He swept out as if in embarrassment, and David bolted the door behind him, as he had been ordered, and he did it quietly, without a fuss. Perhaps it was better after all. Soon silence overwhelmed him. He went to the window and watched the acacia thorns rolling along in the wind. The shadow of the giant cliff was advancing toward the house and would soon engulf it as promised, but when? He bit his lip and counted to a hundred. The cell phone still offered no signal. He collapsed on the mattress, and exhaustion suddenly gripped him. “It’s an outrage,” he said aloud, but of course there was no outrage that he could actually define, so gradually he calmed down, because after all he had no choice. He swallowed a multivitamin pill from his bag and lay quite still, controlling his fidgety hands, for soon they were going to bury Driss in the tumbledown cemetery behind the houses, where a few white stones marked the largely forgotten ancestors.
THE TRILOBITES STOOD THERE IN A LIGHT THAT SLOWLY mutated and declined. The labels fluttered in the hot breezes passing through the glassless window, and the Greek and Latin words scrawled on them could as well have been mellifluous spells. Psychopyge, Asaphus, Dicranurus. The latter was a spiderlike form with splayed legs and two coiled ram’s horns, and came from the Devonian period. To pass the time, he opened some of the newspaper packages and looked at the spined, armored, crablike beasts that had been hacked out of the face of Issomour by Driss. They were as hideous as anything from his own nightmares—as fierce, negative, and chilling. So the distant past had been a nightmare, too, and the Sahara had once been a vast nightmare ocean filled with teeming life that had been as ugly as anything the earth had seen before or since. Demons indeed. That superstition now seemed less improbable. He picked up an exquisite tiny specimen called a Comura, with a single row of perfectly articulated spines, across which he ran a finger. It was marked “Buyer, USA.” The wide, smoothly armored head of another animal was just as primitive, like the disturbingly simple design of a horseshoe crab. It was incredible that wealthy men collected such things, bought them indeed at exorbitant prices at the Butterfields auction in San Francisco and then used them to decorate their bathrooms in Palo Alto and Manhattan and Venice Beach. A single bathroom renovation of a Silicon Valley executive probably kept a Saharan village like Tafal’aalt alive for a year. And these specimens had been painstakingly prepped until their surfaces had a polished sheen to them. They looked like beautiful Neolithic tools, elegant in their fashion, and Anouar had told him that the more detailed their corrugated eyes were, the more valuable they were, the more dealers were prepared to pay for them. And so too with the extravagant, sometimes curly spines. So this was what Driss had spent his time doing, and these were what had filled his waking mind for twenty-odd years. Comuras and Psychopyges.
He lay down again and forced back the tears ready to erupt down his cheeks. How could one spend a whole life digging, trading, preparing these nightmare life-forms from another geological era? It must be enough to drive people mad. It had driven them mad.
LONDON WAS DISTANT NOW. HE THOUGHT OF THE AGONIZING lawsuit that he had lost. The old woman in Chiswick Park misdiagnosed through one of those forensic fuckups that strike as rarely as lightning, but with roughly equal force. He hadn’t spotted the tumor for what it was; he had not concentrated, perhaps, or his antennae had not been as sensitive as they usually were. Some part of his unconscious might well have led him astray, deluding him for a fatal few moments. There was no accounting for what had happened. It had been human error—his error—and all the fury of the gypped medical consumer had fallen upon his lone head. Too late to catch her tumor in time. The woman was dying, and making a considerable amount of noise while doing it. She was decaying because of his error, and it was just enough that he would have to pay for it. And now this—it could hardly be coincidental, could it? It must be the unconscious at work again. The unconscious working as a noose.
For some time, he had had that feeling of oncoming doom. He wondered if Jo, too, had noticed it. They were so rarely intimate anymore, she probably never got close enough to notice. All she could sense was his never-ending irritability, his morose closure. Another thing for which he would eventually have to be forgiven. And yet in the end, he had not done anything wicked. It had just been an accumulation of accidents. One accident after another. Or do we produce our own accidents? Are they the sum total of our little neglects?
