Tangier

by William Bayer

  She was awkward at first, broke her swing at the wrist, but he coached her until she could play a decent game. He ran her about the court, fed her backhands, slices, forehands, serves, and when he noticed an error in her form he crossed to her side of the net, stood behind her, placed his hand beside hers on the racket, and slowly moved her through the strokes.

  It was then that his adoration was revived. Her body became demystified. He became accustomed to touching her, seeing her bare arms and legs, looking at her face beaded with perspiration, thinking of her as a woman, warm, alive. His dreams of the autumn, formal ballets played out against sun-dappled seascapes, gave way quite suddenly to moist fantasies of flesh, thrashing limbs, grasping hands, sucking tongues and mouths.

  He felt then that they shared a physical attraction, all the more powerful because it was unspoken and taboo. He'd catch her watching him, and sometimes, when he stood behind her pressed against her back, he'd feel her spine tremble where they touched as if her body, heated by exercise, was crying out. He knew then that he only had to wait, that sometime soon, at the proper moment, when they were alone or in public unobserved, he had only to let his hand linger a moment too long and she would not be able to resist.

  But when? When might he do it? When might he seize her, kiss her, caress her, cause her to moan and heave? How would they become lovers? When?

  It would not be easy, for Tangier was small. The people of the town liked nothing better than to spy upon their neighbors and unravel their affairs. So the tennis court became a stage where they enacted an erotic dance. They used the public game to disguise their private play. Each rally held a hidden meaning, each exchange of shots was a coupling in code. A soft service became a caress. A smash was an aggressive thrust. Sometimes he'd toy with her, feed her soft seductive lobs, and then, when she was near the net, he'd send a passing shot hurtling by her side. They'd smile at each other as if to acknowledge the meaning of the play. They were tennis lovers. Their courtship was the game. With swishing rackets they flirted hour after hour, vigorously twitching each other's lust.

  Afterward, on the club terrace, drinking beer in sweat-soaked clothes, Jean would recognize the glint of desire in her eyes, but he said nothing, determined she should make the first advance.

  She did, finally, on a hot May afternoon. Monsieur de Hoag was in Geneva on a business trip. Jean had left the office early to join Claude on the courts at noon. They played hard, the heat was terrific, and afterward Claude suggested they take a drive.

  It was a cloudless, windy day of violent waves on the Atlantic shore. She chose a deserted little bay between Cap Spartel and Robinson Plage. They parked on the cliffs, climbed down to the beach, and without a word started to undress. Finally, standing bare, they turned to one another and stared. There was a pause as they ached and tensed, the sort of pause, it seemed to Jean, that must always occur before a passionate event. Then she came to him, circled his waist, pressed her cheek against his shoulder. He felt her shudder as he wrapped her in his arms.

  They made love in a cranny in the cliffs, searing, thrusting, violent. Then, pulled apart, they lay on their backs in the sand, chests heaving, listening to the surf. Jean wanted to speak, but all his thoughts were chaotic. He was conscious only that their act had been momentous, and that by it everything in his life was now, irrevocably, changed.

  They made love again. This time she rode him. He gazed up at her, her face held high, her turquoise eyes upon the sea reflecting back the sun. She rode and rode, never looking down. Waves smashed against the sand. He felt that they were joined.

  Afterward they swam, then licked the salt off each other's cheeks.

  At the house that night she led him to her suite. The weeks of tennis had built up such a backlog of desire that it took them until dawn to use it up. They were savage with each other, devouring, excessive. He ravished her, again and again, and she provoked him further with demands. Finally, when they were finished, Jean felt they'd pushed to the limits of their polarity. He was proud of his manhood, and falling off to sleep he was conscious that his sense of it had been enlarged.

  When Monsieur de Hoag came back and they could no longer be alone, they'd brush against each other in the villa halls. Their hands would touch fleetingly as they'd seat themselves for dinner. Over breakfast in the mornings they could hardly bear the stress.

  After a few days Claude could stand it no longer. She suddenly stopped playing tennis in the middle of a match. They got into her car and drove madly down the coast. In Asilah, in a Portuguese hotel, they made love on a stained old mattress while dry thunder rumbled in the sky.

