Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  On the ground next to the man in the white shirt is a small black briefcase. Beside him is a man dressed in the immaculate white robes of the Sahara. They both have their backs to me. As I look, the second man jerks his wrist. Something dark flies into the sky. I tilt my head but the sweat runs into my eyes.

  The ground shifts.

  The desert is the true seer, I see that now. I recognise the immensity of the landscape. It has a kind of purity: the ultimate truth. But do I want it? I shake my head. I want the sweat to run into my dry mouth. But all I taste is salt. When it rains in the desert, the sand must smell like the sea.

  I re-focus the binoculars. White clouds billow behind the Massif. I find the dark bird – a falcon – tearing at the wispy gauze of sky. The bird plummets to the ground, turning as it goes. A hand’s length from the ground, it swoops up again.

  The robed man raises his arm. The bird drops out of the white air, extending its clawed feet. It slows and sits on the man’s forearm. I see the tracking bracelet around its left ankle. Pain – as sharp as it ever was in Sicily – stabs me.

  The man with the briefcase takes out a small black box, extends an antenna and sweeps the horizon. I adjust the binoculars. He has a solid gold watch on his right wrist, a heavy signet ring with a large ruby on his finger.

  The falcon is thrown up again. It soars into the skies, a dark rose thrown off a snowy bough.

  To touch the very face of God, I whisper to myself.

  Sweat runs like an animal down my cheek. The lines of the helicopter are distorting.

  The bird returns. The man with the scanner commences another sweep. He finishes, lowers the box and the falconer eases a leather hood over the bird’s eyes and they walk back to the helicopter.

  The Asylum is far away. On the road, the black metal blades are turning. I could leave now: hitch a lift to Casablanca, bribe my way out, disappear. Back to Borneo.

  At the thought of Borneo I drop to my knees. Stones dig into my shins. I open my briefcase, take out my tie, put it on, search for my spare watch, slide that on, set the alarm for three o’clock. Interrogation hour.

  Closer to the ground, the plain doesn’t look so much like rubble. I see distinct hills and valleys, a landscape in miniature. A small pale cactus, the length of my forefinger, pokes out from a rock in a strange deep groove. When I sit back on my heels I realise I am in the remnants of a water track.

  Now I see there are myriad variations of colour in the earth. A million versions of brown.

  I raise my face to the sun. I don’t feel thirsty anymore. My mouth tastes metallic. The light presses against my closed eyes. I could imagine that in the desert you only dream in light. Even your nightmares would be in light.

  I look at the watch. Noon. The seconds seem to slow on the panel. Fifty-seven seconds. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. The small numbers flicker. Finally they stop – 12.01. Minutes go by. The panel does not change.

  The helicopter lifts, its blades bending in the hot air. It hovers and turns west, following the road to Casablanca. Soon it is a speck in my eye.

  I stay on my knees in the desert, staring at the shadow my body makes on the ground. This seems like the only shade so after a while I try to crawl inside it. Lying on my back, I see a large black bird. It has a hooked neck and long narrow beak. Another bird appears. They circle lazily. I want to recall the helicopter. I open my briefcase to write a message: Here are your birds. But it seems easier to lie still, grit in my eyelashes.

  After a while, I feel myself moving into shadow, into black water. Back to the black lake in Sicily.

  ‘Water is a kiss.’ Who said that? I knew; I just didn’t know her identity. ‘We dive into rock pools like lives we never thought we could enter. We shed our old skins in water, we take on a new skin. Water passes into us. We want new masks, new identities, but all we can do is take in water. Like tears, like pulses.’

  The light is blotted out. Sister Antony kneels, tugs me upright. Her hood is drawn over her head and her palms are cool. As though night is somehow trapped in her body, like the pockets of darkness trapped in the ground at the end of night.

  ‘When I . . . interrogation, what . . . say?’ My voice disappears into some words.

  Sister Antony raises my head, puts a metal flask to my lips. I choke on the sugary water, feel a sharp aftertaste, like thorns in honey. I twist my head so the sourness runs down my chin but she says, ‘Drink this and I’ll tell you.’

