?"

  "So so," said Zvegintzov. "I sold a chess set and an Arabic-Spanish dictionary, along with the usual decks of cards. Lots of blueberry jam too. There's been a run on that. I have to order another case." He wrote something on a pad he kept on the counter, a reminder to himself about the jam, Lake guessed, though he wasn't sure, because Peter wrote it in Cyrillic script.

  "You know, Peter," he said. "You've got a terrific little business here. Wonderful location. You catch them both ways I bet."

  "Catch them? Oh—I see. You mean the Mountain people. Yes, I do."

  "Sure. Mountain crowd's your clientele. You got a real sweet setup here."

  Peter sat down on a hassock, his thick glasses perched upon his nose. One of the reasons Lake liked to come in at the end of the day was that he could count on finding Peter weary and, he thought, less on guard.

  "Yes," said Peter, "but they come from all over the city too. I'm still the only one in Tangier who imports real Stilton cheese."

  Lake nodded. "Quite the capitalist."

  They both laughed then, a little awkwardly, Lake thought. "You know, Peter," he said, "maybe you ought to give a harder sell."

  "Hmmm. What do you mean?"

  "Well, for instance—" Lake moved to the center. "You could move the freezer over here against the wall. That way when someone comes in with a bunch of kids they go straight for the ice cream before the parents have time to object."

  "Yes. I see. But I keep the records over there."

  "Well—move them. Make a little display. Keep the hot stuff in front, the rock and roll, and the ones that don't sell too fast, the classical ones—stack them behind on the shelves. "

  "Hmmm—"

  "You've got to start thinking in terms of packaging. Catch the eye. Grab the public. Give people the feeling they're in an attractive environment, and put them in the mood to buy."

  "Yes—"

  "That's the problem with Russia, you see. Those drab state-owned stores. Rude clerks. People waiting in line. Everything out of stock. Three thousand size-twelve shoes, but they only fit your left foot. If you started thinking in business terms, you could make some real dough." Lake bit into his lower lip. "Yeah—a gold mine. You could have a real gold mine here."

  "I don't do so badly now," said Peter. "My clients seem pleased enough."

  "Of course. Of course they are. I didn't mean that. You're doing a hell of a job. But what happens when they put in this new road? Then the Mountain people won't be coming by here every day. Course you could move the shop, but you'd probably lose momentum if you did. I personally think you should stay here, brighten the place up, regulate the inventory, and make it worth a special trip." He paused. "Listen, I got to get going. Janet'll kill me if I'm late. Reason I came by was to invite you to dinner. We're having some Moroccans, official types, over Wednesday night. Wondered if you'd be free."

  "Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you very much."

  "Good. Wednesday then. Eight-fifteen. So long, Peter. And think about what I said."

  It had been a curious exchange, Lake realized, as he paused outside the shop, watching Peter struggle with his iron security grill. There was an awkward moment then as Peter locked the door, and they grinned at each other through the glass. Lake waved, Peter waved back, then turned off the fluorescent lights.

  Lake waited until he'd disappeared into his little bedroom in the back. Was Peter intrigued, he wondered, about why the ranking American official in Tangier was taking such an interest in his shop? Impossible to know. His face was opaque. He revealed nothing, nothing at all.

  Hamid Ouazzani was thinking of the summer as he stood on his balcony late that Sunday afternoon. The sun was above the Mountain, just about to set, and to the east he could see Djebel Ben Moussa shrouded in a darkening mist. Soon, he knew, mobs of tourists would descend upon Tangier, and with them all sorts of petty crimes. He could look forward to three months of hard work, new assistants in his office, foreigners haranguing him in European tongues, kif arrests, pickpocketings, fights in bars, rapes, cat burglaries, and trouble on the beach. He could count too, he knew, on one murder at least.

  Kalinka was sitting on the banquette in their salon bent over her sketchbook, intent, working with her crayons. Hamid was pleased as he watched her draw. He'd been encouraging her the entire day. "Draw your memories," he'd said. "Draw your mother, your childhood home." And she'd surprised him—she'd agreed.

  Perhaps, he thought, it was language that was the barrier, that made it impossible for her to answer his verbal probes. He didn't know, but now, watching her, he congratulated himself for suggesting that she draw. She was so talented, her sketches were always so fine, so beautifully crafted, executed with such delicate, patient strokes, and now it seemed that through them she might be able to tell him things which she could not or would not reveal to him in words.

  He left the balcony, walked over to her side, peered down at her work.

  She looked up at him and smiled. "Just as you said, Hamid. Pictures of the past."

  She flipped through the pages, showed him what she'd done. He was fascinated, sat down beside her, looked carefully at every sketch.

  The figures in them were clear and quickly drawn, all enveloped in a moody haze. There was a sketch of a petite Oriental woman ("My mother," she said) standing beside a bicycle with a conical straw hat in one hand, her other arm raised to wave. There was a picture of a heavy-set man holding a little girl by the hand and walking with her beside a lake. There were several views of streets jammed with people, all wearing conical hats, running, escaping from a storm of slashing rain. There were pictures of stoop-shouldered men dressed in black, carrying guns, slinking among trees, and a sketch of a column of upright soldiers marching behind an officer wearing a kepi.

