A Half Forgotten Song (33 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

D
imity was sick on the boat on the way to Tangier.

“I thought your father was a fisherman?” said Élodie, standing on the deck of the steamer with the wind fluttering her hair around her and whipping the words away.

“But I’m not,” Dimity pointed out, doubling over the railing again as her stomach heaved. By then there was nothing left to come up, and she wiped a string of spittle from her chin. “I’ve never been on a boat before.”

“Can we get you something, Mitzy? A glass of water?” said Delphine.

“Ginger’s best, if they have it; or mint,” she croaked, her throat ragged and sore; so dizzy she daren’t let go of the railing. She looked around for Charles and saw him on a bench on the upper deck, sketching a pair of little boys who were playing with their model airplanes. She was half glad that he wasn’t watching her being sick, and half jealous of the boys. Celeste was almost as unhappy at sea as she was, but the Moroccan woman remained in her cabin, lying down with the room darkened. A kind of quiet, private dignity in distress that Dimity wished she could emulate, but when she went indoors she only felt worse, and her head started to pound as well, the blood throbbing through her temples as though it had doubled in volume. Her only hope was to watch the horizon, and remain on the leeward side of the deck. When Delphine returned from the galley with a sprig of mint, asking if she should boil it or what, Dimity snatched it from her and chewed the leaves raw, desperately hoping that the lurching in her gut would stop. At least the mint masked the foul taste in her mouth. Élodie watched her with distaste and a trace of sympathy.

“It’ll be worth it when we get there, honestly,” she said staunchly.

After a while, exhaustion sent Dimity inside, where she lay down on a bench beneath a window to sleep. She had no idea what time it was when Delphine shook her awake, her face alight with excitement.

“Come and see,” she said, pulling at Dimity’s hands until she rose, shakily, to her feet. Delphine led her back out onto the deck, where Charles, Celeste, and Élodie were already at the rail. The light was dazzling, and Dimity shut her eyes instinctively. Such light, so strong through her eyelids that they glowed redder than a fire. When she could open them, it was all-consuming, and she flinched. “Look! We’re here. Morocco!” Delphine said, nudging her closer to the rail. Finally able to see, Dimity gasped.

The city of Tangier rose up from the water’s edge all around the arched harbor, almost too bright to look at; clustered white houses like jumbled building blocks, with palm trees and fragile-looking towers rising up from the mêlée. Here and there, a vibrant slew of pink flowers tumbled over a wall or from a balcony. Above the sparkling turquoise water, the city seemed to glow. The port thronged with boats of all shapes and sizes, from tiny fishing vessels painted every color under the sun to huge, ponderous cargo steamers and passenger ships like the one she was aboard. On the dock, men with dark skins and hard faces were arguing and dealing, loading and unloading. Down on the quayside next to their boat, a heated exchange was carrying on between a man with skin the color of treacle, wearing billowing green robes, and a white man in a smart linen suit. Dimity gaped at it all in amazement. The men’s voices were an alien babble, every bit as incomprehensible as the scene stretching out before her. Just as Delphine had once said, the sea was a different blue than in England, as was the sky; the thin towers looked strange and unearthly, too tall and precarious to stand up to a storm. The air smelled of the sea but also of heat and dust; of spices she couldn’t name; flowers she had never seen before. Stunned, she turned to look at Delphine and found four sets of eyes upon her, and smiles at her amazed expression.

Élodie burst out laughing.

“You should see your face, Mitzy! I told you it’d be worth it, didn’t I?” she said. Dumbly, Dimity nodded. Celeste patted her hand softly, where it clasped the rail for support.

“Poor Mitzy! It must all be very disturbing for you. But breathe it in, immerse yourself, and soon you will come to love it. This is Morocco, my home. This is a place of wonders and beauty, cruelty and hardship. This is the landscape of my heart,” she said, turning back to take in the view. The sun did not seem to hurt Celeste’s eyes; it shone on her black hair and brought it to life.

“Come along,” said Charles. “Time to get off and find somewhere to eat. Once your stomachs have settled, ladies, you will be ravenous.”

