So it had all been a ruse, their coming. She would see how silly it was and then they’d go back to their holiday. Pretend she’d never seen a dead boy on the beach.
–He chose me to find his family, she said simply. –Your science doesn’t explain everything, does it. He’s relying on me.
After dinner they found a budget hotel with an empty room on the third floor where they could thrash things out. Henk knew the owner — he seemed to know everyone — and said he’d sleep on the roof. He was at Kate’s service if she wanted to go on, he said.
–I’m free at the moment, he told them. –No ulterior motives, it goes without saying. He flung up his hands as if they’d pointed a gun at him. –But you can’t go on your own, Kate.
She and Gavin argued for most of the night as the moon bore down, an interrogation light. She’d be safe with Henk, she said, he knew the ropes. Gavin, explosive, said it wasn’t about Henk, it had nothing to do with Henk. –Promise me, Katie, you’ll be back by the time we fly home. Five days.
–I can’t, Gav. But I’ll let you know one way or the other.
Gavin put his head in his hands. –This is crazy. You do know that, don’t you?
–It’s not my choice. I told you already. She leaned forward and kissed the top of his head, the hair damp with sweat. –Take the car, she said. –Leave early. Maybe you’ll make the ferry before the roadwork starts.
She and Henk waited two hours for the bus that would take them into the mountains. There were no spare seats. They stood pressed among men with roped bundles, the odd djellaba’d woman, half a dozen live chickens. Much later, among a handful of houses that might have been a village, Henk indicated they should get off. –You must look as though you belong to a man, he said, and took her arm as if they were a couple. She hung on gratefully, limp with the standing, the heat, the smell of dust and sweat.
Her drawing was passed from hand to hand among the old men who gathered, frowning under their headwraps. –They’re telling us what we already know, Henk explained. –That it’s a tattoo, what it means. Though they say it’s not accurate.
A younger man appeared with a ballpoint, an older man made careful corrections, pausing, pursing his lips. Women brought plates of kefta and couscous, eyeing Kate with open disapproval.
The next village required a battered taxi that flung itself up a mountain round hairpin curves, each moment on the cliff edge an eternity. On the single street an ancient woman, evidently deaf, stared at them in astonishment from a doorway while several children peered round her. No one else seemed to be about. Henk took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. To Kate’s relief a boy appeared, leading a donkey. Everyone was away at some religious festival, he told Henk, who arranged to hire the donkey to carry them, or rather her, along an uphill goat track to the next village.
They arrived as the sun was setting. Another handful of buildings that seemed to have assembled themselves out of the arid pastures — she’d never seen life so stripped to its basics. The place glowed with evening light; a bat flapped past her head. They were offered a couple of mattresses in one of the houses, where a middle-aged woman with the grave face of a saint brought them some sort of bean soup and bread to scoop it up with. Afterwards Kate took a blanket and lay outside as the stars, in their brilliant indifference, came out, one by one.
In the fifth — or was it the sixth? — village, a young woman appeared who knew some English. She seemed to emerge from a group of chattering children and offered Kate a glass of what turned out to be fresh lemonade. Together with an older woman she guided Kate into the dimness of a shuttered room with a low bed, where she must have fallen asleep because the sun was setting when she woke. She made her way, groggily, toward the voices outside.
Henk was sitting at a wooden table beneath a scrawny tree, talking to an ancient man who sat leaning on a cane. The young woman she’d seen earlier was setting out cups and a pot of coffee before them, turning to Kate with the tray in her hand. Had Kate slept, was she hungry? The woman went inside and came back with a filled plate, pointing to a bench by the house wall where Kate might sit. So she was to eat separately from the men. Or perhaps the woman wanted to talk.
Her name was Lalla; she was the daughter of the house, visiting from the city. Her tight jeans, her long red nails belonged elsewhere, that was clear, despite the headscarf. –So you found a body, she said, arms folded, leaning against the doorway of the house as Kate sat eating. –You came all this way because you found a body?
