“Even here?” I asked, amused but intrigued.
“Yes, surely.”
We were in the small but very pleasant beer garden behind the Hotel des Vacances. There were perhaps two dozen other people scattered about the umbrella-topped tables in the late afternoon sun. A few neighborhood regulars, the rest visitors and hotel guests like myself, passing through. Everyone looked happy and relaxed.
My companion was both a foreigner and a local resident. Basma had taken it upon himself to join me at my table the day before, when I had just discovered the beer garden and was settling into The Thirteenth Simenon Omnibus. At first I resented the intrusion and tried to ignore the man, but he would not be denied. Finally I gave in and closed my book.
We spent two hours or more drinking and chatting, with Basma carrying most of the load. But he was easy company. A middle-aged Lebanese, he had reluctantly fled Beirut while he still had a cache of foreign currency. The city had become unbearable, impossible, and he believed he was a target of both the Christians (“Because I am a Muslim”) and the Shiites (“Because they think all international businessmen are working for the CIA”). Besides, business had pretty much dried up. Basma had been in Oranien for the best part of three years, doing the odd bit of trade and otherwise depleting his capital. He was eager to move on to more fertile ground, but had not yet decided where that might be. By then I was tired and tipsy and went to bed early. But we agreed to meet again the next day and have dinner in town, which is how we came to be discussing the police.
“Who, for instance?” I asked.
“Let’s not be looking around and staring,” Basma said softly. “But that couple at the table by the wall on your right. I’ve seen them many times and wondered about them.”
A handsome man and a beautiful woman, both in their late twenties. He wore a linen suit, a white shirt, and no tie. He had dark hair and a strong, unmarked face. She was dressed in a smart, obviously foreign outfit—skirt, matching jacket, and a stylish blouse. I imagined her to be the daughter of a local big shot; she had that air of privilege and hauteur. They made me feel old, or perhaps just envious of their youth and good looks.
“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m just passing through. All I want to do is relax for a couple of weeks.”
“Of course.” Basma smiled indulgently.
So that night he gave me the grand tour of Oranien, such as it is. After the mandatory steak dinner we strolled through the main shopping arcade, which was full of the latest European fashions and Asian electronic equipment, all carrying steep price tags. We took in a couple of bars, briefly surveyed a dance hall that doubled as an economy-class dating service, and then stopped for a while at a neon-riddled disco called Marlene’s, where the crowd was somewhat interesting. There the sons and daughters of local wealth came to dance, flirt, play their social games, and get blitzed. Basma called them second-raters, because the brightest of their generation and class were away in America or England, studying at the best private schools and universities.
By the time we’d squandered some money at a posh gaming club and had a frightening glimpse of a very discreet place where you could do whatever you wanted with girls (or boys) as young as thirteen, I’d seen enough for one night. Oranien’s dull and orderly exterior masked the usual wanton tendencies. It didn’t bother me, but it didn’t interest me.
Back in my room, I poured one last nightcap from my bottle of duty-free bourbon and lit a cigarette. I’d had a lot to drink, but it had been spaced out over many hours, with a meal thrown in somewhere along the line. I wasn’t drunk, just tired, reasonably buzzed. I know this for sure, because whenever I have gotten drunk in the past I’ve never dreamed, or at least I’ve never remembered it. That night I did have a dream, and it was one I would not forget.
I was sleeping in my bed, there in the Hotel des Vacances. It was the middle of the night. Suddenly I was awakened by a loud clattering noise. I jumped out of bed. I was at the window, looking out on what seemed to be a historical costume pageant. It confused me, and I couldn’t move. The street below, brightly lit by a three-quarters moon, was full of soldiers on horseback. They carried torches or waved swords. The horses continued to make a dreadful racket, stamping their hooves on the clay tiles. Every house in sight remained dark, but the soldiers went to several different doors, roused the inhabitants, and seized eight or ten people altogether. They were thrown into horse-drawn carts already crowded with prisoners. The night was full of terrible sounds—soldiers shouting, men arguing or pleading in vain, women and children wailing, a ghastly pandemonium. It seemed they had finished and were about to move on when one of the soldiers, obviously an officer, turned and looked up directly at me. I was standing out on the little balcony, gripping the wrought-iron railing tightly. The officer spoke to one of his comrades, who also looked in my direction. The officer raised his sword, pointing to me. I knew his face—but I had no idea who he was. A group of soldiers, apparently responding to instructions, hurried across the street to the hotel. Still, I couldn’t move. A terrible fear came over me as I realized they would take me away with the others. The rest is sensation—the twisting, falling, hideous sweetness we all dream more often than we would like before it actually happens—dying.
I slept late—it was becoming a welcome habit—and woke up feeling remarkably cheerful and energetic. I remembered the dream, I thought about it through my shower, over brunch, and during my walk to the news-stand for the most recent Herald Tribune. I sat outdoors at a café, drank two cups of coffee, smoked cigarettes, and read about Darryl Strawberry’s 525-foot home run in distant Montreal.
