The bus pulled into the gare routière and stopped. The moment the driver cut the engine, we too joined the stillness of the place. A bus company official left his ticket office and walked heavily towards us. Two children bearing trays piled high with small plastic bags of water came in through the gates, disappearing for a moment into the cloud of dust and exhaust which trailed the bus. One by one people emerged from the shade of the terminal building to greet passengers – their stepping into the heat and light startling, an act of magic.
But after the long journey, there was no urgency among the passengers. I followed Lhoussine slowly down the aisle and onto the tarmac. He stopped and looked about. Stepping round him I moved clear of the bus to watch the conductor climb the ladder onto the roof where he loosened the tarpaulin ropes. Lhoussine found his brother and they embraced, kissing once, twice, three times on alternate cheeks, the student and the soldier.
The conductor lowered our luggage to us, and I slung the comforting weight of my duffel bag over my shoulder before stepping away from the bus, into a moment of uncertainty. I didn’t want to meet Lhoussine’s eyes, didn’t want to restart something that had ended, because whatever thread of friendship there’d been between us was broken now. Did we even need to speak again, he and I, this man who’d been my companion these last hours?
But Lhoussine came towards me, his brother a step behind.
I can’t recall the brother’s name. I remember the uniform with its lone red star and the hat he’d not taken off, and the rifle at his back. He was thin and serious but the grip of his hand was soft.
‘My brother has a car,’ Lhoussine said. ‘May I invite?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. Thanks.’
‘I would like to invite.’
‘Thank you, but no. Go well. Goodbye.’
I turned away. I was hard. Even now I’m not quite sure why.
A few minutes later I saw them again through the glass of the bus-station café, where I was drinking mint tea and circling the names of hotels in my guidebook. Lhoussine and his brother were walking slowly away down the dusty street towards a car, their hands touching. I couldn’t help thinking of Jack, and a group of us boys waiting outside the old Art Deco cinema in Margaret Street in Toowoomba.
*
We’d bought our tickets and were hanging on the footpath, checking things out, Jack the centre of it all. Then suddenly he was beside me, and he was telling the older boys something about me – I can’t remember what – and he wrapped his arm around my shoulder as he talked. But even after the conversation shifted and something else attracted their attention, Jack still lounged beside me, the gentle weight of his forearm on the side of my neck a solid thing, more permanent than anything I’d known for ages. For long seconds Jack and I stood there, together, leaning against the wall of the picture theatre, looking out at the world as it moved around us. Then it was over, and there was a movie to watch, stuff to make happen, a gang of boys to rejoin. And me confused for months afterwards, desperately seeking that moment again.
*
The first two hotels were full of peacekeepers, not a room free. As I approached the entrance of the third, the Hotel Lakouara, a convoy of white four-wheel drives was forming in the car park, half a dozen of them, each marked with two enormous black letters – UN – on their sides. Soldiers were opening doors and slamming them shut, engines were coming to life, and one by one the vehicles were pulling out of their bays into the convoy. When all were in place, they passed through the hotel gate onto the street and swept away, each travelling at the same speed, the same distance between them, as if it had all been choreographed.
I almost raised my arm as they went past, nearly stepped forward to wave one of the vehicles down. Because, after all, I’d reached my destination. I was here, in El-Aaiún, and there they were, the peacekeepers, so close, my brother one of them. They probably knew my brother, those men in their sunglasses, and would do what they could, surely, to help. Instead, I stood there on the footpath with my bag slung over my shoulder as the convoy passed, straining to make out the features of each soldier behind his darkened window. And they looked out at me. Wondering, I guess, what a western civilian was doing there, looking as lost as I must have. It was only when the vehicles had disappeared from view at the end of the long street, and the sound of each of their fading engines fell away to nothing, that I went inside.
‘Vous avez . . . une . . . chambre?’
My crude French, mere fragments of sound I was trying to pass off as language.
‘No. All full,’ the man at the desk answered in English.
‘Where can I find a room then?’
He shrugged. My predicament was nothing to him.
‘The souk,’ he said, ‘cheaper.’ That consolation.
Then, with slow gestures of the back of his hand, he began motioning me out of his foyer, as if I was dust that needed sweeping away.
I set out again and reached a vast square bordered with avenues of date palms like ancient columns, their ragged fronds harried by the wind. The mosque appeared and a water tower and an array of public monuments. Buildings the colour of the local sand seemed to have risen out of the ground, for some evanescent purpose, as if they might soon crumble and be trodden by goat-hoof back into the soil again. Two boys rode past on a bike, the older pedalling, the younger balancing on the cross-bar, both legs dangling down one side. The arms of the older boy stretched either side of the younger; the one pedalling leaned forward, his chest pressed against the back of his brother like they were one creature, just as Jack and I had ridden the streets of The Springs many years ago. They rolled silently past, interrogating me, their two heads moving, their four dark eyes following me in perfect synchronicity.
