The Forgiven: A Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  “And they are all dressed in black?”

  “Like the undertakers of the unbelievers. They are dressed in black, and I must say they are fearsome to look upon.”

  “But nevertheless you had la pipe?”

  “I had to see what it was like. So I did.”

  “It was well done. How was it?”

  “Less than magnificent.”

  They laughed again, but more uneasily.

  Driss said that he used to walk over the bridge that crossed the railway lines behind the Gare du Nord and pass from the neighborhood of the Hindus to that of the North Africans—the lines divided them—and once on the far side, he walked all down the boulevard de la Chapelle under the Métro, where the boozers lay in their calms and the blacks sold their drugs; past the Lariboisière Hospital to Barbès and the Tati store, where he bought his cheap shirts; and from there into the rue de la Goutte-d’Or, which made him think comfortingly of a Moroccan town, and the rue de la Charbonnière, where the restaurants with grillades and the halal places were. Here gathered the Muslims with their food and their gossip.

  It was like a dream, he said to the impressionable Ismael, but not necessarily a very nice one. He walked and walked, he admitted, and the more he walked down the rue Myrha and the rue de Sofia and the boulevard Barbès and even the small and orderly rue Cail that was around the corner from where he lived—with its line of garish Indian restaurants and the blossoming trees at the far end—the more he realized that life was elsewhere and not in Paris, and that he was not the one to live in this place and make it his. So, in a sense, he said to Ismael, he had wasted his time and everyone else’s, and soon, though it was against his will, his thoughts were turning back to the desert and especially when he was alone in the Brady or wandering down the rue de l’Aqueduc toward nowhere, adrift among the migrants from countries he had never heard of, among the skins darker than his own, eating a peach or a bag of nuts and feeling that he was slipping down a long slope toward a pit, for that was how walking down the rue de l’Aqueduc always felt to him.

  “How so?” the younger boy asked.

  “I cannot really explain it. A great anxiety and unhappiness. That is what the world of the unbelievers does to you.”

  The boy nodded.

  “I see, yes.”

  “But I mean it truly. There is no happiness there.”

  “The Koran has said so.”

  “The Book is entirely correct. There is no mistake.”

  DRISS ROLLED ANOTHER JOINT, AND FOR SOME TIME THEY listened appreciatively to the clean, murderous sound of the wind sweeping across the plain, across the fossil trenches of the quarry, and across Hmor Lagdad as it had done for millions of years, even perhaps when it had been a sea. Something lay behind it, an indistinct white noise of some kind, and they could hear it with ears that knew every texture of that wind because they had been listening to it all their lives. Soft wind and hard wind, slow wind and quick, benevolent and malign. The compressor glowed with a metallic light all its own, reflecting some radiance so far off that they could not otherwise detect it. The moon, behind storms of sand high up in the atmosphere? Then how could they see the stars?

  “All the same,” Driss went on, as the fire began to die. “I have been thinking how we can make some money for ourselves and then leave for the city. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Assuredly.”

  “I knew it was. You are the ambitious sort, like me.”

  They agreed on this fact tacitly, and Driss lit the joint. Neither of them was sure how stoned they were now. All that could be said was that things had become indistinct around them. Ismael asked him what he had in mind, and Driss smiled cryptically and said, “Something that needs some pluck, my dear Ismael, something that requires you lose all your sentimentalism.”

  “I am not sentimental.”

  “Up to now, you’ve been. You’ll have to be a warrior from now on, and not think too much. Can you do that?”

  Ismael said that he could, though he couldn’t know, and there was annoyance in his voice. Driss soothed him.

  “Very well. I’ll explain it to you after we’ve finished our smoke.”

  “I hope you will,” the other muttered, and lay down on his side with his hand beneath his head so that he could see the road as well. And yet there was nothing on it and would not be. All he could see were the white posts along its edge.

  “Perhaps we should sleep first,” Driss said. “You’re tired and so am I.”

