‘Do . . . not,’ each word measured, appalled, ‘ever . . . say . . . such . . . a . . . thing.’
How monumental my transgression. The need for him to denounce it. I understood. Oh how I understood.
‘He has done nothing –’ the vehemence of it was shaking him – ‘nothing of the sort. He is missing. Got it? . . . Missing! . . . Got it?’ It was almost a shriek.
I was nodding before he’d even finished. Nodding feebly, nodding to make him stop. I got it.
The way stories begin is important.
The sun continued to fall. In time my father’s panting breath slowed, giving over to something else. There was my father and Em and Jack and me. The bonds of our relationships were almost tangible that faltering afternoon, the last rays picking them out. Father and sons and stepmother and brothers – an enclosed verandah full of the living past. A houseful of it, the town outside filled with history, impossible to measure. A late wren tapped its beak sharply against the louvers, a flash of blue. All three of us looked up as it darted away. My mother somewhere in this too, always.
It was left to Em to begin again.
‘We know barely anything,’ she said. ‘We got a call during the week. They told us he’d disappeared. They said it’s possible he’s been killed, they said it’s possible but they just don’t know. They’ve been looking for him. They’ve sent patrols out to find him, but haven’t been able to.’
They’d known this for days, I thought, but they’d kept it from me. Em quickened, her voice rising, a little shrill.
‘They say it’s possible he’s been killed, but there’s no evidence. There’s no trace, there’s –’
‘I need you to go, Sebastian.’
The house was suddenly silent. Profoundly quiet.
How seldom my father spoke my name, how momentous when it happened. The power of it. The cruel, unsettling power.
FIVE
The land thinned, shedding its layers, first human, then plant. Finally the landscape itself flattened so much that the only things remaining were bus and road and rock-strewn plain. The nakedness was disorienting. I listened to the roadsong, a lullaby of engine and tyre and wind.
Lhoussine said he wanted to learn about Christian countries.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Christian countries,’ he repeated. ‘Australia, America, England.’
‘There are no Christian countries. Only Christians.’
He paused, looked at me, doubtful. But he didn’t disagree either.
‘We have the Qur’an. You have the Bible,’ he said.
These big ideas, and our simple words. I didn’t know if it was Lhoussine, or the limitations of language, but I liked it. The directness of it. Perhaps too much language is a bad thing. Perhaps it gets in the way of what we really want to say. But I was callow too: I liked the idea I was representing my country. The thrill of it.
‘I don’t know anything about the Qur’an.’
‘The words of Allah.’
‘Like the Bible,’ I said.
‘The Bible is men’s words. The Qur’an – it is Allah speaking.’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Do you believe the Bible?’ he asked.
I became suddenly defensive. There, on that bus, beginning its plunge into evening, on an endless road in North Africa, with someone I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have cared, but I did.
‘The errors,’ he continued.
‘What errors?’
‘Genesis,’ he said. ‘It is not true, no?’
‘No,’ I said, thinking of apples and snakes and arks and floods. ‘It is a story. A metaphor. It is true in the way metaphors are true.’
I doubted his English was good enough to know what that meant, metaphor. I’m not sure I knew.
‘And Jesus?’
‘Yes.’
‘He tells about God, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘He is a prophet? A great prophet?’
‘Yes.’
‘But not God.’
I looked at him.
‘If two people have books which describe their God, and one contains errors, how can it be preferred?’
He paused, and because I hadn’t answered, said: ‘The book without error must be true.’
I had nothing. My Catholic childhood left me ill-equipped for this. I knew about the mass and its rituals, but not the Bible. I knew about the sacraments, and the priests, but could quote no chapter, no verse. There was the profession of faith, the stations of the cross, and what remained of the liturgical calendar. I had the parables, and I had Mary and I had dogma. But I did not have the Bible, let alone the Qur’an. I could not look at Lhoussine then for fear of giving myself away. The possibility this man may have known more about the Bible than I did. And even if that wasn’t so, did we, between us, have the language for these subtleties? I trawled through the lyrics of every Bob Marley song I knew for something that might help, but found nothing.
‘And what about you?’ I asked eventually, remembering, ‘why are you going to El-Aaiún?’
‘Like you. My brother!’
‘Your brother is there?’
‘There is nothing to do in Dar El Baida. El-Aaiún is far from home, but there is work. Not big money. Maroc is poor. Not like your country. But money. And work is important, no?’
‘What does he do?’
‘He is in the army too!’ Lhoussine said, laughing.
*
As the sun fell and the desert softened, the road veered towards the coast again and began to follow it, a thin bitumen seam between land and sea. I looked down to the beach, so different from the soft, warm beaches I knew. It was like a primordial battleground, the front between the immense silent desert and the vast-pounding waves. Great clouds of sea-spray swirled in tumult above. The cliffs were so great, so gouged, so jagged that together they seemed a formidable record of the sea’s victories. A few single, desperate huts perched on the cliffs, the hovels of lone fishermen seeking their catch from that utterly inhospitable sea.
