The Forgiven: A Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  They even said that Al-Quaeda squads roamed this part of the desert. He was sure that that blackmailing subject would come up at some point, and only the week before, he and Jo had read in the Telegraph about the western oil workers whose bodies were found near the oil installations in Mauretania. They passed across the Algerian border all the time. Dicky had admitted it, and it was incredible to think that they had all known this before so blithely sending him off to the badlands. They thought it was a high old joke. His heart was audible to himself in the silence, which was made total by the wind’s roar. He thought of his own father for a second, punting on the River Ouse in a straw hat. “Never trust an American or a Nigerian, Davie boy. Slippery tongues.” He looked at his watch, as if it might tell him something provocative, and still he heard Daddy’s plummy, ingeniously innocent voice describing places he had seen in Ecuador when he toured there as a mining engineer in the forties. The world was a dreadful place, Daddy said, by and large, and the best thing you could do was make fun of it. At least that was an authentically English response.

  As he looked up from his watch, Anouar shaded his eyes and went to sit in the car. From the pool of shadow that suggested the form of Abdellah came a sound like the gnashing of teeth. For even if the old man had been crying, he would have kept it down deep and inaudible inside his lungs.

  THE TOYOTA HAULED ITSELF DRAMATICALLY UP LONG, SERPENTINE gullies. It groaned like a beast of burden and sometimes stopped, exhausted, while the gears were changed and the brake was slammed, then released. The old man cursed it and talked to it. His teeth were still grinding. The rancid water in the bottles was now as hot as bathwater. But still they rose, inching toward the shrill blueness that hovered above them and which seemed potentially touchable.

  The roof of Issomour was so high that, looking back, they could see expanses of desert that shone salt-white, pale yellow, and rose. It was windier and hotter, but even here, in the most terrible place of the ergs, there were long, skillfully cut trenches and workers’ tool bags lying in the sun, as if the cutters sometimes took picnics between their sessions. Now, Abdellah didn’t stop. They raced across this new wasteland with a surprising alacrity, as if chasing animals or avoiding men.

  There was a wild intensity in the old man’s driving as he savagely changed gears and drove his beast on and on. By noon they were gently descending again, toward the north face of the mountain, underneath which five villages lay: Boudib, Ambon, La’gaaft, Tabrikt, and Tafal’aalt. La’gaaft was where the despised haratin lived.

  In the backseat, the men slept. Their rifle pressed inadvertently against David’s own seat. The heat poured down through the jeep’s roof, stunning the senses, and the chugging AC produced almost no result. David’s head began to slump against the seat belt, and he felt as if one of his eyes was coming loose like an aging lightbulb. As for Abdellah, he knew that Anouar, his translator, was asleep, so he said a few things to the pimply fool next to him in Tamazight—because even if this David understood a few words of Arabic, he surely understood not one of Tamazight. Roughly translated, Abdellah’s remarks were:

  “In La’gaaft live the blacks. If they ask you in Tafal’aalt if you have been in the village of the blacks, admit it but do not say that you have drunk their water. Say nothing—it’s better that way.”

  And he laughed mercilessly, as David nodded in confusion and said yes.

  AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LONG DESCENT LAY BOUDIB. ITS houses were shaped like domes, and on its metal doors were painted the forms of yellow trilobites. Its back gardens were fringed with spindly, dying trees, and a prickling dust bowled along its rubble lanes.

  At midday, the heat had driven all its inhabitants indoors; even the dogs cowered behind whatever cover they could find. Huge white stones like dinosaur eggs lay piled along the dried oueds where the infected trees gasped out their last. The men in the car were still asleep as they accelerated through Boudib toward Ambon, and even in Ambon they still slept. They had seen Ambon a thousand times, and there was nothing to see but the well.

