The Forgiven

by Lawrence Osborne

  A voice inside him whispered, “You weakling, you coward, you have no force, no determination. You want to go back to sleeping on a roof in Erfoud and being mocked for the black eyes your father gives you? Do you really want to fail?”

  But he had not been able to remember the combinations, and so he had to use guile, patience, a ruse of some kind. If the world is war for the weak, then ruses are the latter’s weapons of choice. One had to be patient until the moment came when one’s ruse could work.

  He observed everything more attentively throughout the house, and there came a weekend when Roger had to go back to England to attend to his business affairs. They told him merrily at breakfast, and Roger leaned over and said to him, very seriously, that he would have to “look after” Angela while he was away, and when he returned, they would talk about his plan to go to Paris. Maybe they could help.

  “Thank you,” Driss said, with tears in his eyes, because he felt he had been very patient with his issue and that finally his patience had received some recognition. He had tended that garden faithfully every day for four months.

  “Though, I must say,” Roger went on, “I cannot see how we could ever find anyone to replace you. You have saved our business.”

  What he had meant when he referred to Paris was putting Driss’s papers in order. But Driss had not understood this at all. Driss thought, “He’ll buy me a train ticket to Paris!” If Roger did this, however, it would only solve a quarter of his problems.

  “So did he buy the ticket?” Ismael asked.

  “It would not have mattered. I needed more money than that. This is the way life is.”

  Twelve

  WO BOYS IN TARBOUCHES STOOD ON EITHER SIDE OF Richard with incongruous glasses of minted iced lemonade, lit like Egyptian statues in the heightened light created by the gate lamps, which had all been turned on as if to expose any possible subterfuge. It was a curious parting gesture on the part of an embarrassed host who took his duties seriously. A gesture of inadequate regret. A third boy carried David’s two bags. The wind picked up now, scattering dust over all present. The Englishman looked once again like a kid being packed off to some distant, unpleasant boarding school from which he might not return entirely intact. Jo, Richard thought, looked surprisingly energetic.

  “We’re giving you a sleeping bag, too,” he said in a chatty way as David and Jo drank their lemonades. “Stone floors and all that.”

  “Sleeping bag?”

  The look of horror on David’s face was more than comical.

  “They might not have a bed out there. They don’t always sleep on beds.”

  “What?”

  Richard laughed and clapped his arm.

  “Don’t look so terrified. It’s like camping. It’ll do your spine good.”

  “My spine’s perfectly fine.”

  A final gloom came over David’s face and he gritted his teeth in a very demonstrative way, so that everyone knew he was gritting them and why. Jo took his hand, then swung herself against him and gave him a long kiss. As if slighted by this show of affection, the Aït Kebbash turned away toward their battered vehicle, and this was the sign that the discussions and delays were over and that it was time to attend to more serious things. A body must be buried with all haste, and every delay is a breach of contract with the holy texts. A kiss is nothing, marital affection a gust of wind.

  On one side of the jeep David now saw that there was a crude yellow painting of a trilobite. The floor was littered with prepping tools and rolls of old newspapers. A tall man wearing a lime-green sweater in the suffocating heat came up quickly to open the front passenger door for him, skipping around him with a spurt of agility. David watched his hand yank open the door; it was practically black, the nails clogged with oil. The Aït Kebbash uttered some curt farewells and piled into the car with the force of a rugby scrum, squeezing themselves into the available spaces with a few ominously angry words. Jo and Richard came to the window, which was broken but half down. The servants were already filing back inside, and the disco music had grown louder, booming against the silence of the desert. One by one, the mental strings that bound David to the knowable world began to snap apart, and he drifted away, gripping the window glass and frowning.

  “Look after her, Dicky.”

  “I expect one of them will give you a ride back afterward,” Richard said affably, putting his arm around Jo and pulling her a little toward him. “If not, call us on your cell and we’ll figure something out.”

  “Will it work out there?”

