Stewart, Angus

by Snow in Harvest

  When Achmed had collected these things, he took Frederick's field-glasses, stood as far back from the pile of possessions as the small room would allow, and considered them in close-up. He returned the field-glasses to their drawer, and taking the shop key from his jeans' pocket, laid it on Frederick's desk.

  With the bundle tied up in towelling over his shoulder the shop door locked itself behind him automatically.

  * * * * *

  Caroline Adam swallowed a mouthful of coffee and sat back. It was cold in the small market place. At eight o'clock the few people who were still about seemed mostly homeward bound. She had little idea of what Harold Lom was after. He had been idly photographing crowd movements in the emptying square. Now he came back and sat heavily down beside her. Sandy Pherson followed, weaving his way between lottery touts and shoeshines with an inane, friendly grin. Sandy's particular genius was operating camera, sound boom, and lights single handed, which was an achievement redundant in London.

  'I'm sure that bloke leaning up against the wall is a dope peddler,' Sandy said.

  Lom looked at him sharply. He took up his own hand Bell and Howell, twisted aperture expertly, and sucked a figure towards him through the zoom lens with a slow gyration of his wrist. It was Achmed, who had just entered the small market place.

  'There's a union, you know,' Sandy said, grinning. 'What did you get?'

  'Nothing,' Lom said. 'Did you hear film running? Always shoot first takes with just your own eyes.' He had no sooner said this than he knew it to be an illogical rule for candid photography. Tiredness, and the kif he had been smoking, had made him irritable and withdrawn.

  Sandy sat back abashed, though he got in a wink to Caroline. That's the way Moses spoke when the Lord finally released him from Mount Sinai, Caroline thought, though without really thinking at all. Sandy sat forward again over his coffee. The glass was so hot you had to grab it by the rim, sip it and dump it. A beggar child cruised up for the unused sugar lump. Sandy slid it to her across the plastic table. The square depressed him, though at the moment he was more worried about the van which, by special permission, was the only vehicle in the small market place. Lom, commanding spontaneously in the field, since obviously there was nothing about it in the contract, had made him responsible for guarding it. It had already lost both windscreen wipers. 'Curiosity, rightful envy, or sheer acquisitiveness,' Caroline had said, in her thorough, faintly bolshie way. Then, extraordinarily, a tout, anxious to prove to an unwary tourist that a glass ring was real diamond, had scratched a sweeping scar on a window. That had been in the new town, and the van had just happened to be the nearest convenient vehicle. There were quite a few people gathered round the van now, and Sandy was watching it carefully.

  'Ask Rabat,' Caroline said to a beggar who had come round to her side of the table. Her Cairo Arabic was quite lost on him; or perhaps the mental leap was too great.

  'What was it that time?' Sandy asked, smiling. They might at least natter while waiting for Godot Lom. But Caroline was now talking to the waiter in Spanish. She turned back to Sandy.

  'He says someone was murdered a few yards from here about two hours ago; she said.

  'We're not reporters,' Lom interrupted, though without taking his camera from his eye. To himself, he seemed to be making a sequence of genius. The kif had acted as a catalyst upon the most secret and impressionable areas of his consciousness. What he was seeing through the camera was a ragged corner of humanity. The people and the place were congruous with one another, yet struck no ordinary responses in Harold Lom because he himself, his concern, and his trains of association, had nothing in common, or nothing at least that was explicably so, with this shabby square, and its equally shabby, indigenous occupants. Instead there was bared within him that often hopelessly frustrated or irrelevantly deceived response that sought to trace and evolve a pure aesthetic. He was totally involved through his eyes.

  'Anyone we know?' Sandy asked Caroline with mock cheeriness. In fact he was alarmed 'I suppose he had a camera, which is the evil eye, and a black one at that, making it doubly worse because black is the devil's colour . . .'

  'I don't think they worry much about that here.'

