Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  Boulders block the entrance into the next cave. I pick my way carefully over the fallen rocks and find muddy ground and pools of water gleaming in low light.

  The far end of the cave is illuminated. The robed figure is standing by a small fire which burns against the wall. The flames make shadows which climb the dark jags to disappear into the vaulted blackness.

  The figure throws back its hood as I approach: a middle-aged woman, Moroccan. Her dark hair is flecked with grey, her brown skin is etched with glowing blue lines: blue flames lick the base of her neck, more crawl out from the soles of her feet; the backs of her hands are heavily inked in lines and swirls and circles. There is a sun image on one wrist, the moon on the other, writing in Arabic below each.

  She watches me approach. Her eyes are grey around the pupil; the flames turn them orange in this light.

  I say, ‘Are you Betsoul?’

  She waits. I wonder if she speaks English.

  ‘I have something from Sister Antony for you,’ I say, slowly and clearly. I put my hand in my pocket and take out the wooden comb and lay it at her feet. She doesn’t pick it up but sketches a small gesture which reminds me of the helicopter pilot who brought me to Abu N’af. The gesture, rising then falling, can be read both ways: acknowledgement if you are a friend, feigned puzzlement if you are not.

  I say, ‘There was a woman with me. Have you seen her?’

  Betsoul peers at my neck. She says, ‘Someone cut your throat.’

  I put my hand up, feel the crusted slash, see the dark flecks of dried blood on my fingers.

  Betsoul points beyond the fire to a hollow in the ground filled with water and surrounded by a low wall of rocks packed in mud. Near the pool is a cleared space. A large flat piece of lighter rock lies there. There are odd shadows – almost stains – on the rubbed smooth surface. The stains remind me of Sicily.

  On the rock a strip of black silk is draped across a pile of white animal skins. Next to the skins is a bucket of coals, a heaped camel-hair blanket, a knobbly chunk of metal which looks like lead, a dried branch with wicked inch-long thorns and a wide knife, almost a hatchet.

  The skins stir, the black silk shifts and slips. It is a baby goat, asleep, the material tied across its small horns.

  I am still staring at the goat when Betsoul says, ‘Look at water.’ Her voice is a deep, flat monotone.

  ‘Look at water,’ she says again and again, as though she is trying to hypnotise me.

  ‘The woman,’ I say.

  ‘A ghost,’ says Betsoul. She points to the pool. It lies like a dark eye in the flickering cave. I move closer. The water is thick, viscous, veined by some lighter liquid. I bend over it. I am worried that I will see – my father? my love? the bottomless well inside me?

  ‘The spirit is released by the sound of the human voice,’ says Betsoul. ‘You have to say all you think and never dared to say.’

  I put my hand into the pool. It is deeper than it appears. I kneel on the rim, thrust my hand further. The blue-black water closes around me. My reflection is the colour of sand. I see myself in the pub, drunk as usual, cursing my father to my new best friends, the same curses I had shouted at him as I left the house.

  ‘What do you see?’ says Betsoul. She flicks with her hand and dark grains fall on the fire. The flames flare turquoise; dark grey smoke rises. A heady smell, tarter than incense, fills the cave.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. I withdraw my arm. There is a dented shadow in the water where my hand had been.

  ‘Mirages,’ I say.

  ‘All you never dared to say,’ says Betsoul, waving with her hand so the smoke writhes around me.

  I say, ‘When I was with her, the woman I loved, when her hair was too short to hide daggers or poisons, she would say that water is a kiss. She loved water, she loved to swim. She would say that we dive into rock pools like lives we never think we would encounter, shedding our skins, desperate to turn ourselves inside out. We want new masks, new identities, but all we can do is take another life inside us, like water.’

  The grey smoke is hanging like a veil over me. I breathe in. I take my first deep breath in the desert, I fill my lungs with night. I breathe in the grit, the poisons. I inhale the fragments of a trillion words. I dream light and the horizon. I open myself out to the desert.

  ‘What else?’ says Betsoul. Her eyes are clouded moonlight.

