Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  She had abandoned the car within sight of the Kabir Massif. On the other side, across the plain and the old road, was the shallow hill that rose to house Abu N’af. If the maps in the book were correct.

  She had hoisted her backpack and walked through the warm blanket of late afternoon. She walked through soft sand and over hard earth, a mile of nothing but jagged stones which slid treacherously beneath her, a mile where humped sand trailed away from the south side of the trunks of pale green bushes with yellow flowers. Another mile filled with small black scorpions that raised their tails and circled her.

  When she reached the base of the Massif, she looked for the boulders that marked the entrance. After nearly an hour, she was thirsty, her water was running low and she worried she wouldn’t make it back to the car before dark. The maps in the book didn’t seem to correlate. She wondered if the author had written in code. It would suit his subversiveness, she thought.

  She saw two boulders set a man’s width apart in front of a fissure in the rock wall. Behind one boulder, chipped low into the red-brown rock almost at the level of the dusty ground, was a tiny fleur-de-lis.

  She went to the other boulder, crouched down. The light was slipping away, the temperature was dropping. She saw another carving.

  She ran her fingers over the two letters etched there.

  AR.

  She looked at the empty desert and squeezed herself through the fissure.

  By the fountain, Agnieska held the book with the red cover. The ripples aged her reflection and she saw what Abu N’af would do to her. Her hair would be rusted iron, her eyes would sink into her face, her hands would become permanently curled. She would have crystals in her joints, in her heart. She thought of the ulcers on her father’s shins, the sores on his face, the froth like champagne foam falling from his open mouth. Anything but that, she thought.

  She stood on the chair in her courtyard and peered over the wall. On the flat roof above the café she saw a woman rolling sheets by hand through a wooden mangle. Beyond her, the marbled sky slid down past the last scribblings of clouds. The afternoon prayers folded into themselves. There was a banging of metal poles and shouts as the night market was set up. She imagined the fish being unloaded and set on the hot stone in their wooden boxes: the long and silvery perch, the small bream, the chunky mullet.

  A thin man with eyes too young for his lined face wheeled himself awkwardly down the street on crutches – two planks of wood – dragging his legs behind him. The sight reminded her that she should see Betsoul. She cracked her knuckles. After today, after the foreigners came to see her, as she knew they would, she would have to go to Quartier Negro. She cracked again; the pain was still in her hands.

  She waved and the thin man’s smile came up like the dawn of a new day.

  There were some things she would miss. In the steel cities in Europe passers-by would look away from the crippled, flinch from the raving, the disoriented. Here, people considered mad or unwanted or an embarrassment in Europe were allowed to wander with respect, could sit in the sun, would be given coins by the locals. The ability to share wealth was regarded as the first step to holiness. She knew that only giving away her possessions had secured her place here.

  When she thought of what she had seen in the caves near Abu N’af, she never ate more than she needed, never drank more than minimal. She lost weight. Before then, she imagined herself as stocky: square shoulders, big stomach. With her hands on her hips, her legs planted wide, she had been the true Polish housewife. Now, her body was withdrawing into itself: stretch marks where she had lost weight on her stomach, her upper thighs. Where she was eroded by what she had seen.

  A chain of bubbles turned over on the surface of the fountain. The turtle climbed up the statue, half floating, half clinging to the bare feet of the cherub. The turtle’s eyes closed, it swayed, held by the water. The wet mosaics of its shell were the colour of the desert at dusk.

  She dragged the chair into the corner and sat in the shade. As always she had to hold the book for a few moments before she opened it. And this was a book she dared to open. She ran her hand over the red cracked boards which made up the cover. It didn’t suit the words inside but its disguise was protection of a sort. This copy she had made of Rimbaud’s book; this decoy to lure the thieves away from the real book.

  Je suis un autre, she thought. I am another.

  She opened the book.

  At the beginning of the book, the traveller had written, This is a story about maps. When he steps onto land at Tangier, he is obsessed with maps, with keeping his bearings. Later that first night, he writes: It is 3 am and my heart is breaking. I see arrows loosed into the sky. I never thought I would miss my country until I left it.