Kate, mouth full of couscous, nodded, though with the food warming her belly she’d half-forgotten Azemmur. Lalla produced a cigarette, lit it, blew out smoke. Her own brother had gone missing in Spain seven years before. He was the oldest, expected to provide for his parents and younger siblings. Her father believed he’d taken up with a foreign girl and was keeping all his money for himself. Had denounced him, publicly, stating that his son was no longer his son, that in fact he’d never existed.
–So I went to Fez to look for work, after we didn’t hear from him. I was lucky, I knew some English, I got a job in a hotel.
Now it was one of her younger brothers who wanted out. He’d go to Spain next year most likely, when he turned sixteen, or the year after that. He came up to them as Lalla spoke, a startlingly handsome boy with thick eyelashes and a shy smile. Said something to his sister, who frowned and flicked her fingers at him and turned away.
–It is time for our English lesson, she told Kate. –He is always saying English, English. Perhaps I am helping him drown, too. But what choice did her family have? –Even the goats here have nothing to eat, with the drought, she said.
She swept her arm across the hillside and gave Kate a look of undisguised envy. –You know any man in Morocco would marry you in an instant, don’t you? Just like that — she snapped her fingers. –And here you are, looking for a man who doesn’t even belong to you.
In the morning Lalla took her from house to house. In each Kate held out the drawing, smudged and torn from handling. In each the answer was the same. No, they knew of no such boy. It was doubtful, indeed, that such a boy existed, one whose mother would have him tattooed like that. What boy would agree to such a thing? What father? Not for the first time Kate wondered about Zainab’s explanation, the one she said the boy himself had given. Perhaps, like the boy’s home village, that too was made up.
Instead they told her about their own sons, the ones they’d lost to that narrow strait that separated Morocco from the continent. They held out photographs, they cried names aloud, they called on Allah as witness. In the last house an aging woman who must once have been a beauty took a framed photograph surrounded by candles from an alcove, kissed it, then held it out to Kate. A child still, the boy in the photograph, with his downy face and dreamy eyes. He’d left when he was seventeen, the woman said as Lalla translated. –He’s thirty-seven now, if he’s still alive, insh’allah. Here, take, you take. And she thrust the photo into Kate’s hands, refusing to take it back. –Look for this boy instead. He’s still alive, I’m sure of it. I have a little money, I can pay. And she fumbled coins from her kaftan, though Kate held her other hand behind her back. It was Lalla who intervened, who handed the photo back to the woman and said to Kate –Don’t you dare take him on. Go home. Find your husband.
In the morning Kate couldn’t even keep water down. A pair of implacable hands had taken hold of her gut, twisting, twisting. She writhed under the sheet, wanting Gavin, wanting the safety of her own room in distant Canada. Lalla’s mother came in and bathed her forehead and hands with rosewater. Henk came in too — she heard his voice from a long way away, speaking to the mother in Arabic. A surge of deep longing for something rolled over her. She vomited into a basin.
Later she dozed from time to time, jerked out of sleep by noises, by dreams. Once she was better she would search until Azemmur told her to stop. She’d met his family, or people who might as well have been his family, in all these little villages — cousi
ns and grandparents, sisters and aunts. She’d eaten their food, slept on their straw mattresses. They’d asked their god to bless her journey, they urged her to let them know if she found the boy’s family. Like all the others he had left for an unknown country, one with no passports, no immigration controls. An underwater country populated by the dead. They lay among the waving seaweed, the fat darting fish.
Toward evening Azemmur came. He was bathed in a kind of shining radiance. He lit a candle that seemed to be floating on a bowl of fragrant oil. –I am grateful, khtî, he told her gently, but you will not find me. He turned, then, and walked toward an ocean she hadn’t noticed until now. She wept and pleaded but he moved resolutely on. She sat down on the sand, cold and shaking, and watched him until his head disappeared beneath the waves.
She woke to voices — Henk and someone else — discussing something in hushed tones. Someone, a woman she had never seen before, came in and held a concoction of bitter herbs to her lips. Perhaps she was dying, though she didn’t think so. She had been granted a glimpse across a border, that was all. Gavin had seen the Alhambra and the village where the Moors fought the Christians, but the place she had seen was in no guidebook that she knew of. Azemmur had led the way, and she had followed. A thin line of radiance lingered just below the shutters, where the ocean had seeped in.
