Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  I take a shot of this page, keep turning. More on being lost in the desert:

  Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write? . . . the darkness above me reels with hovering birds . . .

  I turn quicker, barely seeing the words, until finally a heading catches my eye. Abu N’af.

  On Sitting With The Polish Traveller At Abu N’af. The watch beeps. In desperation I take three photos, pages at random, because some word I haven’t even fully processed has caught my eye. I pick up the book with the black leather cover and my nail catches on a thicker page, at the end.

  It is two pages, partially glued together, with something inside: contrasts of light and dark. A photograph. I run my nail along the gummed edges; there is only room to slide in my little finger.

  A noise, close by. I hold my breath. Laforche is coming.

  I can almost make out the image although I can’t quite believe what I am seeing. It is a man standing next to a line of other smaller shapes. The smaller shapes are attached to structures which I feel are made of wood. There is writing on the shapes. Les fugitifs. I am beginning to guess what the wooden structures are. My brain can’t process the image. 1890, I thought. That is impossible. It is impossible that there would be a –

  Footsteps on the stairs. I just have time to put the book down and slide the camera into my pocket as Laforche comes into the room.

  THE SECOND AFTERNOON

  ‘A message from Casablanca,’ Laforche says. ‘From Hafid Street.’

  He looks carefully at the desk. ‘Imagine being stationed out here, a century ago. Many times Abu N’af was used as a garrison: protecting the well, you see. Then it would take weeks of hard travelling to get back to Casa. The soldiers would sit with nothing to do but play cards, dice; their uniforms crusted with sand, wet rags wrapped around their heads, enduring the flies, the scorpions. Knowing that you couldn’t leave would make it worse. But a roll of the dice never defeats chance.’

  I should be used to it by now, his techniques. I should know that all I can do is wait. It is pointless asking questions.

  But of course I can’t help myself. ‘What message?’

  He says, ‘Your friends are coming.’

  The shock opens crevasses under my skin. Mitch is coming early, just as he threatened. To show me who’s in charge? Or because of new evidence from Sicily about her husband’s death?

  I have to get to the roof and call Mitch. There is a thudding in my ears. The sound of my pulse. The sound of helicopters.

  I bite down, hard, and say steadily enough, ‘What time?’

  Laforche smiles. ‘Maybe right now, they are climbing into the helicopter. Maybe the blades are turning. Now they fly over the desert, watching their shadows fall distorted across the dunes.’ He takes out his handkerchief and delicately wipes his hands. The smell of lavender wafts past me. ‘You know them better than I do, Monsieur. Your friends from Hafid Street.’ He begins to fold the handkerchief precisely. ‘What do you think they will do? These Hafid Street men. These CIA men.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Laforche, I keep telling you I’m not CIA.’

  He puts away the handkerchief and wraps the French book in its ivory silk. ‘If you have offices on Hafid Street, you’re CIA. Maybe you are just a lapdog of the Americans. But don’t keep telling me you are a lowly worker at the Australian Embassy.’

  ‘I can hardly admit to anything else, can I?’ I say.

  He thinks for a minute and nods. ‘But I still have jurisdiction here, you see? So if I decide that the woman is too sick to be questioned, then it does not happen.’

  I put the briefcase on the desk. ‘What do you want? Money?’

  ‘You’ve already given me money.’ He eyes the briefcase. ‘Do you have a gun in there?’

  ‘I’m a pencil pusher, Laforche. I sit in my back room – with my Scotch, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. I organise, I collate my facts. Everyone thinks this business is all guns. But I’ve barely handled one.’

  I want to say: I live in shadows. I’ve played a part so long I’ve atrophied into it. I am the job.

  ‘I think,’ he says, ‘you are telling me what you were.’

  I spread my hands, try to look casual. It is an effort. I realise how much I have let him rattle me. But then I wasn’t in good condition when I arrived at Abu N’af. Right from the start, I was damaged.

  I say, ‘If I tell you anything else I put her life in danger.’

  He snorts and eases the book into the jewelled casket, places it in the bureau and turns the key.

  I say, ‘You think I can tell you she is innocent. But it’s just the opposite.’

