Stewart, Angus

by Snow in Harvest

  * * * * *

  It was in a shallow ravine that they first sat down. There was shelter from the wind. Some species of weeping tree reproached a shrunken stream, which would be dry before the end of summer. Their roots were locked in the broken, eroded soil like talons maintaining precarious balance against gravity. The bank was steep, sharp, with stones. It was purposefully that Naima now let herself he held.

  Naima's body cradled down beneath the tingling emptiness of his chest and arms. Her hair fell free. Open, cupped, Jay's hand received, weighed her head; burrowing, the fingers spread through the soft confusion of hair to close tight, immovable about the velvet-textured skull. He lifted her to him, and his chest and arms became filled and alive. There was a miracle in the simplicity of her giving. He lived now through his lips. Her mouth was a place to drink. It held all sustenance a man could imagine or require. It was denying of fulfilment, which is beyond imagination.

  And, gradually, he pressed the full length of her body against his own. Naima said something temporising about snakes; then didn't seem to care. Jay smiled at the idea of a mortal bite being inflicted in such a situation, deciding the very absurdity must preclude possibility. Heat stirred lazily, stood out sharply urgent at his groin. There was light in the sky to touch the liquid film in Naima's eyes. A contour of cheek-bones found definition, lips sprung in protest from sharp teeth, which scythed with sudden, real anger across Jay's chin, while at the same moment he sensed there had been a colloquial vulgarism in the mention of snakes; but Naima's fingers came up curiously to his chin. Her face softened into lines of concern, even apprehension. Jay took most of her jaw in his mouth in gentle reprisal. And Naima began playing a different game. With tactile deliberation her concern was to have as large an area of their now naked bodies as was possible adhere to one another. Jay drew away, testing the hypothesis, feeling Naima follow him, and acknowledging his discovery with a smile laid carefully across his wounded chin. Then he joined the exploration with possessive vengeance; dominating the search through the ceaselessly shifting planes of total contact until the girl seemed only a right extension of more complete self, and he was unsure where the bounds of her body ended, and those of his own began.

  And the hard bridge still stood incomplete between them. Naima's Loins thrashed away from the threat of their joining. Her mouth held a taut line. Dimples deep with mockery quivered at its compressed ends, and the spine of cartilage defiantly rounded her nose; but her eyes were beginning to melt. Jay's forearms lay parallel the length of her hack. One hand twined cruelly in the fall of hair. The other caressed the heaving moulds of her breasts, tentatively encircled the throbbing pillar of her neck. He immobilised her retreating body with deliberate strength. His eyes transmitted a long message, to find such chaos of emotion answering in her face that his bared swelling discovered resharpened imperatives of reach and burial, and he entered, while her slight body convulsed helplessly, and her features suffused, seemed to flow into one another as though her face lay beneath a rippling film of water.

  Vacuum suspended time. There was joining made. Confluence withheld. And in the raw breadth of no time the sound of drums came from far away, permeating body and consciousness, themselves one, but indisseverable as well from the cold licking wind, abrasive harshness of soil, limply stirred leaves, and the tenacious spread of the tree roots near where they lay. Gravid earth claimed them. In the recognition was fulfilment. Still they reached more deeply within one another until the shadow of a return to mortal consciousness lent savage rebellion to the final search; though, when it came, true confluence was larger than Africa. And they were left amid the bathos of the rush back from eternity.

  'Bloody I can't talk to you much,' Jay said. He felt emptied. Lay, after a moment, rolled away, looking with slowly returning sight into that mighty jewelled wilderness of stars; at the twisted branches above his head, the black solidity of rock against the fearful, unending sky.

  'Ouakà!' was all the girl said. She shivered. Began drawing clothes about herself as unthinkingly as she had discarded them.