  ‘When I was a drunk,’ I say, ‘and I was a drunk for a long time, because the army won’t tolerate questions or initiative but being a career drunk is no problem. Anyway. After yet another period of drunkenness, I was released into the care of my father. I told him I wasn’t going back to the army. That I wanted – ’ I can’t believe I am saying these words out loud. ‘I told him I wanted to be a painter. Of course we had a shouting match and I told him I wished he was dead.’

  I stop. Betsoul throws more grains on the fire. The grey smoke rises.

  After a while I say, ‘I got drunker at the pub and was pathetically grateful when these three friendly guys gave me a lift home. Soon I was maudlin, regretted what I said; my father had never recovered from my mother’s death. So I told my new best friends, Thanks for the ride, I’m going to make it up with my dad. At which point they hit me over the head, robbed the house and threw my pensioner father through a glass door. His jugular was cut and he bled to death an arm’s length from me. They never found the guys.’

  I raise my hand, the water swallows the reflection like black syrup. In the disappearing shadow, I see the light falling from the moon onto her shoulder in the night that we never spent together.

  I hear her voice, ‘All the pain in the world is swallowed by water.’

  ‘Water aspires to death,’ says Betsoul. ‘Its first transformation is despair.’

  She comes and stands next to me.

  ‘Do you know what I see?’ she says. ‘I see Sister Antony taking me away from my family when I was twelve. To give me a better life in a good home, so she told me. To become civilised. To become a Westerner. To speak well, to be able to read all those Western stories that had nothing to do with me. I see myself being raped every night after mass by Father Thomas. I see myself pregnant at thirteen.’ She turns to face me. She holds out her hand. In her other hand, I see the glint of steel. She says, ‘I see you giving me what the good Sister owes me.’

  I give her the book. I think she will examine it, read it, ask me questions. But she takes it from me without a word. She turns and throws Rimbaud’s book into the fire.

  I cry out.

  She stands between me and the burning pages, the knife glinting in her hand.

  She says, ‘Western books have nothing for me, Nazarene.’

  I look past her. The book has fallen open, the pages in the centre are orange and black roses on fire. Curling fragments tear away from the spine, sweep up to the dark roof. Words and letters fly into the night, returning to the desert which houses all the letters and all the words in the world.

  I say, ‘Everything is in the book. The maps of the Kabir Massif, the underground water.’

  A charred fragment floats past Betsoul. She catches it and puts it in her mouth.

  She says, ‘Now we have it.’

  More fragments rise and merge with the night; small voyagers from another century. His book was never ours to keep, Pietr had said. We weren’t worthy of it.

  The outer pages are burning now, the cover beginning to curl, turning shiny. The leather looks wet; it looks like black water.

  I see the back pages pull away from the leather; they burn and float, revealing a thicker page: a shiny page of shadows and light.

  ‘Wait.’ I scoop my arm through the pool and throw myself next to the fire. I thrust my hand in its sopping sleeve into the flames. I catch the black page just as the glue melts and it begins to rise.

  I sit back, charred remains eddying slowly around me. The shiny page is barely touched; the chemicals on its surface have made it harder to burn. I rub my wet sleeve over the blue
flames at the corners. I lay the page on the ground in front of Betsoul.

  ‘This is what everybody wanted,’ I say. ‘You can use this.’

  The flames make the shapes in the photograph come alive and sway. Except that these shapes would never be alive again.

  Betsoul falls to her knees and bows her head but her eyelids twitch and I see the gleam of grey. She can’t stop looking. I don’t blame her.

  ‘Who is this man?’ she points at the white man with the whip who stands next to the grim wooden structures.

  ‘A Polish count,’ I say. ‘The grandfather of a man who has been working with the American military. The grandson is – was – allowing the Americans to use his airfield in Poland. To transport people.’

  ‘Slaves?’ She puts her fingers over the three darker shapes attached to the wooden structures. She puts her fingers over their hearts.

  I wonder what she knows about the CIA’s secret rendition flights. I point to the Pole. ‘The Americans are going to be very embarrassed if their connection to this man is revealed.’

  She covers the Pole’s eyes with her thumb.

  I say, ‘Many Westerners will be very unhappy.’

