Amazir

by Tom Gamble

  As Midday approached, the weather became unbearable and under general consent, it was decided to abandon the fields and slopes and stay inside until the heat subsided. From his shaded doorway, Summerfield watched, undecided as to go and check the installations once again. The valley filled with a sort of thin, simmering smoke that was hot mist for an hour. It then melted before his eyes, replaced by seething strata of heat that sizzled and blurred over the ground until it hypnotised him. When he shook his head to gather his wits, beads of sweat were projected into the air. He drank water, fanned himself and looked on. He thought he saw Badr in the kaleidoscope of heat, bent double and scurrying quickly among the village houses. The figure gave a brief wave in his direction and then disappeared. Summerfield drank tea, resigned to sweating profusely and hoping the perspiration on his body would cool him down.

  Raja appeared, swathed in robes of royal blue cloth. Once inside, she uncovered herself in silence while Summerfield blew noisily and groaned, a sign of growing irritation with the situation. A faint smell of cloves and cinnamon and a deeper, musky smell came to him. It was Raja’s body smell.

  ‘You are angry, Sidi Summerfield. So moaning and angry against this weather.’

  ‘I should bloody-well think so,’ grumbled Summerfield in English. ‘This is unbearable, Raja! I’ve never known it to be so hot—not even in the plains or in Marrakesh.’ He returned to dialect. ‘Can’t you—can’t you do something!’

  She let out a laugh and looked mockingly at him. ‘The French have a reputation for weakness and complaining in such weather—I didn’t know the English were worse!’

  ‘But look at you!’ retorted Summerfield. ‘You’re wet!’ The young woman stepped back and tried to look at herself. True, there were large patches of damp covering her dress. ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’

  Raja touched one of the patches under her arms. ‘No. In fact, I didn’t even know it was there. We have to live with it.’

  Summerfield poured out two cups of water, exhaled noisily and tut-tutted. ‘I can’t understand you all. You’re beyond comprehension. All of you.’

  ‘The villagers?’

  ‘Everybody! Everybody living south of Plymouth.’

  ‘Where’s Plymmut?’

  Summerfield didn’t take any notice of her. ‘Why you stand this awful environment is beyond me. Why don’t you move north? Why don’t the hundreds of tribes get it into their heads that there is better, more clement weather somewhere else? Why don’t you just move, for heaven’s sake?’

  Raja poked out her tongue and looked sullen. ‘How do I know? I’m a woman and my work is to make the fields provide us our food to eat. I know about the fields, but I have no answer to your stupid, unnecessary questions.’

  ‘They’re not stupid. You are! If you thought about these questions and actually did something, then you wouldn’t have to ask them again.’

  ‘Now you are impossible to understand!’ retorted Raja, her voice rising to a shout. ‘Go and ask the Mullah, go and ask the Kaïd, but not me.’

  ‘You said I was angry,’ said Summerfield, aware that he sounded quite childish. However, it felt quite good to have someone to whom he could let off steam and rid himself of his irritation. He suddenly felt quite malicious. ‘Now you are, Raja—angry!’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘You are!’

  ‘I’m not, not, not!’

  ‘You are, are, and are!’

  They looked at each other, surprised by the outburst, and suddenly fell into laughter.

  ‘This is silly!’ said Raja, giggling.

  ‘We are silly!’ added Summerfield, triumphantly. ‘And thank God we are. Imagine if we had to be serious all the time.’

  ‘Imagine if we had to answer questions like yours all the time,’ continued Raja.

  ‘Now don’t be cheeky, Raja!’ said Summerfield, lapsing back into irritation. And so continued another round of arguing until Raja, at this point her words becoming an uncontrollable high-pitched babble of Arabic and Berber dialect, rose in disgust, wrapped herself in her robes, slammed the door shut and walked away.

  ‘Open that door!’ shouted Summerfield after her, but in vain. ‘Come back and open that bloody door!’

  He decided to go out and brave the heatwave. Pacing irritably about his small hut was worse than sitting and sweating it out. Stepping out of his dwelling it felt like he almost walked into a wall of heat and took an involuntary step back. ‘Holy God Almighty!’ he blasphemed, lowering his shoulders and walking into the cauldron.

