The Forgiven

by Lawrence Osborne

CHILDREN STOOD BY THE ROAD WITH THEIR HONEY SPOOLS and fossilized shark teeth, holding up their treasures. They stopped at the long, spellbound lake of Aguelmane Sidi Ali. Ominous cedar forests clung to the mountainsides, and a few guides lounged at the edges of the oncoming night, watching them with a curious lack of interest. The sky was filled with dusk clouds, great shadows on the lake. Farther on, on the Col du Zad, it began to rain in spots, the fields of barren rocks hissing like frying pans being hit with cold oil. There was no one on the road, only a few army trucks. Gradually her mood grew more somber. She glanced down at the Michelin map and it crossed her mind that one can follow maps too blindly; it was a tremendous gesture of trust. One had to believe that these childish squiggles corresponded to an entire country. So her eye followed the line of the headlights now carving flashing visions out of the dusk—whitewashed barriers, spots of drinn grass, animals standing under the trees—and she did not quite believe it.

  His hand reached down to the CD player and he pushed in a Lou Reed.

  He said, “It’s the right road, isn’t it?”

  “There’s only one road.”

  He felt grimly satisfied.

  “God, I hate Lou Reed. What a moron.”

  “It’s perfect road music.”

  “That’s what I mean. I also have Vivaldi. Almost as bad.”

  Shaggy trees shot past in the side mirror. Rocks painted with Arabic words and numerals, leafless thorned trees bent to one side. Men in sackcloth slept in ditches by the road, with pickaxes and chipped trilobite slabs laid next to them. They rolled into Midelt.

  It was a pell-mell town of concrete and antennas. Its streets were filled with wild-eyed men in heavy woolen gowns exuding a ravenous, merry energy. There was a distant taste of quarries. Fossil country, with a long hill for a main street. The world capital of ammonites and crinoids. Desperate signs advertised Fossiles en vente and Dents de requin.

  But in any case, they drove straight through the town, after a quick espresso at the Hôtel Roi de la Bière. The car groaned as it pushed up a long incline and into the dark of new forests, and between the Atlas peaks the night sky suddenly came into definition, sharply illumined at its center, a heartbreaking blue, but vague and treacherous as it reached down to the earth.

  CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT, THEY PULLED OVER AGAIN. THEY were not sure how far they were from Errachidia, or from Midelt, and the turnoff to Azna—tiny, by all accounts—lay closer to Errachidia. They would have to be extremely careful. “We’re going to miss it,” she wanted to say, but it was surely better not to. Instead, she walked down the middle of the road, letting something in her body go free, her hands flapping, and for the first time she drank in the sky and the hostility of the earth, which liberated rather than oppressed, at least for a few moments. Seeing this, he got out quickly and opened the flashlight on her. His voice was penetrating and hysterical, as if he understood perfectly that she had had a moment’s freedom outside of him.

  “You’ll get yourself killed like that. Are you nuts?”

  She turned in a measured way and hovered just out of range. Her fists were clenched and she was not quite steady, not really erect.

  “Get in,” he shouted. “You’re in the middle of the road.”

  And suddenly, behind her, headlights approached. He grabbed her arm; she twisted away, but then scuttled around the car to her door.

  “I’m not blind,” she hissed.

  A large car swept toward them, a regal silver Mercedes convertible with the top down. They were both so surprised that they simply watched it roar past, its fenders polished like tableware, an anachronistic show of brutal luxury.

  “Must be one of the guests,” David said, fumbling with the keys. “We can follow them. A Mercedes!”

  At this, she laughed outright.

  “What if they’re not guests?”

  “We’ll soon find out.”

  “David, no. You’re not to follow that car.”

  He shot off, slamming the pedals, and his mouth was grim and silly. She rolled down her window and decided to let this folly expend itself logically, because there was no way a worn-down Camry could keep up with a Mercedes. Its taillights were already rapidly disappearing into the gloom ahead. She sat back and waited to see what her excitable husband would do, and how he would apologize in due course for his abominable language. His violent moods always exploded and dissolved almost in the same moment, and after them came the quiet of septic ponds and bombed cities. The rages of the modern husband, inexplicable, dense, obscure in origin. And there was something about the Mercedes that had infuriated him even further—its arrogant assurance. Were they Arabs?