  She picks up the photo, clutching it as though she thinks I will rip it from her.

  I say, ‘I have my own photos. The grandson had cages in a cave below his home.’

  She says, ‘There are cages in the caves under the Kabir Massif. That is why your woman came here. She thought she would find the bones of her brother.’

  My feet are aching again, my hands, my eyes. ‘She will never find the bones,’ I say. ‘All the witnesses are gone.’

  I look at the photo of the three African children being crucified on the wooden crosses in the courtyard of Abu N’af. I read the word written in white dust on their small chests. Les fugitifs, 1890. The metal nails in their flesh are almost as large as their wrists.

  The book has finished burning. Ash is falling around us.

  Betsoul says, ‘You know your woman was swollen with sickness.’

  ‘Sick from her time in Sicily,’ I say. ‘From poison.’

  She nods as though satisfied. ‘She was asking questions in Quartier Rouge. So I took her to the Kabir Massif. She became unwell in the caves and I helped her as only women can help each other. She would have died without me. Later, she imagined things that had never happened. She ran out into the desert. I couldn’t stop her.’ She watches me carefully. ‘I sent my daughter Meersun out to find her and take her to Abu N’af.’

  Ashes are settling on my skin. I see fragments of words, messages I have no tools to read.

  ‘I do not know why,’ Betsoul says, ‘your woman came back here.’

  ‘Last week?’

  ‘A few hours ago.’

  I am on my feet. ‘But you said – ’

  ‘If you go now you will catch her.’ She stands. ‘Go now,’ she says. Her voice is rising, her urgency infectious. ‘You’ll find her,’ she shouts. ‘You’ll catch her. Go.’

  I am already stumbling to the exit. As I climb over the boulders into the next cave, I look back and see her: an ageing woman half-veiled in a shroud of falling ashes.

  The light from the fire guides me through the next cave. The boulders are smaller here. As the darkness falls, I light the candle so I can move more quickly. I am tensed, about to break into a half-run, when my foot crunches. More shells, I think, but instead find small bones. I have to look for a long time to make sure. Not animal bones. I see the graceful scallop of a hip bone, the archer’s bow of a femur.

  I lower the candle and see – at waist-height, at the reach of a child – the marking on the wall. It is a mark scratched into the rock by a human hand.

  At first I think it is an infinity symbol. I bring the candle closer.

  The light falls on the etched wings. A butterfly.

  There is no logical reason for what happens next. There is no coherent link. There is only a wooden hair comb shaped like a butterfly and a butterfly cut into a cave wall.

  I stare at the butterfly for a long time. I think about dates, illnesses. I think about poison. I think about the bottomless well that makes me drink, makes me do nothing but work. Always needing to be filled.

  I look at the butterfly and I think, If I had read poetry I would understand.

  Then I think, I do understand. It is in my blood.

  I hear the beating of the drum, the frenzied cries, from the next cave. I step as quietly as I know how but my shadow on the wall must have warned her because she swings. She had been cutting the baby goat’s throat on the sacrifice stone. She waves the red-tipped knife at me. The kid goat, shocked out of its drugged stupor, begins to crawl away.

  Betsoul’s face is pierced by thorns and covered in ash; she is the colour of ghost. She stares at me, rings of white around the rings of grey. She doesn’t know me. She is shrieking in a strange dialect. She waves the knife back and forth but she seems unable to walk.

  I back away from her. I scan the cave, searching for an adult body.

  ‘Where is she?’ I say.

  Betsoul’s gaze darts to the pool. I barely glance at it: it is too small.

  ‘Where is the woman?’

  Betsoul gapes at me. Her tongue is black. ‘I told you,’ she says, the words broken by huge gasps. She is coming out of her trance, she is hyperventilating. ‘Gone to the Kabir Massif.’

  I look around helplessly. Burning candle wax is hardening on my hands. I blow out the flame. There is nowhere to hide. I had been wrong. I turn to go.

  ‘Don’t kill the kid,’ I say to Betsoul.

  She puts her hands over her mouth. She peers down at the pool again. There are bubbles on the surface. More poisoned water, I think, just like Sicily. I move closer. Betsoul’s panting fills the cave. What was the Sicily story? A poisoned lake, the mother covering up for the husband’s murder by the village. Some old story, not relevant.