The streets narrowed on the other side of the square. The souk had no grand entrance like the medina in Casablanca, nor was it contained by high walls. Its markets spread out organically to fill the many-fingered streets of the district. There were tiled arcades, with food stalls colonising the footpaths, rows of them nestled under low tattered awnings, and plastic chairs scattered when men rose from their tables and knocked them askew with their polished shoes as they left. Even here there were shoeshine boys. A push-cart, handmade from discarded bicycle wheels and the sides fashioned from chicken-wire, languished in the street. Inside a café, a boy was bent before a soft-drink fridge, his body glowing in the fluorescent light. I watched him lift a crate of empty bottles onto his cart, which he tilted then heaved into motion, wheeling it down the middle of the road. I entered and drank a bottle of Coke – a small comfort.
*
I lay on the bed in a room in the Hôtel Atlas, the first hotel I’d found with its name in French as well as Arabic. The grimy shirt stuck to my back and my boots hung over the end of the bed. I looked at the cracked plaster on the ceiling and was exhausted. Already it felt like I’d been travelling for years, and had spent a lot of myself to get here. It seemed impossible that a week earlier I’d been lying on my own bed in The Springs looking up at Michelangelo’s slaves, taped near the ceiling. I closed my eyes. I drifted towards sleep before some passing sound from beyond the window – a hushed voice, or a shoe scraping across the ground – startled me and I was overcome by a wave of anxiety, the same feeling as when I first landed.
I got up, showered, changed, and went back downstairs to where the innkeeper sat at the desk, unmoving.
‘Les Australiens,’ I said.
‘Australiens? Oui?’
‘Je cherche les Australiens.’
The innkeeper gave me a dull nod, as if what I’d said was some truth taken for granted, utterly unsurprising.
‘Où je peux . . . trouver les Australiens?’ I asked, working hard to assemble the words. Where can I find them?
He made some movement of his head, neck, shoulders. He looked long at me then, trying to u
nderstand. I started again.
‘Nations Unies. Les soldats Australiens.’
‘Aah.’
He grew animated, and spoke a torrent of what I assumed were directions, the gestures of his arms like those of a flailing swimmer.
‘Je ne comprends pas,’ I said.
‘Demain,’ he said after considering me again. ‘Demain matin. Vous comprenez?’
I nodded. I was fairly sure I understood. Tomorrow morning.
*
I went to bed that night with French in my head, all those soft words swirling around, each running into the others. Mock conversations. Laboriously laying words one beside the other, I was no more assured than a toddler with building blocks. I could see their shapes, and hear the echoes of the conversation from the day gone. Questions and responses, guessing at meanings I’d missed, I couldn’t turn the conversations off, couldn’t stop the sentence-building. When finally sleep came, it was because I was exhausted, not my body, but my brain.
In all my time there it never occurred to me to learn Arabic, to learn anything more than the few meagre words that even the laziest travellers pick up as they pass through. The truth, it seems to me now, was that learning Arabic would have meant trying to understand them. But French was neutral ground, as if the conversations about hotels and bread and bus tickets were taking place in some safe no-man’s land. Perhaps it was the same for them too.
SEVEN
The innkeeper was there again the next morning.
‘Les Australiens?’ I reminded him.
‘Oui, oui.’
He went to the hotel doorway and, silhouetted, called out into the street. Loud and insistent he called again, agitating the air, as if issuing a threat to the whole town. The buildings reverberated already with the day’s rising heat. Eventually a young boy emerged from somewhere across the road. The innkeeper stepped out into the sun, and when the boy reached him, placed a hand around the back of his neck. The man lowered his voice. I recognised just the word Australien. Then the boy was off, and as I followed the man back inside the hotel he pointed me to a seat in the lobby.
‘Attends. Attends.’
And so I waited. The king on the wall. The tiled floor with a mosaic spreading across the room, its geometric pattern broken by the chairs and the low coffee table. I noticed little ridges of sand swept up against the walls by the wind. As I waited a guest came down the stairs, greeted the innkeeper and stepped into the street. I opened my notebook and reread everything my father and Em and I had gathered about Jack and Africa. The key dates and places and people. There again was the name of Andrew Grose, and his rank – Lieutenant-Colonel – the contingent commander, the one I now sought.
It was three hours before the boy returned. He was accompanied by a soldier, tall in the doorway, his head turning to where I sat in the armchair, sizing me up before striding across the foyer with long confident steps. They taught you how to walk in the army. He was dressed in standard army fatigues, those splotches of grassland and forest. His sleeves were neatly folded, a perfect symmetry in the way they sat against each of his biceps. He wore a slouch hat with its leather strap tight at the point of his chin. His face was square, his jaw sharp, his sun-mottled skin and thin red hair shaded by the hat. I read his name – Logan – on the patch stitched above his breast pocket. Had Jack become as hard as this? I wondered.
‘Well, what have we got here?’ he said, breaking into a grin, wide and mischievous, his eyes glinting with humour. He was in his late twenties. Though it was only days since I’d last heard that accent, it seemed much longer. I smiled back.
‘Yeah,’ I said, rising to meet him. ‘I know.’
‘Long way from home.’
