The Forgiven

by Lawrence Osborne

“I would recommend a trilobite called a Spiny Phacops. All the tourists seem to love them. Especially the Belgians. However, I see that you are not Belgian. Nevertheless …”

  David shook his head mournfully.

  “A Spiny Phacops never disappoints,” the manager went on like a busy toy train. “Bill Gates loves them. Your wife will love them. I love them. Perhaps you will love them, too.”

  “I’m not really in the mood.”

  “Awili achnou hadchi. What the hell. As you wish. I am sending over something to eat, at the request of your hosts. A tagine, which is a special dish of the Tafilalet. Your room is ready when you want to sleep.”

  He ate determinedly. An elderly Frenchwoman entered the pool, oblivious to the scornful men observing her, and swam mechanically up and down in a pair of goggles. It was amazing that people came here and stayed in the new five-star resorts lining the roads out of town. The desert was popular with package tours, but mostly they stayed safely near Erfoud. Who was this stubborn old bird doing her laps past midnight? It was probably too hot to sleep in the rooms. He tried to keep up an appearance of stoic English fortitude in front of the table of his captors—as he thought of them. He set his jaw and stared into space, even though his innards were dragging him down and he longed to be alone in that room upstairs. You can’t show fear or even discomfort in front of these people. You have to show indifference to both. You have to show disdain. Yet in the end, the most disconcerting thing was that the Kebbash didn’t even look at him at all. They ignored him completely. The old French lady shot him a quizzical, mystified look from the pool and he wondered if he should ask her for help. It would be a comical scene.

  Eventually Anouar sauntered over and asked him if he’d like to go up and sleep. They took a narrow, dingy staircase to the second floor, and a room with a small balcony overlooking the pool. To David’s surprise, the air-conditioning had already been turned on and the room was half cool—as cool as it would ever get, anyway. Anouar was quite friendly.

  “Sleep,” the latter said, “and I’ll wake you at five.”

  David fell onto the bed and lay there on his side with his eyes open, watching the corrugated white surface of the wall opposite. Then he rolled over slowly and turned on the ancient TV set. An image sprang to life of a moose struggling across a marsh littered with broken trees. “Climate change,” a distant voice could be heard saying in English, “in Siberia.” He opened his cell phone and tried Jo again, but the signal was dead. The moose came to a standstill and stood there bewildered, paralyzed apparently by climate change. David closed his eyes. He was going to have equally paralyzing dreams. He was going to dream that he was in a hotel room in Erfoud, in which sand poured through the broken windows, suffocating him as he lay innocently in bed, watching a moose.

  AT FIVE TO FIVE, ANOUAR KNOCKED SOFTLY ON THE DOOR. David was still on his side and the TV was still on. Waking in a snap, he said, “I’ll be there,” and got up like an automaton. He went into the plastic-looking bathroom to splash a little tepid water on his face.

  In the fluorescent mirror light, his gray face appeared. The eyes were brighter and more urgent than the skin, more wounded. Sometimes it’s a great disadvantage to have to see oneself in a mirror. It would be better to keep one’s pride intact. He fed on the small bottle of Evian supplied by the hotel, then stepped for a moment onto the balcony. The temperature had lowered by about ten degrees so that the air was just about breathable. It was almost light and the wind was still. A maid silently swept the patio around the pool, upon which a detached palm frond floated. On one of the poolside tables sat a single coffee cup, obviously intended for him.

  Anouar wished him good morning and escorted him down. David reasoned that he was about thirty-five, moderate in mind-set, with a smidgen of education. But where had he gotten that education?

  “Ten minutes for coffee, Monsieur David. Then we leave. Is your stomach all right?”

  “Fine.”

