The Forgiven: A Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  The moon lit the rolling intermediate mountains the Moroccans called the dir, “the belt,” and which spanned the desert and the High Atlas. Hamid brought the drinks on a tray and set it on the low wall by the road. They were going to wait for Captain Yassine Benihadd here, apparently, though, in his opinion, it did not show good form in front of the local police. He could sense that they were both panicking. Was their beautiful way of life, their partial exile, so detailed and meticulously planned, now in danger of being destroyed?

  Two pairs of headlights shot up from the road below.

  “Monsieur,” Hamid said gravely, “it is the police. I will take away the drinks.”

  Four

  E WERE SAYING YOU MUST HAVE HAD AN ACCIDENT, but Mohammed said it was a flat tire—they always get flats out in the desert—and we all felt sorry for you. A flat tire, and in the dark! What a drag. Was it?”

  “Don’t ask them now,” Day said to the tiresome French girl. “Can’t you see they want to eat?”

  “It’s all right,” Jo said, her mouth trembling. “We just need to recover.”

  “People disappear here.” The girl laughed. “They just vanish. Did the Arabs molest you?”

  “I didn’t catch your name,” David said stonily.

  “Isabelle. I’m taking photographs of villages around here.”

  “She’s a nomad,” Day said. “Her name’s really Fatima Baba.”

  “Je suis photographe.”

  “She says she’s a photograph.”

  “Oh,” said David, not getting the joke.

  The lamb and prune tagine appeared before the Hennigers. They didn’t react, and then the beet salad and some warmed-up bread, and the room was so loud that soon they were almost forgotten, and Jo was relieved. To be forgotten is dinner party bliss. She ate too quickly and then the wine came, the cold, familiar Tempier that brought her back to memories of Europe, and she thought, “I’ll just get drunk, too, it’s a way out.” Gradually her nervousness dulled and her head cleared. The lilies suddenly caught her eye, and then the German crystal, the hard brightness that money buys and taste arranges, like waking up in a place in which you went to sleep but don’t remember.

  A few other guests called down the table. “Welcome!” “Sorry you had a hassle!” “Remember us from Rome?” But she didn’t recognize any of them. They were all remarkably dressed up for a desert dinner, with their buttonholes and linen suits and strapless dresses, and the man across from her, the American, was wearing a poppy in his lapel. He looked at her for long periods, unblinking, concentrating on her. She shot a look back at him and for a second, their suspicions tangled, wrestling each other in midair.

  “Did you pass Beni Mellal?” asked the Dutch lady whom Day had talked to earlier. David tried to be peppy.

  “We came through Midelt. It’s a different road, you see. Very scenic.”

  “But that’s a main road. Did you get lost, then?”

  “We didn’t get lost,” David said determinedly. “It was just a long slog of a drive. It’s through the high mountains.”

  “It’s the road most of us came on,” Day said.

  “Yes, but we didn’t know it.”

  The room mellowed a little, and without anyone noticing, the oud player left the room with his instrument. Jo swung back her head to empty her glass. She didn’t want to lie anymore. She found the women down the table looking at her with humorous disbelief. A marital quarrel, they were thinking; a roadside row that must have looked funny to passers-by. The men looked at her with a different interest. Was she tellingly detached from her glowering husband?

  “Yes,” David agreed, putting pieces of bread into his mouth like a small boy. “But we’re not used to the roads here. And it was dark. There was a sandstorm, too. We didn’t know which turning it was.”

  “So it wasn’t a flat tire?” Isabelle asked. “You were just lost?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not exactly,” Jo said coldly.

  The table went quiet, and the mocking American put down his fork.

  “Oh?” Day said.

  “No, not exactly. On the way here we had an accident. We hit a Moroccan on the road and killed him.”

  David turned to her, and his blush darkened. The party came to a standstill, and for some time, the guests simply stared at the slightly bedraggled, beanpole Englishwoman who wrote children’s books for a living and who was not really part of their game.

  “Are you sure?” someone said.

