The Blue Hour

by Douglas Kennedy

  But Maika also made it clear that there was no way I was able to travel yet. She held up ten fingers, then four, indicating that she might consider letting me go in two weeks. That’s when I had—courtesy of my hands and gestures—the conversation that I had been dreading. I explained that the men who had raped me had also robbed me. I had no money, nothing. Maika shrugged as if to say, Why do you need money here? You are our guest.

  I acted out and said at the same time, “But I feel bad about taking your hospitality and giving you nothing for it.”

  Maika understood immediately what I was saying and got even more vehement, telling me (or, at least, this is what I was thinking she was telling me), “There is absolutely no need to consider money. You are our guest. We will look after you. We will continue to help you get better. When you are ready we will figure out a way for you to get home.”

  I thanked her profusely. She held up her hand, as if to indicate You’re welcome . . . now stop. Then she ordered me back on the cot, and got Aicha and Naima to begin readministering the cold compresses and the oils and balms to my injuries and scars.

  The next ten days marked a time when, on so many levels, a certain clarity descended upon me. I was still being given the soporific tisane every evening around eight o’clock. Though she was not knocking me out twice a day, Maika had upped the nightly dose so that I was sleeping twelve hours a night. I understood that this was her ongoing induced-coma cure for head injuries. I was largely restricted to my little tent and had nothing in the way of reading material or writing paper and pen to fill up my waking hours (let alone any of those modern distractions—the internet, nine-hundred-channel television, a humble radio). For the most part I was being kept separate from the life of this encampment. So I found myself very much thrown back onto my own thoughts, my own reflections. What’s that line from Pascal about all of man’s problems owing to the fact that he cannot abide sitting alone by himself in a room? As the concussive fog began to lift, as I became ambulatory again, as the terrible shock in which I had been living transformed into a functional numbness, I found myself alone for nine hours a day with little to do except try to sort through the inventory of my life.

  Maika—having taken charge of my recovery—was also insisting that I begin to eat normally again. I had lost a shocking amount of weight since the attack. One day I tried on the white linen pants which I’d been wearing when the two men grabbed me, and which Aicha had laundered for me. I wasn’t more than 120 pounds when I arrived in Morocco. Even trying to tie the drawstring as tightly as possible, the pants still all but fell off me. All that time in a semicomatose state, existing on small amounts of bread and couscous and vegetables, had resulted in my losing many pounds, and Aicha—who was slightly wide-hipped and clearly liked her food—indicated that I needed to be fattened up.

  It was now August. The heat outside was maniacal. I was finally able to leave my tent on my own to use the toilet. I was also invited to join the family for group meals. Maika made it clear that, as their guest, I needed to abide by their customs. Wearing the niqab when outside was obligatory, and I was certainly not going to express my feminist distaste for this practice. These people had saved my life. They had taken me in. They had nursed me back to health. They were demanding not a penny for all the immense kindness and generosity shown to me. How could I question their request?

  Once inside, however, I was allowed to be as unmasked as all the other women in this little village.

  I was, I came to understand, among Berbers. Jabalah—Aicha’s husband, Naima’s father—was one of the men who’d returned with Naima to rescue me. I so wanted to ask her what she had been doing out in the desert alone. I could only surmise that she was allowed to roam the Sahara, and that I hadn’t seen the oasis—which, I came to discover, was behind a stone wall that, when seen from any distance in the desert, blended in with the dusty horizon. Jabalah was somewhat older than Aicha—his heavily grooved face and bad teeth made him look like he was in his early fifties, though I sensed that the hardness of life here had aged him considerably. From the freshness of her outlook and the flawlessness of her skin I guessed that Aicha was, at most, in her early thirties. Jabalah wasn’t a great conversationalist—but it turned out he did speak a smattering of French, enough for the two of us to understand each other. He explained that the Berbers weren’t a “tribe,” but rather, a people; theirs was a pan-Maghrebian population, with Berbers in Algeria, Tunisia, even Egypt. But the greatest concentration of Berbers was here in Morocco, specifically south of Ouarzazate.

  “Here you are in our country,” he explained. “We may be officially governed by Rabat, by the king . . . but we see this as our own kingdom.”

