The Forgiven

by Lawrence Osborne

  Then, in a darker mood, he thought of his emotions when Abdellah had appeared outside his gates on Saturday morning. Out of nowhere, the desert had asserted itself. It was as if these men could call on you at any moment, knock on your door when they felt like it. They could extort you, terrify you, and at a moment entirely of their choosing. And now, because of David’s unforgivable blunder, they knew where he lived.

  “Are you off now?” he said carelessly to Swann as they trotted back.

  “I’m taking the girl to Tinerhir to the Hôtel du Sud, or whatever it’s called. She wants to get a bit of desert. Myself, I’d like to go to Málaga and play the tables.”

  “One is always so exhausted after these weekends.”

  Swann nodded ruefully. He would never give them himself, unless orgies could be organized. Alas, the age of orgies appeared to have ended.

  “Did they bury the Arab boy all right?” he asked Richard brightly as they swung onto the path above the gates, where the palms were not yet diseased.

  “I assume so. That’s the way they do things here. They brush them under the carpet. No one wants any trouble in the end. I expect our unfortunate Englishman bribed them up to the hilt.”

  Swann sneered. “Quite right, too. Silly bugger. Cars do have brake pedals, you know.”

  “That’s been my attitude all along.”

  “I wonder how much he paid?”

  “That’s one of those things a gentleman doesn’t ask.”

  DAVID AND JO LAY BY THE POOL ALL AFTERNOON. CICADAS purred in the walls and David slept, though his nightmares were mild. He imagined he was inside a giant Boeing turbine armed with a toothbrush with which he was cleaning the blades. Sometimes these sorts of nightmares made him laugh in his sleep, and he did this now. “Shredded,” he said aloud, as the turbines began to turn and the dwarves inside them were mashed up. Jo smiled. In the main courtyard of the ksour, the expensive cars assembled and departed, the Mercedes convertibles and the Land Rovers with three extra tires, the Peugeot 605’s rented from the Casablanca airport, and the Alfa Spiders with Spanish plates.

  The staff milled around hauling luggage and complimentary picnic hampers for the road while people snapped their last pictures of the weekend, exchanged e-mail addresses and numbers, and then screamed their excessive good-byes. It seemed to have nothing to do with them, Jo thought. And indeed, no one came to the pool to take their leave. The Hennigers were apparently pariahs, though no one among the guests had actually thought about it consciously. No one even thought about them at all. The bad taste left by the accident had to be expunged as soon as possible, and people were now in a hurry to leave, to get back to the European Union.

  “We’ll see you at Azrou for dinner. The Hotel Panorama?”

  “No, the Hotel Amros. We’ll order trout.”

  Rendezvous along the roads back to Casa were arranged in this way, and as each car revved its engine by the gate, Richard and Dally stood in the shade passing out small garlands of flowers, sometimes dropping them into the passenger seats of the convertibles with a blown kiss. Come back next year!

  To Jo, they were nothing. She lay very quietly, waiting for hummingbirds that never came. Her eyes were fixed on the distant mountains that grew paler as the day wore on. A quiet, hysterical panic simmered inside her. She had not seen Day since the early morning. He had vanished into the crowd, knowing that David was returning. She supposed that he’d wanted to spare her an embarrassing moment. It was considerate of him, but it left all the threads of the previous night hanging loose. His presence was still inside her, like warm and quick stickiness; she realized that she had to be patient. She would have to let it subside away from her with time. But it was not easy. She was grateful that that night they would be driving, not sharing a bed in a hotel. For the rest of her life, she would not have the excuse of being coked up to explain her night of aberration. But then, doesn’t everyone have a night of aberration somewhere along the line? It was a spurious rationalization, but it would do. She got up and went for a swim.

  After three, the house seemed silent. Most of the weekend’s partygoers had now left, anxious not to drive at night. Whereas she and David were anxious to drive at night, and they didn’t know why. To leave unnoticed, she supposed, as undetected as thieves.