  Down by the construction, the vegetation had turned beige, petrified in the windless heat like fossils. A solitary cat, a mangy grey and white tom, sat panting under a thorn bush. Its mouth was so far pulled back in the effort that it looked as though it were grinning. Summerfield winked at it and stooped down to touch one of the toilet emplacements. ‘Ow!’ The cat suddenly started and shot past Summerfield. ‘Bloody hot!’ spat Summerfield, himself scared by the cat’s sudden movement. He exhaled noisily, gave the site a look and turned to go: ‘And this damn heat will dry up all the water in any case,’ he mumbled, as he walked back to his hut.

  The sun changed. White and powerfully aggressive in the afternoon, it seemed to cook in its own heat and turn a strange, watery yellow verging on pink. As evening came, it seemed to swell as it fell slowly in the sky. It became orange, a great shimmering, hovering globe—Summerfield had never seen it so big. He sent up a silent prayer for wind and urged the night to be fresh. Captivated, occasionally wondering why nobody had paid him a visit since Raja, he watched the hours go by as the sun sank, vermillion, in the violet sky. The air did not change. It was as stifling as it had been all day. With the sun, and fatigue of his struggle against the heat, his eyelids sank and eventually closed shut. While he slept, nature prepared itself.

  He awoke with a shout, blinded by the electric white of the flash of lightning. A terrifyingly close clap of thunder roared overhead. Summerfield swore and rushed out of bed to close the door of his dwelling. He paused, cocking his head. What was that strange noise—like distant hooves thudding on the ground? It got louder and louder. It seemed to be approaching the village. There was a single, unexpected gust of fresh wind that disappeared as quickly and surprisingly as it had come. And as the storm exploded overhead, looking out, he saw the sheer wall of water moving inexorably towards the village. He had just enough time to dash outside and retrieve his seat and cushions before the first fat drops stung his skin. He slammed the door behind him and watched. Through the slit of his window the rain hit the ground like bullets, spattering dust and debris. It was as close to apocalypse as he’d ever been. The noise was deafening, the sky black, enraged. He cursed with every rip of thunder and as the water began to drip increasingly through the cracks in the roof, he seriously wondered if he would survive the storm. He began to sing Jerusalem—very loudly—interrupting it with alternate bouts of swearing and praying. He was in the middle of a prayer when the door shot open. A large, masked shape pushed through the doorway. Summerfield let out an instinctive roar and braced himself for struggle.

  ‘It’s me! Badr!’ came a muffled shout. ‘I’ve been knocking for ages! Get your rifle, get your belongings—you must shelter at my house. It’s safer!’

  In the morning, the valley awoke later than usual. An unreal calm filled the air, like the aftermath of a great gathering. When Summerfield and Badr looked outside, they saw a valley strewn with the flotsam and jetsam of the storm—clothes, stones, rocks, shreds of material, young trees, utensils, roofing tiles, wooden beams, uprooted bushes, the charred shape of a mangy dog lying on its back with its paws outstretched. It looked like a battlefield. Only the river, down in the trough of the valley, bubbled and rushed, bloated happy with the water from the summer storm.

  ‘What a mess,’ commented Summerfield. ‘I seriously thought I was going to die. Thank you, Badr. I wonder what shape my hut is in.’

  ‘I’m afraid you should think more of your public toi
lets, Harry,’ said Badr. ‘I wonder what shape they’re in after all this.’

  Surely enough, as the two men picked their way through the debris down towards the clearing, they saw that the screens had completely disappeared, no doubt blown or washed away to the other side of the valley. The gullies leading from the compartments had crumbled and the thrones themselves were mostly down. The cesspit was a pool of brackish water. But there was something else, something different—a large array of heavy urns, some two hundred of them placed in files, four deep behind each emplacement.

  ‘Are these yours?’ said Badr, perplexed.

  Summerfield shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen them before.’ The two men approached. ‘They’re full of water,’ said Summerfield, mechanically. He looked at Badr, puzzled and their faces lit up as it simultaneously dawned on them. ‘Do you know what this means?’

