Gorgeous East

by null

  “I shouldn’t tell you any of this,” he said in a low voice. “I mean you’re not one of us, are you?”

  “Aren’t we all engaged in the same cause, Herr Dr. Milhauz,” Phillipe replied, “world peace?”

  “Yes, yes”—the little man wagged his head impatiently—“as are all beauty queens and socialists and children under ten. But let’s be realistic. The United Nations is a country unto itself, with its own laws, it’s own hierarchy and chain of command. In some sense, it’s like a perpetual motion machine, feeding on self-generating energy and rarely going forward. It responds to a crisis, but inevitably becomes part of the crisis by refusing to act, by maintaining its own status quo. Understand me, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—merely the way things are.”

  Phillipe looked at the little man, astonished. “Well, that’s deeply enlightening, Herr Dr. Milhauz!”

  “We negotiate endlessly, we produce reams of paperwork, just to produce reams of paperwork,” the little man continued. “As I say, our interest is in the status quo. If we keep things the same, they can’t get worse, don’t you see?” He licked his dry lips. “But now, I think events are getting ahead of us. There have been odd rumblings. Conversations overheard in the bazaar at Dahkla, rumors from the Saharoui souk in Laayoune, a place all but impenetrable to Westerners. Even the Moroccans can’t get in. And there’s this symbol—”

  He inscribed a crude hieroglyph in the sand with the heel of his boot: an eye shape, with a sharp point at one end and crossed over the middle by three parallel lines:

  “It has appeared everywhere very suddenly. On walls, on street corners.”

  Phillipe leaned over to study the odd marking.

  “Some say it’s an eye, others”—Dr. Milhauz swallowed—“a bee.”

  “I don’t see that at all.” Phillipe frowned. “Looks more like a fish to me.”

  “This part”—Dr. Milhauz indicated the sharp point coming out one end—“is supposed to be the stinger.”

  “But what’s it a symbol of?”

  Dr. Milhauz shrugged. “A secret society, a conspiracy, who knows. Perhaps an uprising—”

  “Against whom?” Phillipe said, perplexed.

  “Against the Moroccans. Or against Polisario. Or perhaps against us, against the West. Against reason, you might say, against the sciences. Against”—his voice descended to a frightened whisper—“economics.”

  “Du calme, mon ami,” Phillipe said, smiling to himself. “There will always be economics.”

  “Or it may be nothing,” Dr. Milhauz continued. “Maybe just a kind of joke. In any case, I urge caution. Watchfulness. Can you be watchful, Colonel?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Phillipe said. He studied the little man critically in the red light. Perhaps he was insane.

  4.

  Night came, and with it utter blackness. The temperature began to drop. Dr. Milhauz reached into one of his many suitcases and drew out a knit woolen ski cap and scarf. Phillipe shoved his hands into the pockets of his Hermès blazer. Hours passed. He smoked the Gitanes he’d brought from Paris, winnowing the pack to one. Dr. Milhauz turned the pages of a book beneath the slowly weakening beam of a flashlight. Neither spoke. Just before midnight, a truck engine sounded in the distance. They waited and the sound came closer and soon they saw the white throw of headlights wavering, bumping over the dunes.

  “Ah!” Dr. Milhauz exclaimed. “Here they come. There must have been some sort of miscommunication . . .”

  The truck pulled up in a swirl of dust. But it wasn’t the Pakistani military vehicle bristling with soldiers the doctor had expected. It was a battered Méhari pickup—little larger than a Volkswagen Bug—with one door missing. Up front, two dark figures, a young man and a boy, veiled against the dust—though the effect of their covered faces was sinister, banditlike.

  “Where are the Pakistanis?” Dr. Milhauz demanded. He did not speak Hassaniya as he had promised, but Spanish.

  “You come,” the driver replied, his Spanish rudimentary. “And you”—he gestured—“in back.”

  Dr. Milhauz looked down at his pile of luggage, aghast, and then back at the truck.

  “But I can’t fit even half my gear—” he began.

  “We go!” the young man insisted. “Now!” And the truck began to roll off. Phillipe tossed his cigarette in a trail of sparks into the dune, shouldered his bag, and jumped aboard.