  The grit in my throat is washed away. The terrible heat lessens.

  The Sister tips the bottle higher. ‘You need to bring her to life like the desert is brought to life with rain.’ I can barely hear her over the sound of falling water in my ears. She says what sounds like, ‘You need to bring her to life with words.’

  ‘Nothing . . . she listen to.’

  ‘You’re wrong. We die always of a frustrated word.’ Her lips do not seem to move but her voice says, ‘The woman sings songs to the disappeared. I say prayers to God. Laforche looks for poems that will conquer the desert. We are like cactuses sending out shoots, placing our hard thorny side to the world.’

  I finish drinking and hand the bottle back. After a moment, I am able to sit up.

  ‘You want . . . me to talk to the woman,’ I say slowly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  She hesitates. ‘Every time the Asylum has been on the verge of extinction, a woman has arrived to save it.’

  ‘But it can’t be this woman. Maybe it’s you.’

  Her face hardens so the sun traces the flat planes of her chin and right cheek in fire. ‘I hid from Him through the longest night and the brightest dawn.’ She closes her eyes. ‘There is a famous story of the desert. Maybe it takes place in Abu N’af, maybe not. It concerns a religious community long ago, one grown vain and complacent. Trading for silks and ivory idols from the south had replaced contemplation. The community fell on difficult times: years of sandstorms which blocked supplies and left the nuns and monks near starvation. A serving girl appeared among them: a bedraggled thing, barely able to speak, filthy. She was treated roughly, given only crusts to eat, but she never complained. One day she disappeared as suddenly as she came, taking the dust storms with her. The community prospered. Years later a lion was seen digging a grave in ground near the Kabir Massif, ground so hard that no shovel could break it. The lion was burying a woman, uneaten. The body of the serving girl who went into the desert.’ She opens her eyes.

  ‘Storing left-over food,’ I say, holding up the watch, shaking it.

  ‘The body was untouched, the women said.’

  ‘Why didn’t the nuns dig up the body?’

  Sister Antony looks at me as though I am mentally deficient but she answers politely enough, ‘No human tool could break the surface.’

  ‘Right.’ I shake the watch again. The numbers are still frozen.

  I can’t decipher her expression. Later, I realised what it was: acceptance. She could accept my sneers because I had caused someone to be brought to Abu N’af who more than compensated for my lack of faith.

  ‘A mirage,’ I say, sliding the watch back on. ‘They imagined the whole thing.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Mass hysteria. Common among solitaries, I would have thought.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She says, ‘Two nights before your woman arrived, lions were seen on the grave.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ I slap at the dust on my legs, punching to the bone. ‘None of us are saints here,’ I say loudly. ‘It’s different after thirty-five, after forty. There’s a sense of regret. Everything is ruled by time. By calculations. This isn’t a story about a winsome girl. She would be the first to tell you she is no saint. There’s a sourness. A melancholy. A sarcasm.’

  ‘In the desert you only reach your goal by zigzagging through the wind.’

  I have to restrain myself from swearing. ‘Did she tell you her real name?’

  ‘We don’t use our names here,’ says Sister Antony. ‘We take on
other identities in the desert. Other lives.’

  She closes the briefcase and stands. There is no dust on her robe. She leans to help me up. I sway and she grasps my wrists. ‘Your watch has stopped.’ She taps it with her fingernail and the numbers tick over. The alarm setting comes up.

  ‘Three o’clock?’ she says.

  ‘I must talk to the woman then. After that it will be too late.’

  ‘For you?’

  ‘For her.’ I hesitate. ‘For both of us.’

  She still has her hand on my wrist.

  ‘You won’t allow it,’ I say. ‘Like last night.’

  ‘Last night, it was 3 am when you tried to talk to her. That is the devil’s hour, when Christ died on the cross. 3 pm is the opposite; 3 pm is when Christ was born.’ She releases me. ‘Today is your last chance to speak to her.’

  I take a step and tremble. ‘How long was I out here for?’

  ‘Twenty minutes. You were out in the desert for twenty minutes.’

  ‘Who would want this land?’ I say as we walk.