  ‘Water supply!’ shouted Badr and spontaneously embraced the Englishman. ‘You have your water supply—for two weeks at least!’

  ‘But who?’ said Summerfield, stooping to rap one of the great urns. ‘Hold on—looks as though some of them have some sort of a sign on them.’

  Badr crouched akimbo and looked up. ‘It’s the Mullah’s mark—they belong to him.’

  ‘The old devil!’ spat Summerfield.

  ‘Please, Harry!’ said Badr. ‘Such irreverence.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry—a purely Christian reflection, Badr. The old saint, then. Yes…the old saint,’ he repeated, glancing up the hill towards the Mullah’s quarters.

  43

  Nearly a day passed before Jeanne heard the sound of her father’s voice again in the hallway downstairs. She hurried to the landing and peered over the banister, shocked by the greyness of her father’s face. For the first time, she noticed how old he looked.

  ‘It’s scandalous,’ she heard him mutter and he looked up, seeing her for the first time and gave her the trace of a smile. He cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to have a word with you all—mother, Jeanne, Soumia and Mohammed. Please assemble in the sitting room. I need to freshen up a little first. Oh, and pour me a large drink, chérie,’ he added, nodding briefly at Jeanne’s mother. ‘Anything as long as it’s strong.’

  They gathered, as Lefèvre had ordered, in the sitting room, Jeanne and her mother sitting, Soumia coyly accepting a seat herself and Mohammed, uneasy with breaking the rule, declining the offer.

  ‘Madame,’ said Soumia, unable to maintain the silence that had settled over them. ‘I was just thinking that a nice tomato salad would be—’

  ‘Soumia,’ said Mme Lefèvre, pursing her lips and giving the maid one of her silencing looks. ‘The moment is grave and tomatoes won’t help.’

  ‘Sorry, Madame.’ She looked down and clasped her hands. ‘It’s just that ever since a while, if I may dare, things have been—’

  ‘Thank you, Soumia,’ sighed Mme Lefèvre, pausing to consider whether to reprimand the woman. She decided against it. ‘Perhaps we could send you off to De Gaulle in England as a secret weapon—you’d talk the Germans to death!’

  For a moment, Soumia’s eyes grew wide sure that Mme Lefèvre was serious.

  ‘Mummy was only joking, Soumia,’ said Jeanne.

  ‘But she never jokes,’ replied Soumia, involuntarily and clasped a hand over her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry, Madame. It just came out.’

  Mme Lefèvre looked sternly back and was about to reply when her husband entered.

  He had freshly washed and shaved and there was a livid nick on his blue-ish chin from which a bubble of blood had coagulated. Jeanne wished he wouldn’t gum his thinning hair like that. It made him look messy and somehow clownish. Maybe she should ask mother to tell him about it. Her father cleared his throat and remained standing, his glass in his hand.

  ‘I’m afraid the situation is all rather confusing,’ he said and added, with a smile of irony, ‘or perhaps it’s all too clear. The protectorate high-commissioner and the administrative authorities have pledged allegiance to the government in Vichy. It is the official, legally recognised government of France and our empire.’

  ‘Yes, that is clear,’ said Mme Lefèvre, immediately conscious of her shallow remark.

  ‘However,’ continued Lefèvre, sending her a telling glance, ‘even though all French citizens have been asked to comply to this act of allegiance, a minority is still in favour of De Gaulle. Morocco is in limbo—if only for a day or two.’

  ‘The silence is very odd,’ said Jeanne. ‘There are even no cars.’

  ‘Didn’t your mother tell you?’ said Lefèvre, shaking his head. ‘We’ve advised people to stay off the streets until things are clearer.’

  ‘Because of possible demonstrations,’ said Jeanne, answering her father. ‘I talked to Jim and he told me—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lefèvre, holding up a hand. ‘Jim Wilding was good enough to speak to me too. He seemed worried for you—not surprising given the state you’re in over each other. Either people will comply, or there’ll be unrest—hopefully minor in nature.’

  ‘And he thought you might be in danger, too, father.’