  “Come on, Doctor.”

  The little man, confused at first, grabbed a bag and ran after the truck, which gathered speed. Phillipe held out a hand, but it was no use, Dr. Milhauz failed to grasp it and fell behind.

  “Help!” he squeaked, running along, panting for breath. “Help!”

  Phillipe turned and pounded on the roof of the cab. The driver didn’t seem to hear him, or heard him and didn’t give a shit. The doctor receded in the vast night of the desert, waving his arms, wailing—who’s to say what would become of him out there alone? Phillipe took off his Hermès blazer, wrapped it tightly around his elbow, and smashed it into the small oval window at the back of the cab. The glass shattered in three large pieces and fell into the front seat, where it crumbled into shards. Phillipe shoved his arm through and crooked it around the driver’s throat.

  “Stop!” he shouted in French. “Stop! Now!”

  The driver, swearing in Hassaniya, clawed at Phillipe’s arm, but Phillipe squeezed harder and at last the little truck skidded to a halt. The boy in the passenger seat stared, his eyes frightened above the dark veil.

  “Back up!” Phillipe ordered.

  “Let me go!” the driver gasped. “I kill you!”

  Phillipe reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out the ebony-handled Italian switchblade he always carried—another Legion tradition; everyone, even the officers, carried a concealed weapon—and brought the point to bear against the young man’s throat.

  “You don’t understand,” Phillipe said through his teeth. “I am not a member of the United Nations Defense Force. I am not a Pakistani. I am not Dutch. I am an officer of the French Foreign Legion. You’ve heard of us?” He pressed the point into the driver’s skin until a drop of blood appeared. “I asked you a question!”

  “Yes,” the young man said. “Imperialist jackals! Murderers of women and children!”

  “Exactly,” Phillipe said grimly. “So understand that it is I who will do the killing if you don’t reverse gear and pick up my friend!”

  The driver shouted something in Hassaniya, perhaps appealing to the boy who didn’t move.

  “Reverse gear,” Phillipe said, his voice full of military authority. “Do it.”

  The driver reached for the gearshift and the truck bounced backward over the veined asphalt of the airstrip. The pitiful figure of Dr. Milhauz was revealed in the amber glow of the tail lights, sitting on the ground in despair. Phillipe withdrew the knife, but he did not release the pressure from the driver’s neck.

  “I would help you up, Doctor,” Phillipe said. “But I’m otherwise occupied.”

  Dr. Milhauz lifted his head and stared. Then he took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. Tears had streaked the grime on his face.

  “This is very bad,” he muttered as he climbed into the truck. “This does not bode well for our mission here.”

  Phillipe released the driver from his grip. “After you take us to our quarters, you will return for the doctor’s things. Understand?”

  But the driver didn’t respond. He shoved the truck in gear and sped off, just as the moon appeared, round and red between the clouds.

  5.

  The way station was a large, tattered tent that had once been part of a mobile UN hospital unit, its Red Cross insignia scrawled over with overlapping graffiti—Phillipe saw the slogan POLISARIO VIVA! SADR VIVA! peeling now, and in several places, apparently fresh, the odd bee hieroglyph Dr. Milhauz had inscribed in the sand. Worn but magnificent Berber carpets covered the canvas floor within. These, a couple of storm lanterns, a ten
-gallon tub of UN protein crackers, and several gallon jugs of stale water were the only furnishings. They slept fitfully that night atop the carpets. Dr. Milhauz snored so loudly, he woke himself up several times; Phillipe, plagued by sand fleas and uneasy dreams, rose before dawn.

  In the morning, the young man in the Méhari truck returned, its bed full of Dr. Milhauz’s gear. A cohort in the back kicked the stuff out of the bed, shouting obscenities in Hassaniya, and the driver roared off to the east, which was the direction of the camp at Awsard. High cirrus clouds streaked the sky just beginning to blaze. The suitcases and trunks had been broken open, rifled through; everything of value and half the doctor’s clothes, gone. His books remained, but they had been defaced, the pages torn.

  “This is an outrage!” Dr. Milhauz cried, outraged. “I’m going to report this to the council!”

