Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  ‘I relapsed,’ said Agnieska, ‘when I found out what Father Thomas did to Betsoul.’ All that faith, she thought, gone: the time spent in the church’s drug clinic after Jürgen left, the volunteer work at the Mission, the taking of her vows, the conviction that she had found a solution to the curse of her family. All erased by a few words. By the return of demons. ‘I found out,’ she said, ‘and I returned to the opium dens in Quartier Rouge.’

  ‘Your head fell back as I lifted you,’ said Laforche. ‘I saw tremors running up your neck. I wiped the powder off with my finger.’

  ‘And the next day, I went into the desert. I found Abu N’af.’

  She stood beside him. The last of the muezzin’s calls began washing over the flat roofs and pink walls. As always when the voice lapped the city, disembodied, remote and unjudging, she felt calmed. As when she looked into bowls of water, the fountain.

  ‘Drugs, alcohol, religion, poetry,’ she said. ‘All to obliterate the pain. Slow suicides.’

  ‘Betsoul would say it is the words that kill,’ he said.

  She pressed her thumb into the blade in her pocket. ‘Maybe asylums are all I’m good for.’

  Laforche said, ‘I think you should go tomorrow. There is a very good chance that they are embarrassed beyond civility. Beyond reason.’

  They stood on the Mission’s front step. A dog was barking nearby, a woman sobbing. Agnieska thought, Sobbing in her small sea of robes.

  He said, ‘You shouldn’t walk alone, tonight of all nights.’

  ‘I like to walk.’ At night she could walk down alleyways as cool as streams and see into the small courtyards, the wooden benches with their high carved backs and their embroidered cushions lined neatly against the wall, the small brown finches in cages. Gardens shaped out of nothing but rocks and stones. Anything that changes its form has power.

  He held her hand for a long moment and released it. ‘I won’t say goodbye.’

  She said, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.’

  ‘A throw of the dice,’ he said, grimacing, ‘will never abolish chance. I will try to remember.’

  When she left the Mission, the moon lay in the darkening blanket: broken-faced, a jagged fragment of light, as though seen through a cracked cup.

  She remembered the inky blackness of the cave in the desert, the rock pressing down over her, the silence like a falling cloak and, as her ears adjusted, the small breathings, the displacing of air by small bodies. The seam of light which grew stronger the more she looked.

  The cats were out, stalking the market, leaving bent and elongated shadows on the walls. She smelt fried eggs and onions, saw a man cooking on a steel platter over a kerosene flame.

  She walked past the stalls, the men standing behind the racks of T-shirts with Greetings From Casablanca unevenly printed below the stamped silhouettes of a lone camel under a palm tree.

  Occasionally, a woman sat there: small, hunched, light glinting on the stud in her nose. Frowning. All the women frowned in public. Frowns undercut by puzzlement, at the very now of their life, like the look on a horse she once saw being swept down a flooded river.

  A beggar on the corner was selling paper flowers, the thin cardboard badly dyed and streaked. For a moment she saw the streets strewn with broken flowers, people crushed by falling stone and collapsed buildings. The future rose in front of her as a shrieking city of sounds, babble in the tower of Babel. There was no future for her among those for whom empty space was meaningless. She could see her life in the city going on and on, in a night which was always the same night. I am already alone, she thought. I’ve known that since the desert. She thought, Tomorrow I will go. No matter what happens tonight.

  She stopped under a light strung from a wooden pole. Moths were dying in small tearless sparks against the bulb. She should turn here to take the boulevard to Pietr’s hotel.

  A group of shouting youths went past. She recognised the ben Asoub boy. He saw her and hesitated but he was with his friends; he didn’t want to stop.

  ‘I have your gift,’ she called out.

  He couldn’t resist, he slowed.

  ‘Tomorrow at the Mission,’ she said.

  He stopped, was drifting back.

  She said, ‘You can’t give it to your family.’

  His eyebrows shot up. It was a gift for him alone. He was pleased, she could tell by the way he leaned towards her.

