Stewart, Angus (18 page)

She looked at him baffled. '
La
fleur
,'
she
said insistently, searching for the words, '
la fleur orange
:
az'hra—en arab
.'

They had walked some way from the rocks, and were sitting on the open sand. 'Naima
Az-
hra!'
Jay announced once more, this time bringing playful accusation to the new-found surname.

Still Naima shook her head over her
poor pupil. But lighter tone had communicated his meaning. She gave her strangely slow smile, and her eyes wandered over Jay's face with the same sleepwalker's speed.

A vehicle with yellow headlamps was coming towards them along the empty beach. As it travelled over ridges in the firm sand the pool of light from the lamps alternately ballooned out in front of it, and then shrank again, like a great net being repeatedly cast and withdrawn. Jay had tensed seconds before the reason for his doing so became hunch, then certainty in his mind. This wasn't a country whose coastguard bore jovial resemblance to Popeye. A nearer parallel would be the mechanisation of the one time pirates of Barbary, from whom members of the force were no doubt directly descended. It was then that Jay wondered whether his recalling the bank guard had been a premonition. The fact that he was patently neither smuggler nor Spanish agent was of small comfort. He asked himself fleetingly whether his sitting on the deserted shore with a Muslim girl who could easily have been no more than fifteen had uncovered guilt in him which exaggerated fear. And instantly helpless indignation rose in conjectural defence. The Land Rover could carry right on and run them down for fun. It easily might, he told himself. The vehicle was firmly set on a collision course; the balloon of light like bubble-gum reaching more threateningly towards them every second.

'Christ!' Jay said, seeking comfort in what was a deliberate mimicry of Dan Gurney's expletive. 'Silly buggers.' But his mouth was dry, the second phrase came out as a blur, and he realised he'd almost forgotten the girl beside him. 'Coastguard, he muttered. She was frightened as he was. 'Now listen:
you
are the orange flower.' Jay felt for cigarettes, but his hands were like live fish held by their tails. 'You are the blossom.
Naima Az'hra
.
D'you understand?'

'
Az'hra
No
SAHara
,'
Naima said. '
Sahara, mais c'est le grand
. . .
le grand
. . .'

'Desert. . . Sands'

'Ouakà
.'

'Oh God!' Jay said, imitating no one now. In his panic it seemed the spell was broken. Sahara Orange Blossom? The name sounded like someone who had danced on table-tops. Perhaps in Tripoli. But he could blame no one except himself for the distortion. It might only be momentary.

The balloon of light held them now. When he looked he saw it was a small searchlight: white this time. The Land Rover had come off its collision course. Three times it cruised round them; the circumference getting steadily smaller, and the vehicle's speed slower, until it barely moved at all. Some part of Jay's mind was dispassionately acknowledging that looking up the barrel of a machine carbine was one of those sensations which, like falling from a height, was as identical in life as it was in the dream. Fear held him stupidly motionless on the ground. To have risen indignantly to his feet, while it was his only conditioned response, would have been impossible. Some deeper conviction told him that guns and uniforms were to be gawked at helplessly.

A voice called in Moghrebi. Lengthily Naima answered it. 'He asks have we seen his sheep. It has strayed,' she translated eventually.

Suddenly Jay was furiously angry. He saw the gun had been withdrawn. 'He asks that now, does he?' he repeated several times. Then, with his voice steadier, he called out in Moghrebi, 'No—no sheep.'

The Land Rover circled them once more before making off down the vast expanse of beach.

They climbed a twisting path towards the Kasbah, wary lest another rubbish tip reduce them to human counters in some symbolic extension of Snakes and Ladders. Their destinations lay in opposite directions. Jay had hailed a taxi, and gallantly installed the girl, before it idly occurred to him to ask in more detail where she was going. To his astonishment she explained that she had a baby in Dradheb. At that moment it was being looked after by a relation. Her husband, Jay concluded, would either be in gaol, or else simply have abandoned his family; neither contingency would be considered remarkable. Nevertheless he continued to
hold the impatient taxi driver. Making allowance for the difficulties of language, the story came simply. She was not married, Naima said. Not only was her family aware of the child's existence, but they had profited by its birth. Everyone was happy. Some specific contract had been entered upon between her father and her lover, whom she had not seen since shortly after her pregnancy became apparent, although he had frequently visited the child. Euphemism for the buying off of scandal was beyond Jay's linguistic capacities. But he need not have troubled to grope for any. He had no sooner concluded that the father must be a European than Naima explained a further complication of the affair. Her resignation before what perhaps she had only intuitively divined was both moving and irritating. It was the child and not herself that was at issue, she confessed; and one day, she thought, the child would be taken abroad. But now that she had walked out of Mrs. Diergardt's service, a memory that brought an ugly petulance to her expression, she wondered whether the baby's father, as well as her own, would now be angry. She had been wholly resident with Mrs. Diergardt. The crisis would, as she put it leave her 'in the men's way'.

