“Do you remember you said you might be able to find a way to help Hariba?”
“Yeah?” he says, a little more awake now.
“Can you find out if two people could get to, you know, Cádiz or Málaga?”
“Two people?”
“Hariba won’t go unless the harni goes with her.” My heart hurts when I say this and his silence frightens me more.
“The harni, “ he says.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m so mad at her I could spit in her face. But she says she won’t go unless the harni goes.”
He sighs. “She’s a disaster, isn’t she?”
I feel as if I can breathe a little. “She is,” I say. “She’s crazy. I hate to go over there.”
“I wondered what was wrong,” he says.
“I just want it to be over,” I say. It is so nice to be able to tell him that. “I just want her gone and out of our life. Can you check?”
“I can check,” he says.
“Be careful, Alem,” I say.
“I’ll be careful.”
“I love you,” I say, my voice sounding tentative and hopeful to my ears.
“I love you, too, Ayesha,” he says, and puts his arm around me so I lay spooned against his side. I still find it hard to go to sleep.
* * *
It’s two days before Alem finds anything. But finally he comes home and says, “I found someone.”
Tariam is outside, playing with her cousin. I’m watching my sister’s son, six months younger than Tariam. I can look outside and see them there. I don’t like them playing outside, I keep expecting to see the harni, but he never comes here and I know it’s just nerves.
“It will cost them money,” he says.
“They have some,” I say, thinking, More than Khalid?
“It will cost them eighteen hundred.”
“Apiece?” I say. Ahkmim has borrowed enough to have 3,000; can he borrow 600 more?
“No,” Alem says. “Eighteen hundred for both.”
“Oh, good, they’ve got that.”
“They have to go to Tangier, and then they are to wait in a tea shop called” -he looks at a piece of paper-“the Cockatoo.” Someone will meet them there. I have it all here. I’ll go with them.”
“Why do you have to go with them?” I ask.
“Because I’m the one who set it up.”
“Let them go by themselves,” I say.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
* * *
The next evening I take Alem to the harni . Alem is a good-looking man, and in his djellaba he is quite distinguished. But he is not as tall as the harni and not as beautiful, of course. Men aren’t supposed to be beautiful, not like that.
Alem says, “This is the harni ? It looks really…human.”
The harni puts his hands together and says formally, “I am called Akhmim.”
Alem is nonplussed. After a moment, he says, “Let’s go get Hariba.”
The harni waits at the end of the street while Alem and I go to Zehra’s. Hariba is ready, all packed. Everyone is there: her mother, her sister Rashida, Rashida’s husband, and their new baby, Nabil, and Zehra and two of her sons. The little clump of death houses is full, with people spilling out into the street.
Zehra is weeping. She takes both of Alem’s hands into her own and kisses them. Alem is grave and dignified.
Zehra kisses me and hugs me. “You are too good a friend,” she says. If she only knew how I really felt. Hariba’s mother cannot speak. Tears brim in her eyes, but she doesn’t cry. She just holds my hands wordlessly.
It takes forever to leave. The street is dark, but light spills out of the houses all around us. I wonder how many of the neighbors know about Hariba and how many know it’s Alem who’s helping her.
Finally we can leave and at the end of the street, where we turn to go to the train station, the harni is waiting. I’m afraid Hariba will make a fool of herself, but she doesn’t, thank Allah. She’s quiet, but there’s a happiness inside her that infuriates me. She has to realize the risk Alem is taking.
I have insisted on going to Tangier with them. I can’t stand waiting at home. We don’t have the money, I don’t know what we’ll do. I have to have us ready to move. But I can’t. Everything waits on Hariba’s troubles.
Riding the train is as bad as waiting at home. I want to be with Alem, but I can’t say anything to him because Hariba and the harni are here and they’re all I want to talk about. What kind of life does she think she’s going to have? Does she think she’s going to live with the harni like a wife? It’s insane, all of it.
