Rocks, The (21 page)

Very tentatively, he put his hand on her shoulder. Her move now. Then he heard her breathing: she was asleep.

It took him longer.

S
hirts?” said their concierge
the next morning after he’d asked them what they were looking for in the souk.

“Yes.” Aegina opened her bag and pulled out the black shirt. She held it up. “I want to buy shirts like this one. Do you know where we can find them?”

His head lolled backward and he emitted a high quavering note, a private giggle of sorts. “How many shirts you want to buy?”

“Maybe a hundred. It depends on the price,” said Aegina.

“One hundred shirts?”

“Yes.”

The hotelier motioned with his hand for them to sit at the table by the fountain in the courtyard. “In twenty minutes I will have someone take you to the shirts. Sit, I bring you tea.”

“We’ve been through the souk and seen most of the shirts there,” said Aegina.

The hotelier waved a finger and clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “Not souk. You will see.”

Fifteen minutes later, he reappeared with a boy of about twelve. Not a scrofulous street urchin but healthy and clean, neatly dressed in blue shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt that looked like a school uniform. “This is Yusef. He is my son. He will take you to see shirts.”

“Thank you so much,” said Aegina.

Yusef, shy but full of the gravity of his mission, nodded at them. They followed him outside.

The boy led them along indistinguishable streets, away from the Djemaa El-Fna. He walked steadily ahead, looking over his shoulder occasionally to see that his charges were following him. When Luc and Aegina tried to come alongside him, he walked faster. They reached a district that was not the souk, not picturesque: trash-strewn lots filled with carts, oil drums, toppling shanty sheds cobbled together from scraps of wood, corrugated leftovers; carpenters’ shops drifted up with sawdust; upholsterers’ yards windblown with cotton flotsam; sheds housing ironworks, stacks of rusted plate.

“Luc,” said Aegina, tugging at his sleeve, “it’s the
polígono
.” The Spanish word for the industrial park at the edge of large towns in Spain. As a child, Aegina had often gone with her father to the
polígono
at Manacor when Gerald took some broken piece of mechanical contrivance to be welded or bought paper bags full of nails or galvanized screws.

“I guess,” said Luc. He’d not been much of a
polígono
-goer himself.

Yusef, following his nose as unerringly as a dog padding home to dinner, led them through a warren of smaller alleys. They passed long sheds holding bolts of cloth, poles draped with dripping bundles of vegetable-dyed variegated yarn. Luc and Aegina trotted, almost stumbling with distraction, after him.

The boy slowed and stepped into the doorway of an unmarked shopfront. They followed him into a room that might once have been a small travel agency. Pinned to the walls were sunbleached TWA posters: one showing the Liberty Bell,
PHILADELPHIA
above,
FLY TWA
below; in another, cartoon saguaro cacti and golf clubs erupting out of a fat, cartoon cowboy boot, with the legend:
ARIZONA
—
FLY TWA
. Small models of Air France jets and Royal Air Maroc DC-3s sat on the room’s single desk.

Yusef spoke with the woman wearing a head scarf and a long, primly buttoned gray robe, who sat behind the desk. She looked briefly at Luc and Aegina, then rose and went through a back door.

A man came into the room, followed by the woman. Luc thought he looked like Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother. Large-framed, pepper-and-salt-bearded, his mostly white hair crew cut, his intelligent face set in repose. He and Yusef formally shook hands, and then the boy spoke to him. He shook hands with Luc, touching his hand to his breast afterward. He didn’t shake Aegina’s hand, though he nodded to her with courtly acknowledgment.

“Je m’appelle Rachid,”
he said.

Luc and Aegina gave their names.

Rachid and Yusef spoke in Arabic for several minutes, Rachid glancing occasionally, with polite brevity, at Luc and Aegina. He questioned Yusef with close interest, the boy responding with assurances and a great deal of knowledgeable information, Rachid nodding at possibilities.

“What on earth can they be saying?” said Aegina quietly.

Rachid turned to them and said, “What is it that you are looking for?”

Aegina produced her shirt. Rachid took it and examined it closely, the cloth, the hems, the embroidery at the neck. He handed it back to her without expression. “Only black, you want?” he asked.

“I’d like to see white too.”

“Come.”

They followed him through the back door. On through a dark, hot storage room full of wrapped bundles and cardboard boxes. Through another door.

