Stewart, Angus

by Snow in Harvest

  'Prince, let's start on the gin,' Jay said on a perverse impulse. After signalling the barman, he beat a rapid tattoo on the counter with the pads of his fingers, and continued to regard Ali questioningly over his tumbler.

  'Oh, thank you! Thank you ver' march, Jay!' Ali said, coming forward. 'As mat'har fact Achmed stop a-me only other day. In-a small market place. I told a-him that you had gone-ha back to England. . .'

  Ali broke off nervously like a child expecting to be reprimanded. Jay turned to him in amazement.

  'We did think you'd gone, Corbet said, joining them at the bar.

  'Just when was this "other day"?' Jay asked slowly.

  'Perhaps a-two weeks—no mebe ah-less.'

  'And you thought I'd gone!' Jay echoed incredulously. He felt at once outraged and relieved. If Achmed really had been convinced that he had left the country it would explain why he had not appeared. Yet he would hardly have accepted the unverified word of Ali, as their suspicion had always been mutual. He might of course have turned up when Jay was out.

  'Who else did you convince that I had gone?' Jay asked, making light of the matter, now that Achmed's apparent defection seemed capable of being explained away.

  'I don't think anyone else asked,' Corbet put in impishly.

  'Perhaps Farid told Abdullah—the friend you a-know of Achmed,' Ali said.

  It fits, Jay thought. A casual sequence of accidents. Aloud he asked, 'But where did this crazy idea come from? That's what I'd like to know!'

  Corbet was becoming unsteady on his stool. He flapped his arms in ostrich-like gesture. 'Just not seeing you around! Gone are the footprints of Livingstone!'

  'Then I'm deeply offended,' Jay said, playing along with their mood. He looked at the prince, whom gin invariably made tearful. By ordering he had drawn them all knowingly into drunkenness.

  To that small table behind him he and Achmed had often come through the rain and November darkness to eat the omelette, bread and olives, which was the only food the bar provided. It had been owned then by a Spaniard with a beautiful daughter, whom Jay had loved strangely from afar.

  Why afar, he wondered now? How the rain could fall! In minutes the suburban streets became ankle-deep streams; the open ground outside their house squelching mud—rhais in Achmed's dialect. On such nights the steep path to the well was a nightmare of rain-slippery stones; a trapeze act with laden buckets. But, once painted, the house itself was not entirely comfortless. It was curiously wedge-shaped, built on two floors, and so minute that the lower level comprised only a passage to a primitive lavatory and the stair well. Above, the single room was persuaded to accommodate Jay's camp bed, a table, a chair, a freshwater jar, and a straw mat and blankets which divided Achmed's slumbering form from the neat black and white tiles. An area at the head of the stairs was just large enough to stack a couple of suitcases. Primitive cooking could be accomplished on the stairs themselves; washing, water purification and other housekeeping processes, in the narrow passageway below. Using the lavatory had involved a weird but oddly pleasing ritual. One reversed carefully into the small room and positioned oneself over the four-inch diameter open drain, clutching a box of matches between one's teeth. The toilet paper was deposited in a loose cairn and burned, since the cistern would not otherwise accept it. As a final operation a bucket of water was taken from the passageway outside and emptied spiritedly over the concave floor.

  As Jay conjured these scenes before him once more, it was to see Achmed in many different guises. There was the conference with the master of the Koranic school, who had removed his shoes downstairs, and was now sitting reluctantly on the only chair. Ali was there to interpret finer points as they arose. Achmed was quite unco-operative, sulking, whining, and muttering to himself by turns. He was suspicious of all three adults; but also jealous of the intrusion of Ali and the schoolmaster. Achmed felt trapped, while, for his own part, Jay also only wanted the conference to fail quickly, as fail it must, and disperse. He would go on trying to persuade Achmed of the virtues of learning himself.