The first shipwreck startled me. It was an old carcass, its flesh stripped away by the Atlantic long ago, and what remained was a rusting, ribbed skeleton. It was like seeing an unattended corpse for the first time: the travesty of it having been left alone, abandoned to disintegrate on this distant shore. The first startled me, but I counted eight more before the road turned inland once again, repelled finally by that too-desolate sea.
*
We travelled through the night, pulled blankets and jackets and jumpers tight, slept.
I woke as the bus slowed – a change in the engine, a subtle fall in its pitch. There was a weight against my right shoulder. I twisted myself from under Lhoussine and wondered how long the two of us had been like that, me his pillow. He stirred, and repositioned himself, his arms folding against the seat in front, head in the woollen hat resting on his own arms, back hunched, face turned towards me. In the dark his eyes opened, seemed to consider me, then closed once more.
I wiped condensation from the window with the bus curtain and peered outside. I could see the beams of our headlights, and the road stretching ahead. The verge, however, was jagged, and in the umbra of the headlights the bitumen fell away to sandy earth, the odd stunted bush, darkness beyond that.
The bus-driver dropped a gear and then a second. When we halted he slid his window open, and muttered into the night. I watched the set of his head, the angle of his neck. The conductor was soon awake and leaning over the driver’s seat, his arm draped across the driver’s shoulder. I watched the gestures building – hand and head – and the muffled words pushing backwards and forwards, rising without erupting. It seemed like a pantomime. Eventually the conductor stood, swivelled and, adopting the pose of weary messenger, spok
e to the bus. One of the passengers responded, some question. The conductor grunted, and slowly a murmuring began to roll up the bus as people shook each other awake. One by one people’s heads appeared above their seats as they straightened from sleep.
Through the window I saw a collection of low-set buildings, little more than mudbrick huts. Nearer to the bus and close to the ground, the tiny twin sparkles of some desert mammal’s eyes levitated in the dark, before disappearing. Two or three torch beams weaved paths across the dusty ground, thin yellow streaks which, as they neared, leapt onto the bitumen. One of the uniformed men following the beams reached the bus and grappled with the door handle. The conductor unlocked it and the man’s voice was suddenly there with us in the cavity of the bus. He gave some order and we rose from our seats and walked down the aisle, down the steps and out into the winter-dark cold.
The moment my boot-sole hit the ground one of the uniformed men exclaimed, then jerked torch-light into my eyes. My head turned as if I’d been struck. I was the only westerner on that bus in Western Sahara. The only white, and probably the only non-Muslim.
The soldier with the torch-light followed me as I joined Lhoussine in a huddle of men. He prodded me with his torch and said something.
‘Pardon,’ I replied, ‘je ne parle pas Arabique.’ Without knowing if there was such a word as Arabique.
‘Où allez-vous?’ he said.
‘El-Aaiún.’
‘Quoi?’
‘Mon frère. Mon frère est là. El-Aaiún.’
‘Nations Unies?’
‘Oui.’
He left and joined the other two soldiers who’d been watching from a few paces, their three torch-beams boring holes of light out of the earth as they talked. They were in uniform, great coats down to their calves, their weapons slung across their shoulders, easy. Jack could have named the gun, listed its features and recounted its history. To me it was just a shooting device.
The soldier returned. In the glow of the bus headlights I could see a blood-red star stitched onto the shoulder of his khaki uniform.
‘Passeport,’ he demanded.
I took it out and handed it to him.
‘Soldat?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Militaire?’
I shook my head furiously.
‘Australien?’ he asked, looking up from my passport.
‘Oui. Australien.’
He murmured something, then turned, and called this out to his comrades. Australien. The entire bus, these passengers I’d been travelling with quietly since Casablanca, all of them suddenly knew my nationality. I felt exhibited. What did it mean to this soldier, stationed out here on the country’s frontier, that I was Australian?
‘Venez,’ he said. His hand gripped my wrist, and he led me away from the bus and the road and the crowd, towards the long low-set buildings. I swivelled my head and saw Lhoussine moving towards the remaining soldiers, saw him speak. But the soldier yanked my wrist, swung me around and marched me away. The building ahead seemed somehow humble before the desert, its window gently pulsing with light. The soldier moved in behind me as we neared the door, the point of something pressing against the small of my back.
At the threshold, one of his comrades suddenly yelled out across the dark, and my guard pulled me to a stop and looked back. Through the doorway I could see a wooden table, a lantern set upon it, chairs at angles, a low bunk against a grimy wall, a blanket balled at its foot. I waited as the second soldier joined us, boot-crunch on tufts of grass, and spoke softly to my escort, in case I understood. The solider holding me grunted, then released my wrist.
I started back towards the bus, towards Lhoussine who had broken from the soldiers and was waiting for me, apart.
‘They are stupid,’ he said. And then, murmuring to himself in Arabic while he looked for the right word, ‘. . . and hungry.’
‘Greedy?’
‘Yes! Stupid and greedy.’