  “Of course it will. We use ours all the time.”

  It was the father who got in to drive. He didn’t care that the gaouri were talking among themselves: he started the engine with a gruff motion.

  “Call as often as you can anyway,” Jo pleaded.

  There was still a trace of orange flare in the eastern sky as the car began to roll down to the long road that connected Tafnet to the main highway to Errachidia. The owner of Azna and a few others watched it approach the first bend, its taillights flickering on and off, and it was only there that its headlight came on and the prickly pears appeared on the edges of the cliffs. “Poor sod,” Richard thought, and then he said it, only louder than he had thought it.

  “Poor sod. It’ll be a difficult couple of days. I somehow suspect that David has never slept on a stone floor before.”

  “Never,” Jo said.

  “It’ll be a learning experience. Shall we go in and get a drink? We’ll call him in a couple of hours and make sure they haven’t raped him. No, darling, I’m just kidding. He was looking rather cute with those bags, though. Like a Boy Scout on his way to Auschwitz.”

  “David is anything but a Boy Scout.”

  SHE COULDN’T HELP SMILING AT THIS REMARK, AND THE distortion of her face lasted all the way to the first of the open-air bars that had been set up around the dance floor, where the glare of the metal palm trees and the sudden onset of loud music drowned out her misery, but also her natural cautiousness and reserve. Richard’s chirpiness, his jauntiness, reassured her because one was never jaunty when things were serious, or when people might get hurt. And Richard knew the desert far better than either she or David. She relaxed much more quickly than she might have thought possible, and as they threaded their way into the crowd, and Richard slickly procured her a double gin and tonic with a sliver of shaved cucumber, she let herself give in at last to the spirit of a long, confused party. He thrust the cold glass between her hands and gave her a quick asexual hug, a kiss on the side of her face.

  “Come on, bunny. Relax. I am not going to let you mope in your room popping pills. Why don’t you meet some people? We invite only the best people, you know. Some of them are quite amusing.”

  “I must look like shit.”

  “It’s a hundred degrees at nine o’clock. Everyone looks like shit, my darling. And besides, you don’t look like shit at all. Tout au contraire. You look splendiferous.”

  “I usually don’t drink things as big as this, Richard.”

  She looked down at the enormous gin and tonic with its curl of cucumber, and he raised her hands so that the brim of the glass touched her lower lip.

  “Doctor’s orders. Drink it all down. It’s mostly ice anyway. It’ll just make you cold.”

  His eyes went piggy and funny and she couldn’t help it—she laughed and did as she was told. The ice cubes slammed against her lips as the incredibly strong dose of gin slipped inside her. “Trojan horse,” she thought for some reason, and then leaned back on her heels, felt the sweat emerging on her neck, and watched the mass of dancing bodies.

  The whole area was dark apart from the strings of lights shaped like rose hips that swathed the metal trees. The outdoor bar was covered with thick white linen, with the staff done up as corsairs with toy swords, and among the guests, she noticed great balloon-shaped turbans, naked chests and eye patches, wigs and knee-high boots. The music had switched to Sly and the Family Stone, and inside the thicket of
limbs she spotted the American, Day, dancing with a very pretty girl.

  Richard stood by her until he was sure she was drinking heartily.

  “You can dance,” he said quietly. “It’s not a crime. David’s all right. As we speak, he’s probably having a joint with the Aït Kebbash. They’re enormous potheads, you know. Incorrigible. He’ll be stoned the whole time.”

  She said nothing, speaking instead to herself.

  “I think I’ll wait till I calm down. Maybe another drink or two.”

  “Look, there’s Lord Swann. He came on a helicopter last night that landed at Rich. No, luvvy, that’s a town in these parts, believe it or not. It’s been called Rich for centuries. Perhaps it means poor in Berber.”

  And there was the lord, who looked like a seventy-year-old plumber, turning on his heels to something funkadelic. Richard clapped his hands, delighted.