  "With my mother in a cyclo," she said, pointing to her sketch of a little girl beside a woman with the same conical hat upon her lap, the two of them sitting in a contraption attached to the front of a bicycle pedaled by a bare-legged man. Finally she had drawn a low-angle view through a doorway. In a room beyond, Hamid could see a person's back.

  "That's Peter," Kalinka said. "Peter in his store serving his customers. I am behind, in the back room, looking out from the dark."

  "Go on!" he said, excited now, feeling that at last a curtain was being raised. "Tell me stories about them. Talk, Kalinka! Talk!"

  "They are only the past, Hamid. You asked me to draw them, and now I have."

  At that she began to sign the sketches, compressing the letters of her name so they formed a seal. He looked at her—she'd surprised him again. It was the smoke, he was certain, the smoke of her hashish which she'd sucked into her lungs for so many years and which now was working its way out through her fingers, her crayons. But still she was vague. He looked at the pictures again. A beginning, he thought, a breakthrough, an access to the mysteries locked inside her brain.

  Late that evening he took a walk. From his apartme
nt on Ramon y Cahal he made his way by a circuitous route (Rue d'Istamboul, Rue Leonardo Da Vinci, then Rue Mordecai Bengio through the Jewish quarter) to the steep west Casbah gate. Once inside the old fortified section, he began to wander through a labyrinth of ancient, narrow streets, alleys really, not wide enough for two people to walk abreast, with high, straight walls on either side and small, narrow barred windows overhead.

  He walked aimlessly, losing himself in the maze, wandering from time to time into dim culs-de-sac. It was intentional, this becoming lost—he knew the alleys of the Casbah well, but he was deliberately trying to forget his way, lose himself, as if he were a tourist or a man gone blind. It was a game he was playing. He was practicing being a detective the way a cat practices hunting on a rug. He wanted to see if he could find his way by sound alone, listening for water flowing in the sewers beneath the streets, without looking up to search out landmarks in the night.

  The echoes helped him more than the sewers did, and eventually, with less difficulty than he might have thought, he emerged by the old wall on Ben Abbou, the back wall of the Casbah, separating it from the medina below. He walked swiftly then by the Casbah mosque until he reached the giant square, emerging at the far end of it, the side away from the cliffs and sea.

  There was no one about except the one-legged man who watched the cars. Hamid strode across the old stones, hearing the echoes of his footsteps as he walked, until he reached the overlook where he'd encountered Kalinka one night so many months before. Here he lit a cigarette and stared down at the beach and bay, feeling the east wind blow gently across his face. There was a yacht anchored off the mole. He could see people aboard her, could make out their silhouettes. They were Europeans, moving, dancing. He could hear faint music, something romantic, out of date.

  He stood for a time staring out, thinking of Kalinka's drawings, the ones she'd made that afternoon. He'd been tremendously excited by them, but still he wondered: Who were those people? What were they doing? What were their passions, their struggles, the meaning of their guns?

  He would find out. He was a policeman, a detective. He would investigate the matter as if Kalinka were a suspect in a case. He would start a dossier, write her name on the cover. He would file the drawings there, and any others she might make, and his notes on their conversations, everything she said. He would find his way through the maze of her mind just as he had moved through the labyrinth of the Casbah, feeling his way, all his senses alert. Yes, he would discover her, solve the mystery of who she was, and when he was clear with her, when all her past was finally laid out and her foreignness revealed, then he would be free to bind himself to her, make her his wife.

  II.

  By the middle of June our town had undergone its annual transformation from sleepy Moroccan village to thriving international resort. Boats and jets disgorged tourists, and the town beach, at noon, became a carnival of reddening flesh. At night the Boulevard, closed to traffic, became the ground for a great passeo, while on the Mountain the warm nocturnal air brought our damas de noche into bloom.

  Certain incidents those early summer weeks, though quite small, even insignificant in themselves, and later overshadowed by more vivid events, seem in retrospect to suggest the tensions that were then building up in certain quarters of our town.

  The stones that had hit Laurence Luscombe one May evening became more than an odd occurrence to those of us who drove daily through Dradeb. Sometimes we felt we were running a gauntlet as teenage boys shot rocks at us from vantage points on the roofs. For a while it became an adventure to drive through at night. We'd close our windows, hold our breaths, and sigh relief when we reached the Jew's River unscathed. But after a while the fun wore off. Camilla Weltonwhist, on her way home from a party at the British Consulate, received a nasty gash on her forehead when a stone shattered the window of her Rolls. We felt anger on her behalf but were reconciled soon enough. We learned to accept these bombardments, as we did the Socco pickpockets, as part of the price we paid for living in Tangier...

  Achar

  Mohammed Achar's clinic, a subsection of the Ministry of Public Health, was known in Dradeb simply as "Dr. Achar's." It was a maze of tiny rooms linked by passageways that were narrow and damp. When the wind blew, which was often in Tangier, the place was a symphony of slamming doors.