  ‘Why do you think I need answers and definitions? You Westerners are in love with endings.’

  I stare at him. ‘You must need to know guilt or innocence.’

  ‘Sometimes silence is the truest form of affection.’ He sighs. ‘Anyway, who decides guilt and innocence? You? Why should I believe your judgement?’

  ‘Because,’ I say, ‘I was there.’

  He raises an eyebrow.

  ‘All right then,’ I say. ‘Because I’m as guilty as she is. That is why you need to let me talk to her again. Before the others get here.’

  ‘This so-called interrogation is an excuse for something personal.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I say, ‘if you think this is a story about revenge.’

  ‘Not revenge.’

  ‘You think this is a story about love?’

  ‘I think,’ says Laforche, ‘it is a story about maps.’

  ‘Maps?’ I stare at him. ‘That’s crazy. What have maps got to do with it?’

  ‘Everything is a map. These diaries can be a map. Our bodies are maps.’ He goes to the top of the stairs. ‘If Sister Antony agrees, you can talk to the woman. But I will be present.’

  On the walkway, I sit down in the shadow of the wall and plug the camera into my laptop and download the shots of the English translation of Rimbaud’s diary. Supposed diary, I remind myself. I still think of the diary as something forged by Sister Antony.

  I loosen my tie. The shutters rattle occasionally. No-one else is on the walkway. I take off my tie. It is dark blue. Office blue. All my ties are plain colours. Usually dark. I let it fall to the ground. After a minute I pick it up, fold it neatly away in my briefcase.

  The laptop pings: the photo of the pages grows on the screen. I read.

  Abu N’af. October 1, 1890.

  ‘I hate the desert,’ said the Pole, staring with dark unhappy eyes at the red landscape. He waved a small whip of knotted ropes at the flies. The knots caught him on the cheek and left flecks of blood. There were tiny iron nails tied into the ends of the ropes. He closed his eyes, waved the whip again, his mouth quivering when the nails caught his cheek.

  ‘Why come to the desert?’ I said. I was bored. Contrary to what everyone always thought about me, perversion doesn’t interest me. I am already too wracked by my own personal demons to ever want more than the most straightforward connections in other areas. Ironic, but there it is. The number of publicly adored poets, proudly scandalous poets, poets who boast of deranging the senses, who adopt exactly the same position every time – Mallarmé told me he found it soothing – is incredible.

  Incroyable, I should say. I feel my French slipping away like a mirage here. My language is becoming a jumbled mix of Arabic, French and English and, now that I have a Chinese valet, some Mandarin as well.

  I imagine the world using one language in future. It would be made up of words that sound like their meaning, evoke their emotion. Every word has an emotion, a colour. Amigo. That’s blue. Peace: a soft green. Butterfly: jade at its lightest, like the crest of a wave turning over in the shallows near the shore.

  Language would be simpler, no more than the basics in trade. Direct, unpretentious, egalitarian. The new slang. Elitist language would be reserved for the writers, the poets, whose work would become more and more ornate.

  I shuddered. I could already see the la
borious Alexandrine making a return.

  ‘ . . . easy enough to carry away,’ the Pole was saying.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘In war it is easy enough to carry even sizeable pieces away. If one is organised.’ He saw my look. ‘Of art, Monsieur. Pieces of art.’

  ‘Art? What is left? Napoleon took everything he could lay his hands on. The English did their damnedest to remove the rest.’

  ‘In Europe, yes.’ He pointed the leather butt of the whip at the white sands, the white hole in the sky. ‘But not here. Not the Orient.’

  ‘Here?’ I looked around at the stone walls, the camels dropping turds in unison under the lone palm tree. ‘They’re welcome to the flies.’

  ‘No, no.’ He pointed the whip away, to the west, to Casablanca.

  ‘They’ll shoot you before you go a camel-length.’

  ‘Usually, yes,’ he said. ‘But in war, matters get confused.’

  ‘They’ll shoot you even more then.’

  A clink of bracelets. The dark woman who brought Laforche the message has returned. She stands in the archway and stares at me without blinking. Flames are painted in henna on her feet. Her dark pupils are ringed in a ghostly grey.

