Tangier

by William Bayer

  Here they fondled each other for hours to the music of the city's flutes, soaring out of the pain of self-denial into realms of ecstasy and desire. Tangier seemed different then, so different from the dour city of the fast. They listened to their neighbors celebrating and agreed the nights were charmed.

  Yes, she was a different person now, had actually grown, it seemed. Ever since he'd raised the veil from her past she'd become strong, incisive, and direct. Before, he'd seen no way to connect her to the world which he policed. She'd always been separate from the city, his private mystery, but now he felt there was a relationship between his public life and his life with her.

  It wasn't just her work, this grievance census she was taking in Dradeb. It was something more, another kind of link. She mentioned it to him that night they fought and made up, an idea she had about the meaning of her mother's life.

  "I think," she said after they'd made love and were in bed listening to the flutes, "that all those years that Peter was pretending, trying to duplicate his comradeship with mama—oh, you know, Hamid, starting a store here, arranging the beds the same, even making me pretend to be his wife—that all that time he was smothering me with rituals and lies. I couldn't breathe then, find myself, find out who I was. But now I'm free, thanks to you. I've stopped smoking. I've read books on Vietnam. Now, finally, I understand what mother did. And, listen Hamid, there's a connection too between Hanoi and Tangier, between what happened there and what I feel here."

  He sat up abruptly when she said that. He was astounded, unsettled, even shocked. "No, no," he said, "it's not the same. Oh, in superficial ways, yes. But we're not a colony anymore."

  "But it is the same, Hamid, at least to me. Mama wanted much more than to put out the French. She wanted to change the country. Change the way people lived."

  "Where do you get these ideas, Kalinka? From Achar, of course—"

  She slapped him playfully. "I have my own ideas. Where do I get them? From using my eyes, like you." She raised her body and grasped his face between her hands. "You should know, Hamid. You, of all people, should know. You were born down there. No water. The degradation. Surely you remember what Dradeb is like. What difference does it make to the people down there if they're ruled by the French or a Moroccan king?" She paused, shook her head. "It doesn't make any difference. None at all. All they care about is that someone care for them and that no one trample them—that they aren't hurt by life."

  He turned away. She was right, he knew it, could remember his feelings as he'd gazed up at the Mountain as a boy. But he'd put them aside, replacing his hurt at the indifference of the Europeans by a fascination with their styles of life. He wanted to tell her about that, and about all the hurt he'd once felt, but he was afraid that if he started he would talk too much, say things that would not become him, appear less of a man, and by that risk losing her respect.

  "Tell me, Kalinka," he asked, "what did you do? In the old days, I mean—all those years, those twenty years or so you wandered around Tangier? What did you feel then? What did you think?"

  She smiled. "Lost in smoke," she said. "I walked the streets, went about my errands, looked at the sea, picked flowers, sat around the shop. I didn't feel anything then. I didn't understand. Thank you, Hamid, for rescuing me."

  It was a miracle, they both decided, that they'd found each other in Tangier. He felt grateful to Peter Zvegintzov for having brought her to the town.

  Now, when he saw the Russian on the street or bustling about behind his counter through the window of his shop, Hamid felt no anger against him, no need to hound him or confront him anymore. All the old tension was gone, replaced now by pity. He'd made a resolve never to bother Peter again, not even to use him as an informant despite his access to the European world. And he'd told Aziz to forget about him too.

  After that night when he and Peter had talked he had felt a softening, an erosion of the toughness that had seized him in July. After that night he felt more strongly than ever the loneliness of the foreigners, the awful, isolated loneliness in which they seemed to live. Zvegintzov, Luscombe, Inigo, the Freys; even the philanderers, Lake, Baldeschi, Fufu; the active homosexuals, men like Robin Scott and Patrick Wax—they evoked his pity, for he felt they lived in cages, separated from life, cut off from it by lack of love. And he felt an almost tragic stillness on the Mountain that fit in with this feeling too. He was stirred by sadness when he drove up there. The Mountain was so distant, so passionless, as opposed to Tangier, a cauldron of tension and rage, an Arab city, his town, his home. He couldn't explain this difference, and, unable to reconcile the Mountain and the city, he took refuge in his love for Kalinka, the warmth of her beside him in the night.