  Achar prowled about the corridors like a bear. Burly and strong, he moved like a man with too much to do and insufficient time. One Saturday in the middle of June he was everywhere at once, dropping into the tiny treatment rooms, assisting doctors who needed his advice, holding hurried consultations in the hall on the cases that kept pouring in. From time to time he'd disappear into his refuge, a cluttered, book-lined office in the back. Here, at a desk heaped with X-rays and reports, he puffed on cigarettes, sipped mint tea, and shouted furiously over the phone. His heavy bass voice boomed down the hall to the waiting room at its other end—a signal to the people thronged there that someone in Dradeb cared.

  On this particular Saturday there was a small operation to be performed. Early in the afternoon Achar went to the scrub room, washed his hands, then extended his arms so that his nurse could help him with his gown and gloves.

  The patient was a boy with a hernia near his groin, so small it took the doctor more than twenty minutes to find. Achar took no notice of the time, was too involved with his work. He liked surgery, enjoyed patching people up. His hands, he thought, were skillful though hardly great. It embarrassed him that there were rumors they were magical and blessed by God.

  Had his staff started that? He hoped not, though he knew they loved him as much as he loved them. He was a benevolent dictator who shouted orders in crises. But when there was time he always asked their views. "If any of you ever thinks I'm wrong," he told them, "tell me right away. Even if I don't take your advice I still want you to talk. And if I seem to be acquiring a complex, you must tell me that too. I detest the myth of the master physician, the all-knowing doctor-saint." He meant it, and hoped they understood the dangers of being corrupted by the healer's power. When he passed through the waiting room and poor people leaned to touch his hands, he turned away with shame.

  It was difficult to work in Dradeb, but Achar had no desire for a private practice on Boulevard Pasteur. He was always short of antibiotics and blood, and had constantly to worry about keeping his reservoir filled and maintaining his generator in case the electricity should fail. Still he persisted, and now, after some years of effort, he'd managed to assemble a devoted staff who shared his notion that there was too much disease to allow oneself to rest.

  Probably, he thought, he was a better administrator than anything else, with the gift of motivation, of getting people to work. But it took so much energy to enliven others, to give and give while taking nothing in return. Surgery was his diversion from that, an abstract game he played. Looking down at the exposed tissues of the boy, he thought of the body as a puzzle. But afterward, when he'd closed the wound and sewed it up, he felt a rush of exhaustion, a need to rest and close his eyes. It came upon him always after an operation—his bones ached from standing, his eyes from so much strain. And, too, he wondered about usefulness—whether these little operations, these little patchings-up, were really the answer to human pain.

  When he returned to his office, hoping for a quarter hour's rest, he found a young man named Driss Bennani sitting before his desk.

  "Fischer's dead," Driss announced. "He died in California ten days ago."

  Achar lit a cigarette. "His heart?"

  "I suppose so. His son didn't say. Just a note to tell me that he was dead and that he thought I ought to know."

  "Well," said Achar, thinking back to the last time he'd examined Fischer in Tangier, "I'm very sorry to hear this, Driss. He was the only American I ever liked."

  "He was a great man, Achar. I learned more about architecture in my year with him than from all the professors I ever had. He was a visionary. He knew that buildings were for people. An obvious truth
, but not many people see it here."

  Achar nodded. "Yes," he said, "Fischer had great plans for us. He was going to build us a great hospital, the best equipment, a place where we could really work. I suppose all that's out the window now—they're going to tear us down, I hear, and put up skyscrapers in our place."

  "Not quite yet," said Driss. "The redevelopment of Dradeb has been postponed. They've got a different project now. They're going to use the money for a road."

  "I see, though I'm not sure where they'll put it. There're buildings to the edges of the road we have now."

  "No, Achar. You don't understand. Not a new road through here. A road to go around."

  "Oh, yes, I see." He didn't, though—was too tired to concentrate on what the boy was trying to say.

  Driss noticed his lack of attention and began to raise his voice. "A new access to the Mountain. The Governor doesn't like driving through here, and also there's the King. Not that he ever comes to Tangier—I don't think he's been here in three or four years—but in case he does come he'll have a more pleasant access to the hill. So the plan is to build a road up the Mountain from the other side. That way the people who live up there won't have to drive through here anymore."

  "A blessing, I suppose."

  "But don't you see?" Driss was angry. He stood and began to pace around the little room. His bitterness caught Achar by surprise. "There'll never be a rehabilitation. The whole project was a charade. They just wanted to cosmetize the place, put up some high rises to make the street look good. Fischer's idea, to make a new village here, never had a chance."

  Achar watched him carefully. "Sit down, Driss," he said. "You don't have to shout in here. And stop talking like an idealist. It's foolish and boring too. If Fischer's plan had been approved, two-thirds of the money would have been stolen before they laid a brick. Fancy designs, big talk—that sort of thing always conceals a sham. The only way you ever change conditions is to get the people to change them for themselves. Fischer didn't understand that, but he was a foreigner. You were born here. You don't have that excuse."