  She puts a wool blanket and a cloth bundle on the stone floor and marches across, grabs my hand. When I try to retreat, she tightens her grip. She is surprisingly strong.

  ‘I can read it,’ she says. ‘I tell good fortunes.’

  ‘I don’t believe.’

  ‘You should.’ She presses a blunt thumbnail into my palm, staring at me with her fearless eyes. She says, ‘You were born with a map of calamity in your hand.’ She takes the bundle, kneels on the floor and spreads out the blanket. There are minute leather bags hanging on plaited ropes, a few dark wooden bowls, a clatter of thin gold bangles, small woollen mats in clashing reds and purples.

  ‘Before I tell you what I heard, you choose,’ she says with a sweep of her hand, sitting back on her burning heels.

  ‘I don’t want – ’

  ‘First, I tell you a little about each precious gift. A gift for your lady friend.’

  ‘There’s nothing – ’

  She ignores me and begins to relate the history of each object. ‘The three camels on the lid are the three mountains of Mahtouf,’ she says, picking up a small painted box. ‘This is the emblem of my mother’s tribe, the tribe of Betsoul,’ pointing to a mat. ‘This bracelet shows fires and plagues; this bowl is useful for eating chickpeas and onion.’

  I think, Someone at Abu N’af sent Mitch the photos of the woman. I had thought it was Laforche. Now I wonder if this woman is on Mitch’s payroll.

  She puts down the last bowl and says, ‘You can pay me in wheat flour.’

  I look at her helplessly.

  She points at my watch. ‘You pay me with that.’

  I instinctively cover my watch with my left hand, as though she could levitate it off my wrist. ‘I need information about the woman in the sick bay.’ I add hastily, ‘The truth.’

  ‘My fortunes are the truth.’ She sits, cross-legged, the flames on her heels merging with the red-sand colours of her skirt.

  ‘I don’t think you know anything to help me,’ I say.

  She rolls up the blanket. Her bangles clank, muted and resentful. ‘The Nazarene talked in her sleep.’

  ‘I need more than babblings.’

  She gathers the blanket and rises gracefully onto her toes, stretching, and stands, flat-footed and flat-backed.

  She says, ‘I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart.’

  I give her the watch.

  ‘My name is Meersun,’ the woman says, sliding the watch into a pocket in her skirt and squatting on the stone floor.

  ‘I won’t weary you with my story . . . ’ Here she shoots me a sly look as though she senses my lack of interest. ‘Enough to say that my mother Betsoul suffered horribly at the hands of the Nazarenes. My grandfather cast me out when I refused to marry the man he chose for me. A man who had already beaten two wives to death’ – her voice rises indignantly – ‘who took little boys into back alleyways. Women are for babies, he would say to me. Men are for fun. A soldier, of course.

  ‘Sister Antony took me in. She owed me a great deal.’ She raises her broad palms. ‘No-one can operate the rollers in the laundry as well as I can.’

  I wait. She gives me another sly look. ‘Your woman said you found her when she had left her home.’

  ‘So she remembers.’

  Meersun takes the watch out of her pocket, holds it to the light, turning it this way and that so the glass face becomes a bright disc in the room.

  She says, ‘I had to sit with her. Even Sister Antony must rest sometimes. I think she is angry God does not give her energy to work day and night.’ She slips the watch on, up to her forearm, admiring it. ‘The woman told me lots of things. True things.’

  The thudding is back in my ears. ‘Only I can judge what is true.’

  Meersun comes towards me. I hear the swish of her skirts, the slap of her feet on the stone.

  She says, ‘The woman didn’t look at mirrors but watched herself in bowls of water she shook, to make ripples. Then she drew herself like that.’ She waggles her tattooed hand so the inked flames shift and blur before my eyes.

  ‘Distorted,’ I say, turning.

  Meersun says, ‘I think she made the scorpion bite her, so she looked like what she saw in the shaking water.’

  A cloying musky smell comes off her as she stands behind me. Metal rattles and pauses, rattles and pauses. She is tossing the watch up and down in her palm.