  The other man in the encampment was Immeldine. He was Maika’s husband and, like his wife, showed the wear and tear of a life lived under a fierce Saharan sun. He was a compulsive smoker—he always had a cigarette on the go. In the two weeks during which I ate with the family nightly, he spoke very little. I often wondered if he considered me an imposition. I discovered that he and Jabalah farmed a bit in the oasis, growing herbs and a few vegetables that they sold at a market once a month in Tata. They also raised a few goats, which provided milk. The women had a loom on which they made simple rugs of traditional design. And small lace items. And knitted skullcaps of the type worn by Jabalah and Immeldine.

  “They do very good work,” Jabalah told me in his basic French. “Every month we have a friend—Aatif—he drives a van to Marrakesh. He takes everything our women make and sells them to a dealer. Last month he returned with two thousand dirhams for us! Most money ever! A fortune!”

  I thought of my husband, spending the equivalent of two hundred and thirty dollars on a bottle of wine he could hardly afford. Or how I took a potential corporate client out to dinner a few weeks before I’d left for Morocco and insisted on picking up the three-hundred-dollar tab at Buffalo’s best steakhouse. And how two thousand dirhams (at best) was keeping these five people alive for a month. From what Jabalah had indicated, this had been more than twice what they were used to. I could see Aicha and Naima beaming with pride as he said this. With Maika, they were the labor force at the loom.

  It was exactly that—an old-style loom, located beneath a sheet of canvas that had been attached to four poles embedded in the ground. I wandered over one morning to see the women at work. The niqab and the djellaba in which I was dressed was like being encased in a sauna. Watching Maika work the loom, barking orders, stitching with fiendish precision, I couldn’t help but wonder how she managed this in the long garment and severe mask that hid all but her eyes. Aicha favored lighter materials in cream or off-white—but she too was imprisoned in fabrics that covered every inch of her body. Only Naima—still too young to wear the niqab—got away with a head scarf and djellaba. Like her mother and grandmother, she never seemed to succumb to the ocean of perspiration that overtook me every time I stepped outside, hidden from worldly view, my eyes and hands the only parts of my anatomy visible.

  When I offered to help, Maika tried to teach me some basic techniques. But the heat overcame me after a few minutes and I was ordered inside.

  Water was an issue out here. There was, I discovered, a small water hole within the oasis—and an old-style pump garnered this essential fluid of survival up from the ground. It was rationed by Maika. I was handed an old plastic liter bottle four times a day—and had to make do with that. Which also meant that spending much time outdoors before nightfall was tricky. I was given a large pail of water twice a day to wash myself. There was a bucket and a rag in the toilet tent to clean myself.

  I discovered that Aicha was homeschooling Naima. Every afternoon they spent several hours on reading and writing and basic mathematics. One morning, Naima came into my tent hugely excited, as her father and grandfather had returned from selling their produce at the market and Papa had brought her back a large book. Tintin. In Arabic. She showed me its large glossy cover, a little battered in places. I too had read
Hergé’s books when I was Naima’s age, and tried to explain to her that, yes, I knew all about the intrepid Belgian journalist Tintin and his faithful fox terrier, Snowy. I asked Naima to read to me. She climbed up on my lap and proceeded to read me the entire book, even sometimes acting out the voices of Tintin, his dog, and the highly egoistic Captain Haddock. Having Naima on my lap, listening to her wondrous singsong voice, feeling the way she snuggled in against me, made me long for a child like never before—and feel the pain and sadness that this was never to be for me, especially with all that had happened in the past few weeks.

  I was so engrossed in listening to Naima read to me that I didn’t notice Aicha enter the tent, watching us with a smile. When I caught sight of her I was just a little thrown, thinking that she might not like me having her daughter in my lap. Seeing my concern she indicated that this was hardly a problem—and in fact said something to Naima that made her return to her reading.

  Later that day, when she returned alone to change my bandages, she touched my engagement and wedding rings on my finger and made a hugging gesture, followed by a touch to her head. It was her way of posing the question Where is your husband? In reply I made an outward flapping motion with my hands, saying, “He’s gone.” She looked at me with great pity. Then touching my stomach and making a curving motion with her hand, she indicated pregnancy. I shook my head. “I want a baby. But . . .”