  ‘You can’t sell it,’ she said. He looked outraged, as though even to be accused of an impure thought was to be belittled. He was already trying on the adult masks of representation. No-one has a proper childhood in this country, she thought.

  ‘I have a vision.’ She saw Betsoul, like a flash of black fire in her eye. Maybe she was doomed to repeat her mistakes. She said, ‘This gift will get you a job, do you hear me? You will support your family. Everyone will be proud of you.’ Pride, she thought. Useless in itself but still a recognised commodity in the walled city. ‘You can’t betray the vision,’ she said.

  He nodded solemnly.

  She could hear Laforche’s voice. Unscrupulous, he was saying. His tone admiring.

  There were birds perched on the telegraph wires. Night like water, the colour of the octopus eye, was stepping off into more night down the hill. A yellow tongue rolled up into the dark air. A pause then another flare further on. In the flash of light she saw the shape beneath, the tilted head. The flame-eater was practising as he walked to the night market.

  She thought there was a fountain nearby, in a small square. She needed the sound of running water.

  She entered the next alley. Night corkscrewed away from her. It was that peculiar moment of absolute stillness when every person vanished from the street. Deserted. Desert-ed. She thought of the cities she had known, the times when they were revealed as nothing but flickering neon and empty streets. That was the real barren mind, not the desert with its secret life growing beneath the sand. The city was bound by its lines and walls. But the desert was able to be transformed, the way Saint Antony built his community; the way a poet built a poem from the desert of the empty page. Conviction and faith transforming desolation, turning it into mystery and revelation. The barren wasteland inside the mind becomes a sacred place, she thought, the way that Saint John of the Cross transformed his own small cell into a marvellous garden of hope and optimism. She heard Betsoul laugh, a hard jeering sound, as she laid the scarf over the horns of the goat and raised her knife. You are deluded, she heard Betsoul say.

  She walked through the falling cloak of night. At times, she wasn’t sure if she was walking through the city or she was back in the desert. She thought – or was she reciting the words of the poet in the desert? – It was a dream at times.

  I didn’t know who I was. I heard His voice – I sang to myself – I recited poetry – I shouted into the wilderness – the sound echoed off the rocks. She was inside the cave yet the sky pressed down on her. There was nothing beneath her yet the stars in the map on the ground glowed fiery in their splendour. She was alone and not alone. A figure was ahead of her in the darkness, guiding her. But she knew that, in the end, the guide must be replaced by the follower.

  Now she thought, Did I go mad there?

  Outside Pietr’s hotel, she looked at the square white balconies, the flags of America and France hanging over the entrance. The automatic front doors slid back and forth as people came and went. She saw the rectangular couches and glass tables scattered across the marble lobby. When the doors opened a pungent smell wafted out: a disinfectant. The smell of America.

  Music see-sawed into the street; she couldn’t even tell if it was Western or Arabic. That was the only thing that bothered her about journeying into the desert. She didn’t mind moving into silence but she minded losing the music.

  ‘It was a terrible house,’ Agnieska said to Pietr, ‘and yet somehow I loved it.’

  She looked around what Pietr had called his suite but which Agnieska thought was a large white room with a b
ed in an alcove. The cold of the air-conditioning was amazing to her. The shock of leaving the warmth outside reminded her of those other times she had left the heat for the snow: to visit Koloshnovar, to search for her brother in Sicily.

  A peacock came out of the dusk onto the narrow terrace, placing its feet carefully on marble the colour of clouds. The bird’s dark flags of emeralds and sapphire blues swung behind it, merging with the muted garden. Even above the voices of the drinkers around the pool, she heard the soft swish of the silky tail and the click of claws on the stone.

  The bird stopped at the glass door, dipped its head, nodding at them. Pietr got up and banged on the glass so the peacock jumped, its eye rolling as it retreated, offended, its tail colours streaming.

  ‘Dirty birds,’ he said.

  She watched it sway along the concrete path, past the concrete domes which sat like fallen moons between the palm trees.