  David sat stunned with his coffee while birds chattered loudly in the trees. He had never felt so alone, so cut off; the others crowded into the lobby and drank swift pots of mint tea in the gloom where a single oil lamp burned. It took some time for his mind to revive and to resume control of his surroundings. He wondered if he had really slept at all. It wasn’t certain. He drank sip by sip and told himself that all he had to do was see this through—sail through it like a stretch of choppy water. All he had to do was appease the furiously cold, implacable father. Above the pool, a clear sky had emerged with the first color of dawn. Hundreds of doves in cotes nearby that one couldn’t see burbled together as if roused. He went outside into the street for a breath of air. Black-clad women padded silently between the turquoise shutters, and out of the semidarkness a huge radio antenna began to materialize on the top of a hill. From close by there came the sound of hundreds of small mallets and hammers chipping away somewhere, in some open-air workshop near the Oued Ziz. The fossil shop across the street already stirred.

  By the town’s only intersection, where the post office stood, a cop in white gloves loitered as if waiting for a small crime that might well not happen, and all along avenue Moulay Ismail men and boys slept on dozens of mats laid out under the closed doors. David stood waiting for the Kebbash by the Ziz gas station, impatient to get going, impatient for first light, and when his co-travelers appeared he was irritated with them for being so dilatory. Abdellah strode out into the road holding a half-peeled orange and stood for a few moments inspecting the arid, washed-blue sky, across which flocks of sparrows were crossing with a jubilant din. His grief was still impressed upon the surface of his face. He held himself stiffly, as if a tremendous energy inside him could not yet be released. He sank his teeth into the orange and spat out the pips, tore the fruit apart, and attacked it a second time. It was his breakfast.

  They drove through the intersection close to where a huge fossil store called Usine Marmar stood. As they passed the cop, Abdellah rolled down his window and stuck out his hand to graze the white glove of the policeman, though as far as David could see, nothing passed between them.

  ON THE ROAD TO MERZOUGA THEY PASSED LINES OF BERBERS on rickety bikes loaded with tool kits. They were Aït Atta, Anouar explained, riding off into the desert to prospect for aquifers and crinoids. They, the men of Tafal’aalt, did not prospect for such things, which were the preserve of the detested Atta. The men of Tafal’aalt dealt only in trilobites, and in trilobites alone. Issomour was the richest source of trilobites in all of Africa, Anouar continued in a lazy, half-serious voice. Why would they need to trifle with fossilized marine plants? They willingly left such baubles to the Atta, while traders from Germany, France, and the United States paid handsome sums for the beautifully preserved Comura Tridents that they dug from the faces of their holy mountain. Some specimens sold for hundreds of euros.

  Before the sun rose, they were at Hmor Ladgad. There was a quarry called Mirzan set among great trenches of scarred red rock. They stopped by a cluster of wretched huts where a group of ragged little girls stood in the dawn with chisels and hammers in their hands. Their father ran the quarry. A forty-year-old compressor stood nearby, inside a deep trench whose walls were inscribed with the delicate forms of prehistoric placoderm fish and floating aquatic plants. Here the father appeared, scampering up toward them with another small girl. She was wild looking, with matted hair, and she homed in on the white foreigner with something in her hand. She danced around David crying “Ortho-cerus!” The men said nothing, hunkering down instead to a pot of tea. David examined the stone in the girl’s hand, which looked like a polished razor shell, and bought it from her on a whim for a few dirhams. She pointed at her own chest and said, “Tuda!” Anouar pulled him gently away from the group around the tea, however. Abdellah, it appeared, forbade David from coming anywhere near him.

  “He says you cannot drink from the same cup, not eat from the same plate. He says your shadows must not cross.”

  Anouar said this quietly
, out of hearing of the others.

  “He says you cannot touch what he has touched, and he cannot touch what you have touched.”

  He’s mad, David thought methodically. Or it’s the grief.

  “Is that a custom?” he asked Anouar.

  “It’s not. It is just his way right now. It will pass.”

  “I find it very strange.”

  Anouar said nothing. They watched the men haggle over some crudely prepped Orthocerus wrapped in newspapers and some fragmented trilobites. While they did so, the girls stood in the rising wind with a baby wrapped in wool, the stonecutters’ children, born to hack at fossils all their lives. Goats stood around them, cocking their heads and bleating, but no women. David put on his sunglasses to protect his eyes and rummaged through filthy boxes of assorted spinosaur teeth and ringed crinoid stems. He was beginning to feel their sinister quality, their evolutionary remoteness and otherworldly allure. Anouar came with him, as if he needed to be entertained, or at least orientated. David wondered if Anouar felt sorry for him. It wasn’t impossible. They passed some strange “sand roses” from a place called Kem Kem, then some fossilized turtles embedded in a massive slab of rock that was being raised by hand on a single car jack. It was being sent all the way to Norway as a coffee table. It had the feel of a materialized dream, a nightmare that had gone subtly wrong.

