DAVID WAS ON THE BED, NURSING HIS FACE WITH A TOWEL, through which a spot of blood had permeated. He sat up and there was a look of bruised astonishment on his face. As she rushed over to the bed, he let the towel drop to reveal a small gash on the side of his forehead. “You fell off your horse,” she cried, but he shook his head impatiently and snatched the towel back from her as she dabbed the cut.
“Why would I fall off a bloody horse? I learned to ride, didn’t I? And why were you walking back with that idiotic American?”
“Well, if you didn’t fall …”
“Bloody Moroccan threw a stone at me.”
“What?”
“We were riding up on the hill. There was a pack of them waiting for us. Towel-heads.”
She settled beside him and took back the towel. Her little “oh!” of shock at the word went unnoticed. But she went dark inside for a moment.
“You’re the towel-head now. That could’ve been nasty.”
“It was nasty. Little cunt aimed it well.”
“Why were you riding at all?” she asked impatiently. “That was pure folly.”
He looked childishly surprised.
“Why? They were going riding, so I joined. You were fast asleep.”
“It just seems like folly. And I am right.”
“They were lying in wait behind the rocks at the top of the hill. We couldn’t have known that.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
But she thought of the angry men by the gate.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” he said waspishly. “I was with two French girls. They didn’t throw stones at them.”
The cut was nothing much and it had been tended by Richard’s local doctor, who was staying at the house for the weekend. But the shock had been great. David was shaken and his whole body twitched nervously. He clutched neurotically at the towel, dabbing the cut though it was dry, and the repetition of this movement calmed him bit by bit.
“The little bastards,” he growled futilely.
They were riding across open country, he explained. The two French girls were slightly behind him. What he didn’t tell his wife was that they were succulent in their way and he was in a flirty mood with them. They had spent time in London and spoke English well.
They rode for three or four miles along the trail that led past Tafnet, in single file, exchanging little jokes along the way. He had thought it would be a pleasant diversion from all the hassle and horror. They were all bad riders, and it took a while to reach the top of the hill, where the stream tumbled between high, gold-colored rocks.
He was feeling recovered after his long sleep. Where the path curved as it rose toward the next peak, there was a wooden shack, and there the miscreants were hiding. He didn’t see them; he just heard a stone ricochet against the ground. It made the horse jump, and as he turned it round, another stone hit him square in the face.
He dismounted and ran toward the shack, but the girls called him back. Five or six Arab boys ran backward and taunted him from afar, running up another slope and laughing at the horsed gaouri. He didn’t know what they called him. It sounded like hassi. But he saw the ragged hate in their faces. More stones rained down on them, hitting the horses and causing the girls to wheel about. The superficial gash bled profusely.
“We came back at once. They followed us, still throwing stones. I always said they were an irrational people. So now they think I am responsible.”
“Perhaps we should just leave,” she said quietly.
“It’s so incredibly primitive,” he plowed on, ignoring her. “They think of it as an eye for an eye. It’s like Sicily a hundred years ago. It’s like The Godfather. So word got out. There was a crowd when we got back to the gates. The locals were out in force. What a bunch. Half of them with no eyes or teeth. They didn’t seem to like seeing me on a horse. They thought I was enjoying myself.”
“And weren’t you?”
“That’s not really the point. Is it against the law to unwind a bit after a traumatic event?”
She got up coldly and poured him a glass of lemonade from the jug that was always on the sideboard, and always replenished without them knowing how.
“It was just inconsiderate. You must have known they wouldn’t be thrilled by it.”
“So now I have to think about what they are and are not thrilled by? Thrilled?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Hamid said it was some kids from the other side of the valley. Everyone has heard about it. They’re insatiable gossips, apparently.”
“Here, drink this.”
“Yak yak yak. It’s a function of being illiterate.”
He was getting delirious. She pushed him back into the pillows and made fun of him.
“What a nice little fascist you’ve become since being hit by a stone. Is that all it takes?”
“It could have blinded me. It could have disfigured me.”
She made the fan turn faster, and when it was running at breakneck speed, she got up and closed the shutters with their rusted hooks. It was the sunlight itself that made them angrier and less controlled. She put a cold washcloth on his brow and lay with him for a while. They wouldn’t sleep but they could surely slow themselves down. He babbled a bit more, then gave up.
She opened a magazine and read for a while as he fell into a long, grumpy doze. Months of low-level disagreement and tension between them were finding a new surface. His practice was going badly. She couldn’t exactly figure out why. Was there a dearth of people with skin cancers in modern London? Last year, he was sued by a patient. He hadn’t talked about it, but he had lost. It wasn’t written about in the papers, and in conversation he quickly brushed the subject aside. “It’s my life,” his attitude seemed to be. “If it goes wrong, I’d rather it went wrong in private.”
So she gave up trying to talk about it. The months went by when she wrote nothing, imagined nothing, and cared even less. A person can come to a point in their career when the magic formulas that worked before no longer work. Perhaps most people get to that point. It’s an interesting junction in life, but not an easy one to actually live through. The crackling anger in his voice as he poured scorn on the Arabs was a function of his private failures. On the other hand, they had thrown a stone at him. The look in Hamid’s eyes was not easy to dismiss either.
