‘Or could afford it.’
He smiled. ‘Yes. Far more to the point.’ His face settled. ‘I’m sure the Monsignor is not serious about exorcism. But the Sahara is a chess board with everything painted white. To be out there in the vast empty – ’
‘The sacred empty.’
‘Le désert absolu,’ he said.
‘Isabelle Eberhardt went into the desert when she was eighteen. She dived into it, without ropes, without maps, like the ancient well-divers.’
‘Yes – but . . . ’ He moved his hand aimlessly. ‘What will you do out there?’
‘I will begin a community.’ She wanted to say, I will leave the technological marvels of the world and walk into the sacred empty. There is no danger, I will be watched over, the way the eagle hovers over her young. But she knew he wouldn’t understand. So she stretched out her hands: the slightly bent fingers, the enlarged knuckles, the bone showing white under the tanned skin. ‘I have crystals in my joints. Yet the pain vanishes in the desert.’
‘It is the heat,’ said Laforche.
‘It is a miracle.’
‘The dry air is good for arthritis.’
‘I see the desert blossoming like the blossoming of Jesus’s love for his people.’
She could feel him withdrawing. This was a border he would never cross. He said, ‘Le désert est monothéiste. The desert is his own god. Whether we live or die is of profound indifference to the desert.’
‘The desert is a place of wanderings,’ said Agnieska. ‘It knows we go there to find a home, a memory, a name. We take on other lives in the desert. Other identities.’
‘New identities . . . ’ said Laforche. ‘The Church won’t like that. The Americans on Hafid Street won’t like it.’
Agnieska considered him. ‘Are you working for them?’
He met her gaze openly. ‘I already have one mistress.’
‘Two,’ she said. ‘If you count the Church. Three if you include your wife.’
‘Six if I include my children,’ he said. ‘You see? To avoid confusion, a man with so many masters must be honest.’
‘Or exhausted,’ she said.
He smiled, turned the hat in his hands. ‘I will miss our conversations.’ His voice was louder, rougher. She imagined him throwing out a rope, unwillingly. ‘It is a pity you couldn’t stay in Casablanca and start your own community like other women, by marrying and having children.’
‘I will never marry,’ she said. ‘I want my family line to die out.’
As he turned to go, she said, ‘Have you heard anything about a new arrival – a Sicilian? A man this tall, with brown hair, to here.’ She gestured to her shoulders.
Laforche seemed genuinely surprised.
‘Would your contacts know?’ They both knew she meant the other players in the 2 am dice games in Quartier Rouge.
‘I can make enquiries.’ He said, looking down at his hat, ‘Will you visit Betsoul before you leave?’
She kneaded the pain in her knuckles, pressing down on the blue crosses. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Your intentions were good,’ he said. ‘It seemed a worthy thing, to be educated, to work in Father Thomas’s house.’
She saw Betsoul’s contorted face. ‘To be taken from your family at the age of twelve, to be – ’ She couldn’t say the word. ‘Your life ruined by a meddling Westerner. She hates us all. Rightly. She is reminded of it every day.’ Agnieska saw herself walking through the labyrinth of narrow alleys to Rue Farouk, visualised placing the butterfly comb in Meersun’s childish fingers. She saw the dark room with its low ceilings, the silent women endlessly sitting, Betsoul’s remorseless eyes.
Agnieska shivered. ‘You won’t tell anyone when I am leaving? Especially Betsoul.’
‘You can trust me.’
She stared at him.
His face twisted. ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.’
‘Just let me get away,’ she said. ‘Into the desert.’
She left by the back entrance, a narrow passage which ran past the tiled bath-room. The house next door was so close that tiny flowers had managed to grow in the almost perpetual shade at the base of the wall.
She circled the block and came up beside the café, peered around the corner. The pavement tables were empty. The Sicilian had gone. She looked through the strips of beaded leather hanging in the doorway. She saw only a local standing at the bar, foot hooked up on the brass railing, bent over his espresso. The doorway light caught the mirror opposite him; rings of light were thrown across his face as he raised the cup.
