Gorgeous East

by null

  Louise ate like an American, which is to say heavily, ordering an omelette, spécialité de la maison, usually reserved for dinner, more like a soufflé than an omelette, and a platter full of homemade goose liver sausages, and ate every scrap. Phillipe ate a few crumbled pieces of a croissant and drank several cups of coffee. His stomach felt unsettled, sour, though he appeared completely at ease, an ability that might be attributed to battlefield training or an aristocratic disposition, or both. They finished eating; the bill came and Phillipe paid, but neither of them stood up to leave. The waiters clattered around impatiently, clearing dishes. The lovers didn’t speak, they didn’t say a word; they hardly looked at each other across the starched white tablecloth.

  2

  GATEWAY TO

  THE AGE OF THE

  HIDDEN IMAM

  1.

  From the air the Saharoui refugee camp at Awsard in the Algerian Sahara looked like a heap of dirty clothes tossed onto a pile of sticks. Scraps of canvas, blue plastic UN tarps, striped bits of native fabric all flapped and billowed from improvised tent poles in the steady desert wind known by a woman’s name—Simoom—unbearably hot and pregnant with a nagging, sandy grit.

  The Russian-made Antonov C-160 circled the camp in the teeth of the wind in the yellow desert light, lowering toward the uneven airstrip below, flecks of mica hissing against the scarred glass of the cockpit. As they banked for the approach, dark stains revealed themselves between the dunes at the southern perimeter. These couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, even at this altitude: great mounds of trash and human excrement, the refuse of the refuse.

  “Poor miserable bastards,” Phillipe said, half to himself, staring out the scratchy window. “Living in the middle of all that filth for generations.”

  “Since 1973, Colonel de Noyer”—came a voice at his shoulder—“during the first Polisario war. That’s when the Moroccans drove them out of the coastal districts.”

  The voice—nasal, self-important—belonged to Dr. Hanz Milhauz, the man from MINURSO, a befuddling acronym that somehow described the UN Mission to the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara, to which Phillipe had just been sent as an observer by the French government. French military observers are almost always drawn from the officer corps of the Foreign Legion; Phillipe had observed multinational peacekeeping forces at work all over the world in the last five or six years: Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus and the Comoros, Somalia, Kosovo again, Afghanistan, Iraq.

  “It was the necessity of fighting on two fronts that brought Polisario to their knees,” Dr. Milhauz continued. “With half their forces besieging Nouakchott, they couldn’t hold Laayoune against the Moroccans. The evacuation was terrible, a botched job. Thousands died of starvation, the trail of bodies stretched from the Atlantic to the mountains.”

  “Yes, I know all the history—” Phillipe began, but Dr. Milhauz made an impatient gesture. The little man acted as if Phillipe had stepped onto the plane at the UN Mission Compound in Dahkla that morning with a copy of Paris Match under his arm and nothing but the latest celebrity gossip in his head.

  “You may know,” Dr. Milhauz said, “but you don’t truly understand. How could you? No one in Europe understands. They see refugees and say ‘Well, let’s find a way to send them home.’ But in this case, the home in question does not exist. The Saharoui Arab Democratic Republic is a fiction. It has been eroded, wiped off the map, not by wind and rain but by international politics. This is a very intricate situation. Extremely complex. One must first take into consideration the web of tribal affiliations, then the influence of the mullahs—they’re called Marabouts out here, and they’re more like magicians or miracle workers than holy men”—a breathy pause—“simply put, we’ve got to do our best to avoid the kind of disastrous mistakes the Americans are making in Iraq.”

  “Which mistakes are you referring to exactly?” Phillipe stifled a yawn. “I was there, you know.”

  “Oh, well—” Dr. Milhauz frowned. “Everything they’ve done has been a mistake, hasn’t it? A direct result of unilateralist arrogance!”