“What do you think?” said Delphine, taking Dimity’s hand and holding it tightly as they turned to disembark. Dimity searched for words to express how she was feeling. How the heat and the light and the colors seemed to fill her up to bursting, pouring into her soul like elation. How she could not quite believe that such a place existed.

“I think . . . I think it’s . . . like a dream. I think this must be another world altogether,” she said, her throat sore and her head thumping.

“It is,” Delphine said with a smile. “It is another world altogether.”

T
hey stayed only one night in Tangier, a night in which Dimity slept little, sniffing the strange air and the alien smells carried on it, feeling her head reel. It was giddy, dazzling; everything as alien and nonsensical as an imagined land. She woke many times in the night, feeling as though the land beneath her was hollow, insubstantial. As though none of it was solid, and the crust of it might give way and tumble her into nothingness. After a while, she realized why. The boom of the sea was gone; the way it echoed up through her feet in Blacknowle, beating like a vast heart, all of the time. Without it, she felt as airy as a sprite; like a kite with its string cut. In one dream it was her own leaden heart that had stopped, and waking was like being reborn in a new skin.

They hired a car and chauffeur for the long drive to Fez, the journey made slow by sand that had blown over the road in places. The car rocked along gently as the wind nudged it, and Dimity stared out of the window while the others slept, still stunned by how huge everything was, how wild and different. The sky was flawless, hard and unforgiving. Under the fierce sun, the land shimmered with heat; brown dust and rocks and parched-looking scrub, as far as the eye could see. In the far distance, along the road they had just traveled, Dimity thought she could see the dust plume of another vehicle, but it was hard to tell. It was late in the day and the sun was casting long shadows from even the smallest rock and shrub when at last the city appeared in front of them, sprawling low against the broad plain. At first Dimity thought it was no bigger than Wareham, but the closer they drew the more it seemed to spread. The others roused themselves, and Celeste pointed out that the compact cluster of buildings, which Dimity had thought was the whole city, was in fact only the colonial buildings, where the French and other Europeans lived.

“Because we think we’re too special to live with the Arabs and Berbers,” Delphine said mildly.

“Because we’re prudent enough to keep a respectful distance,” Charles corrected her.

“Beyond these buildings is Fez el-Djid. The new Fez.” Celeste pointed to the city, where twinkling lamps had already been lit on the shady side of the streets.

“Is it new? I thought the city was old,” said Dimity.

“The new is only new compared to the old. The new is still many hundreds of years old, Mitzy. But the old . . . Fez el-Bali is the oldest city in Morocco not built by the Romans or other ancient peoples. Here it is, here. Look!” Celeste swept her arm across the sudden view as the car slowed to a halt at the edge of a valley and the city poured down into the low ground beneath them; rooftops so clustered and chaotic that Dimity’s eye could not trace the line of any one street for more than a few yards.

They got out of the car to see better, standing in a single line and staring out over the city. A steady breeze came in from the south, seeming even hotter than the still air, like the breath of some huge animal. Celeste breathed in deeply, and smiled.

“The wind comes in from the desert today. Can you feel the heat, Mitzy? Girls? That is a desert wind; the
arifi,
the thirsty wind. You can sense the power of it. On a day like today, the sun there would kill a man, as sure as a knife to the heart. It drinks the very life from your blood. I have felt it—the urge to lie down is strong, so strong; and then, you are no more. Worn away, just one more grain of sand in the vast ocean of the Sahara.”

“Celeste, you’re scaring them,” Charles chided her, but Celeste tipped up her chin defiantly.

“Perhaps they ought to be scared. This is no gentle land we are in. It must be respected.” Dimity stood up straighter, trying to shake off the lassitude of the long journey in case she should fall asleep and become nothing but sand. They all felt it, the fear and the soporific breeze. For a while nobody spoke, and the soft moaning wind and the buzzing flies were all they could hear.

Then Dimity heard a man singing, though it wasn’t like any kind of song she had ever heard before. A high, thin stream of words, at once fragile and deeply compelling, rich with meanings she would never understand. There was no sound of cars or traffic from the city, only the barking of dogs, the rumble of trolley wheels, and now and then the braying of a mule or bleat of a goat; a low background hum of many lives, lived close together.