She closed the magazine and put her arms halfheartedly around him. She had to remember that he was a man of dismissive judgments that were often right. He was a bit of an animal. He smelled things out, and he was rarely off the mark. It was what had always compelled her about him. But the downside to David’s enviable trait was a brittle vulnerability before things that didn’t exist inside his admirably supple world. He was supple with things he did know and brittle with things he didn’t, and the latter broke him. So he could be flipped easily, and then he became less intelligent, less penetrating; it was then that he needed protection from himself.
She leaned down and brushed the tip of his sunburned nose with her lips.
“You look like a pirate. Like Blackbeard after a sword fight.”
“Be glad I don’t have a sword.”
“Beast. No more wisecracks about Moroccans.”
“It depends on how many stones they throw at me. One wisecrack per stone. I think that’s fair. Sticks and stones, and all that. It’s between us. There’s no one listening. I need to get it off my chest. It’s an injustice, that’s all.”
But the boy is dead, she thought.
“Sometimes things aren’t fair,” she said. “One gets blamed for things one hasn’t done.”
“Not me.”
“Especially you.”
Eight
LONG THE MUD WALLS, THE LIZARDS SCATTERED LETHARGICALLY. They darted into crevices, leaving the pale red surfaces clean and hot. The cactus spines shone like polished steel, and the dust on the road gradually settled with the gravitational grace of a mass of feathers descending from a burst pillow. In the
Source des Poissons, a single girl with delicate coffee-colored tattoos on her hands floated on her back. She looked up at the clusters of unripe dates on the undersides of the palms that were reflected in the water, then spread her hands through the cold water and thought of a certain boy, who at that very moment was driving goats into the shade of a tree. A dragonfly skimmed the water. The cicadas died off and the girl closed her eyes. When the dragonflies mated an inch above the water, they looked as if they were strangling each other to death. She watched them dance across the black surface, their wings making a quietly desperate, vicious sound that was pleasing to the ear.
The trees went silent and from afar she could hear the hum of the generators inside the foreigners’ ksour. The old men sitting on the wall under the tamarisks lit their cheap cigarettes. For three hours, no one would do anything. It was like night. In the garage, the air conditioners hummed and Richard stood alone with the body, anxiously glancing at his watch. His skin prickled with the heat that penetrated even into this secluded place. His back was wet and he marveled at how dry the dead boy’s skin was. It was like writing paper.
By the gate, meanwhile, a man stood with his hand on the bolt, listening carefully. The small crowd had finally dispersed, driven off by the seasonable temperatures, and its members now lay under trees, on lice-ridden mattresses, on pieces of palm bark. They lay awake waiting for the sun to decline. All it needed was a certain eager patience. The guests inside the ksour did much the same. Some lay on floating mattresses in the pool, half asleep; others made love in their rooms, taking care not to make too much noise. A few read books with an iced orange juice at their side. They had tracked their position on maps, some of them, and on GPS devices, but their sense of place was not yet firm. Their minds drifted easily. They ironed their lips with lip balm and evened the tanning oil on their noses, wondering what they were going to do next. There was a fancy dress ball in the evening—costumes provided—but would they be expected to dance? Would they be expected to be themselves or to impersonate people they were not? Would it be fun or the reverse of fun, whatever that was?
IN THE HIGHEST ROOM OF THE HOUSE, A PRIVATE DRAWING room painted with apple-green geometrical tile designs where Dally and Richard spent hours alone reading and tipping bottles of Laphraoig before sunset, the two men stood by the great plate-glass window watching a swirl of dust rising from the distant road.
“Looks like a car,” Dally said hopefully.
“It isn’t the police. They said they were dealing with a morgue, but I haven’t heard from them.”
Richard wondered if he should call Hamid. The afternoon was winding down and the trees were spreading their shadows around the cliffs. They had been sleeping for two hours and the nightmares had not completely blown off. But what would Hamid do? He decided to wait and see. When the body was finally taken away, the cloud hanging over them would presumably be lifted at a stroke. All they had to do was remove it circumspectly, without desecration of custom.
“It’s definitely a car, Dick.”
“The mint suppliers?”
“They came this morning. Maybe someone from the morgue.”
“But which morgue?”
Dally shrugged. He had no idea what morgues there were in the neighborhood of Azna. He didn’t know if they had morgues at all. Didn’t they just throw the body into a pit or something?
Richard had to handle Dally carefully sometimes. He was liable to go off if arrangements carefully made suddenly came unstuck.
“There’s a morgue in Errachidia. Might be a pickup from them.”
Dally did go off. “I wish you hadn’t invited those English people. What a bore they are. And what a mess they’ve made.”
“Are they a bore?”
“They’re a horrible bore. And did you see Mr. Limey’s shoes?”
Richard nodded. “It’s a type, Dally. He’s a public school doctor. What do you expect?”
“I guarantee that tonight they’re the only ones who don’t dress up. They’ll claim they have post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“I’m sure it’s what they have.”