  “He always shows up for the girls. He has an incredible collection of Sahara fossil aquifers at home. He’ll probably tell you about them when he chats you up later on.”

  “I never know what to say to lords. I feel like they’ve run out of things to say.”

  “But let’s not hate on them. I find them very tolerant. They are potheads, too, like the Aït Kebbash. I’ve always been meaning to introduce these two groups. I have a feeling they’d get on.”

  It seemed like an hour later that she was wandering through the brightly lit house, where the carved wooden screen smelled of patchouli oil and the floors exuded a warm, earthy scent of pine needles. It was, in the end, a house that imposed itself as a personality in its own right, a character with history and emotions, and the stairwells breathed like lungs, with soft, momentary breezes that came and went without noise, with a shuffle of tassels and curtain hems. She found a quiet corner where some antique lances hung on a wall and flipped open her cell phone. The steel blades shone above her and her nostrils filled with a scent of damp but exotic domesticity. Smoked tea and varnish and carpet dust. She dialed David’s number and heard it ring: a small miracle. She waited impatiently, the phone pressed too tight to her ear, but he didn’t pick up. It was possible, of course, that he had moved out of their reception area, just as it was possible that he would soon move back into it. Richard had warned her there was spotty coverage in the desert. But the futility of the call depressed her. Perhaps he was smoking a joint in the car. Finally she gave up and pocketed the phone. She was a little tipsy as she tottered through the galleries and halls, her hands held out to grip things and steady herself. She slipped through a maze of lustrous objects whose specificity she couldn’t quite determine, because she wasn’t paying attention and she didn’t care where she was. There was a large, colorful bird in a cage hanging by a piano, its claws wrapped around a brass swing, and brass lanterns with green glass suspended above her from chains, and pieces of antique weaponry, and skin lamps pierced with hundred-year-old multicolored glass. She walked through the rooms as if she were blind, letting the gin carry her. When she heard voices, she backed away, seeking more pools of isolation.

  She was sitting alone on one of the Raj horsehairs in the library when Hamid came to look for her. It was about an hour before midnight, and for some reason the dozen caged birds scattered throughout the house had started singing in five different mutually exclusive keys. She looked up to see Hamid in a cherry sash peering down at her with a cup of coffee in one hand, a spoon balanced on the saucer with a square of wrapped chocolate, as in a restaurant. “Monsieur Richard,” he said, “thought you might want this.” The fire-eaters of Taza were about to perform, and he wanted her to come outside and enjoy it. A coffee would revive her.

  “How did he know I was in here?” she asked incredulously.

  “Monsieur Richard knows everything, Madame.”

  She took the cup and placed it on the arm of the sofa.

  “I will wait to take you outside, Madame.”

  She really wished he wouldn’t, but now that he had his orders, it would be pointless to try to talk him out of it. She gulped down the coffee and then the sliver of chocolate. The molten black eyes took her in easily. She was shaking very slightly. David didn’t call; the unknown had swallowed him up, and it might as well swallow her up as well. But for her, the unknown was just a rich man’s party.

  Hamid seemed to be putting her under surveillance. She stood up when her cup was emptied and asked him to lead the way. He always bowed when asked to do something, but his bows were never entirely compliant. They were reminders that he knew the score and you didn’t.

  They went through the dining room, where the table was magnificently set for another late-night gastronomic orgy. There was a galleon made of pink sugar in the middle of it.

  In the gardens, the disco had been interrupted, and rows of sofas were set up with rugs and furs thrown over them. Water pipes were serviced by the staff, who went from sofa to sofa with tongs grasping tiny morsels of fruit-flavored charcoal.