It was great to be alive. Any sense of menace or fear had dissolved out of the dream. It had already become a kind of mental curio that I carried around with me. Maybe I was happy simply because I knew I could never have had that nightmare in New York. What it seemed to say to me in the light of day was: “Now you know you’re in Blanca.”
“It’s local history,” Basma agreed when we met in the beer garden later that afternoon and I told him about the dream. “You must have known about it before you came here.”
“Sure. Well, vaguely.” I lit a cigarette while the waitress delivered our second round of beers. “I’ve heard the jokes about people being taken away in the dead of night and never seen again.”
“Yes, but they are not jokes. What you dreamed is exactly how it used to happen—and by the way, it still does, from time to time.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that’s politics, which never interested me. I’d just as soon get back to dreaming about sex.”
“Aha.” Basma smiled broadly. “No need just to dream about it, you know.”
“It’ll do for now.”
Basma shrugged sadly. I knew I was doing a bad job of living up to his mental image of American tourists as people hell-bent on having an extravagantly good time. We had a light dinner together and then I disappointed him further by deciding to make an early evening of it. I was still a bit tired from our night out on the town, and I wanted nothing more than to read in bed for a while and then get about twelve hours of sleep. I had it in mind to rent a car the next day and see a bit of the nearby countryside, however flat and dull it might be.
Simenon worked his usual magic. I was soon transported to rainy Paris (even in the sweltering heat of August, Simenon’s Paris seems rainy), where Inspector Maigret had another nasty murder to unravel. It was bliss, but unfortunately I drifted off to sleep sooner than I expected. I woke up a little after four in the morning, the paperback in my hand. I dropped the book to the floor and crawled under the covers. But it was no good. Finally I sat up and groaned, realizing that I would not be able to get back to sleep. For a while I simply stayed there, lying still.
I got out of bed when I noticed a strange flickering of light reflected on the half-open window. It came from the street below, a lamp-post or car headlights most likely. But when I stepped onto the balcony and look
ed down, I was paralyzed by what I saw. They were all there again. The horses, the carts, the soldiers with their swords and torches, the pitiful souls being dragged from their homes, the mothers and wives, the children. It was a repeat performance of the grim nightmare I’d had only twenty-four hours ago, but this time I was wide-awake. I forced myself to be sure: I took note of the cold, harsh wrought iron beneath my bare feet, I sucked in huge breaths of chilly night air, and I looked over my shoulder into the hotel room to reassure myself in some way. But when I turned back to the street below they were still there; the scene continued to play itself out. I was awake, and it was happening.
I realized there were certain differences. Noise—there was none. The horses stamped, the soldiers shouted, the men argued, and their families sobbed, but I heard none of this; I could only see it taking place. Silence ruled the night. And then there was the officer, the one in charge, who had pointed his sword at me in the dream. I spotted him again and he still looked familiar to me, but I didn’t know who he was. This time he never once glanced in my direction. He and his troops went about their business as if I didn’t exist, though they could hardly fail to notice me standing there on the second-floor balcony, the room lit up behind me. The fact that they didn’t may account for the other difference, the lack of fear in me. The scene had a terrible fascination, I was transfixed by it, but at the same time I felt detached from it, uninvolved. I didn’t know what to make of it. I felt puzzled rather than threatened.
Finally I did something sensible. I looked up the street, away from the scene, and sure enough, I saw the usual line of parked cars that I knew belonged there. It was a comforting sight. But then, when I turned back, the dream drama was still just visible. The soldiers and the carts had formed a wavy line and were marching away from me toward the main road, a hundred yards or so in the distance. I watched them until they reached the intersection with that broad avenue, at which point my eyes could make out nothing more than the bobbing, meandering flow of torch flames.
It took another few minutes for me to realize that what I was looking at was a stream of headlights. Then I became aware of the sound of that traffic; the silence was broken. The early shift, I told myself. Hundreds of workers on their way to the abattoirs, stockyards, and packing plants on the south side of the city. The news agents, short-order cooks, and bus drivers. All the people who open up the city before dawn every morning. Any city. I stepped back into the room, sat on my bed, and lit a cigarette, wondering how yesterday’s nightmare could turn into today’s hallucination.
“Do you take drugs?” Basma asked me casually.
We were walking through the park, toward a bar I’d never been to in my life. It was about five that afternoon, and I’d blurted out the story of the hallucination—which was what I still took it to be—as soon as we met for our daily drink and chat.
I laughed. “No, it’s been a few years since I did any drugs, and even then it wasn’t much.”
“You are quite certain that you were fully awake when you saw this—whatever it was?”
“Yes.”
“And you were awake before you saw it?”
“Definitely. I was lying there, feeling sorry for myself for waking up so early. I saw the orange light flickering on the window—it’s a glass door, actually, to the balcony.”
“Yes, yes,” Basma said impatiently.
“Well, as I told you, I sat up, went to the window, stepped out onto the balcony, and there it was.”
“I see.”
Basma didn’t speak again until we reached the bar, a workers’ grogshop that offered only the locally brewed beer, Bolero. Once we got our drinks and I had lit a cigarette, Basma returned to the subject.
“You think it was hallucination.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “What else would it be?”