  Beyond it, outside La’gaaft, the father stopped for a moment to inspect the tires, and David took in the sheer mauve face of the north side of Issomour towering above the villages like a static tidal wave. Its surface was pocked with man-made caves from which ropes and ladders hung. The shadow from this monumental cliff was so long that it engulfed the whole settlement. There was the well, around which two figures stood, their faces visible through bundles of rags. The men in the car awoke. As they tumbled through La’gaaft, they were silent, clutching their old rifle, but far up the face of Issomour, David saw a boy sitting on the ledge of a cave, waving with a white cloth as if surrendering, and the top of the precipice above him had a raw color like blood oranges.

  In each village all the way to Tafal’aalt, the houses were the same cement domes with the same trilobites painted on their metal doors. People came out to shout and greet them. A man with a basket on his head, coiled with ropes, stood by the entrance of Tabrikt with a hand raised, and he called Abdellah by name, as well as one of the other men in the car, whose name was Moulay.

  David felt all his revulsion revive as they came to the edge of Tafal’aalt itself, the last village before the open desert. So this was Driss’s home. It consisted of two dozen of the domed hovels looking like eggs sunk into sand, behind which he could see vegetable plots guarded by low stone walls and clusters of date palms. The paths between them were white like beaten chalk. As with the other villages, the shadow of Issomour reached right up to the gardens and would soon engulf them.

  Abdellah parked his car and strode up to one of the metal doors covered with blue trilobites. He hammered it with his fists and yelled as David was hustled out of the car with his comically neat traveling bags that Jo had packed so fastidiously. The sun shone at its apex, and the blood orange tinge of the cliffs above them reminded the Englishman a second time of a tsunami frozen in time that might yet be released and come crashing down upon them. He peered up at the stone wall and noted the same ladders and cave openings. What could one think about it? One thought nothing, he realized. It was a zone of barbarism, of prehistory. It was a desolate comedy with child labor. One had to stop thinking, to just endure it. One had to lie down.

  The metal doors swung open, and inside, sheltered from the sun’s glare, three women peered out. Their faces and hands were tattooed with delicate lines of spots. They burst out of the house in their black robes, slipping past the men and running toward the car. The sound of lamentation. The men had been dreading it all along. They set their jaws and looked down, almost in irritation, and David looked up at the sun separated by an expanse of blue sky from the edge of the mawlike cliff. What time was it?

  Abdellah waved an ironic hand at him.

  “Come in,” he said in Arabic, as if this was the alien lingua franca between them. “Welcome to my beloved hovel. Please, mind your step.”

  It was the house Driss had grown up in, and it carried the energy of his spirit in some way. Even in Paris, as he told Ismael, he had always kept the memory of it close to his heart.

  Fifteen

  FTER ROGER HAD LEFT, DRISS SAID TO ISMAEL THAT day, he and Angela dug a new bed of sunflowers. Her brisk and yet tender manner with him seemed a little freer than it usually was, as if her husband’s presence always constrained it, and after their work in the garden, they went to the house and she made him pots of Earl Grey tea and scones with raisins—by God, he said to Ismael, a stranger food there was never seen upon the earth.

  They talked more intimately then, and Angela told him that their business was not working as well as they had hoped and that Roger, in fact, had gone home to England to raise more money from his family. Times were difficult, and fewer tourists were coming to the marina at Sotogrande.

  “So,” he asked, “is Roger coming back with a lot of money?”

  “It doesn’t work quite like that. It takes a few months for the money to arrive.”

  “I see.” Dris
s nodded. Then it is now, he thought, or never. And it cannot be never.

  He said to Angela, “I have been wondering about that safe and how you open it. It seems like a very clever thing.”

  “The safe?”

  “Yes, I have been watching Roger do it and I cannot figure it out.”

  “Why do you need to figure it out?”

  She stood up and he suddenly noticed that hours had gone by somehow and that it was already the end of the afternoon and the olive trees were growing gray outside the windows as they stood under the rain.

  “Because,” he said quietly, “I need the money in it.”

  Slowly, they evolved into the same scene they had enacted at the petrol station, except that now they were months along the same lines of thought and everything had changed in Driss’s favor. He saw, superimposed upon the face of the woman he had grown fond of, the face of the ancient unbeliever who would never give him what he wanted.

