Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  ‘The desert.’ He stirred restlessly, muttered under his breath, the English shot through with raw Polish. Vot the fok ist this? Her father’s phrase, when buyers of the African cargo lost their nerve or failed to pay.

  She looked at his signet ring, the pressed clothes. She thought, We all veil ourselves in different ways. We’re all caught between two worlds. She remembered Betsoul laughing at her, taunting her: You’ll always be an outsider.

  She was overcome by a sense of hopelessness so strong that it was almost like fainting. She thought, In Arabic there is a whole world of language just to do with the desert. The desert nurtures and cherishes its languages as a possession in its own right.

  She said to Pietr, ‘How could you ever think the writings of a desert poet would help you?’

  ‘I can sell it,’ he said. ‘All those rock stars quoting Arthur Rimbaud, philosophers as gods, self-destruction as fashion. Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, they’ve all made him the new seer, the man who started modern poetry. A book from him would be beyond price. The French alone would pay a fortune to get it back.’

  She touched her cross. ‘So you think the book is by Rimbaud?’

  For the first time he looked unsure of himself. ‘It has to be. Why else would my grandfather value it? My mother says it is so.’

  She was silent.

  ‘Is it?’ he said. ‘Is it not?’

  The cross was cool and reassuring in her fingers. ‘You should know it is an evil book.’ She thought then said, ‘No, it is a book which records evil.’

  ‘It’s mine,’ said Pietr. ‘It was my father’s.’

  Over by the wall, Stefano stirred.

  ‘It was stolen,’ said Agnieska, ‘by your grandfather. Your father was taking it to France. To return it to the writer’s family.’

  ‘It’s my inheritance. Mine.’

  She touched the scar on her left cheek. ‘I am owed something.’

  ‘I thought you received an allowance from the estate.’

  ‘It’s hardly enough, is it?’ He wouldn’t meet her eye. She said, ‘All the books in the world become sand in the desert. This book is by a poet. It would be justice to return it to the white page of the desert.’ She was aware of Stefano wandering casually along the wall, sliding his feet over the tiles, stepping slowly on the rugs.

  She said, ‘Jesus walked into the desert, reduced himself to nothing. He made himself as blank as the desert. From the blank page you construct the poem, the way you make a garden in the desert. An oasis, a fragile tent of words. The dwelling place of the desert traveller, of the poet.’

  Stefano spoke to Pietr. He had a deep voice in Italian, surprisingly melodious. There was no trace of the cracked hesitations evident when he spoke Polish. This was like the tolling of a bell. It was a voice a woman could fall in love with. She wondered about the photo of Rosza in his wallet. Was it given to him or did he take it?

  Pietr said, ‘Stefano says that whether we live or die is of profound indifference to the desert. It is like the sea.’

  ‘You are a fisherman,’ said Agnieska. ‘You distrust anything to do with fire.’

  Stefano muttered under his breath.

  Pietr stood, adjusted his cuffs. ‘I need to change. Come and have dinner with me.’

  ‘And bring you the book?’

  The shadow at the corner of her eye receded. Stefano was walking towards the window, across the rug in the corner. She could see by the way he moved that he was feeling the floor with his feet. He was approaching the recess where the book was hidden. The join was barely noticeable; it would be almost impossible to feel it through his boots. But he was moving more slowly. Somehow he had sensed something different in the floor.

  She said, ‘Once you read the book you’ll want what I want.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Pietr.

  She thrust her hand into her pocket, pressed her thumb against the knife blade. ‘For the rottenness my father carried to stop spreading.’

  He stared at her. His eyes were an odd colour: not Czeslaw’s stormy grey but an ice blue muddied with shadows. Rosita’s shadows.

  Stefano hesitated as he passed over the recess in the floor. But he came and stood silent behind Pietr who, as though signalled, put down his mint tea. He flicked a speck of dust from his cuffs. Again, he reminded her of a younger Laforche, the man Laforche would have liked to have been, with enough money and a mansion in the country and a more welcoming climate. She could almost hear Laforche saying that he would have made a much better job of being an aristocrat than the aristocrats did.