  He said, “Did you see them?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Strange they didn’t stop. What if we had been broken down? They didn’t even slow down.”

  “Thank god they didn’t stop.”

  “I’m talking about the underlying attitude.”

  “What is the underlying attitude?” she thought bitterly.

  Soon they were alone again. Small white buildings floated by, long-abandoned ditches, destroyed gates, tracks running off into a vast palmery. She knew he was lost, and he knew that she knew. Insects began to crust the windshield, a massacre of crane flies and moths.

  As the road flattened out, the heat rose and touched the backs of her hands, the unprepared skin. Even above the hum of the engine, she fancied she could make out the slithering echoes of water wheels turning inside the oasis. Tracks spiraled off into the palmery, side roads with villages listed in Arabic. But of course they could not read the names. Occasionally, places were also written in French, and these were the beacons of hope. But none of them was Azna.

  He slowed the car under her insistence, and they stopped again to consult the ever more ambiguous map, on which Azna was not marked. He thought it must be on the way to the high village of Tafnet. There the road bifurcated, and both branches petered out. Perhaps the glamorous renovated ksour of Messiers Richard and Dally was there, but they had said nothing about Tafnet in their directions. Nor were there any lights shining in the hills or inside the oasis. They had left too late, he knew, and his heart sank because in all likelihood it was his fault, and it couldn’t be disguised. They would turn toward Tafnet and there would be an argument. He would drive for miles waiting to see if he had been right or wrong, and when he was wrong, she would tear him to pieces. Or he would be right.

  “We should turn toward Tafnet,” he said calmly, folding the map. “I don’t see any other roads that might fit.”

  “They didn’t say anything about Tafnet.”

  “I know, darling. But they may have assumed Azna would be marked along with Tafnet on the sign.”

  “And what if it isn’t?”

  “Then we’ll take a chance.”

  “A chance, David?”

  “Let’s not have another scene. I’m as lost as you are.”

  His hand was shaking.

  “It’s the booze,” she said acidly.

  “Get in. We’ll get an inspiration. We’ll find them.”

  As he put on his seat belt, he said, “It’s not the booze, I can assure you. It’s the worry. The booze never gets to me.”

  A mile farther on, the headlights picked out a camel standing by the road picking leaves from an acacia. Sand drifted over the road, and there were pieces of broken glass. The road turned around an outcrop of boulders covered with prickly pear and dropped a little, smoothing out.

  Far ahead was a sign with several place names stacked on top of each other in Arabic and French. They made out the word Tafnet, and she said quietly, emphatically, “No.”

  “We have to turn,” he insisted.

  She caught his arm and there was almost a tussle. They screamed at each other, and he missed the brake pedal, then found it. He didn’t stop; he just wanted to clear the issue before they reached the sign. A gust of wind blew sand across the road and everything dimmed, and he said, “Don’t be so bloody stupid.” But
her voice suddenly went calm.

  “Turn on the high beam.”

  The sand darkened the moon, and the outline of the road disappeared for a few moments. And then, as her eyes relaxed, she saw two men standing to the left side of the road. They were running toward the car, holding up their hands, and one of them also held up a cardboard sign that read Fossiles, with an exclamation point. It seemed like such a ridiculous scam. “Stop,” she said very calmly to her husband, but something in him seemed to have decided otherwise, and their dreamlike momentum continued. The sign flew into the air, and there was a crash of opposing wills. At least, that was how she thought of it. But in reality, it was too quick for any thought to occur. The car’s metal struck human bone, and the sound it made was like a single blow on a large, tautened drum—a boom that seemed to deafen and stun for a second, a sound she was sure she had heard before but which was at the same time wholly new and fresh and derived from nothing previously known. It was a detonation of some kind that lasted for only a split second but seemed to last for minutes, in the course of which her confidence in the future broke apart and died.

  Two

  T WAS TEN O’CLOCK. SET WITHIN THE RUINED WALLS of the Azna ksour, the main mansion of dark brown pisé cast its square silhouette against the skies. The old mud walls still stood, and the ghorfas, or granaries, were four hundred years old, melted down with time and connected by erratic adobe staircases. The ksour lay high up on the hillside past Tafnet, and it had been abandoned since independence in 1956. It was built close to a natural spring that the Foreign Legion had dubbed La Source des Poissons; its water was said to make sterile women pregnant. The river flowed around the cliffs where the houses perched, half of them abandoned, and from them a flight of steps plunged down to the pool where the women of the Aït Atta floated in secret to recuperate their powers.

