What I first noticed were the sunburnt red patches on my forehead and cheeks, and a plethora of small bites. All those hours with my face in the sand had allowed the fleas to run riot. Again Maika signalled that, in time, they would diminish. So too the blistering welt that covered my chin. But what shocked me even more was the deeply discoloured bruise that covered my left cheek, spreading upwards to the blackened ring beneath my eye. My left ear was slightly cauliflowered from the punch that the little shit had landed on me; a punch which left me with an ongoing echo. And my lips were still severely chapped, almost fractured.
I lowered the mirror. I tried to stifle a sob. I failed. I was a disfigured freak show. Seeing my battered self brought back the monstrosity wreaked on me – and the insanity of my pursuit of a man whom I should have cast aside as soon as the nature of his treachery became clear.
When I started to break down Titrit put her arms around me, letting me bury my head in her shoulder. But Maika wouldn’t stand for such a show of self-pity. Literally pulling me away from her daughter she bore down on me with that bony, exclamation point of a finger of hers, almost shouting at me as she gave me a fast and furious lecture in a language completely beyond my comprehension, but which, by this point, I could somehow understand. Following her broad gestures I understood the central gist of her sermon:
Don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself. What has happened has happened. You have survived. You are not dead. You will be able to walk. You will be able to have babies. Your face will heal. So too your legs. There may be scars, but they will not be disfiguring ones. We all have scars. But now your duty to yourself is to get back to your life when you are ready. But no more self-pity. That is not allowed here. I will not accept it – because I know you are better than that. Understand?
Maika’s vehemence was so forthright (and loud) that Naima hid in her mother’s skirts. I stood there with my head lowered, fighting back tears, feeling like a censured child, while also knowing that everything she was saying made complete sense; that I had no choice but to somehow get beyond the horror of it all.
But Maika also made it clear that there was no way I could travel yet. She held up ten fingers, then four, indicating that she might consider letting me go in two weeks. That’s when I had – courtesy of my hand gestures – the conversation that I had for some time been dreading; when I explained that the men who had raped me had also robbed me. I had no money, nothing. Maika shrugged as if to say: Why do you need money here? You are our guest. I acted out and said at the same time:
‘But I feel bad about taking your hospitality and giving you nothing for it.’
Maika understood immediately what I was saying and got even more vehement, telling me (or, at least, this is what I was thinking she was telling me):
There is absolutely no need to consider money. You are our guest. We will look after you. We will continue to help you get better. When you are ready we will figure out a way for you to get home.
I thanked her profusely. She held up her hand, as if to indicate: You’re welcome . . . now stop. Then she ordered me back on the cot, and got Titrit and Naima to begin re-administering the cold compresses and the oils and balms to my injuries and scars.
The next ten days marked a time when, on so many levels, a certain clarity descended upon me. I was still being given the soporific tisane every evening around eight p.m. Though she was no longer knocking me out twice a day Maika had upped this nightly dose so that I was sleeping twelve hours. I understood that this was her ongoing cure for head injuries. I was largely restricted to my little tent and had nothing in the way of reading material or writing paper and pen to fill my waking hours, let alone any of those modern distractions – the Internet, television, even a humble radio – with which we all seem to pass the time. For the most part I was being kept separate from the life of this encampment. So I found myself very much thrown back on my own thoughts, my own reflections. As the concussive fog began to lift, as I became mobile again, as the terrible shock in which I had been living transformed into a functional numbness, I found myself alone for nine hours a day with little to do except try to sort through the inventory of my life.
Maika – having taken charge of my recovery – was also insisting that I begin to eat normally again, as I had lost (I could tell) a shocking amount of weight since the attack. One day I tried on the tan pants which I’d been wearing when the two men grabbed me, and which Titrit had laundered for me. I wasn’t more than 120 pounds when I arrived in Morocco. Even trying to tie the drawstring as tightly as possible the pants still all but fell off me. All that time in a semi-comatose state, existing on small amounts of bread and couscous and vegetables, had resulted in me losing so many pounds that Titrit – who was quite wide-hipped and clearly liked her food – indicated that I needed to be fattened up.
The heat outside was maniacal. I was finally able to leave my tent on my own to use the toilet. I was also invited to join the family for group meals. Maika made it clear that, as their guest, I needed to abide by their customs. Wearing the burqa when outside the tent was obligatory and I was certainly not going to express my feminist distaste for this practice. These people had saved my life. They had taken me in. They had nursed me back to health. They were not asking a penny for all the immense kindness and generosity shown to me. How could I question their request that I cover my face when outside?
Once inside, however, I was allowed to be as unmasked as all the other women in this little village.
