Anouar tried to imagine what world had produced such a man, but it was impossible. England was a place of green lawns and terrific, fat women. They had peaches there and enormous carrots and beaches made of stones—he had seen them on the TV at the Café des Ksours in Rissani. The men there lived in perpetual gloom and unhappiness, no doubt brought upon them by their infidelity to truth and their indelible taste for buggery.
Yet David was a handsome specimen of arrogant pride and exact manners, and Anouar noticed everything about him that was an expression of pride, respectability, and exactitude. The marriage ring, for example, carefully adjusted upon the appropriate finger; or the gloss of the shoes that was produced by a dainty vigilance that never let up. He had noticed that David had a special cloth for dusting his shoes that he took with him everywhere he went. When the shoes dimmed a little, he leaned down with this cloth and rectified the situation. He breathed on his watch and cleaned it. He wore cuff links even here in Tafal’aalt. Never had such a thing been seen there before.
Now David ate with the metal fork Anouar had provided for him, but he used it with noticeable restraint. Anouar sat with him and asked him questions about his homeland, but David did not seem willing to tell him much. He was more concerned about what Abdellah was going to do.
“Nothing,” Anouar reassured him. “I think he would like to have a conversation with you, that is all.”
“That seems rather improbable. I feel locked up in here.”
Anouar was a little mortified by this comment.
“But you lock yourself in,” he reported. “It is not the same.”
“You know what I mean,” David insisted.
He ate methodically, keeping an eye on the deltoid-shaped flame of the oil lamp. His own thoughts about his hosts were far less speculatively romantic than Anouar’s about him.
“All is confusion,” Anouar said truthfully. “Would you like some kif?”
“You mean marijuana? No thanks. I’m a doctor. I don’t believe in marijuana.”
“What a fool,” Anouar thought, and lit up anyway.
“I wonder if secondhand marijuana smoke makes you stoned?”
But Anouar didn’t understand irony.
“Never mind,” David sighed. “I’m sure it does.”
“It’s as you wish, Monsieur David.”
“The tagine is pretty good.”
“They killed a goat kid an hour ago.”
“Oh,” David said, and his heart sank. It wasn’t like buying a shank at a supermarket, was it? He stopped eating for a moment.
Anouar relaxed with the kif. It was strong, fresh shit from the green Atlas foothills, pungent as mint, and it went straight to your head. He could tell that David was curious about it, but that his upbringing made it difficult for him to accept a polite offer of a puff.
“I can hear people walking past the house,” David said.
“It’s the diggers coming back from the mountain. They come back at dark, when they can no longer see what they are doing.”
David went to the window. Shadowy forms filed past between the houses, clinking with hammers and stones, and the tangy spiced grease in his mouth trickled back into his throat and he swallowed hard, disgusted and grateful at the same time. “So they work from dawn to dusk,” he thought.
It was a nice phrase until you thought about what it meant. And it wasn’t for anything useful or productive. It was futile, in the end. The diggers were obviously paid nothing, and the middlemen and dealers made the profits. One day a European just like him would stride into his same room, point out a Dicranurus, and have it wrapped. The money would keep the family alive for a few weeks. Flour, oil, butter, tea, bread, newspapers, tobacco. But the Dicranurus would then have a glittering career on the far side of the world.
So what, though? It was the same all over the world. One didn’t give a second thought to the sweatshop workers in Indonesia who assembled one’s hundred-dollar DVD player. It wasn’t necessarily an injustice. They were paid what everyone else in Indonesia was paid. They didn’t pay Paris rents in Jakarta and they could eat quite well for a dollar a day. Whereas he and Jo spent thousands on food every month and ate quite badly. They weren’t any happier because they had a soulless little house in some soulless London street with white doorways. Indonesians didn’t envy them. No one envied them. The tone was usually a kind of bemused pity.
A young boy walked by, shouldering a large leather bag. Then the alley fell silent. Anouar announced that he was leaving and that Abdellah would come by shortly to have a talk with him.
“Just you and him. To clear things up.”
“Is he coming with a knife?”
“I don’t know,” Anouar said simply. “One must be prepared for all possibilities. Don’t you think, David?”
“I don’t have any opinions about that.”
“HE’S HIGH AS A KITE,” DAVID THOUGHT AS THE DOOR closed behind Anouar. Perhaps they were all high now. A house full of high Berbers: it was not a particularly comforting thought, but then again, perhaps it was a comforting thought, and after a while, as he stood by the window watching the moon, he heard a strange sound from the other side of the house. It was a low communal singing, the voices rising and falling in mournful sequences. The men were singing around the dead goat. As they sang, David thought he heard an oud playing behind them. The sound was so sad that he couldn’t move from the window until it had stopped. He went to the door and peered into the corridor. A single lightbulb had been left on at the far end, lighting a pile of tools stacked by the end wall. A woman sobbed very quietly in one of the rooms there. He closed the door and held his breath.