  ‘I like this watch,’ she says. ‘Do you have another?’

  ‘No,’ I say. The thudding is louder. There are specks in front of my eyes. I rub them angrily.

  The musky smell is more intense. She whispers, ‘No-one else knows this.’ She is right behind me. ‘The woman told me you killed her husband.’

  The thudding is louder. Closer.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ I shout, turning so fast that my elbow catches her shoulder. She backs away. ‘You’re lying.’

  Meersun stares past me. I hold out my hand. ‘She wouldn’t have said that.’ But I think, Would she? I raise my voice over the increasing noise. ‘Give me the watch back.’

  My words disappear in the roar that sweeps over the Asylum. A black helicopter swoops past the window. It rears upwards, out of sight, the noise wrenched away.

  That bastard Mitch. He had no intention of waiting for me to find something.

  I push past Meersun and shove the laptop in the briefcase. My hand touches the gun and I wonder whether it is just Mitch and the pilot.

  I head for the stairs. Meersun catches my arm.

  ‘You’ll never prove it,’ I say as I pull away.

  She yells into the spiralling light. ‘She said it was the poem you learned for her. I carry you in my heart. It was you.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I shout. ‘I hate poetry.’

  I blunder down the steps, slip on the rubbed smooth stone, and hurry past the fall of stronger light at the archway on the second level. I come out into the ground arcade, nearly tripping over a chicken sleeping against a pillar. I run through the main gateway. I run, head uncovered, clutching my briefcase, a ridiculous man running out into the noonday desert sun.

  The cleared circle where my pilot had landed the day before is empty.

  Away from the shadow of the walls, the air is gasping with heat. I am gasping. I can barely see. I shove on my sunglasses and run to the edge of the plateau.

  Almost immediately I stumble. I slow to a fast walk, then a stroll, then a careful plodding. The ground here isn’t red or even brown. It is a pitted grey landscape of nothing but stones.

  I reach the edge and look down to the plain. The helicopter sits half on the road below, at an angle, as though it has been carelessly parked. Some malfunction?

  A man gets out of the helicopter. White shirt, black tie, black trousers: Mitch’s uniform.
I open my briefcase and use the binoculars to scan the body of the helicopter. Arabic markings, unsurprisingly. Officially, the Hafid Street office is a small import export firm, tight on money, forced to charter from the local businesses.

  The windows are tinted. I calculate: twenty minutes to walk to the plain. Mitch would have water there.

  I hang the binoculars around my neck and set off.

  The road is steeper than it looks and roughly cleared of the larger stones. I try to keep an eye on the helicopter but if I don’t watch my step I slip on jagged pieces of flint.

  A row of white pebbles edges the road. There seems little difference between the stony ground of the road and the stony desert next to it. But it is a valiant gesture. I plod on, feeling my tongue swell in my mouth, checking every now and again that the helicopter has not moved. I begin to see patterns between the rocks; the glaze of lizard tracks. Fragments of pottery, red and crumbling. The dust has coated my shoes; there are big smears on my trousers. I slap some of it off but it seems to settle again almost immediately. The heat is pushing into my bones, my knees feel disconnected. The briefcase is heavy in my hand. I am almost tempted to put it down and come back for it later.

  I am walking into the sacred empty, I tell myself, leaving behind the technological marvels of the world.

  That sounds right. That sounds like something Laforche would say.

  Desert speak.

  I stop. I have almost reached the bottom. Behind me, the road slopes up steeply. The Asylum is pugnacious against the white sky. It is bigger than it looks from the inside. The turrets rise like buds, holding the Asylum’s secret stories. Stories within stories; lives flowering within. Rimbaud, the nomad poet, could well have thought he could create here.

  I stumble over a large stone and another. Not stones: two bloodstained goats’ hooves. They are cut raggedly above the fetlock, the white hair pink-tinged, the split hooves as grey as the desert soil. I back away but it is too late; a scarlet splash is thrown over my shoe.

  I plod on. I think I am moving quicker now that I am on level ground but the helicopter is no nearer. I look through the binoculars.