The soldiers resumed their search. This time it was meticulous. They swept through us, checking the identity cards of each passenger, all of us shivering in the night. One red-star checked the men, a second the women, the third – the one who’d led me away – searched the bus. In the glare of its ceiling lights his hands clawed the overhead storage compartments, dragging bags out, their contents showering onto the floor and the seats. At the height of his ransack, he stopped and pulled a cheap travel bag from the bus, down the steps and onto the ground. It was the sort you’d find at bus terminals the world over, striped red and white and blue. He lifted it, and waved it to us, his voice agitated. No one spoke. He lifted the bag higher. The night suddenly deepened. He raised the bag one-handed above his head, obscuring stars in his wild shaking. This time, somewhere, feet shuffled. It was a tiny movement, but sharpened by the cold air. It was enough. The soldier turned to the sound, and people parted, offering up whoever had made it. He reached a shaking woman, flung the bag at her feet and yelled, his mouth contorted near her face. The woman bent and slowly unzipped the bag. Its contents spilled out, the top of the bag gaping like a wound, the evidence against her exposed, some contraband.
The soldier led her away. No one came forward in protest, no husband, no father, no brother. Once more the soldier stalked towards the hut with his quarry, but this time he crossed the threshold, closed the door, and disappeared. The woman’s bag stood on the ground like a thing defeated, hollowing a space from the crowd of people.
The silence was measured in heartbeats.
I watched the building and the glow of light from its window. I willed it to change, to show the movement of bodies in the room – to see and understand, but there was nothing. Eventually the long quiet broke. Someone whispered, then another. The murmuring grew louder until it sounded like a horde of locusts in the night, resistance. The conductor approached the two remaining soldiers, a responsibility cast upon him. I thought I heard a distant muffled cry from the glowing building. The conductor’s voice was filled with protest and plea, both, but the soldiers were unmoved. The conductor became more and more shrill until his voice broke, and he stepped away from the soldiers, separating himself. Whether he was released by them or commissioned with some new task, I couldn’t tell.
He crossed to where the driver was squatting on the bitumen by the front tyre of the bus. The conductor hissed at him, low and into his ear, before raising his right arm, as if the haunching driver was a dog he might strike. The driver cowered at first, then rose to his feet and followed the conductor, close to his heel.
I was the first they approached because in the dark I was just another body. But when the conductor spoke I didn’t understand; I shrugged my shoulders and raised the palms of my hands. Perhaps he thought it impossible to communicate to me what was happening. Or maybe he was embarrassed, even ashamed. That I, the Australien, should be witness to this, let alone part of it. He moved on to Lhoussine, who was already reaching into his wallet. Passenger by passenger the conductor moved among us, each without exception.
When it was done and the ransom paid, the woman was returned. Her head was bowed. I looked for some sign of what had happened inside that low-set building, the folds of her cloth disturbed, some unevenness in her step. She bent to her bag, and closed it. A man stepped forward, lifted it to his shoulder and waited for her instructions. The woman made for the stairs of the bus while we stood dumb. Again the crowd parted for her, some right she’d earned. Ultimately, this was something that could not be explained in any language.
I expected this would be the end, that we would all now board the bus and be on our way again. But no.
There may have been a murmur I hadn’t heard, or perhaps one of the men had set an example, and the others knew to follow. However it happened, my fellow-passengers began moving as one. Some rolled mats onto the ground. Others simply collected the folds of their gowns and kne
lt on the earth. Lhoussine joined them, the soldiers too, each of them facing the same direction, back down the highway, back the way we’d come. Together they bowed low, and pressed their foreheads to the ground. They incanted and rose and raised their hands to their heads and bowed again. Whether praying for forgiveness or from fear or habit I couldn’t hope to know. Theirs was a quiet fervour, and I felt my separateness.
I stood in the dark, the merest glow of light on the eastern horizon, until their kneeling, and rising was done. Then I stepped back onto the bus with them, the day beginning, finally, to crack open. In those last moments before the bus plunged forward, I wished for something in my hands, some stone to turn in my fingers, some surface to stroke and ease my anxiety.
SIX
El-Aaiún looked to have been swept by the ocean winds into a shallow trench where once an ancient river had coursed its way to the sea. Near the low, black tents of nomads on the fringe of town, foraging goats and camels raised their heads to watch the bus rumble past. The thread of highway passed beneath a triumphal arch of mudbrick. Large chunks of baked clay had fallen loose from the arch and lay in piles of rubble either side of the road. As the bus droned out from beneath the arch I saw, off to the right beyond the town’s perimeter, an army base. Inside the high-security fencing were gleaming modular barracks, and large military vehicles moved slowly around the compound as if they were searching for an opening to get out.
Inside the town we passed housing blocks daubed in white, sheets flapping from their windows. The administration buildings looked like pieces of pastel Lego, grass grew between the cracks in the concrete aprons of petrol stations, and a fierce wind blew. The town’s people seemed stilled, as if they’d stopped breathing the moment the bus entered the city and we were travelling through a diorama. The body of a shopkeeper standing in a doorway. Two women facing each other on a street corner. Lone figures with their heads down, faces turned from the wind, eyes averted from the sun. An old man seated on a crate in a patch of shade beside a wall. There were bands of children standing or squatting close, like the trapped citizens of Pompeii. Army trucks idled, their trays filled with soldiers, so many sun-glassed animals, all eyes turned on us.
Closer to Stone Page 3