The driver had long lost all impatience, and had been offering numerous comments and questions of his own. Jay, for his part, still leaned through the lowered window. The story struck him as genuine enough. The only question in his mind was whether Naima was hoping to take up residence with himself. He tried to envisage Chalmers' reaction, and smiled faintly. At the same time he recalled his ironically remarking to Gurney that he didn't know how to manage servants. But if the possibilities were intriguing, Naima's final revelation brought him back to earth. The father, she announced on no apparent cue, was 'Mister Simon Brown, M.A. Cantab'. She knew his full name because a friend of hers who could read had seen it on a card pinned A the letter box of his apartment.

Jay hoped his face gave nothing away. Naima was scrutinising it pretty carefully. His nod was only incidental to the concern he'd been naturally expressing. Now he signalled the taxi into motion calling '
L'ha'nik
!'
in farewell.

He stood for a moment where he was. In ten minutes he was due to make the further acquaintance of Simon Brown. Plunging down through the medina Jay passed the beggar again, still uttering his weird, single note in the now-deserted alley. The sound followed him for a long way as he climbed up into the less empty European town.

  *  *  *  *  *

Harold Lom also wandered late. The sick pain inside him was sometimes intense. He smoked a lot of
kif
in
an attempt to smother it. Around ten o'clock he went out, carrying only a still camera. It had become imperative for him to work alone once more before he died. The series of stills he would make would be people, he thought; candid, available-light portraiture. When Saunders came out from London the documentary could go on without him. He would control each phase of his last work himself. But he would also choose his own place to die. He would end rather as, twenty-eight years ago on the streets of Warsaw, he had just been beginning. Then there had been no possibility of his ever seeing the end product of his work, shot with a Leica IIIb miniature from high buildings, from garbage carts, even upwards into the street from cautiously raised sewer covers, and printed, always, only in contact. But he had seen the finished work, and so had the world. He had some of his earliest prints in his hotel now. He always carried them.

Lom climbed up into the Medina from sea-level. He took the steps, past the Cine Lux, and up the covered, climbing alleyway between small, drably utilitarian restaurants, which displayed sample meals in their windows. He paused to look more closely at these. There was an individual helping of dry
cous-cous,
the dome of saffron yellow grain cleverly ribbed with alternating bands of sugar and cinnamon, a neatly carved half chicken no larger than a pigeon, raw kebabs on ornate skewers, heavily oiled salad, and a dozen sleep-stunned blow-flies. Higher up he passed the pin-ball cafés; rooms without windows, dimly lit, filled with smoke and the lethargic, mechanical ticking of innumerable devices with winking electric eyes,
and feet bedded in concrete. Higher still, great glass doors gave on to the sumptuously lit and furnished foyer of a modern hotel. Its exterior was no different from that of the other buildings in the alley, of which it formed an integral part. Only its interior, and then possibly just the ground floor, had been gutted and rebuilt. Lom stood astonished before the doors. With the squalor of houses, cafés and anonymous blank doors all about it, the foyer glittered as incongruously as a chandelier in a suburban coal-hole.

'You can have,' a voice said beside him.

Lom looked down at white leather casual shoes, made up complete with headlines and paragraphs in imitation of a newspaper, then up again at the youth who had spoken.

'Can have what?' he asked.

'What you look at.' The youth gestured slightly. 'In there. Lil' boy,' he went on, smiling disingenuously as Lom continued to stare at him. 'You look an' look at him—so I thought maybe you want'

Lom looked into the hotel again, and this time saw the jet-black miniature bell-boy sitting behind the glass doors. He was dressed in scarlet Moorish trousers and jacket, with a white cotton turban on his head, and white barbooch on his
feet. The exotic infant was about ten, and his
feet swung idly

'You can a-fuck him,' the youth said kindly, as if suspecting Lom of purely anatomical doubts. 'Very good boy. Nice.' He tapped the glass. 'See? Nice, no?'

The prodigy had turned his head and smiled obligingly at Lom when summoned.

