Ten
ICHARD LIT A CIGARETTE AND COLLAPSED ON HIS sofa. He was already exhausted and dying for the charade of a weekend to be over. It was a total failure. Things carried on, but there was a feeling of deceit and unease hanging over everything. The old man in the garage, the gang waiting by the gates, and the muttering, superstitious staff suddenly turning against him. David was the bringer of jinxes and bad luck, and Richard’s sympathy for him was diminishing by the hour. Paid? He would now have to have a mad scene with David about this. The doctor would throw a fit; Richard would play devil’s advocate while actually believing the advocacy. “Pay him,” he would say, “and make him go away.” And when David was actually in the room half an hour later, that was exactly what he said.
“Never,” David insisted, shaking his head like a pissed-off schoolboy. “You don’t pay someone because of an accident.”
Richard made sure the doors were closed and he also made sure Hamid kept everyone else away. David was sweating again, and he adamantly refused to put on a costume.
“I’m not putting on a costume until we have this sorted.”
“Fair enough. Let’s sort it, then.”
“I’m not paying him.”
“Did you meet him?”
David shook his head.
“You should meet him. He’s a grieving father, for God’s sake. I called Benihadd. He says it’s the custom here. You don’t have to do it, but if you don’t, it could make things so much more awkward.”
David looked at him coldly. So it was a setup, he thought wildly. It felt to him that moving walls were closing in on him, squeezing him tighter and tighter. The Arabs just wanted money out of you. It was a squeeze. Their grief and annoyance were always exaggerated.
“I don’t even know how much he wants,” Richard admitted, walking around the room in his slippers. “It might just be a thousand euros or something.”
“Or a fuck of a lot more.”
“We could just ask him, couldn’t we?”
“It’s blackmail,” David said. “It’s blackmail pure and simple.”
Richard was gentle with him, because he agreed with it. But so what if it was? So what if it was blackmail? What was the word for blackmail in their language—did they even have one?
“You seem very equanimous about it,” David remarked, his face suddenly twitching. “What if it was a thousand euros? It’s not nothing. Anyway, it’s the principle of the thing, plus a thousand euros.”
“If it was a thousand, it wouldn’t be very much.”
“What are they going to do otherwise?” David sneered. “Lynch me? They do have an army here, don’t they?”
“I wasn’t thinking about them lynching you. I was thinking about them not going away.”
“Oh, your precious weekend, of course! We mustn’t forget that. So we’ll have a nice weekend in the country while they screw me out of a thousand euros?”
“I think it’s better than the alternative, don’t you?”
The heat between them had quickly risen and Richard felt his face go hot and red. David looked like a plump, sullen toad on his leather chair, his legs wide apart, his Thomas Pink shirt wrecked by the heat and perspiration. He stared around him with an alert, knowing desperation. Squeezed, he was being squeezed, and there was no one to defend him but himself. He hated the way white people gave in to blackmail in places like this. The Muslims had the upper hand and they used it mercilessly, but the cowardly whites beaten down by decades of guilt and political correctness couldn’t admit how ruthlessly they were being dealt with. What did they think, that villagers in the Sahara living in shit thought like themselves? It beggared belief.
There was deep inside David a core of the officer class, the colonial officer class to which his grandfathers on both sides had belonged. There were many more men like him than one assumed, largely because they were so careful to conceal their opinions in moments of stress. But when he felt threatened, he lost his reserve and his disguise. He became supercilious and defiant, and he relished the breaking of the contemporary taboos, which in any case had never seemed to him convincing. He thought political correctness was an invention of spineless Americans wallowing in their racial hellhole. It was just that the British had adopted it with an even sillier intensity. It was guilt for its own sake, and it changed nothing. And now Richard.
He sat back with seething sarcasm.
“And what are the alternatives, Dicky? Do they practice castration out here? Or do the police come and screw you as well? Have we thought of contacting the consulate in Casablanca? What about your contacts in the Ministry of the Interior?”
“My contacts? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. The consulate won’t help you. They think of this place as the far side of the moon. We do want to cut down on the red tape. You could be far worse off going that route.”
David looked at his nails, as people do when they are on the passive offensive. “I could take that risk. You see, you feel guilty and threatened because you live here. I feel nothing of the sort. I don’t owe Moroccans anything. I’m not French.”
“David, I dare say you aren’t really thinking about your own interests. Or Jo’s. If we call the consulate, there would have to be a thorough, I mean thorough, look at this whole thing. It would be under the microscope. I don’t think you’d want that.”
“I …”
“No, no, David, I don’t think you would.”
Richard went to the drinks cabinet and snapped it open angrily. Give the toad a stiff drink and force him round. He had a few ancestors in the East India Company as well. Most of them were into watercolors, archaeology, and Eastern religion. It didn’t necessarily make you into a hard-ass.