  It was not a bad idea, Ismael thought. He closed his eyes, and they said nothing until sleep did come to them, if lightly and without depth. Driss lay flat on his back and savored the taste of the kif in the back of his mouth mingled with the sugary mint tea he had drunk earlier. The kif was good and strong, from the high mountains, from fragrant leaves, and it made him dream fluidly: that he was walking down through a fir forest in the height of summer, with the bees droning in the glades, with a sound of water from somewhere. Allah, he thought, knows where I am even if I do not.

  He came down the slope thick with pine cones, and at its bottom, barely revealed between the trees, he saw a woman standing by what looked like a well. She was white, like Angela, but young, and her hair reached down to her arms. She was turned away from him, peering into the well, and around her bare feet flies played silently as if attracted to something about her that he could not see. In the heat, he could not think, and he came down slowly with an ax cradled in his hands, the woman’s head turned away from him. One’s foot breaks a twig and the gazelle turns her hoof, her gaze. She turned slowly and he came out into the sunlight in the clearing, and he thought, “Am I evil? Am I who I am?” It was high noon, and from the depths of those woods came the sound of cuckoos and the drone of heavy flies.

  Seventeen

  WO HOURS BEFORE DAVID ENTERED ABDELLAH’S house, the same sun that struck him carved out the shadows of Azna against the gentle slopes of rocks, and the early-shift cooks peeling potatoes on the back steps of the kitchen looked up, blinking, and noticed prickly pears shining with yellow blooms. They stopped for a moment and shaded their eyes. The light, moving from behind the house’s towers, struck the open ground where their peelings lay and lit the metal buckets filled with slop. From the dining room, they could hear a strange music played on fiddles, a distinctly European racket. It wasn’t music. It made them wince inside themselves, mostly in embarrassment for those who claimed to enjoy it or who were damned to pretend to do so. Nawfal, the second cook, had seen four Chinese men dressed in white suits playing those screeching fiddles. The infidels apparently considered it soothing and entertaining, and they listened to it intently as they devoured their halved grapefruits and bowls of crunchy rabbit food that belonged to yet another darker sphere of incomprehensibility. The boys from the villages on the valley floor stared at the sun and secretly wished that a cloud would come and blot it out, and Nawfal, meanwhile, returned from the dining room with a basket of half-eaten croissants and encountered the mournfully ubiquitous Hamid at the threshold of the boiling kitchen.

  “They tell me they took the infidel to the Tafilalet,” Nawfal sneered, slamming down the basket and going to the back door to light a cigarette against Monsieur Richard’s explicit orders. “Is it true?”

  The boys listened avidly. “It is,” Hamid sighed.

  “They’ll cut off his fingers one by one,” one of them said, and they laughed. Hamid, too.

  “They’ll cut off his feet, boil them, and eat them with their goats.”

  “Perhaps,” Hamid agreed.

  “They’ll cut out his tongue at the very least,” Nawfal opined, sucking on his cigarette and blowing out a ring.

  “God willing,” some of them sighed, and Hamid’s glance of disapproval had no effect. They smiled among themselves and began peeling again. Hamid regaled them with an inevitable proverb. “The tongue has no bones, but it crushes all the same.”

  Personally, he wished no harm to the wretched David. And
yet justice was not always kind; it had to be faced. He walked to the fridges and opened the tall aluminum doors. He reached in and picked out a box of eggs and a plastic box of butter. One could feel dismay, but it made no difference. David had earned his bout of bad cosmic luck. It was the mutinous mood among the staff that was worrying him more. He felt that if something unpleasant befell David, they would calm down. They would feel justice had been served.

  He went outside by himself and stuffed a croissant quickly into his mouth. Sometimes one wished for rain, for clouds. That damned sun, making everything sick. He had just been upstairs to the masters’ bedroom and glimpsed them asleep in each other’s arms, protected by the heavy velvet curtains they had imported from Paris. It made him a little sick, but he never let it show to them. There were certain divides that could not be reached across. There were moments in which amorality was a wise course.

