2
Her own sleep was not total, not profound. She heard a noise, and thought it was the front door opening; knew it couldn’t be, turned her face into the pillow, slept again. A slow cinema unrolled itself: her soapstone tortoise, grown to life-size, grown to giant-size, and set as a public monument before the oily sea. Herself a tiny figure squinting into the sun, at the stony reptile’s feet; younger than her real self, years younger. And all her friends and family, all the people she had known, people she had not thought of in years, everyone gathering to be in the picture; then a shout, and a click, and the descent of darkness, a break in the film.
The shout had broken into her dreams. But it was further than her dreams, outside the purlieu of her imagination. It was not in her head, but in the room, in the passage, in the street. She sat up, scrabbled in the twisted sheets, fumbled for the alarm clock. Little green figures, glowing in a room still dark; it was only three o’clock. She thought she had slept for hours, but her head had hardly touched the pillow. She shuddered. She had become a connoisseur of insomnia, and three was the hour she could not love. The warm, healthy body runs at its lowest ebb then. Death certificates are prepared; night nurses usher the bereaved from public wards.
She leaned over her husband’s naked body. His skin felt cool and damp. “Get dressed. Something is wrong.” Her fingers skittered over the bedside table, where the soapstone tortoise used to bask and doze. She snapped on the bedside light, saw Andrew’s eyelids flicker; he yawned.
“Funny,” he said sleepily. “I heard a noise. Thought it was morning.”
“Get dressed.” She pulled a kaftan out of the wardrobe and dropped it over her head. She felt the burglar’s fingers upon it, as she felt them on all her clothes. She shook: with the sudden cold, with fatigue, with an expectation of disaster. “Did you remember to lock the front door?”
“No.” Andrew sat up. He stumbled out of bed. He reached for his jeans, started to pull them on, slow, fumbling, looking for his shoes. She was ready to go. But her nerve had failed. She was going to wait for him. “No one could come in,” Andrew said. “Unless they broke in.”
“They broke in before.”
Leaving the bedroom door open, she put on all the lights as she went: the passage, the empty bedroom. But there was no intruder. The living room was empty. Fairfax’s blanket, rucked up and cast aside, had slid to the floor. The front door was wide open.
Andrew stepped out into the hall. He turned on the lights to the stairwell; then they saw Fairfax. He clutched the banister at the foot of the stairs; he looked upward once, over his shoulder, and stumbled drunkenly toward them, half crouching, in silence. He gripped the doorframe, sliding from it as though his hands were slippery; he took a step over the threshold, and huddled against the wall. Andrew slammed the door. She took Fairfax’s arm. His whole weight threatened to collapse onto her shoulders, and through the thin cotton she noticed how cold his clutching fingers were. Andrew draped Fairfax’s other arm across his shoulder. Between them, they maneuvered him into the flat, and let him slide onto the sofa. He seemed only semiconscious, stupefied, in shock. Frances took his face in her hands. “What’s happened to you? Fairfax, where did you go?”
“Nothing happened,” he said. His head dropped. She felt unable to support its weight; she could not get him to look at her, to focus his attention even for a second. “Wanted air. Going to be sick.”
“That’s quite obvious,” Andrew said.
“No, no,” Fairfax insisted. “Was going to be sick. Went for a walk. Went for a bit of air. Couldn’t get out of the main door. Went up to the roof.”
He was deathly white, his skin clammy; hardly able to sit upright. “Did you meet someone?” Frances said.
“Who could he meet?” Andrew asked, yawning. “Look, Fran, don’t badger him, leave him alone. He just went walkabout, that’s all. Let him go back to sleep, he’ll sleep it off.”
“He’s in a state of shock. Look, Andrew, look at him.”
