Stewart, Angus

by Snow in Harvest

  Caroline's embarrassment was acute. It was less social awkwardness at having so openly to apply Caladryl to the excruciatingly itching lumps which her hosts' ticks had raised in lurid, nobbly belts about her waist and thighs, than that the family, mystified by the extent to which her skin had reacted, must all minutely inspect the damage with unabashed curiosity; and an incredulousness devoid of any sympathy. She was almost in tears of rage as they dumbly watched her squeezing the last vestiges of ointment from the flattened tube. It was then that Mocktar's wife muttered something to him in Chleugh, and he reached his hand up into the brushwood ceiling low above their heads. What he produced was a nearly expended tube of penicillin eye-ointment, perhaps an inch long. This he tentatively offered to Caroline. She could only smile away the extreme irritation of her skin as quite recovered. The dated antibiotic was, in any case, dead by three years; but this she felt unequal to explaining. The medicine, for trachoma presumably, went back to its hiding place in the rafters. At that moment Achmed returned, and was called upon to explain the mysterious disease that had overtaken their guest's person. Why, Achmed wanted to know, had he not been similarly affected, He peeled off his shirt to make closer inspection. Caroline, anxious now to end the whole enquiry, suggested drily that perhaps he was stale, familiar meat for the parasites, while the was something new, and altogether better tasting.

  Achmed produced the coloured illustration of the lions. The shiny paper seemed to fascinate the little girls. Curiously, they ran their fingers over its surface, tilted it towards the light, tried, to Achmed's fury, to erase the picture with their knuckles. Eventually Achmed put the severed page possessively back in his bundle. They were, he said wisely, a cat as big as a cow. What's more they ate people, and could walk in tonight. There were probably rivers between the lions and the house. But they could swim rivers. He didn't think they could swim seas, but then he didn't think there were any seas they would have to cross. And suddenly Caroline found herself called upon to adjudicate as to just how many kilometres away the lions really were. She guessed four thousand; but this produced only dumb stares, as if she had somehow failed their expectations of her. There was the Sahara between themselves and the lions, she explained; and the great sands were more than fifty times bigger than all Morocco. They couldn't possibly cross it. Eventually, and quite unknowingly, she fell back on the descriptive device Frederick Halliday had used when defining to Achmed the distance his sister was from Tangier. 'Perhaps seven days and seven nights in a taxi,' she said. Then that wasn't as far away as Pretoria, Achmed said at once; and when Caroline asked him about this sudden access of knowledge, he simply looked vague. 'But the lions can run as fast as a taxi,' he said, sensing that some threat had been made to his original point. And they never get tired.

  When Caroline was able to break out from the hut, it was like stepping from a cave into an early morning of prehistory. Mist lay in the valley, but filtered sunlight was already dispersing the heavy dew. A great leaden continent of cloud was slipping down behind the eastern horizon, leaving the sky an unbroken, translucent yellow that darkened more perceptibly to blue with every moment she watched. One of the little girls was milking the goat, wary perhaps in expectation of lions. The dog impatiently chiselling at its forepaws on the threshold was little more than a puppy, but even so Caroline avoided it respectfully. Achmed appeared. He showed her a trap set for small birds in the thorn hedge, and consisting of a sprung twig which tensioned a miniature lasso plaited from grass. There was no bait of any kind, and the success of the device seemed to depend upon a bird's choosing to alight upon a particular twig no larger than a matchstick. Such meals as the machine provided must have been distinctly providential; and only the more so in that there were no small birds to be seen anywhere. They next made inspection of the family's cultivated patch; an area no larger than that covered by the house, and then three-quarters given over to the raising of Mocktar's hashish. After that Achmed showed her the village well and the becerra. The becerra accommodated only one customer at a time, standing precariously on its doorstep, and confined its merchandise to salt, flour, olive oil, lamp oil, beans, sugar, candles, and two glass jars of violently coloured boiled sweets. Charcoal came from an independent vendor.

