Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  Her hands were hurting again. She held a butterfly-shaped hair comb up to the light, looked through the black teeth at the European. He had shiny dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. A beard or heavy five o’clock shadow – she couldn’t tell from here. He was in his early forties, she thought, a few years younger than she. He wore a black T-shirt with jeans. She sensed he wasn’t Polish: Albanian, Turkish maybe. Not Arabic. Or at least, not wholly Arabic.

  The hair comb was made of oiled wood, she saw now. The spreading butterfly wings concealed the wooden teeth underneath. The colours and pattern on one wing did not match the colours and pattern on the other but the painted wood still had great vibrancy in its jumbles of reds and greens and blues and purples. It was small, with narrow teeth for fine hair. It was a child’s comb. Maybe she could give it to Betsoul, to give to Meersun.

  She paid for the comb and crossed to the south side of the market. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the European moving parallel to her.

  At the next stone archway, she turned sharply down a tiny alley. A skinny bare-foot boy stepped in front of her, chewing gum. He wore ragged shorts and half-heartedly held out his hand, not really expecting her to stop. She bent and pushed her scarf back so he could see the scar on her face.

  ‘Can you understand me?’ she said, asking first in standard Arabic. The boy looked wary. She tried Maghrebi Arabic. They would have problems communicating if he spoke a more regional dialect. Every other town – Tangier, Fes – had its own dialect, but Casablanca had been so buffeted by outsiders that the town’s language was diluted and reshaped. She thought the locals now must feel like the Native Americans when they visited Las Vegas. Another construct in the desert.

  The boy was fascinated by the scar – he couldn’t help himself – he kept staring at it. She put her hand on his chin, forced him to look at her. ‘Understand?’

  He grinned. He couldn’t help that either. ‘Enough to do business.’

  ‘Good. You know who I am?’

  He nodded. ‘The Mission Nazarene.’ She led him to the stone arch, held him as they looked around the corner. The European was moving aimlessly back and forth.

  ‘Do you see the white man?’ The boy nodded. ‘I need you to find out where he is from. But discreetly – secretly. So he doesn’t know you are asking. Do you understand?’

  She gave him some coins. ‘More later,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at Al Saad lookout.’

  He took off.

  She continued down the alley, finding the stairs, barely a foot across, cut into the dark brown rock. She climbed, gathering her robes around her, digging her fingers into the crevices to stop from falling backwards.

  She came out on the upper street level. An opening between the shops looked over the houses which jammed against each other in endless pale tan rows and mazes, on and on to the blue-grey Rif Mountains. Irregular puckering in the sky hinted that the day could reject its relentless course, could rebel and add some unpredictability to the routine of an hour spent, like every hour, waiting for sunset and the cooler air.

  A scorpion – dusted brown, innocuous – emerged from between the cracks of a broken pink stone jar lying against the wall. It walked sideways past her, following the glazed path of a lizard through the dirt. She breathed out and the scorpion swung to face her, its tail lifted. She stared at the fork at the end of the kinked plates. The devil’s fork, the creature itself just a receptacle to carry spitefulness through the desert. It was born to strike at weakness: the exposed heel, the flinching sole.

  She backed away. After a moment the scorpion lowered its tail, moved on.

  Out there was the desert. The blank page waiting to be written, she thought to herself. The memories waiting to be unearthed like the water trapped deep beneath the sands, like the brown bodies thrown by the French into the wells to punish rebellious towns. The whole of the mind laid out in hills and fissures, dust and new growth. The desert as the landscape of all fears. A burial ground of lives waiting to be found. She visualised the hills with hard peaks that looked like the necks of broken bottles, the great boulders turned the colour of milk by distance and heat haze, the silence as vast as noise. In the desert, death has always already occurred, she thought; there is nothing to fear. She remembered driving into the desert, away from the red walls of the city, clouds of crickets enveloping her, her skin crawling from the drugs, sickness in her mouth, throwing everything she owned out the window. Everything but the book.

  She had watched for sandstorms. She had been warned: that is when the Polisario, the Saharan liberation movement, usually strikes, in the shelter of a sandstorm.

  She drove through the night and stopped a hundred miles from Abu N’af to scrape off the hot dust and dead crickets from the windscreen. The moon was still bruised in the sky, the sparrows burrowing into the evaporating night, sky and earth becoming one in a veil of pearl grey and dead silver, dawn as a half-erased dream. Her skin hurt from the brightness of the stars but the pain was gone from her hands. Her watch had stopped hours before. She threw it away and stood under the swelling fires of the sun and thought, I have fled Him down the years but here I am in the presence of all creation. I am in the presence of God. She imagined herself as a small black speck in the glowing ball. I am being watched by the eye of God.

  Now, years later, she stretched her aching fingers. I have to get back to the desert.

  The boy was in front of her, smug, bright-eyed. He took out his gum and held it while he recited, ‘The white man’s name is Stefano Tarfuri. A Sicilian.’ The boy scrunched up his lips as though about to spit but thought better of it. ‘He lives in the place called Trepani. His address is – ’

  She bent towards him. ‘He told you his address?’