  Tangier embraced them. Something tragic about the city, Jean thought, provided resonance for their affair. He thought of himself as a man living in a decaying temple; he prayed at an altar of erotic love while a storm raged outside.

  Through May and June Monsieur de Hoag was constantly away, on a series of brief business trips to Zurich, Monaco, and Rome. On one of these occasions Jean and Claude were invited together to Barclay's house, a strange, irrelevant dinner, Jean thought, where Claude's father had acted like a fool. Apropos of nothing the General turned to the Governor and began complaining about his phone. Jean, embarrassed, looking around, confronted Omar Salah glaring at him with hate.

  Afterward he told Claude, then asked if she thought Salah suspected their affair.

  "It wasn't Salah who was watching you," she said with a scornful laugh. "It was Barclay. He couldn't tear his eyes away."

  "But why?"

  "He's an English pederast. Are you blind, Jean? Haven't you noticed him on the terrace of the tennis club devouring you as if you were his feast?" And then, fondling his testicles: "How Peter Barclay would love to get his hands on these!"

  Joop de Hoag, she told him, only had one ball. The other, undescended, had atrophied inside. "He disgusts me," she said with a grimace. "Physically he disgusts me. I despise his body and loathe his wealth."

  She kissed him a while, then suddenly turned over on her back. "I lied to you, Jean," she said. "Last year I slept with Salah. We spent a weekend together in Marrakech. Per-haps he suspects us. I don't know."

  He could hardly believe it, but when he questioned her she refused to tell him any more.

  "Tangier is complicated," she said. "Things here are not so simple as they seem."

  Yes, there was something torturous about Tangier, a sense he had of tension and labyrinthine density all around. Was the romantic charm of this old city merely its facade? Was it an abyss into which he'd flung himself for love?

  He lay awake that night listening to the distant cries of the muezzin, thinking about women and deceit. He was twenty-three; Claude was thirty-five. Together their bodies sang, but there was disconnection between their minds. He'd perceived this in her before, sometimes when they were making love: a lack of focus, a concentration upon herself, her eyes, always averted, fixed on some distant point. Is it possible, he asked himself, that she and Salah are still involved? Why would he stare at me like that? Could she have told him? Is she mad?

  Sometimes he thought that she was. She seemed to want to dare the world to discover them, to take chances no sane person in her position would want to take. She insisted they rent horses and gallop publicly down the Spartel beach. On a tennis ball with a pen she wrote that she loved him, then demanded he smash aces until her words were worn away.

  One morning they played very early at the club, even before Monsieur de Hoag was awake. After a hard set she came with him into the men's changing room. Claiming she was excited by the danger and the smell, she insisted he make love to her on the wooden bench between the lockers. He complied because it was still early and no one else was about, but in the middle of the act he opened his eyes and saw the crippled boy who raked the courts watching them from the door. He didn't tell Claude but later he was scared. He knew that now that one Arab had learned their secret, all Tangier had learned it too.

  There was something corrupting about
the city, he thought, something infectious about its rot. His golden love for Claude had tarnished to a mellow rust. He was beginning to enjoy her whirlpool, her sense of treachery, her bizarre desires.

  Together they went to see Inigo, to confide in him, confess their affair. The painter, flattered to be chosen as their confidant, invited them to make a tour of his house. He was charming, almost childlike, as he led them through room after room, each connected to the next by a Moorish arch, each containing a finished painting hanging from the wall by chains. In his studio he showed them an uncompleted portrait of Patrick Wax. The old man was seated before a display of crucifixes; a Pekingese, sprouting a pink erection, gazed out from beneath Wax's chair.

  When they had seen everything, and had finished gasping over the perfection of his technique, Inigo led them to a little room beside his pool. "This is a steambath," he said, opening a valve. "I built it to remind myself of the many amusing people I've met in the bathhouses of New York."

  Claude was delighted, clapped her hands. "Please, Inigo," she said, "let Jean make love to me here. You can watch us if you like."