  ‘A new invention,’ said Pietr. ‘Single-room apartments. Poured concrete hardens over a steel mesh skeleton and pressurised air. I would have liked to have stayed in one,’ he said, his tone wistful, ‘but apparently they were all booked out.’

  Agnieska said, ‘You should have been an architect.’

  He picked up his brandy glass and sat on the couch next to her. ‘There’s no money in architecture.’

  Agnieska said to him, ‘Do you remember the hall at Koloshnovar? It gave me nightmares.’

  He frowned, rolling the glass balloon between his hands. ‘I remember the red wallpaper.’

  ‘It was the long hall running the length of the house. It was lined with hundreds of heads, animals my father had killed. Thousands, it seemed to me as a child. Antelopes and zebras and lions from Africa, bears from Russia, wolves from Italy. Foxes, rabbits. After a bad day’s hunting, he would go and shoot the ducks in the pond.’

  ‘He was a man of his time,’ said Pietr.

  ‘Do you remember the death masks? His own father and mother, displayed there as trophies. As though by outliving them he had won.’

  ‘He was proud. He believed in the bloodline.’ He drank, a small amount, lifting his chin to roll the liquid on his tongue. He was not a drinker, she was glad to see. He had missed that addiction. She wondered what his obsession was.

  ‘When my father was drunk,’ she said, ‘he would go and shout at the masks. A sea of bile running down the hall.’

  ‘That was the red wallpaper,’ said Pietr.

  She looked at him. Maybe that was his obsession: keeping the truth at bay. She wanted to shake from him this – what? flippancy? deliberate detouring of the truth? In the desert you always zigzagged into the wind. But not here. She didn’t have the time for detours. Maybe that would be what the desert would teach her. In that time-less place, she would give up her own obsession with time.

  She remembered going back to Koloshnovar, secretly. The winter chill was a needle after the heat of Casablanca. She had stood in the snow, seeing the tracks of wolves, hearing the far-off howls. Someone had been breeding them – they had disappeared after the war, after the Russians had arrived with their tanks and hunger. Now they were back, maybe kept by some Politburo chief as trophy guard dogs. The money never strayed far from the top, no matter the government.

  She stood in the rose plantation, saw the bare branches, imagined the buds in spring, only weeks away now. The roses would be grown in squares, arranged by colour, laid out like a patchwork quilt. There would be only one kind: the eighteen-point teacup rose so beloved by the Americans and English. The money rose. The famous Koloshnovar rose, grown by her grandmother to combat the stink of the shoe factory, the cheapening of her aristocratic name, so she said.

  The pink roses had a sullen blood-red tinge, while the darker roses – the deep blues and purple – were streaked with black. Even before Agnieska knew what was in the fields, it made sense that the black soil around the house would be richer. The older servants crossed themselves whenever they went past the rose gardens. They wouldn’t look at them on bad days – those mornings after a night-time arrival which, no matter how secret, everyone seemed to know of.

  ‘My father,’ said Agnieska. ‘He was the only father you ever knew. Unless Stefano . . . ’ She looked around.

  ‘He’s running errands,’ said Pietr.

  ‘That man would die for you.’

  Pietr looked surprised. ‘I wouldn’t expect anything so feudal. I never met him until we visited Sicily.’

  ‘After your grandfather died.’

  ‘After my uncles lost the fight with my mother over the estate.’

  ‘My half-brothers.’ Miniature editions of her father, unable to comprehend that they couldn’t win by shouting and bullying. Sitting in their smoking jackets, drinking, morose, the world passing them by.

  ‘Stefano was always more like a bodyguard,’ said Pietr. He took a larger mouthful of brandy.

  Agnieska felt the weight of the objects in her pocket. She felt their coldness, their warmth. She wondered whether she would have the courage – or the anger – to use them.

  ‘He seems devoted to your mother.’

  ‘I’m glad someone is,’ said Pietr.

  He was watching her. Agnieska wondered whether this was his way of seeing where her sympathies lay. She thought of the first time she saw Rosita, the way she had come into the room. No-one had expected her to travel in her condition. But it was her condition that saved her from being killed outright.

