Tangier fd-1

by William Bayer

  He strode quickly up Rue de Chypre, the lane that led to Achar's clinic. The moment he entered he could smell the disinfectant. It came upon him like a blow across his face. It was eight o'clock and still there were people waiting to be helped. They sat in rows of hard benches, some in casts, others holding their stomachs, a tall, thin girl with a soiled bandage wrapped about her head. He avoided a wet patch on the floor, something thick and yellow sprinkled with a layer of sawdust that had not yet soaked it up. From the cubicles where the doctors worked he could hear moans and a few kind words.

  He ran into Achar at the operating room door. The doctor's white gown was spotted with dark red stains. His large hands, firm and covered with black curls of hair, grasped at Hamid's arm.

  "What happened?"

  "A little girl. Impossible to save her." Achar shook his head. "Come," he said, leading Hamid into his little office in the back. They sat down amidst the clutter. Achar smoothed his mustache, then yelled for someone to bring them tea.

  "Did you see the accident?"

  "No. I was driving through. It must have happened a few seconds before."

  "Pointless, of course. The bus was going much too fast. They have no business taking tourists through these streets."

  "It's the best way back from Cap Spartel-"

  "Yes. Of course. Do you know what they say-the guides on the buses? They have to keep talking, you see. If there's nothing 'touristic' to point out then they have to make something up. When they come through here they say 'This is a typical Moroccan village, settled by people from the Rif who have left their farms to seek their fortunes in Tangier.' How absurd! I have no doubt the cameras click away."

  Hamid nodded. He was used to Achar's rage. "What happened tonight?"

  The doctor shrugged. "A typical incident. There's no water in Dradeb during the day, so when the public taps are turned on at night the children are all waiting with their jugs. Probably this little girl was late, and ran across the street to get a place in line."

  Hamid began to think of his boyhood in Dradeb, fetching water for his mother, carrying bread to the ovens on a board on top of his head.

  "Suicide Village."

  "What's that?"

  "That's what they call Dradeb."

  "Who calls it that?"

  "The foreigners, Mohammed. My friends on the Mountain."

  The tea arrived and they both began to sip.

  "My beautiful friends. They zoom through here in their cars, and always there are donkeys and sheep and little children running about. There are old women who are deaf, and old men who ignore their horns. So it seems to them that this is a place filled with animals and people who want to throw themselves beneath their wheels. Suicide Village-do you see?"

  "Oh, I see," said Achar. "An amusing little name for a place which unfortunately they can't avoid. Well-I'm a surgeon. One of these days all your friends will have to leave. Or else we'll have to cut them out."

  Hamid looked at him, neither nodding nor shaking his head. There were men at the Surete who would use such a statement as a pretext to start a black dossier.

  "Aside from all that," Hamid said finally, "have you had a good day?"

  "Terrible! This afternoon a woman was brought in. Literally she was bleeding to death. She'd tried to abort herself with an uncurled coat hanger. She punctured herself, of course, infected her entire womb. I gave her massive doses of sulfa drugs and tetanus, everything I had. Tomorrow I'll operate-if she's still alive, and if I can get sufficient blood."

  His anger over all this misery showed brightly in his eyes.

  "I envy you," said Hamid.

  Achar began to laugh.

  "No. I envy you. You're a scientist. You can be certain about the truth. The diagnosis may be right or wrong, but moral questions don't arise."

  Achar gave him a curious look. "Really, Hamid, that's one of the silliest things you've ever said. Here in Dradeb all the questions are moral ones. This woman with the coat hanger-don't you see? She was pregnant and wanted to abort. That's a social issue. She committed a political act. No, don't envy me. Here we have far messier days than you in the police."

  They finished off the tea, then Hamid rose to leave. He was at the door when Achar suddenly looked up.

  "My love to Kalinka," he said.

  The tourist bus had left, and now people were running back and forth across the street as if the accident had never occurred. Big cars blew their horns, but nobody turned. Foreigners were driving to dinner parties on the Mountain or in the town.