  Wherever the traveller goes there is always a wind blowing across the wilderness: occasionally benign, usually angry. The sirocco lifting up everything in its path as it sweeps across Morocco. The deadly sinoun – known as poison in Arabic – which carried locusts and bees safely within its yellow folds yet mercilessly choked goats and lambs. When the Libyan army marched into the Sahara to subdue the wind with drums and cymbals, the land appeared to quieten. But it was a deception, the traveller writes. The winds always returned, driven to make men bow down before them. Storms are recorded when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to speak with God. There is rain, thunder, lightning, but there is also wind: whipping around Moses, clawing at his robes, trying to rip the wooden staff from his hand.

  You can escape Africa, the traveller writes, but you cannot escape the winds. You can march east, deeper into Asia. But all you will find are the Indian winds: hot, red geysers which flee from the rain which never comes and boom among the trees as they flatten them.

  As the traveller comprehended the desert, he wrote, The ones who went before me talk about the bowl of heaven, the sacred empty, the sheltering sky. But the sky is black beyond the clouds. There is nothing there, just black space pressing down upon us. Le désert absolu.

  He could see why men believed they found the sacred here. You had to believe if you survived the desert. The cost was too great. There had to be more than the great implacable uncaring of the wilderness. You must believe that your death mattered, that you were chosen to survive. If it was all random chance then the desert was just another place of contrary existence. Your life was a roll of the dice.

  He walked for five days in a reversed world: of light that killed, night that comforted. Everything good was buried below ground, away from the light, closer to hell. He slept during the day and walked at night, trying to compose poetry, the words sliding away from him like sand running out of a sack, rushing away as they had for the past ten years. By the third day, the rushing sand was as loud as a waterfall. He was rationing his water by this time.

  By the seventh day he found it impossible to think of anything but how long it was till his next drink. He had to write the times down on a piece of paper, a process which involved taking off his pack and kneeling and taking off his boots to air his hot feet and carefully pulling out his fob watch and then the paper and piece of charcoal he used to write and checking the time and carefully pouring the water out to the exact drop. Then replacing the flask and cup and boots and paper. A process which took half an hour. And then he was thirsty again.

  By the tenth day he was turning to see if his words were lying behind him exhausted and sprawled. Those ferocious words, those deranged vowels. A is a black corset gaudy with flies.

  When his water ran out, his words went too. His tongue was a dried sponge in his mouth, skin peeling away from his cheeks, his eyelids, his cuticles. There was sand in his ears, nose, the corners of his eyes. He saw the world through a veil. The sound of his knees hitting the sand was a torrent. He prayed, Give me back my poetry.

  The gun-runners found him. They slung blankets between two camels and examined him in the shade, pulling at his mouth, his feet, as though he was a horse. They went through his pack, took out anything of value, compared the size of his
boots with theirs. They found his diary; one of them read it out in slow hesitant French. The gun-runner stumbled over the copied fragments and, swearing, gave him the book. A knife at his throat, he read it out as clearly as he could: ‘La traduction de Charles Baudelaire.’ Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka. A journey to Etna to stand in the mouth of the volcano. ‘Dissertation sur la poétique du feu.’ An essay on the poetics of fire.

  They gave him water, dripping drops into his mouth slowly, the camels’ breaths making small fetid whirlwinds in the sand around him.

  It was only when they reached the plateau and led him through the fissure in the rock wall into the milky darkness and he saw the ribbon of water bubbling up through the cracked black ground that he understood they wouldn’t kill him. They dug at a certain spot and pulled out a cache of guns and strapped a bundle across his shoulders. They tethered him to the stirrup of a camel, a knotted whip hitting his neck whenever he slowed or stumbled. He imagined that death would come suddenly. He wondered whether they would waste a bullet. He thought not.

