The Forgiven (15 page)

He patted the cold sweat on his face as they walked outside. He hated the heat. He hated the sand in the air, the smell of earth and cooking fat. He hated the fucking turbans they wore at night.

Richard turned to him. “This won’t take a minute. We’ll see the fire-eaters from Taza later on. They are really alarming.”

“Oh, great.”

They went past an open space with people dancing. David watched them as if he were deaf, as if the music didn’t exist, which made it a horrible sight. People jigging about like epileptics. He loved only the smell of the expensive perfume on the women’s bodies, sweated off and floating free. Why hadn’t they gone to Rome instead? This very moment, they could be sitting down at Ristorante 59 on Via Angelo Brunetti and ordering a nice cold bottle of Greco di Tufa. What a mistake he had made in coming here. But he had made it for Jo, and he was sure it would “mend her,” as he so often put it to himself. Everyone can be a fool.

She needed a break, a real break. She hadn’t written anything in years. She was bitterly unhappy, and maybe it was mostly because of him, but there it was—one should never deviate from what one really likes. The whole idea of “exploring” as an earnest moral project is pitifully ridiculous, and it always leads to failure, if not acute suffering. What a fool he’d been. There was no need to travel at all, really, except
to go somewhere
more beautiful
, which for David meant an Italian or a French city with a better way of life than London or New York. Places with better food, calmer dynamics, better architecture. You went there and recharged your batteries. You drank and ate unreasonably, with no thought to what you would look like next week with fatter love handles, and that was good. Life was better for a while, so you got your money’s worth. Most of the rest of the world, on the other hand, was just hassle. Perhaps he just didn’t understand it.

“I admit all that,” he thought, looking at his dusted shoes, which no longer responded to polish. “So I’m not exactly a chauvinist, am I? I’m a perfectionist. I just think some Muslims treat their people like donkeys. I’m sorry but they do. They manifestly do treat their people like donkeys. It’s not our fault, never was. It’s their right if they want to.”

BY THE GATES, THE TOYOTA STOOD IN SEMIDARKNESS, ITS
back hatch open, and around it, a few villagers stood as if waiting for some dramatic relief to the tedium of the day, which was just like the tedium of every other day. They listened to the seventies disco music coming from inside the
ksour
with their usual indifference, no longer bothering to imagine that anything decadent was going on. They were more interested in the solitary policeman lounging on the wall and eating a sandwich and in the prospect of the swaddled body of Driss appearing through the gate. The sun had dropped out of sight behind the distant horizons, and the air above the sunken springs had turned gray and moist. The dragonflies had quieted down. Among the ruined houses along the Tafnet road, the wildflowers stood unwilted in morose bunches, their heads made of deep gold petals that broke the dark. The men smoked their long clay pipes, holding the bowls in their left hand, and they had nothing to say. Gossip had exhausted itself.

As Richard and David came to the garage, the men from Tafal’aalt were there drinking mint tea and squatting at the base of the wall.
They looked up with a soft, withdrawn curiosity. It was Richard who was nervous, for he felt nervous around Moroccans when Hamid could not be found immediately. And now Hamid was not around, drawn elsewhere, no doubt, by his innumerable duties. Richard therefore hesitated at the door of the garage. He sensed at once that the men from Tafal’aalt were unlike anyone he had encountered in this country. They were bone-dry and minimal in some way, like pieces of driftwood that have been whittled down to their essential shapes. They moved very slowly but with that purposefulness that makes even humble people seem formidable and relentless and aristocratic. Their poverty only accentuated this dangerous, fluid nobility. The intense darkness of their skin was like something acquired by effort, like carbuncles or scars. They talked in a subdued, gracious manner, as if nothing was worth shouting for or could be obtained in this way anyway. One couldn’t say what they were ever thinking, or calculating, because it was possible that they did neither. They were moldy and dusty, arthritic and dried out, and when they spoke, the eyes suddenly came alive, their hands moved like paddles flapping up and down, and one didn’t know what to think about them.