She remembered the first time they had holidayed in Vienna. Her brother was fascinated by the white gloves of the traffic conductors, how the sun was caught in the silver buttons sewn on the inner cuff. Who would wear a button where no-one could see it? her brother kept asking. Fools, her father had said but her brother had a faraway look. Later she had asked him what he was thinking and he said, When the conductor raised his hand, hoops of light rose in the cloudy air, so the conductor would see himself reflected in the silver, in the eyes of the man in the button, and back to himself, again reflected, endlessly, in silver hoops of light across the city.
She thought the answer was an excuse, or only partly true. But they were close enough that she knew not to ask him, to respect the change that was coming over him which explained his frequent absences, when her father would shout with rage to know where her brother was and she could have said, but didn’t, In the church at Przyznka.
Later, she would feel she knew the exact moment Czeslaw died. Crystals started growing in her hands, there was constant pain in her joints. Crystals in her heart.
She liked to walk around the city in the heat of the day. During the lunch hours, the crowds almost disappeared. The stalls closed up: their cigarettes and soft drinks and T-shirts and caps and elephants with sequinned eyes, all gone.
Now the old town was revealed in all its straight-backed defiance. Strange, she thought, walking through the zebra light of the narrow alleys, stepping across the gutter running down the middle, that in a land so changeable, so filled with the shifting curves of the desert, the occupiers felt compelled – or threatened – to build in squares, block upon block rising out of the sand, hunched into each other, back to back. Why not live in domes dug into the ground? Why not in caves like the miners in the Australian desert towns? The true desert dwellers adjusted their shapes, bent into the landscape. Bedouin tents swelled and billowed with the wind. Only shape-shifters survived in the desert.
People talk about the desert being barren, she thought as she walked the streets, seeing the children with staring eyes slumped by damp walls, the beggars curled on their sides, knees drawn up like shrivelled seahorses in the shadows. The dope addicts were the ones lying on their backs, their empty faces brushed by the tails of the hungry, ceaselessly roaming cats.
She thought, What is the difference between this – this wasteland of mazes and blocked walls and women sitting, their minds filled with fog, the fatalism of the poor – and the wastelands of the modern city, its hard lines, its neon, its empty parking lots, its bare rooms? The inner mind is lost in both, buried beneath sand.
She stepped back to allow the water man with his pony to pass, the bent tin cans clanking over the coat rubbed raw. This country is hard on animals, she thought. Hard on its people.
She remembered Laforche teaching her how to apply pressure on her knuckles, to relieve the pain, releasing the pressure only when she heard the tell-tale crack. He had said, smiling his sardonic smile, If you’re poor in Casa, the only thing you’re allowed to make an art of is dying.
Before she reached the Kabir Massif, before Jürgen’s car had failed, she had been stopped by a roadblock. Soldiers in white uniforms and sand goggles, the flaps of their caps hanging over their necks, had surrounded the car, opened the boot. They were suspicious to find so little; just a woman, a canteen of water, an old book with a black leather cover.
The sky had been
darkening, swelling like plums along the horizon. The soldiers weren’t unkind; they told her to turn back. She looked at the landscape as it reared away in gritty planes. Symmetry in nature, a geometry imposed on man no matter how much he liked to think he was the one imposing the lines. Even a nearby road turned out to be the sharp curve of a sand dune, not a man-made thing at all.
The soldiers pointed to where dark purple-grey was soaking up the pale blue sky. The sun teetered uncertainly, the light breaking out in radiant lines from behind the Massif – lines reaching out from heaven. To her.
In Poland, she would have nodded, agreed to turn back. But now, looking at the desert, she thought, Entering the desert is like entering a book in which the story is narrated by your radical other. The deeper we go into the desert, everything that used to guide us is stripped away by the winds. We must go deeper into the hidden landscape, where black is white, night is solace, water is poison, love is hate. Deeper into subversion. Deeper into ourselves.