'Is that a text from the Koran on your shoes?' Lom asked.

'No.
New York 'Erald Tribune
,'
the youth said, stooping to remove one of them. 'This is date—
Juin—non Juillet
?'

'So
it is,' Lom said. 'No, I don't want to sleep with that child.'

' 'Nother one? Women?
Kif
?
Change money?' The boy raided off requisites with consciousness of parody. He was more concentrated upon Lom's camera. 'Camera good?' he asked.

'Very good.'

'How much money?'

'Three hundred and eighty pounds,' Lom said. He realised that the
kif
had carried him into some para-consciousness, that they still stood before the glass doors, that the scarlet and white pageboy was throwing them ridiculously coquettish glances, that he was talking almost without mind.

'Good camera,' the youth affirmed. 'American?'

'German.'

'Why so much money?'

'It's my work.'

'Is your work? Take picture is your work? Not holiday with wife?'

'My wife is dead.'

'Where she die?'

'Dachau.'

'Morocco?'

'No.'

'You have sister, brother, family?'

'Also dead.'

'What place?'

'Dachau.'

'Very bad town this!' the youth said indignantly. 'Not good!
La peste
?
Epidémie
?'

'
Bien sûr
,'
Lom said.

The youth appeared to be thinking. 'Strange this! You not want any thing. Just take pictures in Tanja. For work.'

'Not necessarily just in Tangier,' Lom said.

'In other place, eh? You have a car?'

'I'm hiring a Volkswagen.'

'Good car! The youth beamed in delight. 'Car go wrong—
et voilà
!
New one. From Germany. In two days. Special post office.' He removed one of his shoes again, and dusted the glazed, leather newsprint with the palm of his hand. 'Germans good,' he said thoughtfully. 'Kind. Frenchmen, Englishmen,
colons
,
no? Take land from
Arabes.
Kill many, many
Arabes.
Germans never kill any peoples.'

The youth had seized Lom's arm. Now he gestured with his head, and they began walking. As afterthought, he said. 'But you know Germans good. You have German camera, German car—no?'

In minutes, it seemed, Lom found himself in a native cafe, shoeless, sitting on matting. An old man, watching a kettle on a crude kerosene-tin brazier, brought a lantern across to where
they sat. Two bedbugs the size of thumb-nails scuttled for the darkness beneath Lom's stockinged feet. The room gave on to an open yard where the forms of men huddled in sleep at the feet of patient, tethered mules. The inevitable photograph of King Hassan had something in Arabic daubed across its covering glass; above it hung a portrait of Nasser.

'
Le noir
,'
the
youth said, smiling, as he followed Lom's glance to the king.

Lom recognised the term of abuse. The Arabs are a white-skinned race, and to call one of their own people a black—
the wog
would be a more colloquial translation—was the ultimate, scornful censure. And it was true, of course. Some unfortunate genetic throwback had given Hassan a markedly negroid face. His father, on the other hand, could have passed for a Castilian or Venetian.

The old proprietor brought glasses of mint tea. The youth had produced a
seobsi
,
joined the two parts of the turned, cedar-wood barrel, and filled the tiny clay bowl. He drew once on the slender pipe before handing it unthinkingly to Lom. Lom inhaled three or four times, heard the faint hiss as the
kif
burned low, and simultaneously tasted the smoke turn sour on his tongue. He waited a moment for the brittle ball of cooling ash to contract in the bowl before knocking it out against his tea glass. Obscurely he felt he was being tested. But his introspective consciousness was still marvelling at the innocence of the Germans. The hysteria at his throat, no more than a giggle really, filled only a part of him. He could watch its development dispassionately: as carelessly as, at that moment, he could have watched himself walking to the electric chair. It was the dissociation of the condemned man. An extreme, whose contemplation discovered a curiously objective facility with respect to his own thought processes. And so it was at a lazy remove that he now regarded the visitor who had stalked up to their low table. Stalked was the right word. The woman was on all fours, and had dirty plastic shoes on her hands as well as feet. It was a giant cat she was pretending to be, Lom supposed; and with a clumsy movement he had fallen forward on to his own hands and knee, arched his back, and was hissing at her playfully. The cripple scuttled sideways from the café like a terrified dog. Lom's position froze. For a moment he was baffled, indignant with shock. He crouched there stupidly on all fours, an old man, in whose face the grey drainage of death could be clearly seen. Then he slumped back, deflated on his heavy buttocks, and covered his face with his hands.