“Where is the father?” he said to them in his blunt, rusting Arabic, and they made a gesture that said “Where do you think? Inside.”

He waited for Hamid, who soon appeared, huffing and puffing, though quite splendid in a ceremonial
djellaba
. The guests were complaining about the cucumber canapés, and Hamid had had to have a whole set remade at the last moment. Can cucumbers, he’d been thinking for the last hour, really go off?

“Monsieur,” he gasped, holding his sides, “I have been running all this time. I am sorry.”

“It’s all right, Hamid. Catch your breath.”

Richard took a quick look at David, who was pale and ice-cold.

“Are you ready for this, David?”

David nodded disdainfully and took his own steps toward the garage door, which was open and somewhat thronged. Richard ordered
the bystanders back and took Hamid and David with him into the garage.

The lights were all on. The father stood by the body, shaken by his own expressionless tears, and Richard saw at once that there was nothing calculating about him. That was unfortunate, and his heart sank a little. The old man simply stared at them, his hands clenched by his sides. David was unable to stop himself staring openly at the body of Driss, which he had never really looked at during the night. He couldn’t find within himself the appropriate emotion, but at least he could look sincerely grave, astounded. He was not invited to shake the man’s hand, and he knew intuitively that such a gesture had to wait. He waited, and he allowed his heart rate to rise, then fall again. Gradually, his sweat cooled. He lost his fear and he began to calculate the probable financial damage.

It was Hamid who had to speak, and in broken Tamazight.

“This,” he said solemnly, indicating David, “is the man who was driving last night. He declares his innocence, before God.”

But his tone indicated to the Aït Kebbash that Hamid, too, had his doubts, and they were not doubts that could be easily tamed.

ABDELLAH LOOKED AT DAVID WITH A CHILDISH CLARITY
, his eyes wide open and questioning and yet somehow refusing to pose any question at all. For a moment David thought that they were remarkably free of acrimony. How could it be? The old man seemed to be simply examining him as one would a stone or a locust hanging in a tree. He looked right through him, too, as if the internal organs were visible and could be judged. He looked through him and there was no expression in his face.

The air conditioners hummed loudly in the confined space and the old man was actually shivering slightly, his burnoose gathered tightly around his head.

It was Hamid who said, “Are you taking the body home now?”

“We are, God willing.”

Richard strained to understand these odd words in Tamazight, but failed. He shot David a worried look.

“Do you want to talk to the Englishman?” Hamid went on, bending solicitously toward the old man.

Abdellah turned to face David more fully.

“You may speak to him,” Hamid said quietly, “and I will translate.”

“No, I will speak to you,” the father responded.

Hamid stepped over to Richard for a moment. “He says he will speak to me. Perhaps it is because you are not believers.”

David shrugged. “Here we go.”

“It’s fine,” Richard reassured him. “Go ahead.”

Abdellah spoke with his eyes fixed on Hamid’s round, pleasant face, with its waxy, comfortable complexion. His voice was gently coaxing in some way but also hard, and either way, it never lost its exquisite sense of measurement. He talked as if he had prepared his speech over many hours, as if every word had already been worked out and fitted into an irresistible argument. There was no visible effort in what he now said to Hamid, so that as he listened, the latter simply nodded and thought to himself, “It’s the most reasonable thing imaginable.” The old man occasionally emphasized a point with a jab of his index finger. He spoke more intensely now, and Hamid leaned forward even farther. The two Europeans were excluded completely. Richard rested his chin in his hand, cocking his head to one side and trying to disguise his befuddlement. He knew enough about locals to realize that the old man was proposing something quite complicated and that Hamid was going along with it. At length, the talking between them subsided, the old man turned away, and Hamid stepped to the Europeans, subtly changing his demeanor as he did so. A little abashed but also foxy, he protected himself with some obsequious apologies before reporting that the father had made a rather unusual suggestion, though Richard was not sure that
suggestion
was the most appropriate word.
Insistence
might be more like it. Abdellah, Hamid said, wanted David to return with them to Tafal’aalt to bury Driss. He thought it as only right and proper that the man responsible for his death should do this, and he was certain that David would agree to it, being a man of honor as he most obviously was. Indeed, how could he not agree to it? It was a father’s request to the killer of his son, but it was made with respect, with reserve, with a deep sense of propriety. It was customary in these parts, Hamid went on uncertainly, and his voice betrayed the extent of that uncertainty. Richard squinted, and he felt the question posed by Abdellah’s demand widening and deepening in some new dimension that could not be framed and resisted by the usual objections.