  'I was quoting our local expert, you know,' Sandy said, trying now to get a response from Caroline. 'Who was he? What had he done to get murdered?'

  'They don't know. But he was English and kept a book shop.'

  'Crikey!' Sandy exclaimed. 'I hope it's not the beginning of a revolution or something.'

  'I'm shooting,' Harold Lom announced. He had spoken almost involuntarily. The Bell and Howell had been purring for some minutes past. Both Caroline and Sandy turned dutifully to watch, though Sandy wondered what Lom thought he was using for light.

  Achmed, who had been loitering by a cinema advertisement pasted in the window of a tobacco kiosk, though always with an eye on Lom, now took it into his head to come forward. He sidled close into the lens like a press-conscious starlet, and then sat down at the next table.

  'Hallo he said. 'English?'

  'Yes,' Caroline replied, in her classical Arabic. 'We're making films for television.'

  'Mummy!" Achmed said.

  'Heavens!' Sandy exclaimed, glancing quizically at Caroline.

  Achmed looked at Harold Lom, who after all was, holding the camera.

  'Ciné?' he asked, 'Film Taran? Hercule?'

  'Not exactly, child,' Lom said; and Caroline observed how a remark could hit him quite as physically as a furled news paper.

  'Film aqui,' Achmed tried again, pointing to the camera, 'Cervantes?'

  'That sort of thing,' Lom said, looking at the boy with a new interest.

  'The Cervantes is a cinema?' Caroline asked Achmed.

  'What film is there tonight?'

  'Tarzan,' the boy said.

  The explanation was wasted on Lom. He had dropped the hand camera from his eye, like a child reluctantly setting aside a kaleidoscope. He felt the need for feverish action, even a little fooling; as if only a violent change of mood could preserve the integrity of the vision he had glimpsed moments before, and leave it accessible to further investigation. "Set up the lot, Sandy,' he said. 'I want table mike, overhead boom, and flat lighting. This boy has just called a totally strange woman his mother, and compared a director he can't really know a great deal about to Cervantes. It's most extraordinary. See if you can draw him to talk, Caroline, keeping out of frame. Use Number One constant at three-quarter face, Sandy. I'll fill in angle and close-up myself.'

  Within three minutes Achmed was basking unselfconsciously in a pool of white light. Most of the people in the small market place formed a dark, muttering circle about it.

  'He's very pretty,' Caroline said, feeling that some encouragement was owing to Lom in what appeared to her as an altogether improbable exercise.

  'Oke!' Lom said, as he did when excited. 'Roll One, Sandy.'

  Lom trusted his visual memory implicitly, and so no take-boards were used by his teams. Sandy's camera had just begun to run when Achmed stood up abruptly. 'Moment,' he commanded; and put the flat of his palm squarely over the lens. Having stopped the take, and thoroughly smeared the lens, Achmed squatted down beneath the cafe table the better to open his bundle in privacy. The process of putting on his tie with space rockets, finding his monogrammed handkerchief, and squeezing a little Brylcreem on his hair, took about five minutes.

  'No!' Lom cried, watching the last operation helplessly. 'Natural, always natural!' He stamped his foot.

  'Shhh! Moment!' Achmed told him simply. 'Now . . . this one.' He dived into his bundle again and emerged with the sheath-knife. Finally he settled with the handkerchief tucked beneath his chin like a bib, the space-rocket tie falling in bright contrast across it, the sheath-knife clasped in his left hand, and a coffee glass in his right. Then he asked the waiter for a cigarette and told Lom to pay ten francs.

  'Roll One and read me footage,' Lom said dully. 'Well convince him we've finished, and then perhaps begin.' He
knelt, coiled in a foetal position on the plastic chair, and holding his own camera loosely. It occurred to Caroline that he would have packed this in long ago if it hadn't been for the audience, which now numbered about a hundred and fifty.