  Even though she might not have understood English, she clearly grasped what I was saying. Her reply was “Inshallah.” Allah willing.

  The days passed slowly. I was still unsteady both physically and psychically, but the languidness of my current existence didn’t bother me. Outside of the nightly meals with the family, and the arrival of breakfast and lunch in the tent, and Maika and Aicha spending a good hour on my wounds each day, the highlight of the day was the hour or so I had every late afternoon with Naima. After a morning spent helping her mother and grandmother on the loom, and then several hours of tutoring by her mother, she would race over to my tent and we would hang out. Early on, Naima said to me, while pointing to her mouth, “English.”

  In reply I said, while pointing to mine, “Arabia,” which, I knew from Essaouira, was the Arabic word for Arabic.

  We spent the next ten days or so teaching each other words, expressions, numbers. I learned how to count to ten in Arabic. Naima got very proficient at English pronouns: I, me, you, he, she, it. I picked up phrases like Shokran min fadlik (Thank you for dinner), Min fir shreb (I need water), and Nti sahabti (You are my friend). Naima delighted in being able to do the ABCs as far as M—with my promise that we would add two more letters a day.

  When the hour was up, Aicha would arrive, Naima would give me a kiss goodbye, and I would have another two hours alone until dinner. I wish I could report that, during the many hours a day I was alone with nothing but my thoughts, I achieved some sort of resolution about the state of my life; resolving to somehow follow Maika’s directive and move forward. But what happened frequently was a panic attack on a major level. A desperate sense of falling into a vortex. The agonizing replay of everything that went down in the desert. The barbarous image of my assailant after I had fought back. My sense of horror at what I had been forced to perpetrate. Had I truly killed someone? The accompanying terror of discovering that ability within me.

  I knew I was still in shock. Whenever I thought of the world outside this nowhere place to which I had been transported . . . I knew I couldn’t stay here indefinitely. But returning to life beyond this oasis seemed out of reach.

  I could see that, though Jabalah could communicate with me in the basic French we both shared, he kept his distance from me. He never indicated that I was a burden to him or his family. But I was a woman. Except for the evening meal, I was being kept out of his life. I accepted this polite isolation, just as I accepted the niqab when outside. He spoke little to me during dinner . . . though I must admit that was probably due to the small television, which captured everyone’s attention including my own. It had a wire antenna that brought in one Moroccan channel. The fact that our encampment had no electricity meant the television was powered by a car battery that they charged using jumper cables from the small ancient truck on which they brought their produce to market.

  On the eleventh or so day of my convalescence I came in for dinner to discover the five members of the family huddled around the glowing set, watching the evening news. Out of nowhere a photograph appeared behind the news anchor. A photograph of a Western woman. As the broadcast was in Arabic, as the reception wasn’t exactly brilliant, it took me a moment to realize that the photo on-screen was of . . .

  But Naima beat me there. Craning her neck toward me, she pointed to the screen and mouthed one of the English pronouns I’d taught her. “You.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE NEWS REPORT: a mug shot of me. A mug shot of Paul. Footage of a crime scene in the desert, with police tape around an area showing scorched earth. And then—oh, God, this was beyond bad—Police Inspector Moufad from Essaouira, giving a news conference, holding up the same photograph of me, shaking it vehemently, as if to say, Here is our prime suspect.

  You.

  Me. Now wanted by the police.

  Me. Now revealed to these Good Samaritans as someone who was on the run. Wanted not just for the disappearance of her husband, but the death of another man in the desert.

  My mind began to race. How were they tying the burned corpse in the desert to me? Did the goon who’d assisted in my rape drive back to Tata? In his panic did he concoct a story that he fed to the police? He was worried about the welfare of his friend who’d met an American woman the night before and invited her on a romantic drive at dawn into the Sahara in her rented car. The discovery by the cops of his pal’s charred body—and no sign of me—would lead them to presume that I had turned on him, things got out of hand, and I immolated his body before driving off into . . .