“I saw him grab a drink at the breakfast buffet. He was guzzling it. His hand was shaking. He’s pathetic. Never again with those two, I swear.”
“Probably wise,” Richard thought dourly.
“We should have invited the Bainbridges. They’re genuinely wacko at least. And they don’t kill people on the way up.”
“There’s always next time.”
They laughed, complicit again. The swirls of dust had reached the cliffs where the tents stood, baking mud-brown in a lengthening sun. Dally poured himself a Scotch. Slowly, Richard got dressed. He loved the desert at this hour. A wild camel nosed its way along the black ribbon of the road, and far off at the opening of the valley a menacing orange light gathered. The fig trees in the garden shuddered as if beaten with sticks, but there was little wind during those moments. The hour of dusk could be tasted, but not seen.
THE CATTLE EGRETS AND AFRICAN FINCHES CAME BACK TO settle in their ruined nooks, and an old man in a tattered coffee-colored djellaba rolled out of the Toyota jeep that had pulled up in front of the main gates and bared his six gold teeth in a grimace of extreme discomfort. The car that Dally and Richard had seen had savaged number plates and panels patched up with cheap epoxy; its wipers were bent back and the radio antenna had collapsed. The other occupants remained inside, huddled together in their ragged chechs. But at length, as the old man approached the door and took off his cloth cap, they also got out and stretched their legs. “A cold place,” they muttered, keeping their expressions tense. Their clothes were caked with grit and sand, and as they unbent themselves, a small cloud rose from them. They beat their sleeves and chechs gently, stretched their mouths, and looked warily around them. A dark orange powder caked the car, clogging the grille and the side mirrors, and on the backseat lay a large sack of uncooked rice. The men of Azna could tell there were weapons in the car, though none could see them. There was a smell of weapons. A smell of bullets and goat grease.
The old man walked up to the closed gate and slowly, orchestrating creaky knees, knelt down in the dust. He settled in, holding his hands together across his chest. His eyes were completely expressionless. Almost under his breath at first, then louder, he said the following words: “I am Abdellah Taheri of the Aït Kebbash from Tafal’aalt. I am here to collect my son. Will you hear me? Will you open your gate?”
He said it again and again, while his companions watched him impassively. They were middle-aged men with grizzled half-beards and large, blunted hands. They were thin desert men of the far south, with bird-beak noses and stony eyes set close together, their teeth half silver. Their faces were covered; their clothes were white and indigo. Their hands were scarred. They spoke Tamazight.
Hamid heard the voice at once. He crept to the gate and put his ear against it. It was the thing he had been expecting all along. The old man raised his voice and he repeated his demand until even the guests could hear it. His voice carried far on the shrieking wind. It was a level, grave voice with no trace of hysteria or emotional exaggeration. Like a repeated hammer blow, it struck home until it produced movement, reaction. Voices can open doors. Richard came down quickly to the gate.
“The father?” he hissed at Hamid.
The servant nodded.
“Well, open up, then. Are you going to keep them there?”
“Are you sure, Monsieur? They are Aït Kebbash.”
Richard smirked. “So?”
“Very well, Monsieur. But they will try and extort money from you. May you be warned!”
Richard ignored him. He heard the word Tafal’aalt. Was it a village somewhere? He asked Hamid if he had ever heard of it; the latter shook his head.
“Where do the Aït Kebbash live?”
Hamid shrugged. “Far, far out.”
And he made a grim gesture with one hand.
“They must have driven all night,” Richard said.
“All day and all night. Many nights.”
“Open the gates, then.”
“They will blackmail you, Monsieur. They are blackmailers.”
It was Richard who slid open the huge bolt.
“Keep the guests away from here. We don’t want them nosing around while this is going on.”
“Do not step out, Richard. Let the other step in. We will see how he is.”
“You mean, enraged?”
WHEN THE GATE OPENED, THE OLD MAN JUST AS SLOWLY stood up. He brushed off his knees and put his cap back on his head, and the men by the car didn’t move as the gates swung open and the staff called out, beckoning him forward. There were summary greetings, exchanges, and Hamid courteously asked where they had driven from. Tafal’aalt was a village of one hundred souls on the far side of the Tafilalet, far out where the edge of the oasis was drying out and the desert plain was advancing. It was beyond the remote fossil town of Alnif. It was on the farthest edge of human habitation, close to the Algerian border and the lonely mountain of Issomour, where fine trilobites and aquifers were quarried. Jbel Issomour was where they made their living, in the quarries that circled the mountain. Nearby, they explained, was Hmor Lagdad, the mountain called the Red-Cheeked One, which could be seen from a great distance off and which they all knew because it could be seen distantly from the quarries just outside Erfoud. Hamid said that he was deeply sorry about his son. What was the boy’s name?
“Driss, my only son.”
“May Allah have mercy.”
“Allah has made it so.”
Hamid was suddenly moved. At last, the corpse had a name and an identity, and he was relieved. To die on the road in the middle of the night was a dog’s death.
“We have kept him here, if it please you,” Hamid said, ushering the old man toward the garage doors. “We have kept vigil every hour.”
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