“Is it?” he whispered in disbelief.

“Well, Monsieur, I cannot quite say. It is the deep desert. These are not people I know, in all honesty. They say it is their custom, and I will have to believe them.”

Richard reflected. Nothing about the old man inspired suspicion. Nothing whatsoever. He was, after all, the aggrieved party, the victim, so to speak. But he couldn’t believe it was just a matter of David’s paying his respects to the grieving family. There had to be something else, and he said so.

“Perhaps,” Hamid prevaricated, “the family might appreciate a sign of Monsieur David’s remorse.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Not at all. But it will be understood. We do not
say
such things.”

“But David has to know what is going on. He has to know the amount.”

Hamid shrugged ineffably.

“I cannot ask him, Monsieur. It would be gross. Monsieur David just has to take a certain amount with him.”

“But Monsieur David,” David said, “has not agreed to this absurd plan. Go back with them to their unknown village? Are you crazy?”

Hamid turned to him with a steely, harsh courtesy.

“Monsieur David, I hate to say it, but it may be that you have no choice. They are not entirely asking you. They are being polite. I think they will insist.”

There was stupefaction in David’s mind for a few minutes, but in truth he had been expecting something of this kind all along. Of course they wouldn’t just take a handout. They’d extract as much out of him as they could. They’d hold him in some village until he agreed. It was pathetically predictable, with their bandit mentality and their extort-the-infidel ethic. He knew it would be useless to keep arguing against it, because Richard would insist, and would argue that, all in all, going back to the village for a night and paying his respects would be a damn sight easier than doing anything else. A handout would be easily affordable for a man of David’s income. And all of that was true. He felt immensely tired by the whole thing, almost worn out, and he already knew that he would give in. The idea in some way offered him relief. Since everyone seemed to tacitly think that he was guilty anyway, it would actually be a relief to be forgiven in some way. And nobody could forgive him except this shabby, stony old man in his dark brown burnoose. If this implacable father didn’t forgive him, no one could. Being forgiven and being exonerated by the authorities were two very different things, and it was because the people themselves felt that difference that he was forced into doing as Abdellah asked. It was a way out, and it was the only way out.

“Unforgiven,” he thought, “I’ll be a marked man.”

Richard read his face accurately enough, and the host felt a quick relief that David understood what he had to do.

“I was expecting worse,” Richard whispered into his ear. “You could make a trip out of it. You’ll be back in a couple of days.”

David twitched, and remained dignified, but Hamid caught his quick, disgusted nod.

“So you will agree?” he urged.

“I suppose I do.”

“It is an excellent decision, if I may say.”

“We’ll see about that. How much money shall I take with me?”

Hamid looked slyly over at the father. “Take everything you have. Then give it all and say it is what you have. They will accept it. They are poor people, poorer than you can imagine.”

“Poor makes greedy,” David wanted to add.

“It’s not ideal,” Richard said, with an unavoidable sense of relief, “but it’s not so bad. It’ll be interesting.”

“Has it occurred to you, Richard, that they are planning something a lot nastier than you anticipate? I mean, it’s just a thought, old boy. There wouldn’t be much stopping them once they’ve fleeced all the cash off me. They might have rather unwelcoming feelings toward me, since, you know, I bumped off their boy and all that. Did we think about that?” He glared at Hamid.

“Well, Hamid? Do you have any thoughts along those lines?”

“Monsieur, you are exaggerating.”

“Am I? Am I really?”

“Yes,” Richard intervened, “you are. That’s the last thing they’re going to do. God, David. Are you paranoid
all
the time?”

“Jo will take it badly.”