  Pietr said, ‘So you won’t give me the book?’

  She said, ‘What you will find there will horrify your sense of yourself.’

  But he was already shaking his head. He wouldn’t listen to her. She saw herself as he would: a dumpy scarred woman, old enough to be his mother but more easily dismissed. Maybe dismissed because she could be his mother. She was tired suddenly. She wanted to leave the city, all this pushing and pulling. She wanted open spaces and winds which caressed the skin, not the cuts from horsewhips held by syphilitic drunkards.

  Pietr had forced a smile onto his face and was half bowing, a relic of some gallantry he felt obliged to make. She glanced at Stefano, expecting to see a smirk, some class-driven derision, but he wore an unexpectedly tender look.

  She asked Pietr where he was staying. He named a hotel, one of the new foreign chains, in which every room was exactly as it would be in America. It had air-conditioning, he said; the bungalows in the gardens used the new Beani dome structure. She made herself look impressed and he said that Stefano had negotiated a very good rate. His tone was slightly defensive, as though he admired the bargaining but resented the need for it.

  They went down the stairs without looking back and she thought how much she would have liked Laforche to have been there, hidden, watching. Deciphering the ways of men.

  Early evening. The sky was a roughened blue-grey curtain, heavy and trembling over Rue Sidi Hmad. Women, their heads bare, were unpegging the laundry strung on lines across the flat roofs. This was the only place they could take off their veils, in their own small kingdom of air and light.

  A red petticoat pinned at one end reminded her of Betsoul: rebellion hidden under black robes like the seeds of desert plants. The real world of women hidden.

  The café was empty. As she turned away from the market, she heard the siren notes of the snake charmer’s pipe. She imagined the animal being roused reluctantly from its sleep, beginning to sway. It wouldn’t be able to resist. The pipe was like the call of the desert.

  She found Laforche, smoking, his tie askew, in his cubicle. His desk was littered with papers. A magazine lay open, a picture of the desert with icebergs superimposed over it: L’Afrique elle fait l’iceberg. It half obscured a book cover. Camus, she saw, L étranger.

  Laforche stood, tugging at his tie, but she motioned him down.

  She said, ‘If the image of the modern Arab is the Koran in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other, what is the modern Frenchman?’

  He sat down opposite her. ‘Egoists with enough time to go mad on the beach,’ he said. She put her hand on the icebergs. Even the photo cooled her.

  ‘More ice marks found in the desert,’ said Laforche. ‘Strange to think all this once stood in Antarctica’s place.’

  ‘Fire and ice,’ she said. ‘Only a few degrees’ difference changes one into the other.’

  She sat up straight. ‘I’ve come about shoes for one of the ben Asoub boys.’

  Laforche cocked his head. She said, ‘The mother with ten children in Quartier Rouge. The crippled one.’

  He looked puzzled.

  ‘The pickpocket,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, I know. Well . . . ’ He spread his hands. ‘The minute you go the Church will reverse everything you’ve done.’

  ‘I rely on you then.’

  ‘Desperate woman.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll leave insurance. One of Betsoul’s curses. Bu
ry a pocket-knife clasped shut on a piece of paper with the Monsignor’s name on it. Make him impotent. I’ll bury it near a leaking well so that the water dissolves the words. The curse will remain, even if he opens the knife.’

  ‘Sometimes I don’t think you believe in religion at all.’

  ‘Organised religion,’ she said, emphasising the first word, ‘interferes with discussions with God. I have never seen a dictatorship or corrupt society that didn’t use organised religion to justify its possession.’

  ‘Mon Dieu.’ Laforche went to the door, closed it. ‘Don’t let the Monsignor hear you.’

  She looked at him with amusement. ‘Isn’t he five miles away, in Quartier Nouvelle? The Western sector.’

  ‘That’s no protection anymore.’ He kicked at the wall. Small spurts of dust and a crusted pebble fell out. ‘Easy enough to insert listening devices from our new friends in Hafid Street.’