  The boy nodded. ‘I make good work.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. She gripped him by the shoulders and gave him a short sharp shake. The boy clapped his hands to his lower spine. She reached around him and found the brown leather wallet wedged into the back of his pants.

  She opened it, saw the driver’s licence, the identity card, the photo of the tanned European. His name meant nothing to her. Trepani. That was more familiar. She recalled the map she had carried twenty-five years before. Trepani. It was near the coast, she was sure. Near the mountain town which had been wrecked beyond repair when she saw it: its wells poisoned, its people gone. Santa Margherita.

  There was little else in the wallet: money, a mix of lira and dirham, some scribbled notes in Italian. At the back she felt an opening in the cotton lining: tucked inside was a small photo of a woman, round-cheeked, dark-haired, unremarkable except for her marble-black eyes. Her eyes were all pupil, there seemed to be no lighter iris, no white. Not seemed, thought Agnieska. She put her finger over the face in the photo. She didn’t look for a name on the back. She knew it was Rosita, the woman she would always blame for her brother’s death, no matter what anyone else said.

  She thought about keeping the photo, but even to hold it made her feel an accessory to murder. She gave the wallet to the boy. He took it, warily.

  ‘You will return this to the man,’ she said. The boy shoved his gum back into his mouth, chewed furiously. ‘If you do not I will know.’ She touched the corner of her eye, then her scar. ‘I will see you. You know all the whites come together. Eventually. Do you know what eventually means?’

  His mouth turned down. ‘It means you will punish me.’

  She straightened. ‘Only if you do not do what I say. But if you do, you can come to the Mission tomorrow and get a pair of shoes.’

  The boy stopped chewing. ‘New shoes?’

  ‘Almost new.’

  The boy nodded, turned to run. ‘I knew they wouldn’t be new,’ he said, but he couldn’t hide the spark in his eyes.

  Agnieska’s home was a large room in a rambling house made up of half-levels and small staircases off an alley near Hafid Street. She shared the bath-room and the squatting toilet on the ground floor but she had her own enclose
d courtyard which extended over the roof of the rooms below.

  As she climbed the steps, she saw there were more gifts left on the worn yellow stone; small things, nothing expensive: wooden bracelets, a silk headscarf, a doll in a nun’s habit made from rough black cotton.

  The scrawny tortoiseshell cat was asleep on the scarf. ‘Arthur,’ she said in French and shooed him off. He gave her an offended look. She rubbed him behind the ears and wondered whether she could take him with her. Would he like the desert? Maybe he was a city cat. A desert fortress may not suit him. Abu N’af may not suit him.

  Her neighbour, the ranting English poet, was shouting again, drunk, a stream of invective, his voice cracking. It was a steady harsh bellow which made her ears flinch. He cursed the city and everyone in it, cursed the desert and the plants and the water, cursed the surface of the wells. When he was sober he would say that was how he wrote his poetry, that out of the bile he extracted fragments that revealed his soul. But she thought that he hated and feared himself. She could recognise it.

  ‘Monsieur?’ she said in English, looking up to his balcony. ‘Monsieur, what do you need?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said after a while, but his tone was quieter.

  ‘You know I am next door,’ she said.

  ‘No . . . ’ He was uncertain.

  ‘Yes, we wrote it down, do you remember? It is on a piece of paper, nailed on your wall.’

  A silence. She heard bells in the distance, a mule braying. The rug-maker and his son passed the bottom of the steps, carrying the day’s makings from the market, going home for lunch.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see the note.’ There was a long pause. ‘I might have a lie-down now.’

  ‘He’s crazy, you know,’ said a voice above her. Her other neighbour, the American girl, had come out onto the narrow balcony on the next level. She was smoking a cigarette in a black plastic holder, carefully using a tiny comb on her long false eyelashes.

  ‘He can’t stand being an outsider,’ she said.

  Agnieska shook her head.

  The girl smirked and blew out a perfect smoke ring. ‘You’ll get him in the end,’ she said. ‘I know. He’ll convert.’

  ‘Why do you think that, my dear?’ said Agnieska.

  ‘You put the fear of God into me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have stayed where you were,’ said Agnieska.

  ‘In the opium den, you mean,’ said the girl. ‘The devil’s den.’ She yawned and stretched. Her mini-skirt rode up, showing the red track marks on her inner thigh. ‘Strange,’ said the girl, ‘how my friends all disappeared. Deported. Yet I was left.’ She looked around her, bewildered. ‘I don’t know how I came here. I really don’t.’

  ‘It’s just one step in a life,’ said Agnieska. ‘You won’t look back now your friends have gone.’ She picked up the cat and scarf and other gifts and opened her door.

  The girl said, ‘A monsignor’ – she stumbled over the word – ‘is here.’ She lowered her voice. ‘With another guy. Porky but charming. The other guy I mean.’

  Agnieska opened the door and went into her room, which served as kitchen, living room and bedroom. It was sparsely furnished: two scarlet rugs on the tiled floor, a low couch, a few cushions. Next to the shelf with her cutlery, cooking utensils and the two framed prints was the potbellied Polish stove; its blackened flue climbed along the ceiling to escape through a grate over the far window. She used it as both cooker and winter heater. That was all she had of home now: the stove, the book and the dead flower.