  She breaststroked her away across the dark blue pool. When she rested, she heard dogs barking in the valley, their echoes reaching far and wide. There was the retort of a hunter’s shotgun and one of the cooks calling across the field behind the south wall. A little later, as she dried off, she leaned over David’s sleeping face. It was colorless and masklike, and the chin twitched with the probably insalubrious dreams that so often disturbed him and which she was never curious about. In this sun-drenched corner of paradise, with the heliconia and honeysuckle bursting around them, it was like a window into a subterranean world that she could never enter and which she knew was always starved of beauty. A sleeping face can be as terrifying as a flight of steps leading down from a trapdoor and disappearing like a rope cast into a well. She wondered if years from now during a bitter argument she might ever tell David to his face what had happened. But he had made her lie, and in a way they were quits. She passed her hand over his eyes as if he were dead, closing lids that were already closed.

  The desert night swept in, with its taste of distant salt. She sat up on her elbows and her heart was wild with hatred and foreboding. Where now? She saw nothing ahead but confusion, dire liberation. If only she could stop now, in this moment, for a dozen years. She listened to the birds settling into the grassy eaves of the house, a flock of cold mouths gathering in the twilight—dinosaurs with red eyes.

  “I FIND IT ODD THAT YOU WON’T STAY THE NIGHT,” RICHARD said over their early supper on the terrace as they lay on silk cushions and agitated starlings flapped about in the sultry dusk air. Hamid served them a salted lemon tagine with cinnamon-sweetened couscous dotted with steamed prunes and lines of sugar that melted as they watched. “It would make far more sense to start out early and get to Azrou by early afternoon and then chill out there. I would have thought, after your experience with driving here at night …”

  “I see what you’re saying”—David interrupted him brusquely—“but we’ve thought it through and we are anxious to get back as soon as we can. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

  “Naturally I can. After what you’ve been through. I just don’t want you to get into another accident!”

  “Oh, lightning doesn’t strike twice,” Jo said nervously, unsure if this was true.

  “It’s your choice. I am more than happy for you to stay on an extra night and set off in the normal way.”

  “I had a sleep all afternoon by the pool,” David countered. “I feel fit as a fiddle. I think we’ll drive through the night and just get back to Tangier in a single leap.”

  “That’s one way of doing it. We’ll give you a better map. Why don’t you stay a night or two in Tangier and recover a bit? There are some boutique hotels there now. You don’t have to stay at the Angleterre.”

  David shook his head. He had refused to say anything about Tafal’aalt and nobody had asked; and now he had no intention of playing it “normal” and pretending he’d do this and do that just because Richard wanted him to. He wanted to get back to England, that was all. He’d relax when he was in that plane in the Málaga airport.

  “The whole country feels jinxed now,” he said.

  “It’s certainly not jinxed,” Dally retorted, giving him a cool stare.

  “Not for you, maybe. But for me. For Jo and me. Nothing like this has ever happened to us.” His hand was shaking.

  “Yes, I see,” Richard muttered. “I can see why you’d want to get out of here as soon as possible. In any case, your car has already been loaded. There’s a picnic hamper in the backseat. The bottle is nonalcoholic cider.”

  It was a cruel jab, and Richard almost regretted it as soon as he had uttered it. But, in another sense, he was speaking h
is mind honestly. Morocco wasn’t jinxed; David was just an incorrigible boozer.

  “Anyway,” Jo said in conciliatory spirit, “it has all ended peacefully at least. Not for that boy, I know. But for everyone else. It could have been a lot worse.”

  Very much so, Richard thought tersely.

  “Did they have interesting carpets out there?” Dally suddenly asked, changing the subject. “I’ve never seen anything from that far out.”

  “I didn’t really notice.”

  What a couple of snobbish queens, David thought savagely. How the fuck do I know what the carpets were like?

  “I don’t feel there’s a jinx,” Jo said quietly. “It’s just a mistake. Traffic accidents happen all the time.”

  “It’s undeniable.”

  Richard looked at her thoughtfully, and caught the subtle tobacco tints in her sad eyes. If only she hadn’t married David. If only. The man carried around a cosmic gloom with him.

  “By the way …” She looked up quickly. “Did you see Day before he left?”

  Richard and Dally looked at each other as if this possibility had only just occurred to them.

  “Why, no,” Dally whistled. “He got off without us seeing him. How did he do that, Dick?”

  “He’s a slippery guy. I dunno. I see him once a year and I never know who he is, really.”

  “Who is Day?” David asked irritably.