  ‘The lizards and small creatures,’ said Agnieska, ‘they make tunnels between the loose stones.’

  ‘Either way we are exposed.’

  ‘You seem irritable. Or depressed.’

  ‘Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.’ There was sweat in the grooves beside his nose. The small room was airless, facing a hot bare courtyard. He sat and unfolded his handkerchief, dipped it into the bowl of lavender water on the desk blotter and dabbed his throat, his forehead.

  ‘You need plants,’ she said. ‘You need a garden.’

  His fingers touched the water. ‘You know drownings are the preferred torture of the CIA,’ he said. ‘So typical of the Americans. Even in the desert they must have the one thing that is the most valuable. Not ropes, not knives. Water.’

  ‘So you still plan to leave tomorrow,’ said Laforche. ‘With nothing but your book of secrets.’

  ‘Most women would call it a book of fears,’ said Agnieska. ‘A record of men’s fears about women, fears about themselves. What they see in the night because they are so disconnected from nature.’

  Laforche took out his cigarette case, offered her one. When she shook her head, he lit a small gold-tipped cigarette and blew a slow smoke ring, tilting his head back to watch it rise to the ceiling.

  ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I don’t see lambs in the desert. I see monsters. Sumerian beasts, the chaos monster from Assyria. It is a wasteland for me.’

  ‘You treat nature as fallen, the desert as a mistake,’ said Agnieska. ‘It is only when man loves the desert for what it is that the earth will be saved.’

  Laforche said, ‘Once they figure out how to mine the phosphates and iron ore in the Sahara the desert will become a strip mall. Like the icefields, like the jungles.’

  ‘They’ll never conquer the desert. The sandstorms will defeat them, the shifting ground. God will defeat them.’

  ‘God?’

  ‘Nature.’

  Laforche said, ‘Haven’t the Americans made what they call a paradise in the desert?’

  ‘Las Vegas.’ She remembered seeing the tall buildings, the hotel that was a pyramid of glass and steel, all trying to reach heaven. She remembered driving down the main street, the endless blaze of light, the smell of money, the sound of the slot machines. The desperation.

  ‘I would go to this Las Vegas,’ said Laforche. ‘As long as camels don’t come into it. It is too undignified to ride a camel.’

  He straightened the papers on his desk, wiped a curl of ash from the blotter. He said, not meeting her eyes, ‘I must tell you, I may not be here for much longer.’

  ‘You have paid off your debts?’

  ‘Nearly.’ Then, because he found he could rarely lie to her, ‘One or two lucky dice will do it. And then I will return . . . ’

  ‘To Paris.’

  She considered him. He had told her about his childhood: his father, the Paris banker, prosperous, with businesses in Casablanca and Rabat. ‘A nice house in a respectable arrondissement,’ Laforche had said, ‘a pretty wife, a healthy son.’ The family’s life was ordered: every day the father returned at precisely six o’clock and went into his study for a whisky and soda or an aperitif before dinner. A pleasant routine.

  Laforche had been a pampered child, allowed to play-act, have fantasies. He had been given an elaborate dolls’ house, a mansion really, with stables and gardens and even a private zoo and a small lake. He stocked the zoo with beetles and ants, and the lake with tadpoles. The beetles often died and the tadpoles turned into frogs and hopped away but it had been his own little kingdom. Then, one day, his father returned home very late and spent a long time in his study. Dinner was delayed, the family waited. ‘But when my father emerged,’ Laforche said, ‘he looked entirely normal. He assured us nothing was wrong and we ate and drank as usual.’ The next night the father came home exactly on time. And the next. And the next. But that night, five minutes after closing the door, a gunshot rang out. ‘Very odd,’ Laforche told her. ‘It sounded like a book falling. I smelled gunpowder for weeks.’

  The family was bankrupt of course: a question of impropriety. Nothing proven but the suspicion lingered. Laforche had to leave school and go into the public service to pay off the family’s debts. He had asked for a transfer as far away from Paris as possible.