  Jo put her hand in front of her mouth and soon they understood that she was laughing, but that the laughter wasn’t normal.

  “It was an accident,” David said unnecessarily. “He stepped in front of us.”

  JO ATE WHILE THE ROOM WENT QUIET. SHE ATE WITH HER fingers. She no longer cared what they thought, and her body craved food. The couscous was sweetened with sugar and lines of melted cinnamon, and it warmed her, made the blood move inside her face. She peered around the room, at the gold frames of the paintings and the Egyptian glassware on the side tables, and she felt the salty tang of pollen on her tongue. It was an incredible place, an Ali Baba palace. There was something Rudolph Valentino about it. You could imagine it in Whitley Heights in Los Angeles.

  The lilies were opened up and their petals were beginning to ripen. The wine in the Riedel glasses was dark as blood and you could see little peering faces reflected in them. The silver tureen in the center of the table had lounging Titans for handles. A grotesque ladle leaned against it. Then she realized that she was spilling couscous grains all over the tablecloth and her lap. Her hand was not quite steady. Something stuck to her chin and her fingers were sticky. She was eating like a child.

  The French girl looked at her archly and the others didn’t know how to look at her. A few commiserations came in, and the hubbub returned. David licked his lips and looked away, his fist tightened around the stem of his glass, and far off in the depths of the house there was a tinkle of moving service trolleys and a sound of padding dogs, a comforting domesticity. How stupid it had been to come here. She felt tears rushing into her eyes, sticking to the lashes and hanging there like something poisonous and knowing.

  “Was it an Arab?” Day said quietly.

  The doors opened and Hamid was there, sallow and ruffled. He motioned to her and his lips mimed the word Madame. It was clear that the police were there.

  “I think you’re wanted,” Isabelle said.

  THE HENNIGERS WALKED BEHIND HAMID AS THEY MADE their way across the repaved paths toward the gate. The servant held up a metal lantern and turned to make sure they hadn’t been abducted by evil spirits. His deepest superstitions were now aroused and he didn’t want to be around these two cursed individuals who had taken the life of a Muslim on the road. They didn’t seem remorseful. “It is their way,” Hamid thought with a bitterness of his own. “They are like stones when it comes to us. They think we are flies.”

  As they walked past one of the braziers, sparks flew into his eyes and he picked up his pace. David was saying to Jo, “I can’t understand why you did it. Was it to humiliate me?”

  “One can’t keep pretending forever. Why lie to them?”

  Up ahead, lamps had been laid around their car. There were Moroccan policemen standing around it taking photographs of the fenders and the wheels, kneeling close to the car’s body. The gate floodlights had been turned off and the stars were as bright as the camera flashes.

  “It would be madness to tell them there were two. We need to snuff this business out now. It wasn’t our fault was it?”

  “I don’t know why I agreed,” she whispered. “I don’t know why I went along with it.”

  “They wanted the car. You seriously think I’m getting involved with this just because some carjacker wanted to shoot us in the head?”

  “Carjacker?”

  “You haven’t been reading the papers. I have.”

  HE WAS DRENCHED WITH SWEAT WHEN THEY GOT TO THE open gate, where Benihadd and Richard were
standing with a jug of iced lemonade. The Moroccan, he thought, looked him over with skeptical detachment before going to his wife, kissing her hand, and saying “Chère Madame.” Benihadd wanted them to walk with him a little on the road outside, on which they had driven a few hours before, and he asked them in a courtly way, as if refusal would be all right with him, and soon they were strolling along the high edge of the road while the captain asked casual questions to put them at their ease. So David had a practice in Chelsea? That was a splendid quartier, wasn’t it?

  “And you, Madame. You write children’s books?”

  “Yes. Not very successful ones.”

  “I am sure they are successful. May I have a title I can look up for my children?”

  “My last one was The Little House.”

  “Ah, but it is charming! Do you not find, Monsieur Galloway?”

  “Charming,” Richard said.