  There was a shocked silence when the butler led her into the smaller breakfast room. Fading laughter curled around her like charred fragments of paper as she planted her feet wide on the floor. A small squat girl in black. The folded arms should have warned us.

  ‘My first impression of Rosita was that she was a witch,’ Agnieska said to Pietr. ‘Later I was ashamed of myself. It was because of the way she dressed in mourning for a man I believed she never loved. Or maybe I was jealous that she had had the last of my brother. I grew to admire the way she defied us. My brothers despised her, humiliated her, yet she never reacted, not even when my father picked up his riding crop and shouted, spittle flying from his mouth. Shouting at this dumpy Italian girl.’

  ‘She knew she was going to win,’ said Pietr.

  ‘When my uncles left her in the catacombs,’ said Agnieska, ‘I thought she deserved the estate.’

  ‘And now?’

  The knife in her pocket was cold even through the thick material. But the other objects were small squares of pulsing warmth.

  ‘I’ve tried to forgive her,’ said Agnieska, ‘for what happened to Czeslaw. The fact that I can’t is my burden.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you to come home,’ said Pietr. ‘You’re the only one left now.’

  She stood. ‘There is no home. It is all ashes.’

  She fingered the knife in her pocket and the wrapped pellets of tainted opium. It seemed so inevitable. She thought, I always wanted revenge.

  Pietr was drinking. She was surprised to see the brandy almost gone. Maybe she had been wrong; firewater was his addiction. He said, the clipped evenness of his words beginning to liquefy, ‘At a young age I learned my mother wasn’t a source of comfort. By my early teens she was always the last one I called. That Viennese expression you used. That was my relationship with my mother. She did not go well with me.’

  The shadows of the wood panels in the glass doors made large crosses on the wall. She wondered how surprised he would be if she told him what she planned to do. Which would prevail: Czeslaw’s blood or Rosita’s?

  Agnieska said, ‘We don’t talk enough about demons in our society. I thought when my father died, the demon had died. Then I realised he had been replaced – by your mother.’

  Pietr laughed but the sound turned into itself almost immediately.

  ‘She bargained with my father to get the estate,’ said Agnieska. ‘She had something that Czeslaw was carrying. A photo in a book.’

  ‘A book?’ said Pietr. ‘The book?’

  A breeze lifte
d the fronds of the palm trees in the huge pots outside. The shifting shadows of the trees broke up on the wall, turned the crosses into twisted vines. I think we keep entering ourselves, she thought, trying to change by layering ourselves with new experiences. With new people. Trying to beat back the dark emotions which are thrust into us. But it is like the way human flesh won’t reject embedded coral. Our bodies sense that these dark emotions are living things; not to be rejected no matter how hard we try. We grow around the foreign object. But it is always there.

  He got up and faced her. ‘You want the book as a weapon.’

  ‘If I wanted revenge I would have shown the book to the police. The African police.’

  He looked uncertain.

  She said, ‘Haven’t you heard the stories about me, as a child? The way I taunted my father.’

  ‘You hate him because of this . . . ’ Pietr gestured at her scar.

  She put her hand over the dead skin. ‘Mistakes are not mere chance. They are the result of repressed desires. That is what I learned here. What have you learned?’

  ‘I learned you did take the book. I wasn’t sure before.’

  She said gently, ‘You know there is a family tendency to steal.’

  She gripped the pellet in her pocket. The blackness was burning in her hand. Was her anger enough? And then there was still the daughter.

  She said, ‘When my father met the Frenchman in the desert and heard his stories, of course he couldn’t resist. My father was an educated man – he would have known who the Frenchman was. Remember: even the Nazis read poetry, worshipped classical music. It is one of the great ironies of history: the great art that moves men to tears at night fails to stop them massacring in the morning. The creative act will never abolish death.

  ‘In the course of his wanderings the Frenchman had discovered many secret places. Places to hide. To store things.’

  She saw her shadow rippling across the curtains. Shadows doubled the world just as reflections in the water doubled the world. But her shadow was small on the curtain: a small child falling on corrugated pavement.