They emerged into a long shed, with a low corrugated roof, brightly lit by windows and white fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling beneath trails of electrical wire. About twenty people, from children to withered husks—they might have been four generations of an extended family—sat at tables and on the carpeted floor. Most were sewing. Four men were cutting cloth with heavy shears at long shiny tables. It was hot, fans blew at the ends of the room and at strategic points between.

“It is my factory,” said Rachid. He led them to a pile of white shirts on a table and picked one up. It was similar to the shirts they had seen in the souk, with the trim sewn on in long strips, but the cloth was finer, and the work neater.

“It’s very nice,” said Aegina. “But I’m looking for shirts that are embroidered around the neck”—she held up her black shirt again—“like this.”

“Of course,” said Rachid. He led them to the other end of a shed where four middle-aged women, all wearing diving mask–sized bifocal glasses, sat on the floor. Their voluminous robes were indistinct from the piles of cushions they sat on, so that they appeared to be shapeless beanbags with bespectacled faces atop swathed mounds of cloth. A large fan was blowing across the group, producing a soft breeze humid with rank body odor and a miasma of cheap perfumes. The women smiled shyly at Luc and Aegina. They smiled back. Rachid picked up a mauve garment and showed it to Aegina. It was a long shirt, the sleeves and hem finely embroidered with a dark purple thread. The work was intricate, in a pattern of tight interlocking complexity, like lace.

“This is beautiful,” said Aegina.

Rachid raised his eyebrows and said simply, “Yes.”

“Would you be able to do this around the neck of a shirt”—she held up her black shirt once more—“like this?”

“Yes,” said Rachid. Then he added kindly: “But it will be better than this. Please, leave your shirt with me, and you will come back tomorrow.”

T
he Renault cruised
for a parking spot among the sleek monochrome Peugeot, Citroën, and Mercedes sedans parked beneath silvery palms in the moonlight beside the Mamounia hotel.

“I don’t see the Jag,” said Luc. “Maybe they’ve forgotten.”

“After three hours?”

They’d run into Rolf and Minka again in the souk, and Minka had again invited them for dinner at their hotel.

“I think they’re a couple of space cadets, those two. Dressed for a Claude Lelouch movie.”

They parked and walked toward the softly floodlit entrance to the hotel. The tall ochre façade loomed like a fort with embrasured parapets, surrounded by palms, a castle-sized Moorish entrance. Its elegance and remove from the busy souk and the blistered, ravaged, beautiful old town made it seem inauthentic, more like the Alhambra by Disney.

Aegina stopped near the entrance and faced Luc. “Do I look okay?”

Her dark hair, washed and glossy after she’d run olive-oiled fingers through it, was parted in the middle, broke on her shoulders and fell far down her back. Her large eyes and her teeth shone. She wore no bra and the oblique light from the hotel picked out her small breasts pushing against the fabric.

“Aegina, you look incredible.”

“Thank you.” She looked him over, his thin white cheesecloth shirt, Levi’s. “You too.”

“Too bad Dennis and Sophie aren’t here to see us.”

Aegina pinched his waist through his shirt.

We’re going to make love tonight, he thought.

They walked inside.

Rolf and Minka were sitting at a table in the bar. Fingering their drinks, smoking, staring at remote extremities of the room, not talking. Minka saw them first; she smiled and waved. Rolf turned his head, fixed his eyes on Luc and Aegina as they approached and made a remark to Minka. She didn’t seem to hear. She stood up and leaned forward to hug and kiss both as they reached the table.

“So glad you came to have dinner with us!” Minka said.

“You found the shirts, yeah?” Rolf said as they sat down.

“Possibly,” said Aegina. “The man we met, a sort of shirt factory owner, is running up a model to show us tomorrow.”

“What about the price?” asked Rolf.

“He wouldn’t talk price until we see what he’s making.”

“
Ja, ja
, then he makes the strike. Once you like it, he gets you like this.” Rolf suddenly grabbed air as if catching a fleeing chicken by the neck.

“And then, if you like it, what happens?” asked Minka.

“Well, if we can agree on a price, then we see what he can give us and how long it will take.”

Rolf and Minka told them what they’d found for his boutique in Munich. Leather Berber satchels, Berber slippers, carpets, hookahs, shirts and vests; how much they paid, how it would be shipped back to Germany. At nine, a liveried waiter materialized to tell them that their table in the dining room was ready. They rose and followed him.