  Benihadd then made David go through the details of the accident.

  “There was a sandstorm earlier,” the Englishman insisted, a little exasperated by the clarity of the moon now. He could see the other two were not convinced. “It blew up suddenly, and we were lost.”

  After he had finished, the captain looked down at David’s boots.

  “It was clear,” David added, “that he was not interested in selling us fossils. How could he be? At midnight?”

  “Monsieur Henniger, people here are sometimes desperate. It may seem surprising to you, but they will do almost anything to sell a single fossil. A trilobite, for example. For forty euros. It is a good sum for them.”

  “I am aware of that. Of course. I know they are poor.” Nervously, David ran a hand through his hair. “I am terribly sorry for all this, Captain. We are devastated. Devastated.”

  Dévastés in French, but with the emphasis on the wrong syllable. The captain smiled and looked down at his nails.

  “I am sure you are. But an accident is an accident. By the way, I was wondering. Are you sure there was only one man?”

  “One.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I couldn’t be surer.”

  Benihadd opened his arms as if to say, “Well, there we are!”

  THEY WALKED ON. COULD THAT REALLY BE IT? SHE WONDERED incredulously. Corruption was marvelous sometimes. So easy, so quick, so essential. She didn’t want to feel relieved, but she did, and as the load was lifted from her mind, her nostrils flared and picked up the aromas of the desert evening. There was a taste of smoke, and the wind rose and fell with sudden changes of direction. She hung behind them and her eye was drawn sideways to the tumbledown ravine with the palm grove at the bottom. There was also a faint scent of jasmine wafting up from it, and of animal manure. Beyond the river lay a series of jagged crests colored like iron, upon which a few dun-colored tents stood with long ropes mooring them to the ground. She had not noticed them before, and her curiosity was stirred. She felt intensely alone. She had little idea where she was. The desert, or its western edge. But what was the desert? And where did the river come from and where did it go? Didn’t deserts and rivers contradict one another?

  She heard her husband say to the policemen, “We are very grateful, if there’s anything we can do …” Her lungs filled with hot, clean air and her palms began to perspire in a quiet way, growing moister in ten-minute leaps. On the tops of the cliffs, goats stood in silence, peering down at the river as if contemplating suicide. Richard turned, hung back, and took her arm. He knew that she was covering something up, but he didn’t say anything; he didn’t hold it against her. It was a just a riddle that would not open yet.

  “They’re going to record it as an accidental death. I hope you can enjoy the rest of the weekend. After all this.”

  “I want to sleep,” she said.

  He wagged his finger, as if canceling out this desire.

  “But tomorrow we have the fire-eaters from Taza!”

  AS SOON AS THE HENNIGERS LEFT THE ROOM, THERE WAS an uproar of gossip about them, and the dinner broke up with laughter and a rush for things to smoke. The doors leading to the central hall and the library were opened wide, and the guests began to drift out of the dining room.

  They surged slowly into the library. More French windows opened onto a spacious patio that had been recently built, with abstract sculptures at the four corners. A bar had been set up here to concoct hot chocolate, Ovaltine, and chamomile tea as bedtime elixirs; they were made up by an old man in ceremonial costume who worked by the light of a tall tubular oil lamp. There were orange trees in boxes here and taped Arab music.

  The huddled, half-ruined buildings of the ksour shone like graphite under the moon. These fortified villages were built to repel the outside world. Next to the library, however, were yet more rooms that invited exploration. A “tea room” with painted wood panels and an octagonal ceiling decorated with images of desert flamingos; a white “reading room” with no books, just long Arab sofas and horsehair Indian Raj armchairs waxed to a color of dark mustard. On the second floor there was another lounge, vast and cool, with antique telescopes and cartographic globes and rugs woven near Tinerhir. A flat-screen high-definition TV stood at one end, with a circular couch and various remote controls. The wide windows looked over the valley with military authority.

