The Forgiven: A Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  Twenty-three

  ETWEEN YOU AND ME,” ANOUAR SAID TO DAVID ON their way to Alnif, “I am emigrating to France next year. I have a cousin who owns a restaurant in Rennes. It will be hard, but at least it is not Tafal’aalt. I have talked it over with my father and he cannot prevent me. It’s life or death. Well, almost.”

  There was a long pause, and the shadow of Issomour crossed their path with its deep blue menace.

  “I am sorry about Abdellah,” David said at length, but dourly, as if he had saved up these words for hours and only now could utter them. He tried to mean them as earnestly as he could, and to not let his obvious relief taint them. Anouar nodded hastily.

  “We could tell that you were sorry. It is why he let you go.”

  “Oh?”

  “He judged you to be sincere.”

  David shuddered and said nothing until they were back at the lopsided square of Alnif, with the birds nesting in the old bab and a bitter wind scouring the dirt streets. They drank a café noire at the hotel. Anouar leaned close to him for a moment.

  “Abdellah instructed me to drive you straight back to Azna, no stops. And I will do it. If you wanted to stop to buy some fossils, however, we could spend an hour in Rissani. I know a good man …”

  David shook his head wearily. “No, thanks. Just get me back to my wife.”

  A moment later, he added: “Do you think Abdellah found it in him to forgive me?”

  “I am sure of it. He must have forgiven you. Otherwise you and I would not be drinking a café noire in Alnif!”

  There was a grim certitude in his voice.

  “I see,” David murmured.

  “He is not a vindictive man,” Anouar went on in a slightly injured tone. “He has been thrown into a great crisis. Driss was his livelihood, his principal digger. What is he going to do now?”

  “I cannot say,” David admitted. In truth, this dimension of Abdellah’s misfortune had not occurred to him.

  David thought about the great lump of cash he had stuffed into his traveling bags, now unused, unwanted, irrelevant. It was shameful now, in fact. And yet everyone knew he had brought it with him.

  They drove past Rissani. Wild camels nibbled the drinn by the road, the shoots of grass flattened by wind against the black gravel. In hovels clustered against the road, fossil preppers came out waving fake Psychopyges and Comuras embellished with car repair resin. “Fraudsters!” Anouar laughed, turning his hand in the air like a screw. “The shame of the nation!”

  He pressed down on the accelerator and the battered Toyota jeep sang like an old harp. They drove through Erfoud without even stopping for a glass of water, and on the outskirts of Errachidia the cell phone finally picked up a signal. He talked breathlessly.

  “It’s me, David. You must still be asleep. Everything’s fine. I am being driven back by one of the men from Tafal’aalt and we’re just outside Errachidia. I have no idea what time it is. We’ll be there in a few hours, I suppose. Just in time for brunch. God, what an ordeal. I hope you weren’t too worried. Anyway, it’s over. I’m getting chauffeur service all the way home. I’ll have a word with Richard about this when I get there. He knew all along, and I must say I’ll have a hard time to forgive him.”

  He was not sure if this was true, however. He would forgive anyone and anything in exchange for a hot bath and a gin and tonic. Moreover, he also felt that he had now earned these little fussy pleasures, and his forgiving Richard his deft deception was a small matter when compared to the forgiveness he himself had earned in the house of Abdellah. Such things did not come easily. He was even sure that his ordeal had made him stronger in ways that the others would not easily understand. It had made him even coarser as well, but he didn’t mind. At the same time, the bitterness of the thoughts that whirled through him surprised even him; they were like crumbs scattered from a meal that has gone bad, but at least he had eaten them and gotten sick and pulled through, which was more than could be said for those idiots dancing the night away in Richard’s ksour. What did he have in common with those pot-smoking retards anyway? At least, through his accident, which had not been his fault at all (was it wrong to protect one’s wife from roadside depravities?), he had seen the Berbers as they really were, which was more than any of them had seen. He had, in a sense, switched allegiances. For all his brutishness, Abdellah had impressed him. To live in a place like that and survive was magnificent in its way, and the greed David had feared from them had not in the end materialized. They were not, he decided, driven by money in the same way that materialistic Westerners liked to think. And then, yet again, he thought about the bag of money. It would be unacceptable to return with it, because Richard in particular, and Jo, too, would spitefully assume that he had stubbornly refused to hand it over on principle. They would get it wrong, but how would he defend himself from the charge?

  He began to think that he would give it to Anouar. He knew very little about the man, but if he was thinking of emigrating to France because he had no other way to make a decent living, he could surely use two thousand euros. Two thousand was a huge sum for a man from the desert. It would take him all the way to Paris and maybe even enable him to live there for a few weeks. It would not be an insignificant gift. For once, a gesture of his would mean something. It would change someone’s life.