I laughed, and took his hand. I barely noticed how vigorously he shook it – his strength, his exuberance – because for the first time since I’d arrived in Africa I was starting to relax. It didn’t matter that I’d never met him before, that if I’d come across him back home I would have stayed clear, would have been sceptical of anyone so comfortable in his uniform. After so many days of being on edge, I yielded entirely to his welcome.
‘So,’ he said, smiling still, ‘what’s brought you here? Did you take a wrong turn up the road somewhere?’
I laughed again.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for someone, Jack Adams.’
How quickly that transformed him. He dropped the smile, stepped back, and folded his arms against his chest. How brief that easy moment between us had been.
I hadn’t thought I needed to be careful. Had so wanted to stop thinking for a while, gain a respite from the wariness. But now Logan stared at me, blue-eyed, his jaw set once more. In the long silence I was aware of the boy’s voice at the reception desk, heard the innkeeper grunt a reply.
‘Who the hell might you be, then?’ Logan said.
‘His brother. I’m Jack’s brother. I’ve come to find him.’
‘You’re his brother?’ As if it was preposterous.
‘Yes, I am.’
He must have seen this was true. How could he not recognise our likeness?
‘I’ve come for him,’ I said.
‘Have you now.’
Was this unexpected tussle simply the sergeant protecting a fellow-soldier against strangers? I took a breath, began again.
‘My name is Sebastian Adams. I’m looking for my brother. I’ve come a long way to find him. Can you help?’
*
I trailed Logan out of the souk, the Arabs stepping aside to let the peacekeeper through. He ignored the street vendors who called out to him, his eyes straight, head erect. He was easy to follow. When we reached his four-wheel drive he tossed some coins to a group of kids who’d been keeping watch over it.
‘Get in.’
I felt like a prisoner being escorted to court. By then I’d realised that of course Logan was a mere errand boy, and it was the Lieutenant-Colonel who’d decide what assistance I’d get. Or whether I’d get any help at all.
EIGHT
I look back now and still don’t know what to make of Grose. He barely seems real, claiming too great a place in my memory of those days. He didn’t so much fill a room, as encompass it. It wasn’t just his physical size – it was the stillness of his voice and his body, the entirety of his being. Rather than shrink with recall he has, if anything, grown larger, more distorted.
His office was bare: a desk and two chairs, a single grey filing cabinet and three or four maps taped to the wall. On the desk was a plastic tray with a single sheet of paper in it, an unsheathed, bone-handled Bowie-knife resting on it as a paperweight. At the top right-hand corner of the desk was an object the size of a man’s hand that I didn’t recognise: circular with ridges running vertically up its sides, sand-coloured with a disc of dark green on top. Some exotic toy, I guessed. In the centre of the desk was a book, an old hardback with a faded red cloth covering, Also sprach Zarathustra in black lettering on its spine. It was open face-down, the pages splayed, as if Grose had just laid it aside, calmly, and only then risen to greet me.
His shirt was open at the neck, the hairless chest bared and glistening with a sheen of sweat. Light skidded off his shaved head, shiny with moisture.
Grose pointed to a seat and lifted his own chair one-handed through the air before placing it beside mine. When he sat, his knee brushed against my own. I flinched. Logan brought in two bottles of Coke, handed them to us, and left, glancing at me over his shoulder as he closed the door. Grose prised the cap off the bottle and it hissed.
‘None of the local rubbish,’ he said, his deep voice almost a croon.
He raised his drink in a toast.
‘The original and the best, for our Australian guest.’
His rhyme amused him, but his smile was not yet something I could hold onto. He put the bottle down withou
t drinking from it and leant back, swivelling his chair and resting his right elbow on the table, his body reclining, the great head still, the cold blue eyes considering me.
‘So Sebastian Adams,’ he said at last, ‘here you are.’
One could wither under that gaze.
‘I’ve come for my brother, sir,’ I said.
‘Seek and thou shalt find, Sebastian? Do you believe that?’
‘Well, yes – you’ve got to try.’
‘I can see him in you.’
He watched me, unblinking. It felt like he was trying to pry something out of me.
‘Sir,’ I said, ‘can you tell me what you know? Have you had any luck? Have you found him yet?’
‘Didn’t your father believe me? I told him myself, Sebastian. From this very room I rang him. There is nothing he doesn’t know. Not . . . one . . . single . . . thing. You’ve come a long way for nothing.’
‘I wanted to see for myself,’ I replied.
Grose laughed – a cackle, high and charged. Then, abrupt as it started, it stopped.
‘And what is it, precisely, you want to see?’
I stuttered. ‘I . . . I . . . I’m his brother . . . I –’
‘You want a wound to thrust your hand into,’ Grose said, speaking over me. ‘Is that it?’
He paused, waiting, but I’d become entranced.
‘Your brother was a soldier, Sebastian. He had a duty to his fellow-soldiers, even when he was on leave. A soldier does not stop being a soldier. He should have gone with them. Instead he stayed down there alone. He went out. He did not come back. He packed his kit one morning, stepped through his door into the desert and has not been seen since.’
‘What happened?’
‘He failed himself.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Closer to Stone Page 4