  ‘You would be surprised, Monsieur. The Saudis come weekly for their hawking – ’

  ‘But the land is dead.’

  Sister Antony points. ‘See the life around you.’ She digs her fingers into the sand and comes up with a small shrivelled date the colour of faded parchment. ‘This is still sweet next to the stone. You can grind it into flour. And that small plant – ’ she touches the tip of a straggly thistle of a green so faded that it looks almost white – ‘can be used for headaches, but only in the right doses. Anything bigger and it becomes a poison.’ She picks up a tiny black seed with her fingernail. ‘This helps digestion but in small portions or you hallucinate.’ She lets the seed drop. ‘Everything must be judged to proportion in the desert. Take too much and you die.’

  Instead of leading me up the hill she turns off the road and walks east, away from the Massif and Casablanca. She points across the flat country. The grey stony ground gives way to the sand dunes rising and falling to the horizon in waves of burnt sand, the flames showing even in the fierce noon light. She points to the most desolate spot in the middle. ‘That is where we found Madeleine.’

  I can’t believe it. There is nothing there.

  ‘Laforche thinks she had maps,’ I say, ‘of some system of old wells.’

  Sister Antony shakes her head.

  ‘If Madel – the woman told us of a way across,’ I say, ‘that would make it better for her.’

  ‘She didn’t have maps,’ says Sister Antony.

  ‘No water? No protection?’

  ‘No.’

  I look down at my dirty hands: the small cuts on my palms, the skin already turning a dull red.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I say. ‘She must have had help.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Who – oh, no. I’m sorry. I can’t believe in divine intervention.’

  ‘What other explanation is there?’

  ‘There must have been someone else with her.’ I try not to think of Pietr. Pietr is dead.

  Sister Antony says, ‘There were no camels, no cars. She was alone.’

  ‘What did she look like,’ I ask, ‘when you found her in the desert?’

  ‘She was hunched over,’ says Sister Antony, ‘as though in great pain. She was trembling, there were stains across her tunic, across her heart.’ She gestured across her chest. ‘But there was not a mark on her. No sunburn, no cuts on her feet, although the ground between the dunes and Abu N’af is harsh, filled with small stones, cactus, old shells, bleached bones. When I put a hand on her shoulder and asked her what she was doing, she said, “I am eating my heart. It is bitter but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart”.’

  I stare at the dunes falling away into Algeria: no trees, no roads, no shade.

  ‘Imagine the first people here,’ says Sister Antony. ‘Even the hardiest must have quailed at what was before them, those black people from the south. The drought would have weakened them. After them, invaders who rode horses and had weapons made of iron: the Berbers. Then, centuries of fighting with clans, the Masmouda in the Rif, the Sanhaja. The Vandals controlling everything until the time of Idris. More clans until the Alaouit ruler Moulay al-Rashid. No real enemies but each other until the French came and divided it all up with the Spanish. And so it goes on. We ousted the colonists. Now we fight, to annexe the Western Sahara, with help from Algeria, of course. And the Americans when it suits them.’

  ‘My employers have some wild idea that arms from Algeria are being funnelled through Morocco and Tunisia,’ I say, ‘and on to Sicily, just a boat ride away.’ I watch closely. She is impassive. ‘Then on from Sicily to bomb targets in Europe.’

  ‘And elsewhere,’ says Sister Antony.

  At the base of the hill with the Asylum directly above us, she faces what looks like solid rock; I think she is going to walk straight into it. But at the last moment she turns sideways and disappears through a narrow opening.

  I squeeze in behind her. Almost immediately the gap widens into a shallow cave. The roof presses down on me. The temperature drops ten degrees.

  Ahead is a doorway: reinforced wood with metal brackets and hinges hammered into the rock. The Sister takes out a large iron key and heaves the door open, revealing stairs cut into the same dark rock that I had seen in the underground bedrooms.

  We climb through the dusky light to the next level. The wall is cool, even slightly damp when I touch it. I smell salt.