I was, I came to understand, among Berbers. It was Idir – Titrit’s husband, Naima’s father – who explained a bit about the Berbers to me. Idir was one of the men who’d returned with Naima to rescue me. I wanted to ask her what she’d been doing out in the desert alone. I could only surmise that she was allowed to roam the Sahara, and that I hadn’t seen the oasis – which, I came to discover, was behind a stone wall that, when seen from the desert, blended in with the dusty horizon. You would only know of the little world existing behind that wall if you could find the wall – which was so camouflaged that it was impossible to spot from any distance. Idir was somewhat older than Titrit – his heavily grooved face and bad teeth made him look as though he was in his early fifties, though I sensed that the harshness of life in this great sandy nowhere aged everyone considerably. From the freshness of her outlook and the flawlessness of her skin I guessed that Titrit was, at most, in her early thirties. Idir wasn’t a great conversationalist – but it turned out he did speak a smattering of French, enough for the two of us to understand each other. He explained that the Berbers weren’t a tribe but a people; that there were Berbers in Algeria, Tunisia, even Egypt, with the greatest concentration here in Morocco, specifically south of Ouarzazate.
‘Here you are in our country,’ he explained. ‘We may be officially governed by Rabat, by the King . . . but we see this as our own kingdom.’
The other man in this encampment was Immeldine. He was Maika’s husband and, like his wife, showed the wear and tear of a life lived under a fierce Saharan sun. He was a compulsive smoker – he always had a cigarette on the go. In the two weeks during which I ate with the family nightly he spoke very little and I often wondered if he considered me an imposition. I discovered that he and Idir farmed a bit in the oasis, growing herbs and a few vegetables that they sold at a market once a month in Tata. They also raised a few goats for milk. The women had a loom on which they made simple rugs of traditional design. They also made small lace items and knitted skullcaps of the type worn by Idir and Immeldine.
‘They do very good work,’ Idir told me in his basic French. ‘Every month we have a friend, Aatif – he drives a lorry to Marrakesh. He takes everything our women make and sells them to a dealer. Last month he returned with two thousand dirhams for us! Most money ever! A fortune!’
I thought of my husband, spending the equivalent $230 on a bottle of wine he could hardly afford. Or how I took a potential corporate client out to dinner a few weeks before leaving for Moro
cco and insisted on picking up the $300 tab at Buffalo’s best steakhouse. And how 2,000 dirhams (at best) was keeping these five people alive for a month. From what Idir had indicated, this was more than twice what they were used to. I could see Titrit and Naima beaming as he said this – because, with Maika, they were the labour force at the loom.
It was exactly that – an old-style loom, located beneath a sheet of canvas that had been attached to four poles embedded in the ground. I wandered over one morning to see the women at work. Wearing a burqa and djellaba was like being encased in a sauna. But the three women didn’t seem at all fazed by the crazy heat. Watching Maika work the loom, barking orders, stitching with fiendish precision, I couldn’t help but wonder how she managed this in the long garment and severe mask that hid all but her eyes. Titrit favoured lighter materials in cream or off-white – but she too was imprisoned in fabrics that covered every inch of her body. Only Naima – still too young to wear the burqa – got away with a headscarf and djellaba. Like her mother and grandmother she never seemed to succumb to the ocean of perspiration that overtook me every time I stepped outside, hidden from worldly view, my eyes and hands the only parts of my anatomy visible.
When I offered to help at the loom, Maika tried to teach me some basic techniques. But the heat overcame me after a few minutes and I was ordered inside.
Water was an issue out here. There was, I discovered, a small water hole within the oasis – and an old-style pump garnered this essential fluid up from the ground. It was rationed by Maika. I was handed an old plastic litre bottle four times a day – and had to make do with that. Which also meant that spending much time outdoors before nightfall was tricky. I was given a large pail of water twice a day for washing. There was a bucket and a rag in the toilet tent to clean myself.
Titrit was home-schooling Naima. Every afternoon they spent several hours on reading and writing and basic mathematics. One morning, Naima came into my tent hugely excited as her father and grandfather had returned from selling their produce at the market and Papa had brought her back a large book. Tintin. In Arabic. She showed me its large glossy cover, a little battered in places. I too had read Hergé’s books when I was Naima’s age, and tried to explain to her that, yes, I knew all about the intrepid Belgian journalist Tintin and his faithful wire-haired terrier Snowy. I asked Naima to read me some of the text. She actually climbed up on my lap to do so, and proceeded to read me the entire book, even sometimes acting out the voices of Tintin, his dog, and the highly egotistical Captain Haddock. Having Naima on my lap, listening to her wondrous singsong voice, feeling the way she snuggled in against me, my longing for a child was immense. So too was my sadness that this would now never be.
I was so engrossed in listening to Naima read to me that I didn’t notice Titrit enter the tent, watching us with a smile. When I caught sight of her I was just a little thrown, thinking that she might not like me having her daughter in my lap. Seeing my concern she indicated that this was hardly a problem – and in fact said something to Naima that made her return to her reading.
Later that day, when she returned alone to change my bandages, she touched the engagement and wedding rings on my finger and made a hugging gesture, followed by a touch to her head. It was her way of posing the question: Where is your husband? In reply I made an outward flapping motion with my hands, saying: ‘He’s gone.’ She looked at me with great pity. Then touching my stomach and making a curving motion with her hand, she indicated pregnancy. I shook my head. And said:
‘I want a baby. But . . .’
Even though she might not have understood English she certainly grasped what I was saying. Her reply was:
‘Insha’Allah.’
Allah willing.