  Yet every so often a feud would erupt among the foreigners, and then this new, sad sympathy he felt would shift quickly to contempt. Such a change occurred on the eighth day of the fast. Suddenly his office was filled with shrieking people. Angry name calling and recriminations filled the air.

  Within the space of twenty-four hours Colonel Brown's Dalmatian attacked the Ashton Codds' teenage maid, Peter Barclay's schnauzer tore open the leg of Skiddy de Bayonne's gardener, Vanessa Bolton's Alsatian bitch set upon the Hawkins' groom, and Katie Manchester's cocker spaniel bit the buttocks of Camilla Weltonwhist's chauffeur.

  There was a common element in these events, Europeans' pets attacking Moroccan flesh. But it was not a simple case of Europeans against Moroccans—the feud developed another way. It became a matter of employers of bitten servants versus the owners of attacking beasts. The Codds, for instance, were adamant in their demand that Colonel Brown's Dalmatian be put to death.

  Hamid tried, as best he could, to sort the matter out. He called the province veterinarian, who agreed to take the dogs away for observation at a kennel near the crumbling corrida de toros on the eastern edge of town. Here they were visited daily by incensed owners bearing platters of ground-up meat, while each morning the injured servants were accompanied by their masters to the anti-rabies injection line at the Institute Pasteur.

  The rabies scare blew over in a week. The saliva tests proved negative, and the animals were returned to loving homes. But though the alarm proved false, the bitterness did not subside. People swore they'd get even no matter how long it took.

  There was no logic, he knew, to these European feuds, yet the city seemed riddled with them—hatreds and vendettas that possessed the foreigners, a form of sustenance by which they renewed themselves and by which, he sometimes felt, they'd be devoured.

  When he described the dog-and-servant feud to Kalinka, she shook her head and laughed.

  "I know you think it's funny," he said, "but it took three days to straighten out."

  "Oh, Hamid, I'm sorry," she said. "It's just so ridiculous—that you have to spend your time on such silly things."

  "Yes, it is ridiculous. I know. All my work. All of it."

  "Oh, Hamid—" She edged closer to him, took hold of his hand. "Poor Hamid, so much trouble you have, so many troubling affairs."

  "What can I do? I'm supposed to police these people."

  "Can you transfer to another section, get away from them for a while?"

  He shrugged. It had taken him years to get where he was. He'd always wanted to be chief of the foreign section. Now he had the job, and all the misery of it too.

  "Listen," she said, "please don't be angry with me, Hamid. You've helped me so much, freeing me from hashish, talking with me, helping me so I could face the world and discover who I am. Well, maybe now I can help you a little too. Because you're a prisoner, Hamid—a prisoner of the Mountain. There're so many more important things than the things that happen there. Injustice, cruelty—I see it so clearly now, and you must free yourself so you can deal with them."

  Injustice, cruelty. She was speaking of Dradeb, of course, and in the same words used so often by Achar. Had the surgeon put her up to this? Were he and Bennani using her to get him to help them in Dradeb? He dismissed the notion as absurd
, but it set him to thinking about his life.

  He had thought that if he could understand Zvegintzov and Kalinka, get to the bottom of their past, then the mystery of all the foreigners would be revealed, and the motives for all their curious actions would become clear to him at last. It hadn't happened. He was still confused, and now Kalinka was implying that he had a narrow vision of the world. A prisoner of the Mountain—was she right about that? He wondered. Could she by some intuitive route have come in a few weeks to a comprehensive grasp of the city while he'd become lost in a sideshow, the foreign colony, so many years? This notion—that for years he'd been missing Tangier's essential point—was too terrible to face.

  It's the fast, he thought, that's clouding up my mind. He'd begun to get headaches from lack of food and interrupted sleep, could hardly bear any longer the deprivation of water in the day. Even his meetings with Robin at Haifa Café seemed boring and irrelevant now. While his favorite informer spieled out gossip, he stared in agony across the Straits.