  Sister Antony takes a torch from her pocket and points to a passage running off to our left. ‘The well,’ she says. She opens a door on our right. Meat on hooks is hanging in rows; chests filled with ice line the whitewashed rock walls. There are lanterns by the door and stacked candles. In Casablanca, the hanging meat is coated in flies, turning a dull green. But there are no flies here.

  Sister Antony points to the wet sheen on the flagstones. ‘The well is drawn off a channel which runs under the Massif to the Kabir mountains. Somewhere deep below the rock, they think there is an underground lake which feeds the channel.’ She draws a breath. ‘To find that . . . ’

  ‘You could irrigate the desert.’

  ‘Then the people would come.’

  ‘Businessmen,’ I say. ‘Non-believers. Americans.’

  She refuses to be drawn. ‘Abu N’af will always be a refuge for solitaries, hermits, people who cannot survive in the noisy world.’

  We climb the stairs. Light comes down to meet us and I see the numbers on my watch. The old sickness is back in my stomach. It is as though it has never left me. It has only vanished briefly, during that time in Sicily. With her.

  I sway against the rock. Sister Antony grips my elbow, hard.

  ‘Everyone plays their own games in the desert,’ she says. ‘For amusement, for money, for revenge. Laforche knows exactly when the Saudis come hawking; they radio ahead.’ She lets me go, steps back. ‘The desert will send you crazy with suspicions, with mirages.’

  ‘Crazier,’ I say.

  ‘Remember,’ says Sister Antony, ‘you can always make a fresh start with your next breath.’

  THE SECOND EVENING

  We are at the door of the infirmary. Laforche stares at me. ‘You understand this is your last chance to speak to her. After this, she says – ’

  I snort. ‘She doesn’t have a choice.’

  ‘But I do, Monsieur. Remember that.’

  We go in.

  Through the half-closed shutters, the fierce light is already fading. Grey is soaking up the sky. The wind whines against the hill.

  ‘It will storm tonight,’ says Laforche as we walk across the floor, our feet hitting the tiles like castanets.

  ‘Rain?’ I am trying to breathe slowly, clear my mind.

  ‘Dry lightning.’

  We reach the bed. Again, Sister Antony is sitting, her head bowed. Laforche stands at the foot of the bed, arms behind his back.

  ‘You look different,’ says the woman.r />
  I put my hand to my open collar, to where my tie should be. ‘Not the office boy.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not the patsy.’

  ‘That’s your interpretation. Not mine.’

  I pull a wooden chair out from the wall, sit next to the bed, my briefcase on my knee.

  ‘Still got your beloved case,’ she says. ‘Your identity.’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘You can’t keep files on everyone.’ She presses her lips together, her back arched. I half rise from my seat. She continues, in gasps, ‘Ashes to ash.’

  ‘Don’t.’ I stop myself from cursing her. ‘Do you want names here? Should I call you Ophelia? Yeah . . . Ophelia and her brother, of the tragic house of – ’

  She forces herself up. She shouts, ‘Don’t you dare include my brother.’ Her face drains white. The welts are as dark as scars. Sister Antony lowers her onto the pillows. The sound of the woman’s breathing fills the room.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ My fists clench. I feel the tendons standing out in my neck. ‘Your brother wasn’t – ’

  She sits up again, clutching at Sister Antony. ‘You bastard!’ she says. ‘You told me my brother was alive. Getting me to help your demon friends.’

  ‘Enough,’ says Sister Antony. The woman falls back, staring at the ceiling.

  Laforche clears his throat. ‘I think – ’

  ‘Not yet,’ says Sister Antony, and to me, ‘Ask your questions.’

  I look at the crumpled figure in the bed.

  ‘Now,’ says Sister Antony. ‘Or never.’

  I sit by the bed. The only way I can look at her is to think of her as a map, not a person. She is a map to recovery with all the answers. She is a country of red and white, of smooth planes and festering welts. I think of the smudged Sicilian afternoon light falling on the gleam of a wrist bone, the curve of her right ear. The lower lobe. Lobe. I almost thought “love”.

  ‘We need to know.’ I raise my voice so Laforche and the Sister will remember when Mitch asks. ‘What did Pietr tell you before he died? Where did he hide the Baghdad statuettes?’