  “Driss, don’t be silly,” was all she said. “There’s only two thousand euros in there. Is that worth it?”

  By God, he thought, it is.

  He came around the table, and one of his hands reached out like a whiplashing cable that has snapped.

  “No, you can’t,” she said softly, and wriggled out of his grip, though he reasserted it. They began to dance.

  He dragged her silently toward the safe, which stood inside a large kitchen cabinet where cookbooks and pots of dried herbs also stood. His free hand searched for a weapon with which to intimidate her into some kind of informative submission. A drawer was opened, and inside were the household knives. “I was not thinking of such a thing,” he said to Ismael, who had gone quiet, “but how else was I to cut through this troublesome knot?” He found a serrated bread knife and raised it against the side of her neck as she sank down toward the floor and tried to twist away. There was something immensely gratifying about this pose of purely subconscious supplication and the way those hippie sandals slipped off and lay in the middle of the kitchen floor. Finally, he felt, the positions of power were as they should be, and if that involved a humiliation for this weak old lady, it was distasteful but not unnatural. It was the reverse that was unnatural. “Let me go,” she was crying, but why should she not cry such things and why should he let her go? When the tip of the bread knife bit into her neck, she revealed the numbers of the combination and he memorized them.

  When he had taken the money, however, he was not sure what to do with the enormous situation that had suddenly opened before him. He had no real plan, he suddenly realized. Night had fallen and he could not very well just walk out of the house without a thought, leaving behind him an angry unbeliever who would now call the police at once. What would he be then? Hunted through the fields by infidels with rage in their gut. It was foolish to think he would get away with it. He needed a little time to get to the road and hitch a ride.

  He thought all this as the knife still lay against her neck. One exertion, he thought, and all your problems are solved. Ignore the look of disbelief in her eyes. She is old anyway. Her time has come.

  “You cannot do that,” she said to him inside his head.

  “Oh, yes, I can,” he replied calmly.

  So much blood for so little a reason. He let go when it was done, and he felt a cool, surprising elation as he cleaned the blade in the sink and put it back in the drawer. The house was suddenly as quiet as a house can be, with only the sound of birds calling through the olive grove behind it. There was just him and his lungs and his beating heart.

  Sixteen

  E WENT DOWN WITH A BAG FILLED WITH CASH AND clothes to the road that ran past San Martín and soon found his way back to the gas station where he had started. A few trucks idled there and some beat-up cars of immigrants that had obviously just disembarked from the ferry. The Moroccan families sat about on the shoulder of the road eating oranges and pastries, and among them he could move with his proposition without difficulty. All of them, without exception, were going to Paris and, in that regard, his ambition to get there himself was sensible. He talked to them quietly and persuasively, asking them who they were and from where they had come and where they were going, and when he offered to pay all their petrol to the French capital, several relented and offered space in their cars. He went with a young family who owned a grocery store in a place called Marx Dormoy. He asked them if this place was in Paris and they said, “Assuredly, it is.” Very well then, he thought. It had not been as difficult as he had anticipated, not by a long shot.

  At this point in his narrative, Driss got up and went down to the trench to relieve himself. He was well satisfied by the effect his tale had had on the impressionable Ismael and he was sure, in fact, that the kid believed every word of it. He chuckled to himself. The fossils all around them gave him the goose bumps, because he knew they were evil, that they were not of this world. But now he was entertained enough to forget the damned things. He loved telling stories.

  “You were cold as ice, brother,” the kid said as he came back and sat down again by the fire they had assembled on the bare rock. He had a waxed paper bag of figs from the market in Erfoud, and they cut them open with the penknife. Driss nodded.

  “Necessity, brother.”

  “The world is cruel. My father keeps saying so.”

  “He is right. Cruel is the word.”