  They rolled into a dusty, run-down bled straddling the road, and Anouar went into a small store to fill the water container. A few palms waved in the wind over a rectangle of houses. David got out as well and walked along the edge of a straggling garden where a few children sat with mud pies and frazzled toys. They did not look up. He had taken the bag with him, and he must have cut a slightly ridiculous, and even suspicious, figure. Nevertheless, they ignored him as he passed, lost in their own thoughts. Above them the sun had risen rapidly and bore down brutally on the plots of partially whitewashed date trees and rickety fences, forcing him to raise a hand to keep his vision intact. He came to the edge of the gardens and a line of walnut trees, and as he stood there slightly stunned by the morning brightness, Anouar came up behind him with a miraculous thing, a heated croissant.

  “Where did you get that?” David laughed, and as he took it from Anouar’s hand, he swung the bag in his direction and added, “Here, this is for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes, absolutely for you.”

  Anouar took the bag with genuine surprise.

  “What’s in it?”

  Does he really not know? David thought.

  “Never mind. I’m going to ask you something. Don’t look inside it until you are back in this same village on your way home. Can you promise that?”

  “By God, I can.”

  “Very well, then. We’ll leave it at that, shall we?”

  Anouar nodded awkwardly, looked down at the bag, and scowled. It felt, to him, like something of an imposition.

  “It is my pleasure,” David said, “to give that bag to you. It’s a very nice bag I bought at Timberland in London. Very strong.”

  “Ah, then thank you.”

  “You’re most welcome. You’re a decent man, Anouar.”

  “Decent?”

  “Yes, decent. It’s the least I can say.”

  “And you, Monsieur David, are very tolerant.”

  Twenty-four

  T THE BEND IN THE ROAD, JO WAITED IN A BELTED pink dress and a large straw sun hat that Richard had given her, the brim so wide that it kept her entire face in shade and its ribbons reaching down to the middle of her back. There were mustard flowers inserted into the band. “A bit too Renoir,” he had said, plopping it onto her head, “but no one here knows who Renoir was or is, so you’re safe.” It was his hat and she liked wearing it for that reason. Richard knew what was best for her.

  She sat on the wall listening to the waterwheels in the forgetful sunshine, baking and content. To make the little lizards scatter she kicked her sandals against the pale green cushionlike prickly pears. It was perfectly silent. The air sme
lled of cedars. The mountains shone, paradoxically, like ice, a brown, sullied ice that shines all the same. When the wind picked up the tassels of her dress and the hat’s ribbon, she felt herself fluttering all in one piece, with the oils of lemons brushing her tongue and a whiff of thyme. She hadn’t called David back until midday, and they had had a breathless conversation in order to get all the prosaic questions out of the way first.

  “I went to bed early,” she said, “and read some of Dicky’s old copies of Punch. It made me sad reading them. Made me think of Granddad.”

  “Never mind,” he had said banally. “At least you weren’t awake.”

  “No,” she said.

  David’s voice was strained, as if it was coming through glass, and it struck her as slightly unearthly, the voice of a man who has been fasting all night, or else drinking. It was no longer quite David’s chirpily angry, wounding voice, and its normally deep reserves of spite had dried up. It was a wounded voice, deliciously rehumanized. She was astonished.

  She heard the car from a great distance. But instead of standing in the road expectantly, she sat as she was. She had a tray that Hamid had brought down for her with an ice bucket and a half bottle of white wine with two glasses. She thought it would make a healing gesture. He wouldn’t expect it and that would be to the good.

  The car neared her, and suddenly, out of the blue, she grew nervous. Had he given all that money to the family? But worse than that, it was also possible that they had done something to him that he had been unwilling to divulge on the phone. She stood up and strained to catch sight of the jeep. Its sound had become subdued, and soon she realized that it had stopped by the track, its engine idling. Standing on the wall, she could see it.

  David was talking to a man next to it. They were talking quietly, in a civilized manner, as if they had things to impart to each other before they parted. A second later the car was veering round the bend. It stopped by her and Anouar rolled down the window, and he thought that she ought to recognize him, which she did not.

  “Taxi?” he joked.

  “Going up the hill?”

  He gave her an affirmative thumb.

  David got out painfully and was in her arms as Anouar waited patiently, eyeing with apprehension the tray with the ice bucket and bottle. “You didn’t!” David whooped, looking over at the ice bucket as well, but forcing himself, she thought, into an exaggerated enthusiasm.

  “Let’s have a drink before we go into that infernal place.”

  “You’re a sweetheart,” he sighed. “I’m parched, too. We’ve been driving since dawn.”

  They kissed again in the bright sun. Her face crushed into his dirty shirt and it smelled of goat kid grease and mint. Anouar watched them with a dumbfounded smile. He quietly asked David if he would like to be driven up to the gates.

  “No, it’s okay, Anouar. We’re going to walk up there ourselves. We need to talk.”

  “Very well. Then I should be going.”