  AT THE SAME MOMENT THAT THE SUN WAS STRIKING THE prickly pears of the kitchen yard, it had sliced through the shutters of Jo’s bedroom and turned the four-poster bed into a small lake of gold. She was awake, eating breakfast in bed and reading a two-day-old Herald Tribune as the rays enveloped her naked toes and warmed them. Her eyes were gold and blue also as she looked up and thought to herself that it was the first time she had woken up alone in eleven years, alone and calm and undisturbed and not at all lonely. She had gone to bed drunk and there was a cocktail glass standing on the night table that she didn’t remember. Her sluggishness made her read lazily, half wondering instead what David was doing at that very moment (eating a baby goat with his fingers? taking a piss in a tin shack?) until a knock on the door shook her out of her daydream and she called out, “Who is it?”

  The door opened. The haratin boy pushed his head through the crack.

  “Madame,” he said gravely, “Monsieur Day has sent you a card.”

  “Monsieur Day?”

  “Yes, Madame. Here it is.”

  A card was mounted on his tray, which he held as if it carried a bevy of drinks. It made her smile.

  “You can put it down on the chair,” she said mildly.

  The boy hesitated.

  “What is it?” she smiled.

  “Monsieur Day says I must wait for a reply.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “You can wait outside.”

  She threw on her kimono and read the card.

  Dear Jo,

  Do you have a terrible hangover like me? I recommend a raw egg and Worcestershire sauce, never fails. It was fun dancing with you playing Mary Poppins. I’m sorry I broke your plate. Come over and have coffee and croissants. The raw egg is all prepared and waiting for you.

  Pirate Tom

  She frowned and examined the loose, carefree handwriting. Had he really been Pirate Tom and had they actually danced? She didn’t remember anything. The tone was odd, but at the same time, he seemed to feel confident about using it. She tried to remember the previous night’s party. A lot of people, a lot of noise. A lot of drinking and the pink sugar ship. There had been more Gnawa and, of course, the fire-eaters of Taza, who had been ridiculous. Day had been there, too. He had been watching her—she remembered that. And she did dance with him, now that she thought about it. Pseudo-waltzing to Gary Glitter. They had walked to the gate and back. She had called him Tom. She was sure she had called him Tom.

  She told the boy she would take a shower and think about it.

  “I will wait,” he said solemnly.

  Under the jets of tepid water, her head gradually cleared without rendering better memories of the night. She didn’t recall coming back into the cottage at all, nor collapsing into her creaky bed. She laughed quietly. She was such a crappy lush; drinking like a fourteen-year-old, staggering about. And she probably had talked in a loud voice and acted like a middle-aged slut. But there was nothing wrong with middle-aged sluts. They were the best kinds of sluts. Day was a sort of middle-aged slut, too. And she was a little aghast at herself, but not as much as she would have expected. Day was shameless. But shamelessness was the single thing she needed most now. It would purge her of fourteen years. It brought out something precious and necessary in her. It reminded her that death was still a long way off.

  She relished the feel of her hips as she turned herself inside the rotary action of the huge white towel and breathed in the smell of expensive cotton and the Crabtree & Evelyn musks. Her face was bright and sunkissed in the mirror, with a slightly peeling nose. The important thing is always now, isn’t it? The spinning brilliance of the now.

  SHE CAME OUT ONTO THE PORCH, AND THE BOY STOOD UP quickly, as if he knew he shouldn’t have been sitting. Was that the way they trained them?

  “I’ll come with you,” she said with great certainty.

  “To Monsieur’s Day cottage?’

  “Where else? That’s what he wanted, isn’t it?”

  But then she remembered that of course he wouldn’t know that, unless he had read the card on the sly.

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “Lead on, then. Is it far?”

  He laughed. “Of course not, Madame.”

  “Of course he read it,” she thought gleefully as they stepped into the sun and the hot laterite paths that stung the feet through one’s sandals. And then she added to him, “You can call me Mademoiselle, if you like.”

  “Whatever you like, Madame.”

  They walked side by side through the labyrinth of tiny houses, turning down a short alley bordered with tamarisk trees. The boy left her at Day’s chalet, where the porch was already set up with breakfast and where the American lay in his pajamas reading the same two-day-old Herald Tribune which she had already devoured.

  “Look,” he said, picking up a fruit from the table. “The lads have found us papayas and sent them down for breakfast. How do they do it?”