  “An American who comes to our parties.”

  Richard and Dally smiled for and at each other, and in the moment of their complicity, Jo’s intention to ask another question faded away. She let it go. There were other things to deal with now. David’s feral alertness was on the prowl again; he had recovered the dangerous spring in his step and it was an open question what he would do with it. He felt humiliated and he wanted revenge, but there was none to be had. He glanced venomously at Hamid, who stood by the railing with the sky forming a darkening backdrop behind him. That inscrutable individual was aloof as always, but Jo imagined that she caught his eye once or twice and that a flash of sympathy greeted her. Yes, everyone was sympathetic to her, but no one could do anything for her. Hamid saw that, and she knew that he saw it. And he saw, too, David’s trembling hand, which betrayed that characteristic addiction of the infidel. They were miserable wretches and he understood it. All they had over him was money. She looked away from him. A slight wind kicked up and his djellaba flapped. He stepped forward a pace.

  “Tea before you leave, Monsieur and Madame?”

  She shuddered and gave no reply. David shook his head, and their ambivalent hosts wished them gone.

  AS THE STAFF AND THE TWO ELEGANT HOSTS ESCORTED them to the car, the first stars came out, fierce and steady, and the hillsides emerged from their dusky indecision as crisp black silhouettes. The air was fresh. Hamid opened the gates and stood at the far side with his metal lantern.

  “Do send me a line when you get back,” Richard said, leaning for a moment on the driver’s-side window. “We always worry until we know people are safe back home. Otherwise we feel oddly responsible for them.”

  They kissed, shook hands, said what people say when they are reluctant to concede that they might not be seeing an acquaintance ever again. It was over in a minute. Hamid wished them luck in Arabic and waved them down the road. The car roared off, a little angrily, Richard thought. Typical David. He was furious for having been bested in some way.

  The gate slammed shut and Dally poured Richard an aged Lagavulin in the library. They made a fire, ate some mince pies, and drank quietly as the wind moaned around the delicately painted casements.

  “What a ghastly weekend,” Dally eventually said, sighing and putting up his feet on a leather pouf. “We’re lucky to be still alive. Did you talk to that French girl? Amazing that people like that actually exist.”

  “I told Hamid to lock the outer doors,” Richard said, and his tone was strangely vacant, but domineering. Dally was startled. But Richard tipped his glass and sucked in the saline nectar with its odor of smoked peat and settled in to listen to a bit of wind. It was quite entertaining after three days of nonstop futility.

  He went over the puzzles that had been thrown his way during that time, the conflicting personalities that could not be resolved, but over and again he returned to the piercing and unrelenting eyes of Abdellah. There was something not quite right with them. When you looked into them, they did not return the favor. They were alive, proud, vivacious even, but they did not see you.

  DAVID TORE DOWN THE TAFNET ROAD A LITTLE RECKLESSLY, until Jo held his arm for a moment and more or less ordered him to slow down.

  “We won’t get there any quicker.”

  “The quicker, the better …”

  She sobbed. He had nothing to say. There was just the bitter impulse to move on, to whirl about and forget. They reached the main road, and David turned north with a stabbing turn of the wheel. He flicked on the high beam and searched for the controls of the CD player.

  “Open the map,” he ordered impatiently. “I think this time we’ll get there very quickly. We won’t be lost.”

  She obeyed, flattening it on her knees and turning on the glove compartment light. She memorized the route, then turned the light off. In the high beam, the same whitewashed posts and abandoned buildings from Friday night appeared again. They were speeding up a long, tiresome hill. At the top of it lay the place where they had hit Driss.

  “I think we should stop,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  “I think we should stop and pay our respects.”

  Three days earlier he would have said “Are you nuts?” But now he was inclined to agree. They should stop and pay their respects. He therefore took his foot gently off the gas pedal and allowed the car to slow a little.

  She felt a deep relief that he did this. So perhaps he had changed after all, and in a permanent sense. They neared the place where a police ribbon still stood tied between two plastic posts. There was a stony hill rising from the right side of the road, which they had not noticed before. It was dotted with cactus, and down it came running a male human form, its head wrapped in a red and white chech. This manic and unexpected figure timed his descent so perfectly that before they had reached the crest of the hill where the road began to descend again, he was standing in the road directly in front of them, where he raised one hand in which they saw a palm-sized trilobite, a Psychopyge. He shouted “Arrêtez!” and David slammed on the brakes.