  After a moment more, Jay did the same. It was then that Naima gasped in terror; clutched suddenly at him with sharply crooked fingers. His first thought was of snakes. He was up on some incredibly agile reflex, dancing madly, wildly scanning the ground at their feet. But Naima found sufficient possession to point. She was uttering low, desolate moans, as if surrender to some unthinkable catastrophe was both imminent and inevitable. This time, Jay realised, it was not a coastguard Land Rover approaching. But rational thought took him no further. Apparently descending the dark, rock-strewn gully, the bright point of light came towards them in wild bounds, seeming to leap unpredictably down, sideways, or upwards in an arc like some hysterical semaphore. If it were a djinn, then it was sufficiently substantial to chase. Angry cries came from the plateau above. Rocks chattered percussively into the gorge, rebounded, became lodged and suddenly silent, the aim and momentum of the next easily judged in the ensuing stillness. They were uncomfortably close. Perhaps it was the indubitably human cries of the pursuers that gave Naima courage in the midst of her fear.

  'Pietras!' she whispered desperately, and began scrabbling for stones herself.

  Jay reached out and grasped her hand. A second later Lom had blundered into them.

  He was a pitiful sight. A scalp wound had soaked his shirt with blood. One of his shoes must have been lost in his chamois' leaping down the gully, and he was limping. His great head lolled uncontrollably above his slumping shoulders, while his chest heaved and fell irregularly to short, painful gasps. 'Better men,' he panted, nevertheless, and apparently unaware that the danger, whatever its origin, was still with them. 'Better men . . . have been stoned.' He took them both in more carefully. The maid . . . The maid with the rock cakes . . . And you . . .'

  'Torch,' Jay said, taking it quickly from Lom's forgotten hand and switching it off. 'We must hide. And shut up.'

  'Must hide,' Lom repeated.

  Together they lowered his bewildered and collapsing bulk down among the tree roots. Jay drew over him the duffle coat that moments before had been their bed, uncompromisingly burying his shiny, bald head in the hood. He listened intently. Some people had gathered at the lip of the gorge now, but they were more than a hundred yards away to their left. One of them gave a cry, stark, ritual and penetrating in that desolate place; yet Jay was sure they had not been seen. The defiant war shout was followed by the crack of a rifle. Pressed close to the ground beside Jay, Naima seemed to find in this a cause for amusement. She began, in fact, to giggle. Perhaps with the djinn harmlessly revealed as Lom, she felt no cause to fear her own people, and presumably it had touched some archaic association with the ritual shot that declared the consummation of a marriage. Jay didn't feel comforted. He gestured to her angrily. More shots crashed out across the night.

  'Not so romantic,' Lom wheezed out in a half-whisper. 'Not like stones.' And Jay wondered whether shock and exhaustion had made him delirious His next utterance seemed to prove as much. The duffle coat still heaved and juddered. 'Man out there dancing himself dead . . . Dancing through death . . . Big fire . . . Blood . . . But guns . . . Guns are cheating. Not real . . .'

  'Shut up!' Jay hissed savagely. 'Bullets are quite bloody final.'

  'I must go back to the fire,' Lom moaned, but more quietly. 'We could send the maid . . . With a truce.'

  'Maybe. If they came.' Jay felt uncomfortable. He didn't know how he might react confronted by a mob, what expedients, priorities might prevail. They had taken the only action they could, and now his fear was mounting proportionately with the confused pause.

  'Yes, the maid,' Lom said; and with steady resolution, his voice rising in crescendo, 'To tell them I'll come back to the fire!'

  Neither the horror nor panic registered with any thinking consciousness in Jay. Lom's shout, and the long, terrible cry that followed it, triggered instinctive action. The animal moved faster than thought, or at least without it. In
a fluid movement Jay was on top of the old man, his intention crystallised as single, the hood torn back, the jagged rock at swinging arm's length above the domed skull. It was only then that he paused. There was an idiot lack of interest, even an expression of connivance on Lom's face. Slowly Jay became aware of his own posture, of the significance of his own arm raised in savage arabesque against the sky. He sensed, rather than saw at first, that the men were gone from the edge of the gully. As the faculties abnegated by the single-mindedness of his leap at Lom returned, he realised he could no longer hear them either. His arm withered. Not without awkwardness, he released the old man.

  For some minutes none of them said anything. Then Lom lit a cigarette, and the autumn bonfire smell of kif reached Jay.