  “Connections in high places,” she said, sitting in one of the wrought iron chairs. Unsurprisingly, the cottage was exactly like theirs. The same design, the same frills. The same flounced curtains. She looked with curiosity at the slice of papaya.

  “There’s a picnic today,” Day went on. “I should—we should—go. There’s a waterfall somewhere.”

  “I don’t really feel like a picnic.”

  “Sure you do. You can’t mope about worrying about your husband all day. You weren’t moping last night.”

  He shot her a mischievous look, and it forced her to do the same.

  “I was being a bitch last night. I’m feeling very guilty today.”

  “Have some papaya. It’s guilt-free.”

  “Waterfall,” she murmured distractedly. “Is that for swimming?”

  “I would imagine. The voyeurs among us want to see you in a swimsuit.”

  “You’re not very subtle, are you, Mr. Day?”

  “I come from a city where subtlety is fined.”

  “I can’t fine you. I can just put you down as you deserve.”

  She drank some of his strong coffee spiced with cardamom. Day was very neat: his clothes were folded, his books were stacked. She struggled to recall what he did. A financial analyst? She had little idea what financial analysts did, if they did anything. His eyes were gray, though before they had been green. So his eyes changed color.

  It was turning out to be a strange weekend. Her calls to David were still going unanswered. Where was he?

  “All right,” she said, more alertly. “I’ll come to the waterfall. I can’t really believe there’s a waterfall in a place like this. Are you sure Dally and Richard didn’t create it themselves?”

  “I am not sure of anything. Men who can summon papaya and velvet curtains can create anything. Do we care?”

  She shook her head.

  “Long as it’s cool.”

  “Water is water.”

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s the thing about water.”

  He seemed to be holding her in his hand in some way, just holding her and watching her. He was one of those m
en whose grooming almost puts you off. He stretched out his long legs and stared at her mockingly. Those pajamas—he must have brought them from New York. She wondered if he wore them every night in his sixty-million-dollar bed in SoHo as he tangled with his whorish dolls. She peered through the half-opened door into the room where everything was frighteningly ordered. Curiously, a baseball lay on the floor, as if he had been practicing and had dropped it there. It lay there like a weapon, mute and shining, and when she looked up, the gray eyes suddenly caught her as if she, too, were a ball spinning in midair and she had to be stopped. She came, therefore, to a mental standstill. The papaya was deliciously cool on her parched tongue. The trees nearby rustled like paper kites. She wiped her mouth and swigged from the potent coffee. Suddenly there was nothing more to say and the man sitting across from her entered her invisibly, without lifting a finger, with the deftness of a thief who knows his way in the dark, though who knew how.

  BY LATE MORNING, DALLY HAD ORGANIZED FOUR JEEPS BY the front gate, and while he waited for the picnickers, he posed in a djellaba for a photographer from the Times Style section. “International revelers,” the caption would later read, “are entertained by Mr. Dally Rogers Margolis and his friend Richard Galloway in the remote ksour of Azna. Pictured below, Sofia Prinzapolka drinks tea from a sixteenth-century Berber cup while bathing at the Source des Poissons. Guests say it’s the best party east of Marrakech. Hash brownies are served for breakfast with imported bananas. Right, some bemused villagers look on as the annual picnic drives down to the Hadda waterfall.” Dally arched his neck. The girl asked him to stand by the wall and look out at the desert.

  “Way cool,” she kept saying.

  “I’m used to it,” he said without affectation, simply because it was true.

  “Move a little to your right.”

  Dally was proud of his picnics. He worked at them and they usually came out right, though he lost sleep over them sometimes. Would strawberries be too predictable if they arrived in the frosted cups with the grape designs, or would they fall flat if they were served with crème fraîche as soon as everyone poured from the cars at the other end? Would the parasols be silly carried by the boys in white gloves? Would dust get into the crème fraîche and the perforated shortbread? No one knew, and Dally didn’t know either. Richard was more concerned with the larger operations and wasn’t much help. But then again, photographers much preferred to snap Dally in a big straw hat sitting on his walls or striking a pose by the waterfalls at the Sunday lunchtime event he had now organized four years in a row. He was more photogenic than Richard, less stern.