  I stare at the bubbles. Poisonous gasses rising to the surface. Maybe it was sulfur, some unknown deposits. I had read that monks used to die of it. More useless knowledge. Monks’ bane. Antimony, just another name for sulfur, pockets of it all across Sicily. Giving the land that peculiar smell. The odour of hell.

  But there is no smell here.

  I kneel on the rocky rim and pass my hand through the water, parting the heavy black surface. Nothing but a patch of pale sand on the bottom of the pool.

  Betsoul is trying to speak. ‘They owed me,’ she says. She looks dazed. Saliva runs out of the corner of her mouth. ‘I kept what she gave in the cave,’ she says, gasping for breath. ‘It was a just payment.’

  I trail my hand through the water again. My reflection breaks up: I am an aging man, alone. Working myself into my grave. As I sit back, the water settles. A small clear bubble pops on the surface. There is no smell. Another bubble rises, then another. A chain of them now. Clear, pure, odourless. Oxygen.

  Betsoul screams. The sound climbs, higher and higher, into the vaulted dark, shaking the walls, the smoke, the air. It is a sound beyond tabulating: every howl of pain collected, every crucifixion, every separation. Ashes rain down upon us. Words rain down. Endless grief. She screams and screams and it is everything I ever wanted to say.

  I half-leap half-fall into the pool and reach down to the pale square. I grab at the bundle in the camel-hair blanket. It is weighted. The chunk of lead is tied to it with rope.

  Betsoul shouts, ‘We told her everyone was dead. So she went into the desert. She’s a desert ghost now. A ghost.’ She shudders and is still.

  I claw over the rocky rim and rip away the rope. The bundle moves in my hands. I still think it is another goat, another sacrifice. Images of birds on fire are in front of me. The flashes of light are so bright as I pull and pull at the wet blanket that when I finally reach the last layer, where the material is almost dry, I am so blinded by flames and smoke and ash and old memories and all the thousand failures of my life that I can barely see the baby girl with blue eyes who lies th
ere, reaching up for me.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr Sue Woolfe of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Sydney for all her support and encouragement during the writing of this book. Notorious was inspired by attending Sue’s class; it would not have been written without her.

  Thank you also to Gaby Naher, Sarah Thompson, Sue Britton, Lisa Thatcher, Ashley Burton, Mark Kosta, Scott Goddard, Nicolette Scapens, and to everyone at Allen & Unwin, especially Jane Palfreyman and Ali Lavau.

  While the Arthur Rimbaud portrayed here is based on historical fact, and on the poet’s explorations in east Africa and his writings (including variations of his famous phrase ‘Je est un autre’), it is important to stress that this story is a work of fiction, as are some of the names of villages and localities.

  Many books of non-fiction and poetry were helpful in my research, including the lives and works of Emily Brontë, Stéphane Mallarmé and Robert Browning. The phrases ‘night remained in their bodies’ and ‘walking in the shadows of their burdens’ are from the memoir Desert Divers by Sven Lindqvist, while Devlin’s recollections of his early army days are extrapolated from Henry Reed’s poem ‘Naming Of Parts’ from his sequence Lessons Of The War. Sister Antony’s recollection of her first meeting with the woman in the desert (‘I am eating my heart. It is bitter but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart’) are taken from Stephen Crane’s poem ‘In The Desert’.

  The reinforced Beani dome which Pietr Walenzska so admires is based on the innovative concrete shell structures of Dr Dante Bini. The excerpt from ‘i carry your heart with me(i carry it in’ is reprinted from Complete Poems 1904–1962, by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust and George James Firmage:

  i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

  my heart)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Roberta lowing is a poet, author, and film critic. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals such as Meanjin, Blue Dog, and Overland, and her first collection, Ruin, was published in 2010. She was a film and video critic for twenty-three years and covered the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals for ten years, interviewing directors and actors and writing travel stories. She recently completed her Master of Letters at the University of Sydney. Notorious is her first novel. She lives in Sydney, Australia.