  His drinking also recalled the night when, after careful financial accountancy, he had decided to treat Ali to an evening on the town. Bar, bar, restaurant and bar, the escapade had ended with an abortive attempt to enter a brothel at around half past two in the morning. They had come lurching back to the suburb in a taxi, Ali convinced, as he often was when drunk, that they were in imminent danger of being attacked and of having to fight for their lives. Jay had made the mud gradient from where the road ended to his house with a growing sense of guilt. There were no windows on the ground floor, but upstairs he could see that the light was burning. At first Achmed queried his identity suspiciously, but Jay stood back where he could be seen from the window and called out, 'Fus? It's me,' Achmed came down to open the door. He was fully dressed, wide awake, and the relief on his face made it radiant. He kissed Jay with a rush of passion. It was a long time before the boy would let him rest. As Jay slowly sobered Achmed's indignation clarified itself into a deep-stated puritan concern about the evils of kif and wine.

  His harangue took the form of near hysteria, a buffering, laughing, violent admonition, filled with mimicry, which produced terrible echoes in Jay's bruised and scoured-out senses. Achmed's particular curiosity was as to the expenditure of money. He wanted to know exactly what had been paid out and to what end. He was inwardly furious that he had not been allowed to guide Jay through what he clearly envisaged as a sequence of particularly vicious commercial snares. So thoroughly did he convince himself that the pathetic Ali was an evil djinn who had led Jay astray that at one point he announced his intention of going out for Ali at once with a knife, and Jay recognised with a sudden start into soberness that the impassioned child fully meant it. He was restrained. Then, sitting on the bed, he proceeded to an absurd parody of the musicians at the restaurant where they had eaten. Strumming an imaginary lute, and clocking up equally imaginary sums of money like a gasmeter, the performance had gone something like: 'Tidily tum ti ti ti! Deux mille francs! Bing bong to ti bim! Trois mille francs!' Then more passionate morality: 'Beer, si; aqui—in dar. Vino, no! No bar! Mañana noche no bar—eh, Jay? Kif not good. Nada! Kif—whew—whizee—zonk Tu comprends?' And he staggered round the tiny room clutching his head. Jay was convulsed beneath waves of tenderness and laughter. About an hour before dawn he was released as from a whirlwind.

  The talk in the bar had grown sporadic. Corbet and Ali would drink on for perhaps another couple of hours. Any time between three and five o'clock All would serve a solitary and rather greasy 'lunch' to his master; after which Corbet would retire to bed, his day ended. Jay excused himself and strayed out into the dazzle of midday, having first swollen Corbet's own praise over a folio of water-colours, one of which he was proposing to sell to the wife of the American Consul, and another to the Jaqueline, whom Jay had met the previous afternoon.

  There was nothing he might do before nightfall. He passed once more from Spanish suburbs through native ones, skirting beneath the dark, wooded rise of the Mountain, and making for the Atlantic shore, whose isolation was so unlike the crescent mile of the famous Plage. He paused only at an alimentation générale to buy a bottle of Stork beer and have a roll stuffed from the eternally open tin of tuna. No one noticed him out here and he strolled unremarked carrying these provisions out. A very black, rag-bound Moor passed him on a donkey, his knees drawn up almost beneath his chin, and his bare feet both supported to one side of him on the bulging straw panier. Coffee children scurried into doorways with fistfuls of mint, or with skirts drawn up, making a basket for charcoal. Others sat with concentration to the manufacture of mud pies A shower must have fallen in the area earlier in the day for the earth smelt fresh and wisps of vapour arose from parches of open ground. Occasionally Jay passed groups of young, middle-class women, moving with sinuous dignity in the sheath-like robes which fell straight from their neatly tailored shoulders to their ankles. The muted greys, greens or blues of the women's djellaba i
nvariably had a matching headpiece which, lying low down and quite square across the brow, dramatically emphasised the eyes by contrasting with the triangle formed by the light chiffon litham drawn over the bridge of the nose. The veil alone, and sometimes a handbag, or the glimpse of high heels, broke the uniformity of colour. The elegance of these women was peculiarly commanding beside the formless white haik of those either older or poorer, who would often only cover their faces with a raised handful of the anonymous drapery.