  Then the foreigners came. Les visiteurs, as they were called. Tall, golden men with bright eyes and fussy, incomprehensible tastes. They could have stepped off a ladder dropped from the sky for all the people of Azna knew. The term visitor also implied that at some point in the merciful future they would depart just as suddenly as they had arrived. It was admitted that they were wealthy and that they spent their money in an exceedingly unwise and profligate way, and that this was much to the advantage of the people. They hired many servants and staff and did not work them very hard. Once again, this was to the advantage of the people. But by the same token it could not be denied that there was something unquestionably demonic about them. It was not just their alcoholic habits, which were extreme even by the abject standards of Europeans. Nor was it just their distasteful sexual habits, though there was much to say about those. It was the way they sat at night on their roof with binoculars looking at stars, the way they sometimes slept all day until dusk, and the way they walked along the old trails at twilight with garlands of flowers and ice buckets. Moreover, they could not drink local water; they swam naked in their own swimming pool and sometimes, God forbid it, in the pools of the Source des Poissons, contaminating the source. “Li jayin men lkharij gharab”—foreigners are strange.

  The few old people left in the habitable houses by the cliffs talked about the homosexuality of Dally Margolis and Richard Galloway with a dry, noncommital disgust. But secretly, despite their horror, they also admired the visitors’ wealth and their cosmopolitan style. Oranges flown in from Spain! Butter from a single store in the 8th arrondissement in Paris! Drinking water shipped all the way from Meknes! They appreciated the influx of cash, the extravagant wages, and the beautification of the ksour itself. It was said that Dally was the submissive one and Richard, with his slightly more austere tone, the dominant. They laughed. The jinns in the ksar and in the granaries, they whispered, were outraged by the presence of infidels in a place built expressly for Muslims, and at night everyone could hear the clash of pots and pans in the kitchens, victims of supernatural rages.

  The jinns were right. There were scandalous goings-on in the main house, but no one ever saw inside it until the morning after. People said there were naked boys asleep on the floors—boys everywhere, and some of them Moroccans.

  EARLIER THAT DAY, AS THE SUN DROPPED, THE SHADOW cast eastward by the crenellated walls, the lopsided rectangular towers, and the half-melted ghorfas had formed a single menacing shape upon the shelves of rocks, an impression of decayed massivity. The yellow-throated tanagers went quiet and stood still on the roofs of the buildings, which were still hot from the sun, and from the river came a sound of aroused swallows. Rabbits could be seen waiting behind cacti, their ears completely erect. A shepherd walked languidly toward Tafnet a mile behind his near-invisible gaggle of goats, swinging a stick as if he wanted to decapitate someone. A swirl of dust rose from the far-off road that led eventually to the Tafilalet. The sound of chattering voices and a Natacha Atlas song coming from the ksar was not enough to make the old people sitting on the river wall turn their heads. They had heard it dozens of times before. There were always parties going on up at the house. “Once,” they would say, “we saw an infidel whore lying on her back in the Source des Poissons. Their men cannot get them pregnant!”

  But when a Christian in a dinner suit stumbled down one starry night to say hello and admire the view, they smiled with mechanical courtesy. They raised their hands and cried “Salaam aleikum” and then “La bess!”, “No evil!”

  THE MIDDLE-AGED AMERICAN WAS WALKING ALONG THE ruined section of the ksour wall that had not yet been repaired. He was in a Huntsman suit with a poppy and held a paper plate with some pieces of chocolate cherry cake, his shoes dusted from his walk. For the men of Azna, he was a sight. He was about forty-five, with Italian features, and no one knew who he was. Tom Day was a private investor in Dally’s business, though he never asked questions about it and rarely showed his face at the latter’s incessant “happenings.” He was too old, he felt, and moreover he had already burned his candle at both ends, as ancient libertines are fond of admitting. The remaining piece of wax in the middle, he felt, was too precious to melt at parties, and his foremost interest was in merely making it last until the end without evaporating in the furnace of fun. No one knew how he made his money, and he never offered the information. It was beyond civilized discussion. He had retired at thirty-eight—that was all one needed to know. He lived alone in New York and kept a house in Ubud, in Bali. A few years earlier, his wife had run off with a hedge fund manager. Nothing was known of her. Women run off and they fade mercifully from the mind.