“Ghosts.” Basma smiled, but not as if he were joking. “Perhaps you saw some ghosts from history.”
“Oh, I doubt that very much.”
“Why? It makes perfect sense. What is more, I think you may have been awake the first time you saw them, two nights ago. You only thought it was a dream, you were less certain because it was the first time and you had been drinking more—yes?”
“Yes, I had been drinking more, but I still think that I was dreaming. It ended in a panic and I was lost in sleep in an instant—no sensation of getting back into bed or thinking about it.” I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another. I didn’t like disappointing Basma again, he seemed as eager as a child to believe in ghosts. “Besides, even if I had been awake, that doesn’t mean it was not a hallucination.”
“The same hallucination, two nights in a row.” Basma gave this some thought. “And you have some medical history of this?”
“No, not at all,” I had to admit.
“Then why do you think it should suddenly start happening to you now?”
I shrugged. “The stories I’d heard about Blanca. The emotional distress resulting from the break-up of my marriage. Throw in the mild despair I sometimes feel at the approach of my fortieth birthday.” I finished the beer and looked around for a waitress—a mistake in that bar. Then I realized how self-pitying I sounded, and it annoyed me very much. “To tell you the truth, I really have no idea at all why this kind of kind thing should be happening to me.”
“Hallucination?” Basma asked again, quietly.
“That makes a lot more sense than an army of ghosts.”
“As long as it makes sense to you.”
It didn’t, in fact, but I was fed up with talking about it, fed up with even thinking about it, so I fetched two more Bolero beers and then changed the subject. I told Basma about my day trip. I’d hired an Opel Rekord that morning and driven past miles and miles of cattle ranches, through small but impeccable villages, in a wide looping route north of Oranien. Altogether, I was out of the city for about five hours, and I’d seen quite enough of the countryside. There was nothing wrong with it—it was agreeably unspoiled rangeland—but it was bland, featureless, utterly lacking in charm or interest. Just as I’d been told.
“Yes.” Basma nodded. “I have heard that once you leave the city it’s much the same in every direction, for hundreds of miles. Although I’ve never seen for myself.”
“You’ve never left Oranien, since you got here?”
“Why should I? There’s nothing to see.” His smile broadened into a grin. “Is there?”
“Well, no.”
“Do you still have the car?”
“Yes, until tomorrow noon,” I told him. “It’s parked back near the hotel.”
“Good. If you don’t mind driving, I would like to show you something. Not exactly a tourist attraction, but I think you’ll find it worthwhile.”
He wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but there was still plenty of daylight left when we drove away a few minutes later. I followed his directions, and it was soon obvious that we were heading toward the south end of the city.
“The stockyards?” I guessed.
“Ah, you’ve seen them.”
“Only from a distance.” I told Basma about the view from the department store.
“Now you will see it all close up.”
I was mildly curious. We passed through the commercial district and then a residential area not unlike the one in which I was staying. The houses and apartment buildings became shabbier and more dilapidated the farther we went from the center of the city; the middle class in-town neighborhood gave way to the worker-Indian tenements on the outskirts. I wanted to drive slowly so that I could see as much as possible, and in the fact I had to because there were so many people out on the streets. Kids playing games and ignoring the traffic, grown-ups talking in small groups (men to men, women to women, mostly), and the old folks sitting stoically wherever they could find a quiet spot. Most of the social life, including the cooking and eating of food, seemed to take place outdoors.
Almost before I realized it, we were there. The industry and the wo
rkers’ lodgings had sprung up together over the years, without benefit of design or long-term planning. There were row houses right up to the open doors of an abattoir, apartment buildings wedged between a canning factory and a processing plant, and a vast maze of corrals holding thousands of cattle bumping against dozens of tiny backyards. After we had cruised around for a while, I began to understand that these people literally lived in their workplaces: you would go home when your shift was finished, but home was hardly any different. The interminable stupid bawling of the cattle, the mingled stench of blood, raw meat, and cowshit, the constant rattling of trains, the drumming vibrations of the factories—everything here, everything you saw or heard or felt or smelled was about decay and death. You could taste it in the air.
We reached the worst of it, a mean stretch where finally the people themselves seemed only marginally alive. They stood or sat about in front of their shacks looking dazed. The streets, no longer paved, became increasingly difficult to navigate. Ditches ran along both sides, and they ran red with blood from the slaughterhouses. In the absence of traffic and other human noises, the shriek of power-saws carving animal flesh was piercingly clear. At every pile of garbage vicious cats and scarred dogs competed with huge brown roaches and gangs of rats for whatever was going. It was getting dark fast.
“I hope you know the way back.”
“Yes, of course.”
Basma gave me a series of directions, and it wasn’t too long before we were on a better road. Neither of us had spoken much in the course of our slumming tour. As soon as I caught a glimpse of the lights in the center of the city my stomach began to relax. I’ve been to some of the worst refugee camps in the world and never felt so tense. But refugee camps are at least theoretically temporary, and there is always the hope, however slim, of eventual movement. The people I had just seen were never going anywhere.
“I suppose I’ve had Blanca beef many times, in all my travels,” I said, just to say something.
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