  Anouar yawned and kept his eye on the others. The foreman was called Amar Taglaoui, Anouar said with a hint of resentment. He was an ouvrier and a poor bastard, but you had to watch him. David shook his head. Around his feet he noticed hundreds of snail-like forms embedded into the small rocks, the sediments of millions of years from when the Sahara was an ocean, and it seemed like a landscape of madness equivalent to what he imagined was going on inside Abdellah’s head. Full of life, but dead; rich in forms, but monotonous. He felt sourly depressed. Grief was just a giant confusion in which millions of bits from a life lay about like ruined fragments, and nothing could make them cohere again. Seeing this terrible mood appear in David, Anouar tried to cheer him up, and he threw up his hands as if performing a conjuring trick.

  “They pour Coke on these gypsum formations to make them look old. Crooks, David, operators!”

  He nudged him to make him laugh. Crooked Arabs, what a thought!

  The men rose from the teapot. They came crunching over the shards of agatized algae and the snail-like creatures, their chechs flapping because the wind had risen and was getting stronger with every minute, and suddenly the sun shot a low ray across the orange sandstone. They made for the car, and David followed eagerly, noticing that one of the men had an armful of fossil rocks. The little girls waved with ammonites in their hands.

  “Where are we going?” David blurted out to Anouar. He knew that none of the others would answer him.

  Anouar put his hand on his shoulder. “Relax, David. We’re going to Alnif.”

  For a moment, Abdellah paused before turning on the engine. His eye scanned the empty road along which the crinoid dealers would pass back that night on their return to Erfoud. He seemed not to be thinking at all about his son or about David. He had paused en route to buy a few specimens from the stonecutters; he had allowed his mind to wander, apparently, and to entertain frivolous calculations—though in the context of a pitiless struggle for survival, such calculations were not so frivolous, perhaps. Abdellah paused, and his psychic attention seemed to turn to David. He caressed his teeth with his tongue and raised the knuckles of his right hand to his mouth for a second. He quivered. When he spoke, it was to Anouar, who sat in the backseat, who would translate for him.

  “A wretched place,” was all he said, grinning suddenly but still not looking David in the eye. “It is dying, as you can plainly see. The desert is what we fish, and the fossils are our fish. Dead fish! It is a joke. God has played a joke on us. Does it make you laugh?”

  “Not at all,” David said grimly.

  “It makes you laugh,” the old man insisted. “It makes me laugh.”

  “No,” David repeated.

  “Soon, there’ll be nothing here. No people, no trees. We’re the last ones.”

  The other men sighed. Bismellah.

  “I am telling you, we are the last ones,” Abdellah repeated, rapping the steering wheel with his nails. “We have fossils and our children. And nothing else.”

  David hung his head, and the engine roared to life.

  “You will see,” the father said softly, as if he really would see when they arrived at their destination, which was Tafal’aalt.

  An hour later, they were at the ruined ornamental gate of Alnif, where birds nested among the colorless weeds. Across a sloped square behind this bab, the villagers and fossil dealers stood about in the first shock of sunlight, unsurprised to see the Aït Kebbash appear among them yet again. The Kebbash went for a coffee at the café, and David leaned against the car trying his cell phone yet again. Nothing. Dicky had lied spectacularly to him about that. Ruefully, he walked back to the bab and peered out at the vast horizontal lines of the desert. Here were the ergs, the open wildernesses. Tufts of pale drinn grass lined the road with a hopeless greenery, and here and there a thorn tree rose into the immense morning light, glistening with a mysterious dew. So this was it, he reflected with all the resilience he could muster in a tight corner. He was trapped in the most definite way. Why had he not simply refused to go? It had been a curious moment of weakness, which was to say of guilt. As he looked back on it, it was incomprehensible. But everything must happen for a reason.