  Hamid parked outside his apartment house on Ramon y Cahal, gathered up his flowers, and carefully locked his car. The wind, blowing even more furiously, seemed to have upset the neighborhood. Pausing at the front door of his building, he could hear the cries of children and insanely barking dogs.

  The elevator, a black cage, moved slowly with irregular jerks. When he entered the apartment he found it dark, except for a thin bar of light beneath the bedroom door.

  "Hamid? Is that you, Hamid?" She was lying on their bed, her pipe in her hand. The thick, sweet smoke of hashish hung about her like a veil. "Soon I'll get you dinner, Hamid. But first sit down, tell me why you're late."

  "There was an accident in Dradeb. Then I stopped to see Achar."

  He sat beside her, and she began at once to caress his hands. Her dark Oriental eyes and ivory-colored skin, diffused by the smoke of her hashish, held the promise of mysterious ways of making love.

  "I bought a nice fish for you today. And strawberries for dessert."

  He picked up her pipe, put it on the little table beside their bed, then bent down to kiss her lips. She was Eurasian, half Russian, half Tonkinoise-his fragile, strange metisse.

  "I'm hungry."

  “Soon you will be fed."

  "What did you do today?"

  “I smoked all afternoon."

  When she finally pulled herself up, he followed her to the kitchen, stood and watched while she heated oil in a pan.

  "I saw Peter today," he said. Between themselves they always spoke French.

  "Oh? Does he still look the same?"

  "Exactly the same, of course."

  "He was surprised to see you. I have the feeling he was surprised."

  "Yes, he was surprised. But he pretended he wasn't and talked too much. He became impertinent toward the end."

  "The same shabby suit?"

  "What?"

  "Was he wearing the same suit-the brown one, frayed at the cuffs?"

  "He wants to see you."

  She flung the fish into the pan. "I don't want to see him. Sometimes I feel him following me, but I never turn around."

  "He follows you?"

  "I don't know. I think he does. But since I never look back I can't be sure."

  It was typical of her, this sort of dreamy remark that offended his sense of order, his restless need to observe everything and seek out its cause. But she was different, full of things half sensed, visions she could not be sure she'd seen, or only imagined while she smoked.

  He left the kitchen, took the flowers, arranged them in a vase. When she brought out the food he waited for her to notice them, and when she didn't he pulled one out by its stem.

  "A good bouquet, don't you think? These are the first agapanthus of the year."

  "Yes," she said, staring closely. "I saw some at the market. I knew you liked them, so I brought them home."

  "No, no, Kalinka. I bought these for you. I bought them from an old woman late this afternoon."

  She looked across at him and smiled. "Oh! Then I forgot. I paid the flower lady, I remember that-but then I must have left them in a taxi, or maybe at the butcher's stall."

  It was possible, he thought, and then again she might have been thinking of a purchase she'd made a year before. He would never know-her vagueness was endemic, a sort of poetry that maddened him yet gave him the sensation that in her presence he could always rest, enveloped in her soft cocoon of dreams.

  For a
long while he lay awake in bed, listening to the wind. It rattled the windows, loose in their old frames. Dogs barked like madmen in the night. He turned to Kalinka, who was breathing evenly by his side, her eyelids fluttering like the petals of a yellow rose. Who was she? He had never understood her, and supposed he never would. She was a cipher, and he a mad cryptographer fumbling for the key to her strange utterances, the pattern of her actions, so random, so obscure.

  For years he'd seen her in Zvegintzov's shop, huddling in the back on the stool which Peter used to reach the upper shelves, or else on the yellow hassock he kept between the ice cream freezer and the counter of children's toys. For years Hamid had seen her, but not really well-she was like a fixture in the shop, a part of the decor, an Oriental girl who'd come with the Russian, a relic of his past life, his life before Tangier.

