The Forgiven (26 page)

“Do you think they hate us?” He nodded at the furtive women in the depth of the grove.

“Not at all. Not the
women
, anyway.”

They saw the party frolicking under the waterfall, as if it were a silent movie. It looked absurd.

“I’m not so sure,” he said, pulling her toward him and without further ado kissing her on the mouth.

It went on and on. The girls splashed in the echoing
wadi
, and she was sure the Berber women went silent. “It’s where they come to get fertile,” she pondered, deep in a red and bloody mood.

When she broke free, she found herself gasping. She turned away, and his hands around her went limp.

“I’m swimming back, not walking,” he drawled. “The spines are getting in my feet.”

“Mine, too.”

“Well, wade back.” He laughed.

She looked at his naked back moving off toward the pale green water.

“Do they have crocs here?” he wondered aloud. “I thought I saw a hippopotamus back there. Must have been a guest.”

Her heart was beating too strongly and she breathed slowly to make it stop. The drummers on the other side desisted and she heard Dally’s hysterical voice making some sort of irrelevant announcement.

Day turned and shot her a little wink. Oh, come off it, she thought. She decided to walk, letting the dead fronds underfoot tear into her skin. It was now one o’clock, and so hot that her head would not clear. The frozen strawberries were laid out in the shade with an array of small silver spoons and cups of vanilla ice cream that had already melted. The scene was somehow dismal. Hamid frowned, crowed a little, and threw up his hands in exasperation.

Eighteen

T ONE FIFTEEN, DAZED BY THE SUN, DAVID STOOPED
as he stepped down into the house’s interior and took off his sunglasses. The sweat poured between his eyes and down the bridge of his nose, which was struck at once by a burned scent of cloves and human salinity. It was the smell of animals living communally, in a kind of ceaseless fear of the future, and when the metal doors were slammed shut behind him, he found himself with Abdellah, Anouar, and one other man in near-complete darkness as they fumbled their way along a bare cement corridor haphazardly overlaid with cheap, filthy carpets. The whole structure was made of this same cement, which had probably been hastily poured and shaped. There were several rooms on either side of the corridor, all with the same patchwork of coarse carpets. In each one there was a crude square window whose wire and glass were insulated with newspaper.

They walked into a large bare chamber with a gas burner and a metal kettle bubbling on top of it. Here were glass cups and a tin plate with a pile of fresh mint and next to it a large block of sugar. The lamentations around the car seemed to grow more vocal, expressed by more voices, but above and around it the wind moaned and soughed and sometimes drowned it out. The window crackled as it was hit by flying sand, which sounded like rain. Abdellah lit an oil lamp.

They sat in a sprawling sort of way while tea was made. Anouar said gently to him, “You cannot drink now. I’ll bring you some in a minute.”

The old man planted himself on a square of cardboard, his throne, and picked up a small chisel with which to hack at the block of brown-tinged sugar. He worked at gouging out some rough lumps and dropped them into the kettle where the mint was brewing. Then he crossed his legs and leaned back against the wall. Anouar cut the stalks of mint and crammed them into the kettle as well while the two men murmured to each other. The father unwound his
chech
as if it pained him, slowly unraveling it to its full length and laying it down next to him. His cropped white hair glistened slightly as he looked down at his own fingers and then spread them for a moment over his face.

David could hear the body of Driss being removed from the jeep and being carried into the house through a different door. The lamentation thus reappeared in the corridor outside the room, loud and reverberating; it unnerved him, and he waited to see what effect it would have on Abdellah. But the old man said nothing. When the tea was ready, he crouched with Anouar and sipped it from his tiny glass cup with loud slurps. They went through four or five cups in this way while the wails from the corridor worsened. It was this that made Anouar uncomfortable, and which made him shift awkwardly from one foot to the other. He asked the old man what he should do with the foreigner.

“Take him to Driss’s room,” Abdellah said a little absently.

Anouar rose, but the father then signified that he wanted him to do something else in addition.

“That friend of Driss’s. Is it Ismael? Where is he?”

“He is in Tabrikt hiding with his father.”

“What is he afraid of? The police won’t come here. Go to Tabrikt and tell him that I would like to speak with him this afternoon, if possible. Tell him Driss’s father wishes it, and he should respect me. I know he won’t come to the burial.”

“He is afraid.”

“Tell him it is understood that he has his reasons for not coming. But nevertheless I want to speak with him anyway. I want to know what he has to say for himself.”

“Very well.”

“Tell him to come quietly, when no one is looking, when the burial is over and done with.”

Anouar motioned for David to rise, and they ventured back out into the corridor with his traveling bags, where the women stared at them thunderstruck. Anouar pushed David quickly down the corridor toward another room at its far end. David went uncomplainingly, grateful to be hustled away from the Furies. They darted into another stifling cement room with a newspapered window, and Anouar slammed the door shut behind them. The floor here was covered with newspapers as well, and a single rug. Around the bottom of the walls, dozens of trilobites were stacked, each specimen numbered and named in roman letters as if in expectation of a western buyer. A mattress lay in one corner, with plastic bottles of water and a small transistor radio.

David understood at once that they must be Driss’s things. It couldn’t be an accident that they were making him sleep in Driss’s bed next to Driss’s transistor radio. His stomach turned and he was tempted to say something harsh, but Anouar preempted him.

“It’s the room of Driss, as you have guessed. There is no other room for you to sleep in. The father wanted you to feel his spirit here, too. He thinks it is fitting.”

