The Forgiven: A Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  The guests began to arrive at the gate in their swimsuits and sun hats and clogs. They looked like a bunch of refugees from a Club Med. Dally yelled at Hamid, whom he spotted at once: “Hamid, get them in the cars smoothly, will you? It’s just awfully hot.”

  Richard was there, in his Sunday best. He was so formidably handsome when he dressed up, Dally thought. He was wearing a pair of Loake suede boots in the heat and cuff links. It was that indifference to discomfort that stirred one to admiration.

  “Dicky,” he called out. “Have we got enough cars?”

  Richard came up with a whiff of Annick Goutal.

  “We’re fine, I think. Where is Jo, the Henniger girl?”

  “I didn’t see her. Why?”

  “Dally, we have to keep her as far away as possible from the snooping scribblers and the photographers. We don’t want her face in any bloody picture. If any of them asks who she is, lie, or say you don’t know. Steer them away from her.”

  “I knew that, laddy. I’m not that naive.”

  “I know, sweet. But Hamid and the boys are gormless. Make it clear, will you? Keep your eyes peeled during the picnic. I think that girl from the Times is sniffing about. Everyone knows about David. They’re gossiping like a bunch of schoolkids.”

  “It’s probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to them all year.”

  “We don’t want anything exciting to happen to them. We want hush-hush and make them think about something else.”

  “Well, the strawberries for one thing. I’ve had them iced. I know it’s weird, but they look like internal organs. Totally freaky. We’ve put them on beds of watercress.”

  Richard scanned the mob of faces for Jo. He was determined to ride down to the waterfalls with her.

  The staff held a flock of rose-tinted parasols above the heads of the complaining guests, who were coughing in the dry dust of noon. The seating arrangements inside the jeeps were organized, with male-female and same-sex flirtations discreetly accommodated. The ice chests and silver plates and champagne glasses all came in a separate vehicle, tended by a tense and authoritarian Hamid, who always felt that his reputation was on the line when operations of this kind were in full swing. A crate of iced shrimp jostled in the back next to the oblong dishes of frozen strawberries.

  “Drive slowly!” he barked at the driver.

  Richard finally saw Jo and Day sauntering into the sun’s glare.

  “Over here,” he cried, waving a little too determinedly and catching her eye at once, but she seemed suspicious, or so he thought, and he was usually right.

  THE CONVOY TURNED OFF DOWN A PRECIPITOUS TRACK above Tafnet. It was shaded by thin, pale green trees and high walls of sandstone that the local youth had scored with amorous, but discreet, graffiti. Sitting awkwardly between Richard and Day with the windows rolled down, she felt the humidity of the river flowing in its deep groove and the faintly acid scent of the okra gardens irrigated by its waters. It was a new way of feeling the intimacy that this landscape offered; its close-knit architecture of water and shadow and rock. You felt that it had been created by real needs over considerable time, rather than by a desire to impress or to be grand. She liked the smell of birds that were sheltered by it, and the sudden glitter of a small canal as it swirled around a water wheel. She liked the dewy sweat on the air that smelled of dung. Someone had told her at the party the night before that the Berber names for the months were still a corrupted form of Latin. She didn’t know if it was true, but it was a seductive thought that the world of Apuleius was still alive in an underground way, that the women crouching on their heels in the palm shadows were still partly pagan and that they made her pagan, too.

  The road was steep. It passed under ponderous, fractured cliffs, winding past plots of fig trees and then slopes of iron-red dirt dark as fresh liver where tiny black goats stood stock-still with quivering ears. Richard told her all the place-names as they went, because he and Dally walked down here almost every day by themselves with their swimming trunks, reading poetry if the fancy took them.

  “Every time we make this walk, I remember why I am not in London. I sing a ballad to Pan, and a few other gods, too.”

  “Not Mammon?” Day asked innocently. “He was a god.”

  “The Phoenicians didn’t quite make it this far west, Tom. Here we are a pleasure-loving band of complete hypocrites. I am going to look for a house for you.” He turned to Jo with beady eyes. “I’ve de-Americanized one and I’m going to do him next.”

  “You haven’t de-Americanized anyone.” Day laughed. “Dally?”

  “He’s a work in progress.”

  They heard the waterfall crashing into its pool, echoing high up into the rocks that formed a small amphitheater around it. A fresh, joyous sound, like that of children playing, and wholly unexpected. The cars stopped by the edge of the wide pool where the river widened. The waterfall was half in sun, its bottom half dark. The water foamed and rippled away from it.

  Hamid organized the setting up of the picnics, the rolling out of carpets, the placing of ice chests and hampers. The party spread out, and a few guests slipped off their outer clothes and plunged into the cooling waters.

  Jo sat with Day and kicked off her shoes. She was in a strange mood, not wanting to be there, yet wanting to be there. Looking across the water, she noticed at once that there was a series of interlocking pools reaching back into the edge of the oasis. Day said nothing, sipping a glass of cold Prosecco and warily watching the young girls splashing under the torrent. Something about them irritated him. Their loudness, their weak sense of self. It was only Jo who interested him now. Her deep coldness attracted him because, being the exact opposite in temperament, he could only interpret it as woundedness. Yet he was predatory and she could never be. Personally, he doubted that a womanizer could ever be entirely cold, as portrayed in popular morality. It was the wounded who were cold. They were incorrigible.