  'Wouldn't it be better to lay off that—at least till we get you back to town?' he suggested. His petulance largely masked the confusion of his own feelings. The revelation that primeval forces could take such radical possession of him was more terrifying than tribesmen with stones. And he was unsure whether their threat had ever been more than nominal. He knew obscurely that life had assumed a darker bias; could never be quite the same. More consciously, he resented Lom for having initiated the discovery. Worse, it had been quite the opposite, a transcendental experience with Naima, that had been superseded by the moment of near murder. Now that happiness seemed a long time ago. Perhaps it was even irreparably spoiled.

  'I'm all right now,' Lom said. 'I think you saved my life from those men with guns.'

  'You didn't want it saved,' Jay said bitterly. And when nothing broke the ugly ambivalence of the pause, he let the child take over completely. 'This, incidentally, is Naima. Not the maid.'

  'I'm sorry,' Lom said, with a social propriety that struck Jay as ridiculous in their circumstances. 'I confused her with someone else.'

  'Just what did you do out there?' Jay was unappeased. They still crouched, fugitives on the ground. Now Lom sat up. 'I was photographing. There was a wild dance. And a fire. Men were trying to overcome death . . .'

  'Bloody fool!' Jay interrupted, feeling contention might insure against Lom's losing himself again. 'Didn't anything tell you this was a Muslim religious festival?'

  Lom seemed to be rationalising something slowly. He became aware of the blood all over him. 'It was instinctive'

  'To what end?' Jay asked grimly. 'Self-preservation?'

  'Some sort of perpetuity, I think.' Lom weighed the remark out thoughtfully.

  'Perpetuity!' Jay exploded, with nothing tactically considered now. 'You hunt perpetuity with a damned tin box and expect us to be gratefully murdered for it! What the hell did you think they'd do if they'd caught you? Take the film to the nearest chemist, and exhibit the pictures in Rabat?'

  'They would have taken the camera to the fire, I think,' Lom said, quietly as before.

  'Oh no!' Jay said, before the chill behind Lom's fatalism could fully affect him. 'They'd have sold it. And whoever did that would have more sense than to leave the film in. Particularly as the body of one Nazarene photographer might be dug up in the vicinity of Sidi Ali,' he added.

  'I'm not a Nazarene.'

  'To them you're near enough, believe me.' Confronted by the inane simplicity of logic operating in Lom, Jay felt unabashed.

  'But I do utterly apologise for endangering you and Miss . . . Miss . . .?'

  'Just Naima,' Jay said. There had been a moment of total blankness. Perhaps it was indeed all beyond him. 'We've got to get out of here.'

  Lom had stood up. Jay was reminded of their first meeting, and of his thinking at the time that he looked a sick man. Naima had been a stranger too; sullen, in foamy taffeta. 'I'll go alone.'

  'No,' Jay said. 'But did you get here in a cab?'

  'It's waiting,'

  'Then an Arab.' Jay was inexplicably, almost deliriously freed at the thought of action. 'Duffle coat, mud from the stream, off shoe and socks, stooped, a stick, hung head. You've been defecating down here, and your daughter will lead you.—We'll make him an Arab,' he said to Naima. Rhais.' He made to smear Lom's face, indicating the mud in the bottom of the gorge, and smiling faintly to himself as he remembered it was a word Achmed had first taught him. Naima went to work delightedly. Lom stood heavily penitent and submissive.

  'Which leaves me just a blatantly zany tourist Christian who set out this evening for a quiet talk about a flat with an English gent whose name almost certainly isn't really Brown,' Jay babbled happily on, consigning Lom's socks and single shoe to the wilderness.

  'Brown?' Lom asked dully.

  'That's right.' Jay clapped a suitably knarled branch he had broken off into Lom's hand, and patted the hooded head into a more convincing stoop. 'Simon Brown. Next on our salvage list, I suspect; and a man some small part of whom would appreciate this hobbling literary allusion—yes! But lean and fumble on the stick.' Jay motioned the pathetic caravan on its way. ' "Leder muder, lette me in!" '

  'A Chaucerian reference to the longings of the Wandering Jew?'

  'Precisely! And another man of cultivation, b'damned!' Jay's enthusiasm was unabating. It cooled as he peered cautiously over the lip of the gully. But the hunt had obviously been abandoned. Their weird procession came out on to the plateau.