  "—Percy Bainbridge, you know, Hamid, the failed inventor, the sycophant—well, he just won a fortune at the Casino Municipal. Amazing! And, oh dear! I nearly forgot—Inigo's broken off with Pumpkin Pie. Yes, it's finally happened. He's gotten rid of that crazy lad. Now he's secluded himself to work on an enormous canvas, a double portrait, erotic to be sure, of Tessa and David Hawkins, our incestuously involved brother-and-sister horseback riding act—"

  Who were these people? Did he know them? How many years had he wasted caring about their pointless lives?

  "—Anyway, let me tell you, I've great plans for little Pie. Now that he's 'wild chicken,' out of Inigo's sphere, I'm going to put him together with Hervé Beaumont, who keeps telling me he wants to become a full-time queen. Pie's a little dangerous, but Hervé can handle that. There's no better hustler around, I think, to teach a boy all the tricks—"

  Hamid turned away. Robin's mention of Hervé Beaumont brought back sad thoughts of Farid. He'd seen his brother many times since his intrusion in the rug room, but neither of them had spoken of the incident, as if it hadn't happened and Hamid hadn't seen what he had seen. It didn't matter anyway, he supposed. They were brothers and loved each other as brothers should. Farid was entitled to live his life as he liked. And yet it seemed to Hamid that in that moment in the rug room he had stood between opposing worlds which he could not put together in his mind.

  Could Kalinka help him reconcile the foreigners' Tangier which he policed with the Arab city in which he lived? Could she give him a vision of Tangier in which all its facets would finally be clearly joined? She'd said he'd liberated her from hashish, and now she would free him from the Mountain. Was that possible? Was she right? Could she really have become so strong?

  He had a dream. He was lost in a medina—not the medina of Tangier, for he knew his way through that, but a new and strange medina, a maze of alleyways and buildings, narrow streets that turned at odd angles, filled with people crying out in European tongues. Yes, that was what was strange—there were no Arabs in these streets. It was a medina for Europeans, which was impossible of course, a European labyrinth in which he was caught and trapped and lost. But then Kalinka appeared, slim and straight in a Vietnamese dress. She beckoned to him. He followed her. She became his guide, led him through the labyrinth, and showed him how he might escape.

  A Night of Five Parties

  Two-thirds of the way through Ramadan the foreign community of Tangier became possessed. The social madness, the effort to transform a disastrous summer into a glittering fête, reached a peak when five parties of varying elegance and size were scheduled for a single August night.

  Everyone's appetite had been whetted, prior to that sweltering evening, by the presence in Tangier harbor of Henderson Perry's enormous yacht. That magnificent boat, The Houston Gusher, anchored in plain sight, seemed to advertise the festivities to come.

  Those fortunate enough to be invited to Perry's "Castlemaine" would have a chance to devour his Beluga caviar and God only knew how many bottles of his fine champagne. The American Ambassador and half the Moroccan royal family were coming up from Rabat. There was even a rumor (incorrect, as it turned out) that the Shah of Iran would secretly fly in.

  In the event that one were not invited to Perry's, the situation was still not bleak. Countess de Lauzon was throwing a rival affair—"an evening of fantasy," she said—at which her guests, the sons of Sodom and the daughters of Gomorrah, were encouraged to appear in outrageous dress.

  Then there were the Manchesters, who'd invited their friends to "drink the dregs" on the eve of their departure for Fort Lauderdale. Willard and Katie weren't aware of the other parties when they sent their invitations out, and later, on account of pride, they couldn't change the date. It didn't matter anyway, according to Robin Scott, since their circle barely touched the higher orbits. Peter Zvegintzov, Dan Lake, the Foster Knowles', and the Clive Whittles had accepted, the Fufus were probables, and the Ashton Codds had promised to "try."

  The gathering of Tangier Players club members at Jill and David Packwood's Shepherd's Pie was the lowest of the parties in social terms, but held the promise of high drama nonetheless. The Packwoods' little restaurant on the beach would be closed to tourists for the night. Once a nasty bit of TP business was concluded, there would be a beer-and-sausages party to celebrate the end of Laurence Luscombe's reign.