  Lefèvre looked at his wife and gave her a fleeting grin of reassurance. ‘For the moment, no one has said anything. I will comply with orders from above, carry on as usual. I can’t see how voicing a fleeting opinion would land me in any great trouble, after all.’

  In the afternoon, sitting on the veranda and finishing off a pair of mittens for the prisoners of war in Europe, Jeanne heard a sharp crack in the distance. She put down her needles. It had sounded like a small banger, dry and harmless.

  ‘Mother?’ she called and Soumia arrived. ‘Ah, hello Soumia. Did you hear that? Get mother for me, will you. Don’t wake father, though.’

  Soumia nodded, looking worried and as she turned to scurry away, there was another solitary crack, followed straight after by a poc-poc.

  ‘Gunfire!’ said Jeanne, rising. She strained her eyes towards the distance and the centre of the old city. When her mother appeared moments later, they saw a thin blue trail of smoke rising to the left of the tall tower of the Koutubia mosque. It was somehow unreal: long, heavy seconds of silence broken by isolated cracks and followed by some other sort of guns with their flat poc-pocking sound.

  Then Lefèvre appeared in his dark green dressing gown, looking tired and anxious. ‘I’ve just had Le Guédec on the phone. It seems someone shot at a police vehicle and hit the radiator.’

  ‘That must be the smoke,’ said Jeanne.

  ‘A lot of smoke for just a radiator,’ said her father. ‘Wrong colour, too.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The shots have intensified,’ said Jeanne’s mother. ‘And now they’re coming from over there too,’ she added, pointing towards the western part of the city. ‘It’s very worrying, Philippe-Charles.’

  Lefèvre rubbed his chin, wincing as he touched the spot where he’d cut himself shaving that morning. ‘Mother, get Mohammed to assemble the bags in the hallway.’ Jeanne looked at her father. ‘One never knows,’ he said back. ‘Oh, and make sure you’ve got your belongings—any jewellery, money, that sort of thing. I’ll take a look at the car.’

  ‘Father?’ It was Jeanne, her voice trembling.

  ‘Yes?’ Lefèvre turned round, inquisitive and annoyed at having been interrupted.

  ‘Jim said he’d be back earlier than planned. He wants to help us.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Late morning with a bit of luck.’

  ‘Then pray that things won’t get too out of hand before he gets here.’

  Jeanne stayed on the veranda. She had already prepared her things after the phone call to Jim two nights before. Suddenly, the shots in the distance ceased and however much she thought the silence would be broken once again by the crack and poc of the guns, it wasn’t. Silence reigned once again, strange and fragile.

  She watched her father, dressed now, walk down to the front gate and approach the gendarme standing watch by
the black Panhard. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the gendarme shook his head several times. Her father’s gestures were at first appealing, then sharper, authoritative, but the gendarme remained adamant, beckoning over a second gendarme from the light truck parked under the trees of the grassy central alley to the avenue. He had a sub-machine gun slung under his arm and Jeanne noticed his slow, lilting gait, a little like the marching style of the legionnaires. Perhaps he had once been one. Her father’s voice was higher now and she heard the words ordre and impensable—unthinkable. The two paramilitaries, towering over the small, balding figure of her father, remained unperturbed. It was almost as if they were mocking him. Then a car appeared, driving fast up the avenue towards them and tearing up a thin cloud of dust in its wake. It came to a sharp halt with a high-pitched squeal and Colonel Le Guédec stepped out. The two guards immediately saluted. There was a brief, low-voiced exchange of words and Le Guédec led Lefèvre aside by the arm. The two gendarmes turned their backs and walked nonchalantly over to their truck. Jeanne watched on. Le Guédec produced a sheaf of papers, seemed to be explaining something. Her father looked quite pale, shook his head. Le Guédec persisted, pressing the papers into her father’s hand and producing a pen. Whatever was going on? At last, with a gesture of futility, Lefèvre read the papers, glancing up occasionally into the Colonel’s, his friend’s, eyes. He signed, handing the papers back in disgust. However, their handshake was long. Lefèvre kept the Colonel’s grip and spoke something before giving the hand a final, firm shake. The Colonel turned, looked back towards the house and caught Jeanne’s gaze. He smiled, nodded and gave her a brief salute.