I fall asleep in the train.
Tangier smells of ocean. In the dark all I can see are white buildings. At least Akhmim pays for our two rooms at the hostel. I expect Alem to comment on the fact that Akhmim says to the clerk that he is Hariba’s husband, but Alem just looks at me, then looks away. I should never have brought him into this. I should have let Hariba solve her own problems.
In our room we lie down on a strange bed, not touching, and pretend to sleep.
It isn’t until afternoon the next day that the three of them go to the tea house, the Cockatoo. Alem says I can’t go. Alem so rarely puts his foot down. I think about arguing, but I don’t, although I don’t know how I can stand it. I sit in our room and watch out the window. I watch for hours, until finally, around dinnertime, Alem comes back with a dinner of shaslik. He looks tired.
“Is it done?” I ask.
He nods. “They leave tonight.”
I cry. He doesn’t comfort me or anything. He just sits on the bed, holding the shaslik and waiting. I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m not sad. Tension, maybe. It’s embarrassing, and I’m afraid to scoot over next to him. I manage to stop crying and we eat without talking about anything but the train the next morning. I wonder what this has done to us, to our feelings about each other. You get over things, I know. My mother says marriage is work, that you work through bad times. This is certainly one of the bad times.
After dinner, he says, “Do you want to walk around a little? You’ve never been to Tangier.”
We walk around and pretend we’re on a holiday. I look at the sea. It’s big, but I don’t feel anything. “Everything will be normal now, won’t it?” I ask.
“I hope,” he says tiredly.
They’re gone, I tell myself. At least they’re gone.
Finally we decide we’re tired and go back to the hostel. Lying in the strange bed, I can hear other people walking and talking through the walls. Death walls are so thick, but the walls of our new apartment are like these, will I go to sleep every night listening to my neighbors? Maybe moving is a mistake. Look what happened to Hariba when she left the Nekropolis.
In the dark I wonder, Are they gone yet? Are they on the water, on their way to Málaga?
When it finally starts to get light, that’s when I can really be sure they are on their way, and I can finally sleep for an hour until we have to get up for the train.
* * *
“When we get home,” I tell Alem, “we’ll both take a long nap.”
We are walking home from the train station. I feel as if someone poured sand in my eyes.
“I’ll go get Tariam after we’ve had a nap,” I say.
Alem takes my arm and stops me. He isn’t paying attention to me, and I look up and see people outside our house. “What?” I say.
Some of them are in police uniforms. Oh, my heart.
“Go to your mother’s,” Alem says.
“No,” I say, “it’s a mistake-”
“GO TO YOUR MOTHER’S,” he says.
They’ve seen us.
He pushes me away, back up the street. I can’t figure out what direction to move, but Alem walks toward them, dignified in his white djellaba.
Will I ever see him again?
5
In the Land of the Infidel
Alem is our savior. In the tea shop he’s as gentle as a brother, holding my elbow to seat me. When
Ayesha married him, I was happy for her. “Hariba,” she told me, “he’s a good man.” But he’s the last person I would have expected to be able to arrange something like this.
Still, here we are in a tea shop, waiting to meet the man who will get Akhmim and me out of the country. I’ve said thank you so many times that Alem is embarrassed. He’s a blessing from Allah. Allah watch over him for what he’s done for us, because I know that Ayesha didn’t want to be involved, I know I cajoled and guilted her into it.
The tea shop has a real bird in it, a white cockatoo with a headdress of feathers and scaly gray-blue feet. It shreds paper and screeches while we sit and sip tea, a harsh, shrill sound that makes me cross my ankles tight around each other and draws my shoulders up toward my ears.
A man comes in and sees us. It’s easy to tell we’re who he is looking for. He comes to our table and says, “Ahmad Shipping?”
That’s the name of the company that Alem works for. Alem nods.
“Please call me Carlos,” he says.