  Dr. Milhauz was Swiss-German, a doctor, not the medical variety, only a Ph.D., one of those self-important economists who infest the UN and insist on introducing themselves to everyone as Dr. So-and-So. He had nervous hands, constantly in motion, and was as round as a person could be, like a walking egg—which somehow made his imperious conversational style all the more ridiculous. His black round-framed eyeglasses—in the style of Le Corbusier—only emphasized his general roundness. He wore the kind of great-white-hunter khaki outfit favored by UN functionaries and television journalists in desert places, the vest and pants covered with inexplicable flaps and pockets, some zippered, others buttoned, all filled with nothing in particular.

  “Look—over there, to the west.” Dr. Milhauz poked an insistent finger at the window. “You can just see the Moroccan Berm. You’ve heard of the Berm, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of the Berm.”

  “Well there it is, take a good look. The enormity of the thing can only be appreciated from up here.”

  Phillipe squinted into the yellow light and saw two parallel lines inscribed on the desert in the distance as if by a giant hand. The Berm was a defensive wall of sand sixty feet high and two thousand kilometers long, backed by a corresponding sixty-foot-deep trench, undulating over dune and guelb and dry wadi, side by side across the desert floor like two snakes into infinity. It had been built by the Moroccans in the early 1980s to separate the desert-dwelling Saharoui refugees to the east from Moroccan occupied territory along the coast that had been the most inhabitable part of the Saharoui homeland. The Berm was one of the only two man-made constructions visible from space with the naked eye. The other was the Great Wall of China.

  “A human rights disaster.” Dr. Milhauz wagged his head up and down like a bobblehead doll. “Took six years to finish. Convict labor, you know.”

  “Yes, I do, actually, Dr. Milhauz,” Phillipe said, no longer concealing his annoyance. “But thank you so much for reminding me.”

  “Just trying to be helpful,” the little man said stiffly. He returned to his seat and his laptop, its screen fading for lack of battery power.

  In two months, Phillipe would deliver yet another report, this one on the Saharoui refugee crisis, to the Committee for African Affairs of the National Assembly of the Fifth Republic in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris in closed session. He had read the committee’s MINURSO dossiers thoroughly before leaving France. He had pored over maps, talked to every Saharoui refugee he could find, read at least twenty books—the best being Never-Ending War: The Gutting of Western Sahara, written by a British journalist, since killed in mysterious circumstances at Laayoune in the Saharoui souk, a kind of walled ghetto imprisoning those Saharouis who had remained behind in what was now an overwhelmingly Moroccan city.

  The book contained a gripping account of the Saharoui revolt against Spanish rule in the early 1960s and the chaos that followed Spain’s withdrawal from the phosphate-rich colony. Before the victorious Saharouis had a chance to establish their Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) or design a flag, they’d been invaded by the Moroccans from the north and the Mauritanians from the south, both hungry for territory and what wealth there was to be derived from phosphate deposits and fishing rights. The Saharoui rebel army, called Polisario—another befuddling acronym—which had defeated Spain, quickly defeated Mauritania, bringing the war to the very gates of Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, before a treaty was signed.

  But thirty-odd years of fighting hadn’t been long enough for Polisario to drive out the powerful Moroccans in the north—who were, at long last, winning. Not through guns and bombs—as Dr. Milhauz might say—but through economic policy. The Moroccan government had poured millions of dirhams into developing the territory stolen from the Saharouis they now called the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Morocco. They had irrigated fields, beefed up fishing fleets, built soccer stadiums and o
ffice buildings, and paved over Laayoune’s parched, dusty plazas with blinding white flagstones.

  And so the SADR existed now more as an idea than a genuine nation. The unfortunate Saharouis—450,000 of them, one of the largest refugee population in the world—waited for an increasingly elusive victory, for the order to return home to Laayoune, no longer their capital; waited to bring their boats back to the rich fishing grounds off Cape Juby, now trawled by fleets of Moroccan vessels. Hopeful, angry, deluded, living on UN protein crackers and logs of tasteless UN cheese and vats of distilled water in the squalor of a dozen camps strewn around the Algerian town of Tindouf like a handful of crottes—camel droppings—tossed into the desert sand.

  2.