A few seconds later, the light went off. The men gathered in the main room seemed to have fallen asleep, and David went back to the window, where he pressed his face against the wire mesh to suck in the cold air. The scent of iron in the air, the heat that moved and crept. He was panicking and his heart rate was picking up its pace, becoming so emphatic that he could feel it with his hand, and a feeling of terror encircled him completely and he gripped the bar of the window as if to stop being swept away. He knew that Abdellah was walking down the corridor toward him. He’d merely waited till his companions were asleep. David thought blindly of the parachutes with swastikas he had made at school and the way he had never been found out for a crime that had caused at least one mother to faint. He laughed. The Issomour cliff was a wall of silver, with the buckets suspended on ropes looking like fairground contraptions of some kind, and across the rubble road that ran through Tafal’aalt, scorpions ran in the white light of the moon. He was still not sure if he was sorry. More sorry for what he had done, that is, than he was for himself.
“That kid was going to rob me,” he said under his breath as the door moved and began to open. “He was going to kill us by the road and take our car. Dammit.”
Abdellah was carrying a candle waxed to a saucer, and he had shaved his head. He spoke perfect French, it turned out.
“This is very difficult for me,” David began.
“Sit,” the father said, and took out two apples and a huge SOG combat knife, which he placed next to him as he sat down.
So David put himself into a cross-legged position and watched with a calm horror as Abdellah picked up one of the apples, leaned the blade of the SOG against it, and began to peel.
THE OLD MAN BENT OVER HIS TASK WITH A REMARKABLE concentration. He removed the peel as a single intact coil and laid it next to him. Then he cut the apple into four pieces and handed one of them to David. A drop of juice hung off the blade as he wiped it against his knee. Between the two men there existed a mental chasm—centuries of antagonism and mutual ignorance. But such a chasm, David considered, would have been relatively easy to span. It wasn’t just that. There was a deeper misunderstanding between them, one that went so far back into the mind that its beginning could not be conceptualized. Thousands of years without trees, without lawns, without ease. Just this wind. They had minds perfectly ada
pted, not to wood, streams, and fruit, but to stones, dust, and wind. They were molded by stone. They were formed by elements that other people only tasted impartially, occasionally.
“Is it good?” Abdellah asked.
“The apple? Fine.”
The old man smiled dryly.
“It is very regrettable, this whole business,” he went on. And David felt a mild outrage that this wily fox spoke such fluent French and had pretended otherwise. Of course he spoke a European language. Moroccans were brilliant linguists, and Abdellah’s clients were all Europeans. The fossils in this room were all priced in euros. It was so obvious now.
“It was an accident,” David said sullenly. “It was one of those things that happen in the dark of the night, dans les ténèbres, vous savez?”
“I know what an accident is. Life is full of accidents.”
“Then, if you’ll forgive me for saying, I am not sure why I am here. I came here as a favor to you, and because my friends thought it would be a good idea. But I am not sure why I accepted.”
“Because you felt responsible,”
“Yes. But I’m not sure for what.”
“You felt responsible for something.”
Abdellah picked up the knife again and proceeded to the second apple, which he peeled in exactly the same way. It was as if he had done this thousands of times blindfolded, as if the apple was sullenly inclined to pop into his free hand superbly naked.
“I will leave that to you to imagine,” he said. “There was one thing that I wanted to show you. It was the fossil that Driss was carrying when he was struck by your car. It was recovered by the police.”
David blushed suddenly, but the father’s voice rolled on unconcernedly as if blushes were only a matter of nature and did not need to be observed with any special care.
“I hadn’t heard about that,” David retorted.
“It was returned to me because it was so valuable. It’s right behind you. It’s called an Elvis.”
Before David could turn, the old man had lithely risen and picked the thing up. He sat down again and tore off the shreds of newspapers from a creature armored with a row of crazy spines, widely spaced eyes, and three distinct humps. It was labeled with the single word Devonian. Abdellah admitted that he didn’t even know its technical name, but that only three specimens had been found in the Sahara, and dealers had decided to give it the superstar name of Elvis. He didn’t mind telling David that Driss had stolen it from his own father and gone off to try to sell it somewhere.
“But,” he added mildly, “this happens all the time. The young boys are frustrated. They feel they are going nowhere and have no hopes. They don’t want to be diggers all their lives. It’s a miserable life. They want to escape. They don’t want to live like their fathers. So they steal an Elvis, which they know will sell for ten thousand dollars in the United States, because even if they sell it in Midelt for a thousand euros, they can still go to Casablanca and find a girl. Yes, they can! Casablanca is full of loose girls, and a thousand euros will get you a long way with a loose girl. And I do not mind telling you that I didn’t mind when I found out. I understood him, and in a way I wished him luck. It’s only a fossil after all. It’s a lump of rock, literally. If he had sold it to you for a few hundred, I would have been happy for him. Really happy.”
Abdellah’s eyes filled with tears. How much better it would have been if David had stopped and bought that damned Elvis. David would be in Azna drinking cocktails with his wife, and Driss would be in Casablanca in the arms of a loose woman. Not bad, compared to what had actually happened. As it was, it was this Elvis that had caused Driss to run away and try his luck on the open road. It was not even greed; it was just bedazzlement.