  Her bedroom was marked out by a thicker rug on the floor. Her spare habit and cloak hung on nails in the wall; her old blue suitcase held her few remaining clothes. Her bedroll was tied up in the corner during the day. A stone block was her bedside table; a place for her rosary beads at night. There was nearly nothing else left from Poland; she had sold the silver hairbrushes and cutlery over the years to buy extra food for the Mission, more shoes for the orphans. On the table now there was a blank space where her Bible used to lie.

  Everything else that was valuable – the book, her passport – was hidden in the corner, under the rug, in a recess she had chipped out herself and covered with a fitted stone.

  Through the window, she saw the buildings whitening in the morning sun. Voices came to her from the small courtyard. She touched the wooden cross around her neck and tightened the black scarf around her hair. Then she rubbed her hands to ease the pain and stepped out into the garden.

  The Monsignor was sitting on the ledge of the small fountain, flanked by the palm trees in their terracotta pots. In the square pool, the water tumbled in uncertain rushes and odd beats of silence from the mouth of the stone cherub. Glass balls of light in water, she thought, travelling from the throat of God. The cherub’s hands were clasped in front of its rigid tunic dress; its wings folded tightly. Usually it looked mournful. Now, she thought, it looked affronted.

  Behind it, the rose vine struggled up the wall and across the frame laid over the bisecting walls. The lattice light fell on the Monsignor in stripes and crosses. She distinctly saw the shadows of crucifixes – black crosses flecked with tiny thorns – on the spreading white bowls of his cheeks. He ran his hand through the liquid silver in the fountain bowl, the great ruby on his finger moving through the water like the red eye on a fat white fish.

  ‘Perpetual motion,’ said the Monsignor in French, pointing to the wooden wheel and paddles at the back of the cherub. ‘Very clever. We must enquire who designed it.’

  Agnieska thought he was talking to her but a murmur in the corner made her turn her head. A small plump young man in his mid-twenties was sitting on the wooden chair in the shade. He had a sleek black moustache and was dressed in a white suit with a white hat in the American style. He bowed extravagantly when he saw her but, looking at the Monsignor, he did not speak. He stood, head slightly lowered, holding his white hat. She thought he was watching her under his eyelashes.

  The Monsignor extended his hand without bothering to dry it. She bent and dutifully kissed the wet ring and withdrew, folding her arms into her wide sleeves. After a moment, she remembered not to look at him directly but dipped her head and rounded her shoulders.

  ‘Very nice, Sister,’ said the Monsignor, looking at the clusters of small pots, the blue walls, the green diamonds in the white-tiled floor. ‘Women always have a knack for making pretty little corners.’

  ‘It is our duty,’ said Agnieska. ‘The garden is the recurring image in the desert. An oasis from sin. A reminder of lost paradise.’ She saw that the Monsignor’s mouth had become a dark circle but she went on. ‘It is the place of the first human bereavement. A heart like the heart of pure water inside a cactus. A heart filled at once with gods and demons.’

  The Monsignor’s companion lifted an eyebrow at the mention of demons. He put his hand up, to smooth his moustache. Maybe to hide a smile.

  ‘Paradise,’ said the Monsignor sharply. ‘I hope you are not presuming . . . ’ His voice ran away like water, as though her arrogance was too much for him.

  She rounded her shoulders further. ‘Never, Monsignor.’

  He was staring at her intently. She saw the black sandals made of finest Italian leather, the solid gold buckles, the robes spreading like a dark stain across the tiles. She imagined the flesh spilling away beneath. These greedy men, she thought. Always less to them than meets the eye.

  The faint creak of the fountain wheel ground into the silence. ‘Good,’ said the Monsignor. His hands were curled into fists on his knees. ‘We are here for your well-being, child.’

  She half-bowed and said, ‘May I offer you mint tea? Grapes and dates?’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘And your colleague?’ She turned to the other man, who was still standing.

  ‘Laforche will have nothing,’ said the Monsignor. ‘We will not be long.’ The small man gave her a smile which turned in on itself at the corners. He bowed again, sardonically, and sat, putting his hat under his
chair.

  The Monsignor cleared his throat, a sound which made her think of rotting leaves in muddy water. ‘Our paths may not often intersect,’ he said, ‘but everyone at the Papal Office watches over our hardworking brothers and sisters at the Mission.’

  ‘Of course, Monsignor,’ she said. She placed the fingers of her left hand on her cross, felt the reassuring roughness of the wood. The fine splinters pricked her skin. She pressed in. She said, ‘I know that Ville Nouvelle is a long walk from Quartier Negro.’

  The dark coin reappeared in his face. ‘Your behaviour . . . ’ His words boomed across the tiles. Laforche raised his eyebrow. The Monsignor frowned, gathered his voice, as though catching mud in a sieve. ‘We are worried about you, Sister. Your health – ’ he gestured at her misshapen hands – ‘is not helped by the extra duties you have taken on.’

  She lifted her head.