  'Hills no good,' Achmed said in English, perhaps so as not to offend the shopkeeper, or, more probably, to impress him. Beneath the well was a level meadow, bound over with ground lichens and marsh marigolds. Into this Achmed repeatedly threw the bill-hook with which he had armed himself, and for many yards around the quivering implement the ground whispered in protest. Yet no surface water rose to fill their shallow footprints.

  After a meal of bread and eggs, a gift this time from the dying grandmother, Caroline announced her intention of moving on—she thought to Xauen, which had been her original intention. Immediately Achmed insisted that he was coming with her. It would clearly have been idle to protest, particularly as the journey overland to the road involved a longer distance than they had travelled the day before. Eventually it was agreed that Achmed accompany her to the road, and thence by bus into Xauen, where he could buy provisions for his family.

  They left the village in a northerly direction, coming quickly into low hills, closely cropped by goats. In patches the leaden-brown earth showed through the turf, like an old tennis ball partially denuded of its nap. This time Caroline sat astride the family donkey, which Achmed proposed to leave in the charge of a kinsman who sold asparagus beside the motor-road.

  * * * * *

  Abdullah appeared that evening with the news that Achmed was not in town. After eating together, and feeding Raskolnikov, Jay set out alone for the Medina. He wanted simply to wander. The excitement of the Referendum seemed to have subsided. There was still no sign of the green bereted shock troops whose appearance would indicate the imminent arrival of the king. Jay passed the bank guard, as he'd often done before, and for some reason was reminded of the day when this had nearly proved fatal. Or had seemed so then.

  Losing the cork of a half-empty wine bottle on the beach, he had stuffed a handkerchief into the bottle's neck as a temporary stopper. In the dead siesta hour the guard outside the bank hadn't at all liked the approach of a young man with so obvious a Molotov cocktail. The front sight of the Russian sten-gun had crept unobtrusively as high as his knee-caps before Jay suddenly interpreted the soldier's thoughts. A braver man would have paused on the sidewalk and emptied the bottle down his throat: But this was one of those things one thought of afterwards. Jay had crossed the road and detoured half a mile.

  Now he passed swiftly through the modern town. The paseo was over. With darkness, the restaurants were filling. Formal groups mostly, displaying the stilted elegance peculiar to the Spanish bourgeoisie. Another solitary figure flicked Jay's thought into the past. They stared through one another; Count Rostovsky and his bulldog were leaving a barber. He was in fact a White Russian, turned house agent. But this was a mean city in which to earn a living. The courteous, scholarly creature had developed a pathological need to cheat more thoroughly than his fellow topsoil tradesmen. And no doubt the game provided intellectual satisfactions in addition to wealth. Either way, their paths had crossed once pretty disastrously for Jay. And Jay's subsequent revenge had had all the innocence of spontaneity. Happening to pass Rostovsky in a sidewalk cafe, where he was clearly clinching a deal with two opulent, Jewish homosexuals newly arrived, Jay stiffened instinctively, his right arm stabbing upwards on a reflex. 'Mein General!' he gasped, before sensing his indiscretion, and hurrying on. But sure enough, when he turned his head, the party had been awkwardly breaking up.

  Jay began to pass Black African window dummies in cheap suits. Nowhere was there a brown one; the Arabs presumably identifying themselves with the European display models. In the Grand Socco Europe gave way reluctantly to the middle east. Old men foraged about the square like crippled beetles painfully exploring vast spaces. This was as far as cars might go. Taxis mostly, like rusted tins, their drivers' teet
h showing gold in their gloomy interiors. Jay passed rapidly on beyond the range of the cars, tacking restlessly down alleyways, ignoring the prostitutes perched on stools and beckoning from their doorways. He joined a main thoroughfare again and found himself in a crowd leaving a cinema. Bhola and The Ape the hoarding read. He peered curiously at the stills. Somewhere in his archives the Indian director must have found a few hundred coloured feet of the Indianapolis 500 motor race, and simply sewn them in, although with what, if any, relevance to his narrative, Jay would never know. Ragged girls and youths milled about the popcorn and peanut stalls with their sharp fishtails of methane lamps. Jay moved through them, seeming only to drift, yet always tensely alert as a rugby player. He began to climb a long street of steps towards the Kasbah. As he got higher the crowds thinned and the night was more still. He nearly ran into an old woman wheeling a pram full of tinkling glass tumblers. A squatting beggar uttered an extraordinary metronome hum, like somebody endlessly plucking a bass wire in a piano. Smells of kif and mint tea issued from cafés where cards were being dealt across matting highly polished by the friction of clothes and stockinged feet A man lingered a long time at a booth selling charcoal, testing its texture carefully beneath his thumbnail. A nervous phalanx of tourists edged out of a smart Moorish restaurant to be ogled by hopeful small boys. In fact it was the restaurant to which he had taken Ali; and, as Jay climbed on until the doors were barred, and all but the most optimistic stalls closed, he suddenly stopped and stood still. What had checked him so abruptly was the realisation of how completely during the last three days his thought had been idly dwelling in the past. There and then, on a conveniently white and reasonably public-looking wall, he made a small sketch of the bird table he proposed that Catherine Diergardt should commission. He would approach her in the morning.