  DESERT GRASS QUIVERED OMINOUSLY ALONG THE DISINTEGRATING edges of the road. Ismael had in fact been sitting alone on this stony hill for the better part of the day. He sat under a coat held up on three sticks, brooding and scanning the surrounding landscape for signs of approaching cars. During the afternoon many of the guests from Azna passed in their stupendous vehicles, and he had had to skip down the hillside each time to see if it was the two infidels he sought. It was repetitive and exhausting. The night fell and it became easier. There was hardly any traffic on the road now. He sat and shivered and prepared the old heavy pistol that Abdellah had given him with a gruesome solemnity. He went over in his mind the events of Friday night, which he had kept resolutely to himself.

  He and Driss had waited in the same spot. They had hitched a lift from Erfoud with the Elvis and a few other specimens and had got off at the bottom of the hill, where the cement truck left them. The desert is a grapevine and everyone knew about the party of the faggots of Azna. Driss was in a dark mood that evening because of the quarrel with his father.

  “We’ll stop the first car,” he said to Ismael as they hid on the hill. “They’ll be loaded with cash. They’ll be soft—they won’t resist.”

  “What if they resist?” Ismael remembered asking.

  Driss waved his hand. “What a stupid question. Are you a girl? They’re unbelievers. What the fuck do you care?”

  “They always stop,” Driss remarked later, as they were eating a can of sardines with their hands. “They’re stupid. But when they
stop, Ismael, don’t be a coward. Act.”

  “I promised you I would,” Ismael shot back. “You think I’m afraid?”

  “You’re always afraid.”

  “No, I am not. It’s not fear. It’s excitement.”

  “Excitement?”

  Driss laughed scornfully.

  “We’ll be wanted by the police afterward. Did you think about that?”

  “What do I care?”

  They sat by the road and waited. A wind whipped up the dark sand and grit, and Driss wrapped his head.

  “Of course I thought about it,” Ismael muttered. “We’ll be in the city by tomorrow morning.”

  He remembered now the look on Driss’s face. To think it was only Friday night that this magnificent warrior was still alive.

  “I’ll leave it to you to shoot, then,” Driss said. “It’ll be your initiation.”

  “You’ll see.”

  He strode confidently toward the Hennigers’ car now without a thought in the world, his left hand gripping a small Psychopyge and his right hand gripping the revolver, which was loaded with six shells. He saw the woman wind down her window with a searching, sympathetic expression; the man relaxed his hands on the wheel and turned off the engine. This proved that Driss had pursued the wrong strategy. People are by and large trusting, especially infidels. He simply walked up to them and said “Salaam aleikum.” They had an astonished look on their faces, as if they wanted to ask him his pardon now that they suddenly recognized him. But what they didn’t understand was that grace was not his to give.

  “Ah,” he thought sadly, “if only you knew.” The woman half leaned out of her window, angling for a view as he crossed the beam of the headlights and into the darkness next to her. He dropped the fossil and raised the revolver without any effort. There was no sound from either of them as he slipped quickly around the back of the car and caught the man opening his door. David’s eyes were not at all frightened. They were merely filled with lame curiosity and wonder. Ismael smiled at him with a cruelty that came straight from the bottom of his heart, because he remembered the Englishman digging a little hole in which to bury the ID of Driss and he knew it was the kind of thing a gaouri would do. And David, for his part, suddenly understood and was not surprised either. It seemed to him then that there was nothing he could have done either way, and that the idea of freedom of choice was completely absurd. It never occurred to him why he had not been forgiven, because he had forgiven himself. So he looked up with tired, resentful eyes and felt everything go into a slow motion that made it bearable. His nightmare of the turbine from earlier in the day washed over him. He held up one hand and tried to utter a single word, but it was too late. His tongue never formed itself around the word, and he had to say it straight to Ismael with his eyes, telepathically, as it were. He was sorry in that split second of repentance. Because when you thought about it, there was not much to say and he had, when all was said and done, failed to say it. He closed his eyes and let the turbine shred him.