He didn’t bother asking what David wanted. He just made up a hugely alcoholic gin and tonic, no ice. He rattled it about to mix it and controlled the outburst of rage that was fast approaching. Suddenly he remembered an incident from school thirty-five years earlier. It was a funny incident, but it seemed less funny now. One Parents’ Day at Ardingly College, one of the boys started throwing mice off a rooftop at the parents and masters assembled below. Each mouse was equipped with a little parachute decorated with a swastika. Naturally, the parachutes didn’t work. The mice hurtled to their deaths and were squashed against the flagstones with the swastika parachutes draped over them. The rumor was, it was David Henniger. He was caned for it, wasn’t he? Richard tried to remember. But was David announcing his love of swastikas or—much more likely—vilifying the masters and parents as swastika types? Richard turned and offered the toad his booze.
The toad’s greedy eyes mellowed at once.
“Cheers, guv’nor,” he growled and grabbed the glass gratefully. He took a swig straightaway.
Richard walked to the windows. There was a puzzle before them. How would they unlock it? It was a puzzle of diplomacy, of tact. He had made his point about David’s not wanting a real investigation. So he was hiding something. The father of Driss could not know that, however. Or did he know it? “The men of the desert know everything,” Hamid said once, like a quote out of Lawrence of Arabia. But they didn’t, really. They were just efficient pessimists, and therefore astute readers of human nature. They always assumed the worst, and that made them correct nine times out of ten. Their pessimism, however, was not like David’s. David was someone who believed that the past was superior to the present, and that was a different sort of pessimist. It was not the entire past that was superior, of course; it was mostly just the British nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The Moroccans, on the other hand, believed as Hamid did when he quoted the famous proverb “The past is gone, what is hoped for is absent and there is only the hour in which you are.” Richard sat down next to him and clacked his glass.
“Sláinte,” he murmured, offering the Celtic toast.
“Bums up.”
They drank morosely. Candles were being lit one by one in the grounds of the ksour, like a sky coming alight at night. David looked
at his watch. He was thinking about his wife.
“I think,” Richard said more conspiratorially, “that we should go down and talk to the old crow. Perhaps we can work something out. I’ve been here for a while, let me tell you, and that’s how one works things out here. No rages and fits. No self-righteous finger wagging. It doesn’t work. It’s always best to listen to what they want. Usually they just want something and they’ll tell you. When you give it to them, you can forget everything.”
David continued drinking with surly swigs.
“Once they sense how weak we are, they’ll go for broke. Since they’ve got nothing.”
“It doesn’t always work like that.”
“I’m glad you’ve agreed, then,” Richard concluded tersely. “We might be both pleasantly surprised.”
“Pleasantly?” David said as he tipped his glass empty.
Richard wanted to berate him, to get it off his chest. If he had been honest all along, they could have called the consulate and left it at that. But the arrogant shit had lied and kept something to himself, and consequently Abdellah, the mourning father, had the upper hand. One is the author of one’s own misfortunes, he wanted to say loudly. But David wouldn’t listen.
“I mean,” Richard corrected himself, “that it might not be as bad as we think.”
“I know when I’m being robbed,” David thought.
“You’re not being robbed,” Richard would have replied. “You’re being spared.”
David stared at the ice cube at the bottom of his glass. He knew it was his fault and he kept his silence. If only he could be transported back to Putney by a devious machine of the future, with a single flick of a switch.
THEY WENT DOWN INTO THE PARTY TOGETHER. DANCING had broken out with horrifying sincerity in the library. Richard had given orders about this, but the French contingent was drunk and they didn’t see why not. They had some Joe Dassin on the turntable and were doing the twist to “Bip-Bip.” Half the guests were in costume, sashed and hatted, and the gin fizz at the outside bar had run dry. Champagne and orange juice was being mustered, and the small triangular mint sandwiches over which he and Dally had pored for a day were making their appearance alongside bowls of beet leaf salad. The fire-eaters from Taza had arrived and were sitting glumly by themselves with their apparatus, waiting for instructions. Richard went up to them and shook their hands with the smattering of Berber words he had learned. They bowed and touched their chests. The outdoor sofas that night were draped with goatskins and piled with sequined cushions, and large monochrome tribal carpets connected them. David walked over their geometrical eyes carefully, as if squishing them underfoot. He hoped it was taboo, that the jinns would get pissed off. He hated all this ethnic pretense and affectation. One could treat people decently without aping them, without rolling out their carpets everywhere. He himself treated all races at St. Ann’s, and the Hippocratic oath made multiculturalism come alive, for once. But there were no grounds for aesthetic surrender. When we saw western knickknacks in their houses, we laughed at them, didn’t we? Dismal kitsch, we said to ourselves. This was no different.
Yet Richard seemed at ease with it. He was a bit of an orientalist snob, obviously, even if you conceded that most of it came from his insufferable boyfriend, who, they said, liked the servants on the side. But then gays always came to North Africa. It was an Edwardian tradition. David’s own grandfather Edwin had done so, to great scandal. Had they all followed Oscar Wilde to Algiers? “Because they could,” he thought. “Because they had the power.” The braziers licked against dark air, which somehow was not at all dark. A boy staggered past with a crate of ice piled with apricots, with stiff leaves still attached to the fruit. One always looked up, searching for the moon.