“Fitting?”

David trembled visibly, and his eyes seemed to Anouar to lose their
formidable color. Moreover, his knees were weakening, Anouar could see.

“Lie down, David. You must be tired.”

“I didn’t have to come here, you know. It was my choice.”

“Lie down. It’s the only bed we have for you.”

David felt himself spiraling downward, helplessly propelled toward this sordid mattress where the boy had slept, maybe for years, since childhood.

“I can’t lie down yet.”

He went to the window and looked out. It was like peering through the periscope of a submarine, because it was at ground level. The whole house was more or less subterranean. The boy’s personal effects had probably been cleared away, but there was still a pile of magazines and a razor standing in a plastic cup. He stared at them in horror. And there was the amiable, slightly blundering Anouar with his huge ochre-colored palms spread out like an old painting of Jesus making his gesture of compassion. Except that Anouar’s gesture was not quite compassion. It was a sort of insistence. He told David that he was going to the burial now, and while he was away, David should keep the door bolted.

“It’s for your own safety,” he said.

“My own safety?”

“The women are hysterical with grief.”

“What happens now?” David wanted to scream.

“Well,” Anouar concluded, lowering his hands finally and giving the sinking Englishman as warm a smile as he could afford in the circumstances, “I will come for you at dusk. Get some sleep.”

He swept out as if in embarrassment, and David bolted the door behind him, as he had been ordered, and he did it quietly, without a fuss. Perhaps it was better after all. Soon silence overwhelmed him. He went to the window and watched the acacia thorns rolling along in the wind. The shadow of the giant cliff was advancing toward the house and would soon engulf it as promised, but when? He bit his lip
and counted to a hundred. The cell phone still offered no signal. He collapsed on the mattress, and exhaustion suddenly gripped him. “It’s an outrage,” he said aloud, but of course there was no outrage that he could actually define, so gradually he calmed down, because after all he had no choice. He swallowed a multivitamin pill from his bag and lay quite still, controlling his fidgety hands, for soon they were going to bury Driss in the tumbledown cemetery behind the houses, where a few white stones marked the largely forgotten ancestors.

THE TRILOBITES STOOD THERE IN A LIGHT THAT SLOWLY
mutated and declined. The labels fluttered in the hot breezes passing through the glassless window, and the Greek and Latin words scrawled on them could as well have been mellifluous spells. Psychopyge, Asaphus, Dicranurus. The latter was a spiderlike form with splayed legs and two coiled ram’s horns, and came from the Devonian period. To pass the time, he opened some of the newspaper packages and looked at the spined, armored, crablike beasts that had been hacked out of the face of Issomour by Driss. They were as hideous as anything from his own nightmares—as fierce, negative, and chilling. So the distant past had been a nightmare, too, and the Sahara had once been a vast nightmare ocean filled with teeming life that had been as ugly as anything the earth had seen before or since. Demons indeed. That superstition now seemed less improbable. He picked up an exquisite tiny specimen called a Comura, with a single row of perfectly articulated spines, across which he ran a finger. It was marked “Buyer, USA.” The wide, smoothly armored head of another animal was just as primitive, like the disturbingly simple design of a horseshoe crab. It was incredible that wealthy men collected such things, bought them indeed at exorbitant prices at the Butterfields auction in San Francisco and then used them to decorate their bathrooms in Palo Alto and Manhattan and Venice Beach. A single bathroom renovation of a Silicon Valley executive probably kept a Saharan village like Tafal’aalt alive
for a year. And these specimens had been painstakingly prepped until their surfaces had a polished sheen to them. They looked like beautiful Neolithic tools, elegant in their fashion, and Anouar had told him that the more detailed their corrugated eyes were, the more valuable they were, the more dealers were prepared to pay for them. And so too with the extravagant, sometimes curly spines. So this was what Driss had spent his time doing, and these were what had filled his waking mind for twenty-odd years. Comuras and Psychopyges.

He lay down again and forced back the tears ready to erupt down his cheeks. How could one spend a whole life digging, trading, preparing these nightmare life-forms from another geological era? It must be enough to drive people mad. It
had
driven them mad.

LONDON WAS DISTANT NOW. HE THOUGHT OF THE AGONIZING
lawsuit that he had lost. The old woman in Chiswick Park misdiagnosed through one of those forensic fuckups that strike as rarely as lightning, but with roughly equal force. He hadn’t spotted the tumor for what it was; he had not concentrated, perhaps, or his antennae had not been as sensitive as they usually were. Some part of his unconscious might well have led him astray, deluding him for a fatal few moments. There was no accounting for what had happened. It had been human error—his error—and all the fury of the gypped medical consumer had fallen upon his lone head. Too late to catch her tumor in time. The woman was dying, and making a considerable amount of noise while doing it. She was decaying because of his error, and it was just enough that he would have to pay for it. And now this—it could hardly be coincidental, could it? It must be the unconscious at work again. The unconscious working as a noose.

For some time, he had had that feeling of oncoming doom. He wondered if Jo, too, had noticed it. They were so rarely intimate anymore, she probably never got close enough to notice. All she could sense was his never-ending irritability, his morose closure. Another thing for
which he would eventually have to be forgiven. And yet in the end, he had not done anything wicked. It had just been an accumulation of accidents. One accident after another. Or do we produce our own accidents? Are they the sum total of our little neglects?