“But frankly, I have no idea why you people have such a thirst for these stupid rocks. What do you see in them? All we know is that you want them and that you are prepared to pay money for them. That’s all we need to know, too. Perhaps you are completely deranged. Who knows? Some of us believe that these are the most evil creatures that have ever existed, that they are the forms of dead demons. That is what they look like, you must admit. They must have an influence upon our minds, an influence that is evil. And that is precisely what attracts you to them.”
“Really,” David stammered, “I couldn’t tell you.”
“Do you know why we called it an Elvis?”
Abdellah got up again and, without saying another word, began to gyrate his hips. He danced for a while, then sat down again, sighing heavily and shaking his head.
“I see.”
But David didn’t see anything at all.
“Well, David, it is all a mystery. He took my Elvis and ran. The next person he met was you, unfortunately.”
He pulled the lamp closer and turned it down. They ate the last segments of the apples, and the wind battered the house, making it sing like a whistle as air flowed through its cracks and glassless windows. The sobbing stopped. David looked down at the Elvis, which seemed to be moving. If it sprang to life, he would have to run. Its eyes glistened. Abdellah took out a long white clay pipe and lit it from the oil lamp.
“Tell me,” he asked, “what cereal do you eat in the morning? I prefer cornflakes myself. I prefer it to cooked goat kid. It’s the one good thing you have given us, apart from ice.”
He chuckled and rolled back on his haunches.
“I’m glad you like ice,” David sneered.
“I like everything that is cool and cold and fresh. You people seem to think we like living in this furnace. You think we like the camels and the sand palm trees and the one hundred and four degrees in the morning? Ah, not at all. I dream of Sweden most of the time. I have seen it in the color magazines. A fantastic place, by the looks of it. It’s the place I would most like to live. How wonderful it would be to go to Sweden and stay there. It must be so deliciously cold there.”
The old man raised one hand and made a strange gesture, as of evoking icicles. Then his face changed.
“Tell me,” he went on. “Was my son alone that night when you struck him with your car?”
David replied automatically:
“As far as we could see, he was alone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, there we are, then.”
Abdellah wiped his hands and scraped together the split pips from the apple and they sat awkwardly listening to the wind picking up, and Abdellah tapped out the contents of his pipe prior to refilling it. He did this as slowly as a man can, indifferent to the infidel’s boredom. But then, it had occurred to him, David was not even an infidel in the strict sense of the word, because he was sure David did not even believe in his own God, let alone Abdellah’s. It was darkness, pure darkness, and a civilized man couldn’t imagine it. And yet he rather liked the guy. He wondered if he should offer him a puff of his pipe instead of cutting his throat, as he had originally intended to do. Come to think of it, he could always do both. There was an idea.
He got up and flung the end of his unraveled chech over his shoulder, taking the lamp with him and leaving David sitting on his piece of cardboard.
“Monsieur David,” he said, as he was about to close the door behind himself. “I would bolt the door when you sleep, if I were you. Anouar will bring you some tea later on. You have been very helpful.”
“You’re welcome,” the atheist said, a little idiotically.
“By the way, you are perfectly free to go wherever you like. None of the doors is locked. If you want to go outside, please do so. Just don’t walk to La’gaaft. As you know, that is where the blacks live.” His voice became spirited. “You’ll regret it.”
BUT DAVID DIDN’T BOLT THE DOOR STRAIGHTAWAY. HE wrapped himself in his sleeping bag and turned off his own lamp. He was aware of the possibility that he had made a mistake, but it was a mistake that revealed itself only in the demeanor and half-conscious body language of Abdellah: he was too friendly. And why the tirade against La’gaaft,
which looked identical to Tafal’aalt? And the hatred of the haratin, who had been neighbors presumably for centuries? The room gradually became cold, and he began to shiver. He took a banana from his bag and ate it savagely. “Here I am,” he accused himself, “eating a fucking banana in a pillbox. Is it me or is it because I’m white?”
A little later he took an Ambien but didn’t sleep. He locked the door, then unlocked it. He couldn’t decide which was worse, confinement or protection. A woman was walking up and down the corridor, in the dark, talking to herself. He decided to daydream. Where was Jo? Sitting by herself wondering why her phone didn’t work? He knew her. She wasn’t enough of a party animal to make the time go by swiftly. She would be killing every minute with a hammer, as her mother used to say. She’d be standing on the wall at night with a pair of binoculars. It was terrible for him to take this for granted, but her unhappiness didn’t make her faithless. It merely made her repetitive.
But still, it was this same repetitiveness that made him love her more the more he considered all her qualities rationally—and he was thinking more rationally now than he had in years. Would he love her less, for example, if she was snorting cocaine at that moment? Of course he would. It would mean that she had forgotten him for a while, at a time when forgetting was out of the question. When it was a crime. Her repetitiveness was her fidelity, which was the knot at the heart of her mutinous unhappiness. But neither of them would cut that knot. They had made a profound decision.
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