  No, that’s ridiculous. You arrived by bus. You didn’t rent a car in Tata. The man who’d escorted me from the bus depot in my search for Paul would remember, under police questioning, that the two little shits had been loitering by the stairs as we headed up to the hotel. So how, why, were they bringing the desert corpse into Paul’s disappearance . . . and the fact that I too had vanished? What incriminated me even further was that I had fled virtual house arrest in Essaouira, much to the fury of Inspector Moufad. On television he was stabbing my photograph with his index finger, as if I were a public health hazard or an escaped war criminal. Apparently they had some sort of evidence to link me to the incinerated body in the Sahara.

  Another possibility: the goon got back to Tata, tried to work all day, was in a state of escalating panic, as he had my backpack hidden away somewhere, and then suddenly came up with an ingenious solution to his problem. He drove back out to the desert, tossed my backpack out near the corpse, returned to Tata, reported his friend missing, said he had met an American woman . . . and didn’t fill in any further details. How we ended up in that spot in the Sahara . . . would that matter when compared to the smoking-gun evidence of my backpack near the corpse? It would directly link me to the events that culminated with a young man being torched alive.

  “What are they saying?” I asked Jabalah. He waved away my question, keeping his attention riveted on the screen. This was worrying. So were the even more hardened looks of Maika and her husband. Aicha, meanwhile, was betraying all emotions, appearing both shocked and distressed. When she actually put her hands over Naima’s ears, so she could hear nothing more of the broadcast, I sensed trouble.

  The news item ended. There was an immediate heated exchange between Immeldine and Jabalah. When Aicha tried to interject something, she was shouted down both by her husband and her mother. Naima began to cry.

  “Please tell me what they said,” I asked Jabalah.

  Out of nowhere Immeldine barked something at me so fierce that Naima hid herself behind her mother.

  Then Jabalah said t
o me, “You go. We bring the food to you.”

  “If I could just explain . . .”

  “Go!”

  I wrapped my face in the niqab and crossed the few steps back into my tent. Once inside the fear turned into a crazed panic attack. I found myself pacing manically around the tiny space, all sorts of extreme scenarios playing out, including Jabalah and Immeldine deciding that they had to turn me over to the police, and the cops picking me up, and my being thrown into a squalid cell in which I would be repeatedly abused by the guards. And Inspector Moufad from Essaouira conducting an all-night interrogation designed to break me, and my signing a confession that, yes, I had killed Paul in a fit of rage on the beach and dumped his body in the Atlantic. And yes, I had agreed to go on an all-night joyride with those two monsters, and when the little shit got a bit fresh with me I lashed out and . . .

  Stop this insanity, I hissed at myself. But my brain was on overload. In moments of lucidity I told myself that all the repressed mental trauma of the rape was now finally coming to the surface. But those nanoseconds of clarity were soon subsumed by full-scale sobbing. All those terrible childhood moments of our family being evicted from a series of houses and apartments came flooding back. With it the realization: It’s happening again. I am being forced out from a place of safety, a family who had given me more love and acceptance and a sense of shelter than I’d ever had. Now this new family is about to reject me, turning me out into a malevolent world that will engulf me as soon as I am beyond this little oasis.

  My sobs became convulsive, so out of control that I felt as if I was about to become unhinged. I was literally crashing into corners of the tent, endangering its stability. Suddenly Maika and Aicha rushed in. Aicha had me in her arms in a moment, firmly settling me down on the cot, cradling me, whispering consoling words that had no meaning for me except that they were soothing. She held me as I buried my head in her shoulder and fell apart. Maika kept her distance as the grief came cascading forth. Perhaps she knew—given what I had been put through—that this was long overdue. Perhaps she also understood my fear of the world beyond. Whatever the reason, she let me cry myself into exhaustion. When I briefly subsided she stepped in, helped Aicha to undress me and get me into the white nightshirt I’d been sleeping in. Laying me down on the cot, she rubbed a different kind of balm (it smelled of patchouli and chamomile) across my forehead and into my temples, then massaged the same substance deep into my feet before sitting me up and making me drink an extralarge dosage of the nightly tisane.