  Day, mildly uneducated, didn’t know what she was talking about half the time—the references she dropped all around her were like heavy stones—but he was skillful enough with people to know how to roll with this small problem. One nodded and said “yeah,” and he didn’t mind. It was a sign of her naïveté, her lack of worldliness.

  “Olive?”

  She looked disgusted as he thrust one up to her mouth.

  “Don’t feed me,” she said.

  It was only belatedly that they saw the Moroccan musicians whom Richard had brought down with them, and who now set to playing.

  “In the water,” Dally suddenly shouted.

  And the small herd stirred obediently, like ruminants motivated by thirst. Two dozen heads dispersed over the pool’s surface, fanning out around the roaring falls, where a stunted rainbow had formed. The Berbers looked on glassily, on the brink of bemusement. Day took her hand without warning.

  “Oh!” she stuttered, and then realized that she was being whisked off into the water.

  “You are a great protester,” he muttered.

  “It’s going to be really cold, I know it.”

  She quailed, then like an elastic band felt the tension inside her reverse and spring forward. She sailed past him into the green water. The shock made her laugh aloud. A few people turned to see who could scream so winningly. Day was delighted. All he had been waiting for was this sign of impulsiveness, since impulsiveness is the womanizer’s best ally.

  “But I am not being a womanizer,” he thought then, crossing the thought out in his mind as soon as it occurred.

  “It’s like a fjord in Norway,” she gasped.

  SEPARATED FROM THE PARTY, THEY FOUND THEMSELVES climbing into the next pool down, a long oval body of water surrounded by low-hanging shaggy palms, and the unripe green dates were so close to the water that their reflections were stable in the water, across which water boatmen skimmed in quick bursts of energy. She didn’t know why she was going there with this odd man who did not arouse all her sympathy, or why she was so lightheart
ed about floating on her back and looking up at the clusters of dates. She let herself melt into this clear, devastating water that seeped away from them into irrigation channels, and slowly, mediated by this same water, the idea of sex was developing between them, as it had been for the previous twenty-four hours. The drums and pipes from the neighboring wadi made them both giggly and childishly uninhibited. Day went underwater and came up with a dead palm frond to prick her with.

  Only a matter of time, she was thinking already. And it was curious how it was always like that: a desire that was inevitable, preordained. She remembered that feeling from adolescence. It was akin to ball bearings rolling down an incline.

  His hand was upon her shoulder and she didn’t make a fuss. His unshaven cheek brushed hers. Men were such opportunists, but if they weren’t scavengers, nothing would happen. The sexual planet would not turn. She certainly gave in.

  “I shouldn’t,” she murmured predictably.

  He laughed, in the cruelest way, and it was nearly a mistake.

  “But obviously you want to,” that laugh implied.

  “Maybe,” she wanted to say to him. “But I want to pretend that I don’t want to. Do you understand that?”

  They found dry land again. They walked through the dry, bristling palms in the paradoxical humidity. They heard the water wheels and the doves, the voices of women walking through the lines of dates with long sticks. The latter greeted them with cries of “La bess!” The decayed fronds underfoot skewered her soles, and she couldn’t pull herself away from the grip of his cold, wet hand. It wasn’t coercion, or even overbearingness. It was just the accurate reading of her own coming-and-going that crushed her a little.

  “Do you think they hate us?” He nodded at the furtive women in the depth of the grove.

  “Not at all. Not the women, anyway.”

  They saw the party frolicking under the waterfall, as if it were a silent movie. It looked absurd.

  “I’m not so sure,” he said, pulling her toward him and without further ado kissing her on the mouth.

  It went on and on. The girls splashed in the echoing wadi, and she was sure the Berber women went silent. “It’s where they come to get fertile,” she pondered, deep in a red and bloody mood.

  When she broke free, she found herself gasping. She turned away, and his hands around her went limp.

  “I’m swimming back, not walking,” he drawled. “The spines are getting in my feet.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Well, wade back.” He laughed.

  She looked at his naked back moving off toward the pale green water.

  “Do they have crocs here?” he wondered aloud. “I thought I saw a hippopotamus back there. Must have been a guest.”

  Her heart was beating too strongly and she breathed slowly to make it stop. The drummers on the other side desisted and she heard Dally’s hysterical voice making some sort of irrelevant announcement.

  Day turned and shot her a little wink. Oh, come off it, she thought. She decided to walk, letting the dead fronds underfoot tear into her skin. It was now one o’clock, and so hot that her head would not clear. The frozen strawberries were laid out in the shade with an array of small silver spoons and cups of vanilla ice cream that had already melted. The scene was somehow dismal. Hamid frowned, crowed a little, and threw up his hands in exasperation.