  Phillipe watched placidly, munching on a cardboard-tasting UN cracker—his breakfast—as the little man went through the tatters of what was left, gathering his clothes into heaps, discarding his destroyed books, burying the rubble in a sandy hole.

  “But they missed something,” he said, smiling weakly. “These!” He pulled up a hidden compartment in the bottom of one of his trunks to reveal two bottles of Johnnie Walker Red—this stuff as good as currency in some parts of the world.

  “I would be careful, Doctor,” Phillipe cautioned. “From what I’ve read, the Saharouis consider alcohol an abomination. A crime against Allah.”

  “I’ve often thought a drink or two would solve these people’s problems instantly,” the doctor said, adjusting his round glasses. “Join me?”

  “Too early.” Phillipe shook his head.

  The doctor, clutching the bottles to his belly, disappeared into the tent and could be heard in there all afternoon, drinking whiskey and muttering to himself.

  6.

  Two days passed. Phillipe spent them not unpleasantly, chasing the shade around the tent, writing long letters to Louise and working on his Satie monograph. His cell phone, useless out here, showed no signal, only the smiling, animated mussel graphic of the French wireless network Moulignac.

  When Satie died in 1925, his brother and a few close friends broke into the small, single room in Arcueil, the dingy Parisian suburb, where the eccentric composer had lived for the last thirty years of his life without receiving a single visitor. There, they found an incredible rat’s nest of fantastic stuff, a lifetime’s worth of creative detritus. Two broken pianos (one of them chalked with the cryptic phrase this house haunted by the Devil), both stuffed with bundles of unpublished compositions, several masterpieces among them; the dozen mauve velvet suits Satie had worn in his Velvet Gentleman years around the turn of the century, when he had refused to wear anything but mauve velvet suits; every letter, every scrap he’d ever received from his only lover, Suzanne Valadon, including images of himself that she’d cruelly snipped from those few photographs showing them together and sent back to him—these kept in a somber black envelope, its surface splotched with the tears wrung out of Satie’s broken heart. Also, carefully arranged in cigar boxes, thousands of neat squares of paper covered in the most exquisite calligraphy: drawings of imaginary Gothic buildings, poems written in an unknown language, illustrations for novels that didn’t exist. And a series of absurdist advertisements Satie had placed at great expense in the major Paris newspapers:

  Glass Castle for rent—needs curtains, reasonable rates. Talking cat for sale—bores easily, plays “Chemin de Fer.” Puppets of God made upon request.

  Not long after Satie’s room was cleared for its new tenants, several of his friends were visited by the same strange dream. They were walking on a wooded path in the Bois de Boulogne on a dark day, storm clouds brewing above the tree line, when they met Satie coming along in the opposite direction. There he was, in evening dress, wreathed in his own sunlight, smiling, trademark bowler hat raised, beard neatly trimmed, pince-nez sparkling, his teeth gleaming like pearls, and a pair of pink wings neatly folded against the back of his cutaway.

  “Tell me something, my friend,” asks the glittering, pink-winged Satie (the same question in each dream!), “does everyone still suppose I’m dead?”

  It was pleasant for Phillipe to think about Satie and the beautiful, lost Paris of 1900 all the way out here in the barren wastes of the Sahara. Thoughts of Satie and Paris were inextricable from thoughts of Louise. Phillipe had brought along a CD player and two discs of Satie’s music; they contained, among other compositions, Mémoires d’un amnésique, Messe des Pauvres, Trois Morceaux en forme de poire. But the machine’s batteries had exhausted themselves, forcing Phillipe to reconstruct these complex compositions in his head, a strenuous and time-consuming mental exercise. Hours passed like this in the devastating heat, with Phillipe squatting motionless in the shadow of the tent but thoroughly occupied on an imaginary piano, scrupulously trying to recall every last note, his fingers moving across a keyboard sculpted out of sand that kept blowing away.

  7.

  On the afternoon of the third day, Dr. Milhauz emerged from the tent flap, terribly hungover, having privately consumed both bottles of Johnnie Walker. He padded around to the east side of the tent in his socks and sat next to Phillipe in the sand, contrite and smelling strongly of alcohol. For a while neither of them spoke.