The dining room was full of beautiful and tanned Europeans weighted down with Moroccan accessories. They gazed languidly at the new arrivals.

A cadre of waiters pulled out their chairs and seated them.

“We didn’t see your car out there,” said Luc.

As if glad to be asked, Rolf said, “
Ja
, we rent an
auto à louer
. Some Peugeot piece of shit. Always I have the Jag serviced when I come to Marrakech. It’s a fucking long drive from Germany. There is a good mechanic here. I give him the car for a few days and he makes a racing tune.”

“Must take a lot of petrol from Germany to here,” said Luc.

“
Ja
, masses,” said Rolf. “Many thousand of franc, peseta, dirham. Got to make it worthwhile.” He talked about the many trips he’d made through Morocco, to the Rif and the Atlas Mountains, to Al Hoceima on the Mediterranean coast, and how everything was becoming ruined by hippie tourism. “You are coming to the tables after dinner?” he asked Luc.

“Oh!” Minka said with guttural disgust. “He likes the gambling. You will lose all your money!”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Luc.

“Always I have good luck,” said Rolf. “It’s because I am a Syltsman. A man from the island of Sylt.”

“Oh no. Please,” said Minka.

“Ja, ich bin ein Syltsmann.”

Minka said again: “Don’t start with that.”

“You don’t like my beautiful song?” asked Rolf.

“What song?” said Aegina.

“No! Now he will sing it,” said Minka, with real or mock unhappiness.

“Ich bin ein Syltsmann,”
said Rolf. “The most successful pop song ever to come from the island of Sylt. You don’t know it?”

Minka tried to clap her hand over Aegina’s mouth. “I don’t think so,” said Aegina, pulling away, laughing.

“It was German second place for the Eurovision Song Contest in 1964. In Sylt I was number one for a year.”

Minka looked at Luc and Aegina, her eyes rolling upward.

Rolf leaned back against the bloodred upholstered banquette. His eyes stared into the distance and he started to sing in a deep, melodic, unabashed voice,
“Ich bin ein Syltsmann, ich bin ein Syltsmann, mein Zuhause ist neben dem Meer . . .”

Minka’s head fell against Aegina’s shoulder as if she’d been clubbed, her mouth dropped open. Aegina laughed, watching Rolf sing.

“Mein Vater und sein Vater, und ihre Väter vor ihnen . . .”
Rolf’s eyes closed.
“Waren Seeleute.”

•   •   •

L
uc was dizzy.
They’d drunk too much wine and smoked more dope in the Mamounia’s garden. He lay in bed in the dark, waiting for Aegina to return from the bathroom.

Last night she’d fallen asleep beside him. How far were they going to take this respectful almost-step-sibling business? Was she so relaxed with him because she’d bought completely into that Dennis–Sophie gambit, or was she in love with this Dennis the banjo player? Was she really as comfortable with him as a sister? Wasn’t she attracted to him? She had been once—or maybe not: maybe that was more about what was going on with her that summer than anything to do with him. With anyone else, he’d have made a move already, but now he had an instinct that he should not rush it. This was Aegina—at last—not some fling. He decided he would let happen what would happen, however slowly.

Did people make money playing the banjo?

He must have fallen asleep. She was getting into bed. He felt a T-shirt next to him. He felt her warmth flooding beneath the single sheet that covered them. Aegina didn’t wear scent, but she had a smell—he didn’t know what it was or what it smelled like except that it was hers and he now lived to breathe it. He closed his eyes, angled his head, and inhaled as he had never inhaled before. There was a dampness to the musky warmth that poured off her . . .

•   •   •

I
t was light
through the louvers when she woke. Now she knew they were going to make love. She wanted to and she knew he did too. She’d fallen asleep the first night, and he’d fallen asleep last night. He was being so sweetly respectful. But he would wake and she would start it.

She could feel she was wet. She slipped out of bed, gliding silently to the door.

In the bathroom, she checked on things—it was approaching but not quite time for her period. No sign, just wet, ready for him. She peed. After she flushed the toilet, she splashed water from the small hand basin between her legs, cleaning and dabbing herself with toilet paper. Then she washed her face and rinsed her mouth.

When she got back to the room, Luc was dressed, standing at the window. The shutters were open and he was looking out into the street.

He turned to her. “Hi,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” said Aegina.

“I’ll go downstairs and get some coffee, and you can take your time. How’s that?”

“Lovely. Thanks.”