I thought the person we met would look like a sailor, worn skin from sun and weather, or like a tough guy, but he looks young and smooth and his teeth are very nice. He’s not E.C.U., he looks Arab, like us, but his name is foreign. Maybe he’s from Málaga? Maybe he’s a foreign? Or maybe he’s like us, and he’s not using his real name?
“You have money?” he asks.
“Half now and half on the ship,” Alem promises.
Akhmim gives him 900. So much money. Akhmim won’t say where he got it, just that he borrowed it from friends.
“There’s no record of them,” Alem says.
“No record,” Carlos agrees. I’m thinking that he has an accent, maybe. A little bit.
“All right then,” Alem says and stands up. He puts his hands together. “A pleasure,” he says.
Carlos looks at him as if he doesn’t know what to make of this man in his djellaba. “The same,” he says.
Alem walks out the door and stands on the street for a second, looking up at the sky. Then he turns left, away from the hotel and toward the water, and walks. Where’s he going?
I’ll probably never see him again. Or Ayesha, or my mother or my brothers and sister.
Carlos watches him, too, then shakes his head. “All right then,” he says. “Let’s go.”
I’m still shaky from being sick, but once I’ve stood up a moment, I’m all right. Akhmim is right there. It’s wonderful how reassuring he is. It’s wonderful to feel his hand on my elbow, just the way Alem held it, but different because it’s Akhmim, who’s part of me now. Since I’m not jessed anymore, I feel different in my head, as if part of me weren’t there. I haven’t told anyone, but I think maybe I’m damaged in my brain. Or maybe it’s just like wearing a cast. You wear it so long it feels like part of you and then when you take it off, you feel too light.
I keep watching for Alem when we walk down to the water, but I don’t see him. The Mediterranean is bright, bright blue. I never knew it was as blue as this. And it goes on out of sight, huge and full of water and air. I lift my face to the breeze.
Carlos takes us down to the docks, which are full of tar and dirt that clings to the hem of my gown, but I’m getting so tired I don’t care. He takes us up on his ship and shows us a place where we can wait. “I need your thumbprint on the manifest,” he says.
“Alem said I wasn’t supposed to sign anything.”
“It’s just a manifest,” he says. “No one looks at a manifest.”
“I can’t,” I say.
There is a tremor all through the ship as if something deep inside had awakened.
“We’re about to cast off,” he says. “I can’t land at Málaga if you aren’t on the manifest. Nobody ever pays any attention to it.” He shows me a slate, all electronic, with long forms and lists. “They’re automatic and no one ever reads them. Sign it or I’ll have to put you both off.”
I look at Akhmim. We’ve already spent 900, if he throws us off, I don’t know where else we can go. I press my thumb to the manifest.
Carlos says, “Sign for the harni, too.”
I press my thumb next to his name.
“Okay,” he says, “I need the rest of the money.”
Akhmim hands him the other 900. Is he going to throw us off now? Are the police waiting onboard?
“Okay,” he says, “we make landfall in about eleven hours, traffic allowing.”
He leaves us in this little place, sitting on the bed. It’s a small room with a bed that swings down out of the wall and a sink. It doesn’t even have a window. The ship is alive and moving, I can feel it. I’m nervous. I put my arms around Akhmim’s neck and lean against him and he puts his arms around my waist. I have forgotten the slightly musky smell of him.
The ship sails on the crayon-blue Mediterranean Sea , and no one bothers us at all.
* * *
We get to Málaga at three in the morning and someone other than Carlos comes and gets us. “Off,” he says. I have been asleep and I can’t figure out where I am or why everything smells like plastic and metal. The coverlet on the bed has a rough weave and it’s imprinted on my cheek.
“Can’t we wait until dawn?” Akhmim asks.
“Customs is here,” the man says. He has a strong accent.
I stumble out of the bunk, feeling stained and dirty in the clothes I slept in. “What do we do?” I ask.
“Claim asylum,” the man says.