  And so Sandy Pherson found himself pouring away footage on Achmed, who, smoking continuously, occasionally altered the position of the various appendages that made up for his own identification. The only question in Sandy's mind was whether the boy would get bored before Lom lost his temper. 'Two eighty,' he said.

  Just then Lom started shooting with the Bell and Howell, and Achmed, at a loss to know which camera should receive his attention, once again commanded the take to stop. 'Hey!' he reproached Lom. 'Two! One and one! Give me this one!' He seized the small camera from Lom and cradled it on his arm. Then lifting it, and squinting at Sandy through it, he told him to begin again.

  'Cut!' Lom said 'Caroline, get my Bell away from the child . . . carefully.'

  Caroline did so.

  'Finish?' Achmed asked Lom.

  'Yes, finished,' Lom said with finality.

  Achmed watched Sandy pecking up the equipment uneasily. 'Mille francs?' he suggested to Lom. 'When photo?

  Lom stared at him. 'He wants to be paid,' Caroline explained, not without satisfaction. The crowd of onlookers seemed to be reproaching Lom with his inane exhibition, even though perhaps they could not have known it had been that. He took out his wallet impatiently and laid a thousand-franc note on the table.

  4a

  Achmed ignored the money. 'Photo mañana?' he asked again 'When photo?'

  The effect of this was that all three members of the team stopped what they were doing and looked at him. Lom felt the dumb reproach of the crowd with renewed force. The boy had all the appearance of preparing for a drama. People from inside the café had gathered behind them now, and more faces looked down into the tiny square from upperstorey windows. Caroline was thinking clearly.

  'You can't have an actual picture,' she said. 'The film has to be developed in a special shop. This film has to be sent to a special shop in England before anyone can see the pictures.'

  'No Achmed shouted with sudden passion. The pictures of me are not going to be sent to England! They are not to go to England! I will show you a special shop where they make photo.'

  'Yes, there are some,' Caroline said. 'But they can't make these pictures properly.'

  'Now what's the fuss about?' Linn asked irritably.

  'He wants the film,' Caroline explained.

  'Does he! Well he can't have it

  'I could cut out a frame or two,' Sandy volunteered. 'There must be photographers here where he could get them developed.' He knew that as far as Lom was concerned the boy could have the whole three hundred feet, which had clearly been no more than a particularly mad rehearsal for them.

  'Have you all gone crazy!' Lom said in exasperation.

  'You can't show films of me to people in England,' Achmed continued to protest to Caroline in Arabic. 'Perhaps they will laugh and say, "look at Achmed!" When can I see the film? Tomorrow? This one is good. This one is not good. If the film is good I will tell you if you can send it to England.' Caroline didn't feel up to answering this confused thought logically. She suspected the by of trailing his coat, though she couldn't be sure. 'You have given is pictures and we have given you money,' she said slowly.

  'Ten dirham!' Achmed cried scornfully. 'What is ten dirham when you have a film to get money for in the cinema?'

  Caroline laughed in amazement. 'Well, you're not getting any more!'

  The crowd, silent until now, found a voice 'This is a bad boy,' an Arab said to Lom in French. While not understanding the words, Achmed sensed their intention. He swore at the Arab with a high-pitched whine. Then, turning to Sandy, whose attitude had been too neutral, he jerked his head contemptuously towards Lom.

  'This one no good! No my friend!'

  Sandy raised his eyebrows and scratched his head.

  'The boy is perhaps mad,' the French-speaking Arab confided in Lom.

  'Caroline, is there any reason why we shouldn't now leave?' Lom asked. Quivering slightly, he had picked the thousand franc note off the cafe table preparatory to putting it back in his wallet. Achmed watched him do so without any change of expression.

  'I should let him keep that,' Caroline hazarded. Lom's childishness filled her with more indignation than she could decently express.

  'I don't consider myself under any financial obligation to this urchin,' Lom said.

  'Then I do.' With a sudden start of perversity Caroline reached for her bag. She instantly regretted the impulsiveness. Beneath this new tension Achmed sensed that he had only to sit quiet.