  Perhaps his rôle distracted Lost from more esoteric imaginings. It was only the savagery of the people he from time to time invoked. 'Did you know they use children from the gaols to clear mine fields?' he exclaimed suddenly. 'The mines are rusty, and it's a question of weight.'

  'Bazaar talk,' Jay laughed. 'Where did you hear a story like that?'

  'Oh, a reliable source.' It was curious to hear so precise a voice coming from the hooded, shambling figure whom Naima was leading by the hand.

  'At the fire?' Jay mocked gently. He was still anxious to test the degree of Lom's insanity, or the unpredictability of the unpredictability of the kif.

  'No, but there's a connection.' Lom was adamant. These people like to think they've a complete indifference towards death. They reassure themselves with displays of contempt for life.'

  So I was right, and that is their appeal for you, Jay thought

  There was a moment's confusion at the taxi. Lom insisted on maintaining his disguise until he had fumbled into the back seat 'You must both have dinner with me,' he said, still beneath the hood, 'though I mayn't be in Tangier much longer. Minza.' And with that economy of directives the taxi was gone.

  Jay turned to Naima with a bright smile, only to recall he knew so little of her as to be unsure even how she thought of Brown. 'Now for Mister Brown,' he said firmly. Lom's transformation and exit had delighted her for its pure burlesque. He was quickly learning to read moods from her eyes alone.

  'Mektoub,' he said, waving in the direction of the departed taxi. 'All that was obviously written.' She had clearly grasped the camera as cause of the adventure, for she raised an imaginary one to her eye now, and reprovingly shook her head.

  Brown was already installed in their taxi. He seemed not anxious to talk at first Jay, for his part had determined not to ask whether repair had been effected unless something were volunteered. As unobtrusively as he could, he ushered Naima into the corner this time, sitting himself in the middle.

  'So,' Brown said, regarding them each in turn.

  Briefly Jay explained the missing duffle coat. Naima concentrated upon making sticky division of pieces of hawah, which she then offered them.

  'So long as he doesn't get himself killed before delivering the portraits of Manolo,' Brown commented.

  Their driver now arrived, perhaps from the silken booths, for he was grinning broadly over some private satisfaction. Brown perhaps sensed the same thing, for he remarked how practically and sensibly the Arabs commemorated religious festivals. But I just went for a little talk,' he said. 'A talk, and more tea.' They moved off.

  'How does Manolo derive?' Jay asked curiously, when nothing more was forthcoming about Brown's entertainment by the prostitute.

  Brown looked at him ste
adily for a moment before taking the invitation. 'His mother, extraordinarily enough, was a mistress of the Glaoui. Not of course a member of his hareem—she was Spanish. Unfortunately, she picked up his occasional use of opium, only used it more and more. When T'hami fell in '55 she was already a broken woman. She drifted north as far as Ceuta, and there married a Spanish garrison soldier. Manolo was born in '56—the year of Independence—and she died shortly afterwards. I never knew her. But Pepé was my constant escort when the Spanish grudgingly let a few journalists into Ifni, when it was under siege in '58. I was one of them.

  ‘He was just a simple man, an Andalusian peasant, a corporal. But we got to know each other well. I learnt, of course, of the child, and a great deal, much probably fanciful, about the incredible splendours and horrors of the Glaoui epoch, which he had absorbed at second hand from his wife.

  'The early days of Independence weren't altogether comfortable. I cleared out for a while to Tunisia—there was private research I wanted to do at some oases. It wasn't until nearly eight years later that I learnt quite by chance that Pepé had in fact been killed at Ifni—there was some question of his having defected to the tribesmen too, though heaven knows why—and I naturally wondered about the child. I can't pretend that I felt any sort of responsibility towards Pepé's son, whom I'd never set eyes on. But curiosity took me to Ceuta—still a Spanish possession, as you know. And there he was. In the garrison orphanage. I realised at once that Pepé had been my closest friend. It was quite obvious that a Spanish orphanage was an altogether inappropriate setting for Manolo. He just didn't fit with the wooden porringers and ugly nuns. The clothes they had put him in gave me physical pain. After that it was only a question of straightforward corruption. I sprung him from the orphanage with the connivance of a sympathetic priest Of course, he has to be brought up as a Catholic.'