  Then, for some reason, their paths began to cross. She'd be walking the streets aimlessly, wandering in her long Oriental dress, white silk trousers flashing through the slit, moving like a sparrow or a butterfly, sometimes with flowers in her arms. When he'd see her he'd pull over in his car, sit and watch her as she passed. Her face was oblivious and gay, as if she had no notion she was being watched.

  One night the previous autumn he came upon her in the Casbah standing in the shadows of the wall, looking out across the Straits. He couldn't remember why he'd come, except that he was feeling lonely and wanted to gaze down upon the city lights. The Place de Casbah was deserted, except for the one-legged man who watched the cars. Hamid's footsteps rang on the old stones, but she did not turn when he came near. Then, when he greeted her, she nodded at him and smiled.

  "It's a good evening," he said.

  "Yes," she said, "thanks be to God."

  They stood side by side in silence for a while, then she floated away across the vast, dark square, disappearing through a massive arch without a sound.

  Suddenly, it seemed, they saw each other every day-in the market early in the morning, before a gas station, or in unexpected places, on narrow side streets, in odd corners of the town. It became a game with him: Where could he go, what obscure quarter of the city could he visit, without seeing her pass? Even in Beni Makada one day, where he'd gone after a man who'd stabbed a tourist with a knife, even there, amidst rotting garbage and dust, in the maddening, punishing heat, he caught a glimpse of her talking with a potter in his shed, their heads close together, her hand squeezing clay. He could not stop then, but afterward, when his quarry was safely handcuffed, he questioned the old man, who showed him a sketch she'd made, a design for a vase for flowers. He was amazed-it was so perfect. It must have taken her hours to draw. All the shadings were fine, and she'd even drawn in the shadows and made the high points glow as though they reflected light. The signature was tiny, fragile-KALINKA, the letters compressed to form a seal.

  So, he thought, there is some purpose to her walks; she moves about on errands, fills her days with little things. But there was something odd too-a feeling he had that she was lost.

  He became interested and wondered if she noticed how frequently they met. Why? Why did he, busy with police work, and she, on her little errands-why did their paths so often intersect? What was there in common about their lives? What drew them together in this teeming town?

  He tried to study her when he visited La Colombe, tried to watch her as he and Peter talked. Sometimes he'd catch her eye and then she'd smile as if to say: "We have a secret-we see each other, have knowledge of each other's life." Did he imagine this?

  Around Zvegintzov she was docile, never said a word. No wonder he'd never noticed her there-she came alive for him only when he saw her walking by herself.

  One day, on a tip from an informant, he and Aziz Jaouhari raided a strange cafe in the medina. They raced up three flights of dark, stale-smelling stairs, then suddenly burst out onto a roof. The sunlight was blinding, the air sweet with the fumes of hashish. A dozen Chinese puffing on long cane pipes lay on reed mats beneath a panoply of freshly laundered sheets. No one turned as they stood watching from the door, panting from their climb.

  "Who are these people?"

  "Isn't that Zvegintzov's wife?"

  Aziz pointed, and Hamid recognized her at once. Her head was covered by the hood of a black djellaba drawn about her dress. It was all so strange-he'd never noticed that there were Chinese in the city before, never imagined that there was a Chinese group. He stared and then withdrew, muttering to Aziz as they descended that they should start a Chinese file.

  What was she doing there? Impossible to know. When their eyes met in the shop he felt confused.

  He saw her sipping tea with an Italian smuggler in a small cafe near the bus terminal at the end of Avenue d'Espagne. He knew the man, knew for a fact that he was ruthless and corrupt. What was she doing? Why?

  Another time, when he was driving down Pasteur, he saw her talking with his brother, Farid, in the doorway of his shop. He raced around the block and parked, then ran to the corner just in time to see her leave.

  "So," he said to Farid, "you know Madame Zvegintzov?"

  "Yes, Hamid, she's come by several times. Thank you for sending her, but I don't think I can help. The sort of horn she wants-copper and very long-I haven't seen one like that in years."