  An hour later, they still hadn’t landed. They were in a holding pattern, waiting for a signal from the ground crew—sometimes camels or a herd of goats wandered across the airstrip—the Antonov C-160 circling the vast tent city fifteen kilometers out as dusk came on, a dim blue flush in the sky from the east. Or maybe the air-traffic controller was merely taking his siesta in the sweltering heat. Phillipe closed his eyes. His sleep had been troubled lately, uneasy—as if there were, generally speaking, something he’d forgotten to do, or something he’d done that he shouldn’t have—though he couldn’t say now what these things might be, and not knowing gnawed away at his subconscious.

  Just two days ago, he’d been in Paris with Louise, going out to dinner for their anniversary. The hard pavement of the boulevard Raspail shining in a spring rain, the crowds coming out of the cinemas in the Place de Clichy, limousines three deep to the curb at Trebuchet in Montparnasse. Reservations on Trebuchet’s trendy back terrace had been made weeks in advance, but Louise decided she wasn’t in the mood for a scene and they ended up at Chez Manon in their usual corner booth. They ate lightly and exchanged gifts: a beautiful necklace of eighteenth-century Venetian glass flowers for her; for him a pair of black velvet Hermès slippers stitched with his monogram in gold thread. Then back early to the house in Neuilly. There they pulled at each other’s clothes in the entrance hall with startling avidity, eager as a couple of teenagers, even after seven years of marriage: The taxi idling at the bottom of the steps, the driver counting his tip on the front seat just visible through the pebbled glass of the street door, and Phillipe tugging up his wife’s tight skirt as she bent over the heavy Directoire table, the shadowy pattern of the ironwork grille falling across her bare back in sinuous arabesques.

  Later, in bed, they made love, gently, face-to-face. Afterwards, Louise shuddered in his arms and admitted she was very worried. She’d had a disturbing dream like Caesar’s wife before the Ides. In it she was falling from a great height, perhaps from the walls of a massive fortress, into complete darkness. Western Sahara—where the hell was this place? Hot as hell and dangerous, no doubt. The ass-end of the earth!

  “Africa is here”—Phillipe drew an outline in the air with his finger—“Western Sahara’s here”—jabbing the South Atlantic coast about halfway down. “Mauritania’s here, Morocco here. All this is mostly unpopulated desert, except for a few tribes of Berber nomads. That’s the Sahara part. The Western part—”

  “Oh, shut up.” Louise made a face. “What if you get taken hostage by terrorists? C’est possible, non?”

  “No,” he said. “Al Qaeda’s got nothing to do with it. This isn’t jihad, this is Moroccans versus Saharouis. Muslim versus Muslim, an old-fashioned battle over access to natural resources. The UN’s on the ground there only as a negotiator—respected by all parties—with a couple of thousand troops to keep order until a deal can be worked out.”

  “And how long have they been there working out their deal, your UN?”

  Phillipe grinned. “About thirty-five years.”

  “Idiots!” Louise exclaimed. “So they take you away from me for a puppet show!”

  “You can’t blame the UN, I’m afraid,” Phillipe said. “This is a French affair. I’m being sent at the request of Madame de la République.”

  “To hell with that bitch!”

  “Spoken like an aristocrat. Congratulations. But if you could only see the condition of the refugees—”

  “Enough!” Louise cried. “They’re boring, your refugees! Send someone else! Send your adjutant. What’s his name—Pinard.”

  Phillipe laughed at this.

  “If you knew Pinard . . .”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a great hulking Canadian, a hard-luck type. Uncomfortable in his own skin. He plays the oboe in the Musique Principale. A good oboe player, even very good, but let’s be honest, the oboe is a ridiculous instrument. I can’t say what kind of officer he’d make, he’s never been under fire. But I can tell you one thing—he’s definitely not diplomatic material.”

  Traffic boomed from beyond their bedroom balcony, racing madly around the circle at the rue de Rennes. Now, Louise indulged herself in a few tears and held him close.

  “I really wish you’d quit, Phillipe,” she whispered, sniffling. “You’re away from home too much. Afghanistan in February and Iraq last fall and Aubagne half the year and now this terrible place. It’s difficult for me, being alone so much. And you know”—she kissed him—“maybe it’s time for us.”

  Phillipe swallowed hard. “You think so?”

  “What do you think?”