  When David and Jo came back to the house, the air was filled with the smell of marijuana. The lounge was crammed with people, many of them lying on the floor and eating McVitie’s crackers slathered with majoun, a mix of kif, dried fruits, nuts, and sometimes fig jam. Some had fallen asleep where they fell, stuffed and stoned and exhausted. David and Jo recognized no one, and their determination to enjoy themselves a little after their ordeal began to ebb. They went back downstairs and wandered onto the baking patio, where sand was blowing about. David got them hot chocolates and they sat on the only bench, listening to the precarious voices babbling away on the first floor. They had no idea what to say to each other. The chocolate calmed them, however. They could hear animals walking around the perimeter wall, a pack of dogs, and the cooks playing guitars nearby. The Moroccan world was close and far off, concrete and abstract at the same time. The different modulation of the Moroccan voices made them carry far. There was something mocking in it, a fractious edge. Jo could sense them commenting privately on the absurd gaouri, the “Romans,” and their insolent women. Their food, their grotesque perfumes, their bad manners. She heard their bursts of laughter. “It’s directed at us,” she thought. “They think of us as flies.” The cooks guffawed and the guitar fell silent for a few minutes.

  David merely said, “I don’t like the sound of those bloody dogs. Don’t they have a boy to drive them off?”

  He had taken her hand, pressed it carefully. It was going to be all right now, except that it wasn’t.

  “I think they’re wild camels,” she said. “One of the staff said so.”

  “They could still drive them off. Camels bite. No, they do. They like to bite people in the stomach. It’s the leading cause of death among the Arabs. They should drive them off with water cannons.”

  She began to laugh, or tried to.

  “We should go to sleep, David. We must.”

  “Why? I’m loosening up finally.”

  “The sun’ll be up in two hours, won’t it? I want to sleep it off. I want to wake up again.”

  He looked for the moon and didn’t find it.

  “You know, they won’t come back, the police. It’s over.”

  There was something unintentionally nasty in the way he said it, something hasty and unseemly.

  “I can’t see how Richard did it,” she muttered. “Did he bribe them?

  What the fuck did he do?”

  “It wasn’t that. Honestly, I think it’s not for us to know. I think it’s just a huge hassle for the police. There’s too much paperwork involved. And, I hate to say it …”

  “Say it.”

  “The kid is a nobody. He’s dirt poor. He’s from some village far away and no one knows
who he is. There’s nothing to be done.”

  “What have we done, then?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just stating the fact.”

  He hugged her. The old gentleman fixing the hot chocolates snuffed the last candle, bowed, and wished them good night. David thought about Benihadd’s refusal to take the body away with him. “We do not have a morgue at our post,” he had said. “There will have to be arrangements tomorrow.” And he had added, without even a trace of irony, “Here, even the garages are air-conditioned!” They waited for him to close the doors behind him, a kind discretion. But they got up anyway and, once again, they didn’t know what to say to each other. The facts were between them, stifling them. The dead boy was in the garage with the air-conditioning turned on, and a man sat next to him in vigil, praying next to a pot of mint tea. They were assassins.

  THEY MADE THEIR WAY BACK TO THE CHALET WITHOUT A servant.

  “David, are you afraid at all?”

  He said nothing, shaking his head. In the chalet, yellow leather babouches and hemmed towels had been laid out for them with a silver pot of sweetened tea. There was a note from Richard. “Try and sleep. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I am not afraid,” David said in bed. “Why should I be afraid?”

  She lay awake, tormented, while he snored.

  The wind quickened, and soon it was howling all down the valley. It spat sand from the deep desert all over the ksour of Azna like a hail of indescribable fineness. The casements and roofs hissed. The palm groves hissed, and the dogs scattered. The staff playing their guitars covered their heads with the hoods of their burnooses and in the garage the flames guttered and the man drinking tea suddenly looked up. Jo lay in the overblown and slightly Gothic four-poster waiting for the Ambien to kick in, a candle burning inside a lantern of colored glass. She listened. Men were running through the dark. The great wood slab of the door began to sweat.