  Leaving the houses and people behind him, Jay walked out along the rough dirt track to Merkala until he came to the sea. At some time a metalled road had been built along the coast, but this had fallen into complete neglect. The Atlantic breakers had undermined its seaward side, leaving a treacherous, jagged lip hanging over the void, while from the cliffs behind falls of rust-coloured rock had made passage difficult even for a pedestrian. Once Jay passed a hermit's cave, the natural excavation in the cliff face having had its entrance partly blocked with corrugated iron and sacking. After about two miles the road began to show signs of ending entirely, and he clambered down on to the rocks beneath it. The sea was a pale, translucent green, stained with ragged patches of deep indigo. The surface of the light swell was untroubled by wind and broke reluctantly into spray only where it met the shore.

  Jay settled to his sandwich. He and Achmed had often picnicked here during the preceding autumn, bathing tentatively amongst the smoothly contorted rock formations, and jealously absorbing whatever warmth the sun had to offer after the bitterly cold night. It was the nearest point at which one could escape entirely both from the sleeziness of the cosmopolitan city and from the cramped, familiar, though restless environment of the native suburb. Jay lay back in hollow of rock. He was consumed now less by immediate anxiety for the boy, whom Abdullah must surely find before nightfall, than by his own responsibility in the matter of his future. The weakness lay—and would continue to lie—in his vacillating determination.

  He began the long walk back, determining to circle left this time, climbing up through the Kasbah before plunging down into the Medina, and so to the European town. He was prone to building an hysterical case about Achmed's abandonment, through attributing to it those fears which were elementally his own. Now, as he walked, other vignettes passed through his mind. Achmed, refusing to be sent home for a few days, and sobbing himself into a desperate nosebleed on the doorstep. Of course he had not gone. Then there was Achmed peremptorily removing Beethoven from the gramophone: 'This one not good, Jay', or acting out his favourite mime whereby it was understood that he had hold of Jay's ears (always the ears) and Abdullah Jay's feet for the purpose of rhythmically swinging him back and forth before finally launching him from the balcony. Then there was Achmed, morose with dysentery, and trapped between the suspect merits of sulphatriad and the certain ones of magic, most fortunately resorting to both. Nicest of all perhaps was the evening when Jay had found the boy reclining in the bath beneath mounds of Hollywood-style foam. 'Tide,' Achmed had explained, giving the word its French pronunciation, and pointing at the packet of detergent.

  On an impulse Jay had stepped into a remote Moorish café buried in the outer wall of the Kasbah and found himself confronted by Brodie Chalmers. Chalmers was in fact sitting shoeless on the straw matting, with his back propped against the wall. A group of Arabs was playing cards. After the brightness outside, the darkened room, probed by fingers of sunlight, and drowsy with the aromas of kif and mint tea, been consecrated to reflection and quiet. Jay had a strange sense of having stumbled upon the ultimate sanctuary, or of stepping into the heart of an ordered philosophy. He suddenly felt like a penitent, and as if his very breathing must be made inconspicuous. The feeling persisted even after Chalmers had motioned him over to where he sat, and they had been talking for some time.

  Did Brodie suppose the Saharan war was only a border skirmish, Jay wanted to know. He thought of it only as an aesthetic insult, spoiling the giant solitude of an area of the desert he had glimpsed and loved. It was also a political insult, Brodie insisted; and one that could only benefit the communists, despite the fact that the Moroccans didn't even know they were fighting a war. The great irony was that the people induced to fight one another were one and the same. The politicians had somehow persuaded them they weren't Of course, there were local tribal rivalries. But these had slumbered for years. The politicians aggravated them. It was the old story. The participants had no understanding of the rival ideologies that motivated his masters; although, on the Moroccan side, he'd except the élite Officer Corps, who were more proud and fascist than anything that ever came out of East Prussia, or even West Point.

  Jay laughed, and recalled his having met with two newly passed-out officers in Marrakesh. They had struck him as quite alarmingly well educated, but also cultured men.

  'Perhaps you should take over the government,' Chalmers suggested. 'You ought to have Arabs in your blood. Or else detest them all. It wouldn't be unreasonable after that assassination in Amman.'

  Jay smiled faintly. 'I'm apolitical—and certainly no confidant of kings.'

  'Well, this one's going to be broken one day,' Chalmers said, with the vagueness he used to obscure both knowledge and compassion. 'The Minister of Labour was here this morning. He was petitioned by about a thousand people as he was about to leave his car to go in to the local ministry, so he stood up on the running-board and cried, "What do I care for you dogs! Go away and eat earth!" '

  That's carrying the autocracy of the Old Guard a bit far, isn't it?' Jay asked incredulously.