  He thought of his wife asleep in her bed in Azna. She wouldn’t be up yet. She would be in her deepest dreams, tossing and turning. He thought of her skin that had a smell of library dust in the morning; her musty, haylike hair falling over the pillow, where he liked to kiss it. He would not describe this journey to her later, he decided. In fact he had already made a resolution to himself that whatever happened in Tafal’aalt would remain with him to the grave, even if it was sadder than anything he could imagine now.

  Fourteen

  HE ROAD GREW LESS DISTINCT AND MORE LIKE A track scratched into the surface of the desert by a cosmic stick, and around it, receding infinitely, the acacias multiplied. Their dagger-like thorns lay all around on the ground. In the far distance they saw the mountain called Atchana, “the thirsty one” in Arabic. It formed one corner of the vast rectangular plateau of Jbel Issomour close to the Algerian border, which now began to rise to their left, a low shadow on the horizon.

  As they neared it, the land grew almost black, its surface cracked and pitted. It was hard, jagged rock, not the sand he had expected, and before long they were rolling across open country, unbound by the puny formality of a road. The car pitched violently, and the Kebbash gritted their teeth. To the left, man-made ditches began to appear, fossil trenches. In the hot season, the workers fled to the Atlas to make a gentler living and they left their tool kits and camping gear by the side of the trenches, where they would remain undisturbed until winter. When the temperatures came down, they would return to find their belongings exactly as they had left them. It was like the equipment of a Roman army that had disappeared two thousand years ago, like the camps you could still see surrounding Masada in Israel. The burned plain to the right had a color of roasted peaches and custard, and across it a single figure made its way in the full anonymity of a morning sun. The car stopped for a moment and the men jumped out and waved. It was a boy of about fourteen wrapped from head to foot in indigo cloth, following a flock of camels that were far out of sight below the horizon. Anouar helped David out of the car and they soaked up the sun for a few minutes while two of the party ran off to peer inside the fossil trenches. The shepherd threw them a few friendly words.

  “They have a completely different idea of space,” David thought mutely as he watched the kid walk off with his stick. On the far western horizon, nothing could be seen but shimmering thorn trees. “They’re not even on the same planet.” Their planet bore only an extraord
inarily slight resemblance to his.

  Anouar offered him some water and they drank apart from the rest of the group, urinating by themselves. They walked up to the trench, and Anouar wound his chech more tightly around his face. Through the soles of his shoes, David could feel the heat of the ground.

  “We’ll drive around the Jbel,” Anouar said, “and arrive through Boudib to Tafal’aalt. It’s the back way.”

  “Why the back way?”

  The Moroccan shrugged. It was too complicated to explain.

  “It’s the father’s choice.”

  David felt a surge of pent-up exasperation.

  “So it’ll add hours to the trip?”

  “I wouldn’t say so long. We’ll be there soon enough.”

  Standing by the car, Abdellah watched them with a hawkish, cold suspicion. He had opened the back of the jeep for a while to see that the body was all right, and his concentration lingered there. When he had closed the back of the jeep again, he stood very erect in the snarling gusts and drew his chech up under his eyes. Something in his look made Anouar shift uncomfortably and draw apart from David. The two men were forced to look at each other sheepishly, and neither could quite decipher the rage in Abdellah’s expression, because it was not entirely the rage that a son’s death would cause. It was directed at nameless things, at things that lay behind persons. David watched the old man turn slowly and kick a rock under the jeep. He walked off by himself and brooded, his head bowed onto his chest, where his long, hairy arms were folded.

  Now Anouar said, “It was his only son. It was his only child.”

  David felt his heart going dim and tinny, like something spinning on a piece of empty ground. He said, “I see,” and his fear assumed a more definite form. The suggestion of revenge began to emerge from the back of his consciousness, where it had been hiding itself. So it was possible. All his old prejudices recrystallized, and he gripped his useless cell phone. Oh, he knew what these tribals got up to when everyone’s back was turned. He was prepared for some cat and mouse.