HAPPINESS
As always he strapped on his duty belt with its baton and flashlight, slid the pistol into its holster, adjusted the gorra to its exact position in the mirror. Luisa teased him sometimes, said he was vain as any woman, but precision was what he’d learned thirty-four years ago as a young recruit and he couldn’t change now. In the hallway he kissed her cheek, as he always did, and as always she patted his arm and invoked unearthly protection. –Que Dios te traiga a casa seguramente. He was grateful for the benediction, though he wasn’t a believer; maybe it had kept him safe all these years. Marisol, texting on her phone, didn’t even look up when he opened the front door.
Already his radio was crackling as he slid into the driver’s seat. Another boatload of migrants, twenty kilometres off the coast near Marbella. That meant another interception, the third this week. He hoped, this time, there were no corpses. Twenty years ago, when he’d transferred from Highway Patrol to the glamorous new Servicio Marítimo, the posting had been his for the asking. –Why does the sea need guarding, Papá? Emilia, then six, had wanted to know. That was two months after he’d found that Algerian child, not much older than Emilia, frozen to death one brutal winter night in the undercarriage of a freight truck on the old A4 motorway just outside Seville. Three others, barely teenagers, had been crammed in as well, so inert with cold they couldn’t walk.
At the station he watched the progress of the migrant boat on the closed-circuit TV, then turned to his paperwork. In thirty-four years he’d never caught up. At night sometimes he sat knee-deep in paper at a desk, trying to beat off more sheets snowing down from the sky. He’d resisted the promotion to captain until his superintendent had phoned from headquarters and told him he was getting his third star whether he liked it or not. –There’s a fourth star, too, capitán Hortelano, his sergeant, Arregui, told him, grinning. –For meritorious execution of paperwork over a lifetime. Measured in reams.
Marisol, twelve then, had said it was cool and called him papá de las estrellas. Felipe, who’d already made it clear he wasn’t following his father into the force, even tried on the jacket with its brand-new epaulets.
Just after nine he downed a café solo in the bar next door and headed to the dock with Arregui. The rescue boat was reporting fifty-seven migrants, including nine women and seven kids. They were nearly always in rough shape, the ilegales — dehydrated, starving, sunburnt. At dockside they were joined by three nurses from the Red Cross. Arregui’s radio crackled again and Hortelano listened in. There was a tenth woman, lying at the back of the boat on sodden blankets. She’d just given birth.
Arregui whistled through his teeth. –What does that make the baby, jefe? A citizen of the Mediterranean?
–Work for lawyers. Hortelano stood watching as the rescue boat entered the harbour, black-skinned figures draped in blankets at the railings, the usual battered dinghy in tow. Fishers of men, Christ had said, though in his own case it wasn’t for souls but for bodies, on behalf of the Spanish government. Why had that phrase from his long-ago catechism classes suddenly surfaced?
Cabo Pilar Meléndez Cardozo, the new badge of a lance corporal on her shirt sleeve, was pulling on her latex gloves and talking to the nurses. He still found it awkward, calling her by her last name — women weren’t allowed to join the force in his day — but he was glad she was here. Pilar had a calming effect on the migrants. On her first interception she’d wept, afterwards, in his office, blowing her nose angrily in a tissue. –I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
–Don’t, he told her. –Don’t apologize. But don’t take it home with you, either.
She was twenty-six, the same age, incredibly, as Emilia was now, and he’d wanted to put his arm round her and tell her everything would be all right.
The boat was nosing into dock, a dozen or more other SEMAR members standing by, plus immigration officers and military police. Pilar and Arregui climbed on board to talk to the crew who’d carried out the apprehension. How many migrants had he interviewed over the years —thousands? Tens of thousands? They were helped ashore, one by one, most of them younger males in hoodies or woollen caps, the few women in robes or jeans. The woman who’d just given birth was carried off by stretcher, followed by Pilar holding a bundle that suddenly waved a fist and gave a sharp catlike cry.