The soldiers stepped back. If you must go on, they shrugged.
You know there is no well until Tagherez? one said, waving at flies.
She nodded. But she remembered the book with the black leather cover and she thought, There is another well.
You should be careful, said the soldier. This route is used by smugglers and brigands. Make sure you are not mistaken for one.
I hardly think –
The government is interested in all approaches to Casablanca these days. You know Algerian Pour La Combat has been tracked over the border. They move at night through the desert and slip into the city and hide in the back alleys. Anyone arriving by truck, plane, ship, is searched now.
He stared at her with flat indifferent eyes. He said, During the day, they add twigs and branches to their clothes, they change their outline. They merge with the desert. They sleep dug in under boulders, grit in their mouths, the sun burning down. They survive on sheer will. Like tough desert plants. He squinted across the unyielding page of the desert. He said, Everyone is looking for an oasis.
Everyone who is not the government, she said.
Every Arab makes his garden an oasis, he said. Yet it is also the place of betrayal. He put up a hand to block the sun, opened his eyes wide at her in the shadow across his face. He studied her Western clothes and said, They have a new name for the brigands. Le terroriste. Born out of fire in l’Algérie. Maybe they will use Nazarenes or nuns to do their work.
She said, The nuns work for God.
Do they? he said. He looked her up and down. He said, Do you? The words hung in the air, like grains of sand. She wasn’t sure whether he said the next words or she only imagined them.
He said, I think not.
Now, in the city where she had never found her true vocation, she turned down Hafid Street, past a man shouting into a phone in the wooden booth nailed to the wall, past another man sitting cross-legged in the shreds of clothes. He was eating couscous and dates from a blue-glazed bowl. In the shadow of his knee, a scrawny cat drank from a saucer of milk. She put coins next to him. He pointed at his small pyramid of rolled cigarettes for sale. She shook her head, saw the Sicilian coming out of the American building on the corner. The CIA building.
She squatted, drew her scarf around her face. In this position she looked like any Arab woman. My disguise, she thought. My protection. Safe in the loss of identity.
A man came out behind Stefano: a tall man with the greyish pallor of the businessman. He was followed by two children: a boy with pale hair, aged about twelve she thought, who stayed close by, looking around uncertainly while a younger child, a dark-haired girl, was drifting across the pavement. The men stood, talking.
The Arabs seated in wicker chairs behind the grille of the café opposite were glaring at her. She hunched her shoulders: shapeless, ineffectual, requesting mercy, insisting to be ignored.
For a time, after she arrived, she had tried to take on an Arab identity: she wore the burqa, she sequestered herself at home, she tried to be dutiful. Jürgen lay on the couch and smoked kif and looked up at her through a cloud of brown smoke and said, Your life is an extended suicide. He laughed at the posturing of the men in the marketplace, derided them for blaming their problems on the West, for controlling their women because their own lives were so beyond their control. Nothing is valued here, he said, unless it has value to someone else. Unless it is coveted.
She had tried to argue with him. Told him they had spent six years travelling the world: Asia, America. Didn’t he want to know where he stood, what the rules were? If you behaved in the right way you’d be protected. He said, You’re at the mercy of someone else’s rules. When they change the rules or they discover you’re a foreigner, you’ll get raped. You’re wrong, she had shouted. But of course he had been right.
The girl child was by the man huddled in his rags on the pavement. She stared at him, then she took the butterfly clip from her hair and kneeled and put the yellow plastic carefully next to the bowl. She extended her forefinger to gently touch the man’s nose. The tall stranger looked over his shoulder and said roughly, ‘Don’t touch that,’ in a loud voice. It took Agnieska a moment to place the flattened vowels: an Australian. By then, the man had picked up the hair clip, grasped the girl by the wrist and dragged her away.
The Sicilian strolled a few feet along the pavement, sat on a stone pillar, his foot swinging. He took out an apricot, began to eat it.
She had found it impossible to walk when she first tried on the burqa. She could barely see through the eyehole. Her sense of direction was gone, the material wrapped around her legs, tripping her. All she saw now was the ground: hard and stony.