  Anouar got out for a moment and they shook hands heartily. They had grown to like each other, but in the distant, impermanent way that an unusual circumstance necessarily imposes. They wished each other luck; Anouar thanked him for the Timberland bag, but not in front of Jo. A few words, a few confusions, then he drove off. The dust from the car hung above the road a few moments, then dissolved. Jo and David drank the wine, enjoying the fussing wasps around them, then left the glasses on the wall and walked slowly up to the house in the fragrant heat.

  “WHAT DID THEY WANT WITH YOU, THEN?”

  “The father wanted to talk with me, that was all. I didn’t understand anything. But I understand that.”

  “Did they ask you for money?”

  “Not a penny.”

  “Then where are the two thousand euros?”

  “I gave it to them anyway.”

  “You did?”

  “I did. Do you find that hard to believe?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I guess I’m a little surprised.”

  “Well, I gave it to them. Not because I was forced to.”

  She lowered her head. She didn’t know what to say. Did her skin smell of Day? She looked at him piercingly. It was not something they could ever talk about again, but the implication in her tone was clear. She had understood everything he had done. He, too, sensed that while he had been away, she had not been on his planet, as it were. And while it could not be mentioned again, it could not be forgotten either. It had altered forever the relation between them, and they both knew it. “It’s all right, Stumblebum,” she whispered into his chest. “We can go home now. It’s all over.”

  “Home,” he echoed.

  The early-afternoon sun struck their faces, and their words dried up. The staff ventured out from the welcoming shade of the gate with cold wet towels, and soon the festive atmosphere of Azna was upon them again. It enveloped them with music and agitation and yapping western voices and the bustle of cars and jeeps being loaded for guests who were about to depart for the airport. The ends of weekends are often a relief.

  RICHARD WAS HORSE RIDING WITH LORD SWANN NEAR Tafnet as the Hennigers reunited. He had not experienced much anxiety as a result of David’s foray, because he knew that the impoverished diggers of the ergs were sufficiently afraid of the Moroccan police not to pull any xenophobic stunts. Besides, the weather had turned milder for some reason, and all his old love of riding had suddenly resurfaced. His nag was called Britney, and he liked murmuring her name into her ear as he patted the long, silky neck colored like young chestnuts and reminding her that she was named after a mad, declining pop star. Between sunshine and horse smells and the baffling Lord Swann, his anxieties and concerns evaporated nicely and his meticulous mind returned to its usual preoccupation with improvements to the house and the upgrading of its electrical systems. His carefully planned weekend, moreover, having partially unraveled, was now winding down entirely and he was frankly looking forward to getting rid of this uncontrollable mass of guests who were continually plying him with unanswerable questions. He was disgusted with them. They brought all their idées fixes with them, dragging them around on leashes like the corpses of so many dead poodles. Why did so few people have the gift of travel, of subtle displacement and simple curiosity? Which was, in the end, merely a question of imagination. Try imagining where you are, and not lumbering around with your festering discomforts and dissatisfactions. And yet almost nobody did. Take Lord Swann. He was a perfect parasite, but amusing enough in his way, and he had been around the block. Investments in Hong Kong, and all that. But he never asked anything about the Berbers, who seemed to him to be elements of an immoveable décor and nothing else. A form of statuary. Of course, he affected to be concerned about them, because that is what everyone nowadays was taught to do. But he really detested wasting any breath on them. They were a source of terrorism, of course; that made them interesting during heated debates.

  As they plodded through a meadow of garish, parched wildflowers with silver-coated leaves and a color of wet mustard, Swann was saying, “I knew Henniger a while back from the club. He used to treat my aunt’s carbuncles. I am sure he has since moved on from carbuncles. Never liked him much, though. Shifty.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Not really one of us. He played cards with Darcy and always won. I hate a man who always wins.”

  “I went to school with him, you know.”

  “Really? How traumatic for you. Did he lurk about?”

  “He used to put out a little school paper called England without Darkies. It was sort of a spoof to make us feel ashamed of our racism.”

  “Was he a lefty then?”

  “I can’t remember. I always thought he was a bit of an idiot myself. I still think he is an idiot. Come to think of it, he is an idiot.”

  “Many people say that about me, Dicky, and I have always admitted that they are, by and large, correct.”

  “There was just something off about him,” Richard said, daydreaming. “I alwa
ys thought that his father beat him or something. There was that look in his eye, the beaten-dog look.”

  “A beaten dog always looks for revenge. Perhaps that’s why he always had to win at cards.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I was surprised to see him here with that stick-insect wife of his.”

  “She’s hardly a stick-insect, old man.”

  “She’s pretty enough, but not my type. No curve on her.”

  And Swann implied that Richard was in no position to judge these things. They laughed. Now they were at the top of the little hill where the shepherds passed in summer. They looked down at Azna, suddenly revealed in its entirety as in a military map. The restoration was so lavish that it now appeared, Richard thought proudly, as it might have a century ago in its heyday. It was a personal triumph, a vindication, and it seemed to him that he had never seen anything as beautiful. Since he would never have children, it was the next best thing. It was a genuinely personal creation.