  Driss could sense that Ismael suddenly admired him more than he had ten minutes earlier, and this had been his intention. The boy looked at him with wide-open eyes in which the newly minted wonder was mixed with a little fear. It was perfect. The balance between them had shifted in his favor, and he felt more assured as he stirred the fire with a stick and ate into the figs. More than assured, he felt mightily pleased with himself. For the job he had in mind, he needed Ismael wrapped around his little finger, and there he was, like human thread. He would, from now on, be a more willing partner in whatever Driss had in mind; he would look up to the older boy and do what he was told. Driss cut up a fig for him and offered half, and all the while he talked, because Ismael wanted to know about Paris. Paris was where they all wanted to go. Paris, where the girls are true sluts.

  “So,” he said to Driss, “you went to Paris after all?”

  “Of course I did. Didn’t I say so?”

  The family from Essaouira drove him all the way there through the night. They stopped at autoroute filling stations in the dark and during the following day, and he and the father took turns driving the car. The father was a fat brute from the coast; he had made a living making chessboards for tourists in the souk of Essaouira. Sly and rolling and overcurious. He explained to Driss the arcane ways of the French, which were different from the more familiar ways of the Spaniards. Driss listened without retaining a single word. He remembered a place near Perpignan in the early morning with cattle standing submerged in mist, and he thought, “It was not so hard after all. The Nazarenes are not as clever as we make them out to be.” He wandered with the family into a food court in an autoroute mall, where the unbelievers ate in open-plan cafeterias awash with alcohol. The French girls were in cutaway jean shorts and tiny T-shirts, and they looked over at him with a short, momentary disdain. The bread was stale. In the shops there were hams wrapped in silver foil and model fire engines, and there were chairs where the truck drivers were massaged electronically. Everyone stood around automated coffee machines and said nothing. Strange, the ways of the unenlightened.

  But then he decided not to tell Ismael too much about Paris. It was better left as a mystery. The weeks on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis behind the Gare du Nord, in the Indian neighborhood of tandoori houses and sari stores filled with gold jewelry (he thought with a smile of the glass busts of women in the windows with vulgar necklaces draped around them); the hammam on the rue d’Aboukir; and the long nights alone in the Brady cinema on Sébastopol watching soft-porn movies. What was the good of describing it? His fruitless search for a job in the newspapers, the useless economies, the endless b
oredom and loneliness. Nothing had happened there but failure anyway. He had not found a job even as a janitor, nor even as a supermarket stocker, which everyone had said was a surefire thing. And the two thousand euros? Ismael asked.

  “Even when you buy a sandwich,” Driss replied sternly, “it costs the same as a week of tagines here. The infidels steal every centime you have. It flows through yours fingers like sand.”

  “Ah, I thought so.”

  Every night, Driss had been forced to walk the streets around Château d’Eau, following clusters of middle-aged Chinese whores who dressed in black like female undertakers and who migrated to the bus stop there when the Métro was winding down. Nocturnal solitudes on the well-named Passage du Désir and the African cafés all along the rue du Château d’Eau, which was the only place he could afford to pretend to have a nightlife. Paris.

  “The City of Light,” Ismael said hopefully.

  A bitch of a den of infidelity, Driss said, a sewer. Though one night, having decided to relinquish his sixty euros and seeing as he was already lost amid Unbelief, he followed a sad Chinese girl back to the chambre de bonne on the very same street where he lived, into a courtyard filled with sacks of cement exactly like his own, and up a winding staircase to a room exactly like his own, six feet by six, with a cat that smelled of carpet cleaner. And this girl, who spoke no French, took off her clothes and stuffed her sixty euros into a box under the bed and asked him, he imagined, if he wanted la pipe.

  Well, of course he wanted la pipe, he said. Would he go to a streetwalker and not get la pipe? He would not spend sixty euros and not get it. They laughed and Ismael said, “By God.”

  “And these Chinese girls walk the streets at night?”

  “They are the only girls left on the street apart from the Albanians, who are all thieves and cutthroats. So that is how we do it there.”