He takes us up on deck. There’s not much room to really stand, most of the deck is like a bunch of boxy buildings and ladders and antennae whipping around searching for signals, but there’s a narrow place to walk, just wide enough across for one person. Akhmim follows me.
There are two men in uniform, and my heart starts beating too fast. I feel Akhmim, behind me, touch my shoulder. The ship stinks and the wind off the harbor smells like oil and garbage. I feel faint.
One of the men in uniform says something to me. The man who has taken us up on deck says from behind Akhmim, “He wants to know if you speak Spanish.”
“No, sir,” I say.
He says something to the man in the uniform-the customs official. The customs official frowns. He has a smooth face like a young man, but I think he isn’t really young. He beckons us to follow him. We climb down a ladder. My knees are shaking and I have to go very slow, but the customs man just waits. Then we walk down another narrow walkway to the gangway, and from there onto the dock. The ship never felt as if it were on the water, it always felt stable, but somehow I can still feel the difference in the dock. At least it doesn’t have the feeling of being alive. The ship’s huge in the darkness beside us.
I turn around and look at the city. It’s all lights, as if it were nine at night instead of three in the morning. There’s a big sign near us all lit up with an image of a woman drinking something the color of pale tea and full of light and bubbles. “Akhmim!” I say.
“What?” he says. “Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry, it’s nothing,” I say.
The woman in the sign is drinking beer .
I knew they drank in the E.C.U., but I never thought they would be so…so public about it.
We go down to the end of the docks to an office. It’s too bright. Everything in it looks so new. A woman is there with a spidery little headset, talking in Spanish, and a man looks up as we come in. The man bringing us in says something that sounds disapproving and this man frowns. He says something to us in Spanish and the first man says something in Spanish and they frown even more. This man points to two chairs, dark red and padded on the seat and back, and Akhmim and I sit down.
There we wait. People work all around us, but no one talks to us, of course. They’re all Spanish people, although one of the men looks a little as if he might be Berber.
Akhmim holds my hand. I’m so tired and sleepy. I try to lean my head against his shoulder, but I can’t get comfortable.
It’s nearly dawn when the man who brought us from the
ship comes back to the office. He talks with the man and woman there, and the woman says something that makes everyone laugh. Then finally he looks at us and beckons, and we follow him outside to a little gray bubble car that really only has room in the back for one, but Akhmim and I both squeeze in. Three people are too much for the little car and every time we hit a bump, the bottom scrapes against the road and I grip Akhmim’s arm, but he just keeps saying softly, “It’s all right.”
It’s not all right. This is where we’re going to live and already I don’t like it. It will never be all right again. But I smile every time he says it.
There’re cars in the street, lots of little bubble cars and some sedans and even some lorries, although not any like Ayesha’s husband Alem directs. These lorries all have human drivers. There are people on the sidewalks and they all have a lot of skin showing-legs and arms and women’s faces. It’s like the mistress used to watch. Somehow, until I actually see it, I guess I haven’t believed it, not really, not in my heart.
You can never go back, says the voice in my head.
I can’t dress like these women. I can’t.
“Where is he taking us?” I ask Akhmim.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Maybe they are taking us to a hotel, or someplace where we can sleep?” It occurs to me they might take us to jail, and I would be separated from Akhmim.
The city is hilly. There are old buildings on the tops of some of the hills and they are grand, lit from outside like monuments. They have steeples or towers. Down on the streets, though, everything is a mix of old and modern.
We drive into a narrow alley and park behind a big foamstone office. It’s nicer than the foamstone buildings at home, it has wavering balconies and it’s got little decorations like stalactites. The building is yellow and the decorations are red and blue. It looks as if a child made the building. I think it can’t possibly be a jail.
The man takes us in a back door and up some stairs. Akhmim holds my elbow. We fall behind because I get tired so easily and can’t go so fast yet, but he waits at the door to an office when we get to the second floor.
Nekropolis Page 18