“He’s drunk, Fran. We should have been more careful, we’ve got used to this stuff, we don’t realize …” As if to prove Andrew right, Fairfax slid down a little onto the sofa. His head dropped back, his eyelids fluttered and closed. “He can’t keep awake,” Andrew said. His own fright—and he had been frightened, by the open door—had turned to sleepy truculence. “I have to be up at six, myself. I have to get into Turadup—”
“Oh, sod Turadup,” Frances said. “Fairfax, wake up, tell us.” He did open his eyes, for an instant; he looked at her warily, directly. She saw pain and fear. But he said nothing.
“He’s not really all that drunk,” she said. “Not anymore. He’s just made a decision, I think.” She turned away, distraught. “He’s not going to tell us.”
“Do you want me to go up to the roof?” Andrew asked.
“No. No, please, I don’t want you to do that.”
“Okay. So let’s sort it out in the morning.”
“We ought to stay with him.”
“He isn’t going anywhere.”
“But he looks so ill.”
Fairfax was sleeping properly now. He couldn’t be pretending; the drink had struck him down. Again that peculiar emptiness invaded his face, as if whatever he lived through could be nullified, erased. Andrew said, more kindly, “Frances, come to bed. Let’s get a couple of hours’ sleep. He’s not going to tell us anything till the morning. If he did, it wouldn’t be coherent, would it?”
“No, I suppose not.” She tried to calm herself. “Andrew—” she took his outstretched hand—“you know the burglary?”
“What now? Something else vanished?”
All week they had been missing things; small, inconsequential items. With each discovery the business looked more random, more purposeless.
“I meant to tell you, but I only just realized this morning. They took our photographs. All the photographs of Africa, those pictures from our wedding … they were in that big brown envelope in the desk drawer, I meant to get around to doing something with them … they’ve all gone.”
“For God’s sake, why? That’s just stupid.” Andrew was angry; but he recovered himself. He put an arm around her, helping her along toward the bedroom. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “But they’re no use to anybody, are they? Why would they take those?”
“To upset us,” she said. “To make us unhappy.”
She lay down on the bed still dressed, on top of the sheet, her legs bent awkwardly, too tired even to arrange her body into a more comfortable position. Her head ached, a throbbing pain. He was right, the photographs were of no value. And she should not think of them now.
But when she closed her eyes they flickered behind her closed lids, blurred colored images, and she tried to fix them, before they slipped away: the only witness to their travels, the only testimony to their joint life. Andrew and Frances outside the DC’s office, marriage certificate held out for the camera. Groups of friends at a restaurant table, the New Stanley Hotel, Nairobi, 1978. Andrew frowning into the sun, Cairo Airport, 1979. Frances in Bulawayo. Andrew in the Mall in Gaborone. Our house, our dogs, the man who did our garden: alive only in errant fallible memory, that private mirror, which distorts more and more as the years go by.
I must sleep, she thought. She allowed the muscles of her face to fall, relax. Nobody knows how they look when they are sleeping. Would her face take on that same defenseless emptiness? It might as well. For who was she, when she was unobserved? The loss of the photographs had achieved its object, it had disturbed and shaken her. She felt as if their past had been wiped out behind them.
The alarm rang as usual at six o’clock. She was awake at once. Andrew stirred. He groaned softly. “Oh Christ, it isn’t morning?” Barefoot in her creased kaftan, she went down the passage into the living room.
Fairfax had gone. She pressed her lips together; her heart thudded painfully, and she put a hand to her ribs, and rubbed the spot where it beat—a vague, distracted gesture, as if she
were offering consolation to someone else, to a frightened elderly woman.
And yet it seemed that he had made an orderly retreat. He had taken his jacket and tie, and picked up his car keys. His blanket lay draped over one arm of the sofa. She picked it up and folded it. Last night’s cup of black coffee was on the floor where she had placed it, untouched. He might have stayed for breakfast, she thought. He might have told us what the fuss was about. Perhaps the night’s events were illusory; perhaps, waking, he could not remember what had frightened him. It was a strangely lightless morning, the sun not visible or even in prospect: a hot morning, silent. Other cups of coffee, which she had poured for herself and Andrew, lay in other rooms: waiting for her to collect them up and pour them away.