  For a moment Jean was stunned, then excited by her idea. How far I've come, he thought, since I dreamed of her in the fall.

  Inigo released more steam, smiled, and left to fetch his crayons. They were already undressed, locked on the floor of wooden slats, when he returned and began to sketch.

  Afterward they knelt beside him, naked, their bodies slick.

  Peering at his drawing, they discovered themselves as vague, amorphous figures lost in mist. It was a tour de force of draftsmanship. Inigo ripped it from his sketchbook and presented it to Claude as a gift. He placed his arms around their bare shoulders, hugged them tight, then lit and passed a kif cigarette.

  "I have a new project for a painting," he said. "Six cocks. Just six. The midsections of their owners too, of course—navels, thighs, hairs. The cocks not hard, not erect, just hanging loose. The title: Six Cocks at Midday."

  He looked at Jean, and then back to Claude. "With your permission, Madame, I should like to include his in the work."

  Jean squirmed with embarrassment, but Claude giggled with glee.

  "I'm perfectly serious," said the painter, reaching down and gently taking hold of Jean's organ with his hand. "Good proportions. Good heft. Perhaps I will locate it third from the left, a little closer to the foreground plane, standing out a bit from the other five. You understand the reference, of course: Six Persimmons by the Zen painter Mu Ch'i."

  Such erudition! People didn't speak like that in Paris. Jean Tassigny was happy he'd come to live in Tangier. In this white, glittering city one could discover who one was. One could dive through a gleaming surface of idealizations and illusions, and swim about in murky depths.

  Now there was danger.

  Two days after they read about themselves in Robin's column, Jean and Claude drove out to the airport to meet Monsieur de Hoag. He was flying in from Lisbon on a morning flight. The field was only fifteen minutes from the house, but they left an hour early to drive along the sea.

  Claude parked above the "Grottoes of Hercules," caves in the cliffs that marked the entrance to the Straits. They walked down toward the ruin of an ancient Roman sardine factory, eroded by two thousand years of winds and drifting sands. The beach was deserted. They stripped, plunged into the sea, then returned to the sand and made love.

  It was a defiant act, well calculated by Claude, for she knew this spot was on the line of approach to the main runway of the Tangier airport. When they were finished, they lay naked to the sun and watched the plane sail in. It was not five hundred feet above them and seemed to float as it crossed the sky. Probably no one in the plane could see them, and certainly no one could have made them out. But still, it seemed to Jean, it was a strange and desperate thing to do.

  After the plane passed and began to bank they rushed to the car, dressing as they ran. Jean drove quickly to the terminal. They arrived in time to mount the observation deck and watch the passengers cross the tarmac to the lounge.

  A few minutes later Jean stood back while Claude ran to her husband, embraced him, welcomed him home to Tangier. He stepped forward then to formally shake his employer's hand. Joop de Hoag handed him the baggage checks. Jean felt pity for him, and terror.

  The Spy

  Early one morning in the middle of July Hamid Ouazzani was driving along Vasco de Gama when he spied the Foster Knowles' jogging group moving like an apparition through the mist. He stopped to watch. They were running on a trail parallel to the Jew's River. He could make out Foster in the lead, taking awkward, gangling strides, followed by a bobbing line of men and women of assorted heights. Hamid recognized some of them: Clive Whittle, Madame Fufu, Jack Whyte, and, at the end, the ferocious Jackie Knowles yelling harsh encouragements to speed up the pace. He fixed on her swinging ponytail, watched it grow smaller as she was swallowed by the mist. He thought of Europeans locked in their danse macabre and sighed over the fate of Daniel Lake.

  He knew from his surveillance that the Consul General was involved with Mrs. Knowles, a ridiculous affair, it seemed to him, considering the abandonment with which Lake was carrying it on. His indiscretions were now the talk of Tangier. He'd been observed kissing her in the balcony of the Mauritania Cinema, and groping with her in the official American car. Hamid didn't want to judge Lake. His posture as a policeman was to understand the foreign mind. But the Consul's behavior was inexplicable. Whenever Hamid thought of him he sighed with sympathy for a human being in distress.