“Why is that man singing? What’s he singing about?” Dimity asked nobody in particular. Her voice was hushed, and she was unable to take her eyes from the labyrinth below them.

“That’s the muezzin, like a priest, calling the faithful to prayer,” said Charles.

“Like the church bells at home?”

“Yes.” Charles chuckled. “Exactly like that.”

“I like the song better than the bells,” she said.

“But you do not know what he is singing. What words he says,” Celeste pointed out, quite seriously.

“That don’t matter much, with a song. A song is only half words, and the other half music. I can understand the music,” she said. She glanced at Charles and found him watching her with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Good, Mitzy,” he said. “Very good.” At this, Dimity flushed with pleasure.

“Girls, did you know the foundations of Fez el-Bali were laid on the site of a Berber camp?”

“Yes, Mummy. You’ve told us before,” said Élodie. Celeste put an arm around each of her daughters and smiled.

“Well, some things are worth saying more than once. There is Berber blood in your veins. This city is in your blood.”

“Well, Mitzy? What do you think?” said Charles, and Dimity felt all their eyes upon her, waiting for her verdict or for some keen observation.

“I don’t think anything,” she whispered, and saw Charles’s and Celeste’s faces register disappointment. She swallowed, and thought hard, but her mind was reeling. “I can’t think anything. It’s . . . everything,” she said. Charles smiled and patted her shoulder in a vaguely comforting way.

“There now. You must be exhausted. Come on. Back in the car and let’s get to the guesthouse,” he said.

“Aren’t we going to stay with your family, Celeste?” Dimity asked, before she thought to check her tongue. Delphine shot her a significant look, and Celeste frowned slightly.

“No,” she said shortly.

They had to leave the car at the city walls, since the streets were too narrow to drive along, and walk the last quarter of a mile to where they would be staying. The door of the
riad,
which was to be their guesthouse, was tall and elaborately carved, but like the rest of the buildings fronting the narrow street, it appeared to be crumbling and disheveled. Dimity felt slightly disappointed until they walked through the doors and into a tiled courtyard with a marble fountain at its center, stone benches strewn with faded mats and cushions, and straggly roses growing up around the pillars that supported the upper floors of the house. As one, the girls gazed up in wonder. There was something sublime about coming into a building only to find the clear, pale-green sky still spreading out above. One star had come out to shine; a single point of light that glistened. The floor was made of intricate blue-and-white mosaic, the walls part tiled, part plastered and painted, and everywhere there were tiny fragments missing and cracks and places where tiles had come loose and been lost; imperfections that seemed to make the whole only more magical.

“They do not build like this in Dorset, do they?” said Celeste, close to Dimity’s ear, and Dimity shook her head mutely.

A tray of heavily sweetened mint tea was brought out to them as they seated themselves in the courtyard, and a servant ran in and out of the door and up the stairs, carrying their luggage in from a handcart, a few pieces at a time. Dimity stared at the boy each time he passed; at his curling black hair and coffee-colored skin. When she saw him with her small, tatty carpet bag in one of his hands, her stomach clenched peculiarly. Nobody had ever carried anything for her before, let alone a servant. Somebody she could make a request of and have him be duty-bound to obey her. She craned her neck to keep sight of him as long as she could, until he vanished around a turn in the staircase. Delphine, sitting next to her, gave her a nudge in the ribs and another significant look.

“Not bad, I agree,” she whispered. “But not a patch on Tyrone Power.” Their hushed laughter spiraled around the courtyard, bouncing from the crumbling, blush-colored plaster.

Dimity, Delphine, and Élodie were to share a room with a low vaulted ceiling from which an iron fretwork lamp hung, casting fragmented patterns of light. It had a cool, tiled floor and flaking walls painted ocher. The beds were made up of low, hard mattresses with small bolsters as pillows and a single woven blanket folded at the foot of each. Tall windows opened onto a stone balustrade with a view to the neighboring building in front, and down the hill over the rest of the city to the right. The sky was by then a velvety black, lit up with more stars than Dimity had ever seen before.

“It’s like a different sky, isn’t it?” said Delphine, coming to stand beside her while Élodie did handstands against the wall behind them, the legs of her pajamas riding up to show her skinny shins. “Hard to imagine the same moon and stars shining down on England.”