The building, at eight A.M., seemed to have crept closer to the earth. There was no one on the roof, and nothing to see; but scraps of wastepaper skittered across the parapet, borne on a low, keening wind. The air felt gritty, sulfurous; a soupy lemon-brown dust haze hung over Ghazzah Street and obscured the view below her. The vacant lot had now become a building site. She could make out the figures of the laborers, moving slowly, scarves bound across their noses and mouths. In that bruise-colored light, hovering among the trenches and foundations, they looked like the natives of some razed city of the ancient world.
She went downstairs, and rang Yasmin’s doorbell. I could have a pleasant chat, she thought; see how the land lies. But there was no answer. It was part of the unprecedented silence of the last few days. She stood waiting, rang again. Perhaps she was being watched through the spyhole? But it had become second nature to think that.
Back in her own apartment, she picked up the phone. She thought of telephoning Yasmin, or Samira; if they were avoiding her, she would like to know why. But instead she rang the Sarabia Hotel. The desk clerk had a public voice, American singsong, the common currency of airport check-in desks, hire-car agencies, fast-food joints: untrained to listen, but pitched to please.
“You don’t have the room number, madam?” he said, slightly shocked. Reluctantly, he said, “Just one moment.”
Fairfax might of course be sitting in a traffic jam somewhere. He might be at the Turadup office. He might be back in his room, catching up on his sleep. She wanted to speak to him. I should have persisted, last night, she thought. I should have dragged it out of him.
The clerk was back on the line: still more politely incredulous. “You don’t have the room number, madam?”
“No. But you have it. If you will take the trouble to look.”
A pause: then, “I am trying for you.” Another pause, quite a short one this time. Then “No answer.”
“Please let it ring.”
“No answer, madam.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll try again later.”
“Okay, madam. Have a nice day.”
She rang Andrew, but he was at the site. She rang Eric Parsons, but the clerk who answered the phone said that he was at the Ministry. She asked if anyone knew where Fairfax was; but no one seemed able to help.
Around noon, Andrew called at the Turadup office to see if there was any mail. Hasan was manning the reception desk, overflowing a typist’s chair, legs stretched out before him; he was turning over the pages of a book of “Peanuts” cartoons.
“Hello, Mr. Andrew,” he said, getting up. “You want to drink coffee?”
“No thanks, I’m in a rush.”
“No mail for you today, but one telephone message.” He pushed it to Andrew across the desk.
“I can’t read this,” Andrew said. “Who’s it from?” He handed back the Arabic scrawl.
“Message from Mr. Adam.”
“Good, I wondered where he’d got to.” Hasan said nothing. “Come on then, what does it say? I’m only an ignorant khawwadjih, Hasan.”
Hasan read it out, his voice expressionless. “He says, I go up to your roof last night and saw two men with box and down the stairs carrying a person who is dead. I am advise you to leave that place.”
Andrew reached out and snatched back the piece of paper. He stared down at it, the loops and squiggles that defied comprehension. “Did you take this message?”
“No, not me.”
“Who then?”
Hasan shrugged. He seemed to think it might be any passerby.
“Well, it can’t be the bloody tea boy, Hasan, because he can’t write, can he?”
“Perhaps,” Hasan said, “he goes to school?”
“I want to know who took this message, and what time it came in.” Andrew slammed it down on the desk. “I want to talk to whoever took this message, Hasan, and I want to talk to that person now.”
But even as he said this, even as he enacted the part of a furious man, a man horribly alarmed, he understood that he would never find out who had taken the message, or when. It was an unwanted message, as unwanted by him as by anyone else who received it; and just as suddenly he understood that the clerk had done him a favor, had offered him a warning.
“I think,” Hasan said, “that it is a joke.” He spoke carefully, and his voice was full of foreboding. “It is not a very funny joke, but best thing is that you know about it. You want to drink coffee now?”
“You took this message yourself,” Andrew said.