  He began to recite his own verses, softly at first, and others: Verlaine’s, Baudelaire’s, Hugo’s, his friends, his lovers, distant voices, songs of mists. The camel kept slowing at the sound of his voice, turning to look at him. The whip crisscrossed his neck, its owner laughed – the camel hates the verses, too – but he kept reciting, sometimes shouting, head thrown back to bellow at the sun. The laughter stopped. There was nothing but the shadows of dawn and dusk and his voice evaporating like water into the sands.

  He knew what he would write if they let him live. He would write: It is all an illusion. There is no test to face, no sacred challenge to overcome. Death has always already happened here. The desert continues on, beyond death, indifferent. The reality I see could be a dream which is dreaming me.

  And yet, I cannot resist. I must go on. I must conquer or be conquered.

  Coming into Kufra they met a caravan train heading for Cap Juby. At nightfall he was led into a large tent with lion skins on the floor, ostrich feather fans waved by boys who didn’t reach his waist. A Scotsman sat cross-legged and sour, barely looking at him as he translated the gun-runners’ French into broken English. The Scotsman never asked about the ropes on his wrist. In the corner, a chimpanzee sat, resting its head in its hands, sighing occasionally.

  When he woke the next morning, the gun runners, the caravan, the tent, all were gone. He was alone on the stony ground, dawn coming up, crimson along the rim. He lay on his back staring at the sky and saw a falcon spiralling towards earth, talons outstretched, disappearing for a moment close to the ground then rising, a small broken shape in its claws, trailed by the sound of shivering crystal: a bell tied to the falcon’s leg. He heard a horse whinnying, men’s voices.

  He had barely taken a few rushed steps towards the men when he stumbled over a hard object and fell. It was a small gold cup, rubies embedded around the base. He used a sharp rock to prise out one of the rubies, hid the cup between his legs and set off after the hunters.

  He traded them the ruby for water, two horses, a gun and a guide back to the Kabir Massif. He sold another ruby for a pen and paper.

  After he made his map of the plateau, the caves, the secret trickle of water, he returned to Casablanca and went to a quiet café on Rue Sidi Hmad.

  He sat down at a table on the edge of the market. It was early afternoon, the town was quiet, sleeping, waiting for sunset, the start of the evening prayers. A camel train was coming in, small dark bodies tethered by ropes, walking through the animals’ dust. He thought he saw a face he knew but then one camel side-stepped into another, kicking backwards, and the train broke up into sandy clouds. The noise was overwhelming, it filled his ears, his soul. He wrote, Sound is water in the desert.

  He opened his diary, read the first entries, the first line: This is a story about maps.

  He thought for a long while. Then, beneath the maps of the journey through the caves beneath the plain to reach Abu N’af, and the notes on his meeting with the Polish slave-trader, he wrote, This is a story about families.

  Agnieska turned to the last pages where the photo lay glued between two sheets of paper at the back. She felt its thickness through the cracking fibres. She considered removing it but told herself she had the original. It would be a warning to the men who were coming to steal the book. She kissed the red-painted cover and put the book away in the stone recess. She threw the rug over it. After today, she knew she would never see the book again.

  There was a knock on the door. Agnieska got up, surprised that she felt so stiff. She had to think for a moment to remember her exact age. I am forty-seven. If Czeslaw was alive he would have been fifty.

  There was pain in her legs. Too much sitting, she thought. This endless sitting of women, indoors. She wanted to rip away her robe, the roof, the city walls. She thought, Whatever happens now with the foreigners, I have to go. Tomorrow. All I have to do is survive until tomorrow. She took a deep breath and went to the door. She knew before she opened it what she would find. She had wondered for fifteen years whether they would come for her.

  The Sicilian was outside. Without his sunglasses he had the kind of knowing black eyes that reminded her of Rosita. Rosza, she had insisted on calling herself, but Agnieska could never think of her as Rosza. After Czeslaw’s death, the woman was always Rosita to her, always the harbinger of doom. This man had the same dead eyes. The young priest in Palermo had said, There were bad rumours about that village. Stories about how they survived during the war.