  He paused, considering his answer: They’d had seven good, busy years alone with each other, dividing their time between Paris and Brittany and Béziers (they went for the bullfights twice a year) with frequent side trips to England, where Phillipe had aristocratic friends vaguely connected to the royal family. Louise gardened and listened carefully to music and took Russian and Italian lessons at the Sorbonne and read the classics—she was particularly fond of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, which she’d read to Phillipe twice out loud—and made sheep’s cheese from her own little flock of six sheep each spring at the château, playing at country life like Marie Antoinette in her mock-rustic village at the Petit Trianon. Louise had also learned the viola passably and could accompany Phillipe on simple pieces. They had many friends, a busy social life: Happiness attracts others—to paraphrase the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld—as a rose the hummingbird.

  But Phillipe was over fifty now, Louise over thirty. She was right, it was definitely time.

  “Children . . .” Phillipe’s courage faltered at the word. What would it be like? Was he fit to be a parent—or too selfish?

  “Child. Let’s start with one.”

  He smiled at her in the darkness. New life, new hope. “Bien. I’m ready.”

  She pressed herself against him and they embraced.

  “It’s the damned pill,” she whispered. “I’ve got to get off it. It takes about a month for my body to adjust.”

  “When I get back, then . . .”

  “Oui. When you get back.”

  3.

  They landed at last in the boiling red light, the sun a hard vermillion orb falling to the west. Great clouds of dust billowed up as the Antonov’s four prop-jets spun to a halt. The rear gangway lowered on its hydraulics and Phillipe descended into the stifling air with a small flight bag slung over his shoulder; the extent of his luggage, it contained a couple of changes of clothing, the usual toiletries, and a draft of his monograph on Erik Satie, still unfinished after all these years.

  He was closely followed by Dr. Milhauz, juggling two large bags destined to join his trunk and other odds and ends on the tarmac. The man traveled like a nineteenth-century naturalist, like Charles Darwin circling the world on the Beagle with brass instruments and leather-bound tomes. These bags were piled to one side and this seemed like a natural place to congregate. A Quonset hut hangar on the other side, apparently abandoned, loomed like the mouth of a robbers’ cave, filled with shadows.

  Phillipe didn’t like the look of the place. His reaction was immediate and felt like a premonition. The desert wind blew steadily in the red dusk; the stench of nearby refuse piles assailed t
heir nostrils. Soon night would drop temperatures fifty degrees, but for now the heat lingered. Dr. Milhauz collapsed on one of his crates, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. The red light of the dying sun shone in his face.

  “This isn’t good,” the little man murmured uneasily. “Where are the Pakistani troops?”

  “Did you tell them we were coming?”

  Dr. Milhauz looked up at Phillipe through his owl-glasses. “There’s supposed to be a UN transport waiting. The Pakistani contingent of our forces have been assigned to this camp. Sixty-five men, not counting medical personnel.”

  Phillipe didn’t say anything.

  Besides the flight crew of the Antonov, hurriedly preparing for the return flight to Dahkla, they were alone. The dunes loomed all around; the tent city, about thirty-five kilometers off, couldn’t be seen from the airstrip. It seemed they were as good as abandoned in the absolute middle of nowhere. Soon, the big Russian plane taxied down the runway, its takeoff lights blinking, gathering speed for the assault on the night sky. As the prop-jets screamed into full power, Dr. Milhauz put his hands over his ears. Then the plane was gone, its wheels folded into the fuselage, the sound of its engines fading into nothing.

  “By the way, let me do the talking,” Milhauz said presently.

  “There’s no one to talk to,” Phillipe said.

  “I mean tomorrow. When we meet the Saharoui Camp Committee. As a gesture of respect, I like to speak to them in the Hassaniya dialect and not Spanish or French. Do you speak Saharoui, Colonel?”

  “I speak only French and English,” Phillipe said. “And also Spanish, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, and a little Russian.”

  “Aha!” The UN representative raised a finger. “You do not speak Hassaniya! I do!” But this moment of triumph instantly dissipated. He took a step closer to the colonel, his shadow elongating. A fenec fox, its ears trembling, watched him from the darkness of its burrow beneath the lip of the dune.