  “I’m afraid I drank all the whiskey,” Dr. Milhauz confessed.

  “And how do you feel now?”

  “Terrible.”

  “Ah.”

  “What have you been doing all this time?”

  “Nothing much.” Phillipe shrugged. “Thinking. Writing letters. Do you know the music of Erik Satie?”

  “No,” Dr. Milhauz said. “I’m an economist, not a musician.” He paused. “And basically a coward, I might as well admit that. I have been rude to you, Colonel de Noyer. I apologize.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I’m beginning to think we won’t get out of this,” Dr. Milhauz continued, his mouth turned down, grim. “Clearly, something’s going on in the camps. I have my suspicions but . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “What kind of suspicions?”

  Dr. Milhauz shrugged. “They’re trying to teach us a lesson, I think. They’re softening us up.”

  “For what?”

  Dr. Milhauz looked at Phillipe, tears brimming in his eyes. “For a terrible blow of some kind. Actually, I think they’re going to kill us.”

  “But we’re neutral, you and I,” Phillipe said reassuringly. “We’re here to help them. Get them better drinking water, more food. Medicine. Why should they want to kill us?”

  “It’s too late for all that now,” the doctor said. “Thirty years too late. The Saharouis hate the UN and they hate MINURSO for maintaining the status quo. For failing to act.” A pause. “Are you married, Colonel?”

  “I am,” Phillipe said.

  “You’re a lucky man.” Milhauz studied his socks, a fine grit now caked into the weave. “I have no wife”—he interrupted himself with a wordless exclamation, then—“I have wasted my life in the desert among people who hate me! I should have stayed in Zurich, gone into banking, gotten married. That’s what my mother wanted me to do. She’s very old now, and she’s alone.”

  Phillipe stood, brushing sand from the seat of his pants. “We won’t sit around waiting for this blow to fall. We’re going to start walking.”

  “To where?” The doctor threw up his hands. “We can’t go to Awsard, not after this. The next camp is seventy-five kilometers away!”

  “That’s nothing,” Phillipe said. “An easy three-day march, even in these conditions. We’ll go by moonlight, sleep during the hot hours. I’ve got a compass and plenty of training in orienteering, believe me, so we won’t get lost. Contrary to popular belief, not a single Legion patrol has ever been lost in the desert, not in a hundred and seventy-five years. We’ll carry water and as many crackers as we can hold. We’ll get there all right.”

  Dr. Milhauz looked up hope
fully, shielding his eyes. “Do you really think so?”

  “Ever bet on the horses, Doctor?”

  “No.” Dr. Milhauz shook his head. “I don’t gamble. Economically speaking, it doesn’t make sense.”

  Phillipe squinted toward the heat shimmer of the horizon.

  “One of the places we love to go, my wife and I, is the track at Long-champs,” he said. “It’s a beautiful green place with all the crowds on a Saturday and the horses, just magnificent, going over the jumps. Really, there’s no finer sight. Do you know”—he paused, remembering, suddenly—“last time we went, my wife put down a single bet on three horses and hit the tierce in disorder? The woman won five thousand EU and some change! All this is to say that she’s damned lucky and I know—I’m absolutely sure!—some of that luck has rubbed off on me.”

  He looked down at Milhauz sitting there helpless. He felt sorry for the man.

  “Courage, Doctor. You’re safe with me. I’m going to get a couple hours sleep inside. We leave at moonrise.”

  And he went into the tent and lay down on the carpet and fell asleep instantly, to the sound of a Satiesque piano pleasantly tinkling from a pleasantly appointed room, its tall window overlooking a charming private garden somewhere off the Place des Vosges in the Paris that existed always at the back of his mind.

  Phillipe woke up long past moonrise. Doctor Milhauz was gone. He walked around the tent, calling the doctor’s name, and was answered only by the wind. He climbed the nearest dune and stared into the gloom of the desert but couldn’t make out any sign of the man, not even a trail of footsteps in the sand. A cold, queasy feeling began to spread in his gut, that might have been the result of days of eating nothing but UN survival crackers and drinking stale water, but wasn’t.