As they walked side by side, David wondered if Richard despised him, because it certainly seemed that way. He was used to it. People nearly always thought David was something he wasn’t. A man driven by rage and curmudgeon emotion. But then England was now a country dominated, he felt, by childish propaganda and feel-good campaigns designed to facilitate a harmony that never arrived in quite the form that the engineers hoped. There was little room for people who just thought what they thought, and said so, even if what they thought could not be summarized in slogans or even in books. Many of his colleagues were Muslims. Internally, his dialogue with them was comical and rich and largely tolerant. It was not murderous except when he felt them siding with their ummah after an outrage committed by their own, for a bomb on a train did not make him any closer to them, but he saw no reason to feel apologetic for that and they did not reproach him. There was decency between them of a sort. A decency that was mutually enjoyable on odd occasions, as when he congratulated Dr. Mutaba on a perfectly performed ear operation on one of his old ladies. As for his own image as the roly-poly Tory with his boozy red nose, it was a stock figure to which he was not attached and, moreover, one was in good company and it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t bad to have a streak of the late Evelyn Waugh in one’s veins. It was a facade, a diversion, and an excuse for others not to look closer. No human being is that simple or that repulsive. A man sets himself up as a cartoon, but it is always for a reason that will become apparent down the road. As he walked through the heat, he felt himself distancing himself from what might happen to him shortly. He would now be free to drink himself to death, at least. His image as a curmudgeon might actually be useful if the Arabs got unpleasant, and, besides, it was just what liberals liked to think about others. Dogmatic as always. But then liberals never understood anything about anything deep down, because they didn’t really understand cruelty and power except through being in opposition to them. Their body language revealed them. It was easy to oppose those things when you yourself didn’t have to use them. But when you did …, the tables turned with the speed of a knife being tossed into the air, and being disgusted and opposed and indignant didn’t cut it anymore. Any fool could feel those things.
They weren’t wise enough, he thought smugly as they sweated between the restored houses alone with the sound of their sandals crunching white-hot dirt. They thought everything in the world was like them, driven by ideas. How stupid can you get? Power in the racial sense was merely how many of you there are. That was simple enough, no? Everyone on earth seemed to understand that except white liberals. It wasn’t a simple or coarse rejection of others. Because he didn’t hate others; he was simply indifferent to them or regarded them as rivals. There was a vast difference between those two emotions. And they were rivals. Human beings are always rivals. He remembered a comment made by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes about Hispanic illegal immigration into the United States. It was, the great man had observed mildly and approvingly, “chromosomatic imperialism.” So there you had it in black and white.
He patted the cold sweat on his face as they walked outside. He hated the heat. He hated the sand in the air, the smell of earth and cooking fat. He hated the fucking turbans they wore at night.
Richard turned to him. “This won’t take a minute. We’ll see the fire-eaters from Taza later on. They are really alarming.”
“Oh, great.”
They went past an open space with people dancing. David watched them as if he were deaf, as if the music didn’t exist, which made it a horrible sight. People jigging about like epileptics. He loved only the smell of the expensive perfume on the women’s bodies, sweated off and floating free. Why hadn’t they gone to Rome instead? This very moment, they could be sitting down at Ristorante 59 on Via Angelo Brunetti and ordering a nice cold bottle of Greco di Tufa. What a mistake he had made in coming here. But he had made it for Jo, and he was sure it would “mend her,” as he so often put it to himself. Everyone can be a fool.
She needed a break, a real break. She hadn’t written anything in years. She was bitterly unhappy, and maybe it was mostly because of him, but there it was—one should never deviate from what one really likes. The whole idea of “exploring” as an earnest moral project is pi
tifully ridiculous, and it always leads to failure, if not acute suffering. What a fool he’d been. There was no need to travel at all, really, except to go somewhere more beautiful, which for David meant an Italian or a French city with a better way of life than London or New York. Places with better food, calmer dynamics, better architecture. You went there and recharged your batteries. You drank and ate unreasonably, with no thought to what you would look like next week with fatter love handles, and that was good. Life was better for a while, so you got your money’s worth. Most of the rest of the world, on the other hand, was just hassle. Perhaps he just didn’t understand it.
“I admit all that,” he thought, looking at his dusted shoes, which no longer responded to polish. “So I’m not exactly a chauvinist, am I? I’m a perfectionist. I just think some Muslims treat their people like donkeys. I’m sorry but they do. They manifestly do treat their people like donkeys. It’s not our fault, never was. It’s their right if they want to.”
BY THE GATES, THE TOYOTA STOOD IN SEMIDARKNESS, ITS back hatch open, and around it, a few villagers stood as if waiting for some dramatic relief to the tedium of the day, which was just like the tedium of every other day. They listened to the seventies disco music coming from inside the ksour with their usual indifference, no longer bothering to imagine that anything decadent was going on. They were more interested in the solitary policeman lounging on the wall and eating a sandwich and in the prospect of the swaddled body of Driss appearing through the gate. The sun had dropped out of sight behind the distant horizons, and the air above the sunken springs had turned gray and moist. The dragonflies had quieted down. Among the ruined houses along the Tafnet road, the wildflowers stood unwilted in morose bunches, their heads made of deep gold petals that broke the dark. The men smoked their long clay pipes, holding the bowls in their left hand, and they had nothing to say. Gossip had exhausted itself.
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