He slept. The usual nightmares arrived, then departed. He woke to the color of the cliff burning in the first moments of a Sahara dusk, the ropes and little caves exposed to a light that seemed oxidized. For a while he didn’t move. He wanted to just absorb the dread pouring out of that wall of bitter, luminous redness. He was sure the burial was already over.
IN FACT, IT HAD PASSED QUICKLY. THE WIND WAS HIGH AND the plot of gravestones carved into the desert was unendurable even as the sun went down. Driss’s mother had died years before; it was the aunts and cousins who wept and cursed. The men had already absorbed their grief into themselves and stood silent and unmoving as the wind hurled debris around them and made them feel their desolation.
They were lost in their own thoughts as the bandaged body was lowered into its slot and the prayers were said. Abdellah thought of his son’s young face as a ten-year-old when he had taken him prospecting across the mountain by himself. A face like an apple, with the burnished freckles of young boys. He remembered it as if it were yesterday, and the Dicranurus they had picked up by the trenches. Driss still had it in his room. Abdellah bit his lip. His tears were all expended and nothing more would come out of his eyes, nothing, in fact, but vision itself.
AS NIGHT WAS FALLING AND THE MASS OF ISSOMOUR WAS losing its sparkling definition against an indigo sky, he went to the edge of the village where the dried oued was full of majestic boulders and waited for Anouar to arrive back on foot from Tabrikt. Almost as soon as the sun disappeared, the air cooled considerably and he drew his chech around his head. His mind was empty, numbed with horror, and no violent words passed through it, not even as his anger rose and fell and rose again, because, after all, life was not words and neither was reality and they changed nothing. Many times during the journey from Azna, he had considered what he should do to the Englishman, but in reality he didn’t know; his mind was as yet unresolved. There was only one thing that mattered to him and that was whether, when confronted with the most painful necessity of telling the truth, David would do so. To tell him the truth about how Driss died: it was the only thing that now obsessed him. Upon the question of that truthfulness, everything would be decided from now on. If David lied, it was one thing; if he had the courage to tell Abdellah truthfully what had happened that night, the ending would be of a different nature. There it was. There was nothing more that a father could ask of a man who had killed his son. The question of vengeance in itself was merely vulgar and had no force. He was therefore waiting before he made any decision. He had had to wait until Driss had been buried and until he had talked to Ismael. But a lie from David could not be forgiven, that much was clear. The lie would be far worse than the original accident. Far worse, he decided. For whereas an accident is no one’s fault, a lie is an individual man’s specific fault because it is deliberate. It’s a real act, something willed, and it is more difficult to forgive than anything.
After thirty minutes Anouar came out of the dark, picking his way along the oued, and behind him came the boy, swaddled in black rags to conceal his identity. Abdellah stirred himself; he beckoned the boy forward impatiently, and Anouar threw off his chech for a moment and got his breath back. The boy was tall, thin, very like Driss. He had been in the house countless occasions, since he and Driss had been apparently inseparable at times. They walked along the oued, finding a place where the wind was tamer. Ismael was extremely nervous, and his shoulders rolled as if their owner wished them to disappear, and his eyes had that wild, vacillating look that you see in the faces of minor criminals as they are being led away by the police.
“Calm down,” Abdellah said
sternly. “It’s not you who has done anything wrong.” And his voice made itself respected, so that Ismael crouched down, as if this would make it more inaudible in the grand scheme of things, and his face was long and birdlike, his eyelashes like a girl’s.
“Tell him,” Anouar said in a friendly way. “He wants to know what happened, that’s all.”
“It’s a terrible thing to ask you, Ismael. But I have to know everything.”
Anouar sat down, and for a while they all waited for the moon to appear over the edge of the Issomour cliffs. Anouar passed out cigarettes and lit them one by one, so that gradually the mood became more serene, more affable, and more conducive to talk. Ismael sighed theatrically and asked how the funeral had gone. He was greatly sorry he hadn’t been able to attend. He apologized. Then he said:
“I was with Driss all the way. We left here together with the Psychopyge specimens wrapped in paper. You remember?”
“I do. Where were you headed?”
“To Midelt. We thought we’d sell them there. There’s a German dealer there, you know. He would buy them.”