  She said, ‘It is very respectable, to be the assistant director of the Catholic Mission in Casablanca.’

  He grimaced. ‘The desert is a tomb.’

  She looked around the small office, the desk, the framed photo of King Hassan II on the wall. She said, ‘For some.’

  She thought that if she were in the desert now she would see the sun’s beats gradually weaken until the misted air was the colour of a soap bubble. The wind would undulate across the pale earth in transparent eddies. The way she had seen the wind rising from the dunes beyond Abu N’af when she climbed to Rimbaud’s tower.

  She said, ‘Do you hear the wind?’

  ‘There is no wind in the walled city.’

  But she had heard it. It would reach the city the next day. She would be travelling into the wind.

  ‘I have a vision,’ she said. ‘Of a scarred and unrecognisable body. On it would be printed a text containing the ultimate answer, the way the desert is unreadable and yet contains the key to the restoration of shattered lives.’

  ‘A man’s body,’ said Laforche.

  ‘No, it will be a woman.’ She looked at the inkings on the backs of her hands. She thought, It will be the reincarnation of the mad scullery girl who disappeared into the desert. Someone whose life created a text to be read the way the desert is a text. She touched her cheek – the old scar made by her father – and felt the throb of the newer marks on her back. The ones she had made.

  ‘You are the key,’ said Laforche.

  ‘Not me but someone who marked herself in humility, not anger. Someone who knows that the desert is only as much a wasteland as the inner mind. She will come out of the desert the same way that Rimbaud came out of the desert.’

  Laforche took her down to the first floor where two locals, watched by a black-browed nun, were sorting through the donation bins. Agnieska kneeled by the pile of shoes in the corner. She had persuaded a cobbler in Quartier Negro to donate an hour each week to fix the worst: to glue wood over the holes, remake the tongues with camel leather, plug the seams with tar. She found these abandoned shoes poignant: life reduced to a remnant of that part of a person most in direct touch with the earth. A man without shoes is a vulnerable thing. He will be cast out by the herd, left behind in the dust. The desert will defeat him. She thought of Rimbaud on his quest: trying to become a seer by entering into the sacred empty, risking madness by giving himself to the great silence. But when his leg ulcerated, he had to return to Europe. Without his feet he was defeated.

  Laforche watched her as she turned over the shoes. He said, ‘There is another irritant in the pearl that is our lives in Casablanca. Your nephew’s servant – the Sicilian.’

  She looked up at him, holding a child’s ballet slipper, the pink sa
tin tip smeared with red.

  Laforche said, ‘The CIA are so touching in their faith that their files will not be opened by illiterate cleaners.’ He leaned against the window sill, looking down into the street. The shouts of the boys playing soccer floated up to them.

  He said, ‘The Sicilian has been buying brown opium. He likes to try it himself but these are large quantities. For business.’

  ‘With Pietr?’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘With an Australian. Do you know him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Australian has two children with him.’

  She put her hand over the point of the ballet shoe, felt the comforting strength of the wood inside. Maybe it evoked her childhood: the factory always in the background, the villagers walking to work, the smell of tanning leather. What she thought for years was the family business, until she discovered what the real business was. She wondered if Pietr had businesses within businesses, what his disguise was.

  She looked at the shoes. Something hardy for the boy; big enough to grow into but not so big that he would trip and fall. She wanted him to have something formal that said: You are a man now. You have dignity. You have weight on this earth.

  She chose a pair of lace-up shoes: British, black, the shoes to wear for work. The leather was stiff and smooth. Like Polish leather. She had refused to believe Czeslaw was dead until the young priest had shown her the shoes with the broken laces.

  Laforche threw his cigarette out the window. ‘What surprises me,’ he said slowly, ‘is the malevolence. There are rumours that you smoke kif and eat majoun. That you are mad.’

  She looked at him. ‘Because of my history.’

  He said, ‘Because a young fool got drunk while playing dice with the legionnaires and spoke about finding you eight years ago, curled up like a seahorse, bruises on your arms, brown powder around your mouth.’