  Eighteen

  T ONE FIFTEEN, DAZED BY THE SUN, DAVID STOOPED as he stepped down into the house’s interior and took off his sunglasses. The sweat poured between his eyes and down the bridge of his nose, which was struck at once by a burned scent of cloves and human salinity. It was the smell of animals living communally, in a kind of ceaseless fear of the future, and when the metal doors were slammed shut behind him, he found himself with Abdellah, Anouar, and one other man in near-complete darkness as they fumbled their way along a bare cement corridor haphazardly overlaid with cheap, filthy carpets. The whole structure was made of this same cement, which had probably been hastily poured and shaped. There were several rooms on either side of the corridor, all with the same patchwork of coarse carpets. In each one there was a crude square window whose wire and glass were insulated with newspaper.

  They walked into a large bare chamber with a gas burner and a metal kettle bubbling on top of it. Here were glass cups and a tin plate with a pile of fresh mint and next to it a large block of sugar. The lamentations around the car seemed to grow more vocal, expressed by more voices, but above and around it the wind moaned and soughed and sometimes drowned it out. The window crackled as it was hit by flying sand, which sounded like rain. Abdellah lit an oil lamp.

  They sat in a sprawling sort of way while tea was made. Anouar said gently to him, “You cannot drink now. I’ll bring you some in a minute.”

  The old man planted himself on a square of cardboard, his throne, and picked up a small chisel with which to hack at the block of brown-tinged sugar. He worked at gouging out some rough lumps and dropped them into the kettle where the mint was brewing. Then he crossed his legs and leaned back against the wall. Anouar cut the stalks of mint and crammed them into the kettle as well while the two men murmured to each other. The father unwound his chech as if it pained him, slowly unraveling it to its full length and laying it down next to him. His cropped white hair glistened slightly as he looked down at his own fingers and then spread them for a moment over his face.

  David could hear the body of Driss being removed from the jeep and being carried into the house through a different door. The lamentation thus reappeared in the corridor outside the room, loud and reverberating; it unnerved him, and he waited to see what effect it would have on Abdellah. But the old man said nothing. When the tea was ready, he crouched with Anouar and sipped it from his tiny glass cup with loud slurps. They went through four or five cups in this way while the wails from the corridor worsened. It was this that made Anouar uncomfortable, and which made him shift awkwardly from one foot to the other. He asked the old man what he should do with the foreigner.

  “Take him to Driss’s room,” Abdellah said a little absently.

  Anouar rose, but the father then signified that he wanted him to do something else in addition.

  “That friend of Driss’s. Is it Ismael? Where is he?”

  “He is in Tabrikt hiding with his father.”

  “What is he afraid of? The police won’t come here. Go to Tabrikt and tell him that I would like to speak with him this afternoon, if possible. Tell him Driss’s father wishes it, and he should respect me. I know he won’t come to the burial.”

  “He is afraid.”

  “Tell him it is understood that he has his reasons for not coming. But nevertheless I want to speak with him anyway. I want to know what he has to say for himself.”

  “Very well.”

  “Tell him to come quietly, when no one is looking, when the burial is over and done with.”

  Anouar motioned for David to rise, and they ventured back out into the corridor with his traveling bags, where the women stared at them thunderstruck. Anouar pushed David quickly down the corridor toward another room at its far end. David went uncomplainingly, grateful to be hustled away from the Furies. They darted into another stifling cement room with a newspapered window, and Anouar slammed the door shut behind them. The floor here was covered with newspapers as well, and a single rug. Around the bottom of the walls, dozens of trilobites were stacked, each specimen numbered and named in roman letters as if in expectation of a western buyer. A mattress lay in one corner, with plastic bottles of water and a small transistor radio.

  David understood at once that they must be Driss’s things. It couldn’t be an accident that they were making him sleep in Driss’s bed next to Driss’s transistor radio. His stomach turned and he was tempted to say something harsh, but Anouar preempted him.

  “It’s the room of Driss, as you have guessed. There is no other room for you to sleep in. The father wanted you to feel his spirit here, too. He thinks it is fitting.”
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  “Fitting?”

  David trembled visibly, and his eyes seemed to Anouar to lose their formidable color. Moreover, his knees were weakening, Anouar could see.

  “Lie down, David. You must be tired.”

  “I didn’t have to come here, you know. It was my choice.”

  “Lie down. It’s the only bed we have for you.”

  David felt himself spiraling downward, helplessly propelled toward this sordid mattress where the boy had slept, maybe for years, since childhood.

  “I can’t lie down yet.”

  He went to the window and looked out. It was like peering through the periscope of a submarine, because it was at ground level. The whole house was more or less subterranean. The boy’s personal effects had probably been cleared away, but there was still a pile of magazines and a razor standing in a plastic cup. He stared at them in horror. And there was the amiable, slightly blundering Anouar with his huge ochre-colored palms spread out like an old painting of Jesus making his gesture of compassion. Except that Anouar’s gesture was not quite compassion. It was a sort of insistence. He told David that he was going to the burial now, and while he was away, David should keep the door bolted.

  “It’s for your own safety,” he said.

  “My own safety?”

  “The women are hysterical with grief.”

  “What happens now?” David wanted to scream.

  “Well,” Anouar concluded, lowering his hands finally and giving the sinking Englishman as warm a smile as he could afford in the circumstances, “I will come for you at dusk. Get some sleep.”