“Ah, Meissner,” Abdellah nodded. “He is a crook.”
“But you were alone on the road together, so late?” Anouar asked.
The boy shifted, and his face became a little petulant.
“We were hitching rides. And sometimes we could sell from the road. We heard there was going to be a big party up at the faggots’ house. Lots of rich foreigners driving by. It was common sense.”
“So you were waiting for cars?”
The boy said nothing, staring down at his own ankles. Abdellah lit the oil lamp he had brought with him and made a merciless study of Ismael’s shifty, twitchingly evasive face. The boy was a notorious liar, and he had many times suspected him of being a minor thief as well. One of those who roamed the trenches at night looking for places he could dig himself. One couldn’t trust him. He wasn’t afraid enough to tell the truth now, but Abdellah would hear him out, because there was no one else. No one else had been there but David.
“The foreigners drove up in their car,” he said to Ismael. “And then?”
“We ran toward them. They slowed down.”
“It’s not possible,” Anouar said.
“They slowed down a little. There was a European man driving. He clearly saw us and that we were holding up boxes of fossils for sale. When we saw him slowed, we thought they were interested. We sprang forward with joy. They pay anything when they are in a car.”
“It’s true.” Abdellah nodded again. “They’re very stupid when they’re behind a wheel.”
“That’s what we thought. We thought, aha, he is going to roll down his window and pay us ten times what he should.”
“You held up the Psychopyges?”
“We did. But we made a mistake. The man didn’t stop.”
“They knew it was a demon.”
“Whatever they knew, they didn’t stop.”
“That much we know,” Anouar interjected.
“But he saw you both?” Abdellah insisted.
“By God, he did.”
“What happened then?”
They boy had tears in his eyes.
“I admit it. I ran away. I was too scared.”
“Where did you run to?”
“I ran into the hills. Up and up until I couldn’t run anymore.”
“You little shit. You pathetic fool.”
There was nothing to say; the boy hung his head.
“You ran while Driss was lying there?”
Ismael stammered. “He was already dead. I watched the man turn him over.”
“What did the European do?”
“He—he—went through his pockets and took out the ID.”
Of course, Abdellah thought. It was so obvious. Men always act in this way. They think God is blind. As if they won’t be found out.
“When you ran, did you turn back to watch?”
“I saw them arguing, the man and the woman. The woman was screaming at the man. The man wanted to find me.”
Anouar and Abdellah laughed, though it was not really laughter—it was a pained sneer. They thought of David running after Ismael and it simply made them laugh. It was comical enough.
“Well, well.”
Abdellah got up and strolled in a circle around the crouching boy. He wanted to kill him, and yet Ismael had only acted out of self-preservation. He was a petty thief, and he acted accordingly. For all he knew, Driss had been a petty thief, too, and he was not quite convinced that they had been standing by the road just to sell fossils. Ismael was a devious boy. His word was nothing. He would lie at the drop of a hat to exonerate himself.
Suddenly Abdellah rose and lurched toward Ismael, laying about him with his hands, smacking him on the head and then beating him with the flats of his hands until he couldn’t thrash anymore. But there was something halfhearted about it all, the hands not really connecting, the anger half feigned, so that the boy knew it and didn’t react unduly, merely rolling back on his heels and turning his face away.
“You fucking wretch!” the father cried, but again a little forcedly. “You worthless scum! What will you do for me when I ask you? When the time comes, what will you do?”
“Anything,” the boy cried.
“You’re a liar and a thief. I should kill you right now. Anouar, where is my pistol?”
Anouar said nothing while the boy flinched, and Abdellah’s arms ran out of energy.
“You say anything, you little shit. Would you do anything I asked you?”
The boy nodded.
“Well, I didn’t ask you. But you owe it to me.”
For a long while, none of them spoke. The moon continued its languid rise and the innumerable man-made caves punched into the vertical surface of the mountain became visible. Abdellah sat down again and lost himself in thought. Anouar lit another cigarette. Furtively, Ismael glanced back over his shoulder down the oued. Perhaps he could just run back to Tabrikt and have done with it. He was thinking of running away to Casablanca anyway. He and Driss had spoken of it many times. Anything was better than this shit-hole. He clenched his fists but didn’t move. Abdellah stopped watching him after a while and looked up at the ladders suspended across the face of the cliff. He stroked his chin. Really, it was difficult to think. The moon was in the way. It was too bright, too penetrating.