The days passed slowly. As I was still unsteady both physically and psychologically, the languidness of my current existence didn’t bother me. Apart from the nightly meals with the family, the arrival of breakfast and lunch in the tent, and Maika and Titrit spending a good hour on my wounds, the highlight of the day was the hour or so I had every late afternoon with Naima. After a morning spent helping her mother and grandmother on the loom, and several hours of tutoring by her mother, she would race over to my tent to spend time with me. Early on, Naima said one word to me while pointing to her mouth:
‘English.’
In reply I said one word while pointing to mine:
‘Arabie.’ Which I knew from Essaouira was the word for Arabic.
We spent the next ten days or so teaching each other words, expressions, numbers. I learned how to count to ten in Arabic. Naima got very proficient at English pronouns: I, me, you, he, she, it. I picked up phrases like: ‘Shukran min fadocik’ (Thank you for dinner), or ‘Min fir shreb’ (I need water), or ‘Fin wan mfouk’ (You are my friend). Naima delighted in being able to do the alphabet as far as M – with my promise that we would add two more letters a day.
When the hour was up, Titrit would arrive, Naima would give me a kiss goodbye, and I would have another two hours alone until dinner. I wish I could report that, during the many hours a day I was alone with nothing but my thoughts, I achieved some sort of resolution about the state of my life; resolving somehow to follow Maika’s directive and move forward. But what happened frequently was panic attacks on a major level. A desperate sense of falling into a vortex. The agonising replay of everything that had happened in the desert. The barbarous image of my assailant after I had fought back. My sense of horror at what I had been forced to do. Had I truly killed someone? The accompanying terror of discovering that facet within me.
I knew I was still in shock. Whenever I thought of the world outside of this nowhere place to which I had been transported, I knew I couldn’t stay here indefinitely. Just as I also knew that the thought of returning to life beyond the oasis seemed out of my reach right now.
I was pleased that the days passed at a languid pace. Just as I could see that, though Idir could actually communicate with me in the basic French we both shared, he kept his distance from me. He never indicated that I was a burden to him or his family. But I was a woman. Apart from the evening meal I was kept out of his life, and I accepted this polite isolation, just as I accepted the burqa when outside. He spoke little to me during dinner, though that was frequently due to the fact that, in the tent where we all ate, there was a small television with a wire antenna that brought in one Moroccan channel. The fact that our encampment had no electricity meant the television was powered by a car battery which they charged using jump cables from the small and ancient truck in which they took their produce to market.
One evening I came in for dinner to discover the five members of the family huddled around the glowing set, watching the evening news. Out of nowhere a photograph appeared behind the newsreader. A photograph of a Western woman. As the broadcast was in Arabic, and as the reception wasn’t exactly brilliant, it took me a moment to realise that the photo onscreen was of . . .
But Naima beat me there. Craning her neck towards me, she pointed to the screen. Mouthing one of the English pronouns I’d taught her she said:
‘You.’
Twenty-two
THE NEWS REPORT: a mugshot of me. A mugshot of Paul. Footage of a crime scene in the desert, with police tape around an area showing scorched earth. And then – oh God, this was beyond bad – footage of Police Inspector Moufad from Essaouira, giving a news conference, holding up the same photograph of me, shaking it vehemently, as if to say: Here is our prime suspect.
You.
Me. Now wanted by the police.
Me. Now revealed to these good Samaritans as someone who was on the run. Wanted not just for the disappearance of her husband, but for the death of another man in the desert.
My mind began to race. How were they tying the burnt corpse in the desert to me? Did the goon who’d assisted in my rape drive back to Tata? In his panic did he concoct a story which he fed to the police? He was worried about the welfare of his friend who’d met an American woman last
night and invited her on a romantic drive at dawn into the Sahara in her hired car. The discovery by the cops of his pal’s charred body – and no sign of me – would lead them to presume that I had turned on him at some juncture, things got out of hand, and I immolated his body before driving off into . . .
No, that’s ridiculous. You arrived by bus. You didn’t hire a car in Tata. The guy from the hotel would remember, under police questioning, that the two little shits were loitering by the stairs as we headed up to the hotel. So how, why, were they bringing the desert corpse into Paul’s disappearance . . . and the fact that I too had now vanished? What incriminated me even further was that I had fled virtual house arrest in Essaouira, much to the fury of Inspector Moufad. He was stabbing my photograph on television with his index finger, as if I was a public health hazard or an escaped war criminal. Apparently they had some sort of evidence to link me to the incinerated body in the Sahara.
Another possibility: the goon got back to Tata, tried to work all day, was in a state of escalating panic as he had my backpack hidden away somewhere, and then suddenly came up with an ingenious solution to his problem. He drove back into the desert, tossed my backpack out near the corpse, returned to Tata, reported his friend missing, said he was cruising an American woman . . . and didn’t fill in any further details. How we ended up in that nowhere spot in the Sahara . . . would that truly matter when compared to the smoking-gun evidence of my backpack near the corpse? It would directly link me to the events that culminated in a young man being torched alive in the desert. That had to be why I was now being pursued for the disappearance of my husband, and my link with that gruesome find amidst all that empty sand.
The Heat of Betrayal Page 25