  Finally there was a soirée at Jimmy Sohario's, "a party to unwind from parties," as it was billed. Everyone was invited: duchesses, diplomats, hustlers off the streets. The idea was to slip away from the Manchesters', the Packwoods', Henderson Perry's, or Françoise de Lauzon's just after midnight when things were cooling down, then hurry over to Jimmy's "Excalibur," where the revelries would last till dawn.

  Tangier was ready, poised for all of this, when the unexpected news of Vicar Wick's suicide broke like a summer storm. A cloud of confusion hung above the Mountain. Lightning bolts of sorrow pierced British breasts.

  But then, as the contents of the Vicar's diaries became known, the shock and grief began to lift. The sorrowful image of him dangling from a rafter in the nave of St. Thomas in a noose of his own contriving, gave way to a sense, generally shared, that the old boy had got what he deserved.

  Word of his scandalous diaries traveled fast. His expressions of hatred, his detestation of his loyal flock, were greeted with stunned outrage. He held them all responsible, it seemed, for the evils that had descended upon the church: the anonymous notes, the pierced sheep's eye, even the hacking of the altar crucifix. People were prepared to forgive the curse of madness, to say "There but for the grace of God go I," but the Vicar's accusations against them, his hatred so monstrously misplaced, eroded any sympathy they might have felt.

  Lester Brown certainly felt that way. "My God," he said, wiping the sweat from his gleaming pate, "how that awful man led me on. He had me spying on people, making lists of suspects whom he knew were innocent all the time. Kept talking about the future of St. Thomas, the hypocrite, as if he ever really gave a good goddamn."

  Lester might have had good cause to feel betrayed, but there were others who, though less intimately involved, expressed great fury too. How can this be? they asked, bitter and confused. How could this man whom we honored, made curator of our faith, have stabbed us so cruelly in the back? Other, less pretty phrases were bandied about the Mountain. "A kick in the ass," said Percy Bainbridge. "A knee to the balls," said Patrick Wax. The furor, which raged like a tornado, brought many Englishmen to tears, not in memory of their late vicar, to be sure, but for what his actions told them about themselves.

  The Mountain recovered after a while, making a conscious effort to dismiss the matter from its collective mind. "We're not accountable," Peter Barclay told his friends, "not accountable in any way. Besides, we must try to occupy ourselves. The parties, for instance—it'll do us good to let off steam. In the autumn there'll be plenty of time to find someone new to lead the church."

  So the stor
m passed, nearly as quickly as it had come. Spiritually regrouped, the Europeans marched on with their lives. There was much to think about those torrid August days; Tangier was restless, and a night of five parties loomed.

  Hamid longed for an air conditioner, anything to relieve the heat. The churning fan that hung from the ceiling of his office made a sirocco of the stifling air. There was a water cooler out in the corridor and a machine that dispensed paper cups. He brushed by it many times each day. He hated it. It mocked his thirst.

  Such a clutter on his desk, such a jumble of cases he could never solve. He hurt from Ramadan, suffered from the fast. One was not supposed even to swallow one's own saliva, or insult Allah by smoking a cigarette. It was mad, he knew, to abide by these rigid rules, especially since he did not think of himself as a particularly religious man. The President of Tunisia had told his people that the Koranic laws no longer applied, but Morocco was different, a theocratic state. The pressure to conform was enormous. Only combat battalions were exempt.

  Truly, he thought, it had been an awful summer, miserably hot, filled with crimes. Then there'd been the suicide, less astounding as an isolated act than for the hatred and bitterness it aroused. The original note addressed to Barclay, which had triggered the Vicar's loss of faith, had never harmed its intended target, and its author, whoever he was, was still unpunished and unknown. But the Vicar, who'd taken on the burden of that author's guilt, was now despised in death.

  Ah, he thought, the infinite complexities of the foreigners, the inscrutable workings of their minds. But really the whole business bored him now—the Mountain seemed alien in the face of the agonies of the fast.