  Agnieska had imagined war-time starvation, being forced to live off horses and dogs. Everyone had to do it after the ferocious winter, the failed crops. The Russians. The partisans coming to hang traitors from street poles in the middle of the night.

  The young priest had shaken his head. The entire village avoided starvation. That was what cursed them, those people in Santa Margherita.

  She said to the Sicilian, ‘Lei parla francese?’

  He said, ‘Agnieska Walenzska?’

  She nodded and he beckoned to the man waiting at the bottom of the steps. The tall young man with the platinum hair slowly ascended. He was a step below her when he removed his hat. She looked at the silver hair. It was almost but not quite the same shade as Czeslaw’s. She supposed it was the Sicilian blood that muted the colour. She wanted to slam the door. There was no good reason he had come looking for her. Certainly no warm feelings, she was sure of it. But she had to know whether this man took after his mother or his father. As her fingers tightened on the handle, Arthur came up the stairs in a rush. She held the door open for the cat to run through.

  ‘I speak French,’ the young man said. His voice was precise, clipped even. A careful voice. Wary. ‘You probably don’t remember me – ’

  She said, ‘You are Pietr. The son of Czeslaw.’

  ‘Your nephew,’ he said.

  She served him mint tea, taking the small iron teapot from the shelf next to the stove. She remembered the ornate silver pot she had brought with her from Poland, the delicate Limoges china. Now her cups were glazed blue stone, stained around the bottom.

  There was a pen-knife in the cutlery box, its serrated blade turned out. She glanced over her shoulder.

  Pietr was sitting awkwardly on the low couch, his long legs drawn up. He had changed into a dark blue suit, a different shirt. He wore gold cufflinks and a heavy gold watch; he had a heavy gold signet ring on his forefinger. The Sicilian, Stefano, had gone outside to smoke. She saw him dropping ash in the fountain; Arthur sat in the corner’s blue shadow, watching him. She hoped the turtle had hidden itself inside the base of the cherub, where it was hollow. Unsurprising that the Sicilian had gone straight to the statue. She touched the knife, felt the cold plastic handle, slipped it into her deep pocket. The Sicilian’s eyes were too much like Rosita’s. It wasn’t the constant searching for the worst in the people around them that disturbed Agnieska: it was their expectation they would find it.<
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  She brought the tea and gestured at Stefano. ‘Your servant?’ she said to Pietr.

  ‘My mother’s bodyguard, childhood friend, I don’t know what you would call him. When my grandfather died – ’ He stopped. She could see he was remembering he was speaking about Agnieska’s father. Wondering how much she knew.

  ‘In ’63,’ said Agnieska. ‘He took nearly a century to die.’ Like a devil, she thought.

  Pietr made a small gesture with his hand, chopping the air, as though he had started to make a wilder movement then thought better of it. ‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘Rosza, my mother, bought land in Sicily near where she grew up; some coastal property, a vineyard. Stefano looks after it.’

  ‘Santa Margherita,’ said Agnieska.

  He stiffened.

  ‘I went there,’ she said. ‘To find out what happened to Czeslaw.’

  Pietr looked down into his mint tea. A tremor ran across the inky liquid surface. She was reminded of a collapse of land, deep below.

  She took a cup outside to Stefano. He was examining the statue in the fountain. This man, she thought, has some kind of sixth sense. Like a jackal or a wolf.

  He straightened and thanked her. ‘Merci.’ The word wrenched out of him. He hooked his thumb at the stone cherub. ‘Shop?’ he said in English, the last letter encased in wetness. Almost spit.

  She said, ‘I had it made.’

  He nodded. ‘Special,’ he said, unblinking. A wolf, then, she thought.

  Pietr was standing when she returned, twisting the signet ring. He took out a linen handkerchief. It was monogrammed: PW. Pietr Walenzska.

  He slapped at the flattened clouds of dust on his dark trousers.

  He said, again with that careful enunciation, ‘How can you bear to live here? The dirt is impossible in an old city. One must change three, four times a day.’