  It was only ten. There was an hour before he was due to call on Simon Brown. Jay made his way to the outermost perimeter of the Kasbah, where the paths faded imperceptibly into goat pasture, or else ended abruptly with rubbish tips that fell vertically into the sea. He was descending stone steps now; their surface plashed over and made slippery by late callers at a pump. He branched right, took a few careful steps along a goat path, and sat down on a grassy hummock overlooking the sea.

  The moon was almost full; eroded on one side like a Roman coin. Fifty yards behind him the doors of houses were closely barred. Out here no one moved. It was so still that he could hear the nearby pump dripping into its grooved runnels of stone. There was uproar behind him. The door of one of the houses had been thrown open, the ill-hung sheet steel shuddering against concrete. High-pitched abuse startled the night; and what appeared to be a handful of ignited catherine wheels was ejected from the doorway. Then the bowl of glowing charcoal embers was followed by the dishevelled figure of a girl. She stood a moment bewildered, like someone vomited from the mouth of hell, before the door jarred to behind her. Fumbling to pull up her veil now, the girl came uncertainly towards Jay. There had been a brilliant lamp in the hallway of the house, and her eyes could not yet have become accustomed to the darkness. Jay was sure her approach was unguided by his presence. Still evidently without any awareness of him, she found a stone not five yards away and sat down upon it

  After a moment, Jay called softly across to her, and she looked up in bewilderment. He called again; this time rising, and moving towards her. She started, then sank back on to the stone as she saw him.

  'Why?' Jay asked simply, indicating the house. Then he recognised her. She was the young girl who had piled his plate with rock-cakes at Catherine Diergardt's. She must have recognised him too, for she smiled in sudden delight, and pointed an accusing finger at him. Quite as unexpectedly the smile wilted and she was in tears. She shrugged helplessly. Then some resolution seemed to come to her. She brought her chin up, and it was firm and pointed beneath the light chiffon litham which lay over the bridge of her nose. Her eyes seemed to turn the corner at her temples like the gold mask of Tutankhamen. With long fingers, she pulled the veil down and laughed. It lay gathered about her throat like a kerchief, the way Jay had seen several women wear them in the privacy of their homes. The girl he saw again had tensely modelled features, in which the curious eyes were set disproportionately large. When she stood it was little higher than his nose, while her breadth at the shoulders was no more than three-quarters that of his own.

  'Rimblah?' Jay suggested, indicating the path down to the sand.

  The girl made a comical face, which expressed, perhaps, only tacit agreement. Nevertheless she said, 'Ouakà.'

  The path was already steep. Jay took her hand, asking her name. It was Naima. 'Jay,' he said, touching his own chest. Naima moved, floated almost, as a slight, dust-grey figure beside him; only her pale oval face, and hands finding definition in the moonlight.

  'Why?' Jay repeated his first question, stopping.

  At a loss for language, the girl produced a quite western mimicry of a walk out 'Madame Diergardt,' she said, and shuddered.

  'And your father's angry because you've lost the job?'

  The girl concentrated on the Spanish a moment before nodding. And that seemed to be enough. They moved on again, Jay went a pace ahead where the descent was steepest. Naima followed at the full extent of his arm; remaining curiously erect like a gyroscope on a string, or a dust eddy crossing rough ground. Her djellaba sheathed her narrowly to the ground and her feet were hidden.