–Look, jefe, look! She came hurrying over to show him. –She’s fine, she’s healthy, at first I thought she’d — Breaking off, biting her lip as Hortelano reached out and lifted the baby from her. Body memory took over, making a cradle of his arms. The black eyes were bright but the skin was cool, the umbilical cord still dangling from the cloths that held her. Without thinking he unfastened his vest to zip her inside, the tiny heart fluttering birdlike against his own.
Arregui phoned him that evening, as he’d asked. The baby’s parents were from Nigeria. The mother was nineteen. They’d walked to Morocco — it had taken them six months — where they’d paid a tiburón, a shark, to arrange passage across the mar de Alborán, the western Mediterranean. The baby had been born half an hour before the rescue boat found them.
In the morning, after he left the house, he found himself driving to the hospital. The mother was anemic and badly dehydrated, so the nurse on duty told him; the baby had a severe case of oral thrush. He stared at the incubator with its tiny occupant through the viewing window, at its tubes and dials and portholes. Down the hall the mother was propped against pillows, her face taut with exhaustion. He rocked his arms, miming a cradle, folded his hands against his cheek as she watched, expressionless. –Okay, he said, slowly, loudly, leaning forward to touch her arm. –All okay.
But it wasn’t. She’d probably recover, she and the baby, but she’d still be deported in sixty days. Unless she found a lawyer, and even then… It was an impossible situation. You couldn’t let them all in.
–They’re taking our jobs, Papá, aren’t they? Marisol said that evening at dinner, in a rare burst of conversation. –Paco’s dad just got laid off from his construction job. Again.
Luisa was passing round the dish of spiced potatoes. –What’s got into you, Kiko, visiting babies in hospitals? She laughed, not unkindly. –She’ll need clothes. I’ll dig out that old layette of Marisol’s.
–Papá’s getting soft, said Felipe. He pushed away his plate and got up. –All right if I take the car?
“The car” meant Luisa’s little Renault, the one he’d bought her last year for her fiftieth birthday. Luisa sighed theatri-cally. –You’ll be home by midnight? Not like last night?
–Promise. Felipe kissed her cheek, already shrugging on his jacket. Slam of the door, the thud of running steps, then the car farting into life ou
tside. Was it really thirty-odd years since he and Luisa had groped each other in some Sevillan back street in his father’s elderly Volvo? He’d had a talk with Felipe when the boy turned sixteen, had even bought him some condoms. Felipe had looked at him pityingly. –This brand’s useless, Papá. It always comes off.
When he went back in the morning the duty nurse, a different one, wouldn’t let him in. –She was terrified after you came, she tried to leave. She isn’t well.
Years ago he would have asserted his rights as an officer of the Guardia Civil, those black-tricorned police who had once terrorized rural villages but were now, in post-dictatorship Spain, redeeming themselves. Instead he returned after work, in civilian clothes. Two guards from Immigration stood outside the door of the ward, edgy. One, a young recruit named Ignacio, he knew from the docks.
–She’s under guard now? Hortelano took out the package of mints that ten years ago had replaced cigarettes.
–We brought her husband in. Ignacio jerked his head toward the room. –The jefe said he could have an hour.
That was unusual, letting people out of detention for a hospital visit. The baby was making everyone soft. The father sat at the bedside, tall and bony in a shrunken track suit, hands dangling between his legs. The mother held the baby, who was sucking steadily at a breast. A glimpse of pinky-black nipple as she saw him and clutched, alarmed, at the blanket, the father rising warily. Hortelano patted the air in a gesture of reassurance. –Enrique, he said, pointing at himself, and slowed down the syllables. –En-ree-kay.
The father wetted his lips and mumbled something that sounded like Adbo. No, not Adbo — a vigorous head shake — Adebayo. He gestured at his wife. –Olabisi. And this one — he spoke in English, laying his large hand on the baby’s head — this one bring us happiness, so that is her name. Happiness.
Hour of the Crab Page 4