  Sympathy: For years he'd lavished it on foreigners. Now he resented them for taking up his time. His capacity, which had once seemed infinite, to hear confessions and then absolve, was diminishing little by little as each July day passed. The summer was at its height, his office was flooded with cases, but his attention was focused on Kalinka, his search to understand her, uncover her dreamy past.

  Every night now they talked, though both of them were tired, she from her work at Achar's clinic, he from his hours at the Sûreté. She was assisting Driss Bennani with a "census" of the slumdwellers—she called it a "census" though Hamid felt it was more than that. But when he hinted to her that he disapproved, she waved his objections away. "Are you jealous?" she asked playfully. "Do you want me to stay home like a Moroccan squaw?" He shook his head and did not persist. Her tongue had become sharper since she'd started to work, and she didn't forget things anymore.

  Most of her memories were based on conversations she'd overheard, or things her mother had told her, but still there was a sharpness to these scenes as if she'd observed them all herself. There were inconsistencies, of course, pieces that didn't fit, but when Hamid listened to her and closed his eyes her memories came alive.

  He had a vision of Peter Zvegintzov: he is in hiding when the Viet Minh come to power, crouching by day in the boarded-up back room of his parents' shop, going out at night, foraging for bread. But then, a week or so later, after order is restored, Peter embarks upon an obsessive search for Marguerite and Stephen Zhukovsky's child. He walks the back streets of Hanoi, the rutted dirt streets where the Vietnamese live, passes abandoned trucks and tanks, and Catholic families packing up to leave. He asks questions, walks and walks, but can find no trace of them at all.

  At last, one evening, beginning to think that they are dead, he returns to his shop, where he finds a waiting boy. The boy leads him to a roofless shanty in the refugee district on the southern edge of town where he finds Marguerite and Kalinka shivering in the rain.

  A year later—the end of 1946—the French are back in control. The Viet Minh have been double-crossed by De Gaulle and Chiang Kai-shek. The French have slaughtered twenty thousand Vietnamese in Haiphong. Ho Chi Minh, retreating to the jungles, has begun the Indochina war.

  Peter sits in the back room staring at the wall. Kalinka, an infant, plays with groceries on the floor. Marguerite sweeps out the shop with a bamboo broom. It scratches against the wood—Kalinka recalls the no
ise.

  Peter is shattered. A man destroyed, he screams in the night, then moans and weeps. His torture by the Japanese has left him with fear and scars. But Marguerite nurses him and somehow finds them food. "Survive, Peter!" she tells him. "A man can recover from wounds. Take sustenance in ideals, fraternity, revolution, the struggle to forge a society that is just."

  Early in 1947 Peter reopens his parents' shop, a glorified grocery store, a prototype for La Colombe. He is busy for weeks replenishing his stock, building new and higher shelves. He has strung the curtain that divides the back room, separating Marguerite and Kalinka's bed from his. He decorates the outside of the store with flashing Christmas lights, then announces the reopening in the French-language press. Customers come in. He offers them special service. They ask about Marguerite. "My concubine," says Peter, "and Kalinka, my child."

  Thus begins the network of lies that is to become a screen around their lives. The shop is a front, a center for espionage carried out from the back room by Marguerite. Hamid has a clear vision of her—a fascinating woman he wishes he could have known. She is strong, made of iron, burning with revolutionary zeal, but also kind and capable of great tenderness, a woman who always smiles.

  Peter runs the shop; Marguerite runs the agents. They come and go, bringing instructions, carrying back her information to the jungles and the war. One day at dawn a man in black pajamas appears. He is a courier come to deliver her commission. She has attained the rank of major. She is among the most effective cadre in Hanoi.

  Peter bounces Kalinka on his knee, up and down, up and down. Through the window she can see her mother bicycling up the street. Marguerite has gone on a mission. Peter doesn't know when she'll return. That night he reads Kalinka a fairy tale, then kisses her and turns off the light. She lies on the big bed, the bed she shares with her mother. She can hear Peter undressing on the other side of the curtain. He is humming to himself. She feels safe.