Calmly Hasan held out his hand for it, a creased yellow palm. He rested his eyes on Andrew’s face; they seemed to express sympathy. “Now I put it in the trash,” he said. “You give it me, sir.”
Andrew glanced at it once more. Then he crumpled it up and dropped it into the clerk’s open hand.
“You were having a party last night?” Hasan suggested.
“A party of sorts.”
“Too much mineral water,” Hasan said.
At half past one Frances made herself some coffee. She sat down with her cassette tape and her phrase book. She felt she was making little progress with her Arabic; and perhaps she would not make any this morning either, but it seemed the best thing she could do was to pass the time, to pretend that nothing was wrong and this was her first morning on Ghazzah Street. She opened the book: Lesson Thirty.
Her businessman had worked through twenty-nine lessons. His passage had not been entirely smooth; at various times he had been owed money, he had fallen ill. He had experienced the usual exasperations and delays: “The driver does not know this quarter. He is holding the map the wrong way up.” But on the whole his ventures had prospered: “I have met all the representatives of all the companies. I have made an appointment with the secretary to the Minister. He will sign the contract tomorrow afternoon.”
And now it is time for him to leave; taking with him, presumably, the antique chest he bought in the souk, at the price of such linguistic turmoil. “He prepares his luggage. He closes up the house. He takes a taxi to the airport.”
So Mr. Smith is going home, she thinks. He will see his wife and children again, he will land on his native soil. It is all so simple for him. “He gives his passport to the Security Services. He receives his stamp for exit. He gets on a bus with the other passengers. The bus takes them to the plane.”
Time dripped by. Frances sipped her coffee. She bent her head over her book. She did not switch the tape on; she felt too weak for any unnecessary effort. The wind tossed the leaves on Dunroamin’s tree, turning up their pallid undersides; dust caked the windows, blown into patterns of mountain peaks, into a shifting geology that lived and died in seconds. Footsteps walked overhead.
Mr. Smith has made it then. He is getting out for good. “He has said a sorrowful goodbye to the new friends he has made. The passengers dismount the bus. His luggage has been carried to the plane. The passengers ascend the aircraft steps.”
And in a few moments he will be airborne. There is nothing to detain him. He has settled his affairs, he has honored his commitments. No one wants to keep him here; no one would have a reason to. His passport has been stamped for him: EXIT VISA ONLY.
Now: she can try to persuade Andrew to break his contract. If s
he could convince him—about the rifleman, about the crate, about the Visitor—if she could persuade him, they could go together, go now, go as soon as it could be arranged. I know, she will say, that I am not offering you a watertight case, a tidy plot, that there is much, almost everything really, still to learn; but let us go, Andrew, before we learn it. They cannot cut and run; they must go through the formalities, or they will not be allowed to leave. What they cannot do is go without attracting attention. You cannot slip out of the Kingdom. You go with permission, or not at all; your intentions must be advertised. Anyone who is interested can find out what you mean to do.
Or she can go alone. Pleading sickness, giving sickness as her excuse, she can apply for an exit visa, and see what happens; see if anyone cares enough to try to stop her. If she has the knowledge, she should bear the consequences of it; but the world does not work like that. Consequences are random here, no more discriminating than a burst of automatic fire; and yet they cut down the future. Consequences are what you get, not what you deserve.
And now the plane is taxiing down the runway. She enters into Mr. Smith’s feelings; he is happy and relieved. “The passengers fasten their seat belts. Their journey will last five hours.”
She heard Andrew’s key in the door. Something was wrong; he never came home so early.
She threw the book aside and went to meet him. He stood in the doorway as Fairfax had done, a few hours earlier; his face was gray. “Fairfax,” he said. “Dead. There’s been an accident.”
Hours passed. She made them some food: “Because,” she said, “we must eat something.” She was not sure which meal of the day it was supposed to be. It was almost dark; soon, perhaps, they would be calling evening prayers. Their mouths were dry; they pushed the food around their plates. Their eyes met, and she gathered the dishes toward her, and took them away into the kitchen without a word.
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Page 26