  In gallant parody Lom produced his wallet again. 'Let the pleasure be mine,' he said. Snapping the note over his forefinger, he extended it towards the boy without looking at him.

  This time, though unhurriedly, Achmed put it straight in pocket.

  Christ, what a bum to try to film with, Sandy thought. Yet in all his moods you suspect he's only acting a part for his own amusement. I wonder if anybody knows what the real man is like, always supposing there still is one.

  * * * * *

  When, from the mouth of an alleyway giving on to the small square, Jay Gadston saw Achmed sitting alone at a café giving on to the

  small square: Jay Gadston saw Achmed sitting alone at a café table, he hesitated a moment, but then went on his way. The boy had not seen him. Settling in another café himself some minutes later, he wondered why he had not gone over to greet him. He supposed it must have been because he had assumed Frederick Halliday to have beers with Achmed, and perhaps momentarily inside the café. Dan Gurney had said Halliday had been trying to contact him, and some fastidiousness, even shyness in Jay, had inclined him, in the moment of his pausing, to feel that the meeting had better not come about casually. Only when he was sipping his mint tea did he recall that there had been something strange about Achmed. He had had a large bundle, tied in what looked like towelling, at his feet under the table. It struck him uneasily that Achmed might be running away, or have been turned out. Perhaps Halliday, whom he had never met, wanted to contact him to offer some sort of explanation.

  These thoughts were in Jays mind when he remembered that had promised to 'phone Brodie Chalmers about some locally available stone. Chalmers' wife had taken to carving small figurines, and the balcony of their apartment was littered with the by-products of this endeavour. They talked about the stone for some moments before Jay said, 'I've just seen Achmed. Looks as though he's on the streets again. Carrying a bundle, as if perhaps Halliday has turned him out . . .'

  'Oh?'

  'Wish I'd gone over and spoken to him. Anyone might do anything to him.'

  'It would seem so.' Chalmers' slow American voice came without irony. 'And I know what you're beginning to think.'

  'What?'

  'That maybe you ought to take him back.'

  'Well . . .'

  'Don't.' Chalmers was emphatic. 'You're acting like your back was up but you didn't know the reason for being angry. Take him in, and you'd be a criminal, that's all. Don't think you're protected here. They could carry you off and none of us would even know. That would be a pity because we like seeing you around. Who d'you think would bring you food in gaol?'

  Jay was exasperated. 'Your cynicism was always on the cool side,' he said. 'But won't anyone believe we're not lovers?'

  'No they won't! Europeans just don't have an elegant little Moroccan like that about the house for any other purpose.'

  'I wouldn't have thought it would worry the Moroccans if we were lovers . . .'

  'Oh, it wouldn't Not a bit! But newly emergent nationalism can be very conscious of the letter of the law where Europeans are concerned. Besides, as I keep telling you, you're probably a watched man anyway—'

  'Because of my father,' Jay echoed hollowly.

  'That's right.'

  This particular fantasy of Chalmers' alw
ays struck Jay as being his most absurd and extravagant. It turned, of course, upon the assumption that because Jay's father had been a prominent figure in the Arab world, the Moroccan authorities must be keeping constant watch upon his son—as a potential assassin of their king perhaps. It always irritated Jay as reminding him that perhaps he ought to be doing, something of the kind. At such times it uncomfortably came home to him that he was a bum; a maker of bird-tables, fractionally superior to the beats, he supposed, but nevertheless, a person who honestly could have told no one just why he had chosen this particular existence in this particular city.

  'No,' Chalmers went on, apparently assuming positive intention on Jay's part now, 'don't do it Sooner or later some. one will say, "Ha, that European is a criminal!" They'll pounce. They won't ask you to resign your commission whatever. Don't think it'll be fun, or any kind of amusing experience. But maybe what you want is some kind of show-down against something pretty immutable, I dunno.'