He let the boy cover his face again and felt his anxiety fragmenting, dissipating. Why not let fate take over? It would anyway. Ismael, for his part, thought incessantly of that day at the quarry when Driss had told him all about his past life in Paris.
FINALLY HE DISMISSED ISMAEL AND STRODE OFF BACK TO Tafal’aalt, with Anouar at his heels. He pounded on the metal door. The women had prepared a goat tagine; the men who had come with him on the journey to Azna were gathered in the main room, smoking and drinking tea. They looked up as he entered, and there was a storm cloud on his face that made them put down their glasses and wipe their lips. He didn’t like this reaction and immediately tried to put them at their ease.
“Relax, my friends. It’s a sad day, but there it is.”
Invoking the One True God, He Who Is Merciful at All Times, they murmured into their glasses again and uttered words of comfort to the father. Abdellah sat with Anouar beside him and began drinking with them. The normal jokes and sexual innuendos were left to one side this time, and silence was allowed to pervade the reunion. When the tagine was brought in, Anouar leaned over to Abdellah and whispered, “Shall I bring in the foreigner?” But the old man shook his head.
“Take something to him instead. I am too tired to think about him now. And eating with us is out of the question.”
“Very well.”
Abdellah stretched out his creaking, aching body on the oil-stained carpet and tore into the communal bread. And to think that the wind was already scouring Driss’s grave not a hundred meters from here. He dipped the bread into his mint tea and found that his hand shook so obviously that
everyone else was aware of it. He could not stop it, and after a while he ceased feeling ashamed of it. He let it shake. Why should it not shake? His whole body and mind shook. When you go mad, he thought to himself, this is what it is like. You begin to shake first. Then all of you shakes. You shake until pieces of you begin to fall off. You become a wolf, a bear. You no longer hear the world. You curl into a ball and Satan begins to talk to you. Your hand goes on shaking and you eat your bread like a fool. You think, “I am poor, and nothing else.” And then you realize that no one is listening to you or your thoughts. You are alone with facts.
Nineteen
HEN ANOUAR KNOCKED ON HIS DOOR, DAVID FLICKED open the bolt quickly and yanked the heavy door open. His face was ashen, with big glass eyes like a doll’s—or so Anouar thought. Perhaps he had been praying to his dreadful, ridiculous God, whom the infidels held in such exaggerated and futile regard. “It’s you,” the Englishman blurted out, and stepped aside to let Anouar with a large metal dish of goat tagine enter. As he passed, Anouar caught a whiff of curious aftershave that smelled like apricot stones, and yet David had not shaved and indeed he was looking a bit shabby.
“Is everything all right?” he asked David.
“I’m just starving. Where were you?”
Anouar said nothing. The room was in darkness because David had not been able to figure out the combination of matches and oil lamp. So Anouar did it for him. He laid the tray in the middle of the floor and organized the lamp while David sprawled next to the tray with a lugubrious groan. He seemed to unfurl like some tired, dented rodent.
Anouar was fascinated by David. By his fastidious cleanliness, his obvious wealth, his refinement, which was genuine, not affected, and by his comfortable sense of superiority. The latter quality in particular absorbed him. It was not just a superiority to the men of Tafal’aalt, after all, but—Anouar supposed—to the whole of creation. He was sure that David would even feel superior to the king of Morocco if he were put on the spot. It was a flabbergasting thought, and that in turn made David a flabbergasting man. Anouar could see this whole phenomenon in the way David folded his handkerchiefs and the way he picked up a glass with two fingers, but never three. He was a gentleman. Only a gentleman would use two fingers. Only a gentlemen would feel a passing contempt that he could not disguise, however hard he tried. The gentleman was like an unconscious robot in some ways. Everything he did was automatic, instinctive, blind. He didn’t think about making mistakes. Fascinating!
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