  'Oh, he's Old Guard, all right.'

  'You or I would at least have judged the distance across the pavement in terms of baffled seconds before yelling, "Eat cake!" ' Jay said after a moment.

  Chalmers laughed.

  'What happened?'

  'Oh, they got him. Left him unconscious in the road before the police could prevent it.'

  Jay shook his head in bewilderment. The insane situation made him angry for Achmed. Yet the people were solidly behind the king, to whom alone such a minister was responsible. Where there were pockets of disaffection the police acted ruthlessly.

  'Have you caught up with your slave yet?' Chalmers asked, as if divining a part of his thought.

  Jay looked at him. 'I've got someone searching now. It seems he was under the impression I was no longer here.'

  'Wouldn't it be best to keep it that way? If he turns up, tell him your wife's coming—tell him anything.'

  Jay smiled. 'I don't think I can do that.' He was tired of making qualifications to himself, let alone aloud, and to someone else. A political utterance from Brodie Chalmers surprised him. Jay had never met a man whose concerns were more jealously spiritual, nor one in whom inner sovereignty was more carefully guarded. There were plenty of other things to talk about

  * * * * *

  Caroline Adam decided she must get out of Tangier for a couple of days. Lom was clearly mad. Worse, she had lost her secondary job with the film unit. Her choice fell upon the small, Atlantic coast town of Arzila.

  She made her way to Tangier's bus station, carrying only a rucksack. A rapido was about to depart for Larache. She had no sooner taken her seat than the small by of the previous night's episode clambered aboard and began questioning an old man who dozed beside the door. Assured as to the bus's destination, Achmed came down the gangway, and then checked, smiling uncertainly, as he recognised Caroline. Caroline smiled back, and with this encouragement, Achmed settled into the seat opposite her, heaving his bundle up on to the overhead rack. Now he asked her whether the bus went to Larache. She told him it did, and then asked whether that was where he was going.

  'No,' he said, 'to my family in the hills.' At that moment a sweet-vendor entered the bus and Achmed became involved with him. When he had obtained what he wanted, he leaned out of the window and attracted the attention of a water-seller. He swallowed three brass cupfuls without a word being exchanged between them; the water-seller co
ntinuing meanwhile to tinkle his bell. Achmed then turned back to Caroline and extended a palm-full of sweets for her to choose from. He seemed completely changed from the brazen creature of the night before, and she readily accepted one. Achmed now lit a cigarette in defiance of the prohibiting notices.

  'Where are you going?' he enquired politely.

  'Arzila—I think.'

  Ahmed considered this for a moment. 'Why do you only "think"?'

  Caroline laughed. 'I'm just going for a few days' holiday. If I like Arzila I will stay there. If not, I will go on to Larache perhaps.'

  'You have no friends to go to? You are travelling alone?' Achmed asked incredulously.

  'Don't you think I'll be safe?'

  At this the boy gave such a comically unconcerned shrug that Caroline had to laugh again.

  'It's strange,' was all Achmed said.

  The bus had now set off, making its way with much rattling and honking along the sea front, before swinging inland towards the back of the town. It was nearly empty, and Caroline thought she could reasonably flout the 'no smoking' notice herself. Achmed now looked at her in alarm. Could it be that this was a Nazarene prostitute? He could think of no other explanation for such behaviour, particularly as she was travelling alone. Yet she spoke Arabic just well enough for him to understand. He decided for the moment to ignore the fact that she was smoking. He compared her with his mental image of Frederick's sister. By contrast this girl was young and pretty. She was also kind, because the night before it was she who had been instrumental in obtaining the money for him.

  On an impulse Achmed said, 'I know two Englishmen. One is young, and is called Jay, but he has gone back to England without even telling me. The other is old, and called Frederick. I was living at his house as if he was my father, but he was killed in the Medina last night by a man with knife.' It was a comprehensive mouthful to have uttered. Caroline looked at him with a mixture of doubt and astonishment. As if to prove he was not lying, Achmed held out one of his feet towards her. 'These are English shoes' he said. Caroline recognised that they were.