Jürgen had told her about Michel Vieuchange, the Frenchman who disguised himself as a woman in a time when the French were much hated and who travelled in 1930 to the ghostly ruins of Smara.
Jürgen said, You could carry anything under a woman’s robes. Books, make-up, guns.
The ability to take on different personas frees you, she said.
He looked at the blue robe, at the veiled and meshed eyehole. But this makes every woman the same.
Like the desert, she said. Everything real is beneath the surface.
You’ll need to put corks in your ears to survive here, said Jürgen. For the dust. For the abuse.
Venturing outside the city she had met women who lived all their lives in the fields with their goats, only coming in for winter. Others walked for hours over the pale dusty stones each day to milk their animals, gather the fine hair. Some were veiled, some not. Yet, walking along with their milk pails, they had a status that made them untouchable, they had a job. They walked in clusters, they seemed united. Free. A ridiculous country, she thought, when women had to have a symbol, some article of clothing, to be protected. They had to be covered or they were just meat for ravaging dogs. A country of dogs.
The Sicilian was getting up. He spat out the apricot stone and came towards her.
She hunched into her robe. He went past, whistling under his breath, in short hollow-tinned bursts. She risked a glance. He was darker up close – something there, she thought, some trace of Africa – and stockier, with big hands, big knuckles. Peasant knuckles. There was a tattoo of a knife above his wrist; another – three crosses – on the veined muscle below his T-shirt sleeve. She saw comb marks in the shiny dark hair above the ponytail.
She waited until he turned into King Mohammed Boulevard. She followed him, keeping her head down, looking out from the shadow of her clothing. He wasn’t hurrying but he wasn’t shopping either. He didn’t glance at the stalls on either side or at the hawkers who descended on him in small waves and trailed him for a few steps before they fell back. As though they were tethered to some invisible zone and could only graze for a few feet.
She remembered when she had emerged from the Massif, still shaking from what she had found in the caves. She had looked across the plain and seen Abu N’af on top of the hill, a light in the nearest tower. She had walked
towards it through the sheet of dawn grey as the sun teetered on the edge of the horizon. The sky had been a growing quarrel but now it softened and wrapped around her. Scorpions moved away from her, the stony pebbles crumbled beneath her. She looked at the fortress on the hill, dark against the milk of the early morning. She was convinced she would reach Abu N’af, would find people, a way back to Casa.
The Sicilian turned, disappeared down an alley. She knew that alley. It led to a small square, enclosed nothing but a few silk shops, cafés. She would be in plain sight the minute she entered it.
She waited until a group of camel riders, angled in their long striped robes, also turned. She followed them through the shadows and slowed when she glimpsed the sleek ponytail ahead of her. The camel riders stepped into the sunlight. She pressed herself against the wall.
Far away, the first of the afternoon prayers climbed the air. The alley was airless; even the wall behind her pulsed with heat. Her hands were hurting, her elbows, her knees. Her heart.
She had a clear view across the square. The Sicilian stopped at a table. A man was seated there: tall, slender, in his mid-twenties. He wore a hat, was impeccably dressed in a white linen suit. A Viennese tailor; she knew the label. He wore sunglasses, it was hard to tell his features from here. He nodded at something the Sicilian was saying, not looking at him. After a moment, he took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. Even from this distance the colour was striking.
She turned and ran down the alley, blundering past a line of monks who stopped, recoiling as she ran past, the air full of nothing but the image of the man. Nothing but platinum silver filling the air.
The first thing she did when she reached her room was check the book. It was there in the recess, under the rug, in its ivory silk cloth. It wasn’t enough for her distress but it would have to do. Her mirror image. She pulled off the cloth, held the book in her hands, ran her fingers reverentially over the cracked wooden cover, the painstaking lines of spidery French writing, the maps of the broken hills, the snippets of poetry, the diary entries. 1890. On Sitting With The Polish Traveller At Abu N’af.
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