  "She said I sent her?"

  Farid narrowed his eyes. "You did, didn't you? I'm sure she said you did."

  He turned away, his hands trembling. She'd sought out his brother, used his name. What did she want with a long old-warrior's horn? Perhaps she wanted to convert it into a lamp.

  After that she was fixed firmly in his brain. Her implacable gaze, her masklike face-he saw it everywhere, even when he closed his eyes. What was happening? He was in love with her. Yes, he loved her-he realized it then. But what to do? Was she playing a game? He must find out, must corner her somewhere, force her to speak. Where? She was always moving, slipping away. In the shop? Impossible! With Peter watching? No!

  He began to lose interest in his work, to wander about by himself at night, hoping to run into her, to find a situation where they could talk. He went to the dark place by the Casbah wall, but she did not appear. He stood gazing down at Tangier and its bay, watching the night pour over the Mountain like thick, black ink, watching until he could no longer see the towers of the mosques.

  He became obsessed, and during the day at unexpected times he would think of her, imagine her coming toward him down a street, smiling, stooping every so often to pick a wild herb or rip a flower from a hedge. Yes, she was tracking him, tracking him inside his mind. At the shop their eyes would lock and she would smile. As he stood talking to Peter he felt tense, certain she was watching his back. Afterward he would go to his car, or move to the shadow of some doorway, and rub away the moisture from his palms.

  He thought only of her and whispered her name over and over to himself: Kalinka, Kalinka. Her name sounded like the ring of a bell.

  One day he went to Farid's bazaar, prowled for an hour among the antiques. Finally he couldn't contain himself-the words pulsed with passion as they escaped his chest. "Find me the sort of horn she wants," he panted. "Find it and sell it to me."

  "Oh, Hamid, she has cast a spell on you. I can see it in your eyes-she has made you mad."

  "Find me this horn, Farid," he begged. "I will pay anything, but find it. Find it soon."

  He found a chicken's foot in his mailbox. Who put it there? A thief, perhaps, someone he'd caught and sent to Malabata prison? Why?

  The next night it was cold. The wind was blowing hard, and he could barely sleep. Suddenly a knock on his door. He was living on Rue Dante then, in a small apartment on the top floor of a building full of Spaniards. He stumbled out of bed, tried to turn on the light. Nothing. The electricity had failed.

  He opened the door. Peter Zvegintzov stood in the dark hallway, a thick, black overcoat hanging from his arm. Hamid could feel tension. The taste of brass filled his mouth.

  "Why do you come here, Peter?" he asked.
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  "My wife wants to leave me. She tells me she's in love with you."

  They stood facing each other in the darkness. He could feel menace in the Russian, and also great despair.

  "I know nothing of that," he said. But at the same time he felt joy.

  "What has happened, Hamid? What has passed between you?"

  "I don't know anything about it. I doubt we've exchanged a dozen words."

  "But she says-"

  "Yes! Yes! Tell me what she says."

  Zvegintzov was silent. Had he betrayed himself? Hamid stepped back.

  "She says you meet all the time, everywhere in the city. She says she's been lying to me, that when she goes out it is never to the places she has said. She says she follows you, and that when you come into my shop you pretend to listen to me but use your eyes to speak with her."

  Zvegintzov stepped into the doorway. A bit of light from the street cut a triangle across his face. There was anger in his face. Down the hall someone yelled "Quiet!" in Spanish. Hamid took another step back.

  "I don't understand why you've come here in the middle of the night."

  "How can you say a thing like that? My wife tells me she's leaving. Of course I've come to you. What difference the time of night? I have come for an explanation. I'm the husband. I have certain rights."

  Hamid stared.

  "For a long time I have helped you, Hamid-invited you into my place of business, told you things that have helped you with your work. You could not force me to do this. There is no pressure you could bring against me. I talked to you of my own free will. Now I learn that you will take away my wife. I confront you and you deny it. Is Kalinka a liar then? Tell me, tell me to my face."