  Jay supposed afterwards that it must have been gouged-out melon rinds. He had a fleeting impression of dark green bottle; like polished rollers, and of punctured Ideal milk cans; but neither of these things was considered disposable, and so he must have been mistaken. At any rate the rubbish tip received them. They had fallen and slithered no more than fifty yards. For all that the progress was exhausting. Naima found her feet first. She was laughing. When Jay sat up it was to see level sand stretching before him. It was a deep sable. Indian-ink monsters dragging themselves reluctantly from the sea were outcrops of rock. Naima offered her hand to him. She vibrated now with uncontrollable mirth, and her teeth flashed.

  'Well,' Jay said in English, primarily to see whether he could still speak. He got up.

  Lying back on the smooth rocks was comfortable. They had retained the heat of day. Jay saw how very young Naima was. He took her slight body to him, smoothing the loose sheath of her finely falling djellaba. The garbage chute seemed to have left it unmarked. She was faintly startled still, even within the innocence of the embrace. Then, with her hand, she began tentatively to stroke Jay's head. She passed a finger down the nape of his neck like an absorbed child. Her body followed no defined pattern of sexual motions; and Jay, for his part, also remained inert. Later perhaps he would kick himself. For the present his sense of wonderment precluded other emotions. His body was scarcely geared to his psyche at all. He felt the shy muddle of courtship dictating all he did. Marvelled at the mock cupidity that had made for his compulsive assault on this girl the previous afternoon. Now there was no impatience for whatever might lie beyond.

  Perhaps all he needed was the promise of strangeness.

  'Will you get back into the house tonight?' Jay asked.

  Naima shook her head vigorously. 'I have another place in Drahdeb.'

  'Your own?'

  After a moment's thought the girl shook her head. Jay let his curiosity ride. As often before, though usually in quite different circumstance, he began rolling off such Moghrebi words as came to him; checking their pronunciation, sometimes their meanings, against hers. It seemed more than merely something to do. The lesson brought intense concentration to Naima's face. She seemed suddenly to discover urgency to increase Jay's vocabulary; searching terribly hard for something new to name. There was little at which to point in the darkness. What there was had been checked and counter checked. Then, after much dredging, she said gravely in English:

  'Or-ange blossom—az'hra.' And again, 'Az'hra—or-ange blossom.'

  Jay looked into her eyes, but saw
the pleasantry he needed inevitably to make would be blocked there. 'Naima Az'hra!' he said, nevertheless.

  She looked at him baffled. 'La fleur,' she said insistently, searching for the words, 'la fleur orange: az'hra—en arab.'

  They had walked some way from the rocks, and were sitting on the open sand. 'Naima Az-hra!' Jay announced once more, this time bringing playful accusation to the new-found surname.

  Still Naima shook her head over her poor pupil. But lighter tone had communicated his meaning. She gave her strangely slow smile, and her eyes wandered over Jay's face with the same sleepwalker's speed.

  A vehicle with yellow headlamps was coming towards them along the empty beach. As it travelled over ridges in the firm sand the pool of light from the lamps alternately ballooned out in front of it, and then shrank again, like a great net being repeatedly cast and withdrawn. Jay had tensed seconds before the reason for his doing so became hunch, then certainty in his mind. This wasn't a country whose coastguard bore jovial resemblance to Popeye. A nearer parallel would be the mechanisation of the one time pirates of Barbary, from whom members of the force were no doubt directly descended. It was then that Jay wondered whether his recalling the bank guard had been a premonition. The fact that he was patently neither smuggler nor Spanish agent was of small comfort. He asked himself fleetingly whether his sitting on the deserted shore with a Muslim girl who could easily have been no more than fifteen had uncovered guilt in him which exaggerated fear. And instantly helpless indignation rose in conjectural defence. The Land Rover could carry right on and run them down for fun. It easily might, he told himself. The vehicle was firmly set on a collision course; the balloon of light like bubble-gum reaching more threateningly towards them every second.