  The wall looked over the head of the valley, the road, and, beyond that, the white edge of the Sahara. Day smoked a cigar, enjoying the puffery and swagger all around him and the way it was taking shape minute by minute, like some monstrous cartoon being drawn in front of his eyes. Something inflating. The staff were hanging fairy lights in tamarisk trees nearby. They made a fuss, cursing in Tamazight and making it clear that the boss had asked them to spell out specific designs with the lights. As they struggled, noisy cattle egrets chattered around them, as if humans and birds were at war for a moment, and the staff beat them off with sticks with many a tsk tsk. The electricity was tried and failed. Allah was mentioned, but he did not intervene.

  The generator was turned off and then on again, and the men in the topmost branches wove yet more bulbs around twigs. Who was it for? They were also hanging small tangerines with the stems wrapped in silver foil, which reminded him of the oranges hung on good-luck trees at Chinese New Year. A yapping of fennec foxes came over the little ravine where the old men sat smoking in the gloom. La bess!

  He walked on top of the wall until he could see the main gate. It was hard not to feel disdain for the way they had done it up in lights and flowers. It was vulgar, but not vulgar enough. Cars roared up the dirt road, greeted at the entrance by extra hired hands in silly turbans and sashes, which the irrepressible Dally had designed himself. Out of them poured dozens of fab people, all of them laughing about the hardships of the Moroccan road. The women were alr
eady in their dresses and they had been drinking in the cars. It was like a ball in nineteenth-century Russia: the rushing up to the venue in carriages was part of the fun, part of the sex. He himself had driven a rental car from Meknes.

  The floodlights were finally turned on and the lacework facade of the ksar became a brilliant image. A staff member came up to him with a tray held at the shoulder, and seemed to wonder what he was doing there all by himself when there were so many beautiful women to enjoy.

  “Vous désirez un cocktail, Monsieur? Un petit sandwich?”

  He walked through the ksour with his stub, sucking the last smoke out of it, and as he passed by the wall again, the tamarisk trees came alight and the staff applauded themselves. Allah was again mentioned, but this time even more emphatically. There was a pulsing celebration suddenly upon the air. He enjoyed the rushing and clapping and the way the servants sank their teeth into the oranges on the sly and caught his eye. Dally and Richard expected around forty people for the weekend, and the tiny houses were filling up. He almost admired it, this talent for weekends, which are usually forgettable—this talent, that is, for making them unforgettable. Dally, he thought, must be a man of meticulous inner workings, a man who is half clock, half ballerina, with a genius for orchestrations and appearances. He ran a number of e-commerce sites in the United States specializing in European fashion, one of the few areas of the economy to avoid the latest difficulties. What kind of name was Dally, anyway? A nickname someone had given him, an insult turned endearment?

  He watched the guests spilling out of the main house’s open doors into the courtyard, where trestle tables had been set up with bowls of fruit punch and iced rose water. There were plates of figs split down the middle and opened out. There was going to be a musical performance. A Gnawa group had arrived, hoisting their instruments. There was something a little urban about them, as if they had come from the city and not from the mountains, which was perhaps a sign of the times, and the tall European and American girls in their locally acquired pieces of ethnic clothing mingled among them with knowing looks of studied cool. One had to stop and watch that. The long, emaciated figures with their eyes ticking over like meters, taking in everything that “world culture” threw their way. They were quite beautiful, but in a way that was far ahead of its time and which left him high and dry. “Well, these are your people,” he thought, and he didn’t mean their shared race. They were the people of the megalopolises, and they were new. They moved like giraffes among the musicians, uttering friendly comments that were no doubt insolent to other ears. They made him remember that he was almost old, in that phase of pre-oldness that was curiously more alive that the preceding stages, but alive because it was ending. He clucked and rolled back on his expensive heels, which were already gathering white dust. What a figure you are, Old Day. Invited by accident to other people’s fun and unwilling even to put a good face on it. You should stay at home.