  Hamid led her to a chair where a table had been set up with a pitcher of lemon water, and next to it sat Richard and Dally nestled in each other’s arms. On a sand stage surrounded on all sides by the guests stood the men from Taza in their outlandish costumes, drummers to one side, their tools dripping with gasoline. The noise of the drumming had risen to block out everything else, and the faces around them were already altered by it, shiny, fixed, tuned out from subtler feelings, the eyes concentrated but not able to think, and they gave you only the option of joining in this coordinated mood, not of standing apart from it and watching from a distance. But Richard, sensing that this was not her type of entertainment, shot her a comforting look and Dally held out his hand for her.

  “It’s all too awful,” he shouted—a thing that should have been said quietly. She nodded and just sat back, unable to do anything else. She hated this sort of thing, but it couldn’t be avoided now.

  The fire-eaters went into their routine. They were stripped to the waist, their chests oiled, and they dipped their inflammable rods in the buckets of petrol and whipped them into the air above their heads, their feet moving in small motions to the pace of the drumming. Cocking back their heads, they held the flaming spears with two hands and brought the fire down toward their mouths, which would miraculously extinguish them. A low gasp went up from the audience, the gasp of unsurprised but chilled children at a fair. She was not interested, but her own revulsion was interesting enough. She felt a momentary blackout shut her down, and she reached out to grip the pitcher of water. A great arc of flame—of fiery saliva—shot across the stage, and the faces went orange for a second and then seemed to disappear.

  “I DON’T KNOW WHY IT IS,” LORD SWANN WAS SAYING, “but the kif here is stronger than the stuff in Tunisia. Maribel says it makes her hallucinate. Dicky, I think you have a man up in the hills who grows it for you.”

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  The lord made a swooning expression, and the girls with him, who were a third his age, all giggled and reached for their cigarette lighters.

  “See, girls? He’s such a scalliwag. Dicky and I have been playing Ping-Pong for years at the Athenaeum. He scalps me.”

  They sat in a ring on the far side of the house, on square tribal cushions, with metal cups of tangerine sorbet and biscotti. The fire-eaters had dispersed to eat with the staff, and the party had become amorphous and loose, which was the way Richard liked it. He kept an eye on its progress, but he rarely intervened directly. He lay back and looked at the intense stars. They seemed to be approaching the earth rather than receding from it. He thought coolly about Jo and her mental state. Was she coping? He couldn’t find her anywhere. And David was driving, driving through the desert, and Richard had lied to him about everything, but it had been necessary. The fool wouldn’t have gone without a few euphemisms.

  “I heard there was an accident last night,” the overbearing Swann cried. “Someone was hurt. Am I off?”

  Richard explained.

  “Ah,” the lord said, sucki
ng in his kif smoke on his back. His Chelsea boots stuck up like little black gravestones. “Mad dog’s an Englishman goes out on a moonlit night.”

  “It’s never happened before,” Richard said pointlessly.

  His parties were written up on blogs across Europe, in garish magazines, and sometimes in the New York Times, and he didn’t want a bad reputation to descend upon them.

  “Where’s the dolt?” the lord demanded.

  “We sent him into the desert to die.”

  A lord’s chuckle. “Good. Quite right.”

  “It’s one of those things,” Richard said neutrally, digging into his sorbet. “He probably mistook the accelerator for the brake pedal.”

  “I had a chauffeur like that once. I had him killed, too.”

  A plump, slothful girl in huge tribal earrings turned on her hip and brushed a mound of whitish hair out of her eyes.

  “I can see these huge reptiles everywhere,” she purred.

  “Maribel, stop smoking at once.”

  “You’re a huge reptile, Daddy.”

  The lord laughed.

  “She’s such a prize, this one. She hallucinates every time. Even with rum and Coke.”

  “I can see penguins,” Dally said. “They’re marching toward the granaries.”

  “Personally,” Richard drawled, “this stuff just makes me unfaithful. I don’t see anything. Perhaps I have a mediocre mind.”

  The lord sighed and crossed his gravestones.

  “Are you unfaithful, Maribel?”

  “Not when there’s so many reptiles around.”

  He winked at Richard. “See? What’s the bloody point of bringing them?”